This is a bit of a weird science chapter. Just a little warning for those of you who are squeamish or would just as soon not think about certain aspects of Grievous's being…
THE ESSENCES OF LIFE
Chapter 5 – Design Flaws
General Grievous never troubled Lissa again about her secure files and for that she was supremely grateful. After a week, she thought it worth a try to make a few timid inquiries about recovering them, doing her best to make it all sound very casual and of no great importance, and Nagas, whose blasé disregard for all matters cryptic would have made a security officer cry, said that he'd see what he could do. A few days later, he got her files back for her. Lissa was amazed to find all her data still intact and undamaged. She'd been almost sure that Grievous would have ordered it destroyed out of sheer malicious spite. After thinking it over, she decided that he must have accepted her reassurances after all, resecured the files, and never said another word about them to anyone from then on.
In the meantime, there was her new life aboard the droid tender to get used to. Geonosians comprised the bulk of the living contingent aboard the vessel, enough of them that almost all of the various Aristocrat classes were represented, as well as a host of the more common drone castes, almost a mini-hive colony in itself. There were also a few other alien teams from Separatist worlds she was unfamiliar with, and the ship itself was manned by a mixed crew of Muuns, Neimoidians and droids. Lissa was the only human in residence. She couldn't have been more of a minority if she'd tried.
Lissa found herself rather liking the Geonosians. They were quite the mad little scientists, their morality appalling by human standards, yet hardly unexpected since they treated their own selves with the same callous disregard. It was rare for any of them to be cared for when they become sick or badly injured, they were just disposed of, and the drones were even more expendable, gotten rid of sometimes on an Aristocrat's mere dissatisfaction or whim alone. Geonosians had a reputation for being xenophobes, but Lissa's experience was that shared interests had a way of overcoming prejudices and it was no different this time. It also helped that they seemed to find the very notion of their prize creation, Grievous, catching her and making her serve him utterly hilarious, and whenever she told them about her kidnapping and got to the part about the General blowing up Marku's moon out of pure meanness just to make a point, they'd just about fall off their chairs shrieking with creaking laughter. Lissa still didn't get it, it seemed to be some cultural thing, but was more than happy to be the butt of their jokes if it meant they'd accept her more easily.
She was delighted to learn that Nagas and one of his Citizen underlings, Attenbro, had both had a personal hand in designing and building Grievous back on Geonosis. They told her a little about it, answering all her questions, and seemed pleased by her professional interest in their work. In turn, they openly admired her droids, Trigger and Gregory, especially after she installed the new language packs that made them instantly fluent in Geonosian, and were quite tolerant of having them around and letting them assist her, treating them for the most part with the same lackadaisical latitude that they extended to their drones. Trigger still did most of the muscle work for Lissa and Gregory found a new calling in becoming her personal translator, hovering about and pompously calling out the occasional technical terms that her own more limited translating headset couldn't handle. All the Geonosians she got to know understood Basic and several of them spoke it decently enough, albeit with weirdly slurred, strongly guttural accents, so they all got on quite well together.
General Grievous decided to undergo all the upgrades they'd recommended, and Nagas, who was enjoying the novelty of being able to discuss important matters with a female (those of his own species being as dumb as drones) and who'd taken quite the shine to Lissa as a result, gave her permission to observe the procedure. Lissa was a tad leery of Grievous's possible reaction at seeing her again, but needn't have worried. All he did when he eventually showed up on his scheduled appointment day was fire a single poisonous glance her way, which made her start guiltily despite herself, then ignore her. Lissa heaved a silent sigh of relief and made a point after that of remaining in the background and out of the cyborg's line of sight, although she insisted on lurking close enough to see all that was going on.
The Geonosians found it easiest to get at Grievous's interior while he was seated in an oversized reclining chair whose general make and operation would, in another universe, have no doubt reminded many people of adventures in dentistry. They flicked on a battery of lights and a sterile field, positioned a couple of carts laden with equipment and parts, and got to work.
