Catalyst

by James Luceno

  Galen had already observed that property in his study of some of the finger-sized kybers Orson had provided. The experiments he had conducted in a lab at the Institute of Applied Science had also revealed that close and extended contact with kybers was detrimental to sleep. He hadn’t gotten a full night’s rest in months, and even on the nights when sheer exhaustion overwhelmed his racing thoughts, the crystals infiltrated his dreams. The Jedi were believed to have been able to establish a kind of rapport with the kybers through the Force. Was it possible that the crystals could affect non-Force-users as well?

  Whatever the case, it was no wonder they could never be properly synthesized.

  Galen gestured to the kyber as it was being lowered to the antigrav platform. “Do we have any information about the provenance?”

  “We do, but the information may be apocryphal,” the Gotal said. “The crystal was apparently found on an Outer Rim world where the Jedi had placed it for safekeeping.”

  “Then it belonged to the Order.”

  “It may have been their property originally, but—and this is the questionable part—the Jedi are said to have seized the crystal from a criminal group that was preparing to sell it to the Separatists.”

  Galen was astounded. If the story was true, it suggested that the Separatists had actually been conducting kyber research, perhaps based on Dr. Zaly’s early investigations. Given Dooku’s Jedi background, of course it made sense. Who better than the Count of Serenno—known to be a master of the lightsaber—to make use of the crystal that powered the weapon to power some sort of superweapon?

  Just the thought of it prompted a moment of vertigo. What secrets might be hiding in the Jedi archives? Would he be permitted to access them? Was the outsized kyber before him one of a kind, or were there countless others—and possibly even larger ones? Would he be permitted to visit worlds where kyber veins might exist, kyber lodes? Who would be responsible for mining them? Would the miners be affected with insomnia of the sort he was experiencing? What about the Order’s secret temples, which were rumored to be encrusted with crystals of all shapes and sizes…

  He placed his hand on the repulsor platform to steady himself, stars exploding behind his closed eyelids. He felt as if he were walking on fire.

  “Is everything all right, Dr. Erso?” the Gotal asked.

  Galen finally turned to the humanoid and forced an affirmative nod. “I want to test the piezoelectric levels before we move on to experimenting with gain mediums or laser pumping.”

  “We’ll make the necessary preparations,” the Gotal said.

  Galen stared into the depths of the pellucid stone. Could it be cut? Could it be faceted? Could dopants be applied to heighten its conductivity and power output? Could its surface energy be altered?

  So many questions, so many questions, so many questions…

  —

  “You’re the captain?” one of the Imperial stormtroopers said to Has as if refusing to consider that idea.

  “Captain Obitt, yes.”

  The stormtrooper cocked his helmeted head to one side. “All right, follow us.”

  Has fell into step behind the pair as they began to lead him deeper into the choke point’s command station.

  Cargo ships entering and leaving certain sectors of the Western Reaches were subject to random checks that had less to do with seizing proscribed goods than ensuring that no one was transporting merchandise carefully controlled by major corporations. A captain had to be ready to show documentation and shipping manifests, and subject his or her ship to boarding parties of civilian inspectors or, in star systems recovering from the war, squads of stormtroopers.

  Has’s crew had been ordered to remain aboard the ship, which was currently serving as a kind of tug. The proton torpedoes and munitions Has had secured from Matese’s contact at an Imperial depot were concealed inside cylindrical modules normally reserved for transporting non-spin-sealed Tibanna gas, which was a costly form of hyperdrive coolant. Inspectors at Imperial blockades usually wanted to check such modules for capacity, leaks, regulatory compliance, and other nettlesome concerns, but there had been none of the usual this time. Once the Good Tidings V’s signature had been identified, Has had been instructed to bypass the inspection bays and report directly to choke point command.

  One of the stormtroopers was speaking into his helmet microphone as they walked, and a few corridor turns later the three of them were met by a gangly human officer who gestured Has into a cramped office. When the hatch sealed, the Imperial perched himself on the edge of a holotable and gave Has the once-over.

