Kuat

[Johanna Bryce]

“So, you can see that I had your interests in mind, Talons,” Johanna quipped, pointing at the holograph of the Kuat Drive Yards orbital ring. Around her, some just sitting next to the hangar, others standing, and some perched on the wings of their transport gunships, the two hundred sapients of Talon Company surrounded their final briefing. The clatter and chaos of Wrecking Machine’s hangar was hardly an ideal location for this briefing, but the distance between her and those in the back ring of sapients mattered little. The systems in their armor--a host of holocams and mics that patched directly into the holoprojectors in their gauntlets and goggles--rendered the lousy acoustics a meaningless hindrance. “This is exactly the kind of mission that the Bridge Rush was preparing us for. Questions?”

 

“Yarrr, Cap’n. So, once she’s ours, is fleet sending over a crew to man her guns?”

 

“Negative, Norris. This is strictly a smash-and-grab, and we get the smashy part. Anyone else? No? We have seven minutes and thirty-two seconds before realspace, and we’ll be off the deck ten seconds before that. Good luck, Talons; strike hard!”

 

There were echoes, refrains of similar phrases, and then the briefing was over. The rings of marines dispersed and made for their gunships--a smattering of refurbished LAATs that might have taken straight from the wreck of a Venator-class Star Destroyer to a set of more modern assault shuttles. There were only two hundred of them left--the remnants of the Talon program that had transformed thousands of freedom-loving sapients into Sith-killers. Bryce, clad in her plastoid armor, fretted over her carbine in an attempt to distract herself from the thousands of what-if scenarios. After the numerous disasters that prefaced the death of the Galactic Alliance, this was going to be her first mission independent from Admiral Slaughter’s command--and in command of his beloved Talon Company.

 

But also the first time that she had finally been on the offensive since the catastrophe at Coruscant. Forcing a smile onto her face, Johanna cycled her rifle one last time then strode to her LAAT gunship. A helping hand dragged her into the passenger compartment from just above her elbow… and then there was nothing left to do but wait.

 

____

 

And then the quiet of hyperspace was shattered by the discord of realspace. A scarred Mandalorian battlecruiser, rechristened the direct and unflattering monicker Wrecking Machine, pierced into Kuat’s orbit, surrounded by a host of frigates, corvettes, and one more modern Bothan Assault Cruiser. From their hangars a swarm of X-Wings and other snubfighters and transports spewed out. On the bridge of Wrecking Machine, a raspy old Mon Calamari voice rumbled out a single command over and over: “Spool them up, spool them up.”

 

While the Neo-Kandosii-class Battleship might have boasted the majority of the squadron’s firepower, the deadliest weapon in the entire squadron was housed aboard the Bothan Assault Cruiser Heraldric. The blocky ship housed enough transceivers and sensor jammers to render communication difficult on a planetary scale, and if her crew was able to wind up their electronics warfare suite in time, it might buy them several minutes before the Sith were able to mount an effective response.

 

And in this situation, with dozens of warships bearing down on Kuat Drive Yards and hundreds of sapients rushing towards the garrison’s Golan Space Station in their fragile spacecraft, minutes were worth men.

 

Element Dar'Manda

Destroyer Group [Railguns]

Experience: Green

Neo-Kandosii-class Battleship Wrecking Machine 20/20

 

Patrol Group Colonia

Defensive Escort (Suppressing Fire)

Experience: Green

Bothawui Wing

Carrack-class Light Cruiser Spoilsport 3/3

Warrior-class Frigate Dragoon 2/1

DP20 Frigate Sophie 2/1

Senth-class Picket Ship Constitution 2/1

Senth-class Picket Ship Badger 2/1

Yevetha Wing

Carrack-class Light Cruiser Allegiance 3/3

Warrior-class Frigate Lancer 2/1

DP20 Frigate Cutlass 2/1

Senth-class Picket Ship Currahee 2/1

Senth-class Picket Ship Patriot 2/1

 

Task Force Carbonari

Electronics Warfare Pod (Information Control)

