The headquarters of Rothana’s planetary defense, despite the late hour and the day off, was not asleep.
If service in orbit ran strictly by the book, albeit under the teeth-grinding screech of Kuat SB officers, then on the ground, the garrison’s life had never shifted onto a military footing.
The war was somewhere out there, beyond the system’s border.
Why change your way of life?
What’s more, the relaxation of the garrison was encouraged by the SB general responsible for ground defense.
He didn’t need the problems that came with a stream of complaints about him to higher command.
This post allowed him a spot at a rich trough; the main thing was not to get too greedy and to share on time with the right people, otherwise a colleague would always be found who’d gladly stick a knife in your back.
The former clerk had gotten his post very opportunely — by “marrying” the daughter of one of Kuat’s founding families.
Or rather, he hadn’t married the daughter, who was only slightly less attractive than a hybrid of a Gamorrean and a Hutt, so much as the money of his venerable mother-in-law.
His wife knew this perfectly well, so beyond the bedroom door, hell began for her husband.
The woman was a closet sadist and took out all her malice on her husband, realizing her filthiest fantasies.
“So be it!” thought the former clerk, one of many from the office plankton, as he treated his whip-lashed back with bacta patches.
Let the family be in decline and not particularly favored, but it was a chance for a young, energetic man who, to get a clerk’s position, had killed his more talented brother.
And he would hold onto it until the end.
His measured life, though marred by some inconveniences, but full of wealth and luxury, had been spoiled over the last two years by only one “sentient” being…
A clone with the rank of Marshal Commander, callsign Imperturbable, but the general preferred to address him exclusively by his number and through gritted teeth.
This clone was far too headstrong.
For example, like right now!
So what if nineteen hulls had entered the system!
Pirates looking for a cozy den had flown into the system a couple dozen times, and no one ever saw them again.
“Report the situation!” barked the Marshal Commander at the senior duty officer, making the SB general wince, while his mother-in-law and wife practically began spraying more venom than usual.
“Just my luck that an emergency happens when we’re flying in the airspeeder!
Stupid bucket of bolts!
It only got the call from headquarters and turned toward it!
That’s it!
I’ll get myself an organic driver.
A prettier one!” “Orbital defense group is taking position according to the ‘green line.’ The enemy passed through the mine banks without losses.” “Communications status?” “We’re being blocked.
Some kind of new jamming system.
Like a chorus of voices.” “Has the courier launched?” “No, sir!
Ships can’t jump to hyperspace!
An anomaly has spread to the system’s borders.
Ships drop out of hyperspace ten microseconds after entry with a burned-out hyperdrive circuit.” “Have you identified the source?” “Apparently, it’s the enemy flagship, sir!” “Are the planetary defense stations activated?” “Yes, sir!” “Status of ground-based guns?” “Crews at their positions.
Awaiting activation command.
Should we signal the command?” “Belay that!” the general cut in, remembering perfectly well that he had sold off most of the missiles, as well as the larger stockpile of tibanna, long ago, and that activating the guns and, gods forbid, the shield, consumed credits faster than he did.
“What do you mean, no communications?!” the general’s mother-in-law snapped, descending from her little world.
“Mama,” it must be said, was a peculiar woman…
To put it mildly.
Without unnecessary words, one could understand from whom her daughter had inherited that lovely appearance of a flabby Hutt.
“I need to call my lawyer!
He’ll sue you for harassment!
He’ll sue everyone!
Lawyer!
Lawyer!
I need a lawyer!” “This is going to be tough,” thought the clone, who, without the SB general, was limited in authority and constrained by the framework of decisions he could make.
* * * The green defense line was located a little beyond the planet’s gravity well boundary.
With this option, the defense fleet needed to fall back from this position, drawing the enemy under the planet’s PDC systems.
The majestic armada, shining with the colors of the Republic, moved to meet the giants, ready to sink their teeth into their enormous flanks and tear them to shreds, burning with righteous anger and pre-battle bravado.
What could nineteen hulls do when the defense fleet numbered two hundred sixty cruiser-class ships, Star Destroyers, and a swarm of three hundred frigates?
As it turned out, they could do a lot!
The flash from the enemy’s largest ship was dim and did not inspire fear, much like the ship itself, resembling a rusted barn of epic proportions, but the blue prickly star that bloomed in the vanguard of the Republic’s light forces, engulfing them with its needle-like prominences, did not just destroy — it instantly vaporized most of the corvettes and frigates, despite their raised shields!
