Saga - PT Dr. Nema and the Eyes Outside Night

Title: Dr. Nema and the Eyes Outside Night
Author: Mechalich
Timeframe: 22 BBY, 110 Days after the Battle of Geonosis
Characters: Rig Nema, Ven Morne (OC), Isoxya (OC)
Genre: Science Fiction Adventure
Keywords: Jedi, Doctor, Clone Wars, Coruscant Underworld, Police, Bioweapon, Assassin, Militia
Summary: When I bioweapon attack threatens to cripple the Coruscant Underworld Police, Dr. Nema is called to find a solution with no one but an inscrutable mercenary to help her.
Notes: This story is connected to my Dear Diary Challenge 2020, being an extension of Dr. Nema's overall tale. It takes place between entries 15 & 16 of that work. It is the second narrative tale in this vein, following Dr. Nema and the Assassin in Yellow. Readers who haven't read those stories should be able to understand this piece, but some context will be missing.

Dr. Nema and the Eyes Outside Night

Rig Nema spent little time asleep. Partially this was a consequence of biology. The long days of her homeworld triggered an adaptation to shortened slumber cycles in her species compared to standard humans. This reduction was further augmented by Jedi training, techniques to immerse oneself in the flow of the Force while resting maximized the efficiency of slumber. Some Jedi made little use of this, or spent the time they would otherwise sleep in meditation. Nema chose to instead maximize the time available each day. She averaged just a shade under five hours of sleep each night. Consequently, she worked late and rose early.

Normally she devoted these extra hours, mostly stolen from the evening, to private devotion to her research projects. Occupied with patients throughout the daylight portion of the underworld's artificial circadian cycle, she needed such time to make any real strides against the needs of long-term projects. She preferred to spend such time in isolation, either before her terminal or in an occupied laboratory, to eliminate all distractions and allow complete devotion to the mentally stimulating nature of pure research. When fully engaged in this way, she felt refreshed against each day’s trials, reinforced by the prospect of a better future.

Mornings were comparatively compressed instead, but she still valued the ability to eat her breakfast and put together the clinic without interruptions. Dee-Dee, with the perfect understanding only programming could provide, knew to obey all commands silently before the doctor officially opened her doors for business. An intrusion at six-thirty in the morning, local time, in the form of a burst from her comlink signaling an incoming call, therefore received a vicious glare and three seconds of silent recrimination before she answered.

Irritation metamorphosed immediately into disquiet before a single word was heard, for the wall terminal identified the caller as Prefect Xeril upon pickup. No good reason could possibility exist for the high-ranking Underworld Police Official to call her at any hour. All contact with the police, and especially with those important enough to control entire levels of the underworld, was supposed to pass through her official liaison, Officer Morne. Prior to this unexpected intrusion that protocol had been maintained consistently.

“This is Doctor Nema,” she answered cautiously, uncertain what would be worse, an emergency or a political inquiry.

“Good, you're awake.” The prefect's voice was synthetically altered, a consequence of the specialized police armor he and his fellows habitually wore, but the masking did little to obscure the brusque tone. “I need you to report to headquarters at once. There's an emergency.”

This supplied one answer, at least. Nema raised no direct objections, as aggravating as unexpected early morning demands might be. Not only was offering assistance to the police a key directive of her mission, however unsuited a doctor was compared to a Jedi Knight for the purpose, Xeril was not unknown to her. While the man had several questionable affiliations in his background, he was loyal to his officers and took his task of securing public safety on Level 1315 quite seriously. If he said there was an emergency, Nema believed it. “I can be ready to go at once,” she offered. “Will Officer Morne be here shortly?”

“Morne's unavailable.” This statement struck deep into Nema. A bell rung in her core, the note unreadable and sour, bottomless in ominousness. “Just get here.”

She did her best to stay calm, to plot the next step, but it was not easy given the sudden stress and the inherent absurdity of the explanation she was forced to supply. “It will take me over an hour to get there using the public trams.”

A stream of bitter curses emerged from the comlink in response to this remark. She wished she possessed some easily suggested alternative, but there was nothing. Even if she possessed a private airspeeder, and the confidence to fly it through the notoriously crowded and maddened underworld skylanes, without access to police traffic overrides the lane restrictions meant it would have taken almost as long regardless. Rapid transit across the Bucket simply did not happen without either bypassing the rules, as the police and other privileged organizations did, or breaking them, as the syndicates habitually chose to. By herself, Nema was neither1.

“Fine,” the Prefect, unable to alter the nature of reality by swearing, eventually surrendered. “Just get here, and hurry.”

Any doctor with field experience knows to be ready in a hurry. Dressed already, Nema simply grabbed her field bag from the storage closet and ordered Dee-Dee to lock up behind her. She exited her clinic in under a minute. The pale yellow backdrop of the underworld greeted her upon egress, lighting yet low as the levels transitioned slowly into the full daylight stage of their cycle.

People were out and about of course. This deeply submerged realm functioned at all hours. Synchronized sleep cycles were a luxury afforded only to societies able to afford an actual sky.

Nema walked quickly to the nearby tram station. She did not run. Unseemly haste was pointless when faced with a rigid and inflexible tram schedule dictated by network operator droids thousands of levels above, and in fact was only likely to cause her to miss one of the carefully arrayed connections. The route to Xeril's Level Headquarters was quite complex, and she had not memorized it. For all of her thankfully few previous visits Morne had driven her there and back. She had to plot the tram course on her datapad.

For the moment the trams were relatively uncrowded, though not sufficiently so that there were seats available. She only hoped to complete the journey in under an hour before the next major shift change filled them to bursting. Passengers stood apart or in small clusters, avoiding contact with strangers and all resolutely staring at the blurred and stained windows, watching nothing. Space, even the space to avoid looking upon another soul, was limited, and the people of the underworld knew better than to waste their opportunities. Nema positioned herself carefully, so her lightsaber rested between her hips and a blocking panel. The weapon had an unfortunate tendency to attract attention, both from desperate souls who would plead for aid she could not provide and from a less scrupulous demographic interested in the considerable black market value of the weapon.

Normally she would never hide this aspect of her identity, but these neighborhoods were unfamiliar, and without Morne's steady gray-coated presence beside her she felt strangely vulnerable. Eyes slid away from her when she stood next to the police officer, while her appearance alone invited inquiry. While Nema was hardly unused to drawing eyes considering her status as the only member of her species on planet, any attention at all aboard the tram felt hostile. Even the looks offered by children seemed to subtly identify her as an outsider, something she continued to believe of herself.

The Bucket's inhabitants had embraced the charitable doctor as welcome among them, but this acclimation had not yet completed its osmosis through her own private barriers.

She had to change trams four times and ride three different turbolifts to reach headquarters. At no point during the trip did Nema speak to anyone, but in general the tram riders moved in tense, unofficial treaty silence.

The building itself stood among a series of other office towers used by various bureaucracies and backed into a vast multi-level set of landing pads for the use of airspeeders. It was squat, reinforced duracrete construction intended to appear defensible. Exterior windows were rare and the base of the structure was surrounded by a barrier wall intended to produce a blast-cushioning courtyard. Spatial limitations afflicted the police just as much as they did everyone in the underworld and this ostensible buffer zone had been stuffed to the gills with massive stacks of supply crates.

The main door was guarded by a pair of officers, and the first sign that something was amiss could be discerned from their nature. Specifically, that there were not living officers at all, but instead blue-plated guardian police droids. The sight of them set off alarms in the back of Nema's mind. The underworld police rarely used droids this far down, and almost never out in the open. They were simply worth too much. There were too many desperate scavengers willing to ambush them, smash them, and sell the parts to the scrap yards. This post ought to be manned by organic officers in their characteristic gray armored coats. Their absence meant something had gone grievously awry.

Nema's approach was challenged by the droids, but they waved her through immediately after seeing her Jedi Service Corps credentials. Once inside, she acquired directions from an ancient protocol droid model, a presence much more in line with her expectations. The Prefect's Office was on the top floor, a quick turbolift ride concluded the journey.

The office turned out to be smaller than Nema expected, barely large enough to hold a single massive desk and chairs for two visitors. It was sumptuously appointed, but not to excess. Either the prefect had profited less from his position than he might have, or he was careful to avoid displaying the fullness of his private gains.

Alone in his office save for a secretary droid, Xeril turned from his terminal and stood upon Nema's entrance. To her shock, the doctor found herself looking the prefect directly in the eyes. That should not have happened; despite his rank he habitually wore the standard underworld police uniform of armored gray coat, mask, and helmet in solidarity with his subordinates. He sported them now. Absent, however, were the rust-colored tactical optics that completed the ensemble. Instead the prefect's dark brown eyes, nested in a web of stress lines, were bare.

Intuition instantly informed the Jedi that it was this that had called her here. “Doctor Nema,” though Xeril's voice retained the synthetic alterations provided by his mask, the effect was ruined when even facial motions remained visible. “I hope you've got some sort of miracle in that Jedi bag of tricks of yours, because I'm sitting on a catastrophe.”

