Dawn of Tranquility, Deep Space
The bridge of the MC85 Star Cruiser was an explosion of semi-controlled chaos as the crew shouted orders and information to one another, the data on their screens dancing in blurs of sensor read-outs, scanning results, navigational computations, system readiness reports, and - most chilling of all - sensor views of the incoming enemy spaceships.
"Additional TIE squadron detected at point eight seventy-two!"
"Three Carrack-class light cruisers following, six - no, five kliks behind!"
"I'm reading one capital ship, make unknown, repeat one capital ship at point eight twelve!"
"What's it doing back there, launching more fighters?"
"Negative on fighter launch, repeat negative. Looks like it's going to let the cruisers and the TIEs test our defenses before it commits to an engagement."
"Well then let's see if we can make it think twice about joining the party." Leia Organa stepped forward, her brown eyes hard and calculating as she looked from the datascreen in front of her to the viewport ahead. Leia's intricate twist of braids were at odds with her casual jacket and trousers - chosen for ease of motion and comfort rather than the visual impression they created - but somehow even without a uniform, without any finery, she still looked like a leader. Leia wore command like a cloak, no matter her clothing or hair. The officers near her straightened, her voice enough to bolster their spirits and chase away their fear.
The approaching ships were only just now drawing close enough to be seen with the naked eye, distant sunlight glinting off the familiar silhouettes of TIE-interceptors, but Leia had a lifetime of experience in battles like this on which to draw. When she gave her orders, they were crisp and confident and showed no sign of fear. "Warn our squadrons in the hangers, then roll the ship three degrees to bring our dorsal guns to bear. If the big ship doesn't want to scrap, there's no sense wasting our deflectors on it. Get me target data on those three light cruisers."
"Yessir!"
"Yes, general!"
"Copy!"
The Dawn of Tranquility's crew leapt to do her bidding, lips and probosci speaking into commlinks while fingers and flippers tapped determinedly at datascreens and control panels.
Leia didn't turn to watch them; her people knew what they were doing and didn't need her peering over their shoulders to make sure. She kept her eyes fixed on the enemy, gauging their attack.
"What's our snubfighter status?" she asked. With the soundless void of space between them, Leia couldn't hear the scream of the approaching twin ion engines, but she didn't need to. It was a sound burned into her memory over countless battles from the last thirty-plus years.
"Blue Squadron and Knave Squadron are launching now. Black Squadron is scrambling, will launch as soon as Knave is clear. Lightflash Squadron holding in reserve. Gauntlet Squadron reports launch, in position to watch our flank."
Leia nodded, although confusion tugged her brows into a frown. "Black Squadron isn't on duty," she said.
"Yessir, general," Kaydel Ko Connix confirmed. "They scrambled when they heard the alarms."
Leia nodded and suppressed a sigh. She'd known snubfighter pilots - especially X-Wing pilots - long enough to know how they operated, and flinging themselves into battle half-dressed and without waiting for clearance was par for the course. There was no point in complaining - especially because depending on how many ships that unknown cruiser out there had at its disposal, Black Squadron's participation in this battle might tip the odds in favor of the Second Fleet's survival, and they all knew it.
"Time to intercept?" she asked.
"Passing into the outer edge of our turbolasers' range now, general," another officer reported. The voice sounded like Angira but she didn't turn to check.
"Open fire," Leia said. "Watch out for friendlies."
The ship's turbolasers began to cycle. The TIEs were too far away to target effectively, especially with how maneuverable the small craft were, but forcing them into evasive action would slow their approach - and there was always the chance that a stray shot or two would get lucky. The more TIEs they could take-out before the smaller ships reached their own effective attack range, the less damage they would be able to do to the Dawn of Tranquility and her support ships.
As Leia watched, one TIE was struck by one of the bright green beams and evaporated in a soundless explosion. A few cheers rose from the gunner stations and sensor officers. Leia didn't join them, but she did allow herself a grim smile. Cheering for a bering's death might seem macabre to some, but given that the pilot in question had been flying for no purpose other than to attempt to kill Leia and her fellows she didn't see anything wrong in celebrating their demise brought. Mass slaughter was never Leia's goal, but it was a plain fact that every death among the First Order made the rest of the galaxy that much safer. It wasn't a pleasant equation, but it was one Leia had learned to see the positive side of a long, long time ago.
