7/28/7956 C.R.C

  Castle Serenno

  Count Dooku's office/ Great Hall

  Count Dooku sighed and lightly rubbed his temples as he tried to stave away a headache.

  Earlier, he had received news that General Grievous had captured a member of the Jedi Order High Council, the Iridonian Zabrak known as Eeth Koth. The cyborg's plan was to lure as many Jedi as he could to his fleet so he could trap them on his own ship and kill as many of them as he could, before blasting apart whatever ship had attached itself to the Recusant and killing whoever remained.

  Although it was slightly more convoluted than simply killing the Council member and blowing away any reinforcements that may arrive later, it was overall a good plan, if a bit costly due to the potential damage to his fleet. But Grievous was using one of the larger Recusants to do this, and even though scaling up the Recusant design is not easy work, even if most of the CIS navy was built before the war even began, Dooku would allow Grievous to have a larger flagship if the mission was a success. A reward for killing so many Jedi.

  However, the plan immediately went bad when two of the biggest pains in Dooku's rear, Anakin Skywalker and Obi-wan Kenobi, volunteered for the mission. Instead of luring the Jedi aboard the ship, Grievous, given his history with the Negotiator, decided to invade the small Republic cruiser and hunt down Kenobi. Obviously, the mission failed horribly, and now Grievous was stuck on the surface of Saleucami with the Republic hunting him down, as Dooku learned not even three hours later.

  To top it all off, General Skywalker was even having to deal with a brand-new prosthetic arm as well and Grievous still failed. And the only reason Skywalker was having to deal with a new mechanical arm, was because his old one was blasted apart. But it wasn't Dooku who did that, nor was it General Grievous who did it. Not even his own student, Asajj Ventress, disarmed the 'Hero with no Fear' either.

  Instead, Skywalker's arm was blown off with a slugthrower of all things, courtesy of one of the few competent military officials Dooku had, and the only one of his kind at the current time. The experimental tactical droid known as BZ-KG, or as he named himself soon after coming online for the first time, General Blitzkrieg.

  Dooku frowned slightly as his thoughts drifted to the prototype droid.

  The experimental Ultra Tactical Droid was definitely proving his worth, despite the very few missions he had even been on. Taking Telos IV back from the Republic was his maiden voyage into the war, to test how well the model performed. But Dooku never expected General Blitzkrieg to take the planet in less than a week, and then turn the place into a Confederate stronghold, complete with an orbital defense grid around it over the course of two months. Nor did he expect the rumors about a custom flight pack he had used above Devaron.

  BZ-KG also seemed to have a knack for getting into and out of extremely dangerous situations, if his escapades on Geonosis were anything to go by. Managing to beat two Jedi and a whole LAAT full of clones was no easy feat, especially since all he had was an HK assassin droid, a B1 pilot droid, and some sort of new brand of recon droid.

  Dooku had a feeling the small bird-like drone was just the tip of the proverbial iceberg, though.

  And to make matters even more surprising, when he called General Blitzkrieg to ask for an update on Pantora nine days ago, he was greeted by the site of the droid's heavily damaged, sparking, fluid-leaking -but still standing- frame filling up the holotank. As the droid gave his report, Dooku realized that he had just gained quite the story to use against the Republic and the Jedi, and quickly capitalized on it by sending a defense fleet to the moon to keep the Republic away, while giving the droid general some downtime to repair himself.

  Anakin Skywalker and General Blitzkrieg had dueled, but while the droid general fought to protect the building and people around him, Skywalker fought like a wild animal, with seemingly no care taken for the people around him and he ended up causing massive amounts of property damage to the apartment building and later to one of Pantora City's many ports. It definitely set a precedent that the Republic's hero didn't really care about collateral damage, unlike General Blitzkrieg, whose army of droids were actively attempting to improve life on the marshy moon.

