Chapter 102: Conquest of Toydaria
Summary: Parting is such sweet sorrow...
Chapter 102: Conquest of Toydaria
-Sovereign of Tythe – 118 Days into the Hutt Crusade-
Izuku was more than a little annoyed as he looked over the updated scans being fed from the Ephemeral Dream and Silent Echoes. He’d decided to kept the additional Toru II-class ship assigned to his taskforce, both due to its general utility and so that it could serve as a ship for Shaak Ti or other Jedi to use for stealth operations. Its maiden deployment had proven just how good it was for that purpose, something which they hadn’t truly considered previously. Mostly due to how few of them they had so far.
Using them for commando or specialist team insertions in the long term could very well be just as valuable as their scouting duties, and the Dream already had the only practical experience in that role. Keeping it and its crew intact, with intention to use it that way between other scouting operations, was just good sense. Of course, right now it was fulfilling the ‘other scouting operations’ bit of that combination alongside its sister ship Silent Echoes, and Izuku was displeased by what he was seeing.
Specifically, he was fairly thoroughly pissed off to see two Battleship Modified Lucrehulks sitting in orbit of Toydaria. They’d known from previous intel that Toydaria was deeply involved with the Trade Federation, but they hadn’t expected the Federation to be willing to try and defend the planet. Nor for them to be so abysmally stupid as to use their ‘secret’ battleship-modified Lucrehulks to do it. Not so soon after the League had cut a deal with the Federation to keep those very ships secret! Yet, apparently, they were that dumb, and now Izuku was forced to deal with their stupidity.
Well, at least doing this so completely and utterly violated their previous agreement of silence so that he could publicly broadcast all the data from the Nimban shipyards. Even if he half-wondered if he actually should. It seemed impossibly dumb that the Trade Federation wouldn’t expect him too, which might mean they wanted that information to get out. Why that would be the case he had no idea, though his intelligence people had mentioned some sort of stirrings about a Separatist movement. One that had been slowly gaining steam before the Hutt Crusade stole most of the galaxy’s attention.
Well, he could work out if he should leak the information or not later. For now, he had some idiots to disabuse of the notion their new ships were adequate to slow him down. They might have been right, prior to Sovereign becoming his new flagship. But if he temporarily borrowed the other new Paladin-class that had become the flagship of the Nal Hutta defense fleet, they shouldn’t have too much trouble with the pair of Lucrehulks that they badly out-ranged…
… … …
“Shield of Serenity, shift fire to Target Two. Bomber Group 3, you’re clear for your run on Target One.”
Izuku’s voice was calm and measured, even as he floated in the meditation chamber that had been added to the Sovereign of Tythe. The addition was one they’d added to all of the Paladin-class vessels, which had ample internal volume for some extras. Situated just behind the Flag Bridge, the meditation sphere was explicitly meant to be used by either those capable of Battle Meditation, or those participating in a Force Gestalt for precision hyperspace jumps.
The entire sphere, even the floor he was hovering above with floating meditation, was a 360-degree combat information display. One that was, frankly, complex enough that a non-Force Sensitive would struggle to make use of a fraction of the data it could display at any one time. Even now, Izuku was using the Force to guide his manipulation of the controls so that the display would show the most relevant parts of the battle for his Battle Meditation to latch onto. Technically, he could use Battle Meditation without any of this, but the setup radically reduced the amount of fine detail he needed to lean on the Force for, allowing him to spread his efforts with the skill more completely.
Frankly, it was making the ‘battle’ a bad joke.
Where before he might have only been able to generally bolster the fleet as a whole, only really more individually linking up to officers, now he could boost the reflexes and decision making of every last pilot in a battle in which there were thousands of starfighters in space. It wasn’t a domination of their wills. That would have been leaning into a Dark Side application of the Force. An abomination that spit on free will…and a liability besides, as the same pilots who came to rely on it would fall apart without the near-puppeting that the Dark Side version would put them through.
