THE ESSENCES OF LIFE

Chapter 9 – Revelations And Ruminations

The spot where Lissa's transponder had been inserted was still itching when Grievous's reinforcements finally arrived and he swung into battle mode. She was glad she had Trigger and Gregory with her as she and the Geonosians whose names had come up on the duty roster travelled over to the Invisible Hand to report in at their battle stations—both service droids made excellent backscratchers.

With so many vessels now under his command and after remaining in one location for so long, it'd been impossible for Grievous to keep the particulars of his fleet secret, but that didn't matter. He'd actually been counting on his intended victims discovering what was coming. The opponents he'd been plotting against were the Cervidians, a highly intelligent and industrialized species who'd fortuitously evolved within a system containing no less than five hospitable planets. All were generously laced with desirable minerals, endowed with oceans and continents draped with lush vegetation, the soil fertile, their climates mild. The Cervidians had populated them all over the centuries and now basked in their natural wealth, which they'd thus far had no trouble protecting. Grievous intended to change all that.

He made no attempt to hurry or conceal his actions once he'd set his fleet into motion. They approached the Cervidian system with leisurely confidence and even the General was impressed by the forces that were waiting for him, the size and scope of the Cervidian's own composite fleet. It would have been enough to repulse any covetous Outer Rim neighbour with ease. But they'd never fought a droid army, and they'd never encountered an opponent like Grievous.

The Cervidians had concentrated their defense before their original homeworld, the planet Cervidia. It was the largest and richest of their worlds, the seat of their government and economics, militarily the most vital, the most desireable. They naturally assumed that the enemy advancing on them would try to take it first, instead, they wound up watching flabbergasted as the Separatist ships deployed about the outermost and least developed of their inhabited planets, paying their homeworld no mind whatsoever. Their confusion and unease turned into shock and horror when the enemy ships began laying down a massive orbital bombardment, targeting the residential sections, sweeping slowly from west to east with every apparent intention of eventually encircling the entire globe.

The Cervidians hastily remustered their forces and raced to the rescue. Grievous sent his mechanized legions out to meet them. A short, vicious battle took place. The Cervidians were outnumbered and outgunned in every respect—they were soon forced to retreat, reeling. To demoralize them even further, Grievous sacrificed two Commerce Guild destroyers to take out the Cervidians' largest carrier and flagship, by ordering the destroyers to pursue and dash themselves into the carrier even though the Cervidian vessel had already turned around. The suicidal action frightened the remaining Cervidian commanders. They were just beginning to understand the full implications of fighting nonliving foes.

Grievous turned his attention back to the bombardment. He'd already learned that such actions were very effective in getting an enemy's attention and subduing them at the same time, and he was having very little trouble subduing this world, which had so few defences that he was even able to use his AGD frigates, the 'air-ground destroyers' that specialized in high-altitude precision bombing. Of course his lovely flagship, Invisible Hand, also played a role. He'd been looking forward to utilizing his vessel's full capacity ever since he'd taken command and was already very pleased by the amount of devastation the carrier-destroyer's turbolasers and ion cannons were inflicting. No spaceship yet built could destroy a world outright, but he thought that his Invisible Hand, based on what he was observing, could come close, that she had firepower enough to wipe a planetary surface clean all by herself if he were to carry out an attack long enough.

Grievous was only interested this time in depopulating his target while leaving its industrial facilities and resources standing as much as possible and called off the bombardment as soon as they'd achieved a good level of planetary saturation. They carried on to their second target, the next inhabited Cervidian world. Grievous had just finished getting his ships into position when he received the somewhat expected request from the Cervidians for a temporary ceasefire and parley.

Setting the meeting up got Lissa involved for the first time in her capacity as the token living member of General Grievous's staff. She was already feeling intimidated and anxious because of the fighting she'd been watching from her office, and when her quartet of battle droid bodyguards showed up at her door, she thought for one horrid moment that she was going to have to go down to the new planet that Invisible Hand had taken station above. She wasn't at all sure at first what to make of Sunny's orders to take her up to Grievous's quarters, and pronto.