“What's happened?” It could not be a bluff. Exaggeration, perhaps, but only slightly at most; in order for a problem to even reach Xeril's desk it had to be too significant to ignore. “Why aren't you wearing your optics?”

“Someone got to us,” Xeril rounded the desk. Repressed anger, fury seeking a target to explode onto, coiled through his motion with each step. “We've been cycling through a new batch, replacements, but someone, somehow, sabotaged production. Slow-moving, some kind of contamination on the inside. This morning, a full third of my officers woke up blind!” He could not contain the rage and this emerged as a roar.

Medically minded to the last, the anger passed Nema by. Her mind already raced ahead, mapped out possibilities, how this could have been done. “A concealed corrosive substance, slow-acting, with the right surface chemistry, could transfer from the inner surface of the optics to the cornea during use, and then induce damage during sleep...” the words emerged as a whisper, coupled to growing terror that rushed through her veins with each breath. “But,” fear did not slow the calculation, only supercharged the estimates. “The manufacturer must have systems to detect contaminants and sterilize all new product, how could any obvious danger get past-.”

Her jaw snapped shut fast enough to click teeth together. Nema realized at once how a hidden threat like this could slip past protection, how a dangerous contaminant could hide unrecognized by the manufacturer long enough to be passed out into the field. “It's them,” she barely breathed the words. Certainty bred spikes of terror. Sharp spines of agony exploded along her limbs and shook her body. “This is the next move.”

“It is,” Jedi, doctors or no, were not supposed to become rattled, and the presence of such a visibly unnerved personage before him served to drain the anger from the prefect and replace it with resignation. “One of the techs ran your tag compound against several sets of optics after dumping them in water. Results were weak, but they confirmed a positive.”

“That is consistent with a compound built on the same general structure but with limited specific commonality,” Nema took what shelter she could in technical matters. “Has anyone come up with a prognosis?”

“All our in-house droids and medics keep saying that it's a foreign substance they can't identify,” the prefect shook his head furiously. “Same problem as before, only this time it’s not dropping politicians through the floor, it's on my officers.

A biological system completely unknown to the Republic, one with no commonality to known forms of life, represented a problem utterly outside standard droid programming and ordinary medical education. Its own nature served as nearly perfect concealment from any method to find or stop it, and somehow someone had placed a piece of this lost life in a position to deal immense damage. Nema considered fear the only possible rational response. “I will do anything I can.” The full weight of this offer descended onto her with crushing power. She realized that, due to one prior incident, she might very well be the one person in the galaxy with the greatest experience with this system. It felt like she had a planet on her shoulders. She struggled to fight through the burden, to find some point of attack.

Thankfully, the nature of her initial steps remained straightforward. She had no idea what she would have done without an obvious pathway. “I'll need sets of contaminated optics to examine, and afflicted officers.”

“There's a whole pile of the things down in evidence,” the prefect offered. “Take whatever you need. And I've got too many officers down for examination at Hexal Medical. It's secure, so ours go there a lot.” He paused, then slowly exhaled. “Officer Morne is one of them.”

Nema's subconscious had realized Morne had to be among the afflicted from the first mentioned. It was the only possible reason he had failed to pick her up, but to hear the words spoken remained a scourge across her back. “Thank you for telling me,” she managed to force the words out softly.

Sympathy did not extend overly far, or perhaps other needs overrode it. “Work fast doctor,” the prefect implored; more command than request. “I don't have the bodies to patch this gap for more than a few days, and without optics my officers won't risk street patrols. The Syndicates have ranged retinal scanners and they know it. If we can't get officers back to work and optics replaced fast they'll be no law, just chaos.”

This was no idle threat. The prediction felt real, the Force resonated along her skull at the words. “I suggest you call the clones now, Prefect,” it was the only thing she could manage to say. Everything else felt too emotional. This desperate expression allowed her to thrust some measure of burden free of her shoulders. “Because medicine is not something that can be safely rushed.”

Her attempt offered no solace. “I already called the clones,” Xeril answered. The slit of exposed flesh narrowed, eyes hard. “But they won't be enough2.”

Nothing remained to be said. Nema could only depart with great haste and leave the prefect to the impossibility of his number juggling. “Force preserve me,” she whispered as the turbolift took her back down. Jedi exercises on the way allowed her to regain a measure of calm, but only just. Her imagination continued to throw out images of the Bucket, already simmering on the edge of unrest due to supply shortages and terrorism, suddenly deprived of police. Flames filled every possibility.

The tram ride to the medical center was mercifully short. To step through the doors and into the white light and sterile scent of the hospital corridors actually helped settle her nerves. Medical environments might be a repository of illness, but this was one context where she felt in command and able to induce change. It took but a moment to acquire directions and find her way to Morne's room. A part of Nema recognized that visiting the officer was probably unwise. She was far too emotionally entwined with her liaison to be an impartial medical practitioner, but it did not stop her.

He was not alone. Private rooms were an out of reach luxury for public servants in underworld hospitals, even for patients with highly placed fathers such as Ven Morne. Three others were crammed in place in narrow medical beds, side by side with only woefully inadequate curtains for privacy.

Some solace could be found in that they were resting in the observation wing. Whatever the condition of their blindness, local staff did not consider it an imminent threat to these men's lives.

Heads turned as the door swished open. Eight eyes, identically clouded and coated white, turned in the direction of the portly uncertainly. None could see, and Nema felt the flood of uncertainly her entrance knocked loose. Morne had the closest bed, his short-cropped black hair and umber-shaded face instantly recognizable though she'd barely had more than a glimpse before. Without his armor he appeared frightfully young, almost boyish, and hideously vulnerable.

“Doctor Rig Nema to see you, officers,” she announced her presence. “Prefect Xeril sent me to have a look at each of you.”

Morne perked up, only to shrink back almost immediately. Embarrassment, she guessed. Many men hated to be seen exposed and helpless in front of women, especially those they pursued romantically, at least among humans. Nema's had always found this somewhat strange, but even among Jedi such reactions were surprisingly common.

“Officer Morne,” she spoke slowly, desperate to keep maters wholly professional. “I need to conduct a detailed examination of the surface of your eyes. Prefect Xeril has stressed urgency, so I will have to take risks, but I will only do so if you volunteer.”

“Go ahead Nema,” he opened his blank orbs wide and stared directly upwards. “I promise to stay still.”

This brave face, overwrought though it was, brought swift agreement from the others, each unwilling to appear the coward before his peers.

“Thank you officers,” The doctor noted, touched even as she was ashamed at manipulating them in this way. She dropped away from her emotions then as she pulled out her scanner and plunged into the work.

The actual issue, once all previous instincts were abandoned and investigation brought to bear directly on the raw scanning microscopy output from the afflicted corneal surfaces, turned out to be almost absurdly simple. When combined with a similarly unhindered examination of the tainted optics the pieces assembled the puzzle with only a handful of deductive steps. “An organism was infiltrated into the structure of your optics, one capable of sustaining itself from their plastoid substrate itself. The actual biochemistry is something I haven't resolved yet, but the byproducts of the chemosynthetic reactions are quite clearly present. Over time this organism produced a multi-layered structure reminiscent in gross architecture of a bacterial biofilm.” Her explanation to Morne involved some creative re-purposing of biological terms. The suspension-and-node molecular arrangement used in this living system formed conglomerated tissues without anything resembling cells, instead relying on freely suspended structures to fabricate organization. Its layered structure therefore resembled a biofilm only when examined from a macro perspective, but she realized the policeman would understand none of this.

“This film on the inside of your optics then gradually produced a series of filamentous molecular components,” they were actually more like strings in some ways, but they were braided rather than linked in the manner of proteinaceous structures. “These, being extremely light, worked free of the film and diffused across to the surface of your eyes. Once there, they reacted with the salt in your tears and induced rapid crystallization, with the filaments acting to anchor the salt to the outer cells of your cornea itself.” The chemistry involved was actually almost ludicrously simple for such a broad-scale biological attack. Nema belatedly recognized that this was a product of the vast difference between the two living systems, inevitably. This new form of life was so dissimilar to the standard cellular carbon-based formation that the two systems struggled to meaningfully interact at all. Just as she'd been forced to rely on brute force molecular bonds to develop her tagging method, the designers of this attack let their filaments simply hook into their targets physically rather than attempt sturdy and more efficient enzymatic bond.

“Can you fix it?” Morne's question cut through the complexity of the diagnosis. He sounded vaguely hopeful, and the level of trust that shone through the Force was almost enough to make Nema blush.

“I believe so,” simple chemistry thankfully allowed for equally simple reversals. “The salt crystals can simply be flushed out using a prolonged eye wash with a precisely calculated pH. Once they're gone a second wash using a non-aqueous sulfur solution will bond the arsenic components out of the filaments and cause them to crumble. It's precision work, the solutions will have to be carefully calibrated and the flow rate tightly monitored, but well within the abilities of a decent surgical droid.” Nema smiled at Morne, even though she knew he could not see it. “That will take some time, but the good news is that the impact seems to be almost entirely superficial. They will be some minor temporary scarring of the cornea. You'll see spots and odd shadows for a few days after the wash is complete, but there will be no permanent damage.”

