Tilius--Thank you.
Tom Robinson--They are indeed. In force.
Ancient lantean--The Asgard will participate, but only with the ships they've already brought.
Master cheif rulz--Thank you, I appreciate the kind words.
Worker72--George is a man who had a brilliant vision that he has spent the past 30 years trying to destroy. But it's a mark of the brilliance of the idea itself that it stands even so.
Also, I'm almost afraid to admit this, but the Vong are not now, nor will they ever be, a significant part of this story. Eventually this AU drifts back into cannon events with a few minor "butterfly effect" changes, but the Vong are never really a subject. Hope that doesn't disappoint too much.
Well, thanks to everyone for reading. I only have a few more posts to go, and then Gods of Dark and Light will be over. Enjoy!
Chapter Thirty-Seven: War
"The Hammer is away," a captain reported. Piett stood on the bridge of the Executor and nodded to himself. "May the Force be with you, my friend," he whispered quietly to the viewport.
He turned to the tactical holonet view of Ackbar and the other commanders of the fleet. There was Baron Soontir Fel, newly promoted admiral and commander of the Lusankya. There were Admirals Ackbar and Pellaeon, both of them worthy, honorable warriors with a firm grasp of fleet tactics. General Rieekan commanded Liberator, while Admiral Daala commanded the Defiant and an Anaxsi admiral named Holdsen commanded the Knight Hammer. In addition to the super-star destroyer command ships, he knew there were thousands of captains, hundreds of thousands of officers, and millions of men and women of all races and species throughout the massed fleet behind him. And a handful of Asgard mother ships almost as powerful as those of the Ori. It was, in fact, the largest massing of ships he had ever seen.
And they fully expected to lose half their ships.
"Ladies and gentlemen, are we ready?"
The assembled generals and admirals nodded. "Then, my friends, may the Force be with us all. And may we see each other again soon."
The admiralty voiced their agreement, and then one by one flickered out. Piett walked the length of the command bridge until he stood next to the captain. "Signal the fleet to attack."
The harassment of the Ori ships by the Alliance fleet had an almost entropic effect on the Ori vessels. The enemy ships clumped together for mutual protection, leaving large swaths of empty space. Many of the clumps were positioned on the edge of the gravity well of Talus and Tralus, waiting for hyperspace encroachments.
But between the binary planets, around the moon-sized station of Centerpoint, hung the bulk of the Ori Fleet, held still in the LaGrange points of the two planets and forming a protective cloud.
The dispersal of Ori ships was in a two-dimensional matrix along the orbital plane. The Alliance tacticians had noted that as well, and used it in planning the first phases of the attack.
And so it was that when the first elements of the fleet emerged from hyperspace, it was at a point along the plane directly between two groups of two hundred Ori ships each. Only one group responded at first. But when over a thousand Alliance ships emerged, the second group also converged, as did two others.
And it was as those other groups arrived that the rest of the Alliance fleet emerged en mass from opposite directions of the orbital plane, like arrows fired at paper. Whereas the first element was led by the Knight Hammer, the remaining five superdestroyers and their thousands of escorts emerged from hyperspace to shred through the Ori battle groups. There were losses to be sure, but in less than five minutes eight hundred Ori-loyal ships had died.
The fleet elements reformed into six separate spears, each spear made up of a superdestroyer and englobed by escort ships to protect the superweapon until the very end.
Because of the previous hit and run tactics, the Ori forces did not dare leave the station undefended for fear of leaving it open to another sneak attack. And so the only ships that turned to engage the Alliance fleet were the battle groups on the fringe of the binary planetary well.
And still, Alliance ships died. Piett watched on the tactical display as Alliance destroyer after destroyer, frigate after frigate, erupted in flame and died under the deadly assault of the Ori destroyers. Still, they continued. Swarms of thousands upon thousands of TIEs and TIE bombers darted among the capital ships, launching both the resonance torpedoes and standard torpedoes, mixed to confuse the enemy. Without the torpedoes, Piett knew they would not have stood a chance.
Between the torpedoes, though, and the new Asgard shields installed on key ships, they continued their progress. Ori destroyers and attack ships died. Piett noted with a smile how the amphibian-shaped Asgard ships wove through the fleet with the grace of fighters a thousandth their size, slicing easily through former Imperial ships. It was, Piett knew, a mark of the Ori's contempt for Imperial technology that they had made no effort to improve it in their own forces.
And then came the fighters that Luke had warned them about. "Piett to Asgard ships, Ori fighters have been launched and are exacting heavy casualties. Your assistance would be appreciated."
"Understood," came Thor's laconic response. Then extra-galactic technology faced extra-galactic technology as the Asgard mother ships began hunting and destroying the Ori fighters, which could withstand a direct turbolaser blast without ill effect.
Suddenly, they broke through. The space between them and the Centerpoint fleet stood empty. "Full sublight," Piett ordered. "All ships attack. As soon as we are in range, bring all the superlasers online and fire."
"We have ten percent casualties," the Executor's captain noted.
"And we have engaged only fifteen percent of their fleet," Piett noted. "Force preserve us." He raised his voice to address not just his crew, but the whole fleet. "This day is not just for us. This is not just for all the loved ones we have left behind in order to fight this war. What we do today is for our children and grandchildren, for all the grandchildren yet to be born for the rest of time. What we do today means freedom or slavery for the whole of our civilization. I gladly give my life, and I thank the Force that I do so now with you at my side!"
