[Republic Commando] - [Short Stories](2)

“How many times have you done this?” asked Atin.

Prudii sucked his teeth audibly and rocked his head, counting. “Lots,” he said at last.

“And they haven’t noticed yet?”

“No. I’d say not.” Prudii clipped bypass wires to the bays above and below the slot to isolate it. “Just so I don’t trigger the safety cut-out.” He inspected a substitute data wafer - apparently identical in every way to the Separatist ones - and inserted it into the slot. “This’ll make sure the foundry adds too much carvanium to the durasteel, and that the quality control sampling reads it as normal levels. See?” He pointed to the readout on the panel. A cluster of figures read 0003. “Machines believe what you tell ‘em. Just like people.”

“You sure that’s enough?”

“Any higher and it’ll be too brittle to pass through the rollers. Then they’ll spot the problem too soon.”

“Okay…”

Prudii took a breath. He was remarkably patient for a Null. “Look, when these chakaare reach the battlefield, the overpressure from a basic ion shell will crack their cases like Naboo crystal.” He removed the bypass clips and attached them to bays flanking a vertical slot further up the panel. More spiked wafers replaced genuine chips. “And just in case they get lucky and spot that little quality-control problem, this one will reduce the wire gauge just enough so that when it takes a heavy current, it’ll short. I like to introduce a different batch of problems for each factory, in case they spot a pattern. How much more of this do I have to debate with you?”

“Just checking, sir.”

“Drop the ‘sir.’ I hate it.”

It was a precise calculation: just enough to render entire production runs of droids so vulnerable on the battlefield that they were almost useless, but not enough to flag the problem when the units were checked before being shipped from the factory - checked by service droids using the same falsified data.

Prudii had to be doing something right. The kill ratio had climbed from 20-to-one to 50-to-one in a matter of a few months. The tinnies still hadn’t overrun the Republic, despite the claims that they could. While Prudii worked, factory droids skimmed past him, oblivious. He stepped out of ‘ů their way and let them pass.

“Is it true you’ve tracked down General Grievous?” asked Atin. ‘“Cos I know that two of you were tasked to hunt him…”

“Not me. Ask Jaing. Or Kom’rk. Their job, not mine.”

Atin hadn’t met them yet. “If they’ve found him, the war’s as good as over.”

“You reckon? Well, it doesn’t look like it’s over yet.”

Atin took the hint and didn’t ask about Grievous again. He kept watch, DC-17 rifle ready, anxious not to use it for once. It was odd to be invisible. He wondered why the Grand Army didn’t use stealth coating on all trooper armour, seeing as most of their land engagements were against droids.

There was a lot that didn’t add up in this war.

“There,” said Prudii, closing the panel gently. He stood back to inspect it. “We were never here.”

They climbed back up to the gantry on their lines and slipped out the way they’d come. It was pitch black outside. They had an hour to get to the extraction point and transmit their coordinates to the heavily , disguised freighter waiting for them. On Olanet, that meant crossing ‘. kilometres of marshaling yards serving the nerf-meat industry. Atin ;’ % could hear the animals lowing, but he’d still never seen a live nerf.

“This place stinks.” Prudii settled behind a repulsor truck in a yard full of hundreds of others and squatted in its shadow. The harmless but nauseating stench of manure and animals penetrated his helmet’s filters. “Five-seven, are you receiving?”

“With you in 10, sir. Stand by.”

Prudii made no comment about the ‘sir.’ He took the data wafers out of his belt and attached a probe to them, one at a time. He struck Atin as a kindred spirit, a man who wouldn’t let any inanimate objects get the better of him, but he was still hard work.

“Shab,” Prudii muttered. He held but a wafer. “What do you make of this?”

Atin slotted it into his own wafer reader and relayed the extracted data to his HUD. The readout was just strings of numbers, the kind of data he’d need to analyze carefully. “What am I looking at? I normally blow this stuff up. I’ve never stopped to read it.”

“Look for the code that starts zero-zero-five-alpha, 10 from the top row.”

“Got it.”

“That’s the running total of units off the line since the wafer was inserted to start the production run. And the date.”