Patterns of Force (Coruscant Nights, 3) by Michael Reaves

Author:Michael Reaves [Reaves, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Star Wars, Science Fiction, Fiction
ISBN: 9780099492139
Publisher: Del Rey
Published: 2009-01-02T08:00:00+00:00

twelve

It had wafted to him, borne on the winds of the Force, and he had known it immediately for what it was—a release of Force energy that possessed a peculiar edge. Neither of his fellows had noticed it—a fact that gave him a perverse tickle of pride. Not all Inquisitors were created equal, it seemed.

The intriguing sensation grew in strength as they pressed onward, rising several levels to a more affluent sector. As they drew nearer the source, it began to flash across his sight in lambent flurries of sparks. They had just entered a neighborhood in which quartets of resiblocks were built around deeply buried courtyards and plazas when he was brought up short by its intensity.

A shower of sparks all but blinded him, his skin flushed with heat, a strange roaring filled his ears, the tang of ozone was in his nostrils … and then it was gone. Completely and utterly gone—as if someone had thrown a thermo-blanket over a fire.

Tesla cast about helplessly and futilely, snarling in the rage of bereavement. “It was him! I know it was him!”

“Pavan?” asked his second, Yral Chael.

“No. Not Pavan. The other.”

He felt Chael trade glances with the third of their number, a Corellian named Mas Sirrah.

“The prodigy is a secondary target, Probus,” Chael said. “We were specifically ordered to step up our search for Pavan and the droid.”

We. The pronoun infuriated him. After his injury at the hands of that rogue—that boy—his lord had seen fit to bring more Inquisitors into the game. So Tesla had found himself paired with Chael and Sirrah. He was the nominal leader of the grouping and was, in fact, charged with the prosecution of the search in this sector, but the members of his team each felt they should have been given the lead. After all, hadn’t Tesla already proven his weakness by falling victim to an adept who was not even a trained Jedi?

Yes, he’d heard the cascade of innuendo that had torn through the ranks of the Inquisitorius like a flash flood. He’d ignored it. Soon he would silence it.

“What makes you think the two will not be found together?” he asked now. “The boy is a Force prodigy of unbelievable strength. It stands to reason that Pavan would want to recruit him, likely in some vain attempt to resurrect the moldering Jedi corpse.”

Again the two other Inquisitors exchanged glances. This time it was Mas Sirrah who spoke. “What makes you suppose that Pavan even knows of his existence?”

“Don’t be stupid, Mas. Such a power is like gravity. It will draw Jax Pavan just as it draws me.”

During the conversation he had been trying to reacquire the scent of that other Force-sensitive, scouring walls and halls and hidden rooms with his mind and finding only echoes, ghost perfumes. He peered down one long, convoluted alley with the unlikely name of Snowblind Mews … but no, the trail was gone—like smoke flayed to transparency by a breeze.

He turned to his peers. “Pavan is somewhere on this level.

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