Rather Be Dead

[Jorga the Hutt]

I'm not an unkind man. I've had a lot of practice at peace, salving my conscience by building weapons for my friends. Until last week I hadn't fired a lethal weapon in ten years.

Then a Sith Lord cut off my girlfriend's eyelids and hands. Gouged out her eye. Filled her circulatory system with Devaronian blood poison. And it wasn't me that had the firepower to rescue her.

I couldn't deal; the Jukre took my edge. So once the prosthetics and the grafts took hold, I walked into blasterfire. Didn't work, wouldn't do it again, far as the papers know I was just plain wounded while participating in a covert joint task force to the planet Serpena. Finance Committee business, exploring potential wrongdoing in relation to Mnenchei space and Republic assets.

The Liberty's Veil is the original modern stealth ship, the very first to combine a stygium cloak with gravitic modulation and thrust trace dampers. That's the holy trinity of stealth, by any expert's interpretation. It's kept me and Mia safe since we built it. It's a good ship. Right now, what I like about it is the engineering section, the workshop.

And the workshop contains a really stupid amount of two things. Thaissen crystals, and Silk Holdings technology.

 

[Jorga the Hutt]

I've done contract work for Silk for a good while, ever since they bought out Eshan Drive Yards and its subsidiaries. The Lightbringer was based on my concept, and on a prototype I jury-rigged on a Mandalorian op. I spearheaded design for the MC180 Remembrance-class, the Republic's command ship, which is built by Silk/EDY. I'm the one that came up with the holosuite in the Ruisto and the paddle beamer/particle beam for the QQ-83N. I tweaked the advanced targeting module for the Rassilon's energy torpedos. The Scanpack was my concept, and I consulted on the derivative tech for Omega.

In short, you could say I design things I shouldn't. So Silk gives me whatever components I ask for, and whatever prototypes run into dead ends. And I make them sing.

Every politician needs a hobby. Some Senators crochet.

 

[Jorga the Hutt]

Crystallography is one of many subdivisions of my hobby. I've got everything from a miniature molecular furnace to a geologic compressor to something not unlike a three-dimensional printer for crystalline structures. The broad pattern of the eventual printer template is simple enough. Geometrically simple, even. Capable of replication with a variety of substances.

I'm crafting one of those substances now, a polytheretic crystalline compound. A portion of it is a basic tetrahedral lump of micronized thaissen. Thaissen sand, I call it, though dust would be the more accurate term. It's as fine as the last sheet of sandpaper you use on a woodworking project, the kind of grit that leaves wood feeling like a woman's hip. Thaissen has one interesting property, and only one. It emits a certain spectrum of radiation when exposed to the Force, which implies very interesting things about conservation and transmutation of energy. It glows blue for Lightsiders and red for Darksiders, but I'm not out to make a Force detector.

Per se.

 

[Jorga the Hutt]

Micronized thaissen is the first step, and it's a step I've already taken. I've got several liters of thaissen sand, made from the smaller crystals Windu, Roberts and I secured on Mimban. It's also made from the castoffs of the refinement process -- that thaissen is for other purposes, but when shaping it properly, the wastage becomes thaissen sand when treated right.

The entire compound will be crystalline; that much I take for granted. My delivery mechanism is crystalline, and most if not all close-scan sensors will miss crystal inside crystal, if done right. At this point it's a matter of making the interface mechanism crystalline. This is almost, but not quite, nanotechnology. We're not at the molecular level, we're just dealing with things small enough to pass into skin cells and blood vessels. I've got the gear, I've got the experience.

I know how to save her.

 

[Jorga the Hutt]

This will be a nasty, nasty poison. But as Da'Vin'Ci said to Auditorei, that which cures can kill, and this project is primarily medicinal.

Thaissen sand isn't the only crystal I'm working with. Devaronian blood poison dissolves naturally in blood -- there's a really ridiculous amount of it in Mia's circulatory system. What I'm seeking to do is make a replicable crystalline interface between thaissen and Devaronian blood poison. I can't make a full neutralization mechanism for the poison; I've tried, at length. In hindsight, I recognize that my failure to cure her is likely what spurred my suicide attempt.

