Harrower-Class Chaos - Chapter Seven (Patreon)

Jedi Secura and I talked for nearly half an hour, the conversation specifically focusing on how their government worked and how the Jedi were set up. It wasn't particularly exciting, but knowing the basics was the absolute least I could do, considering there was not much chance I would be returning home or leaving this galaxy.

Apparently, the Republic worked democratically, or at least as democratically as such a large government could be. Planets or systems petitioned to join the Republic to have a voice in the galaxy's goings-on. Once they were granted membership, the citizens voted in a senator to represent them in the Senate. The Senate was led by the Supreme Chancellor, who was given very specific and limited powers, and they were voted in by their peers from the Senate. At the surface, it seemed functional, but I had a feeling the CIS believers would disagree.

It was also a bit worrying that large enough corporations could have direct representation in the Senate, though at this point quite a few of the larger ones had left to join the CIS.

Say what you would about the political systems back home, but at least companies weren't handed actual votes in Congress or Parliament. 

The Jedi seemed like a monk sect masquerading as peacekeepers, forced into military service. I could tell that Jedi Secura wasn't exactly happy to be essentially drafted, but she also seemed to consider it an extension of her role as a peacekeeper.

The fact that they had actual superhuman powers made their function a bit beyond my experience. War seemed a bit above what Aalya and Plo both described, but if the galaxy was at war, it made sense that people wanted the guys with superpowers to be fighting too. 

As we talked, Plo and his men were transferred to the larger Venator via the ship Jedi Master Secura had arrived on, before returning to my hangar bay. It was around that time that we finally settled into an orbit around Foless. It was a busy space, with starships descending into and ascending out of the planet's atmosphere almost constantly. There were also at least three space stations floating around, though none of them were even half my size. It made me a bit nervous that there were so many things flying around, but thankfully they gave me and the other Republic starships a wide berth.

I mentioned how busy it was, and Jedi Secura chuckled, saying this was hardly considered below average for a Republic world.

According to the Jedi, the repair teams would be ready to start within a dozen or so hours, though they'd likely take several detailed scans of the damaged sites much sooner. Apparently, they had no idea what sort of ship I was, so if they wanted to fix me, they needed to measure quite a few bits before they could start. 

We had been in orbit for about fifteen minutes when Aalya's comms unit suddenly blared. She immediately stopped talking and pulled it from her hip to look at it. As she held it up, a small holoprojection appeared on top of it of a clone in a crisp officer's uniform. 

"General Syndulla, three ships have just entered the system," He said, his energy high and his voice tense. "Two Munificent-Class and one Dreadnaught, far at the outer reaches of the system. They are running deep scans of the planet."

"What?" She asked, clearly shocked. "What are they doing here? Foless has no strategic value."

"Could they be looking for us"? I suggested, Aalya looking at me. "We did get a good look at that ship." 

"There wouldn't be a point in chasing you, Master Plo's report has already spread," She said, shaking her head.

"Maybe they are hunting for me?" I suggested with a frown.

"That… is more probable, assuming they want you for some reason..." She admitted. "What are they doing?"

She directed her question to her comms, while I turned my attention outwards, filtering back into my normal state, my consciousness returning to the ship at large, rather than just focused on the bridge. I could see three ships far out along the system's outer reaches, my sensors letting me examine them from an incredible distance. One of the ships was a make I recognized from when I first woke up, a long, thin ship with a downward curve at the front, almost like a helmet, and a flared back end where the thrusters were attached. Given the clone's words, this must be a Dreadnaught.

The other two ships, the Munificents, given what the clone said, I had never seen before, and they reminded me of a bird covering its head with its wings, as they had two massive, curved panels that ran around the front end of their hulls. I pulled back to the projector just in time for the clone on the comms to speak again.

"They have changed course," the clone officer reported. "They are heading directly for us."

"Well, they were hunting for me in some way," I pointed out, frowning. I idly noted that both Nix and Nox were now sitting at attention, waiting for direction. "Why else would they pop in, run a scan, and decide we were the right target?"

"How long do we have?" Jedi Secura asked, ignoring my words. "How long until they reach us"?

"One minute, fifteen seconds." 

