Star Wars - Darth Plagueis

Palpatine prized the flimsi Vidar Kim had given him and handed it over. “His itinerary for Coruscant.”
    “Perfect.” Pestage slipped the flimsi into his pocket.
    “I want you to wait until his business on Coruscant is concluded.”
    “Whatever you say.”
    “He’s threatening to alert the Jedi Order and the Senate Investigatory Committee about various deals that were made.”
    Pestage snorted. “Then he deserves everything that’s coming to him.” He scanned their surroundings without moving his head. “Have you made a decision about who to use from the data I supplied?”
    “The Maladians,” Palpatine said.
    A group of highly trained humanoid assassins, they had struck him as the obvious choice.
    Pestage nodded. “Can I ask why?”
    Palpatine wasn’t accustomed to having to justify his decisions, but answered regardless. “The Mandalorian Death Watch has its own problems, and the Bando Gora its own galactic agenda.”
    “I couldn’t agree more,” Pestage said. “Besides, the Maladians are known to honor all their contracts.”
    “How soon can you have them on Coruscant?”
    Pestage looked at him askance. “Perhaps it’s best that that remains on a need-to-know basis.”
    The man’s audacity both impressed and bridled Palpatine. “There can be no mistakes, Sate.”
    A long-suffering look flared on Pestage’s face, but his tone was compliant when he responded. “If there are, then I’m certain this will be our final conversation. I know fully well what Magister Damask and you are capable of, and I hope to make myself worthy of continuing to serve you. One day, perhaps, you’ll begin to think of me as family, as I’m sure Senator Kim does you.”
    Just how much does this man know ? Palpatine wondered.
    “You’ve no qualms about living a double life, Sate?”
    “Some of us are simply born into it,” Pestage said, indifferent to Palpatine’s penetrating gaze.
    “You’ll contact me here?”
    “As soon as the work is completed. Just make sure to stay close to your comm.”
    “You’ll also be contacting Magister Damask?”
    Pestage rocked his head. “He gave me the impression that he would be unavailable for the next few weeks. But I suspect we’re safe in assuming that the results won’t escape his notice.”
    On a planet at the edge of known space, above the holo-well of a gleaming metallic table, a quarter-sized three-dimensional image of a tall biped rotated between graphs and scrolling lines of anatomical and physiological data. In a spoon-like seat suspended from the white room’s towering ceiling sat Hego Damask, dwarfed by a trio of slender,tailed scientists—two crested males and a female whose complexion was more gray than white.
    “This being is representative of the entire species?” the scientist called Ni Timor asked in a gentle, almost sussurant voice.
    “This one murdered six members of his species,” Damask said, “but he is otherwise typical of the Yinchorri.”
    Tenebrous had introduced him to the planet Kamino early on in his apprenticeship, but he hadn’t visited in more than three years. In stocking Sojourn’s greel forests with rare and in some cases extinct fauna, he had hired the Kaminoans to grow clones from biological samples he procured through brokers of genetic materials. The glassy eyes, long necks, and sleek bodies of the bipedal indigenes spoke to a marine past, though in fact they had been land dwellers for millions of years preceding a great flood that had inundated Kamino. With global catastrophe looming, most technologically advanced sentient species would have abandoned their homeworld and reached for the stars. But the Kaminoans had instead constructed massive stilt cities that were completed even while the oceans of their world were rising and submerging the continents. They had also turned their considerable intellect to the science of cloning as a means of ensuring the survival of their species, and along the way had taken genetic replication farther than any known species in the galaxy. Residing outside the galactic rim, the Kaminoans performed their work in secret and only for the very wealthy. It was unlikely, in any case, that they would have abided by the Republic’s restrictions on cloning. Moral principles regarding natural selection seemed to be something they had left on the floor of what was now Kamino’s planetwide ocean, which perhaps explained why they were no more reluctant about providing game animals for