Nar Shaddaa

[Sgt. Slaughter]

The hours mounted. In hyperspace, it was impossible to communicate with the rest of the fleet and confirm which ships in the squadron had survived and what casualties had been suffered. Slaughter knew that the cost was high--perhaps even higher than he was prepared to pay, even for the single most powerful head in the galaxy. There was no taking that back, the Admiral told himself while mulling over what he was going to say when he finally met the Head of State. Could only go forward--to the next battle, to the next maneuver, to the next shot.

 

Immediately upon re-entry to realspace, Slaughter issued a few prefunctory orders for the fleet to form an antistarfighter screen around the Fidelity and Misericordia. He then boarded his shuttle to transfer to Justice's Mandate, the Jedi Star Destroyer to which Zinthos had been recovered. Exhausted and still trying to decide what he was going to say to the Imperial Head of State, he ignored the chatter from the cockpit--they were apparently in the orbit of a miserable planet named Nal Hutta, but the significance of the name failed to penetrate the haze of purpose and exhaustion that filled his mind.

 

Guided through the corridors of the unfamiliar ship by a Mon Calamari aide, Slaughter was eventually deposited at the entrance to the ship's medical wards. His stomach dropped at the sight of the familiar ensign above the portal--Zinthos must have been badly wounded. His stomach also dropped when the Admiral saw who was standing guard just outside. He rubbed his hand blearily against his eyes.

 

It was Draygo--or Darkfire, it was impossible to tell what she was calling herself. Her left arm was bound by a sling around her neck and her right hand was clutched around a ceramic mug. The veteran Jedi gave him a dismissive glance.

 

"What happened to you?"

 

"Dislocated shoulder. My fault." That was all the veteran Jedi had to say. In an unnerving manner not entirely unlike an overgrown bird-of-prey, Draygo just stared into the doorway. Her only motion was the occasional rise and fall of the steaming mug of synthcaf. Bruce sighed and just moved forward into the Medical Ward, guided to a back room where the Imperial Head of State was being treated. Slaughter's first inclination was shock--not simply at how visually spectacular the Head of State's injuries were, but how young she was. Both her and Alluyen. But Zinthos had taken control of the Empire on numerous occasions when inaction invited ruin--at the Death Star, and then driving the Sith off of Carida and inviting their reprisals. Physically, she might have appeared wounded, but within that tiny frame was a stern commander that Slaughter would have hesitated to confront.

 

"Grandmaster. Head of State. I've heard Jedi healing can sometimes be as good as bacta." He gave a small nod to the Jedi Grandmaster before plowing on with the subtlety of a provoked bull-nerf. "There is a war to continue. We've taken terrible losses, but I intend to make the lives of the Sith as miserable as possible."

 

Somewhere behind him, the smell of that synth-caf followed in and with it Armiena Draygo.

[Sgt. Slaughter]

It was the briefest of instants, but Armiena Draygo’s feelings betrayed her and she shot Tobias Vos a glance of pure venom. She resisted the urge to clench her fists; she couldn’t indulge in her fantasy of teaching the aspiring war-criminal a remedial lesson in rules of engagement through blunt-force trauma. Dark Sun Station had been rendered useless as a business asset the moment the Galactic Alliance and Jedi fleets arrived--business required predictability and security--and there was no need to sabotage the station. The only objective he had succeeded in was muddying the morality of the Jedi Order--and in fighting a popular resistance, perception of morality counted for so much.

 

She turned away and whispered into the ear of one of the passing medtechs. A few seconds later, the Twi’lek returned with a medical chart and she began to study the medical scans of one of the Black Sun prisoners of war.

 

Admiral Slaughter hadn’t missed the glare across the room. He couldn’t allow this meeting to descend into ego-driven infighting or Jedi platitudes--what mattered right now was guns, men, and steel. Let the Jedi worry about ideology. Taking a deep breath, he felt a peculiar edge sidle somewhere behind his left ear. The Admiral let it in and felt some of the weight of the last forty-eight hours retreat. But it was not a wholesome energy. It was a sense of cold purpose, ready to release itself like a mountain’s worth of fresh powder on the brink of an avalanche.

 

He seized Zinthos’ eyes. “The Sith may have a significant advantage in the Core, but we have the resources to wage a very potent resistance. Bilbringi is still in operation. Borleias holds. Anaxes holds. We have numerous training facilities across the galaxy that have been inactive since the last war. And there are dozens of species that remember full well what life under the Sith Empire was like. Zinthos, the Sith whipped us hard, but this ain’t over and not by a long shot.”

 

“I agree--full partnership. Merge it all--our fleets, armies, everything, unified command. Let necessity determine who commands what. No turf wars, no bull over unit cohesion. Leave it to the engineers to figure out how to rack TIEs in a Mon Cal or X-Wings in a Star Destroyer. Stormtroopers? My people will learn to see them as their comrades. We’ll set up headquarters on Nar Shaddaa--there’s bound to be a dozen suitable structures we can fortify for our needs.

 

“And as for where to strike next… we currently have ten thousand Black Sun prisoners of war under our guns, stuffed to the ribs with cybernetics and Force knows what. They don’t all want to be there--some of ‘em are gonna be slaves, or coerced, or forced into contracts. That’s a huge intelligence coup. Fact is that Black Sun is vulnerable right now and we can inflict some serious damage if we move quickly.”

[Sgt. Slaughter]

Pleasantries, well-wishes, salutes--at least between the men-at-arms--and then departure to the Fidelity. The meeting could have been more productive--most likely would have been, if Draygo hadn’t derailed the proceedings with her personal crusade against collateral damage. By the time that Slaughter had returned to the Galactic Alliance’s surviving MC90 Cruiser, his second wind had worn away and the weariness of weeks of constant action had begun to seep in. He began to doze intermittently on the shuttle.

 

“Slap me,” he murmured when the forward jolt of the gunship’s landing had roused him from sleep.

 

“Sir?”

 

“I mean it, soldier. Put some shoulder into it.”

 

The marine happened to have been wearing plastoid gauntlets, but nonetheless obeyed the command. The slap spun Slaughter around and the stout Admiral was pitched to the deck of the shuttle. Pressing a hand to his stinging cheek as he picked himself up from the deck, the Admiral saw blood on the tips of his fingers and knew that the blow would leave a mark for some hours. That was fine; the pain would keep him awake for at least a few more hours and the rush of adrenaline would make that precious time more useful.

 

“Thank you, soldier. I’ll be in my office.”

 

___

 

When Admiral Slaughter arrived at his office--more accurately, the office of the captain of the Fidelity--some anonymous yeoman had already fetched a pair of canteens of insta-caf. Slaughter nodded in approval--that was two liters of liquid energy. Slaughter summoned his staff and settled down for a long night of analyzing engineers reports--or a long morning, he wasn’t entirely sure what time it was.

 

All over Nar Shaddaa, hundreds of Alliance surveyors were scouring the moon for potentially suitable sites for the nerve center of the joint Imperial-Alliance coalition. Even as he scanned reports of potential sites with regards to their infrastructure, security status, modernity, proximity to potential military resources, cultural value, (not least important) cost, and a hundred other critical variables, yeomans and junior officers filed into the room with armfuls of dataslates. The little grey tablets piled up and the miniature columns began to spread to fill the room. Eventually, the tiny office began to resemble the hideout of a crazed librarian with a hoarding problem, and they had to carefully step around the room to avoid toppling over one of the piles.

 

The abridged transcript of their committee could be summarized as follows:

 

“No. No. No. Its in the middle of a residential block--if that gets hit… No. What the stang are you thinking? No. Damn. Out of caf. Ensign, could you--thanks. No. No. That area is a warzone, look at the murders per cap. At least it would be training for our men. Eh, put it in the maybes. No. No. Too expensive. No. Where is that Ensign? Nah, its on the opposite side of the moon from the shipyards. No. No. There’s a tribe of Jawas fifty klicks away--are you serious? No. No. No. No… give me that dataslate again.”

