Chapter 148: The Kashyyyk Maneuver
Chapter 148: The Kashyyyk Maneuver
- Kashyyyk – 55 Days into the Clone Wars-
Kashyyyk was not a world most would think of as soothing.
Indeed, for any but a Wookiee to claim such a thing would likely get looks of concern for your sanity, should the audience hearing the claim actually know anything about the world in question. If the Shadowlands were taken into account, there very well legitimately might not be any other world ever explored that was quite as dangerous. At least when talking about flora and fauna, rather than volcanoes or other catastrophes. Sure, Dathomir might be the home of rancors, Felucia might have dozens of dangerous denizens, Yavin IV might have insect swarms that could strip flesh from bone in seconds, Korriban might be the home to countless Sith horrors that had bred out of control.
Kashyyyk’s most likely had all of them beat, combined, if you were foolish enough to descend below the upper few layers of the forest.
To those knowledgeable of the Force, a description of the Wookiee homeworld might have sounded like the sort of place you’d expect to be dripping in Dark Side energies. Yet, when such a soul stepped onto the planet for themselves, they would realize the truth. Kashyyyk was natural, in a way that worlds like Korriban were not. While the planet had, in the ancient past, been subjected to what amount to a runaway influx of the Force, the resulting world was balanced within the Living Force. It was as if someone took nature and the proper cycle of life and simply amplified it here on Kashyyyk.
Which was, in fact, incredibly soothing for someone who had recently been bombarded by billions of unnatural deaths in the Force.
What had happened on Geonosis wasn’t an act of the Dark Side, as the Jedi understood it. Not exactly. The Dark Side was a mindset, rather than a thing of nature. Those who walked with the Force, following its will in so much as it had one, allowing it to guide them. They were those who walked in what was sometimes called the Light Side of the Force, but which, in truth, simply represented the Force in its natural state. A practitioner of the Dark Side of the Force instead sought to dominate the Force, to twist it and use it for unnatural ends. This, at least, was the perspective of the Jedi Order that had raised Aayla’Secura from a small child.
It wasn’t even wrong, really. It was just…overly reductive and simplistic. Incomplete, even.
Something she understood now, and which she strongly suspected older versions of the Jedi Order had also properly understood.
The Modern Jedi Order, who had taught her those things, thought almost purely and totally of only the Cosmic Force. Within bounds of that mental construct, they were correct. Yet, the Force was more than just the Cosmic energy field that was created by life in general. The Cosmic Force was the end result, the big picture. Yet, the overall ecosystem was made up of smaller parts. It was here that most Jedi lost the plot, having not been properly taught about the concepts of The Living Force.
Admittedly, the distinction between the two was artificial. It was all one thing, not two separate tiers of power or layers of reality. Yet, for the purpose of a mortal mind being able to conceptualize The Force as a whole, the Living Force distinction served a purpose. The Living Force was all the little pictures that made up the big picture of the Cosmic Force. A world that became ‘Dark’ not by the twisting of the Dark Side, but by more natural events like a mass die off or extinction event caused by natural disasters, was not the same thing as one that had been artificially twisted by the machinations of a Dark Side cult.
In truth, Aayla thought someone really should have come up with different names for the two different phenomena. She suspected conflating the two by accident had caused innumerable acts of stupidity throughout history. It was what it was, unfortunately, and she doubted anyone would listen to her if she insisted on calling natural Dark aligned locations ‘Dark’ and places twisted by cults the ‘Stupid Side of the Force,’ or something like that. Possibly the ‘Cartoonishly Villainous Side of the Force?’
Snorting, lips quirking into a grin at that thought, Aayla came out of her meditation.
She knew, now, that Izuku had been right to send her here ahead of him, for more than just political reasons. Even just a few hours a day spent meditating, in the handful of days since arriving on the planet, had rid Aayla of a stain on her Force presence that she hadn’t even been fully aware was there. Like being scrubbed clean after having been dunked in foul waters, or gently washed off after running through smoke in a burning building. The impact of the miasma created by billions of dead on Geonosis had left that stain, but Kashyyyk’s incredibly active, yet very neutral presence in the Force was easily washing it away.
