Chapter 7 – The Eyes Have It
Nagas the Patriot not only wouldn't sympathize when Lissa came whining to him about what Grievous was demanding of her, he quickly revealed that he'd had a hand in the situation as well.
"Ah, did he ask you finally?" the Geonosian said in response to her complaints. "I'm glad. I suggested some time ago that he assign himself someone to look after his maintenance and care."
"But he wants me to look after those creepy bodyguards of his too and be some kind of—of field medic, I think!" she sputtered.
"If it's only for him, how hard could it be? There isn't much left of his organics. There are only a limited number of things that can still go wrong with him and you've already dealt with one of the worst."
"But—" She halted, voluntarily stopping before she embarrassed herself further. Lissa wasn't even sure why she was getting so upset. She loved Grievous's design, ought to have been tickled pink for this unparalleled opportunity to get to really know the cyborg, inside and out. And if he himself was touchy and ill-tempered, what of it? She'd worked with mean-spirited cranks before and always survived. Maybe Grievous was right and she really was just being cowardly at the thought of having to work under fire. Not a very nice revelation, if true.
"I don't know if I can do this," she admitted unhappily.
"Of course you can," Nagas said. "And you won't be alone. My team has a battle assignment too. We'll be setting up a special shop aboard Invisible Hand and dispatching three techs just to stand by and tend to Grievous's MagnaGuards whenever there's any fighting. Most of what happens to those droids needs shop work anyway. It takes a lot to slow them down. You won't be able to do much for them in the field normally, and will have to send almost all of the damaged ones on to us for repairs."
"Oh, I didn't realize that."
"Now you do. You can send Grievous down to us too, if he wrecks himself. He's damaged his joints before and ruined a foot once. We usually carry a full line of replacement parts for him."
"Oh," said Lissa again, starting to feel much better. She'd had the idea that she'd be trying to coordinate such matters with the maintenance crew already on board, Neimoidians and droids that she didn't know at all. Finding out that she'd have the Geonosians working nearby in tandem with her made the entire prospect of serving as General Grievous's personal physician seem suddenly much less daunting. "Thanks, Nagas!" she exclaimed. "I didn't know that your folk were going to get mixed up in this too."
"It'll be a lot easier to do it this way than to try and use the facilities on the droid tender," the Geonosian Aristocrat went on. "You cannot transport broken droids around much during a battle anyway. It's needlessly risky and just delays things, and it'll be important that we keep any down-time to an absolute minimum, especially the General."
"Okay. That makes sense."
"I'll be aboard the first time or two that we deploy, just to supervise, so you can call on me if you really need help. You'll be fine, though. Besides, Grievous likes you. He'll be forgiving."
"Ha ha. And you know this because…?"
"Well, he hasn't killed you yet, has he?" Nagas said, and flipped his curved snout in a gesture of good humour.
All their speculating didn't last much longer. A few days later, they got the message that their battle stations had been prepared and were ready for inspection, and Nagas brought as much of his team as he could safely get off work over to the Invisible Hand to look things over. He let his fellow Geonosians go on by themselves to the maintenance sections below and accompanied Lissa, Trigger and Gregory to the office and temporary quarters that had been set up specifically for the human's use.
The layout turned out to be unexpectedly posh, a large space with a huge oblong viewport that almost filled one wall from the ceiling to the decking. The window was so extensive that when Gregory flitted over to it, he could land and stand on the floor and still look out.
"Wow!" he exclaimed. "You'll be able to see the ships fighting and everything!"
"Thank you, Gregory. I so want to watch spaceships tearing each other apart and droids and people dying," Lissa replied. She said it with a grin, though. Addressing Nagas, she added, "What is this place? Or was, I mean? It's like an admiral's suite or something."
"Part of the wardroom complex, I think," the Geonosian said. "A private officers' lounge. With so few living personnel aboard, there are probably quite a few entertainment areas going unused."
