Before - Legends Ghoul Road Metal (KOTOR - TOR)

Title: Ghoul Road Metal
Author: Mechalich
Timeframe: 3956 BBY- 3650 BBY
Genre: Drama, Adventure
Characters: B10N, Leontyne Saresh
Disclaimer: Star Wars is not my property
Summary: A droid, the destruction of Taris, the aftermath, and Rakghouls
Note: All reviews, positive or critical, are welcomed.

 

3956 BBY



The first sign was the rakghouls.


They withdrew, vanishing from sight and motion detection. B10N registered this as an anomaly. Three standard months he had been deployed at his post, and in that time there had never been fewer than three of the targets within sensor range.


Why they gathered nearby was unknown to him. His cognition routines were not designed to connect their presence to the abundance of small herbivorous creatures living off the mossy growth at the edges of the coolant pools, but he recognized the plain fact of their numbers.


Once registered the anomaly was noted in his internal log, and subsequently sat there. B10N took no further action. He lacked any directive to do so. Had there been an unexpected increase in rakghoul presence his threat detection routines would have triggered the dispatch of an automated report, but their absence was not something his security profile had been programmed to pass along.


After the pallid beasts slunk away down into tunnels deeper in the sprawling network that was the Undercity B10N registered a second anomaly.

Communications traffic in the levels above increased, spiking suddenly to blanket all emergency channels with information on an order of magnitude greater than mere moments before. Every frequency was filled to bursting.


B10N largely ignored this phenomenon as irrelevant to his activities. Only one specific piece was of any relevance to his mind – messages on the override signal frequency assigned to the Tarisian Power Utility – the one he had an ongoing emergency directive to monitor.


When queried using his internal comlink, he found traffic intensity so great it overwhelmed the standard packet parsing protocols.


B10N’s system was still struggling to fight through the flooded datastream, sort messages, and prioritize a response, when the radiation hit.


Hardened for combat and stationed kilometers below the surface, he should have been proof against any radiation spike, even the mightiest of solar flares.

This was no spike, no burst. It was a flood, a tidal wave of particles pouring through every portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. It burned from radio to gamma, sparing nothing, including the emergency channel B10N was actively interrogating.


Something shattered, white lines blasting through B10N’s perceptions. Automated subroutines, fail-safe systems hardwired into his control unit at a level below active awareness, took control. Huge sections of his systems were hard stopped, shutdown in mid-function, sacrificing the edge to the searing quantum storm in order to shield the whole.


Microseconds later repair routines took action. Processing power was rerouted over damaged circuits, new connections were formed across burned bridges, electrons slashed whole new channels through the substrate of his mind. Brute force reprogramming – the demands of a battle-ready unit – altered him across every system level.

For a full four tenths of a second B10N’s central processor recorded absolutely zero input or output on any function at all. Only the internal chronometer chronicled this lost blackout time.


His optics rebooted.


Awareness, splashed back anew in a way that was as if it had always been, but rendered against a minefield of distortions when compared to his memory, returned. His first impulse was to run diagnostic routines, to process, chart, and recognize what had happened.


Emergency alerts crushed this desire utterly.


Taking in visual data, B10N discovered that the world was shaking.


The visual field was in constant, dynamic motion, up and down. Gyro reported instability on a level just below its compensation threshold. His contact sensors reported that he was on the ground, tumbled over at some point not in his memory. It could only have occurred during the gap.


Gap?


His processor tumbled through clumsy interrogations, pushed to new, desperate speeds by an unknowable impulse that an observer might have labeled fear. There was no time to fully examine the structural shifts down to the atomic level, but it was immediately apparent that there had been a change. Information flow was altered, diverged from previous patterns. Something critical – a key component of his active conscious state – had shifted dramatically.


Unfamiliar impulses assailed his standing state awareness. He remained frozen in place, lying in a jumbled heap as the ground shuddered and raged, for three full seconds. His mind interrogated reference databases, comparing his own reactions to outside sources, building news references, definitions.


Unease. Discomfort. Terror.


The input was emotional in nature.


To recognize this was utterly terrifying. It was brilliantly exhilarating.


Is this awareness? B10N questioned, struggling to diagnose. Am I broken?


