Chapter 29: Return to Ossus

Summary: Training and the first fruits of Mei's genius...

Chapter 29: Return to Ossus

The week it took them to return to Ossus had been put to good use, in more than one way. Mei, of course, had already begun to take apart many of their smaller acquisitions, intent on learning how they worked. Thankfully, Anash had provided plenty of documentation and some solid learning material, so Izuku wasn't too worried about Mei actually being able to put the various purchases back together. Though he had put his foot down on any of the more involved projects, firmly reminding her it would be better to feed the originals into the Infinite Engine Seed for duplication, before taking the result apart.

In some ways, however, it was Izuku and Aayla who made the most progress. They'd both done so with the help of Tholme, though their progress had come in entirely different directions. In Izuku's case, he'd quickly discovered that the Jedi Master was extremely well informed on the galactic underworld. He was also open-minded enough to consider Izuku's general plan at least vaguely possible, if perhaps overly optimistic. With the older man's help, Izuku was able to put far better shape to the individual components of his plans, at least for the early stages. The two of them, when getting down to the nuts and bolts, had quickly agreed that getting some of the businesses off the ground was going to be the most important early component. The fact that money was power hadn't changed just because Izuku had jumped universes, and the manpower the businesses could eventually provide was just as important.

Tholme, to Izuku's mild surprise, was fairly knowledgeable on what was involved in setting up at least the shell components of a company, as the Jedi Order regularly did just that in order to create covers for their operatives. Better yet, the older man had a lifetime worth of contacts that could help get things running. He also, just as critically, knew of a few slaver outfits that tended to target spacers. If he could pin down the location of a few of them, they could make their initial raids against groups that were likely to have slaves with the skill sets they needed.

In some ways, the need to select a target on that basis grated on Izuku's nerves. Such slaves were somewhat valuable, and often didn't suffer the same rough usage as laborers or sex slaves. Not being able to go after the ones worst affected first wasn't something either Izuku or Tholme liked. But practical needs were going to win out, at least at first. If even ten percent of those from their initial raids accepted jobs with the new transport company, flying and servicing ships they could purchase from Anash or others, they would be getting somewhere on disguising the output of the Infinite Engine Seeds.

Aayla, meanwhile, had benefitted from the Jedi Master's presence in a more traditional manner. Her adventures with Izuku, added to her time training with both Masters Fay and Celeste, had pushed her skills significantly beyond where they'd been before her capture. The problem was that those gains had come in wildly erratic areas. Major improvements to her ability to use skills like precognition and telekinesis, were joined by half-random refinements to her lightsaber skills and a random splatter of more mundane skillsets. While all of those gains were beneficial, none of them had been properly integrated into her previous fighting style. Master Fay didn't use a lightsaber at all, and Master Morne's additions were based on different basic foundations than the modern Jedi Order.

Master Tholme, on the other hand, was her Master's Master. Much of what Quinlan Voss had taught her had been based on Tholme's own teachings, which gave the older man the instant insight into her style needed to help her integrate everything she'd learned so far. Over the course of the week, he helped her begin properly adjusting her overall combat style to take advantage of the improvements she'd made, as well as adjusting to the interesting boosting affect her new crystal seemed to have on any Force abilities with a physical component. While channeling through The Heart of the Guardian, Aayla's ability to accelerate herself with the Force, as well as use the Force boosted acrobatics that were a primary feature of Ataru, ticked up noticeably. With Tholme's help to close up gaps and suggest alterations to her style, Aayla was rapidly improving, though it would take much longer than a week to fully adjust.

On the whole, while Tholme's presence put a bit of a damper on the amorous pursuits that had filled their time traveling from Ossus to Esseles, there was no question that more actual progress had been made during the return journey. As they arrived back in orbit, they were surprised to see that Celeste's new ship had beat them there and was broadcasting an encrypted beacon for them from the secondary site, where they'd made temporary space for the Infinite Engine Seed. They'd situated it in what Ood Bnar claimed had been an old quarry, with an abandoned mining facility nearby that would provide a lot of raw materials. The old Master had been unbothered by the idea of scrapping said facility, as it had apparently been abandoned even before the destruction of Ossus. As none of them were willing to disturb the areas that had been populated, which were now effectively mass grave sites, they'd need to move the Infinite Engine Seed off world eventually. But there was enough material for now.

