Note: This story was originally posted to the GateCrashers website for Star Wars month HERE.
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, there was a droid named R2-X4, a squat astromech painted a dark, relaxing green with some stark white highlights. It was born in a batch of 40 identical siblings and sold to the Galactic Republic as repair tools in their battle cruisers. The factory would have sold them to a small traveling business, but the ever-present Clone Wars, as always, pay much, much higher.
As with all other units like it, X4 was not at all a bright intelligence. The only personality required of it was quiet efficiency, and it accomplished that in every rotation, connecting fuselages and reattaching landing gear parts.
Despite the size of X4’s assigned cruiser, the droid would never be one to explore. The cargo bay was its home and it lived a solitary existence among a battalion of worker droids, a small army of clone troopers and a cadre of military leaders. He’d be a metal ghost, until a random pilot would arrive in the bay, tapping its head and calling it “Conehead.” The droid held no feelings about the moniker. Its clicks and chirps were just as mechanical as its functions.
It never understood the appeal in performing beyond parameters, unlike some strange droids there’d be rumors about.
Sometimes, when all other droids were unavailable, the commanding officer would draft it into a spacewalk crew, which was usually made up of a clone engineer and a droid quintet.
That quiet efficiency was even quieter in the vast void of space, but the beauty of starry black vistas was lost on a droid, and the other worker droids. Even the clone engineer, a warrior capable of so much emotion and valor, considered the majesty of space as another wartime routine.
What wasn’t routine was the Separatist ambush. An enemy frigate jumped out of hyperspace and immediately started firing against the Republic cruiser. Complacent and unprepared, the soldiers and leaders within desperately scrambled to initiate a counter attack. So desperate, that they forgot to bring in the repair crew still on their spacewalk.
The engineer was the first to die. A stray laser blast from a droid fighter caused an eruption in the area on which he stood and cracked his protective suit. His body froze into a twisted fetal position. His last words were uttered only to his fellow droids, who were never the emotional sort.
What the five droids did understand though, was the importance of self-preservation. All of them screamed and glided across the ship, avoiding enemy fire and searched for any entrance back inside the ship. Their wildly swiveling heads threatened to screw up into the ether.
Out of each of them, you could say X4 itself was the most desperate. It was not because it valued its digital life, but rather because X4 fretted over his work. Should it perish, X4 believed that its replacement would absolutely fail at the tasks it accomplished with such precise regularity.
Each of the droids were born from a different mold and led different purposes, but none of them would ever “say” that they valued work. It was just their function, after all, and not the only thing they were capable of.
X4 would never know its own capabilities beyond repair, as it was the first of the droids to get destroyed. A droid starfighter, its thrusters blown out by a clone pilot, was determined to take at least one more life in its final moments of consciousness. Its dedication to the Separatist cause, pure. Its satisfaction in the Republic’s destruction, absolute.
It aimed for the droids, and crashed into a molten blaze. X4’s horribly cratered body, its legs blown off, rocketed upwards, much faster than the body of the poor engineer.
But its story didn’t end there. The green-and-white droid’s head was still connected to its body so its operating system still ran. Through a kamikaze strike, X4 transformed into a conical missile, flying so far as to escape the battle arena. No one heard its screams.
It watched as the Republic cruiser was ripped apart, a chain of explosions blew across the sides. A final flurry of torpedoes from the Separatist frigate eventually cracked the ship apart. The sight would put any normal humanoid into a deep state of despair, but with a droid like X4, it could only compute the impossible calculations it takes to repair.
With the battle lost and ended, it continued gliding through the ether. It took an entire planet’s length before its entire audio recordings were burned out.
Only when it bumped against a trashy junk ship did X4 finally “feel” something. Next, it felt the pull of a tractor beam, and gazed upwards at the blighted light that awaited.
Inside, a quiet scavenger, a lonely Weequay male, inspected the broken body of X4. In a foreign tongue, the scavenger muttered to itself, and kicked the droid across the floor. The droid could not speak or protest against such mistreatment, but after rolling down the ship and seeing all the broken-down robotic parts and severed metal heads, it would’ve chosen screams of bloody murder instead.
What was this horrible scavenger going to do, it thought to itself? Multiple scenarios ran through its decreasingly attached head, but the reality turned out to be quite simple.
X4 reached the end of the ship and went inside a particularly hot room. A smelter. A great sense of doom washed over, more intense than the heat. The green-and-white paint already felt like it was melting. Worse, empty gun and torpedo molds hung on the walls.
Not only a scavenger, this alien wanderer was also a weapons seller, and it was easy to guess what the weapons were made from. The Weequay male, staggered into the room and leaned towards the droid. With all its strength, the scavenger lifted X4’s body and placed it into the claw hanging over the forge.
Stomping towards a control panel, it pulled a lever. The room rumbled, and the claw descended.
Half-submerged into the forge pit, X4’s last “thoughts” would be the mourning of one thing. It would be so much better as a tool. R2-X4’s were made to repair spacecrafts, after all.
Months later, a Republic cruiser, vitalized with desires for vengeance, ambushed a Separatist frigate. The battle occurred in a barren section of space, where no planet or life-filled moon could witness it. The first shot fired, a metal torpedo, conical and white, with small green streaks.
Thus begins another battle in an ever-present age of war.
