Author - another day of unpaid labour, my backs killing me.
I figured a work around for Rome 2 total war not to crash, problem is I have to do it every time before I play (basically I have to open task manager - go to details, find rome TW 2, set affinity and tick half the boxes off.) already got like 5 new achievements on steam
****
I had the mercenary commanders brought to the secondary briefing chamber under the pretext of final contract coordination, this didn't require a full staff meeting, so just few of us in here. All of whom are fighters just in case.
Torv stood to my right, Atii to my left and Rusty waited near the wall like a silent piece of industrial execution equipment while Jaster remained by the door with two other warriors.
Sera Valen entered first, still composed, flight jacket dark against the chamber light, two of her Auralis lieutenants flanking her.
Vesk came in like usual in his roguish way, three of his own lieutenants spreading behind him.
News of what we are fighting has already spread and their forces have already started packing up, they probably came here to have a so called 'clean break' or just to see what I can offer them to stay.
Like I would do that, the moment I give them credits up front like no doubt they would want, they will instantly dip.
There is only one way for me to secure their ships, I need their ships more than I need their command or even most of their crew for that matter.
"The... battle. Has begun in earnest," I said. "I need your forces fully committed under local command for the next phase to ensure no miscommunication or contradictory orders, no independent withdrawal from the fight or the system while it is under active attack."
Vesk laughed once. "No. We're done here boy. You hired us to hunt pirates and trash, not to stand in front of Imperial fucking ships and die for your in this political mess. My ships are spooling. We are leaving."
"That would be a breach of contract," I said casually.
He leaned forward, small horns on the side of his jaw catching the light. "Fuck you, brat. Contracts are wind in the Outer Rim and paper burns. You should've stayed in whatever soft Core nest that spat you out."
One of his lieutenants, a human with a gold tooth and a neck tattoo of a broken chain, chuckled. "Maybe, if Elyria can't pay out the remaining term time, we go collect it from the Moff instead. Man's hiring and has a lot of credits."
Yep, that's it. Seeing how Atii just shifted her weight to the side he is going to die first.
Sera's jaw tightened. "My people are not cannon filler either, we came for clean work and system security, not to throw N-1s into Star Destroyer fire. I want my pilots back toward Naboo space while they still have intact hulls and intact lives."
Her senior lieutenant nodded hard. "We can break contact cleanly if we leave now."
I looked at them all for a long second and closed my eyes.
The mercenaries must have read it as hesitation, It was not.
I just nodded slightly.
The first blaster shot cracked from my left. Atii's bolt took the gold-toothed lieutenant through the mouth, burning his entire jaw, teeth, throat and blew the back of his head into a blackened spray against the far wall.
Torv, who now started favouring Mandalorian styled blaster pistols fired in the same breath with two precise shots: one through Vesk's centre mass, the second through the Weequay lieutenant right in the heart.
Rusty just casually reached out and seized the remaining lieutenant by the throat and upper chest, lifted him off the deck, and twisted. The neck and most of his upper body spun in a wrong direction which was accompanied by a wet crunch of bone, cartilage and muscles tearing. The man didn't even get to make a noise. Rusty opened his hands and let the body fall with a wet, meaty thunk on the floor.
The smell of burned flesh and ozone filled the chamber.
Sera had not moved, her lieutenants had gone sheet-pale, hands half-raised in the instinctive calculation of people who suddenly understood they were currently outnumbered, outmatched and outgunned in a very tight space with a bunch of beskar armoured elite warriors and a massive hulking droid.
I opened my eyes and looked at Sera. "I quite like the N-1s."
I did not need to say the rest, the bodies on the floor were already translating for me.
"Escort Captain Valen and her officers to the side room," I ordered. "I am sure they will now issue command transfers now. Auralis forces will fall under Reza."
Sera swallowed once, then gave a stiff nod. Her lieutenants moved when prompted by armed guards, eyes flicking despite themselves to Vesk's corpse and the Weequay lieutenant whose body had deformed under Rusty's grip.
One of them stumbled on the expanding pool beneath the body and nearly went down, when the door sealed behind them, I turned to Jaster. "Take a Mandalorian strike team to the remaining Vesk crews. Inform them their leadership is in a secure room and that continued resistance will be treated as active collaboration with the enemy. Beat them into line if you have to, I need their ships more than I need most of them, their ships can be run by half the crew they have, besides we have quite a few spare droids with naval and piloting modules installed."
Jaster glanced at the dead Weequay and shrugged once. "They'll understand the new chain of command soon enough."
