The last thing Marcus remembered was the blinding headlights of a semi-truck, the desperate screech of tires against wet asphalt, and the distinct thought of "Well, this is going to hurt" before everything went white.
Then black.
Then... orange?
Why was everything orange? And dusty? And why did his entire body feel like it was made of cheap aluminum siding from a 1970s mobile home?
Marcus tried to blink. He couldn't blink. He tried to take a breath. There was no breath to take. He tried to scream, and what came out was possibly the most pathetic, nasally, mechanical voice he had ever heard in his entire twenty-six years of existence.
"Aaaaaaaah?"
It came out as more of a confused question than an actual scream. The sound was tinny, reverberating through what he was slowly realizing was some kind of speaker system located approximately where his mouth should have been.
This was wrong. This was very, very wrong.
Marcus attempted to look down at his hands. What he saw made his non-existent heart drop into his non-existent stomach. Instead of the fleshy, moderately hairy hands of a twenty-six-year-old IT technician who spent far too much time playing video games and rewatching the Star Wars prequel trilogy (yes, he was one of those people who unironically loved the prequels, sue him), he saw... skeletal metal fingers. Beige-brown skeletal metal fingers attached to impossibly thin arms that looked like they could be snapped by a particularly motivated toddler.
"No," Marcus said, his voice coming out in that same horrible, nasally drone. "No, no, no, no, no."
Each 'no' sounded exactly the same. Perfectly monotone. Utterly devoid of the existential horror he was currently experiencing.
He looked further down. His torso was a thin, almost comically narrow box of metal plating. His legs were reverse-jointed, like some kind of mechanical ostrich had a baby with a department store mannequin. His feet were— actually, could you even call those feet? They were more like flattened metal stumps with the vague suggestion of toes.
"ROGER ROGER!" screamed a voice directly behind him.
Marcus spun around—or rather, his body performed a jerky, mechanical rotation that made him feel like a broken animatronic at a Chuck E. Cheese—and found himself face to face with... himself.
No, not himself. Another one. Another B1 Battle Droid, its photoreceptors gleaming with absolutely nothing behind them because there was nothing behind them. It was a droid. A stupid, cannon-fodder, comedic-relief droid.
And apparently, so was he.
"OH, COME ON!" Marcus shouted, throwing his skeletal arms up in the air in a gesture of pure frustration. The motion was so jerky and uncoordinated that he accidentally smacked the droid next to him in what passed for its face.
"Ow?" said the other droid, more confused than hurt, because B1 Battle Droids didn't really have pain receptors. Did they? Marcus wasn't actually sure. He'd spent hours on Wookieepedia reading about the Clone Wars, but the finer details of B1 Battle Droid sensory systems hadn't exactly been a priority.
"Sorry, sorry," Marcus said automatically, then immediately hated himself for apologizing to a robot. He was a robot. They were all robots. This was a nightmare made of circuits and bad decisions.
"All units, prepare for deployment!" boomed a much more authoritative voice from somewhere ahead of them.
Marcus turned—again with that horrible, grinding, mechanical motion that made him feel like his joints needed about seventeen gallons of WD-40—and finally took in his surroundings.
He was in a factory. An absolutely massive factory, filled with conveyor belts, mechanical arms, and more B1 Battle Droids than he could count. Thousands of them. Tens of thousands, maybe. All of them standing in perfect, orderly rows, all of them looking exactly like him, all of them probably filled with approximately zero sentient thoughts.
The factory floor stretched out for what seemed like miles, illuminated by harsh industrial lighting that cast everything in shades of orange and shadow. Massive pillars of stone and metal rose up to support a ceiling so high it disappeared into darkness. The air—not that he could breathe it—was thick with particles of dust and the acrid smell of molten metal and industrial lubricants.
And beyond the factory, visible through massive transparisteel windows, was a hellscape of orange rock, red dust, and absolutely nothing that looked hospitable to human life.
Geonosis.
He was on Geonosis.
Marcus had watched Attack of the Clones approximately forty-seven times. He knew exactly what Geonosis looked like. He knew exactly what happened on Geonosis. And he knew, with a certainty that settled into his metal chassis like a bucket of ice-cold dread, that he was absolutely, completely, totally, one-hundred-percent screwed.
"No, no, no, no, no," he said again, the words coming out in that same irritating monotone. "This is the Battle of Geonosis. THE Battle of Geonosis. The one where the Clone Army shows up and massacres literally every single droid on the entire planet!"
The droid next to him tilted its head in a way that might have been curiosity if there had been anything capable of curiosity behind those empty photoreceptors. "Roger roger?"
"NO, NOT ROGER ROGER!" Marcus shouted. "WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE! AGAIN! I ALREADY DIED ONCE TODAY, I'M NOT DOING IT AGAIN!"
Several other droids in his immediate vicinity turned to look at him. Their photoreceptors blinked in what he could only interpret as mechanical confusion.
