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Nar Shaddaa - Rebel Alliance Headquarters


Raven Nasra

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Hundreds of kilometers above Nar Shaddaa, the leadership of the legitimate governments of the galaxy and their monastic defenders were discussing their counter to the forces of despotism. On the moon’s surface, an equally-critical mission was being carried out by a less storied dramatis personae; these were the anonymous professionals of the broken Galactic Alliance. Hundreds of shuttle pilots, engineers, quartermasters, and protocol droids were scouring the surface for a suitable location for the nerve center of the Rebel Alliance. As unlikely as the Smuggler’s Moon seemed as the location for the headquarters to the resistance against the Sith Empire, the moon was home to tens of billions of sapients and hundreds of species who had known persecution under the Sith Emperors; the Imperial Remnant’s military shipyards would be a critical resource in prosecuting the war; and perhaps most importantly, Imperial Remnant’s aggressive reconstruction campaign had freed up vast acreages of the urban landscape; 

 

The former residents and vagrants of these regions had been evacuated to make way for the inexorable march of the Remnant’s construction droids. The armies of these bipedal behemoths would then plow through the urban jungle, razing entire city blocks and leaving the dust of urban decay in their wake. What was left behind was transformed, modernized ecumenopolis, fully constructed and ready to receive the tenants who could afford the new neighborhoods. It was a cold, unsentimental approach to urban renewal, perhaps, it was difficult to deny that razing abandoned tenements, glitterstim dens, and millenia-old infrastructure and replacing them with structures worthy of pre-Faust Coruscant was progress.

 

One of these projects, however, was placed on indefinite hold.

 

A Lambda-class shuttle landed at the foot of a vast, domed structure in the midst of one of these urban wastelands, disgorging a score of engineers and archivists. Eight Alliance marines armed with carbines accompanied them; Nar Shaddaa may have been friendly territory, but this structure, for all they knew, may have been populated solely by spice-fiends, scavengers, and rakghouls.

 

In centuries past, this domed edifice had been The Red and Black, an opulent casino favored by the Hutts before their business empire. Its architecture had been an imitation of the conspicuous consumption of space on Coruscant--the casino rose above the heights of the surrounding skyscrapers, and the Hutts had purchased the air rights of the entire region to ensure that no mere tenement would ever tower over their jewel. The interior of the casino was no less wasteful in its use of space, and its vast acreage was clad in genuine marble--actual polished stone, all the better for the locomotion of the oversized slugs. For centuries, The Red and Black had been a gem in the diadem of the Hutt business empire.

 

Those days were over. The Hutt cartel had been broken. The Red and Black had been abandoned for nearly a century, and scavengers had picked over the frame of the casino for every useful piece of scrap. Neglect and time had eroded the casino until it was an eyesore in an equally decayed neighborhood

 

All that was left for the Alliance engineers was a durasteel husk, lit only the occasional ray of sunlight that penetrated the cracked dome and their own spotlumas. At least nothing more dangerous than a few spice-addled vagrants inhabited the casino. Still, there seemed nothing to recommend the structure over a half-dozen suitable locations on the Smuggler’s Moon--even if The Red and Black rested atop a major hub of turbolift traffic and vast swaths of urban landscape were readily available for conversion to anchorage and barracks, the enormity of the task of reconstructing The Red and Black seemed prohibitive.

 

Minutes after the twenty-eight surveyors packed up their equipment and boarded their shuttle for their next destination, their Lieutenant received a brief message from above. Way up above, as it so happened.

 

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

 

____

 

Days later, the threshold of The Red and Black was swarming with activity. A small army of engineers and astromech droids had descended upon the abandoned casino and littered its circumference with shuttles. One of the many-appendaged droid skyscrapers hunched over the arch of its dome, its durasteel claws stripping away eroded durasteel and the last fragments of centuries-old wiring that the scavengers hadn’t removed. Other portions of the dome were aglow with white-hot flame as the gargantuan droid welded forge-fresh durasteel armor, the product of the recycled scrap. Hundreds of meters below the droid, every unsecured tool rattled in tandem with subaudible vibrations as the Alliance engineers plumbed the kilometers of its foundation and subcellar with seismic sensors.

 

As it so happened, its foundation had withstood the test of centuries and was safe for inhabitation. Four more shuttles landed from the fleet in orbit and deployed their marines. The Red and Black stood atop a network of long-abandoned turbolift shafts and there was no telling what creatures had been residing with subcellar for the past decades.

