The Vulture watched the droid sanding the rust off the tip of its forward left leg. It was the only spot that still needed buffing, and then Draye could start on the paint. It was also by far the worst section.

It could tell the cleaning droid was beginning to get nervous. It wasn’t sure what to do to fix that, so it just kept doing what it was doing. Namely, keeping a very close eye on it.

Draye walked over, releasing a sharp whistle with her fingers stuck in her mouth. “Yo, Vulture! Remember that favor I wanted you to help me with?”

The Vulture partially turned, expressionlessly facing the Nautolan as the droid on its leg kept working. With some effort, it gave her an affirmative ping, and she laughed.

“You really don’t like using your voice, eh? Ah well, some people aren’t as chatty as me. Anyway, it’s, uh… It’s a bit bigger of a favor than I’d thought.”

That aroused its attention. The droid on its leg nearly fell off as the Vulture fully faced Draye, clutching on for dear life. The Vulture ignored it.

“EXPLAIN.”

Draye held up both hands, forestalling any further protest. “Before you complain, I did a really good job fixing you up. The droids need maintenance, the tools need oiling, scaffolds gotta be moved, the hangar’s in use. There’s a whole lot that I could be charging you for, just saying.”

The Vulture summoned an enormous amount of willpower and spoke once again, this time with even more volume. “EXPLAIN.”

“Okay, tone it down a little!” She shouted, covering her ears. “I just need some junk!”

The Vulture cocked its head. In exchange for repairs… she wanted junk?

Draye rubbed the back of her neck. “Look, there’s a junker currently in orbit over M’e Odata. It’s some higher-end materials on there that I can’t get anywhere else, namely a load of faulty hyperspace engines. You wouldn’t believe how much just one of those costs, and I could sure use the components. I’ll rig you up with a smallish tractor beam, you head up, break through the shields, grab the engines, you’ll be back before anyone knows what happened. Best part is, since you’re unpainted, you’ll be unidentifiable. You give me the engines, I give you a paint job, we go our separate ways and no one knows a thing. Sound good?”

It stared at her flatly, thinking.

That was it?

It gave her a nod, and she pumped her fist with a grin. “Yes! Thank you! Woo! Man, I’m gonna eat fancy tonight. You want any…? Nah, you don’t do food. Finish up with the sanding and I’ll give you the full details.”

With that, she walked off, swaying from side to side in an odd celebratory dance. The Vulture silently came to the conclusion that there were always going to be things about organics that it would never understand, and that this was definitely one of them.

The droid hanging onto its leg, realizing that the Vulture was done moving around, tentatively resumed its work. Several other droids who had been observing lost interest and went away. A pair of Pykes watching the interaction hastily looked the other way when they noticed it saw them.

This place, the Vulture decided, was very odd. It had angry farmers and crazy engineers, little to no Separatist support, the barest minimum of law upholding, and a startling amount of weapons on hand.

It did not like oddities. They made it difficult for orders to be carried through. An oddity was often a wrench thrown into a well-crafted plan (made by someone else), an anomaly to be catalogued and acknowledged and fixed.

Without the orders of its creators guiding it, the Vulture was uncertain whether it was an oddity itself or not. A droid without a master was unthinkable, almost literally. It needed orders like organics needed air.

Contemplations aside, it took Draye's favor into consideration. Would it be wise to commit what some would consider a crime? She didn't seem concerned about local authorities, which implied either that they were lax in their duties, that they didn't exist, or that she had paid them off.

Or, now that the Vulture thought about it, it was very possible she genuinely didn't care one way or the other. It was an astonishing feat of will that she could ignore problems like that without even hesitating on the decision-making process.

Perhaps that was something it could learn from her, provided it stayed.

Once the droid was done sanding, Draye came back out and began passing orders off to her workers. The shipyard turned into a hive of activity within minutes, busily moving from place to place, and more than a few making their way over to the Vulture.

Draye waved at it to get its attention. “Okay, droid! We’re gonna slap a tractor beam on the underside of your headpiece with magnetic clamps and hook it up with a surface connector. Whole thing’s easy to put on, easy to remove. No permanent changes this time, I know you don’t like those. Once you get the hyperdrives, turn the beam onto maintain and head back here. Go fast and feel free to use those guns of yours if the security triggers - which it will, by the way.”

She paused, ticking off her fingers, and then snapped. “Right! Don’t worry about casualties, the parts where the crew sits at is pretty heavily armored. It’s supposed to take hits from stray meteors, so it should be able to hold up against your blasters. Try not to hit any droids.”

The Vulture hadn’t been worried about casualties at any point during the plan, but it did find it interesting that Draye seemed to value synthetic life on an equal level with organic. It felt like it was an odd mindset to have, considering she was herself an organic.

