The Force Wills - Chapter 144

CC-55-

No, as much as he wanted to distance himself from events on Abafar - he was Gregor as well. The commander had warned him about denial - as much as he wished the last year hadn’t happened.

He was Captain Gregor, Foxtrot Company of the GAR’s Special Operations Brigade. Despite all the blood and sweat of the harsh training on Kamino with Mandalorian instructors, and months of successful missions behind him in the early stages of the war - it hadn’t helped at all on Sarrish.

Just thinking about that name was painful - the Battle of Sarrish… what a joke. It was more like the massacre of Sarrish. Dead brothers everywhere, lining the battlefield to such an extent you could barely see the earth beneath the bodies. An entire regiment caught by surprise in the open during a march, then utterly routed.

How the Separatists had been able to achieve it was something he still had no answer for, even with Commander Tano’s help in reviewing the memories. He gritted his teeth, struggling to put them away. It had been so much easier in the past to compartmentalize, now it was as if something was broken - the mental training and techniques he had learned on Kamino wasn’t working anymore. 

As he steadily donned his old Katarn armor in a deserted alleyway, with D-Squad and the commander turning their backs to give him some privacy, he felt like he was also putting on more than just armor again. With each piece, more memories boiled to the surface, remembering each member of his old squad in Foxtrot.

CC-9 and his no-nonsense attitude on a mission, whilst reading philosophy during downtime. CC-31’s constant pranks on the rest of the squad - Jokester they had called him. CC-6’s drawings and art he constantly worked on with a large datapad.

Now - all dead.

He finally picked up his helmet and traced its worn surface that had seen him through so much and the numerous drawn notches with lines traced through - each representing the number of clankers he had personally destroyed. He could recall each mission where he had earned those notches, like it had happened yesterday.

“An unfortunate necessity, Captain,” Commander Tano had said in the mental landscape. “The mind is a delicate thing and to restore your personality - there was no other way given our time constraints.”

Get a grip, Gregor, he thought.

He donned the helmet and was relieved to see his armor’s systems powering up. The internal batteries were still good and his HUD began a self-diagnostic automatically. It was only registering 91% charge, which he understood was just a consequence of general lack of maintenance and how long it had sat inside Borkus’ storage closet.

He tapped the vambrace interface instinctively, without even looking, knowing the specific sequence required. He twitched as the armor’s internal bacta dispenser poked his back. That still worked thankfully, even though it had only one viable dose left in the armor’s integrated backpack.

When at last, he picked up the DC-17m, the specialized modular blaster rifle that had seen him through so much - it felt like he had just put the last puzzle piece that was Gregor, back together.

His HUD registered the weapon with no problem, the diagnostic also going off automatically as it sensed the sheer passage of time since its last synchronization. It all looked good, though he only had three ammo packs in his backpack and the one already inside the rifle, which only had thirty-two shots left in it.

Gregor turned around, “I’m ready, commander.”

She smiled her eyes intrigued, “Each notch a kill, Captain?”

“Five dead clankers per notch, yes, commander.”

“Very well, now I know how you generally operate in a squad, and you’ve been with Jedi in the field before. However, I work a bit differently - I’ll take point, D-Squad behind me, with you taking the rear guard. You’ll see me use my abilities to create mobile cover for us and even use the enemy droids in that role. I want you to blast as many droids with that DC17 as you can manage as quickly as possible. Feel free to use your initiative to create as much havoc as possible. Understood?”

“Understood, commander.”

“All right, D-Squad, fall in.”

The commander drew her blaster and led the way.

They emerged out the alleyway and given how late it was, didn’t see a soul in the street and it was just a few hundred meters to the spaceport itself.

It was a deeper hollow that had been carved out of the northeast of the town, with just six designated landing pads for starships, capable of landing a corvette tonnage or light freighters.

It was very bare bones in terms of infrastructure, with not even a fence around the perimeter and only had a single decrepit building that managed landing permissions and aerospace traffic.

Loader droids and B1 engineers were steadily loading rhydonium fuel canisters onto the lone Rho-class shuttle that was currently landed. Gregor noted with interest how many of those canisters were stacked together around the landing pad.

The Separatists had given some thought to increasing security and had installed a perimeter sensor net that ringed the place, only leaving a single gap towards the main approaching street.

Two B1s stood guard here.

“This is a restricted area, ma’am. Do not approach,” it nasally droned at them.

“Hey wait a minute, isn’t that a commando-”

The commander’s blaster rapidly fired twice so quickly that Gregor only saw her right arm as a blur.

