Chapter 41: Building the Future

Summary: Aayla returns to the fold and we get a glimpse of what's been going on with the buildup of forces at Tythe...

Warning! Chapters 40-43 were published back-to-back! Make sure you don't miss any of them!

Chapter 41: Building the Future

Aayla braced herself as she reached the bottom of the ramp. A moment later, the reason for that bracing became apparent as Mei tackle-hugged her. The enthusiastic engineer's launch had somehow planted Aayla's face right in her boobs…again, and Aayla wasn't above basking in the 'marshmallow hell' as her lover called it. In fact, she smirked as she felt a spike of appreciation from Izuku where he was waiting. Deciding to tease him a bit, Aayla lifted her hands…and planted them firmly on Mei's ass. The engineer seemed oblivious, already chattering away about her newest project, but it certainly had an effect on the emotions she was feeling radiating from Izuku. Perhaps it was how long they'd been forced apart this time, nearly five months of lonely nights, that put the thought in her head a moment later.

Maybe it's time to finally do something about this?

Thoughts turning just a bit calculative for a moment, Aayla mentally nodded to herself. Giving Mei's rear a light squeeze actually distracted the engineer for a moment. Long enough for Aayla to free herself and properly say hi to Izuku, at least.

"It's good to see you too, Mei. But maybe you want to show me some of your new projects instead of just talking about them?"

Mei instantly latched onto that idea, grabbing Aayla's arm and towing her off to see all the progress they'd made while she was gone…

... ...

Izuku soaked in the silence happily, Aayla tucked into his side as they looked down over Tythe from an observation bubble built into the new orbital shipyards. Mei's whirlwind tour had lasted for nearly three hours, before the pinkette had been tracked down by Nikkila and pulled off to some project or other that the Mikkian needed her advice on. Of course, the way that Nikkila had winked at the two of them had given away that she was really just rescuing them. Which both Izuku and Aayla appreciated.

The two of them had been able to catch up a bit over their bond when Mei got too lost in technical details for either of them to actually follow, so the silence of the moment lingered for some time. Both of them were happy just to enjoy being together for a few minutes, before they inevitably had to talk shop. Finally, it was Izuku who reluctantly broke the silence.

"So, I know I already said it over the holo. But congratulations, Miss Jedi Knight."

A satisfied happiness echoed for a moment through Aayla's emotions, even as she shifted a bit to grin up at him.

"Still going to be a while before I stop enjoying hearing that, I think. I'm honestly still shocked they let me try so early, given how non-traditional my training has been."

Izuku couldn't help but chuckle at that.

"I think that's probably why, love. Even if they don't realize where it all came from, the influence Masters Morne, Bnar, and Fay have had on you isn't small. Even I can tell the difference between you and most of the other Jedi I've met so far. Though the Almas Jedi are starting to feel somewhat the same."

Aayla considered that for a moment, then poked him in the ribs.

"You're at fault, too, I think. The way the Force is clearer around you has made all of the Jedi in your orbit a bit more aware of the darkness, and able to push back against it. I think all of us have learned Force Light by now, and regularly meditate with it active. Though I need it less than the others, since our bond lets me ignore at least some of the effects of the Veil of the Darkside."

Izuku made a noise of acknowledgement, but there was some discomfort in it. Even a couple of years after the initial revelation of how he was connected to the Force via his Quirk, Izuku was amusingly uncomfortable with the more metaphysical aspects of Dark and Light. Given his own connection was a near-direct tap of the Cosmic Force, rather than the Living Force, it didn't make much of a difference for him. Not unless he actively tried to warp the energy he was tapping into. So, as always, Aayla let the topic lapse in favor of more practical matters. There were other people whose job it was to try and deal with a Veil that didn't actually affect Izuku meaningfully.

"You've made incredible progress here while I was gone. How close are we to ready for the next phase?"

Izuku sent her a pulse of gratitude for not pushing the topic and answered a moment later.

"We're already ready, actually. The fleet has just been running final sims while we waited for you to return. I wanted you here for when we kick off the operation, and a few days of delay for some extra sims wasn't a big deal."