Stretching as she stood, she was just in time to pad barefoot to the door of the guest treehome she and Zavra were sharing, opening it before the Wookiee outside could knock. Chewbacca blinked in surprise for only a moment, before chuffing in what Aayla had learned was the Wookiee equivalent of an amused laugh. He growled out the exact question he had for each of the last three days with a toothy smirk.
“You are ready for the war meeting, blue one?”
Nodding serenely, a look spoiled by a grin of her own, Aayla responded.
“I’d say let me just get my shoes, but I’m rather enjoying not needing them! Let’s get going, shall we, Mr. Furry?”
Chewie barked with laughter again, even as he gave way, moving toward one of the planet’s rare speeders that was waiting for them. Wookiees didn’t use them much, preferring animal transport when they needed transport at all, but they did have a decent fleet of such speeders around specifically for rapid military movements. Until recent years, that had mostly been chasing down Trandoshan raiders, though that had been stomped on hard now that they Wookiees had a decent sized System Defense Force of their own. One that had, in fact, been blockading Trandosha since before the war began, due to the asshole lizards using Trade Federation ships to attack Wookiee shuttles in their shared system.
Following her ‘local guide’ out onto the massive wroshyr tree limb that made up the ‘road’ here, Aayla reveled in the bark beneath her feet. She hadn’t been lying in saying that it was nice to be somewhere where the natives didn’t give a single, solitary fuck about what you wore. Understandably, really, what with the Wookiees themselves rarely using more than a belt to hold pouches and weapons. As for Aayla, Twi’lek attire didn’t run skimpy just for cultural reasons. Their actual species anatomy had adapted to the dual extremes of Ryloth by being very temperature tolerant, and most Twi’leks found too much clothing to be stifling, rather than protective. The armor Mei had designed for her was less bad in that respect than pretty much any other armor Aayla had ever encountered, but she still hadn’t particularly enjoyed being stuck in it constantly for the entire Geonosis campaign.
Which is why she was wearing little more than a vest that could barely contain her boobs and ‘pants’ that didn’t reach her ankles. On a world with a lot of metal or duracrete, she’d have wanted boots too, but on Kashyyyk where every floor tended to be wood, it wasn’t necessary. A neat little side effect of having gone through Matukai training that toughened the body, which had incidentally increased her temperature tolerances even more. She could probably literally walk around naked on Hoth if she wanted, at least during the day, though the ice planet was cold enough she’d probably feel it at least a little. The skin weave treatment Zavra had adjusted for all of them had only enhanced her physical toughness even farther, to the point that she was honestly probably tougher than the Wookiees themselves were.
Shaking her head as she climbed into the speeder and it lifted off, with Chewie deftly maneuvering it toward the command center for the System Defense Forces, she engaged him in conversation again.
“So, I assume the Veto-class you leased from the League arrived on time last night? I trust there were no problems between our ‘training experts’ and the Kashyyyk SDF?”
Chewie chuckled again, shaking his head and happily catching her up on the Wookiee side of events. She had, of course, already gotten a report from the ‘Advisory Captain’ that was present to ‘train the Kashyyyk SDF on how to use the gravity well systems.’ It was better to make sure she had the viewpoint from both sides, though. The whole thing was a very delicate fiction, after all. Kashyyyk couldn’t openly invite a League Fleet in without an active emergency. The Republic didn’t have anywhere near the political consensus needed to handle a formal alliance with the League just yet, and might not ever given how pissed some planets were about entire sectors defecting to the League.
Meaning they needed to come up with ways to delay an assault fleet long enough for the ‘nearby’ League Fleet to intervene when the time came. The Veto-class cruiser that the Wookiees were ‘leasing’ from the League of Free Stars, was a major component in the plan that they’d worked out. It would be theoretically commanded by Kashyyyk SDF officers, but with plenty of ‘trainers’ on hand to really handle the heavy lifting, the careful fiction legally covering for its presence. If what they’d been working on that required the ship worked out even halfway, the CIS fleet was going to be in for a very nasty shock on arrival. One that should provide plenty of delay for the cavalry to arrive.