An auditory input vastly above the standard scale penetrated his senses and forced this quandary to be shelved. The chamber was suffused by an overwhelming cracking noise.


B10N looked up. The ceiling, a vast duracrete plate over a meter in thickness, was splitting, coming apart.


Recognizing the extreme jeopardy he was now in, he scanned hurriedly for shelter.


The power transfer station and cooling pools shook and boiled. Temperature was rising, heat spikes blasted through the air. The transfer conduits had overloaded. Once vibrant humming was now silent, the core dark. Higher up, where the wiring carried energy through the ceiling, there were breaks and tears. Cracking sparks lanced through the air, some many meters in length. Fissures rippled across the housing. Soon it would break free and fall.


Though one of the strongest known materials, duracrete abrogated before the storm.


Defend the power station; that was B10N’s primary directive. In the face of its destruction that command was rendered defunct. His programming, relying on embedded sequences restored from his internal archives, compelled him to report this and request further orders.


Attempting to send a signal blasted his communication system with static and triggered a radiation alarm. B10N shut it down instantly.


He considered the radiation burst. Measuring the surrounding levels was easy, part of his active sensor suite. Simple equations governed the movement of radiative discharge, basic physics well within his calculation capabilities. Extrapolating back across the distance and shielding he knew lay above him was the work of milliseconds.


The numbers that resulted were an answer in and of themselves.


Fifty meters above him or higher any standard organic being was dead, or would be within minutes. The list of conditions potentially responsible was minute: supernova; asteroid impact; a handful of less-likely stellar scale calamities. B10N rejected them all. Their probability paled in comparison to the one artificial possibility – full-scale planetary bombardment.


Someone was issuing sustained, extreme, firepower on a planetary scale by a full fleet.


There was no pre-programmed solution for surviving this event, no guidance whatsoever, and nothing in B10N’s experience. Rather than planning, he reacted. The ceiling was falling, he needed to descend.


The layout of the nearby warrens projected over his vision. Maintenance shafts from the city sewage system were interspersed among the power infrastructure. These led further below, to the treatment basins buried at the very bottom.


B10N ran for the nearest.


Clumps of duracrete rained down from above. Fist-sized chunks detached and poured through the gap. Fluttering scavengers were smashed to pulp, mosses crushed to green goo, and a projectile slammed B10N in the shoulder, denting armor plate and momentarily disorienting him.


Then the ceiling shattered. Speeder-sized pieces fell dozens of meters, bringing tons of weight crashing through anything in their path.


A huge bombard slammed the metal two steps behind B10N. He was thrown into the air, limbs akimbo. Desperately moving to stabilize, he landed on his hands, rolling in a somersault and throwing his body forward at the maintenance shaft, elbows leading. He crashed through the security grating and spun into darkness.


Spinning in free-fall B10N came face to face with two terrible facts. He had no idea how far the shaft went, or what lay at the bottom. An overpowering, and utterly illogical, need to calculate what would happen if it was durasteel struck him.


Diffusing the desire with deliberate cognitive effort, he forced his mind to focus on finding something he could do to avoid being reduced to smeared parts when he hit.

He settled on the first flash of possibility – grappling an auxiliary water pipe at the side of the plunging tube.


The grasp came with a crack, his shoulder joint howling from the strain as bearings scraped and rasped against their metal housing. His body slammed hard into the wall, sending everything ringing, leading to a brief moment of blurred haze before his sensors compensated for the resonance.


Then the pipe shook.


Desperate, B10N flexed his fingers and slid down, descending fast as he dared in a barely controlled slide. A horrible screeching filled the air in counterpoint to the continuous symphony of crackling and rumbling.


He landed on the basal grating moments before the pipe separated from the wall, clattering down in pieces all around him.


B10N dashed to the side, ducking into the maintenance shaft that waited there. He pitied his stressed gyros, the shaking penetrating through every limb now, aching across hundreds of bearings and motors.


There was no stopping the destruction. The entire city was coming down, pummeled into nothingness by ships high above.


With the city on top, B10N knew everything below would be crushed, flattened beneath the massive levels overhead once all supporting columns failed. To survive he needed to find something that could protect him, that would endure the great weight.


