Star Wars - Darth Plagueis

exasperation grew.
    “Conflict drives a more perfect understanding of the Force. The Empire expands and creates conflict. In that regard, the Empire is an instrument of the Force. You see? The Jedi do not understand this. They use the Force to repress themselves and others, to enforce their version of tolerance, harmony. They are fools. And they will see that after today.”
    For a time, Eleena said nothing, and the hum and buzz of Coruscant filled the silent gulf between them. When she finally spoke, she sounded like the shy girl he had first rescued from the slave pens of Geonosis.
    “Constant war will be your life? Our life? Nothing more?”
    He understood her motives at last. She wanted their relationship to change, wanted it, too, to evolve. But his dedication to the perfection of the Empire, which allowed him to perfect his understanding of the Force, precluded any preeminent attachments.
    “I am a Sith warrior,” he said.
    “And things with us will always be as they are?”
    “Master and servant. This displeases you?”
    “You do not treat me as your servant. Not always.”
    He let a hardness he did not feel creep into his voice. “Yet a servant you are. Do not forget it.”
    The lavender skin of her cheeks darkened to purple, but not with shame, with anger. She stopped, turned, and stared directly into his face. He felt as if the cowl and respirator he wore hid nothing from her.
    “I know your nature better than you know yourself. I nursed you after the Battle of Alderaan, when you lay near death from that Jedi witch. You speak the words in earnest— conflict, evolution, perfection— but belief does not reach your heart.”
    He stared at her, the twin stalks of her lekku framing the lovely symmetry of her face. She held his eyes, unflinching, the scar that stretched across her throat visible under her collar.
    Struck by her beauty, he grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her to him. She did not resist and pressed her curves against him. He slipped his respirator to the side and kissed her with his ruined lips, kissed her hard.
    “Perhaps you do not know me as well as you imagine,” he said, his voice unmuffled by the mechanical filter of his respirator.
    As a boy, he had killed a Twi’lek servant woman in his adoptive father’s house, his first kill. She had committed some minor offense he could no longer recall and that had never mattered. He had not killed her because of her misdeed. He’d killed her to assure himself that he could kill. He still recalled the pride with which his adoptive father hadregarded the Twi’lek’s corpse. Soon afterward, Malgus had been sent to the Sith Academy on Dromund Kaas.
    “I think I do know you,” she said, defiant.
    He smiled, she smiled, and he released her. He replaced his respirator and checked the chrono on his wrist.
    If all went as planned, the defense grid should come down in moments.
    A surge of emotion went through him, born in his certainty that his entire life had for its purpose the next hour, that the Force had brought him to the moment when he would engineer the fall of the Republic and the ascendance of the Empire.
    His comlink received a message. He tapped a key to decrypt it.
    It is done , the words read.
    The Mandalorian had done her job. He did not know the woman’s real name, so in his mind she had become a title, the Mandalorian. He knew only that she worked for money, hated the Jedi for some personal reason known only to herself, and was extraordinarily skilled.
    The message told him that the planet’s defense grid had gone dark, yet none of the thousands of sentients who shared the plaza with him looked concerned. No alarm had sounded. Military and security ships were not racing through the sky. The civilian and military authorities were oblivious to the fact that Coruscant’s security net had been compromised.
    But they would notice it before long. And they would disbelieve what their instruments told them. They would run a test to determine if the readings were accurate.
    By then, Coruscant would be aflame.
    We are moving , he keyed into the device. Meet us within .
    He took one last look around, at the children and their parents playing, laughing, eating, everyone going about their lives, unaware that everything was about to change.
    “Come,” he said to Eleena, and picked up his pace. His cloak swirled around him. So, too, his anger.
    Moments later he received another coded transmission, this one from the hijacked drop