Guardian Dimension--Thank you, I'm glad you're enjoying it.
ancient lantean--The Ori are going for the role of Gods over a new creation that will destroy all of existence. As for creating a new Centerpoint--although it's never said explicitly, it took all the resources of the Ancients to create it, and so the Ori alone would not be able too. Some parts of it the Ori themselves did not understand. As for the Asgard weapons and the SG-1 finally--I too hate it when they change the rules in the middle of the war. If the Asgard beams were that effective, then they should have showed us that when the Ori first broke through. I join you in your rant. Anyway, with Luke having defeated the Prior DNA, he will slowly return back to his Jedi self, albeit it was a stronger grip on the Force than before.
grayangle--Asgard and Thor do indeed kick butt. And yes, at this point Earth is in no danger. I believe during the vents of GOD&L on Earth California has just become a state and the US Congress is realizing they are going to have a problem over slavery between the North and South very soon.
master cheif rulz--No mass slaughter of Asgard in this story, promise.
Tilius--Thank you.
Okay, brace yourselves. This is it--the beginning of the final battle! Enjoy.
Chapter Thirty-Six: Ragnarok Begins
The Sun Crusher had been renamed and remade. The quantum armor had been cracked in the rear of the ship and expanded into a long, narrow hull perhaps fifty meters long. The sheer expense of the project drained the coffers of whole worlds. It was absolutely necessary to their plan of attack.
Under the oversight of Daala and Qwi Xux the Sun Crusher was remade from a small torpedo platform into the most heavily armored troop carrier in the history of the galaxy. "We can fit at least five squads in it," Luke said as he and Anakin looked on over the construction. The fleet had assembled two systems away from Corellia, just a quick hyperspace jump away. "Not to mention all the Jedi."
"Between the armor and the Asgard shielding, I have no doubt we can get in," Anakin said "It's getting from the ship to the glowpoint that will be trouble."
"Well, if we can't do it, no one else can," Luke said without any sense of pride or humility. "I believe we can."
"Are you up for this trip, Luke?"
The younger Skywalker nodded. "I feel stronger every day."
"Mara says you have changed. I sense it as well. The Force burns more brightly in you than ever before."
Luke stood silently, looking at the ship. In addition to the quantum armor, the entire ship was reinforced with thick beams of quantum filaments that bisected the length of the ship. In essence, they were building a hollow battering ram. "I am different, father," he finally said. "For a moment, when you and Mara and the others were reaching for me, others came as well. It felt as if the whole history of the Jedi were centered on me, every knight and master that had ever lived, all focusing their attention through me. I know things about the Force I know I never learned from you, Ben or Yoda. The strength from the Ori is gone, and good riddance, but I am more than the Jedi I was before."
He felt a hand on his shoulder and turned to see his father staring at him with a proud smile. "You are a true master now. Even among the old order, you would have been accepted as such. Your power is like nothing I've seen, and you carry a wisdom in you far beyond your years. You are everything I had dreamed you would be, when I was still young enough to have such dreams."
Luke felt his eyes grow moist and nodded before turning to look back at the ship. "I just hope it's enough. Han, Chewie, Leia and I aren't used to these full frontal attacks. We also just snuck around from behind and blew it up when you weren't looking."
Anakin laughed. "And Palpatine raged every time you did." He too studied their means of entry onto Centerpoint. "These Ori, though, don't seem to have a back door. And their faith is absolute. There can be no compromise with a fanatic. We must destroy them."
Luke put an arm around his father's shoulders. Side by side, they were almost of a height, though Anakin still had the advantage. "We will, Father. The Force is our ally."
Luke sensed a tickle in the back of his mind. Anakin felt it too. "It is time for my meeting with Kir."
"Do you want me there?"
"No," Anakin said. He turned and smiled. "Don't worry, I won't offer him a free shot. He's an Imperial guardsman—he would take the shot without a moment's hesitation and make sure not to miss."
Luke watched as his father walked away, his shoulders slumped as if in defeat. At that moment, he realized that Anakin was fast approaching fifty. With the weight of the war and the emotional turmoil he was in, for the first time Luke thought his father looked old.
Anakin, for his part, strode reluctantly through the Executor toward the scheduled meeting with Kanos. When he arrived, he found the former guardsman standing unconsciously at parade rest while staring out the viewport toward the distant sun of their staging area.
"Thank you for meeting with me, Colonel Kanos," Anakin said.
"It is an honor, m'lord."
With that simple sentence, Anakin heard so much. The words themselves revealed that Kir Kanos knew exactly who Anakin Skywalker was. The acidic tone told him that Kir Kanos had not forgotten who gave him the scar on his face, a scar given because Kanos had wept over the body of the best friend he himself had been forced to kill before being allowed to don the crimson armor. And the body language and expression told Anakin there would be no forgiveness there. Not ever.