Instead, Izuku’s use of the skill was more a case of boosting the situational awareness of every pilot, officer, gunner, and technician to levels most Force Sensitives would struggle to reach. It was something that would even, over time, boost the natural situational awareness, and sense of coordination with others, of those who experienced it. Something that was already being shown with the squadrons from the Knight Errant, who were a quantifiable cut above others even when not subjected to Battle Meditation.
The subtle-yet-dramatic effects were shown yet again as the bomber group, consisting of three squadrons of H-7s escorted by two squadrons of Heroes, sliced their way through the remaining point defense of the first Lucrehulk without losing a single ship. That had been made easier by the fact most of the ship’s Vulture screen had been obliterated, but the Battleship Refit Lucrehulks weren’t light on point defense. Yet, even with half of that point defense still operational, the bombers got their payload away with no losses.
Two hundred and eighty eight rapid fire Enhanced Proton Torpedoes, an extended range and higher yield design they’d rarely used in the Crusade so far, hammered into the enemy vessel. Those torpedoes had been developed for times when Null Torpedoes, which were most effective against shields, would be less effective overall. Combined with multiple Volitions with their Graviton Beams now rapidly closing with the Lucrehulk, whose shields had already failed under the fire from Sovereign of Tythe and Shield of Serenity, it took less than a minute and a half after the torpedo impacts for the ship to break apart.
Not even the legendary toughness of Lucrehulk shields, enhanced even farther in the Battleship variant, had been enough to protect the Profit’s Lance from being rendered helpless before it even got into range of its own guns. The two Paladin-class ships had begun firing at near maximum-range for their Particle Beams, and utterly demolished the shields of the Lucrehulk before it even could shoot back. A few more shots had followed to wiped away its main weaponry, before Izuku had shifted their fire to its fellow who’d had the good sense to try to flee.
Not that it was going to get away.
After all, the Veto had powered up her gravity well projectors as soon as physically possible after entering the fray. Hanging back behind her escorts, she was nevertheless more than close enough and fast enough to keep the remaining battleship pinned. Pinned and jammed, in fact. No one was getting a message out about what had happened to these ships, if Izuku had any say in it. Meditation with Shaak Ti and Aayla had shown in no uncertain terms that they’d be playing into someone else’s game if they said a word about the ships.
So they weren’t going to.
Instead, the pair of battleships that the Trade Federation couldn’t easily admit to having and losing, would just vanish. They’d have to hold any survivors from the battle, of course. But given that the Trade Federation wasn’t a government and the ships didn’t belong to Toydaria, they could try the captains and crew for piracy rather than for involvement in the war. Which would make it easy to disappear them into a penal colony. Perhaps a bit unfair in some ways, but Izuku wasn’t feeling overly merciful under the circumstances.
“Pillar of Justice, adjust vector starboard by fifteen degrees, that Munificent is going to attempt to break out of the cordon. Disabuse them of the idea and offer to accept surrender after you core their engines.”
This battle wouldn’t last much longer. Not in space anyway. As for what to do with the marshy, swampy planet below? Well, what might be a problem for a normal military wasn’t exactly an issue for the League. All they really needed to do was Release the Gungans, who would find themselves right at home and infinitely better equipped than the locals…
… … …
They hadn’t stayed long at Toydaria. Despite the fact that Izuku was confident in the Gungans being able to eventually deal with the locals on the ground, the truth was that they didn’t really need more than a couple of Volitions and plenty of assault transports to manage that fight. As such, while the Shield of Serenity had returned to Nal Hutta, the Sovereign of Tythe, Knight Errant, and Pillar of Justice had met up with a much larger transport echelon that had only left Nal Hutta after they’d fully secured Toydaria.
Now, having arrived a day later at Tol Amn to much happy fanfare by the locals, the reason for that convoy was made evident. As Padmé and her reunited set of Handmaidens watched from an observation bubble, large components of an impressively sized space station were being assembled at the extreme edge of the Tol Amn system. Right on the primary hyperlane emersion vector, in fact. Of course, normally that sort of thing wouldn’t be a useful idea, since space is huge. Even a relatively small hyperlane emersion point included much too great of a physical space to be covered by a defensive station.