"Unit B1-7829," droned a command droid from somewhere up ahead, its voice cutting through the background hum of the factory like a blunt knife through slightly stale bread, "cease erratic behavior and prepare for deployment."
Marcus looked down at himself—at the serial number stamped into his chest plate in small, neat characters. B1-7829. That was him now. Not Marcus Chen, IT technician and Star Wars enthusiast. B1-7829, disposable cannon fodder for a Separatist army that was about to get its collective metal behind handed to it by a bunch of newly-minted clone troopers and approximately two hundred Jedi.
Two hundred Jedi.
With lightsabers.
Marcus had seen what lightsabers did to B1 Battle Droids. It wasn't pretty. It wasn't pretty at all. In fact, if he remembered correctly—and he had an unfortunately excellent memory for Star Wars trivia—the average survival time of a B1 Battle Droid against a competent Jedi was approximately 2.3 seconds.
He was so, so dead.
"All units, move out!" the command droid ordered.
And then, against every fiber of his being—or rather, every circuit of his being—Marcus felt his legs start to move. Not because he wanted them to. Oh no. His legs were moving because apparently B1 Battle Droids had some kind of basic programming that overrode conscious thought for simple commands, and "move out" was about as simple as commands got.
His body joined the endless stream of identical droids, all of them marching in perfect lockstep toward massive hangar bay doors that were slowly grinding open to reveal the hellish orange landscape beyond. The ground shook beneath their metal feet—thousands upon thousands of droids, all moving as one, all marching toward almost certain doom.
"This is fine," Marcus muttered to himself as he was swept along with the crowd. "This is absolutely fine. I'm just a sentient battle droid trapped in a massive army of non-sentient battle droids, marching to my almost certain death against the most elite warriors in the galaxy. Fine. Totally fine. Everything is fine."
It was not fine.
The hangar doors finished opening, and Marcus got his first real look at the Geonosian landscape. It was somehow even worse than it looked in the movies. The sky was a sickly orange-brown, choked with dust and sand. The terrain was a nightmare of jagged rock formations, deep canyons, and absolutely nothing that could be described as "cover." In the distance, he could see massive spires of rock that housed the Geonosian hives, their architecture looking like something designed by an alien architect who had never heard of right angles or basic structural safety.
And rising from behind those spires, climbing up into the dusty sky, were Republic gunships.
Lots of Republic gunships.
"Oh no," Marcus said.
"Roger roger," said the droid next to him, apparently under the impression that Marcus had said something that warranted a response.
"No, seriously, oh no," Marcus continued, pointing one skeletal metal finger at the approaching swarm of gunships. "Those are LAAT/i gunships. Low Altitude Assault Transport/infantry. Each one carries up to thirty clone troopers. Do you know what clone troopers are?"
The droid next to him remained silent, its photoreceptors staring blankly at the approaching doom.
"They're genetically engineered super-soldiers based on the DNA of Jango Fett, one of the deadliest bounty hunters in the entire galaxy," Marcus continued, the words spilling out of his vocabulator in an increasingly panicked monotone. "They've been trained from birth for combat. From BIRTH. You know what we are? We're mass-produced cannon fodder designed to overwhelm enemies through sheer numbers. We have the combat effectiveness of drunk teenagers with paintball guns!"
"Roger roger," said another droid from somewhere behind him.
"STOP SAYING ROGER ROGER!"
A blaster bolt screamed past his head, close enough that his audio receptors picked up the distinctive CRACK-hiss of superheated plasma cutting through atmosphere. Marcus ducked—an action that took approximately 0.7 seconds longer than it should have because his mechanical body wasn't designed for quick reflexive movements—and looked up to see clone troopers already on the ground, their white armor gleaming like vengeful angels against the orange backdrop of the Geonosian landscape.
They were everywhere. Pouring out of gunships that had landed in the valleys between rock formations. Taking up positions on elevated ridges. Setting up heavy repeating blasters and portable shield generators. Moving with a precision and coordination that made the battle droid army look like a kindergarten production of "War: The Musical."
And leading them, blazing trails of blue and green light through the dust and chaos, were the Jedi.
"FALL BACK!" Marcus screamed, turning to run in the opposite direction. "EVERYONE FALL BACK! TACTICAL RETREAT! STRATEGIC WITHDRAWAL! RUN AWAY!"
His legs didn't listen to him. Of course they didn't. Instead of retreating, his body continued marching forward, right toward the rapidly approaching wall of clone troopers and Jedi. The basic programming that controlled locomotion didn't include "flee in terror" as an option. It only included "advance," "halt," and "fire."
"Oh, come on!" Marcus wailed as his legs carried him inexorably closer to his doom. "What kind of stupid programming is this?! Who designed this?! I want to speak to your manager! I want to speak to Count Dooku's manager!"
