Dr. Nema and the Pale Mist
This time the alert came to Nema directly. It represented a bit of bureaucratic displacement, informal promotion, and implicit recognition that she was the appropriate presence actually on-site to receive all emergency action bioterrorism reports in the Coruscant Underworld. Entirely automated, the process simply referred the initial notice to her mailbox unedited. It dropped into her priority message queue when she downloaded her terminal cache during breakfast.
She read one paragraph into the report and froze. A spoon full of granola and paste mixture hovered halfway to her mouth in midair. "You show yourself again," she whispered quietly. Her eyes focused on a single line on the screen: experimental alt-biosystem YH test positive. Positive. For a third time they'd detected the presence of the strange, deadly representatives of the arsenic-drenched previously unknown tree of life.
To Nema's surprise the remainder of the report was innocuous. The detection incident was neither hostile nor extraordinary. The positive test had occurred in air-deposited bacterial mats found clinging to the overhead lighting systems that illuminated the broad expanses of the underworld. The actual bacteria in question were themselves harmless, a routine maintenance issue. The initial report did not suggest any corrosive or pathogenic activity whatsoever. Astonishingly, it appeared they'd simply encountered an ambient organism from the YH tree.
None of these findings reduced Nema's concern at all. Nothing from the YH tree should be able to exist in the ambient environment of Coruscant, or any world humans could inhabit, outside of some extremely rarefied industrial production facilities. Their presence could not be coincidence, it had to represent deliberate, and given the past incidents enemy, action. For the moment she could not attribute any reason why, but that only worsened the dour premonitions.
She responded to the message around sticky mouthfuls and suggested an early morning meeting. Breakfast shoveled into her mouth as she gathered the necessary tools for a very long day. She dressed with the well-practiced hasty care any Jedi learned over time, aided by identical daily costuming. Readied, she instructed Dee-Dee that there would be no open clinic hours today but that he and Tesso could field remote calls. The droids were perfectly competent to offer diagnosis and prescriptions via holo for all but the most complex cases. She simply could not let them open the doors on their own and still expect them to be present when she came back, regrettably.
Preparations made and field kit packed, she called Officer Morne and asked him to pick her up at his earliest convenience.
As she fully expected, that happened to be determined only by how rapidly he could push his airspeeder through the Bucket's crowded air traffic to reach her little clinic. Today that took just over twenty minutes. He likely could have made it faster using lights and sirens, but Nema had impressed upon the officer that picking her up did not qualify as a public interest emergency, however nice it might be to have someone blast through barriers to come see you.
Nema's watched Morne put the speeder down in the small space beside the clinic, barely large enough to accommodate the vehicle, and elevate the bubble doors with a mixture of endearment and trepidation. She was happy to see him, and warmed by his companionship, a few more degrees than she ought to be, truthfully.
Such thoughts were forcibly buried as she climbed aboard. "They pinged again," she told Morne somberly.
"Kriff," the officer grunted. The expletive lost most of its virulence due to the synthetic voice modulator built into the gray mask that covered much of his face, but the sentiment conveyed clearly. He engaged the repulsorlifts and proceeded to gain some altitude before he spoke again. "What's the damage this time?"
"For the moment, supposedly nothing," this drew a sharp swivel of the head, full of incredulity, from Morne. His wide eyes were hidden by rusty red optical goggles, the very same point of damage in the previous incident1. Nema continued. "The detection was made in biological scrapings scrubbed off the overhead lights by cleaner droids. No obvious damage or impact."
"Maybe they were trying to put out the lights and messed up," Morne suggested immediately.
That was a sobering thought. Technically the overhead lighting system was not a critical environmental function. It was officially supplemental to the building and personal scale light sources and could be suspended in times of extreme power demand. Despite this, Nema knew it mattered intensely. Improperly calibrated, maintained, and positioned lighting contributed heavily to both safety failures and the absurd level of mental stress carried by the average underworld resident. Though the level of support provided by the creaky overhead lighting and its automated luminosity cycle was minimal, if it vanished the consequences would be catastrophic.
"It might be good to study a failure of theirs," Nema tried to put a positive face on the possibility. "We would finally get some sense on the limits of their capabilities." The so far boundless potential of their enemy's bioengineering represented one of their more terrifying traits, and a significant impediment to the doctor's sleep.
The Association of Illuminators and Signalists, better known as the lights and signs guild, had a nearby operational headquarters and took only a few minutes to reach. A gracious supervisor, somewhat overawed by meeting a Jedi for the first time, graciously handed over every bit of documentation and sampling he possessed in return for no more than a single signature. Most of it came through a data transfer, but the tightly sealed canister labeled 'biohazard' was distinctively solid. The supervisor was almost comically grateful to watch it leave his office. No one wanted to stand near something that triggered a bioterrorism alarm.
For her part Nema did not exactly enjoy taking possession of that canister and its bright yellow danger placards. She kept looking back at it as they flew to their next destination, eyes glued to the restraints. "When we're done transporting this, have the speeder decontaminated," she instructed Morne.
"I will," the officer agreed, but he did not sound reassured. "If this stuff got on the lights, doesn't that mean it's in the air? Isn't it on everything by now?"
The hypothesis was horrifying, compounded by Nema's inability to immediately discard it. The Bucket, being a labyrinthine construct in three-dimensions in the manner of all underworld strata, had a surplus of surfaces. Few of these were scraped down on a regular basis, and the number of those tested for diseases and toxins minimal. It could be everywhere. "I need to get this stuff under the scope," she refused to give voice to rampant speculation. "See what we're actually dealing with."
She had meant the comment to be reassuring, but Morne unleashed the sirens anyway to speed their passage to the Mutaratak Pharmaceuticals Cooperative.
Parking a hot-running police airspeeder on the public landing pad of their destination probably caused no end of consternation to the management. Nema considered this with considerable perverse delight, improper though such schadenfreude might be. After all, this state of the art laboratory was no typical medical center, but instead the best customs narcotics design facility in the underworld. A little panic was the least they deserved.
Takul, his dark emerald skin and twined and bent horns as prominent as ever above his habitual lab coat, met them on the platform. The Mutaratak technician directed a grim scowl at the airspeeder, oversized canine teeth prominent behind the curl of his clenched lips. "We are of course grateful for our agreement with the CSF," he noted archly, words slippery in his mouth. "But perhaps we could avoid advertising it quite as blatantly in the future?"
Neither of the new arrivals bothered to dignify this with a response. Nema simply reached over and pressed the heavy canister into his hands. "Our unknowable friends are incubating in this mass of congealed bacteria and grime scraped of the ceiling lights. I want to isolate them quickly, before they die off." YH system life had an absolutely infuriating tendency to disintegrate the minute anyone tried to actually culture it. So far all efforts to keep samples alive for more than a few hours had failed. She would not waste any opportunity to change this.
Takul, for all that he was principally a developer of custom-designed psychedelics, was in fact an extremely skilled scientific technician, infuriatingly so at times. He was actually far more experienced with several newer analytical machines than Nema herself. He also understood urgency, and lifted the can and got moving at once.
"Be careful," Morne called from the speeder. He would not be following. The peculiar agreement between the police and the Mutaratak did not extend far enough to allow an officer to wander through the corridors of what was, for all its advanced features and hospital-grade protocols, ultimately a drug lab.
"I will," Nema replied, and held eye contact steady for several seconds. She did not fear any treachery from Takul or his cohorts, not after such an open arrival. Should she somehow fail to emerge from within hale and hearty the entire facility would shortly be reduced into mono-molecular dust. Her hosts were perfectly aware of this and would never take such a risk. No, the dangers of this place were far more subtle.