“Good to know,” Morne extended a hand. He flailed slightly until Nema caught the cue and grabbed it. His grip was almost crushingly tight. “Lying here like this is the worst. Feels so useless. I can't believe they got us like this.”

“The factory must have been compromised.” That idea was not one she could take credit for. Prefect Xeril determined this had to be the case the moment she messaged him with the potential treatment. “The prefect wants me to go and investigate, isolate the intrusion.”

She expected Morne to let go, but instead his grip tightened. “You can't go alone.” The officer's voice was suddenly strong as durasteel. “Not down here. No one can do that, Jedi or not, especially not against this thing.” Concern washed through the Force in time with his words, a heady mixture of emotions that left Nema momentarily numb. “It's got to have more Yellows,” he added. “No way they risked all of them in one go.”

Nema intended to object, to stick up for her ability to navigate the underworld, but the mention of those devastating bio-engineered assassins stopped her cold. A Yellow, she judged, was a serious threat even to a fully trained Jedi Knight, something she most certainly was not. Phantom pain walked along her ribs in memory of the last encounter with the creatures, an incident seared deep into her memory.

Her eyes glanced down to Morne, and she recalled with stark clarity that had he not been there to fight beside her then she would had been smashed to pulp. “The Prefect cannot spare any officers,” she conceded the argument without any offer of solution. It was no lie, his limited capacity was already strained to the breaking point. Police were now working shifts nearly twenty-four hours in length. “And the price of mercenaries is far beyond me.” The war had turned private security into an absolute seller's market. Rates were triple or worse compared to where they'd sat only months earlier in nominal peacetime3. Even a fairly basic security droid, nothing capable of matching a Yellow, was far beyond the budget now.

Morne's mouth broke into a wicked smile beneath his white-coated eyes, an expression Nema found haunting. “There's someone who owes me a favor,” he began.

Nema's skin went instantly tingle tight, her face felt impossibly sensitive. She was sure she would regret whatever followed, not the Force, just suspicion borne from that previously unseen grin. “And who would this be?”

Despite his temporary blindness, Morne's head turned to follow her voice and meet golden eyes. “Her name is Isoxya4. She's an Atsev. They've got a compound up by the droid factories on Thirteen-Twenty-Seven, but you should ask for her at Tornrock Speedway. If she's not there, they'll know where she is.”

“I doubt offering your name will enough to make me believable as your proxy,” Nema countered softly. She did not know the place Morne named, but the name sounded like it belonged to an underground racetrack. Those were certainly common enough. Police would be recognized long before they managed to enter such places, but a doctor's connection counted for little.

One hand let go of the doctor's and reached under the hospital smock. When it slowly found its way back to her a small object dropped into her palm. “They'll respect this.”

It was a disk of gray metal. The surface was embossed with the image of two half-circular bars, chipped in the center, surrounding a spoke wheel. Nema traced her finger over the surface carefully, the metal was cool to the touch, not durasteel but some custom allow. “Are you sure?” Though no master of police procedure, she could be certain an officer was never allowed to loan out his badge.

“Just make sure I get it back,” Morne joked. The beacon of trust in the Force never wavered. His smile was weak, but the grip strong. “And watch yourself with Isoxya. She's tough, and trustworthy in her way, but a bit prickly.”

“Prickly,” this had the promise of a distinct understatement. At the same time, curiosity had hooked into her and now Nema wanted to meet this person. Her fingers curled tightly around the badge. “I'll have this back by the time you're up and about again, I promise.”

“I'm sure,” Morne coughed. “Now go fix our goggles.”

Tornrock Speedway was not accurately named. This matched Nema's expectations, the underworld contained very little actual stone. Natural minerals had to be either imported from offworld or hauled up from quarries in the crust below Level One. Neither was cost effective, especially when compared to countless composite materials that perfectly approximated the same properties of the natural minerals.

The speedway represented what happens when a massive section of formed composites becomes so thoroughly damaged by granite slugs that all structural integrity fails. The result, at least visually, approximated a pile of loose boulders. Nema had no idea what the initial purpose of the huge pile had been, but she could see that some enterprising individual had blasted out a three-dimensional tube-track in the remnants and implemented some creative use of artificial gravity. Too small and short for speeders, she imagined that the track primarily ran some kind of swift-footed animal competitors. The track was currently being cleaned as part of a midday break, and the audience stands were largely empty. Trundled sweeper droids slowly moved across the loops, brushing out blood and refuse.

Living presence divided between a set of raggedy hangers and bungalows operated by the racing teams and a suite of rowdy-looking gambling dens formed out of leftover industrial scale pipes. The former were guarded by aging but heavily armed security droids, while the latter thumped with low music in an electronically synthesized meter. Nema thought it sounded awful, but her general opinion of almost all human-based music was similar, so she refrained from judgment regarding their audio environments.

She picked the central piece of re-purposed pipework, a garish green structure that had to be at least fifteen meters in diameter. The tall Weequay bouncer at the door wore an almost comically oversize blaster on his hip. He gave Nema a strange look up and down. His eyes widened when he eventually realized what her lightsaber was. Braver than she expected, the guard extended an arm across the curtain-barred portal. “Don't want no trouble Jedi. I go get the boss, talk out here.”

Courtesy had not been the response Nema anticipated, but she seized upon the opportunity to avoid dirty looks, foul smells, and assaulting sound. “I am not here to cause any trouble,” she replied, doing her best to sound casual. She doubted it was very convincing, she knew this backdrop did not fit her manner. “I am here to meet a, a,” she briefly struggled to find an appropriate phrase. “Referral. Perhaps you could go and fetch her, to avoid making a scene.”

“Not many people here want to meet Jedi,” the bouncer grumbled. “But maybe I'll ask. You have to promise though, no fighting or chasing if they run out the back.”

This represented an astute assessment by the Weequay as to the hypothetical scenario likely to send a Jedi Knight searching out a quarry in an underworld gambling den. Nema almost wanted to laugh. “Of course,” she held her hands open, palms up. “I have no desire to make trouble for your manager. I'm looking for a lady by the name of Isoxya.”

This appellation did not pass unrecognized. The bouncer's face tightened and his head tendrils twitched. “Okay,” after a moment he came to a decision. “But you need to stand back some.” He pointed towards an open patch of duracrete clearly used as an audience viewing area. “If you fight, that way the bar is okay.”

“I understand,” Nema answered. She backed up willingly, but struggled with growing curiosity as she pondered just who this person was that the bouncer expected her to pick a fight with a Jedi. That was almost universally a bad idea even when, as she openly admitted with regard to herself, the Jedi would probably lose.

As it happened, she did not have to wait long to find out.

Less than a minute after the bouncer went in, a figure burst out through the curtains at speed and blitzed across the pale gray pad. A blur of motion, astonishingly swift, brought her face to face with the doctor.

It was only when she came to a stop that the reason for this frantic pace revealed itself.

Isoxya, if that was the proper identity of this new arrival, did not represent a single being. Instead she combined flesh and steel together. Not as a cyborg, but instead the somewhat less common deployment of full-body powered armor.

Nema recognized the mechanism for what it was immediately due to long experience. Suits of this kind were common among the more paranoid or aggressive species unable to breathe standard atmospheres and unwilling to trust their lives to flimsy breath masks. They were also regularly used by sophonts of diminutive stature seeking to effectively navigate human-standard built environments. She had worked with both groups, but the suit before her represented something remarkably unique.

It began with a pressurize body glove built with a scale-patterned armored outer layer colored in eye-blasting day-glow emergency orange. Shiny yellow armor plating marked by glowing red indicator bands blossomed out of the hips, chest, and shoulders in swooping curves. These expansive sections surely housed the power and strength-assist components. Wide pleated tubes of some sort of black rubberized plastoid composite sheathed elbows, wrists, and the back of the skull. A transparisteel cover, tinted to near-opaqueness, concealed the face above a gray-metal voicebox. Only a hint of red eyes and a metallic tinted skull could be glimpsed within.

Unusual as all this was, particularly the screamingly loud coloration, the strangest of all was found on the inside of her armored greaves. Attached there, reaching from the base of the ankles to past the knees, was a pair of wheels. These locked into a mechanism allowing broad metal treads to propel the woman connected to them with remarkable speed and mobility. She was, in a very literal sense, her own wheel-bike.

Concealed by her helm, the armored alien's expression could not be observed. Nor did motion within that scaled shell convey any cues of body language. When she spoke, however, her displeasure was made clearly purely through her choice of language. “A Jedi, down here. What do you want?” The words croaked their way across the platform in the harsh, guttural contorted tones of Huttese.