The first part of the procedure was purely mechanical, the installing of the chemical filter and rebreather adjacent to the cyborg's breathing aperture hidden amongst the structures that moved and supported his head. They accessed the aperture by first disconnecting the frontal neck struts that functioned in place of the usual humanoid sternomastoid muscles, then turning Grievous's face to one side and tilting the headrest of the chair back as far as it would go, which made the cyborg look as though he were painfully broken-necked even though he technically had no neck to break. Off with the coarse filter already in place to guard against dust and debris, and out with the entire long structure that connected directly with what remained of his respiratory organs. Lissa felt a bit squirmy as she watched the Geonosians pull the thick tube out and wondered what the sensation must be like for Grievous, but then realized that no, of course he wouldn't feel a thing because they were leaving the outer sleeve of the unit in place, it was just the inner portion that they were temporarily removing.
Nagas the Patriot brought the breathing tube over to Lissa for her to examine while the rest of his team carried on. He knew that she was very interested in knowing how they'd managed to create the cyborg's life-like synthetic voice and took considerable pride in showing her the neat trick they'd come up with, the insertion low down in the tube of a little artificial larynx which Grievous operated with his own breathing and which transmitted its vibrational data to the droid vocabulator embedded in his faceplate for processing and integration. The dual system offered Grievous two things no mere droid voice programme alone could yet replicate; the enhancement made by his sniffs, huffs, disdainful snorts and all the other little non-verbal sounds that only a living, breathing organism could generate, and the ability to instantly adjust the volume of his voice from purring whisper to angry roar, not that Lissa had heard him shout yet or ever wanted to, but it was pretty easy for her to imagine that hoarse voice of his raised in a mighty bellow. A neat trick indeed, she thought, although privately she felt a bit disappointed. She'd been hoping to discover a way of giving Gregory the ability to moderate his own rather querulous voice, since, as things currently stood, the little rascal wouldn't know a whisper if it leapt up and bit him in his plushy hinder.
The Geonosians finished with their installation and reconnected the cyborg's neck struts, and prepared for the next portion of his refit, updating the hard-wired programming to operate the new devices. For this, it was easiest to access his brain directly, and Lissa couldn't help but creep a little closer, very keen now to see what was under that elegant alien mask. She already had a pretty good idea of what to expect thanks to her secret scans made back on Marku, but there was nothing quite like seeing such things for oneself!
The faceplate came off first, undone with a few deft turns of what looked incongruously like an ordinary flathead screwdriver that Nagas inserted beneath the flared portion of the mask at the top and bottom. There wasn't much of the alien face left to cover, as it turned out. All that remained was a roughly rectangular section encompassing his eyes, which'd been carefully dissected out complete with all the external skin, tissue and glands left in place and the bony structure beneath left intact to provide attachment for all the delicate sheets of muscle that worked his lids and brows. It rested inside a receptacle lined with synthflesh and carefully shaped to fit snugly against the faceplate and slot neatly into the front of the purely artificial skull that housed his brain.
A second plate recessed into the skull and abutting the facial receptacle and which'd been hidden by the backward sweeping top of the faceplate proved removable in much the same way. Out came Nagas's trusty screwdriver again, to hook into a pair of small sunken slots and lift the plate up. Lissa leaned in, most intrigued. It was an alien brain all right, more narrowly structured and more highly arched than any human brain, and with an intriguing pronounced extra cleft running down either side, yet there were similarities too, enough to suggest some kinship between their species, human and Kalee, in the ways they thought and processed information. The implants were extensive, far more elaborate than anything Lissa had ever seen before, concentrated on the right hemisphere. She couldn't begin to make sense of those just on sight.