 

It was another hour of carefully reading, re-reading, shouting at his similarly exhausted staff officers about the merits and downsides of the site in question--mostly downsides, he would later acknowledge in hindsight. It was an abandoned Hutt casino, rendered defunct by the collapse of the more legitimate enterprises of the repulsive invertebrates at the height of the Empire. Decades of being picked over by scavengers had stripped it of virtually anything useful and reduced the structure into a husk of republican glory, but that was ironically useful to the Galactic Alliance--their engineers would have needed to remove all of that obsolete and substandard wiring. Besides, the structure was remarkably inexpensive, as it had been condemned and slated to be demolished by construction droids.

 

He sent the terse message to the Captain leading the survey.

 

Yes. Exactly what we need. It’s perfect. Do whatever it takes to purchase it. And the surrounding neighborhoods. 

The Admiral then sent communiques to several officers to further investigate The Red and Black and secure it, lest his engineers were about to stumble upon a nest of rakghouls or something even worse. Ten minutes later, he collapsed, his short-shaven head buried under a pile of forgotten data slates. The snoring could be heard from outside the office.

[Sgt. Slaughter]

The next few weeks were not kind to Admiral Slaughter. On multiple occasions, senators of the Galactic Alliance begged that he divert forces to the defense of their home sectors. Slaughter’s response to these requests/demands were to glance at a plaque that a junior officer had recently affixed to the wall of his office, grind his teeth, and quietly growl in the back of his throat while resisting the urge to hang up on those self-important bureaucrats and return to the work that mattered: getting his battered fleet into drydock so it could be repaired in preparation for the next campaign.

 

That plaque was a slab of plain durasteel engraved with two words: “Be nice.”

 

Repairs completed, next step was to seize control of the Black Sun’s captured vessels that had remained in orbit under the guns of a twitchy Rebel fleet. Commandeering a Victory II-class Star Destroyer was a daunting task; each vessel was home to upwards of six thousand sapients and a brigade of shock troopers. The operation of seizing the bridge and engineering compartments of the heavy cruisers was likely to cost the lives of scores of Alliance soldiers if the Black Sun was determined to resist.

 

Admiral Slaughter took up his station on the bridge. Fidelity rested at point-blank range to Red Hussar, her broadside aimed squarely at the primary hangar of the Victory II-class Star Destroyer. In a moment, he could give the order to unleash a volley of turbolaser fire that would detonate the smaller vessel’s ammunition reserves, cracking Red Hussar in two--killing most of the crew in an instant and leaving the Rebel Alliance with nothing more than a hulk that would take months to salvage.

 

A Twi’lek yeoman approached with a dataslate and a mug of caf--extra-hot and slightly-viscous, just like all good navy caf. “Remember, Admiral, be nice.”

 

Slaughter’s jaw worked in annoyance for a moment, then he took a sip of caf and hailed Red Hussar.

 

“Red Hussar, this is Fidelity Actual. We are taking possession of your vessel. Direct your marine complement to remain in their barracks and prepare to receive a command crew.  ”

 

“Acknowledged, Fidelity. Ah… I can’t guarantee that my men will comply with that order. They’re a bit nervous about what will happen to them after they surrender.”

 

That yeoman glanced across the tactical pit and mouthed the words Be nice. A strangled growling sound began to issue from the back of Slaughter’s throat.

 

“Captain, Dark Sun got ugly, but it was an honest fight. That’s war.” Slaughter forced a deep breath. The Rebel Alliance was in no position to house thousands of prisoners of war in its current state; he obviously couldn’t hand that information to an opposing officer, but conducting dozens of courts martial was a waste of time and resources. “Tell your men that they’ll be debriefed, then they will be free to go wherever they like as long as they swear to never take up arms against the G--Rebel Alliance. And if any of them are willing to listen, we can always use talented soldiers.”

 

Minutes passed. Slaughter considered the prospect of having a squad of marines cut into the command superstructure.

 

The response finally came. “My men will stand down. Don’t let them down.”

 

Once Red Hussar began lumbering towards Nar Shaddaa’s overworked shipyards, Silent Spring surrendered control to the Rebel Alliance with fewer dramatics. Over the next weeks, the two Victory II-class Star Destroyers completed a transformation into heavily-armed missile cruisers that bristled with racks of assault concussion missile tubes and concussion missile emplacements. They would sacrifice the bulk of their turbolaser complement, but what they sacrificed in their broadside they would gain in a massive first-strike capability.

 

____

 

Two days later, Slaughter checked on the progress of a project that he had directed Fidelity’s engineers to immediately after Dark Sun. Time and time again, he had encountered fleets whose fire control and starfighter coordination capabilities outmatched his own--whether through some esoteric Force technique, or the combined calculations of billions of droid brains. If the Rebel Alliance was going to function as an effective resistance, it would need command and coordination capabilities to match those of the Sith in order to launch coordinated hit-and-run attacks. That would require the assistance of the Jedi Order.

 

No one in the Rebel Alliance actually knew what kind of facilities a Jedi required to deploy Battle Meditation; there were only a few Padawans and junior Knights in its ranks, and none of the Rebellion’s engineers were Force-Sensitive. Still, they vowed to give the project their best efforts.

 

Admiral Slaughter stepped into what had previously been one of Fidelity’s smaller conference rooms and was astonished at its transformation. The moment the stocky man set foot within the meditation chamber, as the engineers were calling it, the sounds of the ship became muted. The silence left Slaughter uneasy; he was accustomed to the ever-present hums and unidentifiable creaks of an operational warship. The ceiling of the room had been lifted by two meters and an enormous tactical holoprojector had been situated in the center of the chamber.

 

The fact that his engineers knew nothing about the Force, however, soon became apparent. Masses of multicolored crystals--almost certainly synthetic, grown in the last month--were situated around the room in patterns that he supposed conformed to the dictates of some foreign philosophy of spatial arrangement and energy flow. Those ancient ideas of architecture were obviously outmoded, but it was all they had to operate on without access to the Jedi archives. Bruce stopped before a pillar of synthetic amethyst and stared.

 

“This is supposed to be… helpful?”

 

“Ah… amethyst is supposed to help concentrate energy? And the jade helps soothe extreme emotion and helps with balance?” The explanations from his chief engineer came out as questions.

 

Slaughter sniffed and caught the scent of something burning. Something… woody. Not unpleasant. Almost like a perfume that his late wife used to wear…

 

“Is that incense?”

 

“Yes! It helps to cleanse the air and…. remove--”

 

“--Remove impurities?” The two Rebel officers finished at the same time. “Chief, you really don’t have any idea what you’re doing, do you?” A helpless shrug was his response. “I’m going to ask the Jedi for help on this one.”

[Sgt. Slaughter]

The final minutes before launching a major operation were always a frenzy of activity. Ships bearing munitions and fuel raced to and from Fidelity and her escorts, making last-minute deliveries before the operation's timetable forced the MC90 Cruiser into hyperspace. Troops on shore leave were summoned back to their stations, and the starfighter patrols were doubled and then doubled again in preparation of the pandemonium that would erupt once the fleet reappeared out of hyperspace. The airspace surrounding Fidelity was alight with sublight engines.

 

Crammed into standing room with forty Alliance marines into a shuttle intended to ferry twenty, Admiral Slaughter listened to the comm chatter and swayed instinctively with every turn of the shuttle as it returned to Fidelity. Perhaps it was just the rush of adrenaline after having been killed in simulated combat with a simulated Sith, but he thought he detected a certain unprofessional excitement leaking into the chatter from his bridge crew. He grinned; after months of merely trying to survive, it felt good to finally go on the offensive again.

 

A few minutes later, he was at his familiar station in the tactical pits of Fidelity's bridge, trying to reach the Imperial Head of State on a comm channel.

[Sgt. Slaughter]

Red and Black within range of major Sith fleet elements. Attack is expected. Fortify shipping approaches to Red and Black with utmost dispatch. See Attachment 6: schematics for kinetic-kill weapon for use in orbital debris fields. Do not bring Fidelity into the system.

