Chapter 141: The Plunge

Chapter 141: The Plunge

Izuku floated in the middle of the large, custom holotank built into the Miruko. In truth, despite Admiral Lin’s protest, as the Fleet Flagship the Miruko had been specifically built for Izuku in some ways. While all of the Miruko-class had lesser versions of the setup he was using, the Miruko itself had a larger and far superior version. A true, 360-degree spherical holotank intended to support someone using Battle Meditation at the Fleet Scale. Even the controls for this particular holotank were customized to make use of Izuku’s extremely finely controlled telekinesis. Every zoom, every target selection, and comm connection could be controlled with that telekinetic touch. Which allowed Izuku to sink deep into the Force and manipulate everything about the displays with while engaged in floating meditation at the center of the holotank.

He was doing so now, preparing himself for the battle to come, even as they awaited reports from the scout teams. Geonosis was odd for a lot of reasons, not least of which was the lack of a planetary defense shield or significant fleet, despite how well defended it was otherwise. Unfortunately, this was not an oversight, but a reflection of internal Geonosian politics and its consequences. Geonosians were not normally united, with their population spread out in a large number of Hives across the planet, each of which competed against each other. As a result of that, instead of having a planetary shield generator, each Hive had their own potent territorial generators that shielded them from bombardment. Add in the fact that such Hives were ninety plus percent underground, and a unique set of problems were generated for any invader.

Which wasn’t even covering the not so unique set of problems.

Just to start with, Geonosis had a population of nearly 100 billion, though the bulk of those were a semi-sentient worker-drone caste. Only five percent of the population was part of the ‘ruling aristocrat’ caste, with another fifteen percent being upper-caste drones such as warriors and techs. That still meant that their total standing military, exclusive of millions of droids, stood at somewhat over five billion warriors. Worse, because of their constant war between Hives, they had hideously thick anti-air coverage and hundreds of wings of locally-built fighters.

Nantex-class starfighters were a needle-shaped interceptor, optimized for their own in-atmosphere combat needs. Lightly armed but extremely fast and ridiculously maneuverable. They were fighters built specifically for an already-flight-capable species, the tiny interceptors were capable of turns that would rip a normal fighter in half, making use of the fact the insectoid species was extremely well-suited for High-G strain. Even the new Hero II and Sidekick II fighters would be outmatched in sheer maneuverability, though they were far more durable and well-armed than the Nantexes.

Add in the fact that the same strife between Hives meant the entire world was filled with choke points, fortresses, and other hard-to-assault defenses and the world was a nightmare.

It wasn’t all doom and gloom, thankfully. The same internal warfare between Hives meant that, even now, the Hives weren’t truly united. It was the currently-ruling Stalgasin Hive that was fully in bed with the Separatists, though a number of other powerful Hives were firmly allied with them. The Gehenbar Hive were their chief rivals, however, with their own allies and a significant interest in bringing the Stalgasin Hive down. Even better, the fact that they were now essentially surrounded by League Space had strengthened the Gehenbar Hive’s position to the point they were openly challenging the Stalgasin right to rule.

The Gehenbar would not fight for outsiders against their own, but they and their own subordinate Hives would stay out of the fight entirely. An agreement that the League had been able to manage in the time since the Clone Wars erupted properly. This meant that a good forty percent of the Genosian military just flat out wouldn’t take the field in the first place, reducing the ludicrous numbers at work by a significant amount. Even better, the loyalist Hives closest to the Gehenbar territories would have to keep some of their forces back, just in case their internal enemies decided to take the chance to make a move. Meaning that a farther fifteen to twenty percent of the local military wouldn’t be available to face them. This still left, theoretically, up to 2.2 billion troops to overcome, plus whatever droids they had down there. Which still wasn’t exactly something fun to contemplate.

Equally thankfully to the local infighting, was the fact the League forces had their own major advantages. The first of which was the fact that Geonosis flat out didn’t have a fleet, and the League had smashed the fleet that the CIS had tried to bring in to protect the world at the start of the greater galactic conflict. Orbital superiority was theirs to take, so long as they could deal with the anti-orbital guns. Which, given the number of them, wouldn’t be a fun event. They did have a plan for it, though. Which, if even half successful, would mitigate the effect of those guns on the battle.

Worse than the issue of orbital control for the locals, the lack of a full planetary shield had made it pretty damn easy to sneak a number of Toru IIs onto the planet, deploying stealth recon teams with holo-cloaking technology. In point of fact, that was where both Aayla and Zavra were, having gone ahead of Izuku to the planet to help lead the Champions of Ossus in a Force Recon role. They, as well as dozens of other Elite Commando teams, would be opening the festivities by attempting to eliminate or cripple key targets, such as the shield generators on two of the major subordinate Hives. Each of which was operating one of the five major Droid Manufacturing plants on the surface.

