Interlude General Grievous
Grievous's heavy metal foot came down on the already-shattered panel of the main comm terminal. Plastic crunched, burying the remains of circuit boards and bare wires that a moment ago had been spraying violet sparks. The Neimoidian officers who'd tried to barricade themselves in the far corner of the bridge of the Invincible were dead. Their bodies lay among the crumpled chairs and torn hull panels. Grievous felt neither pity nor anger toward them — this was just routine cleanup of witnesses and saboteurs.
The cyborg turned his massive frame toward the central fire-control console. On his right tactical display, three heavy transports belonging to the Intergalactic Banking Clan drifted some fifty kilometers from the cruiser — former allies, now targets.
He reached his upper right hand toward the console, ready to punch in the override codes that would slew the bow turbolasers onto those ships, when a cascade of yellow warnings suddenly flooded his right optical sensor. Log lines scrolled upward so fast that even his organic brain could barely register the alphanumeric error codes.
The virus — the one he suspected Brutus had planted, the one that had disabled the droids aboard those ships after their mutiny — had abruptly stopped running. Something had tried to reach his own mechanical body too, but Grievous had long since prepared countermeasures for that.
Coughing painfully, the cyborg slowly withdrew his fingers from the console. Behind him came the synchronized, dry click of dozens of weapons being armed.
The optical sensors of every combat unit on the bridge — the gangly B1 battle droids, the hulking B2 super battle droids, and the four IG-100 MagnaGuards — all shifted color at once. The soft blue-green glow gave way to a flat, steady red: the marker of direct authorization from High Command.
"Man the manual stations," Grievous ordered through his external vocoder in a rasping, rumbling bass, without turning around. "Bring the bow batteries thirty degrees to port. Now."
The droids ignored him. Not a single actuator on the bridge so much as twitched. His internal receiver registered a complete lockout on his local command frequencies. A symbol lit up on his internal interface, signaling that control had been seized.
The nearest IG-100 MagnaGuard, standing to the right of the command chair, took a short step forward. Its movements had lost their usual fluidity; what remained was pure lethal intent — clearly a combat subroutine had taken over. Without warning or so much as a sound cue, the droid drove the butt of its electrostaff in a sharp, stabbing thrust straight into the center of Grievous's chest plate.
A violet discharge of tremendous power slammed into the durasteel armor. The energy raced down the distribution conduits, but the safety fuses couldn't compensate for the surge in time. The pressure and temperature sensors across the cyborg's chest shorted out instantly. His tactical readout reported a loss of sensitivity across thirty percent of his outer plating.
In that brief moment of physical shock, the general finally understood, completely and without doubt. His entire career, the title of Supreme Commander, the endless Separatist factories, the billions of obedient soldiers — all of it had been a fiction. Dooku, and the shadowy puppet master standing behind him, had kept him on a short leash from the very start. He had never been a leader. He'd been built as an expensive, effective, but ultimately disposable weapon — and now it was time to scrap him.
"Tin cans," Grievous spat, grasping just how far he'd let the situation slip by acting too rashly.
With a sharp whine of servomotors in his left leg, he closed the distance to the droid that had struck him. His heavy three-fingered hand swung up and came down on the MagnaGuard's head with a dull, crushing thud. The thin alloy skull of the IG-100 crumpled like cheap tin. The droid's processor burst, throwing off a shower of white sparks and oily fluid, and the lifeless body toppled to the deck.
Both of the general's upper arms ignited their lightsabers with a characteristic hiss — one blue, one green.
At that same moment the remaining B2s on the bridge opened concentrated fire from their twin blasters. Simultaneously, the heavy blast-proof durasteel doors hissed shut along their tracks, sealing the bridge off from the rest of the cruiser. Twin automated turrets dropped from ceiling recesses with a whir of servos and immediately began peppering the space around the command chair with rapid red bolts.
