4.10

"Captain, the new arrivals are not responding to our hails!" the Doughnut's communications officer shouted a bit more shrilly than an officer of his station and experience really should. Hadn't he accompanied Father in dozens of caravan raids the past few years? In the Force, his faint reddish aura was guttering like a candle in a gale, thoughts shifting frantically from memorized tables of the Doughnut's weapon complement, to the unknown force's number and size of ships, to the shortest path to a hyper-capable life-pod. Apparently, a couple hundred ships in an attack formation aimed at the Doughnut was more than enough to break his resolve.

"Tactical, give me an evaluation of the enemy," Father demanded in the same cold, precise tone he spoke in all ship-handling situations, from simple docking procedures to ordering the destruction of pirate vessels. Except for his focus being divided between the Outbound Flight and our new guests, there was little change in his emotional makeup.

"Y-yes sir," the Tactical officer stammered in reply, then typed several queries into his station's terminal before continuing. "Thirty-two ships of upper heavy cruiser size, unknown configuration. Eighteen ships of cruiser size, unknown configuration. One hundred and fifty-three ships of light cruiser size, partial match to Paskla-class cruisers."

"If I'd wanted the idiotic Anaxes classification of the unknowns, Lieutenant, I'd have asked for it," Father retorted, referring to the eponymous college's classification of ships by length. It had become the Republic's official naval classification system after the Ruusan Reformation, and like many other parts of that treaty it was worth about as much as the paper it had been written on. And the Republic had stopped using paper in official documents some fifteen millennia before said treaty. "Now, give me something actually useful."

"Yes sir!" Half a minute's fiddling with various consoles followed, during which Father had already accessed all pertinent data from his own terminal, and patiently waited for the much younger officer to do the same. The aggressively maneuvering newcomers were still minutes away after all and, as far as I knew, this was the first time the Doughnut's crew participated in actual battles. "Energy readings of the heavier enemies show comparable shield strength to a Nebulon-B escort frigate, with twelve light turbolaser equivalents and fifty point-defense guns identified. The medium-weight ships have the same shield strength, twice the number of point-defense guns, and no long range weapons. The lighter enemy ships have merely a basic particle shield, three light turbolaser-equivalents and twenty point-defense guns." The officer paused, confusion blanketing his Force-aura, and rechecked his readings. "Captain, those numbers make no sense. Even if they were freighters, ships that size should have had stronger shields. And if they are freighters, why are they attacking?"

"That is not the right question." Father studied the main holoscreen where a hundred of the smaller, three-hundred-meter-long ships shaped like flattened spheres were advancing on the Doughnut in a loose concave formation to better surround us and bring all their weapons to bear at the same time. "The right question is whether the data from the long-range sensors can be trusted or our guests, like us, have surprises secreted away behind sensor-blocking covers. "Any ideas?"

Nobody offered any, so I closed my eyes to better reach out to those ships in the Force. Trading physical sight for focus was something I'd have to train myself out of, eventually, but for the time being it was better than scowling while also biting my lower lip; fewer incriminating images of 'teenage cuteness' for Ratty or Aurra to hold against me that way. In the darkness, the Force bridged a void of millions of miles, blue, white, and red radiance making up the infinite web of interconnected life that was the Galaxy and...

PAIN

I found myself lying on the bridge's cold metal floor with no memory of falling and the beginnings of a headache. Nobody had noticed yet; they were all too busy studying the new arrivals through sensors and technical read-outs. Shaking my head to get my annoyingly long hair out of my face, I got up and reached out again, this time slowly. Before getting to those ships there was nothing in the Force except for an ominous sense of unease, the absence of any emotions or glimmers of life alarming by itself. And then, as if an invisible threshold was breached and I was allowed to look beyond...

PAIN

I didn't faint this time, or blank the memory of what I'd sensed. I fell in that gaping maw of agony, terror, hatred, endless torment to the point of insanity like a torch thrown down into some vast, bottomless sinkhole, every inch of that infinite drop accompanied by the screaming of the lost. A million voices long since having screamed themselves hoarse, their only refuge to cry out in their minds for a salvation they'd long since stopped believing would come. An ocean of tears, woe, and despair hammering through my skull like iron nails through a wooden plank.

With a tremendous effort I managed to withdraw before the lament of the damned could completely overwhelm my focus, and lay there behind the captain's chair panting as if I'd run a marathon. Nobody who's ever survived being burned alive was a stranger to pain, much less those who'd gone through the agony of regrowing lost tissue and nerve endings over months of intensive care. Unfortunately, through the Force one could experience both wonders and horrors far beyond what was physically possible, and sensing a million people being tortured at once was among the latter. It was like getting a first-hand look into every single captive in all the concentration camps of the second world war back on Earth, mere images of which could make people lose their lunch. Had the connection lasted for more than a moment I would either join those poor souls in screaming my lungs out... or worse.

"These... are not... warships," I gasped out as soon as I could control the shakes enough to sound coherent. "They... are... slave-carriers. An entire fleet of slavers." Casting out the horror, the echoes of agony I'd received into the Force I held on to my anger. I remembered who the newcomers were now.

