Saga - PT Dr. Nema and the Genesis out of Time

Title: Dr. Nema and the Genesis out of Time
Author: Mechalich
Timeframe: The Clone Wars (21 BBY)
Characters: Rig Nema, Ven Morne (OC), Takul (OC), Isoxya (OC), Lia (OC), Ditwar Logas
Genre: Science Fiction, Adventure, Cosmic Horror
Keywords: Jedi, Doctor, Clone Wars, Coruscant Underworld, Police, Bioweapon, Lovecraftian
Summary: From deep within the heart of the Coruscant Underworld a bizarre alien intelligence unleashes a plot to change the fate of the galaxy. Only Jedi Doctor Rig Nema and her allies have a chance to stop it before all is too late.
Notes: This story is the culmination of the various stories I've written throughout 2020 featuring Rig Nema, including my Diary Entry A Drop in the Bucket and five other 'Dr. Nema...' tales. All questions and comments, including criticism, are encouraged.


I.

The compressed Rebaigaic sleep cycle minimized REM sleep in favor of deep, dreamless, recovery. Nema had always been puzzled by descriptions, related by her fellow Jedi, of visions achieved while unconscious. Her own experience of Force-induced glimpses of the future came instead as frightful hallucinations, an alternative and all-too-real perspective laid atop her senses. Consequently, she habitually shied away from such paths. Her focus retained a distinct preference for the present moment.

No such care served to avoid the vision that struck her now. It could not be dodged. Imagery slammed across her senses, overwhelmed all other inputs. Her clinic’s minimalist bedroom possessed no windows, but Nema stared out into the yellow midnight glow of the endless underworld cityscape unhindered. Vibrant, decayed, crowded, isolated, all the many highs and lows, the diversity and contradictions of this world-within-a-world flooded through her unfiltered.

This image, a vast collage of overlapped spaces, sounds, and scents, rippled. Flecks of darkness swept across it, seemingly generated at random. They rose from below in unstable and erratic batches to attach atop figments of imagery. Then they began to spread. Pixel by pixel they ratcheted their way across the framework of the panorama, a colorless cancer of the cityscape.

As this growth progressed the underworld began to melt.

Not a metaphorical dissolution, some representation of political dissolution or social collapse, this visitation was far more visceral, concrete. The city’s features simply liquefied outright, coated in mind-bending heat-haze. The surroundings began to slump and buckle. Life ceased. Fire ravaged the lower levels. Swiftly enough even the black stains surrendered to the flames, but by then the process sustained itself unimpeded.

All too soon the vision slid away, the underworld itself lost into a condensed pool of degenerate goo.

At that moment a loud buzzing broke through to her consciousness.

“Doctor Nema,” words impacted upon blurred awareness, distorted as if far off. It took several difficult seconds to orient her body toward the internal intercom and an additional few breaths to recognize the source of this audio as her administrative droid Tesso. “Doctor Nema, please respond, there has been an incident outside.”

With a shake of her head to clear away remnant scatterings of black fragments Nema tapped the microphone button to acknowledge the call. “What kind of incident?” The act of assembly, of structuring this sentence, restored a solid measure of confidence in her being. Speaking centered her back in the base concrete layer of reality, not the feverish speculative multiverse of the Force, ever-shifting according to unseen momentum. All means available to regain self-centering were necessary now, with the premonition yet unexamined, unprocessed.

“The police appear to have captured a suspicious individual immediately outside our door,” the droid’s description, delivered in his usual succinct deadpan, struck hard. “They wish to speak with you and record a statement prior to transport.”

“Tell them I’ll be down momentarily,” Nema knew that, officially, she was not actually under surveillance by a police protective detail. The officers presently shackling a suspect outsider her door would, if asked, claim they had been ‘on patrol’ and just happened to pass by her clinic and notice something untoward. Equally, she understood perfectly well that the underworld police had kept watch over her for months, ever since the attempt on her life. That the existent interagency policies forbidding such additional protection were being blatantly ignored was irrelevant.

Technically a municipal law enforcement agency could not provide personal security to a member of the Jedi Order, Medical Corps or otherwise, as such services were the exclusive responsibility of the Judicial Department and their units must therefore fulfill all such duties. Anyone who tried to object to the current arrangement, however, was likely to acquire a very swift education in the inability of legal technicalities to stop a swung stun baton from connecting with the face. Coruscant’s Underworld Police held very strong opinions regarding the care of ‘their own.’

Nema found it all rather tiresome, but she recognized the threat itself was very real, and therefore accepted this kindness. However, the nature of this encounter surprised her. She had not expected the next attack sent against her to comprise any sort of assassin capable of speech. Tesso’s brief report left her curiosity piqued.

It only increased the moment she stepped outside.

The captive knelt between a pair of underworld police, held by arms looped beneath his shoulders. The officers were red-eyed and faceless as ever in their armored overcoats and concealing tactical optics. Though the captive was individually unknown to her, his species was immediately recognizable. Humanoid, with horns like those of a nerf extended from behind his temples. His skin stood out. Gray and green alternating, it featured an irregular array of rectangular patches delineated by sharp borders. Only a little of it could be seen, for most of the body lay concealed beneath a seamless tight wrapping that reached from head to toe, more bandage than clothing, but the hands alone were sufficiently distinctive to mark him out as a Tassia.

Not a common species at all, but one she’d encountered before. They were known for strong Separatist leanings, and more importantly, for working with YH-lifeforms.

An assassin? It was the obvious conclusion, but logic rejected it almost at once. Any killer sent after her would surely be able to overpower or evade the small police cadre on watch. This captive bore the clear telltales of post-stun recovery: pupil dilation, facial muscle spasms, and difficulty balancing. He’d been taken down quickly, no struggle at all. If this was an attack is represented a miserably amateurish one, something she knew her various enemies were not.

No obvious alternative came to mind, however.

The officers pressed the Tassia to the paving. They’d cuffed his arms behind his back and smartly slapped rubberized spray-foam atop his horns. “Caught this one skulking about the alley,” the lead officer remarked. Voice adjusted by the vocal synthesizer in his face mask, he sounded like every other member of his department. It was like the clones, only not at all. “He won’t answer any of our questions, just keeps begging to speak with you doctor. Any idea who he might be?”

“No,” Nema shook her head. “I do not know him.” She did not know any Tassias by name. They were just a group she’d faced during a prior operation. Despite this, she could not shake the impression that man had something critical to say.

With a slight bend, she knelt down and examined the Tassia carefully. Bandage-like wrappings and the peculiarities of his skin structure obscured the signs, but her medical eye was sharp, and augmented by the trickling insight of the Force. The truth could not fail to emerge. “Arsenic poisoning,” the revelation crossed her lips in a slow whisper. Only one possibility supported that particular chronic condition. “You were working with it.”

Bleary eyes, pale and damaged by the ravages of that corrosive element, rose to look upon the doctor’s face. “Scoros,” he spoke, voice raspy as air skipped through the degraded vocal chords. “We were,” his Basic was distinctly accented, touched by the long-ago influence of Mandalore, but otherwise perfectly clean and intelligible. “We were fools, such fools.” His head rattled back and forth.

The officers, cautious of the sharp horns, shoved him back down hard.

Nema raised a restraining hand. No fight remained to this man. Shame and guilt had grown to reach visible levels. He was broken, shattered past the point where he would ever be whole again. No threat.

“What happened?” the doctor asked. She burned to know, but dared not press for it. Push too hard, and he would retreat into silence. Surely he had come to confess, to tell her, it represented the only reasonable motive behind this visit, but she knew the words could only arrive when he was ready. “In your own time.”

He turned back upright, both palms flat on the street base below. “Before the war began,” he started haltingly, unsteady, with many erratic pauses. “My comrades and I, of many peoples, we clustered together and made a choice. We would follow the path of our homeworlds and fight for the Confederacy.” At this admission the officers tightened their grip further. Few among the Underworld Police could be said possess any significant patriotism, indeed they generally identified as servants of ‘the city’ rather than the Republic, but all took a very dim view of those behind civil unrest. Those who worked to disrupt the tenuous balance that sustained the underworld were considered a particularly low class of criminal.

“But we had few weapons,” he gave no sign that the hard grasp of gloved hands penetrated his awareness at all. “Old rifles and simple bombs were not enough to sustain our hopes, to strike even the least measure of important targets.” Nema recalled the random bombings of the early days, the ones that still occasionally happened even now. They rubbed nerves raw, but otherwise influenced little. The cityscape was simply too big for such minor detonations to be felt. “We searched out old tales, rumors of ancient devices, powerful weaponry left behind in the deep places.”

Skeptical as any good doctor to the idea of legends of lost technology, she nevertheless acknowledge that such treasure hunters were not solely conspiratorial folly. The bones of Coruscant were laid down by beings and species no longer much active in the Republic, and scraps could be unearthed. Gree relics, at a minimum, cropped up with some regularity, and ancient feral battle droids could stalk lost levels for millennia after their makers forgot them. “Nothing we managed to find was useful. Many perished in those horrid passages.”

The Jedi offered a sympathetic nod at this. Her personal experience with the uninhabited lower levels attested to their dangers. These Separatists, for all their fault in choosing the wrong allegiance, were not cowards.

“We were going to give up,” he paused. Neck muscles rippled as he gulped air in an effort to fortify his resolve. “But then it found us.” Eyes shook back and forth in their sockets, overcome by the grip of memory. “I was there, I saw the ooze creep out of the walls, the crawling, twisting, tendril-frond things that gave off toxic gases our masks couldn’t stop when we blasted them. I watched many friends die that way, sacrificed just so it could demonstrate its might.”

This ruthless description did not sound out of character in the slightest given what Nema had observed so far. YH-life seemed to assess no value on individual lives at all, perhaps a reflection of the not-truly-independent metabolic status of many of its forms. By its measure the destruction of part of a group in order to impose its will upon the rest probably did not even construe a hostile act. She fought back shudders. “It spoke to you?” Curiosity helped curtail her horror. Any information regarding the illusive governing entity behind the attacks represented invaluable input.

“It used a droid, talked through that,” the Jedi’s head fell when she heard those words. “Some ancient translator it subordinated. Even then, we could hardly ever understand anything beyond the technical data, strings of chemistry and genetics, but we thought we’d established a trade.”

His hands were shaking now, shivers that slowly spread to encompass the entire frame. “It said it would give us weapons, grow them. All we had to do was provide materials and equipment to match the specs. The particulars never made any sense to me, I’m no engineer, but even the best ones we could find, Geranites, Anomids, they really didn’t know what was happening, how any of it worked. It all just sort of shaped itself.”

“At first, it seemed like everything was working, like we were getting everything we’d dreamed,” he continued, dejection heavy in each word. “Those Yellow monsters grew in the tanks we setup, and they managed to kill a bunch of politicians. Those scum deserved it, and for just a moment we could see the possible future, a chance to cleanse some of the worst Senators, the irredeemable bureaucrats, maybe even take a shot at the Chancellor himself.” A brief flicker of the once-fiery guerrilla warrior resurfaced. “But then you stopped them, you and the police and the Ayae.” The shadow of strength vanished as swiftly as it had appeared.

“After that,” he shook his head once more. “The instructions changed. We kept being told to design new weapons, all systems for mass deployment. Most of them didn’t do much, and the once time we got one to work you managed to cure all the officers so fast it made no difference anyway, but the orders kept coming, that thing wasn’t the slightest bit intimidated. We should have said no, should have demanded to try something else, but we were committed, and we were desperate.” He looked up at her, tears gathered at the edge of his eyes. “They brought the clones down here, rounded up so many cells, and the news from the war only got worse, never better. It was our only chance.”

Silently Nema listened. She kept her face carefully sympathetic, but expressed no emphasis. There was nothing to be gained by questioning this bizarre commitment to fanaticism. Those words did not pass easily, but this lost Separatist had become like a patient confessing to a lifetime of bad health decisions. She knew better than to stop it, such things needed to run out to the bitter end.

“It offered us a final grand scheme,” the Tassia’s voice grew haunted. “One that would take many supplies, many months of preparation, but that would deliver instant victory by killing all the clones on the planet.”

As the galaxy’s premier hyperspace transit hub, Coruscant hosted a very large number of clones at any given time, though few stayed for long. Bioterrorism projections had calculated the impact of such a strike at five to ten percent of the army in the absence of a successful countermeasure. That might not win the war on its own, but it came close.

At the same time, the production of such a precisely tailored bioweapon would be incredibly difficult. The CIS had been trying to develop just such an agent since the first day of the war, and they were still at it. She could not imagine that YH-life, separated from the clones by an almost immeasurable gulf of knowledge, had the ability to produce anything so fine-tuned. A much darker suspicion began to take root in the depths of her stomach.

One the prisoner soon confirmed. “It did not lie to us. I don’t know if it even understands how to lie. We simply listened to the crazy garble the droid spouted and heard what we wanted to hear. Fools. We thought it cared. We thought it wanted to win the war. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.” His head dropped, face mere centimeters from the paving. “I doubt it even understands that the war is happening, or what a war even is. It just knows its enemies are divided and now is the time to take back territory.”

Water struck the metal below his feet, the blubbering stream of tears constant now. “One of the techs finally figured out what we making, passed a warning. My herdmates tried to stop it, tried to ruin all we had fashioned, but too late. It anticipated us, had its own armies ready. Hopeless, all of it hopeless.” He looked up again, eyes blurred by saltwater wash. “I drew the lot, the one to find you, warn you.” Driven by some primal impulse to seek comfort, he tried to reach out. The officers, strengthened now by rapidly metastasizing terror, held him fast. “It’s coming,” the weeping warrior cried. “A great cleansing is planned. You have to stop it doctor. Have to redeem our failure. Otherwise, there will be nothing left. Nothing.”

A year ago Nema would never have believed in the possibility of such an attack. The idea of some nebulous unknown intelligence rising up in the darkness to threaten a whole planet, and not just any planet but the beating heart of the Republic itself, would have been dismissed as bad holodrama fodder. Now, with the nature of the underworld inscribed into her psyche, she could only think of Coruscant as the most natural place in the galaxy for such a thing to occur. The heart of the Republic sat atop a rotten foundation, one more than capable of spitting up disease to bring it down.

Her next question, therefore, pierced through the shroud of trepidation into practicality. “What is the weapon? What sort of attack?”

“It is a-,” he stopped suddenly and began to blink rapidly. Tears scattered in every direction. “A-,” the Tassia coughed. Every muscles from the neck up went suddenly taught in unison. His eyes bulged as his throat constricted and only feeble gasps emerged. The tongue pulsed and flapped, clawed to summon a word, but failed.

An acrid, sharp sheen blasted across Nema's senses, pinged recognition in the Force. Distinctive this feeling, a tinge carried only by metal.

Dark liquid sprayed out of the Tassia's eyes.

“Back!” Nema shouted. Her body, driven by some combination of instinct and instruction, acted on its own. Both hands swept forward. Without conscious awareness she grabbed at ambient lines projected over the world in the Force.

The black ooze spilled onto blank paving as the Tassia fell back. Eye sockets lay empty and through those ravaged holes the shattered, cored, remnant of his brain lay open to the air. The policemen scrambled back from the body. Hands grasped desperately for weapons.

A bubble, a pale transparent dome, encapsulated the ruination below. Soft and smooth, it pulsed gently as the substance within, barely enough to fill a shot glass, pressed against the airy membrane. Tiny though it was, it shone with virulent potency. Quivered in every direction, pregnant with promised death.

Mouth clenched, Nema held the barrier in place. She felt frozen, barely able to believe she'd grabbed this thing. In the Force it sat light-less, a blot of malevolence like a black hole unleashed upon an unready star. It took every bit of focus she could gather just to maintain the hold.

One of the officers shot the mass.

At such close range he could not miss, and Nema's barrier blocked matter, not streams of energized particles. The ruby bolt slammed into the little pile of liquid killer straight in the center.

A small portion of the oily substance flared red, then white silver, and then collapsed into a clump. The rest flowed over it, diminished in size, but otherwise seemingly unharmed. The space within the bubble fogged up with strangely shaded steam.

“Not blasters,” Nema cried through clenched teeth, guided by painfully earned memory. “Batons.”

