Orbital 1 (Patreon)

Orbital
Chapter 1

-VB-

Her heart pounded inside her chest the moment they came out of hyperspace. It would be only moments before the Trade Federation caught their signature and moved in on them. They were sure to have had allies in the Galactic Senate who would have alerted them about her lack of presence after her attempts to get the senate to help her.

“Captain-”

Before she could say anything in full, the comms turned on.

"Is your internal comm speaker on?"

It was a voice none of them recognized.

"If so, please respond to this message on QA Frequency 33.5. We wish to make a deal with you."

Obi-Wan grimaced. "How did they know we are here?" he hissed in shock. "We just arrived!"

Padme Amidala had to agree. She, the two Jedis, and their entourage arrived in Naboo System. On top of that, whomever just spoke through the comms had to have hacked their way in, but how did they do that a mere minute after they arrived?

“My Queen?” the captain asked her.

“... Answer them.”

There were a few taps and then a click.

“This is RNN Theed. You have hacked into our comms. Identify yourselves and your intention.”

The comm crackled once before the sly voice replied. “Ah, good! I was hoping you would respond. We are of the Hive Mind Alliance, and we have with us two hundred ships with us. If you are willing to give us a few concessions and gifts, we will fight off the Trade Federation for you, Queen Amidala.”

Amidala quickly fell into her queen role, ignoring for now how they knew she was aboard this ship. “What makes you think that Naboo requires your help?” she asked. “And how do I know that you are not the Trade Federation?”

“Well, it’s very simple. I am not with them, physically. Please turn on your crystal gravitic sensors and … it should be 66 degrees to your starboard.”

The pilot quickly did so, and then he paled. The captain, not wanting to wait, looked over the pilot’s shoulder and grimaced. “My god.”

“Captain?” she asked quietly.

“There is …. There is a cluster of mass signature next to Copta, a moon of Farnak.”

Farnak, the only gas giant of the Naboo System?

“How big?”

“It is at the very least equal to that of the Trade Federation’s blockading fleet-. Shit! The Trade Federation spotted us!”

Her eyes snapped up and saw droid fighters swarm out of the Lucrehulk freighters.

“Ah, you were spotted. How annoying,” the representative of the “Hive Mind Alliance” tsked. “We’ll make it quick. Grant us salvage rights to Trade Federation wrecks and perpetual ownership to Naboo System’s gas giant and its moons over to us, the Hive Mind Alliance. For that small fee, we will put an end to this pesky blockade and invasion without involving one more of your civilians than that are already involved. We are sending the contract over right now. Sign it, and you will have two hundred fully armed and armored ships and its crew at your disposal.”

There was a blip, and something did show up on the main screen of the cockpit seats.

She nearly gasped at the audacity.

It really was a contract, and it even stated at the bottom that if they failed to grant her victory against the Trade Federation, then the contract would be null and void.

“Tick-tock,” the comms buzzed. “Each second you spend delaying means one more of your citizens dead.”

“You seem to know a lot about the queen,” Obi-Wan growled accusingly. “To set up a meeting right here and now and then send a prepared contract soon afterward.”

“My Queen, brace for evasive maneuvers!” the pilot shouted before quickly steering the ship away from the incoming droid fighter swarm.

Her eyes once again looked out into the empty space where hundreds of droid fighters sped towards her and the three Lucrehulk freighters behind the swarm.

She shot forward and signed with her finger on the screen. The touchscreen-ready computer took that and copied it.

The captain, who had also read the document, looked at her in horror. “Your Majesty!”

“My people come before some resources and planets we never cared for,” she replied.

She pressed send.

“Excellent!” the voice crooned slimily less than a second later. “For the purposes of your confirmation, our command channel will remain open for you to hear every single order. The Hive Mind Fleet is at your service. Now, release the bombs.”

“What?!” the captain shrieked.

“Oh no,” Obi-wan muttered while staring out. “They have bombers.”

Everyone who wasn’t the pilot rushed to the viewing ports and saw two dozen small ships speeding towards the Lucrehulks. Where had they come from?

And then they unleashed their payloads and quickly veered away before turning invisible.

The Lucrehulks and the bombs … the lucrehulks weren’t doing anything.

“They don’t know,” Qui Gon Jinn muttered. “They haven’t managed to intercept our communication. They don’t know that there are bombs heading their way.”

“No,” the captain objected. “They haven’t even registered the bombs in their sensors. Did you see how the bombers came in and then left? Those bombs are using the momentum of the bombers and maybe a bit more thrust from its own built-in thrusters to move. There is no way that they will generate enough heat to be detected on any heat sensors as a big enough threat-”

Padme nearly flinched as the bombs struck, four bombs for each of the freighters.

Her eyes nearly went blind from how brightly they exploded.

“... Oh my god,” someone muttered. She realized belatedly that she’d said it.

“Their shields are completely gone,” the captain muttered. “It just flickered and then disappeared. Those-. Those bombs took out Lucrehulk shields.”