Those that remained were scattered by the blast wave like trash that, by some misunderstanding, bore the proud title of “warship.” “We’re all going to die!” a cry rang out on the fleet frequency.
It was the young captain of a ship, whose father was a big shot in Kuat SB, who had only now understood what battle was.
A battle that was beautiful, majestic, and merciless.
She understood it the second a burned, legless body slammed into her bridge, its stumps twitching in the convulsions of a fading life, leaving a bloody smear on the armor glass.
“We’re going to die!” Her heavy Centrax-class frigate veered to the side and smashed into the bridge of a CR-90 corvette.
A second, and both ships vanished in a flash.
“Stop cluttering the airwaves!
Tighten formation!
Upper hemisphere shields to maximum!
Gentlemen, you can sh…
and p…
on the bridge, but silently!
Same goes for dying!” the old officer gave vent to his emotions, but quickly pulled himself together.
“Torpedoes to ready.
Bombers, begin bombing runs on the enemy flagship!
Disable the main battery!” The enemy escort ships, which no longer seemed like rusted barns with ornate decorations telling that the ships had been built by beings fetishizing human skulls and arches, were no longer funny.
These ships, resembling the spires of cities of some insectoid species, now appeared as apex predators, but that was fine — let the first blood be theirs.
The Republic would crush them first, and then bring democracy on the edge of turbolaser strikes to their planets!
There were only nineteen of them!
The Republic fleet still had three hundred heavy ships!
Impatient crews were already firing at the enemy, sending a dense rain of tibanna death their way, though still little effective at that range.
The enemy advanced leisurely, in a wedge, as if on parade, and for now their shields held against the punishing streaks of turbolasers.
The gun emplacements on the enemy flagship’s escort ships flickered.
Four flashes of oblique death swept through the Diamond-class light cruisers that had closed their shields, atomizing and twisting the ships into iron scrap.
The Dreadnought-class ships fared better.
They were covering the Venators, their armor was thicker, their shields more reliable, and they were grouped in fours.
But the Dreadnoughts burned like matches too.
Literally.
The ship armor itself burned, melting and cracking from the unbearable heat.
Had a Temple Guard from the Order been here, he would have felt his vaunted Force, tail between its legs, groaning from the death of a thousand sentients.
The Venators weren’t having an easy time either.
One flash, just one blue star, shattered four ships and crippled two more!
The enemy had achieved its goal and broken the GAR’s ranks.
The wedge stopped, releasing from its belly what appeared to be transports full of infantry.
The alien ships, as if savoring their triumph, stretched into a line and began, with machine-like precision and pedantry, to methodically pick off Republic ships one by one with laser cannons.
The shields groaned, absorbing gigawatts of energy.
Wiring and emitters burned.
Armor vaporized, bubbling and flaking away.
Ships bled air from countless breaches like blood, spewing their internal fittings along with their crews.
The ether on Republic frequencies shuddered with the screams and moans of hundreds and thousands of dying.
The enemy launched its starfighters, which looked like angular coffins, the clones thought.
The mosquito fleets clashed with the roar of two hammers.
Two elements met in battle.
The formation of Republic and enemy craft scattered, dissolving into a multitude of small skirmishes, like a rat fight.
The V-19 Torrent and the Z-95 were good machines in their own way.
Cheap.
Easy to repair.
Reliable.
But they were dust before the aliens.
“Why make something that might not survive its first battle good and spend your own money?
You can make a lot, fulfill a government contract, and then carve out a new one for yourself later!” reasoned the megacorporations in the Unknown Regions.
The equipment, both spaceborne and for infantry, was designed not for war, but first and foremost — to burn!
Because if it doesn’t burn, how will the corporations get an order for new ones?
No way!
So it has to burn.
No!
Not break!
It has to be reliable, otherwise competitors will steal the contract.
But it has to burn!
Clones can be made, and organics — their mothers will birth more.
The clones didn’t give up, but they died one after another, giving the bombers a chance to break through to the enemy ships.
The pilots died in silence, fuming with resentment at losing the fight so decisively, unable even to scratch the enemy machines that outclassed them in every parameter.
They couldn’t even drag the enemy pilots into the grave with them by ramming!
The bombers broke through to the giants, only to fully feel the fire of their point-defense autocannons.
The flying cities seemed to explode with shrapnel accelerated to mind-boggling speeds.
The few surviving pilots would remember for the rest of their lives how enemy cannon shells slammed into the cockpit of a comrade you’d had lunch with in the same mess hall just half an hour ago.
