Chapter Twelve: A Stupid Plan
Seven speeder bikes shot across the barren expanse of Sluis Van. Arranged like birds in migratory flight, the diamond formation cast sprays of gravel backwards as it buzzed inches above the surface, each bike shrouded in darkness and muffled by the suppressors mounted against their engine exhausts.
Anakin Skywalker rode at the formation's center, surrounded by the six members of Arbiter's ground crew. He was wrapped in a black cloak that whipped in the wind, his face covered by a hood that only somewhat shielded him from the dust and grit kicked up by the speeder in front of him.
It was a stupid plan, Skywalker.
The voice that echoed in his head was not his own. It was his wife's—the phrase had become a favorite of Padmé's in their criminal days, one she'd pull out of her back pocket whenever that infamous Skywalker improvisation had come into play. Sometimes his "stupid plans," cobbled together in slapdash fashion, had crumbled to pieces the moment they were put into action. Sometimes, like a miracle, he'd pull them off.
No matter what, her response was always the same. It was a stupid plan, Skywalker—it echoed once again in his skull. She'd emphasize a different word here or there, accompany it with a shoulder punch or a sly wink. When his name had been the word with all the weight behind it, that's when Anakin knew he was really in trouble.
"It was a stupid plan, Skywalker."
"What was that, sir?" a voice sounded in his ear.
Anakin bit the inside of his cheek. He hadn't realized that he'd just broadcast his mutterings across an open channel. "Nothing," he barked. "Stay the course, head for the staging point."
A chorus of a half dozen "aye-ayes" buzzed over the comm, and Anakin shook his head. The fact was, this wasn't even a stupid plan. It was no plan at all, and these people had blindly followed him into battle anyway.
He glanced over his shoulder just in time to see the Arbiter disappear over the horizon, then turned back around to see what lay ahead. In many ways it resembled the borders of a prison—a hulking duracrete wall lined with razor wire, dotted with guard towers and weapon implements. Turbolaser batteries placed at even intervals ensured no one dare attack with a warship; laser cannons nestled between them were meant to keep the smaller ships at bay.
Only it wasn't a prison; it was a terrestrial shipyard, the largest in this sector and all the sectors surrounding it—and Anakin had brought a half dozen soldiers on speeder bikes, with little more than "get some explosives over that wall" as a directive. They'd listened as the Arbiter had touched down kilometers away from the target, as they'd mounted the speeder bikes and taken formation, shooting off across the moonlit sands toward the impenetrable fortress.
Stupid plan. Stupid, stupid—
An explosion of heat and dust sprayed into the air; a flash of green cut across Anakin's vision, shattering the cool blue hues of twilight. Bits of sand half turned to glass rained down upon him as his speeder bike sliced through the particulate shower that hung in the air—beneath his bike, he could see the charred impact point of a turbolaser blast.
He keyed on his comm and shouted, "Scatter!"
Seven speeder bikes swerved in seven different directions as lances of plasma arced outward from the shipyard wall and toward their broken formation. Each impact sounded like a drumbeat, sending a spray of gravel into the air as it smacked into the ground.
Anakin wrenched his bike's throttle as hard as he could manage—the force of his mechanical wrist nearly ripped the handle free of its housing, though he could hardly hear the sound of the protesting metal over the whine of his engine. Suppressor or not, he was now pushing the machine nearly to its limit, throwing his weight back and forth in an unpredictable rhythm. The bike snaked across the sand, its repulsors throwing spurts of sand sideways with each microturn.
The serpentine pattern threatened to make his stomach churn almost as much as his nerves did—even as he swerved the bike to avoid getting melted by a laser cannon, his eyes darted across the landscape in a frantic attempt to make sure his entire crew was still breathing.
He counted each bike as he locked eyes with it, though things were moving too fast for him to nail down exactly who he was counting. Then again, perhaps it didn't matter. As long as everyone made it to the staging point—
Another drumbeat of a turbolaser blast sent shockwaves through the air, this one decidedly more . . . metallic. Anakin glanced to his right to see a speeder bike turning over in the air, its engine on fire and its armored passenger sailing toward an impending impact with the ground. Gritting his teeth, Anakin yanked his bike toward the flaming wreckage.
"I've got him!" he shouted over the comm to no one in particular—as if anybody but Anakin would be reckless enough to attempt this sort of thing. He watched as the burning speeder bike bounced along the ground, his eyes darting between it and the man clad in plastoid who was skidding along the sand behind it. Easing his speeder forward, Anakin reached down toward the ground with his mechanical hand, squeezing it into a fist as he passed over the fallen trooper.
