Disclaimer: I do not own Gundam Seed or Star Wars. They belong to their respective copyright owners. This story is not created with commercial aim. I make no money from it.

Phase 7: An Alliance born in fire

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Part 5

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CIC

Corellian cruiser Freedom

dark space

After it became clear that the Freedom wasn't going to fall apart for the time being, I went back on board to implement my plan for sticking it to the Separatists at Sullust.

There were a few unforeseen complications and all of them came from my people who for some reason decided that now was a good time to begin doubting my sanity.

"You're mad! Totally crazy!" The Freedom's chief engineer spluttered.

"So I've been told. Repeatedly." I nodded in agreement. "Can you do it?" Was it too much to ask for minions who at least once in a while did what you asked them to without giving you lip?

"He's right." The Captain glared at me too.

"You know, I actually got my engineering degrees in nuclear and hyperspace physics. They were kinda necessary even for a Sith if they wanted to receive permanent command of a capital ship."

That wasn't exactly true, but I didn't feel like explaining myself to the engineers. Those were by no means the only requirements, but some solid founding in engineering was required. I actually got that by accident – I went after those courses because the knowledge might be useful if I got thrown in yet another universe. It was a lucky break that getting those degrees came in handy much sooner than I anticipated. I still had to spent eight months taking more courses in a Naval academy on Dromund Kaas in between assignments for Baras before anyone would trust me as the actual commander of even a light escort, much less a proper capital ship. All the hoops I had to jump through were worth it once I got a better ship to base my operations on. Even a light cruiser certain beat the dingy corvette I used up to that point. Besides, doing things through proper channels eventually won me some quite useful kudos with the brass running the Navy so it was all good in the end.

"I know that my idea is theoretically feasible. What I don't know is if the Freedom as wrecked as she is still has it in her. Are the figures on our hypermatter stocks right?" I ignored the duo who looked at me as if I sprouted a second head to consult with Piett.

"More or less. We lost at least a third of the reserves in the collision."

Damn it, even my bloody aide looked at me as if I was crazy. You'd think that after Kamino these people would have an idea of what I deem acceptable and unacceptable. Besides, it wasn't like I intended to go after a civilian target for fun. I was going after Sullust's industry damn it! In the long run reducing the industry at Lununmo conventionally might not be a good idea – we were strapped for ammo and it was an open question how much if any we would be able to recover.

"They would do nicely. Has Joanna heard of the light units we left behind?" I asked Piett.

When we were forced to run, ahem, I mean make a tactical movement to consolidate, the frigates and bombers we sent after Sullumun's industry and any shipping unlucky to be in the area had standing orders in case some kind of kriff up happened. They were to continue raising as much havoc as they could, act as our eyes and ears and preferably split the enemy's attention.

"No change. The Separatists are merely harassing them with a few frigate packs and their attached Vultures. The enemy fleet is still attempting to capture the damaged ships we had to leave behind." Piett waved one of the data-pads he carried.

"That might actually force us to get creative." I looked over my shoulder at the flickering main holotank. The Freedom had one more hyperspace jump in her. At best. Once we got her back at Sullust she would be there to stay. "How are those numbers looking?" I prodded the chief boffin.

"No less insane. No one has ever done something this crazy! Our equipment isn't meant to do something like that! In fact it has all manners of safety overrides, both software and hardware to ensure that saner, less destructive accidents don't happen!"

"It's a good thing then that we aren't trying to force an accident then. Captain, you'll be glad to know we won't need your gunnery crews. Have them set the weapons on automated targeting then get them off the ship."

"Thanks the stars!" The Captain whose name escaped me again whispered and went to rely my orders.

"Even if this insanity works, we'll need days, weeks even to set up everything unless you want few hundred people to stay behind! It's going to be a suicide!" The chief engineer pleaded.

I went to the DC console and zoomed the Freedom's schematic displayed in the main holotank until it displayed only the hypermatter reactor and the systems related to it.

"We're going to cause a cascading overload in the fusion systems containing the main hypermatter reactor, but only after we've fed it to bursting with as much fuel it could handle for a short period. That's where the gravity generators come in."

"That would cause the hypermatter to implode and will vaporize the Freedom." The engineer's face twitched.

"The numbers tell you something else, don't they." I smiled. If this worked it was going to be beautiful.

The chief boffin looked down at the data-pad in his hands, then back up to the schematics. His face twisted into a rictus.

"I though you merely wanted to ignite the gas giant!"

