Alliances (Star Wars: Thrawn, #2)(101)

A big man was coming toward them from the direction of the first-level door, a battle droid’s E-5 blaster rifle gripped in his hands. He jerked to a halt, his eyes widening as he saw the lightsaber blade. “Whoa!” he said, stooping down hastily and dropping the E-5 to the floor.

“It’s okay,” Padmé said quickly. “That’s LebJau—he’s been helping me.”

“What do you want?” Anakin asked, glaring at the intruder over the pulsing blade. Generally, he trusted Padmé’s judgment. But the man had charged in on them without warning while carrying a Separatist weapon.

“I got everyone moving, like she said,” LebJau said, his eyes seemingly locked on the lightsaber. “I just thought she might need me, that’s all.”

“I promised him and his friends some reward money if they didn’t hand me over to Duke Solha,” Padmé added.

“Is the payment of ransom for ambassadors a common practice in the Republic?” Thrawn asked.

LebJau’s eyes widened a little more. “Ambassador? You didn’t say you were an ambassador.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Anakin said. “Those.” He pointed at the group of techs still cowering beside the row of B2 blanks. “They’re still here. Get rid of them.”

“Sure.” LebJau beckoned to the techs. “You heard the man, Vipke. Let’s go. I said let’s go.”

Silently, the techs unglued themselves from the wall and headed across the room. Their expressions, Anakin noted, ran from nervous to frightened to angry. “Frost you,” one of them muttered, glaring balefully as he passed Anakin. “You’ve ruined everything.”

“Move it,” LebJau growled. Still watching Anakin, he stooped and gingerly picked up the blaster again. The last tech passed him, and he fell in behind them, holding the blaster at the ready. Thrawn set off again toward the bins, Anakin and Padmé behind him.

“You know, we could have asked them about the droids,” Padmé said quietly.

“Yeah, we could have,” Anakin agreed. “Didn’t really want them around. Okay, Thrawn—let’s hear it.”

“An experiment.” Thrawn pointed to the bin with the fibrous material. “Touch your lightsaber blade to this.”

Anakin did so. Once again, the blade instantly vanished.

“The material is called cortosis,” the Chiss said. “It’s very rare—I’ve heard stories about it, but never seen any. It’s rumored to have unusually high energy absorption and transmission coefficients, to the point where many energy weapon blasts will be dissipated along the fibers without damaging the fibers themselves.”

“That’s why the blaster shots didn’t hurt it,” Padmé murmured.

“Yes,” Thrawn said. “It’s also soft and frangible, useless for building into armor or other protective materials.”

“Solha seems to have solved that problem,” Anakin said.

“Indeed,” Thrawn said. “It appears they’ve found a method for weaving the cortosis into a network within a protective matrix. An energy impact is therefore dissipated across the entire network and throughout the entire droid armor shell.”

“They’ve covered the walls with it, too,” Padmé said. “The blaster bolts you deflected did the same sunburst thing as the ones you sent into the B2s.”

“I imagine it took considerable experimentation to learn how to use a minimal amount of cortosis while still weaving it into a pattern where each fiber touches at least one of the others,” Thrawn said. “It would appear they used their failures to add extra protection to their factory.”

“So blasters won’t work unless you give a really massive jolt?” Anakin said, looking over at the two sand-angel droids Thrawn had taken out with his lightning gun.

“Or perhaps a very specific jolt,” Thrawn said. “A blaster shot is a single energy pulse, which can be dissipated throughout the matrix. The arc-cannon delivers a prolonged energy profile that overloads even the cortosis’s ability to dissipate.”

“Not to mention putting a massive charge on the skin so that the limbs repel each other,” Padmé pointed out. “That’s a nice touch.”

“Completely unexpected, I assure you,” Thrawn said. “The side effects of combat can be unpredictable.”

“So what’s the deal with my lightsaber?” Anakin asked. “It delivers a prolonged energy profile, too.”

“There I can only speculate, as the stories of cortosis include no such weapons,” Thrawn said. “But I suspect it’s analogous to the functioning of a superconductor. Most such materials can be overloaded by a sufficiently large surge. The far sharper energy gradient at the edge of the lightsaber blade may momentarily block the cortosis effect, sending the energy bouncing back into the blade. There must be something in the return profile that causes the mechanism to shut down.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Anakin insisted. “I can bounce against another lightsaber blade without anything like that happening.”

Thrawn shook his head. “As I say, I can only speculate. But certainly the ability to block lightsabers would be of paramount importance to the Separatists.”