Those were both targets for the elite commandos, while Ayala, Zavra, and the Champions were aiming to do something even nastier to a third. Specifically, they’d picked out one specific manufacturing plant, the one closest to the surface, which Shaak Ti and Ventress had already scouted. Using data lifted by that very pair, they were intending to take over that particular plant by turning the Droid security against the Genosians. If they captured it more-or-less intact, they could then turn its manufacturing capacity against the other forces on the planet.

With the two plants in the subordinate hives hopefully destroyed and a third working for them, there would be only one remaining subordinate Hive with a droid works…and the one under the ruling Hive itself. Taking those, after the League’s initial plans played out, would be a far more grueling and potentially chancy affair. Still, they had to get to that point, before they worried about the potential for a grinding campaign that could take months.

Much to his own frustration, Izuku was stuck here, waiting to guide the assault from space, while others led the ground teams. He needed to kick off the assault from orbit at the same time the ground assault started for maximum impact. A new production line of the Phantom-class stealth landing craft that had helped end the final few battles of the Crusade had, of course, been run. They were, sadly,  difficult enough to manufacture that even for this operation they only had thirty of them to use. Yet ten were already down and landed in strategic positions around each of the three Hives that were their initial targets.

The moment the shield went down, forces would pour out en masse from the Gates inside those Phantoms to begin the assault. Yet, you could only move so many people, so fast, through those smaller Gates. They had been improved, made larger to the point they could put some of the Gungan-made Copek hovertanks and Otta APCs through the Phantom’s Gates. They still couldn’t fit any of Mei’s original mechs bigger than a Striker, unfortunately. Of course, Mei was Mei. She’d taken that little detail as a challenge and developed a new heavy-weapons mech called the Phalanx which could get through to support ground units with artillery support and anti-air coverage. It was squat, a bit squished looking, and far less mobile than most of Mei’s other designs, but it didn’t need to be overly mobile to fill the two roles it had been created for.

Still, the point was that they would have to land heavy equipment like Lancers, Tigers, and Ligers normally. Which, combined with the fact that they were going to need to shield the assault columns from being overwhelmed by Nantex and Vulture fighters, meant they needed to get into atompshere and engaged fast. As it was, part of the reason Izuku was already in place, was that he was maintaining a light gestalt with other Force users in the fleet. They would be micro-jumping into the gravity well with assistance from the Force, to hit as fast and hard as possible.

Now, if only the waiting wasn’t the absolute worse part of warfare…

… … …

Aayla had to admit she was seriously impressed by the Champions, so far. Sure, she’d trained with them previously on Ossus, and knew they’d quietly cut their teeth on some raids against remaining slaver groups throughout Wild Space and the Outer Rim. Yet the degree to which the Ossus Academy had managed to create a true ‘Commando’ Force user, even if they didn’t call them that, was impressive. While she’d give high level Jedi Masters good odds of beating them one-on-one, she suspected even someone like Master Windu would have serious trouble with an entire 8-man squad.

As for the average Jedi?

Even with the reforms Yoda had pushed to see a lot more combat training, she suspected the average Jedi would be utterly slaughtered fighting even a single Champion. Jedi, despite their reputation, were not primarily warriors as a whole. Only Guardians could claim that even partially and, despite those aforementioned reforms, Guardians were still outnumbered badly by Consulars in the order two to one. Not as badly a Sentinels, who were the rarest of the three primary Jedi sub-divisions, and were outnumbered by the consulars five to one, but still…

Of course, Champions weren’t negotiators, researchers or diplomats. They were as good as they were at combat specifically, because that’s what they’d focused on to the exclusion of almost all else. They did so to a far greater extent than even Jedi Guardians, who still studied all the other bits like negotiation and diplomacy to some extent. Jedi, even the ones who actively focused on becoming fighters above everything else, were ultimately jack-of-all-trade. A little detail that had, historically, been part of why the less numerous Sith Orders were able to take them on. As it was, she was fairly certain even most Guardians would look askance at the heavily militant training regime of the Champions, as it didn’t mix well with the Jedi ideas and ideal about serving the Force. For herself, she wasn’t too worried, as she knew full well that others on Ossus were keeping a close eye on the group to make sure the program didn’t go too far. Master Bnar being the foremost of those, with Master Morne occasionally giving things a critical look whenever she passed through.

