Some of you asked about Lissa's age. At the start of this story she is forty-two. My version of Grievous also starts out at forty-two, in fact, I envision the two of them as having been born within a week of each other. I just find characters with some experience and history behind them more interesting. But enough chitchat. Enjoy!
THE ESSENCES OF LIFE
Chapter 10 – Manifest Disclosures
Grievous had come in early for his last routine bacta treatment for exactly the reason his personal physician had conjectured—he'd received a new assignment for which he wanted to be in tip-top form. His masters, Dooku and Sidious, had been well pleased with his vicious efficiency as of late and they thought it high time to put his unique talents to better use by targeting a planet closer to the Republic breast, the staunch Loyalist world of Oronaciem. It would be the General's first foray into the Mid Rim territories and the purpose of his mission would be purely to spread terror—Oronaciem was seen as having no particular value aside from serving as a focal point for Republic support in its area. The assault would also mark two important dates, the end of Grievous's trial period serving as the Supreme Commander of the Separatist droid armies and an acknowledgement of sorts of his first full year of service to the CIS since being resurrected as an experimental cyborg. The two Sith Lords could think of no better way to celebrate their dreadful servant's anniversary than by unleashing him onto the rich, unsuspecting, complacent Republic holdings of the galaxy's Mid Rim.
Grievous had personal reasons to welcome his new orders, too. As he planned his attack, his intelligence suggested that the Republic would send considerable forces against him. The Oronaciems were Monarchists. They'd long had a system of government which revolved about a prominent, well-loved Royal Family that publicly supported the planet's ties with the Galactic Republic, and Grievous was sure that the Royals' safety would be ruled paramount by the soft-headed fools who'd try to oppose him. And what better candidates for the job than his betes noires, the Jedi? Grievous plotted with the expectation that many Jedi would be sent, and in between his scheming, he spent long hours practising his combat techniques with his MagnaGuards, the better to kill them when he found them.
The fleet was pared down to the minimum number of the fastest ships Grievous had under his command and felt safe in taking along on his lightning strike, and his luck and his strategy held as they entered the Mid Rim. His task force was detected en route, early enough for Oronaciem to have some warning—Grievous had expected it—but not so early that they had time to prepare and fully organize their defences. While the main body of the Separatist fleet engaged the planetary forces, Grievous himself led a swift special mission to Oronaciem's capital spaceport and there found, to his immense glee, exactly what he'd hoped to find: the enemy caught flatfooted in the midst of still trying to evacuate its government. The one shuttle already in the air, the General's droid gunships instantly brought down. Anyone still waiting on the ground, they put the run to, by shooting up the remainder of the waiting shuttles and other ships and destroying the landing platforms and control tower. The terminal itself, Grievous ordered be left intact for the time being. He was hoping to find live Jedi to hunt.
The gunships continued sweeping back and forth over the ruined spaceport, suppressing the meagre opposition that sporadically erupted from the port's own defences, while the two Separatist personnel carriers taking part landed and disgorged, in quick order, Grievous, a dozen of his best MagnaGuards, numerous battle droid troops and their weaponry, and lastly, one scared personal physician and her own little band of battle droid bodyguards. The spirits of the latter were not helped any when a stray rocket from the spaceport defences promptly exploded nearby as they were deploying and everyone had to momentarily dive for cover in case they came under further attack.
When Grievous and his MagnaGuards stormed the damaged terminal, he quickly discovered that the Republic had for once acquiesced with his fondest wishes, unwittingly offering him its own version of a birthday gift in the form of at least half a dozen Jedi and a full surviving squad of white-armoured clone troopers, who were still trying to marshal and protect what remained of their Oronaciem charges. He caught a glimpse of figures in elaborate, colourful costumes, probably some Royals, accompanied by people in simpler robes, running off in the background within one of the holding lounges. The cyborg and his droids were also confronted by the bulk of the Royals' protectors, already hunkered down in the same lounge to cover the rest of their party's retreat. A standoff, or so they thought.
