Hello again to all my readers and reviewers, and a special thanks to those of you who've taken the time to let me know exactly what it is about this story that you most felt worth commenting on, pro or con—it really does help me focus the writing so that you'll hopefully find it all as enjoyable and entertaining as possible as things progress. No warnings necessary this time around and I even try and make up a bit for putting the General through the wringer in the last chapter. I'm quite pleased with how Grievous turned out, a little philosophical sometimes as I was writing him up, but I think he came out okay despite that. This also turned out to be an awfully long chapter, and I think that'll be okay with most of you too.
Special note to the person who asked about whether it was all right to recommend this story elsewhere: Sure! Whatever! As far as I'm concerned, as soon as you post fanfic to a site like this, it becomes part of the public domain of fandom for fellow fans to use and respond to however they please (short of anything illegal). If I didn't want to share my Grievous-love, I'd be running off a single hard copy of this thing and adding it to my secret stash of personal drawer stories instead, and I already have plenty of those.
THE ESSENCES OF LIFE
Chapter 6 – Master And Commander
Grievous swung his lightsaber as fast as he could and his opponent parried. He jabbed again, a lightning feint to one side, and his adversary held him easily. He couldn't understand it. The old man barely seemed to move, just flicked his wrist and his arm would reach out and the crimson blade would extend to block the cyborg's attack every time. Meanwhile, Grievous was lunging in fits and starts, sword arm working furiously, weaving as he sought the opening which never came.
"Stop."
Grievous obeyed instantly and adopted a neutral stance with his blade held vertically before his face, blinking repeatedly and breathing hard and audibly in his frustration. Count Dooku gazed serenely back at him, the white of his hair flushed red by his own lightsaber.
"I want to see you counter now," the Count said. "Let me attack. Steady… Defend."
A single stride forward was all it took. Grievous was suddenly under serious assault. Enhanced speed or not, he could barely keep up as he fended off a flourish of blows which seemed to intelligently probe his entire defensive field, coming now from high up to his right, then low from the opposite quadrant, forcing him to swing wildly, almost clumsily, to protect himself. Dooku watched his own swordplay and that of his opponent as calmly as though he were a mere spectator and not a participant at all. Occasionally, he would take another small stride, to make Grievous back up further, otherwise his feet never moved.
A clever twisting jab brought Dooku's blade flickering up over the cyborg's own and Grievous found himself regarding the deadly tip of the Count's lightsaber hovering but a few centimetres before his eyes. He conceded defeat, panting again with vexation all the while. He supposed that he ought not to be so hard on himself for he'd only been practising with the elegant energy weapons for just under a year, whereas Dooku had been at the business of lightsaber fighting for longer than Grievous had been alive. Still, it was humiliating to lose so easily. On Kalee, Grievous had been considered a master swordsman, the best. He'd expected that his basic skills would translate directly once he began training with Dooku, but the Sith Lord, it seemed, was in a class all his own.
Dooku lectured Grievous as the two of them stood together. "Your moves are still too orthodox," he said in review. "Most Jedi never progress beyond defensive fighting. They acquire habits, certain stances that they don't like to vary. Your best weapon against this is surprise. You need to use your speed and stamina to interrupt their habits, get them moving, prevent them from becoming comfortable. Try again now. Attack."
Grievous did his best, jumping about, circling Dooku, switching his lightsaber from one hand to the other several times. He still couldn't penetrate the man's defences, but did get him moving, even if it was just tiny steps to one side or the other. Aside from that, Dooku barely seemed to shift his position at all, still plying his blade with an astounding deftness of hand.
He held off one blow from Grievous for an extra beat, let his own blade sag as if weakening, then instantly flipped it round and struck hard at the base of Grievous's blade. The hilt rattled in the cyborg's hand. Beaten again!
They stood facing one another in rest positions while Dooku critiqued his student once more, the only witnesses a couple of bins in the otherwise empty cargo bay, one of the few safe spaces in while to duel. They were fighting aboard Dooku's own personal galleon, a sumptuously outfitted luxury vessel from his family's private space fleet, manned by a crew of his own Serenno countrymen. The Count was taking Grievous with him to an important conference the human had arranged for all the Separatist Council leaders on the Outer Rim planet of Spree-Aten, a face-to-face meeting during which the representatives of the various member organizations were meant to compare and perhaps better consolidate their various assets for the good of the Confederacy; the first time Dooku was asking his cyborg commander to act in any sort of political capacity. Until they reached that world, however, there was this short lull during which he could train Grievous to better act in one of his other, more deadly capacities.