 

“Fixed fortifications...” are a monument to the stupidity of man, went the rest of the quote. In all of Slaughter’s history in the armed forces of the republic, from his time as a simple line soldier to his present position as the commander of multiple fleet elements, he had never had the misfortune to be tasked with preparing fortifications. Those were waste of time and resources that could be better spent preparing for a decisive assault, his training  as a Talon claimed taught him. It was better to go on the offensive--even to live off the land in enemy-held territory--than to passively wait to be attacked on a location that was critical to the war effort.

 

However, judging from the schematics that had been sent from the office of the Jedi Grandmaster, not all of the fortifications were strictly immobile.

 

The Majestic-class Heavy Cruiser Kalidor lumbered out of the drydocks of Nar Shaddaa SpaceWorks, flanked on all sides by an entourage of smaller vessels. Most of them were small Corellian vessels, such as the speedy, cylindrical DP20 Frigates that were so valuable as anti-starfighter supports, but in this instance their size--or lack thereof--and speed would make them more survivable in the debris fields than the other ships in the squadron. Aside from Kalidor, the largest ship in the squadron was the ancient Carrack-class Light Cruisers Breachmaker and Vigilant. The latter might have been part of the reserve fleets that drove Grievous away from Coruscant, judging from the kill insignia on her broadside.

 

At the end of the careers of those two venerable  cruisers, they had been utterly gutted: stripped of all but the most essential crew. The remainder of both ships--including their TIE racks and a number of jury-rigged arrays that trailed from their flanks like tentacles--were occupied solely by a prodigious cargo of space mines.

 

“Take us out, Lieutenant, one quarter forward until we clear the docks. Signal the corvettes that they are free to send out their engineers as they see fit.” Flanked by the boxy Vigilant and Breachmaker, the Heavy Cruiser lumbered out into the moon’s crowded spacelanes. Once in position, the three larger ships began to release their cargo of mines. It would be a relatively standard mixture: a blend of contact-fused, proximity-fused, as well as a small number of the more modern models that were armed with a laser cannon. 

The smaller ships braved the unpredictable debris fields that littered portions of the moon’s orbit, further contributing to the hazards with proximity-fused mines. The more perilous obstacle that they left behind, however, would be the modifications that the Alliance’s ever-resourceful and enthusiastic engineers made to some of the larger pieces of ship debris. Illuminated by clouds of searchlamps, the lights on their own suits, and the sparks issuing from their tools, these engineers faced one of the most dangerous assignments that had ever been entrusted to a combat engineer: to work in null-gravity, in a debris field, and with improvised equipment and ad hoc schematics.

[Sgt. Slaughter]

A very long time ago, an war and an entire lifetime ago, then-Captain Slaughter had been taken under the mentorship of an older, more experienced fleet-commander. Bruce had no exceptional background; he hailed from the street trash of Coruscant’s Undercity, with an educational record marked more by truancy than any degree of achievement. His abilities in mathematics were mediocre; his knowledge in the sciences was second-rate; his devotion to literature and the liberal arts was lackluster; his performance in rhetoric was raw, at best. What General Aegis had seen in that rough, bloody-minded junior officer… Admiral Slaughter had no idea.

 

The face of that middle-aged, slightly portly, neatly moustachioed officer came to mind especially now. Aegis had been dead for decades--killed at the Third Death Star, like so many of the Galactic Republic’s senior officers--Slaughter remembered his talent and relish for military engineering. Those technically a science, it simultaneously required meticulous attention to detail, an absolute mastery of higher-order mathematics… and some degree of violent self-expression. The latter of those qualities Slaughter could appreciate. The first two… while Slaughter had learned some competence in logistics, any successes came only after persistent bludgeoning of the problem rather than any elegant solutions.

 

And now, orbiting the moon of Nar Shaddaa on the Majestic-class Heavy Cruiser Kalidor, Admiral Slaughter was responsible for the ultimate defense for the last hope of the Republic. The defensive plan called for the deployment of literally millions of space mines and rigging thousands of pieces of debris into orbital traps. Hundreds of locations moonside had already been scouted for use of ammunition caches. Dozens of orbital coordinates had been calculated for staging points for the fleet’s escort carriers--small capital ships, barely more than heavy freighters, but still capable of supporting a squadron or two of starfighters. The entire plan called for an exhausting exercise in mathematics…

 

As the cruiser continued to push kilometers of vacuum and thousands of space mines behind it, Slaughter sat alone in his office, staring at a holograph of his task force’s positions, red-eyed, exhausted, and miserable. Hunting Arach’tar on Centerpoint Station had been less miserable than this duty. Waiting for droid miners to breach an Imperial garrison, choking on Sullustanian cave dust, had been less miserable than this duty. The last time he’d been this thoroughly unhappy had been…

 

“Sir, developments moonside.” That was Yeoman Chambers, one of the numerous officers newly assigned to this staff for this enormous defensive operation.

 

“Enter.” He growled unhappily.

 

The young human entered, saluted, and promptly lowered her voice. “You’ll want to turn on your privacy field, sir.”

 

He reached for the controls, then turned a frosty glare on the hapless junior officer. “Explain,” he growled grumpily.

 

“There’s been a meeting of high command officers moonside. Nasra, of course. Namari…  Queen of Naboo. Admiral Kolchak--formerly of the Imperial Navy.”

 

“On his way to retake Naboo and divert the Sith’s attention?”

 

“No sir. It was entirely concerning the political structure of the galaxy after… after all of this. Sir, they’re talking about an end to the Galactic Alliance in favor of a monarchy…”

 

It was not a dreadful chill that entered the room--Admiral Slaughter’s face turned blotchy and red-hot with building rage. His hands began to shake. Red began to fill his vision--his knees were locking--his peripheral vision began to darken. Words of concern began to echo in his ears--the young officer, visibly alarmed by the Admiral’s rage, reached across the table in search of one of his large hands.

 

Admiral, breathe. Try to unlock your knees, try to relax your hands.

 

The Jedi--where were they?

 

Not present, sir. Not a one of them.

 

Slaughter finally remembered to breathe. Vision began to return to him, the peripheries returned and the yeoman’s dark face was no longer the only thing that the Admiral could see. His hands felt clammy and cold. He couldn’t seem to unlock his fists--he needed to reach out, to do violence, to feel something bend and tear and break in his hands. With horrible slowness, the Admiral rose from his seat, pushing away his chair and gradually putting weight on legs that he didn’t fully trust. They held.

 

Now, violence.

 

Turning to his left, Slaughter raised his right first and swung it into his locker in a full-bodied haymaker. Something within broke--the door gave way slightly under the first blow. An inhuman sound tore itself from his throat--something between a growl and a curse and a moan and a scream--and he kept putting his fist into that door until lack of wind forced him to pause and breathe. He leaned against the wall of his office, just breathing and ignoring the blood dripping down his fingers, his closely-cropped head pressed against the cold plastoid of the locker.

 

“Thank you, Lieutenant. Call a medic. Begin compiling a list of this task force’s crew of Imperial origins. Just you, and only when you are off of your duty shift. Not a word of this to anyone else, understood?”

 

Edited December 7, 2021 by ObliviousKnight

[Sgt. Slaughter]

As it so happened, the shuttle of that LAAT/i gunship was a veteran of the Galactic Alliance, and the Coruscanti was no stranger to uppity Senators who would bully their way onto military transports for personal use. That said, the LAAT/i was a combat transport, almost entirely lacking in creature comforts–overhauling from its previous career in the Clone War made it only slightly more hospitable to Alliance marines and Talons than it had been to Phase One clone troopers. Commander Eribra Lars saluted smartly, her expression conveying that she was already numb inside and no diatribe or threat from a former Senator could possibly move her.