More explosions followed the first as a sudden spate of slimmer turbolaser blasts shot into view from the side, followed quickly by the ships that were shooting them: the first of the Resistance snubfighter squadrons had joined the battle.
Leia sighed with relief. She had a healthy respect for what a small, one-person fighter could do and watching three squadrons worth of Imperial snubfighters scream in towards her ship while her own were still trying to get out of their hangars had made her anxious. Now that her A-Wings and E-Wings were engaging the TIEs in dogfights, Leia could turn her attention more seriously to those cruisers and the unknown capital ship behind them.
"Maneuvering estimates on the Carracks?" Leia asked. "And somebody get me some scanners on that capital ship back there."
"Carracks are dropping into a pincer formation," Connix told her. "The leading ship will be passing into our stretch range in ten seconds, effective range twenty seconds after that."
Leia nodded. "Tell the gunners to hold fire until it's close enough for them to have solid targeting locks," she ordered. "Until then, keep concentrating on the TIEs."
"Yessir!"
A few seconds felt like an eternity in the middle of a space battle like this. Leia gripped the arm of the command chair beside her and tried not to let herself wonder if her son was in one of the ships currently strafing the Dawn 's shields or trying to shoot down its pilots. She couldn't sense him, but that didn't prove conclusively that he wasn't here. He might have learned to hide from her. He might also simply have changed so much since she'd last seen him that she could no longer recognize his Force presence. Certainly there was nothing else about him that remained of the boy she'd once loved.
The Carrack-class light cruisers drew close enough to start shooting, and the Dawn's turbolasers responded. Leia watched as one of her X-Wing squadrons moved to intercept, followed by the E-Wings. She nodded, not bothering to issue orders to either contradict or confirm the attack; her snubfighter commanders knew what they were doing and she trusted them to know how to best disperse their forces in the middle of a firefight. There were still TIEs out there, but the squadron commanders clearly thought the rest of Leia's snubfighter screen could handle them, and their ships would be better utilized dealing with the cruisers. Leia agreed, but even if she hadn't she wouldn't have countermanded their attack yet. Until and unless she spotted something that required their attention elsewhere, she would leave them to their own devices.
"General!"
This time Leia did turn. It was Guila Angira speaking, a young man from Tanaab who had joined the Resistance not because of personal tragedy like so many others but simply because he'd been so inspired by the stories of the heroes of the old Rebellion when he was growing-up that as soon as he had learned that Leia Organa was forming a new Resistance, he had wanted to be part of it.
"What is it, lieutenant?"
"Scan results are in on that capital ship, but our databases don't have a match."
Leia frowned. "Tell me," she said.
"It's roughly double the size of an Impstar Deuce, but sensors read at least triple the turbolaser emplacements. Based on power readings, we estimate the sublight engines are anywhere from two to five times as powerful as the old Deuce model. Shields are...they read as four times as strong, but until bombardment starts and we can get readings of them under stress, there's no way to say for sure how sturdy they are. And, general…"
Angira's complexion was too dark for his cheeks to go pale, but his eyes were wide and his breath was shallow enough that Leia caught herself reaching out as though to steady him, despite the young man's bridge station being more than two meters out of reach.
He took a deep breath and looked up at her. "They've got some kind of cannon under their belly. It seems to be a sort of lightning gun, but...it's nineteen meters in diameter and almost a thousand meters long."
Leia's eyebrows shot up despite her best efforts to maintain a calm expression. "That's a big cannon," she said drily. "How long do you think it takes to charge that thing? Three hours, four?" She snorted, forcing her shock into a smirk. "Typical First Order. Why concern yourself with efficiency or effectiveness when you can instead just focus on how big you've made it?" She shook her head and turned her attention back to the battle sprawling across the stars in front of them.