Lissa had already gone on to check out the most important area, partitioned off behind a door. "They've already got a washroom installed back here," she called out. "Put in a shower, too, looks like." She came out again, smiling happily—smiled even more when she took a quick bounce on the sturdy cot bed set up for her in the far corner and found it downright comfortable. "Liveable all right," she proclaimed. "Nagas, I think you were right. This doesn't seem like it'll be so bad after all."
"What did I tell you?"
The working facilities she'd been given seemed just as luxurious to Lissa, who'd often made do with very little. There was an oversized, fully adjustable infirmary chair that seemed a copy of the one Nagas usually used when tending to Grievous, a great deal of medical equipment, including a microsurgical laser, and an alcove with a fully loaded workstation and room to tinker. All she really needed to keep herself busy, Lissa thought with much cheer, and as a bonus, that utterly fantastic viewport. She could already imagine herself having a good sit-down before it, lounging casually on the floor with a pillow and a blanket and her two droids while she read over files on a padd. In the midst of all her anticipation and Nagas's nodding approval, Grievous suddenly strode in without notice.
It was Gregory who responded first, marching over to look impudently up at the towering cyborg. "It's very rude to just walk in without knocking!" he scolded. "You should—"
"Na na!" Lissa cried, swooping in and snatching the little droid up just as Grievous was shifting his weight onto one foot. She shook Gregory until his head rattled as she hurriedly carried him to the far side of the room, just in case. "General Grievous has every right to go wherever he pleases, when he pleases, without ever needing to announce himself first, got it?" she hissed loudly. She dropped Gregory onto her new workstation table and added sotto voce, "Even if it is rude." Gregory paid no attention and glared right past her back at the cyborg, or at least did as passable an imitation of a glare as any plushy kids' toy-looking droid with two big black half-spherical screens covering its optical sensors could manage. Lissa gave up and slunk back to Nagas's side. "Sorry," she muttered.
Grievous stared at her. "Your invention, that droid, is it?" he asked.
"Uh, yes."
"What a surprise." To Nagas, he said, "Is everything satisfactory?"
"It appears to be, General," the Geonosian replied. "We'll know better once we've finished looking over the inventory and run through a few practical exercises."
"Fine. I will need you and Miss Veleroko in the main hangar bay at fifteen thirty hours. Be there." He shot a fierce glance over at Gregory and Trigger both. "Don't bring the droids."
Grievous's insistence on their presence in the hangar bay turned out to be for a security concern involving his MagnaGuards. When they got there, they found that he'd assembled every one of the fearsome bodyguard droids under his command into ordered ranks, dozens of them standing in silence, their multiple optical sensors glowing redly, row on row. Grievous instructed them to activate their visual recognition sequences and then had Nagas and Lissa present themselves in an eerie little ritual designed to afterwards exempt them from any possibility of being attacked should they ever have reason to approach Grievous if he were incapacitated or rendered unconscious during battle. He further instructed his guards that in such a case, they were to obey all Geonosians and Lissa Veleroko specifically in his place if need be. Lissa almost asked why she was being singled out and the Geonosians not, then realised why. Most humans were still on the side of the Republic forces.
The woman also discovered that she was going to get a special new quartet of battle droid escorts whenever she was aboard during battle stations. They were the usual lanky Trade Federation models, three regular soldiers and an officer, the latter distinguished by bright yellow markings that immediately earned him the moniker of 'Sunny' in Lissa's mind. Sunny was quite bright and capable of limited conversation, but the others were just male bimbo versions of Lola minus the motor mouth all over again, each of them seeming more pea-brained than the next and almost impossible for Lissa to tell apart. They were all noticeably scratched and dinged up, which made her wonder whether they were on their last assignment before being scrapped, or perhaps it just meant that they were good fighters and experienced—she hoped so because their primary duty was going to be protecting her whenever she was planetside. Grievous, it seemed, was prepared to safeguard her services, even if he didn't seem to much value her.