Both droids collapsed to the sandy floor, dead from accurate shots to the head.

He opened fire as well on four B1s that had been on patrol to their right.

Four shots, four kills.

He felt the hard earth rumble underneath his feet and abruptly numerous pieces of hard Abafar void rock burst upward, which began lazily orbiting around them and following their advance.

It was just in time as they turned right onto a descending ramp to the lower spaceport, a full platoon of B1s on patrol were coming up the other way.

An emergency siren wailed through the air as Gregor brought his rifle to his shoulder instinctively and switched to burst mode.

His HUD automatically designated aim points, which he tolerated using for the moment - he fired once, his shots going perfectly through the orbiting cover the commander had generated.

Three B1s died from the burst, one after the other.

The commander’s WESTAR whined rapidly, destroying six within moments.

The enemy return fire was quite accurate for B1s, clearly they had seen some upgrades since he was last on the battlefield, but it didn’t matter.

Each shot was stopped on a torso sized lump of void stone that the commander kept around them.

Back to single shot mode, together they easily finished off the survivors of the platoon.

The commander upped D-Squad’s speed to a light jog as they turned left towards the shuttle just eighty meters away, passing by conveyor belts that were carrying more fuel canisters.

Three B2s with arms already in firing position unleashed a torrent of fire.

D-Squad’s rock shields surged forward to intercept, which were promptly shattered into smaller pieces under the weight of fire.

Yet the commander just pulled more from the earth to regenerate their protection’s integrity.

Gregor took the opportunity to fire and was gratified to note his actual accuracy was still there, as his shots tunneled through the B2’s left shoulder sensor, three times in a row.

He marveled at her sheer efficiency with that WESTAR, her arm blurring around her body and firing off in directions without even looking - yet each shot finding their mark on a B1 or B2 droid.

If this was what a Jedi could do with a blaster in hand… by Kamino’s oceans, why did they bother with lightsabers?!

He added six more droids to his kill tally, which had been trying to flank them on the left.

Three droidekas chose that moment to come rolling forward with their characteristic clatter.

Gregor whirled around to fire before their shields could come online.

His shots pinged off the thick outer armor, but managed to catch one of them in the central droid brain cluster just as they stopped to unfold.

That left two droidekas who managed to get their shields deployed before their fire started to eat away at their rock cover.

The commander was on it though and she openly gestured with her left hand towards three nearby canisters of rhydonium fuel, which launched themselves overhead to land right next to the droidekas.

Gregor didn’t need her order and fired his DC17 directly into the fuel canisters.

The multicolored rhydonium explosion overwhelmed the droideka’s shielding, before sending them flying into the air in pieces.

The shockwave rattled the ground and kicked up fine dust everywhere.

It was surprisingly subdued when it reached D-Squad and Gregor became acutely aware of the peril of a stray shot into any of the large fuel canister pallets.

Don’t think about it, Gregor. Just use it as motivation to not miss and kill them all! He thought to himself and immediately resumed shooting.

The entire spaceport was alive with movement as more and more enemy droids came pouring out the nearby mineshaft and from the lone spaceport building.

He almost spotted the danger of a B2-HA too late, firing off the last few shots of his current power pack.

It died but not before it fired off one of its homing rockets.

“Commander!”

He needn’t have worried though.

As he reloaded his rifle, a large rock under her control surged forward as if it had been shot by cannon and intercepted the rocket.

Its detonation in mid-air flattened an entire platoon of B1s into scrap.

D-Squad arrived at the Rho shuttle’s embarkation ramp and the commander adjusted her rock shielding to cover the forward arc of the craft. It also meant that she could concentrate the coverage enough to provide a more solid barrier to the enemy.

“R2 get her up and running!” she shouted over the din of blaster fire and exploding rock. “Gregor, take care of the pilot!”

He sprinted up ahead of the astromech into the belly of the ship, rushing past the rhydonium canisters, and flung himself at the ladder that would take him to the upper deck.

The B1 pilot opened fire, but Gregor had been anticipating it.

The bolt harmlessly splashed where his head would’ve been, but his DC-17s aim camera allowed him to simply push it above him and two trigger pulls later, the droid no longer had a functioning head.

He took the final rungs of the ladder and grabbed the dead B1 to hurl it out of the way.

“Clear R2!”

The droid jumped up using a brief thrust of leg jets and rolled in at top speed to plug into the shuttle’s logic port.

Through the cockpit transparisteel he saw what had to be a full company of enemy droids approaching and firing towards the commander.