  “There’s been a slight change in plans,” he announced.

  Has tried not to slump. It was the very expression he had been waiting to hear since launching from the depot with the contraband. “I can’t say I’m completely surprised.”

  The officer’s forehead wrinkled and he snorted a laugh. “Don’t get your briefs in a bunch, Captain. Your run’s just been made a whole lot simpler.” Reaching for the holotable controls, he called up a planetary display. “When you reach Samovar, spaceport control is going to transmit coordinates for your orbital insertion. But instead of tugging your payload down the well, you’re going to hold at the insertion point. A couple of haulers will be there to meet you. All you have to do is disengage the canister modules from your ship, and the haulers will convey everything downside.”

  Has gnawed at his upper lip. “Well, that does make my job easier, except for one thing.”

  “That one thing being?”

  “I’m supposed to receive final payment on delivery of the cargo. Disengagement might not constitute delivery for whoever’s on the receiving end.”

  The officer smiled without humor. “It will. Check your account after you release the cargo. If there’s a problem, you order the haulers to hold off, you reengage, and you contact your handler.”

  Has sat silently for a moment. “Why am I not going down the well?”

  “What do you care? Didn’t we both just agree that this is easier?”

  “I’m not arguing. I’m just curious.”

  The Imperial frowned. “The sooner you jettison that tendency, the better. It’s not good for business. Run your concerns past your handler when you see him next, but learn not to ask questions in the middle of an operation. Get with the program, you understand?”

  Has took a moment to respond. “I guess I do.”

  The same pair of stormtroopers escorted him back to the ship, where he had to reassure the crew that the op was still on course. Even so, Has continued to mull over the new instructions while he took the ship to hyperspace.

  Get with the program.

  Except for the delivery modification, things were proceeding exactly as Matese had promised. Has took the former ranger at his word about Krennic not being involved, but the whole scam smelled of special ops. Maybe Matese wasn’t even aware that he was still working for Krennic. But then what would the Empire have to gain by creating a black market in weapons—unless they wanted to keep the war going for whatever reason? So maybe it was nothing more than vets like Matese and a handful of career Imperials exploiting the weaknesses of a flawed system.

  Has brought the ship out of hyperspace a good distance from Samovar. The sublights had just carried them past the planet’s outer moon when spaceport control commed, providing data for insertion, orbit, and landing. Has had never visited the surface, but from space Samovar looked pristine—especially for a world in the Western Reaches, where battles between Imperials and entrenched Separatists were still being fought. He knew that several mining concerns once allied to the Separatists still had downside operations, but those were rumored to be low-impact and environmentally conscientious.

  Coming up on the insertion point, the ship’s scanners found several haulers waiting.

  “We’re going to disengage from the modules,” Has told his copilot, Yalli.

  The Nautolan glanced at him. “We’re not bringing the cargo in?”


  “Change in plans.”

  “Since when?

  “What do you care?”

  Yalli shrugged. “Just curious, Captain.”

  The rest of the crew, including Ribert and his lanky pal, saw to disconnecting from the canister modules. Through the forward viewport, Yalli watched the haulers begin to corral the cargo.

  “They’ve got the goods. What’s to stop them from cheating us out of the final payment?” he asked.

  Has was already checking his account status. When the numbers came up, he beckoned Yalli over to the display screen.

  “Stars’ end,” the Nautolan said, “we just made that much?”

  Has couldn’t utter a word. The amount was more than he or most of his partners had made during the entire war.

  —

  Lyra had given Galen ample time to settle into his new position before following him to the facility. No sooner did she and Jyn enter the research area than the three-and-a-half-year-old was off and running down the corridor.

  “I’m not sure how I feel about bringing her gravboard here,” she told Galen in a concerned voice.

  “A helmet’s certainly in order,” Galen said. He motioned to the bank of display screens surmounting the communications console. “At least we’ll always know where she is.”

