The Force Wills - Chapter 182 (Patreon)

Fives had been flown into battle more times than he could easily recall, in nearly every small craft available in the Grand Army.

In a Crustbreaker, he could already tell that this trip into combat was going to be a memorable one, because he honestly couldn’t imagine that the thing would get them down in one piece.

The interior was cramped and every trooper was effectively treated as slugthrower ammunition. They were effectively standing, with solid restraint harnesses that came from above to lock onto their shoulders, whilst the lower body was secured against a cushioned platform that unfolded from the floor.  

Inside, troopers were stacked two by six, and Fives didn’t know whether he was lucky to be in the third row. Right next to him was a Mandalorian Blade with blue accents to his armor, who hadn’t said a word besides a nod of greeting.

“Comfortable, Fives?”

He was startled by the very familiar visor of General Tano right next to him, as she climbed up to her own spot in the Crustbreaker. Gravity on board was currently pushing him towards his back.

“It’s, uh, different, General.”

“That it is. Relax, it’ll get us to where we need to be.”

Her encouragement and words seemed to just flow into his mind, banishing the mild anxiousness he had been feeling.

She climbed up further and settled into her own harness.

They settled in for the wait before battle.

He occupied his time with the fourth check of all his loaded equipment and weapon. Encased in the harness he couldn’t do much more than feel the shiny new DC15LE blaster rifle, clipped to his backpack. It was a much needed improvement on his old DC15, which had seen him through two years of the war. He was somewhat sad to see the old girl go, he had made so many little improvements and mods to her, she had character but now he was reluctantly moving on.

The LE had been given to every clone trooper going on this mission and its main feature was exactly what command believed they needed for success. The ammo in a single tibanna cell was just 200 shots at max power, but it was a necessary sacrifice in this case.

“Crustbreakers One through Fifteen, stand by.”

The sudden voice of Conqueror’s XO was startling in his helmet. Fives grabbed onto dedicated handlebars set into the restraint frame harness.

The Crustbreaker’s hull shuddered briefly, a rattling that he felt into his lungs. The interior was suddenly filled with red light.

He knew that the Conqueror had just exited a hyperspace microjump and was screaming with redlined engines and reactor straight into the mass shadow of Golatha III, aiming for a low orbit right over the target and eventually a gravitational slingshot that would let it exit that shadow within three minutes.

“Drop point in 50 seconds.”

Fives fixed his gaze forward, trying to not think about the ‘craft’ around him that could barely fit in that definition. One name for them that was already going around was ‘laser coffins’. Just looking at the hull around him, the ducting, exposed heat sinks, it was difficult to imagine that something this flimsy was going to ride through and survive the worst physical environments that you could expose any vehicle to.

“10 seconds. Stand by.”

“Five…four… three…two…one… give ‘em hell from us boys!”

The Crustbreaker launched.

To Fives, it felt like he had just been given a kick by an orbak all over his body, then a nerf decided to sit on him.

He gritted his teeth against the gravitational forces, which his helmet HUD helpfully measured at 4G at the moment. Another fun little feature of the Crustbreaker, given everything they had to squeeze in to make it work, meant the inertial dampeners had to be downsized and given less power to work with.

The HUD also helpfully gave him a small graphic, plotting the position of the ‘Breaker relative to the planet. Fives was thankful for that little bit of extra data integration, but he found himself feeling conflicted about it. He almost didn’t want to know precisely how long this horrific, bone rattling ride would take.

The G meter slowly lowered and finally went all the way down to zero. Another space and weight saving measure, even gravity plating wasn’t a feature on a Crustbreaker.

The craft coasted for two minutes, riding partially on the momentum inherited during launch, minimizing its repulsor signature as much as possible.

Then the upper edges of the atmosphere began hitting them.

The rattling returned, the G meter climbed… one… two… three… four… five.   

The graphic in his HUD zoomed in, projecting the atmo and that they would feel four minutes of this.

He fell back on his training; straining certain muscle groups, breathing purposefully, forcing air through lungs. Their armor under suits contracting with bearable strain, keeping blood where it needed to be.

Only at 50km above the planetary surface did things begin to calm down, as the entry interface plasma was left behind, yet the Crustbreaker was still pulling 1.9 Gs as they plunged down towards the ground on purely ballistic arcs.

Their speed was still nearly six kilometers per second.

It slowed down to 3.5 at 40km and the G meter began climbing again as the repulsors began a powered deceleration.

He gritted his teeth as that blasted nerf sat down again.