"Is your repair work affecting you in any way? Interfering with your flexibility, perhaps?" Dooku inquired.
Grievous touched a hand to the rebuilt cage of durasteel hoops protecting his lower chest, more robust now, no longer penetrable by even the tiniest of foreign objects. The heavier armour had added five more kilos to his weight.
"My body seems to have adjusted itself already," he said. "If I could have one last test…"
"Very well."
Dooku stepped back a little as Grievous reared up to his full height and lifted his arms. Then he performed the neat trick that his specially built arms had been designed for, splitting them suddenly in two from between his middle fingers all the way back to his shoulders with an unnerving metallic crack, each halved limb and hand still powerful and now independently functional. It had been a damnably hard thing for Grievous to learn, to use four arms. At first, he'd had to perform every move in sequence and with a conscious effort of will, first the upper right, then the lower left—a laughable example of the old gag about being unable to walk and chew gum at the same time. But gradually the knack had come to him as his heuristic programming accumulated a store of commands, the separate steps beginning to come together into coordinated motions aided by his peripheral processors until he no more had to think about how to control his metal limbs than he'd had to think about controlling his flesh and blood ones. All he had to do now was act. And the action he wanted to perform at this moment was to reach back with three of his hands and pull a further trio of lightsabers from their sleeve pockets in the lining of his cloak.
Three more spears of light ignited, two blues now, a green and a white. (He'd prudently left behind the red lightsaber he'd taken from the Dark Jedi Asajj Ventress, even though it was one of his favourites, because he knew that Dooku was still furious with him over the whole incident.) He assumed an attack position, head snaked down and out, body arched, legs bent, and upper hands held high, not unlike those of a picador about to stab a beast. A tiny flicker went through Dooku's eyes, just the merest change of surface gleam, but Grievous's acutely sensitive pit instincts, ever alert when he fought, too deeply ingrained into his very Kaleesh nature to eradicate without killing him, caught it even so, and he knew that for one microsecond Dooku had responded with an instinct of his own. Fear.
It shifted at once into something else Dooku probably didn't want him to know, that he disliked seeing Grievous fight with multiple lightsabers and felt a certain disdain for him when he did so, even though he openly taught the cyborg to embrace the tactic of shock and awe when confronting more than one foe at a time. Grievous hated such duplicity, and whenever he sensed evidence of it in his master, he sometimes hated him. Not this time, however. Grievous really did want to test his rebuilt armour and had no time to nurse his malice.
The cyborg began to spin his upper lightsabers, using the inhuman range of motion in his metal wrists to revolve the blades on a flat plane, turning them into defensive shields of fatal light. At the same time he began to glide forward, his gait becoming springy, elastic; his whole body seeming to flex and uncouple into something impossibly lithesome for a mere machine. He held his lower lightsabers at the ready tilted out to either side. His cape streamed away behind him like thick smoke. He came at Dooku and the Count gave ground at last, unwilling to make the first move.
Grievous sprang onto one foot and slashed with the offensive lightsaber on the opposite side. He sprang again and tossed his just used weapon to his freed foot, which grasped and wielded it as efficiently as his hands. He began the second part of his neat trick, juggling his blades with exquisite, hard-learned precision, bouncing acrobatically, the whirling lights becoming a confusing maelstrom of activity almost impossible to follow. It was the way he'd fought at Hypori, taking on five Jedi at once, confounding them so much with his ever changing positions that his enemies became unsure of what part of him or which weapon to target and hesitated, giving him time to lash out and score with deadly accuracy. He'd killed several of them and badly injured the rest, and had mourned at the time that any had escaped him at all. But that had been just as well, as it turned out. The survivors had warned the others that a dreadful new terror now stalked their Order and he relished the thought of all his future victims now living in fear of him, feeling the need to watch for him, embellishing his reputation in hushed voices.
It was probably good for Dooku that he'd left the Order when he did, Grievous thought. The Count could still engage and hold him, even now, even when fighting like this, yet it seemed to the cyborg that Dooku's need for concentration was growing as Grievous's expertise increased. The human always fought him now with lips pressed into a hard line whenever he allowed the cyborg to duel with him at full capacity. He paid attention in a way he hadn't before, the gaze of his dark eyes shifting and darting ceaselessly as he kept track of his student's intricate movements. Grievous had begun to entertain the notion that if only he were allowed to fight in multi-weaponed mode long enough that there was now a chance, just a chance, that he might actually beat Dooku, but that was something he'd never know because the Count never sparred with him for long when Grievous used more than one lightsaber. It offended him, after all.