"Please sit, Kir," he said.
"I prefer to stand."
"As you wish." Anakin sat down and studied the guardsman. "I wanted to try and talk you into joining the Jedi under my son's tutelage."
"No, thank you."
"The Force is strong in you. You could be a Jedi."
"Or a Sith?"
"Yes."
"You would know about the Sith, wouldn't you, commander?"
"More than any," Anakin said. "A Sith broke you, years ago. A man who himself was broken and twisted by another Sith."
"You don't look broken to me."
"My son fixed me," Anakin said.
"How convenient. And you think he can fix me as well?"
"I had hoped. I know better now." Anakin stood. "Colonel, Jedi or not, I more than anyone else know and appreciate your battle skills. I would like you to lead the ground soldiers under the Jedi attack force to Centerpoint. But I will not make it an order."
"Jedi Ekria is going?"
"All of us are going. The war hinges on this battle. If we fail, the galaxy will burn under the Ori's flames of enlightenment."
Kanos ground his teeth and stared at a point over Anakin's shoulder. "I hate you," he said. He made it a statement of undeniable fact. "And I will kill you."
"Fine, kill me later," Anakin said. "But not now. Now, the galaxy needs both of us. Ekria needs you. She has fought with a partner her whole life, and is not prepared to fight alone."
"What makes you think I care about Ekria?"
"What makes you think you don't?"
Anakin stood and stepped directly in front of the colonel, so close their breaths met in a coil of heat between their faces. "Darth Vader was an evil, broken man, Kir Kanos. He would never have apologized to you for the pain he caused. Nor can I apologize for what he did to you, because I know you would never accept it. But I will tell you this—after this war, if vengeance you must have, then vengeance you will get. I will face you alone, unarmed, in a venue of your choosing. And I will not use the Force. I will face you man-to-man, even should it mean my death."
"It will," Kanos said.
"I will grant this to you, though, only if you agree to lead the soldiers in the boarding party."
"I would have regardless," Kanos said with a hungry glint in his eye. "Your offer simply insures I will survive."
"See to it," Anakin said. "The galaxy needs you." With that, the Jedi turned and left Kanos alone.
Two weeks later, two star destroyers and a Mon Calamari cruiser dropped from hyperspace on the edge of the Corellian system and began hard scans of the system. Simultaneously two wings of bombers launched.
Almost instantly, a phalanx of five Ori destroyers emerged from their own more precise hyperspace travel to engage them.
The moment the five destroyers came in range, the wings of TIE bombers began launching small, brightly lit torpedoes. The destroyers ignored the torpedoes as they honed in on the first Star Destroyer. Their five beams of destruction lanced outward and the first Star Destroyer died instantly.
And then the resonance torpedoes struck. Weapons designed to destabilize and destroy whole stars had little trouble with shields even as powerful as those of the Ori, and for the first time since the war began, the Ori destroyers lost all shielding on the very first salvo. A moment later, the Liberator, formerly known as the Aggressor, emerged from hyperspace directly above the orbital plane, pointed directly at the tops of the five Ori ships. It came flanked by two Imperial-class star destroyers. The superlaser fired the moment it emerged from hyperspace, accompanied by a wave of torpedoes and turbolaser fire from the accompanying star destroyers.
The tactic worked flawlessly. The five ships crumpled without any shielding, and were so thoroughly vaporized that the Liberator passed through the dust cloud without a single debris impact.
Just as quickly, the super star destroyer and its escorts jumped back into hyperspace, accompanied by the original surviving star destroyer and the rebel frigate just after the bombers docked. When a squadron of Ori attack ships arrived, they found nothing more than the empty hulk of a stripped, unmanned destroyer ripped to pieces by the Ori weapons.
On the far side of the system at the same time, a similar incident happened. Two phalanxes of Ori destroyers arrived to attack the Alliance incursion and made quick work of the Alliance decoys, and then themselves were destroyed by the Guardian and Defiant, two more converted and rechristened dreadnoughts.
By the time of the fourth such decoy, the Ori began to suspect what was happening and sent out a significantly larger force, including fifty star destroyers, ten Ori attack ships and two phalanxes of Ori destroyers.
The enemy ships ran headlong into a minefield. Hypermatter-enhanced gigaton-level fusion devices began exploding in quick succession as the mines' automated proximity systems locked on to and began accelerating toward their target ships before going off in quick succession.
The only ships that came through the minefield were the Ori craft and listing, damaged star destroyers. TIE bombers, accompanied this time by Y-wing fighters, launched a wave of resonance torpedoes against the Ori destroyers while attempting with mixed success to avoid the Ori attack ships and the few former Imperial ships to survive the minefield.
