The Force Wills - Chapter 76 (Patreon)

I left the bridge six hours later, handing over command to Anakin.

The Conqueror was underway in hyper to its first waypoint, the Rhen Var system and would arrive in eleven hours. The ship’s class 1.5 hyperdrive was an amazing thing for the mass it was pushing.

My first destination, the mess hall.

It was lucky this ship wasn’t actually built solely with droids in mind as crew. As much as the CIS had trust in their droid crews, they did plan and build for the eventuality where organic crew had to take over. So between R2, our own ‘Republic’ droid crew and with the prisoners pitching in, we had made the Conqueror’s officer country livable again.

It spoke of the sheer size of the ship that we could give everyone an officer’s quarters, each one being roughly eighty square meters and still have over a hundred such accommodations left over.

The clones didn’t like being so alone, as they were used to always being in each other’s company in tight bunk quarters, so they doubled up in occupying the rooms.

The other prisoners, mostly being political dissidents from various CIS worlds gladly moved in and luxuriated in the space. I had R2 turn off the water limiters and make sure everyone could have nice long showers.

It was therefore no surprise to see many people in the mess hall with wrinkly skin, smelling of fresh soap and damp hair, if they had it. There was even a Mon Calamari sitting at a table with a bucket of water, occasionally dunking his head in and making all sorts of appreciative blubbering noises, much to the amusement of everyone.

It was very interesting and heartening to see the shared bond everyone in here had. They had all lived through the shared hell that was the Citadel and there were even cliques, those who knew each other and had shared cells on the same levels. All of them were talking, laughing, reveling in the little freedoms they had now - the choice of what to eat, how much, when to sleep and so on. They had even managed to find a change of clothes out of the prison jumpsuits, into the awful gray of CIS Navy uniforms worn with the most disdain and casualness they could.

“Commander on deck!”

I should’ve been sneaky, but I really didn’t want to go through the effort now.

The clones in the room stood to attention and Rex’s ARC troopers also did it in reflex, but quickly started grumbling at their fellows who didn’t know my own policy regarding rank in the Resolute’s mess hall. The others fell silent, then quickly looked at me and I felt their silent awe at the fact that a Jedi and their ‘rescuer’ was among them.

“At ease,” I said with a sigh.

I walked up to the serving station and everyone returned to their conversations, but was much more subdued.

My walk was interrupted though by the same Mon Calamari, his bulbous head and eyes still dripping, intercepting me with effusiveness and seizing my hand with his own webbed hand.

“Master Jedi, thank you, thank you, thank you,” he blubbered and I sensed immediately that he was practically overwhelmed with emotion and even crying.

I still had my helmet on, so couldn’t exactly emote a response, resorting to just a short bow to acknowledge the poor guy.

“It was my duty… what do I call you?” I asked, letting him shake my hand with enthusiasm.

“G- G- Geax Ghamo, Master J- Jedi.”

“Well, Ghamo. We’re not completely out of the far deeps just yet. We’ll all need to do our part in the coming days if we want to keep our freedom.”

“Yes, yes, I just… we’re all glad to be out of that awful hot place.”

Cheers and yells of agreement resounded.

The dam burst at that point and it felt like I was thanked, hugged, hand shook and back slapped by almost everyone in the mess hall, except for the clones.

When I finally reached the serving station, it was to regard an aproned cook that caused me to have a double-take. He was human, had a considerable belly, seemed in his late fifties, but had a full white beard and gray hair. His arms had strong muscles and numerous tattoos. He regarded me with a lopsided smile.

“What’ll you have, Master Jedi?”

I was too astonished by him at first to really look down at the selection of foodstuffs they had taken out of the consumable storage.

“Oh…uh, just load the plate with protein.”

“Protein the lady wants, protein she’ll get,” he grabbed a plate and began dishing up a variety of meats with an assortment of colors.

“Sorry if this seems rude, but how did you maintain your weight in prison?”

“Wasn’t in there long before you rescued us, a few weeks,” he said cheerfully, putting the plate in front of me. His accent of Basic was typical of the Outer Rim, but with a flavoring that spoke of another language and there were even hints that he was faking it a bit.

“Onderonian?”

“Hah, should’ve known you’d sniff me out,” he chuckled. “Name’s Salvok Aanvid, country boy from Onderon.”

“Pleasure to meet you, Mr Aanvid.”

“What’ll you be drinking?”

“Just water.” A glass of cold H20 was put in front of me promptly. As hungry as I was, my curiosity couldn’t be helped. “Sorry, but just how did you end up in the Citadel?”

Far from being offended he just smiled ruefully. “When you just happen to be a cook at the Royal Palace and the current usurping bastard on the throne needs a scapegoat after he had a narrow brush with poison.”

I could sense the man before me was not a jolly old fellow, in fact, he wasn't a scapegoat at all. It was just a mask he wore.

“Thank you for the food.”

“Thank you for getting me out of there. Now get and enjoy.”

