Chapter 42: Impact
Summary: Izuku and Aayla's building faction start making much larger moves against the slave trade...
Warning! Chapters 40-43 were published back-to-back! Make sure you don't miss any of them!
Chapter 42: Impact
Izuku finally let himself relax as he the last of the three security officers dropped to the floor with a thump. Stepping forward, he confirmed that the security console was unlocked, then tapped a quick code into the keypad on his forearm vambrace. The extremely brief comm burst was so simple it would read like static. In fact, for all intents and purposes it was static. It was simply highly specific static, one of several nonsense patterns that each infiltrator on Karazak could trigger to update their status. In this case, indicating he'd taken the slave control chip security office he'd been assigned to.
A small part of Izuku was a little worried he wasn't going to be present for the space battle to take the system. He was one of the few people they had who had any idea about fleet command on even this limited scale. He'd taken that knowledge slowly and from a dozen different sources, absorbed the institutional knowledge required via his telepathy…and then put in the honest hours in both simulations and practical fleet maneuvers to turn that theory into real skill. He'd also commanded the fleet portion of a few smaller raids over the last six months, making him one of the only people they had with that sort of experience.
Unfortunately, he was also one of their small handful of elite, Force-capable, infiltrators.
Between the two skills sets, his ability as an infiltrator was the more critical for this operation. They'd specifically sought out and recruited a few real officers, graduates of legitimate naval academies who had personal bones to pick with pirates and slavers, into the Shattered Shackles. They'd had to do that, early on, as they'd needed trainers for their brand new and explosively expanding navy.
It also meant, however, that they did have a few seriously committed officers with real-universe experience in task force command. None of them had led anything quite the size of the assault force they'd put together for this, nor did they have access to the Battle Meditation he'd learned from Ood Bnar. But they were bringing in considerably more firepower than the System Defense Force for the Karazak system had access to. With the weight of fire at least two to one in her favor, Commadore Rana Lin should be able to handle the spaceborne portion of this action.
On the other hand, the number of people they had access to who could infiltrate critical points in the Karazak Slavers' Cooperative facilities and disable the slave chip and collar controls, was tiny. If they didn't do it, then the slavers could just hold every slave on the planet hostage with the chips, threatening to detonate the micro explosives that would kill them all. Since this was the Cooperative's homeworld, which they effectively owned lock, stock and barrel through a puppet government, the assault force had to account for a dozen redundant control facilities. Each of them required either an elite lone infiltrator or an entire infiltration team, and they all had to be seized within the space of perhaps twenty minutes, to keep from sounding the alarm. Something which had required them to pull every single person they could who had the right skillset.
Aayla, Izuku, Tholme, Celeste, Allaya Djo, plus Knights Agai'i and Terish from the Almas group. Seven Force-capable operatives with enough infiltration skill to handle the most difficult seven of those redundant systems. The other five had needed to be entrusted to a mix of Atarian Rangers and Shattered Shackles veterans who specialized in covert operations. In truth, they hadn't even been sure they'd be able to count on Tholme now that he was no longer Aayla's Master. But the man had shown up right on time and pointedly said he wasn't going to miss out on one of the biggest anti-slaver operations in the last thousand years.
Which. Fair enough.
Aside from the Jedi Order taking on the Zygerrian Slave Empire a few centuries back, no one had done something on this scale against the slave trade since the Russan Reformation. Even among the Jedi, only individuals like Yoda, Yaddle, T'ra Sa, and Fay, individuals old enough to have participated in some capacity in breaking the back of that empire, could say they'd done something like this. Something that would actually hurt the slave trade in an appreciable fashion. Oh, it was still like putting a single, small stab wound in a Krayt Dragon. But managing even that much, without dying, was similarly impressive to someone doing the same thing with said dragon.
All of which made the tension horrible as Izuku split his attention between his own situation, the timer, and the status indicators of the other teams. Finally, just a nerve-wracking thirty-three seconds before go time, the last team reported they had control. Without hesitation, Izuku sent a different pulse of static, ordering all of them to simultaneously shut down the slave-chip control nets. He watched the lights of those nets going down with satisfaction, even as elsewhere Karazak System Command began to panic at the emergence of an entire fleet from hyperspace…
... ...