More to the point, right now, she certainly appreciated the results of their efforts. The squad of eight she’d taken charge of could keep up with her both physically and in the area of stealth. Her squad, along with a similar team lead by Zavra, were the most critical of the assault force. They were, respectively, assigned to capture the Droid Command Center and primary power plant of the Sartol Hive. Other Champion squads were pinpointing additional secondary objectives, all with the goal of turning the droids on the Genosians or disabling the shields and anti-orbital weapons.

Disabling the primary and hopefully secondary power plants would bring down the shield and limit the anti-air weapons only to their local capacitors. Though some of those other teams were targeting secondary means to take out specific sections of defenses in case either assault somehow failed. Meanwhile, the droids turning on the natives would provide a distraction from the multi-prong lightning offensive. Ten columns of fast troops closing in from the stealthed Phantoms, combined with a massive orbital drop that would put troops practically on top of the Hive. All simultaneous to the next to closest major allied Hives also coming under attack, too. It was hard to say if it would all be enough to take this facility intact and functional, but if they could, they could keep it pumping out the B2 series of droids that it specialized in. Which would be perfectly good cannon fodder to soak up loses when they had to assail the other Hives in turn.

Right now, the impressive stealth the team had ghosted through the base with had gotten them into what looked like a ready room of some sort, barely two hallways from Droid Central Command. They were holding position as her mental contact with Zavra and Izuku said that the other pieces weren’t quite in position yet. Zavra, she could get that information directly from, as she led the power plant team. Izuku, on the other hand, was using a mix of Battle Meditation and Force Gestalt to track the larger operation and click pieces into place. Which he then passed on to them. Normally, an operation with this many moving parts would be too prone to failure. With Izuku’s Battle Meditation coordinating, though, it was just within reason. Barely.

Her entire squad felt it when, less then two minutes after reaching the ready room, it all clicked into place. Such was the surety of it that they all began silently moving without the need for any command. They rushed the corridors, half using blasters and half lightsabers as they bull rushed Droid Command. Security was high here, but not at Red Alert, and the blast doors weren’t closed as a result. That was a mistake, even if an understandable one, and her team was through into the command center before anyone could trip an alarm or activate additional defenses. Blasters had switched to stun, not to spare enemy lives, but to limit any splash damage to the systems here, every Genosian in the room down before even getting off a return shot.

Then their slicer pair was at the main terminal, crowing in victory that the administrator hadn’t even been able to log out. Their fingers flew as they locked anyone else out of control and reset IFFs for every Droid in the facility…

… … …

Zavra gave a little cheer as her new favorite minions disabled the power plant, bringing down the shield and reducing the capacity of most of the anti-orbital guns. These Champions were honestly waaaayyyy better than the old Sith or Jedi teams she’d worked with! Sith could do the sneaky sneak stuff pretty well, but were horrible team players! Meanwhile, Jedi were usually bad at the sneaky sneak stuff. Usually, even the ones that were good at it were only good at it until the fighting started, then they ran around with lightsabers out, comparing kill counts in a dick measuring contest!

Which was silly. Everyone knew Jedi had small dick energy, after all. Sure, that wasn’t as bad as the shriveled dick energy most Sith had, but still! Much better to seduce an Agent or Bounty Hunter…supposedly. Mistress Acina had kept her away from both, despite muttering that whenever the subject came up. Still, she’d seemed to know what she’d been talking about!

Anyway, power plant under control! Now to really have fun!

“Right! Set up the illusions showing everything is normal! We want each group that comes to check things out to be properly confused so we can eliminate them piecemeal! Trudy, remember to illusion the remote mines invisible too, for when they eventually figure things out and bring in something heavier. Oh, and Xantiss, make sure you get the Cha Cha Slide protocol in place for the worker droids down here that aren’t on the main network. We want maximum confusion!”

Xantiss grinned so hugely that Zavra could practically see it past his body armor, even as his fingers flew. A lot of the B1 maintenance and worker droids were separate from the Main Droid Control, operated from the power plant as a safety precaution so no one could fuck up their job with broad priority updates. She wasn’t sure what a surprised Geonosian face looked like, and she hoped she got to find out when the B1s started doing that dance thingy that Mei had shown her! With the right programming to fix how poorly they moved, the B1s could do a surprisingly good rendition of it! Humming to herself, Zavra waited with impatience for the real fun to start…

… … …

Commander Eskol Mora felt the urge to move even before the red light in the hold abruptly turned green. She’d already slapped the control to pop the doors, the high-speed model installed in the Phantom taking barely a microsecond longer than it had taken for the light to turn on. All of her people were veterans, who had felt the light touch of Sovereign Midoriya’s Battle Meditation before, and were springing into action even as the doors opened. A Phantom’s bay was large enough to hold a dozen STAPs, plus four Striker mechs and two dozen folded HI-MK4 combat droid droids.

