Entry Eighteen – Days after Geonosis, One Hundred Twenty-Two
I have made an important discovery regarding the fungal spores. This organism is originally native to Champala, and its extraordinary adaptability is due to a period of intense radiation bombardment that afflicted that world. The genome of the fungus contains an immense number of disassociated non-nuclear fragments and it naturally shares these fragments with other fungal cells. At some point in its evolution it began to incorporate bits of genetic material from cells it consumes into these fragments in order to produce signaling proteins that fool immune systems. The rapid sharing of such false lures across the entire pan-variety population allows new varieties to emerge and jump from one species to the next with remarkable ease. The same high level of genetic plasticity allows for the spores to survive in an immense range of environmental conditions.
Though the extremely adaptable nature of the fungus means it rapidly gains resistance to treatments and switches easily to new target tissues, this discovery is promising. Despite the existence of perhaps millions of individual strains modulated by variant fragments of DNA, the core nuclear genetic component is largely unchanged across them all as a result. Therefore if a point of vulnerability can be found inherent to those core functions, it may be possible to exploit it across every last strain throughout the Bucket and beyond.
Unfortunately, the story behind this discovery is not a happy one. No, it is terribly sad, difficult even to write down, much less speak of. Normally, this fungus attacks points of transition between tissue types or the exposed stem layers of surface features such as head appendages, nails and claws, and cartilaginous protrusions; all weak points in the body's defenses. This may cause intense discomfort, and in severe cases may cause permanent necrotic scarring of the afflicted surfaces, but it is almost never a direct threat to the patient's life save as a gateway for possible secondary infections.
However, it seems something unexpected happens when the afflicted surface region is…unusually malleable.
As a matter of official record little is known of the Clawdite species. Being changelings, they rarely reveal their true forms and are often only properly identified upon death. They have a nearly universal tendency to avoid doctors, because the various surface-level changes utilized to alter their appearance are useless against even simple blood-based identification methods. Apparently they have long addressed their medical needs by cultivating their own class of healers and through heavy utilization of nearly universal cures such as bacta. The war, as it has everything else, has disrupted this.
It would seem that there has been a substantial black market trade in bacta for roughly as long as bacta has existed. Morne explained the reason behind this. For those unwilling or unable to show their face in a medcenter such as addicts, fugitives, and those in similar predicaments it is incredibly useful. Grim though that assessment is, the logic is airtight. This is doubly true given that most medical droids, if unable to solve a problem using the materials on hand, will suggest bacta before offering any other option. Though I never thought about it before I suspect there might be some programming bias, supported by the bacta cartel, behind that. The underworld makes cynics of us all.
But the combination of current supply constraints and the astounding demands of a wartime military have made bacta extraordinarily precious. All shipping and storage is now tracked with munitions-level security. The black market has been all but eliminated and what little can still be siphoned off due to high-level corruption has reached prices only kingpins can afford. Even I, backed by the authority and reputation of the MediCorps, have been authorized to store no more than a liter of emergency spray in my clinic. The premises were not deemed sufficiently secure to house more.
This shortage, this sudden reduction in bacta availability, has combined with the fungus to cause a disaster in the Clawdite population. I do not wish to speak of this, I've been rambling on and on trying to avoid it, but I know I must. I need to find the words. It hurts though, so very much. No one is specifically at fault, everything is circumstances, but they remain casualties of war.
Mechanically it is simple. Every time a Clawdite changes shape the variable epithelial tissue used to form the dermal mask is reabsorbed into the osteoderms beneath their skin that serve as reservoirs for the necessary cells. If their disguised form carried any sort of foreign substance with it, that is also absorbed. Usually the osteoderm environment kills any foreign organisms, but the fungus is sufficiently flexible to propagate in the stemcell-factory conditions of Clawdite osteoderms. Consequently, when untreated it will eventually spread throughout the bone marrow and kill the host from within.
