Evening Dress, Conscience Optional (Carach)

[Ashin Varanin]

The Tion Trade Nexus, a mobile station on the Perlemian trade route, was notorious for unfettered capitalism and a diverse selection. For wares to be considered unusual here, they had to be dang near unobtainable anywhere else.

Even when Akure Executive Interstellar was involved.

Professional interim CEO Selka Ventus was, ostensibly, taking stock of the mess Merrill had left. Frankly, she really was doing that, it just wasn't all she was doing. AEI's slot in the Nexus held top-tier biotech equipment and personnel, all accustomed to secrecy and compartmentalization of information. She'd sent out a request for the presence of one Darth Carach in an AEI observation gallery aboard the Nexus, and here she sat in a smallish black dress, looking down into one of Rave Merrill's operating theatres.

[member="Darth Carach"]

 

[Jairus Starvald]

[member="Selka Ventus"]

A tallish man in a largish tux wandered into the observation deck, it was one Darth Carach who found himself invited by a certain lady. He still had memories on AEI, fragmented shards of this and that, some were strong, others were considerably less structured in their existence. Vague, dreamlike, it was pretty annoying at times.

But Carach had learned to live with it, those moments of strange lucidness when he encountered something he had known and was getting to know all over again. The Sith wondered if this was how Selka, or Velok he supposed, was feeling these days.

‘Miss Ventus.’ the Sith greeted her, as he approached her table.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

[member="Darth Carach"]

"Welcome to Biolistics Adjunct Twelve, Lord Carach. The actual biolistics take place elsewhere, two levels down. This is where we see the fruits of our labours."

A taozin amulet kept her thoughts fuzzy to him, and she was a good liar. In point of fact, the horizontal transmission that had birthed Zerek Red had relied on a basic flu from a remote world in the Rishi Maze, one of many charted by Silk. Its symptoms were comparable to Alpha Red, though much less severe, in its many variations. What mattered was that those variations didn't suddenly turn into genocidal aberrations. The source flu, whose name she couldn't even pronounce, mutated wildly and crossed species frequently -- avians and simians, primarily -- but its lethality was low.

"You'll probably want to be sitting down for this. Yes. I've successfully altered Alpha Red -- you know that name -- by horizontal transmission with other pathogens. No, I don't know which. No, nobody currently on site does either. When one does business with telepaths..." She shrugged eloquently.

 

[Jairus Starvald]

[member="Selka Ventus"]

Carach sat himself down, bemused expression made apparent, this brought memories back of the last time a different alchemist had had a conversation with a different mentalist. Velok wasn’t an alchemist, and Carach wasn’t a mentalist, yet this conversation seemed to go down the same roads, the same bends and the same bumps.

God, she reminded him of a woman he didn’t even know himself. How surreal. It annoyed him immensely. Head slightly tilted, the Sith carefully listened to what she was laying down for him right now. So Orcus had been able to get the sample safely to her, that was good, part of him had been worried about it. This thing was dangerous, beyond count and even a Sith like him was anxious about the possible repercussions.

‘You are very much like her, you know.’ A shrug. ‘Or perhaps she was very much like you.’

 

[Ashin Varanin]

[member="Darth Carach"]

"Please. She was driven by a need to be the best, a need to create, a need to define herself defiantly. Me? I grew up in the slums of Metellos, and you haven't seen slums until you've been to Metellos. I washed out of the Jedi Order, then washed out of AgriCorps. I have a fraction of Rave Merrill's power in the Force, and infinitely more enemies. Infinitely more at stake. My motive is survival, by whatever means necessary. I simply have unique ideas about how best to ensure that.

"And for all that, the largest differences between us I see as I take stock of the wreckage she left? I don't hate myself. And she had no taste for cruelty."

 

[Jairus Starvald]

[member="Selka Ventus"]

‘I suppose so.’ the Sith shrugged. ‘She will be missed.’ and that was the truth of it, it mattered not if he had known her or not, she had been one of the best. Good friend too, regardless of the sassy remarks every now and then. Man. This fragmentation was confusing at the best of times, but now it was just unnerving.