She was deliberately making herself a target to draw enemy fire away from the shuttle behind her.

Her blaster had long since been holstered and she was simply holding up both her hands as she conducted their defense with rock.

Even as it shattered or became pulverised under the weight of enemy fire, more was pulled out of the earth to replace it.

On occasion she would send a rock as large as a speeder to smash into the enemy, crushing and felling dozens in one swoop.

Gregor felt the shuttle start to come alive under him as the engines and the power plant spooled up.

“R2, power up the guns!” he ordered, throwing himself into the co-pilot station.

The astromech chirped an affirmative and the controls came alive under his hands.

The Rho-class transport version had eight laser cannons, two for every arc of fire. He activated every cannon except the two in the fore, seeing as how they were obstructed by the commander’s rock shield.

Under his aim, laser beams began scything outward, cutting down multiple droids with each trigger pull.

He winced as he almost clipped a pallet of rhydonium, but managed to kill a squad of droidekas that was rolling forward.

In that moment, the rock shield exploded outward in a massive arc that destroyed nearly half of all the droids that were opposing them.

“R2! I’m inside, go!” shouted the commander.

The shuttle whined and rumbled with power, taking off with an upward hover.

Gregor switched on the forward guns as well and just kept firing.

The hull rang with the impact of enemy fire as the shuttle outer wings folded into position.

He twitched as the gun controls were taken over by R2 just as the droid fired the full thrust of the engines.

The rear turret swiveled and just as the shuttle cleared the edge of the spaceport - a laser beam hit the largest pallet of rhydonium.

Gregor was pushed back in his seat as R2 threw the shuttle into max thrust.

The explosion behind them blinded the visual sensors briefly and he felt the shuttle take a hard hit from behind due to the overpressure.

It was thankfully within tolerances and R2 had managed to briefly switch on the deflectors as well.

Gregor looked down at the unassuming blue astromech and shook his head in wonder, “You realize how many enemy droids you’ve just killed?”

‘Of course I do, do you want an exact count?’ asked the astromech, with a distinct tone of binaric satisfaction.

“Not necessary, I can tell you’ve got me beat by light years already,” Gregor chuckled ruefully.

The commander rushed into the cockpit and took the pilot’s seat, QT, U9 and BZ rolled in behind her.

“All right, well done everyone,” she said, grabbing the control yoke and began tapping numerous controls. “Colonel Gascon, contact R4. Tell him to get the Talon airborne and follow us closely.”

“Right away, commander,” the tiny zilkin popped out briefly from his domain in BZ’s head and got to work.

The shuttle pulled up and within minutes the endless dull orange sky fell away to be replaced with the black void of space.

Gregor was thankful he had kept his helmet on, because it felt like his heart and mind was tearing itself into two directions simultaneously. On the one hand, Abafar was all he had known for so long, it had become a home despite everything. Borkus, while being a lying greedy bastard, had been a kind boss in day-to-day existence. He had even made some casual friends among the staff of the Power Slider Cantina, yet they had all clearly known what he was and yet no one had said anything.

On the other hand, another part of him felt like he was actually coming home now. Among the stars, going back to what he was destined to do alongside all his brothers who fought and bled for the Republic.

Yet it was also going back to the pain, death and trauma that had seen him marooned on Abafar in the first place.

Could he really go back to more of that?

He shut his eyes against the pain, even feeling the moisture of a single tear leak beyond his control. His chest shuddered as he fought against the emotional turmoil that threatened to break every barrier.

The view of space and within it, the distant form of a Venator growing ever closer, let him find the strength to rally and pull himself together.

There was still work to be done.

He could break down into a blubbering mess on his own time later.

“R2, we’re receiving a transmission from the Vanguard. You know what to do,” Commander Tano pulled up on the yoke, bringing the shuttle above the dorsal plane of the star destroyer and beginning final approach to the spinal hangar bays, which were all open and waiting.

‘Program uploaded, I’ve diverted the signal to my virtual buffer. They’ll see exactly what they expect, commander.’

“What is he talking about, commander?” Gregor asked curiously.

“Just a little trick. We pull the enemy holo signal into a virtual environment within R2’s memory banks that he creates. It lets him control all aspects of what the enemy sees and as far they know, there’s just a single B1 on board. If they try to scan us, I’ve also set my lifesign masking to blanket the cockpit.”

Gregor nodded in understanding, “There’s definitely been some tech upgrades since I was last with the GAR.”

“You can say that again,” she chuckled. “Here you’ll need this as well.” He took a device just about smaller than his palm and on one side it had a latching mechanism that could easily clip to his armor’s belt. “Your own lifesign scrambler, quite intuitive, buttons are labeled with exactly what they do.”