“Sithspit! Urrrrrrgggh!” He couldn’t help but vocalize as he strained.

Only at 20km did speeds become less ridiculous at 1.8km/s, still slowing down rapidly.

He reflexively closed his eyes, just wanting this craziness to end!

“Five thousand meters to target. Stand by everyone.”

He belatedly realized that General Tano’s voice was directly in his mind and not coming through his ears. When he could finally breathe properly again, they were just a kilometer away and the speed had jumped down to 180 m/s.

“Flipping around in 3…2…1…”

Fives felt like his stomach wanted to jump out of his mouth.

“Bore laser activated.”

The sheer energetic screech of the thing filled the cabin interior like a physical presence. He belatedly realized that if it wasn’t for his helmet, he’d be bleeding from his ears.

An impact surged through him as if he had just been kicked again. He barely kept breath in his lungs and had to gasp twice, forcing air back in consciously.

His armor belatedly indicated that the internal temperature was now pushing over 110 degrees.

A rumbling echoed through the suddenly sweltering cabin, his armor automatically switching to internal life support as if he was just suddenly thrown into vacuum. 

“Ten meters, twenty, thirty, forty… we’re about to break through. Hope you enjoyed the ride, troopers!” He felt the General’s lightly amused tone in his mind.

Fives could scarcely imagine levity at a time like this!

A loud, rattling bang echoed through the cabin, and he felt it down to his very bones. The internal lights went from red to blue.

Explosive bolts went off in sequence and the front of the Crustbreaker just seemed to fall away.

The first row of troopers harnesses retracted, but descender cables took over automatically, letting gravity and motivators drop them directly into the upper floor corridor of the factory.

General Tano didn’t have to bother, as she just fell and the comforting sounds of her lightsabers activating echoed into the cabin.

All too quickly, Fives own harness disappeared and he descended.

Reflexes, training and instinct coming together as he unclamped and brought his weapon tucked into his shoulder and aimed. Targeting assist came alive in his HUD, as did vision assist. Most troopers rarely bothered with the aim programs, but the LE required it for its primary feature to be used safely.

He landed with weapon in a ready to fire position and scanned down the smoky corridor, joining the formation. The descender automatically detached as he crouch-walked.

In seconds, the twelve man mixed squad of six troopers, five Mando Blades and a Jedi General were moving.

The entire facility’s emergency alarms were wailing along the corridor, strobing lights came on, configured to flash blind organic eyes and only their visor filters spared them from suffering that intended fate.

General Tano immediately hurled one of her sabers ahead, cutting through a defense turret that had dropped from the ceiling.

“Turret behind!” called a Mando, firing his own heavy blaster rifle at another turret dropping behind the squad.

Sparks, the thump of tibanna losing containment explosively and a barely heard crash of crumpling metal.

The squad advanced and Fives winced as they passed by the remains of the turret - it was a Repeater and anti-infantry laser combo.

They had barely gone twenty meters before the General held up her hand into a fist, halting them.

Thick bulkhead doors abruptly dropped from the ceiling in front and behind the team, sealing them in.

She frowned at the doors, tapping her lightsaber gently forward, only for it to bounce off a ray shield.

Her left hand rose, lightsaber humming lethally in it and the entire door gave a metallic shriek of protest as it crumpled inward. The ray shield flickered visibly and shorted out.

A few seconds later they reached their first intersection and turned right.

Tano threw her weapons forward, which became rapid spinning fans of green that flitted forward into each corridor briefly, slashing against the walls seemingly at random.

The reason was quickly revealed as false wall panels fell apart, and the remains of Repeaters tumbled out.

“They have certainly increased their interior security,” she commented absently.

The squad turned right, heading into the core section of this part of the factory. Most of the upper floors were seemingly devoted to minor parts storage and they had to occasionally dodge menial labor droids on wheels. They had flat backs with four articulated spindly arms that zoomed into and out of rooms, pulling parts off shelves and seemed to care not one whit about their presence.

Fives could also now hear distant firefights echoing as the other teams began encountering resistance.

“B1 squads are responding, rising to meet us,” declared the voice of General Skywalker over comms.

Tano raised her fists forward and pulled her arms in.

He heard the crushing of machinery behind more hidden panels in the walls and even minor belching of flame.

“All teams, flame projectors in the walls,” she warned.

They paused at an intersection that had a down ramp to the next floor, but the General froze and hurriedly gestured for a slight retreat.

Her lightsabers stabbed into the floor and the team immediately knew the play; they were going to make their own route.

Fives and the rest of the team arrayed themselves around the hole that was being made and aimed down.