When Dooku thought it time to finish the lesson, he ended it the way he always did, by waiting until he caught Grievous's flying form in a moment of suspension and using the Force to throw him down onto the ground, hard.
"Still too slow, General," Dooku chided. "You have to learn to anticipate a Force push, otherwise no number of lightsabers will save you."
Grievous got up slowly, staring straight ahead. The Count always acted as though the body slams were part of his training, but Grievous thought he knew what was really going on. It was his punishment for his steadfast refusal to bow to Dooku and reserving his obeisances for the true power among them, Lord Sidious.
"Come now," Dooku said. "We'll finish the trip in my sloop."
The cyborg followed him obediently to the hangar bay and the two of them boarded the Count's solar sailor, a personal vessel powered by a marvellous blend of modern and archaic space sailing technology which the Geonosians had custom-built for Dooku back when he'd still based his Separatist movement on Geonosis. Dooku still used the ship whenever it was convenient and advantageous for him to do so, and Grievous had to admit that it was one thing that they did have in common, a shared appreciation for unique, hand-made workmanship of the highest quality. But Grievous never sought it out, nor did he curry favour for it or expect to possess it as his birthright. Dooku did.
The unlikely pair sat in silence together in the interstellar sloop as they completed the remainder of their journey. Occasionally, Dooku would address a few words of command to the droid pilot, otherwise he passed the time by reading over whatever he had stored on his personal data padd. His Supreme Commander, he ignored. It was always like this between them, Grievous reflected. Dooku often had a great deal to say to him, when he trained him, when he reprimanded him, or when they discussed matters pertaining to the war and the establishment of the new order sweeping through the galaxy. But once their professional talk was done and time remained for more personal interaction, there was nothing, not even a pretense. Grievous supposed it had to do with Dooku's background. The human, he knew, had been born into privilege and wealth, a life he'd returned to after he left the Jedi Order. He'd have his own interpretations of what constituted status and social worth, no doubt ingrained in him while still a child before the Order had come to take him away, and Grievous, for whatever reasons, simply did not satisfy the man's standards.
Dooku would not have liked growing up on Kalee, Grievous thought bitterly. No one was ever automatically granted privilege there and the only advantage one ever had at birth was whatever one's forebears chose to pass down in the genes. Grievous's gift had been aggression. A snippet of childhood memory bubbled up, himself already trying to dominate his siblings although barely able to totter yet, his older brothers good-naturedly cuffing him away and laughing, his parents ruefully shaking their heads and saying, "There's one for the military." But that was all, and the memory soon sank back into the part of his mind that was normally inaccessible to him. A moment more, and he no longer even remembered that he'd recalled the snippet in the first place.
Spree-Aten soon appeared, centered in the sloop's forward viewports, and before long they could also see the sprinkling of vessels belonging to the attendees at the conference and the more ordered collection of warships further out, standing on guard. Count Dooku identified himself to the command warship as they approached, then had his pilot sail them past the flotilla of conference ships, just to enjoy the rare spectacle of so many differing alien vessels, most of them grand and luxurious indeed, berthed side by side in space.
Dooku indicated an extra-large starship, stationed off by itself a little. "Do you see that ship there, General?" he asked.
See it? How could he miss it? It was a kilometre long. "Providence-class carrier-destroyer," Grievous recited promptly. And then, because the part of him that could be stirred by the sight of a superb war machine still existed, added, "She's beautiful."
"Yes, the Invisible Hand. Our good friend, Viceroy Gunray, means to use it as his personal cruiser. He doesn't realize yet that once the conference is finished, I intend to take him aside and order him to turn over command of that vessel to you."
Grievous could barely believe what he'd just heard. "Mine?" he breathed.
"Or you can have Invisible Hand's sister ship, which I believe has just completed her trials," Dooku went on smoothly. "You can have that one as soon as she's commissioned, even be at the ceremony, if you like. She'll be named Lucid Voice."
Grievous thought it over, weighing the excitement of launching a brand new vessel versus the look on Gunray's face when Dooku broke the news. "I'll take this one, Invisible Hand," he said.
The Count smiled. "I thought you would."
Dooku ordered the pilot to break off their inspection and begin a descent to the planet. Grievous looked to his superior, knowing more was expected of him. "Thank you, Count Dooku," he said at last, voice husky as much with sincere emotion as with its usual inflection.
