Star Wars: Operations/Chapter 1

Star Wars: Operations

Chapter 1

40 ABY, 4 years after the Swarm War PRESCIENCE-CLASS PROWLER VOYAGER 63 LIGHT-YEARS FROM KUAT SYSTEM, DEEP SPACE

The stirring of Croneau radiation was sufficient to bring the combat alert status aboard the Galactic Alliance Fleet Intelligence Prowler Voyager to Combat Red. It was simply a trickle, a few stray strands of subatomic particles, but with Admiral Bwu’atu, Commander of the Fifth Fleet, observing your starship and its activities, every minor alert was sufficient to raise the alert status, and over the last four hours that the Voyager had been on-station, Captain Lerand and his crew had 13 insignificant anomalies, 13 false alert level raisings, and 13 bouts of extreme stress for the crew.

The fourteenth anomaly would turn out to be the jackpot. Lieutenant Annara of Sensor Ops was the first to detect the minor waveform of Croneau radiation, so miniscule to be disregarded, but when she, on a jolt of supernatural intuition, amped up the amplitude of the Croneau signal, realized that it was the pre-transit waveform of incoming starships from hyperspace.

“Captain! Contacts inbound from vector oh-five-nine!”

Lerand took a glimpse at what Annara’s sensors had recorded: the jagged, thick fluxes of somewhere between eight and twenty starships, depending on their hyperdrives, astrological natural error, and instrumentation error. The waveforms were unmistakable: this was not a ruse or some anomaly. “Voyager, this is Lerand! All hands to battle stations! Contacts inbound.” A momentary pause. “This is not a drill!”

A crackle of static electricity, and a HoloNet tight-beam communications line opened from the Pax Galactica, the Imperial-class Star Destroyer that was the flagship of the Galactic Alliance Fifth Fleet and the personal command ship of Admiral Bwu’atu His Holiness. Quantum loops twitched, writhed under the yoke of radiation emanating from the Pax Galactica, and converged and diverged appropriately for the following words to growl stentorianally, “Major Antz. Please hold for the Admiral.”

The crew subconsciously flinched, for the reign of Admiral Bwu’atu over his subordinates was renowned for its unfailing cruelty. Not exactly cruel by definition, but simply that since none of his subordinates were tactical prodigies like the Bothan Admiral himself, that the crewers of the Fifth Fleet were treated like illiterate derogates. “Voyager, this is the Admiral. Your AI signaled contacts from hyperspace.”

In the background of the incoming transmission, there were crackles that resolved themselves to be a rising cadence of alarm klaxons in the Tactical Center of the Pax Galactica. The prowlers attached to the Fifth Fleet for OPERATION: Roundhouse were picking up contacts.

As the Admiral’s voice trailed off, the TAC screen mounted over the bridge began to stitch contacts. Multiple 2-dimensional lasers drew the tactical screen’s images, and further lasers projected 3D holograms over the command plot. The lines were angular, in their visage, angle, and arrangement, betraying their Imperial origins.

Without further ado, providing no time for any drama or climax like seen in the phony civilian military holovids, the computer wrote the following: 16 INBOUND CONTACTS FROM VECTOR 059, RECORDED FROM SENSOR ARRAY OPS C3. IFF WAVEFORM IDENTIFIED AS KUAT. CONTACT ANALYSIS: 1 IMPERIAL-CLASS STAR DESTROYER, 3 LANCER-CLASS FRIGATES, 12 TARTAN-CLASS PATROL CRUISERS.

Scarce whispers occupied the command deck of the diminutive 250-meter stealth electronic intelligence (ELINT)-gathering starship as Bwu’atu demanded, “Prowlers, call in! What’s the news at the perimeter fleet?”

His snarls, which would soon devolve to diatribes, were punctuated as the sensor main computer beeped nonchalantly. Captain Lerand felt a slender blade of carbonite eviscerate his abdomen, knowing all too well the military doctrine of bringing the heaviest starship last, for protective purposes behind a screen of lighter ships, and for psychologically intimidating ones. The jagged edge serrated through his skin, and his resolve faltered, for an SSD would undoubtedly find the Galactic Alliance spy ship crouching on its flanks and utterly annihilate it within a fraction of a second, an apocalyptic salvo of slurrying turbolasers, ion cannons, missiles…for once, he was disproved. The prowler commander felt the blade being whisked away from his bloodied intestines as Sensor Array Ops C3 painted the last contact: displaced, odd. A partially finished Interdictor-class Heavy Cruiser, hanging at the rear, lagging behind, four gravity well generators with scaffolding over them.