I sat down on an empty table, took off my helmet and began eating.

Barely a few minutes later another hush descended on the mess hall and it didn’t take me long to sense why.

The bat-like large ears and scarred visage of Master Piell appeared at my table.

“Master,” I bowed my head briefly.

“Padawan Tano, may I sit?”

“Please do.”

The seating wasn’t designed for small species, but Piell was clearly used to working in a world that didn’t cater for such sizes. Even the Jedi Temple wasn’t immune to such a failure. He hopped onto the opposite side chair and sat on the low backrest.

I kept eating, waiting for the master to say his peace.

He clearly didn’t want to eat and was just calmly scrutinizing me with his single eye.

I didn’t feel any probing through the Force, so he was clearly trying to puzzle me out the old fashioned way. It seemed he well deserved his spot on the Council for First Knowledge, despite spending most of his time in the High Council.

“You wouldn’t happen to spend any time recently on Arkania or Ragith maybe?”

“No, master,” I answered in complete honesty. Both worlds were known in the galaxy for extreme genetic engineering use, even in children and adults. Although the humans of Ragith did it mostly because of the high gravity of their world.

“Stupid idea anyway, but had to make sure,” he grumbled.

I had to keep my face from smirking in amusement. I sensed he wanted to figure it out for himself and that I represented a fascinating puzzle to him, which he dearly wanted to solve.

“Your hyperdrive plotted you too close to a black hole?” He held up his hands to stop me answering. “No, no, that’s the wrong way round, time would stand still for you whilst the rest of the galaxy would keep going.”

I couldn’t help the chuckle that escaped me, “You are on the right track though, master.”

“What phenomenon would cause this though… nothing I know of, so… You encountered something completely new out there?”

“Celestial artifact in orbit of an artificial singularity. It interacted with our hyperdrive in a novel manner.”

Piell thumped his fist lightly on his leg in annoyance. “Would’ve never even begun to guess that one. So it aged you?”

“Trapped us in a pocket of accelerated space-time for just under sixteen standard months relative.”

“Bloody war,” he snarled under his breath. “The CFK should have you all under observation for six weeks at least. Obi-Wan as well?”

I nodded. “I know the CFK’s procedures when it comes to anything Celestial, master. I can’t say I liked the idea of spending that time being poked and prodded, but your rescue was seen as too vital to the war. We made sure to save a lot of data in our ship.”

“That’s something at least.”

I continued my meal further in silence but Master Piell just continued his examination of me. I also gathered he was testing me as well. Seeing whether I would endure the scrutiny with patience or fill the silence with small talk. If this had been fifteen months ago from my point of view, I might have pushed the issue, but living in a Jedi Chapterhouse had done me wonders on that front. Obi-Wan had tested my patience levels and my current record was just over eight days in a similar situation.

My meal was consumed and I was halfway through my glass of water before Piell smirked. “It seems I have my answer, Padawan Tano. What are your plans for getting us out of this mess?”

“Why come to me, Master Piell? Master Skywalker could answer that.”

“Now you’re trying to test me,” he chuckled, waving an admonishing finger.

“Well, our first step is getting this ship ready to deceive any eyes that land on us. To that end, we need to reprogram a TX.”

“A tac droid? I can see B1, B2 and droidekas being reprogrammed to be loyal to the Republic, but TXs are a different story entirely.”

“Correct, it’d take an expert or savant in droid intelligence programming and even then it’d take such a person months to figure out how,” I smiled knowingly at the master.

It didn’t take him long to connect the dots.

“No… he managed it?”

“Yes, in the last sixteen months we’ve spent a lot of time working on solving many issues facing us in this war. The CIS Droid Armies being one of them.”

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The Conqueror burst from hyper into the Rhen Var system.

The bridge was only occupied by droids, with the only exception being me in the captain’s chair. Standing next to me was a TX-20 Anakin had personally named ‘ITD-1’.

My full attention was on the holo, taking in the traffic in the system.

It was rather substantial, considering that the route was something of a shortcut that could shave ten hours off a journey that linked the Salin Corridor and the Perlimian Trade Route. The only inhabited world in the system was a frigid planet similar to Hoth and even that was a mere CIS military outpost that acted as a listening station and a dumping ground for unpopular navy personnel.

The onward hyper point was a two hour journey in real space and I could see the arrival of the dreadnought had already stirred the system, with some ships altering course for maximum visual range flybys.

“ITD, how are our emissions?”

“Acceptable, I estimate an 91% chance we will make it through the system without setting off alarms or any suspicions.”

We had reconfigured the ship as much as possible to present the illusion of an all droid crew. Everyone had gathered as deep into the central core of the ship, near one of the main reactors, whilst the outer sections life support and grav plating was powered down. The bridge could remain normal, as droids wouldn’t be able to talk to each other in vacuum.

