Chapter 9: Tactical Decisions
39:4:6 GrS
Rendili Hyperworks Shipyard, Rendili, The Imperial Core.
There were times when I forgot that fast travel throughout the galaxy was indeed possible, or maybe it was just that I was too used to prowling through sectors looking for rebel bases which were off the beaten hyperspace routes by their nature as hidden bases. Point is, it was nice to use the Class 2.0 hyperdrive of the Adamant at full power every now and again. So I had ordered the fleet to depart Empress Teta at full speed, riding up the Koros Trunk Line, moving onto the Ag Circuit at the agriworld of Ruan, then merging with the Hydian Way at Xorth, another agriworld, before finally moving off the Hydian Way a little after Lolnar to arrive at Rendili.
And it only took a little bit less than a standard day to achieve, for the Adamant at least. Unfortunately some of the new additions to my command had "suffered" a series of "catastrophic malfunctions" to their engines and hyperdrives that necessitated a holdover at Rendili. The dockmasters had been quite accommodating to my requests for immediate docking rights when I had started waving around Inquisitorius code cylinders.
The wait since then had mostly been that all the TIEs that needed have their software updated had to be done individually, so that was a pain. But I had come to the opinion that this pitstop at Rendili would only benefit the fleet, and therefore me. Yes, those missile racks that had been refilled and Tibanna tanks that had been topped off would come in handy.
But while all this was good, even great news, my job had ended once I had got the fleet docked. Wasn't much a Force user could assist with when the only present tasks were fixing up warships, crew training, gunnery training, pilot training and combat drills for the ground troops. Not exactly my cup of caf, to borrow the local saying.
Luckily I had a primer to distract myself with and, not to brag, I'm pretty sure I was getting the hang of it.
"Dzworokka yun; nyâshqûwai, nwiqûwai. Wotok tsawakmidwanottoi, yuntok hyarutmidwanottoi. Chwayatyun.'' I ground out as my vocal chords moved in ways that most humans never required them to. At the moment I was wholed up in my personal quarters, sitting in a chair with my legs propped up on one of the two desks I had put in here.
"Two there should be; no more, no less. One to embody power, the other to crave it. The Rule of Two in a nutshell." I repeated the lines in Basic. While my personal feelings on the Banite system was irrelevant, whoever had crafted this primer had obviously thought it important enough to make it the first full phrase you learned if you read the primer in numerical order.
Whoever had crafted it had clearly given no shits about future readers either, cause after two pages in Basic, front and back, where it introduced the alphabet and other such things. After that, it was all in Sith.
Not that I was complaining, you can't expect knowledge on this level to be handed out freely. You had to earn it. You had to want it enough to throw yourself head first into a difficult task with the desire to master it from the beginning. Any other mentality would lead to failure.
"Ja'ak." I spoke one last Sith phrase before closing the primer. It meant, more or less, 'I am free.' A rather fitting mantra to hold by.
While my ventures into the Sith language had produced some results, my efforts to devise an anti Star Destroyer strategy for my ragtag fleet was significantly less so.
My quarters were cast in blue as I powered my collection of holomaps back on, showing every major map astronavigation map of the Imperial Core. Various parts of the southern Core were cast in shades of red: Harrsk's holdings. A couple more reports, courtesy of Imperial patrols, had trickled in the days since my arrival at Rendili. Harrsk was on the move, or at parts of his forces were.
Apparently someone had flagged me as the guy to send any and all news Harrsk related my way.
I zoomed in on the southern border that was shared by the Imperial Core and the Deep Core. Sighted Star Destroyers near Thracior, Cortina, Eamus and, most concerningly, Abregado-rae. All of them quick in and out jumps. Combine that with my general understanding of what a fleet that had upwards of forty star destroyers would need and I had formed a general outline of what I thought Harrsk was playing at.
A general idea, I didn't want to be able to perfectly predict every move a madman would make. It would put my own sanity in a dubious light. But I did know that the worlds Harrsk was..., let's go with occupying, couldn't have the resources to feed his forces and supply the necessary resources to keep them in action.
So he was going to expand his fiefdom. The most pressing issue for me in that course of action is that his fleet would now be in the stable hyperlanes and generally stable space of the Core, negating my advantage of being able to face his ships piecemeal.
So I needed to go on the offensive.
An easy thing to say, hard to put into action.
