Metal, Rust, & Rot

[Matsu Xiangu]

It had been a long time since she’d been on Telti. Her experience on the planet had been brief - just long enough to get blood on her hands, to further progress the machine of the One Sith. It was time she didn’t feel she’d wasted despite the futility of the Emperor’s will. She’d fought with friends, learned, gained power and strength through the inherent suffering of others that the brutal organization brought upon any people it set its eyes on.

But it was all so pointless.

(They said we’ve lost it. Our whole galaxy is immaterial - every animal, plant, insect, fish...things have finished changing, and their world is better for opening its wounds over and over. They want us to know that, accept it, come out. They wanted me to know that their way is the right way. What we used to follow was nothing. But I learned.)

Snapping out of it, she pulled the sleek, black outline of her personal transport in line with the landing pad, trying to focus.

(THEY kept crawling back, her teachers, transformers, pushing her from demiurge to creator in a thousand years of borrowed time that passed sooooo slowly back where she used to call home.)

In this Galaxy’s time, she’d been gone for about a year. Even for a place with a notoriously short memory, a necromancer and mentalist who’d once lent her services to the One Sith was not easily forgotten. She assumed her host had told anyone surrounding him to expect a guest, and she was easily recognizable.

“I don’t think the help likes me,” she said quietly to a man she remembered as notoriously prickly as she was shown in, catching a nasty look from the woman who’d ‘escorted’ her.

[member="Darth Adekos"]​

 

[Caulder Dune]

[member="Matsu Xiangu"]

Darth Adekos watched the attendant leave, the scowl never leaving her face. What an unpleasant employee of his. No wonder he preferred droids. "Probably thinks she's not being paid enough to be polite. Oh well. She's a better bookkeeper than a hostess. You can rest assured I'm happy to receive you, even if some of my staff aren't."

Dome Zero, in the legal sense, did not exist. It was located underneath Telti's capitol city (if it could be called a city) of Dome One, accessible only through a private rail station that appeared abandoned and deactivated on the surface. The vile experiments that were carried out here necessitated a degree of privacy. The Final Order, some Imperial tinpot, that had been quashed by the Galactic Alliance hadn't conducted their experiments quietly. It hadn't gone well for them. Now they were all either dead or on trial for war crimes. Taking the train down here was convenient, but if it helped keep the spotlight off of him, he'd do it. The lobby of Dome Zero didn't look terribly different from the lobby of an upscale Coruscanti walk-in clinic.

There were metal benches lining the walls. Some wall decorations, paintings and mirrors. A few coffee tables with magazines and datapads piled neatly on them. A potted plant in two of the corners and a coffee machine in the other. Nothing looked like it had been touched since being set into place several months ago. Adekos liked to apply the homey touches to everything he did. He also liked the idea of an unassuming front entrance belying the more... Brutal aspects of what was taking place here. That was a story for later.

"I must admit, I thought your message was some sort of prank." Adekos spoke, gesturing for Matsu follow him. "Probably from Carach. Not many people who depart for the Unknown Regions actually return and fewer still show any interest in my work."

He stopped short in front of a pair of blast doors, producing a keycard which he passed over a sensor. The turbolift rumbled ominously as it began its descent but the Umbaran kept spouting small talk anyway. "You wouldn't have happened to see an Abominor while you were out there, would you? I've had probes searching for years now." Once it arrived, the two entered and it promptly began the ascent back to where it had come from originally.

 

[Matsu Xiangu]

She let out something like a hum passing for a laugh when Adekos mentioned Carach. She hadn’t seen the man since she’d returned, but she couldn’t imagine he’d changed enough to stop being a thorn in everyone’s side. But her expression turned contemplative when her companion mentioned the usual disinterest in his work shown by those who’d been where she’d gone. She turned her head to look at him, as they stopped in front of the blast doors.

“Foolish on their part, if you ask me,” she answered. “It seems to me that those that make it out there each have a different experience. Maybe it’s just brain chemistry or personal outlook. But where I was...men like you don’t exist. Their technology was primitive at best, but usually non-existent. It seems prudent to me to understand what they do not. Someday when they come for us, that will make the difference.”

Speaking in terms of apocolyptica usually didn’t go over well at dinner parties, but she’d never been good at niceties.

The hum under her feet as they ascended was comforting. Droids had existed Out There, but they were a mockery of the advances in her home galaxy. She’d missed their concrete nature, their inability to do anything but what they were meant for.

“Abominor? No. I did see a Silentium once, though. Strange, even by my standards.”

[member="Darth Adekos"]​

 

[Caulder Dune]

[member="Matsu Xiangu"]

He lofted an eyebrow at that. Were the savage, pre-industrial tribes of the Unknown Region going to someday discover their own hyperspace technology and then use it to launch a cataclysmic invasion of the Known Regions? Sounded like foolishness to him, even if he did live in a galaxy where billions of people could vanish in an instant and wind up in some perverse pseudo-afterlife... Temporarily. Nobody knew how it worked and nobody wanted to know. Best they just left the galaxy just left the whole sordid affair in the past where it belonged.

