A Drop in the Bucket

by Mechalich

Following the Battle of Geonosis, Jedi Doctor Rig Nema is dispatched to the Coruscant Underworld to monitor. Alone and overwhelmed, she must find a place in the community and face down a deadly threat that could destroy the heart of the galaxy.

40. Dr Nema and the Lost Laboratory

Dr. Nema and the Lost Laboratory

"What are we looking at?" Morne bent forward slightly to stare down into the vast hole smashed through the duracrete slab. It sat in front of them, engulfed by darkness within, an old and deep lightlessness unwilling to offer swift surrender to outside intrusion.

"The results of an ancient quarantine," Nema answered the police officer calmly. She stood beside him, neck inclined at a slightly greater angle due to the modest difference in height. "This space was encased in duracrete and built over rather than demolished." That phrase sounded strange when spoken, but it was apparently a fairly common practice in the Coruscant Underworld. Proper decontamination and demolition, with the attendant safety and security requirements, was expensive; turning a space into a box of utterly impermeable solids was cheap. "It got cracked open as part of the redevelopment program."

Distinctive streak marks radiated down the edges of the hole, the characteristic impact sign left by the strike of a massive claw. Only demolition droids, durasteel monsters the size of buildings, left such trails. A single great sweep by one of their shovel-shaped hands had cleaved through many tons of dark gray composite. Similar markings traced a path across the surrounding platform, opened a path through the accumulation of centuries down to the far older level support superstructure. The path of obliteration ran five meters in height and ten in width.

"Single level structure," Morne analyzed. His red optics elevated to take in the full scope of the gray sarcophagus. "Looks like about one hundred meters on a side, inside the duracrete." Briefly, he knelt down and scraped gloved fingers across the dusty residue of the gouge. "Can't see anything inside. How'd you figure out what this place used to be?"

Nema imagined he expected her to attribute the deduction to the Force. At another time that might have been true, but this case was different, and not in ways that instilled her with confidence. "I didn't," she admitted quietly. She hoped her voice hid her doubts, it would not do for Morne to think she'd dragged him along on a fool's errand. "Violet Admixture flagged the site using some sort of cross-referencing protocol. I don't know how it figured it out, but it claims this place used to be an advanced biology laboratory and claims there is an untapped store of unique medical data within." It had actually given a probability, probably. The actual translation was unclear. "It seemed appropriate to take a look before the reclamation reduces it to dust, especially since someone needs to make sure it's safe for demolition."

The swiftness with which Morne fixed the red points of his optics on Nema's face assured her the officer was not convinced. "That Gree squawk-box spouts nothing but nonsense. I don't trust anything it says."

It was a fair criticism, but as she looked into the darkness below, Nema felt a twitch, a shivered compulsion, draw her closer. The Force, it seemed, agreed with the ancient droid brain. She might not follow such signals with strength, but this close their touch would not be missed. She was meant to be here, though as to why she could only guess. "Maybe," she offered, a vain attempt to assuage Morne's objection. "But we're already here, so let's try to figure this place out."

"Fine," Morne agreed to that with surprising readiness. "I suppose we've already put on all this blasted biohazard gear."

Nema smiled, the motion lost behind the seal of her respiration mask. Bulky material covered her limbs. It made her feel sticky. Not an unfamiliar feeling, but not an especially comfortable one either. No one she had ever met actually liked wearing biohazard equipment, though she found herself slightly envious of Morne's version. Underworld police armor was already full covering, so the protective additions mostly consisted of a set of seals appended to his existing issue.

"Okay, stay close," she announced, more to say something than out of any real need. They picked their way carefully over the debris and descended to the bottom of the plating. The hole loomed larger from its base, testament to the vast power and scale of Coruscanti construction operations. Droids the size of heavy starships extruded a city-scape inhabited by sapient ants. A reminder that despite the billions of residents currently present in the lower reaches of the underworld, the ideal number for total population was zero.

The galaxy was rarely so accommodating. The shattered sculptural structure they entered offered yet more evidence of the same.

Scooping action had removed a section of the roof and outer wall. The wall itself comprised two layers, an outer barrier of concrete composite and an inner metal barricade. Some sort of synthetic insulation foam occupied the space between the two layers. Nema raised a glow rod up to the edge of this gap, but saw no objects within. "Nothing built into the walls," she voiced the thought aloud. "Means there's a closed air system, isolation protocols." That design scheme was common in a hospital or laboratory, but beyond that offered no clue as to why this place lay buried.

"Maybe the quarantine measures failed and they buried it in duracrete to prevent disease from getting out," Morne offered. He hovered about the entrance, a position decidedly lacking in his usual eagerness.

"No," Nema shook her head. "This would take hours or days to pour and harden. You might contain a radiation leak this way, but not an active pathogen." She halted just inside the inner wall. The room revealed in the pale light of the glow rod was notably bland. Shelves and racks covered in crates and boxes filled the space in the universal structure of a simple, industrial storeroom. Such a thing might be found anywhere.

Everything within was remarkably pristine, almost completely untouched by time. Even the colors on the box labels retained their initial bright shades, untouched by the harsh glare of the overhead lighting. Nema found she could read the labels on packaging over a thousand years old with everyday ease.

Most of the labels and logos referred to brand names long since defunct, thereby concealing their contents, but the symbols for essential protective equipment, jars of classic precursor chemicals, and universal generic compounds had not changed since that earlier era of the Republic. "This was a medical facility," she noted quietly. "That much is certain."

"A dead medical facility," Morne tapped the red covers over his eyes as he agreed. Their augmented scanning was not military grade, but it still revealed many things the organic eye could not see. "I've got no power readings, nothing at all, not even lingering radiation."

"No banked reactor? No repair droids?" That was very strange. Republic standard machinery was remarkably durable, designed for the long haul due to ancient industrial mandates. In emergency mode a reactor system could run almost endlessly, thousands of years without fuel replenishment. Automated repair droids could function for centuries before progressive entropic gain overwhelmed their restorative abilities. The underworld was full of industrial relics that kept on running without anyone even knowing how they were supposed to be maintained, not the least of them the computer that had led them to this place. Total shutdown was very rare.

"Nothing," Morne confirmed. He sounded unusually nervous. "Anything on the bioscan?"

Nema unfolded the device from her back. She walked a circle through the storage room, each step charted slow turns. "No signature." That not surprising. "There's no major internal shielding, no blank spots. I'm fairly certain the whole facility is covered."

"No power, no life." Some measure of Morne's native confidence reasserted itself through these words. He strode over to the storeroom's inner door. "Shouldn't be anything nasty waiting for us."

This optimism was not long sustained. Though de-powered, the door opened manually easily enough, the runners undamaged by decay. The first thing revealed in the hallway beyond was a dead body.

"Kriff," the policeman swore softly. Neck sharply bent, he stared downward quizzically. "The hell happened to this guy?"