“Warp in,” the comms buzzed again.

The pilot screamed his head off soon after. “Over a million tons of mass just went hyper!”

She saw them no more than three seconds after the call.

A fleet of ships, a total of well over one hundred, sped out of the void and came to a silent stop above the burning Lucrehulks. Though each of these ships were individuals small compared to the Lucrehulks, there were so many of them that it didn’t matter.

“Lock target. Fire.”

She didn’t know how many guns fired onto the vulnerable freighters, but it must have been a lot because she couldn’t count them all.

Over a hundred broadsides of however many guns each ship carried tore into the defenseless Lucrehulks without any of its droid fighters near it for protection, and it took no more than four broadsides over ten seconds before one of the Lucrehulks detonated.

The droid fighter swarm that had been less than a minute away from killing them simply drifted away.

Padme felt her chest heave as tension fled her shoulders.

Naboo was saved.

She closed her eyes and leaned her back against the cockpit hull.

Naboo and its people were saved.

…

“My Queen,” Panak spoke up quietly. “It is not too late.”

She knew what he was implying, but she also knew that if she ran now, then she would be leaving Naboo to the tender mercies and scorns of a possibly mercenary fleet - possibly pirate fleet, though unlikely.

“No,” she whispered back. “I made the choice.”

“We can’t just sign away half of the system, Padme,” he begged.

“I know. I read it. It made the conditions very clear. Can you imagine what they could do to Naboo if I, the sovereign, renegades on the contract?”

“They are probably pirates!”

“Pirates with a fleet bigger than most Core Worlds,” she added.

“What if they renegade on their deal?”

She glanced out of the viewport again and giggled, half-hysterically and half-resignedly. “Our pilot’s not been reporting as he should have been,” she pointed out, literally and figuratively.

He turned, looked, and froze.

Sitting in the middle of the debris field was a ship none of them had ever seen before. Curvaceous and streamlined, it looked more like an asteroid than it did a spaceship but its shining hull dotted with viewports, turret ports, and thruster exhausts was unmistakably that of a spaceship.

What made the captain freeze, however, was its size; the new ship possessed the size as the Lucrehulks before their destruction.

Lucrehulks were freighters, and the economics of shipping gave advantages to those who took advantage of the square-cube law; bigger carried more and wasted less time and energy. However, the Lucrehulk was designed for shipping and thus most of its bulk was empty bar the few quarters, multiple shield generators, hyperdrive modules, and the thrusters.

But the monstrosity sitting in the middle of the debris field was definitely not a freighter. It was a capital ship through and through. He did not want to know what those turrets, visible even from here, would do to a populated planetside city.

“... That ship is a violation of Ruusan Reformation,” he noted absentmindedly in a vain attempt to say something other than gritting his teeth in horror.

It was as his queen said; this “fleet” - whether they were a pirate or mercenary fleet - possessed more firepower than most Core Worlds. The Senate ignored Naboo when there were only three freighters blockading the planet; they would certainly ignore a hundred plus capital ships that they can’t even handle.

A thought fluttered across his mind.

It made him shudder. It made him want to vomit. His stomach dropped at the possibility of its truth. His palms became clammy.

It was but a thought, but it was a scary thought.

What if this was not the entirety of their fleet?

“Pilot, how big is the mass shadow by Copta?”

The pilot wordlessly searched before flinching.

“How big, pilot?”

“Over twenty million tons,” he flinched again.

Silence fell over the crowded cockpit.

“Excuse me, but you have been speaking in mass tonnage,” the young Jedi spoke up. “How does it exactly compute to?”

Panaka decided a quick lecture wasn’t out of place right now if only to drive the fact into himself. “A mass shadow tonnage is an approximation of how much mass a cluster of objects in a given volume of space is. Our ship weighs less than a thousand tons, and such is the case for most ships below the cruiser classification. The things you see out there? Each of those ‘small’ ships is at the very least heavy cruisers, and the average heavy cruiser tonnage is around ten thousand tons. If we assume that all of the mass shadows by Copta are heavy cruiser variants and not that monstrosity-”

“One point five million tons, sir.”

Panaka briefly closed his eyes as another jolt of horror crawled through him before he continued. “- then we can assume that they have two thousand more heavy cruisers.” He paused. “But if the mass shadow is composed solely of copies of that violation against all good common sense and Galactic laws instead of regular heavy cruisers, then there may be enough of them to subjugate a good portion of the Outer Rim.”

The Jedis looked suitably horrified.

-VB-

A/N: so I did some rough calc on Star Wars’s SBD/RU (their numerical designation for shield and hull durability) and EVE Online’s point system. What I came up with was 4 EVE points = 1 SBD/RU [done by comparing the X-wing and how quickly it gets blown up to EVE’s medium scout drones]

Lucrehulks battleships have like 3k SBD/RU, and the Lucrehulk freighters have less. This is why 4 bombs (8k EVE points) each was enough to take out all of the freighters’ shield and do more damage.