The phalanx of battle droids that rounded the corner didn't know they were there. Luke deduced that from three facts: they didn't have their blasters out ready to fire, they seemed to be in a marching formation rather than a battle formation, and there were only six of them. Perhaps there were only six battle droids on Geonosis total, but while they all had the same wing-like modifications and were all equally beaten up and weather-worn, none of them was the droid Luke and Aphra had pursued.
There were more of them out there. They were looking for them, then—or something else. This just happened to be the only band that had found them.
As they approached, a chittering, clacking sound heralded them. Luke and Aphra exchanged a look.
"What language is that?" Luke hissed.
"Geonosian hivemind, I'd guess."
"What's the point of having a hivemind if you need to speak language to each other as well?"
Aphra cocked her head, considering that. "Droids can't join the hivemind. Maybe it's for—get 'em!"
Whatever conversation the droids were having, Aphra cut it short. She nailed the first droid around the corner in the head.
Its head spun on its shoulders, so far back Luke grimaced, before it snapped back into place with a crack that would be excruciating for any being with pain receptors. When it turned to regard them, half of its long head was blackened and dented. Its right optical sensor was a crater. Wires sparked and hung like worms from the rent.
Luke stared at those wires, the way they writhed and dangled and clung to the innards of the droid's head. His stomach flipped, and before he knew it, he had his blaster up and had opened fire. A barrage of shots punched red-gold through the carapace of the second droid around the corner. Its chest gaped open.
"Don't aim for the chest!" Aphra yelled. "It'll just slow them down! Their processing is done in the head!"
"I thought you wanted one!
"I want one! Destroy the—agh!"
The droids recovered from the shock, snapped up their own blasters, and fired on them. Luke shoved Aphra to the side to avoid the storm that thundered towards them. Blue stun rings soaked into the ground where they'd been standing seconds before. The sand jumped into the air like fleas at the intense vibrations.
Aphra shoved Luke off of her, yanked up her blaster and fired again: once, twice, thrice. But she was unbalanced, on her back foot, and her blaster went up and wide. Two shots thudded into the ceiling, the rock rumbling and sand trickling down on their heads.
The third shot struck true. It ripped through the head of the droid Luke had hit, tearing off most of its lower jaw. It triggered a muffled, "Roger, roger?" speech quirk as the voice box fried.
After a moment, the entire face unhinged, and its carapace toppled onto the ground. It kept marching, though: its central processing unit was protected by a thick layer of metal, buried in the back of its head.
"Nice shot," Luke breathed.
They scrambled backwards—bolted might be more accurate a term. The six droids marched inexorably towards them. It was a long, long corridor, but they were faster than the march and before long they were around the corner and into a narrower corridor off the side. Aphra grabbed Luke's arm and dragged him to a halt.
"We need to run," he hissed.
"Did you see how that droid kept marching?" she replied. "It can't see anything. I blew out its optical sensors. But it's still behaving like it can."
"So? We need to run—"
"They've got a collective intelligence system running," she said, ignoring him. "If the droids are still acting independently but can work without their own faculties, it's relying on the other droids' data input. And I bet that visual signal isn't just going to this phalanx."
Luke swallowed. "You think the other squads of droids out looking for us…"
"Are on their way. And we need to get out of here before then." Before Luke could say anything else, she cocked her blaster. "But first, I want my kriffing battle droid."
"Aphra—"
Using the cover of the wall, she darted out and shot at them. Luke heard the bolts unload into stone, sand, and hard, hot metal. His ears ached from the blasts' echoes. When the droids returned fire, she ducked back. The shots that spattered against the opposite wall were red—shots to kill.
Luke frowned at that.
Aphra grinned at him, a little wildly. "C'mon, kid. We've got a better tactical advantage now. You take a shot."
Luke grimaced and peered around the wall. "I think we should run, still." His heart was hammering. "I have a bad feeling about—"
"Then stop babbling and start shooting!"
He raised the blaster to shoot. Too close to the wall. Instead of firing along the corridor, the heat and force of the shot discharged into the wall, carving out a thick chunk of it.
