"The droids are hard to deal with, if we use conventional methods," Jalo began explaining, leading us towards a table at the far end, where I could see different, very much ancient-looking weapons and instruments laid out. They were either being repaired by him or he was doing his best to keep them maintained, but if you asked me, I wouldn't even believe either of those functioned anymore.
"Their shielding against the Force is even stronger here than on the outside. It's like the Dark Side protects them or something... " Iowi added, "You can't do anything to them... Pretty annoying."
"Yeah," Jalo agreed, "But we found a new method," he added, holding one of the old weapons up for me to check it out. "I know, it looks like I dug it out of a museum."
"No, it looks like you dug it out of the earth," I joked, examining it.
"That's not a blaster," Vila said slowly, narrowing her eyes, looking at it in my hands.
"Nope," Jalo replied. "And that's the point."
"Their energy dissipating powers, especially on the later models they somehow keep pushing out, increased with every new iteration. Regular blaster shots were deflected or distorted in a way that made them almost impossible to hit." Iowi stepped closer while speaking. "We learned the hard way... losing two more of the survivors..."
The moment he said that, everyone nearby, looking at us, quieted a little more, making me note the weight on their hearts increase once again.
"They are making new ones?" I asked, catching a disturbing piece of information.
"We can't tell, but I don't think so," Jalo answered, crossing his arms, thinking it through, "My theory is that there was a bunch of them, put away, awaiting configuration or reactivation. I would wager that when the system had woken up, rebooted, it began reactivating the units, which, in turn, began reassembling and fixing the rest. The 'stronger' ones are simply those units that suffered the least degradation and are now back up and functional."
"We made multiple scouting trips to the cliffside," Iowi joined back in the conversation, "From the heat-signatures that we managed to record, it suggests that there is some kind of production line or a whole system activated under the surface.
"Question is... how much...." I muttered, feeling my stomach tighten. "Production systems... I had a vision of this place being destroyed... I mean, in the past."
"We found multiple signs of craters, left behind by massive blasts," Jalo nodded at me, "There were ones even underground or big enough craters that suggested orbital bombardment. But as far as I know, there is an entire, old Sith infrastructure running underground, beyond sea level. We found shafts that go way below this mine, too, maybe even interconnected with others. There are dozens of sealed doors, power conduits thicker than starship hull cabling... It must have been an incredible sight when it was still functioning.
"They're restoring it piece by piece." Iowi snorted, shaking his head, "We don't want to see that sight return, no matter how incredible it may be."
"That's… not comforting," Vila muttered.
"No," Iowi agreed with her, "And it gets worse if we don't stop them."
"So, it comes back to the guns, I assume?" I asked, watching the two.
"Yeah," Iwoi smiled as he reached back and unclipped the enormous rifle slung across his back, the one I'd seen him use earlier on the cliff. Up close, it looked even more brutal, a massive, dense metal tube, reinforced rails, and a thick barrel. "They may not care about lightsabers or blasters," he said, slapping it, "But they can't stop this."
"..." I frowned as I was listening to him, "I saw that. Your shot obliterated its head, which surprised me a lot."
"Exactly," Jalo chuckled, imagining the scene, "These Sith machine-glyphs, or whatever they have on them can't react to the most simple law of it all: physics." He tapped the weapon beside him. "The Force is blind to these, because they can't really use it themselves."
"Wait, I know what these are!" Vila tilted her head, snapping her fingers, "These are slugthrowers!"
"Bingo." Jalo nodded.
Damn... It makes sense. Slugthrowers were old, very old, and pretty much outlawed and forgotten. I remember once hearing that way in the past, before gas-based blasters became the norm, this is what everyone used. Ancient projectile weapons that fired solid metal slugs using chemical propellants instead of superheated gas. But then they were made obsolete when blaster technology spread and changed things up. Huh, it is interesting how we always seem to walk in circles when we look at history...
"In the old days," Jalo continued, as if reading my mind, "before blasters became the standard, these were everywhere. I do remember reading that in the fledgling days of the early Jedi years, they got outlawed because of the brutality they inflicted on their opponents... Especially if they were made of flesh."