The officers understood. Within seconds a metal rod sliced through the air, collapsed the little pocket, and struck the quiescent devil. Electricity crackled across the end of the reinforced knob at the tip.

With the barrier disrupted the little cup of sludge slid forward, but its motion came too late to evade. Sparks flew as ionization cascaded through the semi-solid material, killing the alien life bound up in this strange matrix. Ablated to silvery metal, all water blasted to vapor by ionizing current, it hardened to naught but a smudge on the floor in seconds.

“Kriff,” one of the officers grimaced. Nearby the Tassia lay immobile, body slowly leaking puss from devastated internal organs as it cooled.

“What was that stuff doctor?” the other questioned. His voice trembled despite the synthesizer's masking.

Nema realized the answer instantly. Only one possibility explained the display. Despite this, it took several seconds to find the strength to speak, to guide her voice past the silence of her terror.

“Nanoswarm,” she enunciated the word harshly. Teeth crunched down independently on each syllable.

Such technology was normally almost impossible to craft. The best biochemists and microtech engineers in the Republic could manage nothing more complex than simplistic self-aggregating droids or crude viral particulates. Others, however, could surpass such limits. Ancient societies and lost artifacts betrayed clear evidence of the free manipulation of matter at the nanometer scale, and certain rituals of the Force, including essentially the entire field of so-called Sith Alchemy, could achieve similar effects. She'd studied both such legends as a padawan, mostly to recognize the terrible dangers they could unleash.

A moment's induction was all it took to unlock the realization that the node-and-link structure of YH-life, without any intrinsic cellular barriers to lock its internal organization into fixed scaling, was almost perfectly pre-adapted to produce a weapon of this kind. Several of the various manipulators she'd uncovered during previous encounters were now revealed as mere stepping stones on the path to this weapon of universal devastation. A metallic tide of spokes and filaments to rise up from the hidden vastness beneath and drown the underworld.

She was about to explain this when both police stiffened suddenly. “Doctor,” one tapped the left side of his head. “Tune to emergency response frequency oh-one.”

It was the work of a mere second to extract her comlink, key in the frequency and activate the speaker. “...detected. All units to response according to mass effect response protocols. Message will repeat. Emergency. Emergency. Thermal spike detected. All units...”

“It's already started,” a swirling image, chaotic shifting shades of black and yellow, slashed across her eyes until she managed to shake free of its grip. “He didn't reach us in time. The attack has already begun.”

“Doctor, we've got to get you to headquarters right away,” the officers determined together. “We're going to need you on this.”

For once Nema did not even try to disagree.

 

Yikes. This is getting intense.

 

II.

They assembled together in one of the training rooms at the Underworld Police Prefecture Headquarters on Level 1315. It was not a large room, designed mostly for small groups of officers to nod, yawn, and ignore their way through new training directives propagated by their distant head office far above in Galactic City. The rather eclectic group Prefect Xeril had generously allowed Nema to bring through his doors strained its boundaries just as they did the legalities.

Only Ven Morne was actually an officer of the Underworld Police. Lia and Logas at least had the excuse of fellow civil servant status, which acquired considerable flexibility under the emergency contingencies now activated. No such means could account for the presence of Isoxya or Kayi, the former of whom habitually wore an astounding collection of weapons charges stuck to her skin while the latter was a highly placed member in an organization whose very existence would probably give the average Senator apoplexy if they knew about it. Both had insisted on attending in person, and at the present everyone was far too busy to object with sufficient strength to actually compel such forceful personalities in any way.

It would be Lia who was called to stand in front of the standing holoterminal and explain the boundaries of the ever-expanding crisis. “We are facing a concerted attack by swarming nano-destroyers throughout the Bucket. Initial reports began to surface shortly after noon today, but it is likely the actual assault began much earlier.” She tapped the datapad held in the crook of her elbow and brought out a real-time holofeed from a distant surveillance droid. “This takes the form of a sludgy, ooze or pitch like semi-solid, predominantly black in color but occasionally shifting to silver. The attack is widespread, but it is focused on critical infrastructure, with the overwhelming majority of its effort deployed in an attack on the heat management system.”

The image shifted again, this time diagramming a massive columnar structure, one stretched across hundreds of meters of vertical span and only slight slimmer in radius. Dark-walled and incredibly solid, it held few portals, instead being attached to a truly extensive spider-web of intake tubes joined at all levels. Black goo spilled out of the few viable access points. “Our enemy is very smart, and extremely ruthless,” Lia grimaced and her head flaps flattened down against her skull in anger. “It's directed its attack at what is possibly the most vulnerable target on Coruscant in terms of overall damage potential and at the same time one whose defensive vulnerabilities are ideally poised to exploitation by its unique biological traits. The system is intended to remain sealed against outside actors. Sensitive components are bathed in inert gases and the internal components feature such extensive use of exotic materials that they are lethally toxic to essentially all-known lifeforms, but apparently that only applies within the confines of a carbon-based paradigm. However it's managing, this stuff isn't being stopped by an environment that would kill the toughest microbe you can imagine in seconds. This goo could live inside of a hyperdrive, and essentially, that's what we're facing.”

Nema knew it to be true. While YH-life required water to exist, it did not generally need atmospheric oxygen, and its very internal structure was built using highly toxic metals as key components.

“So far all countermeasures by the work crews and emergency responders have failed to halt the problem,” Lia continued, voice hard. “We have real trouble even getting to the critical areas to get after it, and the disinfectants carried by droids used for maintenance in such spaces are totally useless. Ion blasts are able to kill this stuff, with sufficient charge, and flamethrowers work, but we can't use those in the heating control systems without shorting out critical equipment, and even when effective it means leaving behind a blob of toxic, molten metals that gum up the works almost as effectively as the living form. As of right now,” her image shifted away from holo to a simple flat graph.

Nema did not recognize the units used to label the axes, but she recognized an exponential growth curve when she saw one.

“The hypermatter-based waste heat mitigation transfer is currently reduced to forty-five percent functionality, and falling. The heat sink network continues to absorb energy in the absence of transfers to bleed off temperature accumulation, but that can't be sustained. We're looking at catastrophic failure in seventy-two hours max unless we can stop the attack and start restoring functionality.”

There was a momentary silence as Lia concluded. It fell to Isoxya to ask the question on every mind. “And if we don't?”

Somehow the head flaps pressed down even further. An engineer, Lia took refuge in technical language, but even this did little to obscure the devastating impact of her prognosis. “Once catastrophic failure occurs the heat sinks will phase change. This reaction will flood the Bucket with super-heated gas. Subsequent equalization will raise the Bucket's overall ambient temperature to over 1000 C in minutes. At that point all the stored oxygen and most of the water combust, unleashing a planet-wide firestorm. Within an hour from that point the runaway process will cause the ignition of all other combustibles and the ambient temperature breaches 5000 C. At that temperature durasteel itself begins to loose structural integrity. An hour after that, the duracrete and other base structural materials fail due to overwhelming strain and the entire superstructure of the Bucket collapses. This causes a progressive destructive domino effect across the rest of the underworld. The entire cityscape melts down from foundation to surface and Coruscant acquires a new crustal geologic layer.”

“You mean everyone dies?” Naturally high-pitched, excitement sent Kayi's voice to stratospheric heights, raw and scraping. “The whole planet?”

“Yes,” Lia declared flatly. “The physics are extremely clear. The energy flux works out in almost exactly the same manner as a planetary bombardment. The difference is that the energy surge comes from below instead of above.”

“There has to be a fail-safe,” Morne, attuned to the nature of Coruscant's nested bureaucratic web, objected. “Doesn't there?”

“The heat management system is massively distributed,” Lia noted, her grimace grew tight as it stretched across stark green features. “And massively redundant. If we can preserve, at minimum, ten percent of overall functionality, then a safe step down is possible, or so I'm told.” The rapid way she clicked over to the next image suggested her confidence in that particular estimate was rather low. “Of course there is a failsafe,” She managed to offer Morne a small smile. “Unfortunately it was designed a thousand years ago and never updated. The extreme heat venting measure blasts the excess heat flux up the portals in a column of super-sonic air heated to temperatures nearing a million degrees. When the portals were initially built they were surrounded by ambient field insulation and cordoned off by vast safe zones. Today, even if you could secure the portals sufficiently to channel the flux, which we can't, the casualty estimates start at one hundred billion and just keep on going. And, even if we did that, it would only buy time, heat buildup would simply start over after venting.”

This brutal litany, delivered in level, mechanical tones, carried sufficient gravitas to cement the reality of their circumstances into place. A ticking clock had been put in place all over Coruscant. If it ran down to zero an incalculable tragedy would occur. Nema stared down at her hands. Idly, she noticed that they were shaking continuously.

The weight of responsibility settled over her, massive as stars. Somehow, she sat in place as the galaxy's number one expert in the biology of YH-life. This attack was ultimately biological in nature. It fell to her to find a countermeasure.

“Why don't we utilize an electromagnetic pulse or a microwave burst?” This suggestion emerged in the crisp and controlled diction characteristic of Ditwar Logas. “We have previously established that this enemy is vulnerable to such means, correct?”

“Any blast powerful enough to knock out the swarm inside of the shielded heat management equipment and conduction towers would eradicate all life in huge sections of the Bucket,” Lia noted quickly. Not harsh, merely sad. “And it might knock out the critical equipment we need to protect. It's a last resort at best.”

“We should prepare that option anyway,” the operative announced this suggestion with perfect calm. “The loss of twenty billion lives would represent a calamity for the ages, but if that is the cost of saving two trillion, then we must accept it all the same. Though I should hope we can evacuate in advance. That measure seems wise regardless.”

“Evacuate?” this sharp objection emerged from the throat of Prefect Xeril, ostensibly the ranking official in the room. “We can't evacuate. There's no plan, no provision for that. Can you imagine the chaos it would unleash if we even tried? The minute the public realizes that the entire planet is about to melt under their feet we're going to have absolute chaos, we'll never even come close to containing it.”

It was a pronouncement without hope, this confession. The authorities lacked the power to sustain control even in the moment of absolute crisis. At the same time, Nema could find no fault with the Prefect's assessment. There was no unified means to even contact the entirety of the Bucket's billions, never mind transport them to upper regions in only a few days. The level of centralized control to make that happen would strain the resources of Galactic City to the breaking point, in the underworld it was flatly impossible.

Flight was not possible. That left one option only. To stop the YH attack. The moment this thought struck her, she felt its truth resound with absolute certainly, the rare clarity of perfect understanding that could only come from the Force. “There must be a viable countermeasure,” she discovered to her own surprise that she'd stood. “We just need to figure it out, and buy time until we can deploy.”

The meeting suddenly felt stifling. In a moment when every second mattered, she could not waste minutes here. She needed to be in a lab, needed to face this challenge. It pulled at her, irresistible as gravity. But she could not go yet. “We need a plan.”

“A coordinated response might be able to limit the spread of this nano-sludge and jury-rig measures to bleed off some heat accumulation to other underworld sections,” Lia confirmed the intent. “Buy a few hours at least.”

“Any countermeasure will require intense coordination as well,” Logas anticipated. “This thing, the intelligence behind the YH-biots, it is not mindless. There is a being engaged in active oversight, whatever it may be. It will adapt against us. We cannot rely on victory in a prolonged struggle. No matter the device we utilize, we must strike hard enough to knock it out in one blow.”

Sound advice, but it ran directly into a second crippling difficulty, one Xeril did not hesitate to announce. “Coordination for a problem that spans the entire Bucket? Good luck. Everything, all the departments, all the resources, is divided up by levels and sectors, all reporting to the Municipal Authority in Galactic City or the Senate. We'll all be dead by the time we even manage to convince them this emergency's real.”

“The Republic is at war, we can declare a military emergency under the Assets Mobilization clause of the Military Creation Act and appoint a single coordinator with overall authority,” Nema barely realized she was the author of these words. Her neck turned and brought the taught face of the operative into the center of her view. “You have back-channel access to the Chancellor,” he was a spy, everyone knew it, and now the reason for tolerating his presence revealed itself. “You can make that happen.”

Pale by nature and further bleached by long hours indoors, Logas went positively white in the face of this statement. “Do you have any idea what you're asking?” the words stumbled free out of pure reflex. The cultured veneer vanished from his lanky frame. “The costs?”

“We are talking about twenty billion lives, and that is the bare minimum,” that number, that ridiculous, absurd, impossible but all-too-real number, propelled the doctor to smash aside all deference. “There is no cost that is too high.”

This drew an unsteady swallow out of Logas. “Of course,” he pulled his crafted persona back together. “Who shall I direct the Chancellor to name as coordinator? Doubtless he is not familiar with the local authorities, but the choice must be someone acceptable to all the respective factions, one they will trust.”

All eyes in the room turned to Nema.

She knew what they wanted. She even, though most of her wished to deny it, understood why they wanted her. As absurd as it sounded, she even had relevant experience. During the Nova-13 outbreak she’d been pressed into a similar leadership role.

But that threat had been a long-gestated plague with a known cure. This nano-technological pestilence was different, the priority was development, not deployment, with lightning speed required. She needed to be directly involved in that work. No time could be spared to play at administration. “I can’t,” she worked her away across each pleading expression in turn. “I need to be behind a microscope. I have to find a counter, a way to stop this.”

“So delegate,” fearless as ever, Isoxya cut through all the aggregated obstacles with the bold directness of a born warrior. “Appoint a deputy coordinator and let them run things. It just needs to be your name on top.”

“Fine,” Nema would never successfully attribute the feelings that drove her next words. It might have been the Force. It might have been pique. She liked to tell herself it was trust. “Morne, you’re my deputy.”

Prefect Xeril blanched and sputtered, but surprisingly no one else said anything. Hidden behind his mask, Morne’s expression could not be seen, but in the Force he registered as shaken but steady. Carefully, he turned to her. He asked only. “You’re sure?”

“Yes,” Nema forced the reply out before the impulse to endlessly second-guess matters took over.

Morne stood up. Something invisible switched over beneath that gray armor. Orders rattled out of him at stunning speed, blitzing past any objection. “Isoxya, take Nema down to Takul’s and let her get started. Grab a vehicle and whatever you think you need for an escort on your way out. You are not to leave her side until this is over. Lia, head over to the Municipal Authority Office Tower on Thirteen-Eighteen and start turning its disaster management room into an actual command center. Xeril go with her, I’m going to need your support up there. Kayi, you’re now in-charge of any asset that doesn’t report to the military or municipality. Start making calls, I want a list of relevant resources in an hour. Logas, you have the same deadline. Do whatever you must to get the Chancellor’s approval on an emergency declaration and then get back here, we’ll need those back-channel connections. Also,” his voice suddenly slowed to a crawl. “If you’re not back in an hour I swear I will find you and I will personally feed you into that black ooze one finger at a time. Do I make myself clear?”

“Perfectly,” the agent did not sound intimidated, but his suave glibness vanished.

“Good, everyone get moving.”

Nema did not have time to say anything before Isoxya hustled her out, but she matched her gaze to the red optics all the same. She felt strength and certainty through the Force, all wrapped up in ironclad tension. He struggled, deflated a little as the group dispersed, but held.

Somehow, without any logic to support it at all, she believed she’d made the right choice.

Technical Notes
The idea that a ecumenopolis would not be able to manage heat output is long-established, and in fact Coruscant's upper atmosphere canonically has systems in place to manage its heat flux...for the surface. The underworld needs an alternative system, and that's what's come under attack here.

 

III.

The employees of the Mutaratak Pharmaceutical Cooperative were not cleared to know the true nature of the crisis unfolding, but their ultimate masters in Black Sun, Crimson Dawn, and the rest did not lack for information sources. Nema’s arrival aboard a police airspeeder with sirens blaring and Isoxya riding atop the roof were more than sufficient to reinforce rumor that an emergency truly had come home. After all, officially the police did not have any interest whatsoever in this place.

Nema suspected this would not be the last barrier of secrets she shattered this day.

Takul, emerald-skinned and with threateningly curved horns in front of his vaguely devilish face, met her with a soft smile. As ever, he seemed wholly immune to panic. Probably a pharmacological impulse, that unflappable calm, but the doctor avoided comment. “We were not expecting a visit today, doctor. What is amiss?”

