At last Vader spoke, his voice washing over his acolyte like a deep, cooling tide. "I have sought Jax Pavan for some time now. I have, indeed, made it a priority, for reasons I have not shared with you. I commend you on your sense of duty, Inquisitor. Ever since I brought you in on this, you have not questioned my orders, though I sense you arc curious about them.

"Now I have a new quest for you."

Tesla blinked. A new quest? He had yet to complete the old one. "My lord, I am close to finding Jax Pavan," he said in cool, even tones. "I am sure of it. I've been working one sector at a time, and..." A horrific thought occurred to him. "Do you believe me incapable?"

Vader paused in his pacing and raised a gloved hand. "Nonsense. I believe you quite capable. It is because of that that I am giving you this new mandate. When you find Pavan, you arc neither to challenge him nor to harm him. Your mission will not be complete until you have found the protocol droid that has been his sometime companion-the I-Fivewhycue unit that reportedly was the property of Pavan's father. Pavan is a means to an end: find Pavan and let him lead you to the droid. Of course, if you should be able to locate the droid in some other way, Pavan can wait."

Had he heard right? Tesla shook himself mentally. It took every bit of discipline he possessed to remain stone-faced. He was somewhat taken aback when Vader sensed his dismay.

"Is there a problem. Inquisitor?"

"No, my lord." No, no problem, save that he had just been a.s.signed to the scut work of locating a droid.

A droid.

You sent a stormtrooper on a fetch-and-carry mission like that. A lackey, someone with no special skills. Droids had no affinity with the Force, so sending a Force-sensitive on an errand like this was . . . well, at best, it was a waste of resources. At worst, it was a slap in the face.

"I am aware," Lord Vader said, the insectoid lenses of his mask trained on the Inquisitor, "that this presents more of a challenge. A droid is not Force-sensitive and thus will not reveal itself in that way to someone who is. But I have had it suggested to me that this is no ordinary droid."

As if that made it any less an insult. More of a challenge, indeed. Did Vader imagine he was speaking to a drooling Padawan?

But Probus Tesla was a professional. Despite his young age, he was a veteran of many such missions. He would perform whatever duty his lord deemed necessary, no matter how demeaning it was.

He raised his head to watch Darth Vader stride to the well-camouflaged window of his sanctum, where he looked out at the cityscape below and beyond. There was no reading the face hidden forever behind the obsidian mask, no body language to observe beneath the folds of the soot-dark robes. Nothing but that earlier pacing, which indicated a certain disquietude.

It occurred to Tesla that this was a test, not of his Force abilities, perhaps, but of his loyalty and his perseverance. He squared his shoulders and aligned his spine. One thing he was sure of-something about this particular quest agitated the Dark Lord. Perhaps if Tesla completed his mission, he would find out what it was.

With that in mind he bowed deeply from the waist, knowing that his lord could see his reflection in the window. "Regardless of what kind of droid it is, my lord, I will find it for you. And when I find it?"

"Bring it to me," his master said shortly. "In one piece and operative. And if possible, bring Pavan as well-in the same condition."

"As you wish, my lord," Tesla said and bowed yet again. He did not let his emotions show-not his disappointment, not his curiosity, not his hope that this was merely a gateway to greater things.

The Force would be with him, as it always was. Perhaps it would help him find this droid, somehow. And just maybe, he'd get lucky and catch a Jedi as well.

Chapter Four.

Probus Tesla.

There it was again-that name. That face.

Haninum Tyk Rhinann increased the magnification of his holodisplay and peered at the freeze-frame image of the Inquisitor he'd heard other members of the Whiplash refer to as "the Bloodfiend."

This was a human designation, originally a variant breed of terentatek used for tracking down sentients with an affinity for the Force-in particular, humans. The idea that humans hunted their own kind did not surprise Rhinann overly much, but knowing the provenance of the sobriquet in relation to Probus Tesla chilled him to the bone. Tesla was called the Bloodfiend because of his ability to "sniff out" his prey-Force-sensitive humans. He was steeped in the dark side, and it was said his sense of the Force was so delicately and exquisitively balanced that he could pinpoint its usage by a single being in a crowd of a million.

Rhinann didn't believe it, of course, but he was self-aware enough to know that this was largely envy on his part. He was certain that, were he human, he could stand right in front of the inquisitor and raise not so much as a ripple in the Force-no more, say, than a droid or a doorpost. The knowledge galled him.