"They killed a lot of Jedi with these," Iowi muttered, making Jalo nod his head.
"And it was no wonder," He mimed the motion with his hands. "A lightsaber can melt or deflect a bolt of plasma, but a hypersonic chunk of metal?" He clicked his tongue, snorting once, "You deflect it, it shatters into molten shrapnel. If you block it, the impact still transfers force through you... and if you miss…" He shrugged. "You bleed... a lot."
"Yet they are our only sure-fire weapon against them," Iowi nodded grimly. "A well-placed shot from these, and they fall over."
"No wonder you stopped using sabers," Vila said, chuckling a little.
"When we had to," Iowi answered with a shrug, "We still carry them, of course," he smiled, showing it hanging from his belt under his coat, "Still use them against exposed joints, optics, and servos or cutting through obstacles, but slugthrowers are what disables them the most effectively."
"Their systems are rigid." Jalo added, "From what I managed to discover, these machines were optimized for precision and energy mitigation of blaster shots and lightsabers. If they are exposed to ample force and shockwaves, their internal stabilizers will rattle; that's why they were equipped with anti-Force armor, protecting them from being thrown around."
[Statement: What a poor design choice.] HK finally piped in, [Addendum: Battle droids whose weakness is their internal structure being shaken is a failed product. Whoever designed them was a malfunctioning meatbag.]
"It could be because of their age." Jalo offered, but HK wasn't hearing it.
"So," I looked at the two, "If we have the weapons against them, what's the catch?"
"They," Tharuun shifted, his deep voice resonating through the chamber as he began talking to us, "The machines learn very quickly. Then, they adapt, share their knowledge, and catalog everything. Every trick we tried only works on them once."
"That's why this is urgent, and they must be destroyed," Iowi said, looking directly at me now. "They can't finish their rebuilding! If they restart full production…"
"Yeah, they will be a pain in the ass to deal with, especially if they get lost in the wider galaxy," I murmured.
"Worst, we don't know if they have information about other, hidden stashes like this one was," Jalo added with a shrug. "If that's true... We'll be fighting an army that doesn't sleep, doesn't feel fear, and doesn't care about the Force."
"They already left the planet..." Iowi whispered, feeling worried that showed on his face, "We don't know if those places exist or not, but if they do, they may be up and running already."
Yeah... that was bad.
"Stop worrying about that!" Suddenly, Vila straightened her back, rolling her shoulders, "We focus on the here and the now. So," she added, her voice sharpening, "What you're saying is… we need to rethink how Jedi fight. I'm in! Let's kick some droid ass!"
[Analytical Statement: Conclusion reached. Projectile-based weaponry paired with predictive Force-assisted targeting yields a statistically significant increase in droid neutralization efficiency. I approve of Meatbag Vila's assessment.]
"What the rustbucket said." She nodded, pointing at him.
[Addendum: This method is inelegant, violent, and deeply offensive to meatbag philosophy. Once again... I approve.]
"There is one more little issue, though," Jalo raised a hand, before Vila would start hogging all the slugthrowers.
"There is always a catch... Or a second one in this case..." I muttered, waiting for him to continue.
"Ammunition." Iowi said bluntly, "We only have a limited stockpile of it."
"What does limited mean?" Vila asked, rubbing her temple.
"Enough for one assault on their base and only if every shot counts." He answered honestly.
"Well..." I looked around them all, smiling, "Then we must make it count. You must have a plan... Let's hear it."
"We have a plan, but... it's, well, let me show you."
The map that Jalo projected onto the table wasn't reassuring. It was a mess of overlapping shafts, collapsed tunnels, half-made scans, and guesswork stitched together by weeks or months of sneaking, listening to noises, avoiding ambushes, and surviving on this planet, crawling underground. But they had multiple red lines marked as danger zones, and yellow ones where it may be safe. As for the green, that meant nothing more than that they hadn't found any dangers there yet.
