Chapter 17 – A Droplet Of Mercy
The General's advice had been well dealt. Midway through the next night, just as he'd intimated, the fleet went to battle stations. For Lissa, who'd settled in early as suggested and who was lying on her office cot already clad in her full work dress uniform, the only response necessary was to blearily eye her chronometer, roll over, and go back to sleep. She'd be alerted again if Grievous needed her to personally accompany him into battle and was otherwise free to remain on standby.
Lissa wound up waiting for such a call-out for days and then weeks. Grievous had shifted his area of operations to attack the Expansion Region, both for pure terrorism's sake and to conquer ever more resource-rich worlds at the behest of his masters. Many similar planets he'd secured earlier in the war and turned over to one Separatist faction or the other had since already been made over into foundry worlds and come into full production. They now spewed out millions of droids and war machines on a daily basis and inestimable levels of misery for those unfortunates forced to work as slave labourers, and many of the machines were sent straight to Grievous. He now truly commanded the largest droid army ever recorded in the history of the Galaxy and oversaw and directed his ever increasing forces with as much ease and vicious efficiency as ever. His newest campaign was broader and more ambitious than any he'd attempted before and most of it required his constant personal attention from afar, leaving him few occasions to indulge in his more intimate hatreds. It was the only aspect of juggling such huge numbers which he ever regretted.
The fleet remained at battle stations for so long and the fighting was so continuous that the entire period became condensed forever afterwards in Lissa's memory into three separate key occurrences. The first was when the Invisible Hand felt the touch of serious enemy fire for the first time. It was during one of the early space battles in which the entire fleet took part, and Lissa watched the whole horrid thing through the magnificent view port in her office, clutching Trigger for reassurance while her other biodroid, Gregory, stood plastered against the transparisteel in naïve delight, commenting gleefully on the fighting throughout. A huge enemy vessel, dagger-shaped, had taken station nearby and aimed laser blasts at them for close to half an hour. The Invisible Hand's shielding held well enough and auxiliary vessels and fighters had prevented the giant Republic ship from getting any closer, but every blast that did land made the flagship shudder throughout her entire magnificent length and frightened Lissa badly, not for herself but for her droids. The attack forced her to finally confront the possibility of having to abandon ship some day and having to leave them behind. No one besides herself would ever look after a droid in a crisis situation, and if they were blown out into space or were in a place that lost life support, their biomatter brains would die just as surely as those of organic beings.
The second memory that seared itself into her mind was the time she was called up to Grievous's observation deck to take part in one of his staged shows of force while he played at negotiating with his enemies. The difference this time was that the party that was ferried in was human—all its members were human—and one of the men in passing spotted Lissa standing there beside the droids and looked at her in shock. He kept throwing glances at her all the while his more senior spokespeople and Grievous did their song and dance, his face expressing bewilderment, concern, and then outrage and contempt in turn, until Lissa felt shrivelled by every stare and could barely refrain from trying to defend herself by crying out that it wasn't her fault that she was here, she hadn't asked to serve Grievous and she wasn't a Separatist, not really. Near the end of the whole pathetic farce, the man surreptitiously alerted another minor member of his party, and then it was two of them glaring down at the traitorous fellow human in their midst while the others parleyed. It was one of the worst, most shameful experiences of her life, to feel so vilified, and when the visitors left, she averted her eyes, unable to look at them.
Although Grievous thus unwittingly orchestrated one of her worst memories, he also played a key role in generating the last and best one, the third. That one happened during one of the few land battles the cyborg led during the entire long campaign, when Lissa got to finally fulfill her function.
She never even remembered the name of the planet they'd been on later, just that it'd been one more urban battlefield in an increasingly long string of such unpleasant settings. Sunny had been guiding her along yet another crater-strewn street and Grievous had sprinted somewhere up ahead with his elite. A sudden string of rockets had whistled by overhead and impacted in rapid succession close enough to rattle broken glass and coax loosened bricks into falling and make her momentarily duck, then she'd gotten right up and resumed her careful progress with a tired resignation and unconcern that would have been impossible for her just six months ago.
A familiar bellow had shattered her indifference.
"Veleroko!"
It was Grievous, returning and yelling and striding up fast, several MagnaGuards trailing behind. His head was down and thrust forward and he was shaking it violently from side to side. Lissa, alarmed by his actions, fearing the worst, clamped her arms down to steady the kit slung from her shoulders and took to her heels to meet him half-way.
"My eyes—got caught in a blast," he exclaimed as she ran up. "Do something!"
"Of course," she gasped out between pants. The one vulnerable area left on his body breached—a potential disaster! She snagged his head by one sensor plate, steadied his face between her hands, and did a quick visual inspection. His eyes were gushing tears, some of them blood-tinged, but looked intact. "Can you still see? Still focus at all?"
"Yes, but they hurt. It's burning. Hurry!"
He jerked away from her and danced with agonized impatience. Lissa broke out a couple of filled squeeze bottles she'd long ago prepared for just such an emergency and took hold of his head again. "You have to be still now, sir," she told him. "Just for a moment…"
Grievous quit his jittering about long enough to let her tilt his face into position and swiftly flush his eyes, one after the other. The medicated fluid eased his pain almost instantly. He settled down and she repeated her action, washing what she could reach of his face more thoroughly.
"How close were you to this blast?" she asked him while she worked.
"I got knocked down. There was smoke, a lot of smoke. My chem-filter deployed."
"Uh oh, that doesn't sound good. Do you know how long it deployed?"
Grievous paused to consult an internal read-out. "Thirteen seconds," he said.
"Not so bad then. I think you have a bit of a chemical burn here."
Lissa needed to remove Grievous's faceplate and the whole lot moved over to the sheltering wall of a nearby building before proceeding any further. The cyborg's bodyguards established a defensive semi-ring about them both and Sunny held the General's mask. The woman quickly determined that Grievous's face had been peppered with fragments of dirt and debris in addition to suffering brief exposure to some sort of caustic fumes. She found numerous tiny cuts and scrapes in the exposed skin, including several in his eyelids, which explained the bloody tears, yet the eyes themselves still looked fine, the surface of the corneas undamaged and clear. Grievous had been fortunate, Lissa thought. He must've clamped his eyes tightly shut an instant before the blast effects had struck him.