  In the privacy of his castle, Dooku had chuckled when he watched the Pantoran news interview he was sent by the droid general, where he detailed his harrowing fight against the careless Jedi. It was proving to be quite the hit piece across the planet, and even a few of the planets around Pantora had gotten their hands on the news story as well. To say the least, Dooku had a feeling the story would be all the way to the core, as well as the halls of congress in Raxus, before the end of the week.

  Public sentiment on Pantora was rather quickly turning towards the Confederacy as well, according to a recent opinion poll. It looked like the marshy moon would soon be on the CIS's side, even if it would take the construction of an orbital defense grid over the planet to do so. But building that sort of thing can be done extremely quickly with droid labor, since they only need maintenance and power to function properly.

  But now, however, Dooku needed General Blitzkrieg for another reason. General Grievous may have been good at Jedi killing and ordering his forces around like the warlord he once was, but it was becoming clear to Dooku that the cyborg was hopeless when it came to dealing with Kenobi and, to a much lesser extent, Skywalker.

  It almost seemed like the Force itself was biased and wanted the cyborg to lose at every opportunity when he encountered his GAR rival, or at the very least, force stalemates between them. And Skywalker and Grievous, despite sometimes being on the same frontlines to as close as being on the same ship, never encountered each other, which was odd, to say the least.

  The loss of the Malevolence only increased Dooku's frustration at the Cyborg. That ship, with its twin Mega-Ion cannons, was extremely expensive. Combine that with a recent string of failures, including this most recent one, and the former Kaleesh was starting to slip from the Count's favor, regardless of how good at killing Jedi he was. Perhaps he should allow one of the Malevolence's five sister ships to be used by General Blitzkrieg to see if he could do any better with one than Grievous did.

  It would be rather easy to 'gently persuade' a few people to hand over one of the Subjugators for the droid general, not to mention the Malevolence was the only Subjugator with those expensive twin Mega-Ion cannons, so if another one was lost it wouldn't hurt as badly as losing the Malevolence. But that would be a plan for another time. Right now, Dooku needed Grievous safe and out of Republic hands, so he could continue to wreak havoc on their armies and the Jedi, as per his Master's orders.

  So, with a small hum, Dooku tapped a few buttons on his holotank, and started making some calls to shuffle around a few fleets, to make one large enough to distract a Republic fleet heading to Saleucami to assist Skywalker and Kenobi. That would free up General Blitzkrieg and his fleet nicely for his new mission.

  It was time for two of his best generals to finally meet.

  —

  7/28/7956 C.R.C

  The Finest Hour, Blitzkrieg's Quarters

  In orbit above Telos IV, Telos Defense Ring Loading Dock #12

  The repetitive tapping of one of my fingers on my desk echoed through my quarters, the only other sounds being my internals quietly whirring away and the gentle hum of the ship.

  It's been a little over an entire week since my fight with Anakin Skywalker. Nine whole days since I had been more damaged than I ever thought I'd be in either of my lives. Due to the damage done to my body, and especially my head, I was stuck in the repair bay for nearly twenty-eight hours and was forced to return to Telos IV to get my optics replaced with brand new ones that had recently been made, along with spares in case I needed them.

  With so much damage done to my body by Skywalker during our fight, normal repairs just weren't going to cut it this time around. There were some critical things that were damaged, like the casings that protected my processor and power core. My vocalizer even had a persistent glitch that made me sound like Soundwave but with so much static I had to repeat myself like three times just to be understood by Lona. And my weapons were half melted from lightsaber slashes, so the entire assembly had to be stripped out to replace them.

  In the end, I was forced to have a full refit done. That essentially meant that at one point in my repairs, I was just a skeletal torso and head suspended in my repair bay while numerous machine arms worked on my internals. I was only like that for five minutes, but every second felt like a minute with how unnerved I was to be so defenseless. Never in either of my lives had I been so helpless as I was then. Thankfully, immediately after that I started being put back together, but in the process, I made a few changes to my armor layout so blaster bolts couldn't slip through and hit my 'softer' metal.