By the time she got up to the observation deck, she'd grasped that the people they were fighting had asked for a ceasefire to negotiate and that they were going to meet with Grievous aboard the Invisible Hand. Her apprehension shifted into keen interest. She'd never seen the cyborg like this, acting as a politician, and was thoroughly intrigued as she took her place as part of the regular parade scene she found set up in his quarters. Several ranks of additional battle droids stood to her left, a number of the fearsome MagnaGuards to her right. Grievous waited up on the walkway by the viewports at the front of the deck, as he'd once waited for her, to inform her that she was going to be his personal physician. He had a very cool, ominous air about him and Lissa thought that it would take a brave soul to meet that glittery golden gaze of his without flinching.

The Cervidians turned out to be small humanoid-formed bipeds with short, prettily blotched fur and snouted faces dominated by big dark eyes and large, mobile, almost circular ears set near the tops of their heads. The party they sent was made up of six individuals wearing simple, soft, earth-toned robes, the actual leaders, and another four clad in sturdier clothing and harnesses that hugged their bodies, ceremonial guards or perhaps even the pilot crew of the shuttle that had brought them over. They seemed hardly any bigger than Lissa as they filed past her across the well of Grievous's observation deck, their nervousness obvious, a couple with their mouths part-open in what were probably expressions of extreme anxiety. The General met them up on his walkway, slouched in his predatory pose, staring coldly with his yellow eyes. Even hunched over, he towered above them.

Lissa was just a little too far away to make out much of the conversation that ensued. There were a lot of broad abrupt gestures from Grievous as he first pointed towards her and the rest of his entourage, then out at space. The Cervidians were too soft-spoken to hear at all, or perhaps they were trying to mollify the cyborg by speaking quietly. They cringed almost, before him, and their ears stood straight up and turned a little sideways, so that they almost touched at the tips. Grievous darted his head out at them. Lissa could tell that his husky tone was lowering even further, becoming sarcastic. She picked up such phrases as "don't care if" and "not an option". The Cervidians became frantic. One of them stood in advance of the rest, pleading with Grievous. The cyborg reared up to his full height and glared down contemptuously. He looked big enough to stomp the small alien underfoot.

Grievous stepped closer to the viewports and gestured again, slapping one duranium palm against the transparisteel panes. Lissa remembered how he'd terrorized her the day he'd had her abducted and used the threat of destroying Marku to force her into compliance. A wave of sympathy for the Cervidians washed through her and she wished she could warn them to take the cyborg seriously, that he wouldn't bluff or allow for the slightest latitude. The lead Cervidian was still trying to plead with him. Grievous's voice rose and she could clearly overhear him giving the aliens an hour to make their decision. That said, he turned his back and refused to listen to any more. The battle droids that had escorted the Cervidians stepped up and made them leave, and they slunk out past Lissa again, crestfallen and miserable.

With the Cervidian party gone, Lissa and her battle droids were free to go. As they were walking back to her office down the main corridor, they heard a quick-cadenced rapping, then Grievous himself swept up from behind and past them, racing along with his running walk, gaiting up a storm with his feet flying and his grey and scarlet cape swirling in his wake. Likely going to the bridge, Sunny said, in response to Lissa's query, and she perked up and asked the droid officer to follow the cyborg, to see whether he couldn't get her onto the bridge too.

The guards readily let the human woman in once they'd identified her, and she stepped into the command center of the Invisible Hand for the first time. It made for just as impressive a sight as Grievous's observation deck, a multi-level, expansive space enclosed by a great horseshoe of angled viewports offering yet another dazzling view, the whole partially jutting out from the body of the carrier-destroyer like a separate prow. Battle droids manned most of the numerous stations, interspersed here and there with Neimoidian officers. Grievous was standing at the front of the bridge in the well by the viewports, his head just visible above the upper-level railing.

Lissa tried to remain unobtrusively in the background, but Grievous saw her, of course—he saw everything—and came gliding up fast, hunched over with his head down, as aggressive as she'd ever seen him. "What are you doing here?" he snapped, thrusting his face forward too close to her own.

"I'd like to observe you for a while in your normal work environment, General," she replied.

He blinked, taken aback, stared at her doubtfully a moment more, then spun around with a growly low grunt and what sounded uncomfortably like an alien curse and stalked away again. Lissa interpreted his loss of interest in her as permission to stay and sidled over to stand by the captain's chair. She'd been more than half expecting him to throw her out.