"I'm sure you'll use your new ship to its fullest capacity," the man replied.
The appearance of Grievous, trailing in behind Dooku when they finally entered the meeting rooms, sent a ripple of excitement through the collected Separatist leaders. The Count had apparently not told them that he was bringing the General along, and for many of the leaders it was their first live look at the cyborg, although they were all aware of his existence and his nefarious exploits. Grievous stood by himself while Dooku made the rounds, tolerating the stares and whispers with disdain, making no attempt to socialize and putting off any overtures by adopting a malignant glare as he looked over the various new alien faces in turn, matching them to the names and organizations he'd learned about and already loathing them all, for they seemed to him little more than power-hungry money-grubbers, the lot of them. The only one he had the slightest smidgeon of respect for was the Geonosian leader, Archduke Poggle the Lesser, and that was only because he knew that the Archduke had actively fought his way to his current position and once did battle in his kind's arena.
The conference proper soon began and the Separatist Council representatives each took their turn on the dais as the day wore on, boasting of their assets and the power they controlled and trying to jealously outrival one another as they outlined what they were contributing to the war effort. Grievous then mounted the platform and gave an operational briefing on the war's current status, pruned somewhat for civilian sensibilities and their need to know, and provided the performance of the afternoon as he stalked back and forth on the staging as he spoke, gruff voice running up and down its full range of inflection, eyes flashing with emotion as he swung his head about to ensure that they all understood he was no mere droid. Many of those watching him for the first time were never even sure afterwards of what exactly he'd said, they'd been too cowed and mesmerized by his eerie, ferocious mien, the tense violence in him which seemed scarcely contained as he paced and talked. If there was still a living creature within that metal exterior, they thought, then it must be a savage one, well deserving of its reputation, and that sentiment might not have displeased Grievous, had he known.
Grievous remained on the dais when Dooku came up, which engendered further unease. The unease soon escalated into distress and dismay when the Count made his big announcement preceding his wrap-up speech, that he was appointing General Grievous his second in command, the deputy leader of the Separatist Council beginning henceforth. The vicious cyborg in charge of them? What could Dooku be thinking! Grievous watched coldly as the Separatist leaders came to terms with what they'd just heard. He was not yet sure himself of how to feel about his new appointment; proud, yes, that he'd been chosen for such an important duty, but it was not a job he would have wanted or would enjoy, this shepherding of people he had very little use for, and actively disliked. But then, he disliked everyone. He would just have to get used to the assignment, the same as everybody else.
The only truly positive thing that came out of the whole trip for him in the end was the promise of the Invisible Hand. It did give Grievous a certain mean pleasure, whenever he looked at Viceroy Nute Gunray during the hours he was forced to endure the Neimoidian's presence, to imagine that flat cartilaginous face screwed up in hopeless outrage.
Count Dooku had pressing concerns involving the Techno Union and planets many parsecs away once the conference was over, and Grievous hitched a ride aboard the Intergalactic Banking Clan's cruiser, during which he found the company of the IBC representative San Hill, his onetime employer, as dull and unpleasant as ever. The General was actually glad to see droid faces for once by the time one of his own AGD frigates showed up to rendezvous with the cruiser and ferry him the rest of the way back to his fleet.
The Invisible Hand reported for duty a week later. Gunray had been livid all right, and Dooku had had to placate him by allowing a certain Trade Federation presence aboard the vessel after all. Grievous would have to tolerate having Neimoidian officers on the bridge, including the captain. The General told Dooku in dry reply that he thought he could handle it. His beautiful new flagship was so large that Grievous suspected that he could live aboard and meander around for a year without having to look at a single Neimoidian, as long as he always issued orders from afar and avoided the bridge.
The day after taking command of Invisible Hand, Grievous took out his first patrol of some of his new starfighters—droid tri-fighters and Vulture droids mostly, the squadrons led by battle droid piloted Voodoos, himself acting as wing commander in his favourite old Belbullab fighter. The droids worked well for him as he spent an hour at practising tactical manoeuvres and learning to coordinate communications and positioning with his squadron leaders, and they soon flew together as one smooth integrated team. Grievous led them to a nearby binary star system rife with planets and moons and they went through it all again, this time with the added distractions of gravitational pull and the occasional skip along an upper atmosphere to add a little spice.