No building could accomplish this, but the world abounded with the incompressible – water. In a moment of intuitive understanding, B10N dashed past a sewage monitoring gauge and came to the realization that liquid waste and liquid water were functionally the same.


Amid haywire electronics and rapidly failing systems finding a functional maintenance console took four tries, but once located it was easy to plug in an obtain a route to the nearest holding tank.


Then he ran.


Rattling corridors and shivering gratings met B10N as he stumbled, grappled and crawled his way through a world coming undone. As the siege above echoed through the world below, he was forced to all fours, gripping with every limb and scrambling. Optical processors struggled to keep pace with the constantly shifting environment. Limbs grasped at moving targets only to close on empty air, simple steps forward taking two or three tries.


His progress slowed to a crawl even as the heat rose around him and radiation slowly seeped through. Electrical wiring shorted and burst, filling the air with the corrosive reek of ozone. What had been fetid and stale atmosphere was soon rendered thoroughly toxic.


Spared the need to breathe by virtue of a mechanized metabolism, B10N strode past an ever-increasing slaughterhouse of small organisms. Mammals, reptiles, insects, and more, all the hardy scavengers that survived here in the wastage of the world above were now dying. At one point he passed a pair of Ugnaught engineers, the vaguely porcine bipeds gasping for air, already in the throes of fatal asphyxiation.


By the time B10N faced the sealed hatch the radiation spikes were sufficient that his visual field was streaked by white lines with every bounce. Wrenching the circular door open he took one look at the brown-green sludge below and plunged down.


He pulled the heavy hatch closed behind him and sank into the blackness, submerged in sewage.

 

3956 BBY



By the time the world stopped shaking the holding tank had sprung four holes, been flattened to half its initial volume, and seen internal temperatures rise to within single digits of the boiling point. Through it all Bion had floated in the black, miserable, but un-crushed.


The cessation of continual quaking marked the end of the active bombardment. Bion made no move to leave at this point. Having had nothing to do but think as the destruction progressed, he knew the devastation had only begun. A world on fire must cool, and the descent from perilous heat levels would bring shifts, shudders, and violent settling as the remains of the cityscape moved into a new position. It would be chaos outside for some time. He saw no reason to take unnecessary risks.


So he waited, sitting in the black with his main power off, conserving energy. Slowly the tank equilibrated.


It took five days for the liquid to return to ambient temperatures. Only then did Bion emerge, a metal figure completely coated in a layer of fetid grime.


The access hatch was smashed, and he had to bend and twist to make it out. The remains of the maintenance passages beyond were no better, forcing him to crawl, scrape, and scurry through a chaotic maze of bent tunnels and tumbled wreckage. Power was gone, even most emergency lighting failed, and he made his way forward guided by the pale green glow of infrared.


He progressed slowly to a gigantic section of pipe. Cratered, bent, and halfway flattened, it had once carried potable water to some great reservoir tank in the upper city. Now it sported puddles of industrial waste, loose sewage, and condensed grime pooled on every surface. The air within was choked with particulates.


Surface.


The goal was basic, simple, and essential. Bion found he was utterly committed to reaching the top of this smoldering pile. He must reach a point where he could see above, where the sky was open and he could survey what remained. It was a demand which held all future possibilities in thrall.


No organic being could have made the journey Bion charted that day. Toxic gasses, flooded passageways, superheated duracrete pockets, baths of acid, all these things and worse he endured, if only briefly. Even his hardened chassis, designed to face the weapons of war, did not emerge unscathed. Streaks and scars marked many surfaces before he was done. There was only one small blessing – a canister of refined oil had spilled open, and plunges into the remains cleansed grime and wear from his systems and strained joints.


Smashed glass, melted electronics, and burned bodies were his constant companions. Organic and synthetic alike filled the wreckage, broken and ruined. Terrible burns predominated, extreme heat a power capable of flaying flesh and circuitry alike. Only upon seeing these remains did Bion understand how critical the insulation of the sewage had been to his survival.


Though the path was twisting and jagged, filled with false turns and dead ends, it was short. Once as much a vertical world as a horizontal one, the cumulative pounding of bombardment had reduced the planet to a considerably more two-dimensional state. Though Bion’s altimeter was confused by constant shifts in pressure from settling gases, he suspected that from depths to surface was no more than six or seven levels.


