Catalyst

by James Luceno

  “In a facility that occupies what was the B’ankor Refuge.”

  “I think I heard something about that,” Has said. “Must be exciting.”

  “Oh, very,” Lyra said, eliciting a guffaw from Nari.

  “Tell Has the truth, Lyra.”

  Lyra laughed with her. “Okay, so it’s boring and I sometimes wish Galen had never gotten involved. But he’s happy and the research could lead to a revolution in renewable energy.”

  “Well said,” Nari remarked.

  Lyra’s laugh dwindled to seriousness. “I just wish the work didn’t have to focus on kyber crystals.”

  —

  Galen stood at the shuttle’s viewport, gazing down on a ruined world. He had been wrong to surmise that Orson’s plan was to echo the experience at Grange during the war.

  This was far worse.

  “What’s the name of this world?” he asked Krennic.

  “Malpaz, if it’s of any consequence.” The starship that had brought them there was in stationary orbit far above the shuttle. “It suffered invasions from both sides during the war, but managed to rebuild after each assault. Native population of sentient avians, but integrated with colonists from all over this sector.”

  “Reeva mentioned Malpaz to Lyra.”

  Krennic didn’t respond directly. “Below is what remains of the capital city. You can see where we set up the power grid—that blackened area to the left. The facility itself crowned that hill, just where you see those walls.”

  Galen looked ill. “What happened here? I was very precise in my notes.”

  “The destruction had nothing to do with your research. We were preparing to connect to the power grid when the attack came.”

  “Who attacked?”

  Krennic made a point of hesitating. “Galen, you’re not going to hear this on the nightly holonews, but while the war is essentially won, it’s not over. Not here. Not in many systems of the Western Reaches.”

  “I’ve heard reports of Separatist holdouts—”

  “They’re much more than holdouts. Call them what they are: anarchists. They want the Empire to collapse the same way some hoped the Republic would, only this time our enemies aren’t rebelling in protest of Senate representation, trade routes, or taxes. They’re intent on sowing chaos, on bringing everything down. They have no agenda—political, religious, or any other—beyond a desire to end civilization as we know it. The many attempts the Empire has made to improve the lives of those who suffered during the war have been thwarted by attacks. I could show you ten other worlds that have suffered this same level of destruction.”

  Galen spent a moment absorbing Krennic’s words, then gave his head a mournful shake. “With the arsenal the Empire has—the stormtroopers, the Star Destroyers, and the rest—it has to be only a matter of time until all of them are vanquished.”

  “Each attack fosters another,” Krennic said. “Populations that feel they have been betrayed or let down because the Empire isn’t acting quickly enough, paying enough reparations, or rebuilding what was lost add their numbers to a growing storm. If it continues, we’ll never succeed in realizing the Emperor’s dream of uniting everyone.”

  “There has to be a solution.”

  “There might be.” Krennic held back for a long moment. “Galen, I shouldn’t be telling you this, and I won’t even try to guess how many security oaths I’ve already violated just by bringing you here, but the Emperor has given his blessing to enlarging the scope of our energy enterprise. He has such faith in what you’ve already achieved that he has sanctioned mining operations on hundreds of worlds to provide materials for what will be needed to make Project Celestial Power a reality. Even as we speak ships are ferrying resources to countless star systems in preparation for the day the Emperor will reveal his plan to the public.” He turned slightly so that he could confront Galen head-on. “He is determined to make an example of one world, in the hope that that world will serve as a kind of beacon and usher in the new age.”

  Galen held Krennic’s gaze for a moment, then turned and paced away from him. “There’s more that can be derived from the crystals,” he said quietly without looking back. “Much more power than what we’ve harvested.”

  Krennic followed, placing himself in Galen’s path. “Tell me.”

  Galen inhaled deeply and shook his head. “It’s never been about power. I realized the potential of the kybers from the start.”

  Krennic’s brow furrowed. “Then what’s the issue?”

