Chapter 144: Assault on Hive Stalgasin
Chapter 144: Assault on Hive Stalgasin
It had taken an additional five days for them to feel comfortable even talking about attacking Hive Stalgasin. A frustrating amount of time, given that the wait gave their enemies time to make themselves a harder and harder target, to pump out more droids and arm more of their people. Yet, there just hadn’t been any realistic way to speed things up. The battles they’d fought so far, despite being unqualified successes that achieved kill ratios deeply in their favor, had still bit deeply into their logistics. They’d lost over fifteen million droids, and suffered close to 400,000 sentient casualties, though only a little over half of those were fatalities.
To be certain, those numbers still represented a staggering victory, given that they’d accounted for something like 375 million dead natives and at least 40 million more droids. A massively uneven number brought about by superior hardware and tactics. A number which, with the fall of so many major Hives, had also convinced many of the remaining subordinate Hives to abandon rule by the Stalgasin. Something which was fantastic news, as it reduced their remaining opposition from over another billion to just the core ruling Hive.
A Hive which, unfortunately, supported nearly 85 million native troops and another 20 million droids. Not to mention even heavier defenses than the other major Hives they’d taken on so far. Numbers that meant the League Army was still outnumbered, had a lot of repairs needed beyond just those droids outright destroyed, and just generally needed time to reset, repair, and recover. Their logistics was, thankfully, in much better shape than the enemy, particularly as they believed that the loss of the subordinate Hives had cut the ruling Hive off from raw materials needed to keep the factory they were sitting on producing. Which at least meant the numbers weren’t getting that much worse as they gave the enemy time, even if the static defenses were likely hastily improved.
Even with the recovery time, the League had taken certain losses that couldn’t be made good. Well, not losses exactly, so much as new restrictions. While only a few of the Ossus Champions and other Force users had died so far, all of them save Izuku, Aayla, and Zavra had been pulled off the planet by this point. The death of so many sentient beings, even if the Genosians semi-Hive mind reduced the impact, had created a distinct taint to a world that had already leant Dark due to the natives’ constant internal battles.
The effect was currently still a natural depression of the Living Force, rather than a taint on the Cosmic Force that could be properly labeled as ‘The Dark Side.’ Yet it was still dangerous to Living Force wielders to be exposed to that much, for lack of a better way to put it, Death taint, within the local Living Force. It was the sort of thing that could and would get to Force Users who weren’t truly prepared for it, and the vast majority of their people weren’t experienced with it. Zavra, of course, had experienced far worse for most of her waking life. Izuku and Aayla, likewise, had plenty of experiences with places tainted by genuine Dark Side energies, rather than just the heavy feel of death and echoing pain imprinted on the local Living Force.
Unfortunately, this meant that they’d lost a number of their hole cards, as it were. Even the Wild Weasels had been pulled back, as their members were Force Sensitive enough to begin feeling the weight of all that death, and they’d begun taking more casualties as the local Force had become increasingly murky besides. That didn’t mean that all their advantages were gone. They still held orbital control, more completely than ever. They still have the comm jamming abilities that would make the droids and individual mobile natives less coordinated. The tech edge remained theirs, the normal commandos were still available, and so on.
It’s just that they’d expended most of their major force multipliers already.
Which is why those filling the command post looked less than pleased as they worked through the possible approaches for the next phase of the invasion. They’d already ruled out any real chance of sabotage teams working again, or of finding a way to disable the power or shield generators. Which left, frankly, a frontal assault that no one was happy with. Of course, Izuku had one last trick to play that would help, but he knew full well that no one but him and Zavra were really going to like it. Leaning forward, choosing the moment where the command staff were at their most bleak about the possible costs of the assault, he struck.
“Gentlemen, ladies, I have one last card we can put in play. One that will at least let us carve through the outer positions and reach the Hive itself without suffering crippling losses. You see, I had a bit of specialized hardware brought along…”
He was, of course, right. None of them liked his plan. Yet, none of them could deny that it had a high probability of working and cutting their losses to the entrenched outer defenses significantly. Besides, in the end, he was still their Sovereign, and they knew full well he could just order them to allow it. He would get his way, even if he knew certain people back home were going to chew him out for pulling this particular stunt.
Still, after having been forced to sit on the back lines this entire time, he found he could live with that…
… … …
Despite the chaos of the battlefield around him, Izuku was grinning widely as the massive plasma lance of his custom Lancer sliced cleanly through a Octupatara Magna Tri-Droid. The fact that Geonosis even had some of the Techno Union designs had been a nasty surprise, but it wasn’t enough to wipe the glee from the rush of combat away. Even as another wave of smaller Scorpenek Annihilator Droids attempted to take the spear tip of assault forces he was protecting under fire, he shifted one of the four massive phrik-and-cortosis shields he was controlling to intercept.
Those shields, each of them five-meters across, were the real reason he had taken the field despite all protests of high command. No one had thought anything of the fact that he, Aayla, and Zavra had all put in the hours to fully qualify in a Lancer. The humanoid mechs were, after all, Big Stompy Robots that were immensely fun to mess around with. It was, in fact, half the reason Mei had insisted on making the design practical, despite all conventional logic. The fact that they’d turned out so useful had merely silenced all the naysayers.