The Neimoidian Captain had witnessed their confrontation and regarded Lissa glumly. She didn't know him very well yet, had just exchanged a few nods and pleasantries in passing, yet he turned out to be unexpectedly confiding as they quietly discussed the cyborg together. "You probably deal with him when he's calmer," the Captain said, "but this is the only way we ever see him." Lowering his voice even further, he confessed, "We're all afraid of him."

It was easy for Lissa to understand why. Grievous was in a state, to put it mildly, pacing back and forth at the front of the bridge, dripping menace and angry impatience. He turned back onto the ramp accessing the entrance level of the command center and Lissa tensed as he approached again, thinking he'd decided to toss her after all. But no. He did an about-face a few strides away from the captain's chair and promptly sped back the way he'd come—he'd just expanded his pacing route. Over and over he did the same thing, stalking back and forth by the viewports, then a quick run up and down the ramp, then back to the viewports, and the longer Lissa watched him, the more disturbed she grew. This wasn't just walking about to kill time, it had become stereotypic behaviour, the sort of repetitive motions sometimes performed by stressed animals kept in confinement in a vain attempt to anaesthetize themselves against whatever it was they found intolerable. He wasn't even looking at anything. His eyes were blank whenever he did his one-eighty before the captain's chair, he was zoning out. After a few more go-rounds, he seemed to come out of it and began glancing over all the stations he passed as he strode along and paused on occasion to stare outside, taut and focused on where Lissa thought the Cervidian fleet might be, although she couldn't see it herself. Waiting—no, hoping—for the deadline to expire so he could resume his attack, no doubt. Lissa didn't want to be around when that happened. She'd seen enough.

She left before Grievous got his wish. The Cervidians remained uncommunicative and the deadline ran out, and seconds later, the General gave the order to open fire on the new planet. The Cervidian fleet tried again to stop the Separatist assault, desperately, and were repulsed with ferocious intensity, Grievous freely sacrificing his troops once more to take out several of the biggest enemy destroyers. They withdrew and regrouped a safe distance away, and the Separatist offensive continued all the while until the planet began to glow red in spots as the firestorms on the surface spread.

It was more than the Cervidians could bear, to watch another of their planets and millions more of their people burn. They agreed to surrender unconditionally. Grievous accepted their capitulation and soon earned himself much praise, from Count Dooku and even from Lord Sidious himself, who called to personally express his pleasure over the cyborg's speedy efficiency.

Lissa had watched the second bombardment too, with mixed emotions. She'd become keenly aware that she was in a unique position, able to watch history unfold with her own eyes, and was feeling badly confused as a result, unsure of what to think of all she was witnessing. She even tried tuning into the HoloNet News, the staple Republic broadcast that everyone, even the Separatists, seemed to listen to, for a fresh perspective, but soon turned it off again, sickened by the endless descriptions of atrocities and massacres and the terrible appellations applied to the man she'd been tasked to care for. The best way to handle it, she decided in the end, was to do as the Geonosians did, just focus on her work and not give any thought anymore to the morality or ethics of it all. And if she did think about it, to at least keep her mouth shut, to protect herself.

Not long after the Cervidian system had been conquered, Grievous threw Lissa for another loop by sending word that he wished to come in and undergo his routine bacta treatment several days early. "Oh, he definitely likes you!" Nagas exclaimed as the human was packing up to go over to the Invisible Hand, and Lissa, who was becoming quite fond of the Geonosian Patriot, gave him a mock frown and a playful thump on top of his knobbly head.

Grievous showed up at her office while she was still turning her equipment on and getting ready. "I must say, General," she told him, "that I'm both surprised and pleased to see you coming in so early."

The cyborg stood there in what she'd come to think of as his neutral stance, his body and head erect without being aggressively stretched upward and his legs set beneath himself without much angulation. It usually meant that he was in a neutral mood as well…usually.

"I've been called away for several weeks," he finally said after a long pause.

"Ah. And you don't perhaps want me along to…?"

"It's for administrative reasons. I won't be fighting."