All of them were out the door in seconds, even as a stream of additional STAPs started zooming through the gateway in pairs. The Single Trooper Attack Platforms were a Gungan design, based off captured Trade Federation hardware, and were piloted by HI-MK4s, the latest model of Hatsume Industries battle droids. A full hundred of the STAPS and their droid pilots would pour out from each of the ten Phantoms as the first-strike wave, each of them modified for this operation with a suicide charge for the platforms. The droids were tough enough to bail out right before the STAPs rammed various fortifications and would do their best to overwhelm the fortifications in question before the natives could recover from the exploding STAPS.

Behind them, of course, would come Strikers, Gungan hovertanks and APCs loaded with HK-MK4s, as well as plenty of the new Phalanx mechs. In that order. The goal was to hit hard and fast across three separate Hives, killing any early attempts at organization by the Geonosians. The first wave wouldn’t have any sentient troops that weren’t in the mechs, allowing a reckless blitz, and by the time a second wave started coming the Fleet should be overhead.

Actually, as she stepped outside the Phantom and craned her neck up, she could see it was already overhead. Though it would likely be a minute or two before the fighters and bombers got in-atmosphere. She could already see ground installations trying to hammer the Fleet, even as precise fire from Particle Beams sliced through atmosphere to melt the guns doing that firing. A good sign, that, as it meant the territorial shields had been sabotaged successfully. With any luck, that orbital bombardment would also limit fighter launches from the local Hives, requiring the Genosians to get air support from farther afield.

Well, whatever happened, happened. They were committed now, and it was her job to keep her own people on task and punching forward. Worrying about the overall battlefield was well above her pay grade…

… … …

Izuku had to admit there was a certain visceral satisfaction in managing to make the efforts of over forty different infiltration teams all slide into place within less than three and a half minutes of each other. From the time the Champion Squad led by Aayla was ready in an unusual conference room, to the moment a member of the SAS Team Delta was ready deep in Hive Golbah, only three minutes and 27 seconds had passed. Even that large a gap had been only because Special Assault Service Team Beta had literally needed to repair a faulty door that the locals had a maintenance order out on.

Without Battle Meditation to coordinate, this sort of massive operation, with so many variables, would have been flat impossible. Even as it was, it was almost absurd, the sheer scale of the attempt having caused nearly everyone involved to balk when the plan had first been laid out. It was the sort of finicky operation that might look good on paper, but should have been far beyond practical execution. Only every single team targeting the more complex operations for the Sartol Hive being made up of Force Sensitives had made it feasible, and even then getting each and every other team in position at almost exactly the same time?

Izuku had a very good reason to feel a tiny bit smug that he’d managed to pull it off.

Now, an operation that had admittedly been a gamble even with Battle Meditation, stealth hardware no one knew they had, and some of the most experienced commandos in the galaxy, was going to work. Oh, the degree to which it was going to work, and how much impact it would have on the greater battle, let alone the greater campaign for the planet in general? Those were both still unknown. Yet, at least the opening phase was going to work, which would hopefully turn trying to take this world from an impossible, uphill nightmare into merely ‘plausible but costly.’ Which, given just what they were up against, was a bit of a miracle success story.

All of the commando leaders had portable Quantum Comms, but up to this point they hadn’t even wanted to risk that much, despite how near-impossible they were to detect. As such, until now he’d been solely using the Force to subtly push, pull, prod, manipulate, and direct. Now, finally, Izuku spoke into a comm set to reach all command staff.

“Begin Operation Bugspray. Repeat, Begin Operation.”

With just those six words, the ground teams began to move, Izuku still lending as much attention to them as he could. That was less than before, however, as he’d set the space half of the operation into motion in the same instant. Across the fleet, six Miruko-class ships and thirty Paladins each had a Force User on the bridge, sitting at either the helm or navigation positions. It was only a fraction of the total fleet present, but it was all the Force users they could spare who were capable of joining the Gestalt. With a moment of focused concentration by those of them that were best at Force-Assisted hyperspace navigation, every one of them reached forward and punched commands for a precision hyperspace jump.

The fleet flashed out of existence in the Outer System…and faded back in hovering directly over the three Hives they were targeting. Spotters on the ground had long since painted their aim points, and Izuku leaned hard into his Battle Meditation to bring every weapon that could punch through the atmosphere onto those targets as quickly and smoothly as possible. Right in the moment the shields on all three Hives fell to sabotage, before the defenders could even process the sudden appearance of the fleet in orbit, fire rained down.