 

For the next week, that inhabitation would be limited to two rooms. Its cavernous lobby became littered with cots and the engineers’ equipment. By day, it was evacuated save for a few armed guards as the reconstruction proceeded; by night, it was lit by welding torches that cast a pale, flickering glow on the sapients below while a score of their number hung from the rafters and continued the project of reinforcing the dome against bombardment.  A nearby auditorium became strewn with cables that led into a briefing holoprojector that had been salvaged from a captured Victory-class Star Destroyer. Nearby, a second construction droid pulverized an abandoned warehouse and rebuilt the lot into a facsimile of a landing strip.

 

A barracks, a briefing room, and a landing strip wasn’t much to start a rebellion, but it was a start.

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  • 3 months later...

One of the dilapidated warehouse districts adjacent to The Red and Black had been converted to a vast training complex for the marines of the Rebel Alliance. What had been condemned structures occupied by vermin and vagrants were ground up, pulverized, and reassembled into barracks, rifle ranges, and an array of combat arenas that mimicked the layouts of common ships in the Rebel and Sith fleets. The Marine Proving Grounds, or MARPROG as some of the veterans of the Galactic Alliance were trying to and failing to convince their less experienced peers to call it, were an arena for transforming green recruits into fighting sapients prepared to confront any threat, whether it was smugglers or Mandalorians or Sith troopers or the lords of darkness themselves.

 

There was an surprise scenario planned for the first batch of graduating recruits.

 

Forty recruits of all manner of species assembled in an armory. They were to stage a defense of an MC90’s hangars from a Sith incursion--but their loadout was completely different from the standard carbines and grenades that comprised their weaponry from two months of basic training. They had been issued with an older, bulkier, heavier carbine with an underslung warhead launcher. The customary assortment of fragmentation and smoke grenades was replaced by canisters of buckshot and flame. Their vibroknives were replaced by a heavy blade that resembled the machetes used by the Korunnai militia of Haruun Kal.

 

“Change of plans, Talons!” Admiral Bruce Slaughter, fully kitted up in the same armor and weapons and wearing them as comfortably as a second skin, strutted up and down the lane of trainees as they examined the unfamiliar gear with a degree of skepticism. “There’s a Sith in that boarding party and every single marine in that hangar is KIA. We have thirteen minutes until the bridge is overrun and half the ship’s gunnery crews are killed. Now, move! Move! Every second you waste is three of your buddies dead.” The short, stocky man an AC-15m into the arms of a Twi’lek who had been so surprised by the presence of the Admiral that she had paused in the process of tucking her lekku into the confines of her helmet.

 

“No point in going all sneaky-beaky against a Sith. They already know you’re there. Grenades--specially frags--are a liability. It’s all about massed fire and coverage! You go fast, you go loud, you use every bit of firepower at your disposal--and you do not ever let go of ‘em!” This next part always made Slaughter smile. “Fact is, in thirty minutes, half of us are going to be dead! We deploy in thirty seconds! Twenty-nine!” As Slaughter counted down the seconds before the platoon of ersatz Talons deployed, a company of ersatz Sith troopers was racing through the corridors of the ersatz cruiser under the direction of an ersatz Sith Lord--in reality an Ithorian Jedi Knight who had enthusiastically volunteered for the exercise after months of helping with the Coruscanti refugees.

 

In forty-five minutes, twenty-eight of them were simulated dead and seven more simulated wounded. Slaughter was among them, having been run through by an Ithorian who may have been enjoying the simulated carnage a bit too much. It was always a bit difficult for him to read that species’ facial expressions. But the Ithorian had also been killed--first stunned, then shot in the head.

 

_____

 

All in all, it had been a successful operation considering the green troops and Slaughter walked away from it with a bounce in his step, a surprising result considering his demise. He even indulged in a few minutes to tour the concourse of the headquarters structure. The reinforcements to the vaulted ceiling had been completed and the engineering crews had started to disassemble their scaffolding. Dust and metal shavings littered the floors, but was merely the debris of hundreds of engineers transforming a dilapidated ruin into a fortress that could withstand orbital bombardment.

 

There was no time to tour the briefing rooms; while climbing down from the scaffolding in the ceiling, sirens began to wail and his comlink began to blare. That was the signal for the launch of a major operation that had been in the works since Coruscant.


The spring in his post-mortem step was replaced by an urgent jog to catch one of the final shuttles to Fidelity. As it so happened, it was filled with the marines that he had just led to their deaths.

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  • 10 months later...

Bureaucrats liked to comfort themselves by claiming that amateurs studied tactics and professionals studied logistics. Admiral Slaughter was never one to denigrate the invaluable services of the staff officers that shadowed his every step, nor the beancounters that somehow kept the Rebel Alliance supplied despite its increasingly heterogenous composition. Eventually, however, someone was going to need to trade turbolaser fire from the deck of a star cruiser or place their own body in front of an unfriendly blaster. 