The Geonosians' own battle station was immediately adjacent to the main hangar bay and was quickly deemed by all to be just as luxurious in its way as was Lissa's space. They all agreed that a comfort-loving Neimoidian must've been responsible for setting up their accommodations. A droid officer would never have been so generous or caring at all about the basic niceties. The entire group then spent the rest of their stay that afternoon clearing in at the various sections they'd be dealing with whenever aboard, registering at the mess, getting their signing authorities for equipment and materials straightened out, and sight-seeing a bit en route. They made for quite the entertaining attraction for the occasional Neimoidian crewman they ran into during their dealings, the lean, tall, leggy insectoids with their gauzy wings and distinctive long downfaced heads, and in their midst the much shorter and more compact human's bejumpsuited figure with her long blonde hair trailing down her decidedly wingless back.
After that it was simply a matter of returning to their normal everyday business and waiting. They didn't have to wait long. The week following, Nagas gave everyone the heads-up that the fleet would soon be engaged in a quick strike on a supposedly Trade Federation-held world, something about restoring order after a native uprising. What they couldn't know was the outright glee with which General Grievous was masterminding this particular operation. It was a situation tailor-made to feed his enmity towards all Trade Federation personnel, for he still could not let go that one of their leaders, Nute Gunray, had once insulted him months ago back on Geonosis.
It turned out to be an ideal initiation for the entire biodroid team. They got called out fast and when they arrived at the Invisible Hand, the attack on the planet below, a grim enslaved industrial world with the unfortunate name of Molyha, was already underway. Fighter ships roared in and out of the hangar bay non-stop, and larger vessels, some transporting the ominous ground assault machines the civilians had only glimpsed stashed off in the background during their earlier visit, lumbered out more slowly at intervals. The din was horrific and almost wholly mechanical, just screeching metals and running engines and the odd rare yell by some living line crewman, trying to direct the chaotic traffic. The three Geonosian techs plus Nagas scooted off to their shop at once and Lissa had just time enough to run up to her own station and collect her gear while her battle droid bodyguard leader, Sunny, arranged a berth on the next departing multi-troop transport designed to carry living as well as droid soldiers.
The transport set them down in a city in what looked to Lissa to be a bombed out plaza. The noise was just as bad as in the hangar bay, massive explosions and sounds of shelling going on in front of and on either side of her, and the woman got pretty shaky for a while, trembling in harmony with the ground beneath until she realized that all the fire was directed outward and that none whatsoever was incoming. It became bearable after that and she was able to give some thought to her duties again.
"Where's General Grievous?" she asked.
Sunny pointed towards a nearby street. "Down there. Eighty-seven meters away."
"Oh. You're…in touch with him?"
"With one of his MagnaGuards."
Of course. Easy to forget that the droids' communications amongst themselves was almost always silent to human ears. Even Grievous had numerous internal commlinks scattered throughout his machine body that he could activate and use in conjunction with his built-in antennae without ever saying a word aloud. Sunny's job was to keep Lissa close enough to the General's position to be useful in case of an emergency, yet also keep her reasonably safe. Maintaining a constant link with one or the other of Grievous's bodyguards was the easiest way for the battle droid officer to accomplish this.
Some small arms fire briefly chattered nearby and then Lissa saw the cyborg for the first time, exiting one of the buildings lining the street which Sunny had indicated, along with several of his MagnaGuards. He was moving fast and looked fine, and seconds later the whole party shifted into a fast run and sprinted on ahead out of sight again. Sunny dutifully led his charges on too, following the General.
Lissa finally got her chance to act when they eventually entered another partially cleared zone within the city, this one dominated by a landed transport vessel and an artillery position being worked by busy battle droids. A MagnaGuard was also waiting for her there, walking towards her with one arm dangling. She saw at a glance that it was major damage—the limb was almost sheared off beneath its shoulder joint—and got Sunny to call and alert the Geonosian team, then prevail upon the pilot of the transport to ferry the droid up. All went smoothly and the pilot didn't question her authority at all, just took the MagnaGuard aboard and off they went. Lissa watched the transport lift away, thinking that it'd been way too easy.
