The Ends of Ambition

Turpi Gundo couldn't sleep. The squib had tossed and turned in her bunk for half the night, feeling the ache of decades in her bones, and the insult of fresh muscle strains from today's fruitless labor. Two entire shifts devoted to tearing down the control core of her mining crawler, and countless trips through its grease-stained innards, and she still couldn't track down the glitch in the massive droid's primitive brain. For some reason, it kept failing to adjust to temperature variances on a deep drill, and would just stop, shut down, and lock her out of the override protocols without so much as a warning light. Then it would truculently demand a drill-shaft inspection before it would release the safeties. The shaft always came up intact, and her bits were just about new, so Turpi knew there was nothing wrong down there. She couldn't decide if the primitive intellect was just stubborn, stupid, or both.

She threw the coverlet aside and hopped out of her bunk, nimbly avoiding the clutter of half-completed engineering projects. She went out onto the catwalk that jutted from her makeshift quarters and looked out over the bleak, windswept tundra from the sixth level of her mobile petrochem drill-crawler. Ranjahr was hauntingly beautiful at night, her desolate plains glowed dull orange under a necklace of ruddy moons. The wind was cold, but the monolithic bulk of her home protected her from the worst of the it, and her thick blue-gray fur from the rest. The sensitive olfactory organs in her fur scented the crisp night air, tinged with the tang of petrochems. Off to her right, a dim glow on the horizon marked where Ranjahr's lone city stood, some two-hundred kilometers away to the southeast.

The wind shifted, blowing from the direction of the city, and she tasted something else on the wind. Smoke? Turpi saw a flash of light in the south-eastern sky -- a strobe of red and blue. Her eyes scanned the heavens, and directly above, there were more pulses of colored light. Could there be another battle?Turpi frowned. There hadn't been anything like that since the Empire had moved in on the Federation. The light show continued. There had to be more to it than the Imps chasing some hapless smuggler.

She watched for a few moments more, then cursing her failing memory, realized she had a pair of macro-binocs hanging next to her bunk. Turning to get them, she suddenly scented a tang of ozone and heard the plink plink of something heavier than wind-blown sand raining against her crawler. Ducking inside the hatch, she watched with wide dark eyes and several half-meter chunks of debris caromed violently off the hull and back into the night. Then it was quiet.Turpi risked stepping out onto the catwalk, and eyes on the sky above, she nearly tripped on a spherical hunk of metal at her feet, still spinning madly from the impact.

She nudged it with her foot carefully, but it was cool to the touch. The hairs on her toes informed her that it reeked of burnt tibanna gas. So there was a fight going on up there. The squib reached for the debris, gingerly cradling it in her palms. It was a droid's head -- a sleek, well machined mask, utterly ruined by blaster fire. She turned it side to side, noting the smashed left photo-receptor, the cracks in the durasteel plating that ran from that wound. It was clearly the head of some form of battle droid, probably a Magnaguard series, if Turpi recalled her Sep-built machinery correctly. But despite the damage, the inner brain casing seemed to be intact. The aged squib thrilled to the prospect of salvaging the rest of the broken droid bits around her crawler and rebuilding it. She could use an extra pair of hands around these days-- she couldn't handle things by herself like she used to.

But a better idea occured to Turpi just then. If she could get at the logic circuits inside that brain casing, she might be able to use the heuristic processors to bypass the bottleneck in her crawler's damaged regulators. She might improve production as much as 23%, and with the credits earned, buy herself a labor droid for all that heavy lifting. All thoughts of sleep and the mysterious battle above her vanquished,Turpi dashed back inside, and down the ladder towards the central core. If she started now, she'd be able to get the crawler working the Sesstrom ridge by first light, mid-day at the latest.

There'd be plenty of time to sleep later....