Chapter 104: Forward to Siege

Chapter 104: Forward to Siege

-Sovereign of Tythe – 160 Days into the Hutt Crusade-

Izuku studied the latest reports to come in with considerable satisfaction. Over the last six weeks, his own force, working with a few smaller flotillas, had finished securing the entirety of Western Hutt Space. At the same time, Admiral Lin had managed the same with both the North and East, while they’d already entirely controlled the South. Much to the Hutts dismay, several additional attempts to break the slowly tightening noose using forces hired from Republic space had failed. Which, with the turn of the new year, now left the League of Free Stars in control of over seventy-five percent of formerly-Hutt Space.

Of course, what remained to the Hutts was their core subsector, Bootana Hutta. Izuku’s efforts to get scouts into that region had paid off, with a dozen Toru II class scouts having now thoroughly mapped the previously unknown area of space extensively. That mapping had shown that the League still had a hell of a slog ahead of them, as the 157 worlds within that sub sector were all fortified to one degree or another. Several had significant shipbuilding capacity and sizable defense fleets, many had planetary shield generators, and all of them had extremely loyal ground defense forces. It was, without question, going to be a multi-year slog to chew their way through to conquer those worlds two or three at a time.

That said, Izuku no longer had much doubt they would ultimately succeed.

Yes, the Hutts had shipyards and fleets in there. In fact, he wouldn’t be at all surprised if they had a bunch of squirreled away Super Weapons too. Yet, what they didn’t have were raw resources or the means to acquire them. Those worlds were the oldest Hutt holdings, their star systems having been long ago stripped of most material useful for building anything. That’s what they’d had the rest of Hutt Space for, after all. That little detail was why the League had come to a halt in their offensive again for now. By initiating a Siege on the entire subsector, complete with sneaking in some additional commerce raiders to make it hard to pass material between the worlds within the sector, they could choke the Hutts while rebuilding and rearming themselves.

Meanwhile, of course, they could also focus on building up their own resource sources and increasing their own production. They were already well into retooling the Nal Hutta and Nimban shipyards to League standards, just as one of the more productive examples. Soon, they would be laying down new hulls for warships in those systems, and they were already producing various logistics ships at the Nal Hutta yards in particular. Starfighter production programs were starting on a few other worlds with particularly successful rebellions, while quite a few raw resource extraction industries were slowly coming online in still more. It would take time, but the League was committing the resources to help their new worlds exploit their own resources. Putting money into those new economies as they formed new governments would help shore up the political issues in the long run as well.

Simply put, the Hutts were no longer in any position to keep up with the League’s building pace.

Better yet, the slugs efforts to disrupt trade into the League had begun to falter too. Padmé and he had both been right that there was no way the Republic could allow the Corellian Run to be disrupted for long. Recently reinforced Ord System Fleets, along with some local elements from various planets that had been affected by the disruption to trade, had swept down the Run and kicked the crap out of the pirates.

It was an effort that had been led by Corellia itself, with their Senator, Garm Bel Iblis, having actively taken part. Apparently, the Senator was ex-Corellian Navy, and had taken part in several major anti-pirate operations within the Corellian Sector in the past. He’d proven to be quite the capable leader and shattered the various groups taking Hutt credits to prey on the Corellian Run. In other places, on smaller hyperlanes, it had been others to respond. The Jedi had taken care of a few groups, the Trade Federation seemed to have quietly vanished a few more, and various local defense forces had taken care of the rest.

It was, ironically given the continuing general instability of the Outer Rim, a bad time to be a pirate in the Mid and Outer Rim territories. It was a little concerning to note how many such local defense forces seemed to be growing within the Outer Rim. Notably it was a little telling how many of them seemed to have access to specific designs favored by the Trade Federation, Techno Union, Commerce Guild and Banking Clan. Yet, for all that there was some concerns about that fact, given what Shaak Ti had discovered on Geonosis, the reality remained that for now those forces had been used to smash pirates. Better, the fact that so many pirate groups were dying had finally cut the Hutts off from disposable assets. Even dim bulbs, like most pirates were, eventually clued into the fact you couldn’t spend Hutt credits if you were dead.

