Chapter 95: Warfront

Summary: Views from the front lines...

Chapter 95: Warfront

Admiral Lin’s eyes were hard as she stood, the lone isle of calm amidst the chatter of reports sweeping her Flag Bridge. Her own Paladin, along with the Sword of Liberation, had already waded deep into the Ulmatra system, right into orbit of the planet itself in fact. Their initial operations had gone nearly perfectly, managing to pull nearly half of the planet’s considerable defense force out of position with just a third of Fifth Fleet’s Volitions, before micro-jumping in from the opposite side of the system with the rest of the fleet and charging straight for the planet.

Out of position, there had been nothing the distracted half of the enemy fleet could do but desperately burn back toward the planet, even as Rana’s two Paladin-class ships had engaged the powerful orbital defenses and remaining mobile fleet assets. The bit of subterfuge had been important, critical even, since Ulmatra had a planetary shield, and the Hutts had frantically worked to add additional generators to that shield since this world became their last proper link to outside assistance. Those additional generators gave the local defenders options that even the other worlds with planetary shields they’d taken so far hadn’t. Namely, it had provided the planet with the ability to expand its shields far enough that its orbital defense stations, two of them new as well, could duck in under its protection.

It was a tactic one normally only saw in the Core.

For kriffing good reason too.

Pulling off that particular trick, without crippling your own shield, required a lot of power. Far more than even most planetary shields had access to. The sheer thickness of Planetary-grade shields meant that it was effectively impossible to fire through them, even for the defenders, without intentionally lowering segments of the shield to fire through. That meant you couldn’t just have your orbital defense platforms stay under the protection of the shield. While ground based weapons systems might only need to fire a few shots at a time, requiring just a brief window as a result, the weapons of an orbital defense station were far more like those of a capital ship. They were meant for shorter ranged, sustained fire. It would be utterly pointless to let a defense station dip below the shield, only to open so many holes in it to fire out of that the shield was nearly useless.

No, in order to make use of the trick to help preserve your defense stations longer, you had to open a segment of the shield for them to ‘fall’ down the gravity well and under the umbrella. There, you let them recharge their own shield strength, then opened the segment again to let them boost back out of the shield to reengage. It was an extremely important siege tactic that, properly executed, could prevent the defenders from outright losing their orbital weapons even as they used them for repeated waves of engagement with a sieging fleet.

The tactic was also power hungry as hell.

Since you lost major chunks of power every single time you opened a window for the stations to move through, it took far more than a basic-model planetary shield to pull the trick off. Worlds like Coruscant, Corellia, or Alderaan? Those worlds were the absolute pinnacle of such tactics because they possessed enough generators and robust enough power grids to maintain multiple layers of planetary shielding. There was a damn good reason why very few people in history had been confident or crazy enough to launch attacks against founding worlds of the Galactic Republic like those.

Lesser, but still wealthy worlds, such as Anaxes, Brentaal IV,  Rendili, or Hosnian Prime, might not be that level of crazy difficult to siege, but they still possessed the wealth and power grid for the tactic. It was, more than anything else, what made sieging worlds with truly serious defenses a painful and costly proposition. In fact, had they not taken Nal Hutta by complete and total surprise, the League would have faced a similar problem there. Nal Hutta was wealthy enough to have planetary shields that could have pulled off the tactic, along with quite a few nasty orbital defenses that could have taken advantage of it. They’d simply never had the chance to make use of any of it.

Ulmatra hadn’t originally had a shield powerful enough for the tactic, but the fact they’d had to stop short of the world in their initial rush of conquests had allowed the Hutts to desperately reinforce it. Now, it could pull the trick off…in theory, at least. In truth, Rana had some doubts about the locals being able to properly execute the relatively tricky maneuver. Yet, she’d had absolutely no intention of letting them try their hand at it either.

All of the Jedi they had access to were with her portion of the Fleet, and they’d managed to drop her portion of Fifth Fleet straight into range of the orbital defenses. Where her two Paladins had promptly blown two of the world’s four Golan Space Defense platforms to hell with their particle beams before they could react. Volitions commanded by Jedi had engaged the others, the Jedi using their abilities Rana didn’t pretend to understand to focus on crippling the stations maneuverability before they could hope to make use of the planetary shields.

It had worked.

Admittedly, it had forced them to take a pounding from the remaining half of the fleet before they’d completely erased those stations. Both had been Golan IIs, instead of the Golan Is that had originally protected the world. Yet, they were silent now and most of the remaining mobile fleet hadn’t been properly in position to respond to them. So far their screening frigates and cruisers had done a good job engaging the defenders, and the Volitions that had been focused on the defense platforms were now taking the remaining mobile fleet assets under fire.