"I thought you were a better shot than that—"
Rage overtook him—rage, panic, and terror at something starting to coalesce at the back of his mind. He stepped out from the shelter of the wall altogether and pumped out one, two, three, four, five shots, scorching down the corridor towards the marching, clanking, advancing phalanx of metal and death. A lot of them went wide, his hand was shaking badly enough—Aphra was right, he was a better shot than this, and the pain in his still-weak and injured arms could only account for so much—but enough landed on the droids' torsos, heads, arms, to make a difference. At least he shot one droid's arm off. It clattered to the ground, spindly, the connecting wires sparking, but the droid was otherwise uninjured and just transferred its blaster to the other arm. Droids were ambidextrous.
They kept marching forwards. The faceless droid, with the exposed processing unit and the black hole in its chest where Luke had nailed it, stayed at the front.
There was a half-second pause. Luke stared at how little damage several barrages of blaster bolts had done to them. Or rather—how little they cared about it. All six of them had carapaces smoky and pocked with scorch marks; two of them only had half their heads from Aphra's blow. Still, they kept coming. They were almost undead.
That half a second passed. When, in unison, they lifted their blasters again to shoot at him, he realised why they'd paused at all. The six—twelve—eighteen—twenty-four bolts that soared towards him in unison were stun bolts. They'd taken the time to set them back to stun.
Luke ducked and threw himself aside. A stun bolt clipped his arm; his body spasmed, his whole arm numbing, and his fingers frazzled. His blaster thudded to the ground. His legs gave out underneath him, but the momentum of his dive kept him rolling out of the line of fire, and Aphra dragged him the rest of the way, slamming him into an upright position against the wall.
"Come on." She grabbed both blasters and spun them in her hands, pressing her back to the wall and peering around the corner. "Give yourself time to get your nerves working again."
"They're trying to kill you," Luke got out.
"I saw that."
"They—"
"Luke, focus on getting your shit together right now while I raise hell. We'll talk strategy later."
That wasn't Aphra's style—Aphra's style was to talk now, plan later, not do both later—but his teeth still felt weird, and his tongue was unresponsive in his mouth, so he sat where she'd left him, the hard wall digging into his back.
Blasterfire shouted, as Aphra and the droids exchanged shots again. Luke staggered to his feet, and before he knew it, Aphra was in front of him again.
"Alright, they're closer than I thought," she said. "Can you walk again?"
"Yeah, I—"
"Good. Run!"
Aphra was right: the clanking footsteps were louder and louder in his ears, thrumming through the sand, through the very corridors. He could feel them in his teeth. He took his blaster back from her, and suddenly felt a bit better.
She was so brave. Careless, reckless, but brave. And she was going to save them. He could draw strength from her—he could rely on her.
His blaster shifted in his palm, adjusted back to the feeling of being in his hand, and the sense of Aphraness about it faded. But Luke held onto that strength anyway.
He ran.
This corridor they'd turned onto wasn't a long one, though it was narrower. It narrowed even farther as they raced down it, until Luke could have stretched out his arms and touched both walls at once, and it twisted. It curved first to the left—then to the right—and suddenly, abruptly, it stopped.
"No," Aphra said. For the first time, he heard fear in her voice. "There's light down here—I felt a breeze!"
She was right. There was light in here. Luke lifted his helmet and used his headtorch to point at the ceiling, at least ten metres above them. There was a hole in it. Weak red light filtered down, presumably from some opening to the atmosphere farther up.
This wasn't a dead end—not for the Geonosians. But it was for them.
"You're kidding me," Aphra said.
"Can you use your rope—"
"I can't throw a rope that far."
"Then can we backtrack?"
The thud, thud, thud directly behind them answered that.
"They're coming around the bend," Luke said. He looked to the entrance, to see if there was a corner they could hide behind, but the tunnel sloped gently into this chamber. It wasn't a door into a room. The walls just widened. There were no corners to speak of.
Aphra kept calm. As much as she could, at least. "The tunnel's narrower here. They'll have to come down single file." She widened her feet into a more professional stance and gripped her blaster with both hands, aiming it at the door.
They should have just run, Luke thought. No. This tunnel had been the only way to run.