  “Containment,” Galen said, finally composed enough to look at him. “The kyber will submit to pressure up to a certain point before the output becomes impossible to harness. Untamable.” He gestured out the viewport. “Even this level of destruction is trivial compared with the raw destructive power the crystals are capable of unleashing.”

  Krennic continued to watch him. “But you’ve discovered a way to coax that raw power from them.”

  Galen shut his eyes and nodded. “I’m on the brink. Very, very close…”

  Krennic clamped his hands on Galen’s biceps. “Then go after it, Galen. Don’t concern yourself with matters of containment. I’ll assemble a team to tackle that problem. What we need from you is the means to tap into that power. Give me solid evidence I can present to the Emperor and you’ll have his unconditional support.” He paused, then asked: “Will you do it? Will you do this for all of us? Not simply for the welfare of your daughter’s generation, but for her child’s generation and all that will follow. You are what the Empire has been seeking and needs. The entire galaxy will be nourished by your legacy.”

  Galen exhaled slowly. “We’ll need to work in complete secrecy to avoid any information leaks. No one can know.”

  “That’s right,” Krennic said soberly. “No one can know.”

  THE SURVEY ON ALPINN WAS concluded.

  It had taken Lyra and Nari almost twelve standard weeks to discover the vein. It lay deep in a constricted passage more than three hundred meters underground. Jetpacks dropped them to the bottom of a shaft, from which they’d had to squirm on hands and knees into a downsloping corridor, breathers gripped in their mouths and headlamps casting crazed shadows onto the jagged walls. Lyra used a small cutting tool to remove fragments of the vein, but in the end the field analysis kit Galen had supplied confirmed her initial suspicions.

  “It’s ranite, not kyberite,” she told Nari when they were back on the surface and she had finished the analysis. “They’re closely related, but ranite is denser and tougher. And true kybers are only found in veins of pure kyberite.”

  It was disappointing, but they weren’t ready to give up. Using surveys conducted centuries earlier, they’d had Has fly them to areas of tectonic activity elsewhere on the principal landmass. But while some areas appeared promising, the rifts hadn’t been produced by side-sliding faults, and the presence of additional veins of ranite substantiated that no kyberite would be found, since the two never occurred together.

  By then the camp had become home, and the members of the archaeological team went all-out in throwing a leave-taking party. They lavished small gifts on Jyn, and made it clear that they were going to miss Has’s culinary creations terribly.

  Lyra revealed nothing to the archaeologists about the false kybers, since that wasn’t supposed to be the purpose of her and Nari’s expedition, and she presented the team with maps that indicated possibly overlooked ancient sites. Lost on Jyn was the fact that as close as all of them had become, there was little likelihood they would ever see one another again.

  As Has was running a preflight in the freighter’s roomy cockpit, Lyra said what had been on her mind for several days. “I almost wish we could lie about the kybers being false. Or at least tell Krennic that we need more time to explore and evaluate.”

  Nari and Has threw her questioning looks from their acceleration chairs.

  “It’s our obligation to the Force to protect worlds like this from exploitation,” she went on, “the way the
Jedi did with so many places. We should assume the responsibility in their absence.”

  Nari’s smile was sad, wry. “Unfortunately, that’s not our call to make.”

  Lyra nodded and drew in a stuttering breath, on the edge of tears, then made light of her emotional display with a laugh. “I honestly don’t want to leave.”

  “Then say goodbye to Coruscant once and for all,” Nari said. “Convince Galen not to renew his contract and get back to what you love doing.”

  Lyra snorted. “The only contract he has is with himself. Besides, he’s doing important work. And even if that weren’t the case I don’t think the Empire would take kindly to our up and leaving—not after what’s been sunk into the facility.”

  “What could the Empire do—sue you?”

  Lyra glanced at her. “Who knows what they’re capable of doing.” She gazed out on Alpinn one final time. “Legacy status should be granted.”

  “It won’t mean anything,” Has muttered, almost as if despite himself. “Legacy status won’t protect it,” he added when Lyra and Nari had swiveled toward him.

  “Since when?” Nari asked.