With great effort—the motors in his arm screeched in protest and a yelp of pain escaped his lips—Anakin hauled the trooper up onto the back of his speeder just in time to grab the handlebars with both hands and yank the vehicle clear of the burning wreckage before them. Exhaling deeply, he guided his vehicle toward where the rest of his squad had come to rest—the so-called "staging area," a point about a kilometer away from the shipyard wall that was shielded by a cluster of large boulders. Brining the speeder to a gentle stop, he swung a leg over and hopped to the ground, reaching out a hand to help his battered passenger.
"You alright, Doc?" Anakin asked. The Republic trooper, clad in a grey plastoid armor featuring blue accents, tilted his helmeted head to one side as he gingerly eased himself to the ground. Anakin continued, stumbling over his words. "Doc, uh, Doctor—"
"Medic," the man corrected—his right arm sported a band with the Republic insignia for medical personnel. "Medic VF-104." He snapped into a salute. "But Weston is fine. Just Weston. Not a doctor." With that, he brushed past Anakin and moved toward where the rest of the crew was unloading gear from their speeder bikes.
The drumbeat of turbolaser fire pounded at the door for a few moments—Anakin placed his flesh hand against one of the boulders that was acting as cover, feeling the vibrations through the rock as each lance of energy slammed into it. One. Two. Three, he counted them—and then they stopped.
"They quit shooting," one of his soldiers remarked—Thorm, Anakin reminded himself. A combat engineer, judging by the yellow accents on his helmet and armor. Thorm looked up from the saddlebag of his speeder bike as he withdrew a blaster pistol from it. "That's good, right?"
"They quit shooting for now because they can't hit us," Anakin said with a shake of his head. "They'll send guards, or fire homing rockets, or find some other way to break our cover. We can't stay here."
A guttural cough, one modulated by the helmet of a soldier with a red faceplate, cut through the chilled night air. "I don't get it," the trooper said, slinging a belt of explosives over his shoulder as he stepped away from his speeder bike. "We plotted our route here, we were flying in the blind spots of the guard tower. They shouldn't have seen us."
"No they shouldn't have," another trooper spoke up—this one wore different armor from the rest. Lighter but more flexible, with fewer plastoid plates. The requisition officer back on the Arbiter had called it scout armor.
The woman wearing it had been the only person on the squad to introduce herself to Anakin. Though the rest had acted strange when he'd arrived in the hangar, as though he didn't exist and they weren't to speak unless spoken to, she'd approached him while they were loading cargo onto the Arbiter before takeoff. Scout helmet tucked under one arm, she'd extended the other to greet him.
"It's an honor to be working with you, sir," she'd said, grasping his hand firmly. He remembered feeling outplayed, as though this woman in scout armor knew more about him than he knew about her.
"Good to meet you," he'd replied, trailing off.
"Ranger VF-102," she had finished for him.
Anakin had grimaced and glanced at the deck. "How about your name?"
"Ranger Amina, then," she'd said. The barest hint of a smile had crossed her lips; then, with a nod, she'd donned her helmet and made way for the Arbiter.
Now, Amina stood near the edge of one of the giant boulders that shielded the squad from fire. She gestured beyond the rock, in the direction of the shipyard wall. "They shouldn't have, but they did. Did you see the way the tower was reflecting the moonlight when we got close? I think the whole damn thing is made of transparisteel."
Anakin fought the urge to curse. The worry had itched at the back of his mind ever since the first turbolaser blast had slammed into the sand in front of him. A normal duracrete tower would have had structural components, load-bearing beams and segments between its windows that would have allowed them to slip through the cracks. Sluis Van Shipyards, it seemed, wasn't using normal guard towers.
"It is," Anakin said, nodding slowly at Amina. "It's called a panopticon." He started pacing in the sand, back and forth within the short range that the safety of their natural cover would allow. "Czerka must have sold it to them, back when the Confederacy was still getting along. The outside is like a big mirror, but from inside you can see everything. No blind spots."
With a groan, one of the troopers hoisted a handheld blaster cannon off the back of his speeder bike. His armor bore red accents too, though they were much sparser than Manik's. VF-106, Anakin recalled. Heavy trooper. Vetrovich, wasn't it?
"Doesn't matter what it's made of, we can still knock it down," Vetrovich said, shifting his grip on the handheld cannon.