"Physician!"
Lissa jumped. It was Grievous's deep voice, bellowing at her in exactly the fashion she'd hoped never to have to hear. She looked about wildly until Sunny pointed him out way over by the artillery position with several more of his MagnaGuards. The instant Grievous saw that she was looking his way, he lifted an arm and pointed at one of his bodyguards. She hurried over, her battle droids trailing along behind, already tugging open the kit she'd put together for purely mechanical concerns.
As she came up to the group, she saw something else that suddenly put the hair up on the back of her neck. The bone-white armour plating on Grievous's arms and chest, even his head, was bloodied with great purplish-red gouts and streaks of what could only have been arterial spray.
Lissa suppressed a shudder. The cyborg had killed somebody, obviously, more likely a whole lot of somebodies. Not that blood per se bothered her, it was just that she'd had the idea that he always used those Jedi weapons, the lightsabers, which normally cauterized as they cut. He must've used his blaster instead this time, or maybe even his bare hands. She knew he had strength enough in those long arms and strangely delicate-looking fingers to pulverize and tear any humanoid body into shreds if he chose to do so.
The MagnaGuard Grievous had indicated was dragging one foot. She knelt down and popped the access hatch above the droid's instep and found to her relief that it was a problem she could actually do something about, just a broken connection. She repaired it quickly, so absorbed in her work that she never even noticed Grievous watching her for a moment with rare approval before he took off again with his undamaged guards. The restored MagnaGuard was also off again as soon as she'd run him through a quick functional test, and that was that. One MagnaGuard sent to the shop and a second fixed on the spot. Lissa started to feel pretty good about herself.
The action all over the city seemed to be winding down. The droids manning the artillery piece had stopped firing some time ago and soon removed the weapon's remaining live rounds and began securing their ordnance for transport. Sunny kept them hanging about the artillery position awhile, then announced that they'd been given the okay to stand down too and return to the flagship. Lissa was surprised. She'd thought she'd have to stay planetside as long as did Grievous or any of his elite, but it seemed that the General had already declared the battle to be won and over, and all further danger to himself now negligible.
Lissa asked Sunny to leave her at the Geonosians' repair shop instead of bringing her up to her own station once they were aboard the Invisible Hand, and she spent the next hour helping to get the remaining damaged MagnaGuard functional again. After that, it was just a matter of mopping up, restocking any materials that had been used up (nothing of note, in Lissa's case), and filing some necessary paperwork, then all of them were free to go. In response to Lissa's queries, Nagas explained that all of the MagnaGuards that'd been used in the assault would be routinely checked over later by the destroyer-carrier's own maintenance crew, but unless a problem were discovered that dealt specifically with the specialty droids' heuristic programming, the ship's staff would handle any further repair work themselves. He then asked the human woman how she felt about her first stint of battle duty and she said that she'd quite enjoyed the experience and probably would again, as long as no one took an actual pot shot at her.
Grievous's fleet remained in orbit about Molyha for only another thirty-six hours before handing it back over to a much reinforced Trade Federation police army. Two days after that, the last of Lissa's security checks came through and she was finally cleared to look at the whole of Grievous's medical files. It was serious stuff. Even Nagas seemed concerned for once as he ran off a copy of the pertinent data and packaged it for transport over to the Invisible Hand, and impressed upon Lissa several times that it contained sensitive research information for medical staff eyes only, that even the General himself was not to look at it or be privy to its discussion.
Lissa's usual two faithful battle droid escorts took her over to the flagship and they were soon walking down the major thoroughfare corridor linking the relatively few portions of the vessel that had life support up and running. After the frenetic activity Lissa had seen going on during battle stations, the Invisible Hand on this day seemed almost deserted, but that of course was just an illusion. The mostly droid crew was there all right, just concentrated in the unpressurized parts of the ship or deactivated until they were needed again.