She cleaned his mask in case there was any harmful residue left, then used the last of the eyewash to rinse his whole face one final time before applying a liberal dose of protective wound dressing. The dressing was a lot thicker than the ointment she normally used on Grievous and he predictably balked when she began squeezing gobs of the gooey unguent into the corners of his eyes, by backing up and twisting his head away out of reach exactly as though he were a stubborn horse. Lissa, too concerned for his safety to indulge his temperamental fit or worry about offending him, just grit her teeth and hung on tight, so that he wound up actually dragging her along for a few steps.
"General, please!" she exclaimed. "Just give the medication a minute to liquefy and be absorbed. It'll be fine, I promise. There's no need to fuss so!"
He gave her a dirty look before cutting it out and lowering his head again. The instant she finished up, got his faceplate back on and his vocabulator reconnected, he snapped, "Did you have to put that in my eyes? It's disgusting!"
"If you want proper first aid, then yes, I did have to! It's the best dressing to neutralize chemical burns and protect against further damage over the short term. How do your eyes feel now, by the way?"
He blinked furiously. "Well…fine," he said in a grudging tone.
"Any sort of real pain at all? Irritation when you look around? Blurring?"
Grievous scanned the street adjoining the building and what he could see of the horizon. "No, it's all right. It just feels like they're dry. A little sore."
Lissa nodded. "I couldn't see any injuries off-hand, so that should be strictly due to whatever irritants were in the blast-cloud. You do have some small wounds around your eyes, mostly just skin-deep, and probably a few embedded fragments that'll have to come out."
"I don't have time for that. I have to get back to the battle."
"You can, I'm just saying you'll have to come in for further treatment just as soon as you're done here," Lissa persisted. "Or sooner, if your eyes start troubling you or burning again. You absolutely cannot risk letting this sort of thing turn into any kind of serious injury anymore…you understand what I'm getting at, sir."
Grievous did and his gaze rested on her for a long speculative moment before glancing around at the encircling droids. "I won't take any unnecessary chances," he said. "Will you clear me to go?"
His physician did so, but only after insisting on having a quick cursory look at the rest of him and finding no further significant damage. The big cyborg ran off, back in fighting trim, his elite trotting along with him. Lissa watched him go, her mood a complicated one made up of several emotions. Foremost was her pleasure at having averted a genuine crisis—she'd done her job and served her superior efficiently and well, as she'd promised she would, and Grievous would recover fully thanks to her timely assistance. But there were also darker elements, fear for herself over what could have been among them and a niggling doubt over whether one could really ever morally justify aiding someone like Grievous at all. It was the immediacy of the situation's action and reaction that was bothering her, she supposed. She'd helped preserve a person's vision and the first thing he did afterwards was race away looking for more victims to murder. Whatever happened to pausing to savour one's renewed precious ability to see and appreciating the simple beauty of flowers and rainbows and sunshine and all that other happy crap?
Thinking about Grievous and rainbows in any sort of context jollied Lissa and she snapped right out of her angsty dissolution and got back to doing something useful instead, like getting her medical kit reassembled and back in order. Grievous might have said he wouldn't take chances, but that was like expecting a Neimoidian to pass up a BOGO sale at his favourite retail shop. She had best get herself ready for anything again, just in case.
Both of them, General and physician, lucked in for the remainder of the battle. Nothing more happened to Grievous and Lissa had little else left to do than lag through the rubble and ruin he left behind him for another two hours, by which time the Republicans threw in the towel and surrendered. Lissa shuttled back up to the Invisible Hand and wound down into her own version of operational standby while Grievous remained planet-side to gloat and glory in his latest victory. He eventually showed up in her office as requested just after she'd enjoyed her evening meal, later than Lissa would have ideally liked, but still a prompt response, for Grievous.
The first thing Lissa did was get his faceplate off again and re-examine him with meticulous care under a proper well-lit sterile field and with a surgical magnifier handy. Just as she'd expected, she found several fragments thrown up by the blast Grievous had been caught up in buried in his skin, even a little sliver in his left eyelid, all of which needed careful, gentle easing out. She also had another, much closer look at the surface and functioning of his eyes and confirmed that all was indeed well, although the whites were still somewhat bloodshot with inflammation. Grievous, much better behaved than he had been earlier, lay back in his chair throughout with his arms tucked against his sides and his hands folded over one another and resting between his metal thighs, the picture of submissive tranquility. His evident restored trust boosted Lissa's confidence and she went over and over his eyes and face for a lot longer than she really needed to until she was absolutely sure that she'd found and extracted the last little bit of foreign matter and seen to the tiniest cut, even those that had oozed but a single bead of blood. Grievous stirred when she began smoothing a soothing ointment over his sore skin—the antibiotic cream she normally used, not the gooey dressing—but only to tilt his face her way. His eyes she finished off with the usual drops. He didn't mind those anymore.
"That should do it," she said at last. "The stuff I just applied has good residual effects and should have you healed up within a couple of days. If your eyes still feel in the least irritated tomorrow or your skin's still tender or you develop an especially painful spot, I want you to come straight back in for another look. I'm sure I don't need to remind you of what happened the last time you neglected a wound, General."
"Hmph," Grievous acknowledged, blinking slowly, his eyes still unfocused, almost as if awakening from a nap. Despite the occasional painful twinge when she'd dug something out, he'd been enjoying the rare sensation of being genuinely touched during his examination and treatment.
Lissa next voiced her belief that it would be prudent to change the chemicals within his emergency filter and Grievous agreed with her. He continued to quietly recline while she called down to the Geonosians' shop to inquire about the availability of a refill, then reattached his faceplate. As usual, she cleaned and wiped down the back of the sculpted alien mask, especially about the eye sockets, before positioning it back over his face. She was always doing little extras like that for him, Grievous thought, and now that he'd regained more of his former self, he found himself able to appreciate such things on a far more conscious level. The Geonosians, he knew, would never even consider whether he was comfortable as well as functional. He could recall several early occasions when they'd examined his weeping eyes and just slapped his facial plate back on afterwards with its underside still caked with dried discharge and other grime. It was typical of the sort of attitude he'd come to expect from aliens, a prime excuse for his distrust and dislike of all offworlders. Except for this one, the human woman now hovering over him and critically examining the exterior front of his body while they both waited. She'd treated him as kindly and respectfully as would a fellow Kalee right from the start, and to be extended such by any alien had lately begun to seriously test his prejudice and confuse him.