Across all the fleet frequencies and holochannels came the exuberant replies of the fleet. With his chin held high, Piett stood on the command bridge of the greatest ship of the Galactic Alliance and headed willingly toward the gates of hell.
"Those stave blasts are hard to deflect," Kyle noted wryly.
They had made it almost to the inner surface of the hollow center of the station before being pinned down by a force of thousands of soldiers. Luke nodded his agreement as he, Kyle and Anakin crouched down under the cover of a destroyed monorail transport. The transport had obviously been installed many centuries after the station had been built, and now lay in tattered, beaten remains under the onslaught of the Ori forces.
Kir Kanos joined them, carrying both his repeater blaster and also a stave. "They are excellent long range weapons," he noted when he saw the Jedi's expressions. "I've ordered my men to recover as many as possible. We also have snipers with Tenloss DXR-6 rifles. We're killing men just as fast as we can. But they must have built up a sizable population of loyal soldiers. They're not backing down."
Just then Mara, Ekria and Darana flew over a ridge of twisted ferrocrete and landed beside the huddle. Mara and Ekria both had a stave in their hands and noticed Kir did as well. "They have a nice balance," Mara noted, one professional killer to another.
She looked at Luke. "You took out two hundred bad guys with one of these things. Think you could super-charge one again?"
"That was with Prior DNA still in me. It's gone now. My only power is the Force."
Speaking of the Force, the Jedi felt something and all poked their heads up to see a line of figures in dark cloaks emerging from the line of Ori soldiers. "Inquisitors," Anakin snarled. "Jerec must have brought over the whole organization."
"How good are they?" Luke asked.
"I trained them," Anakin admitted. "A few are of Jedi level. All are dangerous."
"Well, no help for it," Kyle said, lighting his lightsaber.
"Jedi are so stupid," Kir muttered aloud. "All squadrons, open up with your staves on the fools in the cloaks. Use crossing fire, continuous beams."
Two hundred staves opened fire in a criss-cross of solid white lines. With the exception of just a handful who leaped up and away with Force-borne speed and power, the Inquisitors died.
The Jedi turned and stared. "I've been killing Jedi for years," Kanos said, his voice modulated by his helmet. "We don't have time to compare the size of your blades."
Anakin laughed. "Indeed. I think we've played nice long enough." He closed his eyes and sent an image to all the Jedi there of a flying cloud of thermal detonators.
The other Jedi understood and began levitating their detonators toward the enemy. Without any repulsors to detect, the enemy had only their naked eyes to spot the detonators, and unfortunately those tools were distracted by continued enemy fire. So when the detonators started going off, the Ori soldiers were not just caught off guard, but were effectively broken.
"All units, advance," Kir ordered. Anakin ordered the same for the Jedi, and the invasion force continued on its way toward the conical mountain at the heart of the station.
Piett closed his eyes as he watched Carlist Rieekan die.
It was not an Ori destroyer than killed the Guardian, but rather an Ori-loyal star destroyer. Rieekan brought his command ship in line and fired his superlaser on a phalanx of de-shielded Ori destroyers, taking the whole lot out in a single shot. In the process of having his escorts evacuate the fire trajectory, he left a window open for attack. The enemy destroyer actually grazed its starboard side on the superlaser blast, but continued at full sublight with all batteries firing on the super destroyer.
The Guardian attempted evasive maneuvers while the escort ships tried to converge on the intrusion, but the enemy ship was too close for the escorts to fire, or for Rieekan's ship to evade it. Piett and the other admirals watched in horror as the Imperial-II class destroyer flew through a storm of turbolaser fire and rammed into the raised superstructure of the Guardian in a billow of explosive out-gassing and flame. The sheer kinetic energy of the explosion cracked the keel of the Guardian and the ship folded in half, the command bridge swinging toward the emitter of the superlaser at the nose of the ship, until the hypermatter reactor exploded with such overwhelming force that five of the nearest escort ships were engulfed and also exploded.
"Go in peace, my friend," Piett whispered. "Signal surviving Guardian escorts to reinforce the Lusankya and Knight Hammer. All ships are to continue forward."
It was a battle of such numbers that no one person could oversee it. Tactical computers and outlying tac observation ships watched, recorded and analyzed, feeding data constantly to the tactical command station over which Piett hovered. What he noticed most were the green dots of the Alliance fleet blinking out of existence, one after the other.
Then came the exultant report from Daala. "I'm in range of the station. I am firing!"
A communications tech shifted the tactical view to that of the station itself as Daala fired her superlaser, only to have the beam interrupted at the last minute by a loyal Ori attack ship that vaporized instantly. Piett had difficulty holding down his disappointment.
"The lane is gone," Daala reported. "We are continuing!"
Piett heard a garbled scream as, to the port, the entire command tower and lower support structure of the Knight Hammer erupted in a gout of flame under the combined barrage of a hundred Ori attack ships. The superdestroyer's escorts fought a desperate action to save the superlaser, which could still have been functional. In fact, Piett noted with pride that the secondary command deck officers fired the superlaser one last time at the station, destroying a de-shielded phalanx of Ori destroyers just before the enemy finished the ship off.
"We must preserve our primary weapons!" Ackbar said over the net.
"Agreed," Piett said. "But we dare not risk clumping together and making a single target."
"There's no help for it but to fight through," Pellaeon said. "This war, gentle beings, is decided here and now. It is all or nothing."
"Then we fight on," Piett said.
"We fight on," the others agreed.