Normally.
Unless, that is, said space station was intended to have a massively powerful Gravity Well projector. Which, as it happened, was exactly what the large station that was being assembled was for. While only half the size of Tythe Central, the Tol Amn League Transit Station would still be nearly 20km long when finished. A much more powerful set of Gravity Well Projectors than the Veto-class carried was its primary feature, along with solid defense systems and hangar bays for thousands of fighters. Primary defense for the new border station was to be a ring of three Ultra-class defense stations, much larger than their Plus-class counterparts in use elsewhere in formerly-Hutt space.
Previously deployed only at Tythe and Nal Hutta, those Ultra-class stations produced a long-range Particle Beam that dwarfed the output of those on the Paladin-class or the smaller Plus-class stations. Each of them could very easily shred a Battleship Refit Lucrehulk in a single shot, and they could fire faster than a Paladin’s main gun could as well. The bigger picture was a rather blunt one when taken in as a whole.
‘The Border of League Space starts here. Enter only if invited.’
Apparently, a similar station had already finished completion at Ilos, the Outland Transit station was getting upgrades, and a few more existed in pieces but were awaiting final decisions on where they would be placed. The existence of the stations at all, and the fact that they realistically could enforce a hard border if it was ever required, hadn’t been a particularly pleasant surprise for the Senator.
Unfortunately, given that most of the Hutt’s help had originated from criminal elements in the Republic, it was difficult to argue that against there being a justification for building them. Honestly, the only bright side Padmé had seen was that such a defined military border might slow down other systems trying to join the League. It could be easily seen as the League limiting their own border, after all. Even if Padmé suspected that wasn’t the case at all. Tol Amn was simply a good choke point in the hyperlanes to station a fleet base out of, and she suspected that was all this really was.
Of course, there was a more personal reason she wasn’t entirely happy to see it. After all, it was a straight shot out of Tol Amn to Farquar, and that system was a Republic world. Well, to be honest it was a Trade Federation world, which meant she wasn’t entirely happy about passing through it. Yet it was unlikely they would bother her, particularly as they would be leaving with a number of other ‘civilian’ ships that were a little too well armed for most pirates to want a crack at. As the hyperlanes between Farquar and Coursant were somewhat convoluted and intermeshed, they also hadn’t seen any real disruption from Hutt hired forces.
In theory, it was now completely safe to leave and return to her job as a Senator. Something which she could no longer logically put off, despite a recently-awakened part of her desiring to stay. She and Sabé had eventually managed to have an…interesting…conversations with Aayla. One which had led to certain thoughts that she wasn’t exactly opposed to. Even a bit of exciting fun as she…showed off a bit. Yet, she hadn’t quite been able to push past the current potential for a conflict-of-interest on the professional level. Which left her feeling a bit disappointed to be leaving soon.
Sighing as the weight of responsibility set her course, she began moving as Dormé signaled that it was time to head to their parting meal with their hosts. Hopefully, it wouldn’t be too long before they could see them again. With how fast their Crusade seemed to be progressing, perhaps the conflict of interest would resolve itself sooner than she anticipated as well…
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A/N 1: Gee, I wonder who arranged to have those Battleships there. It's almost like someone wants to cause the galaxy to be pissed at the TF...
A/N 2: You probably know this bit by now, but I need to say it anyway ;-)! Once per release, I point out that I have a Page with Early Access content. In example, I just released chapters 103-106 of Displaced Hero there, adding just shy of another 15,000 words which will remain in Early Access until next month. Similarly, there are at least a few Early Access chapters there for ALL of my stories, though NONE of them are ever permanently paywalled. All fanfiction content I make ends up here (or on Fanfiction.net and Questionable Questing) eventually, as new content for each story is released. Typically, there are 75,000+ words of additional early access content for patrons at any one time, all for just a dollar a month! As well as chances to vote in polls that influence which stories are updated, pairings, and other such things.