Without hesitation or Lerand’s commands, the resident Analysis Officer of the Voyager, a stout Bith from Clakdor VII with a translator affixed to aid his heavily misweighted accent, began to speak. His eyes were keen, quick to identify the trespassers of the Fifth Fleet’s second Kuat-bound detachment’s extreme outer perimeter, for that was his purpose for birth. There were no less than twenty-six Imperial-class Star Destroyers unaccounted for by the Fifth Fleet’s first Kuat-bound detachment, which were making a nonviolent flyby across Kuat and her shipyards. The balance were fully constructed, with a few of the star-faring behemoths partially built. Fortunately, the Galactic Alliance had kept a tally of Kuat’s Star Destroyers: all of them. Even though it was in its strictest sense lawful by the Constitution, Fleet Intelligence spying on its member worlds, it was highly discouraged, which was why these recon passes had been conducted by StealthX starfighters on…loan from the Jedi Order. With the supernatural, omniscient Jedi in their cockpits, they had a nil chance of detection.

The R7 astromech units of the StealthXs had taken tens of thousands of electronic pictures from various angles of the Imperial-class Star Destroyers. These photographs were correlated together to form a nearly-perfect 3D wireframe of each ISD, and each structural flaw, no matter how slight, was noted, for this was how the Star Destroyers could be positively identified. IFF tags could be maliciously switched, but not the superstructure of an ISD.

Bith were renowned for their fine eye, inexplicably useful for micro-assembling of microcircuits, and for their technical skills, which had vested Clakdor VII with such profuse defense and civilian contracts for various electronics. Noting a slight misplacement of the numbers two and three dual heavy turbolaser turrets of the inbound Imperial-class Star Destroyer, and a blemish on the right shield projector dome mounted over the bridge, he found the identity of the starship to be the newly-produced Harakeen. The Interdictor Cruiser could be none other than the Rapacious, from the signs of its construction. The Analysis Officer relayed his confirmation of the two main capital ships to Lerand, who communicated as such to Bwu’atu.

A brief moment later, the HoloNet COM channel collapsed, leaving the Voyager to drift in interstellar space, seventeen potentially hostile warships hanging there along with the prowler.

IMPERIAL-CLASS STAR DESTROYER REPUBLICA RASAPAN, HIGH ORBIT, KUAT SYSTEM

A dozen heavy warships of the Galactic Alliance Fifth Fleet held their ground in a drifting phalanx, swinging by Rasapan, a gas giant of the Kuat System, after their flyby past Kuat, using the planet’s mass as a slingshot. Rather, that was the official reason. The unofficial reason, of course, was to provide a distraction for the two dozen Jedi-manned StealthXs scouring the potentially rebellious Kuat System. The formation of the heavy capital squadron was misleading: it was a hybrid of open and closed, neither inviting an attack or threatening one. However, the Kuati had oriented their jammer dishes towards the sky when the heavy squadron had looped around Kuat and the shipyards: expected. What the sensors of the Republica and its sister warships recorded were gibberish: pure fiction invited by the Kuati to conceal their potentially…hazardous motives. Therefore, the StealthXs had been utilized to map the military situation of the Kuati after the squadron had passed and the jammer dishes deactivated.

The recon results were tight-beamed to the Imperial I-class Star Destroyer Borleias, not to be ambiguated with the magnetic effect, but the planet. Actually, to be extremely precise, the Borleias wasn’t an original Mark I design, but rather, a variant. Like the Star Destroyers Elegos A’Kla and Mon Mothma, its foundation was built from the Imperial I-class Star Destroyers, but enhanced technology had allowed the Galactic Alliance to installed secreted, low-profile gravity well generators within the Borleias, giving it interdiction capability, but externally, appearing as a mill-‘o-the-run Mark I Imperial Star Destroyer. Useful against smugglers and military adversaries alike, as without an IFF tag identification and prior knowledge that the Borleias was an Interdictor-variant Mark I ISD, they would have no idea that any escape to hyperspace would be futile.

