Happy Star Wars Day! May the 4th be with you.
The Way of a Siluan, Chapter 18: Success?
Late in year 1 of Imperial rule, or 19 BBY
"Vader, I see that our most charming pupil is making great progress," the Emperor spoke from the shadows.
Darth Vader let his mechanical inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale hang in the air for a moment before he answered. "She is growing stronger in the Dark Side," he said somewhat grudgingly.
"Not only strong, Vader. Her work with agro-chemistry reveals a rather subtle command of the Dark Side of the Force, and I find her zeal to destroy that ancient and backward sect most endearing. The Jedi could have made a knight of her if they'd had more patience, but it is well that they failed. Her anger at being rejected has rendered her most useful."
"Yet..."
"Yes, I see it, Vader, I see it. A time will come when she outgrows her willingness to serve us," the Emperor said, yet he did not sound as if this worried him.
"Her excessive self-confidence suggests that will happen sooner rather than later."
The Emperor smiled a little smile at his apprentice. "Are you jealous, Vader?"
Vader did not answer, but his master could sense a tacit admission, as if Vader had narrowed his eyes at this.
"Be jealous, Vader, it will only make you stronger. But fear not. She is to me as Dooku, useful and disposable."
"If she is disposable, I suggest we dispose of her quickly. I am sure the Imperial Agriculture Program can continue without her."
The Emperor gave Vader a cold and pointed look. "I have other intentions for her which she has yet to fulfil. There rises One whom she must destroy lest that One destroy what she has accomplished for us."
"Then I can deal with them both."
"You are no doubt capable, Vader, of destroying that One, but I envision greater aims, which you have yet to comprehend. It is only in destroying that One that she will gain the power to complete the final task I require of her, and in that task Vader, you have no part, for you have studied so very little of biology."
Hot anger smouldered beneath Vader's mask, but his master only laughed softly at him.
"Fret not, Vader. As I have said, she is to me as Dooku, useful but disposable. When the time comes, the pleasure of ending her is yours, my friend."
"As you wish," Vader said archly, and bowed before his master.
At the IMAg headquarters on Ukio, Ry Kyver stormed into Nathan Xeres' office and threw her black denim jacket down on an empty chair. Nathan, who had been trying to analyze data from his latest plant breeding experiment, looked up to see his boss and long-time friend with a grim expression on her face.
"What's eating you?" he said. "You look pale." Sallow, more like it, he thought, ever since she started that manic witch-hunt. The pale of her face worried him. She hadn't lost her athletic build, but her natural complexion was much darker than what he saw now. And was it just his imagination, or did her eyes flash yellow now too?
Whatever the colour of her eyes, Ry glared at him and his concerned look. "There's still too many of them," she said.
Nathan raised an eyebrow. "I don't see why you're so worried about them. It's not like the Siluans can actually use the Force much."
"By simply being they draw the balance of the Force toward the Light. There can be no dominion of the Dark Side while they still exist. You should know that." She said this, but was also aware of a less esoteric motive for her crusade: destroying the Siluans would gain her far greater favour with the Emperor than the Imperial Agriculture Program alone ever could.
Nathan shrugged. "I think you underestimate the Dark Side of the Force," he said.
Ry flicked a little blue flash of electric current at him.
"Ouch!" Nathan yelled, and struck back in kind, but Ry deftly deflected it at the window, which broke.
"I understand the Dark Side very well, thank you," she said. "But anyways, I need an update on the Senate business."
Nathan sighed. Ry Kyver was not someone who made herself easy to work with. "The next phase of the Best Agricultural Practices legislation is set to go before the Senate tomorrow, and should be law by the end of the week," he said, "depending on how much ruckus Senator Organa decides to make."
"Oh, let the idiot filibuster. He won't stop us. Did you get that file I wanted from the archives?"
Nathan pulled a memory stick out of his breast pocket and threw it on the desk in front of Ry. "You're damn lucky the AgriCorps people on Deema had a backup data bunker, or that file would have been blasted into oblivion with the rest of the place."
Taking the memory stick, Ry smiled and fed it to the secretarial droid, who in turn projected a holographic image: a diminutive figure, lizard-like and wrapped in a long brown cloak. Ry shrieked with laughter.
"Oh, look at the little lizard-man! Good to see you again, Master Lu!" She stressed the name with mock respect. The droid proceeded to play the hologram.
"I am here today to speak of those whom I consider our sisters in the ways of the Force," said the hologram of Master Lu. "I have been blessed to spend much of my life as a Jedi learning of, and learning from, those known as the Siluans. Today, as an introduction to their way of life, I will take you on a pictorial journey to a few of their monasteries, which I hope you too will one day have the privilege of visiting. If you will forgive my partiality, let us begin with the Paloma monastery on my home planet of Yemer..."