As for her heaviest ships, she had switched focus, bringing a handful of Volitions in tight to her Paladins and using them all to hammer at a single point of the planetary shield. It was holding, for now, but the Particle Beams were firing fit to melt themselves if she wasn’t careful, and the planetary shield was faltering over this hemisphere as the locals failed to reroute enough power to support it against their bombardment. Just a little more…

“Failure in sector’s J12-I19, Admiral!”

Jabbing her own comm, Rana gave the order.

“Assault, go! Go, go, go!”

Her people, already on a hair trigger, had barely needed her to speak the order as dozens of assault and landing craft dropped from the core of heavy ships that had been hammering the shields. Nearly half of their fighter and bomber squadrons, held back despite the fact they could have sped up the demise of the defense fleet, dropped ahead of them. Defensive fire was thick as the Hutts’ people desperately tried to seal the breach, but Rana had stolen an idea from the Lucrehulks they were refitting and liberated some of the older model droid fighters to go in as the fire wave. That wave of droids ate most of the initial ground fire, allowing rippling missile and torpedo fire from the follow-on craft to start wiping away ground emplacements, clearing the way for the heavy assault shuttles that followed.

Grimly pleased by what she was seeing, confident that enough of her ground contingent was going to get down to start securing the planetary shields, Rana turned back to the battle in space. The Hutts had managed to amass quite a fleet here, knowing how important the world was. Over a dozen Rendili Dreadnaughts, along with a handful of even heavier ships they’d managed to pull out of mothballs, had been joined by a pair of properly modern battlecruisers of unknown type that had to have come out from Bootana Hutta. Those ships, in particular, were taking a toll on the Volitions assigned to fight them. Time to change that.

“Paladin, Sword, come about 78 degrees port, up 120. Get our particle beams on those battlecruisers! Volition captains, get clear of our fire lanes and keep up the pressure on the planetary shields!”

Rana had used the command circuit for her bombardment group, getting her two battleships around to deal with the heaviest element of their opposition. She wanted those battlecruisers dead before the rest of the enemy defense fleet got back. Her own detached element was doing a kriffing good job at slowing them down, bleeding the part of the local fleet that had gone out after them. But at least half of their heavy ships would still be in fighting shape by the time they reached range. Better to mop up the big guns here, before the returning ships could weigh in. This battle was already theirs, either way. But she wanted it with as few casualties on her side as possible.

This was supposed to be only the first battle in an entirely new offensive, after all. She needed to keep her eyes on the future combat ability of her Fleet just as much as it’s current fight. With that in mind, she began snapping out orders to cycle ships that were starting to take too much damage with those whose shields were still going strong. She’d get them through this…and through every fight that came next, until the accursed worms were ground under their feet for good.

For someone who’d quit the Republic Judicial Forces because she believed she’d never rise high enough to make a serious difference in the galaxy, it was a heady feeling to start actually believing that just might be possible. Now, she just needed to pay back the faith Sovereign Midoriya had put in her by making it happen…

… … ...

Colonel Jozzo Deam, once of the Corellian Security Force, now feeling very justified in letting himself be lured away by the chance to take on the Hutts, looked over at his opposite number for their latest assignment. Knight Rissa Mano had proven herself to be a godsend, or perhaps Force sent he supposed, given the whole Jedi thing. The Devaronian Jedi was an extremely gifted pilot, who’d been allowed somewhat free reign by the League Navy to cobble together a mixed fighter/bomber wing once she’d attached herself to his command as their close air support. He had no idea why she’d picked his Brigade, the 412th, to attach herself to, but he was kriffing grateful she had. Not only had she far more rapidly adapted to combat operations than most of the Jedi had, but she’d proven to be incredibly good at two very important aspects of her ‘job.’

The first talent she’d evidenced, the one that had caused the Fleet to give her a remarkable amount of leeway, was the ability to find diamonds in the rough and turn them into incredibly capable squadrons of elite pilots. New as it was, the League Navy placed a very high value on anyone who could boost the overall training quality and standards of units they commanded. Doubly so among the fighter and bomber squadrons, which had the highest individual casualty rate among the entire League armed forces. Their fighters were fantastic, their training excellent, and the use of droids just as important to keeping the death toll among their fighter pilots lower than anyone else would have managed. But the simple fact that the organic sentient to droid combatant among the starfighter and bomber crews was a straight fifty-fifty split, versus the twenty to one of most of the military, made it impossible for things to be otherwise.