Nema did not mince words. She did not enjoy playing games with this one at the best of times, and at the moment all time had run out. “We have seventy-two hours to devise a counter to a YH-nanoswarm or the Bucket is going to melt.”

“Let’s get to the lab then,” Takul had many faults, his general allegiance not least among them, but he was invaluable in the lab, almost to the point where Nema could actually forget his ethical latitude. Today, she overlooked it all without a second thought. Survival's demands made allies out of everyone.

By the time they managed to boot up the machines and key in the simulations with the specific software packages necessary for the model to handle the truly alien framework of this form of life they barely understood at all, the police had begun to deposit samples.

As the first one went under the microscope Nema adjusted herself along with the optical focus. The totality of her being fell into this observation, this task. Information was required, and she would find it. For now nothing else mattered. All instinct, training, and the Force united behind singularity of purpose.

Takul, perfectly attuned to her research rhythm, passed over samples, reagents, and substrates as needed. He ran automated tests by the hundreds, directed a dozen living Mutaratak chemists, material scientists, and engineers, and supervised a score of droids through attempt after attempt to translate discovery into action. All effort devoted to response, to the counterattack that must exist, had to be there somewhere.

Time passed. Minutes, hours, no calculations were made. Supported by the Force Nema drove her intellectual effort, concentration and deduction alike, past biological limits. Technicians dropped away exhausted, replaced by fresh faces at Takul’s behest. Complaining droids were overridden, processors pushed past tolerances, long-term damage potentials ignored. The Mutaratak assistant himself dropped massive doses of stimulants in a desperate attempt to keep pace with the doctor. Only his long accumulated tolerance for marathon research sessions prevented a fatal overdose, such was the strain.

At the twenty-four hour mark they made their first key discovery.

It was not good news.

“The EMP failsafe, it won’t work,” Nema’s voice came out hoarse. Her skin color faded, the turquoise sheen of her nails dimmed. “The swarm has built-in fragmentation points. The outer layers ablate when struck, leaving behind toxic metals, but it also pops out spores that ride the massed wavefront of an attack. Those spores will recover faster than any post-burst repairs can be made. The whole system will collapse before any restoration can occur.”

“It seems that, having been stymied by widespread bursts before, the organism has protected itself,” Takul noted quietly. “This process, it’s far too directed to be called evolutionary, even in algorithmic terms. This lifeform, this swarm, it is as if it’s being programmed directly.”

“Programmed…” the word hovered along the edge of her tongue. “Biots,” she recalled the word deployed so many times in descriptions of these creatures. Organic machines; that was the nature of YH-life. None of the creatures encountered so far were truly independent, their metabolism was always supplemented, their functionality constrained. They were aggregated, controlled, like one of the old-style master control computer systems.

Fingers numbly grasped her comlink, keyed a code blindly. “Lia,” Nema whispered to the distant woman. “How would you attack a distributed network of droids under direct centralized command?”

“You mean a computer network?” the technician squeezed the words out hurriedly. Background noise suggested she occupied a station in a very busy control room. “You attack the central point, obliterate the command, but that’s why massively integrated centralized networks aren’t widely used. Single point of failure leaves you vulnerable, like the Trade Federation at Naboo.”

“And if you can’t reach the central control?” The true intelligence remained hidden, concealed somewhere in the vastness of the underworld. Doubtless it would protect itself with extreme care.

“If you can’t do that then you have to use a brute force attack, hit an essential network channel everywhere at once along the full spectrum of operations; overwhelm the defenses or inundate communication.” Lia did not ask the reason for these questions, she simply answered. Nema knew such deference came from her Jedi status, and felt considerable discomfort at that, but for now no time allowed for explanation or apology.

She killed the connection and looked to Takul. “Collapse the network. We need some component of the swarm to attack, some essential function that could be knocked out, make it shut down, kill each and every biot.”

“Difficult,” the Mutaratak grimaced. Sharp incisors gleamed between fluorescent lights, a predatory leer. “The components of the swarm are remarkably similar to the raw materials of structural supports. Any sort of bleach equivalent designed to combat it would likely melt durasteel.”

He was right, of course. Out among the heat exchange towers and hypermatter shunt-pylons necessary to keep Coruscant from boiling on its own metabolism police and maintenance workers were using flamethrowers, ion weapons, and massive sonic pulses to try and hold back the advancing swarm. Such methods worked, but the collateral damage was massive, and even ruined, the swarm left behind a residue of toxic metal that made repairs extremely hazardous and devastatingly slow.

Toxic.

That, Nema suddenly realized, was key. It was the centrally unique aspect of the YH-biots when compared to nanofabricated micro-engineering using conventional materials. It had always been there, the actual identity recognized from the very first encounter, a literally elemental variance.

“The arsenic,” she announced, voice firm with enthusiasm. A spark of hope kindled in her breast. “That’s what we have to attack. We have to rip the arsenic out, react it, and turn it into some bonded compound that denies any utilization by YH-life.” She rounded on her assistant, mind suddenly blank of chemistry in the rush. “There must be a process.”

That hungry smile, fangs in full flare, widened enough to swallow the world. “There is.” It vanished as soon as it had begun. “But there’s no delivery mechanism. No equipment. We don’t have any way to attack the swarm. I don’t think it can done in time.”

Scale. That was the issue. The brutality of it slammed down on Nema. She had to grab hold of the lab bench just to stay standing. A countermeasure for Jedi, she remembered the way this foe had tried to destroy her before, an attack perfectly engineered to render a single lightsaber, a single warrior, useless. This expanded upon that, unleashed an artificial organism too vast for any individual wielded counter. Logas had called for the counterattack to take down the swarm in one shot, an attack that killed it before it could devise a response, but it was worse than that.

Any strike also had to hit everywhere at once.

And in the vast, discordant chaos of the Bucket, what could possibly be found everywhere?

Created without planning, absent organization, countless species scattered in every direction, construction molded across a thousand years of architectural trends, an absolute triumph of diversity, but no match for the universality of thermodynamics. Unity, ubiquity, they needed these things now, but in this place such things were considered threats.

This terrible thought had not even finished its passage through Nema’s mind when she burst out laughing.

Takul blanched. For the first time that green face drew back in fear.

“Swarm,” Nema descended into giggling cackles, stomach compressed to th epoint of pain. “That’s wrong, it’s not a swarm at all. It’s a plague, but it is far from the only plague in the Bucket, and it is not the most adaptable. You offer me a disease you black-and-yellow monster?” She could see the swirling colors again, the warped and whirling image overlaid atop her sight. Felt the alien shroud fall across the Force. “Well, I’ll take that bet, and raise you one of my own!”

“Doctor, what are you-.”

Nema smiled at him now, heedless of his skepticism. The idea taking shape in her head was indeed madness, but she felt the pulse of inspiration. More, she grasped the intersection carried through the Force itself, a long-slumbering linkage revealed at last. “It’s simple, Takul, we’re going to teach Miscaf to eat arsenic.”

His only response was a blank look.

“It’s theoretically possible,” Nema fought to retain momentum by sighting speculative studies they’d both reviewed during the lengthy past examinations of YH-life. “And the fungus is incredibly adaptable. It’s just a matter of producing a fragment that will promote and build the relevant metabolic complex.”

“In under forty-eight hours,” objection came not against the plan itself, but to the time constraints. He tapped a nearby machine for emphasis. “And then you have to insure it spreads through the fungal populations and bring the fungus into contact with the swarm at sufficient density to act as a control mechanism.”

These protests were very valid, but Nema refused to consider them insurmountable. The alternative was a catastrophe beyond all description. A moment’s consideration suggested a solution that actually addressed both problems. “We’ll need to maximize mobility of fungal spores throughout the Bucket, augmented by direct propagation wherever possible.”


“Propagation is doable,” the look on Takul’s face suggested a deliberate effort to reach out for any possible optimism. “The fungus is easily cultured and everyone knows how to do it by now.” That was a positive side effect of the lengthy vaccine effort. “But how can mobility be maximized? The underworld is divided across countless isolated spaces.”

This statement did not stop the doctor. The vast reservoir of fungal biomass scattered about the Bucket clinging to endless surfaces and beings could only serve as her predator of the moment if it could get to its prey. Many barriers existed to prevent that. In fact it was only shoddy construction and maintenance of the filtration systems attached to those barriers that allowed the fungus to survive at all.

For a moment she dropped down to a point of near-despair. “A shame we can’t just knock down the walls,” the remark slipped free.

To her shock the hungry smile returned to Takul’s features. “You said your friend the policeman has full emergency military powers, authorized by the Supreme Chancellor himself. A few walls are nothing.”

In response, Nema commed Lia once again. “I need you to generate a plan to maximize airflow – rate and volume together – throughout the entirety of the Bucket with the intent of funneling suspended particulates into the nanoswarms. No blocks, barriers, or other impediments need be considered exempt, break everything open you need too.”

The Stegoceps woman worked in atmospheric maintenance. She understood the intent immediately. “You want to use an ambient aerosol agent to attack the swarms? Anything that can do that will impact everyone living in the Bucket as well.”

“That’s all right,” Nema felt a satisfied glow expand throughout her body. “They’ve all been vaccinated.”

“You’re going to use Miscaf?” Lia had in fact been the very first Stegoceps to volunteer for her species’ version of the vaccine just over a month earlier. “Can that work?”

“Yes,” it would work because it must work. No time remained to indulge other ideas. Nema decided in that very moment that she would do whatever it took to make it happen. It was the only possibility they’d advanced even as far as a working theory. She would turn it into a reality. The Force would aid her, it would be with her, already was with her. The trajectory of events converged inexorably towards this end. It could not be denied.

“Right,” whether Lia believed this mattered little in the present. It was sufficient that she committed. “I’ll put a plan together, but I can tell you right now that this isn’t the kind of thing that can go forward instantly. It’ll take time to set up, and we’re running out.”

“Twenty-four hours,” the doctor did not truly speak the words to the other woman. She set the mark against herself, against the needs of the people, of all Coruscant. As she disconnected she turned back to Takul. “That time limit applies to you too. Go to the syndicates, get them to put all their resources behind propagation. By the time everything’s ready I’ll have the DNA fragment ready to go.”

The Mutaratak bowed softly, bent at the waist until his horns pointed toward the floor. “Should you fail, there will be no chance otherwise. Accordingly, we will prepare in the expectation of success.” He turned and softly stepped out to send his messages.

Nema was left alone with the hum of the laboratory.

Slowly, with a deliberate invocation of patient action designed to calm her nerves, she took a slip of flimsy from a filing tray, placed it on empty space atop the bench, and wrote out an outline. The cold, deliberate strokes Aurebesh demanded centered her in herself. Stark, geometric, so very like the amino acids assembled into proteins, these symbols proxied the struggle to come in calligraphic form.

An enzyme complex. That was the goal. Not the proteins themselves, of course, though she would perforce need to assemble them first, but instead a genetic blueprint that would incorporate itself into the fabric of the Miscaf fungus and allow it to manufacture uncounted hordes of this particular piece of molecular machinery.

The complex would have to complete multiple tasks, Nema knew. It needed to recognize the arsenic atoms inside the ambient medium of YH-life’s slurry, attach to and sever it from all existing bonds through ionic action, and then pass it through a metabolic reaction that rendered it not only harmless to the fungus itself, but also chemically inaccessible to its enemy. All of this without in any way compromising the fungus’ essential cellular functions.

It would have been an impossible task, if she was starting from scratch. Thankfully that was unnecessary. Enzymes of this nature had long been engineered for use by extremophile archaea in bioremediation projects. All she needed to do was adjust the targeting mechanism slightly and insure outputs were properly sequestered. A few minor tweaks and the extraordinarily versatile fungus would handle the rest.

Such tweaking sounded simple. It was not. In reality it involved the direct manipulation of extremely complex molecule-scale templates. Altering the enzyme was possible through use of an advanced protein design and editing software and synthesis suite, one the Mutaratak possessed despite a distinct lack of the military-level medical licenses necessary to allow ownership. With the police supplying a continuous stream of samples, she knew a combination of trial and error and the guidance of the Force would surmount that hurdle.

It was the step that came after she truly feared.

Ten hours of labor followed, until Nema assembled a working prototype enzymatic complex and inserted prototypes into Miscaf cells in observation of its function during real time.

It worked.

The aggressive spores glommed onto the alien matrix and proceeded to suck out arsenic until it collapsed, all cohesion lost.

Black images whirled through the back of her mind as she watched the process. Awareness propagated through the Force inside the swarm. Her enemy would soon learn of this, the Jedi knew. She also recognized that it no longer mattered.

As blighted swarms continued to overwhelm critical infrastructure throughout the Bucket both sides were wholly committed. Direct intervention could no longer affect the outcome. Only this dance of death in evolution and the Force could produce a decision.

One step left, the doctor recognized. Despite the immense desire to dive into the process at once, she enforced rest instead. Unable to find her center in the Force well enough to fall into a trance, she instead had Takul dose her into two hours of dreamless oblivion.

She did not awaken refreshed, merely marginally restored, with a brutal deadline bearing down on her. Briefly she connected with Morne. He informed her that they were moving people and materials in place to enact her plan, and barely containing the spread of panic. He held little confidence in his ability to sustain the latter. Her self-imposed twelve-hour deadline going forward met with agreement from her. “We'll do everything to last that long, but the Bucket will break before the heat sinks do.”

They had only lasted as long as they had through the aggressive use of wartime information control. All official news of the doom to come had been blocked, leaving it to spread through unofficial channels and gossip. So far the hostile mass exodus had not materialized.

In a rare idle moment Nema wondered if Palpatine himself remained on planet.

Then she sat down in front of her lab bench. She had a tunneling microscope hooked directly to the terminal. Visual feeds and a computer model both illustrated the same thing, protein structure. The true life image appeared as a blurry, discolored blob only loosely shaped. In model form the protein mass rendered out far more elegantly as a complex assembly of ribbons, strands, and corkscrew sheets all comprised of ball-and-stick molecular representations. Crystallographic structure portrayed in the false elegance of atomic-scale display.

Nema had to reverse engineer that into a genetic sequence. The actual amino acid code was simple, automatically generated by the software, but that was not enough on its own. She needed the non-coding data, the information that would allow the genetic fragment incorporation into the fungal cells, insure the enzymes were actually produced, and cause the protein to fold correctly into a functional shape rather than a useless string of molecules.

Some clues existed, filtered through memory from general knowledge of the fungus and basic genetic formulations common to all CC-life, universal functions traceable to the very first eukaryotic cell. Beyond such limited inspiration, only a set of highly speculative projections run by medical droids existed. Brute force solutions were impossible, even the most advanced computers in existence could not solve such probability matrices in less than centuries.

Instead she needed to fuse art, instinct, science, and trial-and-error together into a solution in only a few hours. “May the Force be with me,” she whispered as she settled into her seat and closed her eyes.

There in a molecular world with amino acids the size of her head, her projected senses strode through the Force. She pushed and prodded, tugged and twisted along the massed molecular structure, climbed it like some great obstacle course.

Her mind hypothesized new forms along side it. Messengers, promoters, signalers, spacers, countless bits and pieces of the mechanism of life attached, oriented, severed, and more. Lost in the world within she forged continually forward on the essential task. Piece by piece she surrounded the enzymatic salvation of Coruscant with the accessories it would need for battle.

At the end, stumbling in exhaustion through a mindscape blurred and degraded by weariness and mental fog she fashioned at last the clarion call to launch her fungal warrior forth to war.

All the while, completely below the registry of her conscious mind, fingers moved across datapad keys. Tap by tap they edited the computer-generated sequence. Only four keys were used throughout, backspace and A, C, G, T.

The doctor conducted this essential work alone, save for the essential guidance of the Force. It lit her path, directed the climb along the contorted architecture of carboxyl groups and sulfurous bonds. Subtle changes in shading, shifts from sharply discordant blue to softly bonded gold offered an in situ test of the mind's eye.