Experience: Green

Bothan Assault Cruiser Heraldric 9/9

Sacheen-class Light Escort Tanto 3/3

Sacheen-class Light Escort Lanvarok 3/3

Senth-class Picket Ship Iskallon 2/1

Senth-class Picket Ship Nebula 2/1

[Johanna Bryce]

((Golan))

 

The venerable LAAT/i might have been one of the most superbly designed infantry transports and close-air support gunships of the galaxy, but it was old and designed for a cadre of soldiers that demanded little in the way of creature comforts. Johanna swung from a railing in the ceiling by one hand as the larty juked unpredictably through antistarfighter fire, the inertial compensators in the passenger compartment not quite keeping up with the evasive maneuvers. An alarming creaking began to grow louder just above her head; the Talon captain refused to glance upward. The creaky little transport might have been old, but it was spaceworthy, and heavily armed. Yes, certainly spaceworthy, most definitely spaceworthy and completely overhauled by some of the best starship mechanics in the galaxy.

 

Escorted by a squadron of X-Wings, the six LAATis slipped through the antistarfighter screen hastily fielded by the Golan. Not that the transport gunships needed the escort--though large and ungainly they were festooned with turrets and supported the wing-pairs of X-Wings that broke away with their own fire. The initial spike of terror that ran rampant within the interior of the gunships quickly faded, however; their escorts were able to intercept the incoming fighters. 

 

At the last ten seconds before the gunships pierced into the hangar, their chin-mounted guns and turrets snapped forward to riddle the interior of the hangar with laser fire. Though it undoubtedly caused a scene of havoc within the hangar and suppressed any garrison that was entrenched to resist the boarding action, it turned a pristine-white Lambda-class shuttle into heaps of charred wings and wreckage that obstructed the path of two of the gunships. Even in the sealed passenger compartment, Captain Bryce could hear the shouts and curses that rang out over the comm channel.

 

“Frack--frack--frack! Dive--pull up--it's in our lane, we’ll try to--”

 

What the remaining third of the Talon landing force was attempting, Bryce never heard, as the doors of the LAATi slid open to disgorge her and her shock troopers into a ruin of a hangar. They had caught the deckhands in the middle of post-launch cleanup--fueling lines were strewn around their ankles and a personnel carrier sat abandoned in the middle of the rubble, somehow untouched by the fusillade of laser fire.

 

“Leave the deck crew, Talons, leave the crew--only if fired upon.” Bryce shouted into the air at the first whine of small arms fire and the unmistakable whiff of blaster-roasted meat. There was no time to waste for unarmed starfighter crews and even less for prisoners. She and her platoon of thirty shock troopers raced towards the armored bulkhead that separated the rest of the defense station from its hangar and began to infiltrate into the Golan, dispersing into fifteen-man sections that hunted for batteries to disable and sensors to smash. Two of the sections, commanded by Captain Bryce advanced on the bridge, their approach heralded by an unnerving tide of suppressing fire.

 

[Johanna Bryce]

“Report, Bravo--Charlie--Delta.” Captain Bryce panted into her comlink. She and twenty-nine shocktroopers were racing down parallel corridors to the command center in the guts of the Golan platform. She counted thirty meters, then halted her charge to sidestep towards the center of the corridor. The other half of her section rushed forward as a tide of plastoid and steel, and she snapped off a few unaimed blasts at the next intersections to discourage any counterattacks. She and her section of Talons had been nearly unopposed--no Sith shock troopers

 

“Bravo--approaching bow one through seven. Minor resistance. Be there in another minute.”

 

“Delta--Aft eight through fourteen is ours. Seven! Don’t bother, use the whole pack. We’re not keeping it. Thirty seconds, Talons, move it!””

 

The last transmission was muffled by the whine of blasters and shouts of orders delivered under fire. “Ah---Charlie! Platoon of chrome-jobs holed up at aft twelve. Smoke up! damn it all….” More curses, more blaster fire--the Bespinian scowled as she rose from her fighting crouch and advanced the next thirty meters. “Putting up a good fight, but we’ll take ‘em.”