Gregory soon arrived at the door, noted the General's prone state, and felt safe in flitting past without making a wide detour around him for once. He handed his mistress the packet of chemicals she'd requested, then took up station behind one of her shoulders and hovered there, looking down at Grievous.
"So he almost got blown up, huh?" he remarked, way too cheerfully.
"Nothing quite so dramatic. Just a little bit of smoke inhalation off an explosion," Lissa amended. "You can leave anytime, by the way."
"Oh-h! Can't I stay and watch? I can read you the checklist for the procedure."
"I don't need the checklist, Gregory, thank you. Now scat. This is a private medical session and I can't have you hanging about."
Gregory departed under a cloud of pretentious, pretended distress, whining non-stop. As soon as he was gone, Grievous, who'd been watching the little service droid with steely disapproval throughout, growled, "You need to have that thing's memory wiped."
The sheer vehemence in his tone startled and quite amused Lissa. "You can't mind-wipe a biodroid," she countered mildly. "It would destroy his personality."
"Good. I hate insolent droids."
The woman shrugged, unable to prevent one corner of her mouth from quirking upward. "Then our tastes differ, General. I happen to like droids with a bit of glitchy independence about them."
Grievous eyed her, but said nothing further. He'd rather expected that a person who was herself disobedient on occasion would excuse the same of a bloody droid!
Changing the chemicals within his emergency filter required the dismantling of his frontal neck mechanisms so Lissa had access enough to withdraw his breathing tube. Grievous resigned himself and lay waiting with his head lolling impossibly far back while she did her work, finding the temporary loss of some of his functions less upsetting than usual now that it was just the one familiar person tending to him. She soon had him back together and fully restored to their mutual satisfaction, and then asked him if he still had some time to spare.
"Why?" Grievous asked.
"Because I'd like to run a pulmonary function test on you, if I may, General, just to make sure that your lungs are all right. It's possible that you inhaled a few caustic vapours before your filter deployed."
"There is nothing wrong with my breathing. I feel fine."
"We-ell, the degree of damage I'm thinking of is something you probably wouldn't notice anyway," Lissa said. "Your lungs are quite vulnerable, after all, and I know you've already suffered a couple of incidents which involved them. It'd very much set my mind at ease if you would allow me to administer the test. It doesn't take long and there's no waiting about for results."
Her cajoling words won him over and he nodded his assent. He knew all about his lungs' vulnerability, encased as they were within their own sealed separate container, a pair of joined cylinders equipped with pistoning bottoms attached to the rear of his chest cavity. They were the only organs which never benefited from the healing effects of the doctored bacta fluid freely circulating inside his gut sack.
Lissa called ahead and warned the Invisible Hand's medical staff to clear out for a while, then accompanied the General down to the infirmary. Grievous walked a little behind and beside her, feet clacking lightly on the metal flooring, relaxed and slouched way over so that his head bobbed along just opposite her shoulder, and the woman found herself regarding him with considerable curiosity. It seemed an oddly meek sort of position for him to adopt—truly, he could be a puzzle at times, she thought, with his mercurial swings of mood and shifting behaviours. Oh well, it did make him interesting. Lissa still couldn't understand how Nagas or the other Geonosians could have ever gotten bored with Grievous.
The equipment the human woman needed to administer her test proved easily adaptable for the cyborg's special configuration and she soon had the results she wanted in hand. The moment she began perusing her data, though, her brow crinkled up with worry-lines and she began scowling.
"Shoot. Damn it," Lissa muttered.
Grievous stared over at her gravely. Insofar as subtlety was concerned, she appeared to be suffering a sudden attack of whatever condition permanently afflicted Viceroy Gunray.
"What is wrong?"
"Oh, it's these blasted readings, they're…wait, I'll come and show you."
She transferred the results to her own data padd and pulled out a chair to go sit beside Grievous. He leaned over to look, his expression wary and apprehensive, and Lissa, seeing it and suddenly conscious of her thoughtless lapse, hastened to reassure him. "It's not dangerous, what I found. I'm sure you'll be fine. But your results…here, look…"
Grievous learned that his respiratory organs' capacity and ability to exchange gases was restricted—badly so. It seemed to him a serious finding, but Lissa continued to assure him that it was not as alarming as it appeared.
"If you were still fully organic, then of course it'd be serious," she explained. "You'd have no exercise tolerance and probably feel short of breath much of the time. But given that your heart and lungs are servicing only a fractional amount of the tissue they used to, you could still get by just fine, I'd say, with only half the function you have right now. You just don't have much body left to make demands, and since your droid components do almost all the work of moving you about now, it doesn't much matter whether you're active or not—your oxygen requirements always stay pretty much the same, don't they, sir?"
"Yes. I do override my breathing cycle sometimes to breathe harder, but that…" He trailed off and looked at Lissa doubtfully. "That is emotional, I think. I get excited or angry."
"Exactly. But you've never truly felt short of breath, heaved or wheezed for it…have you?"
"No. Not that I recall." Despite his words, Grievous wasn't entirely convinced, however. His attitude remained uncertain, even became a little growly. "The Geonosians never once tested me the way you just did," he continued. "They never said anything about how poorly my lungs were working or anything about how well any of my organs worked. We never spoke about such things."
"I think they went strictly by your blood's gas levels when it came to evaluating your lung function, and those are actually fine," said Lissa. "You just ought to have better lung capacity than you do. I think you should, if only as a backup in case you get really injured."
Abruptly, she pulled her padd away and stood up. She walked back over to the equipment console she'd been using earlier and started shutting things down. "The blasted thing is," she went on without looking back at Grievous, "because I've never tested you before, I now have no idea if these readings of yours are normal for you and always were, or whether your lungs have been deteriorating all along, or whether you were just hurt when you breathed in the fumes. I think I can treat you and get your functioning back up to a better level, but without some sort of base results to compare with, I couldn't even evaluate the treatment's efficiency or know whether…whether…oh damn! I should have done all this earlier! I should have thought and gotten you in for a full work-up right away as soon as you assigned me to look after you."