The largest anti-orbital emplacements had been targeted by every Particle Beam the combined ships could bring to bear, wiping most of them out before they could get off even a single shot. Other, secondary weapons, overcharged so they could reach the ground from orbit, hammered sensors systems, hangar bay doors, and groundside hardpoints that the advanced forces would need to assail. For a solid ten seconds, nothing at all managed to fire back, and then the surviving weapons began to strike out at random ships in a disorganized fashion.

More critically, they were in range of one of the Hives that wasn’t under attack, and that Hive targeted one of the Mirukos and started hammering with everything it had. That Miruko, the Crusader’s Fist and its partner Light of Dawn, along with their escorts, immediately shifted targets to hammer at the Hive in question. The shields on a Miruko-class were absurdly tough and multi-layered, enough so that even potent ground emplacements would take time to batter them down. If the Hive in question doubled down and tried to do it anyway, they would lack enough power to keep that particular grouping from hammering their own shields down in turn.

Predictably, it only took a few exchanges for the Hive city to realize that fact and let its guns fall silent, even as fighters, landing craft, and drop pods poured out of the fleet to Blitz the planet. It was a paltry amount compared to those that were with the rest of the fleet, but they’d stripped this part of the fleet of any and all excess small craft in order to squeeze in as many fighters, bombers, drop pods and landers as physically possible into this first strike. They were hammering every known hangar as well, preventing a lot of enemy fighters from scrambling even if they had been ready to do so.

At least until Hives farther away got their shit together and responded, the League would have air superiority, and they were determined to use it to get some of their heavy assault hardware down while they could. Even as they launched, he noted the first wave of STAPs from the Phantoms hidden on the ground were starting their suicide runs on fixed defensive points. Pushing harder, trying to precog which ones would and wouldn’t be successful in knocking their targets offline, he prioritized orbital strikes on defenses that wouldn’t be properly taken out.

Of course, even before that, he needed to work at stripping away anti-air. Many of the smaller guns had local power supplies capable of keeping them going if cut from main power for any reason, including sabotage. Towards those defenses he sent their H-8 bombers, screened by a set of special Hero/Sidekick squadrons that been developed near the end of the Crusade but hadn’t seen much action. One thing that they absolutely needed to pull off victory on this particular planet was air superiority, and he was determined to help his people both get it and keep it. Hopefully, the wings in question would prove as effective as their namesake’s back on Earth had been.

Sinking almost as deeply into the Force as he had to hold up the Senate Dome, Izuku stretched his ability to coordinate with Battle Meditation to the absolute limit, while also using the same skill to suppress the speed of enemy response as best he could…

... … …

Senior Wing Commander Zala’Zyll had to admit she’d thought someone was insane when, near the end of the Hutt Crusade, the Hero-E was introduced. It was not a standard upgrade on the Hero fighter design, nor was the missile-heavy loadout that their Sidekicks carried. Which was, of course, designed to make up for the fact that Hero-E didn’t have a missile system, nor its original energy torpedoes. Instead, what it did have was a far more comprehensive set of sensors and far more advanced Electronic Warfare suite than was normal for any fighter. In fact, even most corvettes would struggle to match the EW suite in particular.

Given the role of the Wild Weasel Wing, there was a very good reason for that.

Their role, which had initially induced Commander Zala’Zyll to state ‘You have got to be shitting me,’ when its mission profile was first shown to her, was to intentionally bait anti-aircraft fire. The EW suite didn’t just help with scrambling attacks against the fighters, but could also do the inverse and help make them a giant fuck-off target. It started by making a single fighter look like three to most sensor systems, then also actively broadcast frequencies that would mimic things like lidar returns. The Hero-E could even fake being a much-more-heavily-armed bomber or Gunship, if it wanted to. The whole point was that the Wild Weasels, named after some similarly crazy unit from the Sovereign’s homeworld, were supposed to be spotted and shot at.

A lot. Preferably with everything the defense had.

Which was an insane idea, though one that was mitigated somewhat by the immensely powerful EW suite. While it made them incredibly easy to lock onto, once missile launches were detected the EW would go into scramble mode and actively attempt to screw with that target lock. Likewise, by appearing like a bomber or entire trio of fighters, sensor-fed weapons fire would be far more likely to miss them, targeting the false echoes instead of the real fighters.

Add in that the Hero-E had been given shield upgrades and phrik armor plating, as well as handed to the absolute best pilots they could find?

It turned out the idea wasn’t quite as insane as she’d originally thought, and the Wild Weasels had played a critical role in hammering anti-air systems on the heavily defended worlds of the late Hutt Crusade. They hadn’t seen that much action, since the concept hadn’t been properly in place or the new Hero-E model ready until the Crusade was almost over. Yet, their wing had proven to have a wildly disproportionate effect on anti-air defenses over the half dozen worlds where they’d been employed. Better yet, to High-Comm’s mind, they’d been used so little that most people weren’t aware of them yet.