But even so, Grievous didn't retreat. Disengaging his elbow joints, he split his arms into four independent limbs, igniting two more blades. His hands began spinning at three thousand RPM. In the confined space of the bridge, a solid, humming plasma barrier formed, crackling as it absorbed the incoming lasers. The cyborg methodically adjusted the angle of his blades with the precision of a ballistics computer, deflecting the bolts back up into the ceiling. Within three seconds, the left turret exploded from its own reflected fire, while the right one began smoking, its targeting optics destroyed.
Unfortunately, the way out was blocked — burning through the three-layer durasteel blast doors, even under cover of his makeshift shield, would have been a fatal mistake. The bulkheads would need at least forty seconds of continuous thermal cutting, and in that time he'd simply be overwhelmed from every side, unable to guard himself completely.
Grievous made a different choice. Angling all four lightsabers straight down, he drove them into the deck plating beneath his own feet.
The superheated plasma sliced through the decorative coating, the insulation layer, and the thick structural plate almost instantly. The cyborg spun on one leg, melting a clean two-meter disc into the floor. The metal around his feet glowed bright orange, giving off an acrid stench of burning synthetics. As the circle closed, he stamped down hard on the cut section of steel, driving it below, and leapt after it into the dark mouth of a lower-deck ventilation shaft.
The fall lasted less than a second. He landed on all fours, his leg hydraulics absorbing the impact, in a narrow, dimly lit corridor on technical deck thirteen. The air smelled of damp, machine oil, and scorched metal — and he knew immediately that moving through here would be no easier.
From the far end of the tunnel, a solid wall of B2 battle droids was already advancing, their heavy footsteps echoing off the walls. Their processors were running standard suppression protocols for confined spaces — sheer volume of fire. The three-meter-wide corridor left no room to maneuver, no room for the faster forms of his swordplay.
A solid wall of red plasma bolts lit up the corridor ahead. Shots ricocheted off the walls, tearing out chunks of insulation and sparking cable. Grievous surged forward, pressing his body low to the floor, moving on all four limbs like some enormous mechanical insect. His blades shredded the metal walls, but the sheer density of fire was too much.
A well-aimed shot from a forward B2's built-in heavy blaster caught the elbow joint of the general's lower left arm. The energy bolt vaporized the rotating servo and severed the limb's main power line. The arm instantly went slack, dropping its blue lightsaber, and hung lifeless from a bundle of scorched cables and copper wire.
At that same instant, a critical failure alert flashed across his internal display: "WARNING! Pressure spike in the thermoregulation system. Coolant leak detected in Sector 04. Cooling efficiency reduced by 38%."
A piece of shrapnel or a stray ricochet had punctured a flexible coolant line, and now a pale cloud of gas was hissing out from behind the cyborg's right shoulder. The temperature around his one living organ — the sealed capsule housing his heart and brain — began climbing fast. Thirty-nine degrees... forty... If it hit forty-five, the organic tissue would start to die from heat stroke, and no amount of cybernetics would stop his heart from failing.
"I'll still... be faster," the cyborg snarled, hastily changing tactics.
Using his three remaining arms, he tore into the line of B2s. The green blade sheared through the upper half of the first droid; the blue one split the second in two. Grievous quite literally battered his way through, using the mass of his three-hundred-kilogram frame as a battering ram. The droids in his path broke apart with a dry, ugly crunch, and he ignored the small burns scorching black marks across his white plating. All that mattered was getting through in time.
Ahead, at the end of the technical corridor, a massive blast door marked "Auxiliary Hangar 4" came into view. It was his only way out — the place where mothballed shuttles and reserve fighters were still stored. As long as the ship's computer hadn't finished sealing off that section's internal bulkheads. Hacking down through the locking clamps of the technical hatches as he went, Grievous burst through the slowly closing hangar blast door, trailing a plume of gray smoke and drops of leaking coolant.
The massive doors slammed shut behind him with a crash, cutting off his pursuers.