 

Her section met their own first sign of determined opposition only seconds later. Taking the lead, the Alliance Talon pounded the deck with long strides as she charged forward. Her eyes darted side to side, occasionally catching glimpses of her fellow shock troopers fifty meters to the right… and no less than twelve Sith troopers lining the corridor leading to the dorsal shield projectors on her left. Eyes met the unexpressive chrome faceplate of a Sith shock trooper’s armor. Before either had the opportunity to react intelligently, two very disruptive things transpired at almost the same time. First, the detonation of a satchel of nergon-14 charges, little more than a backpack stuffed with explosives almost to the point of bursting, shook the station. That was Delta Section, reducing nearly a quarter of the station's firepower to twisted metal.

 

The Sith trooper staggered, throwing off his aim--or her, it was impossible to tell--aim. Bryce was worse off. Midstride at an all-out sprint, she fell and slid along the deckplates. Second, a stray bolt from her squad caught the trooper in the neck, dropping him with a shower of liquified chrome and a pained gurgling noise. But there were still eleven more troopers directly behind him, all of whom were aiming their rifles at the downed Talon. Not bothering to aim, Bryce launched a grenade into their midst, sending the shot into the ceiling but filling the corridor with shrapnel and steam from burst pipes.

 

Someone grabbed the back of her shirt and pulled her forward, hauling Bryce out of the way of a flurry of semi-automatic and automatic blaster fire. An E-Web, she guessed, judging from the rate of fire. A perfect location to cut them off--even if the emplacement was a bit exposed.

 

Edited June 18, 2020 by ObliviousKnight

[Johanna Bryce]

 

The two remaining LAATi’s of Talon Company raced about the exterior of the station, their turrets opening up on sensor domes and shield generators as the heavily-armed gunships nearly scraped the hull of the Golan in their evasive maneuvers. They were hunting for an alternate point of entry to the station that could be breached--a boarding umbilical, even a portal for astromech droids that could be blasted open. Shrieking by the bridge, the two transports dipped under the arc of the hull to send a flurry of rockets into the unmolested bow batteries.

 

They broke right to continue their hunt for targets to vandalize, leaving a trail of melted armor plating and shattered fire controllers in their wake. Then they located their point of entry. It was a small airlock intended for the use of crew on EVA spacewalks. It was only large enough to accomodate two marines at a time and the transports would be vulnerable until their passengers gained entry to the station, but Echo section’s marines were already at work, setting up a portable magcon field generator and laying ribbons of explosives along the airlock….

 

_____

 

It was inevitable that the Sith stop reacting to their boarding operation like beldons and begin mounting an effective defense. Between the E-Web position at their flank and the fortifications before the bridge, Captain Bryce’s progress had been effectively halted. The radio chatter from Charlie section even indicated that they were being driven from the aft batteries.

 

The Talon directly in front of Bryce--the Chiss Sergeant who had dragged her out of the fusillade from the E-Web position--shouted something. No luck--the marine was mostly deaf in her right ear. Then came a flurry of hand signals: concussion grenade, buckshot, and a countdown of three seconds. The Bespinian nodded; the grenade went bouncing along the deckplates towards the E-Web’s position under a flurry of blaster fire, and then with blinding glare a crash of thunder that came almost as a physical punch to her ribs, Bryce was suddenly deaf in her left ear. But she was up and turned the corner to advance towards the Sith emplacement. The E-Web was still firing blindly and struck one of her men to fell the Talon; a carefully aimed shot from the squad pierced the faceplate of its gunner and silenced the turret. The rest was a frenzy of close-quarters combat, of blind and deaf Sith troopers peeking out from their barricade to exchange fire with deafened Alliance marines, and within a few seconds her section had mounted the barricade and Bryce was firing down at the retreating bodies of the Sith troopers.

 

With this position overmatched, and for the moment, no Sith troopers or automated turrets firing at them, Johanna had a moment of relative peace and signaled her Talons to gather around her. “No luck on the bridge!” She shouted, in the hopes that some of her marines could still hear. A holoprojector in her palm displayed a simplified schematic of the station. “Local transformers are fifty meters aft--hundred mid! They get hit!” She slammed her fist on the holoprojector, dimming the projection and making her point clear. The amount of energy that those devices managed was enormous--the destruction of one of them would cause rolling blackouts that would wreak havoc on the station’s fighting effectiveness.

