Aphra peeled her eyes open. Her lashes were sticky with salt, but she wiped that away. A quick check down at her person confirmed that yes, she was still a being of flesh and blood and not a ghost. She wasn't dead yet! She had to count it as a win.
None of her sensors had been triggered by approaching hostiles overnight. Or over-sleep: she had no idea what the local day-night cycle was right now. She collected them all again stiffly, wincing as the skin of her burn flexed and stretched. It was healing, at least. Slowly. In fits and starts, like a spluttering engine.
She pressed her hand to it and pinched her lips. Alright. Recap.
The previous day—again, circadian rhythms didn't matter right now—hadn't gone great. She'd been so full of hope! The queen had obviously been interested in Luke from the start, if from their first encounter with combative battle droids she'd wanted Luke captured, not killed. Vader had hinted he might know why. Something to do with Luke being a Jedi.
Aphra hadn't actually told Vader Luke was a Jedi—sure, she'd handed the kid over to his death, but she didn't want him dead—but she wasn't stupid enough to lie to Vader's face in order to protect him. Lie by omission? Sure, if she was being very careful. Lie outright? Aphra was a very good liar, no matter what Luke or Sana or any other mouthy interloper had to say about it, but she wasn't gonna risk it with Vader. Unless it was something super-duper worth it, at least.
But. Aphra had known that the queen wanted Luke, and it was probably something to do with him being a Jedi. Which just meant that he wasn't nearly as subtle as he thought either, if even the queen had clocked him as a Jedi without even meeting him directly—so there.
Trading him in should've been a surefire way to get what she wanted. Instead, she'd been backstabbed.
Aphra couldn't even blame the queen. She'd messed up, no two ways about it. Do you have the Death Star plans? Why hadn't she just pointed a blaster at Luke's head and said Give me the Death Star plans? This was what sleep deprivation did to a girl. She should've thought of the We do have them, but we won't give them to you and also we'll kill you loophole.
She couldn't even really blame Luke, either. Oh, she was pissed at him. Her side still hurt like she'd been stung by a thousand waspworms. But that trick with the switcharoo and the sassy comment and the figuring out what was going on while it was happening? She'd taught him that. She was almost proud.
A useless feeling, in this context, because he'd tried to get her to blow herself up and she'd handed him over to get eaten—maybe Jedi meat was extra nutritious?—but most feelings were useless, in Aphra's experience. They only made her weak. That was why she and Sana only ever exchanged words when they were shooting at each other, nowadays, and why she never spoke to her dad.
But she did need to confront Luke again. Probably. Or at least the Geonosians. She needed that blasted bacta.
See? This was what happened when you got used to relying on someone. If you treated them like a pack donkey and make them carry everything you didn't want to make space for, you couldn't use all of those essential items when they were dead.
Plan. She needed a plan.
Aphra packed up her things again and hauled herself to her feet, glancing around at the dark tunnel. Her gaze landed on the other end—where it came out. The droid factory she'd spotted the previous day.
She grinned. Maybe the bacta could wait… for a little bit. (Her side twinged again in protest. She ignored it.)
Her climbing equipment, at least, was hers and in her bag. Up here in the catacombs, a little natural light filtered down, so she didn't have to turn on her headtorch to set it all up. She shimmied into the harness, locked herself into the screw gate on one end of the rope, and tossed the other end of the rope over the side. It bumped against the wall all the way down. Then, she began to climb.
The droid factory was awesome.
As Aphra descended, the sandy walls gave way to metal plating. It made sense: if you were gonna build a droid factory in a desert, you wanted at least some defence against all the dust. It was slippery and more difficult to get her feet on to abseil down, but she'd got pretty good at this sneaking about thing over the years. The more she descended, the clearer the factory below got.
It was darker down here. The only real light came from the machines: molten metal pouring into tanks, fires for smelting and bending the metal, even just the flickering lights on the side of each mechanism. She had to switch her headtorch on to see, but seeing was only half the story. But the noise was overwhelming.
Dozens of conveyor belts clattered along below her, a thousand and one implements flashing hard at work on whatever they were doing. Scalpel; drills; taps full of glowing liquid metal; great cleavers to split metal apart; hammers; screwdrivers; grappling claws yanking parts from place to place. The droids below shuffled and shuttled from one belt to the next, assembled so fast that if Aphra planted the beam of her headtorch on them they seemed to tumble into existence in front of her eyes: first a spindly metal skeleton, then thick feet, then controls, then the wings inserted neatly and carefully onto their backs. Finally, their heads.
