Chapter 98: Hurry Up and Wait
Summary: Do you want to see a magic trick?
Chapter 98: Hurry Up and Wait
-Knight Errant – 108 Days into the Hutt Crusade-
The most annoying thing about wars, Izuku had already discovered, was that there was a significant amount of ‘hurry up and wait’ involved. He honestly might not have minded that fact, if not for the two rather annoying details. The first, of course, was that his various positions meant there was always someone to bother him about something. Despite having done his best to delegate as much as possible, the reality was that any day he wasn’t commanding a battle had him commanding a desk instead, and enough of Miruko had rubbed off on him that he’d prefer ten of the former to one day of the latter.
That was already an old story, though. One that he’d come to terms with and figured out how to manage, for the most part. He did have a solid team that handled a great many of the details long before they reached him, and he was smart enough to make sure he had enough downtime to himself to not burn out. Admittedly, his own nature worked against him a bit there, but he had people he could rely on to give him a firm swat on the nose in reminder when he started trying to do too much.
No, the majority of his current annoyance at the ‘hurry up and wait,’ as they idled just a few light years short of Tsyk and waited for the Death Watch to arrive, was that those same people were mostly absent. Mei had split from them, heading back to her personal space station and lab, back at the Outland Transit Station. Now, Aayla and Zavra, the latter of which he was slowly getting to know in more senses than one, were down on the ground of the planet Tsyk itself. Both of them were able pilots and Aayla was decent enough Fleet commander, but the primary battle here was going to be on the ground.
Given that both of them were stupidly deadly assets for any sort of ground combat, and the Fleet side of the battle was expected to be hilariously unbalanced, where the pair could do the most good had been clear. They, along with the first few squads of the Sovereign’s Guards were down integrating with Colonel Jozzo Deam and Knight Mano. That latter group being the Force Awoken commandos from the Tisht raid that had decided to stay commandos and had been training together as a new elite force. It would be the first test of the new doctrine the Guards were working on, with Zavra in particular having had a lot of good input to add to the tactics they’d already come up with.
All of which left Izuku relatively alone, trying to plow through tons of boring paperwork, and deeply relieved when Padmé and Sabé visited to break up the monotony. He was a bit surprised, given that they’d mostly gone back to barely interacting with him in the three days since Padmé had stubbornly insisted on staying, but it was certainly a welcome break. Though he had to fight back the instinct to stare when he immediately realized that she was now wearing her own version of the ‘bunnygirl adjacent’ uniform that the Handmaidens had finally gotten her to fully accept.
Thankfully for Izuku’s sanity, the uniforms had ditched the ears by now. Less thankfully for the direction of the blood-flow in his body, the pair now looked like virtually identical twins. The only concession to being able to separate them for people that weren’t Force Sensitive was Padmé wearing a set of three accessories done in the signature silver-white chromium of Naboo’s royalty. Two were paired upper-arm bands, with the third being even more distracting as it took the form of a black choker with that silver-white chromium forming a star over her throat. The entire set would, some distant part of his mind noted, likely take less than two minutes to swap from Padmé to Sabé in order to enhance the latter’s ability to act the part of a body double.
It also made Aayla-adjacent portions of Izuku’s mind immediately and inappropriately envision that chromium star being replaced by a D-ring perfect for a leash.
No, down Izuku!
Even if both of them were exhibiting that low-level arousal again, don’t be sucked in! Wait, that arousal that had definitely spiked when his eyes had unconsciously raked over the Senator before he could stop himself. Maybe Padmé was actually an exhibitionist and had just been ‘protesting too much’ to try and hide that? Shaking that surprisingly persistent thought off, he managed to force his brain to properly engage and address the pair.
“Padmé, Sabé, a pleasure as always. Ah, or is it Senator at the moment? Now that you seem to have adopted the new uniform?”
He didn’t get the feel that this was a formal visit, and they’d long since drifted into first name territory outside of official business. His thought that it wasn’t anything of the sort was proven true as Padmé shook her head with a smile. Though he also caught a hint of a blush and another spike of arousal at his mention of her new ‘uniform.’
“Not at all, Izuku. I had hoped Sabé and I could prevail upon you for a tour of sorts. I’m sure you know we’ve been talking with your crew, and they’ve been most helpful. That said, they also clearly weren’t sure what we were and weren’t allowed to know about and sensibly defaulted to not showing anything that might be a security issue. There were several items that are not directly military that we are interested in, however, and hoped you’d be willing to show them off.”
Izuku raised his eyebrows lightly in an expression of surprised curiosity. Which was exactly what he felt, at the moment. Both over just what they were interested in…and over the fact that the Force was telling him it was at least mostly a pretense to spend time around him? Seriously, he was regretting letting Aayla divert him from finding out what she’d figured out. Even if the way she’d diverted him had certainly been enjoyable at the time.
“Okay, you’ve certainly sparked my curiosity. We admittedly have quite a few uncommon technologies,” he waved the far more advanced ‘smartcomm’ device that he’d been using in place of a simple dataslate, “but I admit I’m unsure what non-military systems you might have encountered aboard ship that weren’t also present on Tythe Central while you were there.”
Padmé’s reply was quick and smooth, clearly having already been anticipating a question in that vein.
