At last, after staying on Tatooine for about a month, Amir once again piloted the Traveler out into the galaxy.
Not long after dropping out of hyperspace, he saw the outline of Eternal Ark.
The same neon brilliance, the same bustling chaos.
Euphemia, whose name Kahalman could never seem to remember, was there at the port to greet them.
It had only been a short while since they last met, yet Euphemia's mechanical body had already been upgraded. With Amir's eye for this sort of thing, he instantly recognized that every component on her frame was top-tier equipment.
It seemed Kahalman was not quite as cold as he liked to appear.
"Doctor Kahalman is in the middle of a surgery. My apologies—he couldn't come personally, so I'll take you to him," Euphemia said.
"It's fine, really, it's fine." Amir waved it off as they walked down the street.
Millisyn had already taken out her free-food card and dragged back two glowing drinks from a nearby stall, handing one to Amir.
Out of the four of them present, only two could actually eat or drink.
Amir twisted his face after taking a sip of the beverage, which tasted like cucumber, soy sauce, and yogurt blended together, and began thinking about researching a taste-perception system and turning it into a mechanical sensory component.
At the very least, he should not be the only one forced to suffer through this.
32 ought to share some of the pain too.
Putting that aside, as one of the children of a food-loving people, Amir still genuinely sympathized with Euphemia and 32 for being unable to eat.
They entered the main hall and had not waited long before Kahalman came out of the operating room.
"A former client. His mechanical arm was damaged by a blaster shot. Another Imperial job," Kahalman said, gesturing back toward the room behind him.
"Well, go take care of your business first. I'm not in a hurry." Amir sat down off to the side with Millisyn.
"It's already finished. The rest can be handled by my assistants." Kahalman turned to 32. "How's the new body? No problems so far, I hope?"
"No problems." 32 moved an arm to demonstrate how smoothly it functioned.
Kahalman noticed the modifications Amir had made to 32 and stepped forward to inspect them.
"Very good design. But how about the intelligent system? If it's the same as the Empire's battle droids, then forget it." Kahalman activated the auxiliary attack mechanism on 32's back.
"It's far better than those droids. This isn't some junk unit that just points and shoots at whatever enters its field of view. I added motion-analysis templates so it can predict an enemy's movement trajectory. It's also much more agile. I sacrificed some durability to increase attack frequency…"
Kahalman listened carefully and nodded repeatedly. "Using these small mechanical arms to control the blaster is definitely the right approach. Without a bulky body dragging it down, target lock is even faster than an assassin droid's. Though the arms could be made longer. That would let it fire from behind cover more effectively."
Seeing Kahalman slip into serious thought, Amir continued, "I didn't just build this into 32. I also made an external smart combat backpack. The materials are simple, and the production cost is low. I want to see whether it can be mass-produced and issued to the resistance."
"Mass production? That part is easy enough. The real issue is target identification. Battlefields are chaotic, and it's too easy to hit your own people. Otherwise, the Empire would have equipped everyone with something like this long ago."
"Its attack mode is mainly supportive. It prioritizes targets the user is already aiming at. In automatic mode, it can also be preset so that it only attacks enemies with similar physical appearance or clothing."
Kahalman thought for a moment, then added, "We could make a control visor for the user to wear over their eyes. An external scanner would identify all targets on the battlefield, then the user could manually select who to attack."
"That would definitely work, but in an emergency, manual selection might be too slow. We could assign scanned targets letter codes and add voice-targeting functionality. Then it would truly be target calling in the literal sense."
The two of them looked at each other and smiled.
Millisyn, 32, and Euphemia all looked utterly lost, but even they could tell that if this thing became real, it would greatly improve the resistance's effectiveness.
And every small advantage had the potential to influence the outcome of a war.
Not wanting to keep listening to their increasingly technical discussion, Euphemia took Millisyn and 32 outside to stroll around.
Amir only brought BD-4 with him and followed Kahalman into the office.
"My workshop for building things is here on Eternal Ark," Kahalman said, already anticipating what Amir cared about. "Demand has been low, so I've only got a few droids working there, and output is limited."
"A factory is the easy part," Amir said. "What matters are the high-end instruments. And a lot of the concepts still need testing."
Kahalman laughed. "That won't be a problem. I've managed to get my hands on blueprints and physical examples of a lot of the Empire's top-grade equipment. After all, plenty of high-ranking officials use my work. If they want to stay comfortable, they need to arm me first."
The two of them discussed the matter for a long time and finally settled it.
Kahalman would clear out a section of Eternal Ark and turn it into a factory space, establishing an assembly line for manufacturing Amir's smart combat backpacks. Naturally, the two of them would improve the design further so it was better suited to actual battlefield conditions.
Beyond that, they would also secure a site for testing other projects.
After receiving Amir's call, Ahsoka arrived only a few hours later. Once she heard the two of them explain the plan, she was delighted and practically refused to put the smart combat backpack down.
What had begun as little more than an amusing toy for Amir had become, in her eyes, something precious enough to save countless lives.
With Ahsoka joining them, Amir and Kahalman stopped talking in abstractions. Every suggestion they proposed now had to pass her review, to confirm whether it would actually prove useful in the field.
As they talked, Amir came to realize just how strangely lopsided the technological development of this galaxy really was.
At large scales, they had achieved incredible mastery—gravity-control systems, deflector shields, hyperspace, permeable shielding, and more had all been invented and widely applied ages ago. But these advances had been poured almost entirely into huge, impressive-looking fleets and space stations.
Hardly anyone had bothered to spend time strengthening or expanding small-scale equipment.
Even less attention had been paid to microscopic fields like nanotechnology; only a handful of worlds had produced anything barely worth mentioning.
And information technology had not been taken very seriously either.
Even though fully intelligent droids could be manufactured, that was usually just a matter of relying on established frameworks. From Amir's perspective, the galaxy's programming and software systems were nowhere near as flexible or deeply developed as they looked on the surface.
With the mindset he had brought from Earth, Amir could envision all sorts of fascinating things—things that could easily be built with existing technology, and thanks to the galaxy's high level of mechanical engineering, could be produced very cheaply.
If even a fraction of those ideas could be realized, then the strength of individual soldiers under proper equipment would become formidable.
Especially for the Rebel Alliance. They rarely fought large-scale conventional wars to begin with and were far better suited to small-unit guerrilla operations. If every member of a squad were equipped with a complete set of mechanical combat gear, their effectiveness would absolutely increase tenfold.
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