At the very end of their second practice period, as they were making one last loop about the third outermost of the system's planetary bodies, they suddenly stumbled across a large starship lurking behind one of the world's moons.
Grievous was instantly suspicious. He held back and ordered his battle droid pilots to investigate, and listened in as a ridiculous conversation ensued, his droids demanding identification, the people on the mystery vessel fumbling over their Basic with excruciating slowness and rambling on about diplomatic immunity although they wouldn't say whose, then garbling the signal repeatedly and pleading equipment failure. Nobody was that incompetent and stupid, not even Neimoidians, Grievous thought, and the vessel looked nothing like any civilian job that he'd ever seen. He cut into the transmission angrily.
"This is General Grievous, Supreme Commander of the Separatist droid armies. Stop this nonsense and identify yourself at once or we'll blow you out of orbit!"
Dead silence followed, even though Grievous could tell that the line was still open and active. Then it shut off. Seconds later, the ship fired at them.
The General's fighters scattered instantly into one of the evasive patterns they'd just finished practising. They regrouped and shot back, targeting the mystery vessel's primary energy readings on Grievous's command, and blew out its engines just as it was powering up to flee. The disabled ship began blasting away again, unleashing a barrage of weaponry quite out of keeping with any mere diplomatic vessel.
Grievous ordered his fighters to utterly destroy the target and zoomed in to do his share. The ship's shields were already gone and it began to come apart. It stopped firing. Several escape pods shot away from beneath its forward section. And then, unexpectedly, out jetted a most distinctive silhouette to join the pods.
A Jedi interceptor! Grievous couldn't believe his luck. "Get the escape pods! Destroy them all! Leave the interceptor to me!" he shouted over his open commlink before his droids could target the little Republic fighter. He cranked his fighter from side to side unmercifully as he cut around his own flying droids, trying to get closer to the interceptor. The Jedi was trying to protect the pods, but in vain. There was only one of him, after all, and dozens of droid fighters.
The Jedi didn't give up until they'd scrapped the last pod, then shot away with Grievous hot on his tail. The interceptor was incredibly manoeuvrable, but the Belbullab was much faster and more powerful and more heavily armoured. Grievous knew that he had little to fear from the Jedi's weaponry and that his main problem would be not so much keeping up with the little craft as overshooting it as he gave chase. At one point, they drew even with one another, close enough for a few seconds that Grievous could see the pilot's mass of thick head tentacles and his big dark eyes staring over at him out of a green face—a Nautolan! The Jedi knew him too. He suddenly swerved his ship at the General's, trying to collide with him, but Grievous had been waiting for just such a move and accelerated up into a loop. He came back down behind the interceptor and fired a careful shot, trying to disable the craft, wanting to force the Jedi to land or surrender alive. The interceptor simply nipped aside and he missed. It went on like that for quite some time, Grievous working his way into position over and over to fire, his opponent always dodging away at the last second before the cyborg could do any damage, and all the while the two of them flying further and further away from the battle scene where they'd first engaged one another.
Luck and persistence favoured Grievous at last and he finally hit the interceptor's aft section. A thin plume of whitish mist began to stream out. Grievous, jubilant, thought he might have hit the ship's fuel lines. He pushed on ahead, meaning to draw even with the Jedi again, to jerk his hand downward in an unmistakable gesture, but the Nautolan was already angling away, looking for a place to put down.
He chose a moon swathed in the cloud that indicated a breathable atmosphere and plummeted down through the most unstable looking weather feature he could find, seeking even in this most dire moment to ditch his pursuer with Jedi smarts and trickery, trying to use the violent turbulence of a brewing tempest to literally shake Grievous off his trail. It didn't work. His enemy had a lock on him and rode it all the way down through the roiling updrafts and bursts of suspended rain and hail until the two broke out of the low overcast and slammed hard onto the ground, one after the other, both of them near-crashing. The Jedi flipped his cockpit hatch up at once and took off running and managed to get half a minute's lead before Grievous landed and jumped out in turn.
The moon was forested with needle-leaved scrub and short trees, the ground rocky and covered with lichen. Grievous raced along, not needing his sensory enhancements this time, using only the hunting skills he'd learned long ago while still a boy to track his fleeing prey, fast enough to act as his own steed as he ran the Jedi down. The gathering storm lowered above him. He sped through gloom and thick dank air.
The weather broke with a thunderous roar just as Grievous sprinted out of the ragged forest and crashed through a line of bushes and undergrowth and onto a band of harsh tufted grasses. The horizon abruptly stretched away before him, limitless and lost in fog and the sudden drenching rain. He'd come to the top of a crumbling cliff and skidded to a halt, then stepped carefully forward and stretched his head out.