Hopefully, it worked out as well as planned…
… … …
Zavra cheered as she downed the spicy ale that the Wookiees loved so much, draining it from a proper Wookiee-sized mug of wroshyr wood and thumping it down between her and her opponent. Several Wookiees, who’d gotten over their disbelief after her third such challenger, were cheering on their friend as one of the largest Wookiees she’d ever seen tried to match her mug-for-mug. The informal drinking contest, held after the entire group had finished a hunt for the highly dangerous Katarns in the Shadowlands, had gathered quite a crowd by this point. Most of them were munching on raw or roasted Katarn meat as they watched, the latter seasoned even spicier than the ale. The hunt had gone quite well, bagging not just one, but a trio of the dangerous beasts.
The hunt itself had been super fun! Not to mention a great way for her new buddies, young hunters/warriors all, to blow off some of the tension that was building among the Wookiee forces. Wookiees could be super patient in some ways, they were long-lived hunters, after all. But when it came to a fight, they preferred to get in and get it over with. So the slowly ratcheting tension as the relatively new Kashyyyk SDF faced a certainty that their home would be attacked, without an enemy they could punch in the face immediately, had been causing some problems.
Zavra had known exactly how to deal with that, though! She’d barely had to nudge the officers to rotate the most itchy-fingered recruits off on shore leave, where she’d gotten a hunting party together! Followed by an actual party, of course! It was a bit of a pity that she couldn’t take part in the orgy she could totally feel was going to follow this many young Wookiees with their blood up getting drunk trying to keep up with her, but she was Izuku’s!
Well, she was also Mistress Aayla’s…and there was the fun wine the Wookiees had that acted like an aphrodisiac to most races that were near-human. She was sure Mistress Aayla wouldn’t mind her slipping a little into their dinner tonight! Master had told her to make sure Aayla relaxed some, after all, and there was nothing more relaxing than a couple of dozen orgasms! Yes, that was a good plan. She’d just make off with a bit of that wine a little later. She doubted the Wookiees would mind.
Oh dear, her opponent was looking woozy. Better encourage him to go find someone to have fun with, so he didn’t keep it up and wake up with a three-day hangover that would leave him out of the fighting! She grinned, leaned in to point him towards the female hunter she’d seen him eyeing all night, and purged the alcohol from her system with a combination of her implants and the Force as she did. She most certainly hadn’t told them she wasn’t going to cheat, after all, and this was entirely for their own good!
… … …
Severance Tann was a strange mix of irritated and pleased. Irritated because she’d been performing perfectly for her Master, taking world after pathetic world from the Republic fools. While the other crude Generals and Admirals of the Confederacy used brute force and superior numbers to smash their way into the Republic, her Master had used her as a far more intelligent and capable scalpel. There were a great many worlds among those now within CIS controlled space that needed to be captured without smashing them flat like a barbarian. They had useful industry or other assets that meant they needed to be cowed without being crushed. Severance had been his tool to do so, her Force abilities as his Dark Acolyte making her far superior to the brutes that got by on mere numbers and crude swarm tactics.
Still, while it was irritating to be pulled away from the highly satisfying task of breaking worlds to add to her Master’s assets, another part of her was pleased to be given charge of a much larger task. True, the initial major target was seemingly an easy one, with Kashyyyk not having enough of a defense fleet to have any prayer of stopping what she was bringing along. Yet, her Master believed the League would come to Kashyyyk’s aid, making the task far thornier. Even if it didn’t, there was Umbara beyond Kashyyyk, which was another one of those worlds Master would want broken to heel instead of merely battered and gutted. Their technology would be a boon to the CIS war efforts, after all.
Overall, she supposed she was more pleased that irritated. There was a chance she would get a proper opponent, after all. Probably not the Sovereign of the League, but perhaps one of his Jedi pets at least. They would provide at least some resistance, she was sure, even if they obviously wouldn’t be able to match up to her. Yes, this campaign should prove at least somewhat satisfying, even if it had interrupted her breaking another world properly to obedience.