 

Unfortunately, it also seemed that the Sith were aware of the vulnerabilities of the station's power grid. Bryce's section managed to traverse the distance aft without encountering anything more than token fire from the broken squad of Sith troopers that they had just overrun. However, they encountered heavy resistance the moment that her section turned down the corridor leading to the aft power transformers. The leading Talon just in front of Captain Bryce peeked gingerly around the corner... and promptly spun to the ground when the leading edge of her helmet was struck by the second of a rolling tide of blaster fire from Sith troopers and an automated turret. Bryce grabbed the Private's presumably deceased body out of the line of fire by her boot, only for the Twi'lek to grin and give her a thumb's up. It was a glancing blow--only the armor was struck.

 

Both sides returned fire, largely unaimed and ineffective. It was a stalemate, the Talons unable to advance down the barricaded corridor and the Sith troopers content to merely hold off their advance. The Talons sent a smoke grenade upwards to cover an advance of one of their marines, but the crawling marine only managed to scuttle ten meters forward before a glancing blow to the leg forced him to take cover in the pitiful shelter of an astromech droid crawlspace.

 

Amid the chatter of blaster fire and dimly-heard shouts of orders, Bryce snarled into her comlink. "Delta--cancel orders and support at Alpha's position. Confirm." Still half-deaf, the Bespinian never heard the response. Presumably it was in the affirmative--and hopefully reinforcements would arrive soon, because her men weren't going anywhere in a hurry and would be sitting beldons if more Sith closed in on their position...

[Johanna Bryce]

“Alpha--Echo. Made entry in subsector twelve. About to make contact with Charlie. Foxtrot right behind us.” Pinned down by an E-Web emplacement and her ears still ringing from her section’s concussion grenade, Johanna couldn’t make out the report from the remaining third of her unit that had just made egress onto the station. However, more than five hundred meters away, an additional thirty shock troopers joined the assault on the aft turbolaser batteries to catch the Sith defenders between two angles of fire.

 

Bryce rapped on the helmet of her adjacent Talon. A violent series of hand signals followed: smoke, suppressing fire, dark. That last gesture was met with a confused frown from the Chiss; Bryce repeated the gesture more emphatically, this time greeted with an exaggerated nod and a countdown of five seconds. The Bespinian took a deep breath and prepared herself for a mad crawl up the corridor…

 

Two smoke grenades rolled up the corridor. A wild-spray of fire issued from the shock troopers, mostly enthusiastic but unaimed fire towards the E-Web position, but a number of carefully aimed bolts struck glowpanels, shrouding the interior of the battlestation in darkness and the meager crimson glow of emergency lamps. Into that crimson haze Johanna dove, a grenade in her left hand and her sidearm in her right. Two of her Talons followed, crawling madly through the smoke and darkness in an attempt to spring up at point-blank range and assault the Sith fortifications.

 

“For Carida!”

 

At this range and in the confines of durasteel-reinforced corridors, the shriek of the concussion grenade was shattering. Johanna only had time to place a gauntleted hand to protect her neck--and then once the little impacts of rubble on her back ceased, she was up and running, only meters away from the ruin of the E-Web blaster. A fallen Sith trooper, sitting against the barricade with both legs bleeding profusely, shakily raised a blaster pistol towards her. Captain Bryce caught the glint of the armor moving in the darkness and felled him with a lucky bolt to the breastplate. Only a second later, she and two of her shock troopers were in the last fortification, punching and stabbing and firing their blasters at point-blank range.

 

Red, both figurative and literal, filled Johanna’s vision. The Twi’lek who had followed her up had drawn her vibromachete and brought it down on the neck of a Sith trooper, spraying the area with rivulets of hot blood. Johanna reeled and dropped to the deck when a blaster round creased her midsection--it burned fiercely, but the bolt struck the plastoid where it was strongest. Her attacker wasn’t quite as lucky--his next two shots whined past where Bryce’s head had been only milliseconds early, whereas her pistol fire struck his shin, knee, then finally his groin.

