A Different Sort of Killer
by PasswordPassword
"Make sure no one sends any information back to Iziz. Kill anything that moves," Meetra said.
"With pleasure," snarled Hanharr.
"Affirmation: with equal pleasure, master."
The two of them turned and started hiking off into the jungle.
"And boys," she called after them, a mischievous gleam in her pale-yellow eyes, "play nice, okay?"
"I have not played with soldier dolls," he cocked his head at HK, "since I was a pup."
"Belittlement: nor did I ever play with furry animals, as I was spared the physical and mental impairments of an adolescence."
Meetra smirked in satisfaction. She enjoyed their annoyance, just another small indulgence of her sadism.
"Just enjoy your day out," and with that she put up her hood and departed with the Mandalorian.
Hanharr fell into step beside his mistress's mechanical toy. He felt a deep contempt for the droid, especially now that he was hunting along side it as an equal. This should have been an enjoyable outing; a return to wild growing things, natural light, air free of pollutants masking the spoor of enemies. But he was forced to accompany this empty shell. It was so loud and clumsy with the rigidity of its movements, and its smell was so clearly foreign that any creature with a descent nose could track them. The thing's smell annoyed him. He had smelled it in battle: no smell of fear, or excitement, or anger. It always smelled the same, always like just an object, a thing.
"What does she keep you around for? She has real hunters in her pack."
"Theory: perhaps it is because I am capable of comprehending the differences between packs of wild animals and squadrons of trained fighters. Or for that matter, squadrons of trained fighters that, for some illogical meatbag reason, incorporate wild animals into their unit structure."
"You are a fool. No, less than a fool. Even the worst fool can think; all you can think is what your builders told you to think."
"Dismissal: as much as I would enjoy a rousing debate of determinism and metaphysics, I have several wargame scenarios that have been looping through my behavioral core without solution with frustrating persistence."
"The forest floor is no place for idle daydreaming. Stay focused."
"Pacification: Rest assured fur-bound meatbag, my photoreceptors and auralreceptor will detect the approach of any threat long before your crude watery equivalents do."
"Do not mock me! I have killed kinrath in one shot at a distance of a hundred paces in the pitch black of the Shadowlands, I have evaded the Sacred Beast faced by Bacca the Great, I torn out the throat of an uller with my bare teeth!"
"Query: mock you? Why oh why would I mock you, beast?"
"Hold your tongue before I rip it out."
"Query: Are you somehow unaware of the difference between fleshy meatbag vocalization organs and my clean and efficient vocabulator? Warning: improper removal of my vobcabulator will likely result in fatal amounts of electricity flowing through your body."
"You would be surprised what I can survive."
HK took this moment to silently run the mtg/hanharr/wargame/001 subroutine through his assassination protocols. He had developed the code in his observations of the meatbag in combat and pacing aboard ship. In the space of a few seconds, he played out fifty-eight combat simulations between himself and the fur-bound meatbag. To his droid mind, every one of these scenarios was entirely real, only one tiny subroutine at the initiation of each wargame, just a few lines of code, set the global variable that prevented the subprocessors in his motivators from acknowledging the commands issued by his behavioral core, and set them to provide false feedback instantaneously.
The results showed his chances at such close quarters to be alarmingly low, calculated at just 37%.
"Come on, we have work to do!" Hanharr said as he stomped off down the trail. This new input triggered an override of his reverie, and so he reallocated his core processor capacity to other wargames.
After several kilometers of hiking, the meatbag held up a paw to order a halt. HK's first inclination was to blurt out a query, but given the dangerous environment, he had turned his caution level from its resting point of fifty, to a liberal seventy-two. This triggered the termination of the communications block.
"I smell something to the north… fear…"
Slightly annoyed that they're were no artificial chemical sensors that could approach the sensitivity of a Wookiee nose, he turned his processing power to his aural analysis subroutines. He managed to isolate a pattern consistent with human breathing.
"Affirmation: I hear breathing twenty-three degrees northwest."
"It's a human," Hanharr growled in unveiled disgust.
"Statement: Come, let us see what fun we can have with this straggler."
They followed a gulley north, and at the end of it they found a Mandalorian private huddled atop a bluff.
"Thank all the Mandalores!" he shouted, jumping to his feet, "I'm saved!"
"Query: Why are you up there? Are there perhaps some Iziz scouts you are hiding from?"
