[i]Choaga orbit[/i]
To the naked eye, the small moon Choaga was of no value to a spacefaring civilization. The lava coated moon and its parent planet orbited far too close to its very active sun to be habitable, and contained no abundance of resources. It was a dead moon in a dead solar system. Yet, in the unreal, incomprehensible dimension of hyperspace, Choaga just happened to be within a one million kilometer margin of the highly traversed Coruscant-Coreilla hyperspace route.
Making it a favorite of pirates and privateers.
So Captain Corleone of Black Sun was elated when the Dauntless's interdictor field managed to pull an unlucky frigate out of hyperspace. He and his crew had been hiding in the dark side of Choaga for three days, their interdictor calibrated to target ships just large enough to be worth the credits, but not too large-or powerful, for the small frigate to handle. Military grade hyperdrives had a unique drive signature that allowed a skilled enough computer to detect, even in hyperspace, which ships are defenseless civilian targets.
Yet even with the billions of ships passing through the Choaga system in hyperspace every day, finding a suitable ship to prey was a tedious and time consuming. For one, the Dauntless's interdictor field only stretched out to about five thousand kilometers, and the hyperspace route stretched over a million kilometers wide. Wth the resurgence of Black Sun, many civilian vessels, both corporate and personal, were installing military class stealth systems to prevent space pirates – nicknamed "campers", from detecting their presence from real space. Of those few ships that happened to pass within five thousand kilometers of the small frigate and whose owners were too stupid to install such safeguards, most were not within the ideal weight category and drive category to qualify for looting. After they had searched captured ships for anything of monetary value, Corleone typically let the crew members go free, so he and his crew would have to quickly relocate, as the surviving crew would undoubtedly reveal their hiding spot to local authorities. Therefore, Corleone had to wait for the ripest target, as he could ill afford to stop and loot every random single manned freighter he encountered.
Finally, Corleone's patience had paid off. The frigate magnified on his viewport was a good 600 meters long, and was painted in glowing white. Behind it, the system's giant sun reflected yellow, almost golden light off of its hull, making the shiny vessel look even more appealing. Sensors indicated five thousand lifeforms, most human, and material compositions suggesting large abundances of gold, diamond and even expensive composites such as laminanium. Alerted to the Dauntless's presence, the ship had raised its shielding, revealing only moderate defensive systems. This was going to be easy.
Corleone turned to Lieutenant Jacker. "Lieutenant, jam their transmissions, and make sure you maintain our interdictor field within five thousand kilometers of the frigate. If it attempts to escape, [i]follow[/i] it. Whatever you do, should the ship escape to hyperspace, we ain't finding it, and our hiding spot will be blown." [i]And those three days of waiting will have been wasted.[/i] Jacker nodded in acknowledgment. Corleone turned on the comm speaker and spoke in as menacing of a tone he could muster.
[i]Unknown vessel. This is Captain Corleone of the Black Sun. I am very sorry to interrupt you guys and whatever you're doing, but we have a…problem here. You see, this is our territory, and we did not give you permission to traverse it. So we're going to have to ask you to lower your shielding and allow our…law enforcement troops to board your ship and inspect it. Our ship is well armed with several fighter wings and turbolaser batteries, so it would be unwise to resist. I promise you that, if you surrender immediately, none of your crew will be harmed or taken hostage. If, however, you resist our offer, your vacation will come to a very untimely end.[/i]
A few seconds later; Corleone guessed that the message was prerecorded, there was a response from a female voice.
[i]Captain Corleone of the Black Sun,[/i] – Corleone did not know how a prerecorded message knew his name and employers, but he supposed that the message had a name-recognition feature [i] this is the frigate Cebo. We are a military vessel belonging to the Galactic Federation of Free Alliances Navy. Please cease your hostilities and lower[/i] [b] your [/b] [i]shields for boarding.[/i]
Corleone and his crew sat still for a moment before bursting into laughter. It was a horrible buff. Surely the crew could have at least kept its shields down instead of revealing its weak defenses to the enemy. That way, they'd at least give the possibility that they may be heavily armed. These guys were clearly idiots, but they still had loads of cash for Corleone and his men. To his left, Jacker had stopped laughing and was staring at his tactical screen.
