Private A Thousand Fibers

[Caulder Dune]

BYSS, SOUTHERN ICE CAP
CAULDRON 0032-C

Suspended in bacta, Hion the Herglic floated gently: an oversized buoy in an oversized tank. The seventeenth specimen to reach the final stage in nine months.​

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Recovery of a usable sample had been difficult, though not as difficult as engineering Force sensitivity to an acceptable threshold in a clone. And this was to say nothing of this clone’s predecessors, which had emerged with varying degrees of insanity, rendering them useless. They had been decommissioned, promptly, via a nanogene killswitch that had been installed early in the cloning process.​

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It would not be prudent to clone a Herglic Sith Lord without a suitable contingency plan.​

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Darth Adekos was quite desensitized to his failures by this point, both in consideration of this project and his wider career. He arrived at the lonely cloning chamber with the airs of a perfunctory executive. As if the resurrection of a once-valued colleague carried the same importance as a departmental audit.​

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Resurrection. What an ugly word. Resurrections were for sorcerers. Darth Adekos preferred to think of this more along the lines of a... Reinstatement.​

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He sighed, adjusted the setting on the shield generator attached to his belt, and nodded to the control room staff. A red warning light strobed softly behind him. The warning signal was gentle and muted. Everyone knew what was happening. No reason to get excited.​

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Bacta drained from the tank. The glasteel doors peeled apart, and ejected the Herglic unceremoniously onto the grated metal floor.​

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Adekos folded his arms, and observed impassively as Darth Orcus - or what he hoped would prove to be Darth Orcus - began to stir.​

 

[Darth Orcus]

Bacta, thick and viscous, pooled around the immense, prone Herglic. Sinews began to stir beneath an onyx and alabaster hide. Eyes flared open, fathomless and black and filled with intellect - the eyes of a Sith Lord. Reborn.

The naked, clone behemoth sat upright upon his knees and wiped away the mucous of his birth from his face with a flipper.

Memories raced with in a vat-grown brain. Neurons fired. Pathways in the mind lit up like Coruscant at night. A tidal wave of recollections flooded the clone’s thoughts: the pain of wounds this body had never endured; the loving words of a friend these ears had never heard; the caress of a fine silk suit that this blubber had never felt. And yet the memories were there. Only one thing could this body feel that swirled within his mind: an energy thrumming around him... the power of the Force.

Those auguring eyes tracked upward, brimming with that power, as they met the gaze of a lean, old Umbaran.

“I know you,” rumbled a bass so deep it spoke of the darkest oceans, or the inky void of space, “hauum,” air came through the nasal slits at the top of the Herglic’s head in what was almost a sigh. The slime of bacta dripped down the Herglic’s massive form as he stood to his full height. A broad smile split his features fairly in twain, lips peeling back to expose rows of white, conical teeth.

“Adekos...”

 

[Caulder Dune]

Darth Orcus

He observed the towering, presently immodest Herglic. Good. This one remembered. That was a novel start. But a few others had also remembered, very briefly, before the psychosis kicked in. Which was to say that Darth Adekos was not yet impressed with the handiwork of his underlings.​

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"Welcome back, Lord Orcus," he said, with a kind of rote tone that implied he had asked this very question several times before. "How are you feeling?"​

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Nervous anticipation seeped into the room. Not from Adekos. It came from a large, one-way glasteel viewport far above them. Sith technicians with their fingers crossed.​