I clamped the generator onto my new ride with magnetic mounts and gunned it toward my hapless tin can of a partner.
I’d grown attached to him — plus, I’d sunk way too many credits into his upkeep.
Losing him this stupidly would be a real shame.
The comm signal was close by.
Four minutes got me to the half-collapsed building.
I ditched the bike and scrambled up through the rubble.
Even from down here, I could see red blaster fire flashing from the roof.
The higher I climbed, the clearer the sounds of battle got.
A little further, and I finally saw what was happening.
My droid had taken cover behind a chunk of a clone shuttle’s wing, trading shots with his attackers.
But two tin cans had him pinned down methodically from both sides, not giving him a chance to so much as poke his head out.
The Darkness, never fully gone, surged again.
I leaped out behind the CIS droids, firing at one’s head mid-jump, but he shifted at the wrong moment and the bolt sailed past.
One enemy spun to face me.
The other kept methodically raking Han’s cover with fire.
The string of red flashes made it hard to focus enough to take the thing apart.
I closed the distance in long jumps, dodging the deadly bursts of energy hissing past me a little too close.
The gap shrank to a couple of meters.
A vibroblade hummed through the air right where I’d been standing a second earlier.
But I was faster.
A point-blank shot took his head clean off his shoulders, and the body toppled sideways.
I caught the sword as it fell from his slackening grip and hurled it at the second droid before he could turn around.
The blade buried itself dead center in his chest.
He swayed for a couple of seconds, then dropped like a broken puppet.
“You alive over there?” I called toward where Han was presumably still hiding.
“If not, say yes.”
“Your illogical phrasing is going to put me in an early grave faster than the enemy ever could.”
My partner emerged from behind the wreckage of the ship, looking thoroughly worse for wear.
One arm had been shot clean off; who knew where it had ended up.
Part of his chest plating was scorched black.
My expression must have said it all.
“And don’t look at me like that.
My calculations suggest that if you hadn’t wiped part of the Separatist combat protocols from my memory, my odds of winning would’ve been fifty-eight percent, not thirty-five.”
“Sure — and there’d also be a nonzero chance some hidden subroutine would activate and order you to kill me.”
He froze for a few seconds, processing, then came out with:
“To my surprise, your reasoning is, for once, flawless.”
“You’re a machine.
You shouldn’t even be capable of surprise.”
“At present, my programming deviates from the intergalactic standard by thirteen percent.
Under normal circumstances, a droid’s memory would be recommended for a wipe.”
“But you’re confident I won’t do that.”
“Correct.
My loyalty chip won’t let me disobey your orders.
And my survival index is significantly higher at your side than on my own.”
“What a mercenary, calculating machine you are.”
“Thank you for the compliment, Master.
Now, if you’ll permit me, I’d like some moral compensation.”
He crouched over one of the fallen droids, made a quick motion, and the arm came clean off the defeated enemy’s body.
“Done dismembering your fellow droid?
“He’s no brother of mine.
Separatist scum.”
“Since when did you develop political opinions about droid allegiance?”
“Ohh, that’s not a conversation we’re finishing in five minutes.
Let’s save it for home.”
“Agreed.
Time to clear out of here.”
Nobody else came after us, and there was no need to run anymore.
I grabbed my speeder, hooked the two trophy bikes on behind it, and we made our unhurried way back to the city bunker.
That tin can was going to need a new arm attached — hard to paint the walls of our hideout one-handed.
The image of the Bodyguard in an apron with a kerchief on his head made me burst out laughing.
Time passed, and my plans kept taking shape.
Han finished his full inspection of the new home and delivered his verdict: the place was in eighty-three percent satisfactory condition.
Given enough time and the right materials, he could push that number up to ninety-two — the threshold he considered acceptable for permanent habitation.
With my fleet expanded and Han freed up from inspection duty, the moving went a lot faster.
I had to leave some things behind — the droid assembly table, a bed, other bulky items.
But once the war ended, I figured we could put together something similar ourselves.
Meanwhile, the fighting kept growing in scope.
The ring around the city closed, putting it under siege — and cutting off every route we had into town along with it.
The fall of the Separatist forces was only a matter of time.
Confederacy command knew it too, and tried to break the planetary blockade from orbit, but Republic forces beat back the assault.
Only a handful of transports made it down to the surface.
Victory was already decided; the fighting just dragged on regardless.
The planet grew even less safe than before.