  Honestly, I should have expected Anakin kriffing Skywalker to turn a blaster on me if he got the chance. Next big refit I do, I'm adding a battlemask and a thicker helmet. Perhaps some inspiration from Transformers or Gundam for my new body design as well…

  In other news, I lost my third telescopic photoreceptor on my forehead, and my two main optics were switched out for ones in the same stark white color, but these new ones could actually move around in their sockets, like a KX-series security droid like K-2SO. They could zoom slightly farther out and had better resolution than my old ones, so my vision was overall better than before.

  My weapons were replaced, my vibroblade was sharpened, and my armor was reinforced. In the end, they were all just cosmetic changes, plus a few differences in my armor layout. But during my time in the repair bay, I discovered something strange.

  There was an unknown chip inside my processor.

  Weirdly enough, the chip wasn't in any of my original blueprints, but after a deep scan of my head, it was right there, right at the center of my processor. What was weirder was that when I got a closer look at it, I noticed weird synthetic vein-like… things snaking out of it and connecting to pieces of my processor that were close to it. After nearly two hours of scanning and rescanning the chip and veins, I finally went 'fuck it' and decided to manually poke at it instead of scanning it again.

  …And then I woke up an hour later, internal alarms basically screeching at me that something very bad happened when I poked it. It took a good hour straight of just thinking and theorizing before I finally figured out what exactly the chip was.

  It was me.

  Or rather, my construct.

  In the Cyberpunk universe, there exists a way to forcibly tear the mind and soul from a human, killing them in the process. It is then possible to transplant said mind into a chip in the form of an 'engram', a digital consciousness. It was some sort of really old project that could transfer a human mind from one body to the next as a form of immortality using… spare human bodies.

  What that chip in my head was, was an 'engram' of my own mind. In other words, the chip was literally me in every sense of the word. As for the veins, they are biotechnological in nature and look to be a physical representation of my mind acclimating to this robotic body that I was slotted into. What bothers me is that the veins themselves are growing, albeit slowly.

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  What that entailed I didn't know, but there were no noticeable side effects, besides being able to move through my own coding with much more ease than normal. Perhaps the veins are being produced by a combination of the engram and the Force, and I really am becoming the first biotechnological life in the Corusica galaxy.

  "Could I actually have kids at some point and become the father of an entirely new species?" I had quietly asked myself one night.

  I quickly shut that idea down though, since I lacked the… 'equipment' to do so, even though sexbots did exist in the Corusica galaxy. And the veins were just in my processor, so there was no real reason to worry about any offspring. …Then when I was overseeing Omen's maintenance check I took a closer look at his processor as well, and found the same chip, and the same veins in his head, at around the same level of growth.

  After that I panicked for a few moments and quickly checked a few other droids and found the same chip in all of the ones I checked, but the veins were hair-thin at that point and not really connected to anything. It was then that I realized that I inadvertently really had become the father of a new species, but it was completely unintentional on my part.

  Best I could theorize, me directly interfacing with all of my droids when I sent out that software update started this. And as time passed, the veins grew, connected, and thickened with time and experience. Since Omen and I were much older mentally than all the other droids at this point, our 'personality matrix's' as I decided to call them, were much further along, which explains the Admiral's drive for individuality. It may also depend on a droid's processing power as well, but I'm not too sure about that.

  After discreetly checking all of my other droid models, I realized that not every droid gained the personality matrix. Around one in every hundred droids had them at this point, with some of them having the chips still being formed in their processors, which at this point looked like a small mass of pulsing veins that glowed a faint blue, slowly changing and reforming until it looked like the chip, and after that small nubs would appear where the veins would sprout out from.

  Honestly, it was extremely weird to watch a personality matrix form, to be honest. I do not recommend it for those with weak stomachs or general squeamishness.

  I did keep my findings entirely to myself, though. There's no need for Lona, or any organic on either side really, to find out about any of what I've learned. If that sort of information got out, it could cause everything to fall apart before I was in a position to change anything major. Hell, the entire war could potentially collapse faster than when Order sixty-six was activated, considering how many droids there are.