It was both stupid and clever at once. It would be a million times more efficient to have the combat droids in a high bandwidth com network, but that would leave them vulnerable to external cyber attacks and would’ve made the job much easier in reprogramming them all at once. The deactivation failsafes that were buried deep in their coding was essentially a forced networking and with the appropriate keys, shutting them down.

I double checked my own life sign dampener. The chances anyone would be stupid enough to throw an active scan in the dreadnought’s direction was very low, but it had to be planned for all the same. Any CIS civilian captain would be stupid to do it, but Einstein’s old saying about human stupidity could well apply to the sentient condition in the Corusca Galaxy as well.

“Commander, we’re being hailed by the Rhen Var listening station,” reported a B1.

“Why would they be hailing us?” I asked ITD pointedly.

“There is no reason, commander. Security protocol does not include this.”

“Then as an all droid crew we will ignore the hail.”

Whoever was on that outpost was seemingly not deterred by the silence. For the next two hours as Conqueror streaked through the system, roughly every twelve to fifteen minutes, the hail would come again.

This didn’t feel like a droid with a screw loose somewhere. This was someone stationed on that outpost who probably had nothing to lose and was being an effective troll to a droid controlled ship, just because he could. It’s not like the CIS Navy would whip out a firing squad for someone spamming hails at a bunch of droids.

I also clamped down on my curiosity and didn’t send any requests through the CIS network or even the onboard computers about just who was currently assigned to that outpost. As that would be a very organic thing to do.

‘Be the droid, Ahsoka, be the droid,’ I thought to myself.

The ship’s massive hyperdrive powered up and plunged into the infinitely spinning blue tunnel, on its way to our next waypoint.

I tapped on the ship’s PA, “To the crew of the Conqueror, this is your captain speaking. We have successfully passed our first hurdle. Gravity and life support is being turned back on. You can return to your cabins.”

One down, five jumps to go.

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Our next stop was in the Galidraan system.

It held quite a bit of history, especially regarding Mandalorians.

The single habitable planet was currently held by a governor, Brorr Haaro, whose father had hired Jango Fett’s True Mandalorians to put down a political rebellion.

They had been wildly successful, only Haaro Senior really hadn’t felt like paying the Mandos and so with the help of Tor Vizsla, Pre’s father, framed the True Mandos for murdering ‘political activists’. The frame job was so good that it even convinced the Jedi to send a task force to bring the True Mando’s to ‘justice’.

The leader of the Jedi task force was none other than the then Jedi Master Dooku and they were forced into a battle that killed every Mandalorian except for Jango and one other. Ten Jedi were also killed as the fighting progressed.

Dooku being the very perceptive Jedi he was, realized quickly that something was wrong with the whole situation and it wasn’t long until he discovered the truth that the Jedi had been used from the very beginning to simply kill off the True Mandos so the governor wouldn’t have to pay. That there had never been poor innocent ‘political activists’.

He promptly took matters into his own hands and immediately arrested Haaro Senior, essentially deposing an entire planet’s governor. The political shitstorm that ensued in the Senate was inevitable.

The entire affair, the Jedi Order being hoodwinked to that level, costing the lives of so many, had been another nail in the coffin of Dooku’s opinion of the Order.

Of course, I knew of this affair from the Vizsla point of view. Tor Vizsla had wanted a return to the old days, an entirely new Mandalorian War and conquering the galaxy in the name of his forefathers. He had therefore founded the Death Watch for that purpose, in direct opposition to Jaster Mereel’s True Mandalorians and the New Mandalorians. Which eventually resulted in the civil war that gave rise to the current status quo in the Mandalore sector.

Just thinking about how old Tor must be spinning in his grave, given what I was now doing with the Vizsla legacy, the Blades and Mandalore, was a very pleasant thought indeed.

We had a three hour real space jaunt to the onward hyperspace point and…

“We are being hailed,” reported a B1.

“Who is it this time?”

“It’s the current governor of Galidraan.”

I stood from the chair and ITD sat down.

M8 began working her holo magic, making sure I wasn’t picked up by the holoscanner and that it was focused on ITD in the captain’s chair.

It was one thing to ignore some nobody from a listening post, but that wouldn’t happen when a governor called. TX droids did have some diplomatic programming, not as much as a full protocol droid, but they had to somewhat interact with planets and politicians within the CIS.

I turned off my external speakers that projected my voice from the armor and a few moments later a holo appeared of Governor Haaro.

“This is TX-340263 of the Conqueror,” said ITD.

Haaro was in his forties, very tanned, and dressed to impress. Everything from the clothing he wore, to the fashion sense just oozed wealth and he was totally unashamed about it. He also had the unfortunate disposition, attitude and facial features that made me just want to punch him for simply existing. He had clearly been born with a silver spoon in his mouth.

I projected my senses through the connection and perceived him sitting in an office filled with similar ostentatiousness; animal trophies, preserved skins on the floor, wooden walls varnished to the point they might as well be mirrors.

