Darth Plagueis

Now Zuto and PePe dived at the Muun from both sides and actually managed to get a hold on him. But it was as if the Muun had turned to stone. The Kaleesh and the Quara attacked with teeth and claws, but to no perceptible effect. And when the Muun had had enough of it, he positioned the lightsaber directly in front of him and gyred in their grasp, taking off PePe’s tusked face and Zuto’s blunt, whiskered snout. OneOne-FourDee’s olfactory sensors detected an outpouring of pheromones that signaled the death of the Kaleesh. Zuto, on the other hand — though gurgling blood and moaning in pain — could perhaps be saved if treated in time.

Straightening out of a wide-legged stance, the Muun deactivated the lightsaber and scanned the beings he had killed and those he had maimed with chilling exactitude. His yellow eyes fell on 11-4D, but only for an instant; then he fixed the lightsaber to his belt and went quickly to his nearest victim, who happened to be Doo Zuto. Dropping to one knee alongside him, the Muun gazed intently at the Quara’s twitching body, but precisely at what the droid couldn’t surmise. Zuto’s bulging marine eyes seemed to implore his assailant for help, but the Muun did nothing to stanch the flow of blood or offer palliative aid.

He remained by the Quara’s side for a few moments, then moved quickly to Maa Kaap, from whose crushed chest cavity blood bubbled with each shallow breath. Again, the Muun ran his eyes over his victim, from Maa Kaap’s tattooed face to his large feet. Eyes closed, the Muun adopted a posture that suggested intense concentration or meditation, and Maa Kaap snapped back to panic-stricken consciousness. OneOne-FourDee tuned in to the Zabrak’s pulse and found it regular — but only for a moment. Then the rhythm of Maa Kaap’s heartbeat grew ragged and breaths began to stutter from his lungs.

Soon he was dead.

The Muun appeared to be frustrated, and his disappointment increased on finding that Blir’ was deceased, as well. He spent only moments appraising Semasalli before going to Wandau, who was conscious though obviously paralyzed from the waist down.

“You dishonor your heritage and your weapon, Jedi,” Wandau managed to say. “You could have used … the Force to compel us to do as you wished. I’ve not only seen that, but experienced it.”

The Muun’s face contorted in distaste. “If you’ve so little will,” he said in the tongue of Wandau’s species, “then you’re of no use to me, Klatooinian.” And ended Wandau’s misery with a click of his thumb and middle finger.

Gradually the spray from the ceiling abated and the klaxons fell silent. His examinations completed, the Muun stood and turned slowly to the droid.

“What name do you respond to?”

“OneOne-FourDee, sir.”

“Can you pilot this ship, OneOne-FourDee?”

“I can, sir.” The droid paused, then asked: “Do you wish me to relocate the survivors to medbay or jettison any of the corpses?”

The Muun surveyed his handiwork. “Leave them.” He shrugged out of his sodden robe and hung it over a chair, revealing a second lightsaber affixed to his belt. “Captain Lah remarked that you have medical capabilities.”

“I do, sir.”

Turning his back to 11-4D, the Muun stripped his bloodstained tunic from his distended lower back. “Are you capable of repairing this?”

The droid sharpened the focus of its photoreceptors and olfactory sensors. “The wound shows signs of infection and putrefaction, sir, but, yes, I can repair it.”

The Muun lowered the tunic and retrieved a comlink from a pocket in the robe. Activating the device, he spent a moment inputting data, then turned the display so that 11-4D could read it. “Set a course for these coordinates, then attend to me in the captain’s quarters.”

“Anything else, sir?”

“Prepare food and drink. I’m famished.”

With the Woebegone traveling through hyperspace, Plagueis lay prone on the captain’s bunk, a bacta patch covering the wound on his back, contemplating the results of his attempts to prolong the lives of those crew members who had survived the altercation. Even where he had been successful in effecting repairs to damaged blood vessels and organs, the results had been temporary, as he had not been able to influence or appeal to the midi-chlorians to assist. Calling on the Force to mend ruptured arteries, torn muscle, or broken bone was no more difficult than levitating slabs of stone. But such refurbishments had little effect on a being’s etheric shell, which was essentially the domain of the midi-chlorians, despite their physical presence in living cells.

Among the ship’s crew, the Togruta, Captain Lah, had been the strongest in the Force, but she was beyond his help by the time he reached her. Had it not been for sloppiness on his part, owing to fatigue and blood loss, and lightning-fast reflexes on hers, the lightsaber might simply have pierced her neck and cervical spinal cord. But she had spun at the moment of impact, and the crimson blade had all but decapitated her. The Zabrak, too, had a slightly higher-than-normal midi-chlorian count, but not high enough to make him Force-sensitive. How different it had been to observe the behavior of the Zabrak’s midi-chlorians compared with those of Darth Tenebrous, only two days earlier!

The Jedi routinely performed blood tests to verify the midi-chlorian counts of prospective trainees, but Plagueis had passed beyond the need for such crude measurements. He could not only sense the strength of the Force in another but also perceive the midi-chlorians that individualized Forceful beings. It was that dark side ability that had allowed generations of Sith to locate and initiate recruits. The dispersal of midi-chlorians at the moment of physical death was, for lack of a better term, inexorable. Analogous to his fated confrontation with the Woebegone crew, the moment of death appeared to be somehow fixed in space and time. According to his Sith education, since Captain Lah and the others had been in some sense dead from the moment Plagueis’s gaze had alighted on the freighter, it followed that the midi-chlorians that resided in alleged symbiosis with them must have been preparing to be subsumed into the reservoir of life energy that was the Force long before Plagueis had stowed away. His attempts to save them — to prolong that state of symbiosis — were comparable to using a sponge to dam a raging river. And yet the Sith Lords of old were said to have been able to draw on the energies released during death to extend their own lives, as well as the lives of others. Unfortunately, much like the technique of essence transfer, that ancient knowledge had been lost.

Feeling the ship revert to realspace, Plagueis rose from the bunk, dressed, and walked forward, stepping over the corpses sprawled in the main cabin, the deck plates awash in fire-suppressant fluid and blackening pools of blood, and through passageways reeking of death. One of the crew members, the now one-armed Dresselian, was still alive but comatose.

In the ship’s undermount cockpit the droid stood motionless at the control console. Beyond the transparisteel viewport myriad stars hung in space.

“Sir, we are approaching the coordinates supplied by your comlink,” the droid said without turning from the view.

Plagueis settled into the pilot’s chair, which barely accommodated his long body. “How do you come to be aboard the Woebegone, droid?”

“Formerly I served the needs of a medical facility on Obroa-skai.”

“In what capacity?”

“Research, in addition to performing a wide range of surgeries on beings of diverse species.”

Plagueis regarded the droid. “Thus, your many appendages.”

“Yes, sir. But the ones I wear currently were retrofitted when I became the property of Captain Lah, so that I might better serve the needs of the Woebegone.”

“And how did you become the captain’s property?”

“I believe, sir, that I was awarded to Captain Lah in place of payments due for the receipt of certain merchandise. It is also my belief that the exchange was meant to be temporary—”

“But Captain Lah decided to keep you.”

“Yes, sir. She decided to keep me. I’m sorry to say that I am at a loss to explain her reasons, and I never presumed to ask.”

Plagueis nodded. “That’s a good quality in a droid.”