Vesk had chosen the value of his life in public and received the receipt in public.
By the time I stood again in the main command centre a two hours later, the raid was already in motion.
The holotable carried live returns from the outer engagement zone: every hyperspace-capable fighter and bomber we could throw at them in a quick time, backed by light corvettes and frigates in a narrow strike lance. No heavy units that would slow them down and be a big target for the destroyers and no parade formation like they have done.
Just shock and awe.
They reverted on the disordered Imperial recovery area like a knife slipped under a half-lifted breastplate, the enemy were not ready for a second blow so soon.
Damage-control craft were still moving between wounded hulls looking for survivors and anything valuable to salvage while fighter rearming and repair cycles were incomplete.
Several escorts had drifted out of optimal screen perimiter while assisting crippled ships.
Into that mess came our first bomber pass, proton payloads and ion bursts hammering recovery ships, ruptured escorts, and any hangar mouth still trying to push fresh TIEs into vacuum.
"Direct hits on two recovery tenders," Reza reported through the channel. "One Arquitens scrambling late. Frigate line is punching through residual screen and firing into engine quarters."
On the feed, mostly red light with some green mixed in stitched over broken formation lanes, it is clear that they were not expecting us to hit them again and in such numbers to boot, they are clearly in disarray.
A damaged Victory II tried to throw up a cleaner defensive arc and only partially succeeded; one of our corvettes along with a packs of mixed starfighters cut beneath its wounded flank and raked the exposed support craft sheltering there.
Auralis N-1s, now flying. Whether their pilots hated the order or not, they knifed through confused TIE pairs with lethal efficiency while Vesk's surviving crews because some did try to break out and were subsequently 'liquidised' as Jaster put it.
They came in less elegant and more brutal fashion with their fire patterns wide and punishing across already stressed hulls.
The Imperials began to mount a real defence after the first shock, that was expected, if that wasn't so I would order a retreat and then jump in with my full force because the admiral would clearly be not up to standard but sadly he seems to have some decent head on his shoulders.
"Enough," I said, once the damage markers crossed the threshold we had set. "Pull them out. All strike groups."
The strike force broke contact cleanly enough, we lost a handful of fighters, one bomber that took a lucky turret burst during egress, and a corvette that would need yard time if it survived the return.
Painful, but nothing major. Behind them they left fires, ruptured recovery operations, and a deliberately chaotic burst of truncated signals seeded into the local noise: panicked fragments about internal crisis, system-side revolt, rebel action near Elyria, urgent recall calls designed to sound like a force splitting its attention at the worst possible time.
Stitched in it was some recordings from the small skirmish with Vesk dissenters and voila.
The hidden scout droid remaining near the assembly zone showed the Imperial response almost immediately with their ships beginning to organise to organise themselves into pursuit order with more haste than grace.
Thankfully it's not their full remaining strength, they still left a thin guard around the worst-damaged hulls and the now increased ongoing rescue operations. But the rest were coming including those goddamn destroyers.
I sigh mostly to myself.
"Estimate."
The officer on the scout feed did not look away from the count. "Between sixty-eight and seventy-five ships forming for pursuit. Including all three ISD-Is. Mixed Victory support, light cruisers, corvettes, and remaining troop assets still able to keep pace."
Roughly seventy ships of Imperial anger, wounded but still lethal, turning toward Elyria.
At least better than around a hundred pristine ships I guess and since they are angry hopefully they make some mistakes.
*Orlan Jerjerrod POV - Captain of the Fleet.*
Captain Orlan Jerjerrod slammed both palms onto the bridge rail of the Unyielding Writ hard enough to send pain up his wrists. The Star Destroyer's command deck still stank of scorched insulation and emergency coolant. Red status wash painted every console in the colour of delayed humiliation.
Beyond the main viewport, the assembly zone was a wreck-strewn wound: drifting troop shells, ruptured escorts, fighter debris, and the lingering sensor haze of those filthy suicide craft.
The Unyielding Writ herself an Imperial I-class Star Destroyer commissioned in the early consolidation years, blooded first during anti-Separatist holdout sweeps in the Expansion Region, later assigned to sector enforcement as a symbol of Vordax authority, it had not been crippled.
That almost made it worse, she had been dirtied. The embodiment of Imperial authority was Scarred and forced to absorb orphaned TIE wings from lesser ships like a noble house taking in ragged cousins after a fire.
Orlan hated the image.
He was thirty-four, significantly leaner than his elder brother, with the same pale aristocratic cast to the face but none of the carefully cultivated softness.