Now, I would not begrudge anyone who had made their wealth by working damn hard for it, but I just needed to look at the attitude of the man to see that he was just following the formula of his corrupt father.

It was no wonder that there had been a rebellion by the people of Galidraan.

A righteous rebellion where Mandalorians had been used to quell it.

That sucked and it was one of the reasons why I wanted Mandalorians to be more than just mercenaries or bounty hunters. To never see them reduced to that level again. The True Mando’s had been pushed into a corner and desperately needed the funds and resources to fight against Tor Vizsla’s Death Watch. The people of Galidraan had suffered and died for that.

Now here sat Haaro, no doubt with the local security forces under his thumb, further backed by an uncaring CIS who was too busy fighting in a war to worry about a single world on a relatively unimportant hyperlane.

Removing him by either killing or deposing would just create a power vacuum, into which the most ambitious and worst of his local government would go. If another rebellion happened, the CIS would just dispatch a droid occupation force to do what the True Mando’s did, but with the equivalent of a sledgehammer and tens of thousands dead in the fighting.

I had no time and there was nothing I could do now.

Haaro sneered and looked disappointed, “Droid, are you in command of that ship?”

“Yes, governor.”

“Idiotic, so much firepower in the hands of a stupid machine, what are those CIS fools thinking?”

ITD at least didn’t answer that, recognizing a rhetorical question, though I could well imagine what HK’s response would be.

“Droid, would it be possible to just swing that ship into a low orbit by the planet? So it would be visible from the surface?”

“Proper visibility from the surface would require an atmospheric entry, governor. The ship’s tensor fields would degrade too much that deep in a gravity well. Also I am not authorized to incur any unnecessary delay in delivering the Conqueror to the shipyards for its maintenance.”

Haaro thumped his desk in annoyance. “Fine. Guess I’ll just have to go through the proper channels.”

He cut the holo connection abruptly.

“What was that about, Snips?”

“It seems that rebellion against the local governor’s rule is fomenting again.”

ITD immediately got up and I took the captain’s chair. “Again?” I gave him a brief rundown of the Mandalorian involvement in the planet’s history. How both Mando and Jedi blood had been spilled as a result of the current dynasty that retained power. “Truly nothing that we can do?”

“Nothing now, but perhaps after the war.”

What I didn’t say was that Galidraan could be a nice little place to send HK to when he started bugging me about getting bored again.

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We finally rejoined the Perlimian Trade Route and powered our way through the Arcan system without incident. We plunged back into hyperspace and began the short four hour hop to the Lianna system.

I took a short two hour power nap before I relieved Anakin from his watch.

I had barely put my butt in the seat when R2 began blurting binary.

‘I received the signal, Citadel self-destruct has been triggered.’

“Well it took them long enough,” I sighed. As much as we tried to cover our tracks when escaping to make everything appear business as usual. There was only so much time we had to organize and jury-rig the systems. We had even managed to upload an interactive program to a B1, who would take calls and appear to be Osi Sobeck to anyone calling from outside the system or from the security fleet. Sooner or later, someone was going to trip up the Sobeck B1 mimic in a lie or inaccuracy and then the gig would be up.

The remaining reprogrammed droids would engage in a last stand action, sucking in as many enemy droids as possible before the end. A final failsafe of a self-destruct of the main fusion reactor was rigged to blow the moment any CIS loyal droid entered the reactor room. It would also send a coded message to R2 the moment it happened.

“Do you think they figured it out?” Anakin asked.

“The confusion of our final stand program and then they have to investigate what little would remain afterward. Unless they have someone with very good deductive skills in CIS Intel, I doubt they’d be able to sound the alarm about us being in possession of Conqueror before we make it through the Nexus Route. No, what is going to trip the alarms is the moment we turn east towards Cadinth and Voss, instead of going north - the direction of the shipyards.”

Anakin nodded, “We’re not going to be able to avoid a battle of some kind.”

“I agree.”

“The question is then what does the CIS have nearby that they can send to intercept us. Our CIS codes still work, we can find out where all their ships are. I’ll take ITD and we’ll begin plotting the possibilities.”

“I’ll begin battle drills with the droids, clones and any volunteers.” He gave me a casual two fingered salute before hurrying off to the holo plotting tables with ITD. I tapped my comlink.

“Ahsoka?”

“Master Kenobi, we’re going to have trouble. Final Stand program was triggered.”

“I see, now you want me to stick to Master Piell and Captain Tarkin like glue.”

“Yes, but also to organize any volunteers for anti-boarding teams. We can turn this boat into a nightmare of droids for the enemy, but I don’t want just droids carrying that burden.”

“Very well, how long?”

“Our cover in Lianna should hold, but the moment we come out of hyper in Cadinth, worst case scenario, we should expect a hostile reception. So… about sixteen hours.”

“Understood. Kenobi out.”

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I stood over the holo plotting table, where a full 3D rendering of the Lianna system was displayed for me.