Blaster bolts were flying all around him now. Blue plasma from clone rifles, red plasma from droid blasters, all of it screaming through the air in deadly criss-crossing patterns that lit up the dusty atmosphere like a particularly violent laser light show. Droids were falling all around him—not that any of them seemed to notice or care, because they were droids, incapable of noticing or caring about anything.
A blaster bolt hit the droid directly in front of Marcus, punching through its thin chest plate and sending it crashing to the ground in a shower of sparks and mechanical components. Marcus stumbled over the fallen chassis, his reverse-jointed legs somehow managing to keep him upright through what could only be described as a miracle of cheap manufacturing.
"I'm going to die," Marcus said, his voice remarkably calm considering the circumstances. "I'm actually going to die. Again. Twice in one day. That has to be some kind of record."
And then something strange happened.
A clone trooper appeared directly in front of him, DC-15A blaster rifle raised, white helmet fixed directly on Marcus's optical sensors. At this range—maybe three meters—there was no way the trooper could miss. Clone troopers were genetically engineered for perfect accuracy. They were the elite soldiers of the Grand Army of the Republic. They had spent their entire accelerated lives training for exactly this moment.
The trooper fired.
The bolt went wide.
Not just a little wide. Comically wide. The superheated plasma screamed past Marcus's head by a good meter, close enough that his audio sensors picked up the crack of its passage but nowhere near close enough to actually hit him.
"What?" said Marcus.
The clone trooper seemed just as confused. His helmet tilted slightly to the side—a very human gesture of "wait, what?"—and he raised his rifle again, taking more careful aim this time.
He fired again.
This time, the bolt went low, striking the ground at Marcus's feet and sending up a shower of orange rock and dust.
"WHAT?" Marcus said again, louder this time.
The clone trooper actually took a step back. He looked down at his rifle, as if suspecting it might be malfunctioning. Then he looked back at Marcus. Then back at his rifle. Then, in a movement that spoke of desperate confusion, he switched the rifle to full auto and opened up with a sustained burst of fire.
Every single shot missed.
Not by much. Some of them were actually close enough that Marcus could feel the heat of their passage through whatever thermal sensors B1 Battle Droids had. But every single one of them missed. Bolts went left, right, high, low, one of them actually curved around him as if deflected by some kind of invisible force field.
"WHAT IS HAPPENING?!" Marcus screamed.
His arms—his stupid, skeletal, completely-not-under-his-conscious-control arms—raised his E-5 blaster rifle. His finger—his stupid, unresponsive, apparently-running-on-autopilot finger—squeezed the trigger.
He fired.
The bolt caught the clone trooper dead center in the chest, punching through the white plastoid armor like it was made of tissue paper. The trooper went down without a sound, joining the growing carpet of bodies that littered the battlefield.
Marcus stared at his blaster. Then at the fallen clone. Then back at his blaster.
"Did I just... did that actually...?"
He didn't have time to finish the thought. More clones were advancing, their formations tightening as they pushed forward against the tide of droids. Marcus's body—still operating on its basic programming, still completely ignoring his desperate mental commands to RUN AWAY—turned to face the new threats, his blaster rising with jerky, mechanical precision.
He fired again. Another clone went down.
He fired again. And again. And again.
Every shot hit. Every single shot. Not just hit—hit center mass, hit vital areas, hit with a precision that shouldn't have been possible for a B1 Battle Droid. These were the cannon fodder of the Separatist army, notorious throughout the galaxy for their terrible accuracy and general incompetence. They were supposed to miss. That was the whole point. Overwhelm through numbers because individual effectiveness was essentially zero.
But Marcus wasn't missing. He was hitting. Every. Single. Time.
"What is wrong with me?!" he shrieked as his body continued its deadly work, his blaster seeming to find targets of its own accord. "Am I broken?! Is this some kind of glitch?! Did I get a firmware update that everyone else missed?!"
Around him, other B1 Battle Droids were falling in droves. They were doing exactly what they were supposed to do—marching forward, firing blindly, dying in spectacular fashion. But not Marcus. Marcus was cutting through clone troopers like they were training dummies, his blaster finding gaps in armor, hitting exposed joints, somehow managing to land headshots through the narrow visors of clone helmets.
A clone sergeant with distinctive yellow markings on his armor appeared on Marcus's right, E-5 blaster pistol raised. Marcus's body pivoted—that horrible, grinding mechanical motion—and fired before the sergeant could even complete his aiming motion. The bolt caught the sergeant directly in the visor, the weakest point of the helmet, and the man crumpled instantly.
Another clone, this one carrying a heavy Z-6 rotary blaster cannon, emerged from behind a rock formation, the weapon's six barrels already spinning up to firing speed. A Z-6 could lay down absolutely devastating suppressive fire. Against a normal B1 Battle Droid, it would have been complete overkill—thousands of bolts per minute against a target that could barely hit the broad side of a Star Destroyer at point-blank range.