"Tag a sensor officer to keep an eye on the ship, but leave it alone for now. Stupid thing's probably still in the experimental design phase, more likely to blow-up in their faces than shoot if they actually try to fire it…"
Leia could sense the fear that had gripped the bridge crew in the wake of Angira's announcement begin to loosen. Good; her people wouldn't be able to focus enough to fight effectively if they were distracted by panicking over whatever new superweapon the First Order had brought against them now. Something else that Leia had learned over the last thirty-some years was that there was always going to be another superweapon, and there was never any point in panicking about them. Either they killed you, or you destroyed them. Being scared didn't do anything to help.
"Dorsal shields at thirty percent and falling!" shouted a young Rodian whose name Leia couldn't remember just now.
"Roll the ship," she snapped. "Bring our topside shields to bear and get me a damage report."
The bridge crew raced to obey her orders. Leia's grip on the arm of her chair tightened again. She ought to sit down and strap herself in - a sudden loss of gravity or a heavy hit would send her sprawling, and if the viewport was breached she would find herself ignominiously sucked out into space - but she had never learned to be comfortable sitting during a fight, even one she could only observe from a distance. Better to die on your feet, anyway.
The pilots risking their lives against the TIEs and light cruisers out there doubtless agreed in theory, for all that they were technically seated - but seated in a snubfighter, your feet on the pedals and hands tight around the control yoke, was a very different and much more active form of sitting than in a sturdy chair at a bridge station.
"Black Squadron, tighten it up!" Poe Dameron ordered. "I want concentrated barrage on the portside of this cruiser. We'll never take those shields down with scattered potshots!"
"Copy, commander!" The responses all came in affirmative, in half a dozen different accents and a range of species stretching from Duros to Quarren. Poe nodded absently, already cycling his lasers to the slower but stronger quad-linked shot and adjusting his targeting brackets until they centered on a section of scorched plates along the portside of the Carrack.
"BB-8, transmit that targeting data to the rest of the squadron and instruct their astromechs to coordinate aiming and converge."
The little droid whistled a cheerful alternative as Poe squeezed off three more rounds of heavy shots that splattered against the Carrack-class cruiser's shields. Then the number of blasts hitting the cruiser doubled, tripled, quadrupled; his squadron was coming to join him, pouring their firepower after his.
Down below, the already straining shields flickered under the assault. Poe saw first one and then another get through between the degrading oscillations, scouring deep scorch marks on the durasteel plates below.
"Come on, come on," Poe muttered, as though the shields might somehow hear him and listen, "buckle for me, you know you want to…"
And then, just as a flight of TIEs came screaming up behind their X-Wings, the cruiser's shields flickered once more and evaporated. Poe let out a whoop and said, "Target at will, Black Squadron, repeat, target at will, the shields are down!"
"We'll take you up on that offer, Black Leader," came the cool voice of another pilot. "Knave Flight Three, follow me in. Firepower to maximum. I want that cruiser vaped or fleeing in the next five minutes."
Poe turned his head in time to see the sleek, burly forms of four E-Wings race past, their heavy guns already firing.
"Thanks for the shield breach, Black Leader," the E-Wing pilot continued. "Your people do good work."
"That's what you keep X-Wings around for, Knave Lead," Poe quipped cheerfully. "We do all the hard work so you shiny E-Wing jockeys can take all the credit."
Knave Leader laughed and sent a proton torpedo streaking in towards the hapless cruiser.
"Okay, Black Three and Four, you're with me. We're dusting those TIEs so the others can focus on the big, easy target. Everybody else, follow Knave Leader's lead. I want that ship vaped in the next four minutes."
Between the combined firepower of the X-Wings and E-Wings, it didn't even last two.
As the first cruiser turned away from the Dawn's turbolasers and the second erupted in flames under the guns of the snubfighters, Leia turned and snapped, "Engines ahead one-third! Helm, take us in towards the mystery capital ship. Tell the gunners to prepare to slag that last light cruiser as we pass it. Shields to full on port."
She spun back the other way and asked, "Status report from Gauntlet Squadron?"
"No bogeys detected, general," said Lieutenant Ploi. The pale Quarren's mouth tentacles trembled, but Leia thought it was more from the tension of battle than fear. "Gauntlet reports clear skies on our flanks."
"Good," said Leia, turning back to face the viewport as her cruiser swung to face the remaining Carrack-class and accelerated towards it. She smiled thinly, imagining the flurry of dismay that had to be spreading through the smaller ship's bridge at the sight of the large Mon Cal ship bearing down on them.