The clone troopers, well trained, opened fire as soon as they saw their pursuers, but even they were unprepared for what came next. Instead of taking cover to fight it out, Grievous hurtled out from behind his MagnaGuards in a stupendous leap, tucked up into a somersaulting position, that arced him high over the fire-field and sent him crashing down into the midst of the soldiers. The one he landed on was instantly driven onto the floor under his heavy metal body and dead a scant second later when the cyborg wrenched his head half off with one foot. He took out two more men with crushing blows from his fists, then snatched up one of the bodies by the ankles and swung it at arm's length, knocking down yet more of the astonished troopers. All firing stopped as the soldiers still standing tried to re-aim their weapons at the monstrous metal construct now whirling among them. They'd had no practice in dealing with Grievous like this, had never imagined that he'd utterly disregard their weapons fire and charge their entire squad and the Jedi by himself. Grievous took muster as he fought, battering the men away from him. Fifteen clone soldiers, no, sixteen, half of them on the ground already, only four Jedi left to stall him—yes! he could do this! He shouted at his elite to carry on, to bypass this fight and go after the real prize, the governing politicians and their protectors that had retreated further into the terminal. The MagnaGuards did as ordered, leaving him.
Blaster fire rocketed past his head and Grievous ducked down onto all fours, dropping the corpse he'd been using as a club. He jumped at the men who'd managed to regroup, bowling them over, and yanked out his own blaster and activated a single lightsaber even as he was spinning back to confront the group. The Jedi were running up, to try and get at him, to attack him, but there were just too many people clustered in the way. The turmoil and confusion caused by his attack was so great that he was actually able to get a shot off and hit one of the Jedi in the arm before the man could get his lightsaber into position to deflect it.
Yells and crunching thuds and the loud, truncated hums of a lightsaber in furious action. Grievous did not so much do battle as wade his way through the remainder of the clone troopers, killing them as fast as he could. Their armour was useless against a direct lightsaber strike and scant protection against a kick that slammed into them with the force of a ten-story drop. Those few who thought to back away, to try and target him, he shot, to knock their weapons aside until he could reach them, and he fired at the Jedi too, when they came too close, forcing them to halt and defend themselves. As soon as the last man fell dead, he sprang up onto a little heap of the slain soldiers, metal claws skittering loudly for purchase on the smoking armour, and flared upright, unlocking his arms, exchanging his blaster for three more lightsabers. He held the energy weapons out in a deadly display, each blade a different colour, glaring from one dumbfounded face to the next of his hated opponents.
The Jedi stared back, stunned by the ease and blazing speed with which he'd destroyed the clone squad. Yet they were willing to engage him, nonetheless—they were fools, but brave fools, he granted them that. He stepped back down off the bodies and sank at once into his four-armed fighting stance. The Jedi assumed their own positions, the two outermost sliding off to either side of him, manoeuvring together against him. Grievous welcomed their attempt. His confidence was soaring and his heart pounding with exhilaration in a way it hadn't for far, far too long.
He launched a fresh assault before they could surround him and cut the team in two. Another slinking dash, at the Jedi who'd been slowest to retreat, and already their plans were falling apart. The constant whirl of his multiple blades half-blinded and bewildered them. They'd no sooner isolate and begin concentrating on one weapon than find he'd juggled it, and it would slash back at them from a whole new angle. His aggression was terrifying. His unnaturally bright eyes blazed as he darted his sleek, grisly head about, and short, harsh, guttural snarls—unnerving sounds to hear uttered by an apparent droid—escaped him in his excitement as he fought. Grievous made no effort to defend himself. He took hits freely as he pressed his attack, trusting in his armour to protect him; and in his rush to hurry, hurry, hurry and murder them all so he could run on and catch their brethren and kill them too, Grievous unwittingly added a whole new dimension to his psychological weaponry, the despair wrought by landing a good blow and seeing it have no effect whatsoever. A lightsaber left on his duranium plating for long seconds would have cut through in time, but that was like trying to touch the wind. The cyborg was just too fast for them, his reach too long, and he drove the Jedi back before him with ferocious intensity.
Despair led to weariness and hesitation, and hesitation to error. Grievous caught one Jedi with his juggling trick, slicing through him while the man's eyes and attention were still on the shifted blade. He skewered another when they tried again to surround him and he leapt and flipped over their heads to safety and one of the Jedi was too slow in turning around. The two remaining men backed away even faster from him after that, in no shape anymore to face two lightsabers apiece, and he chased right after them until their will failed and there was no room left to run. He finally dropped them both in the middle of the lounge he'd turned into a charnel-house, just two more sad, crumpled additions to the tapestry of death he'd strewn across the floor.