We had just exited from hyper into said system and I had put us on a leisurely course that made it seem we were still bound for the Syngia exit point that would take us north.

I wanted to squeeze every minute of time for our benefit. The longer we could keep the CIS Navy clueless the better.

Conqueror was currently on the coreward side of the system, just beyond the orbit of the sixth planet, Indinor.  There were a total of seven planets and fifteen moons, now I had to figure out a way to use them to my advantage somehow.

My mind started to visualize courses and…

“Captain Tarkin,” I said without turning around.

“Commander Tano,” he said primly, coming to stand next to me, his eyes staring into the holo.

“You think you can contribute to solving our problem here,” I gestured to the very busy crossroads star system. The amount of traffic here was far greater by a significant order of magnitude.

“I’d be of more use here than on any anti-boarding team or group. It’s also too dangerous considering what I know. If I’m killed then the Nexus Route is lost until it can be found again, which would potentially prolong the war by months if not a year.”

I could only nod in agreement at that. The problem was that now I had to carefully watch what I said or did, since Tarkin was deep in Palpatine’s pocket. The man would no doubt have a wonderfully long report to give the chancellor when this was all said and done.

“Very well, I’m trying to plot a course here that will delay our inevitable discovery. I want to make it seem like we’re still heading for the Syngia hyper point here,” I tapped the controls to highlight the location to the north of the system. “Yet still allow us to abruptly make a break for the Cadinth point in the east with the least amount of time for anyone in the system or the greater CIS to react.”

Tarkin nodded in understanding before walking up to the holocontrols and began running the 3D model of the solar system forward in time to observe the movement of all the celestial bodies. He also brought up the positions of any other CIS Navy units, which was a problem I had overlooked. Urgh, the most obvious and immediate issue. My foresight sometimes ranged so far that I ended up blinding myself to the immediate near-future.

There were three Munificents in transit currently through the system, two heading for the Arcan point directly towards us and one transiting towards the Syngia point. Even if all three came together we could still blast them into scrap, but it was still something that would delay us.

“As far as the rest of the CIS knows, this is a fully droid crewed ship, so we unfortunately cannot make any course that would seem inefficient,” Tarkin held his chin lightly with the fingers of his right hand in a pose I knew all too well. I struggled to banish the image of a much older Tarkin…

“You may fire when ready.”

I banished the urge to just Force Choke the man and be done with it.

“However, we can do this,” he tapped further on the controls to highlight a new course.

One heading for the second planet, Geminor, currently in a south-eastern position relative to the system’s sun. A gravitational slingshot plus our 700 G max acceleration would theoretically get us to the Syngia point in seven hours, but if we rode the slingshot longer and exited with a max acceleration burn going around Geminor, we would exit towards the south-east and dog leg towards the Cadinth point in just five hours and sixteen minutes.

None of the three Munificents could turn around and intercept us before we reached our exit. They’d be fighting their own velocity first and would enter hyper about an hour behind us. Assuming they even got the order to chase in time.

“I like it, Captain,” I nodded to him with a smile. “Send it to the helm.”

“Yes, commander.”

I sat down back in the big chair. “Nav! You have a new course plot. Make it so.”

“Yes, sir.” “Roger, roger.” The B1 and naval clone chorused together.

To pass the time, I brought up a datapad and began exploring everything about the CIS Navy that I wanted to know and naturally couldn’t find out. It wouldn’t be long before they’d scramble and cycle their codes after they found out about the monumental breach we had technically imposed on them. Republic Intel was also going to either kiss me or kill me because of the goldmine we were about to dump on their laps. Of course, I didn’t have access to everything because of standard compartmentalization but it was enough to be very interesting.

I got a pretty good idea of their future plans to further adapt to the Yularen-Tano doctrine, which was basically to imitate it and develop even better torpedoes. There were even a few prototype tri-fighters loaded on the Conqueror that had their missile launchers replaced with torpedo launchers and shields - turning them into a nasty droid version of what a future X-Wing would be.

I looked out of the corner of my eye to see that Tarkin was now standing next to my chair, with a datapad and one hand tucked into the small of his back and seemingly also availing himself of the free access to the Conqueror’s computers.

“I must say, commander. That you avail yourself of your rank much more so than other Jedi I have encountered in the GAR. Remarkable in one so young.”

I knew that he wanted to say I acted more like a soldier or naval commander than most other Jedi, but he couldn’t exactly say that part out loud.

“So you did your research on me?” I asked with a grin.

“Naturally, I couldn’t access Republic records since I met you, but your CIS records paint the story well enough.”

“Most likely in negative terms, I’m in the top ten on their bounty list, after all.”

“Naturally, however, I find that one’s enemies are often a good indication of the type of person you are. They fear you, Commander Tano.”

“And you consider that good, captain?”

