It could not have been more perfect. The two armies have gathered their masses at the bottom of the cliff, with the Separatists somewhat more spread out to be wary of potential bombardment. The Republic has a significant advantage on paper, which they need, because the air base behind them is otherwise vulnerable, and Grievous desperately wants more ships.
Then, the bombardment from the Kalpana comes.
It is not the fiery rain of death that the Separatists have been fearing for the past couple of months, but rather, one of salvation. Because above the Separatists, sitting perfectly between the Republic ground forces on the west and the Kalpana to the east, is a holographic projection of a Munificent-class frigate.
Grievous only has one actual frigate, and it's still visibly parked within Selbar. But in the chaos of battle, no one on the distant Kalpana wonders how this second ship appeared. The holographic projection is far from perfect, slightly translucent and a tiny bit smaller than it actually should be, but those details don't get noticed at such a distance. There's no magnetic signature, no heat, and no metal, but the Kalpana doesn't have the functioning sensors required to tell the difference.
So, its turbolasers fire upon the false frigate, and they go right through it, unabated onto the armies of clones who wait below. There is no defense against such powerful fire, not for ground troops. Their only option is to scatter, but even that is hardly quick enough to have a decent chance of escaping the onslaught of friendly fire. It keeps coming, and the clones part like the Great Sea of Monor II in The Epic Of Somano. It is a beautiful wave of destructive power meant for Grievous, the Babteer Pil, and the droids, but it instead annihilates his enemies.
"That's the craziest tactic I've ever seen," remarks a wide-eyed WanThir as they watch it all unfold from their latest de-facto command center, a small hill jutting into the cliffside.
Grievous nods proudly. He had already explained to the commanders that he was going to be taking holographic projectors from the local theater for purposes of battlefield deception, but he hadn't fully laid out his goals until now. He didn't dare to speak aloud his dream that everything would actually line up so perfectly. And yet, it has. Every bit of meticulous work to set this up has paid off beyond his wildest dreams.
Even LilVas looks impressed, although she murmurs, "Hopefully we can get to those ships before they figure it out."
"We will," Grievous responds. It is true that they're currently sitting ducks. But unless the Kalpana suddenly realizes what is going on, they're going to be able to charge through what were once the Republic's lines and go straight into camp aurek, where starfighters and fuel await.
They slowly begin moving the hologram slightly south in order to keep it above the clones, while opening up an alley for them in the north, and Grievous orders his troops to begin their advance with a single swing of his hand. Droids, Meerians, and others begin to briskly march to what could be their freedom. Only a few straggling clones remain in their way, and they are quickly subdued by the droids at the front of the phalanx.
Leading the way, Grievous, IG-124, WanThir, and LilVas board an DTP-34 airspeeder, retrofitted by Babteer Pil to have a blaster mounted on the front. Ahead, clone pilots and flight crews are scrambling to launch their ships, but it's too late: No one expected the Separatists to punch through so quickly. The ships that do launch are met by an onslaught of vulture droids and surface-to-air blasts from the AATs. Many of the pilots, gunners, and engineers were already killed while they were operating the AT-TEs destroyed by the avalanche or the bombardment.
Ahead of them, nine CR25 troop carriers, one Consular-class cruiser, and nearly fifty V-19 Torrents sit ready for the taking. It should be a sizable enough fleet that they can evacuate all of their soldiers, excluding the ones not already on the Demask.
The Kalpana is now the only real obstacle preventing their escape, but with damage to its sensors and a growing fleet of Separatist ships, it should at least be a winnable fight. The real Demask is ready to join them at a moment's notice. If they want to take the easy way out, they could scatter the ships like drokifish, and the majority could probably get away. Considering what their plight looked like at the beginning of the day, that would be considered a stunning success.
And yet, Grievous wonders. Could we take down a Praetor? They clearly have some struggles with communications, so they might not realize that they need to shoot at the V-19s and gunships that are supposed to be on their side. But would they maybe learn their lesson and become more cautious?