Alone, but not unobserved. As time passed a shadow rose up from the basal reaches of her recognition. Dark and light-less, save for erratic streaks of lurid lemon that revealed pulsating topographic chaos, it closed distance in the cognitive space with brutal inevitability, a rising tide. Closer and closer, until each step taken demanded navigation between swells of bleak emergence. The waveform crashed against itself, and the vibration of this motion gave life to a slow chorus of ragged chants. “Ia...Ia...Ia,” the whisper of cruel wind against the crumbling dune.

The coordinating mind behind the assault was trying to speak to her, Nema realized. She came to understand, clinging in place here beneath the scale of cells, that it was itself Force-sensitive in some way, no matter how absurd that seemed. Its relationship to that universal energy field was just as alien as its biology, strangely shifted, doubtless mediated through some mechanism entirely different from the familiar midichlorians.

“I don't know what you're saying,” she admonished as the struggle for the final pieces, the last critical percent, wore endless. “Maybe you should have tried to talk before you decided to kill us all. It's too late for discussion now.”

The final folded structure unveiled itself in the vision of her desperate hopes, and Nema all but collapsed in exhaustion as satisfaction swelled past all ability to contain. In the last moment before she crashed out of the trance she caught a change in the watcher in the deeps. Jagged yellow highlights streaked erratic spiderwebs across the surface topology, and the unceasing murmur rose through strident crescendo. It hissed and sputtered in wordless rage, and the emanation of the Force echoed with the premonition of violence.

Time, Nema thought idly as she clawed up through a oppressive weight of blear and blur to achieve post-trance observation, is a strange thing in the Force. Vision swam and her sense of balance barely sufficed to keep her in her chair. Her fingers registered only numbness and her tongue weighed many kilos.

Despite this, she heard the blaring alarms with perfect clarity.

 

IV.

Nema's sensory awareness slowly maneuvered back to normalcy as alarms screamed around her. She gradually gained recognition of a bizarre thumping pulsation nearby, one strong enough to rattle glassware and shake her chair. Disturbing though this was, her feelings remained oddly detached and unnaturally calm as she struggled to flush trance residuals from her system.

Time did not resume its normal flow in her perception until the tentacle broke through the wall.

A black serpent thick around as her waist, this massive coiled structure crackled with the characteristic iridescent sheen of YH-lifeforms. Slickly metallic, it writhed and smashed with the strength of a beast several times its size. Reinforced structural plating gave way steadily beneath its blows.

When the wall came down the chaos beyond made everything clear.

The lab the Mutaratak provided for their guest was a modest accessory unit separated from their main pharmacological testing facility. The source of the invading tentacle had come through that large central room, one fully capable of allowing it passage. As it peeled back the one remaining barrier separating it from its quarry Nema saw the true face of her enemy for the first time.

It strode forth on five pillar-thick black legs in pentagonal formation. Each terminated in a malleable blob. Pairs of lashing tentacles extended from the central joint of each of those supports. Once merged together the legs gave way to a central core frightfully similar to a humanoid torso, but rather than arms it projected five pairs of tentacles of its own, at irregular heights. Flashing yellow crystalline patterns streaked across the base of those whipcord structures. It had no head. Instead the massive central tentacle projected upwards from the center of the body, over ten meters in length.

Low sounds, a voice that pulsed vibrations in frequencies human ears could not follow, rippled outward from hidden air sacks with each motion.

All about this hideous thing Mutarataks scrambled for cover. Some, clad in white lab coats, simply turned and fled the vortex of destruction that had enveloped them. Others dressed in some kind of security uniform fought back, blaster carbines in hand. Ruby bolts spattered the air.

This defense proved utterly futile. The YH-monster possessed unbelievable maneuverability. Tissues shifted across the full breadth of its immensity as if controlled by a single muscle, transitioned from stone hard to sponge soft in an instant. It flipped and quivered and oozed through continual contortions. No fixed target could be found.

Whipcord tentacles slammed those who dared oppose it with terrible potency. Snaps connected behind the distinctive super-sonic crackle of whip-strike impact, blows hard enough to shatter steel and sharp enough to cleave it as one.

Green-skinned bodies lined the floor, no more than severed ruins now.

Even as Nema absorbed all of this madness, one revelation over-topped all the others.

The monstrous presence shone in the Force. It possessed a palpable honed strength that, for all its alien shading and shrouded contours, could not be mistaken. Not close as this. The creature held measured control and honed potency to match that of any Jedi Master. Only Anakin Skywalker had put forth an impression with greater impact in the doctor's experience.

Feeling this, she understood perfectly what this thing represented, what it truly was. The core intelligence, the coordinator of all lesser biots and the instigator of plans; the true form of YH-life revealed at last.

“Nema!” Isoxya crashed through the door behind her. Flaring orange in her armor and driving at high speed on raised separated wheels , the warrior smashed apart that flimsy barrier, fluidly surmounted a lab bench, rolled through hundreds of pieces of glassware atop an exam table, and vaulted full speed into the fray. The cold edges of her spider-fang knives gleamed crimson beneath the glow of the pulsating alarm klaxons.

A blur of motion, wheels shunted back and forth in constant positional alteration, the warrior slashed and cut at the storm of tentacles. Never stopping, she twisted through conditioned patterns of strike and evade in a constant struggle to bypass ripostes and land a telling blow on the nearly liquid form of her opponent. “Run Nema!” Isoxya shouted, her helmet-augmented voice penetrated through the din of battle. “This thing's after you.”

It was not the Jedi way to flee in the face of the enemy and leave friends behind, but that particular pride had left Nema long ago. She would not survive five seconds against the rain of blows Isoxya danced within, and knew it well. Footing found at last, she stumbled through the ruin of the door.

Revealing the truth of the warrior's words, the YH-instigator followed. Internal walls could not hold back that serpentine trunk atop its mass. It rolled and slipped, legs running across all obstacles as though coated in oil, with appalling speed.

Nema turned about and sought escape down the opposite end of the hallway. A distant egress beckoned there beneath a still-lit emergency sign.

As the foe squeezed itself into the hallway legs visibly thinned with each step and tentacles sprouted grasping suckers to swing it through this narrow passage. She knew it would win that race.

An orange explosion in the gloom, Isoxya harried the enemy with consummate skill. Spin-sliding beneath the first wave of tentacles she rolled sideways along the wall, bent at the waist. Arms flickered through axe-chop motions as she attacked from myriad angles.

The curved chelicerae of a giant vacuum-dwelling arachnid sank deep into the black flesh of a quivering appendage, its evasive impulse one half-step too slow.

Sharp as any polished metal and coated in micro-serrations the blade bit clean through the calf-width bulbous black bar to tear free through to the opposite side. A mighty gouge opened in the tentacle.

To the horror of all observers that wedge of ruin and flesh began to fold closed the moment the fang jerked free.

No blood. No cells. An internal structure capable of instantaneous reconfiguration guided by an intelligence with a computational consciousness capable of directly interfacing with its own biology through the Force. Bludgeon, lacerate, or pierce alike, such wounds barely registered to this creature.

“Web!” the armored warrior hissed as she spun out and away from counterstrikes by the thrashing swarm. Fangs spun in her hands. Long edges rotated up and out as she maneuvered to slice rather than stab.

Nema tried to run harder, but mental calculations offered no hope she would reach the door in time.

Tentacles slapped against armor as hardened black flesh resisted the impacts of Isoxya's swinging blades and delivered a formidable counterstroke. The warrior skidded down the hall, wheels sparked as they churned against the floor for purchase. Yellow bracing plates buckled at the blows, but held.

In sudden shift, Isoxya's wheels moved against her legs. From separated independence below each ankle they converged together between her knees. Maneuverability sacrificed for speed, for power.

Eyes locked on the lurid yellow patterns at the center of her foe, the Stoneweb Runner charged.

The mighty dorsal tentacle whipped low, slapped across the floor to spike rolling progression.

Somehow, using unseen perambulations of her body as the trigger, Isoxya jumped it.

Lesser tentacles strove to stop this no-holds-barred attack, only to be driven over, smashed aside, and at last sliced clean through.

Leaking silver ooze, a pair of twitching black cables fell to the ground.

Nema felt a surge of power flood through the Force, un-placable in its otherness, but distinctly compelling. Golden eyes widened in horror as yellow patterns on the central form condensed into a singular starfish configuration. Pentagonal legs braced as the YH-instigator stood its ground before the lunge.

With a sudden twitch the severed tentacles on the ground moved.

Shockingly swift, they lashed and whipped themselves at Isoxya's wheels.

Utterly unexpected, the Runner could make no provision for defense. No dodge or weave kept those raging cast-offs from plunging into the center of her axles.

Powerful wheels ground forward against metal-laden tissue. In less than a second they would break free, but for that critical interval momentum halted. Isoxya stood bare before the foe.

A striking spear, silver sharp stake-tip searing in the bloodied glare, the dorsal tentacle reversed itself, bent in the middle, and sprang back down the path it had come.

It pierced Isoxya in the center of her back. Armored scales buckled, shifted, and gave way. Aged muscle and bone beneath were nothing by comparison. Sufficient power impelled this mighty strike that a stubby extension of blighted tissue broke through in front.

The Stoneweb Runner hung lethally skewered just two steps from the reach of her descending blow.

As Nema's eyes widened in horror and her mouth opened in a breathless scream her guardian unleashed one final herculean effort.

Isoxya did not grunt or curse. Silently her right arm rose and then she drove it down with the full strength remaining in her powered armor.

The fang sank down into the center of that monstrous pseudopod, buried to the hilt.

The appendage ripped free a moment later, blade yet embedded within. Isoxya's ruined body struck the floor, a single somber bell tone struck.

Nema saw nothing more before the rapidly advancing black abomination wailed a blur against her skull and the world went dark.

 

Holy crap.

 

V.

The news reached Ven Morne via the only surviving underworld police officer at the pharmaceutical cooperative. Isoxya had commandeered eight, now seven were dead. Some part of his mind registered this terrible loss, the men and woman who would not being coming home again, but something else, something harder, something merciless, crushed this feeling and cast it aside at once. “What in the depths happened?” He shouted over the hololink. “What sort of kriffing disaster is this?”

The officer, bloodstained, shaken, and suffering from a badly broken arm his armored coat could not fully conceal, managed to stammer out an explanation after two or three tries. Enough for Ven to grasp the full scope of the enemy's devastating countermove. “Kriff,” he whispered, and collapsed into his chair. All other words failed him.

Sadness materialized, broke free of the cage where he tried to hide it, but for all its magnitude the feeling remained strangely muted. Isoxya dead, Nema captured or worse, and the whole facility torn up by some kind whipcord alien whirlwind. None of it felt real.

Grief, he suspected, the numbness of overwhelming loss, but more than that. Without Nema he had no options, no solution. His own death was an inevitability now, one whose arrival he could measure through the countdown clock even now projected in the lower right of his HUD. Coruscant itself lay doomed to a lifeless molten future.

All efforts to foster alternative plans had failed. They were notable only in that such attempts had gotten almost the entirety of the underworld's attached Coruscant Guard force eaten by nano-destroyers. Despite the promises of its designers, the vaunted clone trooper armor was no protection against this attack.

Sitting there he tried to fight through the misery, the overwhelming feeling of inevitability, far enough to consider some catastrophic action, anything at all, that might not save the planet but could at least give the upper levels more time to evacuate. It was not easy, all energy fled his limbs each time his thoughts returned to the attack, to Nema trapped within the tendrils of their monstrous enemy.

Painful though it was, Ven could push aside his grief for the others, for Isoxya, for Captain Eights, for the thousands more, and keep working. Not Nema, not her, she mattered too much. He wasn't ready to face hopelessness without her. A sick feeling, that weakness, for he knew she would not give up, no matter how bleak everything appeared.

Without her inspiration he was not up to this desperate struggle, not yet, perhaps not ever.

Silent seconds passed. Messages piled up in the com buffer for the attention of the incident coordinator. The droids did not relay them, not yet. They had no answers to offer. A gaping void existed in the place where all hope of survival lay.

Eventually Ven stood up. He reached for the holoterminal's activation panel. His mind formulated the idea to call Ditwar Logas, to see if the nebulous operative and his even more questionable connections might offer some final possible solution, no matter how costly. Perhaps, he considered idly, they could flood the Bucket. Maybe water would buy the rest of the planet a few days.

Before he could key in the code the holoprojector flickered back to life with a priority incoming call.

Ven's eyes narrowed at the identifier. Why would the officer call back? He accepted anyway, and explanation emerged as the image resolved into the horned, green-skinned face of Takul.

The Mutaratak narcotics chemist looked terrible. He had a jagged cut on the left side of his face from flying shrapnel, a sizable chunk of his black hair was lost with only burned scalp left behind, and his right eye was puffy and swollen past all use. Despite this a wide, wolfish grin split his face, fanged teeth extended to their maximum predatory extent. “Coordinator Morne, excellent news,” he began.

Mutaratak voices were slippery and strange to human ears, with the syllables of Basic stretched across a long tongue and wrapped oddly around their unusual dental array. Takul normally took full advantage of this and masked all expression behind a cloak of precision professionalism to render his intent impenetrable. In this moment all of that had vanished. Somehow he projected a perfectly readable expression of pure joy.

“She did it!” the chemist continued. “Doctor Nema did it!”

Ven went stock still. Never in his life had he been more grateful for the obscuring cloak of police mask and optics than in this moment. The unnerving storm of emotions that played across his face were nothing he could ever allow anyone else to see. Hope and despair, confusion and jubilation, every possible human contradiction; a waterfall roaring down through him. “Did what?” Natural skepticism, ground into him by an adulthood spent within the underworld police, won initial control of his mouth.

Takul's smile only widened, some primordial hyena about to shatter the bones of his kill. “The sequence!” he crowed. “She finished it, the genetic code to weaponize Miscaf as an anti-YH bioplague. We have it. It works! We've already confirmed initial in vivo tests.”

“But,” Ven could not believe it. Denials leapt to his lips on instinct. “But she was captured. Her lab was destroyed.”

This time the grin sought to split the green face in half. “Coordinator Morne,” the Mutaratak laughed. “Have you forgotten the nature of our business? Our security software logs every last input to our systems and the backup, well, it is securely off-site. The rampaging beast did not touch it.”

This admission opened the Mutaratak to prosecution for a long list of charges under the Republic's digital privacy statutes that could send him to prison for decades, but in the moment Ven could only find abject gratitude directed towards the criminals. Somehow the paranoia of these drug makers had unfolded in their favor. “You said it works?” he blinked rapidly behind his optics, struggling to shift gears backward. He needed to step into the boots of Incident Coordinator Morne once more, the man tasked by a Jedi with holding the Bucket together and turning her miracle into a plan of action. “It will kill the swarm before we all melt?”

“It will,” Takul nodded, horns spiked forward threateningly. “If we can get the ambient fungus to take up the sequence sufficiently and move a sufficient volume of spores to the relevant target areas.”

“That plan's in place,” Lia had labored constantly for every hour to make that portion of Nema's scheme a reality, and he'd sent her all the support he could appropriate, beg, or threaten into being. “We can launch as soon as everything is ready on your end.”

“We are currently introducing the sequence to all of the fungus that we and our partners have cultivated. We need to introduce it to a target site in order to trigger the cascade. Several producers will be ready for transport in fifteen minutes.”

“I’ll dispatch the transport teams,” it did not feel real, this idea of victory despite defeat, but regardless of the dream-like dissonance of this revelation Ven’s course was now clear. The necessary procedures had already been laid down. He just had to usher them into place.

Forcing his leg to move with the serious, tightly controlled stride senior officers always used, pace reduced to a deliberated relaxed meter, almost casual, he turned about, left the secure holoterminal alcove, and returned to the incident control room.

“Put a fifteen minute countdown on the clock!” the order barked free before anyone else could speak. “We are go for operation, I repeat, we are go for operation. Doctor Nema’s finished her part of the plan and so we’re going to finish ours. Advance everything to the final preliminary stage. I want to be ready to launch on my command.”

The assembled command and control staff, a mixture of senior business, medical, municipal, networking, police, and syndicate leaders, most decades his senior and several orders of magnitude above his pay grade, stared back blankly. “But Doctor Nema was taken, right?” one of them, someone Ven did not recognize, did not know, dared to speak.