"Not with that, you can't," Anakin said. "The mirror finish and the structural enhancements make the stuff pretty energy resistant. It's like magnetically sealed metal; even your heavy fire will bounce right off."
"It's got to have some weakness," Thorm said, leaning against his speeder bike and crossing his arms—plastoid clacked against plastoid, the sound of sand grinding against itself crackled from beneath his boots.
Anakin nodded. "Glass shatters," he said with a shrug.
A half dozen blank helmets stared back at him. He wasn't sure if the wheels were turning in each of their heads, or if they were simply waiting to be told what to do.
Amina was the first to speak. "Physical projectiles, then?" She pointed at one of the others. "Herrel, get me the cycler rifle."
"Wait," Anakin said, holding up his mechanical hand. "Not until we have a plan." You idiot, he immediately thought to himself. Don't admit you have no plan.
Then again, what plan could he have? He'd been sent to attack a shipyard that couldn't be attacked from the air. Flying, perhaps the one thing he was confident about, was off the table. And now they'd discovered that a groundside assault was equally impossible.
This, he feared, wasn't working. Not just this specific mission, but the entire idea of him being in charge of soldiers. It just wasn't how he operated. Acting on the fly and risking his own ass was one thing; doing it with the lives of several other people was something else entirely.
Afterimages of Lancer shots tearing through city blocks flashed across his eyes. Curdled memories of the one time Obi-Wan had trusted him to plan alone. Now these people, who'd only met him a day before, were ready to charge into battle with him when it was obvious he had no idea what he was doing.
Then again, Palpatine had placed him here knowing full well how he did things. Was this what the chancellor wanted? Risky improvisation as a companion to the carefully considered military action of the Grand Army of the Republic? Perhaps it was. As wrong as it felt, maybe making things up was exactly what Anakin was supposed to do.
He allowed himself a few moments to do a Jedi breathing exercise. He may not have been connected to the Force, but he didn't need to be. He just needed to stay calm.
"Okay," he finally said aloud after the silence had gone on just long enough to be awkward. "The first priority is getting our explosives over the wall, and we don't need everyone for that."
"You have something, then?" Amina asked, tilting her helmeted head to one side.
He nodded, and a confident Skywalker grin flashed across his face. "Here's what we're going to do."
The speeder bike beneath Anakin sang as he spun up the engine. His squad had taken a split formation; four of them, including him, sat atop speeder bikes behind one end of the boulder that was their shield. The other three were on the opposite end brandishing various weapons; beside them, two speeder bikes sat idle.
"Once we're over the wall," Anakin instructed, shifting his position on the bike to glance at each soldier in turn, "fire several shots at whatever is left of that panopticon tower. Make it seem like there are more than three of you."
"How are we supposed to do that?" one of them—Herrel, the one sporting the cycler rifle—asked.
Anakin shrugged. "Hold a gun in each hand. When you think you've made enough noise, hop on the bikes and haul ass back to the Arbiter. Tell the captain to wait for two sets of explosions before taking off." He glanced over at two of the bikes beside him. Engineer Thorm and grenadier Manik—each wearing a pack that contained several explosive devices—nodded sharply.
"We only get one shot at this, people. Let's move!"
Pressing his feet into the stirrups of the speeder bike, Anakin slammed the throttle forward. From beside him he heard the whine of three identical speeder engines, muffled somewhat by their exhaust suppressors. On the opposite end of the boulder pile, sprays of weapons fire erupted.
As he shot across the open plain, Anakin watched out of the corner of his eye at the fire bound for the panopticon tower. It's a good plan, Skywalker, he thought to himself as the zing of cycler bullets pierced the air and cracked against the glass of the tower.
Next came the blaster fire; a heavy repeating cannon wielded by Vetrovich. The rain of bright red bolts were aimed not at the tower itself, but at the ground just below it. As the darts of plasma smacked into the ground, they sent a spray of rocks and debris shooting up into the base of the panopticon—the brittle, fragile, transparisteel base. Even in the dim moonlight, Anakin could see a spider web of cracks begin to dance its way up the tower. A cycler bullet would smack into the glass, its impact point providing the next destination for the fractures snaking along the mirrored panels, and then the process would repeat itself again.
Then the base of the tower shattered, and the observation platform atop it came tumbling forward over the wall.
The timing couldn't have been more perfect. Their approach was lined up perfectly, the collapsing structure of the panopticon was their ticket over the hulking barrier of duracrete. For a moment, it was just him and the bike and the air, and everything felt okay again.
