Took me a while, but here's the new chapter. In other news, I've seen this story has been recommended on TV Tropes – a first for my stories... And with the anti-pandemic restrictions in my area, I can't go out and properly celebrate!
Year 16 of the Empire: Stella Maris
They hadn't even come back to Lothal after the encounter on Malachor, and the Spectres and their guest members had been reached by the Hyperionian with his old Actis and his customized R2 unit – whose additions resembling the Hyperionian's distinctive ears had left Maul speechless even before the Jedi gave him the old helmet with a bone faceplate he had come to bring him.
"Hey! You can't give him that!" Sabine protested.
"As far I know, he earned it." the diminutive Jedi replied. "Though we'd like you find someone to pass it on, it and the other thing, before we can grant you your greatest wish."
"I suppose I can do that." Maul agreed before donning the helmet while looking at the Mandalorian artist.
"When you go, could you take this somewhere?" Ahsoka asked the Jedi Master as she carried a pocket holocommunicator with the Imperial crest. "After the encounter it's only a matter of time before Alpha tells Vader how exactly I've avoided the Inquisitors all this time, and he's not stupid enough not to expect a trap with overwhelming force if he were to use this to track me down."
The Hyperionian took a look at the holocommunicator, then looked at Ahsoka, and asked: "Night Hammer's idea, I presume?"
"Actually Alpha's – though I doubt he expected me to use his suggestion the way I did."
Before anyone could ask exactly what she meant, the communicator projected a message: "Stella Maris, grid L-11", plus coordinates on the local system grid.
"Just like that?" Ahsoka wondered before pulling her communicator and calling directly general Airen Cracken with the news.
"Ahsoka, what's Stella Maris?" Hera asked, puzzled by Ahsoka's reaction like everyone else.
Ahsoka's answer explained far too much. Including Grand Moff Tarkin's prolonged marital status.
"That one is a bit more complicated – though it explains how it started." Ahsoka explained.
Hoffner couldn't really complain of how the business with the Katana Fleet had gone. Most would have just dismissed him, but Senator Bel Iblis (because even if he was involved with the Black Sun, and he clearly wasn't, it had been him to be chosen by the people of the Five Worlds to represent them in the Senate, not Doman Beruss) had decided he could use his skills and gave him a brand new YT-2400 already modified with improved weapons, shields, and scanners, an honest-to-Antonia Corelli cloaking device, and permits for everything, and would sometime employ him as a courier or, as in this occasion, a scout. In this specific case, he had 50,000 creds to verify if the Kampe system in the Deep Core hosted shipyards, with additional rewards for anything he could prove was there. Bel Iblis had provided the secure recording devices, of course: he was generous, not stupid, and making sure your guy couldn't tamper with the recordings was just a basic safety measure. He didn't really expect to find much – the Deep Core only had Koros Spaceworks as a major manufacturer, and the Empire had no reason to build anything large outside the Deep Core Security Zone.
"What the hell?!" he then said when he came out of hyperspace and found the shipyards.
It was amazing, in a way. There were Telgorn shipyard facilities, older models of Rendili Stardrive Harbor-class mobile space docks, and X7 factory stations in enough numbers to remind him of Daver Kuat, Byblos, or Nubia, a dozen Golan I defense platforms, an ancient but still useful Grade III battle station emitting jamming capable of hiding the shipyard and the Golans from most scanners at any but the shortest distances… And as any decent scanner would be able to detect there was something out there from an astral unit away, there was a force of armed Consulars, Ixiyen fast attack crafts and aging AF4-series Headhunters playing the part of an anti-pirate patrol based on the Grade III (that was simply too large to hide).
"Whoever these guys are, they're smart." Hoffner told to himself as he recorded everything. This was worth at least half a million credits…
The stealth corvette Bad Moon Rising had served a long and decisive career, if one that didn't appear on the history holos. Not with the Empire so intent to lionize the more glamorous and spectacular parts of the Clone Wars at the expense of the less showy ones, such as the IPV-2C Trench Torpedoer-class stealth corvettes (named after what Anakin Skywalker used the prototype for over Cristophsis) savaging the Separatist logistics.
And while their non-crystalline cloaks didn't make them perfectly undetectable as the stygium-using one on the derivative ship Carrion Spike did, they could still get into torpedo range of even a Nebulon-B frigate with a good chance of being undetected as long as they had a skilled crew that didn't do anything stupid. Thus it was unsurprising that the Bad Moon Rising, with her veteran crew, was able to get past the antiquated scanners of Stella Maris' Grade III station and land in a hangar alongside a fighter patrol, delivering the Spectres and their guest members Ahsoka Tano, Baarriss Offee, Maul (wearing the helmet brought to him by the Hyperionian), Clonetroopers Rex, Wolffe, Gregor and Nik Sant, and Leia Organa's so-called "evil droid duo" (whose astromech member was for once not bickering with the Specters' own astromech).
"You all remember the plan, right?" Ahsoka asked before they got out.
"We get to the bridge without being detected, then we let the astromechs wipe everyone out." Rex confirmed.
"This isn't going to work…" Ezra said.
"It's going to work." Sant replied. "I know the Sedevacantisti, I've fought at their side during the war, and let me just tell you there's a reason general Tarkin considered them barely less expendable than the Hulk battle droids. Even the average COMPOR guy was smarter."
Ezra was about to reply, but then, seeing that both Offee, Ahsoka and Rex (who had the same identical beard) were nodding, just sighed. It was going to be one of those missions.