The corpse identified as human, male, and given the jumpsuit and many-pocketed long coat combination, medical personnel. The visible portions of his body, however, were severely distorted. Despite the absence of any outwardly visible decay, the skin wrapped over deflated muscle and bone with vacuum-seal tightness, twisted and compressed into a haunted, ghoulish visage far departed from the norm.

Nema recognized the signs instantly from a single glimpse at that shifted skull. It was, after all, how her people were buried. "Mummification," she answered Morne, voice soft, carried from a place of frightful calm. This body, collapsed and bent prone across the floor, lacked the gentle repose of a Rebegaic interred into the sand, but the biological outcomes were unmistakably the same. "The air in here is very dry, almost certainly filtered," she explained as the officer stared ahead blankly. "That inhibits decay while also drawing water out of the body. What you see it all that is left behind."

Morne was not a scientist, but he had good investigative instincts and couple make surprising inductive leaps at times. "Kriff," he swore again, a rare repeated vulgarity. "They sealed this place up while these wretches were still alive."

A grim assessment indeed, but the doctor could not help but agree with it. Bent down, her eyes moved along the body, searched out the telltales. The answer was found in a black mark, scored into the lower back. A single blaster discharge. "One shot from behind," Nema noted quietly. "And whoever fired simply left the body where it fell."

The officer stared. Hidden behind his mask and optics his face revealed nothing, but Nema knew his presence in the Force now. She sensed the disquiet there. He suspected this place held a terrible story, a suspicion with which she could find no fault. "Let's keep moving," she offered. "We need to find a terminal or a droid."

"Right," this practical goal received acknowledgment. "Which way?"

Lacking a map, and with no obvious indicators pinned to the storeroom door, the doctor simply picked left.

The walk to follow was the stuff of cold nightmares.

The picture of this place's final fate slowly resolved into focus. Something, some as yet unknown disaster, caused this place to institute an internal quarantine. Outside some grim and unyielding administrator was so terrified of a possible escape they made the isolation permanent. Probably armed guards at first, but eventually duracrete. When the gray sludge entombed those within panic arrived with it. Violence followed.

The facility itself remained remarkably pristine and well preserved. Though Nema guessed much of the equipment was nearly a thousand years old it remained in nearly perfect working order aside from the lack of power. There was no damage to any of it, no sign of a prolonged room-to-room struggle. Glassware lay in cabinets ready for use, sample trays and centrifuges stood silent and secure, and expensive medical machinery – much of it still worth salvaging for modern use – lurked along the walls. The facility might be mistaken for one simply shut down for a power upgrade, if not for the bodies.

Mummified by time, they lay in the hallways, victims of blaster wounds. None were found in the labs, a curiosity Nema attributed to some sort of internal lockdown, but one lay in the refresher and another sheltered in a janitorial closet alongside silent and unresponsive cleaning droids. Men and women, all similarly attired and all human, they revealed almost nothing about the facility they worked within.

This mysterious and macabre trend continued until they reached the main entrance.

Access was allowed only via a decontamination airlock, standard for a contained facility of this type. No other way in or out existed, all the emergency exits they'd passed were sealed by durasteel lockdown panels. As a result the foyer in front of the door was now a mass grave.

Bodies lay in a loose heap, sprawled atop each other, before the door. The inner aperture of the airlock had been smashed, transparisteel shattered and shards strewn across the floor. Unbroken, the far thicker outer door remained sealed. The fallen formed a fan-shaped tableau of human remains, defined by their proximity to the phantom possibility of escape.

"They tried to break out," Morne summarized as he counted the corpses. "Hopeless," he shook his head grimly. "But someone pursued, probably two gunmen, struck from behind. The ones in the hallways must have been those who broke off from this, tried to find another way out."

"What triggered this?" Nema struggled to retain focus amid such a tragedy. She was no stranger to death, but this disaster occupied another level of horror entirely. "Why would they kill each other?"

"Don't know," Beneath his heavy biohazard coat Morne's shoulders formed a weak shrug. He sounded detached, mind walled away from this ancient disaster. "But it looks like it started up that way." He pointed down the main hall toward the center of the facility.

The followed a short path, one marked by additional bodies, to the central cafeteria. There the dead offered up an answer.

More lab-coat-clad personnel lay sprawled across the tables. Plates, bowls, and utensils were set out, but there was no food. As they spread out to search the room, the officer located the critical evidence first. "Nema, here," he called. "Behind the counter."

When she arrived, the doctor saw the same truth as the policeman. Two bodies lay tucked in below the main food processor, wrapped together in a tight embrace. They wore jumpsuits, but no lab coats, and the symbols on their company armbands did not match those of the others. Piles of ready-to-eat meal products were strewn about their forms, unopened. Each held a blaster gripped in the right hand.

"Security guards," Nema realized. The pieces fell into place easily thereafter. "Lovers, apparently." Mummified though they were, the remains could be identified as a man and a woman of roughly similar age. "They realized when the duracrete started to flow that there was no getting out, so they killed the others in order to hoard the remaining rations and survive as long as possible."

"Would that have worked?" Morne's grim question emerged sour-laced beneath his mask's synthesizer.

"It depends," Somehow, the simple act of running sums in her head mitigated the horror of the prospect. "If this place had a self-contained recycling system it could supply calories for years, especially if all available feedstock were utilized." She carefully avoided mentioning aloud that 'all available feedstock' included all the other remains. If she could spare Morne that bitter road of imagination she would. "Regardless, they did not go through with it."

"Yeah," The blaster wounds on the temple of each body were impossible to miss. "Guess the killing was too much for them. Not sure which would way would be worse, honestly." The officer's body was still. Frozen tension crept out from his edges, a still blue fog in the Force.

With a shudder Nema turned away from the grim sequence. She tried to settle her thoughts on something, anything, else. Unfortunately, horror presents a distinctive fixation upon the mind, inescapable. No path remained but all the way to the bottom. "They must have deliberately shut everything down," the words dropped out through her lips the moment they formed in dark pondering. "Probably so the cleaning droids would not touch the bodies. They made this whole place their tomb."

Morne and Nema stood together in the still silence, surrounded by the ancient dead, for some time. The effort needed to take any other action, to even speak another word, was too much to bear. Only sadness remained.

At the end of some immeasurable interval Morne broke away and wandered slowly through the mess hall. He stopped only upon access to a small wall panel by the door. After a moment, and a breath deep enough to shake his heavy coat, he spoke at last. "The central computer room is two doors down."

This served to shock Nema back into activity. "Let's go." Words knocked away the frozen glaze of stillness and returned motion. "We still need to learn why this happened."

The lockdown remained in place, hundreds of years since its institution. As a central repository, the computer room was secured and inaccessible. Thick durasteel bolts supported an aperture blocked by several hundred kilos of reinforced door assembly. A formidable barrier to any ingress.

Nema's lightsaber cleaved through the protection in under twenty seconds.

"That's a time-saver," the officer noted with forced levity.

The doctor deactivated the blade in silence once the cuts were complete and picked up her glow rod again. She did not like to linger on the impressive capability of her lightsaber when pressed into the role of cutting tool. A Jedi's weapon was meant to be more than simply a door opener.