Marcus's body dropped to one knee—a motion he hadn't even known B1 Battle Droids were capable of—and fired a single shot. The bolt traveled in a perfectly straight line for approximately forty-seven meters, passed between the spinning barrels of the Z-6 during the exact millisecond that the gap was aligned with Marcus's blaster, and struck the power cell mounted on the clone trooper's back.
The resulting explosion sent the trooper flying in three different directions.
"THAT'S NOT EVEN POSSIBLE!" Marcus screamed into the chaos. "THE TIMING ON THAT SHOT— THE MATHEMATICS— THAT SHOULDN'T— HOW?!"
But there was no time to contemplate the apparent breakdown of probability and physics that seemed to be centering on his metal chassis. Because rising up from behind the next ridge, silhouetted against the dust-choked Geonosian sky, was a figure that made Marcus's non-existent heart stop.
A Jedi.
Not just any Jedi. This was clearly a Jedi Master, based on the quality of the robes, the confident stride, and the absolutely terrifying way the green lightsaber in their hand hummed with barely contained energy. The Jedi was a Twi'lek, their blue skin standing out starkly against the orange landscape, their lekku wrapped around their neck in the traditional warrior's style. Marcus didn't recognize them from any of the shows or movies—probably one of the many unnamed Jedi who had been part of the Geonosis strike team.
One of the many unnamed Jedi who had died on Geonosis.
The Jedi's eyes found Marcus across the battlefield. And in that moment, Marcus knew with absolute certainty that this was it. This was how he died. For real this time.
Lightsaber versus B1 Battle Droid was not a fair fight. It was not even a close fight. It was the combat equivalent of a chainsaw versus a piece of wet tissue paper. Marcus had watched the Clone Wars animated series. He had seen Jedi cut through squads of battle droids without even breaking a sweat. He had seen Anakin Skywalker slice through a dozen droids in a single spinning attack. He had seen Obi-Wan Kenobi dispatch entire platoons with nothing but his lightsaber and a mildly disappointed expression.
He was going to die.
The Jedi charged.
They moved with the supernatural speed and grace that defined their Order, covering the distance between them in seconds. Their lightsaber came up in a classic Ataru opening stance—aggressive, acrobatic, designed to overwhelm opponents with sheer offensive pressure. The green blade left afterimages in the dusty air, a deadly trail of light that marked the Jedi's path of destruction.
Marcus did the only thing he could think of.
He screamed.
"AAAAAAAAAAH!"
It came out as more of a mechanical screech than an actual scream, his vocabulator distorting the sound into something that sounded like a malfunctioning garbage disposal. But it was loud. Very, very loud. Loud enough that the Jedi actually faltered for a split second, their concentration broken by the utterly unexpected sound of a battle droid apparently having an existential crisis.
That split second was all it took.
Marcus's body—his stupid, suicidal, apparently-death-seeking body—raised his blaster and fired.
The bolt should have been deflected. That's what Jedi did. They deflected blaster bolts. It was like, their whole thing. Some of them could deflect blaster bolts while blindfolded. Some of them could deflect blaster bolts in their sleep. There were literally training exercises where Padawans spent hours doing nothing but deflecting practice bolts until it became as natural as breathing.
But the bolt didn't get deflected.
It curved.
Not a lot. Just a few centimeters. Just enough that when the Jedi's lightsaber swept through the air in a perfect deflection arc, the blade passed through empty space instead of meeting superheated plasma.
The bolt continued on its trajectory and struck the Jedi directly in the throat.
The Twi'lek Master's eyes went wide—shock, disbelief, and something that might have been a question frozen forever in their expression. Their lightsaber deactivated as their grip went slack. They took one stumbling step forward, then another, and then collapsed face-first into the orange dust of Geonosis.
They didn't get back up.
Marcus stared.
His photoreceptors blinked.
"Did I just... kill a Jedi?" His voice came out in that horrible monotone, completely failing to convey the mixture of terror, confusion, and somehow guilt that was flooding through whatever passed for his consciousness. "I KILLED A JEDI?! I'M A B1 BATTLE DROID AND I KILLED A JEDI?!"
He looked down at his blaster. He looked at the motionless Jedi. He looked back at his blaster.
"WHAT IS HAPPENING TO ME?!"
Another Jedi appeared—this one human, young, probably a Padawan based on the single braid hanging behind their right ear. They had clearly seen their Master fall and were charging toward Marcus with murder in their eyes and a blue lightsaber held in a textbook Form V defensive position. Tears were streaming down their face, mixing with the orange dust to create streaks of mud across their cheeks.
"YOU'LL PAY FOR THAT, DROID!" the Padawan screamed, their voice cracking with grief and rage.
"OH NO," Marcus wailed, "I'M SORRY, I'M SO SORRY, I DIDN'T MEAN TO— WAIT, WHY AM I APOLOGIZING, YOU'RE TRYING TO KILL ME—"
He fired.