Some life was still afoot, however. A sound of rapid tapping came to the trio from ahead, gaining in volume until it overrode even the battle droids' clacking steps. General Grievous abruptly appeared from around the bend in the corridor, striding fast, slouched over and head down. He straightened up as soon as he saw Lissa and the droids and halted right in front of them, forcing them to stop in turn.
"Why are you here?" he demanded.
Lissa held up her satchel, adorned with its profusion of classification symbols. "I have the remainder of your medical files here. They had to be hand-delivered in any case, so I thought I might as well come over and get them input myself."
Grievous nodded. "Very well. Carry on," he said, and slumped back down before walking on. Lissa happened to glance at his face as he moved past with his head on a level with her own and suddenly spotted something she didn't like the look of at all.
"General? Could you wait a bit, please?"
He stopped again and swivelled his head around to stare at her. "What is it now?"
Much to his irritation, all the woman did was come up and simply stare back, directly into his face. He was about to fire off another, much nastier retort, when she said, "Do you have something under your eye, sir? The left one? Just under the inner part of your mask there?"
Grievous suppressed a slight start. "It's just a cut," he admitted. "It's almost healed."
"You got this during the fighting last week?"
"Yes."
"And you didn't think to inform me?"
"It's minor," he insisted. "The bacta will finish cleaning it up."
"You're not scheduled for a bacta treatment for another eight days," Lissa said. "And it doesn't look like it's healing to me. It looks quite swollen, actually. Is it hurting you?"
"No, it's nothing."
"I'm sorry, General, but I have to disagree. I think you should let me look at it."
Grievous straightened up again. "I don't have time for this," he growled, glowering down at her.
"And I'm afraid, as your physician, sir, that I'm going to have to insist that you make time and come with me and let me look at that right now, sir, General Grievous, sir," Lissa replied, stumbling over a whole string of honorifics in her nervousness and acute awareness of what had happened the last few times she'd tried to defy him. The only thing that made her persistent was her belief that she was operating from within a set of rights which even he would have to acknowledge this time…thought he would have to acknowledge. It came to her belatedly as she stood there trying not to wither under his glare that perhaps Separatist medical officers didn't have quite the same authority over ships' commanders as did those serving aboard Republic vessels.
On the other hand, maybe they did. The cyborg suddenly capitulated with an exasperated, "All right!" He jerked his head, indicating that she was to go on, and fell in behind her, hovering and breathing down her neck again in the same annoying fashion as he'd done back on Marku.
Once inside her office, Lissa first got the uploading of the secure files started, then turned to her reluctant patient, who'd already seated himself in the infirmary chair and was waiting with scarce concealed impatience. She got his faceplate off without too much fumbling and saw at once that the small scabbed-over wound beneath his eye was not just swollen but likely infected. Nothing my ass, she thought, but at least it looked to be a simple enough injury, nothing she hadn't handled before when doctoring herself on occasion during the years she'd had to rough it on her own. She wouldn't have wanted to try dealing with something exotic or beyond her limited scope her first time treating Grievous for a legitimate medical reason.
The General had already fallen into his usual routine of pretending to be elsewhere and stared away into nothingness as she fussed over him, but his focus returned as soon as she began hooking up his vocabulator with a temporary connection. "This'll let you continue speaking, if you like," she said in response to his questioning expression, and placed his faceplate and the short coil of linking wire on his shoulder. It was something she'd decided to do days ago, almost the instant she'd resigned herself to her new duty. She just didn't like the thought of Grievous sitting there voiceless should she ever have to work on him and had sworn to herself that she'd insist on taking the extra moment or so to reconnect his vocabulator any time she had to take off his mask, despite any protestations from him. Not that he was protesting any. In fact, he seemed unexpectedly pleased for once, or so it seemed from the way he curiously regarded what she'd done.
The only drawback was that it had attracted his attention directly onto herself, and Lissa found it none too easy to continue working under the cool gaze of someone who lost not one iota of their formidable aspect despite lying down and being partially undressed, as it were.