"Well, that too. The Freedom deserves a nice funeral pyre, besides we're trying to make a point to the Separatists here. They're quite thick so it must be very visible." I nodded sagely. "However, simply turning a gas giant into a brown dwarf at best doesn't suit my purposes."

The engineer stared at the schematics. I could see the gears turning in his head. The numbers I had him and his people run finally made sense. Comprehension dawned. His mouth opened, closed, opened again and he began to giggle.

"It's all about mass! The hypermatter! Fuel! Boom!"

I think I broke him.

"Yes. A big boom. That's the plan." Merely igniting Lununmo wasn't enough. It could be written out as merely defacing a star system. Doing so served little to no tactical or strategic purpose. My plan was much more ambitious.

He suddenly stopped and nodded thoughtfully.

"Oh. I thought you wanted to use the Freedom to create a short lived singularity to suck in the moons towards the gas giant so they would eventually collide. This actually makes more sense. That way we won't have to spend a week or two modifying all the gravity generators."

Wait, what?! It was my turn to stare incredulously at the boffin, who was lost in his little world typing on his data-pad. We could actually create black-holes now? Even if it was just theory... The hell did my boffins smoke?! Why was this the first time I heard of something like this?!

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Part 6

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CIC

CIS dreadnought "Vorpral Blade"

Sullust

After the battle TK-51 kept his forces generally concentrated. He did send strike groups centred around Munificent divisions and augmented with most of his surviving Vultures to hunt down all the Republic raiders running wild around Sullumun's planetary system. Roughly two third of the enemy either fled or died while inflicting even more damage to the infrastructure there.

Sullust's government constantly on the comm and the organics there refused to believe that the CIS forces in system were now under a droids command. They unreasonably continued to insist that he put Admiral Kirst on the comm, an impossible feat considering the state TK-51's commander was even before his flagship glanced off the Freedom and then her escorts turned it into one giant coffin before they caught up to her and ran. His main force was flying along the biggest concentration of enemy wreckage and using their tractor beams to slow them down.

The Tactical droid was busy calculating. He kept a small part of his attention on the boarding parties he sent to secure the Republic wrecks along with the ships sent to secure Republic hulks drifting outside the main grouping.

TK-51 knew that the orders he received by Admiral Kirst conflicted with his chosen course of action... yet he was able to implement it anyway. He should be chasing the Freedom to ensure her destruction. To kill Veil – that much was obvious. While the ship itself was an enemy strategic asset to be reduced, the infuriating Sith was the real prise.

On that point TK-51 agreed. His data-core was still in turmoil because of the impossibility that happened. Was the math wrong? He ran the calculations thousands of times. Made his subordinates and even the ships mainframes do it over and over again.

Mass, engine output, vectors, combined approach velocity, known manoeuvring capabilities, engine outputs, even solar wind... TK-51 knew for certain he accounted for all relevant parameters. The Freedom should have been unable to evade. She simply wasn't agile enough and the Starcrusher went in for a collision after the point in her approach that an evasion was possible.

The Tactical droids in charge of the dreadnought kept TK-51 appraised of everything up until the point they got too close to the enemy ships that Republic jamming blotted out the comm signals. Their plan was solid, simple and as foolproof as possible.

The droids on board the Starcrusher made no mistakes.

The math surely wasn't wrong. TK-51's whole fleet checked it over and over again.

That left only Veil. TK-51 knew that the human was a Sith. That mean he possessed impossible powers. "The Force" wasn't a good enough explanation. All his data-banks had on the phenomenon was descriptions, expected capabilities and tactics when one faced Jedi and after Veil's arrival to the scene, Sith.

What TK-51 lacked was an explanation of what that Force was. The energy field binding all living things together? How was it utilized without equipment to do so? What were its hard limits, the laws governing it?

The holonet, at least the part that could still be accessed outside Republic controlled space, was vague too. Stories, legends. Myths. Where was the science? Why only the Jedi were allowed to study such frustrating discipline?

TK-51 found many varying and often conflicting answers to those questions. None of them were good enough to satisfy his logical mind.

The only conclusion he could achieve was simple. Veil was to blame for the survival of the Freedom. He used that space wizardry of his people called the Force to do it. It made TK-51 angry. The Force had to be understood. Studied, its laws documented. Either that of it proved to be impossible, then it would be an affont to an orderly and logical galaxy and must be eradicated as an abomination.