Her skin tingled when she passed through the decontamination airlock doors of the facility and transitioned to its self-contained airflow. This place possessed a slick, oily feel that crept along the back of her neck through the Force. It was a reservoir of darkness, slowly dripping; one poisonous droplet at a time, seeping out toward the rest of the underworld. She despised the needs that sent her here, but there was no other choice.
Taking biohazard samples back to the surface required navigating a maze of paperwork and jurisdictional overlap that would waste the entirety of the critical operational timeframe. These were the best, and most discrete, laboratories locally available. Their very existence depended upon the peculiarities of the Mutaratak. Separatist partisans might learn she was here, but their eyes could not breach these walls. Her hosts, despite their profession, were strangely honorable in matters of privacy and remarkably resistant to bribery. Unlike most people in the narcotics business, great riches were not their goal.
Isolating the target substance did not task Nema's intellect, but it did try her patience. The light panel cleaning droids simply placed everything that could possibly qualify as a living organism into their biohazard bins, all mixed together, and tests were run against the totality of what the scrubber churned up. Any dangerous organism or toxin found within could be anywhere in the canister. Given that they almost never detected anything of consequence and that everything was usually burned up together prior to recycling anyway, this sort of cost-saving measure was to be expected. As a result they had to monotonously feed discrete bits through a general purpose analyzer one gram at a time, a truly miserable interlude.
Once this step finished, however, pace increased rapidly. Tag molecules designed to glom onto the otherwise unique signature of YH tree life originally developed in crude desperation by Nema had undergone considerable refinement at the hands of the Republic's elite bioterrorism research team and now offered a true system of detection and isolation keyed to the arsenic-based molecular compounds characteristic of this alternative biology. Within just a few minutes of surveying they isolated a dozen core samples and programmed the sorting machine to identify and confine any found in the remainder.
"These things are tiny," Nema noted as she examined the results of the electron microscope's first pass through sample number one. "Maybe too tiny. I know this system lacks cells, but there must be some minimum size to maintain metabolism."
"Agreed. I have a preliminary measurement of what I think is an isolated, hmm, I suppose 'globule' is a functional word," Takul's lippy voice slithered around his enlarged canines, hesitant. "It's about the size of a typical virus."
That sounded ominous. 'Virus' was always a dangerous word in the context of bioweapons programs, but the follow-up expression of alarm died on Nema's tongue. "That doesn't work," she announced cautiously instead. Her thoughts probed and twitched their way through the emergent deduction. "A virus is only able to operate by co-opting the metabolic machinery of its host, but YH life is too different from CC life," she had discovered the labeling system for different trees of life buried in the Jedi Archives among some truly ancient files. Her designation of YH was the first new entry since before the Republic Era2. "For that to actually occur. There's no way their biochemistry can interact with ours at such an advanced level."
"Something to be thankful for," Takul noted softly, a rare sliver of emotion obvious in his voice. "I do not think any tools we possess would allow successful combat with an actual disease based upon this system."
"Yes," that was a dreadful prospect indeed. Carefully, Nema took a deep breath and consciously pushed it aside. She could meditate on such worst-case scenarios later, during dark and sleepless nights. For now the task at hand demanded her full attention. "But assuming our opponents aren't foolish enough to release a virus unable to infect anything, what is the purpose of something so small? Can they even replicate?"
"Perhaps not," the Mutaratak technician suggested. "But it would make sense not to build that capability into a broad-spectrum agent. Experiments trying to culture this system have made at least one thing clear. It cannot easily grow or reproduce in our ambient environment. YH life requires elemental inputs at levels that we find lethally toxic. Any environment in which they could naturally live would qualify as an industrial waste zone."
Arsenic. Nema cursed herself for not seeing that sooner. "Then it must have a purpose that doesn't involve survival or growth. It's not an independent organism, it's like the Yellows, an engineered biot." A biot several orders of magnitude smaller and simpler to be sure, a single circuit compared to an entire droid, but the conviction felt correct. One piece of the puzzle fitted into the right place. "Let's bring up three-dimensional crystallography3. I want to try and figure out what this thing was intended to do."
The small size of their targets made it possible to process imagery rapidly. Unfortunately, the initial results projected out as little more than a blue-tinted blob above the holoprojector. Some parts were dark, others light, but nothing beyond a vaguely conical overall form resolved. No true structural resolution could be found.
"I am fairly certain that's not what processed crystallographic diagrams are intended reveal," Nema noted to Takul, doing her best not to be snide to the technician. It was almost amusing, if you could ignore the context. "So, the question is, what happened?"
The Mutaratak, hunched over the console, scowled at the image with the fearsomeness only available to one blessed with tusks. He zoomed in and out several times, quickly adjusting, then spun the overall image like a top. "It has to be a differentiation error," he growled a moment later. "The system isn't properly calibrated for this type of life. It didn't know what to exclude and imaged everything. We're staring at a refraction blur."
Prompted in this way, Nema realized the true nature of the problem at once. "The goo," she shrugged sheepishly. The nature of the newly revealed biochemistry dumped them into a wretched void of colloquialisms when seeking descriptive clarity. She silently appended the development of a proper lexicon for YH features to her ever-expanding to-do list. Vocabulary represented an essential prerequisite to proper study. For now though they would simply have to blunder through. "It's still mostly water, like our own cellular medium, but the consistency is different, thicker because it has to serve as its own structure, but I guess the program can't differentiate."
"That makes sense," Takul nodded sagely. "I should be able to compensate by adjusting the threshold tolerances. We have presets available for any number of high viscosity media, though it may take some tweaking to find the right one." He paused mid-ramble and some of the nefariously devilish confidence that perpetually marked his horn-roofed expression faded. "Doctor, if I do this," he cautioned. "We will not be able to see anything of structures within the goo, as you put it. The result will be extremely simplified, only large-scale and high-density molecular constructs will resolve."
"Sometimes all a corpse provides is bones," the line was not original, Nema had learned it in medical school, but it felt appropriate now. "We must hope their cellular-scale equivalent can teach us equally as much."
As Takul cycled through image manipulations Nema was left to stand in the lab and simply consider the circumstances. Carefully she closed her eyes and let her mind drift through the overlapping hum of machinery. The Force lay there, somewhere beyond elusive silence. Steady as she could manage, she let the distant presence pass over and through her, sought to let the hidden currents point the way.
"Ah," Takul's voice snapped the Jedi's eyes open. "I believe this will serve."
In comparison to the previous congealed mass, this new image was stark and spare. Almost skeletal in appearance, but not a skeleton of bones; rather the innards of some great mechanical device like one of the great loading cranes used in cargo transport up and down the huge portals that connected underworld to surface. This comparison danced through Nema's mind, escalated from idle metaphor to deliberate framework, and with it she achieved crystallization. "That's it," a spontaneous smile broke across her face. "It's an assembly set."
"A what?" Takul stared at her, confusion occupied the blackness of his eyes.
"It's a children's toy," she explained, recognizing that childhoods varied immensely across cultures. "Designed to make models. There are various types, but they all share a central modularity." She recalled the feel of plastoid pieces in her hands, digits smaller and softer than they were now. "The idea is that you have various lengths of rods," she pointed to an elongate filamentous structure on the edge of the display. "And connectors," a green nail moved to tap a black, tightly constrained spherical form. "You can assemble almost anything with just those two functions, greater size simply demands more pieces. I believe that's the core structural mechanic at work here4." More than believe, she knew it. The inspiration had birthed in the Force. She trusted it to match, she would never be more correct then when it offered her guidance.