Instantaneously, the Knight Hammer and Lusankya emerged from hyperspace, again with their noses pointed down like arrows about to impale the Ori ships along the orbital plan, with a fleet of missile frigates, star destroyers and corvettes. This time the Ori ships had time to fire back, but only just. A frigate and two corvettes died instantly, but not before adding their voices to the barrage that killed the enemy craft.
And then the decoys ended and space fell quiet again.
"I think that got their attention," Admiral Piett said to Admiral Ackbar. The two admirals each commanded a superdestroyer—the Executor for Piett, the Liberator for Ackbar.
"I would say so," Ackbar said over the tactical display. "Are we ready for Phase II?"
"Shock and awe," Piett said, allowing just a hint of humor to grace his otherwise determined and stoic demeanor.
Two hundred missile frigates jumped into the system on the edge of the twin planet's gravity well, perhaps five thosuand kilometers from the nearest enemy vessels. The frigates lived up to their name and design by launching almost a thousand missiles each. The missiles were armed again with hypermatter-enhanced fusion devices and the most powerful conventional thrusters available. The three-meter long devices launched away with massive acceleration that reached near relativistic speeds in just minutes.
The Ori responded with their own lethal speed, and even before the last missiles were launched Ori attack vessels laid into the frigates with ruthless force. Of the two hundred launched on the mission, only eighty were able to jump out.
However, the damage was done. The Ori attack vessels chased the missiles down with great accuracy, but with two hundred thousand missiles in-bound, some were bound to hit. Unfortunately for the Ori-converted Imperials, they made up the first line of Centerpoint's defense. Missile after missile struck Imperialstar destroyers, frigates, corvettes and missile boats one after the other, rupturing hulls and shields alike and leaving a wake of destruction in their passage.
The same tactic was used at all six cardinal points of the massed Ori fleet in a three-dimensional grid of the combat theatre. Missile boats and corvettes jumped from hyperspace and launched long-range ordinance before jumping out again. The Alliance casualties mounted as the Ori began to anticipate the approximate area of the attack and answered with astounding force and speed. However, the effect of the offensive was undeniable.
During the entire operation, a single intelligence freighter hung over the orbital plane, recording everything. Every phalanx of Ori destroyers was located and tagged. Every squadron of Ori attack fighters was located and traced. And the defenses of Centerpoint were also recorded in excruciating detail.
Again, the Alliance offense backed away and withdrew from the theater on the edge of the gravity well of Talus and Tralus. And then the Alliance got nasty.
Mass drivers were an old weapon, used by races as ancient as the Rakata and as modern as the Confederacy of Independent Systems during the Clone Wars. They were a brute-force, low tech weapon that used oscillating magnetic waves to launch nickel-iron asteroids. It was the space-age equivalent to a sling-shot, only it shot rocks the size of frigates and larger, at speeds approaching a third the speed of light.
The Alliance had quickly constructed three such weapons. They were mounted on the converted hulls of previously damaged star destroyers. They were ugly in appearance and in purpose. But those three ships began pumping out rocks zooming out at over 130,000 kilometers a second toward the center of the Ori forces. At a firing rate of one rock every five seconds, each was able to fire 12 rocks a minute. In the course of five minutes, the three craft launched 180 frigate-sized asteroids at the enemy.
The rocks had no propulsion, no obvious silhouette, and no energy readings. The Ori forces did not realize they were under a barrage until a rock three times the size of a Corellian corvette slammed into the hull of a star destroyer with sufficient kinetic force to destroy the entire ship.
The Ori forces responded quickly and efficiently, destroying many of the asteroids before they could pose any further threat. On the edge of the gravity well of the twin planets, a swarm of Ori attack ships, flanked by smaller Ori fighters, emerged out of hyperspace a thousand kilometers stellar north of the orbital plane and quickly spun in an imitation of the Alliance's own tactics to attack the mass drivers. The Alliance escort moved to intercept, but the Ori ships moved past the defenders without hesitation and made quick work of the unshielded mass drivers.
By the time the Ori ships finished off their primary targets and turned to engage the defenders, the Alliance ships had jumped back out of the system. The attack had served its purpose.
It was in the middle of the meteor shower that Anakin and Luke launched the Jedi Hammer. Draped in an Imperial cloak, the ship flew completely blind to the rest of the galaxy, but with two powerful Jedi at the controls, the ship flew as cleanly through the hazards around it as if both men were taking a leisurely flight in a speeder.
In the tightly packed hold behind them, over one hundred of the finest soldiers the Alliance had waited quietly, gripping the hand holds draping from the ceiling since there was not space to sit. Mixed in with the soldiers, who wore modified stormtrooper armor, were all the Jedi save Cilghal and Leia. Counting Luke and Anakin, there were a total of thirteen Jedi leading the attack.
The Force virtually hummed in the ship. In the tightly cramped cockpit, Mara sat in the tertiary seat behind and between Luke and Anakin, staring out into the darkness. "The rocks got a few of them," she noted, sensing the loss of life through the Force.
