Chapter 67

Outer Los Approach, Recopi System

Humbarine Sector

“Right where the Admiral said they would be,” Commander Adar Tallon murmured, “So this is how the Separatists managed to run circles around us.”

Captain Jan Dodonna dipped his chin briefly, “This isn’t the only one. Commenor ACS detected at least six of them.”

Ahead of them, some three-million klicks far, were two massive vessels orbiting the mining world Outer Los, their silhouettes ringed by a halo of light as the great star of Recopi burned at their backs. They were converted bulkers, their superstructures gave away that much, and Jan could only presume they were the improvised auxiliary service ships Admiral Honor hypothesised the existence of. Further confirming their suspicions, Prudence’s sensors were picking up satellite signatures around the two vessels, likely tenders previously shuttling back and forth from the planet to resupply their motherships. They had kicked up the hornet’s nest, and now those tenders were racing back to their hangars and berths, while the auxiliaries’ combat patrols were arraying out for battle.

“Focus on the present, Jan,” Adar said, “We destroy these two, and we ruin all of Trilm’s local operations. She’ll have no choice but to further concentrate her squadrons around her remaining auxiliaries in order to maintain prolonged action.”

“…I’m going to need you in your fighter, Adar,” Jan told his friend, before turning to the data pits, “Contacts?”

“–Two auxiliaries,” a sensor officer hastily replied, “One Lucrehulk. We think it’s in carrier configuration… and three heavy cruisers. Rendili Dreadnaughts.”

Adar Tallon winced, “Lucrehulk-class carrier? We just couldn’t have it easy, could we?”

“Get out there, Commander,” Jan commanded, settling into his captain’s persona, “We’ll draw its attention and cover your vector. Remember–”

“Auxiliaries first, I know,” Commander Tallon waved him off as he departed, “They won’t see it coming, I promise you that.”

Captain Jan Dodonna breathed out, visualising his plan of attack in his mind’s eye. Then–

“All ships; triple line formation! Victory Division, forward!” he ordered furiously, “Intercept that Lucrehulk! Venator Division, launch all starfighters!”

Victory-class Star Destroyer Nike surged forward through the ranks of the Venators with six other Victorys, arranged in a stringent line abreast, missile bays yawning open in anticipation. Their thrust plumes washed across the formation as their supersized main reactors pushed the powerful warships to velocities far greater than any Separatist warship could outpace. The auxiliaries were already fleeing, abandoning what tenders that couldn’t rendezvous in time, while the lone Lucrehulk and three Rendili Dreadnaughts were forming a crude line of battle in a delaying effort.

“Firebolt Squadron launch, Talon Squadron launch, Nemesis Squadron launch…” an impassive voice rang out over the speakers as Prudence’s starfighter wings took to the void, shielded from view by the Victory Division’s backwash in the front. Jan almost missed Adar Tallon’s fighter-bomber wing as he circled around, collecting his starfighters as he did, before taking off on a perpendicular vector to the rest of the task force.

As soon as his Talon Squadron made clear of the fleet, Commander Tallon ordered his drives cut, and the live feed of his wing disappeared from Jan’s displays, replaced with a blinking last known vector track.

“Let’s hope you were right about those auxiliaries needing time to warm up their drives,” Captain Jan Dodonna mumbled to himself, observing the enemy’s fifteen-hundred Vulture droids roil into their classical swarm ‘formation.’

He could see why the tactic continued to prove its usefulness. For a host of droid brains, there was no more natural tactic, and the psychological factor a smothering, devouring cloud of droids possessed was truly fearsome. One reason, of many, Jan would never pilot a starfighter. There had been horror stories from the Perlemian, where over a million droid starfighters executed the greatest swarm ever known in galactic history at the Battle of Centares. Suffice to say, starfighter tacticians across the Republic had been sent scrambling to find a solution.

And the solution was, once again, found in the Victory-class Star Destroyer.

Nike plunged headfirst into the droid swarm, like a shark scouring through a school of fish, her teeth-like clusters of turbolasers and point defence lasers cutting a bloody slew through the enemy formation. Once the swarm’s greatest strength–its solidity–had been undone, Jan’s own starfighters poured into the breach like parasitic wasps, eroding the swarm from the inside out.

“Three points to starboard,” Jan ordered the helm, “Bring us onto the enemy’s port flank. We’ll push the Separatists into the damned planet if we have to!”

