Star Wars - Darth Plagueis

“Subtext Mining.”
    Plagueis nodded. “I will avenge you.”
    Tenebrous canted his huge head ever so slightly. “Will you?”
    “Of course.”
    If the Bith was convinced, he kept it to himself, and said instead: “You are fated to bring the Sith imperative to fruition, Plagueis. It falls to you to bring the Jedi Order to its knees and to save the rest of the galaxy’s sentients from themselves.”
    At long last , Plagueis told himself, the mantle is conferred .
    “But I need to warn you …,” Tenebrous started to say and fell abruptly silent.
    Plagueis could sense the Bith’s highly evolved mind replaying recent events, calculating odds, reaching conclusions.
    “Warn me about what, Master?”
    Tenebrous’s black eyes shone with yellow light and his free hand clutched at the ring collar of Plagueis’s enviro-suit. “You!”
    Plagueis pried the Bith’s thin hand from the fabric and grinned faintly. “Yes, Master, your death comes at my bidding. You said yourself that perpetuation with purpose is the way to victory, and so it is. Go to your grave knowing that you are last of the old order, the vaunted Rule of Two, and that the new order begins now and will for a thousand years remain in my control.”
    Tenebrous coughed spittle and blood. “Then for the last time, I callyou apprentice. And I applaud your skillful use of surprise and misdirection. Perhaps I was wrong to think you had no stomach for it.”
    “The dark side guided me, Tenebrous. You sensed it, but your lack of faith in me clouded your thoughts.”
    The Bith’s head bobbed in agreement. “Even before we came to Bal’demnic.”
    “And yet we came.”
    “Because we were fated to.” Tenebrous paused, then spoke with renewed urgency: “But wait! The ship—”
    “Crushed, as you are.”
    Tenebrous’s anger stabbed at Plagueis. “You’ve risked everything to undo me! The entire future of the Sith! My instincts about you prove correct, after all!”
    Plagueis leaned away from him, nonchalant, but in fact filled with an icy fury. “I’ll find a way home, Tenebrous, as will you.” And with a chopping motion of his left hand, he broke the Bith’s neck.
    Tenebrous was paralyzed and unconscious but not yet dead. Plagueis had no interest in saving him—even if it were possible—but he was interested in observing the behavior of the Bith’s midi-chlorians as life ebbed. The Jedi thought of the cellular organelles as symbionts, but to Plagueis midi-chlorians were interlopers, running interference for the Force and standing in the way of a being’s ability to contact the Force directly. Through years of experimentation and directed meditation, Plagueis had honed an ability to perceive the actions of midi-chlorians, though not yet the ability to manipulate them.
    Manipulate them, say, to prolong Tenebrous’s life.
    Looking at the Bith through the Force, he perceived that the midichlorians were already beginning to die out, as were the neurons that made up Tenebrous’s lofty brain and the muscle cells that powered his once-able heart. A common misconception held that midi-chlorians were Force-carrying particles, when in fact they functioned more as translators, interlocutors of the will of the Force. Plagueis considered his long-standing fascination with the organelles to be as natural as had been Tenebrous’s fixation on shaping the future. Where Bith intelligence was grounded in mathematics and computation, Muun intelligence was driven by a will to profit. As a Muun, Plagueis viewed his allegiance to the Force as an investment that could, with proper effort,be maximized to yield great returns. True, too, to Muun psychology and tradition, he had through the decades hoarded his successes, and never once taken Tenebrous into his confidence.
    The Bith’s moribund midi-chlorians were winking out, like lights slowly deprived of a power source, and yet Plagueis could still perceive Tenebrous in the Force. One day he would succeed in imposing his will on the midi-chlorians to keep them aggregate. But such speculations were for another time. Just now Tenebrous and all he had been in life were beyond Plagueis’s reach.
    He wondered if the Jedi were subsumed in similar fashion. Even in life, did midi-chlorians behave in a Jedi as they did in a devotee of the dark side? Were the organelles invigorated by different impulses, prompted into action by different desires? He had encountered many Jedi during his long life, but he had never made an