Grievous looked at his physician and felt a curious moment of kinship with her. She was rebuking herself the same way he mentally castigated his own self whenever he'd neglected to do something which, in retrospect, he deemed to have been important. "I would have refused," he said to her.
"Perhaps. But I still could have tried nagging you about it even so…as much as I dared to back then, that is."
"Don't bother worrying about it anymore. Keep the results you just gathered as your basis and you can test me again when I come in for my next routine session. Make your comparisons then and afterwards you can decide how to proceed further."
Lissa regarded him with surprise. For Grievous, that response qualified as positively magnanimous. "All right, then that's what we'll do for now," she decided, "as long as you promise to come in earlier if you feel the least bit out of sorts, sir. Oh, and don't forget what I said about your eyes—if anything's still hurting tomorrow, I want to see you back here first thing in the morning."
"Agreed," Grievous said, and on that uncommonly pleasant note, their session concluded.
They parted in the hallway by the infirmary door, Lissa hurrying off to return to her office, the cyborg walking more slowly away in the opposite direction. He was feeling a little strange, calm to the point almost of lassitude, yet also energized and buoyant. Instead of returning to his quarters to look over damage and losses reports, as he'd intended to, he found himself turning off and heading for the ship's cavernous main hangar bay. Some action was what he needed, and a quick jaunt in one of his private starfighters seemed just the ticket. The knowledge that Count Dooku would have been very angry and forbidden his Supreme Commander from even taking off, had he known, made the prospect of a solitary patrol all the more enticing.
Grievous decided to use the Jedi interceptor he'd captured some time ago and warned the flight control people that he'd be out for a while in the Republic vessel to forestall any misidentification mishaps. Idiotic to think that anyone would believe that a single Jedi would even dare come within sniffing distance of his mighty fleet, let alone cruise leisurely through its midst, but there were always a few twits prone to overreacting. He crammed himself into the cockpit, ran through a brief checklist to reacquaint himself with the blended Republic/Separatist-built controls, and lifted up and blasted out of the hangar bay with a flourish. The little ship had been something of an eye-opener for his intelligence people and an equal challenge for his aerospace engineers when Grievous had first brought it aboard. It'd been severely lacking in shielding and some of the usual conventional sensors and controls; apparently, Jedi pilots relied solely on their command of the Force to accomplish much of their navigation and piloting…an interesting discovery. The appropriate Invisible Hand personnel had since managed to modify the interceptor for less esoteric use, but it was still highly vulnerable to offensive fire. It's basic design simply couldn't accommodate a lot of extra weighty shielding that would in any case have destroyed it's outstanding manoeuvrability.
Grievous didn't care that the starfighter he'd chosen was vulnerable. His arrogant confidence in his own piloting ability made up for any lack.
The cyborg had already assigned himself a specific mission before exiting the flight deck and set a course at once for a nearby planetary system. All the battles he'd ever participated in had one certain thing in common—they left behind a degree of wrack and ruin. When his fleet got involved firsthand nowadays that translated into hundreds, sometimes thousands of shipwrecks left adrift after every fight for the scavengers and assigned salvagers to pick through afterwards for days and even long weeks on end. Grievous had recently perused some interesting intelligence which suggested that the earliest unauthorized scavengers that arrived on-scene were often actually covert rescuers or agents recovering valuable data they didn't want falling into Separatist hands. It seemed to the General to be ideal tasking for Jedi that had survived their armies' defeats, given their zealous devotion to the preservation of life and all things good and boring, and he was itching to catch one of them in the act and prove his theorizing right.
His fleet had taken on several star destroyers again during their own latest battle while Grievous had been occupied planet-side and one of the destroyers, disabled and dead in space, had last been reported careening out of control towards a large moon. Such wrecks, once captured by the gravitational force of some chance body, were always doomed. They either picked up speed and plummeted almost straight in or were trapped for a while in a decaying orbit before shredding themselves during one last glorious plunge. Bad news for the salvagers and scavengers, either way. Grievous thought a fatally damaged but still largely intact star destroyer, with its sizable crew, a likely bait for anyone looking to rescue trapped or wounded personnel left behind.
The particular wreck Grievous was searching for had already drifted far away from the battle zone and appeared fully abandoned for the moment. A few flames still licked sporadically out of some of the damaged areas; the ship either still possessed some life support or it was just some flammable from a ruptured line or tank. Grievous flew his fighter in close and up past the vessel's massive stern…impressive. One of the Republic's Venator-class destroyers, about a match for his own flagship, Invisible Hand, in size, he recognized. There were supposed to be even larger star destroyers now in service, but Grievous hadn't encountered any yet himself. He topped the wreck's back end, cruised past one of the bridge towers, and there, way ahead, rising up off the surface of the bow was a Jedi interceptor.
A swell of heat swept through Grievous, impossibly so, yet it registered that way nonetheless—the sight of the other little fighter made him feel that smug and full of himself. The cyborg throttled back and held his bearing. No need to rush or change his course, he was just a friendly colleague, idling in to help. He thumbed up the cover on the fire control button, eyes glittering with malicious glee, hunching forward in anticipation. Just a wee bit closer and Mister Jedi was going to receive a nice just reward for his altruistic stupidity, a big fat dose of blaster fire right up his—
The other interceptor abruptly spun about and shot off at high speed.
Grievous, startled, huffed with surprise and dropped his pretence at once. Possible reasons for his blown cover flickered through his mind as he cranked his own ship up as fast as it could go and gave chase—had the modifications altered something in his vessel's normal expected signature? was there some protocol of greeting which he'd failed to employ? The Jedi fled, his long lead increasing. Grievous redlined his engine and wished, not for the first time, that he still had teeth to grind together in his anxious frustration. Even though the cyborg's engineers had done their best, the instrumentation they'd installed had added many kilos of weight, and the other starfighter was simply lighter and faster. If the Jedi was aiming for his hyperdrive booster ring, there was a good chance that he was going to reach and utilize it to escape into hyperspace before the General could catch him.