But what I can do is make a structure that binds naturally to Devaronian blood poison regardless of its solubility. To do that, I have to make a poison all my own.

 

[Jorga the Hutt]

There's a macroscopic model above my desk. A chunk of thaissen mated to a chunk of blood poison by a crystalline lattice. Crystals scale well; they occasionally even function macroscopically much as they do microscopically, if cut and treated right. Miniaturizing that model is what keeps me up at night. Yes, I've been at this for a while.

I've made several macroscopic models, at immense expense, but Silk is backing this for their medical division as a specialized product. Devaronian blood poison is in vogue, and Silk has immense kolto, bacta, and kolto interests. Health costs money. They can name their price.

This consultancy fee is so steep it'll pay for half my reelection campaign, plus all costs. I am thoroughly fine with that.

 

[Jorga the Hutt]

Testing this is the challenge. I have to test its functionality for both binding and deployment. I have to test the delivery mechanism. And those are just the final stages -- I've tested the crystalline interface, tested replicability, tried literally a thousand minuscule prototypes. I've gone so far as to use a VR control to put me at that level to manipulate it manually.

When I finally test the healing function, there's only one way to do it. I draw a certain amount of Mia's blood from our private blood bank, dope it with DBP, give it a few days to settle in, and then apply variant H. Variant H (for 'heal') is thaissen plus connector, without DBP. The non-DBP variant settles into the blood like icing sugar dissolving in water. A little tangible current, like blood flow, finishes the dissolution. I apply a binding agent -- just some proxythol-aurek -- and the Variant H precipitates. I draw off the blood, run DBP measurements.

I've run this experiment thirty-nine times. My first attempts left seventy, eighty percent of the Talith-approved amount of DBP in her bloodstream. I've consistently gotten under forty for about a week, but forty percent of agony is not acceptable.

We're down to five percent.

 

[Jorga the Hutt]

DBP exposure is a subjective thing. Percentage only tells me so much. Mia's tougher than I am, ori'ramikade though I was. Medical science suggests she should be dead by now from sheer cardiopulmonary stress. Maybe Velok's knowledge is keeping her afloat. Maybe she's becoming...

Anyway. I could catch a Sith. I could do that, I think. But that would take too long, I can't exactly delegate that to my aides -- 'Petre, it's the Senator. Please kidnap a Sith and subject them to human trials.' That wouldn't go over too well.

Every day, every minute I waste, she's in constant agony. And I know she's thinking of pulling a Velok and killing herself to find a new body. She knows how; she was his flash drive. But it's a dangerous, unreliable process. Disasters happen in the field of death transcendence.

 

[Jorga the Hutt]

I know for a fact I won't be able to pull off the second injection, so there's a medical droid standing by and I'm strapped to the table. The droid raises two needles for my inspection. Nothing's precipitated or gone strange, saturation levels and viscosity look right.

"Do it."

First needle. I can't describe agony. I don't have the words, and between being the Bard and serving two terms in the Senate, I live by my words. My whole body catches fire -- I say that, and it sounds like head, chest, arms, legs, big picture. But blood poison is intimate. I'm dying between my toes, in my groin, my armpits, my tongue, my eyelids. It's possible I'm literally dying. I'm contorted against the straps, can't see, can't hear.

I've reached the level of poison that Mia lives with every day.

 

[Jorga the Hutt]

When the second needle goes in, it's cool, refreshing, relaxing. For the inside of my arm, and no more. Naturally that makes everything else that much worse by comparison. The straps cut into me, I've sweated half my body weight and bitten my tongue-

And then, all at once, silence hits my mind. My body stops screaming. My muscles are contorted, locked; it hurts to break that, lay myself down on the bed again, force myself to breathe. In due course I get up. The pain is manageable background noise from the remaining traces of DBP.

I know it's not going away anytime soon.