Commadore Rana Lin had never expected life would take her here. Oh, sure, she was a proud graduate of the Prefsbelt IV Naval Academy. But the Republic Judicial Forces were, frankly, rife with nepotism…and a certain degree of sexism. The latter wasn't too bad, though it had been getting worse when she'd left the service. She personally hadn't possessed the patronage to rise any higher than her rank of Senior Grade Captain back then, not even after twenty years of service, and she'd grown more and more dissatisfied with how hobbled by politics she'd been. An eighteen-year-old Rana had gone into the Judicial Forces to hunt pirates, after losing nearly her entire family in a slaver raid by a pirate band as a child. But the Judicial Forces only rarely got the chance to do that sort of thing these days, and it had been getting worse as the years went on, not better.
It was incredibly ironic…or perhaps poetic? Well, it was incredibly something, at least, that two weeks after she'd ended her Judicial service one of those very missing family members had turned up. Her older sister, the same two-years-older sister who had hidden 10-year-old Rana from the pirates before luring them away, had turned up on her doorstep. Looking haggard and worn, certainly…but alive. Both of them had broken down at their 28-year-late reunion, but that breakdown had included the story of how her sister had been freed. Some mercenary group Rana had never heard of, called the Shattered Shackles, had raided the slavers that her sister Sandra had been recently sold too, and freed everyone involved.
Over the next few days, Rana had gotten more of the story, including the fact that Sandra was now signed up for a program that would help her restart her life. Skeptical and not about to let her sister get caught up in some scam, Rana had used her contacts to check up on the organization…only to discover that they were connected to another group that she did know a bit about. The fact that they worked with the Sentient Rights Relief Group had reassured her, as had rumors of a connection to the Jedi Order. She'd only met a handful of Jedi in her 20 years with the JF, but those encounters had been enough to give her a serious respect for the Jedi Order. She'd worked with the SRRG more frequently, sending the occasional rescued slave or victim of trafficking to them, and she had even more respect for that particular group.
All of which had somehow led her to where she was now. When Sandra had left, Rana had decided to check into the group more completely, wanting to know if there was a way to donate or send thanks. Instead, she'd found a serious but quiet recruitment drive that implied a size to the organization that she hadn't expected. Following up on that recruitment had led, in a fashion that Rana still couldn't quite believe, to being scooped up as a trainer for an entire cadre of officers. Spending two years training captains for command, watching as the Shattered Shackles somehow built a small but serious fleet from seemingly nothing, had been surreal.
It had only gotten more surreal when she'd been quietly taken aside by the man who seemed to be behind everything, and asked if she was willing to lead an Assault Fleet against the Karazak Slavers' Cooperative. Once she'd realized that her ultimate boss was serious, Rana had felt almost divorced from reality as she'd faintly accepted responsibility for leading an Assault on one of the most notorious Slaver Guilds in the galaxy. Things had only gone from surreal to wondering if she was dreaming when he'd shown her the fleet she'd have to work with, leading to her taking command of the single largest force she'd ever personally led. After all, the Judicial Forces might still have some Dreadnaughts here and there, but otherwise most of their forces were outdated corvettes claiming to be cruisers. The Defender II's of her current force alone would have made mincemeat out of the patrol flotilla that had been Rana's final command before leaving the service.
Now, she led the charge from the command ship, a Munifex II named the Light of Revolution, as they dropped out of hyperspace. Forcing herself to focus, she immediately began snapping out orders. Their scouts had drifted in from the outer dark under total emission control over the last week, and had begun feeding them real-time data on the system just minutes before immersion. A trick that had let them plot their drop out of hyper to mousetrap the largest chunk of mobile units in the system. The aging Gozanti Light Cruisers and mixed mishmash of pirate corvettes barely had a chance to react before her Jedi-led fighter wing took them under fire. As she ordered the larger ships to close the range, she honestly wondered if the bombers those fighters were escorting would even leave her anything to shoot at by the time she found the range…
... ...
Izuku was a whirling dervish of death as he tore through the security checkpoint. Two of the hexagon shields he'd adopted into his personal style had been destroyed by this point, both taking hits from shoulder-mounted rockets in place of letting those same hits take out groups of commandos. The other four shields were whirling through the chaos with him. Two were acting as a floating protection against blaster fire on his left side, even as he mentally ricocheted the other two into enemy formations, knocking them over like bowling pins. He could have done the same thing with bursts of telekinesis, but using the shields this way had proven far more energy efficient, and they were already in the seventh hour of fighting on Karazak.