The woman nodded. Well, that certainly explained it. She grabbed her padd and cheerfully said, "Okay then! Let's get started. First, with your permission, sir, I'd like to try going about this a little differently than you're used to. I found out that the Neimoidians have the facilities to give you a good cleanup right in their own medical bay. I'd like to take you there instead of down to the maintenance section, if you're willing. There's only one drawback, I'm afraid."

Grievous's eyes narrowed. "Go on," he said.

"Well, it's their autopsy room, General. Empty at the moment, of course, but if the location bothers you…"

She trailed off. The cyborg thought it over—she could almost see the gears spinning in his head. "No," he decided. "Proceed." In truth, her suggestion had amused him—what better place for a specialist dealer in death?—but she'd never know that.

She further endeared herself as soon as they got to the infirmary by savagely jerking her thumb at the medical staff in what was obviously a preplanned dismissing gesture. Grievous watched with satisfaction as the Neimoidian doctor and his two aides filed out, muttering. If the woman hadn't already arranged for their absence, he would have thrown them out himself.

The autopsy room turned out to be unexpectedly spacious. It appeared that even in death, Neimoidians were typically wasteful and hedonistic, Grievous thought with mild disgust. But the human was right—the space was sealed and equipped with drains and the appointments well suited to wash down his droid body. The hoses were all hand-helds, though, there was nothing automated. Did she mean for him to clean himself?

No. Lissa pulled down one of the water hoses, sprayed it into a sink until she'd adjusted the temperature and pressure to her liking, then turned to him expectantly. Grievous, resigned, let his body slump down and lowered his head. The Geonosians had sometimes had their drones clean him up this way back on Geonosis when he'd first been learning to fight again hand-to-hand and had often gotten filthy. They'd usually made a mess of things on top of just plain annoying him.

It quickly became apparent to him that such wouldn't be the case this time. The woman had evidently had some experience in these matters. Her technique was skilful and she followed an obvious routine, even cupping a hand over his eyes with automatic thoughtfulness when she sprayed his face, and afterwards sliding a couple of fingers in behind his neck struts to protect his breathing aperture in the same way. She seemed to be examining him too, running her fingers with practised care over his various parts to feel for tiny dings and deformities, scraping a bit with her fingernail on occasion if a spot didn't wash off immediately, just getting to know what was unique and normal for the machine body he now lived in. Grievous, always touchy and tense about people taking liberties with his personal self since his resurrection as a cyborg, began to relax, reassured by her competence. She didn't try to engage him in useless conversation in an effort to be friendly or to cover up any nervousness while she went about her business and her handling of him was thorough, yet not too familiar. Something he could tolerate, in short.

Having his droid components touched wasn't the same as having what remained of his organic self examined, yet Grievous again got the sense of having experienced something similar as Lissa continued working on him. Nothing troubling or disturbing this time, just that nagging familiarity. He looked down at the human curiously, trying to remember, and when she bent over to look at his feet and tugged a little on the back of one hock joint to let him know she wanted him to lift the foot up, to look at its underside, it abruptly came to him. Why, she wasn't cleaning him, she was grooming him, just as he'd once groomed the elch gelding he'd so loved to ride when he was still a boy! A clear bright image suddenly sprang up, escaping out of his fractured store of memories. Flok, his name had been, a light tan with smutty brown legs, the first really good purebred animal he'd ever owned. On sweltering days, he'd sometimes ridden him bareback down to the cove from which his clan drew its name and gotten Flok to go in swimming, and afterwards had been a good time to trim the elch's big blunt claws because the tough horn was made a little softer by the water and easier to pare. Flok always tried to lean on him when he was stooped over holding one of the gelding's feet in his hands, and Grievous always wound up cussing him out for his rotten manners and threatening all sorts of dire punishments which he of course never carried out. Flok had been a wonderful companion, an excellent hunting steed, fast and brave, and when Grievous went off for officer training and had no time for him anymore, he'd sold him to one of his friends, who had delighted in the elch's company in turn. Good old Flok…how could he have forgotten about him for so long? And if ever Grievous wanted a testament to how strange his altered existence had become, this now had to be it, that he could equate standing in the autopsy room of a sickbay aboard a Neimoidian space cruiser, an alien woman sluicing water over his raised metal foot, with memories of grooming the favourite mount of his youth on Kalee.