"That does seem possible," Takul zoomed in the holo, highlighted molecular models rendered out following crystallography. "These filament-like pieces resemble crystalline formations formed by various sterols, with the exception that instead of an alcohol group they use metalloid-based compounds." He shifted the image again to focus on the darkened spheres. "These have to be some kind of modified fullerene, with various groups appended to the surface. Presuming, for the moment, the goo contains some array of enzyme-analogues, they could be stuck together and broken apart in various ways."
As Nema nodded in agreement the technician continued to manipulate the image. Dark eyes narrowed and lips tightened in concentration around his canines. "If I can get the perspective just right…" he began, and then his intensity overrode vocalization and the remainder of the sentence slothed forth in the unintelligible syllables of his native tongue.
The image flickered, blurred into static, and subsequently snapped into sudden stark resolution.
Revealed in outline, an extraordinarily complex ball-and-stick model constructed from thousands of pieces, was an instantly recognizable construct. Nema could hardly fail to perceive it, such images appeared on the holonews every day to invoke Republic solidarity. It was not lost on her that this one represented a far less symbolic effect.
It was a flag.
"Curious," Takul, habitually uninterested in politics through a long-trained criminal survival mechanism, ignored the imagery. "The overall structure, including the goo, presented a broad cone. Why could the purpose of such internal asymmetry be?"
The doctor knew exactly what it was. After all, she'd created an equivalent device with exactly the same purpose, only reversed. "It's a tag." She clenched her teeth, thoughts whirled beneath her skull, furious with implication. "The banner portion is the label, a large surface area to maximize contact with the detector. The elongate pole provides distance from the base substrate in order to prevent it from obscuring contact. The anchoring bolt holds it in place on the target."
"That is a logical assessment, I agree," Takul acknowledged. "But in that case these tags must have been broadcast ambient into the atmosphere, otherwise how would they end up attached to random bacteria growing on the lights?"
That represented a salient counter. The atmosphere of the underworld might be self-contained, but it was also immense, and even though the filtration systems were inadequate and flawed they did exist. To broadcast an aerosol tag like this and get any results would represent a major outlay of resources. It seemed a ridiculous course of action.
Her enemy, and though their identity remained unknown Nema knew with absolutely certainty they represented her implacable opposition, was not wasteful in this way. She did not need the Force to know that, her scars carried the message with more than sufficient clarity.
Rather than give voice to her growing suspicion, she delayed and sought further evidence. "Zoom in on the point of attachment."
The image shifted, the flag vanished and in its place a brutal, jagged ring of spikes emerged. Sharp tips forged of sulfur and selenium crystal hooked into the cell membrane of the bacterium, bonded to the cholesterol structures there. A tiny harpoon launched into this very basal member of the opposing tree of life.
"Novel biochemistry," Takul noted. Though the Mutaratak's voice was tricky to read, he seemed to be curious but not particularly impressed. "I'm not sure how well this interface would actually hold up, especially long-term."
The technician did not see it, not yet, but the doctor knew. She said nothing, trusted instead in science, and demanded confirmation. "Run the other samples," she ordered. "I want to compare all the attachment points side by side."
She did not actually want to see that. Instead she anticipated the dark resolution of her speculation. Confirmation came with all its expected dread.
Twelve tags, each attached to functionally identical bacterial substrates by a precisely crafted and distinctively unique molecular spear.
The meaning could not be missed. "It's a test," Nema's voice descended to grim registers as she spoke. Ominous futures waited within each word. "The last attack revealed the limitations of surface-based interactions dependent upon inorganic chemistry." A few days of blindness was certainly measurable, but as biological attacks went not especially potent. "They're trying to find a better interface."
"By blanket broadcasting into the ambient environment and scanning everything?" the drug maker objected. "That cannot possibly be cost effective. In vitro development would much more…" his words slowed and his face fell as the inevitable conclusion crashed down upon them both. "Efficient."
"Their past that stage," Nema managed to give it a whisper's worth of voice. "They're field testing. The next stage will have far more than a flag on the back end."
"As a delivery molecule this is not large," Takul noted quietly. "It is smaller than even the least cnidocyst-derived needle-capsules in use5, but if sufficiently weaponized it could carry a highly dangerous payload during a synchronized deployment. I think it would be difficult to reach viable concentrations though, given the difficulty YH organisms have breeding in our environment."
"I do not think we can depend on that limitation," it was far too thin a defense. Only a fool would bet on a foe who displayed complete mastery of a system being unable to do something only because those who knew almost nothing about it had so far failed to achieve the same. "Keep analyzing, synthesize some of these spikes if you can and test them against various tissues. I want to know which one is the most dangerous. I'll read your full findings as soon as I can."
"Where will you be going?" Takul understood immediately that their collaboration was once again paused.
"The Nova 13 outbreak taught me a lot about airflow down here in the Bucket," Nema offered by way of explanation. "A test of this nature could not be deployed just anywhere, specific points would have to be used. I need to try and track down the source, trace the production if possible. The best way to stop a biological attack is to prevent it from happening in the first place."
The Mutaratak looked up and stroked the twisting curves of his right horn at this. "Perhaps," he answered, smiling in the frightful way that the Jedi had come to associate with his species' unusual ethical viewpoint. "I do hope you are successful. Uncontrolled interference is inelegant. Mind that you are careful with yourself too, doctor, your efforts at adventuring have accumulated a considerable injury record."
"The Force will be with me," Nema answered. Her verbal confidence far exceeded that which she entertained within.
Morne picked her up at the side entrance and speared her with one of the piercing blood-tinged looks so characteristic of the underworld police's red optics. "How bad is it?" he asked as she hopped aboard.
"It could be worse," Nema demurred. That, at least, was true. Catching the operation in the field testing stage was surely superior to learning of it only when the attack had already begun, but the scope of the threat only continued to expand with each outing.
"Right," Morne's sturdy demeanor helped to restore her confidence. With the officer by her side she knew the fight would carry on. "Where to?"
"I made contacts in the Atmosphere Maintenance Guild during the recent plague outbreak," that was a productive, if not especially pleasant, memory. "I'll call ahead, but we need to go to their operational headquarters on Thirteen-Eighteen."
"Copy that," Morne punched the accelerator and dove into the aerial maelstrom that was the Bucket's repulsorlift traffic. It never failed to amaze and terrify the Jedi to find such a crowded sky kilometers below the surface. Gratitude at the officer's willingness to blast through the chaos remained continual.
She had little certainly that she would dare to make the same trip if seated in the driver's seat.
Atmosphere Maintenance represented one of the more important branches of the underworld's many-tentacled utility architecture. This far down the environment was wholly artificial, exchange with the surface atmosphere was non-existent. Instead the residents of the Bucket relied on an immense but largely concealed system of ventilation, heat management, gas exchange, and filtration in order to keep breathing. Perpetually underfunded and subject to a level of procurement corruption Nema would never have believed possible without witnessing first hand, it only barely managed to prevent the underworld from collapse into a death spiral of poisoned air.
A huge number of the employees who valiantly struggled to keep clean gases in the lungs of the citizens were Ithorians, dedicated to the task out of a combination of cultural predilection and physiological needs; extraordinarily vulnerable to particulate contamination due to their complex throat structure they could not afford to scrimp on atmospheric security. Despite their prevalence, the Ithorians were largely absent from the upper levels of management within the guild.
Nema understood the patronage networks of Coruscant well enough by now to no longer find this surprising; she'd taken to calling it the nepotism cascade. The human-dominated Senate appointed their human friends and relatives to the Municipal Authority, who in turn appointed theirs to the utilities, and they then appointed theirs to various managerial positions until finally the jobs available came will few rewards and required actual work, at which point the crash ended. As a result, every agency was rife with internal division and a fearsome conflict between the line workers and the office-based bureaucrats.