The blades returned to the General’s hands and she made a mild downward pushing gesture.

An invisible krayt dragon slammed its foot down, the floor’s steel and structure buckled downward once, then again, before two square meters of floor fell down into the lower level.

Tano jumped down first, before declaring “Clear!”

The team used descender attachments on their rifles to quickly lower themselves.

The general led them just a few meters down this corridor, before her lightsabers got to work again on the floor.

They descended in this fashion for three floors, before the cut section of flooring fell directly on a B1 patrol squad. It crushed three outright whilst the remaining six squealed in surprise.

Fives aimed down and got his first kill of the operation, nailing a B1 directly in the head. The powerful DC15LE practically half-vaporized it, leaving only molten slag that splattered onto the floor.

After a few seconds of fire pouring down into the hole, it was over.

They had just barely finished securing their descenders when-

“BX, droideka, 090!” shouted Tano in warning.

Six droid commandos and three rolling droideka appeared out of this floor’s upward ramp.

Fives snapped his weapon in that direction, but enemy fire was already lancing towards them from the BX, who were doing their rapid evasion routine; jumping and pushing off the walls, trying to close the gap to bring their vibroblades into the fight.

The team threw a storm of blue and yellow blaster fire against the enemy.

Fives missed his first burst, but recovered to catch a BX directly in the chest, whilst two other Mando’s had the same target.

The BX was practically cut in half as the high power blasts went straight through armor, internals and blasted the rear armor into shrapnel.

The general had in the meantime deflected most of the enemy fire and the remainder was safely dealt with by the Mando’s beskar armor.

Her hands were stretched towards the droidekas who were attempting to unfurl and engage shields.

All three destroyers lifted off the ground as they attempted to bring their rapid blasters to bear anyway.

Three deep metallic crunches echoed in the hall as the droidekas were utterly crushed, minor sparks and fires erupting as their internal tibanna reserves and power cells ruptured.

The next floor down revealed the first major production area. It was about twenty meters down to the floor and the vast space was a major assembly line for curved durasteel armor panels. Their size was the most startling thing and looked more like what you’d need for droid tanks. The production line kept working, with menial droids and B1 engineers continuing to work the molds and machinery, despite every alarm and red light flashing in the vast space.

Tano made a few quick hand signals before stepping forward and letting gravity claim her.

Fives double checked his descender module, meaning he was a second late before he jumped forward into the hole.

When they were halfway down, eleven turrets popped out from the far walls of the production area.

With his DC15 busy keeping him alive during the descent, he grabbed for his pistol and a quick snap shot at the closest turret put a decent hole in it, but not out of commission.

He frantically fired again, seeing the turret adjusting to lock on.

Then what sounded like a Mandalorian Repeater echoed through the vast hall and the turret took two blue bolts that ruined the barrel shroud and left it a sparking mess.

Just as his feet touched down he saw that the General now had WESTAR blasters in both hands, whilst her blades hovered around her.

“B2s! 180!”

Fives barely had his descender module reset and tucked his rifle back into ready position, when a fifteen strong squad of B2-ACMs marched through a large loading door, their arms locking down into firing position.

He sprinted and slid into the nearest cover, a thick conveyor line.

A hail of rapid orange blaster bolts began peppering them and the B2s didn’t seem to care if their B1 engineer counterparts got in the way.

“Hey! We’re on your side!” shrieked a B1 indignantly before it took a blast straight to chest and fell over.

The volume of fire was so great and worryingly accurate, that Fives didn’t dare even try to pop up for a shot.

Then one of the massive armor panels on the production line floated upward, angled itself edge first, before blurring with movement straight towards the incoming B2 squad.

Their fire bounced off ineffectually and the mass bowled over the front line, flipped over and crushed the line of heavy droids behind.

The squad immediately took advantage.

Fives popped up, adjusted a setting on his rifle and fired.

The B2-ACM took the shot on the left shoulder. He had missed the critical weakness. It didn’t matter.

Armor that would’ve stopped his old DC15 shattered instead, and a minor explosion sent shrapnel fragments inward, wrecking the internal components even more. The B2 wobbled on its legs before simply falling over forward.

In seconds, seven B2s met similar fates under withering fire from the LE rifles and Mandalorian blasters.

Their new specially formulated tibanna gas mix created a bolt that was far denser, the energy more volatile. Strong enough to punch through and shatter the B2 frontal armor. It was the power of a DC-15X sniper rifle in a more compact package with a higher fire rate.

Fives barely had the time to feel satisfaction at the result.