He fitted it to an empty spot on his belt.

The shuttle descended into the spinal gangway of the Vanguard and slowed down for a landing at the far end, directly on the closed ventral exit doors.

“R4, you with us?”

‘Landed right behind you, cloak is holding, commander.’

“Good, keep it that way and get ready to open the ventral airlock for us.”

‘Affirmative.’

The Venator’s spinal doors began closing.

Gregor frowned as he looked through the various gun cameras. Every hangar bay bulkhead was closed shut and barely any lights were on in the massive space. There weren’t even any droids in sight to do an inspection or unload the rhydonium cargo.

“Guess they’re not bothering unloading,” he said thoughtfully.

“Why would they,” Tano shrugged. “When this ship blows up, it won’t matter where the rhydonium in this shuttle is. Now that we’re inside the scan masking, I can detect how much there is and how many droids we’re going to deal with. Thankfully there’s only a single company of B1s that are acting as crew, another smaller group is on the bridge itself, undoubtedly led by a tactical droid. R2, can you detect any immediate security sensors around us?”

“Affirmative, commander. All internal Republic security systems are active.”    

“So the moment we show our faces outside, they’ll respond.”

“We can take those odds, commander,” Gregor declared.

“We generally can, but I’m more worried about the five hundred buzz droids they also have crawling around the ship. We show ourselves, we’ll be swarmed by them and while they’re not a threat individually, I doubt any of us can survive being tazed and cut apart by dozens of them at once.”

Gregor winced at the thought of going out in that fashion.

The shuttle shuddered slightly under their feet.

“R4, see if you can slice into the Vanguard’s systems without detection, you should also have limited command backdoors that the Separatists may not have found yet,” ordered the Commander.

“Intrusion successful. I have access. The Vanguard has broken orbit and is heading for the edge of Abafar’s mass shadow. They’re burning for the Dadrus exit point; the projected course will intersect the Hydian Way.”

“Projected time to Carida?”

“Four days, commander.”

She sat back in her chair and folded her arms. “Well, D-Squad, we’re on our way. Now we just need a way to blow up this ship reliably in a way that the enemy can’t defuse, ideally not with us on board and get the encryption module safely home in the process.”

Gascon popped up from BZ’s head, “Commander, I might have an idea about that.”

“Good, work on it together with Gregor, but for the moment I need to get some food in me and meditate. R4, loop the hangar security feeds, we’ll move over to the Talon.”

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As much as he understood that the Talon was a new class of militarized scout shuttle designed for special operations which could actually cloak, it was totally different being inside and actually living in it.

Not only did he have the unprecedented luxury to have one of the duo of four bunk rooms entirely to himself, he was also eating a meal that almost had no business being on a ship like this. He had been a cook in Borkus’ kitchen for most of his time on Abafar, learning from the sullustan’s recipes and instruction until the meticulous bastard was satisfied - so he liked to imagine he knew a thing or two about good food. The meal made by the commander tasted like it belonged at a premium eatery for upper society on Coruscant - though it obviously lacked the visual flair those dishes were known for.

The interfaces for the Omicron class were also a departure, with half of them being interactable holographics. They were thankfully still based on the design format he knew, so it was rather easy to get used to.

What really blew the starship apart was that there were even limited fabrication facilities on board, in a tiny workshop room in the aft of the shuttle.

Now he was wearing a spare armor undersuit, whilst the commander put every piece of his Katarn armor through a diagnostic and maintenance cycle that it desperately needed.

As for this helmet…

“Relax, I will not touch the killmarks on it, Force forbid,” she said with heavy emphasis, suggesting it was utter blasphemy to consider otherwise.

He released a breath he hadn’t even been aware he was holding, “Thank you, commander. Most of my former commanders had no problem with it, but there were some navy personnel and Jedi who were… displeased and felt it not befitting a member of the Special Operations Brigade.”

“Bunch of hypocrites,” she grumbled. “If aerospace pilots can mark their kills on their fighters, then you can mark yours on your helmet, end of story.”

“Yes, thankfully, none of the detractors were in my direct chain of command.”

The screen in front of her flashed, showing the results of some complex program and displaying a real time wire diagram of the Katarn helmet.

“Ah, there’s the problem.”

She pulled the actual helmet out of the boxy fabricator’s grasp and opened the hidden rear panel which protected the internal computer circuitry.