The Padawan's lightsaber came up in a desperate defensive sweep, trying to intercept the bolt. It was a technically perfect deflection angle. The kind of thing that would have earned praise from any lightsaber instructor in the Jedi Temple. Under normal circumstances, the bolt would have bounced harmlessly away, probably into a nearby rock or an unlucky battle droid.
But these were not normal circumstances.
A gust of wind—completely random, utterly unpredictable, the kind of freak atmospheric phenomenon that shouldn't have existed on Geonosis—swept across the battlefield at the exact moment the Padawan's blade moved to intercept. The wind carried a cloud of fine orange dust directly into the Padawan's eyes, causing them to flinch, causing their blade to waver, causing the deflection angle to shift by approximately three degrees.
The bolt slipped past the blade and caught the Padawan in the chest.
They fell beside their Master, their lightsaber rolling away to come to rest against a small rock, its blade still humming with energy before finally deactivating with a soft hsssss.
"NONONONONONO!" Marcus screamed, his vocabulator reaching pitches that B1 Battle Droids definitely weren't designed to produce. "I DIDN'T MEAN TO! IT WAS THE WIND! THE WIND KILLED THEM! I'M INNOCENT! SORT OF! MOSTLY! NOT REALLY BUT ALSO KIND OF!"
He looked around frantically, his optical sensors sweeping the battlefield for more Jedi, more threats, more opportunities for the universe to make him commit acts of accidental murder against space wizards.
There were more Jedi.
There were so many more Jedi.
A Zabrak Jedi Knight was cutting their way through a squad of battle droids about fifty meters to Marcus's left, their yellow lightsaber moving in the precise, economical patterns of Form II, Makashi. Each strike was perfectly placed, each movement designed for maximum efficiency. They were beautiful to watch, if you could ignore the fact that they were systematically dismembering Marcus's fellow droids.
"Please don't notice me," Marcus whispered. "Please don't notice me, please don't notice me, please don't—"
The Zabrak noticed him.
More specifically, the Zabrak noticed the two fallen Jedi at Marcus's feet, and their expression shifted from calm focus to absolute fury in the span of about half a second.
"MURDERER!" the Zabrak roared, and then they were running, sprinting, practically flying across the battlefield toward Marcus with the kind of speed that made him seriously question whether the Force was just a fancy name for "blatant cheating."
"I'M NOT A MURDERER!" Marcus screamed back, even as his body raised his blaster. "IT WAS AN ACCIDENT! TWO ACCIDENTS! ACCIDENTS HAPPEN! THIS IS A WAR ZONE, ACCIDENTS ARE BASICALLY GUARANTEED—"
He fired.
The Zabrak's blade came up, easily intercepting the bolt and redirecting it toward a nearby rock formation. They didn't even slow down. Of course they didn't. One blaster bolt was nothing to a Jedi Knight. They had trained for years, decades even, to handle exactly this kind of—
The redirected bolt hit the rock formation at a very specific angle. The very specific angle that happened to be the weakest point of a very specific geological structure that had been slowly eroding for approximately fourteen thousand years. The rock formation, which had been precariously balanced on a narrow base for longer than the Galactic Republic had existed, finally succumbed to the laws of physics.
It toppled.
Directly onto the charging Zabrak.
The Jedi Knight had exactly enough time to look up, see several tons of ancient Geonosian rock falling toward them, and begin to raise their hand in a Force push that might—might—have been enough to deflect the debris.
They didn't have enough time to complete the motion.
The rock formation crashed down with a thunderous BOOM that shook the ground beneath Marcus's metal feet, raising a massive cloud of orange dust that temporarily obscured his vision. When the dust cleared, there was nothing left of the Zabrak except a hand sticking out from beneath the rubble, still clutching a now-deactivated lightsaber.
Marcus stared at the scene.
His photoreceptors blinked.
"Did I just... did that rock... did I..."
He looked up at the sky, as if expecting to see some kind of cosmic entity laughing at him.
"WHAT THE ACTUAL KRIFFING FORCE IS HAPPENING RIGHT NOW?!"
Three more Jedi emerged from the chaos of battle, apparently having witnessed the completely improbable rockslide that had just claimed their colleague. There was a Nautolan with a serene expression that was rapidly becoming not-so-serene, a tall human woman with the bearing of a seasoned warrior, and—
"Oh no," Marcus whispered.
—a Wookiee.
A Wookiee Jedi.
Because apparently the universe had decided that killing regular Jedi wasn't traumatic enough, and Marcus needed to experience the horror of potentially murdering a giant space teddy bear.
The Wookiee roared—a sound that shook Marcus's chassis and made his audio receptors crackle with static—and raised their massive bronze-colored lightsaber. The blade was longer than most, clearly custom-made to match the Wookiee's enormous size, and it hummed with a deep, resonant note that sounded less like a weapon and more like a death sentence.