Nema bit back the urge to grin. The armored alien might have picked any number of arenas in which to play dominance games, but this particular choice represented perhaps the only one that played directly into the doctor's hands. Carefully, and with a touch of assistance from the Force, she drew in the deepest breath her lungs would hold. Then, without pause, she left loose every last bit of emphasis her diaphragm could summon. “Your shameful diction and pathetic intonation would embarrass a fresh-spawned Huttlet. You shame yourself and ten generations of your mewling legged ancestors with such pathetic efforts to mimic greatness unworthy one! How dare you disrespect my presence with such piteous profanities!”

In terms of ability to express aristocratic disdain, Huttese stood utterly unchallenged in the linguistic arena. It had been intricately shaped by a culture that measured dominance contests across a scope most species used to chart lifetimes. Every slight inflection, emphasis, and reverberation could be channeled toward the service of superiority. When unleashed at its proper bombastic volume with suitably abject contempt it became a hammer to strike with the full weight and authority of its thousand-kilo overlords5.

Thank you Doctor Illip Gurvorrd, Nema mused silently as the orange power suit actually whirled back a step. The Hutt immunologist had been brilliant as a teacher despite his extracurricular hedonistic depravities, and he had graciously taught the newly minted Medical Corps resident the species-appropriate means to dress down new batches of students.

The alien before her briefly bobbed her head up and down, a motion that sent the suit rippling over her whole lithe frame. “Can Jedi curse like that?” She switched back to Basic. Her vocoder did not project a typical hard-edged mechanical voice, but rather a smooth, almost slippery pattern, filled with long vowels.

“A doctor is,” Nema deflected. “But it seems I managed to get your attention.” She too dropped the Huttese pretense. Her throat already felt sore from just that one outburst. “You are Isoxya, correct? I would not be entirely surprised if the bouncer simply grabbed the most dangerous person in the bar.”

“I am Isoxya,” the armored presence acknowledged. “And I was the most dangerous person in that bar, by a lot. Now what do you want? I don't know any Jedi and I want to keep it that way.”

Rather than attempt to play games, Nema simply pulled out the police badge. “Officer Ven Morne said you owe him a favor. He told me to collect.”

Isoxya bent down to stare at the badge close up, remarkably flexible despite the heavy lamellar covering every centimeter. “That's the cop's blighting badge for sure, but I never thought he'd actually try to collect that price. What's happening?”

Privately, Nema agreed with this sentiment. She strongly suspected that had Morne been at all able to find his way past a door frame at the moment he would never have surrendered his position as her escort. It was only partly endearing. “Morne has been injured in a biological weapons attack by a Separatist-affiliated group, along with a number of other officers.” Doubtless Prefect Xeril would consider this revealing too much, but Nema contented herself with obscuring the total number impacted. “He will recover, I have devised a treatment,” she wondered if the woman in the armor even cared to know this. “But he wanted you to guard me while I search for the source of the attack.”

“Since when does a Jedi need a bodyguard?” Isoxya caught the nature of the request straight away.

“I am a member of the Jedi Medical Corps, not a Jedi Knight,” it was a tired replied. “And regardless, I do not think anyone should wander these levels alone, especially not considering this opponent.” She risked further revelations. “Are you familiar with the Yellows?”

“You mean those crazy-looking things the Ayae shot to bits weeks ago?” Wheels clicked through a half-circuit. “Sure, I saw the propaganda holos their bolt-heads circulated.”

“Those assassins were bio-engineered weapons, organic droids if you will, and this new attack has come from the same source.”

Nema had intended it as a caution, but she received and entirely opposite response. “You mean I might get to fight one?” The armored woman unfolded to her full height, rising from her wheeled crouch. Perhaps surprisingly, once you subtracted the contribution of those axles from the ensemble she was no taller than the doctor. “This might actually be interesting. Where are we going?”

Such combat enthusiasm was hardly reassuring, but Nema supposed she had made the commitment already. “Level 1318,” she answered. “There is a manufacturing facility there that assembles tactical optical devices.”

“What's that got to do with a biological attack?” As they moved off to walk to the tram Isoxya fell in next to the Jedi with peculiar ease. She did not walk, she trundled along propelled by her wheels. Whatever system controlled them allowed her to match pace perfectly.

There would be no hiding the nature of the attack for long, and Nema had no desire to litter this already tense association with unnecessary lies. “The optics used by the underworld police were contaminated, used as the delivery mechanism.”

Armor might hide most reactions, but Nema thought the way plated gloves tapped the transparisteel helmet suggested an impact landed. “Blight,” Isoxya slurred. “No wonder they've all vanished from the streets. If you can't trust your gear,” her head bobbed again. “That's trouble.” She looked over to the Jedi, voice actually expressing obvious concern. “You said Morne will recover. How bad is it? He gonna have scars?”

“No, the damage was relatively minor,” Nema felt great relief as she said this, acknowledging how lucky it truly was. “Thankfully the stark boundaries between the systems make interaction difficult, which limited the potency of the attack.” In the silence that followed, she wondered with great trepidation whether or not that limit would sustain. A conventional bioweapon, lodged in the same place, could have raced down the channel of the optic nerve and caused rapid brain death. Such a thing would have been detected, of course, but this alternative life could evade most scans and defy conventional treatment methods. She shuddered to think what might happen if the systems fully integrated.

“That's kind of a shame,” Isoxya gleefully ignored such implications. “Wounds count less when they don't leave scars, and that boy Morne could use the rep.”

“Scarification is hardly a mark of combat skill,” Nema countered quietly. Certainly the best Jedi duelists were often completely unmarked, though some of that was bacta's contribution.

“Marks endurance though,” the armored warrior's reply veered in an unanticipated direction, devoid of pride. “Everyone gets cut in fights sometimes, no matter how good you are, if you fight often enough. Scars mean you've got what it takes to keep going, shed your blood for your own.”

They stepped onto one of the broad, square platform lifts that offered passage between multiple levels for heavy cargo. Nema's eyes scanned the loud armor. “It seems unlikely you would receive many scars wearing that,” she noted carefully.

Isoxya laughed, a strange hissing noise that wobbled across registers. “And here I though Jedi knew everything.” She flicked a finger against a metallic scale. It pinged and echoed. “It takes a lot of scars to earn a place as a Stoneweb Runner, years of fighting, enough to prove you won't disgrace the armor.”

Unable to see anything through the armor, and having never encountered an Atsev before it was impossible to compare the dim feeling in the Force, but Nema wondered if this woman represented an elderly specimen of her species. Combat was generally the purview of the young, but with power assist it seemed a practice that might well be extended past the physical prime. She could only hope this was true.

Once on the proper level, they endured a lengthy series of tram rides. Their destination lay thousands of kilometers distant to the north. Even using the long-distance express routes it was a journey of over two hours. The existence of a single major manufacturer was in some ways surprising. The actual total number of underworld police measured in the tens of millions across the vastness of the underworld's thousands of levels. A single point of supply seemed reckless. Doubtless a combination of manufacturing efficiency and corruption bore responsibility. The doctor wondered whose relative had been awarded the valuable contract for such equipment.

While Nema was perfectly content to spend the journey engaged in research on her datapad, Isoxya lacked such quiet pastimes and periodically sought out conversation. “How did you connect with Morne anyway? Wouldn't have pegged him as the Jedi worshiping type.”

“He is my official police liaison,” this clarification seemed more than sufficient.

“Pretty sure it goes deeper than that,” the Atsev woman maneuvered slightly. “Or he wouldn't have sent you to find me. I mean, that had to break a whole pile of rules.”

Rather than engage with this remark, and its entirely too perceptive prospects, the doctor deflected. “And what, precisely, caused you to owe a serious favor to a police officer in the first place?”

“He helped me clear up a mess, that's all,” Isoxya stood completely still, wheels stopped. “There were some duels, and some people got killed. It was all agreed upon, mind you,” she aggressively forestalled that particular line of questioning. “But someone on the losing side decided to cheat by calling in the police. Never found out who it was. They were talking about murder charges for everyone, try to haul all the fighters in. Morne showed up and invoked some weird ancient law, something about 'alternative inter-species community resolution protocols.' Got everything reduced down to some fines. It was generous,” she continued, vaguely conspiratorial. “He didn't have to do that, they had the numbers to haul everyone off, and even though I swear little some piece of everybody lives down here, this is still a human world, we should have known enough to play by human rules. So I promised to pay back the debt someday, one runner to another.”

Something in the way the warrior spoke, the brutally casual fashion in which she described life and death combat, unnerved the doctor. Death might be inevitable, an essential part of living, but it was the most important of transitions. Such flippancy, no matter how many earned scars supported it, was abhorrent.

Yet at the same time she swallowed all words of judgment. Species were different, and cultures moreso. Each had their own ways, and those must be honored on their own grounds. Compromise must be reached in the Senate, to form laws that were fair to all, not determined by fiat. Nema knew she was no diplomat. She was not even a police officer like Morne, trained to apply the law. Isoxya's ethics were not hers to condemn.

Instead, she offered a completely different line of inquiry. “What brought you to Coruscant?”