The bombers seemed to be turned inside out by everything they saw before them.
All that remained of the pilots was a red mist that quickly turned to ice on the wreckage before they could melt away in the detonation of the ammunition load, which from the planet’s surface looked like a beautiful meteor shower.
The admiral watched the enemy landing ships and realized they were moving not toward the planet, but toward the center of his fleet.
“Torpedoes!
Such huge ones!” “Evasive maneuver!
It’s a torpedo attack!” “Admiral, they’re the size of a frigate…” The first torpedo reached its target, ripping open the side of a Venator like a can opener, flying straight through it to detonate in its neighbor in a fiery flash.
Shrapnel from the debris licked off gun emplacements and turrets, tore out entire decks, crumpled engines.
For the crews of many ships, the last thing they heard in those final moments of life was the deafening crunch and screech of armor and bulkheads, bursting their eardrums…
The torpedoes scattered the center of the fleet formation, and one of the aliens took advantage of it.
The ship vanished into hyperspace for a moment and emerged right inside the GAR’s formation.
The enemy ship seemed to be sucked into a funnel for an instant, only to be spat back out a second later in a different place.
Many who survived and didn’t lose their minds, who had somehow caught a glimpse of the enemy ship’s transition funnel, would claim that in that second they had seen the very gates of hell.
The ship executed a sharp turn, its nose maneuvering thrusters flaring, rotating its sides toward the nearest Republic ships.
All its broadside cannons fired.
“Mass drivers!” the admiral thought.
Yes, their projectiles weren’t visible, unlike the streak of a turbolaser, unlike the result.
An Acclamator needed just one such projectile; a Venator needed three for complete destruction, but even a single hit nearly turned the ship inside out.
Energy shields were no help at all, merely dropping uselessly, leaving behind an aurora borealis at the site of the burned-out emitters.
For one moment, the ship shimmered like a diamond.
The next moment, the enemy projectile cracked the armor, crippling the proud vessel.
The Republic forces also snapped back with fire.
Turbolaser bolts spread in powerless fury in bizarre colors across the enemy’s shields.
The alien closed in on the admiral’s flagship and, having sliced through a couple of escort ships with its sharp nose on the way, launched torpedoes at point-blank range.
Not like the other ships’ torpedoes.
The Venator’s deck jumped under the old officer’s feet, dropping him to his knees, but not breaking his spirit.
“The enemy has boarded!
They’re fighting their way to the bridge!” The admiral swept his gaze from his empty eye sockets across the bridge, frozen awaiting orders, stared at the tactical table, watching the precious seconds of a battle lost irrevocably and completely, looked through the bridge viewports at the fight in all its glory, while his mind weighed and made a decision.
“Fleet: withdraw to Object Aurek-Dorn-82.
Launch the ‘Triumph’ squadron from the docks and break out of the system.
Space is lost!
Objective: link up with sector army forces and launch a counterstrike.
Crew!
Ship-wide order: abandon ship!” The admiral, overcoming the pain, stood up.
Clones and officers began hastily leaving the bridge, heading for the escape pods, while the officer, aged into a decrepit old man, shuffled toward the chief pilot’s alcove.
“I gave the order!
Evacuate, officers!” he barked at the young men who remained standing motionless behind their control consoles.
“Sir…
Admiral Davis, I’ll speak for everyone…
We’re staying, sir.
We know what you intend to do, and we’ll go with you to the end!” “Then get behind the shield operator’s console, young man.
This tub still has to make it to its destination in one piece!” The old man, not without the officers’ help, descended into the pilot’s alcove.
His hands rested on the combat ship’s control consoles for the last time.
Guided by his will, the battered ship, which was still miraculously continuing to fight, all because a handful of sailors and officers hadn’t abandoned their battle stations, headed for its final attack.
The admiral’s mind was unusually empty.
There was none of the usual work of thought and analysis.
The decision had already been made and verified, and he piloted the ship without thinking, as if breathing.
The officer was not afraid of death, understanding that he had been dead since his very first time stepping onto a bridge.
All that was in his power was to choose the time and place.
And he had chosen a heroic death.
Not a meaningless one.
In the last moments of life, when victory no longer mattered, he would take the enemy with him to the grave.
“What kind of f…ing heroic death is that?!
It’s my duty as an officer: to die, but to complete my task to the end!
I don’t need a grave.
My tombstone will be a sacred aileron, a fragment of a wing!
I don’t need a monument or honors.
A dead man has no use for them.
Heroes are needed by the living!
