You look closely enough, you'll find that everything has a weak spot where it can break, sooner or later. —Sir Anthony Hopkins
Vulnerabilities is the thirty-eighth installment in the Untitled New Sith Wars series. Jedi and Sith are set on a collision course as a Sith Lord attempts to defect to the Galactic Republic.
The City of Offload was accorded that title only in comparison to every other settlement on Maltoria, of which there were few; on any kind of civilized world, the most generous soul would have squirmed before calling Offload a town. In truth, it was a wonder the inhabitants had not just named it Maltoria, like the planet of which it was the de facto capital, and the system of which Maltoria 6 was the sole habitable planet—and barely that. The system's primary ("Maltoria", Chy assumed, though he had never bothered to check) baked Maltoria 5 so thoroughly even Jawas would have found it unendurable, while the gas giant Maltoria 7 had just enough gravity not to dissipate into space and be done with the farce of utility. Sane explorers would have written the whole Maltoria system off as a bad job had the system's enormous primary not commanded a broad, dense asteroid belt suitable for mining.
Still, none of the rocks in the Maltorian mining belt was big enough to host even a space station, and thus had necessity birthed the aptly-named City of Offload. The Maltorians looked not unlike rocks themselves—a dusty, grimy, hardscrabble mix of Humans, Near-Humans, and aliens, with little in the way of luxury and few beings able to savor what little there was; no self-respecting mining company would actually establish a headquarters on Maltoria, so even the systemary office supervisor was a middle manager who had fallen afoul of someone with greater influence and been condemned to this dismal, dead-end posting.
On Maltoria 6, the former Sith Lord Chy Karibadi is in hiding from the New Sith Empire. Resolving to leave the planet, he stops to visit a brothel first, where he is captured by the Furies Ko Davad and Kuira Suerves. Targere, Karibadi's former master and co-conspirator against Darth Hokhtan, is forewarned of the Furies' seizure of Karibadi and flees his palace on Lucazec. Darth Alecto, who has been struggling with the unsatisfying nature of her victory over Nawsa Arodion, seizes the opportunity to hunt down Targere.
Tirien Kal-Di and Narasi Rican receive the High Council's assignment to go to Onderon, where Targere is attempting to defect and where the annual "Demon's Kiss"—the union of atmospheres between Onderon and its moon, Dxun—is about to seal off the capital city of Iziz. On Onderon, Jedi Knights Shim Dujus and Vemna Grace flee Kuira before rendezvousing with Targere. They successfully evade Kuira's pursuit while Tirien, Narasi, and Alecto arrive on Onderon, then pass Targere off to their fellow Jedi. While Alecto hunts her quarry and secures aid from the head of Onderon's military, Kuira tracks and kills Shim and Vemna.
Tirien, Narasi, and Targere evade detection until the last day of the Demon's Kiss, when Kuira finally tracks them down; Kuira grievously injures Narasi, but Tirien kills her. Alecto catches up to them from a distance, but hesitates to kill all three when she sees Tirien; she shoots Targere instead. Tirien manages to assist Narasi into a hibernation trance before she dies of blood loss, and takes her to H'ratth to recover.
In the aftermath of the mission, Tirien and Narasi grapple with the fallout of their failure while Alecto agonizes over her moment of hesitation.
Behind the Scenes[]
Sakaros considered making VulnerabilitiesVendetta IV, but ultimately declined as Tirien and Narasi's role in the story equaled Alecto's. The working title almost until publication was The Defector.
Shout-outs include:
Karibadi thinks of a gray-skinned Maltorian as "an asteroid miner's daughter", a reference to "Coal Miner's Daughter" by Loretta Lynn.
Alecto's refusal to slash Targere's door to ribbons, fearing it would make her look like a tantruming child, is an intentional slight at Kylo Ren in The Force Awakens.
Shim's "Did you see it? What was it?" was actually not a conscious homage to Ghostbusters, but the similarity occurred to Sakaros upon read-through edit.
Targere feels "a splinter of fear", which later "swell[s] to the size of a wooden beam", a reference to the parable of the Mote and the Beam.
Vemna's reflection that "there was always some special case—a time or place to forget etiquette" is taken almost word-for-word from "Never Smile at a Crocodile".
Targere's explanation of Sith philosophy regarding assets and threats mirrors Count Dooku's in the Revenge of the Sith novelization.
Targere's insistence that Tirien "leave her [Narasi], or we'll never make it", and Tirien's cold reply that "[h]er fate will be the same as ours" come from Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith.
Tirien's repeated admonitions about the seriousness of abdominal stab wounds, and Narasi's incapacitating suffering from hers, were a jab at Obi-Wan Kenobi, in which not one but two characters effectively shrug off abdominal impalement by lightsaber.
Iziz has been visually depicted with marked differences in Tales of the Jedi, KotOR II, The Old Republic, and The Clone Wars. Sakaros opted for the original Tales of the Jedi depiction in large part, though incorporating some aspects from KotOR II. Similarly, artistic depictions of vornskrs vary so widely as to be almost useless, so Sakaros opted for the sleeker, darker look for Whiplash and Wisecrack.
Sakaros invented the word "impressage" for Vulnerabilities; forced to conclude there is no English word meaning "the state of being impressed" ("impression" and "impressment" both have other, unrelated meanings), he returned to the French etymology for the suffix.