However, by taking inspiration from Officer Morne and his deep competence hidden in a bizarrely tangential posting, Nema had discovered how to find necessary assistance secured in cracks within the system. Her colleague in this case belonged to one such obscure placement, a technical wizard who specialized in traffic patterning and flow analysis. She managed and maintained a vast fleet of monitoring and sampling droids that provided all important data from place living individuals had trouble reaching. During the Nova 13 outbreak she'd been the one able to provide the doctor with an all important airflow model and delineated the initial contamination zone necessary for quarantine. Nema had snatched her up after that and brought her on to the incident command team for the duration.
Energetic and youthful, she came down from her office to meet them at the landing pad. "Doctor. Good to see you," the jammer called out. "And you too officer." A smile flashed across the green-skinned face.
Alital Lia wore dark green coveralls marked throughout with a swirled pattern of pale white curvilinear lines formed into complex geometric symbols. Her body and face were human standard, save for the coniferous skin tone. Bright irises shown like garnets beneath a hairless skull topped by six leaf-blade shaped cartilaginous protrusions in paired lines parallel to the ground on each side; the distinct appendages of the Stegocep species6.
"Yes, a welcome visit," Nema noted quickly. "Regrettably, this is not a social call. I need your help to find something."
The green face instantly turned somber. "How bad is it?"
"For the moment, nothing," it was almost amazing that this was true. Though not good news, it had become so rare not to continually hear of some new calamity that it grew in welcome by comparison. "And I hope to keep it that way."
"We'd better head over to my workshop," Lia intoned. "You can explain on the way."
Though Lia was a bright and promising engineering specialist with a series of very respectable, by underworld standards, certifications to her name and considerable unlisted skills, accomplishment did not translate into anything resembling an office space of her own. It almost never did, here. It was not merely corruption, the overburdened nature of the department contributed to an oppressive level of clutter. Such rooms as there were within the metal shell of the building lay piled nearly to the ceiling with parts salvage and scrap, all stockpiled in the illusive hope of some later restoration.
The droid supervisors worked down in the hardened lower sections, great metal-plate foundry shops hardened against sparks, loose plasma, oil spills, and the other hazards of droid maintenance. Lia fitted among them off to one side, near a long internal ventilation shaft that connected out into the rest of the Bucket and offered a corridor for the passage of her camera units. An incessant percussive harmony followed them all through this place, work progressed continually, and with it the clang of metal upon metal.
The space over which Lia could nominally proclaim dominion lay wedged in on one side of the ventilation shaft. It stretched from an overburdened maintenance bench on the open floor to an alcove in the wall filled by a hulking processor tower, a small workstation terminal, and an enormous set of monitors wedged so close together as to be overlapping at points. The space between the two was barely wide enough to permit a human-sized person to lie down, had it been clear. It did not appear that this had ever been the case, and crates and boxes filled with numerous tooka-sized droids in various states of disassembly clutter everything save a narrow path.
"Seems like things are busy," Morne noted as they threaded their way past a very similar overwhelming clutter repository of fans and pumps left by Lia's neighbor.
"Department protocol," Lia shrugged at the detritus threatening to overwhelm her workspace. "The amount of paperwork needed to actually surplus out anything, even just a bolt, is crazy, and you have to get those idiots on the ninth floor to approve it. It's not worth it, so it all just piles up until some safety auditor finally comes by and suspends normal ops so we can run a mass garbage dump." Her lips compressed to a thin line, and one hand swept out across a pile of small camera drones. "Half of these are only missing gyroscopic processors, I could get them all running with a single order of spares, but that's not in the budget." She spun about and dropped down into a much-abused chair lodged in front of her terminal. This fluid motion accented the Stegocep's shapely curves and youthful flexibility that not only tripped a brief flicker of envy in the dark depths of Nema's mind, it also struck the Jedi as surely deliberate. "No matter. What did you need?"
Personal failings vanished beneath the overwhelming importance of the task at hand. "Backtracking," the doctor explained. "We need to identify potential origin sites used in a broad-spectrum aerosol dispersal test project, one that had to be conducted undetected."
From the moment they'd met, Nema had recognized Lia as whip-smart, with a hyper-charged intellect that moved from problem to program at a stunning pace. "You want to know where someone would plant the triggers for a biological attack." She grasped the parameters immediately. Her hands began to dance across the control panel, commands tapped out in staccato harmonic. "There are several possibilities. Most of the truly high-flow locations are frequently monitored and tested as part of the pollution control program, and sudden carbon spike from a biotic agent would be detected almost at once, but that still leaves a wide range of secondary sites. Any good way to narrow it down?"
"The first evidence was found growing on the overhead lights." It was the only clue they had.
Buttons depressed and dials turned. Lia flickered through screens in rapid succession and examined numerous tables of equations eye-bleeding in their complexity. "The local environmental lighting is a low-flow area, to prevent excess heat flux moving through the upper reaches of the Bucket. The only way for anything to get up there in concentration is through ambient updrafts in a zone secured against air traffic perturbation." She paused unexpectedly, a gap in the middle of her explanation. "We're talking about an organism right? How tough is it?"
"How...tough?" Nema's thoughts temporarily froze as she struggled to process the idea of rendering a sub-cellular construct of integrated biochemistry in terms of 'toughness.'
Morne, silent to this point, cut through the paralysis. "The kriff does that mean?"
"Durability," Lia spun about in her chair and looked up at the pair with a smile. "How much battering could it take? How much pollution? Heavy metals?"
These questions led down a highly speculative road, but somehow the answer seemed to be obvious. Takul had, in fact, announced it only a short time ago when he commented on the likely classification of YH-life's native environment. "No testing has been done," Nema couched her answer in typical scientific caution before offering strong speculation. "But probably an awful lot."
"In that case," Lia flickered her screens again. This time they revealed a series of massive tubes, belching up a melange of strange colored smoke. "Then the dispersion systems connected to the recycling smelters are a good bet. There's scrubbers, but they only get some of the mess, and a lot of contaminants just get blasted out fast towards areas where no one lives. The scrubbers eventually get most of it and it ends up in the hazmat waste, but those flows still mean dead zones in the habitation maps."
This sort of neglect, which doubtless led to thousands of cases of poisoning and millions of chronic illnesses, no longer surprised the doctor. It was simply the nature of the underworld. She tried her best to hold back the rising dune of regrets and focus on the task at hand. It was manageable, barely. "Can we locate them?"
"I can re-purpose some camera droids for inspection," Lia spun about in her chair once more. "But it won't be much use if they don't know what to look for." She reached out and tapped an extended monitor. "Can you program in criteria for a dispersal mechanism?"
"I will do my best," the lack of a good model for how the aerosolized biots were stored or produced made it more difficult, but an airborne droplet was still a droplet. It offered at least one approach.
"Great," garnet eyes flashed bright across the gray-clad Morne. "I could use a second observer too. Can you take the left monitor officer?"
"Sure, no problem," the officer did not sound especially enthusiastic, but he took his place accordingly.
Another long, tedious hour followed. Tiny floating cameras scurried about through the blighted and yellow industrial reaches of the underworld. Bobbing and weaving through huge conglomerations of pipes, tubing, and reactor mass they searched diligently in accordance with all the guidance their limited brains and organic chaperons could provide.
Eventually it would be Morne who broke the case. "There. There! Stop you stupid flying eye!" he shouted at the monitor.
With astonishing speed Lia reached across and snapped through a series of commands over his hands. "Got it. What did you see?"
"It was there, on that out-gassing port, no, no wait, go back a bit..." Nema looked over as mumbled commands continued until the image resolved; the camera droid hovering in place.
