Kylo stood, his hands clasped behind his back, as a Kyber crystal taller than him was lowered into a chamber in the floor. Force Destiny. At least, it would be, soon enough. It was in a well-guarded room, behind three code-secured blast doors, in the highest classified section of Weapons Development. A quick skim of a Bothan contractor's mind – an expendable liability who would likely "go missing" after he finished his top-secret assignment – revealed that Hux outdid himself with redundancies. The largest obstacle Kylo discovered was that the majority of the controls for the machine were housed on the Command Bridge rather than in the room itself. Kylo screwed his eyes shut as a wave of fear crashed through him. Even as the most powerful man in the galaxy, he still had no command over what happened. There were too many redundancies, even with the assistance of the Force. With Hux's distrust, he would be executed for treason long before he was able to destroy the machine.
I can't stop it.
As his emotions began to spiral, Kylo had enough sense to download the schematics of the machine onto his holopad before he was lost to the control of his fear or the darkness, whichever one consumed him first. Would there ever be a moment when his emotions didn't control him? Would there ever be a moment when he had control over anything? All he wanted was peace; freedom from the fetters that bound him, that dragged him down into an ever-constant state of emotional drowning. Other Force-sensitives possessed the Force. Whether it was the light or the darkness, the Force possessed him.
Approaching the end of the corridor, he should have turned right to make his way back to his quarters. As the fear inside him escalated, he found himself turning left. He had no plan of where he wanted to go, he simply felt drawn to follow that path. It wasn't often that he allowed himself to surrender to the will of the Force; instead, he would fight it for the sake of fighting. Not this time. The nightmares kept him awake, food was repulsive, a permanent ache had taken up residence in his chest, the fear and anger that fed the darkness were slowly consuming him alive, and his master would return. Nothing had changed since he had come into power; nothing was better. He couldn't find it in himself to care, so he let the Force guide him to wherever it pushed him to go, even if it was down a maintenance shaft.
I can't do this anymore.
Kylo hated ships. He had always wanted to be a pilot, but with the Force, he found it impossible. On world, if his emotions unraveled, he could find a secluded place to "discharge" them; but on a ship? His only option was controlled destruction, or he'd blast a hole in the ship with the Force. His father had been too nervous to fly with him as he grew older, and for that – and that alone – he didn't blame him. It was simple physics to understand what a hole in a ship would do in the vacuum of space.
Kylo's emotions were always volatile, but right now they were at their worst. A violent reaction was inevitable. An ever-strengthening voice in his head made the argument for allowing the Force to blow a hole in the ship. If it was a strategic enough placement, the entire destroyer could implode, bringing Force Destiny down with it. His master could never return, and Kylo would be at peace.
He had never considered the option of taking his own life before. Granted, he never valued his life – why would he when no one else did – nor was he particularly fearful of his inevitable fate, but he hadn't considered it. He'd fought too hard to survive Luke's attack to waste the opportunity for revenge. Even as a boy, he had trouble believing he would live to see his thirtieth standard year. It was a milestone that was swiftly approaching, and even now he hadn't considered that he would reach it. He often found himself complacent toward his own mortality, or even invincible, due to a litany of close calls that had desensitized him.
Still, he'd never considered taking fate into his own hands, that is, not until he killed his father. Then Luke died, and his strongest reason to survive died with him. That seemed like a good enough reason as any to end it all. No one would know the evil he prevented from being unleashed upon the galaxy, but Kylo never cared much for fame anyway. He found himself walking toward the stern of the ship, approaching the power and propulsion center.
The reactor. He could blow them all to Hell. Good enough.
Would it be, though? Would it be good enough? He had only just learned of Hux's plan. What if there were contingencies? What if there were others? Would he be stopping anything at all? If he removed this ship with its high command, it could leave the First Order weak. Who would bring order to the galaxy, if not them?
Kylo was passing the garbage compactors when he heard the shrill shrieks of a droid in trouble. Kylo had learned binary and droidspeak before he'd learned Basic from his family's many droids. He had no doubt the droid was begging for help. The First Order droids were programmed to be cold and ruthless, nothing like the droids he had grown up with. This one sounded more childlike, lost and afraid. His own spiraling fears subsided as he focused his search for the droid. Opening a garbage shoot, he found the droid lodged halfway down, grasping the walls with its compressed liquid cable tethered by its launchers.
"Don't be afraid," he assured it. "I'll help you."
With a swift manipulation of the Force, the droid began to lift effortlessly toward him until it had reached the farthest extension of its tethers. "Trust me; let go," he murmured. The droid surprisingly did trust him, and he was able to drag it out of the hole it had fallen through. Kylo learned quickly that the droid – a young, male personality, black and silver BB series astromech referred to as BB-10XZ– hadn't fallen.