Hopefully including the Genosians.

The original wing of Wild Weasels had been split up after the Crusade to train more pilots in the insane-but-effective idea. Now Zala’Zyll was charged with leading the people she’d trained into the teeth of heavy anti-air to remove as much of that anti-air as possible before the bombers swept in behind them. As they dropped like homesick rocks into the flak corridor around Hive Golbah, she barked commands to her greenhorns.

“Loosen up and get your droids cycling the EW patterns! We don’t know what systems they have down there, so don’t trust the defaults. Cycle until your sensors find the pattern that works best, and for Force’s sake don’t stop moving. Trust your Sidekicks to take out the identified weapons, rather than doing it yourself unless you have a perfect snapshot! May the Force be with you all.”

All of the Weasel pilots had been exposed to an experimental procedure that gave them mild Force sensitivity, then helped to hone that to focus purely on combat precognition. Zala’Zyll leaned into the mental mantras that had helped her the most, though different ones tended to work better or worse for different sentients.

‘I am one with the Force, the Force is with me.’

She snapped through a barrel roll to dodge a heavy laser, her sidekick slagging the gun a moment later, then Yo-Yo the throttle to evade more fire by centimeters. Half-lost in a Zen state, she barely recognized that those maneuvers had happened, as she continued to fall towards the Hive…

... … …

“Blow the mines!”

Zavra shouted the command, even as she deflected the sonic cannon the crazy bugs had someone squeeze into the hallway so that it shot up, into the roof. That alone brought down a chunk of the corridor, but the mines they’d planted finished the job a moment later. To the natives’ credit, they’d only managed to sucker two groups with the illusions, wiping them out, before the bugs had realized there were active infiltrators in the power plant.

Of course, given that their own droids were shooting them everywhere, it had taken them time to mount a full assault on Zavra’s position. When they finally managed it though, they’d swarmed. She wasn’t exactly sure why they were trying so hard to get into the power plant when Droid Control wasn’t suffering half as much attention. Perhaps these bugs had been offended by the Cha Cha Slide droids? Or, well, maybe the fact that those droids were shouting insulting things about the Queens.

Well, whatever.

The mines did a good job of collapsing that particular tunnel, the third one that they’d had to sacrifice. There was only one more leading into the power plant at all, and Zavra had managed to move a huge piece of machinery with the Force to block that one from the start. The Genosians were shit out of luck if they thought they were going to get in here now. Unfortunately, that also meant she was stuck here and couldn’t squish any more bugs.

Bummer. Maybe she could ride along with Aayla’s senses and see if she was up to anything interesting? Grinning, she decided that was a great idea! She’d just have to resist the temptation to distract her with ~fun~ things while the fighting was still ongoing…

... … …

Commander Mora ducked instinctively as yet another group of crazy natives attempted to buzz the column with nothing more than their own wings and sonic carbines. Of course, even if she hadn’t been able to suppress the instinct, its shots before dying horribly to the anti-air mounted on the new Phalanx Mechs couldn’t have hurt her. She was riding a command variant of the Otta APC, her head and shoulders out a hatch on the top to get a physical look out at the opposition. Given the Otta APC had a shield, a single sonic carbine wasn’t a threat, but it was blasted hard for her instincts to acknowledge that as the bugs kept splattering against them.

They might have underestimated just how many of the crazy bastards would come boiling out of caves and holes in the ground, but it was clear that very few of those that did so had heavy weapons at the ready. They were certainly losing the occasional HI-Mk4, and they’d quickly stopped even trying to bring forward any more STAPs after they’d proven just a target for the natives to swarm. Yet the locals had yet to field much that could threaten their mechs and APCS, aside from some Hailfire droid tanks and some limited artillery, at least. Both of which had thankfully fallen victim to their air cover before said air cover got tangled up in a nasty dogfight.

That dogfight was still going on everywhere overhead, with Vultures having streamed in quickly, with local fighters following them less than ten minutes after. Ready squadrons from various HIVEs only, as far as the local fighters went, based on the numbers. So far, even with the Vultures that had been faster to launch, they hadn’t been able to overwhelm their own air combat patrol.

At least not yet, command was warning them that there was likely going to be a period shortly where they temporarily lost control of the skies while the rest of the fleet caught up. Still, they’d bull-rushed through most of the outer defenses of the Hive already, to the point they were starting to fight inside the Hive now. Something that wasn’t turning out the way the natives might have hoped, what with the arm-mounted energy shields that HI droids all carried. Another force might have regretted being forced into tunnel fighting. The League Army thrived at it, far more than the natives did, due to those shields.

