Ayli didn’t crash into her friend Bopo’s home. Smashing through the front door and causing several thousand credits of property damage did not, necessarily, mean that she had “crashed” into Bopo’s house. 

Especially since what awaited them more than justified the destruction they brought with them.

Archivist Bopo was an older Galruxian, an offshoot species from the Rodians. She had gone back to pursue an academic career after working in starship manufacturing for the first several decades of her life. In her time as a researcher, she hadn’t lost an appreciable amount of the muscle mass she’d developed hauling ship components around, which made it all the more concerning to see her struggling to break free of the grip of the Hunter-Killer droid which had her gripped by the neck.

Ayli could have wasted time trying to reason, or threaten, or plead for Bopo’s life, but none of those held even the slightest chance of success.

So she threw her lightsaber.

It wasn’t entirely unreasonable. She’d suspected that Paralus would move against Bopo based on the fact that Bopo was Ayli’s primary connection on the planet. That Paralus’ droid accomplice would use Bargus Brell’s HK droid to do its dirty work was also more or less a given, since that’s what HK droids were built for.

There was still a chance that negotiations could have produced a peaceful resolution – Paralus was likely to have some demands he intended to make if nothing else.  Crashing through the doors however bought Ayli a moment of surprise that she couldn’t afford to waste.

The HK droid had a machine’s response time to dangers which lay within its prediction algorithms domain. Rather than dodging the flying laser sword, the HK unit simply swung Bopo around as a shield.

Which Ayli had anticipated it might do because, while she did not have machine reflexes, she could hear the warnings in the Force, and she could see what the obvious counter to her attack was. By giving the HK something it thought it could respond to though, Ayli ensured it would stay in position, which let her close the gap to it with a Force assisted leap.

Calling her saber back to her hand before it could strike Bopo wasn’t hard. Her hand was where it was meant to be. Unfortunately the HK unit saw the change in Ayli’s attack while she was mid-leap and it had weapon systems to spare.

Monfi swatted the first blaster bolt away before it could hit Ayli, and she caught the second on her blade.

The HK switched to jets of flame, but Ayli had the velocity to dive under it’s arc and take its left leg off at the knee joint.

Despite its heightened response time, there wasn’t any argument it could make against gravity pulling it to the ground, which dropped both it and Bopo on top of Ayli.

Acting as a cushion for Bopo wasn’t the worse thing in the galaxy, but the HK unit was significantly heavier than it looked.

Ayli had shut her lightsaber off when she dodged under the flame stream to avoid hitting Bopo by mistake. As the HK unit spun two of it’s chest lasers at her though, Ayli flicked the blade back to life, plunging it through the the HK’s central chassis. 

She wasn’t sure where it kept it’s memory banks, but she did know which compartment was the only one large enough to house its power supply.

With a Force assisted kick, she flung the inert carcass of the HK off herself and Bopo before the minor explosion in it’s chest reduced it to a pile of very expensive rubble.

“Y…yo…you…” Bopo tried to choke out, finding it understandably difficult to speak after being held aloft by her throat.

“It’s okay,” Ayli said. “We’ll get you out of here to somewhere safe.”

“I think she’s trying to tell us there’s a problem with that,” Monfi said, a pair of blasters in his hands.

“Indeed,” a chorus of mechanized voices said in perfect unison.

Ayli looked away from Bopo, following her friend’s wide-eyed look of terror to find at least a dozen more HK units emerging from doorways and alcoves, each with a clear shot at herself, Bopo, and Monfi.

Against one assassin droid, Ayli hadn’t felt too uncertain. Even before she’d learned to use the Force she’d encountered one of them and they weren’t as impossible to outfight as their reputation suggested. Against a dozen assassin droids, Ayli also didn’t feel much uncertainty, though for very different reasons.

“I am supposed to thank you for accepting my invitation,” the mechanized voice said. “I am also to instruct you that you are to surrender yourself, or this person, and everyone else you know and care about will pay the price.”

“Who am I surrendering to?” Ayli asked, inwardly groaning that they’d entered a negotiation phase despite her best efforts.

Not that negotiations were a bad idea in general. Negotiations were a fantastic thing when the parties involved each had a reason to seek an end to their hostilities. When it came to resolving differences between two parties who each believed themselves to be the aggrieved one, entering negotiations as soon as possible was always the best move.

The controller of the HK droids did not wish to resolve its conflict with Ayli any more than the Imperial Officers she’d stared at down the barrel of a blaster had ever been interested in pursuing justice. These negotiations were about asserting control and maneuvering to be sure Ayli didn’t have any counter plans in play, while she tried to buy what time she could and look for an opportunity to swing things back in her favor.

With over twelve HK units holding target locks on her though, Ayli didn’t need Force visions to show her those opportunities were going to be largely figments of her imagination.

“You are surrendering to overwhelming firepower,” the mechanized voice said.

“That’s a ‘what’, not a ‘who’,” Ayli said.

“Correct,” the mechanized voice said.

“Okay then Overpowering, why am I surrendering to you?” Ayli asked.

“The alternative is death,” the mechanized voice said.

