Chapter 126: Last Gasps of an Empire

*Warning - Chapters 122-126 were all published together. Returning Readers, make sure you're picking up the story from where you left off :-).

Chapter 126: Last Gasps of an Empire

– Kor Desilijic – 23.3 BBY –

Major Averin Trizt and Colonel Jozzo Deam were tense as Knight Mano brought their stealth vessel, the EX-73 Phantom, right up to the planetary shield of Kor Desilijic. The world was one of the oldest and most powerful Hutt Throne Worlds, with impressive defenses that would be a nightmare to pound down the hard way. It also had an insane power grid that would be next to impossible to disrupt. To be honest, even Nal Hutta had arguably been less well defended, and no one had been looking forward to trying to take the planet. It was one world that they didn’t expect the Hutts to blow up themselves out of spite, though since they hadn’t expected any of the Hutts to go that far, they couldn’t take that for granted.

It also shouldn’t have been possible to sneak a strike team in to make sure of that, as they’d managed on a number of other worlds. There had been long debates on what to do about this and a few other worlds that promised to be particularly hard nuts to crack. Many had favored the idea of just seeding the entire area of space around the planet with mines and leaving the Hutts to rot. Yet doing so would also leave the slaves that filled the world to rot as well, and that wasn’t an idea that had set well with anyone.

Just when they were most afraid they’d have to do it anyway, Aayla Secura had produced an unexpected miracle.

Power gems were absurdly rare, to the point that most people thought they were outright myths, not something that actually existed. Yet, Secura had somehow found and acquired a set of three called the Lost Stars of Nallastia. Where and how, none of them had a clue. Yet she had, and the infamous Mei Hatsume had promptly installed them on an experimental ship that had been in testing. The EX-73 Phantom wasn’t a production model, but a hand-built prototype of a ‘Stealth Insertion’ ship. A slightly-larger variant of the Gate equipped landing craft that had been allowing them to deploy large numbers of infantry with relatively few ships on other Hutt worlds.

The Phantom was different, of course, because it had the same sort of crystal-based stealth field as the Toru II class scout ships. The Toru IIs were significantly larger vessels, small frigates or oversized corvettes really, which served a more general role. The Phantom existed for just two things, and two things only. To sneak in and hide on a planet…then to power the Gate it carried to allow the deployment of deep strike commandos and other ground assets in significant numbers. Which was, of course, exactly what they were here to do.

Assuming that the power gems worked as advertised and let them slip unnoticed through the stupidly-powerful planetary shield, at least.

Major Trizt had faith it would work. She was one of those that had fought on Tisht and found herself awakened to the Force. Now commanding Akul Platoon of the Sovereign’s Guards, she and the three squads under her were the only members of that Guard currently participating in active combat operations. They had, early on in their formation, decided that two of their three Platoons would remain with their Sovereign at all times. A personal bodyguard unit…and elite commandos that could support his operations when he inevitable put himself in the thick of it.

Seriously, politicians didn’t normally charge into combat, but their boss had a disturbing habit of doing so. Even when he didn’t, trouble just found him, instead. Heck, Platoon Nexu had ended up in a running fight alongside their Sovereign and his Sith lover just a week ago on Circumtore. A large collection of Bounty Hunters had managed to get onto the artificial ring-world and tried to collect the massive 10 billion credit bounty that Sovereign Midoriya had on his head from the Hutts. They had failed, of course. Nexu Platoon, the boss, and Zavra had been too much for the group to handle. It was, however, entirely too typical of the trouble their principal got into.

The third Platoon of the Guards would always be where the action was hottest, which explained why she was here. It was a plan intended to make sure the Guard kept their edge, with the ‘Combat Platoon,’ currently her Akuls, rotating out every three months. As the Elite of the Elite, there had been no question that her unit would take part in this operation, with several other more ordinary commando units, Jedi, and the entire 412th infantry division as backup. The Guards, Commandos, and Jedi would be infiltrating to both find any nasty surprises and disable the planetary shield. Then the 412th would pour through from the Gate aboard the Phantom to begin the ground assault in full just as the planetary shield came down.

Again, though, that hinged on the power gems working, and only the meditation tricks she’d been taught to help commune with the Force were keeping Averin any calmer than the white-knuckled Colonel Deam as they approached the shields. They were moving fast enough to bounce in a way that wouldn’t be good for their continued place among the living if the gems failed, and Averin envied Knight Mano’s ability to sink much deeper into the Force as she piloted them forward. In theory, the Jedi Knight would be able to sense if this wasn’t going to work. Which was a nice thought, but not overly comforting given there were no real records of this having been tried before.

At least they had tested the ship against the Tythe planetary shields, which were every bit as potent as the ones here covering Kor Desilijic.

Unable to help herself, Averin clenched as they approached the shield…then let out a small sigh of relief as the sector of shield they’d hit blinked for just a moment under the influence of the power gems. The brief flicker was just long enough for the Phantom to pass through, specifically kept to a minimum in order to look like nothing but a momentary hiccup in the systems to the teams running the shield generators. No doubt they would run a systems test, but such momentary glitches were hardly unusual on a planetary scale shield that had been powered up continuously for weeks.

They were in, presumably unseen.

Now they just needed to find a nice hidey hole to operate out of while they scouted out their targets and prepared to create havoc…

… … …

Admiral Lin’s smile was predatory as she watched the planetary shields of Kor Desilijic flicker…then fail. The moment they did, she barked orders.

“All units, launch your attacks! Rikman, watch the Golans, two of them have a vector on our Alpha Assault force. Crush them first.”