"I… no…"
"Ask him what this is," Hanharr clanged his ryyk blade against a metal pole connected to some heavy wiring that led up the cliff face.
"Don't touch that! It's rigged to the permacrete explosives!"
"Statement: It is not wise for fragile meatbags such as yourself to be in such close proximity to high explosives. Meatbags so often set themselves up to be killed that sometimes I question if I am really needed in this galaxy. But then I remember what how clumsily they tend to kill themselves, and how much more elegantly I could end their existences."
"What…?"
Hanharr scoffed, "Elegance be damned! When I hunt my prey, I pit all of my strength and cunning against them, I conquer them, I toy with them for as long as it pleases me, I crush them, and I move on. I need nothing more than that until I am reunited with my tribe among the tree tops of the next world."
"Polemic: Your primitive concept of the afterlife aside, that is barbaric. There is no value in wanton slaughter. When I kill, it is about the finery and precision of the act, it is about doing more with less. It is about the intrinsic purity and goodness of efficiency in the most pure and good actions: the struggle for survival. Nothing is held in reserve in the fight for survival, it is the only place where any being can truly be judged in their entirety. Manifesto: And that, my benighted meatbag friend, is true achievement: to experience an individual completely and overcome them completely. That is the ultimate art, craft, science, and power. I am the artist, the craftsman, the scientist, the powerful; I am the harbinger of death and destruction in all is variety."
"You are a non-creature, a machine. The only difference between you and a bowcaster is that it is incapable of holding pretensions. You are a farce and a—"
"Hey… can you two get me down?"
Hanharr and HK-47 exchanged a look.
"Statement: Why yes of course we can."
"Why?" Hanharr barked.
"Query: Why not? He will be no burden. Statement: we can divide the load between us; you take the torso and I will take the limbs. We can reassemble him upon our return to the Mandalorian camp."
"What?! Hey! You! Wookiee! Your droid needs a memory wipe."
Hanharr spoke, "You do need to forget. Knowing too much has made your machine-mind crazy."
"What did he just say?"
"Statement: My fur-bound meatbag friend has expressed a desire to tear off your limbs and devour your fleshy internal organs."
"What!? No! No! Stay back!" the Mandalorian backed away from the edge.
"You're playing with him," Hanharr said, almost awed.
"Query: he wishes to know if you prefer death by strangulation or head trauma. Bear in mind that I suspect he will select the opposite of your preference."
Hanharr let out a chortelling snarl, "Ask him what this does," Hanharr's massive thumb came to hover over the permacrete trigger.
"Don't touch that!" the man was in complete panic at this point.
"Query: he wishes to know the function of that device."
"It'll blow me up!"
"Error: translation not available. Query: would you like to restate?" the note of joyous cruelty was so clear in HK's vocal modulation that it was obvious he understood fully.
Hanharr maliciously fondled the detonator. He looked up at the man. Amid panicked sobs, he was desperately trying to mime what would happen if the detonator were triggered. Hanharr decided the Mandalorian had waited long enough.
The explosion shook the moon beneath them.
"I thought you said killing was about efficiency," Hanharr said through a fanged grin.
HK thought for a moment, "Explanation: Well, perhaps for one so boring as he, there is value in cruelty. Perhaps… even a bit of art in what you do."
"And perhaps there is a bit of killer's blood in your shell."
"Statement: Very well. Now let us continue in our mutual calling, and hunt down our targets."
HK-47 halted in his tracks, his arms locked at his sides.
"What is it?" Hanharr asked.
"Statement: I am experiencing a strange sensation. My self-preservation protocols are reporting an anomalous series of values. It is almost as if there were more than one 'me' being reported."
"Put it aside. We are hot on the trail."
HK remained statuesque for several seconds, an odor of hot circuitry increasing around him.
"Revelation: It is them."
"The scouts?"
"Statement: No. We are on the outer extreme of the signal range of a transmission sent by an HK-50 unit, encoded such that only another of the same model could receive it. I, however, am equipped with a near identical comlink system, and inadvertently intercepted the signal."
"Your pups are hunting the leader of our pack. We shall hunt them down first."
"Statement: That will not be necessary. My comlink sent out an automatic confirmation message that the HK-50 units have no doubt triangulated, despite their woeful incompetence."
"Then they are on their way here?"