As Severance watched the lines of hyperspace, thinking such thoughts and running scenarios about what she might face, there was an abrupt, brutal warning through the Force. Eyes widening, she opened her mouth to order the fleet to drop out of hyperspace immediately! She was too late, as something else ripped them out of hyperspace before she could give the order. Then, for a few minutes, seemingly everything was on fire…
… … …
Zavra watched with glee as the trap worked flawlessly. Aayla was too high-profile of a figure to have come aboard the Executive Order, the Veto-class interdictor ‘leased’ out to the Wookiees for this ambush. Zavra, on the other tit, wasn’t that well known outside the League, and only a bit better known inside it. She was mostly known to the military, not to random citizens, as she’d had nothing at all to do with the political side of the League. Those who did know of her outside the military mostly did so because everyone around Master was obviously of interest, and people kept track of who those people were. Without any sort of official position or serious political prominence with the League, Zavra had been able to ‘tour’ the Veto-class at an opportune moment.
Which was rather important, as the trap wouldn’t have worked properly without the sort of timing only a Force user could offer.
Scouts had been keeping track of the CIS Fleet, which was uncomfortably large, since it cruised right through an unresisting Uyter and surprised everyone by splitting. A sizable portion of the massive fleet had shift down the Lesser Lantillies…but the majority had shot down the Randon Run, which had been what they’d been expecting. There weren’t any worlds between Uyter and Kashyyyk that had any chance of resistance, so they’d known Kashyyyk was on the proverbial chopping block, and Zavra had rushed to have her ‘tour.’ A tour in which she had, incidentally and with everyone oh-so-casually looking away, been left standing right near the controls for the primed Gravity Well generators, eyes half closed as she waited for a signal from the Force to power them to full.
Which she’d done just minutes ago, and had gotten the timing perfect, getting a lovely view of the destruction their trap was wrecking on the enemy.
Normally, minefields were a dumb fuck idea in space. Enough so that pretty much no one used them in a serious way. Even the League’s use of Sky Mines to interdict worlds was the sort of tactic that cost such a fantastical amount of money that they’d rarely been used throughout history. Even a relatively small planet required tens of thousands of mines to get realistically useful coverage, after all, and even the League had only been able to produce them in practical quantities due to the Infinite Engine Seeds. Even then, they only had enough of a stockpile to use them on a few worlds at a time. Some of which they’d quickly repurposed and sold to the Wookiees for a song.
Trying to use such mines in space itself was typically an even dumber idea, under almost any normal circumstance.
Space was vast, and unless you were trying to do something highly specific and small scale, like protect approaches to a space station, it should be utterly impractical to deploy enough mines for a minefield to make sense. Even if you knew generally where someone was entering a system from, that wouldn’t be enough. Hell, even if you had an Interdictor like the Executive Order to force a fleet out of hyperspace, the amount of area you’d have to cover was still impractically obscene. Gravity Well projectors were not precision instruments, they were area of effect weapons, and the very purpose of their existence meant that said area of effect was not small. Using an interdictor with mines was practical, barely, but it was the sort of thing that you’d need months of work to prepare in advance. At least if you wanted the mine density thick enough to matter.
Unless, that was, you just so happen to have someone on hand who could use what might as well be magic to bring up the projectors at exactly the right moment so that a fleet in transit is pulled directly into a much thicker minefield than should be plausible in space. Which, of course, is exactly what Zavra had done just…five minutes and eleven seconds ago. With the aid of the Force, she’d timed the projectors warming up just perfectly so that the massive CIS fleet was dropped smack in the middle of the trap they’d been preparing for the last week.
Mines were only one piece of what that fleet had dropped into, albeit a brutally effective piece.