Cold fire ignited in the officer’s belly. He rounded on this man, a wrathful visage of rusted red burning in the center of a faceless void. “She finished first!” he thundered. “We have the sequence, her weapon. We can kill this thing, and save the lives of every last sapient being on this planet, including our own miserable excuses for leadership, but in order to do that each and every one of you has to carry out your part of the plan. If you aren’t up for that just because the enemy almost brought us down then I’ll save them the trouble by shooting you myself and finding someone who is! Fourteen minutes!” He shook a gloved fist at the clock, let them see the rage no Jedi would ever reveal, showed the pistol on his belt.

The threat wasn’t the least bit idle. He recognized that in himself. He’d been ready to sacrifice all twenty billion residents of the Bucket to save some miserable portion of Coruscant. A handful of bureaucrats were nothing.

It was enough. None of the gathered men and women wanted to die. Shocked out of despairing complacency, they attached themselves to the only remaining option. Soon orders flew rapidly to communication droids and out to the countless individuals in the field. Everyone advanced, chaotically but inexorably, towards implementation.

Ven answered questions and made decisions throughout. He did not have the answers himself, almost always, but it seemed these senior officials were willing to listen to his directives to consult local experts, accept droid recommendations, and all the other things they ought to have tried anyway when the words came from his mouth. Pride, he suspected in a flicker of emergent introspection between inquiries. No one individual could solve this puzzle, but it was nearly impossible to recognize and admit that, save one as overwhelmed by the circumstances as a lowly policeman.

At the ten minute mark he gave his first major command. “Issue the order to take shelter. We don’t know what opening everything up will do. I want everyone to stay as safe as they can.” Some of the models predicted hurricane force winds, an absurdity in an underground realm usually devoid of the slightest breeze.

“Compliance will be considerably less than one hundred percent,” someone, Ven thought they represented waste management, announced.

“I know,” he fought the sensation of countless faces blurred together as he formed an answer. People were going to die. Nema’s solution was beautiful, elegant, and unarguably merciful, but nothing could reduce collateral damage to zero. Not with twenty billion lives in the contact zone.

Going forward represented the only possibility. Ven would mourn later. Hesitation passed beyond him now, eroded by the tide of no return. “Issue the warnings. Tell crowd control to anticipate increased unrest and respond accordingly. Steady on the countdown.”

At this command speakers, screens, droids, and countless other forms of communication throughout the Bucket began to shout their terrible news. Panic, held at a razor’s edge thus far through silence and overwhelming security effort, took hold at the speed of sound. Bodies rushed for buildings, lifts, and portals in a desperate search for a way out. Others responded with outrage. They charged police barricades, threw projectiles at city equipment, and surged towards riot.

Within seconds, reports of these assaults flooded Morne’s improvised command center.

He knew the state of those men and women out in the field, clad exactly as he was. He knew two days of emergency detail had rubbed nerves raw and placed everyone at a hair trigger. He knew the limit on what he could ask them to do, to endure.

He also know how rioting could disrupt the millions of moving parts the operation demanded.

“Disperse the public,” he crunched out the order, teeth gritted and fists clenched till they were past pain. “Use all available non-lethal means.”

Within moments, hundreds of thousands of stun blasts spoke across the underworld.

More deaths, teeth ground back and forth. Bodies dropped limp to reinforced plating and duracrete foundations, both far harder than skulls. Bones would crack, break, and some would never wake again.

“Kayi,” he called into his comlink. “Reinforce critical locations and weapons free for warning shots with the heavy gear. Put as many holes in walls as you think necessary.”

“One light show coming up,” the militia commander’s high voice chirped back enthusiastically.

This move brought a measure of peace, for a little while. Drunk workers and angry syndicate toughs might charge the police, but not the heavy batteries of the underworld's clandestine armies. A few tons of evaporating durasteel sent the rioters scurrying away from heat sinks and essential interchanges.

Ven wished the tentacled bastard below scared so easily, or at all.

“Two minutes,” the leader of the heavy machinery unit called out. “Final abort point.” When it came to the true hulks of Coruscant’s industry, devices the size of skyscrapers, instantaneous start-up and shut-down were simply not possible.

“Any change in critical conditions?” Ven asked the room. The plan left them all quivering in doubt before its countless unknowns. Anyone with a reasonable objection would not stay silent in the face of such fear.

No one spoke.

“Then proceed,” as these words escaped his mask, Ven felt tension drain from his body. They were committed now. From this point forward everything was out of his hands.

As the seconds counted down mark after mark was called out. Units moved from standing in readiness to active, element after element engaged in coordinated synchronicity. By the end the final signal applied only to those working by hand. Hundreds of thousands of workers burrowed deep into the depths of Coruscant’s mighty, decaying, megastructure.

The clock hit zero.

The words should have been Nema’s, Ven knew, and the thought turned his veins to ice. She was the incident coordinator, the one who had inspired all of this. Her genius had made this plan possible. Forced to stand as deputy in her stead, the invocation of their salvation felt hollow. “Commence Operation Sporestorm.”

Across the vastness of the Bucket and extending into those realms above and below, a vast globe hundreds of meters thick enveloping an entire planet, these words unleashed activity.

Electronic commands opened baffles, deactivated filters, and set fans to the redline. Huge blowers the size of stadiums pushed forth masses of air measured in cubic kilometers. Barriers breached, some at digital commands, others shattered by mammoth demolition droids or sliced open by brave souls with plasma torches. Equipment rolled into position, filled every corridor with fans and pumps.

Emergency sprinkler systems activated, drenched the air with mist to foster fungal growth. Thousands of hoses spewed fertilizer into the atmosphere. Lab after lab launched hundreds of thousands of liters of fungal culture into the growing clouds.

The wind rose. It gathered strength, moved about mineral dust and darkened the lights above. Pressure differentials howled in the humid, overheated air. A tropical afternoon took form. Dozens of kilometers below the surface Coruscant quaked before the raw fury of the storm.

Rain crashed down. Debris flew upon the wind. Panicked people fled in terror or huddled desperately in doorways and beneath vehicles. Acidic stink filled the air as the water mixed with the mobilized grime of centuries in a pungent aromatic stew.

To many it was as if the underworld itself crumbled about them. Addicts rushed into the thoroughfares, minds addled by stimulants, and shouted that the end of days had come.

They could not have been further from the truth.

Across the vast pipe arrays, conduit channels, and huge radiator towers scattered throughout the Bucket and filling the levels immediately below the mist rained down steadily onto vast mats of black and silver. Sheets of alien life wrapped like kudzu on all sides of critical equipment, freezing them until they baked. Men and women scrambled at the edges of these waves, masked and cloaked, desperately wielding flame, foam, and pick in a final rearguard effort to strip away the toxic sludge left behind after blasting.

With each passing minute they were forced further and further from their posts. New waves of killing swarm spread endlessly, crawling atop their dead to reabsorb nutrients and expand ever outward. Empowered by this bonanza of corpses and feasting upon the machines used to halt their spread, they surged stronger with each new pulse. Those who failed to withdraw in time from this matted expanse were sucked into the black haze at the leading edge. Filters clogged, masks overcome, they were drawn down gasping to the silent end.

White armor fragments lay in the forefront, but many colors marked out the fallen now. The air about the towers twisted and swam before the eye, bitter heat haze that grew worse with each passing hour. A visible indicator of the cumulative failures of machines marked in the steady rise of the thermometer.

Then the wind came.

It was hot, heavy with the damage incurred by the devastating nanotech biots. Patches of exposed skin among the emergency workers blossomed with brutal steam burns as the pressure front passed through.

The front wave of particulates, a thick brown soup carrying the grime of unwashed ages, slammed into the black swarm sheets, blasted stains across the undulating surface, and then washed onward. Wind carried it forward from one tower to the next, unceasing.

But the swarm did not pass through the wind unscathed, for these howling masses of hot air carried upon their fronts the chosen instrument of the desperate carbon-based lifeforms struggling for survival at the bottom of their world. No, the wind merely bore forth the cavalry this day. Riders on the storm, too small to see but overwhelming in their potency, had arrived.

Of all those scattered across The Bucket engaged in the desperate effort to hold back the assault, the first witness to the connection was a Twi’lek maintenance supervisor. Old, knees worn down by many decades of standing lengthy shifts, his balance failed him in the face of unfamiliar air motion and the pressure front sent him sprawling to the deck. The hand he threw out to brace himself sank into the dark lightless border that marked the swarm’s furthest reach.

He drew the limb back in sudden shock. Horror exploded through his mind as he saw the blackness coating his glove. His free arm went for the plasma torch at his belt, a maddened choice to strike off the afflicted flesh and save the rest.

When his eyes turned back, lit by the light of the brilliant flare, they saw the glove was not black, but brown.

Orbs widened as brown spots spread like wildfire across the surface of the swarm. Before his eyes they turned a soft, faded yellow, the color of old leaves, and crumbled away. Only soft dust was left behind. Beneath the ruined fabric of his lost glove, his hand was untouched.

The old man threw back his head and screamed, not in pain or desperation, but triumph.

Wind howled, rain fell, and the fungus fed.

Tenacious, voracious, a monster that defied a thousand years of inoculation, disinfectant, and industrial renewal, it tore into this newcomer with relish. Armed with precision-engineered weaponized enzymes and supercharged by a sudden cessation of countless attempts to contain it, MSCIADF gorged upon the swarm.

Brown spots exploded, grew broad circles fading to yellow centers across new contacts with every rushing pulse of air. Hyphae raced across the wavy surfaces, a rushing bramble of connections that tore through its enemy's coordination, dumped in chemical killers from all sides. No respite, no remorse, nothing but the absolute evolution-driven brutality of microbial warfare.

Unprepared for this attack, the YH-nano-destroyers were swiftly overwhelmed. Even where pockets managed to temporarily isolate themselves or beat back the fungus through mass advantage, the unceasing wind simply carried another assault upon the next pass. Continuity vanished as patch after patch was isolated by trails wherein all arsenic lay locked away in the vacuole vaults of the enemy and no metabolism could be done. No nano-swarm army could cross those fungal wastelands. Step by step they were beaten back, surrounded, and consumed.

Ven Morne sat in the center of the storm and silently bent his head. “You did it Nema. You really did it. You saved us.”

“Send droids in first to confirm safe corridors,” he gave orders as he rose. “Prioritize those heat shunts still operational. We need to stabilize the system first before we think about restoration of damaged areas. Keep fungus production at max, we’re going to need local spot control once we switch the storm off.”

“Sir,” these commands were accepted. Work continued, messages flew furiously. Ven kept his eyes on one screen above all, the master aggregate temperature. For hours it had slowly risen, a brutal millstone against their efforts.

After nineteen minutes and twenty-four seconds of Sporestorm it ticked down one one-hundredth of a degree.

In that same moment he received a priority holocall. The source code identified the sender as Ditwar Logas.

Flesh covered by a sealed smart-polymer cowl that reduced his face to featureless save for red optical lensing panels, the operative made for an intimidating sight. Despite this obfuscation, his carriage shivered with desperate hope. “Morne,” the words came so fast they could barely be heard. “We’ve found Nema.”

 

You're welcome.

 

Well spotted, I wondered if anyone would catch that reference.

 

You mean it wasn't just a happy accident?

 

Wow, that was an amazing payoff for both this story and the last years worth of Journal Entries and side stories. Ironically this single action by a member of the MediCorps probably saved more lives then the average member of the Jedi Council does in their entire career. It's a perfect example of Yoda's point that wars do not make one great and you do not always win by fighting lightsaber to lightsaber their are other methods of opposing evil.

 

To give the Jedi their due, many were instrumental to winning space battles that prevented the destruction via bombardment of highly populated worlds during the Clone Wars, and when they failed events like the desolation of Humbarine occurred and hundreds of billions died (planetary population scale in Star Wars gets weird, the Empire killed 50 times as many people gassing Geonosis as they did blowing Alderaan apart with the Death Star).

Biological and nanotechnological warfare (YH-life, because of it's peculiar structure, is both these things at the same time) is a way to bypass barriers of scale through self-replication, something we've all spent the last year living through. The Jedi Order, however, is generally remarkably unprepared to handle unconventional attacks. In many ways this strikes me as odd, for not only are such attacks a well-established part of the GFFA - an entire TCW arc was built around one among many other examples - but the Sith have absolutely no moral compunctions against using them and have quite the Legends record of going for it. So it was nice to have a light side scientific solution for a change.

 

VI.

Ven fought down the surge of joy that blossomed in his chest. Found, he quickly realized, could mean many things. Some of them did not bear contemplating. “What do you mean you found her?” he launched out questions rapid-fire. “How? Where is she?”

“Isoxya,” Logas replied. No somber feeling inflected his words, only brutal efficiency, but Ven saw how tightly drawn he was. That wound remained raw on his own side as well. He hadn't been friendly with the warrior the way Nema had, the doctor had a gift for seeing the best in people, but he'd always respected her, and of all those who'd fallen so far this day her face was the one he knew the best.

“There's a tracking device embedded in those fang blades of hers,” the operative continued. “And the knife is still inside the monster that took Nema. I think it'll stay there until digested or something.” Facial muscles twitched beneath the cloak of his masking polymer hood. A grimace, probably. Even a lifetime of reading the masked expressions of police faces was not enough to be certain. “We managed to track it until it stopped moving. Nema's got to be there.”

“How can you be sure?” Plenty of ways existed to deceive such a basic signal. Ven wasn't ready to fully embrace hope, not yet.

“Because I scouted it with a camera droid,” a new voice, a startlingly familiar one that warmed his heart to hear, entered the conversation. A green-skinned hairless face sprang into being amid scratchy holo-static as the transmitted struggled to accommodate the additional datastream. Lia offered him a soft smile as she appeared.

Ven wished Logas wasn't there so he could admit how much better seeing her beautiful face made him feel.

“You need to see the footage,” she continued, those lovely features suddenly somber. “Playing it back now.”

It was grainy and flat, recorded using the limited optical capabilities of a camera drone. Quality proved wholly irrelevant. The footage seared.

“You're looking at Level 1287, in the derelict zone. This column structure appears to have once been a private aquaculture unit, at least that's the best guess. It should be sealed off, but somehow the monsters cut clean through the bulkhead to a portal access. They hid it with a blanket made of well, membranes. The stuff registers as strong as durasteel. If bits of Nema's fungus hadn't gotten blown down the portal and eaten holes in it I'd never have known it wasn't wall.”

The broken column was situated no more than two hundred meters from the portal, over open ground. Behind the walls the droid had found the gutted shell of a building some forty to fifty meters high. The structure itself did not seem to be anything remarkable, though the outline of large nutrient tanks of the kind used to breed YH-biots suggested why it was chosen by the enemy.

The surface of that long abandoned tower squirmed. Monstrous creatures of countless shapes, colors, and motion quivered atop its walls. Ven's eyes caught glimpses of Yellows and the starfish-shaped assault hordes at the edge of the picture, but all else sprang full-formed from maddened nightmares. A second after they came into focus this assembled bestiary noticed the droid.

Some kind of spear, or perhaps thorn, pierced its eyes in the next moment.

The image vanished.

“Hundreds of the things...” Ven breathed. He put the pieces together swiftly. They had found the den of the primal spawner, the monster maker behind everything who'd abducted Nema.

She was there. He was sure of it.

But he did not know if they could get her back.

“Based on analysis of the surviving frames I estimate no less than five hundred combat capable units defending the structure,” Logas summarized. His usual tendency to act as if he held every possible answer had reasserted itself. “As I believe I have already set all my bridges aflame today I have requested a GAR regiment with heavy artillery support be dispatched for an assault, but it will take several hours at minimum before they can deploy.”

Those words sent a shock lancing through Ven, memory triggered. He recalled the very first time he and Nema battled YH-biots, and devastating limits imposed by the very same difficulty. That time the Ayae had come to the rescue.

They would not be coming today. “All militia units are committed,” he cursed. “I can't call them back.” He needed those soldiers on crowd control desperately, the Bucket was barely holding together as it was. Besides, he recognized that it would take time for them to redeploy in any sort of order regardless, engaged as they were.

Lia, looking at him through the projection, shook her head. She spoke no words, but garnet eyes, bottomless pools of sadness, told him all he needed to know.

