Chapter 31

Columex Approach, Columex System

Vorzyd Sector

Barriss Offee felt cold.

The very moment the blinding glow of pseudomotion retreated from her vision, an energy of coldness and forceful silence took its place. Something is very, very wrong. She flicked a glance towards Tuff, but the tactical droid was as impassive as ever.

“Plot to intercept with that dreadnought,” the droid commanded, “And inform Task Force Nardolin of our presence.”

Dreadnought. The word rang in her skull. She could see it in the distance; a great island of steel buffeted by relentless waves of warheads and lasers. And it did not falter. Every crashing barrage it unleashed was like a hammer to her skull, followed by the cries of the fallen echoing in her ears and the pain of death coursing through her veins.

The Jedi healer raced to the front of the bridge in sheer instinct, pressing an open palm against the freezing transparisteel. Every fibre in her body screamed out –her training, her duty, it was as if everything had led up to this moment. Barriss was well aware of her talent; empathy was a key trait of a skilled Jedi healer. She was supposed to receive the suffering of others, and respond with comfort and healing in return.

But she could offer no comfort. Not here… no against this.

As Messenger sailed through the debris, she was assaulted by visions of crunching hulls and swift bursts of agony. The Force was trying to tell her something, but she was too tired–tired of everything–to apply Master Luminara’s teachings and find out what it was. She didn’t need to know, not when she already knew everything that matters.

Loyalists were killing Separatists, and Separatists were killing Loyalists. It was people murdering people on a galactic scale, for reasons that did not matter. And as a Jedi, she could only witness. Witness the battle approaching, and soon to take part in the slaughter.

Barriss wanted none of it. She was a Jedi. She was supposed to have none of it. But as Messenger forged on ever nearer, the cruelly familiar sensations returned. Sensations that once represented the warmth and respite of the Temple, transformed into the bitter swords that led the Republic to battle.

Jedi Masters.

There were Jedi Masters in the bridges of cruisers, impassively looking on as they commanded the deaths of thousands. It’s people you’re killing, she wanted to scream, not droids! Do you not realise!? Master Luminara has always preached serenity, to be devoid of emotions and connect with the Force more intimately than ever before. But Barriss had to doubt; was this the meaning of serenity?

The Force once again pounded her psyche as if it was a shut door. Sinister discomfort continued to rise like bile as Messenger proceeded further into the debris field, her bow shoving steel corpses from her path. Whatever happened here… was so swift and painful it left a hateful rend in the Living Force. An open wound that would heal in time, yet continued to fester with the lingering emotions of the dead. We’re sailing through a graveyard, Barriss realised numbly.

“Messenger, Kronprinz,” a staggered voice caught her attention, “This is Admiral Greyshade. Do you have the interdiction mines we requested?”

“Affirmative,” Tuff confirmed, “We are currently on course for intercept the dreadnought’s port flank, please advise.”

“Very good–” there was a sharp gasp, an abrupt disconnect, and two minutes of silence before he returned, “–We will proceed with the plan. Locate our mark and follow our lead. Shields to starboard beam; you will be running the gauntlet.”

Barriss stumbled towards the nearest repeater, snatching the droid operator’s shoulder and watching the astronav plot. She could roughly understand the formations of the battlefield through her pounding headache, but with a visual aid, the picture of sheer scale could be fully pieced together.

The battle lines were in a diagonal slant, with the Republic’s right flank furthest away from the planet and left flank nearest to the defensive line of what appeared to be orbital cannons. There were two Republic star dreadnoughts–the furthest one cutting a bloody swath through… Barriss read a familiar designation; White Hand Fleet. A complicated emotion stirred in her chest, one she did not have the energy to unravel.

In any case, the nearest dreadnought was spearheading the Republic’s White Cuirass Fleet towards Columex. The navigation droid promptly ignored her, calculating out the dreadnought’s vector in order to modify Unicorn Squadron’s new approach heading. A dotted line was drawn out, extending from the dreadnought’s bow and stabbing into Columex’s orbital defences.