“Clear! Advance!”

He jumped to his feet and the squad quickly fell in formation behind General Tano.

She holstered her pistols in a heartbeat and raised her hands to the ceiling.

The overhead cranes and conveyor systems began moving erratically and for a moment, Fives wondered what the general was playing at.

Then he realized the problem, when one of the cranes picked up an armor plate, and began moving it in their direction rapidly. It crumpled into uselessness under the Jedi’s strength.

Another articulated arm crane managed to actually fling an armor plate at the running squad.

Tano waved her hand, stopping the heavy plate in its tracks and sending it straight back to bisect the crane. They managed to make it to the main door, fleeing from the factory line itself being turned into an hazardous weapon against them.

Outside the assembly line, they proceeded down the first corridor only to literally run into an assault squad led by Rex. There were only nine of them.

“Rex, merge your squad with mine,” Tano ordered immediately.

With twenty rifles and a Jedi General, Fives began to feel somewhat more comfortable with their chances. The biggest danger of the mission was in the early stages, when squads were small and scattered.

Fives found himself on the left side of the corridor, a Mando in front and behind, with Rex slightly further, just behind the General.

She halted the advance before the next intersection and shook her head.

“We have a defensive strongpoint ahead. Overlapping heavy blaster cannons, behind multiple energy shields, and a local tactical droid controlling everything. It knows we’re here and has every cannon waiting for us to show our faces.”

He wondered why they were just not cutting their way through the floor again, when he reviewed the spotty facility map in his HUD.

Their primary target was the theater shield generator and its primary energizer coils were just beyond the strongpoint. Going deeper could work, but then they’d have to ascend again, possibly straight into the blasters of droid opposition with the literal high ground advantage.

General Tano made the decision in moments.

“Squad, Peth 3,” she ordered.

Fives immediately pulled a single droid popper from his backpack. His action mirrored almost precisely across every trooper in the corridor. Such eerie synchronicity was something he was well used to by now. The training General Tano had done with the 501st and had refined further with her own 96th Legion was second nature to him by now.

21 droid poppers floated into the air and towards the general. They began organizing themselves into their own formation, until a wall of EM grenades were poised and ready.

Fives stepped forward with four other troopers on the left, whilst the Mandos stacked on the right.

The wall of poppers twitched and began beeping ominously.

Tano gestured with a two-fingered hand.

A heartbeat later the poppers were gone, a second after that and the entire corridor beyond thrummed and lit up with such intense EM energy that the air itself glowed blue for a brief flash.

They waited for a two second count and charged around the corner.

The entire strongpoint was in disarray, the cannon mounts in the walls were sparking with residual arcs, light smoke wafting from the shield emitters.

Fives drew a bead on the closest cannon, fired once, shifted aim, fired again on a shield emitter. Rapid shots from the rest of the assault squad quickly turned the strongpoint into scrap and barely salvageable wreckage.

Tano strode into view with the remainder of the squad at her heels, flanking her. Her visored gaze laser focused, yet taking in everything. Fives couldn’t help a shiver of instinctual fear that went down his spine.

She walked straight over to the small transparisteel booth that held the tactical droid, which was twitching in malfunction from taking over twenty poppers in close proximity. The energy shielding should’ve protected it, but it didn’t help when you had a Jedi that turned a basic popper into a precise homing weapon.

The booth opened under her power, she grabbed it by the neck with her right hand and stabbed a logic spike from her armor directly into a small port underneath the head.

A few seconds later, it was done. “I have limited local access.”

She pulled the spike and strode onward, stopping at the massive bulkhead door just a few meters away. It was one of the double-door types that were so thick and armored, even a lightsaber wielding Jedi would take ages to get through the hard way. Laser cutters and explosives would struggle and probably destroy the corridor in the process of getting through.

She stabbed the spike into an access panel beside the door and it smoothly yielded open with the hiss of motivators.

Beyond was a space nearly eight meters high to the ceiling, in the center a large pyramidal device encased in dark durasteel with a glowing emitter at the top that was sending glowing red energy directly upward and into a circular port above. It was surrounded by monitoring stations and control consoles mounted in the walls, flashing with status holos and diagnostics on the theater shield.

“No droids at the consoles,” he couldn’t help but wonder aloud.

“No need, this facility has greater levels of centralized control and automation. It would be an inefficient waste to station even a single B1 engineer in here,” Tano explained, her voice sounding far away and thoughtful. “Place your charges. 2 hour countdown.”