"Independent thinkers," Aphra muttered to herself, watching a long string of identical pink droids march off the line. This was a lot of droids to produce at any one time—well, not a lot, not by the usual factory standards, but a lot more than she wanted any enemy of hers to be generating. She was lucky the catacombs were as vast as they were. They'd soon start to feel cramped with all these droids marching about.
Several walkways crisscrossed the factory, presumably for Geonosian overseers to keep an eye out and make sure everything was moving smoothly. Aphra abseiled past the first one—this factory had several layers, all the conveyor belts going on top of each other and spitting their creations into another tunnel at the other end.
Farther down, it got darker still. Aphra had to spin on her rope and fan the light from her headtorch out. It landed on the next row of droids.
They weren't the pink battle droids. They were slightly shorter and much broader, with thicker arms and legs and fists like rocket launchers. Oh—she watched the machines shove another piece onto the ends of their arms—they were rocket launchers.
She couldn't wait to have to shoot them down. Their armour looked thick enough to absorb a shot from the kriffing Death Star.
Where was the queen getting all this metal, anyway? Geonosis must be a write-off planet to any trading corporations. Did they have mines? Were they active mines? Were they just stockpiling old metal from the Clone Wars?
Had they discovered recycling?
She glanced back up, towards the higher supply line, where the pink, winged droids walked off with the same loping gait as a Geonosian. What was it Luke had said?
Do you really think they were just built to be a private army and grief over what happened here had nothing to do with it?
They fill a void.
Letting herself hang there a little while, she watched the pink droids walking. They looked and acted just like Geonosian drones, from the holos Aphra had seen of the bugs. Their wings fluttered with the same restless, irregular twitches—that wasn't economical, in terms of energy. If the goal was efficiency, they wouldn't do that. But if the goal was verisimilitude…
That wasn't the design they had used in the Clone Wars. The queen had definitely updated it. She was trying to recreate her species in nuts and bolts.
Aphra tried to imagine the grief that would spur on a project like that. She abandoned that thought process almost immediately.
There was a large, cylindrical station on the next walkway she found—it looked like a command station. She stopped her descent and crept towards it. Anything she could figure out about this place would be useful—what sort of file did they use? If she knew, she'd be able to guess what she'd need to decode the Death Star plans.
It was harder than she'd expected to hack in and view the designs, but she did it. Of course she did; she was brilliant. The specs of the rocket-launcher-fisted battle droids scrolled in front of her in blue and white. She resisted the urge to swear. They had some weaknesses—mainly at the joints—but not enough for her liking. She liked her enemies tough enough to take pride in defeating but weak enough that she could, y'know, make it look easy.
A door slammed. She jerked her head up and glanced around. There were arches sealed with metal blast doors at each end of the factory, and one of them had opened to admit a battle droid. She recognised its clanking gait. She was running out of time.
Her hand fumbled for the insertion port. She doubted she'd get out of here without getting spotted, so she might as well deny this supply line the data to keep moving and study it in more detail later. But even as she felt around, she couldn't find it.
There was no insertion slot.
Was the machine controlled by another computer? She had a look around, but she couldn't see anything to transmit a signal or a wire to carry it. Nor did it make sense to have a command station at all if the factory was controlled remotely. No, the plans were just… coded directly into the machine.
The hell?
Strictly speaking, that wasn't not normal—there were plenty of machines designed for specific purposes, not meant to adapt to multiple designs at once—but these supply lines were all identical, and they were all making different droids. If the instructions to do so were coded right into the machine, where were the records? What if the Geonosians switched out which droids were on which machine line and forgot some details of the previous design when they wanted to switch back?
Her what if musings were rapidly interrupted by a shrill series of chirps and clicks. She stepped away from the console and looked up.
A droid stood on the opposite walkway, staring at her.
She grinned, raising a hand. "Hi."
It fired. She swore, stepping farther back from the console and yanking on the rope she was abseiling down. It lifted her off the ground, triggering the motor in the pulley system she'd rigged up: she began to ascend, slowly.
The droid flapped its wings, broad and long, and leapt towards her.