She didn't believe Grievous's assertion that the injury wasn't hurting him and gave him a small dose of local anaesthesia before getting started. He tolerated the injection without reacting, somewhat to her surprise. What did bother him was when she placed a folded towel on his chest beneath his head and began gently dabbing at the scab with warm water to soften its hold preparatory to removing it. This part of her ministrations he bore for all of thirty seconds before irritably snapping, "Just pull it off."
Lissa frowned at him. "That would damage the skin," she said, and went right on doing what she was doing. It actually didn't take much longer. Just as she'd suspected, the wound was hot and the scab had already been partially lifted by the wet infection brewing beneath. She got it off easily and found a nasty bit of abscessing starting up, still contained and easy to squeeze out.
She triumphantly held up what she eventually found at the center of the pus with a pair of forceps, a chip of metal shrapnel half the size of her little fingernail.
"This is why you need to come and see me if you have even the slightest injury," she told him. "This would never have healed on its own. It could have developed into a serious infection within a few more days and spread to your eyes, even travelled into your brain, and then what? To be quite blunt, General, you have very little natural immunity left. You're always going to be susceptible to infection when hurt, unless you let us treat you aggressively right away."
The expression in his eyes was very sullen as she finished cleaning out the wound. Once done, she went off to remove her gloves and wash her hands, then came back and began gently pressing the extremities of the flesh about his eyes with her fingertips.
"What are you doing?" he said, sounding alarmed. (Strange to hear his voice coming from the vicinity of his shoulder.)
"I need to know how well you can still feel. Can you sense me touching you, here above the brows?"
"Yes! It's fine!"
"And here, at the corners?"
"It's…numb."
She quickly determined that the same areas Nagas had pointed out as having poor circulation also appeared to have some nerve damage—danger spots, in short, that would bear watching since Grievous wouldn't be able to depend on pain to warn him of any developing problems. But everything right around his eyes and brows seemed all right and still as sensitive to touch as it ought to be, too sensitive even, considering how much he fidgeted and squirmed and tried to turn his head away as she examined him.
He got even worse when she insisted on rubbing a good soothing antibiotic ointment into his skin and over his eyelids, breathing so hard that she could hear it and lifting his arms and clenching his hands as though he meant to bolt right out of the chair.
"General, will you please relax?" she admonished, frowning at him again. "It's just an antibiotic cream. It'll help catch any stray bacteria from your wound and do your skin good—it seems very dry." He quieted down long enough for her to finish. When she tried to complete her treatment with a couple of eye drops, however, he suddenly sat up so abruptly that he almost knocked the applicator out of her hand and sent his faceplate tumbling into his own lap.
"Enough! The Geonosians never do any of this!"
"The Geonosians don't believe in preventative medicine. I do!" she shot right back. "Now please, humour me and let me finish treating your eyes! I really think this will help with the irritation you feel from the implants sometimes. Just a few eye drops and that'll be the end of it."
"Mmrph," Grievous said, or something like that, and sank back down. But not onto his back, he insisted on sprawling over onto his side this time, lying there like an bad-tempered, antsy cat so he could fully look at her and watch while she inserted the drops, then shake his head at once to show how much he hated it. Lissa thought he was being positively childish since she knew darn well that she wasn't hurting him a bit and couldn't understand what his problem was. She got a tissue to blot up any excess and dabbed one last time at his still slightly weeping wound.
She concluded by simply regarding him after that, finally looking at his eyes as features reflective of their owner's considerable will and personality instead of just as portions of his body whose health she had to assess and care for. They were certainly memorable eyes, well spaced and with nicely shaped, pronounced lids and expressive, mobile brows that were usually hidden by his mask unless he pulled them way down, and even quite a pretty colour, a sort of yellow-gold with a metallic sheen. Lissa guessed that Grievous had once been quite handsome, in his alien way, but of course, that part of him was gone now. All he had left were his golden eyes. Sad, really.
