Star Wars_ The Dark Lord Trilogy - James Luceno [42]
He had asked himself: could he be content to be a mind in a body without feeling? More, could he abandon a life of combat for a life in which the only battles he fought were with himself? The struggle to endure, to live another day …
No. It was beyond him.
By then, the Huk War had ended—more accurately had been ended by the Jedi, and the Kaleesh were still reaping the whirlwind. Their world in ruins, their appeals for justice and fair play ignored by the Republic.
Ever on the alert for investment opportunities, members of the InterGalactic Banking Clan had offered Kalee a dubious sort of rescue. They would support the planet financially, assume its staggering debt, if Grievous would agree to serve the clan as an enforcer. Their hailfire weapons were proficient at delivering “payment reminders” to delinquent clients, and their IG-series assassin droids took care of the wet work. But the hailfires had to be programmed, the IGs were dangerously unpredictable, and assassination was bad for business.
The clan wanted someone with a talent for intimidation.
Both to save his world and to provide himself with a touch of the life he had known as a warrior, a strategist, a leader of armies, Grievous had accepted the offer. IBC chairman San Hill himself had overseen the details of the arrangement. Still, Grievous wasn’t entirely proud of his decision. Debt collection was a far cry from warcraft. An arena for beings without principles; for beings so attached to their possessions that they feared death. But Kalee had profited from his work for IBC. And Grievous’s previous notoriety was such that it could not be eclipsed.
Then: the shuttle crash. The accident. The misfortune …
He told his would-be healers to fish him from the bacta tank. He could bear to die in atmosphere or the vacuum of deep space, but not in liquid. In the shadow of felled trees that would fuel his funeral pyre, he lapsed in and out of consciousness. That was when San Hill had paid him a second visit. Something consequential in mind. Obvious even to someone who could barely see straight.
“We can keep you alive,” rail-thin Hill had whispered into Grievous’s unimpaired ear.
Others had promised as much. He pictured breathing devices, a hover platform, a surround of life-sustaining machines.
But Hill had said: “None of that. You will walk, you will speak, you will retain your memories—your mind.”
“I have my mind,” Grievous had said. “What I lack is a body.”
“Most of your internal organs are damaged beyond the repair of the finest surgeons,” Hill had continued. “And you will have to surrender even more than you already have. You will no longer know the pleasures of the flesh.”
“Flesh is weak. You need only gaze on me to see that.”
Encouraged by the remark, Hill had talked in glowing terms of the Geonosians: how they had raised cyborg technology to an art form, and how the blending of living and machine technology was the future.
“Consider the battle droids of the Trade Federation,” Hill had said. “They answer to a brain that is also nothing more than a droid. Protocol droids, astromechs, even assassin droids—all require programming and frequent maintenance.”
Two words had caught Grievous’s attention: battle droids.
“A war is brewing that will call many droids to the front,” Hill had said just loudly enough to be heard. “I am not privy to when it will begin, but when that day comes, the entire galaxy will be involved.”
His interest piqued, Grievous had said: “A war begun by whom? The Banking Clan? The Trade Federation?”
“Someone more powerful.”
“Who?”
“In time, you will meet him. And you will be impressed.”
“Then why does he need me?”
“In every war, there are leaders and there are commanders.”
“A commander of droids.”
“More precisely, a living commander of droids.”
So he had allowed the Geonosians to go to work on him, constructing a duranium and ceramic shell for what little of him remained. His recuperation had been long and difficult. Coming to terms with his new and in many ways improved self, even longer and