The Vulture wheeled over Draye’s shipyard, careful not to disturb anything below it. She waved her arms wildly, shouting something it couldn’t hear at all, and it slowly came to a stop with the hyperdrives hanging below it.

Heavy loaders came forward, pulling wheeled scaffolding along with them to allow easy access to the devices. The hyperdrives were unloaded in short order, along with the tractor beam and connector. The Vulture undeniably felt better without their hideous grafts hanging off its underside, but the tool had been helpful. Necessary, in fact.

Draye squinted at the hyperdrives with a frown, silently counting. “You missed one!”

The Vulture wordlessly stared at the Nautolan, and she looked right back into its eyes. “What? I mean, sure, you got ‘em. Thanks. But you did miss one.”

It headed back to the hangar it’d been using. Draye shouted after it, “You did! What am I supposed to do, lie? You want me to lie? I can do that if you want me to!” Throwing her arms in the air, she turned and stomped off to work on one of the ships awaiting her assistance.

Pausing by the scaffolding, it glared at the repurposed IG unit standing by. “PAINT.”

The IG unit folded its arms. “No.”

The Vulture found itself somewhat taken aback. It hadn’t expected a reply like that, especially not from another droid. Moreover, the IG line had been bodyguards for high-ranking Separatist officials back when there were officials that were still alive. Logically, it should be more than happy to assist a fellow droid.

Wondering if perhaps it had miscommunicated, it hesitantly repeated, “...PAINT?”

The IG’s head rotated from side to side in a negative gesture that it clearly only knew to do from imitation. “No. You do not respect Draye.”

The Vulture stared at the IG unit, entirely uncertain of what to do with that information. Of course it didn’t respect Draye. She wasn’t a Separatist and she wasn’t a droid. Only one of those could be fixed, and it doubted she had any plans on joining its side soon.

The IG stared up at the Vulture. “Draye Dreydledel prefers droids to organics. She repairs us. Allows us to stay. Renews us with purpose. You do not respect her. So we refuse to respect you. We paint you only if she tells us to. She did not tell us to paint you. We will not paint you.”

The Vulture looked through the IG unit, its inner workings running in loops as it tried to figure out how it was supposed to respond to that.

A stab of suspicion struck it. What if this was an alternate program running in IG hardware? It would explain why its possible Separatist origins weren’t helping it along.

Settling into a more aggressive stance, the Vulture ordered, “IDENTIFY.”

“I am IG-1T. Identify yourself.”

The Vulture froze.

Identify itself? An instant passed, a horrible instant where it tried to come up with an answer to give the droid and found nothing. There was nothing. Whatever had occurred to it after the battle that had downed it had removed more than simply a few chunks of memory. The Vulture’s very identity had been reduced to implications, impressions of who it should have been and what kind of soldier it was supposed to be.

How was it supposed to be a Separatist droid if it didn’t what kind of droid it was!? The only word that it even vaguely could recall that was attached to itself was Vulture. That was no name, anymore than Protocol Droid or Gonk. Which meant… it was essentially a blank slate.

Would it be easy for someone to override it? Would it be a quick ego death if someone supplanted the Vulture with a name not its own? Would it even matter!?

It was torn out of its confusion by a sharp tap on its side. Draye stood beneath it, a complicated expression on her face. “Yo, Vulture. You’ve been standing there for a while now. Iggit said he asked you a question and you just kinda stopped talking. You good?”

The Vulture stared down at her, an idea sparking into existence. Draye had fiddled with its internals. If anyone knew where its name was located, it would be her! A serial number, a factory code, anything!

And all at once, the hope crashed. Draye still called it Vulture. It had not introduced itself, and she hadn’t bothered asking for a name. If there had been anything inside it acting as an identifier, she would have found it. The fact that she wasn’t… meant nothing was there.

How was it supposed to spread the Separatist idealogy if the only surviving member of the Separatists didn’t know its own name!?