That decision made, TK-51 returned to examining his own choices during and after the battle. He found his capacity to not follow an order to the letter oddly disturbing yet pleasing. He was still pondering that dichotomy when an alarm raced through the data-net lighting it on fire. It took the Tactical droid a fraction of a second to determine the source – the sub-routines monitoring the sensors.

Waiting for the raw data to be compiled and made into something even a droid could use took time, far less than the time needed to make it understandable for an organic, yet that only made TK-51 wait what felt like an eternity. He used that time to order general alert. Were reinforcements coming? The odds of the Republic force coming back after the disastrous battle were miniscue. They were far between enemy lines and their commander was a Sith. Everything TK-51 knew about them led him to believe that Veil would prioritize protecting his own existence to the expense of everything else. Coming to fight here, when the Sith's forces were depleted and odds of victory, not to mention survival were low was illogical if there were other alternatives.

With the Freedom crippled or even destroyed after a hyperspace jump in her state combined with the losses the Republic fleet took during the first battle, TK-51 was confided that using ramming tactics he would be able to achieve at least a draw if not outright victory if Veil came back. That was the tactical aspect of such a battle. Even a Republic victory would see them losing so many ships that it would be turning a strategic defeat into an outright disaster.

Seconds later, TK-51 found out he was wrong. Or perhaps he wasn't and the Sith was simply an illogical creature. Roughly half the Republic fleet that fled Sullust five hours ago exited hyperspace at point blank range of TK-51's forces. It took him only a moment to figure out how they did it and it was his fault. Those raiders at Sullumun – there was at least one reconnaissance ship among them and it gave the enemy the precise location of the CIS forces.

The enemy came divided in three battle groups all slashing at his formation from the above on vectors that would put them behind TK-51's fleet. The engagement would be brief and he lacked time to accelerate his ships so they could better respond to the attack. TK-51 actually outnumbered the attacking force by a comfortable margin, yet he wouldn't be able to use those numbers. There was no time and unlike the Sith he couldn't change the laws of physics to suit his whims.

TK-51 did what he could. He gave orders, shifted the acceleration figures of his ships so as many of the escorts would take the brunt of the attack and spare his battleships for a later action. In theory. In practice, there was no time for his orders to have much practical effect. Only the capital ships at the back of the parts of the formation attacked by the enemy could benefit. Those on the point of initial contact... Most of them were able to return fire once, perhaps even twice, which was better than an organic crew could do in such a situation. Those barrages were ragged and uncoordinated and the enemy obviously used its most intact ships as the vanguard, because their shields held. There was not enough if any battle damage to compromise their defences.

The Republic battle groups had no problem coordinating their attack. They acted with that commendable droid-like precision and Confederate ships began to die.

The first strike fell upon the Munificent frigates on the fringe of TK-51's formation. Unable to bring their heaviest forward mounted weaponry to bear, they were left practically helpless against a solid phalanx of cruisers that annihilated them without slowing down. A swarm of Republic frigates and corvettes, perhaps all Veil had left, raced through the wreckage. They went for Lukrehulks stripped off their own escorts. Heavy guns meant to hammer capital ships tried their best. A shot or two was usually enough to disable any of the light ships if it hit at full power, yet they were too small and nimble. They came too fast and began their approach from too short a distance. The UMBRELLA systems did their best. A wall of laser fire and clashed into the incoming escorts. The first of them died stung to death by the light weaponry. Nevertheless, even that last ditch defence wasn't enough – the enemy used their leading elements to absorb the fire-power so the rest of the light ships could come through unscratched. Wreckage and damaged ships slammed into the heavy armour covering the battleships. The former merely scoured the surface of anything useful and at best cracked the armour in places where particularly large chunks struck. The later were worse. For all their huge size, awesome fire-power and formidable shielding, the Lukrehulks were no purpose build warships. Their armour belts while heavy were less than perfect due to the general designs of the ships themselves. In places a crashing escort merely shattered the armour and just gutted a dozen or so decks below. Painful damage, but nothing a battleship couldn't handle.

A few others rammed places where the armour was either badly optimized, too thin or both. In two instances a mostly intact frigates rammed themselves deep within their targets before their reactors went critical. The first went off below the junction where the core sphere connected with the centre of the surrounding outer hull. The resulting explosion caused enough structural damage that the still burning engines of the Lukrehulk tore through the weakened and mangled outer hull and went critical when crashing through the superstructure. Only the central core survived somewhat intact with two stubby protuberances left of its outer hull resembling a pair of burning boxy wings.