After a pirate gang tried to seize two clone corvettes in the middle of the Separatist invasion, Republic command decided to burn out every hostile faction on the planet, full stop.
So now, gangsters who’d realized death might be close were tearing the place apart out of sheer desperation.
Some, high on massive doses of drugs, charged straight into enemy lines, convinced they were unstoppable.
Others got drunk on skyscraper rooftops.
Some tried to organize a resistance front, or fled toward the Upper City.
All that waited for them there was death — the droids had orders to shoot to kill anyone who showed up in their sights.
A handful of gangs figured out which way the wind was blowing sooner than the rest and pulled out to the remote regions in an organized retreat, where they sat tight and kept their heads down.
Han and I barely made it past the ring with the last load of supplies for the hideout.
In the end we had to lose a pursuit through the forest, leaving behind a speeder loaded with small parts.
Two days later we spotted a heavily fortified checkpoint on our route and wisely decided not to pick a fight.
Lucky for us, most of what we needed had already been moved into the new home by then.
After all those endless runs of hauling, stealing, and shootouts, getting back to a normal rhythm of life felt like something out of a fairy tale.
I spent two days just sleeping.
The mental strain, the sense of threat that had been building every day at the thought of getting trapped in that hell pit — it finally let go of me.
My old routine came back: training, meditation, programming material.
One new addition to my daily schedule was trying to figure out who this lab had actually belonged to.
I combed the whole station from top to bottom and turned up almost no leads.
The equipment, advanced for its time, wasn’t especially unique.
No forgotten computer files, no lost diary, nothing like that.
The only clue was the bodies floating in the tanks, and I still couldn’t bring myself to touch them.
They looked too disgusting for that.
Han would probably love that — he’d almost certainly already factored that scenario into his calculations of my odds of dying.
So instead, we just welded the doors to the lower floors shut and got the ventilation running properly.
The droid, incidentally, had turned into a full-time homemaker.
I built him a couple of barely-functional cleaning droids out of the spare parts we’d hauled back, and now he bossed them around and pitched in himself with the tidying.
Within a few days the layer of dust vanished, the junk disappeared off the floors, and order settled over the rooms.
Everything we’d brought found its place.
We installed the new generators in the basement, so now we had more than enough power to last us the next year.
The hangar became my training ground and workshop.
The rooms on the first floor turned into storage for spare parts and assorted junk.
The old command center deserves a special mention.
It became something like a lounge.
Besides the computers, there was a multifunctional table in there — you could use it to pull a droid’s memory, unfold a map, or set up comms.
But the best part was that you could play games on it.
The moment I found that out, I downloaded the local equivalent of chess: dejarik.
I’m pretty sure I’d seen it played in some movie aboard the Millennium Falcon.
Didn’t matter — Han and I got thoroughly hooked.
I won at first, but his mechanical brain started catching up to me fast.
Either way, I was never bored.
Even something as monumental as the Republic’s victory barely registered with me.
So they won.
So what.
Right then, I couldn’t have cared less.
My mind was occupied with far more interesting things.
Step one of the plan — get my own place — I could count as a success.
But that just brought the money problem back around, the funds I still needed to track down Malik.
Selling off the salvage would net me a decent sum, and the Jedi sword alone might go for half a million at some underground auction.
Not the worst option, honestly.
I’d keep it in reserve in case nothing better came to mind.
The second question nagging at me was the gap between what I remembered and what was actually happening.
A lot had faded from memory, sure, but plenty still stuck.
I knew about the Empire, about Obi-Wan Kenobi, Yoda — but I had no idea when exactly the Empire would replace the Republic.
Could be five years off.
Could be longer.
Where had all the Jedi gone?
Going by the movies, none of them made it.
But could two Sith really have wiped out the entire Order?
Jedi died in this war plenty, sure, but not in numbers that huge.
And what would happen to Force-sensitives once the Empire took over?
Because right now, Jedi were actively traveling the galaxy, recruiting new followers.
Questions, and I didn’t have answers to any of them.
Either way — Republic or Empire — I needed money, and a lot of it.
If nothing changed, I’d put the sword up for sale right after the coup.
Right now, if word got back to the Order, they’d send Knights after me for sure, and I had zero interest in fighting them, or in crossing paths with anyone that skilled with the Force in general.
Decided, then.
Build up my strength, build up my funds, and the moment I get the chance, put the sword up for auction.
Well.
Sounds like a plan.
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