Her droids did what she told them to do, with only a few blips and beeps of clarification on getting the tractor beam perfectly centered on the Vulture’s underside. Misplacing it even slightly could throw off the aerodynamacy of the droid. It suspected this was a sort of ‘hit-and-run’ job, which meant it would have to be as fast as possible.

Draye rubbed her hands together. She was a remarkably animated person, the Vulture noted, always moving and twisting and clapping with her head-tentacles in constant motion. How much food did she have to eat to maintain a reasonable level of energy?

“Okay, I’ll send you the coordinates for the junker right… now.”

Three numbers appeared in the Vulture’s view, and it committed them to memory with a glance. Draye grinned up at it. “Got ‘em?”

The Vulture nodded in reply. Her face screwed up in confusion. “Wait, why didn’t you just - is your voice synth broken already!?”

“NO.” It stated flatly.

She stared at it. “You - I gave you a - and you don’t even want to…?”

Shaking her head, she threw her hands in the air and groaned, “Ah, who am I to tell you when to talk. You ready?”

The Vulture got its limbs into flight gear, and Draye slapped her head. “Right, almost forgot. The ship is a government ship and is therefore technically owned by the New Republic, so be careful.”

A slight creak rang through the shipyard as the Vulture sharply regarded Draye, its recently refurbished neck joints complaining at the sudden movement. Without further thought, it took off and started heading upward.

The tractor beam added more drag than it’d hoped for, providing a constant and helpful distraction from the Vulture’s own thoughts.

It was raiding a Republic ship?

Despite its inability to feel anything greater than annoyance, the Vulture considered itself to be quite excited for the heist. Any damage it could do to the Republic would further the Separatist faction. Every little bit helped. Deserts were made out of many grains of sand, but put together formed formidable landmasses; in much the same way, a thousand small strikes to the supply chain would cripple anything when put together.

The Vulture tilted backward, gaining altitude faster and faster. The horizon of Todhar peeled away, almost seeming to rotate around the droid instead of the other way around.

As it left the ground further behind, the temperature gradually began dropping, and the clouds whipping past its head became thinner. By now it was moving almost perpendicular to the ground far below. Ignoring its speed, the Vulture was keeping a close eye on its fuel charge. If it ran out of fuel outside orbit, the consequences would be disastrous.

Several thoughts cascaded one after the other through the Vulture’s mind. If it was stranded in space, it would eventually crash into something. If it crashed, it would cease to work and would functionally die. If it died, then the Separatists died with it.

Its flight path wobbled as it arrived at that conclusion. This trip was undoubtedly a mistake. Why had it agreed to do this for the Nautolan!? It should have thought of something else, demanded a different favor from her. The Separatists’ entire existence hinged on the continued survival of one droid! By any application of logic the Vulture had to survive! If it wanted to survive then it could not run out of fuel!

Just before it decided to turn around and head for safety, it left the atmosphere and the coordinates for the junker appeared.

It wasn’t even five minutes away.

The Vulture floated in space for a precious few seconds, taking a brief moment to wonder if perhaps had a problem with overthinking.

Realizing the irony of such an issue, the Vulture stopped thinking about thinking and took off towards the marked coordinates. As promised, it didn’t take long to find the long blocky shape squatting above the planet. As with most ships of its purpose, the creators of the junker hadn’t bothered adding a retractable roof and had instead installed simple shielding. Who would go to the trouble of breaking through a shield on a government ship just to get some junk?

The Vulture had an answer to that.

For the first time since its reawakening, the Vulture took careful aim and opened fire. All eight of its blasters unloaded with mechanical precision onto each shield projector. It flickered, dying in seconds as an unnecessary amount of firepower struck its sources. A pair of turrets rose from the back end of the junker, and they were reduced to slag in as many moments.

Slowing its momentum, the Vulture came to a stop as its legs slammed into the side of the junker, jarring both. Shaking the impact off, it carefully looked over the randomly assorted cargo on the junker.

The ship bore easily ten thousand square feet of cargo space, and all of it was occupied. The Vulture had no idea whether the Junker had some sort of emergency system, but it was not in the mood to make such a discovery.

The hyperdrives hardly stuck out, and they weren’t even all in the same place. It took the Vulture a full six minutes to identify each one and use the tractor beam to pull it in. Once acquired, the hyperdrives awkwardly hung below the Vulture’s main body like some kind of hideous graft. Its superiors would have been apoplectic.

Striving to ignore the hypothetical fury of its creators, the Vulture pushed off the junker and started heading back to Todhar, leaving the crippled junker behind. It had engines, it would be fine. And if it wasn’t fine, well, that was hardly its problem.

The Vulture couldn’t help the smug thought that the operation had gone so smoothly and quickly. Nothing had gone wrong, and no one would ever know that it had been here.

No one, of course, except for the string of New Republic data servers that were receiving damage logs and theft recordings from the junker’s blackbox.