I'm blushing with pleasure over the kind words y'all keep sending my way and am glad you're enjoying this version of General Grievous. Thank Grievous himself if he pleases you. I find him such an extraordinarily vivid character that my only real writing concern is to try and find adequate words to describe him as he trots about doing his thing in the transdimensional closet in my mind. I really hope you like him in this chapter. He kind of took over for a bit and it didn't come out anything like I'd originally intended. This looks to be a lengthy story and it'll be a good while yet before Grievous even begins to suspect that he's been manipulated. I still have to get Dooku back (next chapter) to unwittingly set that end of it in motion and…well, hopefully, it'll all make sense when you eventually read it. As for Lissa and pals, a few more details about their backgrounds should soon reveal themselves (such as her age). Don't forget that this story's still wide open for plotting ideas. If there's anyone in particular you'd like to see Grievous have a run-in with or something special you'd like to see him do, suggest away!

THE ESSENCES OF LIFE

Chapter 4 – A Special Way Of Going

General Grievous was hunting.

He ran hunched in a partial stoop, legs pumping rhythmically with controlled and endless energy. His eyes glittered as they scanned ahead. His every sensor was on highest alert. With his long powerful limbs, sleek narrow head, and bony-appearing frame, he looked a little like a giant coursing hound on the move, idling still as he loped along, yet ready to uncoil and explode into violent action the instant he spotted his prey. A turn in the corridor came up and Grievous slowed into his smooth running walk. His head lowered further and twisted about. It wasn't spoor that he sought, he was listening for voices. The prey he was hunting was Jedi.

Grievous hated all Jedi with a singular blinding passion that sometimes threatened to overwhelm him. In their capacity as the enforcers of the Republic, the Jedi had once brought sanctions and famine to his world, for which he'd never forgiven them. Later, they'd targeted him too and almost succeeded in tearing him apart, and Grievous thought it a prime, deserved irony that in their attempt to assassinate him, they'd only sown the seeds of their own destruction. Dooku had been correct—it was indeed Grievous's duty to provide leadership and win battles for the Confederacy. That was his primary function. But he also had a secondary duty, one which Grievous himself had eagerly sanctioned. He'd been designed, built and trained specifically to kill Jedi.

Count Dooku himself had provided the training. Years ago, the elegant old wolf had trod the halls of the Jedi Temple as a respected Jedi Master, but the Order had proved far too limiting for his boundless skills and ambitions. He'd turned to the arcane teachings of the Dark Side instead and found the power he sought at the side of Lord Sidious, his Dark Master, and a new name and role as the apprentice Darth Tyranus. It was more properly Tyranus, the Sith Lord, not the former Jedi, who'd taught Grievous the arts of fighting with the Jedi's own favoured weapon. And it was Tyranus who had tried, and failed, to ignite the Dark Side of the Force within his alien cyborg student.

Grievous still had no sensitivity to the Force. He didn't care. The Sith Lords and Jedi could keep their Force. Grievous had his near-indestructible droid components and his enhanced natural talents and his hatred and his lust to kill.

It was a strange paradox that it was only during his hunting expeditions that Grievous ever took fierce honest pride in the machine body that now housed him, the only time that he ever felt fully alive…

The low crumping sound of a distant barrage came to Grievous in the corridor—his troops outside the office building, cleaning up the last pockets of resistance in the Damerung city. The cyborg's sense of hearing was largely artificial, which gave him the option of adjusting it to a considerable degree. He did that now, tuning out the low bass sounds of battle, upping his volume sensitivity, listening for the common frequencies and patterns of speech. His body became absolutely still and locked in place, face thrust forward and sweeping very slowly from side to side with eerie, mechanized precision as he utilized the sensor panels attached to either side of his skull.

There! Just a few words, but words nonetheless, still so faint that they were barely detectable. Grievous fixed a bearing on the sound's direction, reset his hearing to its usual parameters, and unlocked his body. He began to run again with fluid grace, much faster than before. Part of the building had been bombed and was in ruins, the floors torn open here and there, the hallways part-blocked with piles of debris. None of it mattered, none of it stopped him. His big grasping feet could seize and propel him over any terrain, even up and down walls, if need be, and he could leap and scramble with all fours as adroitly as he could run.

It only took him a few minutes more to locate the Jedi in a subbasement level and there were three of them, two good-sized males and a much smaller female, all humanoid in form. As soon as they saw him, one of the men began coming forward, already drawing his lightsaber, and the other two shrank back. Grievous thought it likely that he had a hero on his hands, some fool willing to try and engage him alone in a misguided attempt to buy the others time.

"Going somewhere?" Grievous remarked as he came up, striding upright at full height. The Jedi who wanted to fight him was a Vurk, he saw now, a tall creature as well, but a lot of that was just a sweeping head crest. The Vurk took up a stance in the middle of the floor space, blocking the cyborg's way.