Prudence brought her mighty form around, artillery deck gleaming with open bores, taking the point of the eight-ship formation in line ahead. Manoeuvring around the pinned down starfighter battle, his eight Venators discovered that the enemy cruisers had anticipated the attack, and a furious firefight began. Unfortunately for the Separatists, they were severely outgunned and outtonnaged, and were forced to give ground.

From the corner of his eye, he spotted the fleeing auxiliaries, and considered the idea of scraping up a reserve fighter-bomber wing to pursue them. The thought was proven unnecessary a moment later, when Commander Adar Tallon’s fighter-bomber wing pounced out from behind Outer Los, having circumnavigated the entire world, leaping onto the relatively defenceless auxiliaries and all but tearing through whatever combat patrols remained and shooting their engines dead.

As soon as they confirmed the auxiliaries were no longer moving under their own power and only inertia, Talon Squadron wheeled about and began closing the distance between itself and the rear of the remaining Lucrehulk.

“Broadcast an order to surrender,” Jan commanded.

“They aren’t responding, sir!” a deck officer shouted, instinctively ducking as one of the enemy cruisers ripped itself in half, an internal reactor detonation flinging out high velocity shards in every direction.

With the Victory Division bearing down from their front, Jan’s Venator Division asserting even more pressure on their flank, and Talon Squadron approaching from the rear, the lone Lucrehulk was completely surrounded.

“Send it again,” Jan’s fingers lightly brushed the growing fuzz on his face, “They must realise capture is preferable to death.”

“…With all due respect, Captain,” the communications officer inserted weakly, but pointedly, “This is the Perlemian Coalition. I don’t think they will be surrendering.”

Jan Dodonna resisted the urge to sigh. Regardless, he continued sending unanswered transmissions to the Lucrehulk, even as the last of the Dreadnaught-class cruisers shattered apart, as Nike and her Victorys unleashed their withering hails of missiles. Even as the hundreds of concussion warheads cracked open its shell, seismic waves rippling and ripping through her interior bulkheads and tore the massive vessel apart. Jets of boiling atmosphere burst through the crevices, shooting out debris and bodies into the cold void.

“…Where to next, Captain?”

Jan turned around, not an emotion on his face, “Where’s the closest Separatist raid party?”

“Scans indicated the Sarapin System, but it’s a couple hours old–”

“Based on what we know of their raid patterns, where would they jump next?”

“Well, the Seyugi System, Captain.”

“Plot the jump. We must not waste our momentum.”

⁂

Sarapin Orbit, Sarapin System

Humbarine Sector

Click, click.

Calli Trilm held up the Starpath unit to the light, inspecting it from every angle. She wasn’t so sure as to what had become of it, and she had half the mind to believe it had become infected by some sort of dormant virus… like a sleeper cell. It would make sense, and she could certainly give the GAR credit for such a novel anti-espionage tactic… except it did not behave like one. After all, what sort of sleeper virus would activate before it had been attached to a mainframe? And if there was a sleeper virus, why would it only activate after the device was no longer in use?

To prevent the CAF from reverse engineering GAR technology? Not for something as ubiquitous as a Starpath unit. In fact, the CAF had even better communications technology than the GAR. While the Republic may maintain its advantage in weapons and starship technology, the Confederacy was well and far in the lead with its automation, communications, and most things electronic.

“Tex,” she called out to TX-103, “Have you prepared the isolation chamber?”

‘Isolation chamber’ she called it. Simply put, it was just a digitally isolated space completely separated from any critical systems or accessible networks. It was a common enough technique to train any sort of novel artificial intelligence, especially if no restraints had been hardcoded into it, so as to prevent the intelligence from going rogue and infecting everything within reach of its immaterial claws.

“It takes time to partition a databank of sufficient size,” Tex returned from… whatever he was doing.

“Can’t we just use the same databank Handler One inhabited before?”

“It had been repurposed.”

Before she could reply, a chime on the comms module of her chair caught her attention. Cursing softly underneath her breath, Calli took a brisk glance at chrono before leaping off her seat and climbing down to the viewports. Battle Squadron Salvara–the very same Battle Squadron Salvara that participated in the Battle of Centares and Battle of Columex–were returning from their raid on Sarapin’s orbital relays. The boiling volcanic world was a wealth of effectively limitless geothermal energy on its own, and the old Republic had been wise enough to exploit Sarapin to its greatest effect; effectively using the world as the prime energy supplier of the entire Galactic Interior…

At the cost of making a single world produce up to 80% of the entire Core’s energy imports. Incidentally, Sev’rance Tann’s opening move of the war was to lead an overwhelming attack on Sarapin, knocking out the root of the Core’s entire power grid, completely blacking out tens of thousands of worlds for hours if not days until secondary sources could make up for the sudden loss. Suffice to say, the Republic had learned its lesson, and hastily made to diversify its energy suppliers. However, Calli Trilm would hazard Sarapin still dominated a large slice of that particular pie chart, considering the apparent renewal and improvement of its defence grid.