It wasn't a problem of tactics really, I had access to every design feature of every class of ship widely employed in the Imperial Navy which made it easy to figure out what would work against Star Destroyers. Not to mention the memories of what the Rebels had pulled off in the past, most of which involved a heavy amount of starfighters as the key component of those ISD killing strategies. I happened to have plenty of starfighters, so it would be easy to replicate those tactics.
I go to Harrsk's slice of space right now and I would be able to start whittling down his forces easily. The problem was that I wouldn't be able to keep it up for long. TIEs, for all their advantages, were extremely fragile and would nine out of ten times be destroyed from even a glancing hit. Not to disparage the pilots of the TIEs, I'd never met a group of men and women as fearless or as well trained as them, but the turnaround rate of pilots and machines were horrific and would be unsustainable for anything but a galaxy spanning empire. It would most definitely be unsustainable for my forces if we got dragged into a protracted series of engagements in the Deep Core, something that seemed very likely.
In fact I knew they would become unsustainable in a wider scope a few years from now due to the loss of territory the Empire is set to suffer from the New Republic's offensives with the skill of the pilot corp continuing to tank right up until Thrawn, in order to keep his veteran pilots alive longer, started to upgrade his fighters….
"THAT'S IT!" I cried, leaping to my feet and ignoring the crash the chair made as it hit the ground.
I had it!
It wouldn't be full proof at keeping my numbers from dropping once combat started but it would give them an edge. Imagine the look on an X-Wing pilot's face when a plain old TIE fighter is able to tank a direct shot from their cannons.
I quickly threw on the inquisitorius variation of the standard imperial officer's uniform, an entirely black piece with a pin of the organization's logo instead of blue and red rank tabs; ignoring the top button. Luckily, no one was stupid enough to suggest that Inquistors wear those dorky hats that naval officers wear.
Before I departed I had a thought and looked over at a small wooden box, the kind women used to store their jewelry and was next to my lightsaber. The box pulsed in the Force as the Dark Side emminated off it. The Force prodded me as I looked at it.
Better safe than sorry then. I opened the box and pulled out a silver ring. Bringing it up to eye level, I closely examined the three runes that I had carved onto the ring, two on the inside of the band and the one on the outside. I was pleased to see that none of the runes had degraded or worn away in the ring's time in the box. Moving onto the final test, I pushed the Force into the runes on the ring. The Dark Side flared around the ring and the three runes lit up with orange light as my power fueled them.
I quickly withdrew the power, the runes quickly going back into an inactive state without direct access to my power.
"Guess you're up." I muttered before sliding the silver ring onto my left thumb, and striding out of my quarters, waving behind me to close the door as I left. My control was increasing.
There's an issue with being raised solely among humans, or I guess being raised among any species where you are isolated from the outside world, that I never truly realized until I started meeting other species. Some of them made the brain instinctively identify them as an 'other' or an 'enemy' through no fault of that individual's own.
Perhaps it was the appearance triggering a person's uncanny valley sense or their mannerisms being so far out from a person's established norm that they couldn't help but dislike the alien out of instinct. Sometimes these feelings were wrong, sometimes they were right. The stereotype of isolated worlds with new species having a tendency to eat the people who discover them exists for a reason.
For me, this uncanny valley feeling I got around aliens was a rare thing to experience, and almost never with humanoid classified species. Most of the non-humans I dealt with were classified as humanoids after all. They literally matched up with the baseline of a human's physiology, barring the unique traits the species had. Species that fell outside of that humanoid baseline got classified as aliens. Racist? Not in my opinion. Humans were the majority species of the galaxy, vastly outnumbering every other species. The majority sets the standards after all.
If you took issue with it, take it up with people twenty-five millennia dead.
As for why I'm bringing this up?
Cause there is one, tiny exception to that rule of thumb: Rodians.
I could not stand them. Whether it was the musk of manure they produced, the fist shaped bug eyes, the absolutely weird jutting snout that was their mouth or suction cup fingertips, I don't really know. But I could not stand Rodians, simple as that.
So of course the only dockmaster that was available in the early morning was a Rodian. My luck was just awful.
But I had a purpose for this visit and I did need Rendili Hyperworks to play ball with me, so I tossed the instinctual disgust behind mental walls, schooled my face in a practiced expression of politeness and took the offered seat with a smile.
