4.09

Hurry up and wait.

As famous military truisms go, this was one civilian found the hardest to grasp. War was loud, chaotic, massively destructive battles, action sequences so fast and convoluted one had no time to think, reacting almost blindly to the violence. In contrast to that belief, the first thing the crew of the Doughnut did after the skirmish with the Chiss and with the arrival of the Outbound Flight imminent, was routine maintenance. Hours and hours of going down checklists, adjusting the programming of hundreds of thousands of maintenance and cleaning droids, and going through each one of the ship's billions of components to ensure its full functionality.

Before a ship of any kind could take part in "glorious" battle, its reactors had to be scrubbed and adjusted for peak power output, their cooling systems needed their coolant filtered or even replaced to increase efficiency and handle waste heat, the power lines had to be inspected for wear, and any problems corrected. A mere five percent reduction in power output could make the difference between victory and defeat, not to mention those badly maintained reactors had a tendency to explode when redlined to supply the ship with full combat power. Then you had the engines to go over, both sublight ion thrusters and hyperdrives. That a ship with malfunctioning engines would be a sitting duck in combat might seem like a no-brainer, yet the percentage of spaceships with out of tune engines in the galaxy dwarfed the properly functional ones. We weren't talking about pirate ships here; nine out of ten Trade Federation or Banking Clan ships flew with dangerously worn-down components decades after they should have been replaced. The condition of planetary defense forces or even Judiciary cruisers was worse. With nearly a millennium without wars and official military spending at an all-time low, there were ships that hadn't undergone major repairs or refits for centuries.

In contrast, not only was the Doughnut under constant maintenance from twice the standard complement of droids as typical Lucrehulks, it went through refits and upgrades several times a year. The days of waiting in this barren hyperspace lane beyond the Utegetu Nebula was another opportunity to ensure its ever-increasing armament was fully functional. Anti-air turrets had their servos cleaned, oiled, and tested for rapid angle adjustments, their sensors were checked against the few vulture droids that had survived the encounter with the Chiss, and their integration to the ship's tactical network verified. Dedicated power lines to the heavier turrets were stress-tested, shock absorbers were recalibrated, and the surrounding hull checked for metal fatigue from the massive recoil of the turbolasers. The guns themselves were test-fired both in rapid-fire sequences and in long-range, high-accuracy shots against mobile targets, the data fed into the Doughnut's computer core for analysis and adjustment of the ship's targeting systems. Minute differences in each gun's installation, wear, and interaction with surrounding systems meant that developing programming for that specific gun was the only way droids could get nearly as accurate firing solutions as organics with their support from the Force.

The less than fifty organics present similarly waited and trained for the coming fight - because after the revelation that the Jedi Master Jorus C'baoth had gone rogue and basically taken over the Outbound Flight, nobody thought diplomacy would prevail. I still thought Palpatine had influenced those Jedi during his personal visit to the project, and the changes in his plans from the canon timeline were unsettling to say the least. Where he had originally arranged for the Outbound Flight's quiet elimination, he had now made C'baoth's actions far more public. That a Sith Lord who could influence five Jedi Masters and thirteen Jedi Knights during a single short visit was now acting outside my foreknowledge was scary. Unfortunately, all I could do was prepare.

While Father and the few surviving Federation officers prepared the battleground in our favor and discussed strategy, I tried to drown my worries in training. When I was not studying the finances of running, repairing, and supplying a warship, I was going through katas or blaster deflection exercises with a lightsaber. For all my natural advantages and the practice I've had the past few years, I was far from the performance of the one Jedi we'd ever fought against. Assassin droids or even Aurra Sing couldn't really help with the intricacies of the various saber forms, and trying to recreate them from thousands of videos of Jedi in war zones Father had managed to acquire was problematic. They showed the end result, nothing of the basic building blocks that would let one learn the forms. In that, the single training droid professor Magrovy had managed to rebuild from the ruins of Arca Jeth's Praxeum was invaluable. Its memory might be incomplete after four millennia of ruin, its personality routines destroyed, but simple sparring against an opponent programmed to challenge Jedi helped immensely even if it ended with me in a Bacta tank for healing several times a day.