"Oliver, I will run down to the hangar, get on board the Neutron, and leave," she explained, already tensing to start running. "Retreat around the other side of the planet, then jump to lightspeed. The 501st will arrive in less than fifteen hours, they have more than enough firepower to fight this group back." 

"You… you don't think you can win this, do you?" I asked, and her silence was more than enough of an answer. 

For a moment, I considered my options. Part of me wanted to run, even if it was cowardly. I didn't have any skin in this game yet, and I didn't know these people, at least not really, and this wasn't my fight. And yet they had treated me kindly, and had talked to me honestly. I had no delusions that the idea of a living ship was insane, yet they took it in stride and greeted me as a friend.

Meanwhile, the CIS had shot at me just a few minutes after I woke up. 

Still, I had no shields, and I still didn't have any normal laser weapons. Jumping into combat so fast was… it was a huge risk, not the kind I took happily.

Despite that, the choice felt pretty obvious. Their policies may sound concerning to an outsider, but both Plo Koon and Aayla Secura had been nice to me, and had been honest, as far as I could tell. 

It didn't take long to make up my mind.

"Tell your troops in the hangar to board and leave, you don't have time to get down there. Not if you want your fleet to move now and not get pinned down," I suggested. "Then grab hold of something. You can lead from my deck."

"You… are planning to fight?" She asked, sounding surprised. "You don't have any weapons, no shields." 

"I have my ice… and another trick," I assured her, already turning to orient alongside the venator beside me. "I'll feed the data coming for your ships through the holoproject so you can link up with them and direct them from here." 

"...very well," She said with a nod.

I nodded, then pulled away from the projector again, running the data from my sensors through it and causing it to light up with information. With a flex, all ten of my Black Knights appeared inside the lower hangar bay, all in their ship forms. Even as I melted the hangar cap to let them slip out, I felt the Venator, the Nova Glare, reach out after Aayla Secura explained the situation. I fed that data through the holoprojector as well, with even more information popping up as I did. Then, as the Nova Glare started disgorging a shocking amount of starfighters from its top opening, I added my Black Knights as friendlies and ordered them out of the hangar. 

Under Jedi Secura's direction, the Star Corps capital ship pulled together, and I saw the two remaining ships of Aayla Secura's fleet, a pair of Arquiten-class light cruisers. They shared a similar triple-thruster engine system to the Consular-class, just larger and more powerful, and had the dagger-shaped forward hull that seemed pretty popular with the Republic.

Seconds ticked down as we left the planet's orbit, rushing out to meet the CIS forces. Finally, after what felt like hours, the Venator's larger weapons were within range, and we were suddenly in combat.

Now, while I was stepping up to help the people who had treated me kindly, I wasn't about to dive into the fray and toss my life away. I had no shields and no weapon systems, that meant hanging back and acting as artillery.

And what artillery I was. 

The moment I had started considering the idea of helping the Republic, I had started to spread my ice. Some of it reinforced my armor, growing thicker plates of ice around the central areas along my spine and wings. I had a lot of empty space inside of me, and while it would suck to get damaged at all, protecting my vitals was much more important.

A good chunk of my focus, however, also went to growing some ammunition. Now, as beams of energy started to fire across space, my icy armor was covered in dozens of solid, icy cones, like massive, fifty-foot-tall Christmas trees, with more already forming. As they grew, I focused on my control and snapped a handful of the cones off at the base. I then began spinning them around my hull, like orbiting satellites, faster and faster with each rotation.

Then, just before I was personally within weapons range, I decelerated hard enough to force General Secura to grab onto the holoprojector. I immediately banked hard away from the Star Corps fleet, dodged several thick beams of laser fire, and hurled four ice cones at the approaching ships.

Now, I had some advantages in this attempt. The CIS had no idea what was going on, they had no way to predict I was going to start hurling ice spears at them. They were also flying toward us at full steam ahead, which meant diverting suddenly to dodge was much harder. 

That said, I had never done this before, and I was literally shooting into the dark, trying to hit these hips as they bore down on us. These spears were traveling fast, but they were nowhere near the speed of these laser weapons.

So the fact that even one of the cones impacted the nearest enemy ship, a Munificent according to the data the Nova Glare was feeding us, was pretty lucky. 