"PLEASE DON'T MAKE ME KILL A WOOKIEE!" Marcus screamed, backing up as fast as his reverse-jointed legs could carry him. "I DON'T WANT TO KILL A WOOKIEE! WOOKIEES ARE ADORABLE! WELL, NOT ADORABLE EXACTLY, MORE LIKE TERRIFYINGLY MAJESTIC, BUT THE POINT IS I DON'T WANT TO—"
His foot caught on something.
The something was a fallen droid's blaster rifle, lying abandoned on the ground amid the debris of the battle. A completely normal, completely mundane piece of equipment that Marcus would have stepped over or around under any other circumstances.
But these were not any other circumstances.
Marcus's foot caught the rifle at exactly the right angle to send it spinning into the air. The rifle tumbled end over end, rising in a graceful arc that took it directly into the path of the charging Wookiee Jedi. The Wookiee, focused entirely on reaching Marcus and presumably tearing him limb from mechanical limb, didn't notice the spinning rifle until it was too late.
The rifle's trigger guard caught on one of the Wookiee's bandolier straps.
The rifle discharged.
The bolt—fired from a weapon that Marcus wasn't holding, hadn't aimed, and technically hadn't even touched in any meaningful way—struck the Nautolan Jedi directly in the side of the head.
The Nautolan dropped.
"I DIDN'T DO THAT!" Marcus shrieked. "THAT WASN'T ME! I WASN'T EVEN HOLDING THAT GUN! YOU ALL SAW IT, THAT WAS CLEARLY AN ACCIDENT—"
The human woman Jedi and the Wookiee Jedi had stopped their charge, staring in shock at their fallen comrade. The Wookiee looked down at the rifle still tangled in their bandolier, then up at Marcus, then back down at the rifle, their expression shifting from rage to utter confusion.
The human woman recovered first. Her face hardened, and she raised her hand, reaching out through the Force to seize Marcus and crush him like an empty soda can.
Marcus felt something. A pressure, building around his chassis. The Force, actually grabbing him, actually affecting him. For a moment, he thought this was it. This was how he died. Crushed by telekinesis. It was almost poetic, really. He'd always wondered what it would feel like to be on the receiving end of a Force choke—
A piece of debris—a chunk of metal from one of the many destroyed droids littering the battlefield—chose that exact moment to be caught by another freak gust of wind. The debris flew through the air in a trajectory that a physicist would have described as "technically possible but statistically improbable to the point of absurdity."
It struck the human woman in the temple.
Not hard enough to kill her. But hard enough to break her concentration, to shatter her connection to the Force, to make the pressure around Marcus's chassis vanish as suddenly as it had appeared.
The woman staggered, dazed, her hand going to her head.
Marcus's body raised his blaster.
"DON'T—" he started to say.
His finger pulled the trigger.
The bolt caught her in the center of the forehead.
She fell.
"—shoot," Marcus finished weakly. "I was going to say don't shoot. But apparently my body disagrees. My body has very different ideas about conflict resolution."
The Wookiee Jedi was staring at Marcus now. Not charging. Not attacking. Just... staring. The massive being's dark eyes were wide, and in them Marcus could see something he'd never expected to see in a Jedi.
Fear.
The Wookiee was afraid of him.
A B1 Battle Droid. The cheapest, most mass-produced, most utterly pathetic combat unit in the entire Separatist arsenal. And a Wookiee Jedi—a being who could tear a human in half with their bare hands—was looking at him like he was the scariest thing on this entire Force-forsaken planet.
"Listen," Marcus said, his vocabulator producing what he hoped was a calming tone but probably came out as the same monotone drone as everything else, "I know this looks bad. I know I've killed... um..." He did a quick count. "Five? Five Jedi? In like, the last three minutes? But I promise you, I have absolutely no idea how any of this is happening. I'm just as confused as you are. More confused, probably. So if we could just... you know... go our separate ways... pretend this never happened..."
The Wookiee roared again, but this time there was less rage and more desperate determination in the sound. They raised their massive lightsaber and charged, clearly deciding that the only way to avenge their fallen comrades was to overwhelm this impossibly deadly droid through sheer size and ferocity.
It was, Marcus had to admit, a reasonable strategy. In any normal universe, it would have worked. A Wookiee Jedi versus a single B1 Battle Droid should have been the most one-sided fight in the history of one-sided fights.
This was not a normal universe.
The Wookiee's charge took them directly over a patch of ground that, unbeknownst to anyone, had been weakened by the underground tunnels of a Geonosian maintenance network. The tunnels had been designed to support the weight of Geonosian workers, who were significantly lighter than Wookiees. They had not been designed to support the weight of a three-hundred-kilogram Jedi moving at high speed.
The ground collapsed.
The Wookiee fell into the tunnel with a surprised roar that Doppler-shifted into the distance. The sound of a massive body bouncing off rock walls echoed up from the darkness, punctuated by what might have been growls of pain or possibly extremely profane Shyriiwook cursing.
Marcus slowly walked over to the hole in the ground and peered down into the darkness.