He ponders that problem for their trip across the valley, until WanThir finally asks, "So do we split up and scatter now?"
When Grievous doesn't immediately answer, LilVas supplies, "I think that's the only option. Even if we hotwire everything they have, the Kalpana still will have more tonnage by a tenfold margin."
"Mass doesn't do much good when its commanders don't know what to do with it," Grievous points out, gesturing to their right, where blasts from the Kalpana continue to rain down through the holographic frigate. To keep up the illusion of a battle, the designers even got it to start emitting a bit of holographic smoke. They'll have to get medals afterwards. Along with… quite a few people, all things considered.
Grievous doesn't get many opportunities to work with living soldiers, at least not since the accident, and these Meerians have thoroughly reminded him how much he prefers it. It's especially nice because he was able to leave B9 aboard the Demask with Captain Mu.
WanThir suggests, "Perhaps let's keep our options open, then. Let the stolen ships approach the Kalpana and keep ours at a distance. If they respond smartly, we'll cut and run, going our separate ways, and they won't be able to pursue all of us."
LilVas raises an eyebrow, pointing out, "They could wait to open fire, luring us in before destroying us."
"That would require a level of tactical savvy that I haven't yet seen from them ever since General Keldon's apparent demise," Grievous counters. LilVas doesn't have much of a counterargument, although she doesn't look thrilled. Doesn't she realize that I'm trying to save her city from annihilation?
Regardless of their disagreements, it is a time to be tentatively proud. Today has been costly, but things finally seem to be going their way. Even looking pitifully disabled in his repulsorlift chair, Grievous holds his head high. He has executed two of the most brilliant tactical maneuvers that he has pulled off in a very long time.
While a few V-19s escape, the Separatists storm the airfield, led by their speeders arriving first and a few droid snipers picking off the clones that they can. A lone LAAT gunship swoops down, attempting to strafe the droid army, but it is blasted by an AAT, and it barrels downward in a smoking spiral, headed directly for camp aurek. Grievous thinks that he spots someone attempting to leap out of the crashing starship, but no one other than a Jedi could survive a fall from that distance. Once their speeder reaches the center of the camp, he can spot that the Consular-class cruiser is warming its engines. "That cruiser is getting ready for takeoff," notes LilVas, "but its shields aren't up yet."
As the biggest ship in the area, it could potentially jeopardize everything if it were to take off and turn its guns upon the remaining vessels. "I'll take care of it. Put the speeder down and let IG-124 and I off here," Grievous orders. The pilot follows their orders, and as they disembark, another speeder lands next to them, letting five Meerian soldiers and one Whiphid hop off to join Grievous. Together, they charge toward the cruiser.
Unfortunately, the ramp is up and the doors are sealed shut, but Grievous would rather not render the ship unusable by cutting into it haphazardly. He takes his repulsorlift chair up the airlock hatch on the ship's starboard, activating a lightsaber to cut into it. After a short bit of work, he cuts his way into the sealed airlock chamber.
The ship should still be spaceworthy, but at least we have a place to stand in it while staying within the shield if they turn that on. IG-124 leaps up to join him, while the Babteer Pil soldiers utilize a cable gun to climb their way into the airlock. "Anybody know how to hotwire this bulkhead?" asks Grievous, ripping open a small maintenance hatch to reveal an incomprehensible tangle of wires. After a brief pause, one of the Meerians steps forward, a heftier man with dull gray hair.
"I'll give it a shot," he answers.
As the Meerian works, Grievous becomes increasingly tempted to end this agonizing wait and cut his way in, but he simply can't afford to depressurize the cabin of what would otherwise be his second-largest vessel. Just a few more minutes without incident and we should be able to take it over…
Eventually, the shields come on, but they're well inside of them and able to continue their work. Grievous leans out, watching as droids begin to overrun the camp. He didn't have anywhere close to enough speeders to transport all of them, but the march wasn't particularly far. Hopefully, they should be able to take the CR25s without incident because it looks like most of the area has been cleared of Republic forces.