"Well… I guess that works," I heard the Jedi currently running the fight from my bridge say. "Oliver, try and focus your fire on one ship. The more we can take down, the less firepower they have!" 

I nodded, my internal systems fluctuating as I tensed up and focused. While I could handle it, growing the ice and controlling the rotating and spinning of the spears about to be thrown, getting them going as fast as I could, was taking a considerable amount of my reactor power. I was slowing myself down by multitasking, but with Strong Legs, the loss of speed wasn't as pronounced. 

I hurled another quartet of ice spears, managing to again hit the same Munificent. My sensors could pick up power fluctuations in its shields, but the Venator's apparently better sensors could tell I had actually taken them down about fifteen percent. 

As I focused on taking down my selected ship, the Star Corps followed General Secura's direction and swung around, looking to force them to split their attention even further. Meanwhile, the starfighter squadrons of both groups slammed together between them, explosions spreading across the empty space. I sent out the Black Knights to assist, hoping to stop any squadrons from coming my way at all. As it turned out, the Black Knights were potent little gunships, tearing into the apparently droid-controlled CIS starfighters at a prodigious rate. Casualties came almost immediately, but they were fodder familiars, so that was fine.

Jedi Secura's plan to split the enemy focus worked, as the Munificent I was targeting pulled off from the group to target me, while the remaining two targeted the Venator and the remaining Republic ships, which were laying down a considerable amount of fire into their shields. That all faded into the background, however, as I focused on the approaching ship, even more so when they opened fire. 

"Any advice, Jedi Secura?" I called out, though I remained out of the holoprojector. 

"The bridge is the raised area between the two armored forward coverings," She called out. "Stay out of forward view, the firing lane for its heavy turbolaser is directly in front of it!"

"Gotcha, hold on!"

I pushed my thrusters hard, hurriedly hurling the latest spears, using them mostly as a distraction as I pulled starboard hard. I moved pretty quickly, just managing to dodge two thick beams of energy coming from under the covering wings. Knowing it would need time to recharge, I tore a dozen cones of ice from the forest on my hull and spun them around myself, hurling them one after the other. This turned out to be a lot smarter than shotgunning them as fast as I could, as I could use each one to better judge the next throw. The first few missed, but the next three hit, then it was a mix for the remaining spears.

By now, I was well within range of its less powerful but still dangerous weapons, laser blasts hitting my hull and melting away the ice. My ice armor wasn't holding up, and I could already feel it being smacked with painful, burning impacts. They hadn't punched through yet, but it was only a matter of time.

Perhaps a bit foolishly, rather than repairing the armor, I focused on taking the ship out, chain-firing nearly two dozen cones, the last few smaller than the others as I ran out of premade ones. 

Impact after impact slammed into the rapidly approaching ship, before eventually they were close enough that it would have been hard to miss. Every one of the final dozen cones hit, and while Munificent's shields finally collapsed and the last few weaponized chunks of ice tore into its back half, they did nothing to stop the constant barrage of fire. The pain was searing as more and more of my ice armor was melted, the constant barrage starting to melt and deform my hull, feeling like I was holding a dozen rapidly heating irons to my side. 

"Goddammit, just fucking DIE!" 

With an almighty jerk, I tore off the massive chunks of ice I had formed around my two forward prongs, tearing chunks of my damaged hull with it. I barely had enough time to spin them around my hull before I held them out and drove them deep into the enemy ship as we flew past each other. Even as the ship continued broadside me, one ice spike shattered its bridge, crushing it until it was unrecognizable, while the other massive chunk managed to thread between the two armored forward wings. 

The second spike drove much deeper into the ship, tearing through weapons, deck, and systems. As I flew past, within a few hundred meters, I dumped my energy into the cryokinetic attachment on my hull and turned the dozens of large ice shards inside the ship into a blender, forcing them to stay together and tear deeper, dragging them with me as we flew by each other.

Eventually, control of the ice became too much, and I was forced to let go, but by then the ship's engines had died, and it was simply a wreck floating in the void. 

For successfully destroying your first capital ship, you have earned a Gold Ability Ticket…

For surviving your first direct combat with no critical damage, you have earned a Silver Trait Ticket…