Far, far below—at least forty meters—he could just barely make out the shape of the Wookiee Jedi, lying motionless at the bottom of the tunnel.
"I didn't even shoot that time," Marcus said to no one in particular. "That was entirely geological. The planet killed that one. I'm innocent. Relatively innocent. Innocent-adjacent."
He looked up from the hole to survey the battlefield around him.
It was chaos. Beautiful, terrible, absolute chaos. Republic gunships were dueling with Geonosian fighters in the skies above. AT-TE walkers were advancing across the rocky terrain, their cannons sending shells screaming toward Separatist defensive positions. Clone troopers and battle droids were engaged in vicious close-quarters fighting across a front that stretched as far as Marcus's optical sensors could see.
And in the middle of all of it, surrounded by the bodies of five—no, wait, six, he'd almost forgotten about the first one—dead Jedi, stood a single B1 Battle Droid having what could only be described as a complete and total mental breakdown.
"This is fine," Marcus said, his voice carrying that horrible forced calm of someone who had completely dissociated from reality. "This is absolutely fine. I'm a mass murderer now. I'm a droid mass murderer. I've killed more Jedi in five minutes than General Grievous probably kills in a month. This is my life now. This is who I am."
A blaster bolt screamed past his head.
His body spun, raised his rifle, and fired in one smooth motion.
A clone trooper fell.
Then another. And another. And another.
Marcus's body moved through the battlefield like a tornado of precise, lethal efficiency. His blaster never seemed to run out of charge—every time he thought it should be empty, he'd pull the trigger and another bolt would fire. His joints never seemed to lock up or malfunction—every time he should have stumbled or fallen, he'd instead perform some acrobatic maneuver that he definitely shouldn't have been capable of.
A thermal detonator flew toward him—he caught it and threw it back.
A clone trooper tried to tackle him from behind—they tripped on a rock and knocked themselves unconscious.
A Jedi—another Jedi, how many of them were there?—leaped at him from atop a rock formation, lightsaber raised for a killing blow—a stray blaster bolt from an entirely different battle struck them mid-flight, sending them spinning off course to crash into a canyon wall.
"WHY WON'T YOU ALL STOP DYING?!" Marcus screamed as he continued his involuntary rampage across the Geonosian landscape. "I DON'T WANT TO KILL ANYONE ELSE! JUST LEAVE ME ALONE! GO FIGHT SOMEWHERE ELSE! LITERALLY ANYWHERE ELSE!"
But they didn't leave him alone. They kept coming. Clone troopers, Jedi, the occasional Geonosian warrior who apparently hadn't gotten the memo that Marcus was on their side. And one by one, through improbable accidents, impossible shots, and what could only be described as weaponized coincidence, they all fell.
The battle raged for hours.
The sun—Geonosis's harsh, orange sun—tracked across the sky, casting ever-shifting shadows across the carnage. The sounds of combat ebbed and flowed, intensifying in some areas, dying down in others. The air grew thick with the smell of ozone and burning metal and something else, something organic, that Marcus tried very hard not to think about.
And through it all, Marcus survived.
Not just survived. Thrived. Dominated. He had stopped counting the clone troopers somewhere around fifty. He had stopped counting the Jedi after the twelfth one had somehow impaled themselves on their own lightsaber during a particularly unfortunate tumble. He had stopped trying to understand what was happening and had instead retreated into a kind of numb acceptance, his consciousness observing from a distance as his body continued its impossible campaign of destruction.
At some point, he realized that he had acquired a second blaster rifle. He didn't remember picking it up. It was just there, in his left hand, firing in perfect synchronization with the rifle in his right hand. The two streams of blaster fire cut through the enemy forces like scythes through wheat.
At another point, he realized that a squad of other B1 Battle Droids had started following him around. They weren't doing anything useful—they were still shooting with the typical accuracy of their kind, which is to say, missing everything—but they were forming a rough formation around him, as if recognizing on some level that he was the safest place on the entire battlefield.
"Roger roger!" one of them said cheerfully as it walked directly into Marcus's line of fire.
"WATCH WHERE YOU'RE— oh, you're fine." The bolt had somehow passed directly between the other droid's optical sensors without hitting anything vital. "OF COURSE YOU'RE FINE. NOTHING MAKES SENSE ANYMORE."
"Roger roger!" the droid agreed.
The battle began to wind down as the sun started to sink toward the horizon. The Republic forces, having achieved their primary objective of rescuing the Jedi prisoners and establishing a foothold on the planet, began to pull back. The Separatist forces, having lost more units than anyone had bothered to count, did the same.
Marcus found himself standing on a small ridge overlooking the battlefield, his optical sensors surveying the carnage below. The landscape was littered with the debris of war—destroyed vehicles, shattered droids, fallen clone troopers. Fires burned in a dozen different locations, sending columns of black smoke rising into the orange sky.
He had survived.