The video resolution was limited and marred by several damaged pixels, but it managed to focus with sufficient clarity on a small, rusted, metal canister. Battered and pitted, the receptacle hung affixed just below a huge bank of blasting vents by thick metal bolts. No obvious access to this point presented itself. Whoever placed that tank either flew it there, or possessed truly impressive free-climbing skills.
"That's a firefighters oxygen tank, got to be," Morne announced with unexpected confidence. "Looks old, probably surplus. They junk them periodically when they don't meet spec."
"It could easily be converted into a slow-release incubator," Nema focused on the small gasket and spigot attached to the top. "Crude, but they only need to maintain the integrity of an inert biot, not a living organism."
"Bet you're both right," Lia agreed. Her chair scuttled back to the center of her terminal. "I'll get a retrieval unit out to grab that thing and send the droids looking for any others." She shook her head, flaps sagged momentarily. "This is going to be such a massive mess. I don't even know which forms to use."
"Doctor," Mornre's red optics remained focused on the screen. "This can't be the only tank right? They're probably all over the Bucket aren't they?"
"Yes," Nema's lips twitched toward a smile. It was nice that the officer seemed to be gradually internalizing the true scope of mass biological attacks.
"Fire suppression's considered a security branch of the municipal government," Morne continued, thinking out loud. "Which means all purchases of surplus are tracked. We ought to be able to find anyone who bought hundreds of used tanks."
Lia piggy-backed onto this plan helpfully. "I can arrange a secure line to your precinct from here."
"Thanks," Nema could feel the officer's hungry smile even as it remained hidden beneath his mask.
In the end, inevitably, it took quite a few additional steps. That was the nature of the Bucket. Nothing moved in a straight line, there were only swirls. The buyer was an utterly innocuous shipping company. It was, however, small enough to crumple into confession after a modicum of police glowering. They admitted that they'd almost immediately resold the tanks onward to a large warehouse concern. This second company, a major player in building renovations, was itself well-known to be a front for the Wandering Star syndicate.
Such provenance required a substantial increase in the intimidation quotient from what Officer Morne could provide alone. Thankfully, the Supreme Chancellor had graciously provided the Jedi an appropriate asset. Nema called Captain Eights and secured her liaison a two-squad escort of clones in full battle dress for his visit. These flanked Morne as he read off the truly extraordinary list of penalties some Senate sub-committee had appended to the wartime bio-terrorism statute in front of the local syndicate face7.
No official answer ever came, of course, but shortly thereafter a short message, text-only, pinged the Jedi's datapad. Routed through an untraceable series of relays, it contained nothing beyond a single address, but upon consultation Morne ruled this to be an acceptable level of compliance on the part of the Grand Vigoth8.
"But they haven't given us any idea what to expect and this blank address doesn't qualify as any sort of evidence." Morne's displeasure emerged clearly as he related this, but at no point did he budge on the procedural requirements. "So the underworld police can't just break down the doors." The address in question belonged to a large chemical plant at the very bottom of the Bucket on Level 1311. Supposedly it produced industrial cleaners, but their official filings with the Municipal Authority were blank, and the listed message address for their com number turned up nothing. "We have to find a justification for entry. The Bio-Terrorism statute is probably our best bet, it's new, but very broad. Whatever we do though," Morne continued. "It needs to happen fast. The Grand Vigoth gave us a location, but I'm sure he's playing both sides in this and sent a warning the other way. We've got a day at most before we find a place stripped to the walls." He looked at Nema. "It's your call though, if you want, the clones will probably just break down the door on your order, I think they'd fall over themselves if you suggested they do just about anything."
"I know," she kept her face clear, but down in her stomach something coiled and twisted. Such loyalty, unnatural and unearned, terrified her. It gave her the power to send those brave, innocent men to their deaths on a guess. Men had surely died out on the battlefield playing to the whims of Jedi. "But I'm not ready for that. We need some kind of justification." She met Morne's red optics. "You said the statute is broad, is it wide enough to consider any YH-life detection a potential bio-terrorism threat?"
"Have we found any so far that aren't?" he checked.
"No," Nema whispered. It was not truly a stretch, only an expansion of fear.
"Then I think it should." He gave a terse nod.
To this exchange Lia offered an unexpected solution. "I can modify a batch of camera droids with your testing process and fly them over any access point. If they're cooking this stuff up in there, it's got to have some leakage."
It was an apt observation. In the Bucket, everything leaked.
The camera droids located found their target molecular signature with almost frightening ease. Tainted water leaked through the corroded pipes of the plant's internal recycling system, and this bore a clear signature. At the same time, Lia also discovered a potential clandestine way in. "Structural blueprints for this facility show an inter-level ventilation shaft abuts the east wall near the center along the outer edge of a primary support pillar. I can override the fans and you could drop down and go in from the side."
"That would be less obvious than a squad of clones through the front," Morne noted. "You could get irrefutable evidence that way, justify entry in force before they can destroy everything, but that's two layers of durasteel plating, structural grade." The objection followed swiftly upon the opportunity. "It would take demolitions and plasma to get through. There's no way that we could-," he stopped. Slowly he turned, his optics following Lia's green fingertip down to stare directly at Nema's lightsaber. "Right, or that."
The Jedi resisted the desire to cover the weapon with her hands. She hated to admit that it was more useful as a door opener than as an implement of combat. Seeking to regain the initiative, she hastily agreed. "It does seem like a good opening move, but I'd need Isoxya's help to make the plunge." She left unmentioned that she would likely need the warrior to defend her from whatever waited on the other side.
"She'll say yes," Morne chuckled. "She'll kriffing love this idea."
In Nema's mind that particular truth did not add to the positive side of the ledger. "I'll com her," she managed.
"I can send a floating analyst droid with you," Lia offered in support. "That way I can keep eyes on everything and relay back data."
"Good idea," Morne concurred. "And I'll get Eights to let me hang on to a squad for now. We'll wait just outside the main entrance. Once you lay eyes on some real evidence we can bust in fast."
Nema bit back a sigh. It sounded like a solid plan, action-oriented and with contingencies. She just did not like action-based plans. Absent a better idea and with no time to try and gain access through the slow-moving mechanisms of bureaucracy, she found herself unable to refuse.
The plan found her, less than an hour later, falling through a mad plunge down hundreds of meters of air shaft while clinging desperately to the back of a woman who wore bright orange power armor and sported massive wheels attached to her legs. Wheels presently engaged in a dizzying high-speed spiral dive as their armored pilot did not believe in early braking.
Isoxya's broad feeling of unrestrained joy, spawned by this utterly crazed descent, shown through the Force with brightness matching the armor she wore.
Nema felt as if her eyes had been replaced by oranges, and her stomach converted to a bottomless pit. She could do nothing but hold desperately to the scale-plated armor and trust the Stoneweb Runner to brake in time. Some barely recalled teaching clawed out from in between moments of sheer terror to suggest she wrap a halo of the Force around her bones as shielding, but all attempts to find the focus necessary for such a feet slipped away as the wind whistled past her ears.
The total fall crossed over two dozen levels and hundreds of meters, but remained measurable in seconds. Isoxya waited until nearly the very end to throw her legs out and run her wheels at full power in reverse. A clattering racket echoed through the tube as spiked wheels chewed against durasteel and compelled the fall to halt. Slammed by gravity at the sudden stop, Nema desperately held fast and did her best to avoid vomiting all over her bodyguard's helmet.
At last they stopped, suspended a mere two meters above a massive industrial fan. It sat idle now, but the hundreds of sharp blades easily capable of dicing to ribbons anyone unfortunate enough to strike it remained in place.
"Whoa," Nema heard Lia whisper through their linked coms as her camera drone descended, far more sedately, to catch their position in the tube. "You weren't kidding when you said you'd go fast."
