Star Wars - Darth Plagueis

would be a better choice.”
    Veruna grew flustered. “A recommendation from you is a condemnation! And I suggest strongly that you remain on Coruscant, because you will no longer be welcome on Naboo.” He lowered his voice. “Keep in mind that I have information that can ruin you, Palpatine, inthe same way that you, the Naberries, and the rest are attempting to ruin me.”
    The table fell silent as a squadron of N-1 starfighters shot past the arched windows to disrupt the rally in the plaza.
    Palpatine conjured a smile. “The Naboo will be pleased to see that your space force is good for something, Majesty.”
    Veruna’s bloated face flushed. “More than you know. I told you that I meant to end our partnership with the Trade Federation and Hego Damask, and so I shall.”
    Palpatine glanced at the Hutt and her Bando Gora minions. “With the help of your new partners. And what will you do—chase the Trade Federation’s freighters out of the Chommel sector? Challenge Damask openly?”
    “Damask has betrayed everyone. Ask Gardulla. Ask Alexi Garyn. The Muun should have learned a lesson thirty years ago from the Gran who targeted him.”
    Palpatine took secret pleasure in the remark. And you commit the same egregious blunders they did .
    “What makes you think he didn’t?”
    Veruna started to speak, but bit back what he had in mind to say and began again. “From this point on, Naboo will manage its own resources. Gardulla and Black Sun will supervise the export of plasma and the import of goods, and the Bando Gora will protect our interests in the space lanes. It’s a pity you won’t be a part of it.”
    “A pity to be sure,” Palpatine said, rising to his feet. “Until such time as you replace me, Majesty, I will continue to act in Naboo’s best interests, at Eriadu and on Coruscant. Should I see Damask, I’ll be certain to tell him that he underestimated … your ambitions.”
    Veruna locked eyes with him. “Don’t concern yourself unduly, Palpatine. You won’t be seeing him again.”
    The transpirator affixed to his face, Plagueis moved with agile purpose through the stone-cold rooms that had housed twenty years of experiments. Most of the cages and cells were empty now—the captives they had contained, released. He wondered if Sojourn’s greel forests would become a kind of laboratory, a great scarlet-wood medium for mutantevolution. OneOne-FourDee shuffled past him on the way to the courtyard, alloy storage boxes piled high in its quartet of appendages.
    “Be certain that all the data has been permanently deleted,” Plagueis said.
    The droid nodded. “I will make certain for the third time, Magister Damask.”
    “And FourDee, carry my instructions to the Sun Guards that I will contact them on Thyrsus.”
    “I will see to it, Magister.”
    Plagueis entered the room that had served as his meditation chamber. Though the high-ceilinged space was already fixed in his memory, he studied the few pieces of furniture in silence, as if searching for some detail that had escaped his notice. His eyes lingered on the small antechamber in which he and Sidious had been sitting when they had brought about the shift, and the strength of that memory was such that he was catapulted into a moment of intense reverie.
    For some time he had been aware that Sidious had grown critical of his fixation with unraveling the secrets of life and death. Surely Sidious felt as if Plagueis had made himself too much of a project, often to the neglect of the Grand Plan; that Plagueis had come to place more importance on his own survival than that of the Sith. Meanwhile, to Sidious had fallen the responsibility for arranging and executing the schemes that would place the two of them in power on Coruscant. Sidious directing galactic events in much the same way that Plagueis was overseeing the currents of the dark side. And yet the arrangement was as it should be, for Sidious had a gift for subterfuge that surpassed the talents of any of the Sith Lords who had preceded him, including Bane.
    Plagueis found irony in the fact that Sidious had come to feel about him as he himself had felt about Tenebrous at the end of his long apprenticeship. Tenebrous trusted more in Bith science and computer projections than he had in the Sith arts … But Plagueis understood, too, that the time had come for him to rejoin the world and stand with Sidious to see this most important phase of the plan to fruition: Palpatine’s ascendancy to the