The Jedi stood far below him on a rocky shoreline. He'd led Grievous to the edge of a sea, and if there was the hint of a rather unchivalrous smirk on the green face as the Nautolan looked up at his foe standing on the crest of the escarpment, the stark form etched in sharp relief against the wet, grey, lightning-wreathed sky, then he could perhaps be forgiven, for he thought he'd won, the ocean was home to him, even if alien, and the Jedi-killing cyborg with his heavy metal body couldn't swim.
The Nautolan gave a little wave as he backed through the breakers smashing into froth about his feet, then turned and waded briefly, then dove in. His tentacled head bobbed for a moment longer on the surface while he oriented himself, then vanished for good.
Grievous didn't hesitate a second longer. He rocketed down the side of the cliff and plunged straight through the surf, whereupon he gave the unsuspecting Nautolan the surprise of his soon-to-be-terminated life by leaping off the sea bottom and catching the swimming Jedi by the legs. The cyborg cracked his arms apart and used all four hands to hold his violently struggling prisoner safely pinioned as he dragged him back out of the water, then threw him onto the shingled shore like a landed fish.
The Nautolan jumped up with a most un-Jedi-like snarl contorting his face and drew his lightsaber and the fight was on. And what a fight it became, the cyborg pitted against an experienced old swordsman almost as aggressive as himself at last, the two of them hurtling up and down the beach in a running battle with their weapons arcing and spitting fire in the rain, the surf pounding and the thunder booming and the lightning crackling all around them as they clashed and parried, then drew apart, then sprang at each other again. Grievous restricted himself to a single lightsaber throughout, to make it last, and suffered a few rare dings, but his armourplast shielding was sound and protected him well. He retaliated whenever he was struck and managed to nip past the Jedi's defences and score several blows of his own, and the Nautolan was soon sporting his own collection of shallow wounds and burns.
The Jedi began using the Force directly, trying to flip his opponent off his feet. He was no Dooku, however, and the power he was able to channel was considerably lesser than what Grievous had gotten used to. He had also perhaps waited too long and fatigue ruined his subtlety—the cyborg read his intent and crunched his metal talons through the scree to solid bedrock and was able to anchor himself every time. The futile attempts drained the Nautolan further. His saber swings and thrusts started to falter, their precision fading. The duo no longer danced over the pebbles, trading leads, advancing then retreating in little sprints and dashes. It became a sad rout, the Nautolan stumbling back, the cyborg hounding him and still moving with the exact same tireless, fluid, deadly grace as when they'd started their match.
Grievous brought the exhausted Jedi to bay against the base of the escarpment and killed him with a single thrust through the heart. Afterwards, he turned the body face upward and looked at it for a long time while the dead black eyes filled with rain, memorizing the man's features for later. The Jedi's lightsaber also piqued his interest. Grievous's alien vision had perceived the blade as glowing a soft violet in colour, very unusual, the first such hue he'd seen, and he thought it might be worth having the crystals within the weapon analysed, just to satisfy his curiosity.
The General lifted his sleek head again and squinted through the water streaming over his own face and into the sockets of his mask. The thunderstorm had moved off over the sea. He could still hear it rumbling over the ceaseless beat of the waves and see the occasional flash of lightning now enveloped within the low scud and fog lying just offshore. The rain still sheeted down all around him, not slackening at all, hissing on the shingle. Grievous regarded his fallen foe one last time. Yes, let the sea come up over the beach and retrieve this one. The Nautolan was an amphibious creature. It would be appropriate for the tide to take him.
Grievous walked back to his landing site through the downpour. When he examined the Jedi's interceptor, he was pleased to discover that he hadn't damaged it badly at all and that it was quite salvageable. He climbed inside, finding the cockpit cramped even after he'd found the controls to manually lower and crank the seat back as far as it would go, and sat for a while looking over the alien controls and getting a feel for how the ship might fit him. He'd already decided to have the craft fixed up and learn to fly this favoured fighter of his enemies the way he'd learned to use their favoured weapon. Maybe he'd even use it to play a few sly tricks on the Republic forces, pretend to be a Jedi himself to get close enough to strike—yes, the irony of it already amused him. In between usages, his intelligence people would no doubt be glad to have the ship too. He didn't think they'd captured anything quite resembling this model yet.