When Lissa switched over to the air hose, to give him a cursory drying prior to his entering the bacta tank, she apologized for having taken so long and explained that she'd also been performing the exterior inspection of his droid components which was normally done as part of his monthly mechanical check—it'd just seemed an opportune chance, given that she was going over him anyway, and she hoped he wouldn't mind that she was trying to amalgamate some of his routines to save him time later on. Grievous replied that he didn't mind at all, so mildly that she looked hard back at him, wondering what was up with him now. She doubtfully settled for believing that having a nice warm leisurely hand-washing for once in place of the driving cold all-over spray of one of the automated wash stalls must've put him in a good mood. Maybe.

The rest likewise went well. He didn't seem half as upset as before, being in the tank, and was agreeable later to letting her preventatively treat his eyes and surrounding flesh again and hardly fussed at all, just jerked his head in tiny increments now and then when she rubbed the cream into his skin as though she'd struck a nerve. Everything looked to be in good condition and the pale scar over his cut had coloured up so well that she couldn't even find it anymore. She felt happy as could be when she finished and sent him off, and Grievous seemed satisfied too. She'd fully expected him to be a real terror about resisting the changes she'd had in mind and hopelessly antsy about having his body touched, and it was a huge relief to her that he hadn't been difficult at all. True, he still hadn't expressed a wit of gratitude or interacted any more than he absolutely had to, but it was a start, she knew now that he could be civil if he wanted to, and that something still resided in him that could respond to simple courtesy and kindness.

The General went off the next day to attend whatever it was that required his presence and Lissa used the lull during his absence to finally try and get a handle on what his species was all about. The information she was able to dig out, however, turned out to be frustratingly sparse. It seemed that the Kaleesh weren't exactly major players in the galactic scheme of things. They weren't even members of the Confederacy, just listed as friendly neutrals, and the only thing of theirs that the Separatists had ever had the slightest interest in seemed to be Grievous himself. They shared an uncommonly large solar system with one other sentient species known as the Huk, long-time rivals and on-again, off-again enemies of the Kaleesh, which the CIS was currently classifying as hostile due to some previous unspecified dealings with the Republic. Lissa was willing to bet that if she could access a Republic database, she'd find the designations exactly reversed—there, the Huk would be the friendly ones, the Kaleesh the hostiles.

All the rest was strictly tourist stuff. The Kaleesh were described as homeothermal, humanoid-patterned, live-bearing, hairless bipeds, intelligent yet barbaric in their social habits, who established dominance orders to determine status and who lived in low tech, well-structured clans…she knew that already. The only surprise was discovering how sexually dimorphic they really were, the mature males towering over the much smaller, sleeker females and equipped with purely masculine, wickedly large claws and hyperdeveloped lower canine teeth. It was a trait expressed to a degree that was rare in humanoids and which suggested that Grievous had not been built extra-large after all, that he might have been naturally big and tall. She could find nothing about whether the men ever actually used their fearsome accoutrements or whether it was all just for show, just that the fighting for dominance during their turbulent adolescence did apparently get serious enough on occasion for participants to kill each other. Either way, Grievous, who'd achieved his high-status rank long before he'd ever worked for the Separatists, must've been a pretty formidable and impressive-looking example of his kind, and Lissa regretted not being able to find a single image of him as he was when fully organic.

There was very little else of note. The males did hold all the political power, they were the dominant sex, just as Gregory had related, yet she also found a curious statement near the very end of her search which supported Nagas's assertion. Just seven brief words—'males typically defer to females by instinct'—and nothing more, no clue as to when such deferral took place or under which circumstances or what it consisted of. More frustration… Lissa thought about going to the Geonosians for further help, but sensed that doing so would be dangerous. She was supposed to be looking after Grievous's medical and mechanical needs alone, and they'd already given her all the information she would ever need to do that, all his personal schematics and records and a full library of Kaleesh physiological data. Anything else was something she clearly wasn't meant to concern herself with, and she suspected that even good-natured Nagas would regard her with suspicion should she start fishing around for more about the cyborg's former personal life.