"Why, we'd love to visit the monastery on your home planet of Yemer!" Ry said, and cackled. "The fool! I only wish he could see what he's done to them."
"What's that smell?" Ry asked Nathan, as they stood amid the sagebrush and shimmering heat of the Yemerian badlands.
Nathan sniffed. There was, in fact, a rather pungent terpenoid aroma in the air.
"You're standing on it," he said, and pointed.
Ry stepped back to look at a clump of sunny little daisies with fuzzy grey leaves, several of which still stood erect despite her trampling their neighbours underfoot. She glared at them, then drew her red-bladed light-sabre. With a single stroke sheared off their many heads.
Soon a transport came into view in the dusty distance. When it came within five metres of where Ry and Nathan stood, it stopped and two stormtroopers stepped out and stood at attention. A second pair of stormtroopers opened the hold to reveal a number of people inside: mostly Yemerians, but there were also several humans, a few Twi'leks, two Togruttas and a young Rodian, all wearing monastic robes in various shades of green and brown and grey.
"Was that all you could find?" Ry asked the leading stormtrooper.
"Yes. We searched the entire monastery and the surrounding area."
"There's more," she said, "but we'll deal with them later. You may fire when ready."
The leading stormtrooper gave the order and the four opened fire, mowing down the twenty or so Siluans in the transport in about five seconds. Ry watched with dispassion. If she noticed that most of them died without crying out, she showed no sign of it.
"You may return to your base," Ry told the stormtroopers, then turned to Nathan. "Let's start spraying," she said.
"I'll dilute the tanks," he said, and turned toward the two massive spray rigs that stood nearby, but Ry caught him by the arm.
"You don't need to dilute the tanks," she said. "They're already at the right concentration."
Nathan looked narrowly at her. "At that concentration, a blend of Matrazine and Azopel will leave this place totally lifeless for years."
Ry looked at Nathan sideways. "Yeah...that's why we're doing it."
"But I thought the Senate..."
"The Senate isn't here."
"But I thought we agreed that..."
"The only thing worth extracting here is the phosphorus, and I've got contractor with droids to do that."
"But I thought..."
"I thought your job was to follow orders," Ry said, and folded her arms across her chest.
Ry and Nathan glared darts at each other, but Nathan was the first to look away.
"Curse you, Ry," he said and donned his respirator.
Ry watched him climb into the cockpit of one of the spray rigs, and waited for him to start his engine before she too put on her respirator and then boarded the second unit. She waited and watched Nathan take off first, and smiled as she saw the spray jets on his rig get into action. This was her creation, that fine mist of Matrazine and Azopel glinting gold as it caught the sunlight.
The sunset sky raged red and the air was tinged with the acrid tang of herbicide as Ry Kyver and Nathan Xeres walked through the experimental fields surrounding the IMAg headquarters on Ukio later that week.
"It's not good enough," Ry said. "We're a whole year behind schedule." They were examining the trial of Matrazine-resistant peas and lentils under development for the Imperial Agriculture Program.
"Our progress is well within the average for the development of a new transgenic crop," Nathan said. "There's only so much I can do to speed things up."
"I don't think you get it," Ry said. "In three years, we need to have Matrazine-resistant seeds available for farmers, or the Imperial Agriculture Program starts to fall apart. Your job's on the line as much as mine if that happens."
Nathan rolled his eyes. "Ry, you can't just hand me a bunch of plants from the lab and expect marketable crop seed overnight. The herbicide resistance genes you designed were solid enough, but against the genetic background of the pea and lentil strains we're working with, only three of the transgenic lines are anywhere near our crop performance targets. We can't put these seeds on the market if they aren't up to snuff. It's like you said, if farmers stop trusting us to give them stuff that works, then the Imperial Ag Program falls apart."
"I'm aware of that," Ry snapped. "What I'm not aware of is why you and those lab techs are so damn slow with getting the final adjustments done."
"Look, if you were actually here a bit more, we might be a bit quicker at troubleshooting some of the problems we're having. A lot of this stuff is more your forte than mine."
"Are you saying you're not up to the job?"
"Blast it, Ry! We both have our part! You're getting all the credit for the Ag Program but it was my idea too. Yet you're traipsing all over the galaxy on this damn crusade of yours and I'm stuck here doing the actual work."
"The Emperor wants me to deal with the Siluans," Ry said matter-of-factly, as their field walk wound back around to the IMAg office block. They stopped and stood outside of it, facing each other in the dusk.
"Yeah, but it was still your idea," Nathan said. "Look, could you please, please just be around a bit more to help get things done around here?"
Ry was a little taller than Nathan, and drew herself up to full height so that she could look down on him while thinking of something cutting to say, but then she had an idea. "I'll tell you what," she said. "If you get back on board to help me deal with the Siluans, then I'll make sure be here to do my bit. Force technique and lab stuff, mind you, not field work."