"It stops here, Grievous," he said.

The General blinked, surprised. "You know me?"

"We all know you. Butcher."

So. He already had a reputation. Excellent. Grievous kept his gaze fixed on the Vurk while he swung his body through a lithesome arc, into position. He reached slowly to his waist and removed two of the lightsabers affixed there and ignited them. "Which shall it be?" he said conversationally. "Red or blue? I give you the choice of the instrument of your death." The Jedi said nothing, merely looked disdainful. "The blue then," Grievous decided. "It'll go so well with your blood."

They clashed, by mutual consent, seconds later, and it only took seconds more for Grievous to determine that the Vurk was a purely defensive fighter. Easily beatable, in other words. He went to work with a single weapon.

Precision, speed, power—those were the catchwords that best described the cyborg's style as he danced about his opponent with his lightsaber humming, his processors softly whirring as they moved his heavy body through its perfect simulation of supple life. It was only the Jedi's precognitive use of the Force that made them equal for a time. Grievous could strike faster than the human eye could follow, dart and flex in ways no living being could. He had other advantages, too, but didn't feel the need for them for this duello. He knew that he could wear the Vurk down with little more effort than he'd expend in a simple workout.

The Jedi began to grow weary. He was a good fighter, stolid and brave, but had never met anyone who attacked with such relentless aggression. It took all his skill and concentration to parry the cyborg's attacks and in the back of his mind was the knowledge that Grievous could wield several weapons simultaneously, a demoralizing notion. The Jedi's sides began heaving in and out with exhaustion and his broad mouth gaped as he gasped for breath. His spirit was still willing, and his loyalty true, but there was only so much that Vurk flesh and blood could do against an opponent who never tired and whose every blow was so crushingly strong.

They looked each other in the eye and Grievous saw that the Vurk was already contemplating defeat and that the match was over. The cyborg reactivated his second lightsaber and got serious. Two more strikes, a third, and already he'd knocked the Jedi's weapon out of his tired failing hand. He put the other lightsaber straight through the Vurk's heart, a decent death for an adversary who'd tried, and took to his durasteel heels to hunt down the rest of his prey before the Jedi's body even finished twitching.

The two remaining Jedi had disappeared from sight early on during the duel, but Grievous had no trouble locating them again. One of them was leaving a blood trail.

They'd managed to get down into an even lower level and were trying to recoup in one of the big rooms containing some of the giant machines that serviced the building. Grievous spotted them in a wan well of illumination thrown by emergency lighting, the woman kneeling and the man standing immediately before her and leaning down on her slightly; a pair of humans, or close enough. They both straightened up again as soon as they saw the cyborg's skeletal figure emerging out of the gloom, the yellow eyes glowing like lit coal, the crimson spear of the lightsaber igniting.

To his surprise, the woman came at him at once and alone. It seemed to be his day for encountering heroes. But this one, unlike the Vurk, wasn't worth his while. Grievous perceived at once that she was young and inexperienced and slashed her contemptuously aside with but a half-dozen strokes. It was the man he was after, the older Jedi, the one that could make it a contest between them.

The human had backed into a sort of deep alcove between two air handling units and was leaning against the wall. He was the injured one that had been dripping blood. Grievous could see it saturating one trouser leg above the man's left knee and running down the boot beneath and puddling on the floor.

"Come out, Jedi," he called. "Face me!"

"I'm not making it that easy for you, Grievous," the man replied. "Why don't you come in here and let a real warrior show you how it's done?"

Grievous made a sound midway between a snort of disgust and a low growl. Go into that crevice to dig the scum out like so much vermin? Hardly! He began to stalk from one side to the other before the opening to the alcove, glaring in at the man, getting mad, needing to move to contain his rising furore. The Jedi watched him, a little disappointed. He'd hoped to lure the big cyborg into the confined space to try and stab him through one eye and on into his brain; it was the only vulnerable spot he could see on the armoured body. But that wasn't going to happen now. He could tell that Grievous would rather take the air handlers apart to get at him than squeeze in after him, and he was getting so weak, too weak to even defend himself against the maddened creature much longer.

"Jedi filth. Coward!" Grievous taunted as he paced back and forth. "Is this what you learnt at the Temple, to cower in corners? To run and hide when confronted by superiority?"

From the alcove against the wall, the cornered Jedi looked out at his death raging before him and prepared himself. His eyes shone with quiet courage and devotion and pain and an immense sorrow that it had come to this, that the galaxy was tearing itself apart and for what?; even a flash of brief pity for the twisted meld of flesh and metal that the enemy had sent against him. General Grievous saw none of it. He was too furious because the Jedi would not come out and fight him.

At last he went to the body of the woman he'd slain and put a foot over her head. With great deliberation, making sure that the Jedi saw everything he did, he clenched his metal talons tight and began to lift.