The spaceborne portion of the invasion had gone to plan. Better than to plan, actually, with the element of surprise they'd hoped for but refused to assume they'd get letting Commadore Lin shatter the system defenses with minimal losses. But he'd admitted to himself an hour ago that they'd badly underestimated just how brutal the fighting on the surface would be. A significantly higher percentage of the population of Karazak was willing to side with the slavers than they'd hoped, bogging down their offensive. They'd managed to seize most of the major slave centers early on, at least. But freeing the slaves was only half of what they had set out to do with this operation. The other half was the comprehensive crippling of the Karazak Slavers' Cooperative, and the locals were not making that easy.
Something proven by the very hardpoint he was currently tearing apart. While his abilities and lightsaber were allowing him to rip his way through it, the crude barricade, backed by some very-much-no-crude heavy weapons, had allowed it to hold off the Shattered Shackles commandos for half an hour before he'd arrived. Even as he brutally crushed another repeating blaster into a ball of metal and flung that ball into a hulking, armored alien he didn't recognize, Izuku tried not to think about what this was costing them in lives to make happen. At least their heavy use of Mei's commando droids should hopefully keep their ground forces from being gutted before they were done…
... ...
Aayla was probably going to have to admit to Izuku that the armor was actually a good idea. She was fairly certain she'd have been dead twice over already without it. Once to a blaster bolt that had simply leaked through by pure saturation as she covered the teams of commandos behind her. The other to a suicide droid she hadn't sensed in time due to the chaos and pain in the Force around her. Still, the armor had tanked those hits like a champ, and as she telekinetically sailed a thermal detonator right into the barrel of a hover tank just before it fired, she focused down on her rest of her task. With the tank now a smoking ruin, she jumped over the enemy infantry barricade, then spun and turned herself into a buzzsaw.
She'd been experimenting with a second blade for a while now, even if the one she was using was a generic replacement blade she'd taken from the Temple. Now, her dual blades let her scythe through the poorly-armored locals like they were so much chaff before the reaper. She tried not to let their deaths affect her, knowing that they had been either slavers or supporters of slavers. But she still felt their deaths through the Force, just as she'd felt the deaths of thousands already. In the back of her mind she was already noting that there was a building darkness from the destruction, slowly suppressing her Force abilities as it grew. Even for Guardians, this wasn't a normal scale of death for Jedi, and the feel of it thick in the Force was dragging at her psyche, slowing her down. She was sure her precognition was at least five percent worse now than at the start of the day, and she had a feeling it would only continue to degrade as the darkness of pain and death washed out the light of the local Force.
It was something she was going to have to be aware of. It might even be something she should tell the Jedi Council about. She suspected there weren't a lot of Jedi left, outside perhaps Master Yoda, who had battle experience like this. She wasn't at all sure of the best way to handle it, nor of who to ask for advice. Perhaps Master Morne? At least she would have plenty of time to think it through, once this was over…
... ...
"So, that's the last of the holdouts then?"
Celeste, the last of them to have been out in the field and still looking irritatingly fresh despite that, nodded.
"Yes. There are undoubtedly quite a few slavers that went to ground that we weren't able to dig out or identify, but all active resistance has ended. With our destruction of all their facilities, draining of their accounts, and the large numbers killed or captured, it's highly unlikely the Collective will survive. A shadow of it may reform from those who are away or hid from us, but the group as a whole is broken."
There were pleased, if tired, murmurs from the rest of those standing around the briefing room. Izuku, who had asked the question in the first place, nodded his thanks for the report and moved on to Ral'Atya.
"Ral? How are the evacuation efforts going?"
The Twi'lek, a more usual green instead of Aayla's Rutian blue, was the woman they'd put in charge of their evacuation/medical fleet and was quick to answer.
"Well, so far. We've hit bottlenecks, of course. We knew we would. But we've already sent Comfort, Serenity and Faith off with the first 150,000 ex-slaves. Hope is still here, in orbit, being served by the smaller liners. As we'd discussed before, she's serving as a medical ship, both for wounded and for a constant stream of slaves that are being de-chipped. The other three ships are doing some level of de-chipping enroute, but most of it will be done by the hospitals where they arrive."
Izuku nodded.