That was why they were still dealing with the same six droids. That was why no others had bothered coming. They knew they had them trapped.
The first droid—the one with half a head—rounded the corner. Aphra fired at it. It fired at her. Luke raised his blaster to help, but just as the droid stepped into the chamber, its head teetered, tilted, and fell. Its body toppled to the right; its head thunked to the ground on the left.
"You did it," Luke said. His blaster still raised, a smile crept onto his face. Then he looked at Aphra.
Her face was red, her cheeks blown wide as if she was bottling up a scream. An angry red gash sheared away the jacket and skin of her left arm. Not a fatal wound, but not ideal—
"Do you have the medkit?" Luke asked, because he knew Aphra did not but also knew that Aphra would get so angry if he told her she needed medical attention and he could give it to her.
Still, he shrugged off his pack and tossed it to her. "I can hold them off."
"No, you can't." Her tone was cutting. "But you gotta. Buy me some time."
But she didn't get out the medkit. Instead, she crawled for the—
"You're insane," Luke breathed. But he turned back to the approaching droids. "That thing is half-destroyed anyway, and you still want to reprogramme something?"
"Hey! I'm panicking, and my lovely mechanical language calms me down!"
"What good will one droid do us against the other five!?"
"That's my job to figure out. Your job is to shoot, kid."
The approaching droids stopped in unison when they saw Luke facing them, his blaster trembling in his hands. Sweat coated the side of his face, as hot and wet as blood. The droid at the front, staring him down, was one of the uninjured ones: pink, pristine, and apparently indomitable, its thin wings flitting with every movement as if in delight.
Luke thought of the Jedi that lightsaber had belonged to, and the last sight they'd seen: a droid lurching towards them, and their only job to hold it back.
He needed to protect Aphra.
It didn't matter what happened to him. He needed to protect Aphra.
Luke clipped his blaster to his belt. "My job is to buy you time," he corrected.
He had one half-second, as the droid disengaged, flicked its blaster back to stun, and engaged again. It was enough.
The roar of his father's lightsaber drowned out whatever doubts he might still be harbouring. It threw intense blue light around the dim chamber: reflecting in the droid's shiny head, casting a long shadow on the ground, and he knew the red light and the blue intermingled in shadows on his face. He set his jaw.
Ben had written in his journals about deflecting blaster bolts. Luke had never done it before, but—
"The hell are you doing?"
The droid shot. Several bolts in very, very rapid succession. Luke lifted the lightsaber in front of him, and it certainly wasn't perfect, he could probably do it a bit more elegantly, but the bolts bounced right off of it. One went into the floor. One to the side. A few scattered behind him—Aphra screeched—and a few just dissipated. But none of them hit Luke.
He took a deep breath. When they came again, he didn't think—he remembered what it had felt like to experience a Jedi's final moments, if only for those final moments, and swung. Something guided his hand, nudging him to shift the lightsaber to certain areas, certain places. The droid twitched, and he moved to intercept it. His hands hadn't moved this fast since he'd last soared through Beggar's Canyon and felt the galaxy unravel at his fingertips.
The droid was right in front of him. It cocked its blaster to fire again—and Luke slashed his lightsaber through the barrel. It dropped to the ground, the tip still smoking, the metal red-hot. He slashed again. The droid fell into pieces at his feet.
Air rushed in and out of his lungs. He jumped at the next droid; before they could register what was happening, they were in pieces too. The lightsaber was a star in his hand, and everything in front of him cringed away from their united brilliance.
"Seriously—what the hell are you doing?"
Luke glanced over his shoulder, beaming. "I—"
That was monumentally stupid.
The next droid nailed him in the chest with a stun bolt. His vision exploded with starlight, energy crackling through him. He heard Aphra's voice, calm and level—he did appreciate that she was trying to comfort him and not insult him right now—but that was all he could hear over the crash of blood through his head.
The ground smacked him.
"Wake the kriff up, idiot."
"Mhmm."
"I know." A hot, sticky hand patted his cheek. Then it slapped his cheek, hard enough that the tingles left over from the stun blast intensified again, then abruptly vanished. "Wake up."