But it wasn't a booster ring that the Jedi wanted after all, it was one of the nearby planets, a small one, shimmering and blue with extensive seas. Grievous, far back by now, became puzzled by his enemy's decision as he rode the lock he had on the other vessel all the way down into the little world's atmosphere and through a scattering of fair-weather cumulus cloud. There was very little land for his foe to hide on, just a couple of archipelagos, and the Jedi didn't even try to conceal his exhaust trail or evade his pursuer, he simply angled straight in towards one of the larger, more isolated islands. Grievous automatically evaluated the terrain he was about to descend onto: a narrow band of level land encircling an ancient, splintering volcanic plug, the vegetation tropical and rampant, the seashores sandy and shifting. It looked a little like an island preserve he'd once hunted on back on his own homeworld, Kalee. That expedition had been very successful, Grievous recalled with grim pleasure. Hopefully, this one would yield similar results.
His happy anticipation vanished and morphed into suspicion the instant his sensors detected worked metals on the isle. A trap! Or was it? Grievous cautiously drew closer and overflew the periphery of what his instruments had picked up, a sort of compound of buildings clustered together beside a broad cove. The whole area looked, even from the air, long neglected and deserted. He could find no evidence of any artificial energy sources aside from the faint traces left by the passage of the Jedi's interceptor, nor could he find the starfighter itself, although he was absolutely certain that it had set down somewhere amidst the ruins. Grievous huffed again, this time with a grudging mix of respect and disdain. The Jedi might have been able to cleverly mask his vessel somehow, but it would only prolong the inevitable, really.
The General landed his own interceptor close to the largest building, a once-luxurious, multi-floored residence that was falling into rubble. Stone-slab terraces and lavish gardens that had long since run wild or been overgrown still abutted the ruin and a shaped depression of almost bare sand hinted at a drifted-in swimming pool. Curiously, the two walls of the house that were still intact bore evidence of having been under heavy weapons fire, which didn't make much sense to Grievous. It seemed a target unworthy of attracting such an intense and specific attack.
Several long, low outbuildings nearby were in even worse shape than the main residence. Their walls, metal-framed, still stood, but the roofs had caved in, obliterating any hint of what had been going on within or any hope of concealing a starfighter. Grievous went on, casing the sandy ground for fresh tracks and occasionally halting to sweep his immediate surroundings, trusting in his enhancements and predator's instincts to warn him should the Jedi draw near. A part of him registered that the area he was reconnoitring was still lovely despite the decaying remnants of man-made intrusion and that the sparkling turquoise ocean and the sweet air and the sunny green sky would have no doubt translated into tropical paradise for most people, but that part had no say anymore. The cyborg had gone into hunting mode, and the only thing about the air that interested him at that moment was that it was too hot, blood-heat hot, which was likely to foul up his infrared vision.
A narrow river flowing out to sea bordered one side of the cove and compound. Grievous heard the pound of falling water coming from upstream, and when he investigated, was mildly stunned to find a poured plastercrete dam with a small reservoir backed up behind it and maintenance sheds housing corroding old generating equipment. Hydroelectricity, here, for this one isolated estate? Grievous stood baffled by the incongruity of it all. The compound's very existence argued for an extravagant outlay of funding, technology and effort made at some time in the past. He couldn't understand why the same people had gone to such lengths to create the means to collect such a primitive source of power.
He skirted the end of the dam, too suspicious to step onto the structure itself, and in so doing, stumbled across exactly what he'd been searching for, a faint scuffed footprint that was much larger than any he'd noted already. Grievous hunkered down eagerly. The specifics of the track were blurred—the ground was dry and hard—but he could tell that it'd been made by something heavy moving at speed and that they'd been clawed and walked on broad, full soles. The cyborg half-rose into a crouching pose and swiftly back-tracked, head down, until he'd found a patch of softer soil and several more prints. Their details confirmed that the maker of the tracks was bipedal and had been running. Grievous knew that the species of Jedi who could pilot their trademark interceptors were generally restricted to those that were roughly human-like in size and conformation, and these footprints, he believed, belonged to someone who fell within those parameters. As for the odds that a wild creature of humanoid form had just run by here within the past hour…no, astronomical. Grievous straightened up. For a moment he hesitated, debating whether he should take the precaution of finding and disabling the Jedi's starfighter first, but the lure of the hunt was too strong for him and his blood-lust was up. He whirled about and fixated on his prey instead.
The tracks suggested that the Jedi had crossed the top of the dam. Grievous followed, guarded and tense, his vigilance peaking when he hopped up to use the catwalk that spanned the spillway. Nothing unusual happened, and when he reached the other side, he easily found more of the same broad footprints. Whoever it was, was still moving fast. Grievous stepped up his own pace, encouraged.
The trail angled away through thickets of giant-leaved shrubs and a belt of fringing forest and on into the interior of the island. The jungle closed in over Grievous. He walked beneath old growth now, skirting enormous tree trunks, the dense latticework of the jungle canopy spreading far above him. The soft duff and litter on the open ground readily showed the marks of disturbance and Grievous tracked his prey as easily as would a hound, using his exquisite vision alone, and shifted into his rapid running walk. He sped along through the pristine wild, leg and hip joints churning and whirring, the technological marvel that was his body looking bizarrely out of place.
The terrain began to slope upward and quickly steepened. Grievous could see obvious claw-digs, a long gouge once, where the Jedi had slipped. Then came another zone of scrub and riotous low growth, and the soil petered away into meagre patches between the bare-rock slabs and boulders of a hillside. The cyborg, excited, sensing imminent confrontation, dropped to all fours to continue scrambling upward. He could hear falling water again, a roar this time, and the vegetation was getting wet, dripping almost.
Grievous broke out of the forest directly onto the lip of a deep gorge. Great ramparts of stone reared up before him, blotting out half the sky, and a spectacular waterfall, hundreds of meters high, plunged down one of the fissured faces and into a deep blue pool. The sight was so impressive that even Grievous was moved; he stood for a long moment immersed in simple awe before reverting back into cool assessment. The instant he did so, he crouched, preparing for action, and a hand went to one of the lightsabers attached to his waist. The noise and the mists drifting up made it harder for him to keep watch and he still had the sense that his chase was almost over.