Aayla shifted in surprise.

"Wait, seriously? We've hit the fleet strength we need to be comfortable pulling it off?"

Izuku grinned and nodded.

"Easily. We got some unexpected help with the various redesigns, which let us lay down hulls quicker. Trevo wanted a few of his team to cut their teeth a bit on the Munifex refit design. Then Mei's two designer friends from Naboo turned up raving about the redesigns to the N-1 series she'd sent them. Naboo has officially kicked in a design team under those two to help with various projects, in exchange for access to the N-2 designs. It's not the only help we've gotten from Naboo, either."

Aayla blinked curiously up at him, made curious by the dry tone in his voice. Izuku chuckled and explained.

"Remember Roow Tursath mentioning there might be Gungans interested in the Shattered Shackles? Turns out they were, and it wasn't just the Gungans, either. Apparently, Naboo's human population isn't quite as sanguine about what happened to them as their Queen. While the majority of Naboo is still fairly pacifistic, maybe twenty percent of the human population is pushing for Naboo to become more militaristic. Amidala's expansion of the guard and starfighter corps isn't enough for them…but there also aren't enough of them to shift the overall planetary politics."

Aayla realized what he was getting at almost immediately.

"We've been getting human recruits along with the Gungans?"

Izuku chuckled again at the slight incredulity in her voice.

"Yep. Thousands. Of both. A lot of them have gone into the Shattered Shackles, but even more have started to form a Planetary Guard for Tythe. The incentives we've offered for skilled workers have drawn in enough of their families with them to make them want to protect their new home. The whole thing is still basically one giant training cadre at the moment, but between a few veteran units from the Shackles and hiring trainers from a few worlds with solid militia, the Planetary Guard is going to have some serious teeth of their own in a few years."

There was a long pause as Aayla tried to wrap her mind around that. Obviously, no world was truly monolithic in their beliefs. But to think that so many Nabooians were unhappy with their previous pacifism? She supposed it was understandable, given what had happened to the planet. She just hoped that they weren't pissing the Queen off by siphoning off some of her people. Even if it was probably doing her political base good by removing the strongest dissidents, that still didn't mean she might not be a little irked. Eventually, she shook her head, shaking off that thought as something she couldn't do anything about anyway.

"And the target hasn't changed?"

Izuku's emotions were grimly satisfied.

"Nope. The Karazak Slavers' Cooperative is about to learn the same harsh lesson that the Jedi taught the Zygerrians. Centralization, for a practice the vast majority of the galaxy considers abhorrent, is death…"

If there was just a little vicious glee in Aayla's heart at that statement? Well, she was sure the Light Side of the Force would forgive her just this once…

... ...

Izuku was rather enjoying the disbelief of his partner as she took in the military overview being displayed of the Tythe system. Mei, being Mei, had spent all of her time talking technical details of each project. Meaning it was only now that Aayla was really seeing exactly how many of each of Mei's new toys had been completed. She had seen the frenetic activity in space as she approached the planet, of course. The single finished shipyard complex, and trio of additional yards under construction. The half-completed orbital transshipping station, already operational as it was being built in stages. She'd even seen the new Orbital Defense Platforms, though she hadn't quite processed what they were at the time.

Mei had immediately laughed, quite derisively, when she saw designs for defensive stations like the famous Golan Space Defense Platform. When pressed about why, she'd ranted about the sheer stupidity of using the same weaponry for a stationary defense that you did for the attacking ships. Turbolasers, despite their name, were plasma weapons at the core. Plasma has mass, just like anything physical does. Which meant Turbolasers aren't light speed weapons. In turn, that means that simple physics says a Turbolaser shot, coming from an already accelerating ship, is going to have more speed than a stationary installation. More speed means more range before the plasma collapses, meaning that the same size of Turbolaser on a defensive installation has a shorter range than the exact same gun on an attacking ship.