"Thank you for seeing me at such a late hour Dockmaster." I began the conversation, my natural Core accent a bit more pronounced than usual.
The Rodian, who was called Rez Santrello according to the nameplate on his desk, did his species approximation of a smile.
"It is no problem at all Inquisitor. We here at Rendili Hyperworks are always ready to offer our services to the members of the Imperial Armed Forces whenever the occasion arrives." The Rodian schmoozed, rolling his r's and s's as he spoke. "But I am curious as to what the occasion is."
"I am in need of however many starfighter deflector shield generators Rendili Hyperworks are currently in possession of." I spoke with a nonchalant attitude. "More precisely, I need enough for the entirety of my fleet's starfighter compliment and for those shields to not affect the abilities of those TIEs in any major way."
The Dockmaster did his best to conceal his shock at the extremely hefty demand I had foisted on him, meaning that anyone else would believe that requests like this were part of a normal day for him. Didn't fool me for a minute of course, but that was part of the plan. I needed him off guard.
"Pardon the question Inquisitor, but you want to know how many starfighter class shield generators we have in stock that would fit a TIE series unit?" He asked, his bug eyes glinting with some emotion in the artificial light of the office we were in.
"Correct." I told him before moving my right hand over to obscure my left hand, and the ring on it, from the Dockmaster's point of view. "I'm not in need of something like Chempat's Defender series. Just a generator capable of dispersing two or three direct hits. Do you have something like that?"
"I'll have to check…" The Rodian trailed off as he activated his datapad, his spindly fingers tapping away on the screen. I looked out the window as he did so. At least Rendili Hyperworks gave the upper management a nice view.
The Rodian made a weird noise, maybe his own version of 'aha!'.
"You, ah, appear to be in luck my good sir." He told me, projecting the diagram of a shield generator with his datapad. "Our storage facilities have two thousand military grade generators in them at the moment."
I leaned back into the rather uncomfortable durasteel chair. "What class are they?"
The Rodian, either a master of maintaining a sabacc face or I was just incapable of reading his facial tics, but he couldn't hide the spike of uneasiness he sent into the Force.
"D-class Inquisitor. But I assure you, they are up to Rendili Hyperworks high standards and they have all been put through quality assurance testing as mandated by the Imperial ITAR Acts. They will serve you well."
Lie, the Force whispered to me. So was it standard salesmanship or something else?
I didn't let my facade slip though. "So these shield generators will only be able to deal with a single direct hit, if it can even do that, from every grade of turbolasers on the spectrum. And you call this military grade Dockmaster?"
"As defined by the most recent military classification system, it is." His large and bug-like eyes widened minutely. "Inquisitor sir."
Not exactly the class of shields that would turn my TIEs into the next X-wing, a starfighter famed more, in the technical department, for its hyperdrive and generators than its weapons. But proverbial beggars can't be choosers.
"Well you've convinced me Dockmaster. Those sound exactly what I need." I let a smile grace my face as I addressed the Rodian. "Have the order sent to ship the entirety of those generators to the Adamant or do you need my authentication codes first?"
"I'm afraid I can't do that Inquisitor." The Rodian replied. "At least not without payment first. My superiors would flay me alive if I just handed over those generators for free."
I cocked an eyebrow.
"And why is that?" I said softly. "Rendili Hyperworks has contracts with the Imperial Navy, all you need to do is send the bill to Imperial Center."
I was able to detect a soft spike of glee from the Rodian as I narrowed my focus in the Force solely on him.
"Rendili Hyperworks has been and remains an independent corporation Inquisitor. Emperor Palpatine himself declined to nationalize us when we offered to as a way of showing our dedication to the New Order. 'The loyalty of Rendili to civilization is written across the cosmos afterall'" The Rodian informed me.
I was...really shocked. I thought that the Emperor had nationalized, or partially nationalized in Kuat's case. Did Rendili avoid that fate thanks to their role in providing designs for the Clone Wars or had Palpatine simply forgotten about them. It might explain why the planet and its shipyards had lost more and more relevance and influence as the years went on.
Shoving the many questions aside, I forged ahead. I would have those generators and this Rodian was going to give them to, for free. He just didn't know it yet.
"A wonderful sentiment dockmaster, however the point does stand that the Imperial Navy has contracts already in place for matters such as this. Send the bill up the chain, Rendili Hyperworks will not be underpaid I assure you."