None of that, however, was what made Izuku stare in confusion as they landed and went through the shut down procedures for the Wandering Fate.

"She left at the same time we did, with the same class of hyperdrive! Why does it look like she's been here for at least a day? The ship's already been completely unloaded, and she had one of the prefabs half finished!"

Tholme chuckled at his confusion, but also provided an answer.

"Jedi can calculate far more efficient jumps than a navicomputer, if they have the skill for it. I technically could have done the same for us, but didn't feel the need. Apparently, Master Morne is a bit more impatient…or perhaps simply more used to moving off the usual travel lanes. Such jumps may be her norm, instead of exceptions. They are much harder to track, after all."

Right. Magic Space Fuckery Strikes Again. Izuku sighed. Quirks were bullshit, so he wasn't completely unused to the idea of weird things like this. But they were usually highly specific bullshit. Creating fire, messing with gravity, turning someone into a killer land whale. Quirks did specific things like that for their users. He had a feeling he was going to be quite a while adjusting to the fact that the Force could allow individuals to do a much wider range of complete bullshit. Thank God or the Force, whichever was appropriate here, that far less of the population had access to it. The idea of 80 percent of galaxy having access to bullshit of this variety and magnitude was a bit horrifying. After all, Quirks had created an entire era of chaos when they popped up. One that had taken hundreds of years to mostly settle back down. If more people had the Force? Shaking the thought off before it summoned images of emo teenagers slaughtering villages in place of therapy, he finished the last of the shutdown sequence and stood.

"Well, if she's made this much progress, we'll only make more by rolling up our sleeves and helping out. Besides, Mei is likely about to explode if we don't let her duplicate some of what we brought and start working on it."

Aayla giggled, and even Tholme chuckled, both of them having heard Izuku having to talk his friend out of tearing down the larger systems they'd bought form Anash. They also quickly joined him in trying to head off the chaotic ball of energy known as Mei, however. Best to give that chaotic energy a bit of focus and direction before it launched itself at random projects with all the zeal of a toddler on a sugar rush…

... ...

The next month seemed to both race and crawl. There were constantly a dozen things that needed doing, with everyone pitching in where they could. Without a few dozen droids that had been among the first things Mei duplicated, they'd never have kept up with all the projects their plans called for. Not with so few of them to spread between tasks. As it was, Tholme and Celeste conspired to keep Izuku and Aayla training a few hours a day, which filled the rest of the time they might otherwise have had free. Ood Bnar occasionally took over teaching Izuku, with a fascinated Tholme sitting in on the more esoteric Force lectures Master Bnar offered. Meanwhile, Celeste used those chances to take over Aayla's training and push her lightsaber work to a level that was honestly beyond Tholme. The newly arrived Master was good with a lightsaber, still better than Aayla. But Celeste was a whole different level of dangerous, with an edge of battle-hardening no modern Jedi could match.

Frankly, everyone knew the pace wasn't sustainable in the long run, but by pushing through the month at a blistering pace they'd accomplished an amazing amount. Enough Prefabs had been duplicated and put up to create a fairly comfortable living environment off the ships, along with several workshops for Mei and the droids to use. Those workshops, combined with labor droids assigned to salvage and Mei's obsessive energy, had made some pretty major strides. Some of which left Izuku smug about his friend's brilliance while the Jedi were both impressed and baffled. The first major fruits of Mei's genius were being presented to said baffled Jedi, by a Mei that Izuku had finally telepathically knocked out for twelve solid hours, then had Aayla wrangle through getting properly clean.

Thankfully, when Izuku had finally gotten through to her that it was time to present her 'progress so far' to the 'investors,' she'd perked up and run with it. Now, she was standing before a starfighter, a quartet of them in fact. None of them, most notably, was the Z-95 headhunter that they'd acquired. Despite that minor detail, it was the speech she was currently giving that was busy blowing the Jedi present away.