Grievous raced on to find his MagnaGuards. He didn't have to go far. They'd caught up with the remaining Oronaciems in the foyer of the terminal and already slaughtered them all, battering and shocking the civilians to death with their wickedly efficient electrostaffs. But the Jedi in charge, four more, as it turned out, had made them pay dearly. Five of the specialist droids lay deactivated on the ground, several in pieces, and even a couple of those still standing were missing parts. Grievous had ordered them to leave the Jedi alive, if they could, but the Republic warriors had refused to cooperate there too. The MagnaGuards had had to kill two of them, and the pair left, a slight female humanoid and a strange alien of a sort Grievous had never seen before, hulking and furred, with a long wrinkled snout and big sloe eyes, were injured, the furred one badly.
Disappointed, Grievous looked them over. The furred alien didn't even register his presence and appeared close to death. The woman seemed in better shape. She glowered back defiantly and stood firm despite her bloody wounds.
"Face me, Jedi, and I'll grant you a warrior's death," Grievous offered.
"Go to hell," she snarled, and spat at him.
Fine. Grievous unholstered his blaster and shot them both, not without a certain puzzled regret. He couldn't understand why anyone would choose execution over the opportunity to go down fighting.
Some of his battle droid troops began arriving in the foyer, efficiently continuing their task of securing the terminal. Grievous broke communications silence to check in with his commanders aboard the Invisible Hand and received back the coded message signifying that all was proceeding on schedule and that the battle was going their way. Reassured, he turned back to the carnage wrought by his MagnaGuards, and inspected the bodies with interest. One of the Jedi they'd killed was human and very young. Grievous suspected he'd been a padawan—maybe he hadn't missed out on all that much after all. He left the padawan's lightsaber lying where it had fallen, and that of the other dead Jedi sprawled next to him, too. The cyborg normally only collected trophies from those he'd had a personal hand in slaying.
The civilians were an intriguing mix. Elderly men and women in sober, rather formal attire—the regular politicians, he guessed—and several more that were much more flamboyantly clothed, undoubtedly members of the Royal Family. Grievous was surprised to find two Royal children, a boy and a girl, amoung the corpses. In his experience, most humans and near-human species tried to rescue their young first. It made him wonder who exactly had been aboard the shuttle his gunships had shot down and why they'd been given priority. Beyond that, he felt nothing as he gazed down upon the small bodies. All of his compassion, his capacity to empathize and feel pity, had either been locked away in his damaged mind or ruined.
Grievous took stock of his MagnaGuards. He reassigned the functional ones to assist the nearby battle droids and told the damaged ones that were still in shape enough to process orders to remain in place until tended to. He began retracing his route through the spaceport terminal, and while walking along, discovered for the first time that he couldn't reintegrate his right arm. He could initiate the sequence without any trouble and both halved limbs looked and worked fine on their own, they just would not fit together again. Much annoyed, he used one of his built-in droid commlinks to silently call for his physician to meet with him on ahead.
Sunny and his soldiers and his charge dutifully rendezvoused with the General as he was moving about the scene of his first fight, retrieving the spoils of his battle with the Jedi in the lounge. Lissa stiffened a little as soon as she saw all the bodies lying sprawled about, the cyborg picking through them like a mechanical spectre, and her unease deepened when she observed that every one of the corpses, clone troopers and Jedi warriors alike, were either laced with linear burn wounds or had simply been smashed, there was no other way to put it. A pungent haze, reeking of overcooked meat and burnt plastics and electronics, drifted about, adding to the sickening effect.
Grievous came over to her, stepping carefully and lifting his feet high. He was still in four-armed mode, a fascinating sight. For a few seconds, Lissa almost forgot about the slaughter.
"My right arm won't reintegrate," he said.
"Oh?"
She couldn't perceive any immediate reason why it wouldn't and asked him to try again. She saw it then—something was interfering with the action below his elbow joint. Lissa pulled his forearms out straight and sighted along their join lines, and quickly determined that there was a slight deformity in the upper limb's durasteel. When she felt it, it became even more evident, a very slight depression two fingers wide and with a faint pushed-up ridge up along one edge, just a few millimetres thick, yet enough to mechanically interfere with the integration sequence.
Lissa swallowed. There was only one thing which could've left such a mark on the incredibly strong alloy.
"There's some slight damage just below your elbow, sir, on one of the joining surfaces."
"Can you fix it?"
"Not here. It's structural. Shop work. It'd be best to have it replaced."
Grievous snorted to express his displeasure and his mild disgust with himself for having let one of the Jedi hit him in a vulnerable spot after all. "Find out how long that would take," he ordered.
