The Coruscant sky was drawing nearer the boundary between deep
night and early morning. Yoda waited in his chambers. The diminutive
master's nose itched. He scratched it.
Obi-Wan entered, bowing.
"Late you are."
"I apologize, Master Yoda. I had difficulties disentangling myself from
certain parties." Obi-Wan rubbed his wrist, where the Pure Florinate's
vine tendrils had ensnared him. Some species are
insatiable, he decided.
"Matters not. Pleasant you smell. Some cologne you are wearing?"
"No, Master. I have but paused to sniff a flower and found myself wet with its dew."
Yoda yawned at this cryptic response.
"Your mission?"
"Our sources are correct. Chairman Junker is definitely planning
something - what it might be and whether it has the full support of
Marcite Arms, I cannot tell."
Yoda observed Obi-Wan through half-closed eyes, then nodded for him to continue.
"I baited him, as you instructed, and he rose to it. He is consumed by
a powerful combination of pride and rage. I believe if I offered him a
more direct challenge he could not help but accept."
"Our last resort the challenge will be. So much gossip in the capital.
Know what he plans we must. Thoroughly investigate this you will."
Yoda looked to the window.
"Dawn it will be soon."
"I shall go at once." Bowing again, Obi-Wan turned to leave.
"Master Kenobi."
"Yes, Master Yoda."
"Fear not the dew of the flower, but its thorn. This you will remember."
Yoda closed his eyes and sank into a meditative nap.
The perimeter of the Marcite Arms Consortium compound was peaceful. It was generally this way in the hours before dawn.
The heart of the security machine observed and recorded as
security teams and droids made their silent circuits along preordained
paths. The Machine often used these times to slip into an almost
trancelike state akin to dreaming.
Even at this extreme level of cybernization the central organic
components needed time to rest and contemplate. And so the Machine
dreamt, as it always did, of farms on far-off worlds, limited water
supplies, animal husbandry, crop rotation and fertilizer prices.
It was almost a nanosecond before the disappearance of a security drone
pushed itself up through this revelry and was acknowledged, questioned,
verified and certified in countless permutations thereby automatically
raising the compound's defense level to a heightened Yellow.
The Machine then watched with some distress as a squad of security men
hurrying toward the drone's last known location, inexplicably took a
wrong turning and marched double-time in the opposite direction.
Quickly, the Machine issued counter-orders in several languages, fired
off a brief but pointed report to the night's duty officer and
proceeded to make back-up and hard copies of all related files should
any of these actions result in the termination of contract for one of
Marcite Arms' employees.
The security level had reached Orange when another surveillance droid caught sight of a figure dressed in a dark blue modified ARC trooper uniform an instant before it malfunctioned and went permanently off-line. The intruder's suit obviously incorporated some stealth technology as it failed to show up on any of the systems sensor arrays. The Machine reluctantly raised the security level to Red, the first time this had occurred in the compound's history.
Rapidly the trail of deactivated droids, confused guards and inexplicably deactivated forcefields grew, driving, it seemed, in a direct path towards the most secure sublevel of the compound - the chairman's personal archives.
The Machine opened a new channel between itself and an offsite terminal. After a series of cross-encrypted passwords and counterchecks it received permission to move to its final security threat level procedure. It closed its eyes...
Life began to trickle into the maimed and ravaged body that had been
Shiria Sunwo. Her desiccated lips trembled in the tank of preservative
broth that had been her body's home for over three decades. The wetware
that honeycombed her head directed her thoughts down a dark corridor
along a holographic blueprint. Images of a destroyed security drone
caught her attention. A door opened with a hiss. She followed a shadowy
figure down into the turbolift.
The more energy the system diverted into Shiria's body, the clearer her
imaginings of the intruder became. He was a man. Average height.
Athletic build.
At the same time she found herself dreaming again, or more accurately
remembering - recalling a life in the Jedi Temple, her failure to be
taken as a Padawn, her shameful exile to the farming world of
Probstion, the abduction, the torture, the mangling of her body and the
cybernetic slavery which was now her world.
Her senses, the senses of a Jedi reached out, bloomed and took in
everything at once - she recognized the intruder, she recognized
herself.
The intruder, with the instincts of a predatory animal froze, aware that he had been observed he raised a gloved hand - and the Security Machine's mind, the fallen Jedi Shiria Sunwo, went off-line, permanently.
One final word flickered across Chairman Junker's screen as he watched the final transmission from the compound. Jedi.