"Alderaan first, yes?"
Ral'Atya nodded back.
"For the first 400,000, yes. Since we were trying to keep the operation secret, they and Naboo were the only ones we approached beforehand. Naboo is preparing to take in another 50,000, and Tythe can comfortably handle 50,000 on its own due to our own preparations. That still leaves us needing destinations for roughly 1.73 million additional slaves though…"
It was Tholme that spoke up at that, this having been one of the key things they still needed him for. He had connections that could keep things like this quiet and quick.
"I have commitments from Corellia and Esseles to take a 100,000 each. The Refuge Relief Movement has also said they can handle up to another 350,000 so long as they come piecemeal over a few weeks. We have smaller commitments for around 80,000 more. The Jedi Order has also been informed by Knight Secura and myself, and are looking for more worlds that will take the influx."
Aayla grinned at Tholme's calm tone.
"Don't let him fool you. Master Windu shouted at both of us for close to twenty minutes for not giving him more warning. He also said, 'well done.' Which is high praise, coming from him. But I think if he had any hair left, he'd be pulling it out. Still, with the Jedi Order on the case, we should have places for the rest to go before we run out of those we've gotten our own commitments from."
Izuku took a deep breath, using it for a meditation exercise that Master Fay had taught him early on in his training with the Force.
"And the Order's reaction? For that matter, what about everyone else's? I know we're outside Republic space here, so there isn't anything legal they can do. But has anyone reacted overly negatively?"
Master Tholme fielded the question, shaking his head.
"As for the Republic in general, mostly no. Even now that we've succeeded and are looking for places to send the former slaves, we haven't exactly been shouting from the rooftops about what we've done here. It will be a while, at least a few weeks, before very many people have their attention drawn to it. Even then, since it's so far out on the Outer Rim, and we're being careful to hide how much fleet strength we used for the operation, it's unlikely to draw much concern."
Izuku nodded, relieved, but he also noted the Jedi Master had left out the Order's reaction. Cocking his eyebrow, he simply stared. The older man's lips twitched, but he gave in and answered.
"The Order's reaction is mostly a case of 'wait and see,' for the moment. There are hints of concern that a completely independent group was able to pull something of this scale off, and some of them have remembered you're a Force Sensitive. But the fact that multiple Jedi were involved, and that I freely admitted to throwing my own weight and contacts behind the effort, has bought you a pass…this time."
There was a note of warning in the older man's voice, and Izuku grimaced at it. There was no way there wouldn't be a stronger reaction of some sort once they started on his true campaign. This action, large scale as it would seem to the Jedi Order, was little more than a testbed. A way to work out the kinks for what was to come, as well as getting their people some real experience. To make sure they had a good handle on all the moving parts of an assault at this scale. Still, that was a concern for later. For now, there was still a lot to do to finish the job.
"What about the planet itself? Did the Jedi agree to stick around to oversee a new government here?"
The warning in Tholme's eyes faded as he smiled.
"They did. Asking for that, rather than trying to do it yourself, helped ease their worries quite a bit in fact. Which I'm sure you anticipated."
Izuku shrugged, tacitly admitting that was true. Though, in truth, he also had no desire to try and manage a planet with a hostile population. Slavery had been the economy of Karazak. Unlike worlds which might simply use slaves, this world made the vast majority of their income off the trade. Shattering that trade wasn't going to make them popular with the locals. Izuku was just fine with that, but didn't want to try and handle a pissed off population that would be looking to get revenge and cause problems in every petty way they could. Let the Jedi deal with that this time, thank you very much.
"Alright then. Let's talk logistics for what we want to do with the prisoners and captured hardware…"
... ... ... ... ...
Author's Note: Okay, so...this is a chapter I originally thought was going to take up a lot more space. I mean, it's a full planetary invasion! But, when it came right down to it, I realized I didn't actually want to expand on it in exhausting detail. Not because I don't want to write action. But rather, minor spoiler here, because that sort of thing is going to happen a LOT later on in the story. I kinda don't want people burning out on it before we even get to the point that fleet battles and planetary warfare is going to get super common? Better, I decided, to show it in snippets this time. Then, when they build up to where I intend them to go with all of this, have the battles I do go into be ones that are a bit more epic in scale/size. This was honestly sort of still training wheels for their currently-still-unnamed overall faction.