But she didn't, she just stood there, looking him over. Now that she'd seen the damage inflicted by one lightsaber strike, she could discern more, mostly just lines of surface scorching on his duranium armour, concentrated on his forearm plating. He must've fought like a mad thing to get so banged up, taking on everyone at once, roaring through the room with fantastic speed and energy. He even smelled of death, of ashes and burnt flesh, and she'd just been touching the arms he'd used to massacre the people heaped all around her…
Her hesitation, coming on top of her unwelcome diagnosis, ignited Grievous's already smouldering temper and he blew up. "What is wrong now!" he cried.
Lissa suppressed a terrible start. "E—Excuse me?" she stuttered.
"You! What's the matter with you!"
His angry impatience with her only made her all the more nervous. "It's just—all these people," she tried to explain.
"Yes? And?"
"And—and some of them are Jedi—Jedi!—and you—you killed them all yourself."
"Of course I killed them! Of course they're Jedi! It's what I do!"
"Well, do you have to be so damn efficient at it?" she blurted, and in the next instant clapped a hand over her mouth, horrified at what she'd just uttered. Grievous stared at her, eyes literally bulging from their sockets. She could see the whites ringing his yellow irises between the dark lids, making him look crazed and startled. Then, he coughed.
He coughed again, a short rumbling grunt, low and hollow. It expanded into a whole string of similar sounds and Lissa realised with sudden astonishment that he wasn't coughing at all, he was laughing. Without meaning to, she had very much pleased and amused him.
"My arm," he prompted, with his chuckling done and anger defused, getting back to business. Lissa's cheeks began burning. She supposed that if he understood what her blushing meant, he'd find that bloody hilarious also.
She was able to contact the Geonosians via Sunny and assure Grievous that they could replace his damaged forearm anytime in about fifteen minutes. The General said he'd be up later and told the woman that there were some MagnaGuards that needed looking at a little further along. She trudged off after her bodyguard droids to find the damaged ones, still feeling embarrassed over her lapse. Some battlefield medic slash mechanic she was turning out to be!
The slaughter in the foyer struck her even harder than that wrought by Grievous alone, once she saw that the bodies were those of civilians and that two of them were children, and she turned to the damaged MagnaGuards almost with relief, grateful to have more work to immerse herself in. There was going to be plenty of work, too, and a couple of the deactivated ones looked so scrapped that she thought they'd be lucky to salvage them for parts. She and Sunny arranged for a pick-up, and when transport arrived, rode up with the droids to the Invisible Hand. Grievous had already returned to his flagship, although not to the Geonosians' shop, a short while earlier and there was no reason for Lissa to remain planetside any longer.
General Grievous monitored the remainder of the attack on Oronaciem from the bridge of the Invisible Hand. The opposition launched against him by the world's Republic-augmented forces was brisk, but not as strong as he'd expected, and he had no trouble completing his mission of sowing ruination and despair, and destroying the infrastructure of the planet. As soon as the last shred of resistance had been quashed, he promptly recalled his troops, reorganized the fleet for an orderly retreat, and left, his job done. The real payback, appalling footage of the destruction his utterly unprovoked assault had wreaked, would come the next day, when it was broadcast over the Republic news net.
Grievous kept watch until his fleet was in hyperspace and well beyond any possible retaliation, and then finally went below to the Geonosians' battle duty station for his needed repairs. All of the aliens, including his personal physician, were already busy getting the least damaged MagnaGuards operational again, but dropped that task instantly to see to the higher priority of fixing the General's damaged limb. As promised, it didn't take long before he was sitting with a new forearm in place and his brain wired up through an access port in the side of his skull, waiting for the Geonosians to finish initializing the new part and running their checks. He was surprised to see Lissa's two service droids taking part in the procedure, the insectoid aliens making use of them as they would their own drones. He'd thought that the woman had stopped bringing them along on her duty stints, but it seemed that she'd been leaving them in the Geonosians' shop instead. Grievous eyed the droids irritably, even though they weren't bothering him in the slightest. He supposed he just bore them a grudge because the flying one had unexpectedly sassed him that last time he'd seen them.