But Calli had no intentions to brave the defence grid; she was neither the Pantoran, nor did she have the might of the Confederate Second Fleet, or was its 2nd Fleet Group now? The 19th Mobile Fleet was designed specifically to raid spacelanes and transports, and that’s what she would do. Because energy was useless unless it could find its way to the consumer. And that meant energy had to be transported… in one way or another, as the satellite wrecks around Sarapin could testify.

“Mission accomplished, leader,” heavy cruiser Sarissa’s captain reported, the Rendili Dreadnaught’s running lights flashing in salute as she smoothly slid past Calli’s flagship.

“Damage report?” Rear Admiral Trilm asked.

“Nothing that couldn’t get past our shields. Rendili builds them sturdy.”

That was a lie. Calli knew that was a lie because Sarissa was sporting a nasty black bruise on its port beam, right above one of its artillery blisters, and shields don’t tend to cause that sort of thing. What shields can do, however, is melt the vessel it’s supposed to be protecting by absorbing too much thermalised energy during enemy barrages. That’s why some ships get a ‘post-battle glow’ after an engagement. But that sort of thing only occurs when said warship’s heatsinks get shot.

Nevertheless, Sarissa’s scar was more representative of a direct turbolaser strike than an overloaded ray shield. But nothing short of a direct hull breach would even make them flinch, wouldn’t it? That was what Calli Trilm had concluded. The Salvarans simply have nothing left to lose. Most of the Perlemian Coalition’s Armada was of similar mind; all of them exiled legionaries fighting in foreign space. Give them a target, and they might as well be her personal hounds.

“Then let’s get moving,” she commanded, “Tex, bring us around! We’re going back to Recopia.”

Star of Serenno swung herself over, sublight drives igniting and afterburners blazing like great blue flame all the way to the nearest hyperlane egress. They spotted the wrecks of Sarapin’s trifling defence fleet drifting aimlessly on the way there, gradually heading out the outer planets in the next few dozen years.

“Admiral,” the tactical droid abruptly alerted her, “Do you wish to test the Starpath unit now?”

“Now…?” Calli echoed, glancing out the viewports, “I do suppose there’s no reason not to.”

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She nearly tossed the once-useless cube over to the droid, before interrupting herself with the reminder the cube was no longer so useless. Instead, Calli marched right up to the droid and deposited the Starparth unit in his metal grip. Tex inspected the device with his harsh photoreceptors, approaching the nearest console–and after confirming nothing important was being done there, shoved the operating droid out of the way and hooked it up to the Starpath unit.

“You are certain the system is isolated?” a swell of nervousness rose up within Calli, “I’d rather not brick my flagship.”

“I am certain,” the droid replied, configuring the display and unceremoniously accessing the Starpath’s datafiles–

For a brief moment, it was as if Calli was watching the words of an eldritch deity pass before her, visualised by some arcane sorcery. Hundreds, thousands, trillions lines of encrypted data erupted forth through the console display like an unstoppable, endless cascade of information. Voices, holofeeds, transmissions–what seemed like an entire galaxy’s worth of data surged onto the single console display.

And each and every transmission started with the exact same prefix: [QIXRB MCMH]

“They’re all coming from the same place,” Calli muttered, “Can we decode this? All we need to do is find out what these words mean, right?”

“I suspect it is a single word,” Tex said, his digits frantically reconfiguring the console so that the sheer volume of traffic doesn’t brick the databank from memory overload, “All the transmissions are encoded into five character blocks.”

“Well if it’s nine letters–”

“We lost contact with the Second Auxiliary Squadron!” a droid shouted, voice high in alarm, “Their last transmission was… ENEMY CONTACT.”

“Contact lost with Task Force One-Nine-Eight!”

“Contact lost with the Ninety-first Recon Division!”

“Contact lost with relay frigate Ravana!”

“Second Auxiliary Squadron?” Calli’s eyes widened, “That’s at Recopia! Tex!”

Recopia’s no more than a ten-hour jump from Sarapin!