He reapplied himself to his surveillance. Here was Probus Tesla entering the Imperial Security Bureau yet again. According to the scanner records Rhinann had accessed, each time Tesla pa.s.sed through the various checkpoints in this hive of Imperial activity, he visited not the offices of the Inquisitorius, nor the administrative centers of the Emperor's functionaries, but rather the palace quarters belonging to Darth Vader.

This was interesting to Rhinann because he had also recently discovered, via a combination of HoloNet research and scuttleb.u.t.t from the streets, that Tesla had been asking questions about one Jax Pavan, not to mention a droid who might be keeping company with him, as well as an erstwhile Sull.u.s.tan journalist. . . and, last but unfortunately not least, an Elomin who might or might not be seen with one or more of these individuals.

Interesting was not the operative term, of course. The information he was uncovering was, in a word, terrifying, because it indicated that Vader knew more about the company Pavan kept than was healthy for any of that company-most of all Rhinann. Not to mention indicating that Vader had narrowed his search for the Jedi to this very sector of Imperial City.

Rhinann made a minute gesture that flipped the display to a frame in which he had been compiling a map. This was a set of locations at which Tesla had been seen or had asked a series of seemingly random questions about a group of miscreants whom one would hardly expect to find in close proximity. The bright dots on the map formed a nearly circular pattern around the very neighborhood in which Rhinann sat at his HoloNet console.

No doubt about it-since Vader had brought in the Inquisitorius, the net was tightening. He wondered why the Dark Lord had waited this long to introduce the heavy guns in his search for Pavan, and shrugged. Who alive could fathom the mental machinations of Palpatine's second in command? No doubt Vader had his reasons for prolonging the search this long. Perhaps he had been waiting for other arrangements and affairs to be concluded, or perhaps he merely enjoyed the whisperkit-and-mouse aspects of the hunt. It didn't matter; what did matter was that his former employer was obviously tired of fencing and was going in for the kill. Through Tesla, Vader had learned the names and occupations of all of Pavan's team of misfits, save one: as far as Rhinann had been able to ascertain, the only one whose name had not figured in Tesla's careful questioning was Dejah Duare. Which was a good thing, because if she was linked to the Jedi in some way by the Inquisitorius, her seemingly bottomless well of funds might be unexpectedly siphoned dry.

The Elomin's pulse quickened and a choking tightness seized his throat, uncomfortably close in sensation to one rime when he had felt Vader's phantom grip close suggestively there. The connection between Dejah and the rest of them, he realized, could be made at any moment. If he was going to get out of this situation, he should act now, while the Zeltron's wealth was still available to him.

Quaking, he selected one of his newer aliases randomly from a cache of carefully compiled profiles of deceased and nonexistent persons, then accessed a travel broker's HoloNet node and prepared to buy himself a ticket offworld. Just shy of completing the transaction, however, he hesitated. If he left now, he might save his sorry hide, but he would forever forgot his chance of experiencing the Force . . . unless he found the bota and took it with him.

Rhinann sat back in his chair and stared, unseeing, through the travel brokerage's colorful HoloNet "storefront" to the dingy gray wall of the conapt and contemplated the full implications of that.

He had no moral problem with lifting the substance and fleeing with it. His only problem was that he wasn't certain who had it. He suspected l-Five still carried it, but he couldn't be certain that the droid hadn't already revealed its existence to Jax Pavan.

Even if he had, Rhinann realized, I-Five might still be the safest ent.i.ty to guard it. There was no way that even a dark-side-sensitive such as Probus Tesla could disinter stray thoughts to any meaningful degree from a droid brain.

The simplest thing to do, then, would be to kidnap I-Five.

He gave a half laugh, half snort that rattled his nose tusks. When kidnapping a freakishly sentient machine became the easiest of your options, you were in more trouble than you knew. Especially when the droid in question was contemplating regicide. Still, I-5YQ was, when all was said and done, a mechanical device, and like most mechanical devices he had an OFF switch. That switch was hardwired to the droid's consciousness template and couldn't be removed without irreparable damage-in other words, killing him. Therefore, for all of Lorn Pavan's clever manipulation of the droid's programming and firmware, that master switch must have remained untouched. If Rhinann could contrive to get the droid alone long enough to somehow deactivate him, he could go through his pockets-so to speak thoroughly and without fear of reprisal.

That, of course, was the trick: l-Five's reflexes were preternatural quick compared with even the dazzling reaction time of an Aleena. Next to Rhinann, who was a diplomat, not a warrior, he was bottled lightning. And unlike the average droid, he wasn't programmed against shooting first and interrogating the result at his leisure.