Grievous looked around, expecting an empty evacuation bay and fighters ready to launch — but his right optical sensor immediately caught movement all across the perimeter of the hangar. He wasn't the only one who'd been waiting for this.
The Vulture-class assault fighters mounted on their landing struts had already powered up. Their elongated nose sections, housing twin heavy blaster cannons, had rotated a full hundred and eighty degrees — inward, aimed directly at the entry point. The ship's computer had completely seized control of their navigation systems.
An instant later, all four Vultures opened fire in perfect unison. Massive gouts of red plasma slammed into the floor a meter from the cyborg's feet, tearing chunks out of the composite decking. Grievous threw his body hard to the left, executing a long tumbling roll, and took cover behind a row of heavy durasteel containers holding spare generators and reduction gears for droid repairs.
The heavy plasma rounds hammered one after another into the outer wall of his cover. The metal of the containers buckled and warped, beginning to melt, giving off thick white smoke and the smell of hot iron. Slag rained down onto the former general's shoulder plates.
Grievous froze in a half-crouch, powering down his lightsabers for the moment. His internal chronometer showed the exact figure: exactly twenty-eight minutes since Brutus had sent his encrypted transmission and unleashed the digital virus. The cyborg switched his surviving left optical sensor to passive-data mode and noted, with displeasure, the critical charge level of his central power core: only twelve percent remaining.
Realizing his cover wouldn't last much longer, the cyborg quickly put together a plan that was somewhat suicidal but workable all the same.
He'd have to fight his way to the nearest locked-down Vulture fighter, manually overload its fuel cell, and trigger a directed thermal explosion. The force of the blast would be enough to blow out the hangar's outer blast doors along with the containment field holding the atmosphere in. That would cause instant decompression, venting everything in the bay into open space.
He had a decent chance of surviving hard vacuum, thanks to his fully sealed durasteel body and the isolated capsule housing his internal organs. If he did nothing, though, death was guaranteed.
The cyborg gripped his one surviving green lightsaber in his upper right hand. His lower left arm — reduced to a stump after the corridor fight — still hung by a couple of power cables at his hip. The general yanked it hard with his other hand, tearing through the last copper strands, and gripped the heavy metal stump in his three-clawed hand.
His internal tactical computer projected a targeting grid onto the ceiling-mounted automated turrets. The clock was running.
Grievous hurled the severed remains of his left arm with full force at the far corner of the hangar, aiming for a pile of empty fuel drums. The heavy chunk of metal crashed into the containers with a bang. The turrets' automated targeting systems, programmed to react to any change in mass or movement within the sector, instantly swung their barrels toward the source of the noise. Their photoreceptors locked onto the decoy. Recalculating trajectory and returning to the previous sector took them, according to his internal timer, exactly zero-point-eight seconds.
That was all the time the former general needed.
Using his three remaining limbs, Grievous launched himself out from behind cover with a powerful shove. He moved in a jagged, zigzagging line, pushing off support struts and the hangar's side walls. His claws tore through paint and gouged deep furrows in the metal. Laser bolts from the turrets and the Vultures hissed and detonated inches behind him, but always a fraction of a second behind his path.
In two long bounds, the cyborg covered the forty-meter distance and landed directly on the nose cone of the nearest fighter. Without losing momentum, he brought his right mechanical foot down in a short, crushing stomp. His foot clamps hit with the force of an industrial press — the protective housing over the Vulture's main engine burst open with a screech, exposing the tangle of internal tubing and a glowing blue plasma injector.
The general drove his green lightsaber to the hilt straight into the exposed injector.
The plasma blade instantly burned through the magnetic stabilizers. The power circuit shorted out, and a rising whine — climbing into an ultrasonic shriek — began building inside the fighter: the unmistakable sign of an irreversible thermal reaction in the hypermatter fuel cell. Less than two seconds to detonation.