Fungal growth in the osteoderms and bone marrow inflicts severe pain, analogous to suffering numerous microfractures all at once. Such pain is more than sufficient to drive the Clawdite to seek out a bacta purge, which will cure the body of the fungus. However, in the absence of bacta the cheap mass-market medical droids diagnosed their symptoms as bone disease, and prescribed bone replenishment drugs instead. These, to everyone's regret, do nothing to the fungus.
Finally, a mother brought her afflicted youngling to see me two days ago. The child was only seven years old. Her mother was desperate, and apparently someone managed to convince her I was trustworthy. I can only wish they had won that argument sooner, because it was too late, too late, too late. The fungal infection had spread to the bone marrow, deep within every part of the skeleton, eating it away. I had her rushed up to Galactic City for emergency treatment. Morne drove them personally, sirens screamed the whole way, but all for nothing. The Chandrilan Charity Clinic has the very best emergency medical staff in the galaxy, bar none. They took one look and said nothing could be done. Too late even for a bacta tank. The decay was irreversible.
They put the little girl in hospice care. She expired in ten hours.
That was only the beginning. I've slept three hours at most in two days. Everything blurred together, an endless scramble through underworld hovels seeking out the scattered and barely connected pods of Clawdites in the hope of administering treatment. Too many losses, and too many who could not be found. Even those we could save will face consequences. The massive quantities of crude anti-fungals we had to flush through their systems caused permanent damage to the osteoderm cores. Many will never shapeshift again. Upon learning this a horrific fraction of those so injured killed themselves.
Between the dead, the missing, and the suicides the current estimate is that at least one third of Coruscant's underworld Clawdite population, as many as six thousand people, have died. All such deaths were unnecessary. Every. Single. One. The affliction is entirely treatable.
Supply shortage, general paranoia, and specific species and cultural traits combined into a catastrophe. No one can be blamed, no corrupt official, no criminal syndicate, no improper medical response, nothing but 'the war.' For the residents of the Bucket that will not be good enough. Truthfully, it's not good enough for me, but where I blame myself – the Force offers enough to know I should not, but that stops nothing – they will blame the government. The Senate, the bureaucracy, everyone who took away their precious bacta. The Clawdites will be worse, many will join the Separatists now. Morne says the police are already planning anti-changeling countermeasures.
This is ironic, in a tragic way, for it is ultimately the Separatists who are behind this supply shortage. Yet even they are not specifically to blame here. Their blockade efforts are both a perfectly acceptable military tactic under the existing laws of war, and, if what Major Kayi told me is true when I asked her before, a strategic necessity. Restricting shipping is the easiest way to cripple the Republic's economy, and if they cannot do that they have little chance at victory.
Grand strategy demands that little girls and boys from a community that has no allegiance to any side die in misery.
This Clone War must be ended, as soon as possible, but I cannot think on that now. I have a new war of my own to fight. This fungus shall find in me no mercy. In official records it is named MSCIADF, but I intend to append a single word to its entry in the archives: extinct. The Clawdites, through the window of their unique biology, have illuminated its workings. I must do this. I must make this breakthrough bought with blood and scales mean something. If I do not there will be a next time, and it might not be an extremely rare species then.
Even so, this should not have happened. War was coming for years, since the legendary Naboo incident if not before, but no one made ready, not here, not in the Senate, not even in the Jedi Temple. A secret army was fashioned, and the clones alone among us were prepared, but war is not simply a matter of armies. Nothing else that should have been done, needed to be done, was. Instead now, with war upon us, we must become ready. But how can Cosucant achieve this? Even its soldiers do not know war.
Force be with us that we find a way before all is tears.
Notes
Champala is the homeworld of the Chagrian species. The radiation bombardment mentioned here was established in description of the species.
A massive bacta shortage during the early stages of the Clone Wars seems extremely plausible.
An osteoderm is a bony deposit embedded in the dermis, best known in Crocodilians. It seems a plausible sort of mechanism to support the sort of structural changes Clawdite shape-shifting. There has to be some sort of tissue reservoir to allow the transformation to take place.