‘Anyway, tell me more. I can see you are practically jumping about the implications.’

This was a good thing, in his opinion. The Vong were a problem, oh yes, they were quite useful right now. But they couldn’t be touched with the Force and they seemed to be almost endless in mass, tens of thousands died and the following morning there were another hundred thousand ready to jump on the deadwagon for their Dark Lord.

But for how long? When would they decide that enough was enough, and that perhaps the best course of action was to eradicate all the Sith altogether and start up their own little heresy? Pondering thoughts only the Voice held.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

[member="Darth Carach"]

"Well, in utility it's a far cry from a virus that renders the Vong Force-accessible." She smiled without humor. "Silk's primary pharmacological business is in kolto and bacta derivatives, not biological weapons. I was lucky to put together the-" Disposable. "-team I did. This is basic gene-gun splicing with the right source material, nothing more complex than that. The new genetic material slows the symptoms, and doesn't include the code for final transformation."

Droids wheeled isolation bubbles into the space below. Selka leaned against the plate glasteel. "On the left you have your average Alpha Red victim about to die. Yes, that's a young rakamat turning to jelly. On the right, humanoid and biot samples contaminated with Zerek Red between one and fifteen days ago. Initial symptoms are comparable. For humanoids, migraines, bleeding from eyes and mucous membranes. Yorik coral goes pale and loses tensile strength, becoming brittle. Amphistaffs suffer the kind of problems that would make you pop a dozen Stri'agra. Long-range communications biots like villips and yammosks start losing coherence, range, detail. There's pain, also," she added. "But you'll note how much longer it takes. That's deliberate. It makes the pathogen travel farther before it's detected, and it's the price of grafting in the bounded stability of the donor sources."

 

[Ashin Varanin]

It was, all things considered, a very crude graft, and a large part of her didn't like that. But time was of the essence, and even standard biolistics regimens would suffice if enemy analytics teams didn't have much to compare it to besides stock Alpha Red. Unknown Regions flu strains didn't grow on trees, especially ones from companion galaxies. Her team had relied on some fairly heft machinery to run over twenty thousand combinations, some from this source, some from other candidates. The blood of an awful lot of test nunas was on her hands. Well, that was the colloquialism; nunas weren't affected by this. But insignificant fast-reproducing Vong biots were absolutely everywhere, especially in Silk territory down south, near the old Hrosha-Gul and Horde stomping grounds. And she'd pulled in enough favors for access to Zonama Sekot, though she hadn't had the time to take advantage of that. Zerek Red was a slapdash job, and she didn't pretend to have the education to understand it, or project how long it would take the One Sith's shapers and alchemists to find a solution. What mattered, in the end, was killing as many Vong as fast as possible, without getting pegged for it.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

Because as much money and risk as she was sinking into this particular project, and that was plenty, it had a shelf life. Its expiry date was contingent upon who used Alpha Red first. There was every chance it was out there. Sooner or later it would get used; weapons always did, regardless of scale. When that happened, the Shapers and the alchemists would turn their attention to finding a solution for Alpha Red. She didn't think it especially probable, but the One Sith had a history of making million-to-one happen nine times out of ten. And when they did (she considered it an inevitability), it would please her to be able to drop Zerek Red on what needed a good Zerek Red drop, and show that evolution wasn't a one-way street. Fear tasted really, really good, and the fear of the powerful especially.

But those thoughts were even more treasonous than this project, and she kept them locked down as best she could. The taozin amulet wouldn't cover everything.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

As stopgap measures went, though, this wasn't the worst. Barsoomi Flu was native to, well, Barsoom, an uncharted and worthless pre-tech world a galaxy away. And because of that planet's immense remoteness and insignificance, this particular pathogen had never come to light in the larger galaxy. More to the point, backtracking it by symptoms alone would produce literally billions of alternative rival hypotheses. And without knowing which pathogen had been spliced into Alpha Red to alter it, her counterparts would need a lot of Zerek Red samples and a lot of time to analyze what was going on. Time she could spend staying a step ahead of them, preparing other strains -- or, more likely, finding another move, a better move. Bioweapons meant escalation, and nobody could escalate like the Sith.