“Legacy of the Founders is too unwieldy to navigate around the orbital cannons,” Tuff explained, “And presenting a target that large, their only course of action is to close the distance as quickly as possible. And that means they have no choice but to overextend themselves.”

As if on cue, the gargantuan ion drives of the Legacy were in full view, along with two more identifiable blips. First was Kronprinz, a Tionese warship that looked wholly out of place. Her glassy armour shimmered in kaleidoscopic colours surrounded by the hail of red, green, and blue laser bolts, gracefully minnowing through the torrential chaos. She swung around just within the dreadnought’s blindspot, stern narrowly missing the battleship Hexenkoenig, who along with the rest of Task Force Nardolin was holding off the onslaught of the White Cuirass Fleet with determined steadfastness.

Unicorn Squadron’s vector was gradually spelled out on the plot–to skirt the edges of Legacy’s firing envelopes and deploy their interdiction mines before pushing on to the safety behind the orbital cannons.

“We are going to… mine it?” she asked.

“No. We are going to mine our reinforcements,” the droid answered, as if it was the most natural thing in the galaxy.

⁂

“Dive, dive!” I roared as Repulse was bracketed by a cannonade of furious turbolasers.

The entire White Hand Fleet immediately turned on a dime, rotating ninety-degrees south–just as it did at Centares–and overclocking their drives the get the fuck out of the Mandator’s range. Unlike her smaller cousins, Pride of the Core was not lacking in ventral firepower, and my personal command was getting savaged. Ten warships disappeared off the map within the first three minutes, and another sixteen followed by ten minutes.

Twice that number were left disabled, with their stern shields buckling under the intensifying firepower, followed by their engine blocks giving way. Left with only inertia carrying them away, the renewed assault of the Steel Blade was all but certain to eat them alive. Benevolent Mother and thirty-one other ships suddenly pitched upwards, rolling over and punching out three furious salvos into our unexpecting pursuers.

“Sir?” Stelle looked up at me.

Fifteen minutes. Half my fleet was gone. Those who couldn’t escape had already chosen the hill they’d die on; slowing down the enemy. I checked the condition of the Clysm Fleet, and found out they had been hit just as hard–if not harder than we were. While the White Hand was stuck beneath the Pride of the Core, the Clysm was unfortunate enough to be trapped in the process of crossing the Cerulean Spear’s ‘T,’ and was now finding themselves between an immovable juggernaut and a vengeful warfleet.

I prayed for them, and reverted my attention to my own survival.

“Communications of Renown, sir!” the comms droid shouted–

“Sir!” Zenith-II hailed me, “Cylinders Seventy-Five to Eighty-Nine are still loaded and ready! And with us out of the way, they have a clear shot!”

Even when the answer was so damn obvious, it had somehow slipped my mind in the chaos and carnage. I didn’t hesitate to respond.

“Then have them open fire!”

Repulse’s transmitters screamed out the order in the general direction of the planet, brute forcing its way through several layers of Republic jamming. Almost immediately, the Steel Blade cut their pursuit and veered away, taking refuge behind the massive bulk of the Mandator.

Pride of the Core, on the other hand, wasn’t so lucky.

Thump, thump, thump. I could somehow hear the blasts of the Cylinders echo through the vacuum, with the sheer energy output of their gravitic ignitions rocking every warship in the vicinity as if they were dinghies in storm-tossed waves.

Pride of the Core tanked the first and second shots with hastily prepared kinetic shields, which shattered with the third shot. There was now a race between the Mandator frantically diverting power to her frontal shields, and the Cylinders frantically trying to bring her down. But as buckshot after buckshot of asteroids just disappeared into the dreadnought’s mass, I realised that at this range, the asteroids didn’t have enough time to get up to useful velocities, allowing the Pride to literally tank the barrages with sheer bulk alone.