Fives pulled out one of his baridium demo charges and walked over to the closest major conduit, maglocking it to an appropriate point and began adjusting the settings. These were new charges in the GAR arsenal, roughly as large as a smashball, which had as much space devoted to its communication signalling as it had explosive. It meant a remote detonation command could be sent even underneath all the rock of the mountain or in environments that precluded standard comms.

“All right. Objective complete. Moving on to secondary.”

888888888888888888888888888888888888

‘Skyguy, charges are on the theater shield. Status?’

‘Rather busy, Snips!’

Anakin pushed his lightsaber through a B2, bisecting it groin to head. A mild Force Push sent the two glowing pieces of newly created debris smashing into another duo of B2s marching forward.

He blurred and dodged through the droid’s attempt to shoot him as he weaved through what felt like every bloody combat droid in the facility marching towards his position. His squad of sixteen surviving troopers and Mandalorians were all stuck behind the bulkhead cover of the corridor, shooting as best they could under the suppressive fire.

He knew it had been too easy to get this far so quickly and that the reactor would be the most protected space in the factory, yet he had eagerly decided to take on this objective from the list Ahsoka had presented.

Slash left, killing a B2, deflect right, roll forward, deflect left, duck and he threw his lightsaber forward.

With the Force, he grabbed hold, spinning the blade rapidly and orbiting it around his body once, blurring forward in a sprint, and orbited it again.

In that single series of moves, eleven B2s fell apart behind him and the corridor quickly fell silent.

‘Nicely done, Skyguy. Welcome to the world of Lightsaber Telekinesis,’ Ahsoka declared with dry amusement.

‘Yes, yes, hilarious,’ he retorted as he recalled his blade to his hand. He looked to the highest rank clone in his cobbled together squad. “Captain Jink, status?”

“Already on our second tibanna cell for most of us, General. Vyllo took a blast on his arm, but his armor did the job, he’s stable and ready to fight.”

“All right, back in formation, we’re behind schedule.”

His squad formed back up and they began a careful advance to reach the down ramp on this floor. They were still in the outer ring of the factory hive and had to transit deeper into the inner rings. Unfortunately, the designers of this place had definitely saved the best defensive works for the transit points between the rings. Strongpoints, double-bulkheads, energy shielding, turrets that featured anti-infantry lasers, and even gravitic traps that created sudden 15G zones. They had lost three troopers and a Mandalorian to the last one. What’s worse the traps had a randomness to them that didn’t make anticipating them easy. They would remain powerless  and offline until suddenly a signal was given, making even sensing them with Mechu-Deru problematic.

They were moving through the down ramp when he sensed it and burst with speed back through the squad’s formation. His lightsaber streaked through the air under his control and stabbed straight through the armored chest of an IG-86 droid that had been trying to drop from a ceiling shaft directly onto them.

“Contact!”

Anakin whirled around to see two more IG86s burst out of hidden wall panels, one of which stabbed a trooper straight through the chest into the weakest part of his armor, whilst the other tackled a Mandalorian Blade, who just barely managed to parry the incoming vibroblade with his own.

Feeling a spike of fury that he quickly got under control, he reached out with the Force and both droids were violently pulled upward towards the ceiling before being utterly crushed. He threw both to join the dead third and pushed them away back up the ramp.

“Run!”

The squad obeyed a heartbeat later, managing to get through into the lower floor corridor in moments.

Anakin blurred through the threshold and forced the ramp doors to close behind them.

Just in time for a rumbling explosion from droid self-destructs, that rattled everything around them. The shock distorted and bent the flooring, dust rained from the ceiling, lights flickered before stabilizing.

“I hate those things,” Jink grumbled. “Bloody clankers aren’t pulling their punches on this one.”

“Who did we lose?”

“Catcher, General. He was from the 96th.”

Anakin subtly made a note with his armor’s onboard systems. “Form up. We’re close to the inner ring threshold.”

The squad halted seven uneventful minutes later with the firmly closed blast door ahead and taking staggered cover behind corridor bulkheads. There was a surprising lack of any defenses or traps that he could see or sense. That alone was making him very weary, since they were now quite close to the factory central reactor.

Then he noticed the very floor they were standing on. The floor texture was subtly different but had been colored to match the monotonous industrial gray of the entire factory.

“Off the floor! Climb!”

He jumped straight up, grabbing hold of the overhead strut of the bulkhead that stretched over the corridor.

The Mandos in the squad instantly lit their jetpacks, some even grabbing troopers under the arms to get them airborne faster.

The last foot got off the ground just in time.