  Speaking of my blue-skinned togruta head engineer, I jerked back slightly when I received a call from her on my holotank, which I answered after sitting up straight and composing myself.

  "General, the first squads of Junglefowl units are about to be delivered in the landing bay. Would you like to see them before they're sent to the landing craft?" The small hologram of Lona asked.

  "Yes, definitely. I'll be there momentarily." I replied.

  The call ended, and I stood up, cycled in a deep vent, grabbed my cloak and put it on, then walked out of my quarters towards the hangar.

  Project Junglefowl was probably what I expected to be done the quickest at first, in all honesty. Either it or the Defoliator reproduction, but those things need another week of testing before they're considered safe to use.

  The design of the AT-ST was closest to the current tech base that we had, since the AT-RT was basically the same thing, just small enough to fit inside an AT-TE's cargo bay. Although, the Junglefowl had to be upsized a bit due to tech differences, and for just a tiny extra bit of intimidation factor to have something so large coming after you. The Junglefowl is thirty-five and a half feet tall and fifteen feet wide, armed with the closest recreations that we could make of the weapons that it had in the OT.

  Some differences between them are the extra armor on the legs and body, the larger footpads and gyroscopes for extra stability, an extra set of retractable serrated foot blades to take down both obstructions and any poor fool that gets too close, and to top it all off, the pilot. AT-ST's may have had a pretty good autopilot mode, but Junglefowl units were powered by a droid brain. The three prototypes were put through trials in the Telosian wilderness. They passed, doing remarkably well in their roles, and their memories were copied and are being used for the production model's brains for efficiency.

  Junglefowl units are meant to work in teams of three, each with a different set of cheek mounted weapons. One with a rocket launcher, one with a concussion grenade launcher, and one with a quad-barrel repeating blaster. There are also designs in the works for a self-propelled artillery piece or tank destroyer built on the Junglefowl chassis, similar to something I saw briefly in that Han Solo spotlight movie. Also, from that movie is one of the only instances of indirect fire I've ever seen from Star Wars.

  As for why the design is called a Junglefowl, it's a play on the term 'chicken-walker'. The name Junglefowl actually comes from the genus Gallus, which comprises four species of birds that are all known as Junglefowl, although only one can be traced as the ancestor of the modern chicken. They were domesticated about eight-thousand or so years ago, although I'm not sure how long ago the birds were domesticated in the Corusica galaxy.

  As far as I can tell, they're only found on Endor, Batuu, and Takodana, which seems weird. You'd think such a delicious type of food would be galaxy wide with how fast they breed and grow. Perhaps I should get some from the little forest moon and start up a fried chicken business to help make money for the war…

  After a few minutes of walking, I finally entered the hangar, where I could see the surface of the planet from outside as the Finest Hour sat anchored to the defense ring. As I stood there, Lona walked up beside me, datapad in hand as she looked over the incoming supplies.

  "Good to see you, sir." Lona greeted.

  "It's nice to see you, too, Lona." I replied. "How are things looking?"

  "Well, we've got about three or four more incoming crates before we meet the quota. A shipment of twenty Infiltrator droids just came in if you want to send your update to them, and the Junglefowl units are on approach."

  With a warbling rumble, another transport craft hovered in, carrying multiple crates of parts, gas packs, and other assorted things that we needed. It briefly landed, unhitched itself from the crates, then the warbling engine sound increased in volume as it sped off back out of the ship. Lona checked something else off of her list as soon as it left.

  "So, when are the Junglefowl units supposed to arrive?" I asked.

  "After this next shipment. After they're here and a bit of pre-activation maintenance is done, they'll be loaded onto a C-99 for whenever the next ground battle is. …Speaking of which, here they come."