Nathan rolled his eyes. "And you'll make sure the Emperor knows I had my part in this too."
Ry shrugged. "Sure. Deal?"
"If that's what it takes," Nathan said.
"Well, come to the office then, and I can give you a list of locations to scout out," Ry said, and turned to go into the building.
"Look, just text it to me," Nathan said. "I got to run. I have a date tonight."
"That Twi'lek?" Ry sneered.
"No! I told you, Tifini's a Zabrak," Nathan said, and then wished he'd kept his mouth shut.
"I see you're taking a walk on the wild side," Ry said sarcastically.
A muscle twitched in Nathan's jaw. He had two choices, and only one would end well for both of them. Fists clenched at his sides, he turned to go.
Ry watched him walk away, and realized with a sudden ache that she wished she had someone – friend, lover, housemate, anyone – to spend the night with, but she quickly stuffed the feeling back into a black hole where it belonged. She had more important things to do!
The red sky turned to grey, and Ry was left standing outside the IMAg office block, listening to the hum the generator made when it was running low on reactant. She sent a quick text to the site manager to deal with the problem, and then headed inside to the clean counters and bright LED lights of the laboratories on the second floor.
The main laboratory she entered had its own hum: refrigerators, incubators, the fan on the fume hood where a lone lab tech worked late. Ry didn't bother going to say hello. She could have headed to that end of the lab to check on the tests Nathan wanted her help with, but instead she pulled out her key card and opened the door to the side-room where a special incubator housed the project the Emperor himself had asked her to undertake years ago.
The incubator, which looked more or less like a huge white chest freezer, sat at the far end of the room. Ry went to it and for a moment rested her hand on the edge of the smooth metal lid. A datapad above the incubator attested that this was iteration 133 of the experiment. She threw the lid open.
Inside sat a multi-layered grid of smooth, transparent petri dishes. Each was marked with the date, replicate number and species of the mass of cultured cells that grew on the smooth brown nutrient agar. For a minute and a half she held them in her gaze, probing them through the Force, then slammed the lid shut. Null results again! She turned to the computer at the laboratory bench near the door and brought up the latest quantitative DNA analysis results for this batch of cells. The mass of data, displayed in sharp little green letters on the black screen, only confirmed what she had sensed for herself: none of the cultured cell lines, whether plant or animal or bacteria or fungus, had sustained any lasting increase to its midi-chlorian levels.
Why the Emperor wanted cultured cell lines with enhanced Force sensitivity, he had not said, though Ry certainly had her own intentions for what to do with the results. If she got results. She went back to the incubator and threw the lid open again. All those smooth and shining petri-dishes, all those amorphous green and white and deep pink blobs of cultured cells, all were just another failed attempt in a long series of failed attempts to use any combination of Force technique or laboratory skill to get the results she and the Emperor wanted.
How could it be? How dare it be? She of all people, she, Ry Kyver, who could use the Force to perceive the design of new agro-chemicals and to create novel genes to modify crops, she of all people ought to be able to change the midi-chlorian count of a stupid cell culture. Yet all remained recalcitrant to her efforts. She glared at the smooth petri-dishes until, under the force of her gaze, several of them broke with a sudden pop, sending a shards of plexiglass flying into her face.
Just then, her comm beeped. Seeing the caller ID, Ry quickly closed the door of the side-room in case the lab-tech was listening. Then, with the press of a button, she answered the call and Darth Vader stood before her, ever so slightly larger than life. It was only a hologram, streaked and grainy and slightly translucent, but she bowed to his metallic bulk and flowing cloak all the same.
"I've been trying to contact you. Where have you been?" he asked over the sound of his rasping breath.
Her lips curled in a proud smile. "I have discovered and destroyed the monasteries of Yemer and Terrapin. As soon as my business on Ukio is done, those on Cynar and Arum will follow. Few Siluans will remain when I'm done."
"Beyond those circles rises One whom you must destroy, lest that One unmake what you've accomplished."
"I'm aware of that," she snapped, but it was a lie. "And I will find that One, but it will take time. Finding an unknown Siluan is very difficult, even using the Force."
"Then you should be putting more time into the search."
"I would, but I can't exactly walk away from my responsibilities at the Ministry of Agriculture now, can I?"
"That is no excuse. If you fail to do this, the Emperor will not be pleased."
Her eyes narrowed. "I'm not going to fail," she said tersely.
"That remains to be seen."
Ry folded her arms across her chest and glared at him.
Vader allowed her to do this, he let her try to stare him down, as the sound of his breath reverberated in the air around her. He waited, until at last a muscle flinched under her left eye and she looked away. Only then did he end the transmission.