I could’ve sword the dreadnought was wracked by an internal ignition following another well-placed shot, with panels of armour bulging out briefly, but her bulkheads must have contained the detonation. A detonation that would’ve completely vaporised a Venator. I had to admit, to my own chagrin, that Kuat really built these things to be unstoppable.

“All units, return to your stations,” I commanded, “We will reorganise and sweep back around. Stelle, are we able to redeploy Victoria Louise?”

Victoria Louise. Our dreadnought-killer. Except, there were two dreadnoughts and one dreadnought-killer. Not the most advantageous situation, but if we can get rid of the Pride, the White Hand and Clysm can mop the fragile Steel Blade and flank around the Cerulean Spear and White Cuirass.

“Cylinder Ninety is lining up their shot against Legacy of the Founders,” Stelle reported, “It will take at least half an hour to modify their station, to say nothing about calculating a firing solution. They’ll have to fire across the length of our battle line. If Victoria fragments, that’ll be the death of us.”

“So that’s out of the option,” I grunted, tunnelling my attention to Task Force Repulse reforming into an elliptical formation just below the Steel Blade.

The Steel Blade attempted to take some pot shots with long-ranged missiles, but Benevolent Mother and a handful of other crippled warships had taken up the mantle of being out ad-hoc point defence screen. With their ion thrusters under repair, they were stuck between us and them. The only thing stopping the Steel Blade from completely thrashing the disabled warships was the malevolent threat of our Cylinders.

We were at an impasse. And every second that ticked away was a second that Task Force Sol and Task Force Clysm had to endure, unsupported and grossly outgunned.

My mind raced with ideas, for anything that could reverse our fortunes. I had a hard time limit; and that was until Cylinder 89 fired. Meanwhile, the Pride of the Core was ponderously yawing to starboard in order to bring the Cylinders in range of her broadsides, while relieving her beleaguered bow shield generators of pressure.

“Registering a new drive cone!” the sensor droid called, “They extracted right on top of the Pride. Transferring data… looks to be a Star Destroyer, sir!”

I leaned forward, checking my sensor repeaters. There was indeed a new signature about a thousand or so klicks above the Mandator, but nothing that outright confirmed its build. Still, Star Destroyer drive signatures were pretty recognisable, but Repulse unhesitatingly identified the ship as a Venator-class star cruiser.

Even more enemy reinforcements? I wiped my face, blinking away salty tears as I double-checked the Venator’s extraction vector. The easiest way would be to analyse the correlating radiation involved, but Cronau radiation detection required specific sensors, and Repulse’s had either been shot off of disabled for more combat-relevant ones.

A heartbeat later, thirty more drive cones blinked into existence around the Venator. And Repulse identified them as Separatist warships, from the plumes of their ion drives.

A droid snapped to attention, “We’re receiving a broadcast on all Separatist scrambles–!”

“–This is General Sev’rance Tann of the Confederate Second Fleet. Reinforcements have arrived.”

Short, sweet, and to the point. I’ve never heard more beautiful words in my life. Why the broadcast was coming from the Venator was beyond me, but damn I should’ve always known Sev’rance Tann delivers in the best way possible.

That feeling swelled as two more masses of drive cones erupted onto the tactical holo. Admiral Tonith and Admiral Trench. It must be. We had won.

“The enemy is up,” I immediately declared, “All remaining ships, full power to sublight drives and double-up bow shields! We’re rendezvousing with the Second Fleet by taking the direct route!”

In other words, smashing straight through the Steel Blade while they were still caught off-kilter, and hopefully, sandwiching them from above and below. At the same time, the Second Fleet’s Providences–Ascendant Sky among them–dived down and ripped out a fusillade of ion torpedoes directly into the Pride’s rear, disabling the great monster for the moment.

“Enemy warships are shifting their attitudes to meet us,” Stelle reported.

“I can see that,” I growled, “Aim for the spaces in their formation. We’ll blow right past them.”