A TIE exploded mere meters off the bridge making Leia flinch from the sudden burst of light and flame. An X-Wing soared through the spreading cloud of fire and shrapnel that had once been an enemy starfighter and Leia smiled in approval at her pilots' skills.
"Engines, increase speed one mark," she commanded coolly. Her eyes fixed on the distant spot where the mystery cruiser was lurking. All she could see of it at this distance was a faint glint of reflected light, but she still narrowed her eyes threateningly.
Go on, she thought, flinch.
Jessika Pava soared through a dissipating explosion that had moments before been the TIE fighter under her guns then banked hard to keep from plowing directly into the Dawn of Tranquility's bridge viewport.
"Nice shooting, Three!"
"Not so bad yourself, Lead!" Jess retorted, spinning her snubfighter to present a more difficult target to the gunners on that last Carrack-class cruiser as she dove towards it for another strafing run, her wingmate tucked tight on her tail.
They breezed past Poe, who was juking and jinxing while he played bait for a pair of interceptors who were too fixated on their target to notice that Poe's wingmate was soaring into position behind them. Jess smirked at the doomed First Order fools and turned her eyes - and her targeting brackets - to the Carrack-class.
Part of her wanted to break and go after the cruiser that was running, slag its engines to pin it in place and keep shooting until its hull cracked and its atmosphere vented. Every ship and crew that she could deny to the First Order was one fewer that could bomb worlds or kidnap children - but Leia liked letting the enemy live if they were smart enough to run. Said that it helped undermine the First Order's credibility to have survivors limp back to their bases, gasping about their narrow escapes and marveling at the mercy the supposedly fanatical Resistance had shown in letting them live. It was a sensible strategy and Jess approved its purpose...but that didn't mean she had to like letting the enemy go.
Still, this cruiser was still fighting, and watching its shields flicker like a spinning gwayo bird under the converging turbolasers of the Second Fleet was satisfying enough for now. Jess sighted in on a sensor array and squeezed her trigger. Most of her shots dissipated into the shields, but a few slipped through as it oscillated under the barrage. She watched as the array slowly crumbled under the assault…
"Augh! I'm hit!"
The cry was pained, the voice familiar. A cold hand clenched Jess's chest and she glanced frantically at her sensor screen, looking for the blip that symbolized Black Leader's position amidst the fray.
It wasn't there.
"Poe!" she cried. "No!"
Then the Carrack's gunners found her, and a hail of heavy turbolaser fire opened up beneath her. Jessika banked hard, trying to shake their targeting lock before her ship, too, succumbed to enemy fire. The droid tucked securely in the socket of her X-Wing wailed.
Same here, little guy, she thought as she gritted her teeth and hauled on her control yoke with all her might. Alarms began to sound as first her deflectors failed and then her upper port engine.
"Sithspit!" Jess snarled. "Hold it together!" she ordered her ship.
Miraculously, it obeyed. The vicious deluge of lasers tapered-off as she moved out of the reach of the guns that had targeted her. Jess let herself draw a shuddering breath, then made her voice level as she asked, "Damage report, BB? Four, you still with me?"
"Barely, Three," came the rattled response. "That was close!"
Jess nodded and breathed another sigh of relief at the survival of her wingmate. "Yeah," she agreed. "Let's not do that again."
But even as the damage readout she had asked for scrolled across her screen, she knew she would. Nothing short of the total defeat of the First Order - or her own death - would dissuade Jessika Pava from throwing herself right back into the fight. Not even the loss of her friends.
"Smegging Sithspawned Huttspit!" Poe Dameron swore as his damaged, powerless X-Wing spun slowly through space. He struggled against the weight of inertia - without power, his internal compensator was down - and managed to twist around in his seat and pry open the casing over the emergency restart button. He slapped it with his palm - and nothing happened.
"Sithspit!" Poe yelled again. "BB-8, can you hear me? BB-8?"
He told himself not to panic. With the ship's power down, he and his astromech had only the hardlink between ship and droid over which sound could travel. He probably just couldn't hear BB-8's answering beeps, that was all.