Lissa got a call on her personal commlink while Grievous's forearm was still being initialized. He could overhear her making a few weak objections to someone on the other end, then telling the Geo team leader that she had to run up to her office for a while to oversee some new equipment installation she'd asked for. Grievous moodily watched the human woman leave. Even though he knew the Geonosians were highly capable technicians, more so than Lissa on this occasion since they had the specialized experience which she lacked, he found himself resenting their cool efficiency in a way he hadn't before and wishing that she'd stayed on to help handle his repairs. He just didn't like the Geonosians' approach anymore, their unsympathetic attitude towards him, now that he'd had a taste of being treated in a warmer and more personalized fashion.
Grievous passed the time by idly watching the two service droids. He couldn't recall ever seeing designs anything quite like them. They both looked needlessly cutesy, with their mobile antennae and prominent, obviously faux eyes, and out of place working at the serious business of getting him functioning at a hundred percent again. The long, six-legged one was carrying an instrument-laden tray on its flat back as though it were a sort of mobile cart that had the added benefit of being able to hand out its contents. The flying one was currently engaged in holding a small comm padd and calling out steps, in Geonosian, from what Grievous recognized as some sort of diagnostic checklist. He was faintly amused by the fact that the small droid seemed to be taking pains to hover just out of his reach and still had the gall to aim the odd, disapproving glance his way. If the thing belonged to him, Grievous thought, he would have had it memory-wiped at the first hint of glitchy impudence, presuming he'd ever own such a machine at all. Bad enough he had to endure casual slurs from other people, let alone tolerate it from a droid!
The small droid seemed almost to sense his thoughts and drifted even further out of reach than before. It seemed to mutter to itself and Grievous could have sworn he saw the artificial corners of its small mouth turn down in a frown, crinkling the faux suede 'skin' covering its face and body. It reached a hand back to scratch at the part of its body which projected behind and probably housed its anti-grav unit and—
Grievous blinked. Wait a moment—it scratched itself? Since when had anyone ever programmed a droid to scratch at itself?
As he continued watching, the little droid did it again, digging at its butt with every appearance of satisfactorily relieving an itch. Grievous stared hard at the Geonosians, but they either didn't notice what the droid was doing or saw it and didn't care. The cyborg turned his attention to the long droid with the tray on its back. The Geo in charge had just handed it one tool and simply waited, hand outstretched, until the droid chose another and placed it in the tough insectoid palm. No words passed between them and the Geonosian didn't even look at the droid, just waited for the machine to intuit his needs and choose the right instrument—he let the droid make an informed decision based on observation and choose!
A gust of hot, almost indecipherable emotion swept through Grievous. Shock, anger, a sense of having been duped—it all surged forth in turn and his hands clenched so hard on the armrests of his chair that the metal began to dent. Sadly, the Geonosians still didn't consider any of this as being out of the ordinary. They'd all gotten used to the cyborg's mercurial moods and anger, and had stopped trying to fathom reasons for his swift rages long ago—it was just the way he was, they thought, or rather, had been made to be. Grievous seethed on, alone. The second his repair was complete, he meant to get to the bottom of this, oh yes…
Many levels above, Lissa finished overseeing the installation of a second computer station suspended from ceiling tracking above the infirmary chair in her office, new equipment which she'd requested, in part, due to the General's very intolerance of her droids, and a bit of an extravagance, but she was damned if she was going to ever risk having Gregory booted into oblivion again just because a certain cranky cyborg couldn't take a joke or find humour in a harmless little droid's sauciness. The timing of the work crew couldn't have been worse, for she'd really wanted to help finish up with Grievous, yet there'd been no arguing with them, and she'd learned long ago never to query the sometimes bizarre illogic of military scheduling. As soon as the crew, a grumpy Neimoidian tech and his two maintenance droids, had done their thing and left, Lissa indulged her second personal reason for having wanted the new equipment. She slipped onto the vast, oversized chair, adjusted it to her satisfaction, pulled down the new screen and unhooked the remote keypad, reclined back and…ahh!…perfect! Certainly a lot better than sitting hunched over at her usual workstation for hours on end. Lissa had recently found an awful lot of intriguing new information now available to her, thanks to her high-level medical clearance, and she saw no reason why she shouldn't be as comfortable as possible while she perused it all during her spare time. She felt that the Separatists owed her that much, at the very least.
It occurred to Lissa that the only thing that would make her moment of self-indulgence complete would be the addition of the soft blanket and one of the pillows lying on her bed. She actually got up to fetch the items, to try out the complete indulgence package, as it were, and it was lucky for her that she did so, for she'd no sooner gotten to her feet than Grievous burst in, and he was in a rotten mood, to put it politely. He also had her two droids with him, holding Gregory by the scruff of his neck in one hand, Trigger heeling miserably by his side as ordered. As soon as Grievous saw the woman standing there, facing him, he allowed Trigger to scuttle on past him and threw Gregory directly at her, none too gently. Lissa anxiously examined the two of them as soon as they'd rushed up to her, but they only seemed to be agitated, not hurt.