"Stop that!" the man exclaimed.

Grievous crouched lower over the torn corpse and the face he showed the Jedi was pure evil.

"Your padawan, was she?" he sneered. "Pity you weren't a better teacher."

With a cry of hurt revulsion, the man rushed out and Grievous leapt gleefully forward to meet him. But it wasn't the fight he'd been hoping for. The Jedi was far more seriously injured than he'd thought and staggered, wounded leg threatening to buckle, every time he turned to his left; a worthless opponent. Grievous, disgusted and angered anew, cut the man down in a trice, then needlessly swung again, dismembering the body as it fell. It helped assuage his rage a little.

Once he'd calmed down, Grievous retraced his steps to collect the lightsabers from all three of the Jedi he'd just killed. The Vurk's weapon had an unusual hilt that seemed partially inlaid with petrified wood. The cyborg turned it over and over as he inspected it, pleased by its uniqueness and its heft and feel. It would make a fine trophy.

He forced his way through the wreckage of the building's damaged north face and soon rejoined the droid troops mustering in the convenient open space of one of city's parks. His officers had little more to add to what they'd told him before he'd gone off to hunt the Jedi. The city was now theirs, its officials taken captive, and all military resistance planet-wide had been quelled. Grievous's job, as he saw it, was now over. All that was left was to wait for the civilians to start arriving and turn over the occupied world's policing and control, and what became of Damerung after that didn't much interest him. His understanding was that it would become a Techno Union holding, though.

Grievous shuttled back up to his command ship feeling unsatisfied. The inhabitants of Damerung hadn't put up much of a fight and it hadn't been much of a campaign. The Republic evidently didn't value the planet overly and had sent very few forces, and the only Jedi commanders they'd managed to locate and isolate in the end had provided Grievous with only mediocre sport at best. If this was an example of the sort of rabble he'd be facing in the future, he ought to be able to slice his way into the very heart of Republic space in next to no time.

Count Dooku was still busy with his own affairs at Brentaal IV and Mirgoshir and unavailable to take Grievous's briefing on the battle's conclusion. The General left a message summarizing events instead. Reviewing operational reports kept him occupied for a while after that, but Grievous was frankly already bored with the whole subject of Damerung. He needed a new world to subjugate, a fresh challenge! Unfortunately, Dooku's future plans were evidently dependent to some degree on the outcome at Brentaal IV, and he'd been unwilling to discuss possible alternatives with Grievous, leaving him in limbo.

Grievous ran over a list of topics and projects that he kept on the backburners in his mind—potential busywork, for when he needed a change of pace. The Marku woman's name popped up. Ah yes, those files she'd refused to open. She'd never know how close he'd come to killing her for trying to protect her data or that she owed her life to a garbled incoming transmission received at just the right distracting moment. He turned to his computer, accessing the requisite information.

To his incredible annoyance, he discovered that his people still hadn't gotten the secure files open. He couldn't believe it. A whole department at his disposal and they hadn't managed to crack a couple of simple codes devised by a human female. This was ridiculous! And since he had time to spare and was in such a bloody-minded state anyway, he decided all at once to fix the problem himself.

Back to his shuttle and over to the droid tender. Grievous had turned the human over to Nagas the Patriot, the Geonosian leader of the biodroid and heuristics science team aboard the tender, with instructions that Nagas was to employ her as he saw fit and get what use he could out of her. He hadn't thought about her since and imagined that the Geonosians had put her to work slaving away in some lab.

He found her nowhere near a lab. She was sitting relaxing in one of the civilians' lounges with Nagas himself and several of the other scientists. And to Grievous's now extreme annoyance, she still had two of her droids with her, the small brown one standing in her lap and looking up at her face and patting her cheeks with its little hands, and the big, long-bodied, bronze-coloured one lying with its six legs folded up beneath it on the floor beside her chair like some insectile pet. All of her unnecessary equipment and droids and vehicles were supposed to have been confiscated, but Grievous, with his unique insight into the logical stupidity of droid thinking, thought he knew what had happened. The battle droids in charge had been unable to classify the two custom jobs and had been incapable of proceeding with the sequence of confiscation without completing the step of classification. Either that or the woman had somehow talked her way into keeping the droids, an even more irritating prospect.

The Geonosians had all turned their snouts in his direction with calm curiosity as soon as he came into the lounge, and after a pause, Grievous afforded them a curt nod. If it hadn't been for them, he'd've long ago died or gone insane in a bacta tank. To the woman, he simply made a beckoning gesture before turning and walking out again. As soon as he had her alone out in the corridor, he spun and began advancing on her.

Lissa resignedly let him back her up against the wall. Did everything with him have to do with force and intimidation? Couldn't he just have a nice, normal conversation for once?