A narrow game trail bordered the top of the steep cliffs overlooking the pool and gorge. Grievous stalked along, searching the patches of thin soil and low, clinging vegetation edging the path for spoor, then reversed his direction. The mists seemed to get thicker the further he went away from the waterfall. He peered down and noted the slow boil of curious up-swells distorting the water surface just before the entrance to the gorge. Steam appeared to be rising off the up-swells. Hot springs? He utilized one of his vision's thermal options…no, the water roiling up was cold. There must've been an aquifer beneath him, disgorging its contents under pressure, Grievous thought, or perhaps it was just a quirk of geology funnelling a flow of chilled water from deep underground. Whatever its source, the amounts gushing up had to be substantial. Within the constrictive channel below, thick clouds of fog positively billowed up, sometimes rising high enough to envelope him as he strode on, other times burning off under the hot noon sun before it could escape the gorge.
During one of the foggy intervals, a spidery dark apparition extending out over the chasm loomed out of the mist. It was a cable bridge, meant for foot traffic alone, ancient enough in design, but constructed out of materials too durable and sophisticated to have been strung by anyone but the mysterious compound dwellers. Grievous felt one of the thick wires slung at chest height for use as a hand railing. The metal still seemed perfectly sound, the short plastiform planks laid as footing were filthy and old, yet still intact. A good scenic outlook from which to see the waterfall and rapids below and the reservoir they fed, Grievous guessed, at least whenever weather conditions and the tricky mists cooperated. His duranium fingers on the cable railing gripped, testing the bundled wires again. He leaned down a little, scanning the wet surface of the planking, and saw mars in the condensation beading and several smudges of dirt spaced a certain equal distance apart. The one separating typical humanoid footfalls at a walk, say.
Grievous jerked his head back up. He started forward.
The instant Grievous set a foot on the bridge, he knew it was unsafe. It had nothing to do with the structure's engineering or any lack thereof. He simply knew that if he tried to cross that he would never reach the other side. Slowly, he withdrew his forward foot off the planks and backed away a few steps. He went very still and locked his body and allowed only his head to continue moving, swivelling it meticulously from side to side, every sense cranked up for maximum detection and focused on the area at the other end of the bridge.
When he switched over to his infrared vision, a vague smudge of light punctuated by two much brighter small discs appeared against a darker background and hovered briefly before seeming to wink out. Grievous waited, concentrating, and the small glow reappeared, just for an instant, then vanished again. A thin thread of white-hot rage began twining its way up his artificial spine. He turned off all his enhancements and freed his body and growled, a low, guttural rumble meant only for himself.
"Give it up, Jedi!" he called out with harsh assurance. "I know you're there!"
Swirls of dense mist still blanketed the air above the gorge. He could see and hear nothing at all out of the ordinary at first. Then a distant coil of fog flashed green and the bridge shuddered and the far end of it abruptly came loose. The entire flexible boardwalk and its cable railings swung downward in a smooth arc. It smacked against the cliff face beneath Grievous's feet, bounced and undulated a few times, and then just hung, still whole and now utterly useless.
The fitful mists, fanned by the falling structure, twisted and wafted about and suddenly evaporated away into nothingness, and a grey-brown figure was revealed standing upon the far edge of the gorge, somebody big and broad through the chest, his limbs draped with hanging fur. His long face, projecting out from beneath a hood, was covered with much shorter, sleeker hair than what coated his body and his slitted eyes were encircled with dark naked skin. The alien had already deactivated his lightsaber and hung its hilt in its usual position on the waistband of his skirt.
Grievous swore. "You again!"
The Whiphid Jedi he'd tried to kill twice before inclined his head. "General Grievous," he acknowledged, his voice raised to make himself heard over the thundering falls.
The cyborg could not believe it. Bad enough to be confronted with this living evidence of one of his few failures, but to do so under circumstances seemingly designed to keep them apart! Grievous clamped his toes tight and leaned forward out over the gorge as far as he dared, estimating the distance. He might have been able to leap across given a running start, but to jump cold off the narrow edge…no, he'd never make it. His eyes narrowed and he fired a furious glower over at the shaggy Jedi.
"What is your name?" Grievous demanded.
"K'kruhk," the other man replied. "My name is K'kruhk."
"Well, Jedi K'kruhk, as I recall, our last encounter was cut short and unresolved. Would you care to continue that duel now? Meet with me on the beach so we can finally end this as warriors should?"
"I—no, I…fear I must respectfully decline your challenge," K'kruhk said. His words were still loud, but otherwise entirely mild and reasonable, almost apologetic. "I have no wish to fight you, General, even now. I would much rather extend a hand in friendship than extend it holding a lightsaber."
"And I would much rather you extended your neck, to make it that much easier for me to kill you," Grievous shot back angrily. "You owe me your head, K'kruhk. Twice over!"
"I know. Yet it seems that fate demands that I retain it. I think that you may also be a man who believes in fate, General. Will you not take this as a sign that we should be talking instead? Put aside your quarrel with my Order for once and agree to a parley in place of more mindless bloodshed?"
Grievous responded with another savage glare. He was fast approaching that violent, obsessive, engineered state in which nothing else mattered to him save getting at and rending the creature before him limb from limb, and had already begun to pace the dangerous edge of the gorge as best he could in his frustration. The big talons on his feet crunched through the thin soil on the trail and into the rock beneath with every step. His narrow head snaked out before him, shifting from side to side to keep his gaze fixed on his prey as he strode back and forth.
"I thought you already had a coward who specialized in negotiation, that human, Kenobi," Grievous grated out. "Summon him and perhaps I'd be willing to listen to some of your prattle before killing you both. I'd even agree to fight you together—two on one, K'kruhk, someone for you to hide behind for an extra minute of life!"
The bulky figure of the Whiphid seemed to hunch in on itself. The curved downface lowered, its expression turning strangely sad, yet he said nothing in return. His opponent's refusal to rise to the insults infuriated Grievous all the more. His frenetic pacing grew almost careless, one foot slipping once as he spun about, sending chunks of stone and earth tumbling, and his bulging eyes blazed with abnormal, burning intensity. K'kruhk watched it all with somber concern, the look on his own face becoming more troubled.
A stray tactical concern shot through the cyborg's mind, penetrating his murderous frenzy. "Jedi!" he demanded again, hoarsely. "When I first approached you, in space, how did you know? How could you tell it was me in the interceptor?"