No one had realized that they hadn’t been qualifying just for fun, but because Mei had created a custom set of Lancers just for them.
The custom Lancers were more powerful, better armored, and their use-case was largely based around Izuku’s personal combat style. Super-sized versions of his phrik hex-shields were mounted on the back, just as he would normally carry his when armored up, each of them equipped internally with anti-grav systems that would reduce the strain of moving them around with the Force. Only Izuku could manage four of them, which was still a downgrade from the six he used in personal combat, but Aayla could manage two, and Zavra three.
Between them, and with the Force guiding how they used them, they were a mobile bulwark for a fast-moving spear of mechs. They’d waited until the battle was fully in swing, then used a Gate to deploy on the extreme right flank of the battle. With Izuku, Aayla and Zavra’s Lancers acting as a neigh-immortal speartip, they’d thrust into that flank of the battle, with a line of heavy mechs and elite ground troops following in their wake. Curving once they were through the front, so that they threatened the rear of the forward troops, they’d accepted fire from the Hive itself by deploying heavy shield mechs to that side, then unloaded mercilessly into the backs of the Geonosian front line.
Even now, as Izuku happily let the familiar flow of combat adrenaline flood his system, washing out months of politics from his system, he kept up the brutal forward pace. A Hailfire tank, a group of DSD1 Dwarf Spider Droids, and a unit of some sort of heavy Geonosian non-droid weapons platform fell in rapid succession. He was only lightly dipped into Battle Meditation, just using it to bolster coordination of his own spear of heavy metal, but he could feel it as the entire right flank of the enemy folded inward and began to collapse.
Any moment now, that would turn into a catastrophe for them as Sidekicks with heavy missile loads would be pouring through a Gate brought in under the shield. Their fire from above combined with a massive artillery barrage that the General had been setting up would rip the heart out of the bunched up center as the right flank folded into them, crippling the entire outer defense of the Hive. All he had to do was keep up the pressure. A job he was delighted by after being relegated to the rear lines until now.
That probably wasn’t the healthiest mindset that had ever crossed through a Force User’s mind. But Izuku was ultimately a creature of action and he had a lot of frustrations to work out on a stubborn enemy that had refused every offer to negotiate a surrender. He could mediate later to recenter himself if necessary. Right now, he was going to take what he could get. Who knew when the next time he could convince his people that taking to the fight personally was a good idea would be, after all?
… … …
Izuku hummed, watching on in interest, occasionally blocking a desperate shot from a gun someone got working on the Hive walls again, keeping it from disrupting the rapid assembly of ‘The Cracker.’ He’d only been able to watch from a distance as the weaponized Gate assembly had been used to crack open Hive Robi, and it hadn’t been needed at all for the previous three Hives, which had each been cracked by orbital bombardment and bombing runs. The ruling Hive, unfortunately, had a much more robust set of shields, including secondary shields protecting the shield generators. Meaning they had to bring in The Cracker, under the primary shields, to breach into the Hive itself.
The design was brutally simple, though currently impractical to use aboard ships for technical reasons Izuku freely admitted he didn’t understand. Something about kinetic blowback from the Gate? He knew they only got single shots out of the thing before having to outright replace some parts for another shot, and that in spite of the fact that the parts in question were made out of beskar, of all things. Still, despite the fact he didn’t understand the technical details entirely, the actual mechanics of The Cracker were dirt simple.
A Gate, connect to another Gate, in front of a fuck-off huge railgun, mounted on a large space station that used Isotope-5 to power both the Gate and the railgun.
That railgun was far larger than even the ones mounted on their Siege-class frigates, and even if the Hive’s walls had been made of phrik or beskar, the sheer brutal kinetic force would still have punched a breach into the fortress-spire. As it was, it was merely reinforced, thick native stone. The Cracker would break a massive breach into the base of the spire, just as it had with Hive Robi, and the Army would use that breach to begin taking the Hive. Of course, considering that this Hive was much larger and more heavily defended than even Robi had been, they were actually setting up three Cracker Gates. Each one was currently being protected by himself, Aayla, and Zavra. One for each of the special Gates as they were set up.
Three shots, three breaches, plus aerial troops using openings farther up the Hive Spire to get inside and work their way down. It was still going to be an ugly slog, but they’d already learned from the other Hives that the League Army was actually much better suited for tunnel fighting than the Geonosians themselves were. The Geonosians might live in the tunnels, but they were a flying species that typically preferred to do all their fighting under the open sky where their maneuverability was in play.
There was no longer any doubt they would win. It was only a matter of how high the cost would be when the bill came due…
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A/N 1: Numbers. Holy **** the numbers. Geonosis has CRAZY numbers, with the population being 100 billion and them having a fuck ton of warrior caste. Worse, they are fanatics. I actually sort of understand why the Empire eventually tried to just sterilize the damn planet to deal with them. I've tried to make the tactics and hardware of the League make up for the numbers, but even with that, the League had to put something like 10% of their entire ground military into the planet just to have a CHANCE of success. Thankfully, the vast majority of worlds that might be fought over in the Clone Wars don't have populations that huge, even in the Core.
A/N 2: What? If YOU were the boss and had Mei on tap, YOU'D demand a personal mecha that you could use to kick ass with too, and make it badass enough that everyone had to admit there was a reason to let you.