"So! I realized after putting the Z-95 baby through the IES, that everyone in the Republic is dumb and basically the only improvements between old fighter craft and the new stuff are better materials and better miniaturization! Same thing with the HWK-290! I had to build a scanner for it, since Celeste didn't want me cutting her baby apart to put it through piece-by-piece! But once I scanned it, the exact same things were true. Same design principles, just iterated with better alloys, capacitors, and so on. More stuff, smaller space, but basically the same patterns! Very boring."

Izuku coughed to cover a laugh as Mei scowled. She glared at him for a moment, before letting go of her rant.

"But! That's also sort of a good thing. Kinda of. Because it means that I can just overhaul the blueprints in the IES library and update them. The result isn't quite as good as if we started from scratch. Especially not if I started from scratch and built something actually original for once! But I know Izuku wants to get started heroing! And I needed to learn anyway! So, I built these babies!"

Turning to wave at the four starfighters behind her, which to a laymen like Izuku, admittedly looked entirely too similar to the Z-95 to shoot down Mei's statements about similar designs. A single T wing shape with two engines, the lines were somewhat different, and it only had two engine exhausts instead of four. Otherwise, it was a bit bulkier of build, but right around the same size. Honestly, the biggest differences seemed to be the engines and the fact that these 'new' fighters had slightly down-and-forward swept wings, compared to the ruler-straight wings of the Z-95. Well, that and there was no transparent cockpit.

"This baby was originally a Liberator-class starfighter! Which I thought was actually a good name for Izuku's plans. So, these are just Liberator II's! They are way better than the originals, though. I've updated the design using the material specs, improved alloys, and better miniaturization from the Z-95. Then I used the space saved for two things! One, it has a class 2 hyperdrive. It needs an astromech for jump calculations, but it does have the drive. Second…I eliminated the pilot for a droid brain!"

That…did explain why the 'cockpit' area didn't have a transparent canopy. Presumably, the droid brain would just use the ship's sensors to fly, not actual sight. Still, while Izuku thought he had a good idea of the answer, the question obviously needed to be asked.

"Ah…Mei? Why?"

She spun and pointed a finger gun at him, firing it in a cheesy way with a very 'businessman selling you things' smile. She was too cute for it to seem like a used-ship-salesman-smile. But it was certainly somewhere on that spectrum.

"Because we don't have people to fly them! And…they aren't as good as the headhunter-baby yet. Performance wise, they are only about 93% as good as the Z-95 baby. Also…they are prototypes I don't completely trust not to explode!"

Mei quickly pushed past that comment, ignoring the consternation on the Jedis faces.

"They are safe enough to move around and pilot normally. They just might still have some bugs in combat! The droid brains will do fine for them, even if they are going to need to accrue experience against modern ships. It's just that I had to hack together their programming from some of the dubiously-legal-spec stuff Anash put in the pilot droid of the Wandering Fate and combine it with the combat programming from droid brains stored in the IES. That combat data is…dated. By several thousand years. And the stuff taken from the modern pilot droid can't completely cover the gap. At first, these things won't be as good as piloted Z-95's. Maybe, like…75% as good? And the systems shouldn't have too many compatibility errors, but edge cases where they malfunction seriously and explode in combat have a non-zero probability. No IFF issues, though. That's hardwired. Don't want crazy robots shooting Izuku again!"

Mei looked unhappy about the qualifiers, but pressed on to fully answer Izuku's question. Just incidentally avoiding having to explain the 'again' part of the crazy robots thing. Izuku was onboard with that. Being chased half-naked around the UA campus by robots programmed by drunk-Mei had not been one of his better moments.

"But! Even if they aren't as good as piloted Z-95s! These babies are totally disposable! The droid brains are specifically non-sentient models but do share data in real-time. No ethics concerns and, so long as even one of them survives, the next generations will be better and better, until they are as good as the fighters performance can handle. Even as they are now, since they don't have organic pilots, you can just take them along as disposable force multipliers. Making up for your lack of people and ships in space!"

Izuku nodded. That was about what he'd figured. Except for one little detail.

"And you totally needed to rebuild a smaller ship before trying a bigger one, didn't you?"

Mei blushed and looked away. Izuku snorted.

"It's still good reasoning Mei. And it didn't exactly cost us anything, right?"

Mei shook her head.