Yet, shamefully, she could not deny the proven utility of this aspect.

The computer room was not large, and looming machinery filled it nearly floor to ceiling. Only narrow maintenance paths allowed access at all. A many-armed repair droid lay powered-down in a wall alcove. Numerous thick cables and wires snaked upwards through holes in the ceiling as part of the distributed terminal network this space supported. Everything lay still, gray and lifeless without power. In the center of the room the modest emergency maintenance terminal waited patiently in the dark.

Enterprisingly, Morne hit the main power switch on the wall panel beside the door.

Nothing happened.

"Expected that," he grumbled. "But figured I should try anyway. None of this will operate with the main reactor offline."

"We probably lack the codes to end the lockdown and reactivate it," Nema noted softly. "Can we just get this terminal up? Run a bypass?"

"Maybe," Morne crawled beneath the terminal. "I've got spare power cells." No one on Coruscant entered an abandoned area without them. "And though this stuff is old, it looks like its Republic standard connections, should still be compatible. Let's get the panel off and see if there's a good spot to run a splice."

They bent down to work through the process. Neither doctor nor officer was any sort of technical specialist, but both had learned to handle personal equipment maintenance in harsh conditions. It took some effort and trial and error, but they managed to wire in a portable cell and reroute the internal charge circuit.

Working improved Nema's mood, a little, deflected her mental processes away from pathways paved in time-sealed horrors and back toward the present. The panel was not a person, and repair was not healing, but her hands took refuge in the purpose all the same. Her mind found some measure of contentment speculating as to the nature of this strange place.

With the power cell fitted in, a single button press brought the terminal back to life. The monitor screen appeared completely normal, almost totally untouched by its long senescence. This surprised neither observer. The industrial design standards adopted by the Republic a thousand years earlier had many failure points, but durability was not among them. Protected from decay as these had been, they would last millennia.

"And now we have a new problem," Morne spoke up almost immediately. "It wants a password."

"Of course," Nema peered at the panel. "At least it doesn't want a card or cylinder," she did her best to remain hopeful. "They must have thought the door was enough." Golden eyes focused on the instrument panel beneath the screen. "I don't think we'll be able to slice this, it's too simple."

Morne paused, leaned over, and then tapped a single key. The screen shifted slightly. Now it demanded both a password and a user identification. "This place was owned by a company called Dycel Biolytics," the officer explained. "It's all over the walls. Assuming they're bankrupt and in receivership, there may be a publicly available administrator access in the security archives."

"I'll have Tesso run a search," Nema raised her comlink to contact the admin droid, back in her clinic half a world away. Manual search of such a vast database would be impossible, but the droid was optimized for just such duties.

The former CSI-droid turned office administrator worked fast, but not instantly. A good ten minutes of silence waiting ensued while the faraway machine labored. Nema ran probabilities in her head, grateful Morne felt no inclination to strike up a conversation. Idle chatter felt sacrilegious in this place of loss.

The login and password Tesso delivered were utterly random and meaningless at a glance, doubtless computer generated, but they worked. A handful of keystrokes unlocked full access to the maintenance terminal.

That result proved to offer relatively little. The local cache contained almost entirely purely technical data related to the operation of the computer system and the primary protocols driving the maintenance droids. Despite this, Morne found a chronological record that related the timestamps of critical events through the lens of automated response. With a little mental translation it provided a picture of the catastrophe.

"Here's the initial alarm event," the officer tapped a gloved finger atop an entry in the server maintenance log. "That triggered an automatic internal quarantine." His finger moved down several lines. "Then, an hour later, there's a second alarm in a different spot, and a manual decision is made to enact full lockdown procedures and notify the authorities." He then slowly scrolled down a long list of anodyne entries to just above the bottom. "Five days pass, and then all external lines are cut. Bet you the planet that's when they started to pour duracrete and the mass murder spree got underway." A single entry remained below, a terse final line. "Six hours later our two security guards shut down the main reactor and decide to end it all."

Finger motions made the pattern clear to Nema, as did the dates. These events unfolded just under one thousand years ago, in the first decade of the Republic's emergence from the chaos of an earlier era of warfare and madness. With living memory of that terror fresh in their minds, the Municipal Authority must have possessed the combination of paranoia and ruthlessness necessary to literally bury a project they wished forgotten. Regrettably the timeline failed to clarify why this had happened or what sort of research had been conducted.

"A containment breach, apparently across multiple labs, but everyone survived for five days, and ultimately died of blaster wounds in fear of starvation, not disease." Nema mused aloud, teasing at the knot of strangeness. "Whatever broke free was not a pathogen, and it does not seem to have persisted inside this place. A curious case."

Morne punched in another command, one that brought up a wireframe map of the facility. "The quarantine alarm originated from this lab. Maybe one of the terminals there has the data. We've come this far, we can repeat the procedure."

Nema agreed. "Good idea."

The repetition did in fact unfold almost exactly as before, from the lightsaber cuts to the input of the administrator password. This time the terminal in question had almost too much to say, as it vomited up the extensive user data of one Doctor Ulcheront Bellicho, Chief Research on something called the BDZ Reclamation Initiative. Nema plugged in a data disc, grateful for the standards that allowed such interfacing across the centuries, and proceeded to extract the terminal's entire content library.

"This place looks like any other lab," Morne commented as he walked about between benches, shelves, and freestanding machines. The comment might sound odd in the mouth of a different police officer, but his experience beside the doctor had brought him to more than a few by now. "What was so special about this place?"

Moments after she heard those words, Nema's disk completed its extraction and she inserted it into her datapad for a consistency check. By the grace of the Force the file she opened in order to confirm fidelity contained an executive summary of the whole project. The first paragraph explained everything. "They were researching CM life." This discovery arrived as such an immense surprise that she briefly lost track of Morne entirely as she delved into the prospectus. "It was part of a project to reestablish functional biospheres on war-ravaged worlds." Her mouth struggled to keep pace with her thoughts. The project certainly fit the timeframe. "It appears they never got past the early stages though, mostly theory and some simple cultivation experiments with very basic cells." Nothing supplied an immediate answer for the shockingly aggressive quarantine response.

"Hold on," the officer's interjection brought her out of the realm of theoretical biology and back to the present. "I thought the bad guys were YH, what's this CM business?"

"There are many forms of life," Nema recited immediately. Her recent research in this area had been exhaustive, and the data swam perpetually in the forefront of her memory. "We, and the overwhelming majority of all known lifeforms in the galaxy, are CC, or Carbon-Central, life." The generalized arrogance of that label was not something the doctor had missed. The idea that one particular formulation of self-replicating system should be superior or more important to the galaxy than another was the worst sort of anthropomorphic distortion. Truthfully, the reason for the dominance, was likely explained by a head start. Getting there first mattered considerably in evolutionary terms.