He peeled his eyes open. Aphra stared down at him.
"How old are you again?" she asked. She pinched his cheeks between her thumb and forefinger.
"Eighteen," he got out through his squished cheeks.
"I swear, you look like a baby—"
"What happened!?" His angry tone didn't really translate through the muffling squished-cheeks effect. But, thankfully, she let go and leaned back into her crouch.
"Meet my new friend," she bounced on the ball of her heels and slapped the shin of some banged up metal contraption beside her, "Mister Switchboard. Say hello, Switchy."
"Hello." Luke winced. The voice was shrill and grating enough that his ears stung.
"Yeah, I had to replace his voice box, and I only had that one lying around. We'll work with it."
"Switchboard." Luke was out of it, but not out of it that he missed the joke. "Because you—"
She grinned faux-modestly. "Because I switched his boards. What can I say—I'm a wordsmith!"
"Where did his friends go?"
"Oh, them? Don't worry about them."
"Aphra—"
"They retreated. Ha! Turned and ran more like. You waved about that lightsaber and took two out in less than a minute! That was impressive."
He sat up fully, nursing his head. "Then they shot me."
"But then I picked up the lightsaber, and by that point they were scared of it. So they left!"
Luke narrowed his eyes at her. "That's… convenient."
She grinned wider and held out a hand. "You know what's even more convenient?"
Sighing, he took it. She helped him to his feet. "What?"
"Switchy's gonna show us the way back to their headquarters. He's still got alllll the juicy information right there in his head, including the way to go. We've just got to follow him to find what we're looking for."
"And what are we looking for?" Luke thought back to the corpse they'd found just outside the catacombs. He was starting to get the idea that many Jedi had fallen here, and that Geonosians were a formidable opponent. But he had no idea why—or when—the Geonosians had fallen themselves.
"The headquarters," she said. "Keep up."
The headquarters weren't nearby. Even Aphra's chatter eventually faded from the strain of all that walking. She hadn't slept yet, so after a while they took a break for Luke to eat and Aphra to snooze, but two hours later they were on their feet again.
"How's your arm?" he asked her. She hadn't asked him about his injuries—definitely healing but still felt awful—but he figured he'd always been the polite one in their duo.
She looked down. She'd slapped a bacta patch on it and had done with it: it was still red, but not that furious red it had been before. The transparent bacta patch seemed to soak up the redness like a sponge feeding on blood, leaving new skin in its wake. "Healing."
"Does it hurt?"
"Not enough to stop me from using a blaster." She looked him up and down. "What about you? I need my assistant in top shape if we're heading to their headquarters."
Luke stifled a smile. "I'm… fine."
"Are you sure? You're looking a little rough around the edges—"
"I'm as good as I could be." But she leaned over and patted him down—harshly. Luke gritted his teeth to stop from crying out. "That hurts, by the way, if you could—"
"So you are a little rough around the edges." But Luke recognised the telltale signs of relief bleeding into her face, softening the set of her mouth. "But healing?"
"So long as you don't hit me again."
"No promises."
The moment bled away quickly, and the silence it left behind pressed down on them like pain.
Luke swallowed. "We're… both injured."
"Yeah."
"He's," he gestured to Switchboard, whose head rotated towards him when Luke gestured, "the only droid we managed to injure."
"Hey—I got that other one right in the face."
"He's one of the only two droids we injured, then." Luke frowned. "I can see why the Clone Wars were so difficult. Blasters took forever to work against those droids."
"They're tougher than the usual droids," Aphra agreed. "The Clone Wars were hard because there were so many of them, not because they were difficult to defeat one on one. If I'd had a blaster against six of those old droids? Boom!" She mimed pulling a trigger with her fingers. "No problem at all. You're right. These ones are a lot tougher. A lot of the weaknesses have been solved."
"Like…?"
"Usually I can down them in one headshot." She gestured to Switchboard. "But look at him. How many did he take? Three. And even then I didn't destroy him, I just disconnected his processing unit from the rest of his body and rewired him. Even when the pieces fall apart, they don't get that beat up. The only thing that's not tough about these guys is apparently their polish."