The second area in which Knight Mano excelled had been in the development of close combat air support tactics. The League had done its best, pulling from every old source it could find, to build a military the likes of which no one had ever seen. For the most part, it had even succeeded. Yet, in the specific area of air support for ground forces? Their tactics had barely been better than anyone else’s. For, it had to be said, the simple reason that normally starfighters and bombers were designed explicitly for space and air superiority fighting, with ground support roles being a very distant third or fourth string thought for most engineers.

The fact that the Liberation Army was far more lavishly equipped with anti-air due to its heavy focus on mechs and power armor had only amplified that detail. Frankly, approaching anything over the size of a Company was going to give a bad day to most enemy starfighters. All of which had meant that, aside from calling in air strikes and maintaining air superiority, no one had really known how to best leverage fighter/bomber support against enemy ground troops.

Rissa Mano had taken one look at that fact and decided it was stupid.

Just as talented an engineer as she was a pilot, she’d immediately began to modify some of her craft to better support ground pounders. She’d started with basic ordinance loadout changes and new tactics…then moved on to practically redesigning a set of H-7 bombers once she’d proven herself. Stripping out every other weapons system, including the bomb/proton torpedo equipment, she’d instead hijacked some spares of rapid-fire point defense quad lasers that normally went on corvettes or fleet logistics freighters. She’d stripped them down, reducing their range but increasing their cycle rate still farther, and strapped a pair of them under the H-7s wings as turrets.

Frankly, the modification made them completely useless in space.

In atmosphere against ground targets, though? Even with their ranges reduced, the two turrets could reach out and touch a target at just over two kilometers distance. They could, in combination, do that at a fire rate of 2,000 bolts a minute. A ludicrous fire rate, while still retaining enough power to punch through most armor short of a full-blown tank. With the modifications, the six H-7s that had been so converted had turned into such devastating close air-support that the research and development people had apparently taken notice and were planning a dedicated gunship platform to make use of the idea.

Knight Mano’s tactics, added to Jozzo being one of the more experienced commanders in the war, had caused the 412th to rapidly rise up as one of the most respected ground units of the Crusade. Which, as it happens, is also why they’d been rushed to Tsyk. The Wookiees, working with elements of the Army, had cleared this world less than a month ago. Heck, they’d left it to support Aylayl less than two weeks ago. Which should have meant that the planet didn’t need much more than a garrison and a picket force. There was an exterior hyperlane to Unagin here, but Unagin didn’t like the Hutts and was already in tentative talks with the League of Free Stars about joining up. Given that it was also a minor hyperlane, not suitable for taking large fleets through without doing it piecemeal, it also shouldn’t have been a primary target.

Until they’d learned through an intelligence asset Jozzo wasn’t privy too that the Hutts had assigned it to be the new target of a much-reinforced Death Watch.

Grudgingly, he had to admit that it was a good target for that band of terrorist psychopaths. They apparently had enough ships to at least fight through to get their ground units actually on the ground, and the garrison here would have been easily overwhelmed. With only a little additional support, taking Tsyk would have both allowed the Hutts to pour more assets into the combat still ongoing on Aylayl and possibly sneak a decently sized fleet in to hit the nodal defenses at Hollastin.

While the Fleet covering Hollastin wasn’t small, it wasn’t large either, the stretched-thin assets of the League not able to be strong everywhere. The larger nodal defense fleet was at Circumtore, not Hollastin, and a Hutt Fleet might well have been able to smash everything Hollastin had before bolting back out via Tsyk. All while also undermining talks with Unagin and others in the region by ‘proving’ the League couldn’t defend the worlds they’d added.

Thankfully, it wasn’t going to happen.

“Alright. We want the Death Watch to get down here on the ground. So the fleet is going to weaken itself, fake a retreat, and only come back in to hammer any orbital presence after the Death Watch are down. The whole point is to pin the bastards to the planet and wipe everything they send out. Maybe even everything they have at all, considering how much they are committing. That means we need to talk about how to hide the additional ground forces and your squadrons though.”

Knight Mano grinned entirely too cheerfully at him for the topic, even as she brought up a set of files about…large scale holo-projectors?

“I’ve got an idea about that! Tell me, Colonel, how do you feel about magic tricks?”

Blinking, but knowing by now that his opposite number always had a point when she sounded like that, Colonel Jozzo Deam leaned in to listen to what she had in mind…

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

A/N 1: So the Hutts are properly dug in now, in places at least...but they also just got cut off from the outside. Hopefully the tactics described here make sense to most people. I'd say everyone, but someone ALWAYS argues about the soft sci-fi fleet tactics...

A/N 2: Rissa Mano is a canon character, but we only see her once, early in the Clone Wars. She fit what I wanted here well enough, particularly with her stated skills in piloting and engineering, so I coopted her ;-).