K'kruhk took his time before answering. "You are steeped in death and hatred, General," he said at last after a very long pause. "Your aura reeks of it and of the blood you've shed. I pity you."
"What?" Grievous snapped back. "What did you just say to me?" To add to his outrage, the thick mists in the gorge billowed up again at that moment, swiftly obliterating the alien form once more. The cyborg could no longer see K'kruhk at all. "Jedi! Answer me!" he cried.
The reply, when it finally came, sounded much fainter and already far away. "Goodbye, General," the low voice drifted over. "You'll forgive me for saying that I hope we don't meet again."
Grievous uttered a hideous curdled snarl in response and launched himself out across the void without thinking. It was a stupendous leap, a magnificent leap, and just as he'd estimated, it fell several meters short of his intended target. He plummeted into the gorge with his hands and feet outstretched before him, ready to seize and grab, but the cliff face streaming past was very steep and he fell a long way down before coming into contact with it. The instant he did so, he began scrabbling and clawing with furious strength, digging long scores and gouges into the friable stone until he'd managed to arrest his plunge well enough to drive his talons home and hold fast. He finally jolted to a halt so close to the bottom that flung spray off the white-water boiling through the narrow channel wet him down almost at once as thoroughly as though he'd fallen in. The near dousing on top of his miss did nothing to improve his temper.
Getting back up, out of the gorge, proved no problem. His wild efforts had carved fresh handholds down half the cliff face. He scrambled up rapidly, propelled chiefly by powerful thrusts from his long legs, pulling hard with his hands when he had to, all of it accompanied by the non-stop roar of the falls and the rapids and his own angry grunts and growls. By the time he reached the top of the gorge, he found the Jedi long gone, of course. The Whiphid's tracks led Grievous downhill this time, straight through the jungle back towards the ruined mansion, and for a few moments he thought K'kruhk might have taken shelter in the crumbling structure to regroup, but his faint hope of trapping the Jedi was dashed as soon as the trail then took a sudden turn away from the compound. The tracks intersected a broad band of younger growth, the trees too small to form a light-omitting lofty canopy yet, and turned again, and Grievous realized that he was now following a long overgrown dirt road. He pushed faster through the dense clumps of undergrowth, no longer needing to see any footprints to know where he needed to go.
An even brighter spot opened up and Grievous stepped out into a clearing. Most of it was taken up by a single smallish domelike building that was still surprisingly intact. The cyborg walked around it, his manner now more cautious, one lightsaber already in hand though still deactivated. The structure appeared to be made of solid metal sheeting, something more resistant to decay than all the other outbuildings he'd seen so far. And when he crept around the final corner and saw the front of it…
A hangar. The bay door was wide open and it was empty within. Grievous snorted with disgust, reattached his weapon to his waist, and stalked inside. Dead, dried vegetation had blown inside and the smooth floor, made of more sheeting, plastiform this time, was so dirty that he could clearly see the pad marks where the Jedi's interceptor had sat and all the details of how K'kruhk had moved around, most of the prints spaced widely apart or smudged in his hurry to exit and then reboard his ship. Grievous went outside again and soon found evidence of how the Jedi had manoeuvred his interceptor down and into hiding as well in some broken branches on the surrounding trees and clear-blasted circles in the ground litter. The Whiphid had known about this secret hideaway all along and was by now so long gone that he'd no doubt already reached his hyperdrive booster ring and made use of it to escape again. Blast the wretched creature! He had to be getting some divine help, was meant to survive for some unfathomable reason mere mortals such as himself couldn't possibly comprehend, Grievous thought—it was the only explanation he could come up with for how any one individual could survive three close encounters with him! The cyborg scuffed around the front of the derelict hangar, kicking at the ground and muttering and grumbling to himself. Maybe K'kruhk was just lucky. Some people were like that, surviving one mishap after another and beating the odds through sheer fortuitous circumstance. If so, he had to be the luckiest damn Jedi in the whole Jedi Order, the luckiest one ever in the Order's entire squalid history!
Grievous calmed down in time and looked the building over more carefully before he left. Solid metal construction made for durability, but also concealment of private spaceship use…what could possibly have been going on to necessitate such things, he wondered. The intriguing possibilities aroused his curiosity as he wound his way along the overgrown road, following it back towards the beach. Grievous had once been very fond of exploring. As a youth, he'd often felt tugged by wanderlust and spent much of his free time roaming the wilds about his family's holdings, and it was only the even greater excitement of training with his clan's militia and the enticement of a promising military career which had really kept him home towards the end. Now, as he kept striding along, stimulated by the unfamiliar jungle and the chase he'd just experienced and the puzzle of the abandoned alien compound, a little of his old adventurous bent returned and began overriding even his disappointment over losing the Jedi.
The road abruptly petered out at the back edge of the once-cleared zone about the rotting mansion, just as Grievous expected it would. He checked the building out again, much more slowly and thoroughly than he had the first time, and came away with no more answers than he'd had before. All he could determine for sure was that it had once been an incredibly opulent residence that had been pounded into ruins by some sort of heavy ammunition—aerial missile fire, he guessed, from the positioning of the damage on the two remaining standing walls. Grievous walked on, past his parked interceptor, and returned to the dam he'd crossed earlier. He remembered glimpsing an odd break a short way down the near shoreline of the reservoir lake when he'd been pursuing K'kruhk…ah yes, there it was, an incongruous little sand beach set right where such a thing had no business existing. Another artificially constructed feature left behind, he thought, and a few minutes of splashing along the shore and pushing his sleek body through thick reed beds and other clustered water plants brought him into position to confirm it—there were even a few pilings left, from a long-gone dock. People had boated here once and probably fished and gone swimming. They still could have. The jungle and aquatic vegetation was encroaching hard, but hadn't yet completely reclaimed the small clearing with its deep sandy base, and it was still a pleasant place, bright and open to the sunshine, yet protected and private.