He sensed and everyone heard the high pitched buzzing of sudden electric power being conducted through the floor itself. Fine dust was visibly repelled from the floor, then jittered and danced within the confines of the sudden EM field. Within seconds, he could even see a mild heat haze at just the right angle and smelled the sharp, metallic scent of ionized air.

The boots of a trooper were insulated, but the sheer amount of current passing through the floor now meant it wouldn’t be enough. What made it even worse, was that trooper boots also had maglock systems for zero-G vac maneuvers, which now would act as conductive paths and also overwhelm the insulation around those electromagnets.

‘Great, 14 men hanging by their fingers and jetpacks in mid-air, now we just need…’ He very consciously stopped that thought.

He hooked his lightsaber to his belt, and carefully turned towards the blast door, making sure of his handholds and grip.

“Any of you struggling to keep your grip, you call for a Mando to support you, that is an order,” Anakin declared sternly.

“Yes, General!”

He took a deep breath and focused, reaching forward with his senses, through the floor, tracing the conduit pathing beyond. He quickly found the reason for the sheer power, as they were directly emanating from the reactor itself, which was easily devoting a fair percentage of the max output just towards the defensive systems around it. Even a number of conduits towards the factory lines had been shut down as a result of emergency and other counter-assault protocols.

He pulled back and focused on the linkages to the floor beneath.

His will called a flat blade of the Force into existence. A plane of shearing force that continuously pulled with the width of less than a millimeter.

He reached out with a hand and closed his fist to aid the visualization.

The Force Blade sheared through the conduits once, twice, and finally a third time.

The floor below them snapped and crackled with residual arcs.

“Clear!” he declared and let go to land on the floor.

It was a very relieved squad that similarly dropped to the floor behind him.

They quickly stacked on either side of the heavy blast door. He gestured to the Mandalorian woman, Lieutenant Shaizla, who had been acting as their slicer to go forward. Just like Ahsoka’s M8, her beskar armor held a droid intelligence.

“Door sliced, General,” she announced a minute later.

“Open it.”

The heavy double blast doors split apart and recessed.

Beyond was a cavernous space that housed a fusion reactor that could’ve easily powered a Venator. It stood forty meters in height, a bulging spherical monstrosity of dark gray panelling, countless feed lines, power regulators and conditioners, conduits snaking everywhere before coming together and merging into power lines as thick as a person, which disappeared into the floor below. A small swarm of menial maintenance droids floated around the reactor, tending and regulating the various subsystems. As large as the reactor was, the empty space around it was more than fifty meters of reinforced flooring before you even reached it.  

“Move,” he ordered urgently.

The squad burst forward into a fast walk, their weapons tracking and scanning sectors of responsibility as they moved.

They reached the edge of the reactor sphere and with a gestured signal, they split up into two groups and began placing demo charges on conduit lines or against the reactor exterior.

He kept a close eye on the maintenance droids for any reaction, but they just continued mindlessly doing their individual jobs. Not reacting at all to an enemy force placing explosives on the very machine they tended.

For long minutes the Republic assault team nearly emptied their backpacks, each leaving only one spare demo charge for an unforeseen emergency.

“I don’t like this, General. It’s too easy,” Jink commented on the tac net.

Anakin inwardly cursed and stopped himself from snapping rather unfairly at the clone.

He scanned around with every sense he had and mercifully, nothing changed in the huge reactor complex; no B2 or IG droids popping out of the floor in large numbers, no Repeater turrets or armed swarm droids. Just the constant rhythmic hum and thump of a giant cycling reactor.

A quick gestured signal and the squad reformed and sprinted for the exit, just barely keeping their rifles in proper position. He could feel that their own instincts were screaming at them as well.

He released a breath he almost didn’t know that he had been holding when they were out of the reactor complex, locking the door behind them. 

‘Snips, reactor objective complete.’

‘We’ve already sabotaged a factory line and I managed to get a proper look at what they’ve been building here…’

He felt Ahsoka’s grim apprehension keenly across the Bond. “It’s that bad?’

‘Skyguy, this isn’t just a better or bigger droid. What the CIS is building here is practically a paradigm shift in ground based warfare. If we let this factory get anywhere close to full capacity, we’re frakked. The only thing the GAR has on ground that could meaningfully fight this… megadroid, is a SPHA-T artillery gun. Even then, the megadroid is much faster and agile, the SPHA-T will struggle to hit it.’

‘Megadroid? Is that what the Seppies are calling it?’