The thing behind this monstrous assault was smart. It had found Nema and taken her before she could present her solution. Only the paranoia of drug dealers had saved them. It would not wait too long a second time.

Ven met those eyes, neck stiff. He gave Lia a single long stare, let his optics express all the feeling he could not voice.

She nodded back, tears at the corners of her eyes, understood.

He could not imagine a stronger possible affirmation. Silently he knew he did not deserve the affections of either the woman he was about to leave waiting or the one he had to rescue. All that was left was to love them both as best he could, albeit in two very different ways.

“We can't wait,” he told Logas. “Set up a rendezvous point for an assault.” To Lia he added. “Can you clear the portal and get us some lift barges?”

Lia smiled, but the agent sputtered. “Morne, what in the blazing galaxy are you about to do?”

“If we don't stop this thing, today,” optics met optics in a clash of opaque visions. “It will strike again, and next time we won't have Nema to save us. I'm going to get her back and put it down. That's all.”

“But we don't have any resources!” the agent protested.

“You really haven't gotten used to life down here yet have you?” Ven quipped. Lia rewarded him with a molten chuckle. “Don't you know that at the bottom of the well the bucket is never empty?”

Before Logas could say anything more he ended the transmission. Back in the command room he gave a swift series of orders. “Prefect Xeril, take overall command of Sporestorm,” he tried to ignore how ridiculous it was to give orders to a man several steps up his own command chain. “You can reduce flow when the models give the go ahead, but don't let up. I want this thing exterminated.”

“Understood,” there was no shortage of that particular sentiment.

“Set my helmet transmitter to interface directly with the emergency communication frequencies,” he told the lead communications manager. “I'm going down to the steps to make an address.”

The comms official stood to raise an objection, caught the way Ven pounced toward him, and simply said. “We'll be good to go live in two minutes.”

Two minutes was a long time, but there were twelve floors between the emergency command center of the Bucket's central Municipal Authority Hall and the wide steps in front of the raised main entrance. Ven avoided the turbolifts and descended the emergency back stairs.

That way he had no time to think about what to say.

A cordon of gray-cloaked officers behind speeders and barricades sealed the bottom of the steps. Nervous and tired, they stood with blasters out. Black barrels pointed out at the massive crowd, tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, that gathered in protest in the vast square beyond. A throng of angry citizenry propelled by fury, loss, and the need for answers.

Ven Morne pushed out through the heavily reinforced doors, one hand on each side, back bent into the effort, and spoke to them.

“Residents of the underworld, I am Officer Ven Morne, of the police, but today I am Deputy Incident Coordinator Morne. As you have seen, we, all of us, have suffered through a hideous, cowardly, biological attack that tried to kill every single one of us, to destroy the very world we live within.” his voice rose slowly as he spoke, unconsciously. Throughout the gathered crowd, and across the whole of the planet, the emergency communication system they'd cobbled together carried those words to billions of ears. Protocol droids converted them to thousands of languages in real time. Though many initially turned away, the sheer universality of the message gathered them all up.

“But this attack has failed. Countless of your fellow citizens labored in this effort. Many have given their lives, but we have prevailed! The enemy is beaten, consumed onto death by a counter fashioned by a single soul among us. Doctor Rig Nema, a name known widely, and always called friend, devised this weapon that has saved us all. Every last one of you, myself included, owes her our lives. We are still here because she defeated that which would destroy us.”

He paused, gathered breath as he was shouting now. “But the enemy has taken her! The scum thinks to steal her away, our saint, in her moment of triumph. I say no! I'm going to get her back, we know where she is.”

All at once Ven's voice fell, steady, even, just above a whisper though perfectly clear. “I'm going after Doctor Nema. I'll go alone if I must, but I will take any who are willing to fight to get back one of our own along. Who will come with me?”

On that vast plaza, amid the great crowd, a deep silence spread. The moment lay poised, frozen, on the point of decision. A universe waited to see which way it would fall, upon one who would cast the choice forth against the balance of billions.

In the end it came from far toward the back, barely within the range of Ven's hearing.

A single word.

“Scoros!”

A fist rose from among countless bodies, green and gray skin divided on sharp planes wrapped about the stock of a blaster rifle.

Tassia. Separatist-aligned, beholden to the YH-monster. Betrayers of everything. Their distinctive, endlessly empowered battle-cry split the air. Willing to sacrifice all for one step on the path to redemption.

“Scoros!” A second hand, clasped about the butt of a blaster pistol and covered in the gnarled, leathery epidermis of a Nikto, joined the first.

“Scoros!” The third hand belonged to a human woman, vibrosword pointed to the sky.

The floodgates burst.

“Scoros! Scoros! Scoros!”

The maddened chant burst from a hundred thousand throats at once. Relayed across the comm system it raced around the planet. In moments billions were roaring, and floor plating shook with the echoes.

Ven struggled to stand as he projected rendezvous coordination for seasoned fighters to follow He commandeered one of the speeders in the barricade and blasted over the thunderous crowd toward the critical portal.

He swore he'd get there in time.

 

VII.

Ven had no illusions about his ability to lead a mass combat engagement. Thankfully he knew an expert who had her own reasons to save Nema and qualified subordinates who could cover her role among the militia forces. Major Kayi, of the Ayae, massed only perhaps forty kilos of flesh and bone, but her repulsor-mounted neuro-linked battle ring clocked in at ten times that weight and sported enough firepower to intimidate the most blaster-fetishistic bounty hunter.

She stood next to him on the first of several heavy drone barges tied to the landing platform on Level 1311. Thousands of bodies, sporting a collection of weapons and armor as varied as their assembled species, lined up behind her. The vengeful horde he'd summoned to save one lost doctor.

“This isn't an army,” Kayi snapped out words; her high-pitched voice sharp and serious. “It's a mob. There's no tactical options, it'll be all we can do to hit the landing and charge. I've scattered the real fighters I recognize here and there to stiffen the rest of the lot when they see what we're up against but we'll still be lucky to get half of them to actually attack. Considering the way those Yellows fight this is going to be a mad melee. If we win it'll all be about numbers.”

A grim assessment, one Ven found tasted sour on his tongue. Winning by attrition meant many, maybe most, of these people, all volunteers who'd chosen to follow him forward, would not be coming back. “There's got to be something.” He looked into Kayi's red eyes and tried to summon hope out of the soft fuzz surrounding them.

The Ayae officer clicked her teeth. “The droid cameras show a breach in the column on the right side, ground floor. Tracking telemetry puts Nema in there. If that's true, so's the thing that stole her.” Kayi curled her slender fingers into fists. “Nema said if we took out the central intelligence the rest would shut down or go mad and she's been right so far. That's the key.” her hands swept out to encompass a nearby cluster of fighters. “I've assigned a squad full of heavies with you. Cut through the mess, kill that thing, and get Nema out. It's the best chance, maybe the only one.”

“Right,” Ven nodded. “Five minutes till launch.” The hurry was relentless, and they were leaving thousands of would be soldiers behind, but he could not shake a growing fear that they had no time left. Whatever cruel need the monster had to imprison Nema, he doubted it would save her life for long.

Kayi's gathered heavies increased his confidence considerably. They resembled the cast of a particularly blood-soaked holodrama. The group started with a pair of Wookiees bearing over-sized bowcasters and swords thick as his leg and only got worse from there. A quick scan turned up a Mandalorian, a Nova Guard, and a Thanrex Encoffiner all in full armor. A trio of Nikto grenadiers filled out the row behind them.

The biggest surprise of all was found on his right. “Ditwar Logas?” Ven could hardly have been more surprised to find the operative present. The spy could fight, surely, Nema had said as much, but he hardly seemed the sort Kayi would include among a batch of Isoxya-style killing machines. A bayonet on your rifle looked intimidating, but most of the time was nothing but a showpiece. “What are you doing here?”

“Saving Doctor Nema,” he replied serenely, the masked face gave nothing away. “That would be the present imperative, would it not? I have a private reason to involve myself, and at this point I feel I can indulge any personal desires. The Chancellor can hardly complain about my actions on the day we saved the whole planet.”

Ven tried to ignore this remark. He didn't like to think about this man's personal reasons for involving himself with Nema. They hit a bit too close to his own. “And you're a fit for this crowd?” he asked by way of changing the subject.

With a startlingly swift snap-click motion Logas pulled his rifle off his back and spun it up to ready position using only one arm. He spun the heavy weapon about as if it weighed nothing. Cybernetics flexed impossible strength through his limbs. “Morne,” the operative spoke quietly. “You were trained by a particularly savage police force and further educated by the schooling of hard streets. Myself, well, those responsible for my current career path had a decidedly narrower focus.” his body compressed through a deep exhale and the rifle returned seamlessly to its housing. “They were interested only in the art of murder.”

“Oh,” sensing no further elaboration would be forthcoming the officer checked his own weapons. Service pistol and stun baton seemed rather meager compared to the arsenals of the others, but he had faced this enemy with them before, and trusted nothing better. They would serve.

“Stand by for descent,” Kayi called out the command.

In the next moment the floor dropped out from under them.

Combat descent through the yawning abyss of an underworld portal had everything in common with a halo drop, the only real difference being that instead of a chute hanging from one's back the deceleration was controlled by a plate beneath one's feet. It was an ordeal measured in the knees and stomach. They came to a sudden stop amid the wretched stench of mixed species nausea.

The concealing false wall no longer existed, torn away by the hunger of Nema's ravening fungus. Clear space extended from the landing to the tower beyond. In between there was only a plain of bare metal.

And a legion of nightmares.

They had countless shapes, but everyone of them wrong. Twisted, asymmetrical whorls and spirals wrapped about bendy limbs and pulsating tentacles. Every off line and deformed polyhedron existed in defiance of billions of years of evolutionary expectation intrinsic to all who stood against them. No mere clash of species, this battle arose between truly foreign lineages.

Kayi, ever aware of the circumstances, left no time for fear. “Forward!” she called the charge. “Scoros!” Running ahead of her troops, a shining blur, she let the rotary cannons on her arms roar.

Wordless sussurrations rose from the enemy in answer, mind-blighting creatures lurched into lumbering advance. Booted feet counter-charged in response. Bodies slammed into each other. Blood and ichor stained the durasteel below.

The battle joined in rage.

Ven found himself in the center of a ring of warriors. The heavies flowed together in formation, driven by some veteran battle instinct he did not share. Monstrous forms surged around them, struck at the edge of a warding barrage of blaster fire and explosions.

A pattern took hold. Grenadiers lobbed a brutal bombardment ahead to clear the path, armored warriors charged in and cleaved through all counters, then heavy blasters secured the position. In this way, bleeding ammunition, energy, and wounds, they advanced across the field of madness.

Though woefully under-gunned, Ven flowed through with the third group. Rather than fire fast as he could squeeze the trigger some unspoken gut feeling saw him aim and spot shots with delicate care. His bolts lanced joints and binds, barely noticed by others, that served to cripple contorted flesh capable of shrugging off far more potent blows.

Nema, he realized. All the endless hours watching her as she diagrammed and examined the anatomy of YH-life. A dark truth of biology; the knowledge to heal lies only a mirror's edge division from the knowledge to kill.

Yet for all that his performance exceeded his own expectations, it was nothing compared to the variance unveiled by Ditwar Logas.

The operative became a blur, motions so swift it was as if he stepped between still frames, transition unseen. His rifle leaped through his hands, jumped from arm to arm interchangeably, and freely shifted from blazing high-energy artillery to deadly blade. He did not run, he swarm in three dimensions across the bodies of his foes.

Ven watched as the vibrobayonet sliced the skull capsule face of a Yellow while Logas stood atop its shoulders. He rolled down to the paving, fired six shots in a circle, and kicked back an advancing mass of claws in one move. In the next the bayonet sang a song of severing through a halo of tentacles. No anger, no rage, accompanied this. Logas did not roar like the Wookiees or grunt like the Mandalorian. Utterly silent, he simply eliminated, target by target, with cold mechanical precision.

The officer had seen holos of Mace Windu fighting battle droids. These flashed across his eyes now, a resonant image of barely controlled devastation. The inevitable realization drummed through his skull that this man was far more than a spy.

In the chaos of combat there was no time to take the thought further.

Their formation saw them to the edge of the tower, but then it all came apart. The instigator might not understand combat tactics in any human sense, but it could recognize a point of weakness. So it had done, and plugged the hole with strength.

Chalk-white in color, it stood on a stalk-like appendage fixed in place and surrounded by a curtain-cloak of rippling, mobile, ribbon-form armor plates. At the front of a conical head it bore three slit-shaped crystalline eyes in a row. In the center beneath was a ball like structure filled with pointed silver pins.

Spears.

The first strike took one of the Wookiees in the chest. The bolt pierced clean through, tore flesh, bone, and fur like flimsy. Broken remains fell away.

Grenades arced down at this horrible turret-form, only to be battered away by whipcord ribbons of armor. A storm of spears shot forth in riposte, and Nikto bodies joined the piled wreckage on the floor. Blaster bolts spattered across the silvered chords and solid skull, but traced no impact beyond light charcoal stains.

The others scattered, weaved to dodge the deadly cannonade of barbs.

Ven dove behind the only available cover, the body of the fallen Wookiee.

Armored turret, recognition assessed this target. He watched as blasts and blows failed to bypass this thing's adaptive armor. Saw the futile efforts of warriors to breakthrough and fighters fallen to the counters.

The charge stalled, and as the arts of combat failed to meet the challenge the policeman's eyes took over. The others were fighting fair, strength versus strength, a contrast so primordial in nature both sides could fully understand it.

But Ven was no warrior, he was an officer of the law, and the law, as everyone knows, does not fight fair.

He aimed carefully and then fired again, as fast as his pistol would cycle.

His shots impacted unimpeded, for they were not aimed at the white turret blot at all. Ruby streaks dumped an entire blaster pack's worth of accelerated particles into the deck plating beneath it.

There is no ground in the underworld. Cold metal plating absorbed the totality of that barrage, turned red, then orange, and when it glowed white hot as steam billows boiled off and up into the core of the turret-form.

Flesh squealed as it burned. The stalk coiled, warped, and bent. The monster crashed down to the super-heated floor.

Where it boiled.

“Advance!” Ven called out, knowing this triumph meant nothing yet. “Have to get to Nema!”

The surviving heavies broke through shattered walls. Beyond they found the gutted floor of the tower filled with tall nutrient tanks. Horrors gestated in milky liquids, growth arrested by the commands of their overlord. Eyes slid away from those creatures, mind-shattering in their formlessness.

In the center of that grand chamber was a single tank, this one clear and pristine. Ven's eyes misted as he saw the golden-skinned figure suspended within. Whole, she hung neutral in the emptiness.

Beside that silent encasement waited a lord of nightmares.

It stood fully twenty meters high atop paired pillars formed of twining black vines. At its crown were two rings of lashing appendages terminating in cold blue crystalline fangs, one of six and the other of seven. These curled to offend the eyes alongside the irregular yellow panel facets that warded their bases.

This was the monster that slew Isoxya, the officer knew. The mind behind it all. He could feel the pressure of the thing now, so close. Wordless voices howling at the edge of awareness. Alien fury at the mewling creatures that dared defy it. A mind capable of seeking to annihilate a trillion lives without hesitation.

He shot it.

Black skin seemed to simply drink in the bright bolt. No sign of harm emerged.

To his right the Mandalorian fired a disruptor pistol. This cold pulse-blast, a hundred times more powerful than ordinary bolts, left a slight mark, but no more than a surface coating.

One of the crown tentacles snapped down and cut the warrior in half, armor and all.

Time slowed. Fighters struggled, flailed, and died. Blaster bolts wrote a pattern of nothing across the skin of the foe. Tentacles slapped aside such other strikes as came close. Blows cleaved through bodes backed by an impossible strength only the Force could supply.

The ragged survivors of the assault squad were formidable, but they were not enough, after their losses, to do what Isoxya could not.

It is not just powerful, Ven realized as a tentacle slammed him against a tank and cracked every one of his ribs. More than a beast, it reasons, and it has the Force.

The Force... His red-covered eyes looked past the enemy, to fall upon the doctor, floating unaware in the central tank.