She didn't even consider going straight to the source. Even if Grievous had once been of a disposition inclined towards answering her queries, it was ruined now, and his memory was too messed up by the sounds of it to be reliable anyway...if he could remember anything at all.

Lissa finally gave it up and turned back to her medical information. She had plenty of that, all she'd ever want to know about how Kaleesh bodies worked and how their brains functioned. What she didn't know, and still didn't, was what it was they liked to do with those bodies or what they liked to think about.

She didn't see Grievous again until after he'd returned and the biodroid team got a quick call-out a few days later in aid of a brief bout of fighting on a very small planetoid. It seemed too little a world to even have an atmosphere, yet it did, and Lissa wound up going down to experience it first hand. She had to go and sign out some cold-weather gear first. The planetoid had a temperate climate for the most part and the area they were landing in was undergoing its early winter.

The shuttle she and her usual four protectors plus several squads of regular battle droids rode down in deployed them on a low rise on plains near some hills in the middle of nowhere. Grievous and a half-dozen of his MagnaGuards and some of his droid officers were already there with their own shuttle, one especially equipped to act as a forward command post for small scale operations. They stood outside in the snow together, all of them intently focused on a particular range of hills some several kilometres off, yet try as Lissa might, she couldn't see a thing worth looking at. It wasn't until Sunny, her battle droid officer, told her that Grievous was coordinating a raid meant to take out a hidden base of organized mercenaries suspected of being friendly to the Republic that she began to understand what was going on.

The action finally got underway with the arrival of a number of troop and equipment transports, overseen by droid gunships and a squadron of mixed types of air machines. The base was sited within a system of vast caves with one major entrance facing off to their right, well dug in and difficult to get at. Sunny informed Lissa that Grievous was ordering a chemical attack to try and drive some of the defenders at the entrance back long enough to give the transports a chance to deploy and get the troops and their machinery inside. There was supposed to be a huge stockpile of weaponry and explosives within the base. Grievous was hoping to capture it and some of the mercenaries, to better learn who'd been supplying them. The CIS didn't need a fledgling Republic movement springing up in their own Outer Rim backyard.

Luck wasn't with the Separatists on this day, however. A number of droids did get inside, but were then stymied by savage resistance. They needed heavier ordnance to advance further, a few well-aimed concussion bombs from one of the gunships perhaps, yet Grievous was reluctant to authorize it—he wanted to take the base intact, if possible. He decided to give it some time, to try and wear the defenders down first.

As battles went, it was the most restrained, remote one Lissa had been involved in yet and she and the others at the command post were never in any real danger. It wasn't very cold, only a few degrees below freezing, and the big red sun was shining, and she was warm and cozy enough in her parka and lined boots that it turned into a rather pleasant outing for her as the day wore on, not much to do but watch the air cover cruise about and watch Grievous and his guards and wait for something to happen. By mid-afternoon, the sunshine started kicking off some convective activity, and the scattered cloud dotting the sky soon thickened up into great individual towering cumulus clouds generating heavy flurries. Some of the snow showers began marching their way. Lissa hadn't experienced a snowfall in years. It became almost exhilarating, to watch the grey veils come in and then wrap about them in a swirl of heavy wet flakes that would gust through their post with brief fury and reduce their visibility to almost nil; then, a few minutes later, the flurry would move off and the sun reappear. The droids bore it all stoically, as droids always did, standing like statues whenever the snow beat at them, quickly becoming encrusted on whatever sides were exposed to the prevailing wind. Only the rippling capes of the MagnaGuards and Grievous remained free of being temporarily enshrouded.

The snow accumulated differently on the cyborg than on his droids. His chest and skull and the mask about his eyes were warmed by the heated fluids and blood-heat within, and the flakes that struck him there melted at once and ran in little rivulets down his face and the front of his body between his chest plates. Sometimes he'd lift a hand up to his head to wipe clean his sensor panels or his vocabulator, where the snow did stick. Lissa, watching, wondered if the precipitation was fuzzing up his built-in antennae's reception.

The weather did nothing to interfere with the attack on the base and the stalemate continued. Towards evening, as Lissa was sipping at a canteen full of hot java juice, she thought her vision must finally have gone from the hours of watching—one of the hillsides suddenly seemed to slump and flatten out. She was about to try rubbing at her eyes when a rolling roar washed over her like distant thunder and the ground underfoot began to vibrate, and she understood then that she hadn't been seeing things at all. Sunny told her that the rebels had just blown up their weapons stockpile rather than let it fall into enemy hands.

