"Are we ready, Dr. Ruik?" Daala asked.
The male Nautolan scientist looked away from the equipment that had been set up on this floor of the LiMerge building and addressed his Chief of State. "We're ready, ma'am." He turned to one of his assistants, a female Devaronian, who was waiting by one of the room's exits. "Bring in the subject."
The Devaronian complied as she opened the door and waved in a young, mid-twenties human male with fair skin. He was guided by the Devaronian toward the equipment set that Dr. Ruik had prepared, and the human sat down in the chair that was among the apparatus. With efficiency becoming of their scientific backgrounds, Ruik and the Devaronian, Plesar, strapped the human subject to the chair by his wrists, ankles, and head; the subject, for his part, offered no resistance.
The reason for the subject's willingness to undergo what he was about to endure was because of the promise that Daala personally made to him. This man was destitute; he had lost his job fairly recently, and he knew that if he didn't provide for his family by the end of the month, they would probably end up down in Coruscant's Vongformed underworld, where they would either be killed or, worse, turned into Ferals.
He was promised that, no matter what happened to him, if he underwent this procedure, Daala would see to it that his family would never have to fear poverty or homelessness ever again.
It didn't take too long after the man was strapped in before Ruik and Plesar began injecting him with several different needles, all connected to a nearby console by long duraplast tubes, along various points on his body. Again, the subject offered no resistance even as he winced and occasionally cried out from the pain.
"Now comes the moment of truth," Ruik said as he walked over to the console. He looked up at his assistant. "You may join the others for this, Plesar."
The Devaronian wordlessly complied as she trotted over to Daala and the various other scientists who had been working on this project since the Chief of State's return from her previous vacation.
Once Plesar was in place, Ruik simply pressed a button on the console.
Immediately, red-brown fluid flowed from the console through the tubes before passing into the needles that led directly into the human subject's body. Within seconds, he began to scream in pain.
And the screaming only intensified with the agony that he was undergoing. The fluid kept on coming, as it was supposed to; according to Ruik and his assistants, if what Daala wanted had any chance of working, the subject had to have all of this fluid.
Soon, the fluid stopped flowing, and the tubes ran empty. A long, silent moment passed as the man slumped in the chair; the pulse monitor on the console said that he was still alive.
"Just give him a moment to regain consciousness," Ruik said to all the others, "and he should be..."
When the man woke up, his screaming had reached its zenith of intensity to the point that everyone else present had to cover their ears. Yet most of them still watched in horror as the red-brown fluid that he had taken in began to stream out of his eyes, ears, nostrils, and mouth.
The only person who watched with frustration instead of horror was Daala; she was hoping for better results, after all.
In a matter of seconds, the screaming died away along with the man. And not only did he lose his life, but he also lost his physical composition; in other words, he was literally reduced to a puddle of hydrocarbons that spilled out from the chair and onto the floor.
All was silent in the large room for quite a while before Ruik said, "Can someone clean that up?" He pointed to the mess that was their test subject.
One of the interns, a young blue-skinned female Twi'lek, hurried over with a bucket with a mop in it in one hand and a bottle of cleaning solution in the other; without any outward signs of disgust at her job, she went to work cleaning the mess up as Dr. Ruik walked over to Daala.
"I'm sorry, Chief," the Nautolan said. "I thought that-"
"Your clearly overestimated how much of those modified midi-chlorians were needed, Dr. Ruik," Daala interrupted him. "Next time, use a smaller amount."
"That was exactly what I was going to suggest," he said nervously.
"Keep me informed," she said. "Let me know when you get a successful test."
"Yes, ma'am," Ruik replied with a subservient nod even as Daala turned to leave the room.
As she walked down the corridor leading away from the midi-chlorians lab, she activated her commlink and spoke into it. "Commander Harkin?"
"Yes, Chief?" came the reply from the other end.
"You'll be in charge of making sure that family needn't worry about poverty and homelessness again," she said.
"Yes, ma'am."