General Grievous returned to his new flagship feeling happier than he had in a long time. The unexpected battle and the duel with the Jedi and recovering the interceptor all seemed an auspicious beginning for his command aboard the Invisible Hand. Once back in his office high up in the vessel's sensor and observation pod, he soon discovered that the Jedi he'd just killed had been the Jedi Master Thur Megia, one of the Order's oldest and most experienced, and that seemed a good omen also, that he'd been able to fight such a well-regarded warrior to a standstill one-on-one. He'd remember Thur Megia. The man had left his mark on him, a noticeable score on the cyborg's left chest plate, which the rainstorm had washed clean for him.
Grievous quit his office and strode out onto the observation deck he'd appropriated as part of his personal living quarters, an outrageous extravagance, but of course he had every intention of using the space for far more than just a residence. Intimidation, for example. The deck, perched atop a conning tower set back toward Invisible Hand's stern, commanded such a splendid view of most of his flagship's own mighty expanse and of his surrounding fleet that Grievous thought it just the sight to share with planetary leaders who were having trouble deciding to accept the Confederacy's generous offers of protection and management.
Pleasant schemes of threat and menace occupied Grievous's mind as he paced along the raised walkway adjoining the deck's expansive 180-degree wraparound bank of viewports. The Geonosians had gotten the problem with his new grey MagnaGuards fixed and he now had a stock of four different models of the specialist combat droids to chose from. A contingent of four apiece, no, six, all of them clad in the modified Kaleesh cloaks and headcloths signifying their elite status and loyalty to him, ought to make a fine display, Grievous thought, for any special visitors he entertained in his quarters. Perhaps some of his battle droid officers, too, and a droideka stationed to either side of the entrances onto the deck for added encouragement. He'd be sure to always wear his own campaign cloak with all of its sleeve pockets filled with his favourite lightsabers. And maybe a few extra affixed to his waist and his blaster holstered on his metal thigh—that would work well. Battle droid escorts would make his guests walk down the stairways into the well of the deck, and then they'd have to climb up again to meet with him as he stood waiting on the walkway by the viewports, hands behind his back and holding his cape away from his sides, head lowered and thrust forward so they'd see his eyes and know at once that they were dealing with a living being and not a damn machine. And his fleet and armies, of course, filling the void beyond and always providing a glorious backdrop.
The cyborg's thoughts slid again onto the subject of the Jedi he'd just fought. A Jedi Master protecting a diplomatic ship, well, that was just typical. He wondered what species or organization had greased the Republic palm to earn that little favour. Perhaps the intelligence section could figure it out from the routine combat footage shot by his starfighter and some of the battle droids' ships before they'd blown the so-called diplomatic vessel into atoms. If the Republic had started saving its best Jedi warriors to guard politicians, then he wanted to know all about it. He thought again about how he'd plunged into the sea after Thur Megia, the creature's shock when he'd first wrapped his fingers about the slippery alien ankles…no, the Nautolan hadn't seen that one coming, hadn't realized that the Separatists' top Jedi-killer could now pursue him underwater. Grievous supposed that he ought to inform the Geonosians that their rebreather upgrade had just undergone its first practical test and had performed beautifully, deploying the instant the water had flooded his neck and snicking away again into its recess as soon as the need for it was over and he'd cleared his breathing aperture with a vigorous snorting exhalation. Maybe they'd give that human woman the day off or an extra hour's break or something, whatever it was civilians did to reward one another when they'd done good work. The whole notion of the rebreather had been hers, as he recalled.
A delicious idea of his own suddenly inundated Grievous's mind. He mulled it over, found it sound, deliberated some more, liked it even better, and jacked his arm up and activated the embedded commlink. He issued a few terse orders, then stationed himself by the viewports on the right side of the observation deck, to watch for the incoming shuttle.
The human woman, Lissa Veleroko, soon arrived, stumbling out of one of the lifts at the back of the observation deck, the two battle droids that routinely monitored all her movements dutifully flanking her. She was rubbing her puffy eyes under her bangs because for her it was the middle of the night and Grievous had just thoughtlessly had her shaken out of a sound sleep, but she woke up fast when she saw the view and the full expanse of the room and the General waiting for her at the far end of it. She hadn't gotten to see anything of Invisible Hand on the shuttle ride over.