“One’s enemies should always fear encountering you on a battlefield. You are a curious reversal of the type of Jedi I’ve seen in this war, commander. Most Jedi let the Code dictate their tactics and as such prevents them from seizing the initiative or capitalizing on enemy weaknesses and going on the offensive. Defense is favored too heavily, causing unnecessarily large casualty figures and losses. This is why an order of peacekeepers should not be leading a war.”

“You are correct,” I acknowledged easily. He was slightly surprised how quickly I threw the Order under the bus. “Yet, there were not enough ready naval and ground commanders among the Judicial Forces to step up either. The core world navies would never be sent into the Outer Rim and they were all filled with careerists who had never even fired a weapon outside of a firing range.  In the time it would’ve taken to properly train all of them, the war would already be lost.”

He was forced to concede that point and nodded. “Given all the militarization happening all over the galaxy, should the Jedi not be taking a step back as people are trained to fill those slots?”

Logic dictated that course of action, unfortunately Palpatine didn’t want the Jedi out of harm’s way. The Jedi Order also couldn’t afford to be off the front lines either at this point, as it had too much vested in the outcome of the war to leave it in the hands of the Senate alone and too much blood had been spilled. To simply just pull out was not an ending the general rank and file of the Order could even accept, as it would mean that all the fatalities had been for nothing.

The Jedi code could preach self-sacrifice as much as it wanted, it didn’t change reality and the nature of the sentient condition, as much as the orthodox faction would like to believe.

Yet another chain in the trap that Palpatine had woven, again trying to prove to the Jedi how flawed the code was.

A few hours later, the Conqueror was drawing closer and closer to Geminor.

The planet loomed large in the forward viewports and it almost looked like we were on a collision course to slam ourselves against the atmosphere at a fractional velocity of light.

That local aerospace control had not called us over the radio was somewhat odd and it showed the leeway given to the CIS Navy in their own space. Anyone doing this maneuver in a Republic core system would have traffic control screaming in their ears, not to mention beginning inquiries into how to suspend the captain’s starship license.

“Slingshot beginning now, commander,” the naval clone announced.

I looked up as the Conqueror began changing its relative attitude to bring the planet above our heads.

We were moving so quickly at this point, the blue orb would be there for just a few seconds.

The sheer speed was slightly mind boggling when it was so viscerally demonstrated. In the normal void of space, you usually had no reference frame to perceive the velocities you were cruising at.

Then the planet seemed to just hang there for a moment, yet, just as quickly it vanished from view.

“Slingshot complete, ETA to Cadinth point, one hour fifty three minutes.”

“Sensors, if those Munificents so much as twitch in our direction, I want to know.”

“Roger, roger.”

“Activate all droids, guns and torpedoes.”

“Roger, roger.”

Conqueror became battle ready in less than twenty seconds, a nice benefit of having a droid crew that didn’t have to scramble to stations, as they could simply activate after going into standby mode at their posts.

It didn’t take long and just a few minutes later we received the first hail from one of the two Munificients heading towards the southerly Arcan point.

“Ignore it,” I ordered flatly.

“We could always respond and use the puppet tac droid, try to convince them it's malfunctioning in some way,” Tarkin suggested.

“A conclusion they’d naturally come to anyway, captain,” I grinned. “After all, it’s impossible to capture a dreadnought of the CIS Navy. Those star frigates are being commanded by a partial organic crew. Right now they’re frantically referencing the Conqueror in their ship databases and running head first into the classified nature of its assignment to the Citadel. All they will see is the fact that it’s an all droid crew. What is the simplest explanation to them that fits the facts?”

“I see,” he nodded.

“The Conqueror’s former classified mission will also throw quite a few hurdles in the way of anyone trying to make sense of things. The less data points we throw at them, the better.”

Five minutes of ignoring increasingly frantic hails later…

“Fighter launch!” reported sensors.

“Bring it up on holo,” I ordered, turning to the large holo table to the side of the bridge. I really hated the layout of the CIS bridges and dearly missed my command chair.

I studied the rendering of the system and the angry red deltas that represented the fighter launch.

“It’s a probing launch, only a single squadron of Vultures,” Tarkin said immediately. “It can intercept us before we reach the hyper point.”

“Clearly trying to see if this malfunctioning droid crew still has their friend or foe properly programmed.”

“The longer we preserve our cover, commander-”

“Yes, captain, the better our chances of escape.” I turned to our resident tac droid, who was remarkably silent. Guess Anakin had removed this one’s initiative somewhat, not to mention their arrogant chatterbox tendencies. “ITD, hypothesis, you are malfunctioning, causing you to set an incorrect course. An allied unit sends a wing of Vulture droids at you. What do you do?”

“Ignore them until a sufficient level of threat is presented, in this case if they either opened fire or tried to ram our ship,” it replied.

“Figured that,” I mumbled. “The Vulture squadron will also detect our weapons systems are active though.”

“If our deception fails though, we need to be able to engage, commander,” Tarkin pointed out.