Suddenly, the cruiser lurches and begins to rise. "Enough of this!" Grievous shouts, "I'm cutting in."
The Meerian turns around, looking insulted. "Have some patience; I'm almost in," he barks before getting back to his work.
"You've got about thirty seconds," Grievous says, before the ship begins to tilt sideways, trying to make them fall off. Two Meerians find purchase by holding onto Grievous's repulsorlift chair, which he barely manages to keep in place, while the rest find purchase by holding onto IG-124, who remains rooted thanks to magnetic feet. Grievous can see the ship firing down onto his forces, but there's nothing he can do about that just yet.
It's only about ten more seconds before the door opens, and as they step inside, they are mercifully righted by the ship's artificial gravity. At last, they've now reached the fun part: the battle that he can do with his lightsabers.
Unfortunately, that battle gets quite a bit harder when the one ambushing them wears Jedi robes and swings a yellow-bladed lightsaber directly at Grievous's neck. He raises his own weapon in a vain attempt to parry. However, IG-124 reacts in time, holding his electrostaff vertically and blocking what should have been the killing blow. A few clone troopers manage to shoot Grievous, but his armor protects him, and most of them are focused on battling the Meerian soldiers behind them.
As the two groups of infantries begin their firefight, Grievous and IG-124 dance around the Muun Jedi, who swings her lightsaber in a classic Niman offensive while backing away to prevent her enemies from encircling her.
Grievous does his best to contribute, but the chair is just too slow, his arm isn't as strong or fast as the normal cybernetic, and he knows that he can't really hope to keep up in this state. But IG-124 presses forward, putting some distance between Grievous and the Jedi with a sequence of lunges that forces the Jedi to go on the defensive. The MagnaGuard doesn't even have a tenth of heart or creativity that his Izvoshra once had, but the combination of strength and speed is undeniable, and Grievous trained him well in the Jedi Arts.
IG-124 matches Niman with a mix of Jar'kai and Ataru, designed to take advantage of the electrostaff's dual-bladed nature to fill the hallway in its reach. Grievous knows these moves perfectly because they're ones he taught. So, when IG-124 steps right and delivers a lunge towards the Muun's shoulder, Grievous expects it completely.
He knows that it gives him an opening to dart on the left of the droid, squeezing past on his chair despite the narrow hallway. Grievous sweeps a low strike for the Jedi's feet, forcing her into an awkward backflip to avoid it. By the time she lands, IG-124 is all over her, swinging a powerful blow that she only barely gets her saber in the way of. However, she doesn't have the leverage to fully block it, so she once again is stumbling backwards. This duel is over.
She just can't regain her footing now. Every parry is a desperate one, and the droid controls the pace of the battle as it drives her further and further back. Eventually she backs into a wall, and the duel is complete.
There is nowhere to back away when IG-124 plunges the electrostaff directly into her stomach. The current burns through flesh, delivering a powerful shock to the helpless Jedi in her last moments as she is skewered by the lethal weapon. She's not one I was ever familiar with, but her skills certainly don't indicate that she would be of significant pedigree.
He picks up the Muun's lightsaber and heads for the cockpit with the surviving two Meerians, who look to have won out against the clones, and he gets ready to take for himself this new vessel.
The Kalpana is blind, deaf, and mute.
The saboteurs were able to fight through the clone army and disable comms before Djinn's reinforcements could arrive, and all that just resulted in a wild bantha chase between the two forces. They can theoretically still use their short-range comlinks for communications within the ship, but even those are getting increasingly spotty from what are apparently jamming capabilities of the Infiltrator-series.
Kuallue's command is turning into what would be a nightmare for any normal commander, but the good news is that the Potentium lets him see and speak in ways that are immune to the damage they've taken. Everyone on the bridge looks up eagerly to the Jedi, their only source of any clarity in the midst of this chaos. What Kuallue doesn't dare say is that his own clarity is perhaps equally questionable. They focused all their firepower on a holographic frigate, that much is now clear to everyone. He curses both himself and his subordinates for not seeing through the trick. Grievous continues to play them expertly, with his deceptions remaining one step ahead of them.