Of course, her column of reinforcements would still be vulnerable, which made her bark a command into her comm after a moment’s thought. Despite how useful the Phalanx was as an artillery platform as well, she ordered them posted along the column length as extra anti-air instead. Artillery wasn’t much use on the interiors anyway, anywhere but the factory. Nodding sharply as the order was acknowledged and her forces shifted, she willed her people and droids to press on.

They needed to take those Hives as fast as possible, or sheer numbers would overwhelm them eventually…

... … …

Izuku grit his teeth as he was finally overwhelmed and had to start prioritizing, dropping all but the commanding officers of the ground teams out of his Battle Meditation. The aerial battle had taken time to begin in earnest, as the locals had been caught off guard by the initial micro-jump into the planet’s gravity well. Yet Geonosis had tens of thousands of vulture droids, in addition to its local fighters, due to being one of the places that manufactured the bloody things. Even with the hangars of the Ertela Hive, their third target and the primary Hive that made the fighter-droids on the planet, successfully sealed, more than enough Vultures were elsewhere to have been thrown out as a rapid response force.

Even with them stuffing every fighter they could into the initial attack group, only three things had kept them from getting overwhelmed in the air early. The first was the major success of both the Orbital Bombardment and the Wild Weasel Wings in hammering down the anti-air defenses, with the H-8’s following up to cripple the sensor net as well. The second was the fact that the Miruko-class and Paladin-class now carried gunships along with fighters, a new design developed after the Crusade.

The Cavalier-class gunship had been designed to do exactly two things, but do both of them insanely well. The first, originally inspired by modified H-7s during the Crusade, was to operate in a fire-support capacity for ground troops. The second role had been instantly hit on the moment the designers realized what its combat loadout was going to look like, and that said loadout only needed minor modification to make it a deadly anti-starfighter platform as well.

That was something which, given the focus that first the Hutts and now the CIS had put on starfighters and other small craft, had been seen as an excellent and sensible addition. Thus the final loadout of the gunship had become two hefty quad laser turrets, dorsal and ventral, two more forward fire-linked blaster cannons, and four of the Energy Torpedo launchers they’d pulled out of the original Heroes and Sidekicks. It was a beast, and they had 280 of them in the field, between the two Mirukos and thirty Paladins.

The third thing, of course, had been Izuku’s Battle Meditation boosting the pilots, granting them all preternatural instincts and superhuman coordination. Not quite to the same level as Jedi pilots, but beyond what could easily be reached by non-Force Sensitives. It was this last, however, that faltered first as the battlefield shifted. More and more enemy fighters, now including the insanely agile native-built Nantex-class, were arriving…but so were the mass reinforcements from the rest of the fleet.

Starfighters were fast, and the rest of the ships burning in from the outer system had released all but a token defensive screen worth of their small craft the moment the operation had first sprung into motion. This meant that the first reinforcements to reach the combat zone consisted of over twenty thousand fighters and bombers, plus well over a thousand additional gunships. All of which had screamed into the battle just as the locals were getting enough air assets into the mix to seriously challenge for air superiority. Admittedly, there were only half that number of additional minds involved, since the League continued to use a sentient/droid mixed lead/wingman setup.

Even so, it was too much for Izuku to handle.

Something had to give, for him to continue maintaining Battle Meditation, and the average sentient trooper down on the ground was at significantly less risk than their pilots. By now, the League Army had moved to nearly a thirty-to-one ratio of droids to sentients, while the fleet had only five-to-one…and the Starfighter Corps in particular had only a 50/50 split. There were legitimately still more living minds down on the ground already than in the fighter waves, of course. Even only a half hour into the battle, nearly three million droids and over a hundred thousand sentients had poured out of either the 30 Phantoms and their Gates or made it to ground in landing craft and drop pods.

Yet Izuku had been managing it all, up until that point, as most of the sentients were engaged in relatively simple two-dimensional engagements. 10,000+ additional pilots, all of which needed help in a three-dimensional Furball of Doom, with a truly ludicrous amount of enemy and allied fighters weaving everywhere? It was too much. So much so that he had to drop all but the most critical of the ground units. He kept helping the surviving commando teams and the critical commanding officers, but otherwise stopped assisting everyone else on the ground. Even the Champions with Aayla and Zavara who, while still up to their eyeballs in trouble, each had the Force to call on for guidance of their own.