"CM life is one of nearly twenty forms of life with a high level of similarity to our own, but which utilizes a variant fundamental biochemistry. Its genetic molecule utilizes nucleotides that correspond to those found in our own DNA, but are not the same. Similarly, its proteins are built from a completely different set of amino acids. However, at the cellular level it appears quite similar to CC life. YH life, by comparison, is almost incomprehensibly alien, there's almost no chemical commonality at all."

No reply came from Morne in response to this deluge of fundamental biological information, and Nema delved deeper into the terminal rather than address the vast gulf in their comparative understanding of the subject. Right now the biology was not actually important. Whatever the particulars of the CM life experiments conducted here, none of the organisms survived. For the present the task was to find something, anything, justifying crawling through this frightful mausoleum.

Project records revealed experiments performs and pathways explored. Additional secrets were unearthed through analysis of the metadata, a study of who and what had been behind the idea. It had been a public-private partnership overall, part of a scheme by the Senate to restore devastated worlds across the galaxy following the ravages of war that marked those final decades of the previous era.

The key initiative was the last one to launch, begun only a few weeks before the demise of the facility. Incited by its unusual name, Nema read the title aloud. "Base Delta Negative One? What sort of title is that for an ecological initiative?"

These words drew a shift of the skull from Morne across the room. "Sounds like a bad joke," he smirked.

The doctor knew better than to ignore the impulse to seek clarification. "What do you mean?"

"Well," Morne shrugged a little. "I mean, Base Delta Zero is military terminology." His voice turned unexpectedly grim. "Code for the maximum level of planetary bombardment, one that reduces all structures to ash, melts the soil, boils the oceans, and even cracks open planetary bedrock so lava flows obliterate even hardened subterranean structures. It think there's been six of them in this war so far."

Nema's mouth fell open. She shivered. Thoughts fled her mind at lightning speed, ran erratic in endless directions until at last, after some unnamable darkness passed away, sorrow ordered them enough to continue. "That would utterly destroy, no, completely obliterate, the biosphere," she whispered. She saw it in her mind's eye, the conversion of beautiful worlds of blue and green into lifeless gray-brown rocks. Suddenly, as she gripped hard on the edges of the terminal to support her suddenly liquid legs, her shifting vision caught the edge of an elaborate machine in the corner and unearthed inspiration amid despair.

The machine in question crafted sample atmospheres.

"It would drastically alter atmospheric composition," Nema continued, her voice regained its strength with each word. "Eliminating the ozone layer CC life needs to survive under most stellar spectra." Phrases stumbled out fast now, driven by unfolding understanding and true admiration for the revolutionary and hopeful premise behind this long-lost initiative. "But the stereoisomers used by CM life are only one-tenth as vulnerable. Carefully engineered, you could create a microbial system that would stabilize the devastated atmosphere and rebuild the ozone layer. Then you could deploy an integrated virus to eliminate the CM microbes and re-seed the planet for colonization, reducing conventional restoration timelines from millennia to centuries and dropping the cost by multiple orders of magnitude."

"Centuries to restore damage done in hours," Morne cut away the hopeful impulse with a single devastating statement. He did not crush optimism totally, only primarily. "Still, I guess eventually is better than never. Doesn't explain why they buried this place though."

At that moment Nema recognized that she already possessed that answer. "Ozone," a single word sufficed, though she appended others for the officer's benefit. "These microbes produce ozone, and at high concentrations, especially in enclosed environments, ozone causes respiratory failure. If these creatures proliferated through the Bucket they could poison the entire zone." Upon further considered she added. "This is quite possibly the worst location imaginable for this sort of research."

"Sounds about right," Blessed with the boundless cynicism of an underworld native, Morne gave off not even the slightest indication of surprise. "Explains why they buried this place. Probably a whole lot of schemes involved, the people here just took the fall when it finally went bad."

While Nema's experience with the vagaries of underworld life was considerably shorter, it was enough to supply total agreement with that sentiment. Rather than focus on a thousand-year-old tragedy and allow it to drag her back down, she returned her attention to the terminal. "There's a fairly complete set of lab records here," she noted. "And there might be some useful analysis programs calibrated to alternate life systems work that could help the YH research effort." The entire field of study registered as barely extant on the scale of galactic research. "I'm going to pull everything and then we can go. There's nothing still active here." She was absolutely certain of it now. With this much time in the facility the empty signature common to truly lifeless spaces echoed crystal clear in the Force. "We can sign off on demolition without any worries."

"Good, extract that and then let's extract from here," Morne quipped. "This place is miserable. I'm sure the MEs will just love the cleanup job.

They waited idly for several minutes while Nema slowly copied over the extended memory onto another data disc. The ancient nature of the system meant that, while hardware remained fully compatible, certain cumbersome cross-over protocols were needed to access the software. It made for a far slower process than normal.

Critical consequences attached to this brief window of delay.

In the same moment as Nema extracted her completed download she saw Morne raise one hand to the side of his head, the characteristic movement attending an incoming comcall. Concern blasted out of him through the Force, a visceral burst of chill.

"What happened?" The Jedi anticipated bad news.

"I've lost contact with the officers on the perimeter," the policeman's hand descended to his belt. A single jerk pulled free his service blaster. "There was a burst of shooting over the com, then nothing. I'm trying emergency frequencies now." He tapped the edge of his optics with his free hand, repeatedly. "Nothing."

In an effort to avoid idleness in the face of sudden urgency, Nema pulled out her own comlink. On an impulse she messaged Lia, driven by the suspicion that the atmospheric technician might be able to find a droid camera with eyes on the site. "It's Nema," she began, the rising need in her voice slowly slipped loose. "Do have eyes on these coordinates? There's an emergency." The doctor quickly rattled off the zone address, glad she'd memorized it earlier.

"Hold on," the Stegoceps technician's reply arrived slightly garbled, struggling with the interference of solid duracrete walls, but it remained intelligible. "There's an air quality drone nearby, I'll execute an override and reposition. Ten seconds."

Nema thanked the Force for Lia's decisiveness and trust. The time necessary to provide a briefing that could withstand bureaucratic scrutiny might well be fatal.

The interlude gave Morne time to shake his head. "All the kriffing comms have gone dead. Headquarters can't raise them either. What's going on? I need to get out there." He began to move at once, but the doctor's outstretched hand briefly forestalled him.

"One moment," she cautioned, and a feeling emerged that charging forward was precisely the wrong move right now. "Lia's using a drone to take a look."

This served. The use of airborne visual support was well understood, and Morne's trust in Lia was surely equal to Nema's own.

"Uh, doctor," normally secure and business-oriented at all times, Lia's voice now resonated with a haunted undercurrent. "You're in that big duracrete box right? It, uh, it looks like the ground's come to life and is trying to eat it."

"What?" Nema's face tightened. A terrifying premonition struck her. "What do you mean?"

"Have you ever seen a tray filled with worms?" Lia's commentary sounded suddenly very far off. "The floor looks kind of like that."