"What can I do for you? General Grievous."

"Ah. You've educated yourself," the General replied, tone sarcastic. He put his face down far too close to her own so that once again her field of vision was dominated by his bone-white mask and glittery, yellow-gold eyes. "Are you enjoying your new position?"

"Actually, yes I am," Lissa answered, sounding surprised herself. "I've always wanted to work with the Geonosians."

"Perhaps I should charge you a job-finder's fee."

"I don't like the job that much."

They stared at each other, the cyborg expressionless, the human toying with a feeble grin she didn't quite dare express.

"Or perhaps you would do me a small courtesy in exchange," Grievous went on. "A matter of releasing certain files, for instance."

She looked puzzled for a moment, then said, "Oh. Those old things."

"Yes. Those old things," he repeated, ominously.

Lissa was now regarding the alien commander with some dismay. "General, those files, they're…confidental. It's just private research I'd hoped to patent and sell someday, for commercial use. It has no military applications at all."

"I'll be the judge of that."

"I absolutely promise that you'd find it all a waste of time. Wouldn't you rather think about more important things? Like improving your failsafe features?"

"My what!" He looked about to hit her, instantly infuriated by her presumption and reference to the humiliating incident on Marku. Lissa scrambled to deflect his outrage.

"I—I spoke to the Geonosians about what happened," she stuttered, "and they explained it a little, what they've installed and, um, programmed, and—and the parameters they're using. And frankly, General, it could be better. You ought to have a two-tier system of failsafes."

"Two-tier," he echoed flatly, glaring at her.

"Well, yes. It's quite possible, for example, that a simple filter could've saved you conk—, er, being in the state you were in when I first saw you. A filter designed for your breathing aperture, I mean, set to deploy in a compromised atmosphere."

"Deploy," repeated Grievous, and his eyes narrowed suspiciously. "Have you done military work before?"

"Er, some," she admitted.

"For the Republic?"

"Oh, just—contracts here and there. I can't talk much about it. You know."

Grievous did know and he was getting pretty steamed. But he also wanted to know more about the failsafes. Slowly, he straightened up and said, "Continue."

Lissa felt much more confident without his standing stooped over her and breathing in her face. Her voice became more animated and she began using her hands the way she was wont to when in full spiel. "There's another thing," she said. "Think of what might happen if you ever had to ditch into water. Your body is so heavy. You can't swim or depend on the usual flotation devices."

"My chest is pressurized. I can survive without breathing for several minutes."

"But if you sank, General!" And now her tone was just as ominous as his own had been. "The failsafe you have now would kick you into torpor and protect you for a while, an hour, say, but after that you'd start to suffocate, unconscious or not. Lying on the bottom."

She made a stabbing motion towards the floor with one forefinger as she finished her words and Grievous's own fingers twitched on the edge of his cape, subconsciously pulling it a little closer. Choking to death while unaware would be a terrible way for a warrior to die. And the scenario was not implausible; the shuttle crash that had almost killed him had been over water and it was only by pure good fortune that his smashed body had been recovered before he'd drowned. Grievous most assuredly never wanted to risk drowning again.

"Nagas never said anything about any of this," he said slowly.

"Well, he wouldn't, would he? Geonosis has so little standing water that the hazards of ditching wouldn't even occur to most Geonosians. It's not a usual danger for them, drowning, except maybe in one of their flash floods. They just don't think about it."

"I presume they do now since you've already discussed this with them."

"I have," Lissa confirmed, "and we agree that you should definitely have some sort of rebreather, just in case. There are already several good models available that could be adapted. Even the Jedi use them as part of their standard kit, a pretty good one, too."

Do they now, thought Grievous. A pity he hadn't known that earlier, when he'd retrieved the lightsabers. He looked down at the eager emotion suffusing the woman's face and felt a sudden vague discomfit without exactly knowing why, but the feeling passed as quickly as it had arrived. He considered what she'd said instead, mulling it all over briefly.

"Tell Nagas to write up what you've discussed as a proposal," he decided. "He knows the routine."

"Already done, sir," she informed him. "He was going to submit it tomorrow."

"Fine. I'll make my decision reference any upgrades after I read it. You may go."

"Thank you, General!"

She took off like a shot and again Grievous felt a brief uneasiness, but couldn't place its cause. He walked off, at a slow pace for once, hunched, letting his cloak fall forward to envelope him. So his little salvage project had worked for the military, had she? That would explain certain things, her ready servility for one. But background intelligence would have to take a good close look at her now. And if Grievous sensed even a hint of duplicity in her, the slightest intimation that she was concealing information that could be valuable to the Separatists, he swore he would force it out of her with his own bare hands.

Thinking about security checks tweaked his memory at last and brought him to a sudden crashing halt.

BLAST the wretched woman! She'd completely distracted him from the matter of the secure files!

TBC