"HOW! DID! WE! PULL! IT! OFF!" Ezra shouted as he was standing on the station's bridge, with the crew completely incapacitated and almost nobody noticing them until they arrived there, with the few exceptions easily dealt by the Force users before they could raise the alarm.
"Shik Sedevacantisti." Sant replied, as if it explained everything.
"Could you explain it to someone who didn't fight with the 18th Army during the Clone Wars?" Maul asked.
"Religious extremists." Ahsoka replied. "They think they have the favor of their god, and that everything will go by his will. On one hand, it makes them fearless in battle, but on the other they tend to not think things through and be reckless. Saw them in action at Third Sullust, they stunned Ventress by charging their ships as if they were crewed by battle droids while being clearly organic.
"Now, Artoo, Chopper, it's your turn – and then we can call in the fleet."
Giacomo Rossi, one of the slave guards at the Harbor-class dock Stella IV, turned to look outside when the alarms started blaring. It was immediately clear what was happening: the Republic Outland Region Security Force faction of the rebellion had found them, the Night Hammers and the shielded TIEs were a clear giveaway. And they were there in force, enough that they would quickly overwhelm both the open patrol and their actual defensive force of Basiliscus attack ships and Templar fighters.
"Prepare for jump." the internal speakers announced.
Giacomo chuckled for a moment – they had known there was the danger of being discovered and caught, and they were ready to jump with the shipyards, the factory stations, and the yards of completed ships at a moment's notice, with gravity mines ready to trap the infidels there.
He felt the jolt of the jump… And, after a few seconds, the jolt from an emergency jump out of hyperspace. Looking out again, he saw a strange organic-looking ship and a number of Lucrehulks, among others.
"Attention, we're in an interdiction field." the speakers announced. "Prepare for boarding."
Like the other guards he prepared to fire his DC-15S at the invaders, that didn't make them wait: seconds after the hull was pierced by Separatist boarding torpedoes, that unleashed old B1 and B2 battle droids humming… All Stars Burn as One?! Giacomo was stunned in surprise by the Separatist droids humming the Republic's anthem, and was gunned down before he could recover.
"Home One reports a complete success on their part." Hera said from the radio. "And we're almost finished here too."
Left out was that R2-D2 had remotely reprogrammed the enemy hyperdrives to fly right in the ambush from the Massassi Group fleet and the Agamar Force, or how Chopper venting the stations' atmosphere had reduced the resistance there by killing their crew and those of most ships inside. It shouldn't have worked. It wouldn't have worked against all but the laziest Imperial forces. And yet…
"Why didn't they upgrade the computer security?" Ezra asked. Then, before Sant could reply, he added: "Aside for being "shik Sedevacantisti", I mean."
"They screwed over Ranulph and Wilhuff Tarkin once upon a time, they overestimate their intelligence." Sant replied. "They didn't tell you?
On the Home One, the five founders of the Rebellion were reading the inventory of what they had captured, and just how many of the newly freed slaves that had been building the ships for the Sedevacantisti were volunteering to build for them.
"How did they even manage to pull this off?!" Bel Iblis wondered from his knowledge of how shipyards were built and ran.
"Easy: they bought one of the Harbors or Telgorns, procured the blueprints for the various shipyards and X7s, and built everything from raw materials, slave labor, and the considerable affluence they've been increasing by selling counterfeit DP20s to pirates and us, among other less than legal or moral enterprises." Tarkin stated, his gleeful smile unnerving the others. "That and a controlling interest over TransGalMeg Incorporated, one I expect they'll lose to Farool and his group now that we've dried up this revenue."
"Aren't those Bulwarks?" Organa asked as he pointed at some of the captured ships.
"A derivative, designed for the Advanced Light Battlecruiser program of the Imperial Navy and losing to the less specialized Allegiance and Secutor entries from Kuat. Though we could call them Bulwark Mark III, I suppose. Now, we'll need to run numbers soon, I want to know that we can avoid contract Hoersch-Kessel Drive for that project."
"Can't you drop your grudge for their old Separatist loyalties?" Mon Mothma asked the Grand Moff. "They're under a new administration now."
"And that's the problem. For all their moral failings, the Trade Federation would always give their customers their money's worth and made a point of guaranteeing good to excellent quality in all their products. The current owners, on the other hand, are cutting too many corners, and I won't risk the new interceptor by putting it in their hands – not if I have an alternative. And if we have it…"
"If we have it, we can proclaim the Alliance in a few months."
notes
I'm using this chapter for a few things. In part, to set up plot points for this story, but also to fill a few plot holes in the Rebel Alliance' procurement of warships, namely how was TransGalMeg able to develop and manufacture the Bulwark Mark III in the Imperial era and where do the Rebel DP20 frigates, AKA Corellian gunships, come from: for the former, it's larger than an ISD and the resources needed for its development are large enough the Empire would notice, especially considering TransGalMeg used to work with the Jedi Order (they manufactured the hyperspace rings for their starfighters) and the design is based on a CIS one; for the latter, we know it's a Clone Wars-era design, and all production would have ended in the Corellian fleet or the Republic fleet, and later in the Imperial one, so it was unlikely so many would end up in Rebel and criminal hands… But if TransGalMeg had developed the former in the open to try and sell it to the Empire and was manufacturing both in a secret shipyard, then I solve everything.
As for the Sedevacantisti… They're my invention, and I assure you guys they explain a lot of Tarkin's personal life in this continuity.