All hesitation evaporated within the Jedi's mind. Certainty settled over her, cold and horrible. "Lia, call Prefect Xeril. Use my personal code." The technician had it already, the Jedi had trusted her with it during the Nova-13 outbreak. "Tell him he has to dispatch a unit with swarm cloud countermeasures. Captain Eights will have something." The clones surely would, they had something for every possible contingency, though it would surely take too long for them to arrive.

"What about you?" Lia was a highly intelligent woman, and she could make the same calculations herself.

"We'll figure something out," Nema had no idea what, but she tried to project all her confidence into the little communicator. "Just make the call Lia." Unwilling to linger any further, she terminated the connection.

Red optics met her gaze and stared as Morne's focus moved from the tiny cylinder up to her face. "They're trying to kill you, aren't they?" He guessed. The coldly mechanical tone imparted by his mask's voice modulator infected this deduction with a profoundly chilling undercurrent.

"Yes." It was not a guess. The Jedi knew it to be true. She could feel the intent now, a strangely diffuse hunger on all sides, circling closer and closer. "But it's not the Separatists." Something black and shapeless flickered across her eyes, bizarre and tormented forms stuck and popped at the edges of her peripheral vision. "It's them, the real threat." That it saw her as an enemy, not merely an obstacle to be overrun, sent terror racing through the doctor to the point her limbs actually shook. "The source of the YH-biots."

"Cunning bastard," Morne noted quietly. Then he stepped toward the door and waved for Nema to follow. "Let's move. Can't stand still and wait. We need to figure out options."

Nema followed Morne as he hurried out of the lab and down the hall. "Where are we going?" she questioned, unwilling to say aloud that this place quite emphatically possessed only one way out and it was currently filled with an unknown and deadly swarm.

"As far from the entrance as possible," the officer replied. "Got to buy time. Maybe there's a secure vault in here or something."

They rounded a corner and discovered time had already run out.

It extended down the darkened hallway like a tendril of sand projected from some great shifting dune, but rather than uniform motion, this advancing pseudopod comprised countless writhing shapes. Trifold in form, three tentacle-shaped appendages bent around not a center, but each other. Uneven in size, they formed asymmetrical knots to unite their being. Sucker-feet attached in curvilinear rows along their edges to grasp and pull them forward in a gruesome conglomerate motion of shifting black tissue. No eyes or other sensory organs appeared. In the Force the advance accrued mindlessly, one shuddered lurch at a time.

That terrible swarm of shaped masses extruded a pale blue-green film as it proceeded, one that steamed and pitted the durasteel wall panels and scored deep channels through the hardened ceramic floor tiles. Corrosion more than sufficient to utterly consume any carbon-based life it might contact in mere moments.

Without hesitation Morne fired into that mass. Again and again, as fast as he could pull the trigger, he unleashed a full two dozen shots in a breath.

Ruby bolts slammed into black, slick-skinned tissue. Tentacles scorched, shivered, and stilled at the impacts. Each blast culled one-third of a tripartite cell from the swarm.

Not enough, not nearly enough. The oncoming horde's advanced slowed, but only by a nigh-imperceptible measure.

"Run!" Nema screamed, and grabbed Morne's shoulder. They could not fight this, not with blaster or lightsaber. Her foe had chosen its weapon in full knowledge of such weaknesses and there was nothing to be done but flee.

"We have to get out," the Jedi continued. "We can't fight that without flamethrowers or explosives." The clones had such weapons, they appeared in news holos, but even had Nema held one in her hands at that moment she would not have known how to use it.

"The only way out is filled with scum-spewing tentacle monsters," Morne noted as he charged down the hallway. The crawl moved at a slow walk, sprinting would buy a few moments. "Everything else is coated in duracrete. We'd need explosives to get out too!"

Nema, blinded by regret and the fear of the oncoming onslaught with its promise to reduce her to ooze, failed to note when Morne suddenly stopped. She slammed into him at full speed. The collision knocked them both down, and the jumble left heads and faces lodged in positions sensitive enough to dispel some of the overwhelming apprehension.

The officer rolled over at once. Without comment he pushed the Jedi to her feet, though the emotional roil of triggered feelings could not be hidden in the Force. "Right idea, wrong spot," he muttered grimly as he rose. "We need a drain, a big one that we can still get too."

No understanding attended these comments, but the Jedi's trust in the policeman was ironclad. "Wet propagation lab," she supplied immediately. "Three doors down, turn left, then second door on the right." It would have drains, as any room full of large tanks must.

They ran. The swarm slithered forward behind them. They could hear it moving now. It slopped and slapped across the tiles, the combined percolating undulations of ten thousand astromech-sized starfish. Unthinking and unstoppable, they were not weapons, but their very nature carried death by virtue of extreme alienation.

Morne found the lab, and with quick cuts Nema brought the door down using her lightsaber. She did not lament the loss of that barrier. The things behind them would simply have digested it.

They entered a compact room lined along every wall with massive floor-to-ceiling incubation tanks. A central lab bench, standard height and rectangular in shape, occupied the center space. Various pieces of expensive equipment, microscopes, centrifuges, auto-titrators, and spectroscopy machines sat atop it. All were cold and dead now, but the tanks remained full. Thousands of gallons of water loomed within, unchanged by the centuries though all life they once contained perished long ago.

"How does this get us out?" Nema asked, desperate. Morne was already in motion. He grabbed the nearest chair and threw it into the battered doorframe. A first start at a meager barricade of junk.

"The duracrete's multiple meters thick on top," he grunted out between tosses. "But the bottom abuts the level base, and that's only two meters. Drainage occupies half. Two one-meter cuts, two stages, one lightsaber."

There is no real ground. A truism of the underworld, and yet Nema realized she had practically forgotten it. Digging downward here did not mean rock or soil, it meant more underworld, and the underworld was not solid. She found the principle drain pipe access, ignited her lightsaber, and started cutting.

A problem reared its head almost at once. The glowing green blade sank in to the hilt easily enough, but when she began to transcribe a circle she encountered resistance. Not the hallmark of a hollow pipe this, but rather stone solidity. "Morne," she called out as she grasped the hilt with both hands and put the whole of her strength behind the motion. "They filled the whole pipe layer with duracrete."

"What difference does that-," he paused to gulp air between shoving every last piece of mobile equipment in front of the door. "Hell." He finished, recognizing at the same time as the Jedi that the duracrete plug would weigh hundreds of kilos, impossibly heavy to lift out.

Rep optics turned to meet her eyes and desperate hope suffused the frame beneath. "Can you lift it with the Force?"

These words struck her across the face, a full force slap of rebuke. A follow-up clipped the opposite direction when she supplied the only truthful response she could. "No. I cannot." It was a failure, a weakness in her. Inability to properly conceptualize objects in the Force, one of all too many imperfections and errors that kept her from knighthood. Many times in the underworld that lack threatened to destroy her. Now it seemed at last they would and Morne, through not fault of his own, would pay the price for her failures.

Tears formed at the edges of golden eyes.

A sloppy squelch from the impromptu barricade signaled the arrival of their doom.