She reattached his faceplate after wiping down its interior and he got up and started for the door before she even put her utensils down. "Just a moment, General," she called. "There's something more I'd like to say."
He halted, at least, although he wouldn't turn around. She contemplated his back thoughtfully.
"I'm not even going to pretend to understand what's really going on here," she finally said. "I just want you to know that even if you don't take my position seriously, I do, and I intend to try and do my best for you. And I wish you'd help me by, well, cooperating a little better and taking advantage of what expertise I do have. I wouldn't like for you to do yourself harm just because you couldn't be bothered, and I'd hate to see you do something really foolish like lose those eyes of yours out of sheer neglect."
He stiffened. Turned his head about, very slowly, until he was staring back at her over one shoulder. "Is that all?" he asked, in a flat tone as indecipherable as his expression.
"Yes, I think it is," Lissa replied softly.
He continued on out and she sighed. Ouch, he hadn't liked hearing that too much. Still, it had to be said. She had to protect herself. If he went ahead and wrecked himself now, at least she could always honestly say that she'd tried to talk to him about it, but he'd chosen to ignore her.
She sighed again as she finished cleaning up, still innocently unaware of the full extent of the upset she'd just caused Grievous. He'd hurried up to his quarters the instant he'd gotten away from her so he could stand in his favourite spot before his spectacular bank of viewports and brood in private and stare out through what was not quite yet his window of woe, but which was fast becoming his window of malcontent whenever things particularly disconcerted him.
The numbing agent the woman had used on him had already worn off. Grievous lifted a hand to his face and gingerly felt about his wound with one fingertip. He'd lied to her about the discomfort it'd been causing him. He'd been feeling stabbing pains that had been getting steadily worse for the past two days. The cut was still very sore even now, but it was only the residual soreness of a wound that had been well tended and was finally starting to heal. And the swelling had already subsided considerably. There was space again between the underside of his faceplate and skin.
His own dishonesty bothered him. He had no idea of why he'd felt the need to lie. It didn't make any sense to him. Part of his duty as a good soldier was to keep himself in the best fighting condition possible and look after himself or ensure that other people did so. He hadn't done that, had even gone out of his way to behave otherwise. Had he always been so difficult when it came to routine medical concerns, so uncooperative, as the human had charged? Grievous didn't think so, but couldn't remember for sure. He did know that he had a large family befitting his status, a lot of offspring and numerous wives. He wouldn't have that if his disposition had ever been in any way suspect…would he?
Grievous trailed his finger over beneath his eye, absently rubbing the skin. The woman had touched him with her bare hands. He hadn't expected that. Nobody had touched him since before his accident, not really, not even the Geonosians, who were always dickering around with his eyes and who invariably used something—an applicator, delicate instruments—between him and their large, naturally armoured fingers. They only put their hands on him directly when they needed their sure, strong grips to move around some of his heavier droid components, and touching his droid body was not touching him at all in Grievous's opinion, since the tactile sense his machine self experienced was nothing like real feeling, it was all just variable pressure and the detection of movement and temperature gradients. He sometimes made the link and interpreted warmth as pleasant because he still recalled enjoyable times spent basking in the sunlight and dozing before a good fire on a chilly evening, but otherwise there was nothing—never any pleasure to be gotten from the sensors strewn across his exterior, and no pain, either. The sensual connections had all been broken. Except for the flesh about his eyes. He still felt there.
The cyborg shifted from foot to foot with rare distress. What agitated him most was that he was sure he'd experienced sensations similar to what Lissa's unwitting probing had engendered before and he couldn't remember that either, neither the circumstances nor the time frame, nothing at all. He ran through the inventory of personal memories left to him. Her soft human fingers had seemed so small and weak and she'd used them very gently, almost tenderly. Was it just that it'd been a woman's hands on him that troubled him so? No, of course not. He loved having females touch him. And in any case she'd acted as a physician should, her conduct entirely professional, and he'd never minded medical staff of either sex handling him before.