Wincing as, despite his best efforts, another three pilots died in rapid succession, Izuku refocused his efforts. The local craft were proving far more dangerous than the Vultures, and needed to be prioritized. It would only be another twenty minutes before the lighter fleet elements such as their corvettes and frigates would start arriving. With most of the anit-orbital guns that could range on them silenced, even if doing so had cost them six badly-damaged Paladins, those lighter ships would be able to start making a serious difference quickly. He just needed to hold it together a little bit longer, even if he was beginning to feel like he might end up in another coma if he had to hold it much longer than the fleet’s arrival without dialing back a lot.

Hopefully that didn’t happen, or Aayla might well force him to sleep on the couch after he woke up…

… … …

“What in the unholy kriff is this?!”

Aayla was used to weird, but as she chopped another shambling dead Geonosian apart, she could admit to some serious confusion. Sure, the Jedi had run into the occasional undead bullshit because of the Sith, but these actually didn’t feel like some sort of Dark Side monstrosity. In fact, she’d been nearly as caught out as everyone else when they’d made the final push into the Royal sublevels of Sartol and been ambushed by seemingly dead natives!

Zavra, whose team had joined her for this push as both of them were relieved by Army forces, was floating a head from one of the dead Genosians up to her own eye-level. Aayla would have thought it some sort of macabre game, given how Zavra could get a little…loopy…in combat, if she hadn’t been able to feel her lover’s concentration. Clearly, she’d noticed something that Aayla hadn’t. Abruptly, disturbingly, the Force began peeling the skull back…and Zavra’s telekinesis caught something alive as it tried to jump from the skull to Zavra.

“Huh, some sort of worm. A brain parasite maybe? Interesting. Potentially dangerous too. We need to pull back and push droids forward in front of us. As well as check the entirety of our teams to make sure none of these got through as…”

Zavra smoothly dodged to the side as two of the Champions turned to try and hack into her with lightsabers. She tsked and quickly disarmed them, the two clearly fighting their own actions.

“Come on, pull the teams back into a defense until droids join us, and help me try and get these things out without killing our people.”

Gulping and knowing that Zavra’s knowledge of medical science was far greater than her own, Aayla quickly started barking orders. Droids from the League Army would have to do most of the fighting down here, with her and Zavra carefully moving forward to deal with the Queens once the corpses had all been put to flames. Now that they were alert to the problem it should be possible to deal with.

Hopefully.

Grimacing as she remembered that theirs was only the first of three infiltrations to get at the Queens of the different Hives, she keyed her quantum comm. No one was trying to take the other two Hives intact, but they’d known the Queens existed at least, which meant groups were being sent into the other Hives to try and force surrenders. Thankfully, the way they’d crippled the Sartol Hive in particular meant they’d gotten this deep faster than the assaults on either other Hive. Better make sure the others all knew what they were up against…

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

A/N 1: Okay, time to talk numbers again. Yes, the planet is canonically listed as having a population of 100 billion. Which, of course, means that the force Yoda brought was HILARIOUSLY inadequate if we take things at face value. It would have been like spitting on a sun and hoping it kindly went out for you. The League is putting damn near 10% of it's total ground assets into this assault, and will STILL need a kill ratio of 20 to 1 to succeed. Mind you, that's actually PLAUSIABLE with them, because they likely achieved more like 100 to 1 in the initial attack, due to the incredibly ridiculous sabotage, made possible only by Battle Meditation to pull off. They KNOW they are going into a meat grinder, and did everything in their power to stack the deck in their favor. Given superior tech, orbital control, and a lot more experience, they bring the battle into the 'this might be plausible' range, instead of the 'nope, fuck that, we don't have nearly enough troops' range.

A/N 2: The Champions are something I had planned for a while, the fruition of the Ossus Academy bringing together so many Force groups. They aren't very numerous, there being less than 150 of them in total. Yet, they are insanely capable as they are far more FOCUSED than even Jedi Guardians. They also don't make up even close to Ossus's full numbers. Ossus, at this point, has a few thousand students in varying levels of training. The advantage of not caring what age or background your students come from allowed them to grow much faster than the Jedi. Particularly as the worlds within Hutt Space hadn't exactly been recently visited by Seekers looking for Force Sensitives...

A/N 3: This DID give me a good chance to show just how big a difference Izuku can make with Battle Meditation. In Legends/EU, Palatine could pull the same trick with even larger fleets, the abrupt lack of it when he died contributing in a major way to the fleet at Endor breaking  and running. You can see near the end of the chapter where Izuku hits a wall, though. He's good, likely the best living user of Battle Meditation at this point in the timeline, but he's not the crazy levels that Legends Palaptine would have eventually reached.

A/N 4: The Gunships were previously included in the complements of the Mirukos and Paladins, but hadn't been named or see yet.

A/N 5: The Wild Weasel Wing is, of course, based of the actual tactics used starting in Vietnam, modified to fit better with a sci-fi setting.