Of course, the writing being somewhat on the wall by this point, even if the rest of the Galaxy wasn’t aware how much that was true, meant that other issues were starting to come to a head. Specifically, there were a lot more unaligned worlds and Republic border worlds now initiating talks with the League than anyone had really expected. In some cases, it was enlightened self-interest, with formerly Hutt influenced worlds realizing they needed an in with the new proverbial overlords. Those were the most distasteful of the batch, and they were having to handle them very carefully. They typically had functioning governments, which meant they could theoretically be brought into the newly forming League Parliament. Doing so before both cleaning them up somewhat and getting a healthy counterbalance of non-corrupt worlds was too risky, though. Injecting poison into the system right at its infancy was a great was to reproduce many of the Republic’s issues.

Those worlds, thankfully, weren’t actually the majority.

The largest single chunk of worlds currently applying for membership were previously unaligned. Worlds that had no love of the Republic due to how they’d been used as a buffer between said Republic and Hutt Space, but which had also held strong against the Hutts. Sometimes for decades, other times for centuries, and a few for several millennia. Understandably, they were still cautious, but many of them were very firmly interested in the League of Free Stars. Better yet, quite a few of them had robust, functioning governments of various types.

Unagin, Daalang, Lannik, Sinta and Laboi II were some examples of that group that were farthest along in talks with the League, having started such exchanges months ago. Each had their own reasons and their own difficulties. Lannik and Laboi II were both relatively primitive and very interested in the League’s offer of uplift technology, for example. Both also had forms of government that didn’t gel well with the Republic, being a Monarchy and an Elders-led tribal species respectively. That didn’t pose a problem for the way the League was structured, which made it an extremely attractive option to both world’s respective leaders. Unagin, Daalang, and Sinta on the other hand had simply had issues with the Hutts. Having managed to keep the Hutts at bay for various reasons and through various means, they were interested in the trade and mutual defense that the League could provide.

The most potentially problematic group, even more so than the corrupt worlds that would need careful cleanup, were the Republic worlds. Chalacta was one of the least troublesome examples, its status as a border world with Hutt Space nebulous enough that no one was likely to blink too hard at it shifting. Bimmisaari was the opposite extreme, as it was technically the Capital of the Halla Sector. The Bimm were an extremely peaceful species, who had been loyal members of the Republic for close to two thousand years. Unfortunately, the decline of the Outer Rim since the New Sith Wars and Ruusan Reformation had not done them any favors. They were, in fact, pissed at the Republic for practically abandoning them. Only the fact that they were largely pacifistic had kept them from joining the louder dissenters in the Outer Rim, who were growing more volatile and extreme by the week, now that the Crusade wasn’t distracting the Galaxy quite so much any longer.

Bimmisaari was within the zone that the current treaty regarding the Hutt/Republic border zone still covered. Yet it, along with several other worlds who had expressed interest, would be a bit more eye-catching if they left the Republic. Bimmisaari was the most eye-catching, since it was a Sector Capital, but there were several trade and industrial worlds that were within the zone and very bitter at the Republic at the moment. Worse, in a way, those worlds needed to be acted on the fastest in some ways. Now that the League had so much control over former Hutt Space, it was virtually certain that the Republic would begin pressing the issue of redrawing those treaties. They could put it off for a while, they were still at war with the Hutts and the Senate didn’t exactly move quickly anyway. But if they had even a year before that became a serious issue, Izuku would be surprised.

At least, on the flip side, they’d gained several PR wins with the Republic. The first, one which had actually done far more to settle the naysayers down than he’d expected, was to get the Interpol between the League and Republic working. The first way that helped was that it had vastly accelerated the speed with which they could ‘clear’ a lot of Republic businesses in Hutt space and pass many or most of their assets back to their parent companies. In some cases, the companies involved had even been clean enough to allow them to continue operations within League space. He’d expected there to be friction when a fair few big companies had criminal charges brought up as a result of the Interpol…but he’d underestimated the major corporations.