And blow right past them we did, travelling so quickly we must’ve exceeded Repulse’s muzzle velocity, even as she and her sister ships Renown and Revenge trumpeted out a series of bleeding bolts from their superheavy batteries in quick succession. I resisted the urge to shut my eyes as Repulse in particular burned so close to two Jedi cruisers that some paint must’ve been scraped off her radiator wings.

Then, now above the Mandator, I could finally catch my breath as the Second Fleet came to support my forces–and realise the sheer daring of General Tann’s stratagem against the star dreadnought. Her stolen Venator-cum-flagship was caught in some exceedingly queer docking procedure with the Mandator, flipped upside down and hugging the larger dreadnought’s dorsal surface so closely she had slipped beneath the shields. But that wasn’t all–the cruiser’s main hangar doors were wide open, and hundreds of Decimator repulsortanks were ‘falling’ out and onto the Mandator’s hull en masse, somehow having swapped out their repulsors for tractors and reaping the benefits.

They dropped onto the gunnery trenches and artillery decks like a swarm of termites, their turbolasers ravaging everything in arm’s reach. Explosions rocked the dreadnought as isolated gas storages were ignited, blowing up battery platforms as Decimators sowed havoc roaming all over her surface, deploying endless legions of buzz droids as they did so. The Mandator’s great size had become its undoing, as the AT-TE’s and clone commandos deployed to fight off the boarding party now had to fight off the boarding army over indefensibly vast surface area.

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We won. We won. The mantra repeated itself over and over in my head. The Republic was surrounded on all sides. The Steel Blade Fleet had already seen the writing on the wall, and the first bursts of emergency hyperspace jumps were sparking on the tactical holo. The last of the Cylinders were firing, taking potshots at the enemy’s routing rear. I could imagine it was the same picture all across the star system.

“Violent energy reading from starboard–!”

Without warning and like a hammer of God, a blazing pillar of bloody crimson smote Sev’rance Tann’s Venator, along with the Pride’s entire bridge stalk.

⁂

“The Dark Side is always at hand, Padawan. It is no farther away than a heartbeat, an eyeblink, side by side with the bright side of the Force, separated by no more than a hair. It waits to snare the unwary, wearing a thousand disguises.”

Out of the many lessons Master Luminara had taught her, this was the one Barriss remembered most clearly. Of course, Barriss had heard that before, many times, and she believed what her teacher said, but she had never really felt or understood exactly what it meant. She had never been tempted by the Dark Side, as far as she knew.

But as clung on for dear life as Messenger was thrown about, bracketed by offending fire on every side, she reflected on what Master Luminara meant by a thousand disguises. Fighter screens fearlessly threw themselves between the warships, droid and organics alike surrendering their lives to absorb the onset of turbolasers and missiles rocketing from the dreadnought’s artillery decks. All in order to protect the interdiction mines that would somehow–somehow–win them the war.

“Two klicks to clear,” Taylor reported, “We’ve lost three ships.”

Unicorn Squadron was accelerating alongside the dreadnought’s tapering prow when Barriss felt herself inexplicably drawn towards the Legacy’s bridge, looming high over them. Her mind was slowly cleared of distractions, of anguish echoing through the Force and visions of destruction, until nothing but serenity remained.

…

So this is the Dark Side of the Force.

“Every conscious move you make, from the smallest to the largest, requires choice. There is always a branch in the path, and you must decide upon which turning you will tread. Do you recall the testing of your ability to sense a remote while wearing blinders?”

This was among the most basic of Jedi skills. A remote was a small levitating droid about the size of a goldfruit that could be programmed to zip about and fire mild electric bolts at a student. With a blast helmet on and the blinders down, the only way to know the position of the orb was to use the Force. As a student progressed in the use of his or her lightsaber, blocking the remote’s bolts became a standard exercise. Since you couldn’t use your eyes or ears to track the device, the only way to avoid being shocked was to let the Force guide your hands.

“And did you ever feel during those times like destroying the remote? Reaching out with the Force and crushing it like a wad of scrap flimsi?”