 

For the final few minutes before Fidelity launched into hyperspace, the middle-aged Admiral was alone in his office. His hazel eyes stared into the holographic image of a star system that was next on the Rebel Alliance’s list of targets, fingers idly scratching at a few days of stubble. In astrometric terms, it was an unremarkable system: an unusually high number of asteroid belts, a gas giant and a pair of habitable planets and a terraformed moon. But it was that final planet in the fourth orbital position that concerned the Rebel Alliance and promised to complicate the invasion; it was host to an extensive series of orbital shipyards.

 

He had not been told the true name of the system. That information, apparently, was so closely guarded that not even the commanders of the invasion would be allowed to know. What he had been told, under privacy field in his office, was that the shipyards were capable of constructing the larger models of Star Destroyers. That narrowed down the list of potential systems significantly.

 

A buzz interrupted his train of thought.

 

“Admiral, the Mandalorians have formed up. Everything is ready.”

 

Mandalorians. Bruce had yet to be briefed on the cultural differences between the various cells of Mandalorians, but that was an unexpected addition to the Rebel Alliance. Whether their cooperation was secured through credits or diplomacy was not freely divulged, but if there was anything that he understood about the sons and daughters of Mandalore, it was that they relished a fight. For the moment, at least, their cooperation could be trusted. Whether they followed his orders… it would be intriguing whether they would do so, seeing how he has sent so many of their creed to a cold grave.

 

He couldn’t afford to worry about that, however. The entire battle plan hinged on this coalition--and a coalition of former enemies at that--being able to fight alongside with some degree of coherence.

 

He gave a long sigh. Around this time, Bryce would have jabbed him in the solar plexus to josh him out of his anxieties and teased him about getting old. Instead, the Talon had been deployed… elsewhere, with the Jedi to a station that he wasn’t allowed to know about. Such were the necessities of the service.

 

“Thank you, Yeoman Gnugga. Have Tal’dira our departure. He may jump when ready. And… please make sure that I am not disturbed, life or death circumstances, that sort of thing.”

 

“Aye, Admiral.”

 

His eyes glanced towards a small mat in the middle of his stateroom. The quarters on a star cruiser were far from luxurious, but the square meterage in this tiny room at least allowed him a few small personal items...

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  • 5 months later...

“Glad I was never in the old Rebel Alliance. Never was cut out for this secrecy…” Midstream through an old story about the war with the Arachtar, Bruce Slaughter interrupted his train of thought only long enough to grouse about the unusual nature of his return to Nar Shaddaa. The Chadra-Fan pilot of the shuttle glanced away from the translator clipped to her collar, squeaking something in her native language that was just outside the device’s range. The Admiral arched a blonde eyebrow and glanced over from the copilot’s chair. “Didn’t catch that, sorry.”

 

“I mean, it’s a strange time, Captain.” She squeaked, her voice closely followed by the mechanical drone of the translator unit. The pilot had instantly recognized Bruce Slaughter, even if Alliance Intelligence dictated that he wear a Captain’s rank pips and try not to draw attention. Instead, the middle-aged Admiral had decided to regale forty shock troopers and two officers with a retelling of the Battle of Centerpoint Station: how a combined force of Republic and Imperial capital ships had borne down on an equally massive extragalactic fleet; where two superweapons had converged an unprecedented weight of firepower on a single star system. Even the Jedi had gotten in on the action: their Grandmaster had dispatched a large number of her walkers to support the fleets.

 

It had taken years for the Corellians to clear the debris field.

 

“But anyway, we knew that whoever hit the control room first was going to be in command of the biggest gun in the galaxy. Yeah--even bigger than Hammer of God. Way bigger than the Death Star. We probably moved a little too quickly than we should have--seemed like every few meters, those robots were sending suicide bombers at us. They were literally coming out of the walls. But they managed to channel us into an open foyer about five hundred meters away from the control room, and things got… ugly. They had these heat-seeking micromissiles--nasty buggers, really agile, could almost go around corners. They had this nasty semi-armor piercing warhead--punch through light armor, then a shaped charge that would blow right through a man. And that’s how I lost my--” Bruce rapped on his left hip.

 

“I don’t want to know, sir. And we’re ready to disembark.” The Chadra-Fan attempted to squeal May the Force be with you, sir, but her species’ equivalent of a conspiratorial whisper was not detected by the translator unit.

“What? No. That’s… it took half my leg off!” Slaughter protested as he hopped down from the LAAT/i and onto the deck of the Dreadnaught-class Heavy Cruiser Tripoli. Glancing around at the unfamiliar lines of the old cruiser, he immediately decided that he liked the look of the craft. She was old, certainly, and the hangar was more than cramped--it was barely functional--but the deckplates resounded with a heavy weight that suggested a profound degree of toughness, of real grit, that belied her size. Turning around, he waved furiously at the departing transport and roared at the top of his battle-hardened voice. “I’ll see you on Umbara!