Nagas decided to do a little routine organic maintenance while they had Grievous on the figurative table and turned the leadership of the remainder of the procedure over to his colleague Attenbro. The Patriot chatted softly with Lissa in his heavily accented Basic as he worked at the less demanding task of looking for any worrisome areas of inflammation or infection, and inspected all the places where the implants cut into the tissues. He pointed out a few markers as he went, the part of the brain responsible for bodily coordination, which they'd upgraded; another portion that dealt with spatial awareness and pattern recognition, which they'd so far left alone. Occasionally, he'd find a little tab or spot of something he didn't like the look of and would just summarily snip it away or abrade it off. Lissa again got a little fidgety—this was Grievous's brain after all, the seat of his being, that Nagas was so casually nipping away at. She glanced at the Kalee's reduced face, wondering how he felt about what was going on, but he was simply sitting as he had throughout the entire upgrade thus far, stoic and unmoving and with his eyes either closed or partially open with a distant, unfocused expression in them. Probably trying to pretend none of it was even happening, she thought, and felt a hint of sympathy for him. It was the way she'd likely try to cope if she were in his place.
There was a little necrosis at the extreme lower right edge of what remained of the General's face. Nagas expertly lasered away the dead tissue and popped in a piece of synthflesh in its place. Another tiny bit of him gone. It was an ongoing problem, Nagas explained; the blood flow at the outer edges wasn't the best. Sometimes his flesh would regrow to fill in the space, sometimes not. The implants in his eyes also tended to irritate them from time to time, making them weep a little thick matter for a day or two, but that seemed a self-limiting problem which didn't interfere with his vision, so Nagas was disregarding it for now.
The Geonosians worked on Grievous as though he were a piece of meat. Not that they were ever known for their bedside manners, but their cavalier attitude finally bothered Lissa enough that, while they were resealing his skull plate, she went around in front of their patient to speak to him.
"General Grievous? How are you doing?"
His closed eyes snapped open and he actually appeared startled. After a moment, he managed a sort of slow deliberate blink by way of acknowledgement, then closed his eyes again, shutting her out. Talking to him was evidently not part of the routine. Lissa left him alone after that, although she was glad she'd made the effort.
When everything was done, Grievous left without saying a word or looking at anyone, and the Geonosians said nothing to him. Lissa gazed after him thoughtfully, wondering when he'd be in again and whether she'd ever get a peek inside his chest.
As it turned out, she got to see him again much sooner than anyone could have predicted. A few days later, while securing a world named Shartil, General Grievous came to grief.
It went wrong for him right from the start. Shartil was a peaceful, agrarian world in the middle of nowhere, its humanoid inhabitants immersed in cultural pursuits and matters of art and philosophy rather than in fighting invaders. The only reason Grievous was tasked to take the world at all was because of its strategic importance as the only planet within an entire vast sector endowed with a temperate climate and an atmosphere hospitable for most of the species loyal to the Confederacy, a potential way station, in short, for Separatist troops to put down on or use as a gathering and assembly point. Shartil offered not a wit of resistance when Grievous's armies first showed up and conquering the Shartilli turned out to be as simple as shuttling down and telling them that they were now under the protective umbrella of the Confederacy of Independent Systems. Or tried to tell them—they had some sort of ridiculous rule by committee government in place and seemed unable to decide on who should represent them when Grievous demanded that the planetary leaders be brought before him after he landed in what passed as their most noteworthy capital city.
He waited, fretting, by a beautiful conservatory in the garden courtyard attached to a ludicrously over-embellished public building, almost a palace. He'd brought his whole entourage, a troop of battle droids, a dozen of his elite MagnaGuard droids, even a squad apiece of droidekas and super battle droids, and the longer he had to stand there and endure the placid, stupid faces of the Shartilli that kept cringing up to him, pleading with him to wait just a little while longer, please, they'd almost decided, the angrier he got and the more useless the whole show seemed to him, for how could such snivelling cowards even distinguish between a truly magnificent display of force and a simple kick to the backside? To add to his aggravation, one of his newest MagnaGuards, a grey model he'd just finished training up himself not four days ago, suddenly up and keeled over on him, crashing down with not a sputter or hitch of warning. It wasn't the first time it'd happened, either—a different grey had gone down in just the same unexpected way only a week ago. Grievous just about hit the ionosphere. He was so peeved that he called up and personally ordered Nagas to send down a team to get the problem fixed NOW or send the lot of the unreliable new models straight back to Holowan Mechanicals, one or the other.