He hadn't flown in years. Not like this, anyway—he'd piloted speeders, but they were sluggish passenger vehicles meant for navigating Coruscant's traffic-choked sky. The bike was perfect—it moved with the slightest touch, the degree of fine control so responsive Anakin felt that he could twitch and change its course by fractions of an inch. Wind whipped by his face, clawing at his hair and kicking up grit that spattered against his skin like tiny needles. Even with its suppressor, which did its best to muffle sound, Anakin could hear the bike rumbling beneath him, vibrating with contained power. At the corners of his vision, he could see Amina and Thorm and Manik on their own bikes, tight on his heels.
It almost felt like something out of time. As though he could hang in the air, suspended, forever, always moving and never arriving.
Then a fresh volley of turret fire erupted from atop the wall, and he forced his thoughts sharp.
The duracrete loomed larger every second—as they approached the base of the wall and their improvised ramp over it, it suddenly felt as tall as anything Anakin had seen on Coruscant.
As he shot up the spine of the collapsed panopticon and crested the duracrete wall surrounding the shipyard, sharp thoughts became muddled with panic. His target was nowhere in sight. There were administrative buildings and parts factories as plain as day several kilometers away, their smokestacks pumping thick plumes into the night sky. Parking lots packed with employee speeders, and landing pads with starfighters and shuttles—but between all of that and the wall, a vast expanse of nothing stretched across the ground.
For a supposed operational shipyard, Sluis Van seemed sorely lacking in actual starships. Anakin swore under his breath as his speeder bike coasted to the ground—slamming on the airbrakes, he forced it to a stop.
"Where the hell is the target?" Amina hissed, her speeder pulling up alongside Anakin's.
For a moment, he thought of Obi-Wan. With him this would have been easy—just get inside the compound and ask the Force to point the way . . .
Stop, he scolded himself. It's not like you and Padmé couldn't sneak into unfamiliar places before you knew you had . . . it. Use some old tricks.
"Uh," he said aloud, hurriedly scanning the space before him—and then he saw it.
The expanse before him wasn't completely empty, though from this angle the optical illusion was quite convincing. Even so, he could just make out a streak of blackness against the sand. A canyon cut through the rocky desert. A thick, crooked scar—not the gentle sort of canyon formed by water erosion over millions of years. This one looked as though a great being had reached down from the heavens and tried to rip the continent in two.
The intelligence documents he'd studied on the flight to Sluis Van mentioned one critical detail, the detail he'd hinged this entire operation on. The Sluissi built their ships in "stacks." As a capital ship was assembled, its repulsorlifts—the first of its propulsion systems to be completed, laced throughout the chassis—raised it slowly upward, making room for the next skeleton to begin below.
He'd expected to find these stacks out in the open, suspended in a web of scaffolding. But of course they didn't build them that way. The ships would have been completely exposed on all sides, vulnerable to attack from any direction.
They must have built them in the canyon.
"This way!" he said, throwing the bike's throttle wide open. His speeder zoomed across the expanse, his three companions tight on his heels.
The canyon's edge was approaching now, faster than Anakin would have liked. Wind tossed his hair about, threatened to dry out his eyes and throat as it sliced past him—but he couldn't afford to slow down. Out here they were visible; if they could get down into the canyon fast enough, they might avoid detection.
Of course, there was the matter of safely descending into it. Anakin had no idea how deep the canyon was—or, more critically, how deep the stack of ships was stored. A speeder bike could survive a decent drop, like the one they'd just made over the shipyard wall. Hundreds of feet, though? Perhaps even more? Out of the question. Their bikes would hurtle out of control, falling unguided, powerless lumps of metal spiraling through the air.
Unless . . .
"We're going into the canyon," he called out over the comm. "As soon as you're over the edge, cut your engines!"
A mix of responses sounded in his ear. Two voices, confused and horrified, called out a chorus of "what?"
One voice, a woman's, simply said "aye aye."
And then he cleared the lip of the canyon.
The Force, he pondered, may have been effective at slowing time, but it wasn't the only thing that did so. Plain old adrenaline would do the trick, as it was doing with him now—for a moment, he saw everything in a top-down view with perfect, crystalline focus. Set deep within the canyon were massive oblong shapes arranged in a row like a parade or a funeral procession, the sinuous curves of their hulls reminiscent of the Sluissi shipcrafters themselves. They were shrouded in shadow, and seemed impossibly far away and yet dangerously close at the same time.
In the space between and around them, the canyon plunged into blackness.