“It’s entirely possible they were in use on Tythe Central, but we didn’t see them due to them being ‘behind the scenes,’ as it were. On a military vessel, they became much more apparent. Just one, quite innocuous example, is the incredibly broad usage you’ve made of micro-repulsor fields to create something like a ‘hard-light’ construct. Eirtaé initially commented on it regarding the keyboards the smartcomms can project, but we hadn’t realized until our looking around the Knight Errant that it is used heavily for forming on-the-spot tools as well.”
Izuku blinked, searching his mind momentarily for what Padmé was talking about, only to remember his own brief surprise at seeing a mechanic do just that. Even Mei had been startled when he’d sent her a query about it, and had mentioned not having considered using the technology that way. He vaguely recalled he’d signed off on her developing a whole series of more advanced multi-tools that used the idea, including crediting the original mechanic that had adapted the idea and rewarding him for the clever development. Mei’s ‘tool quality’ versions had quickly become a hit, the overlapping repulson fields actually making the ‘hard light’ tool more durable than ninety percent of purpose-built tools. Not a true replacement for said purpose-built tools, but an incredibly useful multi-tool.
“Well, there’s certainly nothing secret about those, even if the multi-tool version is currently fleet-issue only. Were there other things? Just that seems like it would be better just to send you a file on them.”
There was, it turned out, quite a few other things they wanted to know about. From having discovered a micro-bot reconfigurable training room, to several medical devices they’d developed for dealing with battlefield trauma. Izuku soon found himself giving a remarkably complete tour of the non-military systems of the Knight Errant, all the while unable to shake the thought that the pair had more reasons for the tour than he understood. The fact that he could swear he caught both of them ‘posing’ a couple of times to better show off their semi-scandalous uniforms began to give him a hint, though surely that wasn’t right?
… … …
- Tsyk Ground Command -
Aayla stared, while Zavra outright cackled in glee, clearly approving of the deception that Knight Mano had come up with. Not that Aayla didn’t approve of it. She was just having a hard time wrapping her mind around it. Doubly so since the entire thing was conceived and created with purely mundane technology, no Force tricks or illusions required for making an entire Brigade of the League Liberation Army just vanish. More than that, the devious Devaronian had actually made the garrison for the world vanish as well…sort of.
More accurately, she’d used a lot of basic electronics, slag metal, and holoprojectors to make it look like the local garrison was still in the field base that had been created for it. The electronics and slag metal, along with some sensor scramblers, would do a good job of convincing anyone looking for the garrison to believe it was right where it was supposed to be. The fact that the League routinely used fairly advanced ECM, so it was difficult at best to isolate individual mech signatures, only made the illusion easier to sell.
Which didn’t even get into how she’d hidden the actual forces they had on planet.
Taking refuge in pure audacity, Knight Mano had used a combination of holograms, sensor baffling, and simple-to-fabricate wood-and-plastic frames to disguise the entire 412thas an abandoned electronics factory. Such facilities weren’t even close to rare on the planet. The local Tsyklen species had been long-prized as a ‘client race’ of the Hutts due to just how insanely good their nimble nine-digit hands were at delicate tasks. One of the most common of which for the general population had been the manufacturing of large quantities of a broad range of necessary electronics. Tsyk produced a lot of the general electronics hardware preferred by Hutts, the paranoid species not exactly loving the idea of buying things like advanced security consoles, high-capacity data servers, and parts for their hoversleds from outside manufacturers. Nothing Tsyk made had been critical, hence why it hadn’t had a heavier defense force, but it had almost all been useful.
The planet was also, as a result of several thousand years serving that role, heavily polluted and covered in hundreds of abandoned factories for outdated models of whatever the Hutts wanted. Hutts weren’t exactly known for eco-friendliness, and if it was cheaper to simply write off a factory and build a new one when you wanted to shift production? Then that was exactly what they were in the habit of doing. Kriff the consequences for the planet and the people living here.
Knight Mano had taken brutal advantage of that fact to fake a main factory with dozens of smaller ‘production facilities’ surrounding it. The largest ‘buildings’ were actually a barebones framework hiding the heavy artillery park housing multiple Battle-Liger mechs. Smaller buildings that should have been secondary production, quality control, housing or storage areas were, instead, disguises for the smaller Battle-Tigers and groups of Strikers and Power Suit Troops. All running in low power mode and covered in sensor baffling that would leave them looking an awful lot like an entire small factory with nobody home.
A small factory that just so happened to have a perfectly dialed-in target in the fake garrison. Which had, in fact, retained enough droid-manned anti-air guns to make a very convincing appearance of a fully manned garrison. Only made easier to sell by the fact that the holo-projectors had been programmed to show plenty of people ‘scrambling to react’ to the incoming raid.
It was a fantastic ‘Magic Trick’ as Knight Mano called it. Assuming it worked, Aayla was going to push forward a recommendation that the woman be encouraged to start writing an entirely new manual on lessons in deceptive warfare tactics…
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A/N 1: So, Knight Mano's efforts were based on the real life tricks pulled in WWII by Jasper Maskelyne of the 'A Force' deception department. If you're a history buff at all, some of the stuff they pulled off is fascinating reading. Given that Star Wars combat is based a lot around WWII style warfare, I thought it was a good fit to include something like it.