She yanked the rope again. The motor spun faster, and she shot up. She got a few shots off at the droid—yeah! Right in the head!—that at least knocked it to the ground. It wasn't injured, but that didn't matter. Aphra reached the shelf of rock she'd abseiled from in a few moments and unstrung her equipment in record time. Her dad had been right about one thing: danger sure was the motivation she needed to get a job done fast.
When she ducked back into the catacombs, the whirr of metal wings loudened—and multiplied. That was how they worked. They would always call for backup. Even the queen and her droids would know about Aphra's whereabouts by now, and she still needed to go even deeper into their hive, to try and recover Luke's pack.
Idea.
She paused at a crossroads and lifted the scanner. There were several options, each stretching out into darkness other than the one she'd come from… but one doubled back. Towards the factory.
The factory, theoretically, would be at the heart of the hive. Especially if the queen was using her droids as pseudo-children, now she was sterilised. From the bottom floor of the factory, it shouldn't be far to the queen's chamber and… wherever they'd taken Luke.
But all droids would expect her to run.
She grinned.
Alright, so the floor of the factory wasn't quite on the same level as that of the queen's chamber, according to the scanner. But, as Aphra unstrapped herself from the rope and mournfully left it behind, she was a lot closer than she had been before.
The scanner buzzed in her hand, so on her way out, she took the tunnel to her left. The heavy metal door groaned open, and she ducked inside, marched down the corridor—
Oh.
She swallowed.
This corridor was where they stored the newly produced droids, clearly. They lined the walls, waiting patiently in neat little alcoves, their heads positioned so perfectly beneath the arches that the keystones looked ready to drop and knock them out. Lights on their challises blinked, slow but steady. They were fully charged, activated, and ready to go, then. They were just in standby.
Well, they could stand by all they wanted. She looked a step forwards, winced at the thunderclap that was her foot hitting the ground, and looked around.
The droids still stood there, blasters clutched in their right hands and crossed over their chests. Their long heads pointed straight forwards. As Aphra crept, inch by inch, along the corridor, it felt like their dull gazes formed a latticework of lasers to avoid.
But they didn't. She could keep moving. It was—
The metal door slammed shut behind her. She clapped her hand over her mouth to stifle a shout, then glanced around. The droids' lights blinked briefly, their blasters twitching, and Aphra stayed very, very still.
Their sensors clearly didn't think it was important enough to wake up fully. Her chest rose and fell slowly, relief flooding into her lungs, and she took another step forwards—just in time for a stray wind buffeted by the closing door to rake sand off the ceiling and blow it in her face. She clamped her mouth shut, stifling her gasp. Her nose started to tickle.
No. No way.
She reached up to pinch it, but the tickle spread, and she could feel it. The muscles in her nose and face trembled with the effort of—
Oh, come on.
She dashed forwards, elbows flapping awkwardly as she tried to grip her nose and pump her arms to run at the same time. No doubt she looked like one of her mother's chickens from back on stupid Arbiflux, but so long as she got out of here—
She did not get out of here. The sneeze rocketed through her sinuses and nostrils. "Achoo!"
Every muscle in her body tensed. She spun around, snapping up her blaster to aim at the droids behind her, on either side of her. She'd made it a scant twenty metres from the blast door she'd come through, and there were at least twenty metres of parked battle droids on the other side of the tunnel, stretching towards the other exit. Still, she backed towards it slowly, focusing on the ones she'd passed.
Their lights flickered—faster and faster. Aphra kept rotating her blaster from droid to droid, wondering which would shoot first. That one looked tough—big and scary. It was identical to all the others but yeeeeah, that one. Third on her left. That was a tough one. Her blaster wavered towards it.
It didn't wake up.
She loosened her tight, terrified breathing a little, until she was sucking in rasping gulps of air in her relief. Alright. The sneeze hadn't woken them. That was a good sign—she was a loud sneezer—and she relaxed her footsteps. They sounded less like thunderclaps when her life wasn't on the line.
After a few minutes, her heavy breathing petered out. No more panic. She had enough oxygen. It was fine, and she—and her lungs—could relax.
It meant that, when the sounds of her breathing weren't filling her ears, she could hear the other person's breathing right behind her.
That time, she did yelp. She spun around and shot her blaster before she'd even thought, another strangled yell tearing out of her throat. The bolt went wide, but that didn't matter; it would never have found its target anyway. A blue beam snapped to life and slammed it into the floor faster than she could blink.
She glanced up, already knowing who she'd be looking at.