“Cybot Galactica hired a hundred of our engineers to develop complex environmental pathfinding protocols using the underworld's pipe systems as a test environment,” the explanation sounded stale, off-repeated. “Any permanent settlement with more than fifty residents counts as a nest, and every nest must have a posted runner. My husband was one of the engineers chosen, so I volunteered for the posting.” Somehow, she managed to shrug through the armor's constraints. “But a secure corporate barracks has no actual duties for a runner, so I've got a lot of time to fill.”

“I see,” she did understand, after a fashion. To have one's presence required but superfluous was a situation known to her experience. Patients blessed with wealth or political authority often distrusted droids, as a resident she'd regularly been called in to simply observe while the machines worked, her presence totally unnecessary. Nema wondered what a whole life reduced to such moments would become. “And that leads to gambling?”

“I don't bet,” nothing made it past the armor to suggest offense at the implicit accusation. “I just like to watch the races, and the track boss lets me practice on the track during downtime to try out new configurations.” she reached down to tap her wheels. “Not a lot of places around here let me use my full mobility.”

This statement demanded a follow-up, necessary to satisfy curiosity. “But you can walk, yes?” Golden eyes stared at the apparatus. “You still have boot plates, so I assumed.”

“I can.” At some unspoken command the paired wheels shifted. They separated, split apart upon the horizontal axis and then, propelled by micro-motors, spun around to fasten on the outside of Isoxya's armored legs. With an audible whirl they then fastened into place in this new position, locked at a point just high enough to allow the soles of her feet to touch the ground. The Atsev, apparently feeling demonstrative, chose to walk from one end of the car to the other. This done, the wheels shifted again, this time dropped directly downward until each spun on a new axle positioned outside her ankles. She spun a tight circle utilizing this alternative configuration before she stopped and returned the wheels to their original joined pairing.

“Lots of options,” An invisible smirk attended those words. “Mastering mobility is what a Stoneweb Runner does, but this base configuration is the most energy efficient. I try to keep to it, power cells aren't limitless.”

“Intriguing,” the display solved at least one puzzle Nema had wondered about regarding powered armor. Limited power supplies represented a real break on their utility, a solid case for why they were not ubiquitous.

Their arrival at the factory did much to reduce Nema's hopes for any sort of swift solution. The facility was massive. Huge block-shaped buildings sprawled across several levels and more than a square kilometer of surface, all without any obvious points of differentiation. Hundreds of workers were surely employed within, and thousands of droids.

“Hope you weren't planning to search the whole place,” Isoya mused. “Don't think you'd make it far.”

“It’s only one specific product,” as far as Nema could tell all the police optical sets were identical. “There must be a specialized assembly line or output point. We need to find a public entrance and someone who can guide us.”

“Sounds like Jedi work,” the armored warrior lounged atop her wheels. “I’ll track you.”

As it turned out, what followed would have been better described as police work, and not the exciting kind. It took well over an hour of negotiation, finagling, and referring back to Prefect Xeril’s office for confirmation before they were finally allowed full access to the facility and assigned someone to lead them out to the relevant assembly line. Nema spent the whole episode regretting Officer Morne’s absence. She was certain he could have handled everything in minutes. He understood the Bucket’s particular mixture of convoluted bureaucracy and informal networking, something she struggled to even image, perfectly.

Their nominal guide, pulled from his regular duties begrudgingly, was a dun-skinned Zabrak engineer who kept staring as Isoxya’s wheels with a feverish hunger. This made for a rather more exciting journey through the confusing catwalks over the production lines to their goal than was probably necessary. “I’m quite sure there’s no contamination,” he told them for at least the tenth time when they finally arrived. “But I can idle specific parts of the line if you tell me where you wish to search.”

Having taken advantage of the substantial lead time to consider this, Nema readily offered her prepared answer. “I want you to take us through the steps, starting after all high-heat processing has completed.” Her understanding of the enemy’s foreign biological structure remained rudimentary, but bizarre as the system was, it still appeared to require liquid water to function. Exposure to boiling temperatures ought to be equally lethal.

“Very well,” the engineer reluctantly agreed. “We’ll start at component integration.”

The optics were assembled from three major components. The outer rust-shaded metallic shell, the gray lenses on the outer surface that acquired visual input, and the internal circuitry that relayed that data and programmed the HUD in the center. There were also binding straps and polymer comfort strips attached to allow comfortable wear of the pieces. All were produced separately and then fitted together by precision robot manipulators inside a sealed and airless environment. Organic engineers monitored this using screens only. As all the components were either hot molded or soldered together using plasma welders immediately prior there seemed no opportunity for foreign infiltration at this stage.

The next step, by contrast, grabbed Nema’s attention at once. Each pair of optics was placed inside a molded vacuum wrap of some kind of self-hardening plastoid. Then the space inside was injected with a semi-liquid off-white slurry. They were then placed on tables and left there for some time before any further steps were taken.

“What is that?” Nema demanded. “What are you coating them with?”

“It’s a bonding agent,” the engineer answered immediately, words tinged with pride. “It infiltrates all interior spaces and surfaces before hardening to create a perfect seal that increases structural durability at no loss of flex. It’s a key part of our revolutionary process, the one that won the contract in the first place. Without this protection, nano-scale contaminants enter the internals gradually and corrode the sensitive circuitry in mere months. Our design retains integrity for over a decade.”

Even without the Force this represented the obvious candidate, but the tingle of sensation that crept up her spine as she watched provided absolute certainty. “Your supply has been tainted,” she told the engineer. “This is the source of the blindness.”

“Impossible,” the engineer objected. His horns slashed the air as he shook his head violently. “We institute checks at every stage of mixing to insure purity, and nothing could possibly live inside the mixture while in liquid form, it infiltrates and corrodes living tissue in that state.”

“Life is more variable than we know,” Nema tried to be supportive. She did not think this man at fault. Preventing foreign materials from entering the supply was clearly in the company’s interest. They simply lacked any experience with this new form of biology and the possibilities it opened. “I have a specialized test available. I need access to your principle storage tank.”

The Zabrak fumed, but he led them.

The main bonding agent tank occupied an entire corner of the massive assembly hall. A huge blunted cylindrical structure strapped to a set of induction heating coils and low-sequence stirrers it was large enough to hold ten thousand liters at least. Nema did some quick mental arithmetic as she stared at this vast repository of apparently toxic chemicals. “Can a sample be procured?” She looked to the engineer. “The amount used on a single set of optics should be sufficient.”

“We took a whole battery of samples this morning following the CSF’s emergency message, and found nothing, even using the special test kit they sent over,” the engineered groused. “But if you insist, we can do so again.”

Struck by an unexpected thought, one that had percolated up the back of her mental processes all through the long catwalk excursion, the doctor tried a different approach. She reached out and passed her bioscanner into the engineer’s hands. “I’m sure you did the test correctly,” she smiled lightly. “But I suspect your equipment lacks the requisite sensitivity to resolve the resulting signal from ambient noise.” Industrial grade never measured up to medical grade, and like everything else in the Bucket this manufacturing equipment was ancient. She would have been shocked if the producers relied on any design less than a century in age. By contrast, her portable bioscanner was the best model in the galaxy, part of enhanced custom batch donated to the Medical Corps as part of a publicity campaign by Arkanian Microtechnologies. “I’d appreciate if you ran the exact same test again, but used my gear to compare the results.”

“Fine,” the Zabrak grabbed the scanner. Initially harsh, the anger melted from his features when he stared at the device. “I’ll start right away,” he mumbled.

“You sure this will work?” Isoxya, otherwise silent to this point, interjected as their guide went to procure his samples. “He could just lie about the results.”

“His pride as an engineer won’t allow that,” Nema responded, confident the signal would be there. She also had a second source of assurance. “Besides, he can’t delete any data from my scanner, it’s locked to my genetic signature. Lying would be useless.”

The warrior laughed lightly.

Any snide remark she might have offered was buried beneath a string of curses unleashed in at least four languages.

“Nice,” the armored warrior commented on the Zabrak’s infuriation with bemused admiration. “It takes real effort to learn those growling Trandoshan curses.”

“Doctor Nema,” the engineer turned about holding the scanner’s display before him in horror. His face flushed from chin to horns. “What madness is this?’

“Life,” she squeezed sober severity through the word, unable to suppress the combination of fear and wonder that surged through her whenever she considered this truth. “But not as we know it.”

“We’ll have to swap out the whole tank,” the Zabrak blanched and rambled. “Junk the whole batch, scrub it clear with high-heat oil washes. That’s a three-month supply the cost will be…”

“Recouped by the replacement orders from the underworld police when they swap out all their potentially contaminated gear,” Nema consoled the man quickly. “Impress upon your superiors the need for a high sensitivity scanner and sweep this entire line from start to finish. Any area that can be safely heat sterilized, do so. This was not a quality control failure or an act of industrial espionage, it was a deliberate Separatist attack, I’m quite certain you can apply for war relief from the government.” Whether or not any would be granted was a matter about which she was far less assured.

The engineer briefly relaxed a bit, but only long enough to stiffen again in the face of the Jedi’s next question. “Now that we know the organism was inserted into this tank, the question is how? Who has access?”