"Affirmation: Yes, they are."
"Your pups are clumsy hunters. They come straight at us through unfamiliar terrain."
"Reluctant Statement: For once, meatbag, I agree with you. These defective units are a stain upon a prestigious series of assassin droids. They possess no subtlety, no nuance. They are as naïve and stubborn as astromech droids, and I feel dirty to even have them assume my name. To think that merely three integer increases—"
"Silence! We will seek higher ground and ambush them."
"Warning: you should know that I am incapable of knowingly harming them."
"What? Why not?"
"Answer: these units are based on my template, and are thus sufficiently similar to me for my self-preservation protocols to identify them as me. I could no more destroy them then I could destroy myself."
"Then stall them!" Hanharr roared, "I will wait in that tree." He sheathed his ryyk blades and leapt into the tree, perching stealthily on an overhanging branch.
Within the hour, they came, in a threesomes, naturally, their slick grey armor splattered in mud and their joints slightly creaky, revealing that their water proofing was starting to fail.
Admonish: Such spotty quality on an HK unit! Inexcusable! My own progeny, reduced to ephemera! He thought.
"Condescending Greeting: Well, if it isn't our progenitor unit, still clanking across the Galaxy in his battered and corroded frame."
"Overbearing Command: Now if your memory core is still intact enough for you to accomplish the task, we demand that you take us to your master"
"Misleading Credo: So that we may facilitate communications, and bring about an end to hostilities!"
"Query: What is the source of your model's obsession with adding pretentious adjectives to your speech conditionals? You are pompous, blindly violent, senselessly destructive, and ignorant of all subtlety. It is almost as if you were programmed by the master's pupil."
The HK-50s made a rebuff, but something had consumed HK-47's processing capacity. He possessed a subroutine that ran constantly in the background, automatically reporting external memory files with similar patterns to his short-term memory files. In this case, it had reported a memory from one of his locked memory cores. He used the opening to subvert the lockout and examined the memory-link between his query to the imposters and the locked memory file.
Statement: Malak.
It was obvious. Revan had overseen the design of HK-47 personally. But for the next stage in the project's development, deployment of assassination on a mass scale, Reven had left his apprentice in charge.
Statement: Only Malak could have brought such blunt stupidity to an art as refined as assassination. He was the source of these obtuse pretenders! They ape my model in an identical pattern to how Malak aped my master.
HK's epiphany was interrupted by a war cry from Hanharr as he leapt from the tree. A stupid mistake. That sound might frighten or stun a meatbag, but an HK unit, even these deficient ones, knew only one response: attack! HK found his estimation of the meatbag's chances slipping by the picosecond.
Then the HK-50s turned up and to the left and began firing blindly. Hanharr came from their right. There was no room in the slick, clean code of HK-47's conciseness for the slightest moment of shock or confusion; he simply accepted this new datum and entered it into his projections
The HK-50 to the left fell first, crumpling beneath his ryyk blades before it even got the chance to turn and fight. Its vocabulator automatically sputtered out the words "systems failing, master," it an odd, almost mocking tone.
The second one brought its weapon to bare, a heavy repeating blaster (an assassin droid armed with a heavy field weapon, inexcusable!) Hanharr flung his massive frame at the droid, swatted the blaster aside with the back of his paw, and stabbed upward, behind its chestplate, and into the droid's memory core.
Observation: A surprisingly precise attack revealing an impressive instinct for detecting weak points not entirely inferior to my own target structure analysis assassination protocol.
Hanharr gave no sign of hearing as this HK-50 spoke its identical last words. He held the limp body up on his sword as a shield against the last one. As the Wookiee took the long strides of his charge, the droid stood silent, rigid, and dumb in its firing pose. With his free hand, he severed the thing's head along its vulnerable neck join. The ant-like durasteel head tumbled to the ground and spoke its self-eulogy into the muffling mud.
Hanharr roared in triumph, the animalistic sound reverberating off the walls of the little canyon. This sparked a new Epiphany. He had thrown his voice before. He had purposefully misled the HK-50s. More disturbing still, a quick wargame projection revealed that he would have faired only marginally better. Here was a curious meatbag, a creature that hinted at one series of limited habits and abilities but regularly broke this pattern. A screen of simplicity hid inner complexities.
Already, HK-47 looked forward to the wargame scenarios that would update his profile.