Battle of Dathomir (Corruption War)

The Battle of Dathomir was the first major battle in the Corruption War.

Prelude
Several weeks before the battle, the Zann Consortium came into power on Ilum as Tyber Zann united pirate fleets across the galaxy under his command and coalesced them over Ilum. After amassing a modest fleet and setting the Galactic Empire into his crosshairs for destruction, Tyber calculated that he would never be able to take on the ferocious, multiheaded savage beast that was the Empire even with all the pirates and major criminal organizations in the galaxy, and set out to take the Rebel Alliance as his allies.

Tyber's chief lieutenant, Urai Fen, on a brief raid on the Imperial stronghold world of Byss for concussion grenade launchers, came across a set of Imperial data files that detailed information about a seemingly minor Outer Rim world: Dathomir. Urai ignored them, but the computer data piqued Tyber's attention, and Zann realized that with the significant encryption, the files had to contain extremely valuable data. Bribing an Imperial Intelligence computer specialist, Tyber Zann unencrypted the files and was able to discern the presence of the Nightsisters on Dathomir - beautiful female humans all attuned to the Dark Side of the Force. The Emperor himself had been drived off Dathomir by these female witches, and interdicted the planet with an Imperial fleet under the command of Admiral Javar, fearful if they escaped and destroyed his Empire. The awesome, terrifying strength needed to defeat the Emperor, a Sith Lord, astonished Tyber Zann, and he created a devious plan to enlist the help of both the fledgling Rebel Alliance and the Nightsisters. Zann investigated further, and found that hundreds of Nightsisters had been imprisoned within a wide Imperial prison complex, and were being held by Force-negating ysalamiri creatures from Myrkr, rendering their Force abilities useless. The Emperor was attempting to break them and force them to join his cadres of Sith apprentices.

His bribed Imperial Intelligence slicer planted a datafile concerning false information about a universal weakness in the shields of all Imperial Star Destroyers in the primary computer bank for the Dathomir prison. Then, he informed the Rebel Alliance of the sliced datafile, and offered to launch a joint assault with the Rebels to recover the falsified file. The Rebels agreed, and sent a fleet under the command of the au courant Mon Calamari MC80B Star Cruiser Mon Remonda to Dathomir to assault the Imperial world.

Battle
Several hours before the orbital invasion, Tyber Zann inserted several dozen of his Defiler shocktroops onto the planet's surface, posing them as technicians to readjust the Force cages imprisoning the Dathomiri witches. They were able to enter the prison, and then covertly set thorium charges around the prison at critical locations: the autoturret computer controller banks, the security poison gas vents, the stormtrooper armory, and the vehicle detachment fuel tanks. Moments before the joint Zann Consortium/Rebel Alliance fleet reverted from hyperspace, the Defilers detonated the explosive charges, freeing the Nightsisters, who were instilled with a vengeance. Armored as stormtroopers, the Defilers fired upon the Imperial guards, wreaking operational havoc throughout the legitimate stormtrooper ranks. Word swiftly reached Admiral Javal in his command ship, the Imperial I-class Star Destroyer Darkfire. The orbiting fleet and the planetary stormtrooper and vehicular corps were in complete disarray, and Javal panicked, sending an Imperial Star Destroyer, the Night Wolf, to hold position above the prison and bombard it into scrap if the riot broke through the Imperial guard lines.

The unprepared Imperial fleet came under a swift and startling attack from the thirteen warships, which were under Tyber Zann's direct command from Zann's flagship, the Merciless. The two Aggressor-class destroyers, the Merciless and the Disruptor V, opened fire together on the third Imperial Star Destroyer, annihilating it and damaging two nearby Strike-class medium cruisers. The situation fell even deeper under the talons of chaos, and this manifested in a tremendous amount of Imperial communications traffic. In the midst of the turmoil, however, a gauntlet of two Dreadnaughts and four Strike cruisers held their ground against the advancing assault fleet. As the Imperials sloppily opened up a salvo of weapons fire, Tyber Zann ordered a coordinated assault on the enemy warships, one at a time. The Mon Remonda mauled a Dreadnaught, and two Corellian gunships swiftly assailed its flanks, utterly destroying it. The MC30c frigates made the second Dreadnaught their objective, penetrating its shields with the joint warheads of ninety proton torpedoes, overloading them, and then ravaging the ship. As the Aggressor and Vengeance classifications of warships destroyed a Strike cruiser, however, the Imperials rallied. Jamal fired the Darkfire's experimental proton beamer cannon, blowing apart an MC30c frigate's shield generators from the overload factor. As it retreated, a TIE bomber unit slipped under the Rebel X-wing interceptor screen with the assistance of several elite squadrons of TIE interceptors and cracked the frigate in half. As Tyber Zann's fleet took down a third Dreadnaught, the TIE bombers, along with a out-of-position Strike Cruiser, managed to impact a Corellian gunship's concussion missile magazines, spectacularily detonating the warship.