An hour later, Commander Harkin and two other loyal officers of the Coruscant Police Department had taken a transport shuttle to dump the corpses of one human woman and two children, both girls, down in the Vongformed underworld of the planet. The transport rose up before anyone aboard could see any Ferals come to collect their bodies for sustenance.
. . .
During their trip from Bastion to Hagamoor 3, Tahiri had a somewhat interesting conversation with her Mandalorian partner.
"You gonna tell me your name?" she had asked him at one point when they were still in hyperspace. She was sitting in the copilot seat while he was in the pilot's chair.
"I don't see any reason to," he had replied. The Mando appeared to be playing a game on his datapad, one that Tahiri couldn't see.
"Yeah, well, I'm gonna need to call you something other than 'Hey, you,'" she retorted.
"Call me Partner, then," he said indifferently.
"Partner, eh? Not very creative."
"Doesn't need to be; gets the job done."
"Guess it does," Tahiri said just as indifferently.
She turned back to look out at the view of hyperspace before her; a part of her wanted to follow in Partner's example and play a game on her own datapad. But her curiosity got the better of her.
"So do you have any family, Partner?"
"If I don't wanna tell you my name, what makes you think I wanna tell you about my family?"
"Well, at least that tells me you have one."
"Who doesn't? Even if we don't know our families, if we're orphaned or somethin', we still at least came from a mother. And that tends to mean a father, too; and that's even if you count sperm donors with no legal rights to you. And they, in turn, had to have come from somebody. And so on and so forth."
"Pretty technical definition of a family," Tahiri observed.
"I guess it is," Partner replied. So far in the conversation, his tone hadn't shifted from passive disinterest.
"So I guess you don't wanna let me know if you are the progenitor of a family," Tahiri said.
"No, I wouldn't."
"Right, Mandalorian secrets. I can understand that. Wanna tell me what game you're playing, at least?"
"Not really."
"Not much of a conversationalist, huh?"
"I don't need to be."
"Makes sense," Tahiri said.
It was at that point that the Firespray's proximity alert rang out, informing them that they were nearing Hagamoor 3. Right away, Partner shut off his 'pad, set it off to the side, and dropped his ship out of hyperspace over the designated moon.
Minutes later, the Firespray had landed near what used to be the research facility that was looking into the nanovirus plaguing Mandalore. While Partner was still in his Mando helmet and armor, Tahiri had put on a vac suit to protect her from the inhospitable atmosphere of Hagamoor 3 as she and her "friend" went to see what they could find that the Imperial investigation team couldn't.
It took them a couple of hours, but finally, they did find something interesting.
Partner held up the thin sliver of metal before Tahiri. "Beskar," he said. "Found over there." He thumbed in the direction of a nearby junk pile in the debris.
"That's it?" Tahiri asked.
"It's all the beskar I can find in this ruin," he said. "But the fact that there was even this much confirms that there was a Mandalorian presence here when this facility was destroyed. And considering the fact that beskar is nigh-impossible to destroy, that means that whatever happened here was so destructive, it managed to break it."
"But why wouldn't there be more beskar then?" Tahiri asked. "Surely, there'd have been more than just this little sliver."
"My thoughts exactly. And since neither of us were told that any beskar was found during the Imperial investigation, what does that tell us?"
Tahiri took a moment to let the pieces click together in her head. "Are you saying there's someone on the inside of the Imperial government working with Belok Rhal to cover up his involvement here?"
"Let's just assume, for a moment, that an Imperial investigator, or group of Imperial investigators, weren't as forthcoming with Head of State Fel as they should have been," Partner suggested. "Maybe they didn't log what they were supposed to log. Maybe they managed to take all of the pieces of beskar from here to cover their tracks; but this one little sliver managed to sneak by them somehow, as if for our benefit of a more complete investigation."
"So if there's someone dirty in the Imperial authorities," Tahiri said, "maybe they can tell us where we can find the rest of the beskar that was taken from here."
"And let 'em know they should have been a little bit more thorough in their investigation," Partner said as he toyed with the sliver in his hand.