Chapter 106

Jedi general Lena Trava fiddled uncomfortably with her lightsabre as she watched the frantic preparations in the hangar bay around her.

The republic light cruiser 'Gremlin' that she had been given command of didn't have a vast hangar bay filled with starfighters and transports like the ones on the massive venator class star destroyers.

And it didn't have nearly ten thousand crew members to keep it running as well as thousands of troops to deploy against any threat.

The Gremlin had barely over one hundred crew members including officers, enlisted crew members and pilots, and eighty troopers able to be deployed to a planets surface, but whose primary role was the security of the ship.

But apart from Lena the entire crew was made up of clones which meant that not only were they incredibly skilled at the roles they were trained for, but a lot of the crew were trained and able to fight like the troopers who were currently racing between the five LAAT/is arranged in the hangar bay.

The gremlin had eight LAAT/is in total, but captain Flowers had told Lena that deploying them all to the surface of Tula to save the clones fighting there would be unwise as if they were all shot down the ship would have no way of retrieving the troops on the ground.

Similarly, only fifty of the ships eighty troopers were being deployed to the surface with the rest being held in reserve on the ship.

Lena had been happy to let captain Flowers come up with the plan for the rescue mission due to the fact that he seemed to have a much higher ability in planning than her, but she had insisted on accompanying the clones to the surface.

Not because she thought that she would make all that much of a difference in combat, but because although she might not be as skilled as others her best ability was still her force healing and she knew there were bound to be wounded in need of help.

"Ten minutes till we exit hyperspace general," Lena turned as captain Flowers jogged towards her wearing the armour of a clone trooper captain.

The naval officer had tried to talk Lena out of accompanying the clones to the surface but when his attempts proved hopeless, he decided that he would come along as well to try and keep her safe.

"Good… are your men ready?" She asked as she glanced around the hangar.

"Yes ma'am, Sand-bat squadron will clear the way and then the gunships will secure the battlefield and retrieve any survivors." Flowers reported as he watched a group of pilots running towards five waiting Y-wing bombers.

"And the clones on Tula?" Lena asked, and Flowers shrugged noncommittally.

"We won't be able to receive any updates from them till we drop out of hyperspace, if they are still transmitting, we'll find out how bad the situation once we are on route to the surface." Flowers said.

-

"Sir! Incoming!" Spoon heard the shout and through himself sideways as a missile slammed into the dirt nearby.

The missile detonated, relatively, harmlessly as it sent dirt and shrapnel pinging off Spoon's armour.

He rose to one knee and raised his blaster rifle to his shoulder before firing a burst at a battle droid with a still smoking rocket launcher raised to its shoulder.

The blaster bolts ripped through the droid, sending its now depowered body sliding backwards down the slope of the valley.

Spoon immediately started firing at the other droids charging towards him and his surviving brothers. Not that there were many of them left.

He had been a bit busy dealing with the constant separatist assault to do a proper head count, but he could tell that there were barely over fifty clones still breathing on Tula, and more than half of them were bleeding out in their makeshift medical centre.

"Lieutenant! We're completely out of medical supplies, if we don't get help soon the wounded are going to start dying." A stressed but firm voice said from beside Spoon, and he turned to see Chalky, one of the surviving clone medics.

"Still no word from command, we're just going to have to hold out for as long as we can." Spoon told the medic who just gave him a flat look.

They all knew that medical supplies weren't the only thing running low. Blasters might be able to fire a lot more shots than slug throwers before they needed to be reloaded, but they still needed charge packs to function. And they were running dangerously low on them.

Chalky's white armour was stained red up to the elbows with the blood of his injured brothers and there was a bloody bandage wrapped around his left bicep.

Like most of the surviving troopers the medic had clearly picked up an injury somewhere during the battle, but he obviously wasn't very bothered by it.

Before Chalky could respond a group of super battle droids broke from the ranks of their lesser droid comrades and charged straight towards Spoon and chalky.

Spoon fired his blaster rifle on full auto at the super battle droids, cutting down three of them before it finally ran out of charge.

He swung the un-powered blaster at the closest super battle droid like a club, knocking it down to one knee, before smoothly drawing one of his blaster pistols with his right hand and firing repeatedly into the damaged droid.

Another droid rushed him from behind and he unsheathed a vibro-knife and slashed it across the chest, cutting all the way to its power core then destroying it with his blaster pistol.

Spoon then tried to turn towards another of the super battle droids when he felt a searing pain in his left shoulder as a blaster bolt ripped through it, forcing him to drop his vibro-knife in pain.

A super battle droid lumbered towards Spoon, and he raised his un-injured arm and fired his blaster, but the large, armoured droid shrugged off the blaster bolts before swinging a massive metal arm into the ARC trooper's side.

Spoon grunted as he was thrown backwards, and judging from the pain in his side he was pretty sure he had broken a few of his ribs.

He looked up through the pain to see the barrels of the twin blasters built into the super battle droids arm pointed straight at his visor.

Spoon's short life flashed before his eyes and he waited for the flash that would signal his death, but instead the battle droid went staggering back as a white armoured medic slammed into it.

Chalky rode the super battle droid to the floor before he jammed his DC-15s up against the droid's head and firing into it until it stopped moving.

"Charge! Form up on the lieutenant!" A voice shouted and Spoon saw Spanners charge past him before bisecting a battle droid with a powerful swing of an entrenching tool.