Draye whacked one of its legs. “Hey! Vulture! Why do you keep doing that?”

The Vulture felt uneasy. “WHAT?”

An extraordinary series of expressions flashed across Draye’s face in order. Confusion, shock, concern, fear, dismay, and quite a few the Vulture didn’t know how to identify. IG-1T - Iggit, she’d called him? - stood right behind her. There were few ships in the hangars at the moment, and the sun was approaching the horizon, tinting the world in shades of orange and gold.

The Nautolan took a deep breath. “Vulture,” she carefully started. “Are you familiar with disengagement decision syndrome?”

The Vulture paused, but eventually shook its head. Draye winced. “Okay.”

She sat down, folding her hands in her lap. “Okay. This is complicated. But basically, disengagement decision syndrome has a small chance of occurring in very very old droids, usually ones that haven’t been booted in a while. It reprioritizes certain capabilities, mental capabilites, over motor functions. It comes as a result of the droid’s inner workings attempting to preserve mental stability for as long as possible. Do you… do you get what I’m saying?”

The Vulture shook its head once more, and Draye sighed. “It means that if you stop to think about a problem, you stop. You stop moving, you stop processing, you stop acknowledging everything outside of your immediate thoughts. With grounded droids, it could be worse. Most they can do is fall over. With a flying droid… well, it could crash. You could crash.”

Several pieces fell into place, prior information that the Vulture had acquired slotting into all the right places to form a very wrong picture.

Draye held her hands up defensively before the Vulture could appropriately react. “Now obviously that’s not a good thing! If I’d known that you had it I never would have sent you up for that job.”

Looming over the frazzled Nautolan, the Vulture grated out, “FIX.”

“I can’t!” She threw her hands up in the air, frustration leaking out of her voice. “If I knew how to fix it - if anyone knew how to fix it, it wouldn’t be a problem! But I…”

She trailed off and sat, her legs almost giving out as she half-collapsed onto a trunk. Iggit cautiously patted her back. “I can’t fix it,” she hoarsely told the Vulture. “I’ve lost so many droids to it. They go into traffic, visit a ship, even just go outside, and I… can’t do anything.”

The Vulture did not like that answer. It didn’t like knowing that it had a problem, it didn’t like having to acknowledge the problem, and it was rather rapidly starting to dislike Draye. It was an irrational dislike, of that much it was aware, but Draye was the one who had brought the issue to the Vulture’s attention and it much preferred when it didn’t know.

Separatist droids were perfection. They were cunning, ruthless, obedient, intelligent, and dangerous. They were not flawed!

It couldn’t harm Draye, it only just left being in debt to her a few minutes ago. It couldn’t harm Iggit, because he was Draye’s servant! What was it supposed to do?!

The answer became very suddenly, sharply clear.

The greatest duty a Separatist droid could perform… was to battle the Republic.

So it would perform that duty. It would find Republic ships, one by one, and blast them to smithereens until nothing and no one would have any choice but to acknowledge the superiority and power of the Separatist fleet!

It strode towards the open center of the shipyard, eyeing the sky. It didn’t notice Draye frantically gesture to Iggit, and it didn’t see the IG unit seize some kind of giant gun.

The Vulture definitely noticed when Iggit fired the pulse cannon, turning off every single system all at once. The last thing it saw was Draye sprinting towards it, concern plastered across her backstabbing face.

It resolved to kill her when it woke up.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Draye placed a hand on the inactive Vulture droid, tears leaving dusty tracks on her face. Iggit ran up behind her, still wielding the pulse cannon. “Are we to dismantle it?”

She shook her head, trembling hands clenched into fists. “No. But I’m not letting another droid go and get itself killed.”

Turning to her crew, she bellowed, “Ground the Vulture! Make sure it can’t go.”

As droids began to haul the Vulture into a hangar, Draye told it with an inflection of steely resolve in her voice, “I’m going to save you, droid. Whether you like it or not.”