All these thoughts and more were banished when Matsu said she saw a Silentium. "A Silentium? Alive?" He said, scarcely able to contain himself. "I wasn't even going to bother asking. The Fringe often reported Abominor encounters, but never...!" The Umbaran trailed off. These kinds of outbursts were unprofessional. "Well, I'll have to turn my probes in that direction. Goodness..."

The doors opened once the turbolift came to a stop and Adekos promptly lead his guest out. A narrow corridor stretched before them, punctuated again with fake potted plants. Every so often there was a door marked with a number and a letter. Beside every door was an elongated, polarized window from which an observer could look into. He started talking again even as they moved forward, passing a few of the doors. "This is a grisly sort of work, I'm afraid. Understanding and perfecting the technovirus works necessitates a lot of sacrifice on the part of the test subjects. It's often very painful, so I restrict most of the preliminary testing to brute beasts. You know, mindless creatures. Animals the galaxy will hardly miss. I'd rather minimize the suffering of other subjects."

He stopped in front of one window, next to a door marked 1C. He flipped a switch under the window and it slowly became transparent. The room the window looked into was totally featureless and occupied by a single humanoid figure, which soon could be seen to be a Yuuzhan-Vong male... Or what remained of one. Chunks of flesh had fallen off and littered the room. What muscle and bone were exposed had taken on a shiny metallic sheen. The creature was also missing one eye and the one that remained looked fully cybernetic, giving off an unnerving red glow. It gave no sign of even the barest movement, standing perfectly still.

"This one was from the first strain developed. Took three days to reach that state. It wouldn't stop screaming the first few hours, but it got real quiet after that." Quickly, almost as an aside, he added: "I believe that was only because the technovirus absorbed the larynx. It's rather difficult to say."

 

[Matsu Xiangu]

The Adekos she knew of wasn’t prone to outbursts, and as such she couldn’t help but feel something of a smile tugging at lips painted dark. The star-shaped robotic creature had appeared to want nothing to do with her and probably would have found Adekos’ interest uncomfortable at best, but she liked to imagine how the information-gathering process would have gone.

Following him in to the carefully staged hallway (nothing wrong here...nothing abhorrent to humanity behind these dark windows…), she nodded perfunctorily at his criteria for subject selection. She did not share his squeamishness. It was less a product of any perceived superiority - she believed herself no better or no worse than the creatures around her. She simply did not care. Experimenting with creatures of different strengths, species, and types allowed her to see the fruits of her labor in multiple scenarios. She could therefore anticipate differences out in the field that might give her an upper hand. And besides, practice made perfect. She could raise the dead with simplicity.

She loved them.

But when the lights went up his explanation made more sense. She had no particular grievance with the Vong, but nor was so particularly fanatic. She’d spent more than her fair share of time around them due to Reverance and Vrag’s fondness for the creatures. They seemed to revel in pain. But Adekos had cowed one, clearly. Perhaps their aversion for technology found this too much an indignity to bear.

She walked forward, nearly touching the glass, her eyes narrowed in fascination as the thing stared without a sound. (It’s screaming in there. It’s still screaming.)

“How do you control them?” she asked, sounding reverent. “My Dead are connected to me through the Force. I can feel them. I know what they're doing, where they are. Is it the same with these? Or is it more...technical?”

[member="Darth Adekos"]​

 

[Caulder Dune]

[member="Matsu Xiangu"]

"Telepathy, largely. I cannot sense them unless I try to do so actively, nor can I always be cognizant of where they are." To illustrate his point, Adekos traced a small circle in the air. On cue, the Technobeast shuffled about and faced the opposite wall, away from them. "I confess I know precious little about the undead, but I can't imagine these two concepts are terribly different. Until I get around to running some comparative tests, I'm content to say the only differences are aesthetics and method of creation."

He could hazard a guess as to the fact that the process of becoming a technobeast was far more grisly than becoming a member of the undead. Technobeasts, technically, were still alive. They were just quasi-mechanical lobotomites. The only victims of necromancy were corpses- empty vessels that had long left the body. Adekos wasn't about to insult the former apprentice of his colleague by implying his technobeasts could outmatch the undead. Not without having tested such theories extensively beforehand. He privately suspected that the effects of the Technovirus (metal skin and jagged, claw like protrusions) made his creatures slightly more durable and dangerous.

Then again, was durability really an issue when neither zombie or metanecron could actually feel pain? Belia Darzu had grafted blaster cannons to a technobeast Rancor, so he supposed the issue of modularity could give him an edge. Just as well, a seasoned Necromancer could probably graft all manner of even greater atrocities to an undead Rancor. Certainly moreso than he could if they had access to Sith Magic. "They do, however, recognize me. It is less of a matter of physical appearance and more that of power. So long as I am connected to the Force, the technobeasts I create are incapable of acting against me."

It was that same blaster cannon-toting Rancor that gravitated towards Darzu's holocron with the rest of her technobeasts long after she had passed. They actively sought out and coagulated around the holocron and defended it against those who would try to take it. So the legends said, anyway. Curious as he was, Adekos wasn't exactly eager to conduct an experiment regarding what his technobeasts would do when he died.