In constrast, the Republica was not outstanding in any fashion, just a Mark I ISD that’d seen some skirmishing in mopping up Yuuzhan Vong dissidents that didn’t surrender after the final Battle of Coruscant. As the Republica’s sensors found no trace of a Kuat Drive Yards (KDY) facility shrouded in the titanic hydrogen gales of Rasapan, Captain Rathran signaled, “No trace of the KDY here, Admiral. Calling in the StealthXs…”

MILITARY COMMAND CENTER “SITE-H” CORUSCANT, CORUSCANT SYSTEM

General Togg, the mouthpiece for Fleet Intelligence’s requests (read: directives) for the Chief-of-State of the Galactic Alliance, broadly gestured at the various prowler reports playing across the massive panoramic widescreens plastered across the Situation Room of Site-H, the highest-level command center where the military and political chiefs convened in times of crisis on Coruscant.

“Thirteen of the fifteen prowlers deployed on the fringes of the main contingent of the Fifth Fleet have reported Kuati contacts: all Imperial-type warships armed for battle. All twenty-six Imperial Star Destroyers have been accounted for in these scattered Kuati taskforces. They’re all reorienting for a behind strike on the main Fifth Fleet group that’s out-system. It’s an act of war, gentlemen. We have approximately forty seconds before the Kuati ambush groups make the jump.”

Chief-of-State Cal Omas, his cheekbones prominent and cheeks sullen and sunken from the last several weeks, of which one where a Kuati assassin had injected him with a potent cyanide derivative that had nearly killed him, had lost all humane motives to investigate the Kuati taskforces further.

His thoughts were further enzymatically accelerated as a picket commander of the main Fifth Fleet out-system group reported the arrival of two Kuati-controlled ELINT prowlers. There was no turmoil. Without formality or pause, he pivoted on his reclining gel chair, uneyeing the synth-whiskey in the chrome tumbler on the table before him, bringing the weathered Bothan Admiral of the Fifth Fleet into his sight, thousands of light-years distant, yet, only a few meters away from his face.

“Admiral Bwa’atu, begin OPERATION: Adamant.”

The admiral, his heart racing upon the adrenaline of the scene, snapped off swift orders to his executive and tactical staff, and then reciprocated his Chief-of-State. “Yes, sir. Bwu’atu, Nek, Fifth Fleet commander, signing off.”

RESIDENTIAL ZONE 86-IB, CARNATION GARDENS 3 CORUSCANT, CORUSCANT SYSTEM

The Galactic Alliance Guard entrance was swift enough to deter and dislodge onlookers: potential spies to confirm the deed had been done, perhaps. That was why one DD-45 Deterrent-class combat lander on-loan from the Galactic Alliance Army deployed its troops over the crime sites, while no less than three further landers landed on equidistant points on an imaginary circle from the central lander: cordoning the site off and choking possible avenues of exit for civilian onlookers that had witnessed the brutality within the perimeter.

Multiple loudspeakers activated, hailing in a cacophony for the civilians to desist and surrender in the galaxy’s dozen most common languages, and when the hundreds of assorted aliens broke, bodies alight with treacherously dismaying fear about their whereabouts by nightfall if they were captured by the government officials, the GAG on-site commander, Colonel Burseg, gave the order to reinforce the perimeter. Vapor grenades sprang in random trajectories from hastily-installed launchers from the loaned combat landers, and roiling waves of asphyxiating, vaporized irritant gases subdued the masses. Gatling projectile cannons whirred, rotary barrels accelerating stun pellets, lewdly spraying slivers of soporific-coated metal, to force the civilians into submission, indiscriminately pummeling the gagging figures through the rising mist.

As the vapor dissipated, chemical bonds fracturing and molecules unraveling and the citizens beginning to gain senses in their extremities, two further GAG landers along with a fully-equipped field medical gunship descended to arrest the citizens. Such an act had been lawfully approved under the Amendments for Enhanced Counterintelligence Operations (AECO) of the Galactic Alliance Constitution as of seventeen hours ago.

