Chapter 3 – Contractual Talks
The day after his adventure on Marku, General Grievous left his fleet again and took a task group out to meet an incoming convoy of Neimoidian vessels. There was absolutely no operational requirement for him to rendezvous with the convoy, nor had the Neimoidians requested an escort. The only reason Grievous went out to meet them halfway was to see the Neimoidian leader, Nute Gunray, squirm.
The General knew full well that Viceroy Gunray despised him, but even he would have been surprised by the depths of disgust his very existence engendered. In many ways, Grievous was every Neimoidian's worst nightmare brought to life: A droid that had somehow acquired free will and gained authority over the living. The Viceroy's entire staff loathed and feared Grievous to some degree, to the point where they often referred to him simply as 'that creature' whenever they spoke of him amongst themselves. Nute Gunray had an even more unflattering private moniker for Grievous. He always thought of the alien cyborg as 'the abomination'.
When Gunray learned that the abomination was coming out to meet him on this particular day, he was so upset that he couldn't even finish his morning meal. He'd been expecting at least two more days of peace before he'd have to deal with the horrible cyborg and now that peace was shattered. It was intolerable, and so unfair too, thought Gunray, that he was still suffering the General's harassment just because of a little slip of the tongue made months ago during their first meeting on Geonosis. How could he have been expected to know that the abomination had some psychotic craziness in him about being mistaken for a droid, and really, what did Grievous expect people to think when they saw him?
The Neimoidian slunk off to try and find a more impressive formal outfit to hide within and to round up his aide and ruin his day as well.
When Grievous came aboard, he made his entrance the way he always did when dealing with Gunray, stretched upright to his full imposing height so he could look down on the tall Neimoidian and striding haughtily and fast to make his flowing cape ripple back off his impressive armoured shoulders. Gunray received him sourly.
"This is an unexpected pleasure, General," the Neimoidian lied.
"Yes, it is," Grievous agreed. "Forgive my eagerness, Viceroy, but when I learned that you were near and thought of sending your troops into battle, I could not wait to take charge of them a second longer."
Gunray was so incensed by the abomination's smug proprietary tone that his hatred for him momentarily flared even brighter than his fear. "You'd better take care with my ships," he blustered warningly. "There are some brave men on those crews."
That was a laugh, thought Grievous. He hadn't met a Neimoidian soldier yet who'd struck him as being anything better than walking cannon fodder. He wished he could tell Gunray exactly what he thought of his so-called brave men, but was too mindful of his superior, Count Dooku's, sharp insistence that he not antagonize the Viceroy beyond reason. The Neimoidians' Trade Federation was just too valuable a player. Theirs had been the first organization to come under the sway of Dooku and Lord Sidious, and they still supplied the bulk of the ordnance and vessels under Grievous's command.
Even Dooku couldn't prevent the General from exercising his right to inspect said ships and weapons first-hand, however. As he and Gunray walked along, Grievous let his body relax into its more usual partial slouch and lowered his head and extended his neck. He knew perfectly well that the posture gave him something of the aspect of a stalking predator and that it made Gunray nervous, and he enjoyed the instinctive flinches he could sometimes scare out of the rubbery alien leader if he moved just so with sufficient menace.
Grievous spent the rest of the day shuttling from ship to ship, meeting with the new captains and their executive officers, looking over their operational setups and armament, getting a sense of what and who he now controlled and could expect of these particular Neimoidians and their machines. Nute Gunray and his repulsively fawning aide trailed after him throughout, becoming more and more annoying, until he finally ditched them with the excuse of needing to return to his command vessel. The Neimoidians let him go, happily, and made no attempt to extend any after-hour social niceties. They most especially did not try to invite him back for dinner. They knew that the alien cyborg neither ate nor slept, just one of the many reasons they found him such an unsettling, exhausting, horrid creature to deal with.
While Gunray and company recovered, Grievous remained on duty—he was always on duty. As the hours wore on and the watches aboard his ship turned over during what passed as a night, he read over all the new vessels' specs and their maintenance records and their crew listings. He studied his background research on the ships' classes, their history of usage and their construction, and fixed all the points he thought significant or of potential use in his mind. The work came easily to him. He'd always had an excellent memory, a good head for detail, an eye for the ebb and flow of battle. It was all part of what had made him such an outstanding warlord during the days when he was still flesh and blood and savagely decimating his enemies, and what had most attracted the attention of the people who'd gone on to oversee his resurrection from near-death and make him over into the half-machine being he was now.
They'd left him all of it, all his analytical skills and keen intellect and his cunning and his love of warfare, all the qualities that still made him the perfect strategist and tactician, the perfect general. In other ways, the ways that made him Kaleesh and a man, he'd been profoundly damaged. He still remembered that he had a family on Kalee, awaiting his return, he just didn't care anymore. He no longer prayed and he'd forgotten the faces of his ancestors. Grievous did not know that the people he now worked for had tried to erase him as a personality. He understood only that he felt constantly driven to conquer and kill.
Fortunately, it was easy to keep himself occupied. There was a whole galaxy out there, with thousands of worlds and species left to master, and Grievous felt compelled to learn everything he could about each and every one of them. Dooku had already assigned him a new world in need of subjugation, the planet Damerung. Grievous turned his prodigiously enhanced mind onto the subject of its overthrow, and by the time he and the Neimoidians reached his main fleet, his battle plans for its invasion were already drawn up and near-complete, with only slight adjustments left to be made subject to the latest intelligence. It had been a good couple of days. Now he felt up for some recreation.