"So that's why Grievous didn't take part in the action!" Lissa exclaimed.

"Yes," said Sunny. "That's why the General didn't take part."

The collapse of the cavern system had taken out over two hundred Separatist droids as well as whatever mercenaries were still inside when they'd destroyed themselves. No matter. There were always plenty of droids. The only irreplaceable individual on scene was still standing safe and secure, albeit disappointed, on a snowy rise overlooking the battle's sudden conclusion.

Once he'd called back his own troops and what could be salvaged of any that'd been damaged, Grievous ordered one of his AGD frigates to lay down a quick precision carpet bombing to ensure that the base was utterly finished and anything left alive annihilated. To make sure that it could not be scavenged by any hostiles after they'd left, he had several gunships saturate the ground with a long-acting biochemical agent that would sicken or kill most organics on contact unless they were wearing self-contained protective suiting. Lissa stayed on and watched it all happen, thoughtfully. Grievous might have had his mind scrambled in some respects, but when it came to getting his job done, his thinking was nothing if not thorough.

The fleet was underway again before nightfall. Lissa, who'd returned to the droid tender, was off-duty and yawning her way through the last few pages of a tech journal and thinking about hitting the sack, when she got a message that General Grievous wanted her back so he could undergo his latest bacta treatment ASAP, he'd be too busy tomorrow and for a while afterwards to keep his scheduled appointment. A new assignment must've just come his way, she thought as she scrambled about, looking for a decently clean pair of coveralls to wear, and felt quite grateful that at least he hadn't gotten his orders in the middle of the night.

It was so late nonetheless that there was no need to chase away any Neimoidians this time—the infirmary was already unmanned for the night until the following morning. Grievous stood quietly for Lissa again throughout his wash. Her apprehension of him had eased considerably over the past several weeks and this time she relaxed too and took some pleasure in her task in addition to just trying to complete it to the best of her ability. Grievous's design still delighted her. It was such a perfect meld of form and function, all the different, specialized components fitting together just so, and her hands began going over the curved, beautifully worked metal and duranium surfaces with real enjoyment as she cleaned them off. When she got to the cyborg's arms, she felt safe in holding his own hand briefly in her own, one after the other, to check on the functioning of all the intricate joints of his fingers and also just to admire them, as she'd once admired his construction when she'd had him lying on the floor of her workshop-lab on Marku. She hid a bit of a smile as she inspected the fine digits and remembered. Who'd have guessed that the nasty creature she'd met back then would ever allow her to go over him like this voluntarily? She suspected that Grievous would still fire her out the nearest airlock, though, if he ever learned how thoroughly she'd examined and scanned him while she'd had him unconscious and at her mercy, so to speak.

Lissa reviewed her information about his brain's normal functioning and its enhancements and alterations while he stood immersed in the bacta tank. Nagas had recommended that she have a look inside his skull every second time he came in for his bacta treatment. It was just under a year since he'd been operated on and his mind was still recovering from the medical outrage done to it, still prone to bouts of inflammation and localized infection in trying to reject all the hardware that'd been inserted into the organ. Lissa hadn't liked the look of Grievous's brain at all when the Geonosians had let her work on it the last time and she was determined to come up with a better regimen than just hacking away at any bits that had given up the ghost and become necrotic. A little preventative medication, for example, similar to what she was doing for his eyes…that couldn't hurt and she'd already put together a good cocktail of easily obtainable drugs, general antibiotics and anti-inflammatants, that should work well on a Kalee, especially when applied directly. She intended to speak to him about it as soon as she had him in her office and in his chair.

She paged back to the combined scan showing the full extent of the scarring in his memory and aggression centers. Her fingers drummed a nervous tattoo against the sides of her padd and she scowled. She still had a hard time accepting the sheer callousness of it all and had grown deeply suspicious about whether Grievous even understood what had been done to him. She just could not believe that anyone would voluntarily agree to having memories of their family suppressed in some lame, heartless attempt to better focus them on their work, and being left unable to sleep properly wasn't right either, it wasn't healthy. The Geonosians should have gone back in and fixed that if they cared about their creation. But that was the problem—they didn't care. She was starting to believe that Grievous had been deliberately designed with an inherent obsolescence, that he'd been put together just well enough to stay sane and last for the duration of the war.