Then without even bothering with a tool, she hovered her hand over it and one of the processors detached itself from its housings and flew directly into her hand, which she handed over to a patiently vigilant R4.

The droid’s claw grabbed it, pulling it into its body.

A few minutes later it produced a factory fresh replacement that the commander slotted back.

“All right, this should sort out the issue of you having to reboo- sorry, restart your armor interface every two hours.”

He took back the helmet, “It was something I’d learned to just live with. Our maintenance corps would’ve just given me a brand new one. Thank you, commander.”

“You’re welcome,” she gestured to the neatly lined pieces of the Katarn armor on the floor, which glinted in the overhead lighting, having been cleaned but not polished. “Everything’s good to go. Battery is recharged and I did my best to fix it up, it’ll hold a charge up to 96%. Ammo packs recharged and internal bacta reservoirs refilled.”

Gregor quickly gathered everything and after putting it on again, felt only the same satisfaction that he could remember when he had first put it on after his training on Kamino.

A flex of his right wrist brought out the vibroblade from his knuckle plate, which buzzed with enough power to cut through any enemy droid in this war.

He checked the battery level and it was showing a proper amount of drain.

Yet another lingering issue the commander had fixed.

“Right, D-Squad, gather round!”

All five droids gathered in the central multifunction cabin.

“Hold on, BZ!” Colonel Gascon shouted with annoyance rapidly making successive leaps and rolling jumps in the wake of his own droid. He scrambled up and alighted on the tall droid’s head and thumped it with his foot in annoyance. “You’re supposed to wait for me! Don’t just wheel off.”  

BZ made a teasing snorting burst of binary.

Commander Tano’s eyes filled with amusement at the display. “Now, we’ve given ourselves a full day of rest and recharge, it’s time to discuss where we go from here. R2, have you made any progress on the Vanguard’s communication system?”

“Yes, commander, but it’s not good news. The enemy has physically disabled the primary and secondary arrays. I would need direct access and at least a few days to fix it, assuming the spare parts are in storage as they should be.”

“And no possibility of sending a signal from the Talon through the sensor masking,” she massaged the bridge of her nose. 

“Yes, we will not be able to signal Coruscant or any friendly vessel the Vanguard encounters on its journey to Carida,” R2 confirmed.

“Tell me about the Vanguard itself, is it combat capable?”

“Marginally, there’s only enough B1 droids on board for a 23% efficiency rating.”

“I’ve been looking over the data,” Gascon paced back and forth on his droid’s head. “The Separatists have mostly focused on adding systems to maintain the ruse that the Vanguard is a fully fledged GAR ship. They even have the latest access codes that would make any other Republic ship write off its return from the MIA list, as a top secret mission that had been concluded. The bridge is filled with highly detailed holograms of naval clones doing their work in a very realistic fashion. You can even talk to the simulated captain quite convincingly. R2 bring up the holo.”

The astromech used its holoprojector to display a side profile of the entire ship, an area at the base of the bridge superstructure lit up.

“Primary ship command functions have all been rerouted to what was a fairly large storage bay one level below the main bridge, and it's where the tactical droid in charge of this mission and his B1 crew are flying the ship from. They’ve also activated a system which is projecting false lifesigns, just in case someone is curious enough to throw a few active scans our way. Quite ingenious.”

“As much as we don’t like it, the enemy will also innovate in this war,” Tano sighed and idly began walking around the displayed hologram with her hands folded behind her back. “Self-destruct?”

Gascon shook his head, “All the charges around the hyper matter fusion cores have been physically removed.” 

“Of course, that would be too easy,” she declared sarcastically.

“As for blowing up the ship, Captain Gregor and I have devised a simple method. A single modified thermal detonator with a timer and encrypted remote detonation circuit, which we can produce on the Talon. It’ll then just be a matter of slicing a small entrance into one of the hangar bay bulkheads, which U9 can do with his laser. The chain reaction of one hangar blowing up will essentially atomize this entire ship on our command.” 

“There’s also another problem, commander,” Gregor winced internally. “I’ve been running the numbers in the Talon’s computer in respect to the blast yield that the Vanguard will produce given the exact volume of rhydonium fuel we can detect via passive sensors. It is much greater than we can really easily conceive of, especially since we also have to take into account the hyper matter reactors and its fuel into the yield calculation.”

Commander Tano closed her eyes and her face visibly grew pained. “What blast radius are we talking about?”

“Assuming a real space detonation, at least a lethal range of sixty kilometer spherical radius, which will expand to a damaging residual effect of over three hundred kilometers. What this means for us is that finding a safe spot to detonate while we’re on the Hydian Way is effectively impossible given the traffic at the waypoints where the ship will decelerate. Show me the nav data, R2.”

