Chapter Sixty Five

Quinlan and his force of starfighters came out of hyperspace, racing deeper into the targeted system as their scanners scanned the region before them. It was a small system as they had expected, dominated by a brown dwarf star as Master Fay had been able to sense through her force meditation. That woman's ability is uncanny. I wonder how many other Jedi could've discerned the amount of detail she was able to get with the Veil of the Dark Side pressing in on us as it is. That answer would be not many, Quinlan thought, feeling despondent for a moment.

Looking down at his sensors, he saw what he had expected to see, again thanks to Master Fay. At least one large space station orbited around a small planetoid, the only other solar body in the system. There weren't even asteroids, barring a few scattered rocks in the outskirts of the system, which they had already flown past. It was more of a moon than a planet really, with two large bio-domes on the surface directly abutting each other.

"Astromech droid, what can you tell me about that space station?" Quinlan asked.

The beeps and woops of the reply of course meant nothing to Quinlan, but one of the instruments in the cockpit was a translation device, which translated the astromech's noises into words on a screen. The gist of it was that the droid couldn't tell him anything about the space station, since it was not matching up to any known stations, though there were bits and pieces of it that did.

"Why am I not surprised?" Quinlan said, shaking his head. In the Outer and even in the Mid Rim, that kind of construction was all too common. It wasn't safe, and it would never be as nice, as clean, or as safe (which in Quinlan's opinion bore repeating, given space and all the myriad ways it could kill you) as a purpose built space station would be, but it would be cheap, which unfortunately was all too important to most star systems out here.

The astromech's continued beeping brought Quinlan out of his musings about economics and need versus safety. By this point the defenders of the system were aware of them and had already formed up their defenses in preparation. The numbers were coming in as he looked at his sensors. Ten Corvettes or, as Quinlan knew them to be, refitted small freighters; two frigates, again simply refitted medium-sized freighters; three squadrons of mixed starfighter types; and a dreadnought.

This last was a very unwelcome surprise. It was an old-style dreadnought, but it was the only made for military action ship in the system, and it didn't look as if it had been modified all that much. "Four heavy turbolasers, heavy shielding, sixteen quad lasers, four tractor beams," Quinlan mused. "That could be a challenge."

The opposing fleet had come out to meet the attackers even as the Jedi contingent's starfighters began to turn away, not making to jump out right away, which should have made the defenders think. It didn't. Instead the seeming sign that the attackers were leery of combat seemed to have lulled the defenders into a false sense of security. After all, they had three squadrons of mixed starfighters and thirteen capital ships against two squadrons of starfighters. They must've thought that their birthdays had come early.

Moments later, however, Quinlan felt the faint touch of Master Fay, controlling the gestalt between her and the other Jedi in the task force on his mind. A moment later he smiled grimly as an idea of how to take care of the dreadnought occurred to him. "All starfighter pilots connect your missile systems to mine. Five seconds from mark, instigate plan turnabout… Mark!"

With that Quinlan gunned his starfighter's engines, streaking forward faster than his fellows, who had noticeably slowed their headlong charge into the system as their sensors picked up the defenders ,as if they were now second-guessing themselves, unsure what to do.

It was a little known fact that proton and concussion missiles had about half again the controlled flight range of a starfighter's lock-on systems. You could also connect various starfighter computer systems together into a limited datanet. For short amounts of time anyway. After all, a datanet like that wouldn't help starfighters while they were in dogfights where individual skill and dexterity as well as training with your partners mattered far more than whether your computers were speaking together correctly and keeping track of everything. But at range, that was a different story.

Turbolaser and quad-laser blasts began to pepper space all around Quinlan as his starfighter ducked and dodged with his Force-given preternatural reflexes, zooming forward as the two squadrons with him broke, streaking away and to the sides of the incoming defenders. The defenders broke in turn, the fighter squadrons breaking up into groups of four or five racing after each of his starfighters as the capital ships slowed, lobbing fire almost lazily towards the one starfighter still streaking towards them.

A moment later Quinlan felt a shiver of the Force, the faint touch of Master Fay and Master Dooku's minds on his suddenly becoming far more present. At the same exact second the rest of the attacking force suddenly came out of hyperspace.

The effect was immediate. The cruisers began to open fire on their opposite numbers; the corvettes and frigates began to pound on one another. But the speed of the incoming forces was telling, forcing much of the defenders' fire to miss while the attackers had the advantage of a few seconds surprise to move through their enemy's formation, spinning around before the attackers could recover from their shock. The dreadnought, however, took their best attacks and simply fired back calmly, not even trying to dodge, trusting in its powerful shields and armor.