Logas, still a blur, utterly unwilling to surrender, slashed through a tentacle with the shimmering edge of his bayonet. The endless lashing whirl acquired a sudden gap.

Electricity can disrupt it, the policeman remembered desperately. He reached down and snapped the stun baton to full extension. Counting the moments he caught the opening on the next pass. Fighting through bitter pain and failing breath he threw the flimsy little rod with all his remaining strength.

It flew end over end past flailing limbs, edged tendrils, and fallen bravery. The round tip struck the glass surface of the tank and, with a sudden spark-flash, broke through.

“Nema!” Ven Morne cried.

Golden eyes opened.

 

He found her!

 

I like how its Morne's non-combat abilities that make him useful to the strike team and allow them to defeat some of the YVH's defenses. Now with Dr. Nema awake it will be up to her to defeat the central intelligence. The question of course is how since I rather doubt combat will be the solution. Personally I suspect what will allow her to defeat it will be her medical knowledge just like Morne's police knowledge allowed him to discover solutions.

 

VIII.

Nema emerged from darkness into a strange, altered awareness. Everything felt startlingly clear, as if she’d just awoken from the most relaxing sleep and the air was perfect. At the same time her surroundings were fogged and muddled. Senses resolved minimal space only, no more than a few body lengths in any direction, and utterly without objects. She floated in a void.

A tank, memory supplied the answer, recalled the miserable thickness of lodging in a stew of bacta. This was similar, but at the same time different. No sticky taste of healing liquid stained her tongue. No comforting warmth of elevated temperatures enveloped her. In truth, there were no external sensations at all. Clarity came from within, a piercing understanding unleashed in the absence of all distractions, all other inputs.

Thump. Her heartbeat quaked through her. She followed that signal, counted off the measure. Many seconds passed before another pulsation followed.

A terminal level. Summation was easy. Despite this diagnosis she felt no fear. As she stood upon the edge of death the final slide into oblivion no longer seemed significant at all, reduced to a mere academic concern. Instead she wondered what circumstances might possibly have placed her in this state, and to what purpose.

“Close…closer,” the words were distant at first, lost through curtains of mist. Repetition drew them near, and in time Nema turned and focused on their source. A shadowed blot pushed through the fog. “Found. Connected.”

It flowed into being, form precipitated from the ambient condensation itself. Clouds wrapped and coiled, wove and spun, dyed to taste and gathered about central emptiness. Thus was this being rendered, shape from shapelessness.

It took on a vaguely humanoid countenance, or at least that of a hooded cloak draped atop such a body. Within that cowl lay naught but shadow, and the trailing edges disintegrated outward into a chaotic trim of twitching tendrils. It held to a pale sickly yellow shade, the color of a half-healed bruise.

“Found,” a voice strong and smooth, but doubled over by echoes against its open internal cavity, emerged from within the bottomless depths of the cloak. “Heard. Seen. Known. No mask? No mask!”

These words, scattered and cryptic though they were, illuminated much to Nema. This was the YH-instigator, the mind and presence that lay at the heart of all manifestations of such life on Coruscant, the only true intelligence among the totality of their kind. She could feel its presence, no longer shrouded as it had been. Now it was clear, approachable, all blocks removed. A deliberately forged conjunction, tunneled through the Force through the elimination of all other inputs, including her own essential metabolic processes. Necessary to prevent the noise of her own mind from overwhelming the foreign, faint signal.

“I hear you,” she tested her voice, felt the words bridge the gap; watched their syllables ripple across endless folds within the contouring of the yellow cloak.

“It speaks, it sees, it knows,” the yellow thing flowed closer, billowing in unseen winds. “And we know it.”

Immense in the Force, a strength possessed of the casually refined consciousness the doctor could only compare to great Jedi Masters, Nema found herself utterly shocked by the absence of any impression of darkness from this emanation. Strange sensations aplenty abounded, and there was a distinct absence of the luminous glow beneath the skin she associated with glancing at a true Jedi in the depths of meditation, but the faceless expression beneath the hood concealed no malevolence.

Those lost to the thrall of darkness were not unknown to Nema. She had seen dark poisons spread cancerous through one of the Vahla and stood behind her master as she fought a berserk killer of the Bando Gora. Such corruption left distinctive signs. Linked in this way, minds bridged through the Force where nothing could possibly remain concealed, she could not fail the diagnosis.

But this creature gathered in itself no greater concentration of ill than any ordinary being. “What are you?” the words escaped her lips at speed, propelled by unnameable horrors. “How could you do this and not be tainted? You should be blighted to your core!” Fury leaked through, the death of Isoxya and all the others pulled from memory and thrown at this creature’s base.

“Scale too small, scope too narrow,” it shivered back. “Fail to understand. Cycle demands destruction. Breakage brings benefit, allows salvation. Dominance is doom.” Its voice rose in volume, gained, empowered, by urgent need. Passion from beyond all veils. “Center must be shattered! Only means to save! Cycle turns, discontinuity opens future!”

“Shatter the center?” these words tumbled through the mind, troubling in their desperation. The instigator, Nema realized in shock, believed it was doing the right thing, the necessary thing. Driven by whatever passed for its moral calculus, it saw itself on a sacred mission.

Considered from the end objective, the meaning became clear. “You want to destroy the Republic, destroy the government.” Trembling, she enunciated this deduction. Shocked disruption rocked her mind at the slightest recognition of this perspective. “Break the galaxy to save it.”

It was sheer, unadulterated madness, an absurd delusion, but draped in the lucidity of deprivation, Nema realized that this being fully believed in it. Its commitment was total. Worse, she knew that for all the alien attitude of its cognition, it was shockingly intelligent.

“There are a trillion people on Coruscant!” she found her defiance then, the righteous cry of doctor and Jedi joined as one. “You would sacrifice them all for you preferred future? For your cycles?” It became a raw rejection scream.

“Ephemeral existences irrelevant,” the cloaked thing brushed this aside as the stone ignores the single step. “Subsumed by patterns, evaluation not favor one over another, pointless action. Must act on outcomes.”

Hammer blows these words. Not their content, no, that was startlingly recognizable. Nothing more than cost-benefit analysis on a galactic scale, the sort of credit-measure assessment of policies a droid might give, or Ditwar Logas.

The type of analysis the Force told a Jedi to explicitly reject, but that same Force flowed off this creature calm and assured.

Linked as they were, it carried a dreadfully seductive allure.

She was a doctor. No patient could be sacrificed for the so-called greater good. Intense desire struck against the core of all Nema was and bounced away. The yellow cloak writhed, anger evident at last.

Yet that brief moment of captivation, the unwelcome intrusion of this thought across the folds of her brain, brought forth critical insight.

“Biots,” she whispered. “Non-sapient automatons crafted by a single intelligence, a central command node. And even the body is a lie, a convenience. Your intelligence is tied to your essence, distributed across the backdrop of all your biomass. You are the swarm. No individuals exist at all.”

To this thing the very idea of a trillion lives, a trillion souls, on Coruscant was incomprehensible. It did not reason in such a fashion. The one and the all existed in tandem, without distinction.

“Recognition?” the yellow form questioned. “Understand essential? Our actions vital. Opposition must cease. Breakage will occur. Not too late, path remains.”

“No!” Nema screamed at it, her conviction rebounded about itself to unbreakable heights. “I will not let you do this! Our lives have value, inestimable worth. You can’t simply take them.”

For a long interval, all time lost at the edge between life and death, the blackness within the hood looked away. Staring into the endless mist the Force quivered within it, and Nema felt that it struggled with uncertainty found there. A welcome revelation, that it too was capable of doubt.

“Understood us, you attempted,” it spoke slowly. “Saw. Watched. Possibility emerged, alternate path. Effort expended, convince opposition, rectify eon. You reject our method. Offer substitute?”

The magnitude of this request submerged Nema. This thing wanted her to tell it how to destroy the Republic, to break the galaxy’s government. A mystery vanished with this demand. Why it had acted now, why it offered its resources to the Separatists. From the perspective of this being they shared goals. It had learned from them, come to understand the nature of the Republic, and when they proved incapable of implementing those goals it had acted along with perfect directness while the galaxy remained divided.

“I cannot forsake the Republic,” Nema refused this being a second time. “The suffering would be immeasurable.” A Separatist victory would serve this thing’s purpose. She did not believe the CIS could successfully hold the galaxy together. “There must be another way.”

“We have found no alternatives,” the comb of tendrils twitched in waves at the base of the thing. “All paths turn closed. Scale too small, scope too narrow. Find alternative.”

Too much, it was all too much, and her being quavered. The edge was running out now, the drop too close. “I don’t know what you want. I don’t understand your cycles. I can’t help you. I would if I could. I’m sorry.”

The third time, for no reason she could explain, she did not refuse.

Again the yellow hood turned and examined the void. When it rotated back at last there was color within that shadow recess. The burnished golden shade reflected in her own eyes stared back. “Admirable,” the alien intelligence intoned. “But time runs out. Current course must be sustained. Possibilities closed unheard. We are sorry…Nema.”

“Nema!”

Her name struck from both sides, voices entwined and metamorphosed into one. The song of alien enchantment harmonized with the hymn of familial love for a single endless note.

Rig Nema's eyes opened.

She hung suspended in a tank of nutrient solution. A broken oxygen tube slipped free of her mouth, and she gulped air as suppressed breathing instincts asserted themselves with overwhelming need. Thankfully the tank contents drained away ahead through a hole left by a stun baton.

Beyond fractured glass barriers loomed the immense vessel of the instigator, massive and implacable. She could still feel it, but the intimacy no longer wrapped about her, only a faint reflection remained.

Battle raged without. Her suddenly sharp vision caught glimpse of Morne's gray overcoat collapsed to the ground, Mr. Logas' blue jumpsuit dashed back and forth nearby, disarmed but still dodging. Others, unknown to her recall, struggled in the face of the overwhelming assault of deadly tentacles. In the distance a low rumble told of great conflict yet unresolved.

Meaning relayed through the stun baton. Morne, desperate, had given every effort to free her from the enemy's thrall.

And it was her enemy. She looked up into the black-and-yellow patterns and knew it to be true. Today was not the day of alternatives. It had rejected any chance that she might find another path, decided to destroy her instead. For now only battle remained.

Hands dropped to the hilt of her lightsaber at the moment her feet found solid ground below. To her amazement the weapon remained in place. It had not been stripped from her grasp.

Her finger paused atop the ignition stud.

A trap. That was the impulse to face this foe with glowing blade in hand. Isoxya fought this being that way, she remembered in a surge of sadness, as fine a warrior as any Jedi, and those severed pieces hindered it not at all. It was an extruded organism, cutting would not kill it.

The moment demanded other means, and as jagged-edged blades on the end of rippling coiled appendages shattered the last glass barrier between them Nema realized that others had known what she would need and already provided it.

But she despaired of harnessing strength sufficient to match the instigator. The power of a master was not something she could demand on a whim.

The hilt turned in her hand. Fingertips passed over a tiny ridge, the almost imperceptible suture left behind by Lia's welds. It came to mind that another power source lay at hand.

“The crystal is the heart of the blade.” Nema put both hands on the hilt of her lightsaber, gripped hard, drew on the Force, and twisted.

A single crack split the air. The lightsaber fell to her feet in two pieces. A little green gemstone rose up from the debris to the center of her forehead. A single tap of one finger clicked it into place in the gap at the center of the sigil hanging there.

It fit perfectly.

Paired tentacles raced down to impale her.

Nema spread her hands, breathed in, and pulled the Force through the khyber crystal into her body.

Every nerve burst into flame. The surge of power raced through blood, bone, and muscle. Light exploded across her vision. Tissues convulsed and her breath burned in her lungs. Energy deluged her body, beyond control, beyond restraint. It demanded only release.

Bladed edges, silver-black and stained with crimson, rang out impacts in the air. Once, twice, thrice; three strikes for three barriers. Planes of power, soft chartreuse glow stretched between emanations of the Force. A circuit of posts, twined concentric circles, and three aligned rings in sequence, each of the barriers given unto her by one of three priestesses unleashed in tandem.

Matched to the floor at one edge, they joined together on the others to form a perfect tetrahedron. A shimmering, spinning barricade that held the instigator away from all. Tentacles rasped and slammed against those shining walls in vain, unable to find purchase against the Force alone.

But Nema felt each blow. Drumbeats struck against the inside of her skull.

Not enough, she knew. This will not hold it long. It has to end.

Her body bucked with strain. Steam rose from her skin. Blood vessels burst within her eyes.

Some reverberation of the connection through the Force remained between them. She felt it each time the radiant planes contacted metal-black arsenic-laced flesh. The alien mind of the instigator remained far out of reach, but she could feel the substance of its chosen vessel. She delved out, raced down those paths, consciousness thrust into the physical form of the adversary.

Priestess teaching formed barriers of the Force along existing faults in reality. Extended now, the doctor detected the same in the structure of the YH-organism. Lines cast across its being, wired through the innate bond between all living things and the Force.

Memory cast her back into the former battle, the manipulation of fungal enzymes. Chemical bonds, bent, wrapped, and oriented. Information an aspect of position, the essential affinity between form and function drilled down into her mind. The assembled lattice hid a different formulation in this alternative abiogenesis of life, but the evolutionary principle remained inviolate.

No matter how strange it might seem, life was life.

Nema grabbed the barriers with all her strength, pulled, and folded.

Her hands moved almost imperceptibly, but the vast polyhedral form shifted mightily. The great beast within thrashed, and chunks of its flesh fell away. Great black blocks of entity struck the floor and boiled away to naught but disassociated gases in an instant.

Hands shifted again and again. She no longer saw the macro form, only the assembly pattern, the structural steps needed to birth this creature of devastating potency. One by one she worked them in reverse.

Not battle, surgery. Dimensionless edges sharp enough to cleave atoms systematically unmade the blighted, monstrous, form invoked to Coruscant's destruction. One piece at a time components were hewn free and the menace reduced in scope.

She lost count of the folds, the maneuvers. The process demanded contraction, conclusion. She dared not stop, each step commanded the next; only chaos waited otherwise. Juggled and unstable, the form must be strained to completion. No energy could be spared to even contemplate another possibility.

All proceeded in silence. The instigator made no sound as it slowly fell to pieces. Those few observers still alive to watch were too stunned to even move. Nothing existed beyond the folding planes, circles gathered together a whole universe.

And then, unexpectedly, the procedure arrived at the final fold.

The three planes now formed a threefold knot the size of her palm. Within it a marble-sized blob contained all that remained of the YH-lifeform. Nothing but a speck to all it had once been, a tiny seed from the mighty tree.

A single move remained. Cross all three planes together at once, tear the critical link asunder, end it all.

Nema's skin burned. Blood clouded her vision. Pain lanced her spine. Agony spat across her hands.

Every last scrap of that damage, and more, ordered that blow to fall. Morne's smashed ribs, Logas' blood-soaked skull, the fallen all about her. The searing memory of Isoxya's shattered armor. Cold calculation demanded destruction claim this creature, lest it strike again and reap a trillion lives. She wanted to do it. It was right, surely, the execution of an implacable enemy, one by its very nature beyond any other form of justice.

Muscles twitched, stumbling, ravaged fingers shifted toward motion.

The little nugget pulsed, once against each barrier. A final, desperate act of defiance. Light shown at each impact. Green, green, and then yellow.

Three times it asked. Twice I refused. The Jedi recoiled. But on the third request I agreed.

She owed it the same.

Hands relaxed, dropped numb to her sides. The spinning barriers of Force energy vanished.

As if in a trance Nema stepped forward and knelt by the little sphere of dark-shaded tissue. The instigator was still there. She could feel the presence, taste the foreign but now familiar flavor of YH-essence in the Force. Cracked, that presence, fading fast. The form left to it now insufficient to sustain its being.

Driven by an inspiration of unknown origin, she reached up, pulled the crystal from her brow, and placed it atop the remains.

Blackness coiled and surged. It bonded to the lattice, infiltrated it. A network of dark veins spread through the form, with black caps gathered at each end.

Deep in the Force, the presence stabilized.

“You sure about that?” As if from far away Nema heard Morne's voice. When she turned she discovered he stood next to her.

“Yes,” unsteady at first, she found confidence upon repeat. “Yes. None of us have the right to deal in extinction, and this being is beyond the judgment of any law we might write.”