In that same instant, as the general's sensors registered the start of the chain reaction, the outer hangar wall shuddered under a colossal impact. Space beyond the containment field lit up with bright flashes. Three heavy Venator-class Star Destroyers dropped out of hyperspace right alongside the Invincible's starboard flank, in flagrant violation of every flight-safety protocol on record. Their massive gray hulls blotted out the entire view.
According to the long-range comm data still available to Grievous, this was the Republic fleet.
Without so much as a hail or a proper battle formation, the Venators opened up with everything they had. Heavy turbolaser fire began methodically stripping away what remained of the Separatist cruiser's shields near the stern and engine section, knocking the ship badly off-balance. But the most devastating effect came from the ionizing pulse that accompanied dozens of simultaneous hull-armor detonations. A powerful EMP wave surged through the ship's internal cabling.
That, oddly enough, turned out to be a stroke of luck — the B2 troopers on the corridor froze mid-stride with their arms raised, red photoreceptors flickering erratically as their processors dropped into an endless reboot loop. The Vultures lowered their nose cannons to the floor, their targeting systems shutting down.
At that exact moment, the fuel cell Grievous had rigged finally blew. The blast wave from inside, combined with three turbolaser hits from outside, tore apart what remained of the hangar's outer durasteel doors. The magnetic containment field collapsed.
Explosive decompression began. Tons of air, mixed with hull fragments, pieces of jammed droids, and loose debris, howled and roared out through the breach into open vacuum.
Grievous instantly sheathed his lightsaber at his hip, dropped chest-first onto the deck, and slammed the magnetic clamps in both feet to maximum. His three-clawed metal feet locked onto the ribbed steel decking with a heavy clunk. The outrushing air tore at his frame, his one remaining arm sliding across the metal, but the magnetic locks held his weight. The coolant warning kept flashing; his core temperature had climbed to forty-two degrees. Before his eyes, out in the black vacuum of space, a duel unfolded between the dying cruiser and the three Venators.
Through the thick veil of smoke pouring from the breach and clouds of freezing droplets of technical fluid, a dark silhouette suddenly appeared.
It was Brutus's Sith infiltrator. The ship was pushed to the limit of its maneuvering thrusters, holding position in the decompression zone through sheer brute force from its forward reverse engines. Its hull bore fresh scorch marks and deep gouges from collisions with debris, but the pilot held a steady course. The ship turned its stern toward Grievous, and the heavy boarding ramp began lowering before the vessel had even fully matched velocity.
At that moment, one of the hangar's overhead support beams — weakened by the blast — cracked and began collapsing directly onto the descending ramp of the infiltrator. There was no room to spare; the falling beam would crush the ramp's hydraulics.
A massive figure leapt out from the opening hatch. It was a fierce Dashade, who ignored the icy dust of vacuum whipping across his face, gripped his heavy, broad vibro-blade with both hands, and — with a silent, furious roar in the thin air — raised the weapon above his head to catch the falling multi-ton beam on its edge and his own shoulder. The giant's joints buckled under the strain, the deck beneath his feet groaning, but he held the durasteel beam in place, holding open a narrow corridor of safety.
Behind him on the ramp appeared a witch. The Nightsister planted her feet firmly against the ramp's grip-rails. She thrust her arms forward, and a visible, concentrated telekinetic wave of the Force lashed out toward the B2 droids still rolling helplessly across the floor in the decompression. The shockwave swept the remaining tin cans aside, clearing the space around the general.
Kem, still holding the beam with one arm, leaned forward sharply, threw out his free upper limb, and clamped a death grip on Grievous's shoulder joint. The Dashade wrenched the cyborg toward him with brutal force, tearing his magnetic foot-locks clean out of the deck plating, chunks of hull still attached.
With one powerful motion, he hauled the smoking, mutilated body of the former general into the infiltrator's cargo hold. Varja immediately slapped the emergency close control. The airlock door slid down, cutting off the roar of escaping atmosphere and restoring normal pressure to the compartment.