"Runner's got to run," Isoxya mused, exultant.
The Jedi judged it best to say nothing. Instead she let go of her companion and braced herself across the shaft on splayed legs. "Where am I cutting Lia?" she asked as she unhooked the lightsaber from her belt. The swirling fall left her hopelessly disoriented.
"Thirty degrees to the right," the camera-guided voice informed her.
"Understood." With a snap-hiss the glowing green blade ignited. Not waiting, Nema plunged it into the smooth durasteel surface. The hilt bucked in her hand as it passed through the opposed grains across multiple layers, but she gritted her teeth and kept it steady. Carefully she began to carve a wide, accessible oval out of the wall.
The peculiar smell of molten durasteel, the rapid decay of ultra-heavy elements as they were heated past stability and decayed through myriad steps down into noble gases, filled the airshaft. Nema held her breath to minimize exposure. Many of the intermediates were extremely unhealthy to inhale.
"Let's go," Isoxya vaulted through the gap, leaving the Jedi to follow less elegantly.
They exited into a truly bizarre scene, industrial and biological processes combined across a vast expanse. The interior of the main plant hall was at least ten meters high, one hundred meters across, and perhaps a full kilometer in length. The floor had been almost entirely cut away to form five long rectangular pools from end to end. Only small barrier walkways remained between them. These pools were filled not with water, but with a gray-shaded oozing mass of curious consistency. Its surface sparkled beneath the bright white overhead flood lamps. That brilliant illumination projected sufficient strength to drive Isoxya's helmet cover to its maximum tinting. Nema was silently thankfully that her desert-bred golden orbs could handle such ferocity.
Pumps, tanks, and other devices for the culturing and maneuvering of liquids lined the long sides of each pool. Long-armed hover droids moved slowly across each silvered surface, dipping and plucking as they passed. Pipes ran up from varied depths, snaked across the ceiling, and converged at a vast central vat that lodged its great bulk in the middle of the room. Heat haze, for the air was sticky and miserably warm, obscured all labels on this storage system, but not the tall thin-limbed smelter droids that labored beside it.
With but a glance Nema comprehended the nature of this facility. It was a large-scale production facility for microbes and biotic molecules, its initial purpose likely breeding the enzyme cultures featured in many cleaning products. The current owners had converted it to the manufacture of something far stranger and far deadlier.
They had not left it unguarded. In addition to the droids, living workers moved through the facility. Most wore impermeable body suits and complex breathing apparatus. Nema's eyes widened as she recognized the style of those dark helmets. Geranites, they were a rare species dependent upon a unique gas mix to survive. These workers were unarmed, but one turned and barked out an alarm as he saw Isoxya roll into the hall.
This alerted the second group. A humanoid frame with blaster rifle in hand turned about some ways down along the wall-abutting walkway the intruders occupied. "Scoros!" he shouted this strange and unintelligible cry as he spotted them. Clearly male, he wore a gray jumpsuit with inset armor panels that covered most of his body, but the few clear patches of skin revealed a marvelously odd pattern of turquoise and silver in a stark geometric pattern of sharp-lined divisions like a checkerboard. Short, tightly-curved horns, like those of a nerf, projected rearward from the temples from beneath a shaggy lock of blond hair.
Whether alarm or rallying call, the strangely resonant one-word signal rang out repeatedly across the immense room, volume and import increased with each repetition. Footsteps joined the cacophony as guards began to run. Rifles slipped free of shoulder slings and the sparkling tension of violence rippled through the Force.
The nearest guard turned upon the unexpected entrants."Scoros!" he shouted a second time, rifle raised to his shoulder. Leveled to shoot, his finger descended toward the trigger. No demands to drop, to surrender, emerged. Dark yellow eyes narrowed to aim without the least suggestion of mercy. He intended to shoot without question.
His one problem was that, in the spectrum of acceleration to lethal force, the lady on wheels had a distinctive edge.
Motorized, braced, and able to achieve extraordinary levels of contact due to razor-sharp spikes on the spoked tires, those wheels could reach a maximum speed to match a speederbike and hit it almost instantly when spinning full bore. Sheathed in protective impact-dispersing armor plate the rider could strike without any need to slow or brace. It was a blissfully simple application of turning momentum into destruction unleashed without hesitation.
The guard, restrained by the need to aim, was one step too late.
An orange-yellow armored composite ripped into his neck as the Stoneweb Runner crossed his position with right arm extended. Reinforced alloyed plating shattered bones and crushed neck cartilage, a lethal throat-crushing blow inflicted even before the torque of impact lifted the guard's body from its feet and slammed him down to the bare metal floor. The skull cracked and buckled its way through a series of hideous pops and crunches as bone shards broke off and shot through the brain matter.
Isoxya, now marked by a crimson stain on her right hand, did not so much as slow down. She spun about, swerved left, and charged down the next guard. All through the room Geranite workers and panicked droids stampeded in panic from the wheeled monster unleashed in their midst.
"Echuta," Nema swore, circumstances sufficiently serious to drive her into the dark depths of Huttese expletives. "Lia," she commed hurriedly. "This place is an industrial scale weapons lab, tell Morne he can break down the doors as loudly as he wants, but he needs to do it now." In between words she charged after Isoxya in the desperate hope that chaos might shield her from blaster bolts until help arrived.
"Got it!" the atmospheric monitor camera, compelled by its own hardwired safety protocols, retreated upwards to hide along the ceiling.
Nema had no time for excitement at their find. She dropped to the floor and rolled as nearby blaster bolts passed over her head. One shot missed low and struck straight into the nearby culture trough. Boiling steam filled with metallic gases spewed forth in a multi-colored plume.
The Jedi wrapped the Force about herself as best she could and ran through this gout. Consciously she controlled her throat and refused every impulse to inhale the caustic fog. Tumbling and sliding as she passed, she reached back to her kit bag and pulled free an emergency breath mask by touch. She slipped it on in between steps, thankful for the life-saving device. A firefight in here would soon fill the air with arsenic, a miserable way to die.
Up ahead Isoxya slammed one guard through a back-breaking blow against an overhead pipe and then jump-kicked through another. Her wheels, now split apart and whirling on the outer side of each leg, easily absorbed a desperate shot and plunged their lethal grip spikes through the unfortunate. Only a shredded torso remained when she trundled past.
A distant ruby bolt clipped the Runner's shoulder, but inflicted little more than carbon scoring upon the stout plating. For a brief moment between deadly spins and crushing pummels she paused to look back at the Jedi. "These ones crack easy," Isoxya called out. "But there's a lot of them. We need a plan."
As much as it shamed that part of her that placed 'Jedi' in front of her name, Nema knew she was not a warrior while Isoxya was practically constructed around the term. The Stoneweb Runner did not desire a plan so much as a proper target extracted from the madness of pipes and sluice gates. Thankfully, the doctor could grasp the obvious answer immediately. "The central tank," Nema turned and pointed to the vast storage structure in the center. She guessed it to be some two hundred meters distant across a pathway of narrow catwalks, knee-high pipes, and a slick central corridor between the primary end-to-end production pools. "Pierce it and it'll vent enough toxic mist to fill this whole place."
"Got it," Isoxya called out at once. She whipped forward in a storm of deadly motion. "Stay behind me."
Canisters, crates, railings, barrels, and all the other miscellanea of operational biotic industry lined the way. To the Jedi they served as a considerable impediment to her one-handed lightsaber-bare run. To the Stoneweb Runner they were the path.
