Lepers and Kings

[Ak'lya]

Research had never been her strong suit.

It turns out that when you free a woman from slavery and train her to be a spy, she has almost no skills in business and research. A dark smile crossed the woman's face. Maybe there was a reason he'd done that. Maybe he'd wanted her to stay in her role. Just as much a slave to him as she had been to the Hutt. It didn't matter. She had her own life now, even if she was more or less good at one thing.

She was only here to supervise, anyways.

It wasn't like she was supposed to be working at benches. She'd picked up a passing knowledge of the business, but she was a bleeding heart, as Strask put it, and didn't entirely agree with some of the testing procedures. Next to her, a hologram of the old Bothan seemed to keep pace as the pair walked the causeway above the lab.

"So they're making a new drug? Some sort of stimulant?"

"Yes." She gave a small nod to the bothan, before turning her head to the floor below. "The first attempt went poorly. They were trying some new drug type, and it caused massive, uncontrolled muscle spasms. The mice died from asphyxiation." She sighed. "The whole batch had to be scrapped."

"Why? We could sell it as a poison, maybe send it off to Isley for his spec ops..." There was a silence between them. "Let me guess, officially, we can't"

"Iraek, between you, me, and the fence post, I don't care what you do with it. But it won't be an official product." She sighed. "We have a public image to maintain. Releasing a poison onto the market will dampen that."

 

[Ak'lya]

As the hologram seemed to think, she turned her attention to the floor again. Nothing new. They needed to have this ready to ship in a few weeks. They would need a month without a lucky breakthrough. Maybe she could stall with a new cybernetic. A production version of her own eyes? Maybe something more? She wasn't sure. They needed something, though. Not enough product would bankrupt them. As silence took over, the realization of what was happening dawned on her. Strask was taking to long to simply be thinking.

"You just put in an order for the poison, didn't you." It wasn't a question. The Bothan showed up next to her. "Just keep it off the books."

"When don't I?"

"Fair enough." One of the scientists stood up, excited. Noting the pair on the balcony, he waved at them, as if asking them to come see what he had. "Well, looks like we may have a chance here after all."