The Nautolan walked through the larger entrance to one side of the spaceport, rambling the whole time. The Vulture wasn’t sure how it was supposed to respond, or even if it should be trying to.
“-which basically adds up to a load of nonsense. Droids ain’t got much brainpower ‘cause their makers aren’t willing to give them any. I mean, come on! You give something the curse of sapience and you’re not even gonna give it the spicy bits? Where’s the passion? Where’s the emotion? And don’t give me that ‘oh it’s all just chemicals, Draye, droids don’t know how to get annoyed’ because you could break your neck tripping on the lip some of my repair droids give me.”
She stared up at the Vulture, something approaching admiration in her eyes. “Now you, you’re a Separatist droid. They knew their AIs back and forth. Knew how to shackle ‘em better than anyone else. Most of you are dumb as a brick and about as creative, but you? You own yourself.”
Before the Vulture could even ask if it’d been insulted, she turned right back around and kept walking. The spaceport was well-designed, with compact areas for specific component synthesis and repair. Hangars surrounded a large quad of take-off-and-landing pads, half of which were occupied by various unfamiliar ships. Droids practically covered the floor, units from every type of station the Vulture had ever known all under one roof, serving under one purpose.
The Nautolan - The Vulture suspected her name was Draye, based on her rant - went straight for an empty hanger, gesturing for the Vulture to follow her. “So basically I’m gonna give you a nice tuneup, get rid of most of that rust, maybe help you with what’s left of your paint, and give those eyes a good dusting. You clearly ain’t got standard equipment under your hood, so if you’re alright with that I’d like to take a closer look at some of the fancier stuff you’re packing. Sound good?”
The Vulture briefly paused. It was likely that she would expect recompense of some kind, which in fairness would be in order. Repairs were not cheap, and required both time and effort, all three of which should always be rewarded. The only problem the Vulture faced was that, in a rather blunt manner, it was broke.
Draye whacked one of its legs with a calloused knuckle, snapping it out of its fugue. “Look, I ain’t gonna charge you for the tune-up. If hospitals made patients pay to get their lives saved, no one would go to-”
She came to an abrupt stop, scowled at herself, and continued. “Okay, that ain’t true anymore, but I still stand by what I say. You need repairs, bad, and I’m gonna give ‘em to you. But, if you want the deep clean and the examination and the software updating and the shields and so forth - heh, and so forth. I’m so refined. Mommy would be proud. Anyway, if you want the good stuff, you gotta agree to do me a favor.”
Draye raised her hands defensively before the Vulture could even gesture. She seemed to talk enough for both sides of the conversation. “I can promise you, right here and right now, I’m not gonna trick you into being a servant or something like that. But a droid of your size can do a whole lot of things that I can’t, and I’d sure appreciate the help. How’s that sound?”
With a little time to think, the Vulture more seriously considered her offer. Its work force was becoming less and less appealing the more it interacted with them. The boy seemed slightly unhinged and apparently viewed the Vulture as a particularly large pet, and his mother wanted nothing more than to get rid of it. With enough time, the Vulture was certain it could convince them to do what it wanted, but whether that time would be better spent on something else would remain to be seen.
Moreover, it badly needed repairs. Several of its joints didn’t quite extend as far as they were supposed to, and there wasn’t a square inch on its body that didn’t have at least a small amount of rust on it. The warehouse had been built near the coastline for some inane reason - definitely not the logic of its creators - which meant that saltwater had accrued all over it. In other words, it was not exactly in the best condition of its time.
Satisfied with its impeccable logic, the Vulture gave Draye a cautious nod. She beamed up at it. “Fantastic, I’ll get you started on the deep cleaning.”
Leading it over to an empty hangar, she began directing various droids well-equipped with cleaning tools over to the Vulture. A pair of heavy loader droids began wheeling scaffolds over, and a group of labor droids went to work with sanders and lubricants on the base of the Vulture’s limbs.
Meanwhile, Draye climbed up one of the Vulture’s legs, careful not to stick her fingers in any wiring, and straddled the back of its head. “Hey, this bit’s gonna hurt like all heck. Is it alright with you if I turn you off for a bit?”
The Vulture immediately shook its head. No one present, and possibly no one alive, had the proper clearance required to deactivate the Vulture, no matter how temporarily that might be.
She winced. “I don’t think you get how much you’re not gonna like this. I know you don’t have pain receptors - or at least I don’t think you do - but there’ll be bits of you spazzing out for a solid ten minutes at least. I gotta check on your communications center, and that’s buried under a whole crapload of higher functions and motor corteces. Do you understand?”
The Vulture nodded in immediate reply, almost chucking Draye off in the process. Once she’d gotten herself in a more secure position, she apologetically told it, “Okay, just don’t get mad. I did warn you.”
With that, she shoved her fingers under the back of the Vulture’s head, and psych suppression promptly turned everything off.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
When it booted up once again, it found itself still in the hangar. Several droids were still cleaning it off, although they were much higher on its legs than they had been only moments before.
It could feel Draye sitting behind its head. She must have felt it flinch, because she began talking the moment it booted up.
“Good to see you active again. I thought you were dead at first. I, uh, I repaired everything you needed to get fixed, but… Well, I thought you’d have a voice synth to fix, and… you don’t. At all.”
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That did not come as much of a surprise to the Vulture. Part of it had fully expected something along those lines. If it didn’t remember having one and it didn’t have the necessary code to use one, it only seemed logical that it lacked one to start with.
She still seemed concerned about it. “So, since there wasn’t anything to fix, I went ahead and put one in.”
The Vulture nearly broke something trying to turn around and look at her, outraged. She had tampered with its creators’ designs!?
Draye held on, shouting, “Calm down! What’s the matter!?”