“Only a handful of engineers,” he protested. “And we mix large batches all at once to prevent line shutdowns. The tank is only ever opened to adjust the trace chemical balance. We do the mixing in the tank itself, since it’s a proprietary compound.” His face drew tight. “I know everyone with access personally. None of them would compromise our jobs, or work for the Seps. You must understand that.”

“Heh,” Isoxya did not hesitate to call out this proclamation of loyalty for the falsehood it was. “Like any of you have an ownership stake. If they offered enough, I bet every last one of you would take the Seps’ credits.”

“You dare-“ the engineer began, muscles pulled taught.

“Stop,” Nema intervened at once. Her command was stern and authoritative, in the voice used to compel recalcitrant patients. “That is for the police to investigate, not me. I am not here to question loyalties, only to solve a medical emergency. This is a very large tank,” she stared up at the hulking metal structure. “The input quantity necessary to insure sufficient quantities of organism infected every pair of optics would be significant, especially since I doubt it was able to feed directly on your glue. As much as one hundred liters might be necessary, more than anyone could sneak in under their coat. How did they accomplish that?”

Unexpectedly, the answer came from the armored warrior. “It looks like it came in through the storm drain.” She pointed a yellow-plated finger at a grate in the center of the room. “That’s certainly how I’d assault this place.”

“There are security measures,” the engineer protested.

“How hard would they be to slice?” her contemptuous tone offered its own answer. “Besides, your security is oriented against in-house theft and espionage, not someone breaking into your glorified goggles-shop to dump one kind of goop into other goop.”

Rather than engage in an argument, Nema moved to the grate, crouched down, and peered into the black abyss below. She could see nothing in the darkness within, and the Force offered no hints. Isoxya’s suggestion was not impossible, the grate was just wide enough to allow a standard humanoid to squeeze through. The climb would not be easy, she guessed. The drain pipe fell at least ten meters perfectly vertical before discharging into a larger series of pipes in the complex’s foundation, and the inner surface was soaked and slick with algal mats.

This offered an idea. “Can we scan the inside of the drain for damage? Holes from climbing spikes or droid claws?”

“We don’t need a scanner,” Isoxya rolled up beside her. Her wheels shifted as she moved to allow her to stand flat and bend down to the edge of the grate. From there, she grasped the bars of the drain and wrenched it free in a formidable display of suit-augmented strength. Next, she plunged her head inside the hole. “I’d be a lousy runner if I couldn’t tell whether or not someone recently climbed this face.”

She spun about, her skull passed through a full three-hundred-and-sixty degree panorama on the inside. “There’s a good sheet’s worth of algae in here,” the warrior noted. “Need to reset the cleaning droids probably.” She sounded vaguely amused. “Caught their tracks though, and the ripple marks an Anacondan makes on a surface like this. Bet that’s your security hole, not any of you engineers. You’d crack, but not even the Pykes can get the snakes to give up their own. Most of the time nobody can even tell them apart.”

This last statement was not, Nema knew, hyperbole. Due to a stringent population bottleneck and the clutch-based peculiarities of Anacondan reproduction all current members of the species shared key genetic markers and other biotic indicators. Ordinary basic testing would fail to differentiate individuals, only specialized, calculation-heavy sequencing worked.

“Ha,” Isoxya’s narration continued. “There are some climbing punctures. Looks like magnetic hammer-stick contacts. Deck, someone things they’re special to try to free climb this with those rebounders.”

Though the climber slang was impenetrable, this seemed sufficient confirmation. Nema suspected a more comprehensive examination by the police would make matters certain. She decided it was time to contact Prefect Xeril.

The resulting comlink conversation with the police official involved a considerable amount of vengeful yelling, but a few pointed questions directed at the Zabrak engineer worked to arrange for expedited delivery of new optics without the proprietary bonding setup entirely to cover immediate needs until the supply chain could be formally secured. From there it transitioned to a question of payments and Nema beat a hasty retreat from the conversation. She secured a second sample of the contaminated tank material for analysis and then worked to escape the situation before politics could snatch her up further.

She did not immediately return to her clinic. Instead, she plotted a route to the Mutaratak Pharmaceutical Cooperative. While she disliked working with Takul’s people, she knew she would need their advanced analysis equipment in order to properly examine the creations of this strange enemy. Additionally, the diversion gave her time to think about how she would go about composing a report on a biological attack. That promised to be a procedural nightmare.

Isoxya, rather than go back to the races, rolled along for the ride. She offered that perhaps she would go visit Morne in the hospital.

Initially this appeared to be nothing more than an expression of the Atsev woman’s curious sense of humor, but when their tram came to a sudden stop in the midst of a vast, bleak, tunnel section Nema recognized the subtle influence of the Force at work.

Battle-ready from wheels to helmet, the warrior never even considered the possibility of mechanical failure despite its commonality in the underworld. “Ooh,” she announced as she rose up atop her wheels. “Looks like someone’s feeling awfully vengeful.”

The overpowering sense of foreboding that erupted up the back of Nema’s scalp compelled the Jedi to agree. “Someone must have reported our visit,” she belatedly realized. She felt ridiculous for not insisting on a police escort. An expedited airspeeder had none of the hijacking vulnerability of a public tram. Instead, she was left to stare at her armored associate and wonder how far the Atsev’s commitment ran. “What’s our plan?”

In reply, Isoxya put both hands to the seam of one set of tram doors just as the tram’s power failed and they were bathed in the vermillion glow of emergency lighting. “Never stick around to fight through an ambush,” she grunted as servomotors strained and the door slowly wrenched open. “Got to break out. Besides,” she added as she slammed the doors back into their resting posture. “No bystanders this way.”

She launched out without hesitation, and the Jedi followed.

“Which way?” Nema asked the warrior.

“Back,” she turned and rolled out, screeching along the outside edge of the track as her wheels whirled. “We were in car three out of twelve.”

Nema had to run to run hard to keep pace. It took mere seconds to recognize that Isoxya could accelerate to full speed and leave her behind without the slightest effort. Some Jedi might be able to use the Force to run beside those wheels, but she was not among them.

“They’ll sweep backwards from the front,” the runner continued. “We’ve got to find a side access before we’re pinned, hope it’s only lightly covered.”

They did not need to go far to reach this objective. Not three cars further they hit the access door to a power junction. It ought to provide emergency egress to an open level surface after a short climb. Unfortunately, the light guard they’d hoped to encounter did not materialize. Half-a-dozen humanoids, garbed in dark-shaded light armor that blended into the deep shadow and cloaked their faces behind hoods and masks, waited for them. Limited by the confines of the tram tunnel they stood in pairs, three deep.

As their quarry approached these sentinels drew not blasters, but swords. Short, single-edged blades, they carried one in each hand. Light shot through the darkness of the tramway as electrical arcs shot up and down these blades in a cloak of deadly charge.

Nema fumbled her lightsaber free. She struggled with a peculiar sense of familiarity with these crackling weapons and charcoal-shaded warriors as she placed the glowing green blade ahead of her in a ragged guard position. The odds, far from promising, left her hands vibrating with trepidation.

Isoxya surprised both sides by accelerating. The armored woman charged pell-mell, the whirl of her wheels brutally loud in the confined space. Not straight on, she shifted to an angle and then, defying all expectation, somehow drove upwards along the side wall. Sharp metal spikes extended from the edge of each wheel tread and bit into the duracrete molding to propel this incredible twist.

Her arcing path shifted again at its midpoint. Wheels split apart and she spun in place. This motion launched her from the wall in defiance of all natural expectations of motion with great power. Inverted, she contorted in midair, swept past blades out of position to block. Armored hands ripped through the faces of the middle pair of enemies.

The warrior carried no weapon and now she proved why there was no need for one to gruesome effect. Strength enhanced and propelled by the momentum attached to easily one hundred kilos of armor, it was as if each was struck by a speeder rather than a person. Flesh tore, bones broke, and bodies crumpled into a pile.

The rear duo could only dive aside to avoid joining this crushing collision. Isoxya was able to flip forward over her fallen foes and spin about on split wheels to face these foes without chancing blade strikes.

Nema observed no further, for the paired warriors in the forefront charged her.

Agile and swift, they carried their motions and weapons with a skill the Jedi easily assessed as beyond her power to match. A career filled with observations of masterful Jedi anchored this evaluation absolutely. She dared not duel. Only desperation could serve.

Desperation, and a lightsaber.

Two steps to the right and Nema threw her back against the curved wall of the tunnel. This posture disrupted the tandem attack just enough by putting the warrior on the right one step closer. For a single cross she faced only two blades, not four.

The electro-sword in the left hand led the attack, low, with the other blade held back across the chest to block. Nema saw this, sensed her chance, and moved at once. No time allowed for regret.

She lunged, arms extended, in a straight thrust of her green lightsaber. The enemy’s attack, unblocked but committed, sank deep into her right thigh. Blood gushed as the weapon sliced through muscle and scraped along the bone. Electricity danced down the blade and scored lashing burn arcs across the whole of her leg. She pushed it all back, dumped the pain into the Force, beyond thought and understanding, just long enough to focus on the moment, to complete the stroke.