Grievous strode off by himself to try and calm down. He stalked through the conservatory greenhouse, down all its paths and past the magnificent collections, the rare exotics, the twinkling fountains, unseeing and furious, frustrated by his mission and Shartil itself, which wouldn't fight him. He stood for a while by a gushing waterfall that dewed his ceramic duranium face and found no comfort, and took to his feet again to do it all over, needing to move. Gradually, some of his emotion and aggression bled away and he was able to return to the entrance of the conservatory in a more reasonable state of mind. It helped that Nagas's team had already arrived and were diligently working on the MagnaGuard, which'd been discreetly dragged off to the far side of the courtyard. Grievous watched them for a moment, noting that they'd brought the human with them and that she seemed to be doing her share. One positive thing, that. They were getting their use out of her. Then he looked again at the opulent public building beyond and felt a fresh wave of embittered scorn that people could live like this while Kaleesh had starved.
A pair of battle droids escorted up another cowering Shartilli, this one clad in voluminous robes and wearing a tall conical hat. "President Vesperanimin, sir," one of the droids announced.
"At last!" Grievous exclaimed, and stepped forward.
A shattering explosion ripped through the peace and beauty of the alien courtyard.
Grievous lay under the rubble of the destroyed greenhouse stunned with shock. Two thoughts had leapt almost instantly into his mind as soon as the percussive ringing of the blast had faded and were now chasing themselves round and round; the first, suicide bomber, the second, how dare they? How DARE they!
His limbs convulsed and he burst out of the wreckage, wild with rage, and stood seething as he took stock. The conservatory had been totally demolished. Pieces of his battle droid troop lay scattered everywhere, the super battle droids and droidekas had all been felled, even two of his MagnaGuards were down, with several others clearly damaged. Droids that had been outside the immediate blast radius and mostly unaffected were already moving in to assist him and he could see members of the Geonosian team in the backdrop getting slowly back up on their feet, dusting one another off, taking stock themselves.
Grievous hopped down off the debris pile into a clear area. "Get the council members!" he bawled at the approaching droids. "All of them, every one! I'll teach them to—"
Abruptly, he staggered sideways.
Grievous looked down at himself, shocked anew. He couldn't see a thing wrong with his legs. They'd just worked fine, carrying him nimbly off the wreckage. He cocked his head up and looked about, confused. He was supposed to be virtually indestructible!
His balance went again and this time he lurched right into one of the damaged MagnaGuards. All his power seemed to be draining right out of him. He began shuddering violently as he fought for control of his body, sinking down, his leg joints folding up.
The droids that had reached him stood about his awkwardly sitting form in a loose circle, at an utter loss. And now something worse was happening. He couldn't breathe properly anymore. His lungs felt on fire and ready to explode. Grievous tipped slowly over to one side as he gulped and coughed weakly, sprawling down onto the ground, unable to do a thing to prevent it.
A forest of droid legs and feet filled his field of vision. Then he saw the grasping toe-claws of Geonosian feet, a pair of black service boots. Yes, the scientists would help. They were alive and could think, could figure out what was wrong with him, not like his blasted stupid droids that were still just standing about like great metal lumps.
He lay there miserably while the Geonosians clicked and chirruped urgently to one another. He felt a soft touch on his body, the human's hand, reaching in under his chest plating and sliding over his synthskin until it rested directly over his crazily hammering heart. Dimly, he made out that all the aliens were arguing, or maybe just disputing, then came a few terse orders issued at the droids.