As the Dockmaster launched into his response, something about how he'd have to file the paperworks which could take up to two galactic business weeks to be processed by Imperial Center yada yada yada. Then he dropped the unsubtle hint about how he could expedite the process significantly, for the right amount of credits wink wink, nudge nudge.
Oh he said it better than that, dressed it up all nice and pretty with a bow on top. It probably would have seemed perfectly reasonable to the average customer this middle manager dealt with, maybe even the lower officers of the Imperial Navy.
A part, small that it was, felt sorry for two of us were going by different playbooks and only one was aware of that.
So with an inconspicuous twist of the silver ring on my left thumb, which I had been shielding from the Rodian's sight all this time, I pushed the Dark Side into the carved channels, activating the three runes at full force.
The faint smell of sulfur filled my olfactory sense as a concentrated blast of the Dark Side rammed itself deep into the Rodian's head. The effects were instantaneous: the Rodian's mouth dropped downard, completely limp; his eyes glazed over, and his antennas lost all rigidity and fell flat on top of his head.
He was still alive but there were no lights on upstairs.
I dropped my relaxed pose and leaned forward, propping my elbows on my knees.
"Now let's try this again." I said, pushing a smidge more power into the ring. "You will give the appropriate orders to have all D-class starfighter shield generators in this facility sent to the Adamant, an Imperial-class Star Destroyer immediately."
"Ah….oh...yes...sir." The Rodian vacantly muttered in response. His hands started to type away on his datapad.
"It has….been...done." He said a minute after he had finished typing.
"Good." I stood up. "You never met with me. And wipe the last two hours of activity from your datapad."
I looked down as the Rodian, swaying minutely from side to side, followed my orders.
"Now carry on with the rest of your day as if we had never met. Good day Dockmaster, I don't think we'll be seeing each other again." I was walking out of the office before he even had a chance to stumble out a reply.
As I walked back to the hovertrain station, I pulled the silver ring off my hand and examined it.
"Tch." I scoffed out loud. The ring now had blackened scorch marks all over it and had lost its polished sheen. The carved channels had ever so small breaks in them and three runes had been completely burned out. It couldn't be used again.
Well what can you expect from a prototype, at least it worked I mentally patted myself on the back.
You see the ring was my attempt to automate the most commonly known Force ability, at least as it was known in the galactic pop culture: the Mind Trick.
Even with twenty years having passed since the last generation of Jedi had roamed the galaxy flinging the Mind Trick around like candy; people hadn't forgotten it. They'd forgotten what exactly was behind it but they did remember that people would briefly act differently for a short period of time after they had met with strangely dressed offworlders.
Combine that with very exaggerated tales of Jedi and their abilities, along with a hefty dose of Imperial propaganda, and you get a social stigma, a taboo, against using a simple hand gesture. The Inquisitorius had even nabbed a Jedi who hadn't caught on to the change or had used said Mind Trick too much.
But back to the ring, I had devised it, with my infinitesimally small knowledge in Sith runes, back in the day with the intention of it allowing me to omnidirectionally cast mind tricks from anywhere in the room I was in, as long as I had narrowed my focus solely on my target. Preferably it would be used in conjunction with my investigations of planets for rebel sympathizers.
The project had fallen through after select test subjects had been rendered more into a semi comatose state instead of the 'I'm going to drunkenly confess some of my deepest secrets' state that I had been aiming for. The spectacularly limited number of uses I got out of the ring hadn't helped either.
I was pleased that the final prototype had gotten to serve its purpose in some limited way. So I tucked the now normal ring into my breastpocket, started whistling a jaunty marching tune, and made my back home.
I had some new upgrades to install on my starfighters, the general upgrades to the fleet would be finished in about a day and I had done it all with no risk to myself. An absolute win in my books.
That Rodian did have a chance, a very low one to be fair, to recover his mental faculties in time to cover his involuntary involvement up from his superiors. Or he wouldn't and whoever investigated him might be able to pick up my direct involvement. Who cares?
I would either return to Rendili so powerful they wouldn't dare raise a fuss about some mid level manager being mentally damaged and would be throwing themselves into serving my every need so they could secure my patronage or I wouldn't be returning to Rendili at all.
A/N: Thanks for the review Waterflames3. I hope you enjoy the rest of the story to come.