Luke stood before her, about five metres away: not close enough to hit her with his laser sword, but she'd have to run if he lunged. His legs were spread in what looked like an actual recognisable sword fighting stance, which was cooler than anything Aphra had thought Luke capable of.
Other than that, he was unchanged. His hair was still a disgraceful mess, his clothes—castoffs of hers that had fit her poorly and him less poorly—as dusty as she'd last seen him, and his boots scuffed and worn.
He seemed to have all his limbs, which she had to admit was encouraging. None of them had been eaten! If he was still alive when Vader got here, she might stay that way!
And the best part: he was wearing his backpack. Her gaze clapped on it like a shaak's on a particularly delectable patch of grass.
"Luke!" she said. Her side stung, as if suddenly reminding her of… everything that had happened. She ignored it. Explosive betrayals were unimportant right now. "I'm so happy you're alright. Pass me your bag."
He looked at her intently. "Who else knows that we are here?" he asked. His intonations were flat and unnerving, as if he'd forgotten the nuances of a language he was fluent in.
Was it a stress thing? Emotions? She had betrayed him. Aphra knew people who struggled with language when they were upset. She switched to Huttese—she was pretty sure that was his first language. "Luke? What's going on? How did you get free?"
Luke blinked, as if the new language was totally incomprehensible to him. Then he nodded, as if locking in a new gear in his head. "Who else knows that we are here?" he asked again, this time in unaccented Huttese.
Aphra turned her head slightly to look at him. "You and the boss. And whoever the boss's told. Which is probably no one. You know this.
"Who is 'the boss'?"
"I can't tell you that." She rolled her eyes. Luke was a right pain in her arse sometimes. A lot of the time. She was so glad he hadn't been eaten yet. "You know I can't tell you that."
"You will tell us." He stepped forwards, lifting his lightsaber slightly. Not into a fighting stance, but it sent a shiver down her spine anyway.
"Whoa—hey, now. Watch what you're doing with that." She took a step back, but he matched it again. Four metres between them now—or, well, four and a half. His strides weren't that long. "Look, the boss is coming here anyway. He's interested in you—don't ask me why, you're not that interesting—so you'll meet him then. But before that, you know I can't—"
She paused. Her eyes narrowed.
"'Us'?" she asked. "Who's us?"
"Your 'boss' is coming here," he said. "Then you are useless. We can ask him for who else knows about us when he comes." He raised his lightsaber into a fighting stance.
Aphra stumbled back, faster this time. "'We'?" But she wasn't stupid. She knew what this meant. "You— you mean the queen?"
"No one can know we are here until we are ready." He stepped forwards again. He still wasn't in range, but he didn't seem to be in a hurry. Why would he be? He was the one with the lightsaber.
"So, she didn't want to eat you," Aphra guessed. Another step back. Two. "What did she want, then? You to join her? She must've been pretty persuasive if you're acting like this." But the scorn in her voice didn't hold up. This wasn't like Luke. In all of her heart-stopping adventures, she'd never known someone to change their behaviour and allegiances so abruptly. She'd never even heard of it.
But there was a first for everything. Because this certainly wasn't Luke.
"Have you been possessed by a dead Geonosian?" she asked. "Is that why you're suddenly all murderous?" She'd had no idea the Geonosians had anything like the capacity for mind control. "The Luke I know and love hates killing," she tried to grin, tried to knock a little sense into him, and added, "especially close friends like me."
"You do not love anyone," Luke said and lunged for her.
She hit the ground and rolled to avoid the first slash of the lightsaber. The second, she rolled again, but the tunnel was too narrow to manoeuvre quickly or easily. Which was always an advantage to the guy with the biggest weapon. She sprung to her feet to dodge the third swing—only for the fourth to drive down on her head.
Her hands seized Luke's arm. The blaster she'd been holding clattered to the floor. Luke had gravity and momentum on his side, but he was still a scrawny eighteen-year-old. Alright, he was a farm boy used to manual labour; he wasn't scrawny at all. But she occasionally beat him when they were arm wrestling. By a miracle, she held his arm in place—the lightsaber blade inches from her face.
"How dare you?" she bit out. She kneed him in the crotch.
The squeal of pain he made was very Luke, and it almost made her feel bad. ('Almost feeling bad' was the most common feeling Aphra experienced, if she were to be honest.) Again, she ducked back. Ten metres from the blast door. She was meant to be going the other way. She was meant to be going towards Luke's bag.