Anakin absorbed the black for an unpleasantly long time, captivated by the sight and unable to even check behind him to see whether his companions were in the same state.
Then the bike's nose lurched sharply downward.
He cut the engine.
And plummeted straight down.
Without the main engine's roar, Anakin plunged into silence—the wind buffeting at his face was nothing more than a distant hum. Exhaling sharply, he gave a silent prayer of thanks to . . . well, whatever. He had somehow pulled it off.
When the main engine had cut and the bike had entered freefall, its nose swept down til it formed a ninety-degree angle with the ground—and then, rather than continuing to spin, it stayed firmly pointed at the bottom of the canyon.
As far as the repulsors were concerned, the ground was now the sheer canyon wall.
Now he just needed to wait.
In the center of his vision he could see the dorsal surface of a Sluissi capital ship growing ever larger; despite the wind and the ever-present sense of gravity pulling him forward, Anakin somehow got the sense that the ship was hurtling toward him and not the other way around.
It occurred to him that only half the job was done, and perhaps his thanks had been premature. He'd made the transition from driving along the ground to driving down a wall, but switching back was perhaps the trickier bit. A silent countdown echoed in his head, based on nothing but a gut feeling that if I don't want to die I need to engage the engine—
Now!
Shouting with the strain, he yanked upward on the handlebars, triggered the main engine, and braked.
The bike screeched as it was ripped back to forward position, and for a moment of blind panic Anakin was afraid he hadn't done things quickly enough, that he would just continue to fall forever—and then the repulsors caught against the outer hull of the capital ship, and he was floating.
Adrenaline pounding at his head so hard that it felt as though he would pass out, he just sat there choking out ragged breaths. You're not dead, you're not deadyou'renotdeadyou'renotdead was the only thing his mind was capable of thinking. He would be in a sizable amount of pain later—what he'd just done to his arms was in no way good even considering his mechanical hand's assistance—but for now there was just the shock of being alive.
An equally horrid mechanical screech sounded as Amina's speeder bike wobbled into position beside his own. Anakin raised an eyebrow and offered the ranger a nod—though her landing hadn't been as clean as his, she had pulled it off.
A new panic flashed through his head—Wait, the other two, where the hell are the other two. Still choking on exhaust and dust, he rasped into his comm, "Thorm, Manik, did you two make it?"
"Behind you, sir," crackled his earpiece.
Twisting around hard enough that the bike gave an alarming lurch, Anakin caught sight of two shapes floating toward him, one flecked with yellow, the other with red. Neither one was riding a bike, which should have been impossible—but then Anakin looked up and saw that both of them were suspended from thin, black pieces of blastweave.
Parachutes.
They came down on either side of him, cutting their chutes loose as they gained their footing on the starship's hull. "Apologies, sir," Manik said, managing to sound a touch shaken despite the helmet, "but we lost the bikes."
Anakin resisted the urge to peer over the nearby edge of the capital ship—it'd probably just give him vertigo—and offered Thorm and Manik a shrug. "Let's hope they don't hit anything on the way down. I think we might have made it here undetected, wouldn't want falling wreckage giving us away." Then, glancing at Amina: "The bikes will seat two. Give them yours, you can ride with me."
The ranger offered a silent nod as she dismounted the speeder bike, her boots clacking against the strangely smooth surface of the warship hull.
"Now what?"
Thorm's question was a fair one, though Anakin was hesitant to admit that he hadn't really thought that far ahead. He'd been preoccupied—first with getting over the wall and into the shipyard, then finding these supposed "stacks" of vessels, then getting down into the canyon alive and undetected. Now what, indeed?
He took a few steps away from the trio of helmeted troopers, gazing down the flowing metal expanse of the capital ship's hull, past the bow and beyond to the next stack of ships in the canyon. The topmost ship looked finished, at least to the naked eye. Bits and pieces were missing from the ship below it. The one below that was even less complete, on and on until the sixth ship, lit only by worklamps and spotlights mounted at the lower recesses of the canyon. The bottom of the stack was a skeleton of steel that barely resembled the finished product at the top.
"You know, when the intel said they built them in stacks, I thought it meant they'd be held up by scaffolding," he said, more to himself than to his accompanying soldiers. "Scaffolding we could blow up," he added, turning toward Manik with a knowing glance. "But they're not. Look at them." He pointed with a mechanical finger. "They're just . . . floating."
"Repulsorlifts," Amina muttered, her helmet almost completely muffling the near whisper.