 

“Sure thing, Senator, your… uh… honor.” Her voice wavered on a knife’s edge between pilot-casual and insolence. She hopped up the uncomfortable gap between the transport’s passenger compartment and the deck. “Hop on board. Spiker, we’re taking off! Get Kalidor on comms, Vev-Isk-Krill on board for the Admiral. Mind you strap in, Senator…” Lars muttered, just a little too quietly to be clearly heard over the beastial roar of its supercharged engines as the pilot rushed through the preflight checklist.

 

The second after the engines chugged to life and caused the entire landing platform to swirl with a miniature dust-storm, it became evidently clear why the republican cadre of the Rebel Alliance clung to these relics of its past. With the knee-buckling lift and rib-rattling rush of its engines, the qualities that allowed it to survive were demonstrated–the gunship was fast, and could turn and climb almost like a starfighter.

 

Short of commandeering a two-seater starfighter, Outremer would have been hard-pressed to pick a speedier transport to the Admiral. He had also chosen one of the least comfortable rides in the fleet.

 

____

 

Slaughter had some time to think when the medic arrived and began bandaging his hand. His knuckles stung at the touch of disinfectant, and some instinctive part of his mind caused him to stiffen in pain when the Bothan manipulated the broken fingers into a cast, but the physical sensations felt… distant. Almost as though they were happening outside his body. It was almost like when Steadfast had fallen under the guns of the combined Black Sun and Sith fleets–he had felt the moment when that grand old lady’s heart had given out, even though the blow had been inflicted on an unliving starship.

 

There were so many questions that the Admiral needed to address, and all of them laid outside his capabilities. Was the entire republican contingent of the Rebel Alliance in danger of being purged? What of the Jedi? Were there any surviving political figures that could be trusted? How best to preserve the republican fleets even as they were expected to protect Nar Shaddaa against the brunt of the Sith fleet? And on a less critical but more immediate urgency, how best to explain Slaughter’s uncharacteristic injury–broken fingers that could significantly hamper his abilities in combat?

 

And even as he pondered these questions, hundreds of freighters were alighting from the Smuggler’s Moon in a miniature imitation of the similar evacuation that he had managed from Coruscant.

 

“It was a sparring accident, Graves,” The Admiral snapped. “Nothing serious. Just had an unfriendly exchange of knuckles in a friendly match, and I lost. That’s the story.”

 

“Yessir.” The irony dripped from the Bothan’s voice as he sprayed a hard-setting foam around the injured fingers. “A sparring accident. Never mind the fact that you’ve wrecked your office. And that you haven’t been seen in the ring for about a year.”

 

“Taking care of–”

 

A heavy knock pounded on his door, followed by the clang of a plastoid object hitting the deck. “Admiral, here to replace your–oh spast.”

 

“Sparring accident, 

 

“Admiral, here to replace your–oh, spast.”

 

“It was a sparring accident, Petty Officer. Even a friendly bout can go this way...”

 

“...Uh huh–”

 

Crowding the office even further, Lieutenant Chambers came racing up, the diminutive human practically hopping up on her tip-toes to make herself seen above a hulking Gotal and a ceiling-height plastoid screen. “Sir! You have an incoming transport, a Senator… duh-out-ream-er,” she spoke the name out slowly, unfamiliar with the phonetics and the Senator himself. “Wanting to see you. It sounded urgent.”

 

“Quicker than I’d expected.” Slaughter grumbled and pushed himself one-handed to his feet. It would be impossible to hide the cast–only a Wookiee would have worn a glove large enough to hide it–but he was otherwise presentable. No specks of blood around the uniform’s cuff. A touch of unpleasant body odor about him, perhaps. This was a meeting that the Admiral needed to accept.

 

The Admiral’s shuttle bay was only a short walk from his ready room, but such was the pilot’s haste that Slaughter arrived only just in time to watch the LAAT/i race into the hangar. At this point, its pilot had decided that she’d had enough fun with the Senator and landed at a speed that was almost comfortable… and besides, the short, thickset build of Admiral Slaughter was visible even from outside the magcon field. Bruce merely stood stationary, waiting to begin his performance with a crisp salute that would display the cast on his right hand.

 

[Sgt. Slaughter]

There were few locations more difficult to spy within Kalidor than its commanding officer’s shuttle bay. Like any other hangar, it was constructed primarily of grey, featureless durasteel that was frequently heat-blasted by sublight engines and pounded by rough landings. Unlike the hangars housing the combat squadrons, there was almost no clutter, only neatly-coiled fuel lines and a few immaculately-maintained shuttlecraft. Rather than having swarms of maintenance crew, droids, and pilots rushing to and from their starfighters, every single hand who frequented this miniature hangar could be named on sight by the Admiral–including the deck officer who supervised its operations from an elevated command post at its entrance and oversaw its security through a number of prominent holocams.

 

It was fortunate for the Rebel Alliance that Admiral Slaughter that the man had never been assigned to a diplomatic mission. Or an intelligence-gather mission. Really, it was fortunate that his duties rarely required him to leave a warship or a military base, because it was virtually impossible for the man to exercise any degree of subtlety or tact. Even if the man had dared to hide his knowledge, his face inevitably broke out in ruddy blotches and twitching blood vessels when he was under stress. His knowledge was written on his face.

 

“I am aware that such a meeting has taken place.” Slaughter kept his voice even, though the vein twitching in his forehead belied his stress. “Rumors and unofficial channel always get the details wrong, without exception.”

 

[Sgt. Slaughter]

“So it was said.” There was a strong temptation to ball up his fists and find something or someone–preferably Imperial–to vent his anger out on. The pressure exerted on his fingers by the plastform cast on his right hand was a firm reminder of his desire for self-destructive violence. The muscles in his jaw worked and ground his teeth.

 

But if there was any lesson that General Aegis had struggled to impart to the young Bruce Slaughter, it was that he would rarely be able to indulge in his own satisfaction–not if he had any interest in the wellbeing of the sapients fighting under his command. Blind rage was a luxury that was dangerous even for a front-line grunt–but for a fleet officer aiming a flotilla armed with hundreds of turbolasers, capable to glassing entire worlds, it was ruinous. Use the anger–rather than letting it use him–internalize the hate and fury and use it to focus his thoughts. Guide the storm that raged within him, rather than allow himself to be thrown about by its currents.

 

Slaughter turned to glance at the front of the hangar, where a Twi’lek was watching at the deck officer’s terminals with burgeoning interest, and made a decisive gesture across his throat with the blade of his hand. The deck officer responded with a nod and thumbed several controls on the security station, killing the hangar’s holocam recording. This would be as close to total privacy as a warship could provide.

 

“The republic isn’t dead,” Slaughter growled, stepping uncomfortably close to the Senator. “Not while we’re still alive. And there’s a lot of us still alive–and even more us who gave their…” he paused as his mind searched for something poetic to say, something inspirational. Nothing came. “Their everything. We have to survive for them. Gotta make it through this battle first. After that, I intend to send out a coded signal to the remaining units from the Galactic Alliance, warn them of the political changes and that they might be in danger.”

 

[Sgt. Slaughter]

If a Jedi had been present on Kalidor, they might have felt compelled to rush towards Docking Bay One-Besh, for the mixture of exhaustion and rage suddenly spiked with the urge to commit violence on another sapient being. The vein that had been stress-hammering under the skin of Slaughter’s forehead popped out, and something as hard and cold as tempered durasteel slammed down behind his hazel eyes.

 

“Been a while, but as I remember it we swore similar oaths to defend the republic and the Senate.” The man’s jaw might have been welded into one immovable piece as he growled. “Nearly started a shooting war with her imperial majesty down moonside when her lot seceded and showed up above Corrie with a Star Destroyer.

 

“Well, the Senate doesn’t exist no more. Our… heh, government–mostly moon-dust at this point. Same for the elections and constitution and everything that we swore on before Hesperidium went down.” Slaughter knew perfectly well, that as one of the senior fleet commanders of the Galactic Alliance during its last days, much of the planet’s defense was his responsibility–and to say that he had failed was understatement. “‘Sfar as I’m concerned, the last that remains of it are these people who’ve put their trust in us to keep them alive–or at least spend their lives for something that they believe in, not that imperial’s dreams of a throne. You must have a really low opinion of me if you think I’m going to waste them by starting a civil war in the Rebellion.”