  Lyra took a moment to track Jyn’s movements on the screens. “Okay. But we might also want to consider padding the walls.”

  They kept a further eye on Jyn until convinced she was out of harm’s way. Then Galen called up a view of the facility’s principal lab. “There’s something I’ve been dying to show you.”

  Lyra glanced around while Galen was preoccupied. Everything her gaze fell on was shiny and sterile, almost to the point where the facility made Helical HyperCom’s plant seem warm by comparison. Galen and the rest of the researchers and staff didn’t seem to be bothered by the security measures, and she supposed she would eventually get used to them, but the abrupt displacement of the B’ankora from the refuge continued to rankle.

  “Look at this,” Galen was saying.

  Displayed on the central monitor was an enormous translucent crystal.

  “That can’t be a kyber.”

  “But it is.”

  Galen didn’t seem to be able to take his eyes off it.

  “In most cases, kybers are brought to the surface by seismic activity—movements along slippage fault lines, and typically only when an oceanic plate is sliding against a continental plate. But even then the movement has to be horizontal. The crystals rise, gathering impurities or other minerals along the way. That’s why it has always been said of kybers that they are more often grown than mined. The smaller ones can literally be picked up in caves, in streams, in the lava tubes of ancient volcanoes, or sometimes they’re found embedded in veins of kyberite, a false kyber. But this one, this one…Clearly it was mined, as well as polished, though we haven’t been able to identify the source tectonic world. There are traces of a brown rind that must have covered the entire crystal at one time, so it might have been discovered in a massive pod. The source world would have to be remote, one unsuited to settlement or habitation. A world only the Jedi knew about.”

  Lyra regarded him as he spoke—more, it seemed, to the crystal than to her. He hadn’t been sleeping well for months, and he had that mad-scientist look in his weary eyes she’d seen before when he became obsessed with something. At the apartment he had left sketches and enigmatic doodles pinned up all over the place; eerie intertwinings of numerals and obscure figures and mathematical symbols.

  “The Jedi’s relationship with the kybers—and I use the word deliberately—goes back tens of thousands of years,” Galen continued. “Long before that kybers were worshipped for their patterns, and the fact that they’re impervious to fire and resistant to hammering—outwardly eternal. Ancient beings associated them with wind, rain, and breath, but the Jedi may have seen them as embodying an aspect of the Force. It’s not known how the few extant museum pieces escaped the Order’s notice, or why the Jedi weren’t allowed to confiscate them.”

  “Is that what this one is?” Lyra asked. “A museum piece?”

  Galen finally turned to her, shaking his head as he did. “This was on its way to the Separatists when the Jedi seized and sequestered it.”

  Lyra frowned in misgiving. “Doesn’t the fact that the Jedi intervened say something about the potential power of the crystals?”

  “Of course it does. Remember, Dooku was a Jedi. He knew all about the power of the kyber. From the start the Jedi were determined to keep that inherent power to themselves.”

  Lyra made a face. “Then couldn’t it be that they were protecting the rest of us from that power? Even their lightsabers were just tools for keeping the peace.”

  “Unfortunately the Jedi are gone,” Galen said. “But that shouldn’t mean we’re obliged to ignore the crystals out of respect for their centuries of service.”

  Lyra held up her hands. “I only meant that the Jedi never would have wanted that energy to be turned to an evil purpose.”

  “Of course they wouldn’t,” Galen said. “And I was concerned about that very thing happening during the war, but not now. This is the Emperor’s dream.”

  Lyra wrinkled her nose. “Can’t we just call him Palpatine—in private, I mean?”

  Galen ignored that. “For millennia the Jedi had what amounted to exclusive rights to the crystals, except for rare instances when they were discovered by outsiders and found their way onto the black market. I hate to say this, but there’s reason to believe that they refused to share the secrets of the crystals out of fear of surrendering some of the power they enjoyed.”

  Lyra was taken aback. “I don’t believe that for a moment.”