 

Smiling from ear to ear, Slaughter greeted the captain of the artillery cruiser and attempted to commit the names of his officers to memory, but they were of six species, two of which the Admiral had never encountered before. He tried not to stare at the Zeltron Master gunner--her species was rare in the Rebel Alliance. 

 

“Pleasure, all of you. I expect that you all have been briefed? Wonderful,” he grumbled happily to a chorus of affirmatives. “Then you understand that our objective in this mission is not to liberate, but to punish. This is not going to be like something from the good old days. We are going to hurt the Sith, we are going to make sure that they hurt hard, and we are not going to stick around to bind up their wounds.”

 

Slaughter led the officers to the bridge at a jog. All around the ship there was a general impression of rigidity. This was a genuine warship designed by shipyards intended to pack as much armor and weapons onto a hull, not an exhibition crafted by a people who viewed every frigate and cruiser that came out of their docks as an individual work of art. Even without having set foot on one of these cruisers, Bruce instantly recognized the positions of the stations on the bridge. It was an older, more traditional design: minimal viewports, elevated crew stations overlooking a central command post, rather than the modern--some would say Imperial--predilection of a central walkway looming over crew pits.


The Admiral strode up to that central holographic pit and picked up the familiar, blocky comms unit. A flip of a switch transmitted to the small fleet under his command. “All units, orient and report in.”

Edited by ObliviousKnight

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“Fleet is forming up, Admiral.”

 

“Thank you, Captain.” Slaughter muttered as he paced around the tactical pit. The design of his station was somewhat old-fashioned compared to Fidelity’s--none of the hyper-modern high-resolution holographs and gesture-driven user interface--but it had a feel of pragmatism and rigidity that the Admiral appreciated. Tactical information was more readily available, offering estimations of ranges and projectile flight time without switching modes. Of course, Tripoli had been refit as an artillery cruiser. Its mission was to use higher-order mathematics to kill people in vast numbers. 

 

The Mandalorians had already arrived, the familiar battering ram-like prows of Nat’ah and Xaakzhamheid forming a protective screen in front of the artillery cruisers. Beyond those ships were swarms of scout A-Wings, already flickering in rays of yellow-white drive exhaust as they entered hyperspace. They would arrive at their destination mere minutes before the heavier ships of the Rebel Alliance. Somewhere nearby--the tactical pit reported their presence but the poor visibility of the Dreadnaught offered almost nothing in the way of exterior views--were the lighter ships that had been dispatched by the Imperial and Hapan factions of the Rebel Alliance. 

 

“Transmit countdown to the fleet, starting from three minutes.” Fleet tenders and refueling tankers were retreating from the warships, and that would give them just enough time to clear their exit trajectories. “And signal to all assets, ‘May the Force be with us.’ Stop.Bruce exhaled an amused snort at the eyes that flickered from the former Imperials--that was a purely Republican sentiment.

 

Slaughter stood in a broad stance, closing his eyes and breathing deeply at the tactical pit. Somewhere in Tripoli, he thought he detected a trace of an ultrasonic whine as the ship’s hyperdrives began to charge. There was the periodic staccato clunk as its oversized batteries whirred into stowage positions and locked into secure stand-by. His mind repeated the familiar calculations in the final one hundred and forty-nine seconds before entering hyperspace--fuel expenditures, gravitational coefficients, lagrange points, and dozens of other stellar essentia--and then the plates shifted a millimeter under his feet and the fleet had entered hyperspace.

 

Imperial Knight Expeditionary Incendiary Artillery Battery |Aeneas|

Taskforce Experience: Veteran (2xp)

Sphyrna-class Corvette Aleppo |2/1|

Sphyrna-class Corvette Beirut |2/1|

Dreadnought-class Heavy Cruiser Tripoli |10/20|

 

Imperial Remnant Incendiary Artillery Battery |Acre|

Taskforce Experience: Veteran (2xp)

Sphyrna-class Corvette Tiberias|2/1|

Sphyrna-class Corvette Dimona |2/1|

Dreadnought-class Heavy Cruiser Acre |10/20|

 

Medical/Engineering Task Force |Bloodsteele|

EF76 Nebulon-B Escort Frigate Merciful Touch |3/3|

EF76 Nebulon-B Escort Frigate Raven’s Touch |3/3|

Zebulon-B Frigate Mecha Metal |3/3|

Nargi-class Pursuit Frigate Watchman  |3/3|

Corellian Rescue Frigate Majesty |3/3|

Corellian Rescue Frigate Majestic |3/3|

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