Entry Seventeen – Days after Geonosis, One Hundred Fourteen
It is good to be home. Perhaps that's wrong. Certainly I am happy to be out of the hospital, but I do not know if it is right to refer to my clinic as home. I've only been here for a few months, and though I consider the clinic my own since no one else has ever used the outpost's emergency resources for this purpose before, can I accept this place as the one where I belong? Even temporarily? My old room in the Jedi Temple waits for me should I desire to return. I even have a few keepsakes stored there. However, I do not think of that place as my home. In truth I have not thought so since my failure in the trials, half a life ago.
This little outpost, cramped as it surely is, represents the first place that I have lived alone, not shared somehow with another. Other Jedi, fellow medical students, expedition members, there has always been someone. Here I am alone, independent and in control of my own space, for the first time.
And yet I am not alone at all. It is very strange. I have patients come to see me every day, and while I take some pride, perhaps too much, in having few repeat visitors, it seems almost every new arrival is a co-worker, family member, or close friend of an old one. The myriad networks that define the Bucket, bonds of guild, neighborhood, species, and syndicate have wrapped around my clinic and entwined me in their circumstances. Patients gossip incessantly while I treat their fungal lesions and bacterial cysts and through some strange social osmosis I absorb the tenor of this artificial world.
Today this channel of word of mouth information revealed that I have become something of a sudden celebrity. It seems, as most everyone expected despite official statements to the contrary, that the attempt to cover up the temporary blindness of tens of thousands of police officers was a miserable failure. Everyone knows it happened, and apparently everyone also knows that I was partly responsible for devising the treatment. Rumor exaggerates my role extremely, of course.
I have very mixed feelings regarding this attention. The police are not exactly beloved in the underworld. My patients are primarily non-human and their natural inclination toward the human majority underworld police force is suspicion. Most are inclined to view the gray-cloaked officers as enforcers on behalf of a distant and uncaring Senate. At the same time, the local population is sufficiently familiar with the horrors of Hutt Space and other galactic regions where law enforcement is completely impotent to understand the essential role of police as a break against the power of gangs and syndicates. The result is an uneasy acceptance and a set of ritualized behaviors. Direct attacks on the officers apparently violate one of these unwritten rules, and a biological attack is recognized as wholly beyond the pale. Several of the large Syndicates went so far as to have their street toughs openly denounce the incident, almost amusing if it did not reveal how little I still understand. Ironically, I have even heard considerable grumbling suggesting the Separatists should confine their attacks to 'the government,' as if the police are some native element of the underworld completely disconnected from the Senate bureaucracy. Such sentiment, I have noticed, does not extend to the clones. The small number of Coruscant Guard present seem doomed to serve as a living symbol of the war.
Such a classification has already encompassed the Kage. Despite my official report's immediate high-level classification and Isoxya's personal agreement with Prefect Xeril to remain silent, I still wonder how he convinced her, the species identity of our opponents leaked almost immediately. I suspect that the officers who responded to the tram hijacking failed to exercise restraint with regard to the bodies found beside the track. The police have already launched aggressive inquiries throughout Coruscant's tiny Kage community, but the natives of Quarzite are unlikely to offer anything freely. Their culture is remarkably tight-knit and highly xenophobic. I worry as to the official reaction when the government fully processes this incident. Will they treat this action as what it was, a terrorist act carried out by a trained warrior contingent, or will blame and punishment fall upon the entire community?
I hope that some clue to the true culprit behind this attack can be found. I do not believe that the Kage were behind the bioengineering. They did nothing more than place the device. Such hopes are faint. I suspect that particular connection was severed by spider fangs. Still, perhaps the police will find something. Even better, samples of the organism would be helpful. Takul was only able to conduct a very preliminary round of testing using the optic and tank based material I sent him before it all perished. It is not enough. This is a problem for the best minds in the galaxy. We have barely begun.
I will go back to working on the fungus instead. That project remains important, certainly, but it somehow feeling as if I am neglecting the true threat, and my part in the war.
Notes
Nema's reference to failing the Trials refers to the Jedi Knight trials. She was assigned to the Service Corps directly from Initiate status, but was a Padawan for a time and was reassigned following failure in the Trial of Skill - meaning she's not good enough with a lightsaber to be considered a Jedi Knight. I've chosen this interpretation of her career history because it explains why she possesses a lightsaber when other Service Corps members do not.
The question of the underworld community's relationship with the police is a tricky one. The very fact that the police go masked suggests the relationship is rather fraught. Complex and to some extent even ritualized behavioral patterns would likely arise in such a situation.