The infiltrator banked hard, gave full throttle to its main engines, and pulled away from the dying Invincible in a tight, steep arc, vanishing among the debris and dense rock formations of the nearby asteroid field — somewhere Republic sensors had no hope of picking up its cooling engine trail.
...
The infiltrator slipped into a narrow crevice in the nearest massive asteroid. The hull scraped dully against solid, compressed rock before the maneuvering thrusters gave a reverse burst and locked the ship in place within the dark basalt pocket. The vibration from the engines faded, giving way to the steady, barely audible hum of the ship's generator.
Grievous lay motionless in the dim light of the technical hold, his massive durasteel frame locked tight in the deck's repair clamp. A thick external interface cable ran from his right thigh to the infiltrator's distribution panel.
On the diagnostic display monitoring all his systems, indicator lights winked out one by one: Brutus's partner, whose name Grievous didn't know, had forcibly locked down his main power distribution lines and limb servos, leaving the cyborg with access only to passive sensors and life-support systems. The charge indicator on his central power core sat fixed at four percent emergency reserve. His thermoregulation systems were malfunctioning, and the processor reported his organic core sitting at a residual temperature of forty-one degrees.
The hold's central tactical display, linked to the infiltrator's external optics, showed what was happening outside in open space. The three Republic Venator-class Star Destroyers were finishing off the sector, methodically destroying the now-unescorted Invincible. Clouds of freezing gas and debris vented from the flagship's ruptured compartments, sometimes in isolated jets, sometimes in continuous sheets. The ship's defense systems were already dead, its reactor section completely gutted by the ionizing strike. No doubt by tomorrow every Republic news channel would be reporting the total destruction of the dreaded General Grievous, along with his flagship. What the general still couldn't figure out was how the Republic fleet had shown up in exactly the right place at exactly the right time.
The hold's door hissed open, letting in a burst of warm air, and Brutus stepped through. The Sith moved slowly, favoring his left side heavily, one hand pressed tight against his ribs. He crossed to the equipment rack, leaned his back wearily against the bulkhead, and stood there for a few seconds in silence, looking at the motionless general.
"Sensors show your organics came through fine," he said dryly, not moving his hand from his broken ribs. "Your temperature's dropping. Ten more minutes and we'll start recharging and repairing your internal systems."
Grievous couldn't use the vocoder built into his mask, so he routed the sound signal directly through the speaker in his chest plate. His voice came out hoarse, cut with static:
"If you don't want... heh-heh... me tearing these clamps out of the bulkhead, you'd better take the lockdown off me."
"I seriously doubt you've got the power left for that," Brutus said, giving the battered cyborg a brief, assessing look. "Besides, the lockdown's there for the repairs. During decompression, your processor could easily have burned out from overheating if you'd started moving. And you still can't move — not until we've got everything fixed. You can thank Kem. He's the one who carried you out of that hangar on his back."
"What are our losses?" Grievous asked calmly.
"Your flagship, as you've probably gathered, is gone. The entire Separatist fleet in this sector got intercepted and taken over by someone with some very 'authoritative' access codes, so I fed the Republic a tip that your flagship was sitting here nearly undefended. Now let's get to the facts — we don't have much time before Republic scanners start sweeping this asteroid field."
Brutus took a step forward, pushing through visible physical pain, and looked straight into the cyborg's yellow organic eyes.
"As far as the Confederacy of Independent Systems is concerned, you're officially a traitor, a saboteur, the works. We've been monitoring the networks — Count Dooku's already sent out an order revoking all your authority. Do I even need to mention the Republic? Best case, they lock you up. Kalee's bled dry from the sanctions, and your prospects aren't looking great."
"Enough... heh-heh... gloating. If you've got a proposal... say it plainly..." the former general snapped irritably.
"Fine, fine, let's take it in order. Right now we've got a common goal, and you have no idea just how much. Beyond everything else, your cooperation with us could directly help your home world, so let me get to the point. Have you heard anything — news, rumors — about an organization called 'R.G.A.'?"