Rhinann backed out of the travel node and returned to his map. He considered the proximity of the Tesla hit closest to their bolt-hole. I low long? he wondered. How long did he have before he completely ran out of time?

There was no way to know. He considered the sequence of his informants' reports about the Inquisitor and the amount of time that had pa.s.sed between each of them. Based on this, he gave himself twenty-four standard hours to come up with a plan-or to have circ.u.mstances present hint with an opportunity to isolate, deactivate, and rob I-Five. If he hadn't gotten the bota within the next day, he would simply leave. He was, after all, a practical being.

He returned to the travel node and purchased a one-way ticket for the next outbound freighter on the Perlemian Trade Route to Lianna, which was the closest planet to the Outer Rim in the sector nearest Elom. This time tomorrow. Rhinann promised himself as he transferred funds from the account Dejah had set up for them, lie would be on that freighter, with or without the bota.

Jax made his way along the narrow, serpentine length of s...o...b..ind Mews. It was a running joke among the members of the team that the namers of the narrow pa.s.sage couldn't have had even the vaguest idea of what the appellation meant; no one on Coruscant had seen snow for uncounted centuries. It was Den's opinion that the name shining from street signs at the occasional corner was actually a ribald phrase in Shistavanen or some other planetary dialect that just sounded like s...o...b..ind Mews. and that whenever Basic speakers uttered the phrase in the hearing of the aliens, they would howl with laughter.

Jax walked slowly, tentacles of Force sense curling outward toward the walls of the densely packed resi-blocks that rose to dizzying heights on either side. It was nor the worst neighborhood in which to live. In fact, the ornate stacks of conapts that lined the mews and looked out on the cul-de-sac plaza known as Poloda Place still wore a shadow of their original elegance. Their once gleaming walls were age-dulled and grimed, but there was a certain shabby respectability about the place that Jax felt was to their advantage. Most people who hid out from the Imperial eye went to the lowest levels of the city and dived into its deepest, darkest haunts. So when Imperial forces went shopping for criminals, that was the first place they looked. They did not often think of poking their noses into the more affluent areas around Poloda Place-usually a haven for artists and other creative types.

Until now, Jax reminded himself. Rhinann had told him of the shadow)- personage who had been nosing about recently only one or two levels below. A human named Tesla. A man well versed in the Force.

An Inquisitor.

Jax felt himself tighten up reflexively at the thought, and wondered at the vagaries of fate. If Tuden Sal had fulfilled his promise to Jax's father, he and Tesla might have been peers, possibly even friends. Now he was set at odds with a man he didn't even know.

He reached the street and began to walk aimlessly, trying to process Sal's proposal and the reactions to it of his teammates. Den, Rhinann, and Dejah were obviously dead set against the idea. That was understandable. They were afraid. It was just as understandable that I-Five, who felt no fear, was willing to entertain the idea.

Dejah's alarm, however, had been palpable. HE could still feel it tugging at him, imploring him. He wondered if it stemmed from the fact that the Zeltron's late partner, the light sculptor Ves Volette, had been killed by a domestic droid. The droid, which belonged to the household of one of Volette's most loyal patrons, had some how coiik to reason that it must use deadly force to protect the interests of its mistress.

It made emotional sense in the abstract that Dejah should have a fear of droids, but somehow the theory felt wrong under her particular circ.u.mstances. The crimsonskinned Zeltrons were a markedly hedonistic species of humanoid, whose unique combination of exceptional beauty, empathic ability, and pheromone production made them often seem shallow. Dejah was not shallow. She had grieved the loss of her partner, and had stayed on Corns cant out of loyalty to the man who had solved his murder. It was surely that same loyalty, Jax reasoned, that caused her to argue so vehemently against Sal's plan, and not an irrational fear of putting a droid in a position where it could kill. In the brief time she had been living with Jax's team in their roomy conapt she had shown no uneasiness around I-Five.

He was flattered, Jax realized. Flattered that Dejah had become so attached to him that she had not returned to her homeworld as she had planned. He chided himself for the emotion. He'd gotten past the need to draw on the Force to counteract Dejah's heady combination of pheromones and telempathic subtlety, but occasionally he caught himself having silly, almost adolescent thoughts about her. The fact that she had begged him not to leave the conapt just now, expressing fear for his life with the Inquisitors at large, had likely contributed to those thoughts.