She sized Luke up. He was still recovering from the kick, but otherwise unharmed. What were meant to be the symptoms of mind control? She'd only ever seen it in overdramatic holodramas, and they always had the person moving stiffly, confused and awkward in their body. Luke moved more fluidly than he ever had before. He talked awkwardly, though.
No. She had seen it before. Just not with anyone she knew.
Abersyn symbiotes were legendary. They were rare but dangerous—dangerous enough that every budding archaeologist got a thorough briefing on what to do if they turned up at a dig site. They could live in stasis for eons; the ruins of collapsed societies were usually where they turned up. If they did turn up there, it was because they were the ones that caused the collapse.
There was one active hive of them out in the galaxy. The Queen of Ktath'atn ruled over it; as the being in the hive with the strongest willpower, she overrode all her underlings' minds to make them serve her. That was how Abersyn symbiotes worked. They leapt onto you, burrowed until they attached to your brainstem, and then they had control of your every movement. Infecting other organics with a symbiote was how the Queen of Ktath'atn and the rulers of many of those now-collapsed societies had imposed their will on them. Total. Implacable. Obliterating.
Luke hadn't been infected with a symbiote, had he? She had no idea how she was gonna get it off him—or even if she could.
Had Vader known about this? Was that what he meant by his assurance that the queen would want a Jedi for something else?
If Luke was infected, he should have the symbiote hanging off of the back of his neck. At least some sort of mark. She really should check. She should—
"Agh!"
Luke threw his lightsaber at her. It scythed in a gleaming arc and nearly removed her legs from her torso. She pressed herself against the wall; it soared past her hips, close enough for her to feel the heat. The blade embedded in the tunnel door up to its hilt. Metal bubbled red and orange around it.
Aphra didn't like having her back against the wall, so she stepped forwards again, seizing the middle ground.
"You're infected," she said. "This is mind control. Is this a symbiote? Why the hell does the Geonosian queen have a symbiote?"
She swallowed.
Symbiotes often caused the death of empires. It was why the Galactic Empire was so stringent about vaporising all of them in a plasma furnace. Was this what had caused the death of Geonosis?
Was the queen its only survivor?
No wonder she was looking for new organisms to serve her. Aphra would have guessed that Luke, as a wannabe Jedi, would be a pretty powerful candidate for the new king of the hive, but if the queen was Force-sensitive too…
She was speculating uselessly. There were only two things she needed to know: were these Abersyn symbiotes?
And if they were… She, Luke, and the queen were the only three organics on the planet, as far as she knew.
No hive queen had ever been satisfied with only one vassal.
"Are you trying to kill me?" she asked. "Or—no. No way. You won't get me involved in… this. I'm an"—her throat tightened, glancing at the droids on either side of them—"independent thinker. I'll die before I let you—"
"Yes, you will," Luke said. He lifted his hand.
A hum was Aphra's only warning. She threw herself to the ground just as the lightsaber whipped out of the door, back into Luke's hand. That too would have carved her to pieces.
He was trying to kill her, she registered distantly. She didn't know why that had been so hard for understand.
No. She did know why. It was Luke.
But how was she supposed to fight this? He had a lightsaber, and she'd lost her blaster. What other weapons did she have? More blasters in her rucksack, sure—she'd given the rations and the medkit to Luke to make space for them—but what good would blasters do against a somewhat proficient Jedi? What else did she have?
Her eyes widened. She groped for her pack.
"Why would we want you, Doctor Aphra?" Luke sneered, with many voices layered over his own, judgement heavier than any disappointed gaze he'd given her in the last six months. "You are a loveless, self-centred individual. Your interest in profit trumps all interest in connective or constructive pursuits. For years, you have flown alone and made your own misery a problem for everybody you meet. You are alone and you are lonely, and yet you are too repugnant to try to fix it. Your mind would only poison us."
Aphra's mouth dropped open, even as she continued to rummage around in her pack, putting pieces together, building her salvation. Her hands could work while her heart smarted.
Luke had lectured her before. But that had been different. This was something different.
She was being lectured to by the queen of a parasitic hivemind.
"Wow," she said. "Alright then."
She pulled out the flamethrower.
Luke did not approve of a lot of her weapons. He didn't approve of the fact that she sacrificed space for important things—like rations and medical supplies—to carry fancy tech to kill things with. She'd joked with him about the flamethrower, even.