When frustration or boredom became too much, I focused on the Force. It was the one thing in my new life that would never become a chore because the Force was real, actual magic. Lifting supply crates in the cargo holds was no less magical for its mundane utility. Using data terminals without touching them never lost its shine no matter how much slower it was than normal or how hard I had to concentrate. How could they? I was doing the impossible by wielding a mystical power to which impossibilities did not exist. It was a dream every single sapient being had had at least once, and I was now living it; how could it not be exciting and awe-inspiring both? Even when that joy was tempered by the uncertainty of the future, the danger of the Sith, the frustration at the slow progress when time till the coming war grew short, all I had to do was meditate. Where normal people had to live with their feelings, influences from both the environment and other people, Force-sensitives got to choose. I could cast fear, anger, boredom, frustration out into the Force, and enhance the sense of mystery and achievement, strengthen my own motivation, and desire towards getting better by using those emotions as focal points for meditation. That mental supplement became even more effective when taken along with more physical enhancers, such as the serum from the medical research facility on Drongar. If such things worked for Captain America, who was I to turn them down?

And then, almost a week after our clash with Thrawn's forces, the Outbound Flight arrived in the system.

xxxx xxxx xxxx

​

"Captain Pakmillu of the Outbound Flight, I am Captain Andrim, acting commander of Special Task Force Two," Father spoke into the communications console as I walked into the Doughnut's bridge. "With the authority granted to me by the Chancellor, I order you to power down your engines and hyperdrive immediately." The Mon Calamari male on the comm screen opened his too-wide, lip-less, fish-like mouth to respond, but his image was replaced by that of an older human male in white robes before he could do so.

"The Outbound Flight is under Jedi control, captain," the tall old man with the wild hair, even wilder and longer beard, and piercing brown eyes said. At a height of nearly two meters and over a century old, Jorus C'Baoth looked like Albus Dumbledore's a prouder, more self-absorbed twin. "As such, we do not recognize any authority but our own."

"A bold claim is given the Jedi Council's service to the Senate and the Republic, not to mention certain articles of the Ruusan Reformation," Father responded with no less intensity and conviction than the rogue Jedi Master. "In fact, both the Senate and the Council have tasked me with inviting you to explain this, and several prior decisions of yours to them, master C'Baoth. Specifically, the fifty thousand colonists you've declared yourself a ruler over, and the multi-billion-credit project you've hijacked." The two men glared at each other through the comm screen. Without awareness of how the Force flowed through them both, one could easily dismiss the Jedi Master as ageing, unkempt, senile man rambling his delusions at the younger but far more aristocratic figure of an Arkanian noble at the height of his power and prestige. Appearances, however, could be deceiving. Father's presence in the Force had grown stronger over the past few years, flaring with the weight of his influence in the galaxy and the depth of his experience in actions against pirates, slavers, and corrupt Kuati working for a Sith Lord. While lacking her training and talent, he caused ripples in the Force as strong as Aurra Sing had back when we first met. C'Baoth however dwarfed him like a forest fire would a single torch. Not only did the old man have as much raw ability in the Force as Serifa Altunen but also a century of experience using it. I could sense his presence clearly even before seeing him in the comms for the first time.

"Explain myself to the corrupt authorities of a failing Republic? In this ship lies the future of the galaxy, a galaxy the Senate which you draw authority from has seen mired in decay, piracy, slavery, and the corporate greed whose interests you represent." I felt the Force dancing around C'Baoth like a raging whirlwind, currents of cyan and crimson light battling for prominence. With his focus so close by and my own focus on him, I saw how far he'd strayed from Jedi doctrine even before he confirmed as much with his following words. "We are the Jedi, the ultimate power in the universe. We will do as we choose. And we will destroy any who dare stand in our way."

"So be it," Father said and cut the connection. "Helm set an intercept course with the Outbound Flight. Tactical, power up the main battery in ion cannon configuration and prepare long-range tractors."

As the six Dreadnought-class cruisers welded to a small space station that made up the Outbound Flight vessel ponderously picked up speed, the Doughnut accelerated to match them, then began to close the distance. The main tactical holoscreen showed both ships' relative position in the system and their apparent near-crawl of an advance at that massive a scale. Even with their hyperdrive powered up, the Outbound Flight could not jump away immediately. So far in Wild Space, we were beyond the well-known hyper-lanes of the explored galaxy. Whereas even in the Outer Rim a captain could find reliable maps and jump coordinates for any system if they had the right connections, backers, or enough credits, here they had to rely on a ship's own long-range sensors to make detailed hyperspace surveys before they could proceed. Unless C'Baoth wanted to make a double-blind jump from an unmapped system to another unmapped system and almost certainly burn his ship's hyperdrive, not to mention potentially crash the ship on a hyperspace anomaly, he needed time to finish those scans. It was why Outbound Flight had had to stop in this system in the first place.