He replayed their recent parting at the door of their apartment: her gazing up at him, worry on her lovely face, her deep red lips parted, her eyes glittering with fear, her hands fluttering between them like startled birds. He had felt her willing him to embrace her and had deflected the impulse, though perhaps not as successfully as he'd thought. It would have been the most natural thing in the world to lean his head down and kiss her. It was a moment out of a romantic holovid.

He chuckled and shook his head. Gotta watch that.

He knew his Jedi discipline and the detached state it supported frustrated the empathic Zeltron, and he suspected she'd be pleased to know how attractive he found her. He was not numb to her pull-he felt it as a tingle on the skin, a flutter of his heart, a quickening of his pulse-but he was a Jedi, after all, and it took just a touch of the Force to deflect her attempts to influence him.

He looked up to find himself at a crossroads: left, right, up, down. Which way to go? He struck out at random, stepping into the down tube. As he slowly descended he found himself thinking, unaccountably, of Laranth Tarak.

The Twi'lek Jedi had been absent from his team for several months now, and while this wasn't the first time he'd thought of her, it was the first time she'd come to his thoughts with such strength. He hadn't seen her since the day she'd quit the team to work full-time with the Whiplash and its leader, Thi Xon Yimmon, a charismatic Cerean who-to hear his a.s.sociates tell it-possessed the fighting prowess of a trained soldier and the wisdom of a Jedi Master.

Strange, Jax thought. It hadn't occurred to him before to wonder why Laranth had abandoned their group. He recalled she'd been impatient with him about something he'd never discovered what, exactly-and there had been a moment when he'd visited her in the medcenter after her encounter with the bounty hunter Aurra Sing, when he'd wondered if their relationship was sliding toward ...

He drew himself up short, recalling the day: Laranth lying on the medcouch, patched and tubed and pale, and him at her bedside, a roil of emotions turning him inside out.

Had there been a moment when she had read him and feared he had grown too attached to her? Or had she already felt the pull of Yimmon's personality? Or both? Or neither?

He looked around and realized that his steps had taken him down into Whiplash territory. In fact, he was only a block or so from the charity in whose headquarters the group occasionally held clandestine meetings. It was one place of contact between the insurgent organization and those who needed its help.

It struck him, in that moment, that what he wanted most right now was Laranth's take on this whole business ... and her opinion of the trustworthiness of Tuden Sal him self. After all, they had only Sal's word that he was really a new Whiplash member and that Laranth had sent him to their door. And even if she had sent him, that was no guarantee that his plan was sound.

Jax directed his steps toward the community kitchen that served as one of the Whiplash's windows on the world. He was about three long strides from the door of the charity when an unseen compulsion abruptly settled violently about him like a bola, all but spinning him about. For several seconds he felt like a feather buffeted in a strong wind. He put a hand out and steadied himself against the facade of the nearest building, reaching out with his senses to locate the source of the disturbance.

Down. Down and to the west. That was where it was.

What it was, was easy.

It was the Force.

Chapter Five.

Probus Tesla returned to Ploughtekal Market despite the fact that his target had been changed. After all, he reasoned, the droid and the Jedi he sought surely were in close proximity to each other. The droid belonged to Pavan, or so reports suggested.

Which led the young Inquisitor to wonder why his lord had changed the target in the first place. Find one, logic suggested, and you would eventually find the other. The Force had been telling him for weeks that a powerful sensitive was present in the environs of the marketplace. The chances of that being anything other than a Temple-trained Jedi were vanishingly slim. Tesla's own Force sensitivity was the surest means of finding Jax Pavan, so why would Darth Vader set him on this detour instead? Was it a test, or was his lord simply guiding him to use his sense of the Force in a different way than he was inclined to do?

The idea set him back on his heels, mentally speaking. Perhaps it was not his ability that Darth Vader doubted, but his loyalty. Perhaps what was being tested was not his skill but his obedience.

The thought raised a tendril of shame. He had doubted Vader's wisdom, if only for the briefest moment, and even as he went about seeking the protocol droid-asking questions of his contacts and sifting through the answers he was hoping to encounter the presence he'd come so close to touching mere days before.

He stood now in the shadow of a support pier listening to the marketplace chatter, sniffing its panoply of scentsgreed, acquisitiveness, anger, satisfaction-tasting the subtleties of those emotions, hoping to encounter the vibrancy of the Force.

He experienced the Force that way-as scent, sight, sound, and savor. Every nuance of it thrilled his senses, playing darkly in his head, exploding on his tongue, dazzling his eyes with color and light. Because of the sheer power of those things, he'd had to learn at an early age to filter and control the impulses the Force evoked in him. It had been a lifelong struggle to work through the potency of those impulses, and he often wondered if all Force-sensitives experienced it in this way.