Luke eyed the dozens of scratch and scuff marks on Switchboard's carapace. "Maybe that's tough too," he suggested, "and they've just been in use for a long, long time."
"Why, though?" Aphra asked.
"What?"
"Why would a dead planet need an indestructible army?"
It was a good question. And one that might answer all of Luke's questions about this place. But he wasn't in a questioning mood right now. "You're not worried about them? At all?"
"About what?"
"We're walking to their headquarters." They turned a corner, and a gush of hot wind blew in their fingers. Luke huffed; Aphra gagged. "There's gonna be so many more of these—we can't fight them all off—"
"You did pretty good."
"Seriously, Aphra."
"You think I don't have a plan, Luke?" She scoffed. "Everything's gonna be fine."
"What was it that Maz Kanata said when we stole the antique stealth droid microdust from her?"
Aphra paused. "What's that got to do with it?"
"'You underestimate how well I—or indeed, anyone who's spoken to you for more than five minutes—know you,'" Luke quoted. "You're not subtle. I know you have a plan. But I'm your partner, so I'd like to know it."
"You're my assistant." She elbowed him. "So, you don't get to. And if you haven't figured it out yet, clearly I'm a lot subtler than you think."
He'd offended her. He could tell he'd offended her. "If I know, I can help you execute it better."
"Just do what I tell you to do."
"How am I supposed to help you?" Luke insisted. "I know I have less experience than you, Aphra—I'm reminded of that every day! But I can help you. I can invent and improvise just as well as you can"—her snort was insulting—"and I've proven that. How can I improvise a solution to the problem when I don't even know what we're looking for?"
"I told you," Aphra said. "We're looking for this place's rotten heart."
"And then what? You've mentioned the Droid Gotra's mission—are you looking to steal the droid factory? Or"—he swallowed—"are you looking for the weapon that killed everyone on the planet?" Please, no…
She tilted her head. "That would be nice. I could probably sell a weapon like that for a lot."
His footsteps stumbled to a halt. She didn't stop walking with him.
"You don't care, do you?" he asked her retreating back.
She did stop then. She turned around, hands on her hips, and raised her eyebrows. "What?"
"You don't care at all that this place is a horror show. That it's dead—almost everything here is dead. You just want to know how it was destroyed, so you can do it elsewhere too." He swallowed. "So you can use it."
He wanted to know how it was destroyed. Leia did too. They wanted to stop it from happening anywhere else.
Aphra…
What did she want? What drove her?
"If you don't like it, leave," she said. "You're just here for backup, anyway."
Luke stared at her.
"You don't care about anything," he said. "You'll endanger yourself and me chasing after whatever you're looking for. We've been confronted by the dead at every turn—dead Jedi, dead Geonosians, corpses, droids—and you don't care."
Aphra jutted her thumb at Switchboard. "Kid, he doesn't look dead to me."
"They have wings, Aphra," he said. "They're built to look like Geonosians."
"So?"
"Do you really think they were just built to be a private army," he asked, "and grief over what happened here had nothing to do with it? They fill a void—"
"Why do you think I'd care?" Aphra interrupted.
Luke faltered at that. "You're… you're an archaeologist," he said. "When you're digging up graves, don't you want to respect them, learn from them, instead of desecrating them?"
"No."
"No?"
"Look, kid, I get that you're young, and head to toe you're the epitome of what healthy farm living can do for a guy," she said. "But get your head out of your happy sunny childhood. There's a war out there. Between the Rebellion and the Empire now—before? Then it was the Clone Wars. I told you, it killed my mom, it killed who knows how many other moms, and that doesn't change. That goes back years. Archaeology, you see nothing but death. Everyone is dead. Usually horribly and gruesomely—that's why they're interesting."
She took a step towards Luke. Suddenly cowed, Luke took a step back.
"That's all there is, kid. Conflict, death, and ways to make money off of it. The galaxy will not look after you. No one will. You have to find your own doors. So, don't lecture me about 'not respecting death' or whatever." She raised the pitch of her voice to her whine while she mimed the quote marks, then scoffed. "I'm the one who's actually seen it."