While any number of minor corps had gotten in a lot of hot water and were now busy drowning, the big corps had all built cutouts into their operations as seemingly a matter of course. They were still guilty as sin, of course. But they’d had the cutouts in place to blame the crimes on local operators and get at least a percentage of their assets returned. Most of the local cutouts had been arrested for illicit Hutt dealings anyway and been written off by corporations that could realistically write off entire planets at need.

In part, letting them go had annoyed Izuku and Aayla both. Sadly, they both also had previous experience with that sort of thing, and it wasn’t worth getting into a fight with a galaxy-spanning Megacorp over most of the things they’d ‘gotten away’ with. A few particularly heinous crimes like sentient-experimentation were another matter, but the Republic’s public was more than happy to pile on the people arrested for those crimes and their parent companies. Most of whom had already possessed questionable reputations in the first place.

The second way that the Interpol had helped was also a PR coup that none of them had the slightest issue with. There were thousands of slaves in Hutt Space, tens of thousand more likely, that had been captured from all over the Republic. The Interpol had set up a specific sub-division, with careful oversight, to identify and return those slaves to their homeworlds and families. Worlds like Ryloth and Kashyyyk were singing their praises. The PR it gained them with the more peaceful factions, ones that were now forced to acknowledge there had been very good reasons for the Crusade, was immensely valuable. Success, particularly success where Observers had to admit they’d managed to keep their noses fairly clean, was the best justification. Not, perhaps, the way the universe ought to work if one wanted to call it a fair place, but it was how it did work, fair or not.

Those PR wins, combined with political efforts by both Esa Rotsino and Padmé, had at least temporarily assuaged the Republic’s fears and concerns regarding the League. While not everyone was happy, given that Hutt Space had been convenient for certain brands of corruption, the majority were starting to consider that the bleeding sore that were the Hutts being removed might be a good thing. At least in the long run. It wasn’t like the Hutt Empire had ever been popular, it had merely been considered inevitable. The idea of it being gone was pleasing more people than it was pissing off, even if it had also somewhat destabilized the political climate of the galaxy as a whole.

The Hutts had been an institution, in a lot of ways. They might have had less than a thousand worlds in total, but they’d been obscenely rich and well connected. Their sudden absence from their previous positions of power-behind-a-whole-lot-of-thrones was disruptive to the halls of power as a whole. Eventually, that would settle, but a lot of shifting of factions and senate seats was occurring in the short term. Particularly from worlds within The Slice region of space that had been most affected by the Hutts. Thankfully, the biggest winner of the shifting positions was Padmé’s faction, who were attracting a lot of people interested in the opportunities the League may open up for them.

Yes, despite the amount of paperwork this was all generating, even with his best efforts to delegate, Izuku was pleased with how everything was going. Of course, he was even more pleased with the idea that he’d be able to get away from it all for a vacation soon. Mei had a new experimental test upcoming, of a system which promised to bring major benefits for the League. More importantly, Aayla was insisting that they all take some time off afterward, while they could get away with it, to help avoid burnout. Considering that they’d been going pretty full tilt since the start of the Crusade, with only the occasional day or two of proper break, he had to admit she had a point.

Work-life balance was important!

No, it wasn’t just because he was looking forward to seeing Aayla, Mei, Zavra, and Shaak Ti in bikinis or less! Honestly, he’d been surprised how easily Shaak went along with the idea of a break, even if she and her padawan had spent a fair amount of time since Padmé’s group left getting hip deep in the fighting. Come to think of it, maybe the reason Aayla was so insistent on this break was because she wanted to see Shaak Ti in a bikini? His lover did seem to have quite a bit of lingering thirst for the other Jedi. Not that Izuku could blame her…

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A/N 1: I don't like doing chapters that are entirely exposition, but in this case it fit as a way to make the transition between regular battles and other events taking the forefront fit. It provides an explanation of what has been going on, and what the overall situation in Hutt/League Space is now like.