For the first time Nema watched as Isoxya undertook combat maneuvers in an environment with an appreciable three-dimensional structure. The Atsev woman transformed from her usual deadliness into a truly terrible thing to behold; an arachnoid monster out of the mythic darkness of primordial memories. Constant shifts of wheels and powered limb strikes spun her through the environment with free-form grace, launched up and down, swirled about, and whipped past all obstacles in a stunningly swift and severely sepulcher passage. All in her way were severed through swift strikes from arms, legs, and wheels.
The Jedi struggled to keep pace along a trail marked in broken bodies and pooling blood.
The horned and cross-hatched guards were men and women of dedication and tenacity. They did not quail before this demonic parkour entity come to shatter their ranks. Instead, guided by some unseen officer and the ever-changing contours of their one-word battle-cry they formed up into clusters.
Only they did not attack. To Nema's great surprise these troops, her quick estimate suggested nearly thirty divided into three squad-sized pods, fell back from the center toward the distant main door and stood in vigilant cover as the unarmed workforce fled past. Isoxya, by now well ahead of her companion, charged the central tank unopposed.
It made no sense to the doctor's mind. If that tank burst not only would it contaminate the whole facility, but all the product stored within would be rendered useless. It was the critical objective, and even her nearly non-existent tactical acumen made it clear it ought to be the stage for a desperate final stand. Doubly so given the new addition of the whine of chained fire from a heavy repeater joined the din. The clones had laid siege upon the opposite side.
The solution to this puzzle was laid bare as Isoxya turned the final corner and skidded up to the main tank controls. A broad blur, bright dandelion yellow with black accents, detached from the ceiling and landed with a resounding thrum in the space before the Stoneweb Runner.
"By the Force, no…" Nema breathed.
It was a bent and twisted creation, two and a half meters high atop recurve legs balanced on razor-edged hooves. A single horn protruded from the front of its sunken and armored head behind a massively reinforced heart-shaped chest plate. Bizarrely jointed, it sported a protruding abdominal structure behind the hips that twitched and flashed. It had no hands, for its arms ended in armored hoof-cups, but within those nested writhing tendrils capped by tube-feet.
Strong as a Wookiee, fast as an assassin droid, armored at least as much as the warrior before it, and bioengineered to completely lack any vulnerable points, this nameless killer possessed frightful cunning despite its lack of proper consciousness. A terror born of the same disturbingly unknown origins as the tiny barbs spawned in the nearby pools, it was a weapon bread to stalk and slay. In the absence of any database entry to describe these monsters, the Underworld Police had keyed off their coloring and adopted called them Yellows. Somehow, this simplistic appellation utterly failed to defang their reputation.
Isoxya paused before the beast. The heavy battery-brace plates wrapped about her pelvis briefly retracted from her hips, long enough to reach down and grab a pair of sickle-shaped blades secured there. "You want to play the chase?" the Stoneweb Runner raised those curved implements up before her, reverse-grip, offset. "I'm game, but you, you get the spider's fangs."
The Yellow made no sound. Without warning or hesitation, it lunged, and the battle was joined.
Nema dared not watch, nor could she try to intercede. Her clumsy bladework would not help now. Instead, her eyes flowed away from the kaleidoscope of combat motion to the assembled guards. One cluster had moved off, perhaps to defend the main entrance, but twenty rifles remained. Sooner or later they would unleash a barrage. She could not hope to block multiple shooters, and even should Isoxya triumph against the Yellow, a sustained assault would burn through her armor.
The desperate calculation flashed through her mind in an instant; the scenario unsustainable. It had to change if they were to survive, and she was the only one there, the only one able to be that difference. It could not wait, the duel might end in seconds, and there would be no survival in the current aftermath.
With a glance, she took in the tank. Pressurized, chilled, it was vulnerable; even a small breach could trigger a catastrophic discharge. Golden eyes traced the largest intake pipe, a huge tube she could have easily swum through extending down into the pool beside it. As her vision moved along that course it passed across the glowing green blade of her lightsaber.
A blade of superheated plasma.
Nema acted at the moment the thought struck her. She refused to allow even one instant of consideration, of hesitation in the full knowledge that such reflection would persuade her from the necessary desperate course. The many forms of madness attendant to this action could not be cataloged, only embraced.
She took a single deep breath and jumped into the breeding pool.
Her entry submerged her completely without a splash. There was, to her great surprise, no pain. Nor did she feel disoriented or nauseous. Lethal doses of arsenic and a score of heavy metals worked their way across her epidermis and mucous membranes one molecule at a time, but no effect would be felt until well past the death dose. She could well perish without her brain even recognizing the danger. With her nervous system oblivious the only guide was the clock in her head, a countdown to fatal exposure barely reaching double-digit seconds.
The intake pipe lay mid-way in the water column, a meter below the surface. A complex feeder and filtration system capped the end of it. With no time for subtlety Nema simply made three broad cuts in the side with her lightsaber to hack open a fist-sized hole. A slurry of strangely rust-colored sludge poured out. Her left arm brushed aside this sticky substance while the right pushed ahead. With all the strength she could summon she shoved her lightsaber inside and threw it upwards.
Two strokes backwards and she reached out with the Force.
Doctor Nema would be the first to admit her telekinetic abilities were minimal at best. Grandmaster Yoda could lecture that 'size matters not' from dawn till dusk, but no amount of philosophical exhortation had ever allowed her to lift anything larger than a chair or heavier than a mouse droid. Despite this, she had a great deal of practice in using her mind to make tiny, precision adjustments to positions, a skin flap here, a blood vessel there, and other medically necessary tweaks. Her lightsaber, though it might be physically detached from her hand, remained a part of her self. To reach within its structure and disable the circuit that prevented an overload in a liquid medium took almost no effort at all.
It took far more to survive the resulting explosion.
As an initiate Nema had been taught to swim, but the thick nutrient mixture, blasted up to airspeed velocities, did not behave like any wave. Thick and heavy, its blast front unfolded more like a landslide. To endure she drew upon a skill acquired in her very first years upon the sand dunes.
Every muscle relaxed, she went limp and faced into the blast. Rolled and carried by the immense power of this surge she let the flow wash her along, over a pipe, around a standing spar, and finally to a bruising stop against a plastoid barrel.
When sturdy blinking managed to clear her eyes she fixated first on the only splash of color remaining in the now gray-stained space. Orange rose above yellow and Isoxya stood battered but victorious atop the carcass of her foe. The guards, by contrast, lay scattered about the vast room. Many were crumpled with fractures or subdued by severe shrapnel wounds. Far away, at the entrance, the main access doors lay stove in and tall humans in red-highlighted white armor charged forward with blasters raised.
Nema tried to stand, but failed. Her flesh was mostly unharmed, merely bruised, but her nervous system sputtered and refused to obey her commands. Muscles twitched spasmodically as errant signals fired through pathways corrupted by invasive ions. Her breathing weakened and darkness encroached upon the edges of her vision.
Poisoned. Heavy metal overdose. Neurological damage. Scattered thoughts failed to cohere. Medicinal instinct recognized rapid degeneration. But the next step was somehow unknowable, beyond her reach in some vast colorless space.
Instead her mind fell back upon different, older intuition. The ingrained practice to submerge herself into the Force in crisis, the Jedi path past emotion, past thought, back down to the primordial core.
But this time as Doctor Nema sank down towards that luminous point at the center of all something rose up to meet her.
It was formless; an impossible coiled configuration of corroded and crippled textures cast out shining yellow bars atop a black field. No words passed from this being, but knowledge poured into Nema's mind. Images in a discordant dispersal of patterns and symbols. Molecular maps, chemical bonds, tissue folds, developmental fissions, genetic material, and more. A flood of biology blasted through her saturated synapses until fireworks cascaded through her consciousness.