"BB-8, if you can hear me, see if you can get the engines restarted! We need to stop this spin before it slams us into something!"
Still no answer, no sign of a response. Poe craned his neck, but he couldn't see past the fuselage of his own ship to where the little droid sat. He had to trust that BB-8 was working to fix the ship...had to trust that BB-8 was okay.
Poe didn't want to think about what he would do if BB-8 wasn't okay.
"All right, all right, let's see what we can do with this," Poe muttered, and reached for the controls again. There had to be something he could do to get his ship operational again…
The third and final Carrack-class light cruiser finally turned to try and run from the barrage being poured on it by the Resistance fleet, but it was too late. The sturdy ship cracked and split under the stress of its maneuvers.
"Third Carrack is breaking up!" Connix announced to the bridge.
"Escape pods?" Leia asked, her knuckles white on the arm of her chair.
"Negative, general. Not yet."
Leia nodded grimly. "Keep sensors scanning it. If there are survivors, we'll pick them up. Guns, concentrate probing fire in the direction of that unknown ship."
"We're too far away for even speculative targeting, general."
"I know. I just want to see if we can make them flinch."
"Copy. You heard the general! Open fire!"
Leia made herself look away from the datascreen showing the continued destruction of the final Carrack-class ship and tried not to think about how many lives were being lost needlessly due to the First Order's fanaticism. All they had to do was use the escape pods…
But how many would? The First Order didn't train its people to value their own lives. And now that she knew more about their conditioning techniques, thanks to what little information had already been gleaned from that one brave stormtrooper defector, she couldn't help but wonder how many of them were making the choice to die willingly, and how many of them never had a choice at all.
She turned her eyes towards the distant capital ship and willed her engines faster. Maybe there, at least, she could find some answers.
As the third Carrack dissolved in fire and shattered metal, the snubfighters that had been pounding it scattered and regrouped off the Dawn 's flank. Jess shook her head to try and clear the spots from her vision - she had been looking straight into the ship's engines as the first gout of explosive fire had erupted, and even with the flash-protection on her visor and viewport, it had been bright - and scanned her sensors looking for any remaining TIEs. Then -
"I have eyes on Black Leader!"
The crackling voice coming over Jess's comm might as well have been a balled by Maxa Jandovar for how sweet it sounded.
"Ship looks damaged but intact," Knave One continued. "I'm tagging its trajectory and sending it to Dawn for pick-up."
Jess sagged against her restraints in relief. "Dammit, Dameron, you better not be dead," she muttered, then louder, "Thanks, Knave One. Black Three and Four here, you want a hand with that mystery ship?"
"Sure, Three, come over and play and let's give these Imp-imitators a dose of the cold, hard vacuum of reality, Resistance style."
Jess and her wingmate banked to join the E-Wings but before they could close more than a few kilometers, the distant ship gave a flicker of pseudomotion and jumped to hyperspace.
"Kriffing coward," Jess snarled.
"Good work, everyone." The familiar voice of General Leia Organa came through the comm. "Gauntlet Squadron, please come around and root-out those last few TIEs for us. See if anyone actually wants to surrender this time." She paused to allow for the grim chuckle that Jess surely wasn't the only pilot releasing at the idea that anyone in the First Order would have the sense to surrender rather than die."Everyone else, back aboard. Let's see how bad the damage is...and thank you all."
The comm closed with a click and Jess pulled her ship around to join the crowd of snubfighters streaming for home - or to the ship that served as as close a thing to home as any of them had these days.
On the bridge, with the battle done, Leia could finally allow herself to sit. "Transmit instructions to the fleet to jump to Rendezvous Cresh at their leisure," she said as she sank down into the command chair. As much as her people and their ships needed rest in the wake of this sudden skirmish, taking it here where the First Order knew to find them would only invite further battle. "We'll regroup there and debrief," Leia told her people. She returned their acknowledgements with an absent nod, her eyes already drifting back to the viewport and the drifting detritus of their victory.
A wave of exhaustion washed over Leia and she sagged down in her chair, pressing a hand over her eyes. Another battle won...another battle fought for no good reason. Another host of lives lost to add to the First Order's tally as part of the endless cost to bring freedom to the galaxy.
Wasn't this supposed to be over by now?