Officer Morne did not surrender swiftly. He moved to the walls and tried to push the nearest of the heavy tanks in front of the door. Though a fit man, it did not so much as twitch. "Blasted heavy things." The sloppy strikes at the piled debris beat out a steady rhythm now, and Nema could see the toxic, corrosive excretions beginning to seep through below.

That liquid advance offered a sudden inspiration. She stood, and with a single broad sweep of her lightsaber cleaved through the side of the nearest tank.

Water spilled out in a rush, nearly a thousand liters of liquid unleashed in one stroke. It spread from wall to wall to form a layer a full centimeter deep. Unable to drain through a duracrete stoppered pipe, it rushed out beneath the crumbling barricade and into the hallway beyond.

Fourteen other tanks lined the walls. The lightsaber did not stop. From one to the next, slicing and slashing strokes set free long-stored liquid. The outrushing flow drenched the Jedi in moments and rose to an ankle-deep swirl.

As she cut free the last component of her impromptu deluge she was brought short by an unexpected cry from Morne. "Nema! Get on the counter!"

Without needing to ask why, she dashed across the inundated floor and threw her body onto the cleared lab counter, never hesitating. As she slid to a painful, stomach bending stop, motion slowed and her eyes watched the seemingly endless descent of the dark metal rod that was Morne's shock baton from his hand down into the pooling liquid near the door.

At the moment of contact sparks cascaded across the floor. With universal contact, the powerful stun weapon dumped the entirety of its stored charge loose in seconds, enough to fill the air with the acrid scent of ozone, before the capacitors overloaded and gave way with a screaming metallic pop. Invisible beneath the surface, that massive discharge of voltage conducted smoothly through the water in all directions, seeking the shortest path to ground.

YH-life utilized metallic elements to a far greater degree than ordinary carbon-based systems. Silicon and heavy metals formed key components of its tissues. Though in many ways incredibly durable, it was also far more conductive, and particularly vulnerable to electrocution. The tentacle forms of the swarm, all surface and no center, were doubly so.

There was no sound. Simple biots engineered to swarm and smother, the creatures lacked all vocal apparatus. They writhed and twitched in silence, cleaved by electrical wrath.

"That won't kill them all," Nema knew. The stun baton had nowhere near the power required to incapacitate such a vast onslaught.

"Right," grim agreement came from the officer. Carefully, he jumped off the counter and landed with a splash. With one hand he picked up the fallen baton and tossed it to her. "Rig the spare power cells in, we'll give them another blast if they come through." Blaster in hand he advanced toward the barricade. "I'm going to make a different kind of wall."

The next several minutes would live forever in Nema's nightmares. One blaster rapport after another beat out a steady drum as Morne punched a ruby impactor into every blue-black appendage he could find the angle to strike. The Force, already obscured and shuddered by the strangeness of so much alien existence, shrouded in incomprehensible fashion in a manner that set nerves on edge, twitched with each burst of violence. The slaughter of these not-entirely-living creatures unleashed something utterly unfamiliar, a presence dreadful not in its darkness, but through pure strangeness. The unbridgeable unknown lodged in the Jedi's mind.

She struggled desperately to focus on the mechanical task she'd been given. Not difficult, it lay well within her technical understanding, but the precision required proved almost impossible to summon in the face of that bizarre haunting. Circuits blurred before her eyes and the universe itself seemed to jump and writhe as she worked.

It was not finished until after Morne exhausted his targets.

The grim effort was not in vain. When the swarm shuddered into life again it moved slowly, barred from advancing by the need to displace the corpses of its own vanguard. Precious minutes were gained in nervous waiting as the bodies slowly disintegrated beneath the consumptive touch of their fellows. The prospect of rescue rose from unbelievable hope to distant possibility.

Twice they repeated the brutal procedure, first with the remaining spare power cells, and second with the single stronger battery used in Nema's lightsaber. The latter move took all her will to allow and left her huddled atop the counter with hands trembling around a dead and useless metal cylinder. All defense sacrificed.

Mentally she understood that the electrical discharge stunned hundreds of swarming biots and Morne's subsequent exploitation of the window this offered slayed scores. The calculation was perfectly clear. With blade in hand she might slice one or two apart before being overwhelmed, mere seconds of survival versus the many minutes offered by the extraction of the power cell. Simple arithmetic, but it offered no solace. A Jedi does not cower weaponless in the face of the enemy, should never hide away while another stands guard over her. Pounded into her by the entirety of her upbringing, the impulse could not be silenced. Brain battled muscle memory and she shivered in the cold as Morne slaughtered without mercy.

The policeman took to his task standing ramrod straight beneath his coat; a grim pillar of resolve. Thoughts dedicated to the moment, he reflected no fear at all. Desperate determination suppressed it utterly.

He returned as the hideous pseudopods began to twitch and shudder once more. Creep and crawl accelerated into motion and they surged over the mounds of their fallen without hesitation or remorse. Morne levered himself onto the countertop with pistol in hand.

"We don't have anything capable of producing a fourth blast," Nema told him. She tried and failed to keep despair from her voice. She'd searched, but none of her medical tools had sufficient punch, and they'd been engineered specifically to avoid any sort of catastrophic overload.

The officer nodded. His body remained steady, but she felt something unseen slump off him.

"Got half a blaster pack left. I'll bottleneck the doorway as long as I can. Water seems to slow them some, maybe got a few minutes."

Nothing further emerged from beneath the mask. In that strange silent moment, the background of continuous shuddering motions through the shallows dissipated into ambient nothing, Nema discovered there was no need to say anything at all. Recognition had already completed its work, understanding and acceptance between officer and doctor long since forged into unbreakable bonds. With her deactivated lightsaber in hand she stood beside him and waited for the horrors to advance.

Against all expectation her comlink barked to life in that instant.

"Nema? Morne? Anyone? Can you hear me, please respond," Lia's voice, raw and full of anguish, scratched across countless layers of metal, polymer, and reinforcement to their ears.

Morne's blaster barked a sharp burst, then another, nearly drowned out the distant voice.

The Force is the ally of the Jedi, and at times it is the seemingly least among its gifts that provides salvation. Rather than lose the far off beacon to blaster fire and the lashing of countless tentacles, Nema let the Force channel her awareness, just enough to carry her toward what mattered, that distant lifeline.

"This is Nema," she clasped the comlink to the edge of her lips, desperate with the hope that the Stegoceps technician would hear through the storm. "Do we have support coming?" She could not hold back the question, the possibility of hope at last.

"Nema, thank the Force!" Lia's joy shot through the digital signal and filled the doctor. Hope kindled once more within. "Uh, yes, there's a plan, but it's going to be messy. You need to take cover. I can give you a minute of prep-"

Morne grunted behind her. Golden eyes turned to see black arms coated in blue suckers surround the counter on all sides. The metal started to melt as their corrosive secretions filled the pooled water.

"Do it now!" Nema shouted into the comlink.