Several of the closest battle droids grabbed hold of Grievous and began to drag him. He tolerated it at first, but as soon as they began lifting him, he began to fight instinctively, lashing out spasmodically with no real control, limbs thrashing, sending the droids flying in all directions. Someone started to yell at him.
"General Grievous! General Grievous! Stop it! You have to stop and let us help you. Please!"
Female. The human's voice. He rolled his eyes, trying to see her, unable to move his head.
"Here. I'm right here," Lissa said, and now he could see her, squatting down close to him, looking into his face. "General, we have to lift you up and get your head down. I know it's terribly undignified for you, but it's very important that we do so. Will you let us? Let us try to help you?"
His desperate struggle to breathe overrode any verbal reply. He gave her permission with the pleading and honest fright in his eyes, the way his body went limp again.
A snatch of long-ago memory came to Grievous as the droids seized him and began pulling him over the ground again, himself lying bleeding and gasping on a battlefield as his elite swarmed around him. He closed his eyes and did what he'd done then, concentrate on trying to remain alive while his people raced to save him.
The droids, under direction, draped his body over a beam projecting several feet above ground out of some of the bomb blast rubble, his hip joints uppermost and head and arms trailing on the ground. His face was in the dirt at first until someone pulled his arms out straight and shifted his head into a better position. Then came a long period during which he could feel a good deal of manipulation going on with the flexible cage of durasteel hoops that his chest nested into and then a very strange sensation of cold within, which quickly dissipated. A more pleasant sensation soon followed, Lissa's hand resting warmly on the synthskin above his heart again.
"How are you feeling, General?"
"Better," he croaked.
It was true. His breathing and the sense that there was something terribly wrong inside him had eased almost as soon as they'd upended him over the beam. He shifted his uppermost arm a little and clenched his fingers and to his great relief, found that he'd regained control of his body, at least a little.
"Try not to move your legs at all," Lissa said to him. Her blue-grey eyes were very bright and her cheeks flushed with high colour, Grievous saw, as he looked at her. "You'll be all right now, I think. We caught it in time," she continued softly, smiling back. "You ruptured your gutsack, I'm afraid, General, and lost a lot of fluid. It disrupted almost everything for a while. We're making do with universal plasma from a battle pack for now and added enough to get you stable again, and should soon have you taped up well enough to transport you."
Ah. So that was it. Not his life-blood draining out of him this time perhaps, but life-sustaining nonetheless, the doctored bacta fluid that bathed his organs and kept his chest pressurized. He lifted his head a little and could see that the Geonosians were closing up the hole in him with emergency wound tape, and was suddenly happy enough to still be alive that he could feel a certain wry relief that they weren't using duct tape.
He wasn't so happy later when told that he'd have to remain in a bacta tank for two days to properly flush and cleanse his organic components and ward off any problems induced by his near respiratory collapse. The Geonosians had used a piece of pipe torn up by the bomb blast to pour the plasma into him fast during their makeshift field operation and it hadn't exactly been sterile.
Lissa wasn't very happy either. Her colleagues left her in charge of Grievous while they saw to the matter of redesigning the durasteel cage armour that had proven just a little too flexible to protect him properly under all circumstances. Not that she minded the opportunity to learn more about him, exactly, it was just that the sudden, unexpected responsibility in of itself dismayed her—she couldn't even bring herself to imagine the horrible repercussions should he come to any harm, or heaven forbid, actually die while in her care. But of course he didn't die, he just got cranky because he didn't like being kept in the bacta tank. He was also still very bitter over what had happened to him and was soon demanding explanations she couldn't always provide.
"I was told the synthskin housing my organs was impenetrable," he complained at one point. "Why did it rupture?"
"It's impact-proof," Lissa said, "but not, it seems, as tear-resistant as was hoped."
"I don't understand."
She just looked at him. And because he was being a pain and because she still had unpleasant memories of how he liked to stage practical demonstrations, decided to stage a demonstration of her own.