"Are you sure?" Father asked, fixing me with a questioning stare as the first hints of anger begun to bubble in his aura. Slavers were the only people worse than pirates in his worldview.

"They are called the Vagaari. One of our Chiss guests told me about them," I lied to cover my foreknowledge before the Trade Federation officers present. "Nomads that raid small colonies with overwhelming force out here in Wild Space, loot everything valuable, and abduct their entire population. They lack advanced shield technology, the Chiss said, and use human shields by literally storing captives in their outer hull. I didn't believe him until I saw that many unshielded assault ships."

"Interesting. We will confirm this... after the battle." Father turned back to the main holoscreen and the quickly approaching enemies showed within. "For now, let us prepare a warm welcome for our new guests."

xxxx xxxx xxxx

​

The closer the Vagaari vessels came, the harder it became to ignore the screams echoing through the Force. Even without specifically reaching out to them, their presence was like some vast shadow getting closer and closer through the void. First, it was like whispers at the very limit of my senses. Then it became like voices lost in the wind, audible but not clear enough to be understood. Now, with the Vagaari assault craft in extreme weapons range, I had to actively avoid listening and even then it pressed against my senses like so much white noise demanding to be heard for all its incomprehensibility, like standing before a tidal wave I knew was coming with my eyes closed.

The Vagaari frigates disgorged fighters as soon as they came within thirty thousand kilometers, ten small craft each to distract us before the heavier but slower ships got into our weapons range. The joke was on them; they had been within range of the Doughnut's magnapulse cannons for five minutes and its lighter, long-range ion cannons for one and a half. We had held our fire on the premise that what the slavers didn't know would hurt them, and to give them more time to split up. The slaver nomads, in their great experience of fighting heavily armed ships, had decided to split up and target the Doughnut and the Outbound Flight both. Perhaps against ships of a tech level similar to their own their little armada would be enough for a quick victory, but facing multiple lighter enemies had been exactly what the Doughnut's armament had been designed for - and the Outbound Flight's Jedi ought to make incredibly accurate gunners against the fighters at least. Unlike their capital ships, those didn't seem to carry slaves in self-contained torture machines as "armor".

A thousand fighters swarmed the Doughnut from all sides to better overwhelm its gunners and exploit any blind angles in its anti-air defenses. Unfortunately for the Vagaari, the Doughnut's computer core was capable of running hundreds of thousands of individual droids in combat situations; a mere thousand fighters would not even warm up its processors - and the thousand anti-air guns on the Doughnut's hull didn't leave any angle uncovered. As their fighters made their approach, the computer assigned ten quad A2-G2 laser cannons to the closest hundred bogeys and fired. Computer targeting might not be as good as Han Solo's or Luke Skywalker's, but the attackers were not as small or maneuverable as Tie fighters either; in five seconds only debris was left of the enemy vanguard.

Fortunately, the Doughnut had particle shields powerful enough to shrug off ramming cruisers. The Vagaari small craft had no shields at all; pelted by debris at their speeds caused more of them to explode, only adding to the losses quickly mounting up from the anti-air defenses. The standard fighter tactic of slowing down relative to a capital ship in order to go through its shields and fire at the hull saw the anti-air defense accuracy skyrocket. Still, hundreds of small craft got through. Their weapons far too feeble to harm the Doughnut itself, they concentrated their fire against individual surface emplacements... and met with a nasty surprise as their fire was stopped cold. The Gungans of Naboo specialized in small-area shields that were compact enough to be portable, but strong enough to fend off light artillery. Father hadn't needed the portable power generators so our agents had only stolen the shield projector tech... then he'd added individual projectors on every gun emplacement, tractor beam, and communications antenna on the Doughnut's surface. Fighter craft that bypassed the main shields would still have to contend with local screens too small for them to fly under... and get slaughtered by close-in anti air fire.

The shadow of torment from the captives on the Vagaari cruisers intensified as those ships came closer, shooting with their light turbolasers. Even if their guns were light, several hundred of them still added up, the main shield being pounded by a couple Star Destroyers' worth of firepower as the fighters fled for their lives. Safe behind their living shields from any captain that would hesitate to fire on thousands upon thousands of hostages, the Vagaari slavers knew they'd eventually tear through our defense. Then the first of the Doughnut's ion cannons fired, revealing to those scum a weapon that didn't have to destroy their ships in order to disable them. Not all of the Doughnut's armament could fire disabling shots, and the magnapulse cannons were far too powerful to be non-lethal against unshielded light frigates, but we could take out their swarm of garbage ships long before they could take out our shield.

"Captain, a transport ship is moving through our defenses," the communications officer called out. "The anti-air can't seem to get a lock on it, it's maneuvering a split second before every shot. And... it has a Republic transponder." I risked a few moments of pounding headache to reach out at the transport with the Force just as they were flying towards an air lock. Over a dozen strong Force-signatures flared through it, none particularly weak but one of them as bright as a small sun.

Apparently the Force thought thighs were going too well for us, because it'd just decided to lead the Jedi to the Doughnut just as we were distracted fighting off most of the slaver fleet...