Darth Plagueis by James Luceno

well. He spent only moments appraising Semasalli before going to Wandau, who was conscious though obviously paralyzed from the waist down.
    “You dishonor your heritage and your weapon, Jedi,” Wandau managed to say. “You could have used … the Force to compel us to do as you wished. I’ve not only seen that, but experienced it.”
    The Muun’s face contorted in distaste. “If you’ve so little will,” he said in the tongue of Wandau’s species, “then you’re of no use to me, Klatooinian.” And ended Wandau’s misery with a click of his thumb and middle finger.
    Gradually the spray from the ceiling abated and the klaxons fell silent. His examinations completed, the Muun stood and turned slowly to the droid.
    “What name do you respond to?”
    “OneOne-FourDee, sir.”
    “Can you pilot this ship, OneOne-FourDee?”
    “I can, sir.” The droid paused, then asked: “Do you wish me to relocate the survivors to medbay or jettison any of the corpses?”
    The Muun surveyed his handiwork. “Leave them.” He shrugged out of his sodden robe and hung it over a chair, revealing a second lightsaber affixed to his belt. “Captain Lah remarked that you have medical capabilities.”
    “I do, sir.”
    Turning his back to 11-4D, the Muun stripped his bloodstained tunic from his distended lower back. “Are you capable of repairing this?”
    The droid sharpened the focus of its photoreceptors and olfactory sensors. “The wound shows signs of infection and putrefaction, sir, but, yes, I can repair it.”
    The Muun lowered the tunic and retrieved a comlink from a pocket in the robe. Activating the device, he spent a moment inputting data, then turned the display so that 11-4D could read it. “Set a course for these coordinates, then attend to me in the captain’s quarters.”
    “Anything else, sir?”
    “Prepare food and drink. I’m famished.”
    With the Woebegone traveling through hyperspace, Plagueis lay prone on the captain’s bunk, a bacta patch covering the wound on his back, contemplating the results of his attempts to prolong the lives of those crew members who had survived the altercation. Even where he had been successful in effecting repairs to damaged blood vessels and organs, the results had been temporary, as he had not been able to influence or appeal to the midi-chlorians to assist. Calling on the Force to mend ruptured arteries, torn muscle, or broken bone was no more difficult than levitating slabs of stone. But such refurbishments had little effect on a being’s etheric shell, which was essentially the domain of the midi-chlorians, despite their physical presence in living cells.
    Among the ship’s crew, the Togruta, Captain Lah, had been thestrongest in the Force, but she was beyond his help by the time he reached her. Had it not been for sloppiness on his part, owing to fatigue and blood loss, and lightning-fast reflexes on hers, the lightsaber might simply have pierced her neck and cervical spinal cord. But she had spun at the moment of impact, and the crimson blade had all but decapitated her. The Zabrak, too, had a slightly higher-than-normal midi-chlorian count, but not high enough to make him Force-sensitive. How different it had been to observe the behavior of the Zabrak’s midi-chlorians compared with those of Darth Tenebrous, only two days earlier!
    The Jedi routinely performed blood tests to verify the midi-chlorian counts of prospective trainees, but Plagueis had passed beyond the need for such crude measurements. He could not only sense the strength of the Force in another but also perceive the midi-chlorians that individualized Forceful beings. It was that dark side ability that had allowed generations of Sith to locate and initiate recruits. The dispersal of midi-chlorians at the moment of physical death was, for lack of a better term, inexorable. Analogous to his fated confrontation with the Woebegone crew, the moment of death appeared to be somehow fixed in space and time.