Well, he'd probably remember sooner or later. In the meantime, he'd been tasked with a new system and species to conquer, five heavily populated planets in all, the lot of them rich with mineral resources, the outermost planets and some of the moons equally promising yet still untapped. His latest intelligence indicated that the system inhabitants were fighters who'd been swift to protect their wealth before. Grievous's troops would get a good workout this time.
The instant the cyborg's thoughts swung onto the subject of formulating battle plans, all his distress and unhappiness, his vague confusion and turmoil vanished as if a relay had suddenly switched over in his mind and he forgot all about it. He stepped forward and began to pace, his attention redirected, looking through the viewports at his ships keeping station nearby and pondering how best to use them and all the other forces under his command. The memory he'd been struggling for, that of his infant children happily gurgling as they patted over his part-closed eyes and cheeks with their tiny hands when he put his face down close to them, sank safely back beyond retrieval once more. He'd become General Grievous the Supreme Commander and Separatist leader and Jedi-killer again. Nothing else.
While Grievous strode about his quarters and contemplated the logistics of waging war, his personal physician went about her own business many decks below him. She'd decided to tarry awhile, since she was aboard anyway, and have a look at the classified data she'd just uploaded into her office computer. She went to the nearby mess to get a big cup of the hot beverage the Neimoidians favoured and which had who-knew-what in it—she sure didn't because she'd learned early on never to inquire about the actual composition of any Neimoidian food—returned to her office, settled comfortably in at her work station, and pulled up one of the new files, a huge one full of graphics. Finally, a detailed three-dimensional look at exactly what had been done to the General to integrate his droid components and the command center of his remaining organic self! She'd only gotten to see his brain's surface features to date, nothing of what was going on within the tissues themselves.
She studied the 3-D scans of the right hemisphere first, the side where the most elaborate implants had been sited. Now and then, she referenced her implant schematics and mapping charts of normal Kaleesh brain function to keep straight in her own mind how the various alien workings were arranged, and soon had a good grasp of how his motor functions were being channelled and augmented. She looked over the left side scans next, not so much going on over there, just a lot of hard-wired connections snaking away down into the cylindrical housing that also contained his spinal cord and the big blood vessels servicing his brain and facial remnants. There looked to be a little scarring damage just beneath the surface, too, and then some more, showing up like tiny dark nodules. Odd… And here was another one, suspended as though—
Lissa suddenly sat up much straighter. She rotated the graphic until it presented a dorsal view and stacked a batch of the upper horizontal cross sections, superimposing them. Two tight clusters of the nodules now showed, several dozen in all. She consulted her charts again. The spots were concentrated in the areas listed as pertaining to memory and aggression.
The woman drummed her fingers against the sides of her keyboard. Well, this was certainly strange. There was no possibility that the damage was random, not with such precise patterning evident when one saw it all at once. She tried to get a better enlargement of one of the nodules and it still looked exactly like what she'd thought it was, just a knot of scar tissue, almost spherical in form, and very small. If it'd been on the surface instead of within the tissues, even Nagas probably wouldn't have bothered removing it when he did his occasional organic scrub-work on Grievous's brain. She supposed it must have something to do with the cyborg's integration into his current form, yet honestly, what could deliberate damage to his memory have to do with learning to operate a droid body? Maybe he'd experienced some horrible trauma before his operation that had psychologically crippled him so badly that repressing certain events was the only way to heal him. She was just guessing, though. And it didn't explain the scarring elsewhere.
Something else to ask the Geonosians about, Lissa decided. They obviously didn't mind her knowing since she'd been cleared to look at the data. There was probably a perfectly good explanation for what she saw that had to do with Grievous's Kaleesh neurology.
She resecured the files and packed it up a while later and returned to the droid tender until she next had to report for battle duty. It would be the battle Grievous had been thinking on even as she was making her discoveries, finalizing his campaign plans with his damaged mind.
TBC