"Nope! These things are cheap to make, at least for us. Salvaged raw materials from the mining complex make up most of their structure. The IES only had to create a few critical bits from scratch. Give me another week and I can make another dozen of them without worrying about straining our production. And even that's without slowing the stockpiling of trade goods we're doing."

Izuku nodded, already reworking his mental plans to account for having a couple of starfighter squadrons, even somewhat dubious ones, to help in their anti-slaver operations.

"Good work, Mei! As always!"

Apparently, that was finally too much for Aayla. The Jedi had been silent until now, put looking more and more incredulous. Izuku wasn't quite sure why until Aayla finally put it out there, tone attempting to be level but failing.

"Mei. Are you telling me that, in just a month, you effectively modernized a 4,000 year old starfighter design. Enough that it is within shouting distance of modern state-of-the-art fighters. Then, just for good measure, reworked it to have a hyperdrive and droid brain?"

Mei nodded happily, with Aayla slowly sinking her head into her hands. After rubbing at a migraine Izuku could feel over their bond, she almost glared at him for his seemingly taking this in stride.

"Izuku. It takes an entire team years to design a starfighter. Even to just update an existing model to new specs, it should take a team of professionals at least six months. Probably longer."

Before Izuku could get a word in edgewise, Mei chirped out a cheerful explanation.

"That's because they're idiots! Seriously, you have sentient Artificial Intelligences. Yet, for some reason, your designers insist on hand-mapping all the updated control runs and other finicky little details! All the parts are already modeled! Just feeding the changes you want to make to an astromech, let it make the 'most logical version,' then go back and fix the stuff it did too logically. You know, like making things too hard to service or not resistant to battle damage by creating too tight of tolerances. You just go back and fix those sorts of things, then put it through the AI again. Rapid prototype via AI! Totally normal back on Earth, but they don't seem to do it at all here. Supppperr weird."

That made sense to Izuku, but when he looked at the Jedi, it was clear that was…not the normal method of starship design. Izuku frowned at that, he knew some people on Earth were against that sort of AI use as well. But that was more on a 'it steals my job' level. Which seemed like it wouldn't make sense on a galactic scale. Aayla, looking as bemused as frustrated now, provided at least a sort of explanation a moment later.

"Mei, most people don't trust droids enough to do things that way. As you just pointed out, they often overlook issues in favor of the most 'logical' approach to design. Usually, droid-designed anything is a nightmare to work on or work with."

Mei nodded at that.

"Oh, totally. Only an idiot would let a computer design something from scratch. Too much room for interpretation. But if all I have to tell it is 'you have these spaces free to wire this set of control runs through,' then give it explicit tolerance limits and materials to work with? It can do it just as good as a human, but the human would take a week. The droid takes 15 seconds and I can double check its work in half an hour. Of course, it matters a lot that the droids I used were explicitly designed to perform complex maintenance on ships, too. Heck, astromechs are programmed to do something similar just to reroute power after battle damage!"

None of the Jedi seemed to have a response to that. Which didn't change the incredulity he could feel pouring off all of them. Izuku just decided to roll with it and be smug about his friend's brilliance. Well, at least until the first of the starfighters spontaneously exploded. This was Mei, so that was a non-zero possibility, even if she had gotten better about it…

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

A/N: So, I kinda agree with Mei about ship design in Star Wars. Obviously, a lot of the issues are because all the various eras are actually being written from OUR era. Which makes it a little hard to conceive of major tech differences. Yet, even so, the authors were seriously lazy when they've made various ships from various eras. A lot of the time they might as well be cut and paste, with no major changes between them. Mei isn't going to take that lying down forever. But for now, she's still learning. Which is where the updated Liberator came from.

The logic behind it is basically all described by Mei. The only extra note from me is about why it was in the Infinite Engine's database. The Liberator was in use even BEFORE Darth Revan's Sith adventure. Since I don't want them to be stuck using all Sith Ships, I'm making the logical assumption that Revan would have updated the IES with Republic Designs as well as Sith designs. Why wouldn't he, after all? Particularly if he updated the library after he went back to being a Jedi.

There will also being a few other ships that ended up being absorbed by the Infinite Engine's territory on Nar Shadda before its caretakers kicked the bucket. But I'll keep those to a minimum. Really, there's only one that I explicitly want, for reasons that will be gone into when it is made in-story.