The star chart of the Hydian appeared as it threaded through the galaxy towards the Core worlds and the projected course.

“There are very few mandatory stops along the Hydian, since for thousands of years navigators have tried to make it as economically efficient as possible. The next stop for this ship will be Uviuy Exen, but the seventy minute transit in normal space is one of the busiest in the galaxy because it connects to the Shwuy Exchange heading west. Breental IV is next, but that’s even worse because it’s the primary route to Coruscant. The ship will then make a four hour journey along the busiest cargo route in the sector and pass by two inhabited worlds before making the turn east onto the Perlemian Trade Route. Our one chance will be here in the Castell system, which is the final turnoff point for Carida. The waypoint traffic might have thinned enough by that point that we could risk a detonation with minimal or acceptable civilian fatalities.”

“And a detonation in Carida?”

“It would depend where they exited hyperspace, assuming they make for the closest edge of Carida III’s mass shadow, that will be our final chance to detonate. It’s risky but at least it means the only casualties will be outer patrol fleet elements and fighters.”

“I see you have a clear preference for which option we should take. Cutting it awfully close if we do that,” she said flatly.

“Correct commander, but this is the Grand Army’s job. We protect Republic civilians, even if we have to sacrifice our lives in the process,” Gregor said with steadfast purpose.

She nodded in agreement, “As it should be, captain. Very well. We will detonate in Carida as soon as possible. R2 will you be able to override an outer door so the Talon can escape?”

“Security lockouts means I would need to be in the flight deck control room to do that.”

The commander shook her head, “No sacrificial plays are going to happen on my watch. You and QT will work with me to fabricate a remote slicing spike I can install in the flight deck computer beforehand. BZ, R4, I want you two working on the Talon’s engines. See if you can’t give us some more acceleration, so we can get clear of the blast zone faster.”  

All three droids chirped and blurted their ascent.

“All right, D-Squad, any questions, concerns?” Everyone looked at each other in silence. “Good so our course is set. Gregor, U9, and I will be doing the infiltration work to plant our detonator and slicing spike. Nothing should go wrong, but I want you with me just in case. In the meantime I want you also to design some contingency plans.”

“Of course, commander.”

“All right, let’s get to work.”

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Just six hours later, under cover of R2’s looping of local security sensors, I carefully dropped to the spinal hangar deck from the invisible Talon’s ventral airlock.

U9 followed with a slight burst from his leg jets and Gregor took up the rear.

Luckily we didn’t have far to go for this part, quickly hurrying towards the massive bulkhead blast door that covered Port Hangar Bay 11, just fifty odd meters away from the Talon. I had almost never seen these doors used before on a Venator, as they were meant as a final emergency option when the atmospheric containment force fields failed. The sheer redundancy and hardiness of those fields to battle damage, however, usually meant that if those fields failed and you needed these doors, it generally meant you were screwed anyway. 

Gregor and I kept our weapons up and trained on the distant transparisteel window of flight control that looked down onto the spinal bay, but there were no enemy droids in sight.

We crouched against the massive hangar door as U9 rolled forward, his laser cutter already out and aiming towards it.

The astromech settled into a more stable two leg configuration, before the bright green laser flashed out instantly and began the ovoid shaped cut.

The huge blast door’s strength meant this would take a fair bit of time.

Fifty seconds later, the beam stopped abruptly as U9’s inner capacitors ran dry.

The result was a mere thirteen centimeters of thick battle rated durasteel that had been cut. 

Now we had to wait a further two minutes for the capacitors to recharge but also for the laser itself to cool down.

U9 had been refitted with a state-of-the-art microfusion power source to accommodate firing the weapon for prolonged periods, but even this couldn’t handle sustained output for long.

My mind idly toyed with the idea of a micro hyper matter annihilation reactor and while it certainly was an intriguing notion in terms of huge amounts of power in small space - the sheer danger of a droid walking around on a planetary surface among people with that…

No.  Just no. 

It destabilizes and you’d at least have a Tsar Bomba level liberation of energy.

U9’s laser switched back on with an energetic whine.

The biggest danger here was a burn through.

If U9 was a millisecond late in switching off or was clumsy with guiding the laser - it would go beyond the blast door and hit a rhydonium canister.

Thankfully, he was a properly programmed astromech and operated with navicomputer levels of precision.

Twenty minutes and 49 seconds of cutting later, we had our entrance.