Eventually he cleared this barrier and emerged into pale red light.


The landscape unfolded around him, a panorama of ruin.


A model smashed by hammers. That was Taris. The world was jagged chaos, from hand-span to horizon. Pieces ranging from microscopic to colossal lay strewn without pattern or order. Wreckage rested bent and ravaged in more ways than Bion could catalogue. Every function of industrial society, destroyed in multitudes, could be seen beneath the charcoal-shrouded sky.


Did anything survive?


The vista revealed nothing. It was still, unmoving. Probability suggested that yes, somewhere in the expanse there were a handful of organic survivors and a significantly larger number of the more durable droids. It even suggested that there were whole city-sized regions where the damage was comparably much less and entire structures might endure in operation, but there was little hope. Even those survivors of the bombardment were unlikely to live long. Toxins, radiation, lack of food and water would soon kill the remaining organics. A drop in global temperatures from the darkened sky would complete the blows.


Droids might be less vulnerable, but Bion knew full well that he was at risk. Radiation would linger in the ruins for centuries, perhaps millennia. Above all, they required power to function. Without a recharge he faced the long, cold slumber of the ages in a matter of days.


A cog in the security infrastructure of the energy industry, Bion had an advantage over most others lost in the ruin. His internal databanks contained the records of countless small reactors – emergency units designed to power a block, building, or factory. Nuclear in origin, they could run indefinitely. If he could find one still functional, it would sustain him.


He looked out at the landscape, chose a direction that seemed slightly more passable than the others, and set out with determination.

 

3951 BBY



The sunsets had cleared, though their reds were still vibrant in a way they had never been before. Rain had returned, though it was terribly acidic and laced with toxins and heavy metals. The temperature had rebounded, steadying at a new normal slightly below what it had once been.


Recovery was underway, even while the planet still rotted.


What little had survived to this point began to turn outward and expand into the ooze spilling out from the lost cities.


Bion endured. His reactor, secure below ground, kept him operational. The ruins provided scavenged parts, tools, and equipment for maintenance, though his armor plate was slowly transforming into a multi-hued patchwork.


There had been visitors, ships arriving on rare occasions. None had landed close by. Bion avoided these off-world scavengers, for so they must be. He had no desire to be seized, dismantled, and used as replacement parts for some other Sentinel. The off-worlders did represent the possibility of travel, of emigration from the ruins, but nowhere within Bion’s nature did he find any desire to go elsewhere.


He wandered among the ruins, slow and careful. A metal crate, made by hand, adorned his back. Though the impetus for his circuits was to guard the reactor – the one programming direction remaining to him – he always kept his sensors checking for useful salvage.


It had rained the night before, heavily. Puddles dotted the ground now, acidic enough to slowly rot durasteel. Bion chose his steps carefully to avoid them.


Beneath the cloud-covered sky he pierced the dim light to spot something new. The rain’s force had peeled away the hinges of a great metal door. The portal had been severed and fallen inward, permitting access to a once sealed building half-buried in the muck below.


Striding with care, always aware of his footing, Bion descended into the ragged opening to examine the vault beneath.


The nature of the place was easy to determine. Though cast at an off-angle, the stacks of plasteel canisters and crates, the silent shells of heavy load-lifters, and the bony remains of a pair of short-statured aliens – Ugnaughts most likely – all marked this place as a warehouse. Bion’s outlook tilted considerably more positive. The place appeared untouched, not looted by any hands.


Tags of printed flimsy had once marked the sides of each container, but corrosion had destroyed them. No outward clue betrayed the contents. Bion examined the seals, concerned for the unknown stores. Though worn, and in some places bearing the signs of insect damage, they were intact.


It was a state the droid intended to change. He carried a prybar with him, a sharpened metal hunk fashioned from the reinforced durasteel of a load-bearing girder. Now he applied it to the slumbering receptacles.


Weakened seams were unable to resist the inhuman strength of a combat droid and the robust solidity of durasteel. They yielded swiftly.


With the lid pried back, Bion stared down at a neatly stacked pile of conductors, several hundred at least. The second crate, packed similarly, contained circuit boards. These outcomes were quite hopeful.