Her opponent brought the other blade up to block with ease, almost casual in interposing the base of his blade in front.

Yellow eyes burst wide in shock as the green plasma lance shattered the metal without pause on its path through to the center of his chest.

Pain exploded through Nema as she drew back from the glowing hole in the torso of her fallen enemy. It burned hot and cold at once, an agony nearly paralyzing in its overwhelming intensity. Her thoughts fled from the present, down distant paths of analytical recollection far away from all memory of suffering, to latch onto a seemingly insignificant detail.

Kage, she remembered. They are called Kage6. Years before she’d co-authored a report on metabolic adaptations to high-pressure conditions of which they’d been a small part.

With the satisfaction of recall she hurtled back into the anguish and crisis of the present to stare into the wrathful visage of the final warrior. Only death waited there.

Nema swung her saber wildly, battling not only her opponent but her body’s potent desire to collapse to the floor. Mindful now of the danger to his weapons and the loss of reach as a consequence, he sidestepped and maneuvered for an opening.

It came in the next moment, for the Jedi’s leg refused to support her any further and she crumpled to one knee, gasping for focus.

The Kage warrior began a thrust combination Nema despaired of blocking, only to turn aside and suddenly jump back as a spinning electro-sword nearly cleaved through his head. His neck snapped about to look upon the yellow and orange form of Isoxya oncoming at full speed.

Nearly helpless, but with the lightsaber still in hand, Nema bent forward and flailed her weapon as far as she could reach. Reflex led the distracted warrior to block softly with his right hand sword. Betrayed by hardened instinct, he screamed in outrage and pain when the glowing blade chopped through his own and continued unhindered to sever the arm at the elbow.

He did not suffer long. Brace posture ruined by the paroxysm of damage, he could do nothing as Isoxya accelerated further, raised the angle of her wheels, and vaulted through a mounted charge. Her front wheel slammed straight into his chest. Metal grip spikes pierced flesh and immense force slammed through bone and organs. Her armored form drove him to the ground and rolled onward. When she passed by and decelerated after he did not move.

“And here I thought Jedi were legendary warriors,” Isoxya, much of her orange surface now coated crimson but entirely undamaged, strode up to kneel in front of Nema. “But you’re not much at all.”

“I,” Nema bit down through the pain and concentrated. She pulled a constriction bandage from her bag by touch and slapped it around her upper thigh above the wound. “Aaagh!” she screamed again as the smart fabric wrapped and tightened on contact. It bit deep into her leg until muscle bulged on all sides, but the seal of this tourniquet stopped the bleeding almost at once. “Am a doctor.” She met the warrior’s concealed red eyes. “I don’t have time to spare on lightsaber practice.” She left unsaid that even during those years when she’d practiced daily her improvement had been minimal.

The orange-armored warrior said nothing further on the subject. “Well, we don’t have time for you to hobble along on that leg.” She tapped both her shoulder pleats. “Grab hold, we need to move if we’re to break through.”

Without hesitation Nema scrambled onto Isoxya’s back. She hiked her legs up as far as possible, battling the numbness already beginning to settle in on her right, to avoid the razor sharp spikes attached to the weaponized wheels.

The warrior did not wait for her to settle in comfortably. Gears spun and she blasted down the tunnel and slammed through the doors into the power box room. Somehow, through a set of principles Nema’s foggy mind did not quite fathom, the warrior managed to wheel her way up the access ladder and into the maintenance corridor above without stopping. She spun out on top and blasted down one hundred meters of compact, nearly lightless passageway towards the exit.

Opening the exit door would apparently take too long, Isoxya simply slammed through it bodily, blasting the barrier free of its grooves to send it spinning through the open space beyond.

In the first flash of light to infiltrate down the tunnel Nema saw a Kage warrior dodge aside from this impromptu projectile.

“Blight,” Isoxya noticed this too, and beyond.

A whole series of maintenance passages converged together here, doors spilling out across a wide loading dock and landing platform combination beside a service road. Their egress dumped them out atop a wide duracrete slab, devoid of cover, and encircled by fully two dozen assembled swordsmen.

It was far too many to fight. Nema suspected her armored ally might have a chance to break out, but she had no chance to survive.

One warrior stood behind the others. Golden bars walked across his left shoulder and forearm, marking rank. He held raised blades in each hand, ready to order the final attack.

“They were a lot better prepared than I thought,” Isoxya grumbled. “You have any special Jedi ideas? Or do I embrace the Final Run?”

Something, perhaps drifted in through the Force, floated up from the distant recesses of memory. “Challenge,” she whispered through numbness and pain. “You have to challenge the leader.” She let go then, and dropped to the floor to wobble on her own two feet. Damage spiked through her skull, but she felt better for the contact.

The Atsev woman did not hesitate. “Challenge!” she called, one yellow hand speared toward the leader’s mask.

All across the platform warriors in black hesitated. Their killed charge paused.

Their leader crossed his arms. Lightning from his swords arced about the rim of his face. “Who are you to challenge me?”

“Isoxya, Stoneweb Runner of the Atsev,” she coughed, wicked with impertinence. “That enough? Or should I start listing achievements, ‘cause that might take a while.”

This declaration seemed to pass muster, but a second objection followed. “A challenge can only be honored if both sides stand to gain. Your desire is obvious, but your position is hopeless. What grounds do you possess?”

Rather than let Isoxya answer, Nema ignited the blade of her lightsaber. Her arms felt weak, the fingertips cold, symptoms of her need to reach a hospital soon, but she held the cylinder up firmly. “If you win, I will yield my lightsaber. Otherwise, I will throw it beneath Isoxya’s wheels.”

Yellow eyes narrowed beneath the nearly-black violet hood. “I accept,” he turned back to his opponent. “On one condition. You must doff your armor Stoneweb Runner. The duel must be fair.”

“That mean you’ll fight me naked spark-sword?” Isoxya mocked. “There’s not much on under this.”

In response the Kage leader silenced his blades and began to strip aside his garments.

“Oh, you’re actually serious,” Isoxya shrugged. “I guess it’s a duel then.” She turned about to face Nema. “I need you to help me with this, it doesn’t all come off easy.”

That, as it turned out, was a significant understatement. Well over one hundred catches, pins, and seals had to be breached in order to take off just the powered components and the wheels. The scaled base layer involved its own set of pressurized bonds and even then was tight enough that the Atsev practically had to slither out of the armor as if she were a molting snake.

With her armor removed Isoxya’s body was revealed to be that of an otherwise fairly normal humanoid. She had gray-green skin in shifting shades along a continuum from laurel to celadon. Thin strands of crimson hair clung to the top of her scalp, wispy and ragged. The most notable variation in physical structure was on her feet. Her ankles were wrist-like, with additional mobility, and the toes were elongated and splayed, both signs of adaptation to a complex, three-dimensional environment where all limbs needed to grip.

She wore nothing but a tightly fitted waistband and breast-band of simple black synthetic beneath her armor. Her opponent was similarly clad in naught but a gray loincloth. The commonality ended at the skin. The pale charcoal dermis of the Kage warrior was smooth and tight, wrapped snuggly across the lean musculature of a fit male in his early prime, taught and powerful. The Atsev’s was loose and wrinkled in contrast, sagging heavily in several places, and coated in a truly exhaustive map of scar tissue. Fine lines covered her face and formed a labyrinth about her dark red eyes. Though lean and spry still, her form was nevertheless gnarled by time.

This did not go unnoticed by her opponent. “Surely a warrior of your seniority has earned an honorable retirement.”

“Young man, those who bathe in blood can never find idle peace,” Isoxya barred her teeth, bright red like her little remaining hair. “The itch always remains. Almost a shame to kill you, if you haven’t learned that yet.”

The Kage did not appear to take offense at this veiled insult. “If you require blades,” he offered amicably, noting the bare hands of the Stoneweb Runner’s armor. “One of my men will provide you a pair.”

Isoxya laughed, hissing fury that echoed across the platform. “Oh no. You pried me out of my armor shadow-man. That means you get to taste the spider’s fangs.” She bent down to the insides of her doffed hip pieces. There, on the inner curvature, she pressed down and undid an unseen latch. Hidden panels opened and something fell into each hand, perfectly at ease in a reversed grip. Almost casually, she rose up and strode to the center of the dock.

At first Nema thought the weapons were made of some black metal, but as she looked closely it emerged that the softly curved blades, double-edged but coming to a conical point, were not the product of any forge or fabricator. Countless tiny unique markings revealed their origin in the mouthparts of some mighty beast and no hilts had been carved at their base until after extraction. Isoxya held those severed fangs in offset guard, body loose against the rigid pose of her opponent.

“How should we start?” the Stoneweb Runner sounded cocky. Nema wondered where she obtained such confidence. Her foe appeared perfectly fit and moved with the flow of a trained warrior, and he was surely less than half her relative age7.

“My second,” yellow eyes never left red. “Will toss a blade. When it strikes the floor we begin. It ends at death. Do you accept?”

