Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order 06_ Balance Point - Kathy Tyers [11]
“While we’re here—” A Ho’Din plant-development specialist rested his off-green forearms on the tabletop. His long legs almost didn’t fit under the conference table. “I would like to petition for Sector Four of the reclaimed marshlands. I have several promising vegetative species under development—”
“I apologize for interrupting my esteemed colleague,” the cereals specialist put in. “But Sector Four was promised to the grains project—”
“And where’s Cree’Ar?” The meteorologist, Sidris Kolb, spoke Leia’s mind. So far, Dr. Dassid Cree’Ar had missed every one of these weekly meetings.
Not that I blame him, Leia thought wryly, watching the Ho’Din pass her datapad back to her personal aide, Abbela Oldsong. At each meeting, they downloaded their current research into Leia’s administrative files. Cree’Ar, a plant geneticist, sent his reports via his own datapad.
Leia had known many truly eccentric people, whose brilliance showed not only in their results, but in odd personal habits—Zakarisz Ghent, the slicer-turned-intelligence expert, came to mind. Fired by her vision of creating a haven for refugees who’d lost everything but their lives, and could yet lose even that, Leia had agreed to work as a liaison between this bickering gang of researchers and SELCORE back on Coruscant. The researchers were happier alone in their labs, or surrounded by a few subservient techs.
She didn’t put her name on that weekly report. She was sick of dealing with Coruscant’s new breed of bureaucrats and their veiled condescension. They could find her if they tried hard enough.
Leia couldn’t fault Cree’Ar’s techs for their devotion. His most recent breakthrough, cooperating with the distinguished microbiologist Dr. Williwalt, had been a bacterial sludge capable of topfermenting tanks of toxic, pollution-laden water pumped out of the swamps. It digested the leavings of Imperial war factories, leaving rich organic sediment and a gaseous factor they could collect and use for fuel.
Under Cree’Ar’s supervision, refugees were pouring local-made duracrete into SELCORE-imported forms, dividing sectors of the toxic marsh that Gateway dome surmounted. They’d created six miniature ecosystems, cleansed six half-klick squares of marshland, added tons of cleansed soil-building material, and created Duro’s first arable croplands since the Duros left the surface.
No wonder Cree’Ar didn’t take time off for staff meetings. He probably was as tired of bureaucracy as Leia was herself. She had wrung a hefty SELCORE budget out of the New Republic’s Advisory Council as her payment for traveling to the Hapes Cluster and begging for the Hapans’ military aid—her own contribution to the Centerpoint disaster.
Mustn’t think about that. It wasn’t her fault. Wasn’t even Thrackan’s, really. No one had intended to see the Hapan fleet wiped out.
It all came down to communication. It bothered her that the paired settlements could barely keep the cables intact. How could she supervise a planetary reclamation project, a symbol of rebirth amidst all this death and loss, when no other settlement reported to her scientists on a regular basis?
Her cereals man turned to the elderly microbiologist.“What we really need,” he suggested, “is a strain of microbes that will digest particulates out of the air. Then we could take down the domes and move out onto the surface.”
“That’s true,” Leia said dryly. “Until we scatter, we’re sitting flinks for Yuuzhan Vong sharpshooters.”
The cereals man’s bushy eyebrows shot up.
How like a scientist, she reflected, so involved in his own project that he’d forgotten the galaxy staring over his shoulder.
Abbela Oldsong finally finished taking Leia’s datapad around. Adjusting her pale-blue shoulder wrap, she handed the datapad to Leia, who eyed the readout, then saved new information before returning it. As usual, Cree’Ar’s