Lissa put her padd down on the deck and rolled one sleeve up and held up her arm. "Human skin," she said to him. She gave her bare forearm a whack with the back of her other hand. "Impact-proof enough that I'd probably have to break the bone before a blow would split or cut the skin." She held up a pinky and wiggled it. "We don't have much in the way of nails, and they're relatively soft. But if that nail were ragged or in any way rough and caught my skin just so? It could tear a real nasty little scratch into it. If I caught my skin on something harder, a snag on plastic or metal, anything like that, it could rip wide open."
"All right. Fine," Grievous muttered.
"We'll never know exactly what caused your rupture, but it was likely a sliver of the greenhouse sheeting or maybe a tiny bit of framing, sliding along between your hoops and tearing you up when the explosion threw you against some debris in an arched position. If you'd hit with your body straighter and everything overlapping the way it was supposed to, it never would have happened."
But Grievous had lapsed into a sullen silence and no longer wanted to talk.
It was during one of these sullen, cranky, quiet periods, with the cyborg brooding in his tank and the human standing before him and scowling over her scanner padd as she struggled to make sense of all the information she'd suddenly had dumped on her, that Count Dooku arrived out of the starry blue to visit with Grievous.
"Our good General must have been touched with unusual luck and foresight when he recruited you," the Count remarked as he came up to Lissa. "You are Miss Veleroko, I presume."
Lissa barely registered the man's presence, being far too absorbed by the comparative readings on her padd, which just weren't willing to settle down into anything approaching normal, not at all. "Yeah," she acknowledged.
One of Dooku's eyebrows arched upward. "And how is my droid commander?" he asked, his tone cooler.
"Cyborg," Lissa said shortly.
"I beg your pardon?"
"General Grievous is a cyborg. I don't put droids in bacta tanks."
"And I am not used to being addressed in such a perfunctory manner."
Belatedly, Lissa realized that once again she'd been guilty of keeping her nose stuck in her work when she really ought to have been paying attention to the bigger world around her. She put her padd down and turned to face Dooku.
"I am sorry, sir," she apologized. "Given my background, I'm afraid I tend to become overzealous about terminology."
"That's quite all right, my dear. I'm sure the General is a fascinating subject."
"You must be Count Dooku. What can I do for you, sir?" she went on, pleased that this Dooku—who was Grievous's superior, she reminded herself—was already revealing himself to be a decent sort willing to forgive her blunder. Nice-looking man, too, tall, impeccably clad and groomed, his white hair and beard contrasting appealingly with his glossy dark eyes; old enough to be her father and then some, surely, yet he had about him the ease and vigour of a much younger man. Lissa's gaze became laced with considerable interest as she attentively continued looking at him.
"How is General Grievous?" the Count inquired politely.
"Well, you can ask him yourself. He's perfectly alert and aware."
"I'm asking you."
Lissa blinked. "He said earlier that he felt fine."
Dooku nodded and moved past her to stand directly in front of the bacta tank. He and Grievous regarded each other for a long time, silently. "I'd appreciate a certain expediency in the matter of his repairs," Dooku finally said. "I have need of him."
Lissa blinked again. Repairs? What she said was, "We should have him out of there and back on duty by tomorrow afternoon, sir."
"Good."
Count Dooku turned away from the tank. He paused beside Lissa, looked down at her and said, "I'm sure we'll speak again.", then left. She watched him stride to the door, elegant cape swirling in his wake. He hadn't said a word to Grievous. Huh! Nice boss…
While Grievous was still recovering in the bacta tank, the cyborg ordered that every living thing in the city where he'd been attacked be rounded up and slaughtered. Once out and back on his feet, he positioned his warships for an orbital bombardment and levelled what remained of the Shartilli civilization, watching all the while with grim satisfaction. The planet would serve just as well as a way station without its populace.
TBC