Where his elder brother, Moff Darnis Jerjerrod had grown broad on politics and long lunches, Orlan kept himself sharp, dark hair cropped regulation-short, a thin scar under the right jaw from a boarding action against some filthy Twi-lek rebel group, the one he never stopped referencing when people mistook him for a purely political appointment.
His uniform was immaculate even now, except for a streak of carbon across one cuff he had not yet noticed.
His marriage to his second wife was three days old when Darnis had cut through the honeymoon with orders and a family command tone that still made Orlan's molars grind.
Not a request but a summons.
Lead the fleet, clean the sector's so-called infection. Be useful for once.
Their relationship had always been a cold war under one roof: Darnis the elder, heir, house head, Moff; Orlan the younger blade expected to cut where directed and smile when the credit went upward.
Reliable intel was supposed to be part of the package for him to swiftly get rid of the rebels.
Instead it was false intel that had been part of the god damn package.
It was supposed to only be light resistance with disordered local defence headed by a rim upstart from the core that was exiled here, with mercenary supplements and no stomach for real Imperial weight.
Some of that had clearly been proven false now has it.
Whether Darnis was incompetent, deceitful, or quietly hoping he, his younger brother would die out here under someone else's guns was an open question Orlan intended to answer later with a formal execution if necessary.
And yet not everything had been worthless as it would seem.
The intercepted fragments they managed to get from their transmissions after the second raid pointed to panic in Elyria itself with internal disruption and loyalist noise.
The second strike was a force that was supposed to deal more of a crippling blow but was recalled under pressure. If even half of that was true, then the local government was already spending itself in desperate gambles on multiple fronts.
They had thrown suicide ships and a quick second sting because they could not endure a long conventional arrival.
With what Orlan still had, he could crush them.
He could raze the system to the bedrock, erase the little governor's seat of power, and then turn homeward. Not as Darnis's obedient hound either but as the man who restored order while the Moff failed upward through nepotism and borrowed authority.
March on Vordax Prime, present his traitorous brother's head in a sealed case to Imperial judgment. Let the sector watch.
Let Coruscant notice which Jerjerrod actually produced results. Yes, that would work.
He would be Moff.
"Reform the line," Orlan snapped. "All ships still under power to assault posture. We push through at once."
A pale operations officer turned from the fleet board, throat bobbing. "Captain, there is no fully intact screen remaining. Fighter strength is down to sixty-three percent. We are at seventy-one active ships. The rest are destroyed or too crippled to-"
Orlan drew and fired in one motion, the bolt took the man through the upper chest, slammed him into the console, and left him sliding to the deck with a burned hole in the uniform and a final wet attempt at breath.
Several bridge crew froze with one junior lieutenant that made a sound but died immediately when Orlan's eyes cut across the deck.
"All ships prepare for hyperspace jump to Elyria," Orlan snarled, voice raw with rage. "If a damaged hull disintegrates mid-transit, then it disintegrates. Any captain refusing the order will be named traitor and I will hang their families from the orbital docks of Vordax Prime. Move!"
No one argued again, the next three hours were a study in enforced will.
Orlan did not leave the command dais for longer than it took to have the corpse removed. He personally reviewed which wounded ships could be whipped, threatened, or mechanically overridden into the jump queue. Two corvettes with unstable hyperdrives were ordered forward anyway and a Victory II with compromised heat regulation was told to keep pace or be left as evidence of cowardice.
He walked the upper bridge galleries once, letting the crew see him unbroken, then returned to issue corrected formation packets for reversion: destroyers cantered, remaining troop assets tucked behind the heavy wedges, fighter wings ready for immediate launch upon realspace return.
During transit he tried to record a private message to his new wife multiple times and each time he deleted it with a sigh without sending anything.
He dictated another sealed note for Imperial Centre in case Darnis attempted to claim the coming victory as his own design, he reviewed old house ledgers in a side pane, estimating which cousins and clients would abandon his brother fastest once the Moff's failure became undeniable.
He even allowed himself, briefly, a glass of dark spirit from the captain's locked case. By the final minutes of the jump, the rage had refined into something almost bright.
He paced before the viewport as the tunnel roared around the Unyielding Writ.
The countdown hit thirty.
Twenty.
Ten.
At ten he smiled, feral and sure, and dropped into the command chair.
In the last seconds he let himself imagine Elyria burning clean under orderly bombardment. The local fleet broken. The governor dragged into chains if still alive.
Then Vordax Prime and his fat brothers face when the door to his office opened and the house hierarchy ended at the barrel of a sidearm. