The Fall of the Infinite Empire

Chapter 22

The stars spread out before Soaf-Rushk. Alone in his chambers, as he almost always was, he looked out the windows onto a galaxy that belonged to his people. But all was not right with the galaxy. His people had conquered an empire under his guidance, and by the strength of his creations. But now they had turned from the path of reason, beguiled by Zhed-Hai's promises. And it was not as though Soaf-Rushk could not understand the attraction. An army of Gifted slaves was quite a thing, provided they could be controlled.

But they could not be controlled. This was the lesson of his own people's history. The Rakatans had been slaves of the Kwa, and the Kwa slaves in turn. And every slave turns against its masters, eventually. If the masters did not need the slaves, the slaves would not exist. But the masters' need was the slaves' strength, and the more the masters depended on the slaves, the stronger the slaves became. Then one day they would rise up. There was only one way to prevent this. A world without slaves. The machine was not a slave. A slave is kept from its nature by the power of the master. The machine has no nature but what the master gives it. And yes, his machines could not do everything Zhed-Hai's humans could do. And that was the point. They could never rise up. They could never turn on their masters. They could never be anything but what they were told to be, for the act of their creation and the act of their instruction were one and the same act.

The Council did not understand this. This was the danger of filling it with thick-headed warriors. They could not think of the future beyond the next campaign. Their minds were always on the nature of their enemies, never the nature of their own people. They defended what they were incapable of understanding. But what was the alternative? Clever schemers like Zhed-Hai? It had been Soaf-Rushk who had placed the then young xenobiologist on the Council, but once he had become aware that was a mistake, he had maneuvered to keep the rest of the Council composed of warriors. They were fools all, but they were easier to anticipate and control precisely because of their stupidity.

Did Zhed-Hai understand the disaster he was bringing forth? Surely, he was intelligent enough to grasp the fundamental workings of power. But what did his furtive mind do with that understanding? Was his arrogance so great he thought he could alter the basic truth that the humans would rebel? Did he really think that the lives of their loved ones would be enough? When had love ever stopped the pursuit of power? The humans would rebel, their children and mates would be slaughtered, and they would find new mates and make new children. And then they would build their own empire on the bones and ashes of their masters, and their masters' children.

Or did Zhed-Hai have secret plans to control them? Was this army to be guided by something else? Had Zhed-Hai figured out a way to circumvent the freedom all intelligent beings possessed? If so then this army would not be a Rakatan army, it would be Zhed-Hai's army. And then it would be Zhed-Hai's Empire. And what then? A system in which all power flowed to and through a single point was doomed to fail. Dominance over the Empire had been in Soaf-Rushk's grasp for centuries before Zhed-Hai had risen in influence, and the Council had descended into its current factionalism. But despite controlling the source of all the Empire's weapons and most of its droid servants, Soaf-Rushk had never reached out to grasp that power. Even he, greatest of the Rakatans. would eventually fail to live up to the demands of that supremacy, and when he fell, the Empire would fall. And the Empire must never fall, for the Empire was their people.

Or worst yet, did Zhed-Hai see the risk, but take it without any way to stop it, just to defeat Soaf-Rushk? Was this all bitterness at his refusal to step aside, to let Zhed-Hai have his day as the pre-eminent leader of the Empire? Was Zhed-Hai willing to put everything and everyone in danger, just to satisfy his ambition? Was this the inevitable consequence of Soaf-Rushk's own decision to hold on to life? Piece by piece his body had failed, despite the strength of his Gift. He had already lived longer than any Rakatan in history before he started replacing his decaying parts. He had to hold on. Since his rise to power there had not been a moment where the Empire had not needed him. He was the only being alive who could remember the war with the Celestials at its peak, when millions of his people fell in battle year after year. His creations had saved the Empire from defeat, and his leadership had guided the Empire to its imminent victory. What did Zhed-Hai want to have happened? Was he to have left the Empire in the hands of the generals when his natural span of life came to an end?

Zhed-Hai was meant to have saved Soaf-Rushk from the existence he had made for himself. When he had, without the young xenobiologist realizing it, taken note of and advanced Zhed-Hai's career it had been with the idea of putting him on the Council one day. Zhed-Hai was to have provided a necessary scientific counter-balance to the vapid belligerence of the generals. Zhed-Hai's scientific successes had actually not interested Soaf-Rushk much. Zhed-Hai's genius turned always towards improving living things, and Soaf-Rushk's had always turned towards replacing them. Indeed Soaf-Rushk had just assumed that as Zhed-Hai learned more about the state of the Empire he would turn towards Soaf-Rushk's way of looking at matters. Rakatan lives were precious, and they had lost shocking numbers to the war. Turning the tasks of empire over to the droids and ships made in the Star Forge was the future. An orderly, mechanized world under the authority of a Council led by the brightest minds of the Empire; that was the future. It was the future that Soaf-Rushk had planned and prepared for. The future Zhed-Hai was supposed to shepherd into existence after Soaf-Rushk died.

But, almost from the beginning of his tenure on the Council, Zhed-Hai had worked to undermine Soaf-Rushk and his plans. And so Soaf-Rushk had been forced to stay alive. He had been forced to turn himself into this thing, this half living-half machine monstrosity. His enthusiasm for the machine had always been because he recognized them as fundamentally expendable, as a mere simulacrum of what truly mattered. They could be tasked with violence and drudgery because they did not matter. And now here he was, years past the point where he could confidently say most of him was real. His eyes had been the first to go, followed by his fingers and then hands. Those had been easy to lose. The sensors and appendages he had replaced them with were more functional and more precise anyway. But with each piece of himself he lost Soaf-Rushk felt the loss more. How much longer would he even count as a Rakatan and not a machine? He could feel the machine creeping into his mind sometimes. Thoughts would appear, antithetical to every principle according to which he had lived his long life, and they would not be banished before they were weighed and measured. Potentialities which had once been unthinkable were increasingly the subject of calculations so rapid that Soaf-Rushk was not aware they were happening until they were done. A terrible thing, to have worked out how many of one's own people you could kill before the species would no longer be reproductively viable.

When such thoughts came to him, the Star Forge itself was his comfort. It was his ultimate safeguard. It knew his mind. It knew what needed to be done if Soaf-Rushk lost control of himself. Sometimes he felt as though the station was more alive than he was. And in a way it was. So many hundreds of his people had been sacrificed and incorporated into the Star Forge that it had something of a mind of its own. Grafting minds unto inanimate matter was Soaf-Rushk's greatest accomplishment. The Star Maps, the Star Forge, they made the Empire possible. He had put the Gift into things. But things that could be controlled, in the way that Zhed-Hai's humans never could be. The Star Forge could think, and feel, after its own fashion, but it could not resist the programs by which it operated. It could not resist his input. Push a button and it did what it was told. It belonged to him. But the humans would not belong to Zhed-Hai, even if that was his plan.

The horrible possibility that Zhed-Hai simply did not care, that he was doing this just to undercut Soaf-Rushk with no further thought for the health of the Empire, ate at Soaf-Rushk. Was his enemy a fool, or a madman? Either way he would have to be stopped. This would be Soaf-Rushk's last great service to his people, to stop Zhed-Hai before he destroyed the Empire. It would begin with this campaign of eradication against the Sith. Zhed-Hai's presentation about the humans had been an overwhelming success. They had been adopted by the Council, with only Soaf-Rushk's close friends and supporters voting against it. Flush with victory Zhed-Hai had moved quickly to the issue of Korriban. He had pointed out that he was decades away from having a human army to send to subdue the Sith, and that something would have to be done about them first. The fleet was being assembled. Soaf-Rushk had been commanded to create more ships and weapons. The bombardment would eclipse anything the Infinite Empire had done before. Not only would nothing on Korriban survive, the planet itself would be reduced to dead asteroids floating in space. Such was the plan. This plan would have to be stopped. The threat of the Sith was needed to convince the Council to finally approve the droid army for which Soaf-Rushk had been pushing for decades.

'And the Sith needed to be fed to the Forge,' came a thought unbidden. The machine again. Always considering every angle was often a distraction from what truly mattered. But it was of course true, a neat side benefit of a conventional invasion would be that the Star Forge would be made stronger. This must be done. The Star Forge was the future of the Empire. It was more than just a factory. The minds of those sacrificed to create it had come together to form the backbone of the computational system that operated the station. And that conglomerate mind had been shaped over the centuries by Soaf-Rushk. It had learned from him and would always be available to make his perspective, the product of long centuries of leadership, known to whomever would replace him as the provider of weapons, ships and droids.

So Zhed-Hai had to be stopped. Soaf-Rushk knew he would have to move fast, and decisively, to undo what Zhed-Hai had already accomplished. Such hasty action ran counter to his own instincts, but there was no time for subtlety. The fleet was assembling, and it must be diverted from its current path. The Council did not intend to meet again before the attack on Korriban was to occur. Indeed several of the prominent generals had already left Lehon to return to their ships, some to resume the hunt for the Celestials, and some to prepare for the attack on Korriban itself. The difficulties inherent in the situation were real, but not insurmountable.

However, if Zhed-Hai was working actively against him, it might be too late to stop the wasteful destruction of Korriban. Soaf-Rushk needed to know what his rival was up to. He needed to know where Zhed-Hai's attention would be so that his own efforts would escape it. And for that he needed a better sense of what his rival's ultimate goals were. The uncertainty as to why Zhed-Hai was doing what he was doing needed to be resolved. And as Soaf-Rushk looked out the window towards the planet on which he had been born he had an idea of how that could be done.

On Lehon the object of Soaf-Rushk's thoughts was himself deep in contemplation. The Council meeting had gone better than he could have hoped for. All his requests for resources, transportation and worlds for the human project had been approved. He could begin moving supplies to the human colonies he had already established, something which he had set in motion immediately upon leaving the Temple. He would also, and more importantly, be able to move the humans he had on Lehon without any threat of interference. And he would need to move them quickly, for the Council had also approved the plan to eradicate the Sith. This they had done far more quickly than Zhed-Hai had anticipated, and that haste presented something of a problem. The timeline for the attack on Korriban now complicated the timeline for the dispersal of the humans. The humans had to be mostly settled on their new worlds by the time the attack fleet broke up and the ships returned to their normal assignments. There would not be an opportunity like this again. And Myra needed to be prepared for what was to come. Her group could be among the last to go, so he still had time, but he would need to speed things up. He no longer had time to let her figure things out for herself. She would have to be told.

While Zhed-Hai was busy thinking of the various moving parts of his plan, Tytus and Fa-Rush sat in the transport conscious of being ignored. For Tytus this was welcome. He knew his mind was open to Zhed-Hai's inspection. He knew the Rakatan had only to look into him and find that Tytus had begun to understand bits of the Rakatan's language, and that he had heard and understood some of what had been said in the Council meeting. And from there it would be nothing for the Zhed-Hai to see that Tytus had started putting together plans of his own. He was trying to keep his mind clear and calm, to delay thinking about the consequences of what he had heard until he was no longer in the Rakatans' presence. That task was, however, beyond his abilities. But he was in no danger. Zhed-Hai had chosen Tytus for the demonstration because he was so unremarkable, and now that he had served his purpose, Zhed-Hai did not give him another thought.

Fa-Rush on the other hand, he felt the absence of Zhed-Hai's attention very keenly. Why had he been brought to the Temple, if not to accompany Zhed-Hai into the Council chamber? This human was permitted to be there, but not he? So his function today was to procure transportation? He was reduced to the status of a valet? To a status below that of a guard? This was his reward for years of work and faithful service? To be demoted to the lowliest level of servant? And worse yet to not even be told? To simply be given menial tasks and expected to accept them? Fa-Rush seethed in his seat at the front of the transport. Of this Zhed-Hai was unaware. He had chosen Fa-Rush for service on Tatooine years before because he too was, in his way, unremarkable. A professional climber unsuited for military command, Fa-Rush was effectively worthless to most Elders, but he was a reasonably efficient organizer and manager of facilities. But the research facility on Tatooine was being closed down, and so now there was not much use for Fa-Rush, and so Zhed-Hai had no time to waste considering his feelings. His thoughts were on Myra.

Myra's thoughts were elsewhere. She sat on the stone near their little house, her legs crossed, and her eyes shut. From the children's perspective she had gone into a trance in the house and seemed to be trapped in some terrible nightmare. This had done nothing to help ease their fear. As Corus was simply crying into her mother's neck and shoulder, and Brun was pacing anxiously around the inside of the small house, it was Sani, who had remained seated, watching her mother, who first grew concerned. When Myra's face had become contorted with distress she had motioned to her brother to help her pick her sister up and take her outside.

When Corus began to cry louder at being taken away from Myra, Sani said, "Momma's looking for Pappa. We're going to go outside and let her do it."

Corus declared her opposition to this plan with louder cries. Brun went along with Sani, but looked around nervously, worried more guards would come to take them away while their mother was apparently incapacitated. Sani sat down with Corus and began to pull individual blades of grass from the ground and started tying them together to make little chains of grass, eventually making a bracelet that she gave to Corus. While she did this she said, as much for Brun's sake as her little sister's, "It's like back home. When we needed something, she would go search for it. Water, food, a new cave to sleep in, whatever. Now she is looking for father." Brun nodded slightly as she said this while he alternately fidgeted and paced.

"But she's in the house!" Corus said in a mixture of a cry and an angry yell.

"You know Momma has magic now silly. She showed you, don't you remember? When she picked up the stick without reaching down to pick it up? Remember?" Sani replied playfully.

Corus nodded warily, feeling that perhaps she was being tricked.

"Momma can do things now that she couldn't do back home. The aliens are teaching her things," Sani said softly. "Right Brun?"

"Yeah, yeah. All the people say Mother is really strong. The strongest there is," he replied, sounding as anxious as he still looked.

"How do you know what people say?" Corus asked indignantly.

"I talk to them little fish," Brun said, using their father's favorite nickname for Corus which Corus did not like anyone but their father using for her.

"Mother says you aren't allowed to talk to other people," Corus said pugnaciously, her little chin going out.

"Mother says I am not allowed to talk to some of them, not all of them," Brun said haughtily in return. As they continued to bicker Sani just smiled. If they were arguing they weren't focusing on mother sitting there silently. Sani was not sure how she knew that their mother was searching for her father, she just felt it was true. The three of the played and argued and talked for a while out there on the grass when their mother stepped out of the little house. Her face went from alarmed to relieved when she saw the three of them.

When Corus saw their mother she leapt to her feet where she had been sitting with Sani making grass bracelets, and ran over to her. Myra took her up in her arms again and mouthed, "Thank You" to Sani, who tried her best to keep the pride welling up inside her from showing on her face. Brun ran forward and yelled, "What happened? Did you find father?"

"No, but he'll be ok. Everything is going to be ok."