While the capital ships dueled, the incoming starfighters pounced on their opposite numbers, coming out as they did in groups, several flights breaking up and turning to hunt down the heretofore confident pirate starfighters, who were caught utterly flatfooted with most of them too far away to aid one another. They had no chance to reform into their squadrons as their original prey turned on them, catching the slaving scum between two firing zones. One of the new starfighter squadrons stayed together, attacking the two medium sized, refitted freighters. One of these freighters was already sitting listless in space, its side blown out from some exterior explosion.

As he was wondering what had happened there Quinlan's systems finally locked onto the dreadnought he was still racing toward. "All ships of Task Force One, fire torpedoes!"

Behind him his starfighter pilots all let loose of fusillade of torpedoes. They were locked onto his, as if his torpedoes were tracers acting to guide them in. They did, though, come in from a wildly scattered arc, since they had not reformed yet, with each wing-pair firing from a different point in the somewhat sprawling battlefield.

Many of the torpedoes didn't even follow their predetermined lock on, instead locking onto enemy ships all around them. Yet most followed their pilots' plans, smashing into the target from all sides, not as an unstoppable blow as Quinlan had hoped, but as a wave. The dreadnought's shields rippled and died in segments, then the last few torpedoes hit, smashing guns flat or blasting its armor to pieces.

The cruisers immediately took advantage of this, moving in a line over the most wounded side the dreadnought and pouring fire in. the dreadnaught fought back, and more than one of the cruisers' shields died, damage beginning to accumulate. It also rolled, but the cruisers moved with it as fast as they could, continuing to hammer the damaged sides of the ship.

Eventually the dreadnought's shields failed utterly on that side, and soon after it lost the weapons systems facing its enemies. A second later its engines shattered, turning a barrel roll into an uncontrolled twist, and Quinlan winced. That had all the signs of the ship's internal gravity machine going, and while the ship wasn't going fast enough to make that immediately fatal, it certainly wouldn't be pleasant for the individuals aboard. A second later, the ship's generator exploded under either the strain of combat or accumulated damage, shattering the entire ship into four pieces.

Quinlan looked around, somewhat astonished as he realized how complete and how quick the destruction of the defenders had been. Surprise really counts for that much in naval battles? He had not been involved in any kind of naval battle before this. The nearest experience he could compare it to was a dogfight he'd had with a few pirate ships as a padawan. This had been something else altogether.

In fact the cause of the attackers demise was only partially surprise. The Corvettes and makeshift frigates simply didn't have the defenses they should have had. Like most pirates this group had simply added as many weapons systems as they could to their ships rather than weapons and shields in equal measure. It had come back to haunt them now, making them unable to match ships that, at least for the dreadnaught and "light cruisers," they should have been able to overwhelm.

At the moment, however, Quinlan had no way of knowing that. More to the point besides a few starfighters wildly evading their fellow starfighters, the defenders' mobile fleet had now been dealt with. That left the star fortress in orbit, and whatever weapons the base below could bring to bear on orbital targets for them to deal with.

However Quinlan's innovation had shown them the way forward. After informing Master Dooku of what he had done, the light cruisers of the Republic Navy moved in, taking long-range fire from the fortress as a few starfighters of the Serenno star force went with them, having proved slightly better in computer simulations in picking off concussion missiles, though they didn't have to do that often. Concussion missiles and proton torpedoes were expensive, and were almost impossible to get in large quantities on the black market. Still, the long range turbolaser fire was bad enough, and again the cruisers' shields began to fall, failing in some places as damage added up.

While they took fire from the star fortress, the Republic's sensors reached out, discovering everything they could about the space fortress. Then with all the starfighter computer systems locked to their own, they fired. These Consular class ships didn't actually have any homing weapons, but they had the targeting computers for them, and the starfighter missiles once again lashed out.

It took two volleys from all the attackers to get through the star fortress's shields and batter its defenses down. Whoever had designed the space fortresses had done a much more thorough job than the pirates had on their actual ships. Their systems were better too, killing many of the proton torpedoes before they could enter sprint range. But it wasn't enough to halt the weight of the torpedoes.

At the same time that the space battle entered its second phase, the rest of the Jedi had turned their attention to the rest of the operation. Quinlan's starfighter again raced forward, joining the dozen troop transports, while on board one of them, Master Fay went to work.