Their mistakes resulted in significant friendly-fire casualties, and what Kuallue is beginning to feel in the Force is that the deaths are many. He might have killed hundreds. However, upon some consideration, Kuallue knows that he can't admit to that completely. As much as a disaster as his command has been, it would only get worse if he were to demoralize the troops by speaking so plainly about the depths of his failure.
It seems like every step he takes costs him more, and he has nothing to show for it. To back out now would be an incredible loss, and Grievous would almost certainly escape. The only option is to double down until he succeeds.
The Separatist ground forces look to be battling the clones at camp aurek, but the numbers should still be in their favor, depending on how catastrophic the bombardment was. If they're overrun, the clones on the ground will hopefully have the sense to abscond with their ships or destroy them before they get taken. Sadiya's warnings continue to be a cry of frustration, despair, and anger. She probably realizes the extent to which they have bungled this attack without her in command, and she's probably rightfully upset. Had she been with them, a more seasoned commander probably wouldn't have made the mistakes that he has. But until she returns, her vague telepathic hints are essentially useless.
"Do you have any idea where General Grievous is now?" Dorain asks, breaking a long silence that has gone over the bridge. For the past several minutes, they've all just been waiting for any sort of direction. Kuallue hasn't been able to give it.
Kuallue suggests that he may now be preparing for an escape aboard the real Munificent-class frigate within Selbar. Everything is becoming murky and nebulous, and his eyes can deceive him. He explains that some number of Separatist forces are approaching or within camp aurek.
Captain Karne, a graying woman with several decades of experience in the Judicials, walks over and states, "My officers are unable to tell anything more precisely based on their cameras." Even if they had, the possibility of further holographic tricks renders such data highly suspect. After another pause to consider, Kuallue reaches out with the Potentium, speaking to any clone pilots that he can find, whether they be already dogfighting in the air, waiting on the ground, or docked aboard the Kalpana, and he asks them to scout out what is going on at camp aurek.
Perhaps none will heed his call, or perhaps many of them will. It's hard to tell. Behind Kuallue, Karne, and Dorain, he can see one of the clones messing his helmet comlink to try to send out that message more precisely. "Captain!" one of the officers announces, "It looks like the Munificent is taking off."
"The real one, this time?" Dorain asks skeptically, as he and Karne walk away from the viewport to check out on the camera feeds. Kuallue floats himself over that way as well.
They give it a more careful analysis, noticing how the ship actually moves, leaving empty space on the airfield where it once was - unlike the other incident, in which the real ship remained in place. Karne holds out her hand against the image to make some rough measurements comparing it to the town around it.
"My belief is it looks legitimate, Admiral," the officer replies hesitantly. Kuallue ponders for a moment, and he begins to feel that Grievous isn't on that ship, either. But that doesn't change much. Separatists are the enemy, and these ones are real. He tells them that there are many Meerians on that ship, but not Grievous.
Dorain frowns, responding, "Of course he wouldn't make it that easy on us, but he won't be able to hide forever, especially if we destroy that ship. It's his only capital ship."
"So then, we must open fire," Karne asserts.
After no objections are heard, Kuallue once more relays the command telepathically to all of the gunners on other parts of the ship, who are far too distant to hear and would require the comms to work. This time, he makes sure that his orders are a request and less of an assertion. If any of the gunners have reasons to doubt, they shouldn't go through with misguided orders again. Kuallue isn't about to repeat that mistake.
In response, the Separatist ship sails south, trying to put some distance between itself and the Kalpana. They are drawn into a chase with the Munificent, angling their shields primarily forward and pursuing it away from Selbar.
"Don't lose any altitude," Karne cautions, "We want to make sure that if any secondary Separatist ships take off north of us, we have enough height to intercept them."
"Wise strategy, Captain Karne," Dorain agrees, "Although we'll want to angle our nose down in order to train our dorsal guns on that Munificent."