But what did his opinion matter? She did somewhat understand his point about the medical supplies, by now. But this baby was gonna come in handy.
It roared to life. Luke stumbled back, surprise splattering over his face.
"Deflect this, Jedi!"
The flames launched at least five metres. Luke scrambled back, out of their range; she could see him lifting his hand to bat them away with the Force, but fire was tricky. It gobbled up every scrap of air it could fire. Back and forth it darted; you couldn't catch it. Aphra liked to think she and fire had a lot in common.
That included an ability to burn everything down.
She used the extra space she had to back off again, farther and farther. Sweat flooded her forehead, her cheeks; she reached up to slip her goggles over her eyes before she went blind, and they almost slipped off her face. Luke stayed back, hand clenching.
Aphra expected that the space between them would make no difference. He had the Force, like Vader. He could wrap his fist around her throat without touching her, choke her, bring her to her knees without a second thought. Looking at him through the dance of the flames, the way red and yellow light illuminated the stony set of his jaw and the veins on his clenched hands, she expected to stop breathing.
But apparently he hadn't learnt that trick, yet.
She glanced over her shoulder. The door to the factory should be close, now. Three metres away. Two. One—
Luke said something in Geonosian. It was just a series of clicks and clacks. Aphra knew what it meant the moment her back hit the still-closed door. He'd locked it.
There was no escape.
But Luke certainly wasn't coming any closer.
"You know what, Luke?" she called out. "Just for you, I'll make a deal. I'll leave the planet—alive. I'll even leave you behind for the queen to play with, because I know that's who I'm really talking to here. Give me the chance to run, and I'll leave the planet now. I'll never tell a soul I came here, or about your lovely droid factory. The boss can come here, you can kill him—he's the one who wants the Death Star plans, I don't care about them—but I'll be gone. Out of your hair! Metaphorically," she added. Geonosians didn't have hair. "We're at a stalemate here anyway! C'mon—"
"We are already aware," Luke said, "that you would leave behind a companion to rescue yourself." Then he said something else in Geonosian.
All the droids along the sides of the corridor whirred to life. They snapped to attention in synchrony—and pointed their blasters at Aphra.
Aphra pointed her flamethrower at the droids to her right. It had a narrower cone of fire than she'd like, and that took the heat off of Luke for a moment, but—
None of the droids fired, even while she made her desperate assault. Luke didn't even take advantage of the lack of fire directed towards him. He walked forwards slowly, calmly, bouncing his lightsaber in his hand.
Aphra sucked in a breath, glancing at the droids on the left. Why weren't they firing on her? They'd even had the gall to lower their blasters. Why wasn't Luke attacking her?
She glanced back at the droids she'd set on fire, and her heart sank. They were melting, but still recognisable. Still functional.
What the hell were these droids made of?
How the hell was she supposed to fight them?
Luke gave another order in Geonosian. All the droids' blasters—even the half-melted ones, under her fiery onslaught—cocked again. That must be two dozen focused on her, through the fire. A barrage in the making, even if Luke couldn't reach her.
"There is no escape," Luke informed her, smiling slightly. "You will not join our hive. Instead, you will feed it."
She hadn't known Luke could be this cruel.
Something about it seemed almost familiar.
There is no escape.
That was what Vader had said to her, when he'd nearly killed her for her mistake. The way he'd stood then, feet wide, shoulders relaxed, utterly unbothered by what he was about to do, the life he was about to take…
She looked at Luke. And she said what she'd said to Vader, then.
"If you're going to kill me, do it with the lightsaber," she said, leaning against the door harder. "Just—make it quick. I don't want to die of a thousand blaster bolts. Heh." She tried a smile. "It would probably ruin the meat."
Vader hadn't listened to her. He'd continued to choke her into unconsciousness, then left her there. But Luke, even possessed and puppeteered by an alien queen, was a kinder man than Vader.
"Then switch off the flamethrower," Luke ordered.
With trembling hands, she did.
The droids didn't lower their blasters, but nor did they spring into action. Luke did.
He moved faster than she'd seen any human move before. One moment he was ten, fifteen metres away from her, then he was right there, his lightsaber slashing for her neck. If Aphra hadn't been prepared, she would have been dead.
But she was prepared.
Of course she was prepared.
Luke was on top of her; her hands were already up. She seized his arm, ducked, and used the momentum of the lightsaber to ram it into the thick metal of the door. It swam through it with ease and a sizzle. She tightened her grip and dragged it along, down, along—and up again.