The droids marched her over to Grievous along the walkway. Her apprehension rose as she got closer to him even though her conscience was utterly clear for once and the cyborg looked…well, kind of normal for a change. He wasn't hunched over or reared up or glaring at her at all, nor did he look sick or injured in any way. He was just—standing, arms hanging down at his sides, legs flexed a little and set well beneath himself. And wearing his incongruous cape, fastened to fit snugly about the cowling encircling his neck mechanisms. It gave him a look she found at once both dashing and slightly absurd, but then they all seemed a little cape-happy to her, these Separatist higher-ups.
She got to him and stood there herself while he looked her over, expressionless, not saying a word. Lissa wasn't very good at tolerating awkward silences. "Nice ship," she tried. "Yours?"
Ass! Of course it was his ship! Grievous didn't seem to mind the extreme brainlessness of her question, merely said, "My flagship.", in an offhand way, and then turned away and began gazing out a window. She waited some more, biting her tongue, still utterly clueless as to why he'd had her dragged out of bed and brought to him at such an insane hour.
"I am in the process of reorganizing my staff," he said at last, "and it occurred to me that there is one position which I've left unfilled until now." His head swivelled and he looked pointedly at Lissa. "That of personal physician."
Nothing. No enthusiasm. No instant gratitude. Just a dull stare and a frown line deepening in the skin between her oddly haired eyebrows. Grievous swung fully about and stepped back in front of the woman. "On my world," he added, and his voice was now much colder, "such an position would be one of great honour."
Grievous's tone, lowering into an area she so did not want to visit, booted her instantly out of her stunned disbelief.
"Er, it's not that, it's…General, I—think you may have gotten a very wrong impression of me. I have no medical training, not really, just what my mother taught me and what I've picked up from colleagues over the years. I've never been officially sanctioned or certified. I couldn't give you even the most rudimentary examination or handle any sort of useful drugs or prescribe them, not legally."
"I'm not interested in paperwork or legalities, only performance," Grievous said impatiently. "You do have a thorough understanding of your own kind's physiology, yes?"
"Well, yes, but—"
"And Nagas has told me that of all the species assigned to my fleet, yours and mine are physically the most similar, correct?"
"Well, I—guess, yes. But—"
"Then it should be easy for you to learn Kaleesh physiology once provided with the appropriate medical data. I'll see to it that all of my personal records are released to you as well," Grievous plowed on, oblivious to her consternation. "Now, how is your understanding of heuristic programming?"
Lissa had to put a hand up to her face to steady herself against the sudden switch in topics. "Heuristics, um, yes. Nagas has been working with me on that—"
"Good. You'll be responsible for the proper functioning of my MagnaGuards as well. That is what the position entails, caring primarily for me, and then my elite. I'll authorize that an office and quarters be arranged for you here on Invisible Hand. You'll be expected to report aboard whenever the fleet is at battle stations."
"B—battle stations?" she almost yelped.
"Yes," the cyborg confirmed. And then, because it had been an excellent day for him and he was still in an overall very good and forgiving mood, leaned way down and purred into her face, as if in confidence, "Unless, Miss Veleroko, you have an objection to exposing yourself to warfare, do you? Would prefer to accompany me as I go about negotiating or overseeing the signing of treaties instead, something very safe?"
What the—? Was he trying to be funny? Insinuating that she was a coward? "Of course not," she said indignantly. "That'd be pointless." Then could have kicked herself because it sounded as though she'd already accepted the position and agreed to its terms. Wait a minute, what in the hell just happened here, she thought, confused.
Grievous straightened up again, satisfied.
"I'll send for you once the office is ready," he said, and nodded at her battle droid escorts. "Dismissed."
The droids took her out, a look of bafflement still on her face. By the time she crawled back into bed on the droid tender, she'd already half-persuaded herself that she'd just experienced a lucid dream and that the meeting hadn't actually occurred. By the time morning rolled around, she woke up convinced that it'd all just been some weird-ass nightmare until Gregory shattered her belief by demanding to know where the battle droids had taken her in the middle of the night for half an hour and why had she looked so stricken and funny when she came back.
Grievous, of course, never knew anything of this and wouldn't have cared if he did. He spent the rest of his night thinking up more schemes and plots and mentally trying out new ways of introducing himself to all the hapless people he planned to subjugate. I am General Grievous, he thought, Supreme Commander of the Separatist droid armies, deputy leader of the Council of the Confederacy of Independent Systems, and these are my elite warriors and my bodyguards, and my executive officers, and my personal physician. Yes, he liked the sound of all that, especially the addition of the physician. It made him sound alive.
TBC