It was not the sort of question one was encouraged to ask other aspirants during Inquisitorial training. He had spoken of it to his master, of course, for he had to learn the discipline of his gift.

Master Kuthara had not commented on whether his particular experience of the Force was unusual or common. He had only said, "The Force flows through you,around you. You must learn to sail its currents and harness its winds without letting them swamp you or blow you off-course. Your discipline is a vessel, and you are the being whose hand is on the tiller."

He had been about fourteen when that conversation had taken place and had suspected that his master experienced the Force in just such a way-as a current to be ridden. He had been naive enough at the rime to ask, "But wind and wave have no motive, do they. Master? We speak of an ill wind, but isn't that just a pretty conceit? The wind and waves are random."

"Your point?" his Falleen master had asked, oddly puzzled.

Tesla had grown used to Master Kuthara answering his questions before he could even frame them; the uncertainty thus expressed had been a bit unnerving.

"Can the Force be said to have dark and light sides? Winds are neither dark nor light; currents are neither dark nor light, they simply are."

There had been a moment of suspended time in which he waited for his master to applaud his intuition, punish his audacity, or simply astound him with an answer of the utmost simplicity and profundity. He had more than half expected the latter. So the answer he got had stunned him.

"You disappoint me, Probus," his master had said. "It is the most elemental of understandings that the Force is a duality. You have mouthed that duality yourself, apparently without understanding it. Light and darkness simply are. It is that elementary."

Impulsively Tesla had blurted, "But isn't darkness merely the absence of light? Light is made up of photonic particles. Darkness isn't made up of anti-photons, is it?"

For that question he had been instructed to take his lightsaber and spend six hours practicing Shii-Cho-the most basic of combat forms.

Later, when he had lain on his bed aching with fatigue and numb with boredom, his master had come to him in an odd frame of mind-if not apologetic, at least conciliatory.

"You will understand in time, Probus," he'd said, "that the Force is neither as simple nor as complicated as we want to make it. It falls into the realm of neither science nor mysticism. Its use is at once an art and a discipline."

"Like sailing," Tesla had suggested.

His master had nodded, a wry smile curving his thin lips. "Like sailing. Or like learning to sort through and comprehend the world of the senses."

Tesla sorted through his senses now: peering, scenting,tasting, listening, and still hoping that he would catch...

He raised his head and turned to look out over the marketplace, eyes narrowed. Through a veil of multicolored light he saw a flash of blue-white radiance moving away rapidly. The scent came next, pale and sweet and tangy at once. A sound that was almost musical danced and shimmered at the fringes of his hearing.

He smiled in antic.i.p.ation and dived after the sensory ghost. The crowd of shoppers parted before him as people recognized the uniform of the Inquisitor-cloak and cowl of an indescribable hue that seemed to shimmer with phantom color, the Imperial crest upon one shoulder.

Across the width of the teeming square he trailed the bright target, determined not to lose it as it dimmed. He suspected the Jedi must have used the Force for something to have sent up such a vivid little flare just now.

That puzzled him. It had puzzled him since the first time he'd picked up the telltale signature of a Force-user. A trained Jedi would surely know better than to give in to displays of power in so public a place, and it was hard to believe he would have need to.

This gave Tesla some pause; it was just possible, if not likely, that Jax Pavan was intentionally luring him some where.

He bit back a chuckle of dark mirth. That would be futile. Probus Tesla knew without ego-or nearly so- that his abilities were exceptional. He had been trained by one of the greatest masters in the College of the Inquisition, and he had earned his place in the Inquisitorius by utterly defeating that master.

Regrettable, that, and it had drawn from Tesla the pledge that one day he would take Master Kuthara's place in the college himself, training aspiring Inquistors. He would never, he promised himself, give any of them any knowledge of himself that could be used for his undoing. Oh yes, he'd come to understand well why it was best not to speak to others about one's own relationship with the Force. To understand others' sense of the Force was to understand how they could be defeated.

He was dismayed to realize that the sensory target was dimming still further-its scent was all but gone, its taste turned to dust, its music muted. Only the light of it pulsed at the fringes of his awareness from white to blue, paling against the mundane palette of the market.

He hastened his pace, zigging and zagging through the crowd until he reached a long, dark alleyway with a dim rectangle of light at its nether end. Gouged into the ferrocrete walls of the surrounding buildings, the alley seemed to lead nowhere. And yet this was where his quarry had gone.