"Uh, captain, I think we've got a problem."
Struggling to keep his laughter under control, Corleone turned to his lieutenant. "What is it?"
"We're detecting five small, single manned fighter craft approaching twenty thousand kilometers…kriff."
"[i]What?[/i]" Corleone demanded, his serious face on once again.
"X wings! They're X wings! They're-"
Jacker was interrupted as the icons on his display flickered and disappeared, even that of the Dauntless.
"Kriff, this is not good." Jacker tried rebooting the hardware, to no avail. "They're jamming us."
"Who?"
"The ship, sir, the-what was it, Cebo? Our gravitic scanners have gone flunk, but for some reason, our EM scanners are unaffected." He pulled his face closer to the screen and tapped it. The screen changed to a picture of the Cebo, with various graphs and numbers displaying data on the ship's mass, drive systems, shielding and weapon emplacements. "Probably so that we could see this."
Suddenly, the frigate's shields were no longer weak. Suddenly, its weapons no longer consisted of a few quad laser batteries, and out of nowhere several turbolasers, missile racks and an ion cannon and popped out of the hull.
Suddenly, the crew was no longer laughing.
"Should we send another warning?" Chosk asked over the comm. The other pilots laughed, but the squadron leader Cyco actually considered it. "Maybe we should. They probably though we were bluffing the first time." Probably was an understatement; the scumbags had forgotten to turn off their comm before bursting into laugher. "No, we shoudn't." Ted chipped in. "We gave them their chance. Besides, I'm in the mood for kicking – hey, look what we've got here!" Cyco's HUD registered five boogies, identified as old but refitted tie fighters, leaving the frigate's belly. Clearly, these guys weren't getting the message.
"Rogue three and five, circle two klicks left and right. I'll go up; rogue two and four, circle five klicks left and right, copy." The instructions were met with quick "Roger that"'s from the rest of the pilots. Left and down were, of course, based on the orientation of the nearest celestial body, which happened to be the small moon that the Black Sun mistakenly thought they could hide behind. Pulling back on the throttle, Cyco pulled his X wing 90 degrees upwards, and then quickly spun his starfighter downwards when the central tie fighter was within a kilometer's distance. The tie fighter spun upwards to meet Cyco, and opened fired. Green blasts of energy zipped past Cyco's cockpit, and his X wing's sound simulation program registered the distinctive "pew pew" noise of a tie fighter's guns. But the Alliance had planned this operation with perfect efficiency. The positioning of the Cebo in front of the sun was not only to make its hull shine and increase its lure, although that was one of the reasons. Its sensing equipment jammed, the tie fighter's pilot would have to rely on his or her eyes, and the extremely bright sun of Choaga caused his shots to go wild. Still, Cyco put his X wing into a roll just in case, and fired [i]his[/i] lasers; these red, back at the approaching boogey. The tie fighter exploded, bits and pieces of it impacting against Cyco's shields.
To his left and right, Chosk and Ted had looped their X wings into figure eights, luring the clueless tie fighters right into Cyco's line of fire. Cyco tapped the two tie fighters on his display to target them, and two proton torpedos shot out of the X wing's missile hatches at the tie fighters. Too late, they saw the glowing blue objects shooting out towards them and abandoned their goose chases, and barely had time to run before the torpedos struck vaporizing the two fighters in brilliant balls of light.
The two remaining tie fighters were a good dozen kilometers away, their pilots clearly more cautious after witnessing their fellow pilots' fate. John and Smilie, the two new recruits of Rogue Squadron, targeted them and each fired a black missile about the size of a concussion missile. These new missiles, nicknamed flak bursters, exploded into relativistic, edged debris concentrated in a sixty degree cone. They were new developments, and rarely used in fleet battles due to enormous friendly fire concerns, but here they proved that they were worth the ten trillion credits. The missiles exploded, their fragments moving so fast they appeared as a solid black wave. Within a microscopic fraction of a second, the two tie fighters were grounded into dust, and another fraction of a second later a good portion of the debris impacted against the distant frigate.