A quick use of TK pulled the glowing slab of durasteel out of the way and I ducked inside into complete darkness.

I didn’t need conventional sight to perceive the towering edifice of floor to ceiling rhydionium canisters that filled the entire bay. There was hardly enough room for me to stand inside and I was somewhat amazed that B1s had managed to stack the volatile canisters so perfectly without causing an accident that doomed this entire enterprise from the start.

I took one sideways step and pulled out the modified thermal detonator, carefully threading it through the gap between two rows of fuel canisters and balancing it there.

A flick of the small switch activated its attached comlink circuitry.

I emerged back into the dull lighting of the spinal bay and shoved the cut piece of durasteel back, just so it wasn’t too obvious.

A few hand signals to Gregor and we began our journey towards the overhead control room with U9 in tow.

We stopped at the main door leading into the ship’s port superstructure. I tapped my comlink twice, giving the R2 the signal to loop the next sensor.

It took slightly longer to get to our destination than we wished, having to avoid a number of B1 patrols and we didn’t dare use a turbolift.

U9 did the job of hacking our way through the locked hangar control room doors.

The Separatists hadn’t made any changes to the controls or systems in here, at least visibly, but I sat down in front of the main console and checked.

Thankfully, no issues in that regard.

I gave U9 the hand signal and the droid used his internal tooling to carefully open the systems panel around the logic port.

With that exposed I handed over the remote slicing spike, which the droid installed among the gaps of the solid state circuits with a few careful welds.

I held the panel in place around the logic port and U9 closed everything up. We now had the spike in place without it being bloody obvious to any passing enemy droid.

My held up fist halted Gregor - we would be spotted if we went outside - but not by the enemy…

I leaned out the control room door and made a grabbing gesture.

The Force Pull latched onto the blue-gray form of an LEP service droid and sent it soaring through the air towards me with an astonished electronic feminine scream.

I brought it to a stop right in front of me and grabbed the tubby droid under her spindly arms and pulled her into the control room.

“Hush now,” I hissed, poking the vocabulator in her beach ball sized spherical head, briefly shorting it out with a spark of electrons from my forefinger.

Her yellow optics blinked and emoted quite well as she took in the imposing armored form of Gregor.

“... shshrrzz… oh my, that was frightening,” said the droid. She looked up to me, her small four fingered metallic hands wringing themselves. “So sorry, Master Jedi, it’s just such a relief to finally see friendly faces.”

“You’re a Republic droid assigned here?” I asked, but already knew the answer. LEP service droids were in use by both sides, but this one would’ve already raised the alarm and she had no wireless linkages that I could sense. Meaning she had cut herself off from the ship’s network to remain undetected.

“Yes. I am BNI-393, but my master called me Bunny.”

I couldn’t help a slight quirk of my lips in amusement, “This ship had a navy man or Jedi in command?”

“The former, Master Jedi. Captain Jahat Valerian, Republic Navy from Coruscant. He was killed in the defense of the ship as the enemy overwhelmed us,” she said with a distinct tone of sadness.

“You wouldn’t happen to know how the enemy managed it?” Gregor asked grimly.

“I’m sorry, Captain, but I do not. All I know is that during the battle, we had major power fluctuations and eventually a long period of power loss. It wasn’t minutes afterward that the alarm for enemy boarders sounded. I could only watch from the maintenance crawl ways as the entire crew was killed.”

“Commander, finding out how the Separatists managed to capture the Vanguard is critical and an opportunity we cannot squander,” Gregor pointed out.

“You’re correct of course, but that risks both our primary objectives here. Besides-”

“Excuse me, Master Jedi,” Bunny raised her metallic hand apologetically. “While I would be rather useless in answering an engineering or tactical related matter. There are other Republic droids still on board who have managed to avoid the enemy, including a WED-15 who worked in engineering, two GNKs and an MSE droid. I can gather these survivors and bring them here without being detected.”

“Do so, but take them into the cargo hold of the Rho shuttle down below.”

“Understood, Master Jedi.”

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It took most of the remaining day for Bunny to escort the survivors into the shuttle’s hold.

I had worried about them being detected in the process, but the LEP servant droid used maintenance crawl ways and revealed that she had recovered her master’s primary command codes for the Vanguard. She had also sliced the security systems from a datapad that she carried around and from there the sheer size of the ship worked to her advantage to avoid the B1 patrols.

First to arrive was the MSE droid, which chirped and screeched with happiness, twirling around on its little wheels in joy at seeing me and R2 waiting in the belly of the shuttle. This specific droid was designated MSE-62.