“Sure, let’s hurry this along. I’m getting cold out here.” This last was purely mockery. The climate-controls of the underworld desperate shed heat. It was never less than comfortably warm.

To the side, where neither combatant could easily observe, the second tossed his left hand sword. Neither warrior watched as silvery metal spun through the air. They faced each other and listened. Three meters separated them across flat ground, nothing more.

At the first ring of metal on concrete the Kage leader took a single solid step forward.

Isoxya's reaction unleashed considerably greater drama.

She launched herself upward, an explosive motion channeled through every cell in her body. Not straight, her jump spun and curled, spiraling through the air with black blade whirling about her. Her enemy, puzzled by these erratic contortions and wildly curling blades, fell back into a defensive stance. Her pathway descended beneath the arc of his hesitant weapons and slammed her body flat against the duracrete. Brutal impact crackled across the platform, but Nema saw not the slightest indecision as Isoxya struck.

Without pause the Stonewind Runner scissored her body. Both knees rose up in the same moment as she flexed her torso forward and extended her arms out, blades leading. Kneecaps spiked hard into the shins of the shocked Kage. Blindsided by this unconventional and unexpected attack pattern, his balance fractured.

When Isoxya completed her coil about the back of those wobbling legs, the ground anchoring her slither-snap contortion, and plunged her curving fangs into his thighs it shattered completely.

Nema saw the moment of decision with perfect clarity. A gong rang through her in the Force, signal unmistakable. A choice, one entirely dependent upon the Kage, would determine everything.

As his legs went out from under him two options remained. Attempt to brace himself at the hips and fight with all his weight to stay upright or instead embrace the fall, lean into the drop, and deliver a deadly riposte on the way to the pavement. Far too fast for a conscious reaction, everything depended upon instinct and muscle memory.

Both paths unfolded at once in the Jedi's mind. In the first the brace failed as Isoxya leaned into the pinch with her full weight and hauled her blades up the body to carve a path of lethal blood loss. In the second the Kage drove an electrified knife point first through the Atsev's left eye.

Only when muscles stiffened and strained beneath gray skin did the doctor recognize how the Stoneweb Runner had tilted the odds.

Spider fangs, she thought. Not a metaphor. She watched as those double-edged curled spears wrenched up to the hips, splitting arteries and veins until a wretched deluge of life poured out of the ruined warrior. Metal edges are smooth, but the protein-based construction of a fang, even one reinforced by titanium-strength mineral bonds, is not. Micro-serrations along the edge and the hollow poison-injecting tip caught the nerves and stiffened muscle fibers, a false signal that applied a critical thumb on one side of the scale.

Isoxya, stained dark red-brown from head to toe, did not gloat. She tapped her fangs once on the duracrete to clear away gross chunks of flesh and stood. With one step she moved back, turned, and looked over to the one who now led the Kage. Blood pooled slowly at her feet.

“That's it then?” she directed this partial question to the assembled warriors.

“Yes,” the second spoke stiffly, but made no move to attack. A series of swift hand motions passed among the warriors. With great swiftness the others retreated down various side tunnels. The second picked up his fallen leader's discarded clothing, but made no move toward the corpse. “As the victor,” the words emerged tortuously pained. “You may keep his blades.”

A short bob of the head, clear in negation, was returned. “Runner only take trophies from spiders.”

“As you say,” the Kage came forward and bent down to retrieve the two fragments of metal, quiet now. Upon his rise he turned his head directly to Nema. “Do not seek us out Jedi. You will find only death.”

“That will be for the police to decide,” despite the horrors attendant to this moment the words came free with ease. To her surprise, the Jedi felt this not only a proper truth, but also the right course. Prefect Xeril and his officers would tear through the Bucket in search of those who dared to blind them with far greater fervor than she ever could.

No further words were spoken. The final two Kage vanished down a dark passage and the doctor was left alone with the victor, and the fallen.

When they had gone Isoxya sank down to the paving. She rubbed both hand over her knees. “Ugh,” she groaned loudly, with real effort behind it. “That aches. I'm too old for spin-plants. Tomorrow is going to be wretched.”

Nema, her own hurt returned now that the rush of battle was gone, could only sympathize. With the Kage gone she made an emergency call to the police and dropped to the floor herself beside the Atsev. It would take them some time to arrive, even with the train hijacking, such was the nature of the underworld. Sitting at least reduced the stress on her leg. She suspected her tomorrow would be filled with pains of its own. “Why did you dare such a risky maneuver right from the start?” she could not help but ask. She might not be much of a fighter, but she had been trained by those of great skill, and this went against all her teaching.

“Younger means faster, stronger, and more stamina,” Isoxya draped her body over her dissembled armor. “And he was good, I could tell from how he moved. I wasn't going to win a drawn out fight. If you have to jump into the spider's maw, you just jump, before they've spotted how you run.” She laughed briefly. “Besides, you're never more ready to risk everything on one move than when it's the first. I guessed seven out of ten. Lousy odds to bet your life on, but the best I was going to get on flat rock.” She stopped then, and turned to Nema, a wry smile on her face. “Better than I should have had at all. How did you know this challenge would be honored anyway?” The jovially casual tone of this question startled. “I had no idea what they even were.”

“Kage, native to the planet Quarzite,” Recall returned details piece by piece. “They were part of a project I worked on a few years ago, high-pressure atmosphere impacts.”

“What in the Force does that have to do with death duels?”

“Cultural background is important when working with any species, no matter how technical the project,” Nema felt rather ridiculous explaining this. It was only natural, obvious. “I always research it, to do otherwise would not be properly diligent.”

“Sure,” the Stoneweb Runner did not sound convinced. She looked up into the yellow expanse between levels. Her head turned to catch the flashing lights of an approaching airspeeder. “Shame we'll never find out where they got their goop from, but this was far more interesting than I thought tagging along with a Jedi would be. If you need an escort in the future, I might just roll along.”

This particular endorsement left Nema stunned. She had no idea how to process it at all. Nor could she understand how relaxed Isoxya was at having risked everything on a single maneuver only minutes before, never mind the incident as a whole. The damage to the underworld police would be temporary, and hopefully better detection measures could be devised and distributed, but this attack could never be anything less than disturbing. It represented a major escalation from the Yellows, and added a clear link to trained Separatist partisans. This was no longer just a threat to a handful of influential figures or institutions. The whole of the underworld was at risk, threatened by an enemy whose nature could not be grasped. That haunted her far worse than the bloody gouge in her leg. She could not shake away the terrifying premonition that this war of systems had barely begun.



Notes

1. Because Dr. Nema is a member of the Jedi Service Corps and not a Jedi Knight, she doesn’t possess a GAR military rank due to the Clone Wars. As a result, she lacks many of the explicit and implicit privileges common to Jedi Knights. She probably could have gotten access to a police-level emergency transit authorization if she’d really insisted on it, but she was perfectly happy letting someone else do the driving.

2. At this point it is still quite early in the Clone Wars. While the Coruscant Guard – the military police unit formed of Clones responsible for Coruscant – will become a powerful and nearly omnipresent force in time, at this point it’s barely entered the Underworld at all.

3. I don’t think I’ve ever read this explicitly anywhere, but this seems like it would have to be the case. Certainly there are examples of bounty hunters taking on security contracts during the Clone Wars.

4. Isoxya's name is a taxonomic name, specifically the genus Isoxya, refers to the Box Kite Spiders, a group of Orb Weavers with armored, spiny abdomens, reasons for this name should become fairly self-explanatory through the text.

5. There’s a somewhat complex bit of subtext embedded here. The very existence and use of Huttese as a trade language is essentially a dominance play. Hutts can speak Basic perfectly well, but they “choose not to.” Instead they’ve spent thousands of years forcing other species to speak their language as a means of putting one over on everyone else. Consequently, being measurably better at speaking Huttese than someone else is a means of expressing superiority.

6. The Kage are a near-human species that first appeared in the TCW episode ‘Bounty.’ Several individuals were later affiliated with the Separatists, so they seem a reasonable source for clandestine commandos.

7. To quote IG-11 ‘species age differently,’ Nema has no idea how long Atsevs actually live, but she’s got a pretty good eye for how far along in a typical lifespan a given humanoid has likely proceeded.

 

Seems like Nema has made a very useful friend.

 

As always, I really enjoy the detailed thought that you've put into how the Coruscant Underworld works for this series. Isoxya is a really interesting new addition -- she's definitely got her own motives to help, whatever they are. But she's also quite likable, in her own rather stabby way. Which is probably an improvement over a lot of the allies Nema has made so far! Anyway, definitely enjoyed this episode in the series. (It definitely feels like a "monster of the week", and I very much mean that in a good way!)

 

The insert stories chronicle Nema's growing struggle with YH-life, so they are connected, but an entire tree of life takes on many forms, so there's a lot of variety. In-universe they don't exist as diary entries because, as missions involving active engagements with a Separatist-aligned enemy, Nema writes up official after-action reports for the Jedi Council and she's far too busy to repeat herself in her diary.