"He violated us!" Gregory accused, clinging to his mistress, brave again now that he was safe in her arms. Even poor Trigger crowded against her and was in need of a hug; a rarity.
"General? What in the world—?" Lissa sputtered, while trying to pry Gregory, who was squeezing way too hard, off her neck.
"Yes. That is what I am wondering!"
His reply made no sense to her whatsoever. She finished peeling Gregory off her body, looked the two of them over once more, and then turned to the livid cyborg. "What were you doing with my droids?" she asked, still baffled.
"Why, just returning them." He bowed to her a little, lowering his head, in full sarcasm mode. Just as she'd earlier unintentionally pleased him, so it seemed that something she'd done had now had the exact opposite effect. He was clearly very angry with her, yet she didn't know why! "After all, Miss Veleroko," he continued on in a sneering tone, "I wouldn't want to deprive you of your companions. Your little, half-human, half-droid companions."
The penny dropped. Partly. Lissa opened her mouth to speak, closed it, frowned, then tried again. "How did you—"
"I guess I can read a damn DNA analysis too!" Grievous shot back.
Lissa became more somber. She regarded him gravely for a moment, then turned to her service droids again. "Why don't you two go back down and help the Geonosians?" she said to them.
"But they just told us to stay up here!" Gregory whined, not wanting to miss a potentially juicy argument.
"I don't care what they said. Go back down and help them out or just wait for me in their shop until I come and get you. Now scoot!"
Gregory lapsed into self-pitying whimpers as he flitted over to the door, taking care to fly a wide bow around Grievous, but Trigger, also reluctant to obey, although for far more altruistic reasons, held his place. He hesitated, looking from Grievous to his mistress and back again. "Ma'am?"
"It's all right, Trigger," the woman reassured him. "General Grievous just wants to talk." She fired her own look at the General, stopping just short of glaring at him. "Go on now. I'll be down soon."
The long bronzy service droid submitted and went out in turn and then it was just the living individuals left in the room, the cyborg and his personal physician. "Well?" Grievous demanded.
"Well, what? Forgive me, General, but I don't quite understand why you're so upset—"
"I'm not upset! Those things are biodroids!"
"Yes?"
"You don't deny it?"
"Of course not. I thought you knew."
"I—"
For the first time in ages, Grievous found himself at a loss for words. The human woman continued to regard him, attentive and sober. "Even if you didn't know, I would have happily told you they were," she added in a quiet voice, "if you'd asked."
Implicit in her reply was the way she'd really wanted to phrase it—"if you'd bothered asking"—which Grievous, always hyper-sensitive to slights, readily discerned. It made him all the madder. "Biodroids with human brains," he finally said, his voice contemptuous. "One of your Republic edicts, I presume, to allow that."
"Brain tissue, not entire brains," Lissa corrected, "which was donated and obtained in a perfectly legal fashion." Now she was getting a little mad too. Of all people to hassle her about ethics! "Really now, General, what kind of a person do you think I am?" she exclaimed indignantly.
"A Separatist."
"That—That's not fair. You gave me no choice in that matter."
"Didn't I?"
She stared back helplessly, then averted her eyes. The sad thing was that he meant it, saw nothing wrong in sacrificing an entire species to pursue one's own self-interests. It was pointless to object any further, not to mention dangerous—he was clearly fuming over something again. Lissa sleeked her own ruffled feelings and attempted a less antagonistic approach.
"General Grievous…why don't you just ask me what it is you want to know?" she tried.
The tall figure seemed to shift fractionally, the long face tuck in at the bottom. "The droids. Tell me about them," he said, his gruff, accented voice harshening it into a command.
"They're both experimental prototypes. I built Trigger first. His model's meant to be a service droid for handicapped children. Gregory's more sophisticated. He incorporates more bio-matter and was supposed to be a child's companion and teaching droid, but he…he didn't turn out quite as I expected. He's a little too cranky for kids."
"Bio-matter?" Grievous echoed suspiciously. "It has a personality. That of the brain's owner."
"No-o, not quite. It'd be more accurate to say that his droid programming incorporates some of the donor's inherent personality traits, the ones that survived the dying process and were hard-wired into those portions of his or her brain which I did use."