"This," Jalo said, tapping the green part of the holo with one finger, "is the mine we're in now, the old extraction site." With that, he shifted the projection to show a long, slanted shaft that extended downward and away from our current position, vanishing into darkness.
"We found this about two weeks ago," he continued. "This is a natural fault line that was widened by mining charges in the past. It runs deep, very deep, but we never went all the way. There is a blockage where it cuts into darkness on the projection, and we never even dared to try and open it up."
"It doesn't matter," Iowi folded his arms, leaning closer to the map, taking over the explanation, "What is important is that from there, there is another line, leading to the surface, that eventually opens out a few clicks away from the cliffside. It is far enough that the droids don't patrol it, giving us the chance to reach them unseen."
"It's our exit," Jalo agreed. "We have been using it to get in and out without them seeing us. Of course, we usually took detours to approach their base from a different angle, so we wouldn't give it away. But now, we can strike at them!"
"And once we are out?" Vila asked. "Are we taking a vehicle or something?"
"No," Jalo shrugged, shaking his head, "We walk. That can't be detected."
Watching the rest they had, the surface route was looking... Difficult. We would emerge far from the landing platforms, beyond the areas the droids swept regularly. From there, we would have to circle the cliffside on foot, using the broken terrain and probably the bad weather to mask our approach.
"The storms will work in our favor," Iowi explained, exactly what I was thinking of, "Their sensors will go blind in this kind of interference, not to mention how much visual range drops. Even the droids don't like moving in it."
[Addendum: They are inefficient in heavy particulate atmospheres.] HK agreed, [Clarification: I do not share this weakness.]
"That's comforting," Vila said dryly, "I hope it's true."
"That's not all," Jalo rotated the map again. "We have Tharuun's maps from when they arrived and explored their end, reactivating the droids." As he finished, another marker flared to life, which was buried deep beneath the cliff itself. "This is our target," he said. "This is one of the shafts they mapped, and we know it can be accessed."
"If it's not closed..." I muttered.
"It is a ventilation shaft." Tharuun spoke up again, "Their machines need air."
"Since when do they breathe?" Vila chuckled, but Jalo just shrugged.
"More like, for cooling or the release of gases. We will see when we are there."
"Perfect..." She muttered, not really happy about it.
"Whatever it is, we will use it," Iowi continued, "We will go in there and avoid detection as long as we can."
"As for the map of their underground base, we only have the partial one that Tharuun managed to create," Jalo said, projecting the slice of a pretty vague collection of rooms and corridors. "We will have to find our own way once we are inside."
"Let me guess," Vila shrugged, "There's no convenient control room with a big red button that says: OFF."
"There should be," Jalo replied. "The Sith thought like any other species; nothing can change that. No matter the origin, this is a factory, so there has to be a central assembly nexus, maybe a kind of power distribution, command logic, or manufacturing queues. Even if it's not labeled, I will know if I see one! And if you overload it…" He chuckled and then made a small, expressive explosion with his hands.
[Assessment: Catastrophic cascading failure probability exceeds ninety percent.]
"Nice numbers," Vila nodded, looking between the two, "I like those odds."
"The only issue here is," I stated, "That the droids wouldn't react like soldiers, they wouldn't panic for sure, and they wouldn't retreat, not even in the face of a self-destructive chain reaction. Once the facility is threatened, everything would converge on the intruders, on us, trying to take us out. Even if we can get to that point, undetected, we won't sneak back out."
"No," Iowi agreed, "We would fight our way back out."
"With limited ammunition," Vila moaned, seeing the problem, pinching the ridge of her nose.
"Better than doing nothing," Jalo spread his hands, ready to go, "Which is why we hit hard, hit fast, and don't stop moving."
"We go in," Iowi agreed, "break the machine, and make it impossible for this place to keep producing death. Then we just need to escape and wait for the Masters to arrive to take care of the rest."
"Haaah..." I sighed, smiling, glancing at Vila, "If we fail, Master Katarn will kick our asses..."
"So?" Vila smirked, nudging me and then glancing at the rest, "We just make sure we don't fail."