  He continued to fiddle with the instruments as a means of avoiding eye contact. “Since the Empire came to town.”

  “The Legacy statutes are supposed to be inviolable,” Nari said.

  Lyra thought about it. “Yes, but so were the statutes protecting the B’ankor Refuge.”

  Has finally looked at her, then Nari. “Get ready to see just what the Empire’s capable of.”

  —

  “This can’t be Samovar,” Nari said when Has had dropped the ship out of hyperspace and the planet came into view. She glanced at Lyra, who had Jyn seated on her lap, the two of them gazing over the instruments at the despoiled world. “The northern continent was completely forested when I was last here. It looks like a desert.”

  “I can assure you that’s it’s Samovar,” Has said. “The Empire works fast when it wants to.”

  The jump from Alpinn had been tortuous, but Lyra finally found herself in the Western Reaches. Has kept the ship distant from Samovar, but scanners showed hundreds of massive freighters in orbit and even greater numbers of smaller vessels feeding them whatever was being extracted from below. Far from the freighters the turbolasers of a Star Destroyer were denuding an entire landmass. The oceans and atmosphere of the northern hemisphere were brown with contaminants.

  “A few conglomerates had concessions to mine limited amounts of ore,” Has was saying, “but now the Empire is taking whatever’s available, with former Separatists from all over this sector working as Imperial employees.”

  “Employees or slaves?” Lyra asked.

  “It’s a fine line. They come for the work, but end up in debt and unable to leave.” He cut his eyes to her. “You’ll see the same at Wadi Raffa. Deforestation, strip-mining, unchecked extraction.”

  “Why,” Lyra wondered aloud, “with so many other worlds to choose from?”

  “Bigger Star Destroyers?” Nari suggested. “Larger military installations?”

  Lyra looked past Nari to Has, who suddenly struck her as far less guileless than he appeared. “What made you decide to bring us here, Has? Were Samovar and Wadi Raffa some of the places where Orson made use of you?”

  The Dressellian’s expression neither denied nor confirmed anything. Has merely said: “You aren’t the only one who didn’t want to leave Alpinn. I guess I’m just trying to get with the new program.”

  —

  Galen’s whiskered and drawn face was awash in the glow of the computer room’s displays and holoprojections. Data swirled around him: calculations, the results of recent electron diffraction experiments, magnified views of kyber crystal vacancies, plain-text excerpted from Jedi archival material.

  He had signed and sworn to all the security oaths Orson had pressed on him, which now made it a crime for him to discuss the Emperor’s expanded dream project with anyone—even Lyra, for her own safety as much as his. All that, though, would mean nothing if he failed to find a way to amplify the research he had been conducting for more than a standard year, but which had fascinated him for half his life. Assuming he could coax greater power from the kybers, would Orson’s team be able to contain and deliver the enhanced output? His personal legacy aside, how could he not participate on learning that anarchy and violence might doom the project even before it could be implemented?

  Of its own accord, his mind veered to thoughts of Lyra and Jyn, and the need to safeguard their future. How could he have allowed them to leave Coruscant? How could Orson have permitted it, knowing of the growing insurgency, the random raids on innocent worlds? Nightmares had plagued him for months following the battle droid assault on Lokori. Could he allow Lyra and Jyn to experience that again? Would he ever be able to forgive himself or Orson should something unthinkable befall them?

  Vallt, Grange, Lokori, now Malpaz and so many other worlds…

  He had to bring about change; it was his obligation to alter the circumstances.

  He reached for the finger-sized kyber he had taken to carrying with him wherever he went. Each of the crystals was as unique as a snowflake or a human iris. It warmed as he curled his hand around it, but he knew from previous research that the crystal would show no change in temperature; and he knew also that it would not warm a sheath or a towel or any inanimate object. It responded only to life, even plant life. Which made the Jedi’s use of it to power their lightsabers all the more ironic and mysterious.

  He held the crystal up to the light of the displays, marveling at the kyber’s mix of transparency and opacity—characteristics the ancient Jedi had referred to as “the water of the kyber.”