"At least your father's still alive," Luke burst out. "He's still alive, and you don't seem to care—"
"Leave that alone." Her voice darkened. "You don't know anything."
"Why do you think I stowed away on board your ship?" Luke asked.
Aphra shrugged and turned away from him. She was trying very hard to look like she was already bored with the conversation. "You probably ran into trouble somewhere. That's what you do."
"I did," Luke conceded. His voice was preternaturally calm. "The Empire hunted down and executed my aunt and uncle."
She rolled her eyes. "And you couldn't have gone to your parents?"
"My parents died when I was born. My aunt and uncle were the only family I had." He hesitated. "Other than my neighbour—Old Ben Kenobi. I found his body at the farm too; I think he tried to rescue them."
His voice was still level, but his fists shook. He saw Aphra's gaze flick to them—then flick to the narrow tunnel they were standing in, the battle droid behind her. She was squaring up for a fight.
He ignored her and continued: "It didn't work. The Empire killed them all. I had nowhere else to go. I— my best friend was at the Imperial Academy so I couldn't contact him, and I had no one else." He took a breath and met her eyes. "I stowed away on the first ship I found in Mos Eisley."
Her gaze flicked over him, reappraising. "Why'd they kill them?" she asked. She was still trying to sound like she didn't care.
"I don't know." The words released a great weight from his shoulders. "I… I don't know…"
Her eyes widened as his shoulders heaved. His heart pounded. He did not want to have to be comforted by Aphra, of all people. And she didn't want to have to comfort him.
So, she didn't. The momentary sympathy he thought he'd detected in her face shuttered behind the cold exterior he'd only seen on her a few times before. The unyielding, unfeeling core that lay behind all the jokes, all the flair, and all the talk about adventure.
The ruthlessness that had kept her alive.
She said, "Then you're not naïve. You're just delusional."
Before Luke could respond, she turned to Switchboard. "How much farther?" she demanded.
Switchboard said, in that shrill voice that brought tears to Luke's eyes again, "Very near to here."
"How long?"
Luke plugged his ears and let the rest of their conversation become muffled. He turned away to compose himself.
When he turned back, Aphra was watching him, her face fixed with a smile again.
"You ready?" she asked. "We're almost there."
We were born to build. From the moment we mature, worm-young, into something strong, flexible, and winged, we are consumed by the urge to build. It was why outsiders have always craved our industrious spirit, and also why they destroyed us.
These hives—their spires, their catacombs, the gorgeous, ornate decorations we take pride in—were the work of generations. We built them with our own spit, we gathered the waste of the phidnas ourselves, and chipped away at the stone until it was dust and malleable in our hands. We designed droids too—beautiful droids, cheap droids, efficient droids. We do not always build things to last, and they were not built to last. They were built for the use the outsiders designated for them. They were thrown against Jedi and the millions of one human who always followed along with them. We killed the Jedi, and the Jedi killed our children.
But then our deaths came too, from those that the Jedi fought to protect. Such is the way of things. The hives that feud forever will eventually destroy each other. But our societies are used to this. They survive this. Rarely—very rarely—is so little left that they cannot rebuild.
What has been done to us, we cannot rebuild from.
We have no flesh left. Our young are left to feast on scraps and suffer and die before knowing what it is to fly, or to build. We do not always build things to last, but our battle droids? Our only remaining children? That which remains in our image? We built them to last as long as engineering could let them.
But there may yet be new flesh in our hive, and our children strive to assist with these. We believe that rebuilding from the ashes is possible—just as you do, Jedi. You scrabble in the dirt for clues about your people. We have them.
Rebuilding thus far has been a fragile affair. The greatest tragedy Geonosians understand is when something built to last does not last, but fails too soon, and fails again, until there is no hope of redemption. Do you know what it is to try to reclaim lost glory, only for your enemy to tear it from you in another blaze of misery? Do you know what it is to hang everything, all your hopes, on one last vessel, only for that vessel to be cut adrift in the vast vacuum of space?
We know that you know what it is to be that vessel, if nothing else.
But do you know what we would do to no longer be alone?