‘Yes, an AAP-1 advanced assault walker platform. It’s nine meters tall, with multi-layered armor, the outer layer has a light phrik composite.’

‘So lightsabers are mostly useless, of course they would be,’ he inwardly sighed as his squad paused at a corridor junction, turning west to get out of the inner-ring of the factory.

‘It gets even better, it has a full coverage deflector shield, stronger than a droideka’s. The same type that’s currently on a Scorpenek annihilator droid. Redundant power cores and distributed processing. It’ll continue fighting after losing limbs or even catastrophic damage. Gyro-stabilization is next-gen, it’ll compensate if you try to push it over with something heavy enough or the Force. It’s also agile enough to get up from prone, which most walker platforms struggle to do. Their own documentation and M8’s simulation gives the droid a short sprint speed of 80 kph with a sustained combat speed at 45. It also has jump jets, which lets it do a constant hopping maneuver to rapidly cover ground!’

‘Snips, why are you so exasperatedly angry?’

‘Nevermind my feelings, I haven’t even got to the weapons it has. Twin heavy repeating cannons in the left arm. A shoulder mounted, variable yield plasma mortar, firing anti-infantry airburst or concentrated anti-armor rounds. Dual wrist-mounted energy web projectors.”

‘Energy web? Tell me that’s not what I think it is,’ he thought with alarm.

‘It is. This thing can literally project shields offensively to pin its targets down! About the only saving grace is its short relative range and it can’t use the web and its own shields at the same time. The right arm is mostly for 2 meter retractable vibroblades and crushing claws for close quarter work. The icing on this nerfshit cake is a right shoulder mounter missile launcher rack with eight long and short range anti-armor or infantry missiles.’

Anakin knew immediately what the CIS was trying to do here. They were trying to stop winning by sheer numbers and instead were building something that could stand qualitatively as opposition to the best that the Republic could put into the field; a Jedi-led clone combined arms element.

‘Snips, in your slicing of that production line, did you find any indications of how many active Megadroids there are at the moment?’

‘No. The line I accessed was a targeting computer production assembly.’

‘I want you to find an assembly line that can give the answer and find out.’

‘Skyguy, we destroy this place, then it’ll be an academic question-’

He almost lost his footing when what felt like a minor earthquake shook the mountain.

‘Frak! The charges on the theater shields just went off. The droids must’ve tried their luck disarming them!’

‘Snips-’

‘Yes. I know.’

The tac net blurted a specific tone across the comlink, as Ahsoka gave the signal for every active Republic unit to head for the exfiltration point immediately and only sabotage if the opportunity presented itself.

‘See you at the rendezvous, Snips. You better be there.’

‘I will, Skyguy.’

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I could understand why Anakin wanted that data.

Heck, I wanted it as well. It would’ve been nice to have certainty, an exact account of how many megadroids there currently were in this factory. Unfortunately, the entire factory had now become a literal hive of every armed droid that could be fielded and even the floating maintenance droids were now toting blaster weapons and being thrown at us.

This level of resistance meant that the factory commander was actually being creative and the chance that our opponent was either a veteran or an ST droid was considerably high.

I skidded to a halt next to another assembly line entrance in the western quadrant of the factory and stabbed an interface spike into the bulkhead door.

“Squad, cover me!”

Some of the mandos and clones rushed past, before forming a defensive line, finding cover, whilst another team smoothly guarded our rear. We were now 27 strong, having met up with the survivors of three other squads and folding them into our formation.

“M8, what can you get?”

“Scanning, Mistress… this is a deflector shield production line. OH that clanking bastard! Our opposition is definitely an ST droid. He just fractured the factory network into isolated instances.”

“Contact right!”

Blaster shots streamed in both directions immediately, a small swarm of flying drones and a squad of B1s.

My lightsabers blurred in motion behind me to deflect incoming fire.

“Is this enough data, M8?”

“Yes, mistress. I can extrapolate with 92% confidence now that this factory has enough components to assemble 310 megadroids. Based on the history data, time passed since it started full production, local space available, we possibly have 18 megadroids within the factory storage bays.”

“So few?!” I shouted over the continuing firefight.

“They’ve been having some problems with system consolidation, mistress. There are numerous examples in the files of failures and entire production runs of components being scrapped and redone. It seems the R&D for this project was somewhat rushed and they’re iterating as they go.”

“Good enough!”

I pulled out my interface spike and delivered a Force Push that sent the remaining droids flying.

“MOVE!”

My squad didn’t need to be told twice.

We performed a fighting retreat, the small company divided in two, one squad leapfrogging the other, whilst the other held the line.