My death must be effective, so that these (further untranslatable string of profanity and naval jargon) bastards feel sick after I’m gone!” The world froze for the admiral.
He found himself on the bridge of his first ship, in an equally hopeless battle.
His chest wasn’t yet covered by the tombstone of an admiral’s rank bar; instead, a midshipman’s bar shone proudly there.
Back then, the commander of their frigate had died on the bridge, and he had taken command on his own authority, because his friends were at the battle stations then, friends he would rejoin in a few minutes today.
The veteran’s lips twisted into a sarcastic grin.
“Screw you, Republic, you’re not getting a model hero.
I’ll remind you how to fight!” the officer thought, and began to sing the song they had sung in their first battle, on a battered frigate with a smoking reactor and one working cannon, against three squadrons of fighters.
The very same song they sang after drinking binges in the Fleet Academy barracks: “Last year in the spring,” “Right from their bunks, a convoy” “Conscripted the invalids to war.” The ship shook from an explosion.
The clone from the flagship’s anti-boarding detail, like his comrades, had ignored the evacuation order.
“Better to die on the ship’s deck than in a lifeboat in space,” they reasoned.
On the deck, they could at least do something.
This clone did.
He strapped himself with explosives and blew up the field projector in the hangar, thereby ejecting two three-meter giants who were butchering his brothers like cattle from his protected ship.
“So they wouldn’t lose men,” “They sent us to fight —” “To finish off the Mandalorians.” The enemy ship, of course, noticed the Republic flagship’s maneuver, and its captain understood the opponent’s intent.
The enemy gunners opened a barrage on the stubborn ship, but nimble frigates stood in defense of their admiral, taking death for him.
Simply ramming the enemy projectiles.
They didn’t flee, like mercenaries.
They weren’t afraid for their own hides.
They were all part of the great Republic fleet, which, even as it died, did so with its head held high.
“Some without legs, some without arms,” “Some practically corpses:” “Thugs and cutthroats…” The deck under the Space Marine collapsed unexpectedly.
After he fell, a loader piled on top of him, its manipulators pinning the superhuman, guided by the hands of a young female technician, while clones tried to pierce the armor joints at his throat with vibroblades.
“And they made from us” “A special forces of invalids —” “The ‘Battle Prosthetics’ Battalion.” The midshipman who had ripped a Z-6 from a dead clone’s hands and was hosing down the passage to the bridge with fire was ground into bloody pulp under the feet of the Flesh Tearers, enraged by several dozen small but annoying wounds.
“We hold a grudge against the world,” “We don’t need a latrine,” “We’ll brutally waste everyone anyway!” Clones brought AT-TEs onto the ships’ hulls.
Their heavy cannons could at least somewhat penetrate the enemy fighters.
Republic pilots rammed in entire squadrons, taking one or two enemies with them or crippling another gun emplacement on the enemy’s hull.
“Death doesn’t scare us,” “We just need an order —” “We’ll do everything fast and precise!” The battered flagship no longer resembled a Venator.
It looked like a piece of twisted metal and flew purely by inertia toward its target, steering with its few surviving maneuvering thrusters.
The Space Marines kicked in the door to the bridge just as the admiral brought the ship to its target and gave the order to overload the reactors.
The enemy cruiser dodged a direct collision at the last second, but the explosion battered its already patch-covered side, putting an end to that ship’s battle.
The commander was forced to make a warp jump and retreat to his rear.
The admiral, by ramming, had won the soldiers precious ten minutes, enough for them to escape the planet’s gravity.
The ships — the few that hadn’t scattered and whose commanders hadn’t forgotten what honor was — managed to reach the docks hidden in the asteroids, grinding their teeth as they watched the enemy methodically, with machine-like precision, finish off their comrades who had remained in the rearguard on damaged ships.
The aliens had won the battle for orbit.
So be it!
The GAR still had aces up its sleeve to spring a couple of unpleasant surprises.
* * * Taron Malicos, former master of the Jedi Order, smiled a light and happy smile, alternately tensing and relaxing the muscles of his arms so that his limbs, bound in a straitjacket, wouldn’t lose their tone.
“The plan is working.
My ‘benefactors’ were right.
It’s very easy to push the Servant of the corpse on the throne in the right direction.
They place too much importance on signs, especially the Force-sensitive ones.
The third act of the play has ended in the fire of the burned fleet at Rothana.
All that’s left is to wait for the opera soloist’s entrance.
He will appear.
He can’t help but appear after a blow to his pride!
The plan must be carried out!
Her plan must be carried out…”