Grievous cruised the perimeter of the little beach and found, in quick succession, the remnants of the old walkway once used by the compound residents to access the area and then another well-used game trail. The local fauna coming down to water? It seemed likely. The sand was peppered with tracks, all relatively small, most showing evidence of cushioning pads and multiple clawed toes. A concentration of prints under one of the bordering trees caught his attention and he found a scattering of fish-like skeletons lying about, most almost intact with decaying heads and tails still attached…very strange… He squatted down on his hocks to examine the remains more closely, metal legs folding up neatly, his expression reflecting much of the same lively intensity and enthusiasm he brought to his Jedi-hunting, although for once devoid of the usual accompanying rage and hatred. Small animals had chewed the bones here and there, but there was enough remaining for Grievous to find several too-straight edges to the residual flesh about the heads and spines. Someone had cut the meat away, not torn or bitten it off.
Another wordless exclamation of surprise escaped him. So—people did still make use of the island, although whether they'd just been visitors roughing it for an afternoon or were resident aboriginals of some intelligence was hard to determine from the meagre evidence he'd uncovered. Grievous combed through the sand beneath the skeletons with his fingers without turning up anything new. Another mystery to ponder over… He stood up and went back to the edge of the water, wading in a few steps. Grievous had always enjoyed fishing, both for leisure purposes and as a means to augment feeding himself and his family, and he found himself wondering whether the reservoir had been stocked and what the skeletal remains had looked like in life. Fish were pretty much fish throughout the galaxy. They were one of those lower, water-living life forms which evolution always seemed to nudge along into the same basic efficient design in the end.
But why was he standing there speculating when he lived in a body that could let him see for himself? He could breathe underwater, Grievous suddenly remembered! The possibility, once considered, proved impossible to resist. Impulsively, he waded further in.
A click as the rebreather slid into place, a gasp and a sharp cough, and his transition was complete. Grievous stepped carefully so as not to stir up the sediment underfoot until his head was covered by a good meter of water and then just stood, still and quiet. The area about him and around the old dock was clear and open. Further out, tall strands of some water weed with long fronds swayed in the slight current, and on either side of him, where the sandy bottom changed over into proper soil, thick masses of smaller plants, some suspended and rootless, grew right up to the shoreline. If there were fish to be seen, fish he'd no doubt just frightened into hiding, they'd soon reappear out of those aquatic jungles.
In the meantime, with no Jedi and no fighting this time to distract him, he could concentrate on the pure sensations of being underwater. The dense ambiance he'd plunged into was one ruled by scent and sound rather than vision. Even though the water was clean and well-lit, Grievous found that he could not see very well, at least not with his usual detailed razor-sharpness, but that he could hear his own heartbeat and the rhythmic draw of this lungs with remarkable clarity. With the base component of his audio sense turned up, he could additionally hear the distant thrum of the falls and rapids, even the slap of wind-driven waves on the side of the dam and on the far shore. It all seemed very alien to him, a much restricted, simpler world than the one he was accustomed to, yet its very simplicity appealed to him also.
The dance of the sunshine, broken into scintillating yellow-green rays by the ripples on the surface of the water, became almost hypnotic. Left without any cues to trigger his behaviours, as far removed from his normal surroundings as it was possible for him to be, all of Grievous's malice and anger, his gnawing programmed drives and constant tension began to fade. They subsided into faint ignorable whispers, overcome by a measure of rare peace. He slipped into the light torpor that was as close to sleep as his tortured brain could approximate and stood entranced.
When Grievous came to, there were tiny minnows playing about his head and nibbling at his vocabulator, and the sunrays were slanting into the water at a steep angle. And he saw his fish, whole schools of them cruising the shoreline and the old pilings of the dock, and out in the deeper waters, amidst the waving water weeds, lurked the dark spindle shapes of larger, solitary predators. Their fins weren't arranged quite right and the big ones had what looked disconcertingly like atrophied limbs hanging down beneath their gill covers, but they were recognisable as fish even so, and fled and hid with typical piscine caution the instant Grievous moved. They'd been nice, plump fish too. He imagined they made for good eating.
Satisfied, Grievous turned and made for the shore. When his head broke the surface, he surprised two creatures that were crouching over his tracks on the beach, shocking them into immobility.
Grievous regarded them with equal astonishment. Staring back were two leggy little bipeds scarcely bigger than small children, one about two-thirds the size of the other, both long-limbed and lean, their wide-open eyes gleaming like gold coins out of dark brown snouted faces as they gawked at him. Their smooth-skinned bodies were hairless and naked aside from belts supporting pouches made of worked hides slung about their waists and the larger one also carried a wrapped bundle of something long on its back. They looked remarkably similar to reconstructions of ancestral Kaleesh which Grievous had seen in museums, and their sentience, though primitive, was unmistakable, their terror equally so.
The cyborg knew by instinct how to calm the fears of potential prey and gazed away from the two creatures as if he'd lost interest in them. He turned and splashed ashore four or five meters to one side of them, then walked straight ahead with exaggerated nonchalance, still feigning indifference, keeping his face tilted just far enough to enable him to watch the natives out of the corner of one eye. They held their place, still frozen and taut, with only their own eyes moving as they slowly, fearfully, marked him. An adult teaching a juvenile, Grievous observed with some wistfulness as he went by. What they must have made of his tracks was impossible to guess at.
The instant that a safe distance separated the cyborg and the little aliens, they sprang up and bolted away into the undergrowth. Grievous had been expecting them to behave so and didn't bother looking back, he just found the old pathway back to the ruined compound and kept walking along, still sauntering. His interlude with the fish and the encounter with the aboriginals had refreshed him greatly. He felt relaxed and happier than he had in a long time, and the only thing left to mar his peace were his eyes, which had begun to feel gritty and sore again—maybe immersing himself so soon after injuring them hadn't been such a great idea after all. Then he realized that he now had an excuse to visit his physician for more attention and a reapplication of that soothing medication and brightened again. He'd just tell Lissa that he'd spent some time in the water while pursuing a Jedi. It was honest enough and would forestall her aiming one of her disapproving frowns at him. He also decided, on the spot, that the Jedi he'd been chasing, K'kruhk, must've been meant to live and had been benefiting from divine intervention all along. It was the only interpretation which his enormous pride would allow.
Grievous retrieved his interceptor and flew back to his flagship. He disembarked at about the same time that the two aboriginals he'd met finished racing home and began breathlessly relating to their tribe-mates how the White Death had come out of the god-made lake and passed them by.
TBC