Kuallue has the responsibility of relaying all those commands to the officers on distant parts of the ship, but most of thrusters are controlled from the bridge, so he just watches out the viewport as they fire upon the Munificent, and he wonders what Grievous's nebulous presence could possibly be planning.
Most likely, he hopes to lure them away in order to set up for himself a safe vector out of Selbar, so that he could escape on a smaller vessel. Kuallue advises everyone to keep a lookout behind them. Humans are limited in that way, with how they generally only like to look in the direction that they're going. It's a strange limitation to their physiology, and he still wonders why it is shared by so many other non-Celegian species.
As if on cue, one of the officers shouts, "Admiral, we have ships spotted ascending from the north!" That would be near where Grievous's forces had been. Dorain and Karne seem to be weighing their options, wondering which they should pursue.
"Wait, those starfighters are headed for us," Karne notices, squinting at one of the grainy camera feeds. It's hard to see exactly what they're looking at through the clouds, but there are definitely several dark silhouettes.
"Dozens of them are coming at us!" Dorain shouts.
"Reangle the guns and launch all fighters! I don't want any vulture droids getting through!" Karne orders. Kuallue relays once more. She could be right, and they should indeed be wary of these unidentified ships. There are already vulture droids and an irregular fleet of Babteer Pil vessels dogfighting above Selbar. Maybe, some have broken away in order to try to prevent them from catching the Munificent. However, Kuallue gets a sense in the Potentium that he's not quite right. They could be-
One of the gunners opens fire just as Kuallue realizes that the fighters are V-19s. He can sense that there are living pilots, not droids. It's another in their long list of mistakes, but at least they're getting faster at correcting them. He orders more firmly with his telepathy this time that the fighters are friendly and that they need to hold their fire.
"Those are friendly…" Karne realizes, probably not fully understanding how Kuallue's telepathy helped her figure it out. It doesn't matter, because right now is about winning, not about who gets the credit for it.
They're being reinforced, probably from camp aurek. The clones must have had to flee from the droid attack, he suggests to Dorain, Karne, and the bridge crew. Maybe they can now finally get a report from the ground once these fighters dock, as it looks like they're trying to. Slowly, with help from Kuallue's telepathy, the gunners are realizing their error and holding their fire.
Meanwhile, some of the fighters launching out the Kalpana's hangar are now dogfighting with one another. As laser bolts are exchanged between them, Kuallue has no idea who he wants them to shoot at, but he can feel Djinn's urgent explanation in the Potentium that he's on one of those ships, doing something necessary.
"What's going on there?" Dorain asks, pointing at the dogfight between the identical starfighters. After a moment, Kuallue understands, and he explains that the escaping prisoners and saboteurs must have stolen their ships, but that Djinn's group is pursuing them.
"Which is which?" spits out an angry Karne.
Kuallue doesn't have any idea at first, but he begins to realize after a minute, when one group of fighters breaks away and opens fire on the Kalpana's engines. Now, they at least know who their enemies are, and the numbers should especially be in their favor since there are the other V-19s arriving to reinforce them from the north. It also looks like most of the CR25 troop carriers from camp aurek and the Consular-class cruiser Micah Giiett are headed their way. Everything should be mopped up, and they won't even need to worry about re-angling their deflector shields.
The dogfight continues over their engines, and some of the arriving starfighters shoot into the crowd, though at this distance, most of the shots miss and instead hit the Kalpana. But then, Kuallue realizes the truth with horror.
Those ships are not friendly; they are hijacked. He can sense Grievous aboard the distant Micah Giiett. They've been fooled a third time.
He reaches out in the Potentium, begging one more time to their gunners to save them from the incoming strafing runs. He tries to explain, frantically, that their ships have been hijacked. He demands that they direct their weapons on the V-19s and prevent the upcoming catastrophe.
But telepathy, especially in this level of complex detail, is art that requires subtlety and control, and Kuallue is overwhelmed by a wave of anger and frustration.