As over a company of well-armed GAG stormtroopers bearing EK-6M autorifles, hybrids of suppressed blaster rifle/light repeaters, fired specially-fitted high-tension hypodermic syringes from the barrels of their weapons at the cowering, battered, bruised, unconscious aliens, the impacts and the resultant injection of fluids plunging them into deep comas for...processing at the local GAG HQ, Burseg daintily stepped off of the command lander, appearing to be insouciantly waltzing with his entourage of GAG troops.

Yet, the appalling, ghastly macabre before the GAG colonel was sufficient to terminate his carefree demeanor. The satellite photos overhead had done no justice to the senseless of the crime, and fear materializing within him, the high-handed serpent, its elongated, poison-wrought fangs depressing into his heart, the blood secreting outwards as his tissues were sheared and all strength and valorousness drained out from his body, every vessel vasodilating...

Two butchered Jedi Knights laid before him, in vast pools of uncoagulated blood. No, that was insufficient to describe this abominable murder. Words can not carry the sheer despair and helplessness raging within him. One Jedi had most of his/her (an androgynous corpse, for so much had been ravaged) upper and lower chest completely expulsed by some sort of wide-barrel explosive launcher. The limbs were sagging at their joints, for the connective tissue was so strained there. The Ithorian head had been brutalized as well, the hindbrain excised and fresh blood and cerebrospinal fluid welling from that wound, and the eyes both crushed within their sockets. The Cerean had most of his face blasted off, an indescribably horrid sight. It wasn’t just blasted...for the violences that had to be inflicted upon that defender of the peace had to be so abberantly exorbitant that the word blasted did not fit. Furthermore, both legs had been severed at the mid-thighs, the muscle fibers in the upper portion tensed, contracted, no mind to tell them to release their hold. The lower thighs, claves, and feet were not visible anywhere within the public park.

The gentleness of the swaying cloned trees seemed harsh, the winds artificial (which they were), as if some violent spirit had seized them, commanding them to move ominously on the deployed GAG companies that were barricading the area.

Vomitus accumulated in the base of Colonel Burseg’s stomach, its lethal lichen threatening to expulse itself downwards through his pyloric sphincter and into his intestines, for the sight was so revolting. As reverse peristalsis drove the partially dissolved bolus upwards and instinct, a sudden mad demon, compelled him to open his helmet’s visor release, the mass of hydrochloric acid-stained food laid on the periphery of one of the blood bathes. The blood and acid intermingled briefly, and Burseg turned away, unwilling to face further the horrors.

“Captain Ala’ka, signal Forensics and tell them to get a team down right away. Major Vesan, tell State to ensure that the media doesn’t get within five kilometers of this thing and to give authorization to suspend all airborne flights over this area.”

Two whispered, pallid half-affirmatives, volume toned down from the revulsion within the GAG officers, answered him, and Burseg rose his eyes to the sky, where one of the GAG landers was levitating, and he reckoned that the gentle plumes of pressurized steam hanging the Deterrent-class lander in the sky were never before so majestic.

GALACTIC ALLIANCE HOLONET TRANSMISSION, 759-538-EHG BRAVO SECRET CLASSIFIED

START TRANSMISSION: // Galactic Alliance Guard Rattatak Contingent II Corps Encryption Keyword: ..........

To: Luke Skywalker, Extraordinary Plenipotentiary Counselor to the Chief-of-State, Grand Master of the Jedi Order

Subject: Rattatak Investigation Results (detailed files attached), After Action Report

After five days of investigation, the male Zabrak Jedi Knight Arr-Ethkan Jae could not be found after the subject under investigation filed his 12-hour report to the Jedi Temple. His last known position was the Oto Gunga Communications Café in Kayy City. GAG Section Four deployed I, II, and III Corps to find the subject, but intensive investigation could not reveal his current whereabouts.

CONCLUSION: Jae, Arr-Ethkan, CURRENT STATUS: Missing in Action

ATTACHMENTS: 31 gigabytes, contents classified

END TRANSMISSION: //

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