Victory smelled of ozone and burnt wood. In the center of a Theed plaza, Qui-Gon Jinn's body burned on a funeral pyre. The Jedi, with Obi-Wan at their head, kept solemn vigil. Padmé, Captain Panaka, and Naboo's dignitaries paid their respects. It was a moment of grief, the price of peace.
Kaelen watched from a distance, apart from the crowd. He felt no sorrow. He felt a cold, calculating rage.
They're burning a pawn and they think they've won the game, he thought, as the 17% of his brain processed the situation with ruthless logic. They don't see the player who moved him. The Sith is still out there. Palpatine, on Coruscant, is probably accepting condolences and consolidating his power. We won the battle, but we handed him the entire chessboard. And these people... they're celebrating a victory.
The naivety was suffocating. The Republic had done nothing. The Jedi had sent two men. They had relied on a child slave and his own suicidal plan. They had won by the skin of their teeth, at a terrible cost. What if next time the Federation wasn't so stupid? What if next time they came with a real fleet, not just a droid control ship?
Naboo was vulnerable. The galaxy was vulnerable.
It was then, as the flames consumed the Jedi Master, that the idea blossomed in Kaelen's mind. It wasn't an idea of defense. It was an idea of annihilation. A counterattack. They needed a weapon. A weapon so absolute, so terrifying, that the mere threat of its use would prevent any future aggression. A weapon that he, and only he, could build.
Not a giant planet-destroying sphere. That was crude, inefficient. I need something more elegant. More... viral.
The Genesis of Protocol Specter
The next day, Theed erupted in glorious celebration. A magnificent parade wound through the Grand Avenue, with Padmé and Boss Nass presiding together from the palace balcony, a symbol of newly forged unity. Confetti rained from the sky, and the cheers of the crowd drowned out all other sound. It was the perfect image of peace restored.
Kaelen was there, standing a step behind Padmé, in the Royal Engineering Corps dress uniform. He smiled, nodded, played his part. But in his mind, he wasn't at the parade. He was in cyberspace.
The network architecture of a Federation fleet is based on a centralized command system... vulnerable. Their entangled quantum communication systems are fast, but they generate a detectable parity anomaly... an entry point. I could design a virus, a worm that doesn't just shut down a ship, but turns it into a weapon against its own sisters.
As Padmé held aloft the Globe of Peace, an ancient Naboo artifact, Kaelen was designing the algorithms for his weapon.
Infection protocol: the worm disguises itself as a routine software update. Once inside the first ship, it uses its communicators to jump to every other vessel in the fleet in under three seconds. Phase one: take control of navigation and targeting systems. Phase two: override IFF protocol and randomly reassign friend-foe identifiers. The fleet would fire on itself into annihilation in under a minute. I'll call it... Protocol Specter. Because when it's done, the only thing left will be ghost ships.
After the ceremony concluded, as the others headed to a banquet, Kaelen excused himself. "I must verify the integrity of the palace's power systems after the battle," he said. It was a perfect excuse.
He locked himself in the palace's most advanced engineering lab. The room was silent, save for the soft hum of consoles. For hours, his fingers flew across a holographic interface. No hammers or soldering irons. Just the cold light of the screen reflected in his concentrated eyes. He was building the galaxy's most devastating weapon, and all he was doing was typing.
He wove logical feedback loops, polymorphic encryption, and data paradoxes into his code. His new understanding of complex systems allowed him to create a weapon that learned, adapted, that was almost a living thing. It was Rick Sanchez's masterpiece, born from the mind of Kaelen Ror.
The Cost of Peace
Late that night, Padmé found him. She still wore her elaborate celebration gown, having slipped away from the endless banquet. The lab light silhouetted him, a solitary figure absorbed in a swirling vortex of holographic code that spun around him. There was an intensity about him she had never seen, one that slightly frightened her.
"The battle is over, Kaelen," she said softly from the doorway. "You should rest. You've earned it."
He didn't turn immediately. He finished a code sequence, and the hologram flickered, showing a simulation: a fleet of Federation cruisers turning on each other in a silent, destructive ballet. He shut down the simulation and finally turned to her. His eyes didn't hold their usual humorous glint. They were filled with an icy seriousness, that of a man who has looked into the abyss and decided to build a bridge over it.
"The battle isn't over, Padmé," he replied, his voice barely a whisper but laden with immense weight. "It has just begun."
He gestured to the screen, where now only lines of indecipherable code remained.
"This... this is to ensure that next time, we don't need luck, or child prodigies, or Jedi sacrifices." His gaze met hers, and Padmé felt a chill. "This is to ensure that next time, there is no next time."
Padmé looked at the code, then at Kaelen. In that moment, she didn't see the witty hero who had made her laugh on their ship. She saw a terrible, unknown power. She saw a man who, to protect peace, was willing to build a weapon capable of annihilating anyone who dared to threaten it. And she realized, with chilling clarity, that the war hadn't changed him. It had merely shown him what he was truly capable of.