Grievous had no objections to her wanting to alter his routine when she later opened up his skull plate. Really, he was turning out to be quite reasonable about such things, as long as he was thoroughly informed beforehand and presented with some logical explanations for any changes. From his somewhat distracted air, Lissa guessed he was also already thinking out how best to accomplish his latest task and perhaps almost welcomed the opportunity to sit quietly and do that while at the same time undergoing one of his annoying but necessary maintenance sessions. Whatever it was that was making him agreeable, it made her heave another huge private sigh of relief.

Lissa meant to use the fixed laser again instead of the handheld model and immobilized Grievous's head—an extraordinarily easy thing to do, in his case—before getting started. She didn't care if the Geonosians did laugh at her cautious manner. She intended to lose not one neuron more than she absolutely had do whenever working on the General's mind and for that she needed the precision that only the fixed instrument could afford. A quick glance showed that she'd probably have quite a bit of precision work to do. She could already see a distressing number of little pale and blackish spots on the surface of the tissues about many of the implants.

A mental image of the scan of the damage she couldn't see drifted up and demanded attention. Lissa stood behind the cyborg, looking down at his exposed brain, in a quandary, distressed by what she knew and by what she was considering. She'd learned almost nothing about Grievous's true background and nature, only that he'd once been a warlord general on his homeworld and had been involved in a mutilating accident. He might have always been a brutal man, already the vile monster and butcher described in the HoloNet broadcasts long before he'd been recruited. She didn't even particularly like him and still bore him a terrific grudge for having bullied her into her current situation, and supposed that she might even be doing the galaxy a huge favour if her laser just happened to 'slip' some day as she was working away on him, although that would undoubtedly lead to her own death as well. On the other hand, there were those nodules, his abnormal behaviours and rages, his abusive training which bordered on cruelty. It was possible that he was just as much a victim of his circumstances as she was herself.

Nagas had said that they were going to go back in and remove some of the blocks when the cyborg had initially seemed too violent. He'd specified the word 'remove'…

"General Grievous?" said Lissa slowly. "Would you…mind if I took a short series of scans while I worked? I'd like to have them for comparative reference for the next time I have a look at you."

She held her breath. Grievous sat there in a half-reclining pose, eyes closed, hands lying in his lap, holding his elegant alien mask. He looked remarkably peaceful for once, calm, trusting almost. "Go ahead," he replied.

Lissa adjusted the scanning machine. She brought up a picture of one of the little balls of scarring within Grievous's memory center. She activated the integrated targeting option and slaved it onto the microsurgical laser. The hell with it. Part of her job when examining the cyborg's brain was to clean up any dead and dying tissue and that was what she was going to do, clear out some dead stuff.

As quickly as she dared, feeling a little sick with anxiety the whole time, Lissa targeted, then used the laser to destroy three of the nodules, leaving behind tiny empty spaces surrounded by what she hoped were live, healthy cells. She had no idea of what would happen next. She'd been unable to find any neurological case studies involving Kaleesh that offered any insight into how well the species recovered from traumatic injuries to the brain or the removal of tumours and lesions. Maybe he'd regain all his memories, turn out to be a decent guy, reconsider what he was doing, and quit. Maybe nothing at all would happen. Lissa refused to speculate any further. Fate would have to take over for her.

Negating three blocks took all the extra time she dared risk taking without making Grievous suspicious and she then moved on to some genuine work, taking the occasional scan whenever she was done with a specific area. She released his head once finished with her examination and microsurgery, completed all her preventative treatments, closed him up, and that was that. Grievous paused to look at the last scan she'd taken and left up on screen, a external dorsal view of his own mind, but otherwise did as usual, simply found his own way out and left.

Lissa surreptitiously watched him go. The woman who'd never had the slightest use for politicking throughout her adult life and who'd once earned the General's scathing assessment of being a fool because of it, was now a saboteur.

TBC