“We are in a dreadnought, captain. These ships are heavily armored, an order of magnitude greater than a Venator. We can take a hit.” I turned my chair to face the appropriate station. “Guns, power down our weapons, but keep the droids controlling them active. Shields remain off. We must appear to not consider them a threat.”

“Yes, commander.” “Roger, roger.”

The Vulture droids intercepted us nearly twenty minutes before we hit our exit point. I was half tempted to order that a non-standard hyper jump be calculated to get us out early, but that was not the initiative a droid would show.

The fighters eventually settled into an escort formation.

“A remote signal is being transmitted to our computers, commander,” reported Sensors.

“R2?” I asked the droid.

The astromech was effectively now in charge of the massive computers on the Conqueror and from a certain point of view, now using them as a part of himself. He blurted a noise rudely in contempt.

“They are attempting to force a local command override to see if they can open our starboard hangar bay door. I’ve rebuffed them. Changing the command codes was the first thing I did when I took over.”

“Now we see how the local CIS captain is going to react.”

He’d either attack futilely with the Vultures or simply order them to return to their mothership.

A few minutes later the fighters peeled off and decelerated hard to turn themselves around.

Conqueror blasted past them as a result and soon enough our hyperdrive engaged right on time.

Now the question was, what kind of reception were we going to get in Cadinth?

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I glanced at my chrono as it gave me a five minute alarm.

It was just as well, I’d been getting lost in reading all the raw intelligence this ship’s computers could provide with R2’s help. I didn’t want to have to wait for Republic Intel to get their greedy hands on it, filter it, analyze and only then decide what I should know.

“Nav, drop us out of hyperspace thirty seconds early,” I ordered.

“Yes, commander,” the clone glared at his B1 partner.

I submerged in the Force reaching out to every soul on board and tapped my armrest controls for a shipwide PA, “All hands, battle stations.”

Tarkin frowned at me, “You suspect that we will hyper directly into battle?”

“An ambush. Tell me, Captain Tarkin, what would you do if you had a rogue dreadnought flying around in the core worlds and only had a smattering of ships in range, the heaviest of which is cruisers, to solve that problem?”

“It would depend on what I had to protect. If there was no vital world, with industry and a high population center, I would herd it, play for time to get a proper fleet together.”

I brought up a holo of Cadinth along with its stats. “10 billion sentients, not exactly a picturesque garden world and the Cadinth Oligarchy are not happy under CIS rule but have de facto accepted it. Their industrial output loss would be felt.”

“I see, in that case… suicide ships? With an all droid crew it would be easy.”

“Precisely. Coming out of hyper early is not exactly something our hypothetical rogue droid crew would do, but the CIS Navy has had many hours to come to terms and plan. Perhaps even someone from Intel has pointed out that they believe the Conqueror to now be under enemy control, even if they don’t say why. In the end, I think our little deception has run its course. We must now sow chaos and leave the enemy bewildered.”

“All guns and tubes powered and ready, commander,” reported Guns.

“Power heavy tractor beams as well.”

The clone obeyed but I could feel his confusion, “Tractor beams, yes sir.”

The clock counted down and I took a deep fortifying breath, pushing my confidence through the Force, ‘We can all do this. Fear nothing.’

Ten seconds…

Five…

Four…

Three…

Two…

One…

The Conqueror shot into the Cadinth system over 1,8 million kilometers short of where she should’ve been.

In less than two seconds I took in the picture of what the holo was showing me.

“Nav, hard to port all thrusters and repulsors! Red line them if you have to!”

“Hard to port all thrusters and repulsors!” “Roger, roger!”

Even having anticipated this tactic, even with all the space we had…

Dodging a cruiser traveling at 60% of lightspeed was going to be nail bitingly close, especially as the suicide ship was trying to correct for our evasion.

“Eight seconds to impact!” shouted Nav.

“All torpedoes fire salvo!”

It would be spitting into the wind given the forces involved, but it would at least reduce the cruiser to the equivalent of a shotgun blast instead of a relativistic kill vehicle.

The Conqueror belched out a truly world-ending amount of torpedoes over the next three seconds, emptying the belt-feeder launchers to send 1236 weapons screaming hungrily into the void, directly heading for the CIS cruiser.

“Shields to double front!”

“Nine seconds to impact, evasion seems to be working!”

I shook my head, “Engage reversers, forward starboard thrust at max!”

We were now in a contest between a dreadnought’s maneuverability at low speed and a much smaller ship’s maneuverability at such a ridiculously high speed.

“They’re correcting, impact at six seconds!”

The cruiser was still just over a million kilometers distant. Our torpedoes despite pushing upwards of 5000Gs would merely act as a firewall at these speeds.

“Five seconds!”

“Tractor beams in repulsion mode, full power forward!”

“Four seconds!”

720 000 km.

“Three.”

“Two.”

Space was suddenly lit up like a new brief star had been born as the mass of torpedoes detonated.