“I trust you,” Morne paused. “That will always be enough for me, but I suggest you not tell anyone else.” He held up the paired fragments of her lightsaber.

“Good advice,” she smiled as she carefully placed the parts around the changed crystal and snapped them back into place. It did not surprise her that they felt as if brand new.

That she immediately collapsed afterwards was equally expected.

Notes
For those who have read "A Second Opinion" and were wondering what was going on with Nema's lightsaber during that particular AU piece. Well, now you know.

 

IX.

When Nema woke up again she was no longer in the underworld. The ceiling above her belonged to the Jedi Temple. That recognition remained firm. She had expected as much.

Morne's presence by her bedside was not on the list of anticipated possibilities.

He wore his dress blues, not the underworld uniform, rich umber skin and firmly handsome features clear to be seen. As she took them in she discovered all sense of physical attraction dissipated at a thought. They had moved past such distractions it seemed.

“How long?” she asked him after figuring out how to make her voice operate once again.

“Five days,” Morne answered calmly but firmly. “They pulled you out of the bacta tank last night.”

“Strange,” the doctor considered this news. “I can barely taste it at all.”

This drew a grimace across Morne's face. “Right, the med droids said you may have permanently lost sensitivity to your surface nerves, taste and touch both.”

Nema ran her hand along the blanket across her chest. Diagnosis confirmed, contact felt weak, barely perceptible even when she gripped hard. “I see,” she made herself smile. That too felt oddly muted. “Is that all?”

“Seems to be,” a quick nod, honest and welcome.

“Considering I used my body as a capacitor for a khyber crystal, I suppose I should feel lucky.” Living tissue was not prepared to survive such stresses. Truthfully, she had given herself poor odds of ever waking up at all. “How about you?”

He tapped his chest gently, revealing the presence of a polyplast wrap beneath his clothes. “Twelve cracked ribs,” he shrugged. “I did eight hours in the tank myself, but its nothing compared to those who didn't come back.”

They bowed their heads together. “How did you even manage a rescue mission?” Nema questioned. “Actually,” she considered, mind trawling slightly further back. “How are we not ash?”

“Takul,” the second question was answered first, with one word only. “And, for the rest, I asked for volunteers.”

The first answer was troubling, but exceedingly reasonable; the second utterly unbelievable. “You asked?” She stared at him wide-eyed. “You just asked the citizens of the underworld to help you and they actually answered?”

“Nema,” quietly serious, all curt officer brevity dropped, these words came slowly. “You cured a horrid disease and then followed that up by saving the lives of everyone on the planet. Maybe up here that's just what people expect Jedi to do, but down in the underworld we understand debt, and we pay it back; in blood when we must. You're a hero, and it won't soon be forgotten.”

At this he suddenly stood. Sternness disappeared when he smiled frightfully. “That reminds me, we both have to attend a parade in four hours. Don't worry,” he waved a quick hand. “You won't have to walk, but attendance is mandatory. The Chancellor will be there.”

“What?” Nema blinked in disbelief. “Why?”

“You did catch the part about saving everyone on the planet, didn't you?” His smile deepened. “Politicians tend to make a big deal about that sort of thing. There's going to be medals.”

Horror joined shock on the doctor's face. It was all too much, too ridiculous. “Not just for me, surely?” She manged only this weak objection.

“No,” a quick head shake. “Thousands of names.” The smile vanished. “Too many of them posthumous, kriff, way too many, but yours is first on the list. I made sure of it. You deserve it Nema.”

“You made sure of it?' Skepticism reasserted itself. “How?”

Morne gave her a lightly mocking expression. “It's simple. You were in a tank, so this time I wrote the report.”

The cynical expression only deepened. “You wrote the report?” The officer's talents were many, but literary expression was not among them.

“Well,” he did not meet her stare, not entirely. The desire for his absent mask was clear in evidence. Not that it made any difference anymore. “Mostly Tesso wrote the report, but I supervised.”

“So you are responsible,” Nema considered this. She hurriedly struggled to evaluate the level of discomfort this parade was liable to inflict. “You know, I may have to take revenge.” She had absolutely no desire to endure the inevitable pomp and circumstance.

“I thought Jedi were above revenge,” the quip masked suddenly real concern.

“Maybe, but doctors aren't,” Medical school made sure of that. Ridiculous as such banter was, it helped calm matters down, suppress the jagged memories that strove to rise up and overwhelm. “Lia will be there, correct?” At the subsequent nod, the decision emerged unbidden. “Well then, I think I'll suggest she kiss you in front of all those cameras.”

The broad blush that exploded across his cheeks finally made it possible to laugh again.

_ _ _




“Your report is concerning, Mr. Logas.” Many would have found these words difficult to hear, for Sly Moore rarely spoke at any level above the faintest of whispers. After all, she did not need too in order to be immediately obeyed. That others need strain to discern her words was the least demonstration of her authority.

It made no difference to Ditwar Logas. His eardrums were extraordinarily advanced synthetic polymer membranes that fed directly into an audio synthesis and parsing system attached to the principle auditory nerves. Speech volume was something he manipulated internally, not the other way around.

None of which robbed Moore's words of their import or deprived her of the least bit of her nigh-limitless dominion. He knelt quietly on the floor before her desk, grateful for reinforced limbs that kept the position from becoming an endurance test, and offered the most reasonable reply he could fashion. “I understand there are difficulties, and I am aware that the information I was able to secure regarding this new YH-branch of living beings is insufficient. Unfortunately Doctor Nema is the principle expert and in true academic fashion she shared everything publicly.”

“The anomalous lifeforms are a concern, yes,” Moore noted, face almost perfectly impassive. “But as they have been eliminated they are not a current priority. A much more pressing matter is this Jedi, Rig Nema. You report that she has acquired a level of popular support, here on Coruscant no less, sufficient to inspire tens of thousands of otherwise unaffiliated civilians to risk their lives to rescue her. That complication is extremely troubling. It must be resolved, at once.”

“Of course,” Logas responded immediately when the spymaster fell silent. He refused to allow any thought further down this path to gestate. “And I would hope you will allow me to propose a solution.”

An almost imperceptible lift of one finger indicated Logas should proceed.

“The key, I submit,” nerves warred throughout his wired body, but he had practiced this speech for days, granted precious time by the needs of convalescence. “Lies in Rig Nema's status as a member of the Jedi Medical Corps. As such she is not simply a Jedi, she is also doctor, fully licensed and in possession of a professional degree. In fact, this secondary career is so deeply ingrained that she preferentially identifies herself as 'Doctor Nema,' not as a Jedi. That is the leverage we can manipulate now.”

He hurried forward, a relentless effort to prevent any objection from arising. “Rig Nema's popularity in the Coruscant Underworld is already immense and likely only to rise further as the vaccine she developed spreads across more of the planet.” He took a breath, determined to suitably emphasize the next point. “Any sort of adverse incident would be profoundly deleterious. Thankfully, the overwhelming majority of the population knows of her only as a doctor. They have no knowledge of her membership in the Jedi Order. Her solution to the recent crisis was primarily a medical one, with her actual combat actions barely witnessed and immediately classified. My firm assessment is that she will never willingly expound on the latter set of events publicly. As a result, with proper media direction we can insure that the public is aware only of a heroic doctor, and does not associate these events with the Jedi at all.”

He dared to raise his head slightly. “In fact, in this way we can make it seem that the Jedi abandoned the underworld in its time of need,” That, he admitted privately, was even partly true, not that a handful of lightsaber-swinging knights would have accomplished much. Morne, and he admitted he'd underestimated that one, somehow called up enough firepower to besiege a small city and they'd still been overwhelmed until Nema folded the thing to death. He'd played back those moments his blood-covered lenses had manged to record of that event many times, but he still couldn't understand it.

“This viewpoint adjustment is assisted in that, due to an agreement between her homeworld and the Jedi Order, Doctor Nema does not wear standard Jedi attire. I confess, she does carry a lightsaber, but she hardly ever uses it. In fact, perhaps the most notable casualty of the whole incident was her bodyguard, Isoxya, who died valiantly in combat defending her.

“A Jedi with a bodyguard?” Moore crooked a finger, an expression that, translated onto a human, might have been roaring laughter. “You are correct, the public would never believe in such a thing.”

Just like that, Logas knew he had won, though he made certain to keep all emotion from is face. “I can only submit this approach as my recommendation, of course.”

“Noted,” the spymaster briefly gathered her cloak about her and stood. “Perhaps it is appropriate to be thankful for this Jedi and her intervention in this very much unexpected circumstance. Nevertheless, it must be understood that one, or even many, heroic contributions do not alter the overall calculus. The continued presence of the Jedi Order in the halls of power cripples this government, leaves it blind and lame, unable to harness the tools necessary to administer the galaxy properly.” Slowly she swept around her desk and walked over to Logas. She looked down directly at the top of his head.

“One of your particular background understands this, correct? The power of the Jedi Order must be broken and there can be no hesitation in our work toward that end.”

“Of course not,” Logas agreed firmly. Silently, he desperately wished Nema were not a Jedi. Why couldn't she just be a beautiful Force-gifted doctor? What need did she have for the Order anyway? It was not as if they'd supported her at all. “Independent groups that seek to shackle the nexus of government cannot be tolerated.”

“Good,” Moore stepped back, doubts assuaged, for the moment. “You will continued to operate in the underworld. It would seem that area requires additional attention.” It was both a command and a dismissal.

Logas backed out of the room. As he left he wondered, for the ten thousandth time, how he might possibly convince Nema to leave the Jedi Order.

_ _ _




In the end Nema was awarded the Medallion of Honor in a ceremony that featured the presence of Chancellor Palpatine himself. Isoxya, posthumously represented by her husband, received the same recognition. Morne was granted the Chancellor's Service Medal and promotion to major. Kayi was similarly honored and granted the rank of Brevet General in the Grand Army of the Republic, Reserves. Lia, Takul, Prefect Xeril, and several others received the Medal of Valor for their service.

Nema struggled hard to avoid laughing during Takul's turn at the podium. She was fairly certain it was the first time Palpatine had draped a medal around the neck of a member of the Pyke Syndicate. Ditwar Logas' conspicuous absence from the ceremony did not go unnoticed in her eyes. She felt a measure of disappointment on that account. He'd fought as hard as any other, it seemed unfair that his career should rob him of recognition, as if the scales were somehow left unbalanced.

Such dour thoughts did not retain their hold for long. Lia took her advice and drove all other thoughts from the mind by seizing the moment with incredible purpose. Not only did she kiss Morne in front of the Chancellor, but she asked him to marry her at the same time. This left the poor officer to stammer out acceptance and treated everyone to the otherwise unknown spectacle of Palpatine struck speechless on a public occasion.

Despite the expectations against which she'd steeled herself, Nema found she was not jealous at all, merely happy and slightly lonely at the same time.

She would later recall that, toward the very end of the ceremony, the Chancellor briefly glanced directly in the direction of her lightsaber with an unreadable expression on his face. Presumably he found the obvious damage markings on the weapon unexpected, something only a man with the vast depth of perception needed to maintain his position was likely to notice.

The whole festive mess left her exhausted, exposed to more than her weakened body was ready to endure. She collapsed into her bed in the temple almost the moment of her return. The lines in the ceiling above, once so calming, felt like strangers now.

“This isn't my home anymore,” she whispered in the dark, announced a truth at once stunning and inevitable.

She was still a Jedi, no part of her denied that, but more than that, now she was an underworlder too, and there was yet work to be done.

“Ia,” a voice whispered in the back of her mind, unbidden. “Ia,” it came again, but this time on the third beat it changed. “Ai.”

“An alternate path,” Nema sighed. “I suppose its time for a new research project.”

Fingers wrapped about the lightsaber as she dropped into sleep. Unseen by any eyes, yellow lines traced along the green edges of her nails.

End.

 

I find it interesting how Nema rejects the very idea of sacrificing a few to save many considering that doctors often have to make decisions to choose between potentially saving one person or let them die and potentially save more during triage situations. While the death of over a trillion is a horrific act there are circumstances where it could be argued to be justified. Depending on what the YVH being saw its actions might be argued to be the correct ones after all if sacrificing trillions of people saved hundreds of trillions a purely utilitarian ethnic system would argue its a moral good even if other moral systems would argue that the actions were evil. It's certainly interesting how you have the YVH creature as not necessarily evil so much as having a different morality and makes for an interesting contrast from the usual Star Wars villains.

This right here shows that whatever Nema's view of her own worthiness to be a Jedi she is definitely worthy and does neatly explain what was so odd about Nema's lightsaber in your previous story with Anakin and Nema working together to defeat Palpatine.

I love how at the end there is still humor and happiness and we are reminded life goes on and we get to see Palpatine actually shocked always a good sign.

I suspect that Palpatine senses the remaining YVH lifeform even if he might not necessarily understand what it is and of course Nema does not recognize the significance of that fact but then again Palpatine's biggest skill is hiding himself in plain sight.

This is one of my favorite of your stories and I eagerly look forward to your next story.

 

I consider triage to be a matter of resource distribution; a matter of taking the most efficient actions given limited available resources. The proposition of sacrificing the few to save the many is more like the trolley problem, and doctor or not, a can't see any Jedi not explicitly rejecting the trolley problem to the point of trying to bend the universe so that the problem never actually occurs (this righteous conviction actually gets the Jedi Order in trouble sometimes).

The big thing here is that the YH instigator doesn't understand individuality in anything like the sense we do. YH-life does not have cells, it is not compartmentalized. The one and the all are contiguous. Discarding an infected piece is therefore simply the natural response. This is super weird and I'm not sure how well I was able to convey it since it's hard to even hold in my own head.

The principle inspiration here is basically Lovecraftian, which I should hope is obvious from the title, so I wanted something that was fundamentally different from other life in the galaxy. In my head canon YH life differs heavily in the Force as well. The Instigator is something like the Ones - a conscious wellspring for a fundamental life force - but sourced from a different origin point (a number of other EU entities slot reasonably into this role). Nema couldn't have actually 'killed' it permanently anymore than Anakin stabbing the Son permanently 'killed' him, but the disruption would still have been meaningful.

 

That makes sense and fits Jedi ideals. Also in fairness to Jedi they are experts at finding a third way rather then falling into the all too common trap of being hard men making hard decisions and missing that there are better ways.

I suspect that it would have either led to his death, unlikely but possible, or more likely his exposure; it would certainly be interesting. Also what will happen to any other YVH with the consciousness contained in Nema's lightsaber does it die or is it just lacking intelligence and is there YVH creatures on other worlds then just Coruscant?

 

The counterpoint is that understanding flows both ways. Had the Instigator better understood Palpatine, the Sith would have had greater awareness in reverse and would have potentially been able to head off or even suborn the threat. Anyway, such speculation gets deep into the AU zone

So the deep theory behind all this that I developed during this process is that each of the many trees of life throughout the Star Wars galaxy, and there's a bunch of them in the EU including things like Mynocks and Crystal Barnacles and so on, has its own variant connection to the Force and its own version of the Ones. And it's just that way back in the early evolution of life in the GFFA the Ones somehow triumphed in the primordial struggle between various trees of life and gained mastery over the galaxy (maybe they bribed the Bedlam Spirits or something). That's why CC life (meaning humans and everything else that traces back to our LUCA) dominates the galaxy. Everything else is stuck struggling to survive on the margins.

Trapping the conscious of the Instigator in Nema's lightsaber doesn't really do anything on a cosmic scale anymore than the 'death' of the Ones on Mortis did, though it perhaps absences them from the metaphysical sphere for a while (private theory bit: killing the Ones was necessary to allow Ezra's intrusion into the World Between Worlds, otherwise the Father would have smacked him out faster than thought). YH-life exists elsewhere in the galaxy, but it's basically limited to filamentous sludge in high-arsenic environments, mostly deep underground.

The Instigator was ultimately trying to seize on a window of opportunity based around the impending 'death' of the Father and the extremely high volatility that Palpatine had induced in the various galaxy-spanning systems to both halt a potential victory by the dark side and to drastically weaken the overall hold on the galaxy by CC life to allow it an opportunity for a YV life resurgence.