With a hostile vessel on his tail, C'Baoth had two options; either keep out of range long enough for the scans to finish, or face us head-on, beat us, and then finish the scans at his leisure. Now, the Outbound Flight project might have the firepower of six capital ships and even better shields, but Dreadnought cruisers were capital ships only as far as the Ruusan Reformation was concerned; the entire Outbound Flight was smaller than the Doughnut's central sphere, the whole Lucrehulk dwarfing the mobile station dozens of times over. No matter how arrogant C'Baoth was he wasn't stupid, and he could feel the danger of facing us head-on in the Force. Thus the two ships settled into a slow stern chase through the vast emptiness of space. One hour into the chase, we were moving through the local asteroid belt and deeper into the local star's gravity well. Two hours in, the Doughnut's deliberately slow pursuit got within a hundred thousand kilometers.

"Tactical, uncover long-range batteries. Let's keep the rogue Jedi honest." At Father's command, four bulges in the Doughnut's equatorial belt opened up, two at the bow of the ship, one port, and one starboard. The eighty-meter protrusions were barely noticeable in the three and a half kilometer long spaceship, and they look identical to the heavy-duty tractor beam projectors all Lucrehulks had to handle cruiser-sized cargo modules further disguised their true purpose. Now that they were deployed though, the massive turrets hiding below the thin, scanner-blocking domes were obvious. The Doughnut's reactor output peaked as four M-68 planetary magnapulse cannons charged for a few seconds, then fired. The product of Kuati research and development of anti-orbital weaponry, the enormous guns could fire either destructive energy to blow up a small cruiser in one shot, or charged particles to disable ships temporarily. Due to massive energy requirements, no warship built after the Ruusan reformation could power even one, but the Doughnut had reactors to spare. And while their inaccuracy against small pirate vessels made them unpopular with most planetary governments, as a heavy battery on a battleship they made perfect sense.

Three out of four shots slammed into the Outbound Flight's shields and made the outer layer strain at the enormous energy discharge. Through the Force, the distant crew's sudden alarm and C'Baoth's rising anger was evident. The Jedi on board might have been aware that Father's deliberately slow pursuit had to be some sort of trap, but that knowledge didn't make the use of anti-orbital weapons against them any less surprising... or helped them shoot back at several times their own weapons' range. Four more shots followed three seconds after the first, bursting through the weakened outer shield entirely, and straining the second layer. Even with the Dreadnought cruisers' shield generators improved for this project and powered by auxiliary reactors in the central station, the four M-68 cannons would quickly chew through them. They might only have about a third the power of a v-150 planetary defender each, but that weapon would one-shot Imperial Star Destroyers in the future, and the Doughnut had four of the smaller cannons. The Outbound Flight frantically redlined its sublight drive and only two out of the four following shots hit home, still making the second shield layer flicker.

"How unprofessional," Father commented at our target's attempt to run. "Wasting power on engines will weaken their shields and they'll never outrun us tied to that station as they are."

"Sir, Outbound Flight is powering up its hyperdrive!" the tactical officer cried in excitement.

"Excellent," Father responded with a satisfied smirk. "They did precisely as we wanted them to."

How do you fight someone who can predict the future, or at least any imminent danger early enough to avoid your plans? You distract them by presenting an equally strong, immediate danger while herding them towards the real threat. If said real threat is distant enough in both space and time, it might escape the enemy's precognition. That had been only one part of the plan, however. Father and his Arkanian mad-scientist friends had noticed that dangers that were more abstract, less physically harmful, were harder for me to detect. Lethal attacks were the easiest to sense, non-lethal attacks were a bit harder, and risks that weren't directly harmful were the hardest of all. As C'Baoth had his ship attempt to jump out, thousands upon thousands of tiny dots in the system plot went from blue to red as gravity mines dispersed days before followed their contingent programming and activated. They weren't missiles that would directly attack the Outbound Flight, nor ion mines to disable them, merely something that would prevent them from fleeing. Worse still Father and the other officers had not planned when to use them but programmed them to go off if C'Baoth tried to run. There had not been a set event in the future for his danger sense to pick up, but a danger brought about by his own decision - something much harder to sense before deciding to make said decision.

With the Doughnut's entire supply of gravity mines interdicting much of the system, Outbound Flight had nowhere to run. Unfortunately, it was not the only ship affected. As soon as the interdiction field went up, almost two hundred other ships dropped out of hyperspace, an entire fleet snared by the trap meant for a single vessel...

Well... crap.