"It's almost elegant, when you think about it," Anakin continued. "When the ship on top is finished, they can just fly it away. Float the rest of the stack up a little, start building the next one on the bottom. Keeps the partial ships protected from an airstrike."
Then there was an inward hiss—a gasp filtered through Amina's helmet. "But if the one on top falls—"
"The whole thing crumbles like a house of cards," Anakin finished for her, nodding as he said it. "We get inside and blow up the repulsor coils, or whatever's powering them, and it'll crush the whole stack." He glanced past Thorm and Manik, to the stack visible just behind this capital ship's engine housing. "We'll find a way inside this ship. You two can ride aft and take the stack behind this one."
A modulated laugh emerged from Manik's helmet as he rubbed his hands together. "Two bombs bringing down a dozen capital ships. I like that math."
"Think you'll still like it after you put this on?" Thorm asked—he'd extracted two black belts from the pack on his back and was dangling them both in the air. Anakin looked at the loops of fabric with one eyebrow raised—each sported a small metal box along their length.
"What're those?"
"We've got a target now," Manik said, snatching one of the belts from Thorm. Shifting uncomfortably as he draped it around his body, he tightened it not across his waist, but his chest. "Briefing documents were very clear. Bomb goes off no matter what." As he cinched the belt tight, a green light came to life on the metal box, which was resting near his heart.
"Dead man's switch," Thorm added, gesturing with the other belt before extending it toward Anakin. "Connected to the heart rate monitors in our armor."
Before he could grab it, Amina snatched it away. "I'll take that." Turning to look at Anakin, she shook her head. "Under no circumstances are you supposed to wear one. Briefing documents were very clear about that too." She wrapped the belt around her chest and yanked it tight; the metal box affixed to the belt came to life with an identical green light. From Thorm's pack she extracted the corresponding explosive device and carried it over to the saddlebag on Anakin's speeder bike.
What briefing documents? He didn't dare say it out loud—best not to look unprepared in front of the troops—but the intelligence reports he'd read had made no mention of anything like this. Hadn't Palpatine sourced these soldiers from the old peacekeeping force on Naboo? And now he's got them doing . . . well, whatever the hell this is.
It seemed a bit extreme, but he was in no position to argue with the "briefing documents" considering he hadn't read them.
"Moving on," he muttered; then, louder: "extraction should be simple enough. A ship of this size will have a big corridor running down the spine. Used for quickly moving crew and cargo. Get your speeder bike in there and you should be able to get it up to full speed. Fly straight for the nose of the warship and blow a hole in it; the Arbiter will be waiting to catch you on the way out."
Three plastoid chins clacked against three plastoid chestplates—silent nods of acknowledgement.
"One more thing," Anakin said. "We'll want to time our detonations. The captain's listening for two explosions as the takeoff signal, so we won't want to set things off too close together." He took out his commlink and jammed his thumb against the transmit button several times in rapid succession. In his ear, he heard the sound—a hurried staccato of clicks. "That's the ready signal. Wait until we've heard it from each other. After that, Manik and Thorm will set their bomb off first. Amina and I will follow. Other than that I want radio silence. Got it?"
"Aye aye!"
Pocketing his commlink, Anakin swung a leg over his speeder bike and revved the engine. He felt the bike dip a bit as Amina hopped on it behind him. A glance to his side revealed Manik and Thorm had taken a similar position on their borrowed bike. He nodded at the two of them and twisted the bike's throttle again.
"Move out!"
Republic Archives: Panopticon
Panopticon is a product developed and sold by Czerka Arms Corporation. Though the name has come to refer to a type of transparisteel, the original panopticon product was a security watchtower constructed out of this material, sold to a private prison corporation in the Outer Rim.
The panopticon towers crafted by Czerka lack the blind spots of a traditional duracrete watchtower, offering occupants complete visibility of the outside. Additionally, a microlattice used to reinforce the transparisteel gives it a high level of energy resistance—the glass behaves as though it were magnetically sealed and is thus resistant to all but the heaviest of blaster fire.
Panopticon transparisteel is not widely used within the Galactic Republic, owing to Cerka's relationship with the Confederacy of Independent Systems. Additionally, the towers are victim to a notable weakness—the microlattice which gives the glass its energy resistance also makes it more brittle than typical transparisteel. In 1124, prisoners in the Ord Binir Private Correctional Facility staged a daring escape, toppling a panopticon guard tower by shattering its windows with improvised slugthrowers, which caved the roof in and crushed the occupants inside as the tower collapsed on itself.