 

[Sgt. Slaughter]

“I…” A strangled growl emanated from Slaughter’s throat. His instincts told him to escalate this controversy into an actual conflict that the fleet Admiral could grab and beat with his own fists, but even an amateurish analysis of the forces would tell him that he would lose any fight. Not unless… but the contingencies he would have to resort to would be utterly unthinkable. Even contemplating his current advantage in Nar Shaddaa’s orbit seemed to make him deflate a little. At least the vein in his forehead ceased pulsing.

“Senator, a lot of the men serving with me… we’ve been together since before the beginning, long before Onderon. A lot of people from Fidelity when we hit Dark Sun. We knew when we rescued Nasra that we were definitely going to have some disagreements with the Imps, but desperate times. We didn’t rescue her to trade a Sith Emperor for an Imperial. I–we owe it to them so when they finally get to go home, it’s to their homes. Force knows, the Galactic Alliance wasn’t perfect, I’ve cussed out the Senate on the news more’n a few times, but the people running their homes was home. My people, they find out that their homes are going to get taken over by another Empire…” Slaughter just shook his head.

Edited January 21, 2022 by ObliviousKnight

[Sgt. Slaughter]

Silence was Slaughter’s response. It wasn’t an ordinary, thoughtful silence that merely signaled that the Admiral was thinking of what to say or trying to get his Coruscanti undercity accent under control. It was a dangerous silence; the kind that indicated that he was so shocked by what the Senator had just said that there were no words to be thought of, that he didn’t want to believe what he had just heard. A slightly stout man, much given to belying his height through casual slouching, the Admiral managed to gain a few centimeters when his spine instinctively stiffened into parade formation at the suggestion of doing something he’d previously thought unthinkable.

 

“....What?” The tone of voice indicated that it wasn't a question. It was a reflex.

 

There were no intelligent words that he could think of. At that moment, the Admiral wasn’t sure if he wanted to order the shuttle pilot to seal her ship and give the two middle-aged men complete privacy; or whether he wanted to grab the Senator by his collar and physically throw him back into that shuttle’s passenger compartment.

 

[Sgt. Slaughter]

The shadows of the shuttle bay shifted and Slaughter’s gaze turned distant to observe as the view outside the magcon field lifted. The inky starfield was soon replaced by the rust-and-gold orb of Nar Shaddaa’s night side. Swarms of sunlight engines, most of them leaving the moon, dotted the black orb–the numerous civilian ships that were evacuating the vicinity of the Red and Blacki. The Admiral nodded; that turn was one of the final maneuvers of the minelaying operation. With a single command, the minefields that lined the safer approaches to the Smuggler’s Moon would be armed, and ingress to the moon would become far more hazardous. It would not be impossible, but the designs of assault shuttles tended to emphasize speed over maneuverability, making them unsuitable for navigating the orbital debris fields.

 

Kalidor would soon return to drydock to refit, removing the towed minelaying arrays for her normal payload of concussion missiles. That was an operation that required no supervision.

 

The mental calculation completed, Slaughter returned his attention to the Senator. The shock had vanished from Bruce’s eyes. Whether it was the routine tactical assessment or something in Outremer’s speech, something had given him focus.

 

“The problem is… no single person is a monolith. Definitely wasn’t that for the Galactic Alliance, imagine it’s the same for the Imperials. I know that they’ve got a collection of Moffs and industrial leaders and minor nobles that have united behind Nasra… but what happens to them if she dies is even more important. Can’t have them withdrawing from the Rebel Alliance. We definitely can’t afford to have them splintering into warlord factions… like what happened when Palpatine was killed. Fact is, Senator, we need to keep those people in the Rebel Alliance, or we’re lost.”

 

[Sgt. Slaughter]

After the long weeks of meticulous planning and calculation for ammunition and fuel expenditures, frustrating wargaming and recalculating hyperspace jumps and drilling until the mind grew numb, the hour that all of this preparation would come to its culmination had finally arrived. There was an intellectual part of Slaughter’s mind that quailed at the conscious knowledge of that scope of death that this battle would cause… but that battle-hardened grunt that guided his instincts was exhilarated--the old soldier wanted to find his executive officer, punch the enormous Twi’lek in the shoulder and roar let’s fracking go.

 

It was all that Slaughter could do, to force his heart rate down and take a deep breath. This battle would only be survived through exhausting coordination rather than a headlong charge into enemy turbolasers. And besides Tal’dira was several light-hours away, on the bridge of Fidelity, and waiting for the signal to converge Nar Shaddaa’s fleet elements on the Sith Empire.

 

On the bridge of Kalidor, Slaughter watched with dissatisfaction as dozens of explosions rippled on Nar Shaddaa’s surface--no, along the edge of its atmosphere--as waves and waves of space mines fell out of their orbital rings. The proximity-fused explosive mines were simply exploding upon contact with atmosphere; a minute change in ambient pressure, and the man-sized mines simply disintegrated in a puff of shrapnel and a spot of flickering flame against the glow of atmosphere. The larger mines--the easily identifiable unmanned batteries--were attempting to keep station, but there were streaks of flame that were descending into atmosphere that signalled that some of those were faltering.

 

The largest of those mines, those were the size of starfighters and composed of the larger debris that had accumulated over Nar Shaddaa through the course of millennia of illicit space travel. Those were far too large to be affected by an interdictor’s gravwell projectors--at least, not without several hours of focusing the projectors on those objects. In many cases, those mines were nothing more than chunks of disabled starships to which engineers had strapped crude guidance sensors and thrusters--only a close encounter with those obstacles would reveal their modification.

 

But this was all moving more quickly than Slaughter had feared. He was going to need to draw the full attention of the Sith away from their interdiction mission, with nothing more than a single Majestic-class Heavy Cruiser, a pair of antiquated Carrack-class Light Cruisers that had survived almost a century of service, and a smattering of tiny Corellian Gunships that were keeping station in the debris fields.

 

“Comms,” Slaughter squinted at the interdictors and their antistarfighter screen. “Signal the squadron, subspace channel Zerek: ‘The Republic confides that every sapient will perform his duty.’ Shields full forward, ahead forward and begin a starboard turn once we clear Debris Field Eight. The gunners may fire when they are ready.”

 

It would be several minutes before Fidelity and the survivors of the Galactic Alliance would receive the subspace signal and make their microjump. Even longer would be the time it would take for those ships and the Imperials to take their positions and bring the proverbial hammer down on the assault. Until those heavy guns and the hundreds of starfighters arrived, however, it would be left to his few ships and their disciplined, long-range fire to keep the Sith entertained. The first ranging shots caused the deck to tremble under his feet. Those were far outside the optimistic effective range of heavy turbolasers… and yet Slaughter saw something make contact and vanish from the tactical boards.

 

And even if his men could survive this battle, there was the small matter of somehow ensuring that Nasra would never pose a threat to the Republic.

 

[Sgt. Slaughter]

For the moment, at least, it appeared that Admiral Slaughter’s paltry collection of Clone War-era frigates and a single modern cruiser was being ignored. That was understandable–and uncharacteristically cautious for the Sith Empire. They tended to prefer decisive, decapitating strikes, gruesome assaults that would give their warriors an opportunity to get stuck in and get their hands dirty. His hazel eyes flickered towards the massive exchange of firepower between Nasra’s Imperials and one of the larger Sith battlegroups and the Admiral snorted in satisfaction. Very likely, Nasra was leading from the front, on that modified behemoth of an Imperial Deuce. That exchange was their decapitating strike. 

 

Even now, it seemed that the Sith considered the Imperial remnants to be a more significant threat than the survivors of the Galactic Alliance. The miniature singularity that their weapons had generated and launched towards the Imperials was certainly evidence of their prejudice.