In addition to proximity-based mines, which the Wookiees had ‘purchased as discount’ from the League, dozens of small asteroids and makeshift platforms had been towed into place all around the perimeter of the trap. On or in those asteroids and platforms were thousands of sprint-launch concussion missile and proton torpedo tubes. Sourced not from the League this time, but from Corellia. The Core world was largely tapped out for large fleet assets it could send to anyone, with too many commitments already. Yet, while even the massively productive Corellian shipyards were unable to produce enough ships to help everywhere, minor ship components were another matter entirely. The production of missiles, torpedoes, and the tubes to fire both had far outstripped the ability to build the ships that they’d go on.
As such, when the Wookiees had asked not for ships, but for shipments of launch tubes and the weapons to put in them? Corellia had been confused, but happy enough to provide. Meanwhile, as it just so happened, one of the few technology exports from Kashyyyk were targeting systems, manufactured by a fabrication plant in Thikkiiana City. They were high-quality and somewhat in demand…and there were enough of them in production at any one time that diverting enough to create the trap hadn’t been overly difficult. Quick welding jobs to build slapdash frameworks to anchor the jury rig of targeting systems and missile/torpedo tubes were well within the Wookiees ability to handle.
The result was, frankly, one of the most glorious orgies of destruction that Zavra had ever had the delight to see.
Over 15,000 torpedoes and missiles joined similar numbers of mines in smashing directly into the CIS fleet moments after it emerged from hyperspace, well shy of the Kashyyyk system proper. The fleet’s shields weren’t even up, and dozens of ships just vanished, consumed by the massed explosions they were hit with on exiting hyperspace. Of course, this was a big fleet, and many of the ships in it were tough. While perhaps ten precent of the fleet died instantly, the corpses of those gutted vessels acted as shields for still more ships, which took hits of their own but staggered through. Still other ships, by luck or fate, escaped damage entirely by simply not being targeted, or having arrived outside the target zone. The fleet had been spread out, after all, so not every ship was pulled out of hyperspace directly into the trap.
Still, at least another fifteen percent of the CIS fleet was crippled. The Executive Order, Kashyyyk’s SDF, and what Republic allies had been able and willing to muster ships to the world did their best to pour salt on the wound with turbolaser fire. They wouldn’t do so for long, the fleet assets available here less than five percent the tonnage of the enemy fleet. Yet, so disoriented and panicked were the enemy that they still got several broadsides in utterly unopposed, before the Executive Order lowered its projectors and the defenders hopped into hyperspace, fleeing with pre-calculated hyperspace jumps back into the Kashyyk system proper.
In total, by the time Severance Tann managed to get her fleet back in order, it would prove that a full twenty seven percent of her massive fleet had been either destroyed or rendered too damaged to even think about fighting. All before even reaching the Kashyyyk system itself. Worse for her, it required almost two full days to make repairs to everything else. By the time she arrived at her target, an ‘emergency request for aid’ would see a large fleet of League warships waiting to slug it out with her.
Who knows, this had worked well enough that maybe, someday, they’d called it the Kashyyyk Maneuver…
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A/N 1: So, in this chapter, we get Aayla's viewpoint on one of my own greatest annoyances in Star Wars. Specifically, that there seems to be two conflicting definitions of 'Dark', that extend across both canon and Legends. The 'Dark Side' is defined very explicitly in Lucas's original vision for Star Wars as being a perversion of the natural Force. In Legends, this is best shown in the Kotor/SWTOR games, I think, as they have the time to show it off. That the 'Dark Side' is COMMANDING the Force to bend to your will, rather than letting it guide you.
On the flip side, however, there are numerous times in both canon and legends where LOCATIONS are depicted as 'Dark,' because of the what happened there. The remnants of Alderaan are one example, as are a dozen worlds that were tinted 'Dark' by natural phenomena. As Aayla observed in this chapter, basically being a vector for expressing my own annoyance, these two things REALLY ought to have different names to clarify the issue. They don't, unfortunately, leaving attempting to talk about the Dark or Light sides of the Force a murky and confusing nightmare.
A/N 2: Sneaky, sneaky. Minefields and traps are hard to properly utilize in space combat, but with the right tools it CAN be done. I figured, given that the Wookiees are Hunters more than Warriors, they'd be fully onboard with planning a nasty trick like this, even if it meant bending a few truths a bit.