Luke looked back at her and nodded with a serious expression. "I wonder if Sonel was on any of those ships."
"He would gladly kill you, Luke," Mara said.
"And yet, in his own way, he is a good man," Luke said.
"Even good men can do evil," Anakin said, his eyes also focused on the darkness cast by their cloak. Suddenly they began to swerve as Anakin followed the guidance of the Force to maneuver them through the enemy fleet. Mara watched with interest as her master flew blind with the same skill she used getting Luke out of Centerpoint. "I can see why the old holovids called you the greatest pilot in the galaxy," she said.
Anakin flashed an uncharacteristic grin at his son. "Hear that, Luke? I think she likes me."
Even Luke had to chuckle. Mara leaned forward and whispered into Anakin's ear, "It's just not the same for me without your armor."
Luke's chuckle turned to an open laugh as his father's grin turned to a grimace. Then the grin returned. "I still have it, you know," he said suggestively.
"And to think you're my father-in-law!"
The moment of levity lasted only until they all sensed the dark heat ahead of them that could only have been the glowpoint of Centerpoint Station.
"Well, do we try to sneak in and dock, or crash through?"
"I'd say dock, if it weren't a thousand kilometers across," Anakin said. "But I don't cherish fighting through that distance. The closer we can get to the center cavity, the better."
"Then we crash," Mara said. She turned and saw the Jedi watching expectantly. They too had seen the glow in the Force. "We're going to crash through," she old them. "Everyone get into their crash webbing. Jedi, get on your masks. We're going to be putting up the crash foam in a second."
"It's going to be hard to fly covered in crash foam," Anakin muttered as he slipped on his breather.
"Better than flying as a puddle of goo," Luke pointed out, before he too put on his breather.
When the Jedi were all breathing through their masks, and with the soldiers' armor self-contained, she hit a jury-rigged red button beside her. Instantly crash foam billowed out around them, filling the entire ship in a protective cushion.
She heard Anakin's voice through the Force announcing the acceleration to ramming speed. They would be hitting the station going at full sublight.
Suddenly all their danger senses flared. Behind them, the Ori had somehow detected them through their cloak. Ori destroyers broke off from their five-ship phalanx formation and pursued as five separate ships, firing constantly.
The first shot took out the cloak without effort. The second shot hit the quantum armor. Armor that could survive a direct impact with a star destroyer and survive the center of a star held up for a full ten seconds against the destroyer's shot. Anakin juked the ship left and right, spinning wildly until he managed to break free from the prolonged blast. Even so, they could all feel the ship decelerating. The drive units had been damaged.
"We've still got plenty of speed," he said. "We have enough momentum."
The enemy fired again, and this time the quantum armor popped and shattered toward the rear. The interior of the ship was suddenly exposed to space. If it weren't filled with crash foam, everyone inside would have been sucked out into the darkness.
All that saved them from the finishing shot was time. The ship hit the surface of Centerpoint Station like a missile. The inertial dampening system absorbed a significant fraction of the force caused when the ship crashed through the outer surface of the station and went from three hundred thousand kilometers to absolute rest in the course of one second.
However, there were limits to what the grav plating and dampening fields could do. Hence the foam. Even so, Mara almost lost her breather despite her tight bite on it when her whole body felt as if a giant hand came from behind and swatted her like a giant bug. The foam, which should have prevented any movement once exposed to the heavy g-force of a crash, still bent and gave under the force of her weight.
But they survived, and they were in Centerpoint. A fine mist of water droplets sprayed from the crash systems over the whole ship, and in seconds the foam dissolved to nothing. Jedi and troopers alike fell to their knees gasping from the force of the crash. Behind them, they saw a hole in the ship large enough for three men to walk out side by side, and beyond that a hole open to space. Behind even that, they saw a flurry of lights. While they were crashing into the station, the Alliance fleet had begun the full engagement of the Ori forces.
They stumbled out of the Jedi Hammer and onto the deck of the station and looked around. The station's automated emergency systems had a static shield containing the breach, and as they stood watching, the walls seemed to begin repairing themselves.
But the breach had been severe enough to empty the section they had crashed in. Anakin, Luke and Mara emerged, and Ferus Olin joined them. "Do you have our position?"
Luke and Mara shared a glance, and then let the Force guide them to the glowpoint. "No idea," Luke admitted. "But we need to go that way."
"Good enough for me," the Jedi Master said. A veteran of the clone wars, the Jedi Ferus easily back into the general role. "Fall in," he snapped to the soldiers. "And look alive."
The lead trooper, wearing red epaulettes over his armor, nodded and brought his squad into formation. With Jedi ahead of and behind the main body of the soldiers, they began their invasion of Centerpoint Station.