 

“They’re leaving us alone for the moment. Mistake. Helm, expand our orbit and set course for that breach in minefield Aurek Seven.” That breach in the minefields was perilously close to an orbital bombardment range of The Red and Black. It needed to be held–otherwise, an interloping Star Destroyer could rain destruction upon the Rebels while they were still scrambling to answer the attack. “Gunnery, focus your fire on their screening corvettes.”

 

Kalidor and its escorts continued their orbit towards the breach in Nar Shaddaa’s minefields, disciplined salvos of their port batteries raining upon the lighter ships in the Sith armada every few seconds. Facing only light return fire, it wasn’t even necessary for the bird-like Kalidor or the boxy Carracks to even take evasive action, giving their gunnery crews a wonderfully stable platform to practice upon their targets.

 

And on the bridge of the heavy cruiser, Slaughter couldn’t resist the urge to keep glancing at a timer that continued to tick down…

 

[Sgt. Slaughter]

A shiver ran down Slaughter’s spine at the report of multiple Sith contacts–including at least one Star Dreadnought-sized vessel–reverting from hyperspace. Without even seeing the distant contacts appear on the tactical display, the Admiral knew that it could only be Black Scarab, and that it would soon be bearing down on his position. Under the guns of Black Scarab was a familiar position. The flagship of the Sith Empire had nearly killed Steadfast at Onderon, nearly killed Fidelity at Dark Sun. 

 

Under both circumstances, Slaughter’s task forces were retreating from that behemoth. This time, his units were against the wall of a world that they were duty-bound to protect, and could not–would not withdraw even at the cost of their lives.

 

“She can’t escape from us this time.” Slaughter tried to laugh, but a dry lump had wedged itself in his throat and it came out as a cough. “Activate the rest of our units in the debris field, target Scarab. Shields ahead full, ahead flank–ignore Sagittarius, it won’t matter in a moment.”

 

In orbit around the moon, a number of sensor contacts began appearing on the Sith’s sensor readouts: engine emissions and missile locks. However, what these sublight engines were propelling towards the capital ships of the Sith fleet would not immediately become clear: these contacts had no lifeforms aboard, no IFF signatures, barely any power generation, and only the crudest of sensors that were barely capable of detecting anything smaller than a walker transport, let alone a starfighter. It would only become clear several minutes later, when asteroids and chunks of freighters and even larger ships began to displace from the debris field, that those sublight engines were propelling enormous chunks of wreckage and space trash towards the Star Destroyers of the Sith fleet.

 

A direct hit from Eye of Sagittarius and a slew of turbolaser blasts knocked Slaughter to his knees. His head hit the tactical overlay and he began bleeding from a cut on his forehead. Something seemed to drag the Admiral downwards as he bodily hauled himself back onto his feet. “Doesn’t matter; ahead flank, all guns on Scarab. Engage at point blank-range, park her in the kriffing hangar if you can. Swarm the schutta.”

 

The bird-like Kalidor and her escorts closed to throwing distance with the flagship of the Sith Empire, braving intense counterfire and punishment from its batteries until the lines of its hull filled the horizon. Soon, some of the batteries could not even depress far enough to engage the pitiful little ships that were engaging Scarab–but even still, it was a matter of a single heavy cruiser, two ancient frigates, and a swarm of tiny corvettes engaging a vessel that outgunned all of them combined, several times over. It was more certain than inevitable that Slaughter’s task force would be wiped out; it was mathematical.

 

And then the timer on Slaughter’s bridge ticked down to T-minus-three. At that moment, dragged out of hyperspace just a little ahead of schedule by the artificial singularity, the bulk of Slaughter's veteran forces appeared.

 

It had occurred to the veteran Admiral of the Galactic Alliance that attempting to defend Nar Shaddaa with fixed, conventional fortifications was unlikely to succeed. His experiences under the shadows of Ziost and Hesperidium had taught him that his mind simply wasn't imaginative enough to anticipate the tactics of the Sith Empire, and he had willfully designed a defensive plan that could bend and even break under the Sith assault, but continue fighting. It was an idea born from the bad old days of the Rebel Alliance, when units like the Tierfon Yellow Aces and Partisans had no choice but to avoid pitched battle with the Galactic Empire.

 

The majority of his forces had lingered in the dark, uninhabited reaches of space between the Y'Toub system and its closest interstellar neighbors, waiting for the signal to reinforce the system. There was Fidelity, Slaughter's old MC90 flagship; the ancient (and badly battered) Victory II-class Star Destroyers L’Ouverture and Gerrera, the hypermodern Nebula-class Star Destroyer Benediction and a host of tiny Corellian-built gunships and frigates; but beyond that, originating from virtually every possible vector from which it was possible to approach the Smuggler’s Moon, were the little ships that Slaughter had squirreled away in preparation for this defense. Some of them were bona-fide warships and escort carriers, but the majority of those "little ships" were obsolete corvettes and frigates, barely capable of more than slow hyperspace travel. Many of them appeared to be little more than heavy freighters that had been refitted with magnetic clamps and fueling lines: barely more than what was required to support three or four starfighters.

 

As pathetic as those little ships were in comparison to the mighty Star Destroyers of the Rebel Alliance and Sith Empire, they had specific instructions to not directly engage the Sith unless absolutely necessary. Their mission, much like the Rebel Alliance of their ancestors, was to support their starfighters as they engaged in hit-and-run tactics: to find a target and unload their missiles against it, and then to run back to their carriers and reload; and then to repeat as many times as possible until they ran out of ammunition or they were dead.

[Sgt. Slaughter]

Many kilometers away from Nar Shaddaa, Fidelity absorbed the full might of the ion blast of Ilk of Ion. The a halo of azure light briefly flared around the bulbous Mon Calamari cruiser as its shields were overwhelmed, then lights began to dim all over its hull… and then even the glow of its sublight engines was shuttered. The ship began to drift vaguely in the direction of Ilk of Ion, listing to one side in a long, starboard circle that would eventually send it into the space between Nal Hutta and its moon. Only running lights continued to blink on the ship’s hull in their monotonous, off-on robotic pattern, and then not even those seem to be functioning. They were flickering madly without any discernable pattern… but the sudden evasive maneuvers of Gerrera and L’Ouverture revealed that the flickers were a message in Mon Calamari blink code.

 

Lost power. Drifting towards Sith fleet elements. Use for cover and target starfighters.

 

The two Victory-class Star Destroyers weaved in and out behind the drifting hull of their flagship, using the great bulk of the Star Cruiser’s armor to protect against the worst of the turbolaser barrages that targeted them. In retaliation, the broadsides of the two missile cruisers opened up in gouts of blue-white flame. Each time those salvos of missiles lashed out, forty new targets would have no choice but to take evasive action, break off their attack runs, or die to a concussion missile.

 

On the opposite end of the chaotic melee, just above the atmosphere of Nar Shaddaa, Kalidor and her escorts were doomed, and the crews of those outmatched ships knew their likely fate. The moment that Black Scarab took up a position to bombard the moon, all of them knew that they were not likely to survive the day. And yet, there was no panic. No one aboard those ships fled their stations and rushed for escape pods. Even when Breachmaker, one of the two ancient Carrack-class Light Cruisers, simply disintegrated into a mass of twisted steel and secondary explosions, the other ships continued to close the distance. Its sister, the Vigilant, began to orbit the shield generators on the dorsal surface of the Sith flagship and pumped salvo after salvo into the generator towers. Nexu and Piorun, two of the Corellian-built corvettes, seemed to take Slaughter’s words literally and parked themselves raced along the hull of the behemoth so closely that they resembled a pair of enormous starfighters on a strafing run.

 

Kalidor, the Majestic-class Heavy Cruiser and the slowest of that small squadron of ships, fared almost as badly as the expanding cloud of dust that was Breachmaker. For the moment, the bridge crew was functioning as a living machine, thoughtlessly outputting close-range turbolaser blasts against hostile batteries and firing away anti-missile interceptors without any thought for their own functionality. Slaughter’s mind seemed to exist in a state of Jedi-like hyper-clarity; at the cry of hull breaches across all decks of its starboard wing, the Admiral simply looked up from the tactical pit and glanced up to see the spray of debris and fire that issued from Kalidor’s side. That reverberation in the hull was that of a reactor shutting down, an engine dying… and four turbolaser batteries that jettisoned their cannons and crew into vacuum.