  A large transport craft lumbered into the hangar and settled onto the floor under the direction of a B1 foreman. The bay doors opened, and the forms of the first ten Junglefowl units showed themselves as they floated out on large hoversleds. Their main bodies were settled on the ground, making them look slightly frog-like with their legs folded up next to them. The other two transports with the other twenty hovered outside patiently as they waited for the first one to finish unloading

  From what I remember, AT-ST's were always standing up when offline, so seeing them 'sitting' on the hoversled was a novel experience to me. It made sense though. Why wouldn't AT-ST's sit down so the crew could climb in or out of them. And from what I remember from the few clips I watched of Rebels, AT-ATs laid down like camels to offload their troops.

  I was broken out of my thoughts when Lona whistled.

  "Wow. Those guys are pretty impressive." She commented.

  "And with the programming they have, they'll be a terror on the battlefield. Not to mention their adaptive camouflage."

  "It's a shame we can't cover all of our vehicles and droids with the chameleon camouflage that's going into your new body. Or are you still doing that?"

  "No, it was too expensive. I calculated that to have just one of my arms painted in the stuff would be about fifteen thousand Confederate credits."

  "And that'd be, what? Ten thousand Republic credits?"

  "Yep."

  "Well, that sucks. You seemed really interested in that type of camo."

  "General, I'm sorry to interrupt whatever it is you're doing." Omen interrupted over my internal radio. "But Count Dooku is on the line in your quarters. He said he has a new mission for us."

  "Got it." I replied, before turning to Lona. "The Count is asking for me; I'll leave you to your duties."

  "We definitely don't want to upset our leader, do we? We'll talk later." The togruta replied, walking off towards the Junglefowl units.

  Knowing that Dooku was one for punctuality, I quickly made my way back to my quarters and accepted the call, kneeling in the process.

  "General Blitzkrieg. You have been repaired, I take it?" Count Dooku asked.

  "Indeed. I am at your beck and call, my lord. What do you ask of me?" I responded.

  "General Grievous has been shot down on Saleucami, and is unable to be contacted. You will go there and rescue him from the Republic… or recover his remains."

  I jerked my head up so fast the joints in my neck shuddered. What is he playing at? Does he want Grievous dead?

  "I shall endeavor to bring the Supreme Commander back in at the very least one piece, sir." I replied as I stood up and saluted the Count.

  "See that you do so." He said, raising his head slightly along with one eyebrow.

  With that parting remark, Dooku ended his call.

  "Wait, was that the 'signature look of superiority' he used on me?" I muttered.

  I shook my head and sat down at my desk, calling up the fleet connection. I sent out a fleet-wide notice to prepare for departure, then spent about thirty minutes finalizing reports before I got the notice that resupplying had finished. After that, I finally started making my way to the bridge. When I finally arrived on the bridge, Lona and Omen were already there and turned to greet me as I entered.

  "Going by the fleet-wide notice for departure you sent out a while ago, I'm guessing we're leaving on another mission?" Lona asked, crossing her arms.

  "Indeed, we are. Count Dooku has tasked us with the rescue or recovery of General Grievous." I responded.

  "And how exactly did Grievous get himself into a situation like that?" Omen asked.

  "Jedi, probably?" Lona ventured.

  "Most likely. My credits are on Kenobi and Skywalker." I remarked.

  Lona's raised eyebrow raised even further. "Sir, with all due respect, that's a fool's bet. It's obviously Kenobi and Skywalker."

  "I was about to say the same." Omen added with a tilt of his head.

  "Yeah, you're right. It is a fool's bet." I said, before shaking my head slightly. "Anyway, we have a cyborg to save or recover the body of, so let's get moving."

  With a flourish of my cloak, I sat down in the command chair and watched as we jumped to hyperspace.

  "All hands, prepare for departure." Omen ordered.

  The engines hummed deeply as my entire fleet cast off and formed up. With a flick of a switch, the space through the viewport was replaced with the swirling corona of lights as we soared through hyperspace.

  Saleucami here we come.