Through the comm channel, Cyco could hear John cheer and echoed his sentiments. The purging of Black Sun had begun.
Corleone watched in horror as his tie fighters were destroyed. [i]This can't be happening. I was so close-[/i] "Away!" He pointed at the lieutenant. "We need to retreat and regroup. Set a random course for lightspeed." Jacker shook his head. "No good. The Cebo has an interdictor field of her own." Jacker cursed. He took another look at the tactical display; having been adjusted to use EM scanners. "The X wings are retreating," he pointed out. "Where?"
Jacker shrugged. "I don't detect any…oh, no, I do and…" Jacker's mouth figuratively hit the floor. Out of literally nowhere, the display registered a giant ship, over twenty times the size of the Dauntless. Reaching over the frozen lieutenant's shoulder, Corleone tapped the ship, bringing up the digital image of a wedge shaped ship. It was a star destroyer.
A [i]super[/i] star destroyer.
It was the Liberation, a prototype super star destroyer and perhaps the most powerful vessel ever created that wasn't a small moon, a crusher of stars, a gun of a galaxy or a Centerpoint station. Nobody would have guessed that it would be used to hunt after pirates. The Alliance sure was taking Black Sun's resurgence seriously.
The Cebo had launched five thermonuclear warheads at the Dauntless. Three had been intercepted by its point defense systems, but the rest impacted against its shields. Jacker, having regained his composure, checked the shields. "We're still doing fine," he stated matter of factly. Right after he finished, the ship shook violently beneath Corleone's feet, and he was comically thrown forward, banging his head against the ground. As soon as he clumsily stood up, the viewport in from of him shattered into millions of pieces, and the captain was thrown backwards, but caught hold of a chair in his fall. He noticed that a small piece of transpirasteel had been lodged into his left arm. He faintly heard screaming and outright panic as the ship's atmospheric shields activated to cover the broken viewport, and most of the crew had abandoned their posts and were running for the escape pods. Turning to his right, Corleone realized that his hand had not grabbed onto a chair, but instead onto Jacker's corpse, with a giant gap in his chest. A piece of transpirasteel had thrusted through him, through the chair and into the heart of the weapons coordinator. Turning to where the viewport had once been, he saw the distant image of the Liberation several hundred thousand kilometers away, firing green turbolaser bolts into the puny frigate. Corleone figured that the ship could easily have turned the ship into a cloud electrons and protons, and realized that they wanted to capture him and his crew alive.
Corleone shook his head, as though doing so would clear his mind and allow him to think up of some ingenious plan to escape. Should he and his crew be taken prisoner, they would probably be forced into ratting out Black Sun, although Corleone felt no moral loyalty to the organization. Although Corleone and most of his crew hadn't actually killed anyone, the mere fact that they were in Black Sun would likely evaporate any sympathy the Courts might feel for them. He turned to a young, nervous looking man who was still manning the controls. "Hey, you, what's your name?" Corleone tried, and failed, to hide his desperation.
"P-private Albert, sir," the boy replied, but his eyes were focused on his holopad.
"Well, it's lieutenant now." Corleone stated. "I want you to apply thrusters – full power. Get us away from here." A moment later, Corleone was once again thrown from his seat by the acceleration of the Dauntless's powerful engines. He landed on his left arm, further widening his wound. He stood up, only to get yanked forward onto his face as the ship decelerated.
"What the hell was that?" He demanded. "Tractor beams," Albert stated. "They've trapped us."
The comm system was somehow still functioning, and Corleone realized that he hadn't muted it. The woman's voice from before, a voice that Corleone could have sworn he recognized from somewhere, spoke again.
[i]Dauntless, we have captured your ship and will commence boarding operations. Do not offer any resistance, the marines' blasters are not set for stun.[/i]