“Easy there little guy, don’t short a circuit,” I chuckled. “R2 here is going to interface with you and copy what you saw during the attack. We need to figure out how the Separatists did this. Is that all right?”

It chirped an affirmative and allowed R2 to use his logic spike on the side interface panel of the MSE.  

Unfortunately, 62 didn’t have much more data to add to the puzzle. He had seen a few of the battles that took place aboard the Vanguard, but no smoking gun.

Bunny brought in the WED maintenance droid next, which had the designation of WED-EN-419.

It was here that we got a nice piece of the puzzle, as 419 had been in the hyperdrive chamber, at its battle station, ready to respond to any damage. It had monitored a direct sensor feed on power levels being delivered to the drive and had seen a graph diagnostic. In the aftermath its standard procedure was to download that data, before it left to hide during the battles on board.

R2 displayed the data on a holo for me as we both reviewed it.

“Well, there are the first power dips of the battle, but that’s just typical for when the shields are drawing power to reinforce the grid after torpedo hits.”

The waterfall graph kept streaming past my eyes until a sharp fluctuation hit before it dipped completely and at that point the ship had been entirely without power, with not a single erg flowing at all for more than five hours.

Then the reactors seemingly restarted and power was normalized until the hyperdrive engaged, presumably by the Separatist droids who were now in complete control.

“What do you think, R2?”

“This shows a 90 percent match to data and investigations from the remains of vessels which were disabled by the Malevolence’s Ion Wave Cannon.”

“We would’ve heard if they’d built another Ion Wave, R2. Master Kenobi destroyed their last attempt at the Battle of Abrion Bridge.”

Those things were resource hogs on the level of a super-weapon. It was nothing in comparison to the future Death Star, but in the current Clone Wars era it was a relatively major effort that had not eluded Republic Intelligence. That threat had sent Obi-Wan’s fleet and the 212th Clone Attack battalion last year to Abrion, where they destroyed the planetary shipyard where its components were being produced and assembled.

“Yes, but the data is clear, Commander. The Vanguard was hit by an ion weapon of enough power to utterly neutralize its energy systems, but not destroy or fuse them utterly. Once the battle for control of the vessel was over, they had usurped control and flew the vessel back to enemy space.”

Could this be the evolution of ion cannons into being what they would be during the Imperial era?

My mind was awash with particle physics and math, whilst R2 and I spitballed ideas against each other for how an ion weapon could be made to achieve what the data was revealing to us.

“What about an ion heavy torpedo?” I proposed as Bunny arrived with the last two Republic droid survivors -  two GNK power droids that were merrily gonking with happiness at seeing me. “You can theoretically create a warhead with an ion pulse generator overclocked into the extreme which would burn itself out, but you don’t care about reuse of a warhead. I mean off the top of my head with a beryllium agitator and high density diatum power array you could get - 1.5 or 2 gigaferma of ion energy?”

R2 was silent for a moment, “I can calculate nothing to disprove your theory, yet empirical testing will be necessary for confirmation. The modulation and frequencies to achieve the effect we are seeing in the data is the missing piece. It’s clear that the CIS has made a breakthrough in that respect as a result of the ion wave cannon research.”

“Well, Republic Intelligence will just have to-”

I twitched as my focus turned away from physics and returned to the probability lines. “Frak!”

My hand almost slapped my comlink, only for me to realize that would be a very bad idea at the moment.

“R2, interface with the gonk droids, get their data and bring all of them into the Talon as soon as possible.”

I didn’t wait for acknowledgement and blurred into Force Speed, rushing towards the invisible Talon.

I slid underneath the ship feet first, making for where I knew the ventral airlock was, but I was too late.

With a mild electric whine my vision was filled with a brief flash as the Talon’s cloaking field gave up the ghost, revealing the military shuttle in all its glory.

I surged into the ship straight through both airlock doors with a Force Jump.

“QT! BZ! U9! Get to the cloak generator, now! R4, make sure our local security sensors are still looped!”

Thankfully, when you ordered droids to do something in a hurry, there was no emotional disbelief to overcome. Gregor burst out of his quarters, already in his armor and putting his helmet on with his DC-17 in hand.

“Commander, orders?”

My lightsabers flew through the air to hook onto my belt. “Cloaking field failed. We may be compromised. Follow me.”

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A/N: Cloaks are designed for long term operation in the void of space, but not entirely in such a continuous fashion. The transition to Abafar's planetary environment, then to the Vanguard's internal environment also didn't help. Oops.

Enjoy your weekends and stay awesome folks.