I knew some had utterly failed, merely acting as projectiles for the cruiser to crash into.

Those that actually detonated in time made a wall of proton particles that collided with the relativistic mass of the cruiser.

My most irrational thought at the time was to wonder if we had just effectively recreated an ad-hoc collider in space and had generated anti-matter.

It didn’t matter and the cruiser became nothing more than relativistic debris that carried onward on its last trajectory.

In the next second as the debris crossed the final 180 000 km, and Conqueror just managed to get out of the worst of the expanding cone of relativistic debris-

The tractor beams in repulsor mode under R2’s direct control managed to lock on to the larger bits and managed a further nudge.

The last and smallest bits were shrugged off by the shields.

A question I’d always wondered in my youth in both lifetimes. When you flew in space at FTL in Corusca galaxy and your sublight engines could manage thousands of Gs, where were all the potential KKVs?

They could be there, but they were always a last resort and even then, you needed to catch your enemy totally unaware. Such as sitting on an emergence point with no velocity, no shields either ray or particle and expecting nothing.

There was also the issue of reciprocity. The moment one side started digging into the KKV bag, the other side would as well. It was an odd form of an unspoken Rule of War in the galaxy that had been in place since the early days of the Old Republic.

I found myself not really blaming the CIS for resorting to it.

The CIS Navy from their own point of view, now had a nightmare rogue droid scenario on their hands. Command failsafes had seemingly not worked and given the intensity of the fighting at the frontline battlespaces, not much provision for any rear-guard action had been made, when the enemy couldn’t ordinarily breach into these sectors of space.

Facing us now at the Cadinth emergence were three Recusant light destroyers, six Fantail destroyers and another six Diamond-class cruisers.

This was the first time I had seen some of the latter in active combat duty in space, though I knew there had been forty of them at the first Battle of Geonosis. All flying as part of the Commerce Guild’s contribution to the war effort.

They were essentially half-saucer shaped ships with bulges in the center to house their sublight engines and hyperdrives. They were about a hundred meters in radius and featured two massive turbolaser cannons and numerous anti-fighter flak turrets.

It had been one of these that they had turned into a KKV.

“Nav, normalize our vectors, give me a course that arcs around their left flank. They tried it once, I don’t want to give them another chance. Guns, how long until we have another salvo reloaded?”

“Three minutes, commander.”

“We’ll stick with guns until then. Sensors, any fighters or Hyenas clamped onto those Recusants?”

“None that we can see, commander.”

“Nav, full ahead, lock onto each Recusant with four of the heavy batteries. Splash your targeting emissions, I want them to know. When we reach maximum range, open fire.”

I closed my eyes, reaching out forward through space towards the CIS ships.

Naturally there were many droids on these ships but I found the organic crew… roughly half of the ships had organic captains. Now the question was, who was actually in charge of this small fleet?

If it was a tac droid…

I had to try.

They had to know this was now futile. I could sweep them aside contemptuously with just a few broadsides.

I pressed hard on every soul I could reach. ‘Your gambit failed. Do not cast aside your lives uselessly. You lost. Retreat.’

I repeated the mantra over and over.

Despite my compassion though, I would not shirk in my own duty, as distasteful as it was. They were still the enemy in enemy ships, who could be used in future engagements.

“Aspect change in targets, commander. They’re burning hard… they’re retreating!”

“What’s their course?” I asked calmly, opening my eyes.

“Towards Cadinth IV, looks like a high orbit.”

“Keep our guns locked and our torpedoes reloading, change course, maximum accel to the Voss hyper point. They twitch back in our direction, destroy them.”

“You’re letting them go?” Tarkin asked with a raised eyebrow. I couldn’t hear any disapproval in his tone or even sense it. He was just curious. The older Tarkin would’ve wanted to massacre the paltry CIS fleet anyway.

“They can outrun us when it comes down to it and lead me on a pointless chase all around the system. I don’t care about this one small CIS fleet. I care about the knowledge in your and Master Piell’s heads, captain and getting it back to Republic space as soon as possible.”

He looked at me a moment longer, before bowing his head slightly. “Understood, commander. And… thank you for getting me out of there.”

I could feel his sincerity. For all that he was a cold, calculating bastard… he had been tortured extensively and he recognized the role both Anakin, Obi-Wan and I had played in regaining his freedom and rescuing him from that hell.

“We still have Voss to go, but there should be no CIS ships there, this was their only gambit…” I let go of my anger and hatred for the future Wilhuff Tarkin. This was not him and perhaps he would not become that monster - or maybe he would. Why else was I fighting? If not to prevent people from becoming like that in the monstrous machine that was the future Empire. Even Yularen would become a contemptible monster in the future Imperial Security Bureau - obsessed with the vision of the Imperial order and eventually dying on the Death Star.

I met his eyes and bowed my head, “You’re welcome, Captain Tarkin.”

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A/N: Whew, close call. Hope you enjoyed.  Festive blessings to all of you.