Star Wars_ Coruscant Nights II Streets of Shadows - Michael Reaves [8]
MYSTERIOUS DISASTER STRIKES CAAMAS
SCANS HAVE CONFIRMED THAT THE POPULATION OF THE CORE WORLD CAAMAS HAS BEEN DECIMATED IN A PLANETARY APOCALYPSE OF UNKNOWN ORIGIN. ORBITAL INVESTIGATION TEAMS SAY THE MOST PROBABLE CAUSE IS A CLUSTER OF HIGH-YIELD ACTINIUM BOMBS, NO DOUBT OF SEPARATIST ORIGIN, THAT HAD BEEN DRIFTING THROUGH THE CORE SYSTEMS SINCE THE END OF THE CLONE WARS. IT IS ESTIMATED THAT 70 TO 85 PERCENT OF THE POPULATION HAS DIED FROM THE EXPLOSIONS AND SUBSEQUENT FIRESTORMS …
Accompanying the news story were holos of the devastation. Ves could see the charred remnants of cities. Entire forests, encompassing thousands of square kilometers, were still ablaze, the obscuring smoke visible from high orbit.
My world is gone, he thought. Not literally; the globe was still there, orbiting around its sun, but the Caamasi civilization would likely never recover. The Empire could try to spin the disaster as a result of leftover munitions from the war, as if any sentient with even a Level Three education couldn’t realize how slim the odds of a bomb cluster just happening to hit a planet, even in the Outer Core, were. The truth was there, for anyone who could read between the data lines.
Amazing, how calmly he was accepting it. That, of course, was due to shock. He hadn’t accepted it, not at all. Not yet. He wondered clinically if, when his brain finally let it in, he would go mad.
Caamas. His world. His people. Reduced from shining civilization to near barbarism—the few that were still alive—in less than a day.
And the Emperor had given the order.
Of that Ves Volette was certain. He was apolitical, but he wasn’t stupid. Only a ruler as paranoid and ruthless as Palpatine would be threatened by a planet of pacifists. His people had done nothing wrong; they had merely exercised their right, under the Galactic Constitution, to protest the extreme restrictions and tax hikes the Empire was levying on art, science, philosophy, and other modes of consilience.
His people. Quiet, reserved, knowledgeable, compassionate … it had been said that the Jedi, when attempting to formulate the consistent ethos that eventually became the Jedi Code, had gone to the Caamasi for guidance. No more. No one would visit his once-beautiful homeworld now, save possibly to stare in outraged shock at the devastation of a planet that once had been a beacon of rationality.
Ves gasped and staggered, suddenly beset by a memnis, a sense-memory so intense that, for a moment, the small and cozy surroundings of his workshop vanished, to be replaced by his home in Jualya Village, the picturesque hamlet in which he’d grown up, nestled in the rolling hills of Kanupian. He was standing in his den, looking out at the tartapple orchard, admiring the opalescent tints the rising sun was striking off the glossy leaves and silver skins of the ripe fruits. He could hear songfish piping in the nearby stream.
He remembered the actuality, when it had taken place: three standard months before he had left Caamas and came to Coruscant to light sculpt, to capture in controlled photons universal emotions, feelings common to nearly every sentient being of the galaxy, to display and, he’d hoped, to sell his work. Although Caamasi were overall nonmaterialistic, they weren’t foolish. As the philosopher Hyoca Lans once put it, “The problem in galactic society at large is not that there are too many poor sentients—it’s that there are too few rich ones.” There was nothing wrong with capitalism—as long as it was accompanied by some form of egalitarian ethos.
The memnis ability was a primordial, ingrained aptitude coded in the Caamasi genome, unique to the species. They typically occurred at times of great stress, and were nearly always linked somehow to the stressor. He’d only had one before, as a child, when a beloved nest uncle had died. Ves frowned in puzzlement. This memnis, this recollection of a pastoral moment not long before he’d left Caamas—how could it possibly be linked to the mundicidal