  “It’s in keeping with their actions at the conclusion of the war,” Galen said in a calmer voice. “Their attempt on the Emperor’s life might have been an effort to ensure their elite power and status.”

  Galen’s words were familiar, and Lyra suddenly recalled when and where she had heard them: on Kanzi, shortly after Orson had displayed the kyber crystals and Galen had asked him outright if they had once been used to power lightsabers.

  “What of it?” Orson had said. “They were waging their own separate war and they lost.”

  Lyra refused to accept it, and had said as much.

  “Are you suggesting that the Emperor would falsify the events that occurred in his office? Have you had a look at him since his encounter with the traitors? Have you seen what they did to him?”

  Galen had intervened, saying that no one was doubting the Emperor’s word, but Orson wasn’t about to let Lyra off the hook so easily. Addressing her, he had said:

  “They doomed themselves by clinging to their outmoded traditions instead of embracing the science of the new age. Think of the good they could have done if they’d been willing to share their secrets instead of allowing themselves to be drawn into a war—against their own principles. But they had no choice once they saw their Order threatened by one of their own.”

  And now here was Galen, all but mimicking Orson’s words when she knew he didn’t believe half of what he was saying.

  On Lokori, when reports of the events in Palpatine’s office and throughout the theater of the war had reached them, both she had Galen had refused to accept the official explanation—the Imperial explanation. The Jedi killed by the thousands, their Temple the scene of a battle, scant survivors scattered to the stars, the Force dispersed…She was as heartbroken as if she had lost a family member, and had cried for hours. And yet most beings were so glad to see an end to the war that they accepted the deaths of the Jedi as they did the sacrifices made by the clones of the Grand Army. In what seemed merely standard weeks to Lyra, the Order all but passed into myth, with scarcely a trace of mourning or grief. Orson’s new age had dawned and the Jedi were relegated to history.

  So why the change in Galen? Was he masking his own sadness for what had befallen the Order to justify
his feverish desire to unlock the secrets of the kyber? Intent on providing for her and Jyn, fixated on resuming his research, was Galen in danger of losing his way?

  His intense gaze had returned to the massive kyber.

  “Who knows to what ends Dooku might have put this crystal.”

  “I can guess,” Lyra said carefully, “since Dooku loosed a droid army on the galaxy.”

  “Dooku was undeniably evil,” Galen said without facing her. “But the Jedi also need to be held accountable—even historically—for being insular, and for locking their secrets away. Now we have an opportunity to expose at least some of those secrets.”

  Lyra shuddered, and somehow Galen picked up on it.

  “Our research could lead to a dramatic shift in the paradigm. It’s not unreasonable to feel threatened.”

  “As long as the change is for the benefit of everyone,” she managed. “The way the Force is.”

  He nodded, as if assessing her words. “I’ll defer to the Order’s sound judgment. We’ll investigate with judicious care. But who knows, one day we may even get to the root of the Force itself.”

  Lyra laughed despite herself. “Now you’re really beginning to scare me.” She fell silent, then said: “Galen, have you slept at all since you’ve been here?”

  “When I’ve needed to. You know how I am.”

  “That’s why I’m asking.”

  He made light of her concern with a negligent wave. “I’ll catch up. Right now I couldn’t sleep even if I wanted to.” He paused to magnify the view of one facet of the kyber. “The internal structure is unlike anything I’ve seen. It’s almost a bridge between organic and inorganic, as close to alive as a stone can be—which I suspect is why the Jedi were able to interact with kybers through the Force. We don’t have that option, so science will have to substitute. But it’s almost as if the crystals evade our attempts to investigate their properties on a quantum level. They flee from our efforts to analyze them with neutron activation, even plasma mass spectrometry.

  “We took extreme care in pumping the crystal with various lasers, and yet still managed to harvest unexpected returns—sufficient to power a modest population center for a standard week. As I explained to Orson, restraint is the challenge facing us right now.”