Trained by working with droids every day, Lia was no stranger to hair-trigger choices made at inhuman speed. Given the order she reacted at the very limited of biological potential. "Brace!" A single word of warning, shout at the maximum volume the comlink could convey, was all she spared them.

Loud enough for Morne to hear as well. He turned and threw himself on top of Nema in a single motion. They landed flat on the countertop. The officer extended hands and feet outwards in a death grip, his massive gray armored coat practically smothered the doctor from above.

She had no time to complain, barely enough to recognize the presence above her, before the blast hit.

Arc flash.

Nema learned this term later, the proper technical definition to characterize the impact. The specific form of wave-front unleashed by an electrical explosion, one caused in this case by a current fault generated by deploying thirty power droids in series and triggering an overload as they charged into the swarm. The absolute output measure tipped the meter in megawatts.

It blasted through water and along internal walls, channeled towards anything that could possibly ground it. YH-flesh, filled with conductive metal mixed alongside organic molecular structures, shredded beneath its lash. Boiled and burned, the biots vaporized instantly. A sickening, squalling echo followed the blast front through the Force as they immolated.

The tissues of Humans and Rebagaics resisted only slightly better. Ionized air burned and current seared across surfaces. Nema felt the charge wave encroach upon her, unseen.

It stopped before it touched her flesh.

Above her Morne howled.

His coat, thick, armored, and insulated, absorbed a tremendous amount of damage, till it smoked and smoldered across every centimeter. A barrier lifeline, the gray garment saved both lives even as it disintegrated. It covered Nema entirely, sealed against the edge to form a protective cocoon encasing her.

Morne's hands and feet lay outside that cloak of protection. Sparks lashed his limbs as his gloves melted and his boots eroded away. Pain spiked in the Force, an endless tower of agony as countless surface nerves burned. Even the reflection of this damage drove the Jedi to the edge of madness. How the officer could endure was beyond all imagining.

But he did not let go. For three critical heartbeats Morne held on, no matter the pain, no matter the loss of sensation, no matter what.

Nema knew it saved her. Unshielded save for her delicate hazmat suit she would have burned away.

They might have perished anyway, despite such heroism. Lia, unaware of the water spread across the complex floor, unleashed far more power than otherwise necessary. Once inside the sealed structure, coated in impermeable metal walls, it had no means of escape. Everything within lay open to obliteration as the arc flash burned to find freedom.

No escape save for the hole Nema cut in the floor.

Conductive panels sheared apart by lightsaber offered a narrow passage to the duracrete below. That impossibly sturdy composite material easily absorbed the electrical blast, enough power to run a city block for the better part of a week, with only an exceedingly modest increase in internal temperature.

The arcing wave washed down into that fill and vanished. Only devastation remained in its wake.

Morne moaned, delirious with pain and shock. Nema knew, she could feel the damage. Desperate, she pushed hard, flipped the officer over and freed herself from his limp embrace. It was not easy, he was larger and heavier than she without the added weight of armor, but a surge of adrenalin provided the necessary potency.

"Lia," Nema went for her comlink first. "Lia!"

No response, and a heartbeat later she realized the device was dead. The electrical surge had shorted it, and all the other equipment she carried along with it. She lay trapped atop a counter surrounded by poisonous, smoldering corpses – the air slowly filling with toxic fumes as they burned – and stuck with completely analog tools alone.

Time for regret or hesitation did not exist. She had a patient in front of her, a man who'd just nearly sacrificed himself to protect her. She would save him, failure was not allowed to enter her consciousness.

Teeth clenched, she started working.

Her laser scalpel would not activate, so Nema cut through the ruins of Morne's boots and gloves with scissors. The ruined composite fabrics, blessedly designed in the expectation of high heat, crumbled off easily. Had they melted to the skin the result would have been far worse. She slashed free the coat using the officer's own multi-tool, carefully severed the concealed clasps between armor plates, and then sliced free the clothes beneath. Only the mask and helmet were left, kept to preserve the necessary filtration system as the concentration of toxic metals rapidly rose toward lethal levels in the air.

His core, thankfully, remained mostly unscathed. Though reddened visibly near the seams and beneath the belt, the ruddy umber skin was otherwise undamaged and the Force revealed no hidden internal wounds. Only on his face did terrible power reveal the impact of shock, system disruption capable of killing those who ought otherwise to survive.

Lacking any other material to form a suitable pillow, Nema tore off her headdress and placed it beneath the officer's calves. The wire-frame support of the irregularly horseshoe-shaped covering held the limbs up a few critical centimeters, just enough to redirect blood flow back toward the torso and skull. She applied a pharmaceutical remedy by means of a shot to the arm, a compound to boost oxygenation and stabilize heart rate.

Only then did she dare turn her attention to the extremities.

The damage was hideous. A collage of blackened and blistered flesh made a map across every surface in the place of healthy skin. Nails lay crisped to nothing and little pock-marks revealed the shattered scars once hosting follicles.

Nema knew burns well. They were a common form of severe trauma. These were among the worst she'd ever encountered. Without prompt attention Morne could lose all four limbs. Even more dangerous, the exposed flesh provided no barrier to the toxic backlash unleashed by the dead YH-biots. Despite the filtration protecting his lungs he might well still absorb a lethal dose of arsenic.

That outcome could not be contemplated.

Bacta remained the best possible weapon against burns, but the little spray bottle was powered by a tiny electrical motor. Now useless, Nema tore the reservoir free instead and squeezed out doses by optical measurement across the impacted tissues. Then, with incredible delicacy and a protective sheathe formed over her fingertips using the Force, she carefully massaged the sticky fluid about until it covered every scrap of surface.

She repeated this process with an antiseptic spray and finally with dermaseal bandaging agent. By the end her hands were covered in a kaleidoscopic color patterns and felt thick as duracrete blocks.

"No rescue party," Name whispered quietly as she finished. She counted the minutes with growing worry. A trauma team ought to have arrived.

Except her comlink was dead and the floor was covered in water contaminated to nearly lethal levels. A rescue party would need full hazard gear to approach safely. Such articles were in short supply in the Bucket, and not easily deployed. It would take time to assemble a team.

And there would be no rush if they thought nothing remained to save.

The doctor scanned the room, and then her own battered hazard suit. Black circular scars from electrical discharge marked it. Air escaped the helmet through numerous micron-sized punctures. It lacked security, but the gross structure remained sound enough to buy time.

She did not need a functional dosimeter to see the thickening silvery mist cloud the room.

"Okay," she muttered to herself in search of reassurance. "I can do this. I can do this."

Eyes closed, Nema deliberately slowed her breathing. She focused on the silence inside, on the soft and glowing presence deep down. Carefully, taking all the time necessary, she let it leak out. Slowly, cell by cell, vein by vein, nerve by nerve, that presence filtered through her muscles and wrapped around the fibers of actin and myosin. It felt warm, but not half as hot as the surge of heat when she grasped the nearly naked Morne beneath his shoulders and slowly levered him into emergency carry position on her back.