Systematically he chopped and pried his way through the supplies. Industrial electronics components of all types gazed back when revealed to the air. Condition varied, as did the utility, but many of these things were valuable for droid maintenance.


Three quarters of the way through, dozens of boxes into the process, he found the treasure.


It was inside a canister, one a meter high and black on the outside with an anti-corrosion coating. Within was an array of tightly packed cylinders. Each was slightly longer than his hand, with enlarged stubby caps on each end sheathing a softly glowing core of blue circuitry.


Power cells. Hundreds of them.


Freedom!


Each canister represented a portable power source capable of sustaining him for weeks, perhaps months. Checking the design carefully he even suspected they could be recharged repeatedly, albeit with diminishing returns, if he could locate a supply of gas.


For five years Bion’s world had been proscribed by a fifty-hour marching radius – a boundary of endurance centered on his precious reactor. This discovery liberated him, the whole of the planetary wasteland was his to explore now. It promised a far more eventful existence.


Looking upwards through the shadows of crumbling buildings he saw flickers of green in the pale light of the setting sun; the first signs of vegetation returning to the heights. Seeing this, Bion felt renewed.


He gathered up the canister of power cells in his arms and headed home.

 

3931 BBY



The body was quadruped in shape, with long forelimbs and stubby, bent, hindlimbs. It had a large, low-slung head with a long, toothy snout, vaguely crocodilian in shape. Small eyes adorned the side of the face, but the large nostrils suggested scent was the primary means of navigating the world.


Armored on top with wide, stout scales, the body was naked on the flanks and belly, and it was there it was torn. Large slashes had been raked through the tissue there, ripping the beast open and leaving a red stain on the moss-covered plate below. Tiny insects swarmed at the edges of this ruby pool, feasting.


It was a recent kill, hours at most, perhaps much less. Bion knelt beside the body, studying it curiously. Ferrazid, he identified the creature, and was quite certain. In the pre-development era it had been among the most common of the megafauna of Taris, a broad-spectrum omnivore. In the cityscape it had been all but extinct, a creature shown in holoimages rather than flesh. These remains told a different story in the ruins, one of recovery and growth.


Bion’s memory contained pre-bombardment maps he could overlay atop the landscape. Once, this had been a rich residential sector. He suspected the Ferrazid population might have been reborn from surviving pets.


The presence of the Ferrazid was only a modest puzzle in itself. Though the population was still very small, this was not the first time Bion had observed the reptomammals. He had caught glimpses, always from a distance, for the past ten years. His confusion came instead from the kill.


The hound had been young, but full-sized, an adult. Its body appeared as healthy as any organic life might well expect in the toxic-soaked environment. He had not seen any predator capable of challenging it.


Territorial in the extreme, Ferrazids fought for mates, but the data indicated they used headbuts, not their digging claws. It could not have been a bogstalker – those creatures were the most abundant large animals, but they lacked the strength for this task. He considered the wounds against his memory of other sizable lifeforms.


Scavengers had brought Akk dogs to Taris, and feral populations were loose in some places. It was possible, but the wounds were wrong. Akk dogs had massive canine teeth, and led with them in combat. The Ferrazid's flesh lacked the large, deep punctures these would have caused. The only bite marks it bore were slender, narrow and compact rows, the sign of many needle-like teeth in a circular array. Nothing Bion had seen possessed such anatomy.


Standing, Bion wondered what predator he had missed. The mystery was invigorating. Taris’ slow and fitful recovery brought endless, continual change. This variation was the feedstock to keep his processor bright.


He walked on, probing through a cluster of fallen masonry, sensors alert, seeking any trail or sign.


There was a pool of water nearby, a basin formed out of the hopper of a wrecked garbage hauler. Yellowed grass sprouted at the edges. Insect buzzing filled the air.


Curious, Bion extended a probe into the fluid. A vast array of carcinogenic chemicals, heavy metals, and radiation by-products showed up immediately, but the levels were lower than he expected. Atmospheric recovery was accelerating.


When he stood up again he heard the shriek.