Somehow, impossibly, against all odds and all logic, he had survived.
"I lived," Marcus said, his voice filled with wonder. "I actually lived. I'm alive. Well, not alive exactly, I'm a droid, but I'm functional. I'm still functional. I can't believe I'm still functional."
"Unit B1-7829."
Marcus spun around—still with that horrible mechanical motion, though he was starting to get used to it—to find a command droid standing behind him. The OOM-series command droid was taller than the standard B1 units, with yellow markings on its shoulders indicating its rank.
"Um," Marcus said. "Roger roger?"
"You have been identified as the most effective combat unit in today's engagement," the command droid said, its voice carrying the flat authority of a machine that had never experienced doubt or hesitation. "Analysis of battle data indicates that you personally eliminated four hundred and seventy-three Republic clone troopers, seventeen Jedi, and are credited with three AT-TE walker kills."
Marcus's photoreceptors blinked.
"I'm sorry, did you say seventeen Jedi?"
"Seventeen confirmed, three probable, two pending verification," the command droid confirmed. "This represents the highest Jedi kill count of any single unit in Separatist history. By a significant margin."
"I killed seventeen Jedi," Marcus repeated slowly. "Today. In one battle. I, a B1 Battle Droid—the literal cannon fodder of the Separatist army—killed SEVENTEEN JEDI."
"Eighteen if the pending verifications are confirmed."
"EIGHTEEN JEDI."
"Nineteen if the probable kills are—"
"OKAY, I GET IT, I KILLED A LOT OF JEDI." Marcus waved his skeletal arms in what was meant to be a gesture of exasperation but probably looked like some kind of mechanical seizure. "What I don't understand is HOW. I'm a B1 Battle Droid! We're not supposed to be able to kill Jedi! We're supposed to die in waves while the Jedi do flips and look impressive!"
The command droid's head tilted slightly. "Your objection has been noted and logged. However, it does not change the observable facts. You are the most effective combat unit in Separatist history. As such, you are being promoted."
"Promoted? Promoted to what?"
"You are now designated as Unit B1-7829-Alpha. You have been assigned command of a patrol squad and will be deployed to the Outer Rim for ongoing military operations."
Marcus stared at the command droid for a long moment.
"I'm being promoted," he said slowly. "I'm a B1 Battle Droid, and I'm being promoted. Based on my combat performance. In which I somehow killed almost twenty Jedi and nearly five hundred clone troopers."
"Correct."
"And no one finds this suspicious? No one is wondering how a B1 Battle Droid—the dumbest, most incompetent mass-produced combat unit in the galaxy—suddenly became a one-droid army?"
"Your objection has been noted and logged," the command droid repeated. "Report to Hangar Bay Seven for transport to your new assignment. Glory to the Separatist Alliance."
The command droid turned and walked away, leaving Marcus standing alone on the ridge, staring out at the devastated battlefield below.
He had survived the Battle of Geonosis.
He had killed seventeen—possibly nineteen—Jedi.
He had been promoted.
And he still had absolutely no idea what was happening or why his luck seemed to be operating on some kind of cosmic cheat code.
"This is fine," Marcus said for what felt like the thousandth time that day. "This is completely fine. I'm just going to be a battle droid soldier in the Clone Wars now. Fighting against the Republic. Killing Jedi. Probably becoming some kind of legendary figure in the Separatist army. No big deal. Totally normal situation for a former IT technician from Ohio."
He paused.
"I'm going to die. I'm definitely going to die. One of these days, my luck is going to run out, and I'm going to get cut in half by Anakin Skywalker or crushed by Mace Windu's purple rage or—"
A blaster bolt flew past his head.
His body spun, raised his rifle, and fired.
Somewhere in the distance, a clone sniper who had been lining up a shot at him fell from their perch.
"—or not," Marcus finished weakly. "Maybe I won't die. Maybe I'll just... keep accidentally killing everyone who tries to kill me. Forever. For the entire war."
He looked down at his skeletal metal hands. At the blaster rifle still clutched in his grip. At the serial number stamped on his chest plate.
B1-7829.
No.
B1-7829-Alpha.
The deadliest battle droid in the galaxy.
The Jedi Killer.
The Survivor.
The very confused, very terrified, very much not-okay reincarnated Star Wars fan trapped in the body of a machine designed to die in spectacular fashion.
"I hate my life," Marcus said as he began the long walk toward Hangar Bay Seven. "I hate my not-life. I hate whatever this is. I hate everything."
Behind him, the squad of B1 droids that had attached themselves to him followed along, their optical sensors bright with what might have been loyalty or might have been the basic programming telling them to follow the designated unit with the Alpha designation.
"Roger roger!" one of them said cheerfully.
Marcus didn't even bother responding.
The Clone Wars had begun.
And somehow, impossibly, against all odds and reason, he was going to live through them.
Probably.
Maybe.
Hopefully.
...Roger roger.
[End of Chapter One]