Heat flooded her skin, a crimson burst across every sense. Nema refused to be embarrassed, refused to ignore this immense hormonal impulse. Instead, she channeled it into strength and resolve along the cable to her inner energy. For now nothing else mattered.

Knees bent and with Morne's weight splayed across her shoulders, wounded hands and feet swinging free, the doctor slipped off the counter and into the charnel mixture below.

Careful to land with minimal splash, she leaned into the weight of her burden and took the first step forward.

Water rippled as she walked, and dampness, a faint metallic tingle carried down to her toes along with it, slowly seeped inside. Ruined tentacle forms floated past, bodies marked by horrific burn patterns alongside the sucker rows. Darkness reigned, but the Force guided the way as she strode one step at a time toward the exit.

Morne's weight massed a brutal burden upon her shoulders, but at the same time filled her core with strength. Purpose clear, this beacon of certainty carried her forward even as everything below the knees went numb. He had saved her and now she would save him in turn. Nothing had ever been so necessary, so obvious, in her whole life. In the face of such clarity the Force reflected back a deep embrace far more powerful than she'd ever experienced.

It lasted until the very last few steps, to the passage through the shallow duracrete cocoon that marked the final threshold. Here, lingering in the shadows and shield by that chalk-shaded immensity, a single three-armed form found protection in a crevice. Shielded from the blast and merely stunned, it dropped from above to land before Nema with a soft splash.

Golden eyes saw droplets spray in a fine fountain, frozen still as time ground to a halt in the infinite tableau of the moment. A single black arm arched forward, wrapped about her left knee, and plunged a single blue-rimmed sucker through a burn scar in her hazard suit. Polymer and plastoid breached, a single filamentous ring connected to soft skin.

The briefest of connections, it lasted for a tiny fraction of a second. Long enough even so to hurl Nema's mind through endless vistas. Black-and-yellow images strobed across the deeper reaches of her mind and thoughts screeched beyond a gulf of billions of stars and years.

"Ia! Ia! Ai! Ai!" Wordless voices howled with blood-curdling potency through her skull. Garbled exhortations and incoherent patterns assembled in incomprehensible arrays of light, shape, and motion. Relayed at impossible speed the blasted across synapses and rushed down neurons, a deluge of information beyond any potential absorption.

The cascade assaulted instead, its endless onslaught of sparks and shimmers eroded all mental architecture extended to meet it. The gulf widened with exposure.

Pain blossomed in the blackness between.

Then everything stopped; eradicated in a sudden burst of crimson.

"Nema!" the cry reached down to awareness distantly, emergent from some faraway place and time. Disconnected after-images, a many-sided polyhedral form, warped and wavering, asymmetrical yet somehow perfectly ordered, faded hesitantly. A sense of profound loss, failure to comprehend, to bridge, lingered.

Unsteady, blinking, autonomous responses resorted, slowly returned her to present, to Coruscant, and to awareness of her circumstances. Weight, present again, crushed her down. She slumped to the wet paving and looked upward into the advance of many figures, running hard. A green face, head flaps waving in counterpoint to her strides, marked out Lia in the lead. A small blaster pistol, smoking slightly, dropped from the technician's hand as she threw herself at the pair.

"Morne!" she croaked in frightful distress as the officer rolled off the doctor's back and onto the ground. "Oh kriff, what happened?" Violet eyes met Nema's golden irises. "Is he-?"

The doctor shook her head, the motion felt strange until she recalled the absence of her headdress. "Severe burns. He needs a bacta tank. We both need-." Nema paused as her body shivered and she barely managed to turn aside in time to be violently sick atop the duracrete. "Medical attention," she managed before she collapsed into the waiting arms of an onrushing mod of police. She let the delirium rise up then, no need to hold on any longer.

Nema awoke in a hospital cot. She felt slightly foggy but otherwise fine. The décor was, unexpectedly, a source of confusion. Gray and dark rather than white and sterile, it lacked typical medical traits. When she turned and saw Morne lay next to her the truth became clear. No hospital would have placed male and female patients in the same room.

The shift in perspective also revealed a green-skinned figure in a chair beside Morne's cot. Lia, surely, for no other Stegoceps had reason to stand a bedside vigil. That she stared down at the officer rather than the Jedi was a noteworthy fact, though one Nema presently lacked the will to process. She shunted it aside for later consideration before she spoke.

"Where are we?"

Lia pivoted on her chair, a swift turn. A bright smile spread across her sharp-boned face. "You're awake, that's good." She re-oriented to face the doctor, folding chair scraped across the tiles. "This is the Clone Barracks on Thirteen-Thirty."

Upon hearing this, Nema leaned back. She left her eyes roll and drift towards the ceiling. It was a welcome answer, one that left her safe and content, if slightly puzzled. "Why here?" she queried. "Why not a closer hospital?"

"Security?" Lia's smile vanished. "Prefect Xeril and Captain Eights both agreed that you needed a protected place for convalescence since this was very clearly an attempt on your life."

A denial leaped to the doctor's lips, only to fade into nothing before it could be voiced. A short search of her thoughts questioned this conclusion but could not find a flaw in the reasoning. The enemy, that strange blackened, cyclopean thing behind all the YH forms encountered so far, had tried to eliminate her.

It was almost flattering, while at the same time utterly terrifying. The recognition from this foe offered validation to her efforts even as it stressed her helplessness. She had no target that she might attack in response.

Nema didn't want to think about that, certainly not while she lay on a hospital cot. "Thank you," she offered to Lia. "Your quick thinking saved us."

The technician blanched, red tones shading through green. "I almost killed you!" she countered. Tears gathered at the edges of her eyes. Her gaze briefly fixated on Morne.

"They would have surely killed us if you didn't," quietly she shuddered beneath her blankets. The memories would surely foster many nightmares to come. "That attack was well planned, it could have killed almost any Jedi."

Initially these words were offered in jest, but they settled over Nema with sober magnitude. It was true. Charging the horde with a lightsaber would only bury the knight in toxic sludge, and few were telekinetically adept enough, even among masters, to keep all spray from skin. Those swarming biots, so long as they could trap their quarry in a confined space, represented a terribly potent anti-Jedi weapon.

"I need to speak to the High Council," she told Lia, pressed with a sudden sense of urgency.

"You'll get your chance," the technician's words were soft but stern. "This is a big deal now, with the officer deaths and all the property damage. The police took it all the way to the Chancellor's Office. Apparently there's going to be a special investigation."

Some slight reassurance emerged alongside these words. Force willing, a real investigator could find the true enemy and root it out. Nema desperately hoped so. She bent her neck to look at Morne, unmasked and calm in sleep. He appeared fine now, restored almost perfectly by the miracle of bacta, but all it took to recall the horrific wounds was a blink.

She was learning about YH-life, but the foe was learning in turn, and she could not shake the premonition that in this race all she knew and loved was far behind. Unwilling to waste further time, she forced her aching body to sit up. With a turn sideways she focused on the technician in front of her. "Did you by any chance look at the program I salvaged?"

The smile returned to the green face.