Ayli laughed.

“Oh, sorry there, that one’s not going to cut it. Please try again,” Ayli said.

“Surrender or you will die, and your companions will die as well,” Overpowering said.

“Nope, see that’s not how this works,” Ayli said. “The choice you’re giving me is to either die here and do some damage to you in the process, or wait and die later after you’ve been able to get something that you want. There’s no logic in surrendering under those conditions, and you know that. So, like a good little machine, why don’t you play back the instructions you’ve been given to convince me to do what your master commanded you to get me to do.”

Ayli hadn’t been certain that she’d be able to provoke Overpowering but the blaster bolt one of the HK units fired at Bopo told her she had managed to hit a nerve. She felt almost as proud of that as she did bouncing the bolt back at the offending droid to send it toppling headless to the floor.

One down, lots left to go.

“Surrender now and you, and you alone, will be brought back to the one who seeks you,” Overpowering said. Ayli was intrigued that it hadn’t said ‘my master’ or anything of the sort. 

That Overpowering was an unfettered machine intelligence was horrifyingly obvious, but Ayli had still expected it to bow to the one who was really calling the shots, especially since ‘that one’ was a Dark Side Lich and Dark Siders were egomaniacs, the lot of them.

“Okay. Excellent. Now we have something to work with,” Ayli said. “My answer is no.”

“Then you will die.”

“Uh uh, not so fast,” Ayli said. “You haven’t asked me why my answer is no.”

“Your reasons do not matter. You will die,” Overpowering said.

“I think they rather do matter.” Ayli knew she couldn’t talk any of them out of the situation, but buying time meant buying hope and that she could definitely do. “Your orders are to bring me back. As a corpse might be a viable alternative but alive is the preference.”

“Preferences can change,” Overpowering said.

“They can. Mine are quite flexible in fact,” Ayli said. “But you still haven’t asked me why my answer is ‘no’.”

“Your reasons are immaterial. Surrender or be destroyed.”

“Again, your programming is coming up just a bit short.” Ayli knew that Overpowering wasn’t a droid, and if there was one thing the other unfettered machine intelligence she knew hated, it was when people assumed the limitations of a droid applied to them as well.

“I am superior to you by all measures.” Which was the kind of thing an entity would say when it had been told since it’s creation that it was nothing more than a tool.

“You need some help with understanding people still though,” Ayli said. “See, you’re not threatening me with death and destruction. That’s a given no matter what choice I make. The choice you’re offering is whether the people with me will be part of that death and destruction or not.”

“Yes. Exactly.”

“Which is why I have to say ‘no’. Because while you’ve made that offer, its purely empty words, and there’s no trust relationship between us which you can call upon to support your claim.”

“There can be no trust between us.” Overpowering seemed confused by why the concept had even arisen in the conversation.

“Sure there can,” Ayli said. “You can establish an easy trust bridge by letting these two go.”

“Ayli, what are you doing? Don’t be stupid girl,” Bopo said. 

“I’m not. I brought this trouble to your door, or what’s left of it. Let me take it away too.”

“Your friend can go,” Monfi said. “I have a vested interest in seeing how this plays out.”

Because if he was with her, his partner could follow them. 

It wasn’t a bad plan.

Ayli was terribly interested in having Horizon Knight blood on her hands, but she also knew Nix would kill her if she turned down backup when it was offered, especially since alone she really was likely to wind up dead.

“I’m sorry, in what galaxy do you think I‘m going to watch a bunch of bolt buckets walk one of my friends off to her death?” Bopo said. “I’m not going anywhere.”

Because, of course she wasn’t.

Ayli wasn’t sure why that surprised her. Bopo had always been a sensible sort, with a knack for somehow still making the worst decisions Ayli had ever seen. 

Somehow that reminded Ayli of Nix, which left her questioning if she had a preferred personality type she liked to associate with and what that said about her.

“It seems I am in need of an alternate means of persuasion,” Overpowering said as glaring red floodlights streamed in through the windows from outside. A deep and multi-harmonic rumbling accompanied the lights.

“I recognize those engines,” Boppo said. “That’s an Assassin-class Corvette out there!”

The Assassin-class Corvettes were Imperial ships. Ayli knew them well. One had burned a city to the ground trying to root out the Rebel cell she’d been with.

“If you recognize the ship, then you know what it is capable of,” Overpowering said.

“You’ve moved up to holding the city hostage now?” Ayli asked, the smell of a hundred burning buildings rising from memory.

“Will that be enough to convince you to surrender or shall I destroy it to prove my sincerity and look for bigger or more personal targets?” Overpowering asked.

Ayli tried to sense where her decisions would lead her, but so many branches of her future were cloaked in the Dark Side that the Force did not seem like a trustworthy source to turn to for divination.

So she looked instead to her companions.

Monfi nodded his agreement, and while she hadn’t known him long, she appreciated his support nonetheless. It was Bopo who convinced her though. Bopo who had seen her make the dumbest of mistakes was looking back at her with confidence and a trust Ayli knew she couldn’t let down.

“We surrender then,” Ayli said. “Let’s go have a chat with your master.”