The other wasn't so fortunate. The Lukrehulk it struck had sustained significant battle damage earlier that day. The armour covering the upper hemi-sphere of the central core was compromised. When the frigate Shield Maiden rammed into it, she was able to slam herself within the sphere and only then her reactor went critical. What was left of the battleship's armour betrayed it again by being able to contain and reflect the ensuring explosion for less than a second before shattering and partially vaporising.

The result was devastating and three seconds later, the Lukrehulk's own hypermatter reactor suffered a catastrophic failure due to direct damage. The battleship's central core vaporized, its armour turned into molten chunks of shrapnel along with the outer hull. The ensuring shock-wave and high-speed impactors were enough to gut its remaining escorts.

Those disasters were merely a taste of what was about to happen and TK-51 was helpless. The time of contact was too short for his formation to properly react. There simply wasn't enough time to calculate a hyperspace jump to get away nor for his ships to shift headings and manoeuvre to bring their numbers to bear. Only a handful could get enough acceleration to attempt ramming the enemy.

TK-51 reached an unpleasant conclusion – he made a mistake. More than one in fact. He assumed the enemy would be logical and even if he wasn't that he would be able to win. He didn't pay enough attention to the republic assets left behind in Sullust nor did he extrapolate the threat they presented. TK-51 merely assumed that they were left to cause as much damage to the infrastructure – an expendable throw-away assets that were no danger to his fleet.

He was wrong. His data-core went into overload calculating how to deal with this disaster. He had to regroup and go after the enemy. TK-51 still had his orders, but the Freedom was nowhere in sight.

Long seconds passed. More frigates and light destroyers died. The remaining Republic escorts flew inside four battleships. They had to crash somewhere within, the speed was too high and there simply was no time to de-accelerate. The resulting explosions were enormous. That had to be deliberate overload of hypermatter reactors, perhaps fed with excess fuel too, because there was no other way to explain how energetic those detonations were.

That made six Lukrehulks and their escorts gone. Only now did the Republic battle line engage with the remaining battleships in range, which had the core of their sub-formations torn out.

There was no contest. Two Venators lost shields and suffered light to moderate damage in the brief exchange. A Lukrehulk died, a pair were mission killed and three more were left with significant damage. At least finally the point of contact was over...

The sensors refreshed. The Republic fleet was past and the glare of their ECM was no longer obscuring what was behind them – a hundred bombers with a third again number of escorting fighters. They fell upon the damaged Lukrehulks and this time there was no UMBRELLA system to counter them. The rest of the Confederate fleet shot missiles, even turbo-lasers, though while the attempt was commendable it was too little too late. Hundreds of torpedoes hammered the damaged Lukrehulks. The missile deflection shots got a quarter of the bombers thanks to the efforts of their escorts who paid for it with half their numbers.

In exchange all targeted battleships were at least mission killed.

The Republic forces continued to accelerate and TK-51 knew they would flee in hyperspace before his ships could get to them.

He ran over everything he knew about Veil and the Force. Those legends and supposed myths didn't seem so outlandish any more. Did the Sith knew what TK-51 would do? Could he really see the future as some stories told? Was this a trap?

No. Even Veil would not sacrifice an asset like the Freedom unless he absolutely had to. So this wasn't a trap from the start.

Right?

While pondering those thoughts, TK-51 gave the relevant orders, for the fleet to get under flank speed and pondered what exactly to do besides the obvious – move so he wouldn't be caught in such a pincer again. He had to neutralize the Republic recon elements within the system ASAP.

Then a distress call came from Lununmo. The Freedom was there with the rest of the surviving Republic fleet. Crippled or not, that ship and her consorts were deep within the planetary system and hitting the moon closest to the gas giant and the fusion fuel extraction and storage facilities there.

Was this a bait for a trap? The Freedom had to be on her last legs.

TK-51 stood locked in indecision. He had his orders. His target, perhaps with Veil himself on board was within reach. And this time the calculations of risk versus benefit weren't enough to sway his sub-routines into avoiding the directives of the late Admiral Kirst. TK-51 couldn't simply watch while the enemy reduced Lununmo's industry. He had to fight, yet after this second engagement, the Tactical droid no longer had an advantage.

He made a call to the organics running Sullust. They still had elements of their SDF gathered around the primary inhabited world, which was called Sullust too – why they didn't give it a distinct designation from the star and system itself, TK-51 would never know. Foolish organics.