Profoundly alien, immensity unknowable and ancient beyond all reckoning this fracture entity brushed itself across the barest edges of her being with soul-shattering strife. In that disjointed, dissolved moment of disintegrating clarity each was aware of the other and knew them for an enemy; struggle irredeemable.
Then Morne's hand grabbed hard at Nema's shoulder and shook. Bleak revelations vanished in the onrush of black helplessness. "Nema! Nema!" he shouted, loud words barely reached her ears. "Medic!" The last fragment grasped before awareness surrendered to the blur of the Force.
"Hey," Nema opened her eyes to this remarkably innocuous word. Bleary and unfocused, she stared upwards into a white and red helmet, familiar but momentarily impossibly to place. Her mouth felt foul, stained with a sick-sweet taste that, after a brief blink of pause, memory rushed in to label as bacta. "Easy now commander," the voice beneath the helmet, now recognizable as the distinctive cadence and pattern of a clone trooper, continued. "Don't try to move yet. Give yourself some time to settle and recover. You took a dose I can hardly believe, I had to pump you full of enough chelation agents to treat the whole squad. You should be fine, got the bacta purge through you in time, no permanent damage, but it's been a huge shock to your body, need to take things easy."
"Right," her head felt foggy, but it lifted steadily, everything dropped back into place one piece at a time. Some measure of distress remained, unwilling to surrender, and that answer too rose into awareness shortly. "You dosed me with general chelation agents9?" she confirmed.
"That's right commander, had to get all those nasty metals out of you," the clone was remarkable energetic and upbeat given the post-battle context.
"Yes, of course, that was the correct emergency action," speaking helped provide focus, hold back the veil of nameless disconnection and attendant twitchiness that twisted through her with every breath. Medical terminology, familiar, drilled deep into her being, kept her thoughts in the present. "But I need you to dose me with cadmium, four micrograms, in a ten percent alcohol solution, as soon as you can."
"Cadmium?" the clone jerked back. "Commander, you can't ask me to poison you!"
"Medic," Nema had to fight through jitters to speak, every effort to form words stressed her neck muscles terribly. "You are a medic, yes?"
"Yes commander, they call me Mixer," the clone nodded his helmeted head.
"An appropriate name for a medic," Nema tried to speak with conviction, but the words tumbled atop each other, slurred and disjointed. "I am a doctor, Mixer, I am very aware of my own biology." She tried to retain focus, keep her thoughts from scattering, her tongue from jumping around in her mouth. It was very, very hard. "My system requires cadmium to catalyze several enzyme interactions that are zinc-mediated in humans10." She recited the technical terminology practically by rote, using lecturing technique to hold the sentence together. "Without it my skin will degrade and my nervous system will overload and induce severe seizures."
"Okay," clones were not programmed to question Jedi. Given a plausible explanation, and growing signs of visible distress, Mixer yielded. "I'll mix it up."
Nema managed to hold off going into a full on seizure, but her fingers and toes were twitching madly before the injection came and everything returned rapidly to normal. After only a few minutes more she managed to sit and then subsequently stand. This drew the attention of the nearby Isoxya, among the only people idle in the aftermath of the brief altercation. The Stoneweb Runner's armor was streaked and puckered by blade and sucker marks, and completely shorn through to her grayish skin in several places but she did not appear seriously hurt.
"I saw that you won," Nema congratulated the warrior. It felt like the appropriate opener.
"That thing was twice as fast as anything that big ought to be and twice as strong for anything that small," the warrior snarled, but she finished buoyantly. "But in the end still a beast. Managed to trick it and knock out the left arm. That was enough."
"Good to know," it was, mostly. Though the creatures were organic, they were still constructs like droids. To know they shared the weaknesses of their mechanical counterparts was encouraging.
"Just so you know," the warrior's voice ground hard. "Jumping into that slush might be the most fang-blighted crazy thing I've ever seen anyone do, which isn't a compliment. You take too many risks."
"I am a Jedi," Nema demurred. She tried not to think about it. Some actions, no matter how correct they might have been in the moment, simply could not be reviewed fondly. "And it was necessary."
"I guess it's your life," Isoxya shrugged, a movement that encompassed the whole of her armored frame. "Here," she handed over a battered metal cylinder.
It took a moment to recognize the compressed and torn object as her lightsaber.
"Figure it might need some repairs."
"Yes," The Jedi agreed. She turned the heavy little tube over in her hand. It felt strange to see it in this state, not like her weapon at all. She wondered how it would feel when repaired.
"You should go see Morne," Isoxya concluded. "He's up front processing the prisoners."
Considering the size of the facility and the heavy guard the mere handful of prisoners ultimately taken was very small. In due course Nema realized that she was actually largely responsible for this. Her explosion had not only disrupted the attack and allowed many to escape, it had killed or fatally poisoned most of the rest through its heavy metal tsunami. A mere quartet of guards and pair of workers were pressed into police speeders.
"Nema," even with the mask his elation upon seeing her was obvious. The hug that followed when he rushed her was extremely unprofessional, but the doctor returned it with equal vigor. Contact felt good, fortifying, after what had just happened.
When he finally let go the full police mask descended at once.
"This operation qualifies as a success, I guess," he noted carefully. "We disrupted the production facility and despite a large amount of collateral damage suffered only some moderate injuries. Unfortunately, someone managed to purge the computer systems after your big blast and I don't think these survivors, even if we can get them to talk readily, actually know much of anything. They're just Separatist sympathizers engaged in a weapons project. I guess the helmeted ones are Geranites and the horned ones are Tassias," he said it as if reading from a datapad. "Both their homeworlds joined the CIS, these people are just ordinary recruits."
It was frustrating how mundane, how normal, that description made this incident sound, but a cold voice suggested to the doctor that this was simply the new reality of the Clone Wars. "I learned something," she told Morne quietly. Dim and frightful recollection swarmed up as the bizarre images marked their way along the discontinuity of being. "There is a power being this, something ancient and inscrutable, not just some Separatist corporation. They must be sponsoring it. Given some time, I think I can find out more." The answers, she thought, would be found in the life left behind as the wave receded.
"That's something I guess," Morne offered. He sounded taught, uncertain. The future loomed heavy over them both. "Maybe the slicers will turn up something too. Hope so, this sure isn't the end of this."
To that proclamation Nema could only shiver in agreement.
Notes
This is a reference to the events of "Dr. Nema and the Eyes Outside Night," please see that story for details.
Since this is a nominally Disney Canon story, this means in the last thousand years, not twenty-five thousand.
Crystallography is completely real analysis method used to analyses atomic-level structures in materials, including biomolecules.
If you've ever used K'Nex or Tinkertoys, that comparison should provide a solid visual for what the non-cellular molecular backbone of YH-life is intended to look like.
Cnidocysts are the stinging cells used by jelllyfish. Properly harnessed they would make an ideal molecular-scale delivery mechanism for drugs, significantly smaller than any mechanical needle.
While the name Stegocep is my own invention, Lia's species is canonical. She's the same species as Voe Atell, who briefly appeared in TCW as a member of the Separatist Senate.
Several sources establish that during the Clone Wars Palpatine got a number of laws passed that represented a sort of proto-Imperial approach to legal doctrine as opposed to the much more lax and merciful approach common the Republic previously. It seems only reasonable that 'bioterrorism' would be one of them.
This is the canonical title of the leader of the Wandering Star crime syndicate.
Chelation is the actual medical process to treat accute heavy metal exposure. It involves flushing compounds through the body that mind and extract metals.
This is a re-purposed bit of real-world biochemistry. In extremely low zinc environments, mostly the open ocean, certain diatoms utilize cadmium in place of zinc for key reactions. Nema's homeworld, Rebaig, has extremely low amount of zinc in the crust, so her species has a similar adaptation.