Droid memory was not malleable in the form of organic recollections. A sound, once heard, could be recognized again forever at a single exposure. Flagged with high importance, it could reroute attention with equal speed.


Bion knew the scream. He knew the throat it had issued from.


Rakghoul.


Long-dormant programs surged to life deep within Bion’s processing core. Immediately his consciousness was populated by a whole new array of overrides, imperatives, and options. These directions slammed up against twenty-five years of isolated development, paused, and then interfaced.


At a speed of thought thousands of times greater than that of any organic the wanderer of the wastes confronted his former existence as guardian of the power supply. They conflicted, weaved, and emerged as a new being, remade once more and unleashed into the ruins of Taris.


When the shriek repeated Bion’s blaster rifle, unused in decades, was in hand, armed and ready. His head swiveled on its mount, scanning, searching.


In the jagged and tumbled ruins sound would twist and bend, reflecting and echoing in myriad ways too complex to model or trace. Bion did not trust its direction, seeking instead the confirmation of motion, of the visual, photonic assurance.


From a narrow crevice formed by the imperfect collapse of two great buildings the Rakghoul leapt forth, bursting high in a lethal spring.


Gray-skinned, with ragged flesh pulled taught over hard, narrow muscle, it was hairless save for rare, elongate spikes of black keratin the length of a hand. It stood short, no more than a meter and a half in height. The posture of the thing was strange, crude. It’s head pushed forward from the shoulders, not straight upright. The face was a distortion of the humanoid design. A vast mouth filled with sharp needle teeth occupied the whole of the lower half. Atop this were a pair of central nasal slits, flattened and elliptical, one above the other. Though it had no visible eyes, only ragged crushed sockets, this did not seem to prevent it from seeing.


Long forearms hung fully to the ground, ending in enlarged hands with massive, muscular fingers topped by large nail-claws. It screamed again, revealed a broad, triangular, spittle-flecked tongue.


Bion shot it in the chest.


The ruby bolt struck dead on, leaving a black burn mark above the heart.


Pain-wracked screams burst from the Rakghoul’s throat. The hideous howl, head thrown back, set every one of Bion’s sensors quivering. The creature did not fall, but bobbed back and forth.


It lunged.


Bion shot it again, and again, tracing a series of ruby punctures along the right flank.


Eight shots, four hits, and the Rakghoul collapsed to the wet duracrete less than a step from the droid’s feet, twitching.


Blaster barrel pressed down to the nostil slits across the skull. The trigger depressed a final time.


The beast’s whole body lurched, muscles spasming as a wave of power slammed through the frame. It rose a full decimeter off the ground. Thereafter it lay still, motionless, dead.


Surveying the scene, playing it back through his memory, the droid considered the conflict. Durable and resistant to pain as Rakghouls were, five shots at close range should not have been required to kill one. The old memories suggested the first shot alone ought to have been sufficient, a clean kill. At most, two of the others would have served.


The culprit surrendered quickly to this review of possibilities. Bion raised his rifle before his optics and stared at it with a grievous foreboding of inadequacy.


Twenty-five years the weapon had lingered. A quarter century of degradation in blaster-gas potency. The equations were available to him, inevitable progressive loss of stopping power.


Kneeling by the body, Bion examined the Rakghoul, considering the case in tandem with his rifle.


Rakghouls were the enemy. It was a bold fact, but he found much beyond simple programming to support it. They were unnatural creatures, born of an artificial disease. They had no place in any ecosystem. Their presence betokened a single proper response: extermination.


He did not know how these creatures, ravenous predators, had survived. It did not matter. Where there was one there were surely many more. As the ecosystem recovered and regained robustness they would only grow in number. Filth and toxins were little threat to them. The countless humans and droids that had once confined them to the Undercity were gone.


Bion remained. He decided he would kill them.


For twenty-five years he had wandered without a purpose. Now, an old one had re-emerged. Astonishingly it had only gained validity across the gulf.

He was a Mark V Sentinel – a droid built for combat, for battle. Combat was purpose. Rakghouls were an enemy, one endless in number.


Wanderer he remained, but now each step carried direction with it.


The first task, Bion recognized, was to procure a better weapon.

 

Bion, killer of zombies rakghouls. I like the explanations of how his programming evolves in response to each new development.