A Reluctant Sith

Chap 13

Ahrie stood in an empty hallway. Emergency lighting. She knew where she was. She knew how to get to anywhere else on the ship. But, this ship was dead. No life, other than the scrappers. And no sense of fear. The foreboding tension of an unknown future.

"That door there on the left," Sho said as he pointed his light at it.

Ahrie walked up to the access panel. Closed her eyes and sensed the mechanism.

"This is ... should be ... a storage room. The latching mechanism is stuck. The superstructure is twisted a little. Any of your droids have a blaster?"

Sho nodded.

"Have them blast this spot under the panel," Ahrie said as she made a circle on the wall below the black, lifeless panel. "Be careful though, when the latch detaches, that door may well slam open. There's a lot of tension there."

Ahrie started walking back down the hallway as Sho explained what to do to one of the droids. He walked to join Ahrie.

"Now," Sho said.

The droid stood a meter back and began firing into the wall below the panel.

Sho counted following each blast. "... two ... three ... four ... how many do you think it will ..."

Sho was interrupted by the door slamming open with an ear splitting crash.

"Five," Ahrie said. She walked back to the room.

"Intruders," said a voice Ahrie recognized. She ran and stood in the doorway, between the Imperial shock droids and Sho and his droids.

There were four. Tall. Thin. Metallic black. Vader was always partial to black. Each had a blaster in each hand and all eight were now pointed at her.

"You are intruders! You will be ..."

Ahrie interrupted the squad's leader by pulling the blasters out of their hands, dropping them on the metal flooring. She lifted the four droids up a meter and slammed them into the back wall.

"Oh, Darth Tempus. We ... we apologize, my Lady. We have been locked in this room with no contact. We had believed the worst."

Ahrie set them down on the floor.

"Power down," Ahrie said.

"Aye," all four said in unison. And powered off.

"Those are YT-3s," Sho said. "Painted black, but they're still just all-environment, heavy industrial droids. What are they doing here. With blasters?"

"They were YT-3s. In the early days of the Empire, Palpatine and Vader needed incorruptible agents to replace the Stormtrooper clones they were losing to attrition. They needed a tool that allowed them to push their presence out into the Empire without worrying about them becoming compromised. These things were the most robust option. Very hard to destroy."

Ahrie walked around to the back of the droids and started fiddling with the head of the one on the far left.

"The Empire's droid engineers came up with a personality and obedience over-ride they could simply plug in. It sort of pushed the droids' decision making, some might say free-will, off to the side. It forced compliance, over-rode pre-wired non-harm and non-kill directives."

Ahrie pulled out a rectangular wafer from the back of the one droid's head and closed the panel. Then proceeded to do the same with the other three.

"What will you do with those?" Sho asked.

"The implants? Destroy them. No good can come of them."

"And that will return them to what they were before?" Sho asked. "Nothing residual?"