Then she yanked the lightsaber out of Luke's hand, seized the back of his jacket, and spun him around so he stood between her and the droids.
She pressed the emitter plate of his lightsaber to his temple. "You're still Luke enough to have mercy, then," she murmured in his ear. "You're still trusting, too. How much of this killer behaviour is the symbiote and how much is just Luke Skywalker when he's betrayed?"
The idea that even Luke, sweet, hale farm boy that he was, could be a sadist when he was angry and desperate should be reassuring. It took the heat off of her, morally speaking. Anyone could become a monster.
Strangely, it just made her feel worse.
Luke gave a low, clicking order to the droids. They didn't fire—likely for fear of hitting him—so whatever it was, she wasn't worried about.
She felt around the back of his neck, studying it closely. There was nothing. Even when she pulled his jacket down farther or ruffled his hair, there were no marks—puncture wounds, scabs, scars, or even a symbiote hanging off of him.
Abersyn symbiotes always left a mark of some kind. This wasn't the symbiote.
No matter. She set her jaw. It had the same effect. She would treat it the same way.
"I'll be taking that." She shifted the backpack off of him—he hissed something inhuman as she did, but the lightsaber at his head stopped him from protesting too vociferously. "Thanks for your help. I'd say it's been a pleasure, but it hasn't."
She kicked backwards. The still-hot, lopsided hole he'd carved in the door for her groaned and fell away with a thud.
Still holding the lightsaber to his head, she fumbled for the blaster at her belt and lifted it to his back. Luke tensed. So did Aphra.
After a moment, she set it to stun.
She fired. Luke slumped forwards in her arms. Sheathing her blaster and picking up her flamethrower again, she stepped through the hole, dragging him with her.
Hesitation seized her when she glanced down at him. Unconscious. Helpless.
Vader was coming here for him. She could kidnap him right now and save them a lot of trouble.
But right now? Her plan was to book it to the surface as fast as her legs could carry her. Carrying an unconscious teenager—and, once he woke up, a teenager who was trying to kill her—would make it so much harder to run away. Aphra always prioritised running away.
"Sorry, Luke," she muttered. "Next time, maybe."
She tossed him back through the hole. The droids exploded into action the moment he was clear, but that moment came too late. She turned. The rope she'd descended by earlier was still hanging there, swaying slightly in the breeze. A quick ascent—it would cut her escape time in half.
She grinned and ran.
We are usually better equipped than to give important leadership positions to children, but our drones are few, so we must make do with a child's inadequacies. Wormie is impetuous, angry, and thoughtless to where our strengths truly are: in coordination.
In numbers.
If we had called upon the firepower of our creations earlier, she would not have escaped. She would have been dead before she hit the ground.
We know.
If we had used them, instead of co-opting this confrontation into a personal crusade, we would not have this loose end.
We know.
And while mercy and efficiency are twin blades we admire deeply, in this case—
We require the best flesh for our young. We needed—
We see all. All our thoughts are transparent as a void. Deception is pointless. We know what was done and why. We forgive it.
We forgive?
We always forgive mistakes. Re-assimilation is easy, as is correction. Wormie has been alone for a long, long time, and acts thus. But we need not act alone anymore. None of us are alone.
Wormie understands what went wrong. We all understand.
We do.
Wormie will not fail again.
No. We will not. The outsider now flees for the surface, for her ship, but Wormie knows her; we all know her. We still hold her prize with us. She will not leave until she has it, and her leader is likely likewise. Soon, we will have our chance to eliminate this threat to us and feed ourselves at once.
And we are all in agreement, as we always are. We do require the best flesh for our young.
Wormie, as one of our young, has been defeated by a pathetic slip of an outsider. His flesh is riddled with the weaknesses of his birth species.
We cannot overcome such weaknesses.
No. But we can mitigate them.
We build our creations. We are always building, and we are always adapting. Our creations, at last, begin to resemble us in metal, if not in flesh. Wormie can too. Wormie has always longed to walk the skies, and now he longs to be one of us in flesh as well as mind. We can achieve this. We can build this reality. Our droid factories have always been exemplary, but droids are only the beginning of our capacity.
We will give our young the wings they need to succeed. But first, there is still the task we went to the factories for.
We have our droids. We need more worms.
We have more worms. We need more flesh.
We need to raise the dead.