"His or her? You didn't know the donor?"
"People don't exactly line up to donate their organs at the best of times, General, let alone die under circumstances favourable for harvest. All I ever knew was that any tissue I worked with came from adults that hadn't suffered from any known psychological or neurological disorders." She paused, couldn't quite suppress a smile. "I only found out after the fact that Gregory's donor must've been a cantankerous, lazy, know-it-all in life. I've never tried using quite so much bio-matter again. Trigger's got about the right percentage to have the qualities I look for in a biodroid. He's much more intuitive than a regular droid, more interactive, and can learn, and he has a pleasant disposition…well, I think he does."
Grievous mulled over her words. "Did you make other biodroids?"
"A fair number. Never as many as I would have liked to, given that they're a special interest of mine. Unfortunately, getting the bio-matter I needed was always difficult, and there isn't—wasn't—much demand for them in the Republic market. A lot of people don't really understand what a biodroid is. They mix them up with cyborgs."
Yes, I can attest to that, thought Grievous sourly. "You—worked with cyborgs?" he asked.
"Of course. I've dealt with quite a few people over the years whom you could class as cyborgs. About half of them human, the rest aliens of various species. My main job was working up their droid components, nothing as sophisticated as your own, they were just designed for everyday getting about." She paused again, to eye him. "No one was ever as extensively enhanced as you, though, General. I did have one client, she'd retained only about thirty, thirty-one percent of her organic body, but that was an unusual case."
Grievous eyed her back. His ill temper was starting to unravel under the weight of her ready responses, yet he couldn't shake the feeling that something was being left unsaid. Lissa waited patiently for his next question, the picture of proper subordinate compliance. It was really quite frustrating how she could look so guileless and provoke the sense that something devious was going on, both at the same time.
"You've had considerable experience, then," he remarked at last, stalling in lieu of another query.
"The Geonosians wouldn't let me anywhere near you if I hadn't," she replied, quite reasonably. A lot of what she said was reasonable. That was annoying, too. He hadn't forgotten how she'd reasonably talked him right into forgetting all about her secure files once.
Grievous was running out of things with which to confront her. In retrospect, he wasn't even sure anymore why his discovery had angered him so. The Geonosians, it had turned out, had always known that the woman's machines were biodroids—it'd helped convince them that she knew her stuff and was safe to entrust with their most valuable creation. The ones on battle duty hadn't known exactly which species had contributed the 'bio-matter', as Lissa so quaintly put it (nor had they much cared), but a quick analysis run at the General's behest had easily solved that mystery. Huh…humans! He served two of them and was now himself served by a third, and every one of them seemed to have the knack of being able to fluster him with but a single glance or a well-chosen phrase—even their blasted human-brained biodroids could bother him. It had to be a species trait.
"Your droids, do they know what they are?" Grievous demanded, trying one last time to rattle the woman.
"Naturally. It'd be impossible to hide it from them since I do have to maintain their organics from time to time. They think it makes them special. And they are."
The immediate, smooth reply stymied him. So much for any residual hesitation. And why, exactly, was he interrogating her like this at all? It wasn't as though he were looking for reasons to get rid of Lissa. She was the first person he'd met since his accident who understood and could look after his special needs and who treated him with the deference and respect he wanted while doing so. Even better, from his perspective, he could do with her as he pleased and order her around with absolute impunity. He couldn't do that with Nagas or his subordinates, all of whom had the powerful backing of their Archduke, Poggle the Lesser, and through him, Count Dooku himself.
Grievous shifted his weight again and drew his brows down and tilted his face, managing to convey a very creditable scowl despite his lack of organic features. Lissa watched him carefully, hiding her own considerable trepidation. The big cyborg had evidently become all of a sudden suspicious of her, although she didn't think it was for the reason she feared, yet he was also starting to appear a wee bit confused. A manifestation of his returning memories? She couldn't tell, not without quizzing him. She was suddenly struck by how fundamentally dumb her sabotage target of choice now seemed.
In the end, Grievous did his own version of hemming and hawing by retreating into military procedure and making a cursory inspection of her new equipment and taking a spin around her office before proclaiming that all was "very well" and to "carry on", and then stomped out, still miffed. Lissa, relieved enough to have escaped his wrath to be feeling saucy, bit her tongue to keep from yelling after him to please feel free to come back anytime.
TBC