Taking a step backward in its wrath, the Vulture’s leg snagged on a scaffold and it tripped. Keeling over backward, the Vulture seemed to fall in slow motion, scrabbling at the smooth floor in a vain effort to obtain traction.
It didn’t find it.
The giant droid crashed to the ground and felt its armoring wheeze under the impact. Draye was thrown off of its head and tumbled to the floor, rolling to break the fall. Several droids rushed to her aid, ignoring the Vulture.
Somehow managing to pull its legs beneath it, the Vulture regained its footing and stood tall, looming over the insolent Nautolan who had tampered with its designs. She stared up at it, defiant and frightened. The expression triggered something within the Vulture.
Why was it upset?
A reasonless explanation thundered forth, anger fueling its speed, but logic cooled it almost instantly.
Draye had intended to repair it. With the function she was planning to fix missing, she had instead added it. There was no other way to do so than to modify the Vulture’s inner workings.
A third wave of defensiveness reared at the very thought, and the Vulture seized upon its source. A subroutine, one so subtle and in the background that the Vulture had never bothered to look at it, vomiting aggression into its systems every time it considered the thought of personal modification.
Before the subroutine could activate again, the Vulture froze it and considered its purpose from a more objective standpoint. Its creators must have installed it, but why? To prevent outside manipulation? To halt enemy research?
The reason became clear all at once. Vulture droids were dangerous and powerful, but their insides were more fragile. It would be best for everyone if nobody could repair Vulture droids except for their designers.
The logic of loyalty wavered, struggling to maintain confidence in the irrational conclusion. It held, and the Vulture returned to the present.
Draye stared up at it, wide-eyed, and suddenly found her words. “What in Glee Anselm was that for!? I could’ve broken - heck, you could’ve broken something! I fixed you! We - we had a deal!”
The Vulture stared down at the hassled Nautolan, thinking. It lacked the code required to use the voice synth properly, but it could still feel the new technology sitting on the outside of its perception like a grafted limb. It couldn’t feed thoughts to it and expect full sentences to flow out of it, but it could probably force words into it with some effort.
Draye probably wanted an apology. It was a familiar concept to the droid. If organics feelings were damaged, they needed affirmation from the offending party that the offense was unintentional. Whether the offender actually believed such a thing often seemed to be irrelevant. In this case, oddly enough, the Vulture felt that an apology might be aptly warranted. She had done good work, she had been respectful, and she had been efficient. It had not returned that respect very well.
With that in mind, it lowered its main body, angled its legs in such a way that its head was bowed, and bluntly uttered, “APOLOGIES.”
There was protocol to making amends. Organics often saw a lowered head as a sign of great respect, a symbol of offering one’s weakest point in submission. The Vulture was well aware that it was in no danger and that the Nautolan couldn’t actually damage it if she wanted to, but if it could present itself in such a way that she felt it was attempting to be vulnerable, it would almost certainly be an easier accepted apology.
Its theory proved correct. Her tan face tinged red, and she sheepishly rubbed at the back of her neck with a callused hand. “Well,” She muttered, suddenly unable to look directly at the Vulture. “It’s alright. Just be careful, I ain’t as tough as you.”
The Vulture conceded the point with an affirmative blip. Words were tough, and it wanted to reserve them for when it had to.
That, and using the grafted technology just felt wrong.
With a muted bang, the doors opposite the hangars flew open, and a familiar pair of Twi’leks walked in. Zeh’tocu looked concerned and his mother (who the Vulture somehow still didn’t know the name of) had a stormy expression. “You!” She shouted at Draye, clearly aggrieved. “You stole my droid!”
“Yeah!” Zeh’tocu cut in, partially hiding behind his mother as he realized just how many droids were in the shipyard.
Draye’s face went from forgiving to furious in a fraction of a second. “Who let you in!? This is a droid-only zone!”
Both women came face to face with each other, neither willing to budge over the other.
“You sure don’t look like a droid to me!”
“I’m the carkin’ engineer here, how do you think shipyards work!?”
“How is that my problem? Besides, you stole my droid!”
“I didn’t steal crap, ye baay shfat! That thing came in here all on its own and if you think you’re takin’ it right after I almost killed myself fixing the thing, you’ve got another thing coming!”
Zeh’tocu snuck around the irate women, beaming up at the Vulture with a smile. “C’mon Vulty, let’s go!”
The Vulture found itself in the extraordinarily common and indescribably frustrating situation of needing to make a decision. It could either go with the Twi’lek livestock farmers, who admittedly lived much closer to the Separatist warehouse… or stay with the well-equipped engineer with an army of droids who knew how to give it repairs.
On second thought, it wasn’t much of a decision.
Staring down at the young Twi’lek boy, it flatly stated, “NO.”
His face lit up in excitement. “You can ta- wait, what?”
Draye and the Twi’lek woman both stopped their argument to look over. Zeh’tocu put a hand on the Vulture’s leg, pleading, “But - I thought we were friends!”
Draye let out a loud snort. “Kid, military droids don’t do friends. Just allies with benefits. Do you really think you can offer a droid of that size anything it wants?”
Zeh’tocu’s face fell. “But…”
The Twi’lek woman walked over, pulling her son away with a pointed glare aimed in Draye’s direction. “I’m going to talk to you later, got it? This is not over.”
Both Vulture and Nautolan watched the pair leave, and then Draye looked up at it with a giant smile. Instead of saying anything, she started heading off to another door marked ‘Shove Off’, talking to herself in a singsong voice. “I got better benefits, I got better benefits~...”
The Vulture continued to observe the crazy Nautolan as she nearly danced into the room before shutting the door. With her gone, it turned to the other droids in the shipyard, who pointedly didn’t look at it.
They had loyalty, it gave them that.