The droid told Kylo a story of being treated like an object, property, as many droids were still subjected to throughout the galaxy. He was told he was a failure, broken, inferior, and worthless until he believed it. They called him BB-10XZ, but all he wanted was a real name. The others laughed. Quality tests marked him as defective because he was too much like the 'lesser' BB-8 units. Finally, he was thrown away with the garbage, told he was "not useful enough" to live anymore. He sustained damage to his occipital sensors when he had fallen, effectively making him as worthless as they had insisted all along. Kylo swallowed past the tightness in his throat, blinking back his emotions. He wished he didn't understand how the droid felt.
His previous mission temporarily abandoned, Kylo guided the droid to his side. Using the Force as a tether, he helped guide the BB unit with the slightest adjustments of the energy around him. Not a single officer noticed the odd pair, or, if they did, they had enough sense not to glance his way. He guided the droid back to Weapons Development, finding a droid development room. The astromech enjoyed tumbling his way through the room as Kylo search for spare BB units, or sensor parts. His search was unsuccessful, but he was able to find a manual for that series.
As he left the room with the droid in tow, he noticed a blonde-haired contractor exiting the room adjacent to Force Destiny. It also contained a large, vacant chamber, and he was curious about what else Hux had up his sleeve. "What weapon is being developed in that room?"
The contractor stared at him in an odd mixture of reverence and fear. "Whatever you would like to be developed, sir."
I am the Supreme Leader. I am the Supreme Leader. I can make whatever I want, it's my ship, these are my weapons, I can stop the Force Destiny without blowing this place. But what can I make to stop..."Can we create a rapid-freezing carbon chamber?"
"Sir?
His mind was already a thousand steps ahead. If the other man said anything else, he couldn't hear him over his frantic thoughts. He turned on his heel, nearly forgetting the droid as he took off toward his chambers. After the astromech whined in sadness, he stopped and guided it with the Force until it caught up to him. He had the manual; he could fix the droid and then he could drop the droid off on the next on-world trip he made.
Once inside his chambers, he used the Master Comm to demand one of the officers to find schematics for the freezing chamber from the Empire archives. Then he collapsed into his chair, throwing the manual on the desk and opening the schematics for Force Destiny on his holopad. The droid asked warily what Kylo wanted the manual for; what he would try to fix.
"I'll fix your sensor," he promised the droid as he scoured the holo. "You don't need to fix anything else." The droid continued to stare at him, but Kylo didn't notice. He was analyzing the holovid that explained how the machine functioned. The more he watched, the more terrified he became of the implications.
The Holovid demonstrated the three different applications for the machine; the first explained how to remove the lifeforce of an individual, the second explained how to save a dying individual, and the third explained how to reincarnate an already deceased individual whose lifeforce had previously been imbued upon an object.
The first application was simple. The machine could be used to drain the lifeforce from a living Force-sensitive subject. It operated by strapping the subject onto the vertical Kyber crystal. When the control lever on the panel was dragged into the "up" position, the machine rotated the revolving bars forward until they were moving at high enough speeds that they created a spherical bubble of Force. Once the Force sphere was created, energy – quintessence dark energy – was pulled from the electrified chamber into the Force sphere. It reacted with the energy from the Kyber crystals, and that energy traveled into the subject standing in the liquid on the platform. That energy was absorbed into the larger crystal, removing the lifeforce from the subject and transferring that essence into the Kyber liquid. The liquid containing that lifeforce was removed and saved for later use or discarded to be replaced by another Force-sensitive's lifeforce.
The second application was more complicated. It detailed how the machine was used to contain the lifeforce of a dying subject, then transfer that lifeforce into an inanimate, previously Force-sensitive body. The control lever on the panel was moved into the "up" position, as it was done in the first application, and the lifeforce was removed from the subject and transferred into the Kyber liquid. The body was then discarded. Another viable body – typically drained of life by the first application – was strapped onto the vertical Kyber. The control lever was pulled into the "down" position. The machine rotated the revolving bars backward, and the energy was pulled from the large Kyber outward, removing the lifeforce essence from the liquid and into the inanimate body, reanimating it.
The third application required freshly melted Kyber liquid containing no lifeforce. The liquid was created as a byproduct of the machine when the Kyber melted in the reaction between the crystals and energy, but it could be flash frozen and stored in large containment vats. An imbued object was placed in the fresh Kyber liquid. The machine was started with the lever dragged into the "up" position, removing the essence from the object and absorbing it into the Kyber liquid. As in the second application, an inanimate Force-sensitive body was strapped onto the vertical Kyber, and the control level was dragged into the "down" position. The lifeforce from Kyber liquid then transferred into the inanimate body, reanimating the soul in the new body.
I'll destroy it all – the entire galaxy – before I allow him to return.