Spoon forced himself to his feet and raised his blaster as the surviving clones charged forwards to engage the droids in hand-to-hand combat.

-

"You good to go Halfy," Noise asked as his fingers danced over the controls in front of him, preforming final flight checks.

"All systems are go, lets do this thing!" Half-life, Noise's gunner said with a laugh from behind him.

Noise grinned in anticipation as his BTL-B Y-wing bomber indicated it was fully operational.

"Okay sand-bats, let's go," The voice of Noises squadron leader sounded over the comm and the line of Y-wings ahead of him began to take off.

The five bombers of Sand-bat squadron, named after the small venomous bats native to Tatooine, and their pilots had been assigned to the Gremlin after the losses they had taken in the fighting over geonosis.

Normally starfighter squadrons contained around twenty starfighters, which the gremlin wouldn't have been able to support, which was why the republic had assigned the undermanned squadron to the light cruiser rather than replace their losses.

"Here we go again brothers, let the violence commence," Boom-boom, Noise's wingman, said happily as he throttled his ship forwards and then it was just Noise's ship left in the hangar.

Noise accelerated after the rest of his squadron and soon joined them in the endless void of space as they began racing towards the planet bellow.

"We all know the plan, so I'll make this brief." Sand-Bat leader said firmly, "our brothers on the planet's surface slugging it out with a droid army a hundred times their size, lets change those odds".

"Hell yeah! Let's blow stuff up!" Boom-boom cheered, and Noise smiled as his wingman proved once again why he had earned that nickname.

Noise was just as happy to be flying this mission though, the prospect of dropping heavy ordinance on the enemy and saving his brothers was too good not to be excited about.

Sand-bat squadron flew in a v formation away from the light cruiser, with sand-bat leader in the lead position and Noise and Boom-boom bringing up the rear, and soon they were diving through Tula's upper atmosphere.

Noise knew that the five LAAT/is would now be lifting off from the Gremlin's hangar deck, but his focus was reaching the battlefield as soon as possible and dropping enough ordinance to destroy as many separatists as possible.

"Incoming fighters," Sand-bat 2, Hutch, reported calmly even as three red dots appeared on Noise's own sensor display.

"They're moving to intercept, and are almost on a collision course," Boom-boom observed without emotion.

"Understood. Increase speed but maintain course. We're not here to deal with enemy fighters, we're here to protect our brothers on the ground." Sand-bat leader said, and Noise followed the rest of his squadron as they accelerated to near their fighter's maximum velocity.

It wasn't long before Noise managed to spot the distant shapes of three separatist vulture droids rapidly growing in size as Sand-bat squadron accelerated straight towards them.

"Maintain course, only fire if the clankers are directly in front of you otherwise just ignore them. One way or the other they'll get out of the way," Sand-bat leader said as the danger of one of them colliding with a vulture droid started to increase.

Noise took a moment to appreciate the irony that they were playing chicken with the vulture droids, and relying on the fact that the droids unfeeling mechanical processors had a higher sense of self preservation than the living clone pilots who were about to willingly charge straight towards them, before the five republic bombers closed with the three separatist fighters.

Two of the vulture droids broke off and tried to swerve out of the way of the clones before they collided with them, one barely made it in time and passed so close to Noise's ship that he was worried that it might have scratched his bomber's paint job.

But the third stayed on its course heading straight towards Sand-bat leader, until it was vaporised by a burst from his crafts twin forward mounted laser cannons.

"Halfy there's one about to pass by you," Noise called to his gunner as the vulture droid that had barely missed them started to appear in Half-life's sights.

"I see him," the gunner muttered, and a second later Noise heard the sound of Half-life's twin ion cannon firing followed by a short whoop of triumph and the load bang of an in-atmosphere explosion as the vulture droid erupted into flames.

The final droid fighter had to turn, which bleed off a lot of its speed, and soon it was racing to thy and catch back up with the speeding republic bombers.

But despite their head start the fighter had a much higher top speed than the bombers and soon Boom-boom's gunner was having to fire furiously to try and keep it at bay.

"He's on my six, I'm taking fire," Boom-boom said, a note of panic creeping into his voice as red bolts of energy began flying past him.

"Maintain course, we're almost there." Sand-bat leader ordered, "I've made contact with one of the troops on the ground. They are going to deploy green smoke on their position, and we're authorised to fire danger close and destroy everything beyond the smoke."

The canyon where their brothers were fighting was soon visible bellow them, along with two plumes of green smoke drifting slowly upwards.

The five bombers continued nose diving straight towards the battlefield, the lone vulture droid trailing just behind them, until they looked like they were going to slam straight into the ground.

"Pull up… now!" Sand-bat leader shouted, and the squadron pulled up sharply on his order.

As the noses of the ships began to raise Noise and the other pilots hit the controls to fire both their laser cannons and their torpedoes, sending lines of destruction rippling through the separatist ranks.

They blitzed over the top of the droid army, dropping proton bombs as they went, and soon the canyon was filled with fire and explosions, reducing the droid army to puddles of slag.

The vulture droid's synthetic mind didn't manage to tell it to pull up in time, and instead of sailing safely over the top of the droids it slammed into the ground, carving a path through the assembled battle droids before it slammed into a hover tank and the ensuing explosion added to the hell that the canyon had become.