You could overcome that, and most defensive installations did so, by the simple expedient of making a bigger gun. But that bigger gun used more space, more power, more tibanna gas, more everything. All for relatively modest returns. Worse, space stations couldn't dodge very well. Oh, they could move, of course. They had to be able to, both to maintain orbit and in order to position themselves against an aggressor. But they typically aren't all that fast, and can't really move much in a tactical sense. Meaning that defense installations were even more vulnerable to missile bombardment than to being out ranged by plasma weapons. If you wanted to, you could simply launch from outside the range of the orbital installation, then pull back and let physics carry your missiles in even after burnout.

A ship could evade that sort of tactic relatively easily. That was, in fact, why most space battles happened at relatively short ranges even in space. A defense station could not do the same. Meaning it had to either tank the fire with heavy shields, use a defensive starfighter screen, or rely on extremely heavy point defense. All of which reduced the room for those bigger guns that the station needed, just to achieve parity with an attacker. Mei had, again extremely derisively, pointed out that you'd literally be better off using a simple railgun instead of a Turbolaser. The same amount of power could achieve insane velocities for a railgun, without the range limitation, and high levels of kinetic energy was still just as lethal to a shield as plasma.

Mei, of course, hadn't settled for anything nearly so plebian. Instead of massive MAC installations…she'd built massive, 1,300 meter long, Particle Beam installations instead. Particle Beams are near-lightspeed weapons at such scale. Meaning Mei's statement of 'dodge this, motherfucker,' when she'd enthusiastically described the weapon, was an accurate in its implications. The massive particle beam main weapons on each of the five Orbital Defense Platforms, only two of which were completed yet, could reach out and touch someone at several times the range of a Turbolaser. They could do it without giving the opposition a snowballs chance on Tatooine of dodging, and they could deliver a devastatingly powerful hit on contact for good measure.

The only downside was that you needed a lot of power, which meant each station only had one of those monster Particle Beams. But each one of those main weapons could core a heavy cruiser in seconds. Worse for any attacker, Mei had gone ahead and installed railguns too, she'd just made them as smaller defense weapons. If an attacking force muscled past the particle beams and into their own range, the power used for the main weapons could divert into insanely powerful shields, while railgun fire lanced out to deliver a pounding to any capital ship that got that close. Fighters were too small to practically hit with weapons like that. But each station had its multiple rings of more traditionally armed and highly mobile point defense satellites that would give fighters a bad day. Add in a defensive fighter screen provided by the planet, and those installations were vicious killers that made the best the Golan Arms company could produce look like throwing spitballs.

Which, of course, only covered the 'stationary' defenses.

Tythe now hosted two mobile fleets, as well.

The first fleet was the only one technically assigned to the Tythe system itself. Smaller than the second fleet, it was anchored to the planet, with a handful of patrols moving about the rest of the system. It was currently headed by four of their newly improved Munifex II's. They'd redesignated the refitted design as 'heavy frigates.' Despite the reclassification, they were impressively armed. Their Turbolasers had been suitably upgraded, a handful of Quad Lasers had been added for better point defense, and improved miniaturization since their original centuries-old design had allowed them to make room for stronger shields and a second starfighter squadron.

Added to those vessels were twelve Defender II corvettes. A number that was honestly too high for their designed fleet mix. In action, there were only supposed to be two screening corvettes for every Munifex II. The reason for the additional four ships was the fact that the Defenders were simply too good a fit for Patrol Ships. The extra ships, while assigned to the fleet, were actually rotating through patrols of the rest of the system. Each of those Defenders on patrol were accompanied by a Turbostorm Gunship and a squadron of N-2 starfighters, which made for a mix no single pirate or smuggler was going to want to run into.

The local defense fleet paled in comparison to the Assault Fleet.