Bryce forced herself under the cover of one of the engineering consoles of the power distribution room. A lifeless, blue arm was twitching just beside her. It was just her and the Twi’lek in the meager salient into this vital facility. “Payload up! Prime and bring it up!” She screamed to her Talons to reinforce her position. Hopefully, they would arrive in the few seconds before the Sith realized that it was just two shock troopers who had broken into their fortification.

[Johanna Bryce]

The deckplates under Johanna’s boots gave a subtle shudder as the rumble of a distant explosion caused every unsecured object in the power distribution center to rattle. Datapads rattled and fell from the engineering console, impacting against the Talon’s helmet and greaves. With a clumsy roll on the datapads and miscellany that had been scattered by her squad’s sabotage, she risked a peek over her meagre cover to be greeted by the horrifying sight of red lightsabers.

 

The shock trooper could barely make out the mystic freak’s face in the smoke--he appeared humanoid, but she wasn’t even positive about the creature’s sex. His mouth twisted, probably to speak, but Johanna was mostly deaf and mostly uninclined to even make an attempt at lip-reading. The first thing that every Talon learned about combating Sith was to fill the air with as much blaster fire as possible, and from as many angles as possible.

 

At the same time Johanna switched her blaster pistol to stun, she felt a heavy impact against her shin. She glanced down and paled.

 

It was a satchel charge. Consisting of several kilograms of nergon-14 and other high explosives, it was an efficient array of explosives designed to defeat fortified bunkers--or as Talons and the Alliance Marines liked to call them, a “backpack of boom.” They were typically equipped with remote detonators, but Johanna knew perfectly well that her Talons had elected to use thirty-second fuses for this mission. For all she knew, Johanna had only seconds left to live.

 

The shock trooper fired off a few wild, unaimed stun blasts in the general direction of the Sith acolyte, then picked up the satchel charge and threw it deeper into the transformer room. And then she ran. Her fellow Talons were already retreating to a safe distance, so it was just her and the Twi’lek shock trooper sprinting to catch up, hoping that they would be able to outrun the imminent explosion--or the Sith, for that matter.

[Johanna Bryce]

As sage wisdom passed down throughout the generations in any competent military unit admonished, a running demolitions officer outranked everyone. At that moment, the demolitions expert in Bryce’s section was raving to get back, further, no further than that it’s going to blow in only a few seconds. Even half-deaf, the shock trooper could hear the gravelly voice of the Mon Calamari and she sprinted in the wake of her fellow Talons. Already partially deaf to the lower register of the audible range, she felt the explosion that tore a breach in the hull of the Golan more than she heard it, for artificial gravity failed for a half-second and the next step launched her into open air.

 

The shock trooper went sailing through the air on her next step, only to land on her face and skid to a halt at the sternguard of her section once gravity reasserted itself. Lighting was switching between the white overhead panels and the emergency glowpanels on the floor seemingly at random, and the dull hum of electronicas had become disconcertingly silent. “Fleets pulling out!” Bryce shouted to her squad. “Done all we can, back to the transports!”

 

The withdrawal was slow--twice, Bryce’s section encountered patches of corridors where artificial gravity had failed and the shock troopers had no choice but to float towards their transports. They returned to the hangar to find it in ruins, bodies and fueling hoses and wreckage strewn about the deckplates. The emergency shutters had also closed; the magcon field had failed and every piece of debris had rushed towards the void of space until the shutters had sealed the hangar against vacuum. Johanna jogged towards her transport, making a mental count of her soldiers and fretting until her noncoms piped in with the reassuring signal of “all accounted for.”

 

“Finally! Seal her up and let’s blast out of here!” Johanna called to the pilot of her section’s LAATi. The cabin doors swinging shut, the Talons’ transports yawed around and unleashed the remainder of their rockets into the hangar shutters, blasting a breach large enough for the transports to escape through. Armored bodies and pieces of debris rushed through the gap--unsecured munitions crates skidded along the deckplates and refueling hoses trailed along with the gust of wind. Once the draft had diminished, the four transports eased their way through the breach.

 

The Rebel transports calculated their hyperspace solutions only seconds after their re-entry into the void. Moments later, the survivors of Talon Company had escaped into the relative safety of faster-than-light travel.