  The energy potential was a given; his team had proven as much in their earliest piezoelectric experiments. But an ignition facility or a power plant would have to be more than an enormous lightsaber, which, in addition to housing a crystal, was believed to incorporate an emitter matrix, modulator circuitry, plasma, and a superconductor that channeled energy back to the negative pole of the lightsaber’s hilt. By rights lightsabers shouldn’t have been able to cut through meter-thick durasteel and yet they could, which lent credence to the notion of their being augmented by the Force itself.

  Acting through the kybers?

  If the answers lurked somewhere in the former Temple archives, they had yet to be discovered, and probably never would be since many of the secrets of lightsaber construction had been passed down through oral tradition. Perhaps the answers resided in one of the Jedi Holocrons, but he had not been granted access to those.

  Some of the kybers delivered to the facility had almost certainly been cut and faceted, perhaps to eliminate occlusions and thus intensify their power yield. Perhaps, then, the largest examples could be faceted in the same way gemstones were cut to maximize light refraction. Thus far the research team hadn’t succeeded in pumping laser energy into the crystals without weakening their lattices, almost the way living cells were affected by radiation. A more pressing problem involved controlling the crystals’ seemingly innate impulse to diffract power—treacherously and erratically.

  He trained his gaze on the crystal.

  Was it resisting him?

  What sacrifices needed to be made to unlock its secrets?

  Again his thoughts drifted to Lyra. How long would he be able to abide living a lie for a greater purpose? Was his fascination with the research blinding him? Had the crystals in some way imprisoned him?

  Robust, immutable, inscrutable…Perhaps, as superstition had it, he could only unlock the kyber’s secrets by facing in a certain direction at dawn or by watching mist rise on certain remote worlds. One Jedi commentator had called the kyber a somnolent stone that needed to be woken up to perform its purpose. But that same commentator had cautioned that the crystal was also easily insulted and a Jedi needed to take care.

  Galen understood that he would never be able to interact with the kyber the way the Jedi had, through the Forc
e, but as he had told Lyra, he had science on his side, and powerful machines that would address it atom-to-atom and compel the crystal to perform as demanded.

  —

  Early in their relationship, when Lyra was still doing freelance survey work, she and Galen sometimes wouldn’t see each other for months at a time. Reuniting after those absences had always been a bit awkward, and finding their way back to being a couple had always taken a few days. It was something they had grown to accept, and neither of them made too much of it. Once Lyra had decided to put her career on hold so they could start a family, absences hadn’t figured into their relationship.

  The enforced separation on Vallt was entirely different.

  Returning from almost four standard months with Jyn, Has, and Nari, Lyra wasn’t sure what to expect, especially in light of what she had seen at Samovar and Wadi Raffa. The rampant devastation she had witnessed had affected her thinking about what the Emperor was saying publicly and what was actually happening far from the Core. She had been tempted to inform Galen immediately of what she had discovered, but decided to allow time for the three of them to grow close again before airing any of her concerns, if only to prevent the information from coming out in a crazed cascade.

  Almost from the moment they landed on Coruscant, she felt that something was off. The familiar chasm loomed—and not only between her and Galen but also between Galen and Jyn. She wanted to ascribe his intense preoccupation to the demands of the research, but the more closely she observed his behavior, the more cause she found for disquiet. In the past he had never attributed an unwillingness to discuss the research to it being too technical for her to grasp. On the contrary, he would spout off in the most technical terms, knowing full well that she didn’t understand the half of it, then go through his usual process of simplifying and simplifying until she could at least make some sense of it. That, too, was part of their dynamic, and why he was willing to entrust her with transcribing his personal notes.

  Now all at once he couldn’t explain what he was doing. She might have been willing to overlook it because she had her own summary field notes to compile for Orson—and more to the point, she didn’t need to know everything in depth—had Galen not encouraged her to remain in the Central District apartment rather than return to the facility. He would commute back and forth, he told her. That way Jyn could attend an actual preliminary school rather than be tutored at home.