James Luceno: Darth Plagueis

“Subtext,” Tenebrous said in a weak voice. “Subtext Mining.”

Plagueis nodded. “I will avenge you.”

Tenebrous canted his huge head ever so slightly. “Will you?”

“Of course.”

If the Bith was convinced, he kept it to himself, and said instead: “You are fated to bring the Sith imperative to fruition, Plagueis. It falls to you to bring the Jedi Order to its knees and to save the rest of the galaxy’s sentients from themselves.”

At long last , Plagueis told himself, the mantle is conferred .

“But I need to warn you …,” Tenebrous started to say and fell abruptly silent.

Plagueis could sense the Bith’s highly evolved mind replaying recent events, calculating odds, reaching conclusions.

“Warn me about what, Master?”

Tenebrous’s black eyes shone with yellow light and his free hand clutched at the ring collar of Plagueis’s envirosuit. “You!”

Plagueis pried the Bith’s thin hand from the fabric and grinned faintly. “Yes, Master, your death comes at my bidding. You said yourself that perpetuation with purpose is the way to victory, and so it is. Go to your grave knowing that you are last of the old order, the vaunted Rule of Two, and that the new order begins now and will for a thousand years remain in my control.”

Tenebrous coughed spittle and blood. “Then for the last time, I call you apprentice. And I applaud your skillful use of surprise and misdirection. Perhaps I was wrong to think you had no stomach for it.”

“The dark side guided me, Tenebrous. You sensed it, but your lack of faith in me clouded your thoughts.”

The Bith’s head bobbed in agreement. “Even before we came to Bal’demnic.”

“And yet we came.”

“Because we were fated to.” Tenebrous paused, then spoke with renewed urgency: “But wait! The ship—”

“Crushed, as you are.”

Tenebrous’s anger stabbed at Plagueis. “You’ve risked everything to undo me! The entire future of the Sith! My instincts about you prove correct, after all!”

Plagueis leaned away from him, nonchalant, but in fact filled with an icy fury. “I’ll find a way home, Tenebrous, as will you.” And with a chopping motion of his left hand, he broke the Bith’s neck.

Tenebrous was paralyzed and unconscious but not yet dead. Plagueis had no interest in saving him — even if it were possible — but he was interested in observing the behavior of the Bith’s midichlorians as life ebbed. The Jedi thought of the cellular organelles as symbionts, but to Plagueis midichlorians were interlopers, running interference for the Force and standing in the way of a being’s ability to contact the Force directly. Through years of experimentation and directed meditation, Plagueis had honed an ability to perceive the actions of midichlorians, though not yet the ability to manipulate them.

Manipulate them, say, to prolong Tenebrous’s life.

Looking at the Bith through the Force, he perceived that the midichlorians were already beginning to die out, as were the neurons that made up Tenebrous’s lofty brain and the muscle cells that powered his onceable heart. A common misconception held that midichlorians were Force-carrying particles, when in fact they functioned more as translators, interlocutors of the will of the Force. Plagueis considered his long-standing fascination with the organelles to be as natural as had been Tenebrous’s fixation on shaping the future. Where Bith intelligence was grounded in mathematics and computation, Muun intelligence was driven by a will to profit. As a Muun, Plagueis viewed his allegiance to the Force as an investment that could, with proper effort, be maximized to yield great returns. True, too, to Muun psychology and tradition, he had through the decades hoarded his successes, and never once taken Tenebrous into his confidence.

The Bith’s moribund midichlorians were winking out, like lights slowly deprived of a power source, and yet Plagueis could still perceive Tenebrous in the Force. One day he would succeed in imposing his will on the midichlorians to keep them aggregate. But such speculations were for another time. Just now Tenebrous and all he had been in life were beyond Plagueis’s reach.

He wondered if the Jedi were subsumed in similar fashion. Even in life, did midichlorians behave in a Jedi as they did in a devotee of the dark side? Were the organelles invigorated by different impulses, prompted into action by different desires? He had encountered many Jedi during his long life, but he had never made an attempt to study one in the same way he appraised Tenebrous now, out of concern for revealing the power of his alliance with the dark side. That, too, might have to change.

Tenebrous died while Plagueis observed.

In Bane’s age a Sith might have had to guard against an attempt at essence transfer by the deceased — a leap into the consciousness of the Sith who survived — but those times were long past and of no relevance; not since the teachings had been sabotaged, the technique lost. The last Sith possessed of the knowledge had been inexplicably drawn to the light side and killed, taking the secret process with him …

Plagueis wasn’t certain how long he remained at Tenebrous’s side. Long enough, though, that when he rose his legs were quivering and some of the dust from the explosion had settled. Only when he took a few backward steps did he realize that the event had not left him unscathed. At some point, probably when he was focused on murder, a rock or some other projectile had pulped a large area of his lower back, and now the thin tunic he wore beneath the enviro-suit was saturated with blood.

Despite the swirling dust, he inhaled deeply, eliciting a stab of pain from his rib cage and a cough that spewed blood into the hot air. Drawing on the Force, he numbed himself to the pain and tasked his body to limit the damage as best it could. When the injury ceased to preoccupy him, he surveyed the grotto, remaining anchored in place but turning a full circle. Littering the hard ground, injured hawk-bats were chirping in distress and clawing through circles of their own. Far above him, a beam of oblique and dust-moted daylight streamed through the dome’s large oculus — itself the result of an earlier collapse. Close to the jumble of stones the collapse had piled on the grotto floor sat Tenebrous’s small but priceless starship — a Rugess Nome design — alloy wings and snubbed nose poking from the artless mausoleum the explosion had fashioned. And finally, not meters away, lay Tenebrous, similarly interred.

Approaching the ship, Plagueis scanned the damage that had been inflicted on the deflector shield and navigation arrays, coolant ducts, sensors, and antennas. Tenebrous would surely have been able to effect repairs to some of the components, but Plagueis was out of his depth, lacking not only the Bith’s fine motor skills but his knowledge of the ship’s systems. Though unique, a marvel of engineering, the ship couldn’t be traced to Tenebrous, since both the registry and title were counterfeit. It was possible that the rescue beacon was still functional, but Plagueis was reluctant to activate it. They had arrived on Bal’demnic in stealth, and he intended to depart in like manner.

But how?

Again he squinted into the light pouring in through the oculus. Not even his power in the Force was enough to carry him from the floor and up through the grotto’s unblinking eye. Nothing short of a jetpack would do, and the ship didn’t carry one. His gaze drifted from the oculus to the grotto’s curving walls. He supposed he could spider his way along the arched underside of the dome and reach the eye, but now he saw a better way.

More, a way to accomplish two tasks at the same time.