The Fleet they’d assembled to first blockade, then assault, this particular Throneworld, was one of the largest they’d used in any single battle. Enough so that she wasn’t directly commanding any single ship, or even division of ships. Commadores Rikman and Yager, by now suitably veteran commanders themselves, were in charge of the two battlegroups now rapidly closing with the planet. Each of those battlegroups had four Paladins and a dozen Volitions each, plus an entirely array of smaller ships. Which didn’t even count the truly staggering numbers of starfighters and bombers that they’d already put into space.

For good reason.

The Desilijic kajidic was one of the two wealthiest in the entire Hutt Empire, or what was left of it. One of the bare handful of clans that could trace their roots all the way back to their original homeworld of Varl, with this very world being one of those the original Hutts had fled too when Varl was rendered uninhabitable. To say the defenses were thick was a horrible understatement. Even now, her tactical screens were reporting over 9,000 starfighters launching from the surface, and that would likely only be one of several waves.

The majority of them were Vultures, likely acquired in bulk from the Trade Federation early on in the Crusade, before Trade was fully cut off. They were chaff, really. Fodder that their own fighters would cut down in mass numbers. Yet their sheer quantity made them a genuine danger, which is why she’d concentrated so much of the Fleet’s fighter strength for this assault. She’d even gone so far as to use a half dozen of the Lucrehulk conversions to act as additional carriers, launching their fighters and hanging back. Those ships alone had released 6,000 fighters of their own, and over 3,000 more had launched from the two Battlegroups.

The fighter massacre was admittedly going to be spectacular, but it wasn’t her primary concern.

That was the fact that Kor Desilijic had eight Golan Space Defense Platforms, along with a dozen other armed stations, shoals of sky mines, and a staggering number of one-shot defense satellites. Even without the planetary shields, this was going to be a brutal fight, and she hoped that the ground teams were doing well with knocking out the ground emplacements. For now, she watched as the first shots lanced out at the Golans from the eight Paladin class ships and their particle beams. That fire concentrated on just two Golans, intent on knocking them out of action before the stations themselves could come into range. The pair were the one’s she’d pointed out had a firing arc that currently covered the assault vector for the landing craft following the fighters in, making it critical to disable them before the landing craft got in range to be picked off. They needed to get some of those landing craft down, so they could support the 412th that were deploying even now through the Gate of the prototype stealth vessel that had made this assault practical.

Settling into the battle with grim determination, making sure to keep half an ear on the various callouts the Jedi and other Force users with her fleets were making, Rana watched as the final dying gasps of the Hutt Empire began…

… … …

– Tythe Central – 23.0 BBY –

Izuku smiled grimly as he read the latest reports forwarded by Admiral Lin. In the last three months, five of the remaining major Hutt Throne Worlds had been captured, with only four remaining. Even now, plans were in place to crush those four as well, finally bringing the Hutt Crusade to a proper end. It was only a matter of freeing up enough ground forces to take worlds with millions of defending troops that had slowed the pace at this point.

The five worlds captured were still providing some degree of resistance as, hard to believe as it was, the Hutts did have loyalists. That meant they couldn’t pull the troops used to take those worlds out just yet, and ground troop numbers had always been the League’s greatest limitation. They made due with extreme Quality over extreme Quantity, though recruitment from former Hutt worlds was beginning to bring up their quantity as well. Something they could easily afford, given just how much wealth they’d looted from the Hutts.

Hell, those five Throne Worlds alone were still choking their accountants, trying to catalog all the treasure hidden in the Hutt vaults that had been seized. Even the accountants, already used to seeing absurd numbers from other Hutt worlds, had seemed a bit…faint…at what they were finding. As near as Izuku could tell, Kor Desilijic alone was richer than the entire Corellian System, and Corellia was one of the ‘Big 5’ economies in the entire Republic. Put all together, the money and treasure from within just the Bootana Hutta subsector likely nearly matched the entirety of the Core.

Even Izuku had been initially surprised by that fact, though far less so than his poor accountants. He had read his history after all, and the Hutts had been accumulating and hoarding wealth since before the Republic existed. Such accumulation of wealth had been the Hutt clans primary way of keeping score between themselves for at least 15,000 years. The Hutt Cataclysms, a civil war that had ended their imperialist empire building, had shifted the survivors to a new mode of thought. The very name ‘kajidic’ was a philosophy as well as what they called their various clans in Huttese. That philosophy had rejected outright war and territorial conquest at turbolaser point as methods ‘used by lesser species,’ and shifted the competition between clans into one of ruthless financial and economic warfare.

In hindsight, it stood to reason that such a philosophy, executed for so long, had resulted in a truly staggering amount of wealth being squirreled away. So much wealth, in fact, that the League was genuinely going to have to hide a lot of it, in order not to completely fuck the galactic economy. Which didn’t even account for the number of priceless artifacts and forgotten technologies which seemed to be hidden under every other rock on some of those worlds. The entire species had been massive packrats, and the clans had been given a long, long time to build their hoards.

Well, at least he was now one of the rare politicians in the existence of sentient kind that didn’t have to worry too much about the annual budget…

... ... ... ... ... ... ...

A/N 1: The Hutt Crusade is nearly over. I never intended to draw it out too long, as the League needs time to uplift as many of those worlds to their standards as they can, expanding their industrial base and recruiting heavily for the war they can see coming. The fact taking the Hutt throneworlds just happens to provide them with the massive surge in wealth to do so, so long as they don't overplay their hand, will help them manage it far faster than would normally be plausible.

A/N 2: You probably know this bit by now, but I need to say it anyway ;-)! Once per set of chapters released, I point out that I have a P-atreon Page with Early Access content. In example, I just released chapters 127-130 of Displaced Hero there, adding roughly 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.