Currently hiding in the system's asteroid belt, running sims for their planned assault on the system of Karazak, was the heaviest hammer they'd been able to put together with a year of buildup. The IES-Beta shipyard, the Evolution Shipyard, and the new shipyard here at Tythe had been worked hard. More importantly, the Defender II corvettes actually didn't require a shipyard. They were small enough that they could be built in atmosphere relatively easily, and there was a massive production facility groundside on Tythe that was now doing just that. With the still-expanding IES-Beta shipyard able to concentrate on the Munifex IIs, getting some help in the most recent months from the new Tythe Shipyard, they'd been able to produce quite a few of the class. All while the Evolution Shipyard was produced a newly-upsized carrier variant of the ES-23 for them. The ES-24c could handle four squadrons instead of the previous two, and carried a default mix of three starfighter and one bomber squadron.

All of their hard work meant that the Assault fleet consisted of 12 Munifex IIs, 24 Defender IIs, 8 ES-24c Carriers, and 30 Turbostorm Gunships configured for troop deployment. There was also a quartet of even larger ships, which hadn't been made by them. Sadly, in a way, those ships weren't combatants. Instead, they were relatively lightly-armed but heavily shielded Mon Calamari built passenger cruisers. At least, that had been what their original core design started life as. These ships had actually been ordered back when they first started making anti-slaver raids. It was simply only now that they were ready for service.

The Mon Calamari, who believed in highly individualized ships anyway, had been enthusiastic about modifying their 1,200 meter MC80 passenger cruisers for use as medical and evacuation vessels. Each one of those massive ships had been optimized in such a way that they could lift a staggering 50,000 people. And it would have been double that if not for the fact that it had the capacity to see to roughly 2,000 patients at once, mostly via use of medical droids. Obviously, it didn't have remotely that number of bacta tanks. But it did have a large number of even those, have a full 100 tanks aboard, to see to the most seriously wounded.

While both Izuku and Aayla wished they had warships that size…they both knew that those vessels were far more important for their long-term goals than any warship. There were, most likely, two to three million slaves on Kazark. The Serenity, Comfort, Hope, and Faith were their answer to actually being able to practically free so many people. Simply wiping out the slavers wouldn't save everyone. Being able to rapidly de-chip thousands of slaves, combined with the personnel lift to move 200,000 ex-slaves at a time? That was just as important as winning the actual battle.

Those four ships were the last piece they'd needed to make their next phase work. Now, it was just time to actually do it…

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

Author's Note 1: Star Wars weapons tech is really fucking schizophrenic. Particle Beams are Actually a Thing in universe, but the handful of references I found to them make me think that the writers who DID use them had no idea at all what a Particle Beam actually is. For that matter, autocannons are a thing in some primitive parts of the SW verse...but Railgun/MAC technology is weirdly absent.

Frankly, the ODPs from Halo would be several magnitudes more dangerous than basically anything mounted on a defense station in SW. At least that we know about. Given the tech level required for MAC defense platforms like that is WAAAAAYYYY below the SW tech level, it is REALLY bizarre that they are absent in favor of plasma weapons with hilariously low ranges and terrible muzzle velocity. Basically, the only thing I can chalk this up to is the entire galaxy getting into screwy patterns of thought and not bothering to consider alternatives. I mean, they technically ARE only about 1,000 years out of a sort of dark age where a lot of knowledge was lost. And those 1,000 were years of peace. But STILL.

So, yeah. My science might not be perfect. I've got a pretty solid understanding of the physics involved with the various weapons. But I'm not, you know, actually a physicist. So everything might not be entirely accurate, but it should be at least somewhat so...and Mei isn't about to ignore basic realities like the range difference between stationary defenses and mobile ones -_-. I'm trying to keep it balanced, though, by doing things like making the Particle Beam weapons she came up with extremely power hungry so she can't just slap a dozen of them on a capital ship.

Author's Note 2: The MC80 cruisers were, in fact, originally passenger liners. And there is a version of them that was designed/redesigned at one point (I think by the Alliance or New Republic) to carry people. I used that model as a basis for my numbers, though I actually LOWERED the total number of people it was claimed it could lift by quite a bit. Both because it seemed a bit high, and because I wanted this early version of it to be as much a medical ship as an evac ship. The Mon Calamari, of course, wouldn't have had any issue building what's essentially an aid/relief vessel, despite its size.