Our route to the ventilation shafts in the west was an effective 1.3 kilometers of turns, corridors, ramps, and moving through three different production lines for the shortest route. The sheer square meters of floor space that this place had was difficult to truly appreciate in a scan, until you were running through it and fighting for your life.

At this point, I cursed my trained Jedi cognition. There was no blurring of the next frantic hour of battle. I felt and experienced every moment, and would remember every moment with perfect clarity.

Remember each bolt deflected, each trooper and mandalorian lost, each meter of corridor or production line.

It truly felt like my company was being deliberately targeted by every armed droid that the ST could scrounge together and throw at us.

By the time we reached the final production line we would have to traverse through, we had lost nine troopers and rescued the scattered remnants of three other squads.

I froze at the closed blast door and turned back to gaze at the battle-worn surviving men around me. My battle-mediation was running strong, but I had to be more frugal with the Force as the running battle continued. Now I was paying for it and my opponent had anticipated the least time route I would take and delivered us a parting gift.

“General?” Rex asked in concern as he saw me hesitate in opening the door.

“We have been anticipated. When we move beyond this door, remember your anti-Basilisk training. I will also amend it slightly, do not for one moment stop moving. Do not stay in cover for longer than three seconds. Understood?”

I received many nods from the company behind me. The doors parted with a brief insert of a logic spike.

The vast room beyond was another armor plating factory line, filled with fabricators, molds and laser smelters. Every machine was active, still processing, the few B1 engineers were hyper focused on their jobs, they ignored us and ignored the hulking form of a 9 meter tall megadroid, standing on a cargo grav lift at the far end of the room.

Its head was rather simple, with little to no facial embellishment that most droids received to make them more appealing to organic eyes. Two red photoreceptors set in that huge head immediately locked onto our position.

The megadroid had a remarkably organic roundness to its armored body, a curved barrel chest, huge armor pauldrons over its shoulders that almost reminded me of a 40K space marine. Arms that ended in a fully articulated five fingered hand.

I only had a moment to appreciate what was the pinnacle of war droid technology in the galaxy, when the megadroid lifted its left arm to aim its dual cannons straight at me.

The Force screamed in warning as I blurred into an empowered sprint.

It did not fire.

Instead its aim tracked away from me and released a triple burst that caught two troopers and a Mandalorian as they were running into the room.

The sheer concussive shriek of that cannon was nothing in comparison to the effect.

Two troopers in Phase II armor were just blasted into near nothingness and the beskar of the Mando might not have been penetrated, but the sheer transfer of forces still produced the effect of a speeder crash as he was bodily slammed into a nearby fabricator.

For the briefest of moments, I was shocked.

I had done everything right, I had expected to be the priority target as a Jedi, I had decided to take that fire, give my men time, but the megadroid had cruelly changed tactics and done so on purpose. Even my precognition had presented a number of paths, but somehow this megadroid had gone down one I had judged as ridiculous and least likely.

Anger and outrage found me.

Accepting and conquering it took me three precious moments.

My telekinesis grabbed hold of three nearby armor plates and two more closer to the door.

Two I sent shooting forward at effective slugthrower velocity towards the megadroid, two went to give my men some effective cover, whilst I kept the last to shield myself.

The first of my projectiles was too fast, simply bouncing off the megadroid’s shield, whilst the second penetrated.

I gritted my teeth with sheer focus and concentration as the plate shifted at the last moment to strike flat on the megadroid’s left arm.

My hand raised and I formed a fist.

The armor plate crushed and wrapped around that very dangerous left arm. I called on so much strength in the Force that it left me slightly woozy.

The megadroid looked down at its ruined appendage, wrapped in what would’ve been the armor of another of its number, the dangerous cannons underneath thoroughly wrecked.

It lifted its right hand and two long curved vibroblades emerged in a manner that was quite reminiscent of a certain rapidly healing mutant in another universe. It took one step off the cargo elevator it had arrived on, and casually kicked a nearby furnace with such strength that it flew… straight towards me.

I dodged easily, but had to leave my shielding armor plate behind in the process.

“FIRE NOW!”

The room exploded with rapid blaster shots, as finally, my company opened fire with everything they had.

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A/N: It turns out, that Coruscanti tech can make a very nasty and agile Mech equivalent, especially with the necessity of invention that war brings. It's crazy expensive, but when you're throwing around money already at the other costs associated with a war, and are desperate enough, that consideration mostly falls by the wayside.

Whew, hope you enjoyed the battle. Have a great weekend and stay awesome folks!