 

Even before the ship began to veer off from its headlong charge, the words escaped from Slaughter’s lips without conscious thought. A minor course adjustment, and then the cruiser began a languid roll that would transform its one-engine list into a spiraling dive towards Black Scarab.

 

And then the lights went dark and the sound of glass shattering filled the air. Slaughter was knocked to the ground, saved from being blown into vacuum by the emergency shutters.

 

When the Admiral came to, the crimson emergency lights were dimly illuminating the bridge and he was looking into the face of his Yeoman, Chambers. He tried to reach up to grasp the woman’s arm to physically haul himself up to his feet, but something wasn’t quite responding correctly. His arm tingled numbly. He blinked again and focused on the shock in the human’s expression.

 

He knew the look in Chambers’ eyes. There was a subtle widening of the eyes that even military discipline couldn’t stifle. That poor girl was looking at a dead man.

[Sgt. Slaughter]

“Up. Help me up, dammit. No, no drugs, gotta keep--spast.” A medic knelt by his chest and began tearing open packs of meds: painkillers, antiseptics, dressings… a lot of dressings, and went to work on shoving the material into a wound somewhere below Admiral Slaughter’s stomach. Pain erupted like fire, and he sweated and spat despite the chill of the warship. “Local, local.” He felt scissors work into his right sleeve and needles slip into the veins in his arm. Now, why was no one helping him back to his feet? And why wasn’t he able to move his legs?

 

He gave a glance downward, past the two sets of hands that were alternating between shoving bacta-infused dressings into his gut and shoving down against them into what had to have been a terrible wound. A shard of transparisteel--if something as wide as his leg could be described as a mere shard--was sticking out of his gut. Potential spinal cord injury. Almost certainly severed arteries.

 

“Admiral,” A light shone into his eyes. A finger pressed against his neck. “We need to get you to the medical frigate.”

 

“Th…” Slaughter winced as the dressings shoved into place against something that did not appreciate being shoved. “Prop me up. Do what ya can do, I ain’t moving from my post. This is a time when an Admiral’s life doesn’t mean a kriffing thing. Up, damn you!”

 

Querying glances were exchanged between the medic and his executive officer, with a clear calculation between the eyes of the Ryloth that was forcing blood and plasma and Force-knew-only-what into his body.

 

The answer to that calculation seemed to be: “Frack it. He’s probably going to die anyway.”

 

A brace strapped around his neck. He snarled and ground his teeth as two sets of strong arms lifted his body onto a stretcher and wheeled him towards his tactical pit. Another incoherent growl and curse rent his throat as the medics did… something to the stretcher that caused it to tilt forward. Once the red cleared from his vision and coherent thought returned to his mind, his focused on the enormous holograph of Black Scarab and he scowled. It had been badly damaged--probably during the time he’d been unconscious--and nearly crippled by Misericordia and Constantine, but its battered hull possessed so much tonnage and so many weapons that its mere presence posed a dire threat to Nar Shaddaa.

 

He grit his teeth and forced his vision on that ship, that damned ship that had haunted his republic for years. No more running. He would see it dead, neutralized, drifting, or blown to spacedust.

 

Something in the pit of his gut, somewhere in the vicinity of his torn intestines and spine, coiled like an enraged viper and prepared to strike.

 

“Signal SpaceWorks. We will need their tugs. And to L’Ouverture and Gerrera, slave their launchers to our targeting data. They may fire when we have a lock. Helm, dive.”

 

Breachmaker and Vigilant towards Black Scarab, two slowly spiraling hulks against a burning dreadnought. One of the surviving frigates managed to intercept a barrage from one of the dreadnought’s batteries and drifted out of the formation. After the cruisers cleared the Scarab’s flanks, they leveled out their flight paths their few remaining batteries rotated to target that gargantuan ship’s engines… and remained silent. The only fires that issued from those ships were blazing away from self-defense anti-starfighter weapons, not turbolasers or even ion cannons.

 

Far away, the nearly undamaged missile destroyers Gerrera and L’ouverture opened up with full broadsides, twenty eruptions of smoke and flame issuing from the dagger-like flanks of the Victory-class Star Destroyers. The salvo of missiles wobbled to and fro as they rode the sensor data to the targeted engines of Black Scarab, like predatory fish homing in on the distant smell of blood.

 

And very, very far away, crews raced towards the tugboats of the Imperial SpaceWorks. Those ships were squat, fragile, unarmed civilian vessels--literally useless in a fight--but they boasted a thrust-to-weight ratio far beyond that of anything in the battle above Nar Shaddaa. And their tractor beams, as powerful as those seen on armored cruisers, meant that once those ships reached speed, they could drag an unwilling victim along with them…

 

[Sgt. Slaughter]

A moon and its surface-spanning city burning below them. The Sith fleet above them. A star dreadnought in the middle of their formation–or, what was left of it. Far in the distance, a stardock that was being strafed by Sith starfighters.  And all around them, scattered wreckage and escape pods, each a pinprick of light that was blotted out by the conflagration of the moon that they had attempted to defend. The Sith were not accepting surrender. Even escape pods had become targets of opportunity in this infamous butchery.

 

At this point, every member of Admiral Slaughter’s task force who was near a sensor readout, from starship captain to gunnery crew to starfighter pilot, understood that they had found themselves in the sort of scenarios throughout the galaxy celebrated with solemnity. This had become one of those days of doomed heroism, when a small band of determined defenders were besieged by an overwhelming force. All of those days ended the same way.

 

They were all going to die.

 

Throughout that overmatched task force, a peculiar breakdown of discipline began to unfold. Not a single sapient shirked their duty. There were no calls to abandoned doomed vessels. Crewmen chose to ignore closing blast doors and alarms of hull breaches, rather than escape and save their lives. Even pilots had begun going down with their stricken starfighters, trying to guide their exploding vessels into a nearby hostile or fire away a few more cannon blasts, rather than trigger their ejection seats. 

 

That was exactly the problem. Nobody was leaving their posts.

 

For example, when Piorun was struck by an entire octuplet of turbolaser batteries and was set afire from stem to stern, not a single escape pod alighted from the hull of that doomed Corellian Gunship. She continued to race along the keel of Black Scarab, a burning missile in search of its target. Waggling madly as its helmsman struggled to keep the ship on course despite the fact that one of its engines was burning and another was flickering with unsteady thrust, she eventually found it: the keel hangar of the star dreadnought. The DP20 frigate set its entire reactor output into thrust, trusting that a hundred meter-long corvette crashing into a chamber filled with fuel lines and warheads and replacement starfighters would cause far more damage than its remaining weapons.

 

On the opposite side of the star dreadnought, Vigilant, a Carrack-class cruiser whose memory stretched back to the Open Circle Fleet that had bested Grievous at Coruscant, continued to orbit the command superstructure of Black Scarab. The blocky vessel continued to spit its meager allotment of turbolasers by aid of the Mark-One Eyeball alone–its sensors had been knocked out about a minute ago–in an attempt to score a lucky hit that would disable a shield generator. This was an impossible scenario for a light cruiser, and it soon lost its engines, and then the remainder of its armament and any sign of power on board.

 

L’Ouverture and Gerrera continued their scissors assault on the surrounded dreadnought, heedless of the smaller ships that had turned to target them. The two Victory-class Star Destroyers bobbed in and out behind the cover of Fidelity, relying on the bulk of the disabled MC90 cruiser to protect it from Black Scarab and a few of the Victory-classes. That tough old battle-wagon had had armor blasted off all over its hull from the attempts of the Sith to obliterate the smaller ships… but… then an errant volley was repelled from its hull with a flash of azure light rather than an incandescent spray of molten alloy. A few batteries blasted crimson towards Black Scarab and her entire hull shuddered as a single engine cluster flared haltingly. Gradually and painfully, Slaughter’s flagship was coming back to life.