Grievous turned the final integration of the new Trade Federation ships over to his droid officers and carried on with his task group to find the droid tender he'd diverted off and left orders with several days ago. The tender had once been owned by the Intergalactic Banking Clan, used by them as something of a giant movable warehouse for the repossession of goods on those unfortunate occasions when IBC clients reneged on their payments. Its cavernous storage bays had been easy to convert into specialized labs and repair shops, and it now served to help maintain and constantly upgrade the mechanical troops of the Separatists' droid armies instead.
Grievous's timing proved impeccable. The droid tender's crew was still engaged in its salvage operation. He ordered his own ships into position and boarded the enormous support vessel.
He found the crew unloading all they'd looted into one of the lower bays that was still being used for its original intended purpose. The human female, largely undamaged, he was satisfied to note, had been herded off to one side with her collection of droids and was being guarded by several battle droids. She looked scared and utterly bewildered and was clutching the little brown flying droid he remembered seeing near his crash site in her arms, but there was also a hint of steely outrage about her, waiting to be expressed once she'd assessed her situation a little longer. Grievous came to a stop close by and watched the proceedings with interest, waiting for the woman to notice him.
As soon as she did spot him, she froze, then dropped the small brown droid onto the back of the six-legged one, ordered the lot of her machines to be absolutely still and quiet, and resolutely pushed past the battle droid guards and began hurrying over to him. She had some grit in her. Most people in like circumstances, Grievous knew, would've been much happier showing him their backs.
"It is you, isn't it?" Lissa exclaimed as she came up. "From Marku? Please, do you know what's happening here? Can you do anything about it?"
"I orchestrated it."
She recoiled as if struck, jamming to a halt. "What?"
"We have need of your services. From now on, you'll be working under the auspices of the Confederacy Of Independent Systems."
"The what? Who?"
Her confusion was beginning to irritate him. "You'll be working for me," he simplified.
That one sank in. "You? You're doing this? You're kidnapping me?" He watched as she wrestled with the revelation, her affective human face contorting. "How could you do this to me?" she quavered. "We helped you!"
"And now you'll help some more," Grievous added, meanly, and her expression hardened again. Better, he thought. He despised weakness. Weakness was boring. It was much more entertaining to assert his will over the strong-minded.
Lissa was shaking her head, stubbornly.
"No, I don't think so," she said in response to his words.
"You're refusing my offer?"
She gave him a dirty, sullen look. "I guess I am."
As expected. He snapped his head up and strode past her to the nearby wall without another word. There was a shielded viewport set there, a big one. Grievous hit the control that opened the blast shutters.
A starred vista filled with huge lurking starships revealed itself. Lissa joined Grievous at the viewport, walking with slow, dragging steps. She looked over the vessels, bristling with weaponry, recognized what they were and recognized the small planetoid they were pointed at, and slumped a little and her face fell.
"What is all this?" she asked, wonderingly.
"My army."
"Your army? Yours, personally? Who are you, anyway?"
The General's temper, always short, snapped its tether. "Are you completely stupid or is this an act?" he snapped at her.
The woman drew herself up with wounded dignity. "I'm apolitical," she said. "I don't follow the news."
"Then you're a fool."
Grievous produced the ops padd he'd been holding all along. It was a considerably bigger instrument than the usual scanner padd, with a much larger screen, and the cyborg clapped it up against the viewport with one hand where Lissa couldn't help but see it. He lifted his other arm and spoke into the communicator embedded in its forearm, already keyed and open.
"Fire control, link targeting image to my padd," he said. "Begin magnification, standard increments, three second intervals."
A picture of Marku appeared on the ops padd's screen, a picture that rapidly changed to provide an even closer view of the planetoid, then closer again. Lissa looked nervously from the ops screen image to the unaltered scene visible through the viewport, back at the ops image. She understood that the picture must be coming from one of the ships close to Marku, being transmitted at the General's behest.
"Do you see it?" Grievous asked in his low, husky voice.
The ops image continued to magnify. She could see geographical features now, a range of hills, plains…
Grievous spoke again. "Will you work for us?"
More details now. Lissa saw a spray of dots, which resolved into an aerial view of familiar simple huts, then—
"Hey!" she exclaimed.
The cyborg's eyes narrowed, glinting within the shadowed sockets of his mask. "Will you work for us?" he breathed, almost whispering.
She could see individual Markusians now, clustering together. They must've been terrified by her abduction.
"Leave them alone!" Lissa cried. "They've got nothing to do with me! Don't hurt them!"
"Fire control—"
"No! Wait! Stop!" The woman was so frantic that she clutched her own head in her panic. "All right! All right, I'll cooperate!" she yelped.
Grievous stared at her, coldly calculating. Then, "Abort primary target. Select secondary target. Fire at will."
A bloom of fire emerged at once from one of the giant warships facing Marku. The outermost of the planetoid's three small satellites abruptly seemed to lurch in its orbit and began to come apart. Chunks of it started to explode out in all directions.
Grievous left the human female sagged up against the viewport to think things over. "That was a nice moon," Lissa whimpered to herself as he walked away.
TBC
