12

Walking through one of the long dark corridors built beneath the Imperial Palace would normally have depressed Kirtan Loor, especially as he was on his way to a meeting with General Evir Derricote. When Derricote had summoned him the General had seemed quite manic—a state Loor had seen crumble into a tantrum filled with demands on previous occasions, yet even that prospect could not dampen his mood.

Corran Horn was on Kessel freeing prisoners. Loor allowed himself a laugh that echoed sinisterly through the passage. Over the past two weeks the freed criminals had been filtered back into Imperial Center. The Rebels had been careful in their insertion efforts—security was maintained at normal levels, which meant a substantial bribe could make almost any datafile look like it had never been sliced. Had he not been tipped to their arrival, Loor would have missed their reentry into Coruscant’s underworld.

Loor even allowed himself to admire the Alliance for its plan. Criminals had a penchant for making themselves highly visible targets. The Empire did need to maintain order on the capital world, but their resources would only extend so far. By bringing to Imperial Center the people they did, the Alliance managed to breathe life back into the corpse that was Black Sun, causing some fairly alarmist reports to start filtering up from the constabulary.

Somehow, though, even their dire predictions amounted to nothing against Loor’s mind’s-eye image of Corran Horn helping to escort criminals from Kessel. Three of those on the list had actually been arrested on Corellia during Horn’s time with CorSec. It must have killed him to let someone like Zekka Thyne escape justice. What I wouldn’t have given to be there and see it.

Kirtan Loor forced himself to laugh again and willed himself to remain feeling triumphant, but could not. His basic fear of Corran Horn undercut his sense of superiority. Corran Horn, Gil Bastra, and Iella Wessiri had managed to deceive him long enough on Corellia that they were able to escape before he could have them arrested and jailed. He had found Gil Bastra after over a year and a half of searching, but Bastra maintained that’s because he had given clues to draw Loor after him. Prior to that he had thought he was close to Corran once, but that had been a mistake, and Loor had no idea where Wessiri or her husband was.

The fact that they had been able to fool him once meant he had to assume it was possible for them to fool him again. In the old days, before Ysanne Isard had summoned him to Imperial Center and pointed out his penchant for making unwarranted assumptions, he would have assumed he could not be fooled again. That would have guaranteed his being deceived. And that would have doomed me.

Because he worked to no longer allow himself to assume too much, he had reassessed Corran Horn. From this reassessment his fear had grown. Loor had always known Horn was capable of being a killer, and he had labored under the assumption that Horn had actually murdered a bunch of smugglers in cold blood. When it became apparent that those murders were a sham—Loor’s face still burned as he realized he had based his assumptions about those murders only on reports created by Gil Bastra—he saw Corran Horn as someone capable of using violence, but also as someone who could control his temper. Horn emerged as more cunning and that trait became more dangerous when coupled with his relentlessness.

To “motivate” Loor in his supervision of General Derricote’s project, Ysanne Isard had released the fact that Loor had killed Bastra into channels that would carry that data to the Rebel Alliance. She also let it be known that Loor was on Imperial Center. She had said at the time that she hoped such information would serve to distract Horn from looking into other matters very closely, but Loor knew it would just draw Corran to Imperial Center like vice draws Hutts.

I will have to be very careful when he gets here. If he gets to me it will be because I want him to, but on my terms and to my benefit.

As Loor neared his destination, the door to Derricote’s lab opened to an inrush of air and the General himself stood there beaming. Though cadaverously slender, there was no way Loor could squeeze past the General’s rotund form and enter the lab with the man just standing there. “I thought you wanted me to see something in the lab, General.”

Derricote brushed a hand back over his thinning black hair, then clapped his hands. “I do. The Quarren were very helpful, very helpful.”

“Put it in a report, General.”

“No, you must come see for yourself.”

Loor hesitated. The holograms appended to the first of Derricote’s reports had been enough to make him queasy. The idea of looking at experimental subjects in person did not appeal to him in the least. Well, perhaps just a bit, but only out of morbid curiosity.

“Lead the way.”

Derricote stepped out of the doorway and Loor entered the lab. Unlike the majority of suites in the Imperial Palace, the laboratory had stark, functional appointments. Bright lights reflected from white and silver surfaces and the only things even approximating decoration were red and yellow signs warning of biohazards, live wires, and operating lasers. Glass walls allowed them to peer into a labyrinth of rooms where white-smocked individuals appeared to be taking creatures apart or putting them back together with the help of surgical droids of various configurations.

The door closed behind them, with the air whistling in as the opening narrowed. Derricote glanced back. “It sounds like that because we are under negative air pressure in here. That way if something breaks out it will not be carried by a draft out of the lab.”

“I thought humans would be immune to this plague.”

“No, that’s not exactly correct.” The General smiled and Loor knew the man just loved exposing any weakness in Kirtan’s knowledge of the project. “We are starting from a number of viruses for which aliens show a high susceptibility. It is possible that spontaneous mutations could change it enough that humans could be affected by it. The chances of that are very limited, primarily because the genetic sequences we’re using would have to be massively altered for humans to fall sick. It is possible, of course, that this might happen, but at the average mutation rate, it would take a thousand years before that would happen.”

“But you could make a vaccine, couldn’t you?”

“Building up immunity to a virus is not all that simple. It could take years to perfect a vaccine for this disease.” Derricote smiled casually, as if talking about an inconsequential amount of time. “It could be done, but it would take a concentration of resources that would exceed these by ten or twenty times.”