 

As for Kalidor, when the one-winged eagle was struck by yet another turbolaser volley, several batteries were hit and set on fire with jets of burning charges. Rather than screaming for medics and abandoning the doomed positions, the wounded gunners, some of them clutching grievous wounds in an attempt to stop loss of blood or organs, jumped back into the burning hulks of the great guns. They fired shot after shot at point-blank range until either their guns or their bodies gave way to the fire. The cruiser managed to complete its traverse of the Black Scarab’s keel, only to come to a stop directly under one of its engine clusters so closely that she resembled a parasite clinging to a host.

 

_______

 

Yeoman Chambers stood by Admiral Slaughter’s side, hands shaking with adrenaline as she held a wired comlink to the Admiral’s mouth. His voice was guttural and strained as he spoke, and his shortness of breath was forcing him to pause every few seconds.

 

“Initiate self-destruct sequence, confirmation code Besh-Senth-Cresh…” a long series of numbers and military phonetic letters followed. Getting the sequence of words correct and in order actually wasn’t important. There were precise contingency codes that Slaughter could recite that would cause him to get locked out of Kalidor’s computers, or dispatching a silent distress signal, but for initializing a standard self-destruct sequence, it was the voice recognition that served as his authorization. This assumed that his voice wasn’t so altered by his groans of pain that his voice wasn’t unrecognizable to the bridge computers.
 

Slaughter cursed again when another direct hit from Black Scarab caused the deckplates to jump under his feet, jostling the transparisteel plate in his chest. That was followed by another curse from the medics at side; blood began to ooze from his abdomen again.

 

“Self-destruct confirmed, counting down five minutes,” came the serene, androgynous reply from the speakers. When that countdown terminated, the reactors aboard Kalidor would detonate with a quantity of force best used to describe stellar collisions. It would cause the hull to fragment like an enormous hand grenade and would spray debris all over the keel of Black Scarab, centering on its wounded engines.

 

“Good. Get me to the helm. Signal…” Slaughter took a deep breath. “Signal abandon ship. Someone’s gotta keep… her steady.”

 

Knowing that he had approximately five minutes remaining in his life did not provide Slaughter with any self-aware moments of clarity. He did not reflect on the fact that he was about to die while refusing to leave his station, in much the same fashion as his deceased wife. He did not think on a life of decades of service to a republic that made him, pulled him out of a Coruscanti slum and put weapons and schooling in his hands. He just stared into the sensor overlay at his command post, glaring at the imposing shadow of Black Scarab as though he could kill it through sheer force of will. It was more than the fact that the Rebel Alliance needed to defeat the Sith flagship, as it was a critical resource that could defeat entire fleets unsupported. He needed to see that ship dead, to have its shade wiped from his memory.

 

Only… the stretcher was not being pushed towards the helm. He was being pulled away–towards the portal of the bridge, towards his shuttle bay.

 

“Sorry, Admiral. Can’t let you do that.”
 

“Besides, she has foot pedals!” chimed in the Twi’lek helmsman, most helpfully. “You won’t be able to operate the controls in your state.”

“What! Damn you, let me do this!” Slaughter coughed on something and had to take a deep breath. The medics were now trying to shove something fiendish and plastic over his mouth and into his throat. He pushed it away even as he was being carted towards his shuttle. “Do not–let me take the helm–do not take this from me!”

[Sgt. Slaughter]

The next few minutes were like a fever dream that passed in and out of Slaughter’s consciousness, to be remembered only upon waking in the indecent hours of the morning. He vaguely remembered clutching at the elbow of one of the medics and snarling something combative--and then he caught a glimpse of himself through a chance reflection in the medic’s spectacles. His body looked… broken. His abdomen had been torn open by transparisteel shards, one of which were glinting out of the viscera as a polished spear. A pool of blood surrounded his body despite the best efforts to stop the bleeding.

 

A heavy impact and another jolt of pain pierced through the cloud of painkillers. He glanced around and saw the familiar boxy interior of his command shuttle--and a portable bacta tank, bubbling ominously with a translucent ooze. Slaughter raised a hand in a vain attempt to protest--he couldn’t breathe. A ghastly, gurgling noise escaped from his throat.

 

Curses responded all around him. One set of hands placed a mask and an irritating trail of plastic tubing down his throat. Two more lifted his body from the stretcher and shoved him into that sinister pink fluid. A warm prickling sensation went up his arm--

 

--and then he was out.

 

The LAAT/i transport raced from the hangar, into the chaos surrounding Black Scarab and her escorts. The airspace was so cluttered with escape pods and starfighters and munitions that the unescorted shuttle went unnoticed even after it cleared the debris field. Only a pair of passing TIE Defenders on a strafing run managed to catch its transmissions through the interference and broke from their attack to form up on its sides. Though an awkward, unmaneuverable craft, the LAAT/i boasted an impressive top speed and it raced through the blackness, chugging urgently towards Fidelity.

 

Upon breaking the magcon field of Slaughter’s flagship, the TIE Defenders broke upwards to rejoin the fight.

 

An entire team of medics and droids were awaiting the Admiral once the transport settled. One of them spoke urgently into a comlink as the bacta tank was carted away towards the medical bay. “We have the Admiral, sir. They got him into bacta, but we don’t know enough yet. Crazy son of a… He actually kept command with those wounds.”

 

((@Beck Pilon))

[Sgt. Slaughter]

The remainder of the battle was mop-up action for Fidelity. One by one, she and the two Victory-class Star Destroyers at her flank pounded the remainder of Black Scarab’s escorts into submission; the three capital ships operated with a sort of ruthless efficiency that was born out of mixture of battle-tested experience and cold fury at having been forced to watch the battle from a distance. The ships pounded at the squadron that had bombarded Nar Shaddaa, reducing the daggers on Fidelity’s left flank to hulks, and then the right flank. There was a single desperate moment when both sides of the MC90 cruiser were aflame and she was still badly outnumbered, but L’Ouverture and Gerrera maneuvered to place their weakened shields in the path of fire until their command ship could effect some damage control.

 

One individual barely even noticed the battle. That was the Bith surgeon D’ruppo Kozim, operating in a sterile surgical suite so soundproofed and insulated from the remainder of the ship that he barely noticed a single erstwhile vibration. Robotic arms twisted and stitched and cut within the bacta tank that contained Admiral Slaughter’s broken body like an obscene orchestra, closing hemorrhages and removing organs that could not be saved. The Bith blinked his enormous black eyes with exhaustion: one kidney might be saved by the bacta, but the other had been shredded; nearly a meter of intestines needed to be bypassed; his left lung had collapsed and would need to be monitored for weeks; and the damage to his spine was quite irreparable. He would walk only with the aid of implants.

 

But he would live. For the moment, steady vitals would be sufficient. Returning the Admiral to service would take time and patience.

 

____

 

As operations died down to retrieving escape pods and rescuing ejected pilots, Captain Tal’dira of the Fidelity finally allowed himself to sit at the command pit of his bridge. Though a hulking brute of a Twi’lek warrior, he felt utterly spent at the conclusion of this battle. Even if the Rebel Alliance had survived this siege, the losses had been so enormous that it was impossible for him to feel anything other than weariness.

Even after receiving a positive report from the medicals operating within the deepest bowels of the cruiser, the green-skinned Twi’lek merely sighed and hailed Moff @Vangar's flagship, the Ancillary Justice. Fortunately, the report had been summarized for the benefit of the military officer and even he was able to deliver a satisfactory explanation as he read. “Moff; Fidelity Actual. The doctors have reported back. Admiral Slaughter will survive. No signs of brain damage. He’ll be confined to bacta for…” There were no estimates for how long that period of time would be. “They’ve rigged up a comms system so he will be able to communicate once he comes out of anesthesia.”

Edited July 2, 2022 by ObliviousKnight