At least, then, the Rebels won’t have a chance at doing it since they don’t even have this facility. Loor lowered his voice. “You can cure it, yes?”

Derricote nodded. “Bacta.”

“Is that all?” Bacta was the treatment for everything from a simple cut to severe combat trauma, from a sniffle to the virulent Bandonian Ague. “If Bacta will cure your disease, the disease is useless.”

“Hardly. The more severe the case of the disease, the greater the amount of bacta needed to cure it.” Derricote’s dark eyes glittered in a way Loor found rather unnerving. “In the very late stages of the disease bacta can hold the disease at bay, but some organs and extremities may be so damaged that they will require cybernetic replacement. Come and see.”

Derricote led him deeper into the laboratory complex and through a doorway into a stainless-steel corridor. Transparisteel windows lined the walls and gave them views of detention cells with one or two individuals in them. On the left were piggish Gamorreans—naked, as were the squid-headed Quarren on the right side—looking miserable in their clinically spare environs. Those nearest the doorway through which they entered appeared relatively normal—though they were such a sight that Loor couldn’t bring himself to study them in any great detail.

“You will notice the transparisteel windows are triple-paned. That central sheet is reflective on their side, so they cannot see us. The walls between the cells are soundproofed. We found that necessary to maintain order.”

“I see,” Loor said, but he really saw no need for security precautions. The first few Gamorreans were placid, though they did seem to know people might be observing them through the windows, so they sat in such a way that they preserved their modesty. Farther along they appeared to be in some sort of a stupor. Their black eyes had become quite glassy and fixed on one point. They just lay there, barely moving, in whatever position they seemed to find themselves, no matter how uncomfortable.

Loor did notice a splotchiness on the Gamorreans’ flesh. Angry black boils seemed to radiate out a spider’s web of lines that connected them one to another. One creature had a boil on his tongue and several others showed them on the bottoms of their feet. Loor assumed the boils were painful since what little movement he did see seemed to be an attempt to relieve pressure on them.

He also noticed these Gamorreans seemed very dry. Mucus and saliva did not decorate their faces the way it normally did. Clearly the creatures were sick, but Loor somehow took that to be the most telling sign of their disease.

Then he saw the final-stage patients.

The boils had broken open and the Gamorrean’s flesh had cracked along the spiderweb lines. Black blood oozed from the wounds and the Gamorrean left bloody footprints everywhere it wandered. And wander it did, darting left and right, backward and forward, dancing as if the floor were made of molten lava. The creature slammed into walls, leaving runny silhouettes of itself on the transparisteel, then it would rebound and fall to the ground. There it thrashed around, vomiting up liters of thick black fluid, then somehow clambered back to its feet and hurled itself around the room again.

Loor reeled away as the Gamorrean he was watching splattered himself against the window. The Intelligence agent fell to his hands and knees, fighting valiantly to keep from vomiting. He forced himself to breathe in and out through his nose and the nausea passed. “That’s horrible.”

“I know.” Derricote slapped him on the back. “The Quarren go black all over, then their autoimmune system goes insane and liquefies their bones. They become a sack of fluid just teeming with Krytos.”

“Krytos?”

“My name for the virus—it is a combination of the world names for the viruses I’ve combined here.” He sighed and Loor could tell he was savoring the vision of the dying Gamorrean. “A milliliter of an end patient’s blood is sufficient to infect an adult. The incubation period is falling slowly, but the period from first symptoms to final stage is remaining fairly constant. I doubt we will improve on that.”

“Why not?”

“What you saw, the boils and the bleeding out, part of the whole process. The virus is replicating itself in the host body. Once it has filled a cell with virus, that cell explodes and those next to it are infected. The circulatory system carries the virus throughout the body. Cell by cell the creature dies, and the process escalates until you get the end stage. By then the pain is incredible—did I mention the virus doesn’t seem interested in destroying pain receptors? Most remarkable, really.”

Loor reared back onto his haunches, then stood. He focused his gaze on Derricote and consciously ignored the movement he caught out of the corner of his eyes. “How long from onset to final stage?”

“There are seven stages. One for each day of the disease.” Derricote pointed to the right side of the corridor but Loor refused to look in that direction. “The Quarren die more gracefully, if liquefaction can be seen as graceful.”

“How much tinkering did you do to make the disease jump species?”

“Not much. With the Quarren version we should be able to attack the Mon Calamari population. I will need other subjects, of course, to test other crosses. I was thinking a raid of Kashyyyk might …”

“Kashyyyk?” Loor looked at Derricote to see if the man had finally lost the last of his sanity. “I will check with Madam Director Isard, but I think eliminating a species that proved useful as slave labor before would be unwise. I suggest you and your scientists should compare the known susceptibility of alien species and try to group them so you can tailor a virus that will do the most harm to the largest number.”

“We could do it that way, though it would be more elegant to engineer a specific …”

“There is nothing about your Krytos that is elegant.”

Derricote took a step back and blinked. “What? Not elegant?”

“Don’t take that the way it sounded, General, take it the way I meant it.” Loor forced himself to smile. “Your work is most impressive, utterly unforgettable.” The image of billions of aliens falling down and dissolving into fetid puddles in the canyons of Imperial Center almost made Loor sick. “The Rebels are coming here to take the center of the Empire. What they will get is a world of death and they will be powerless to save it.”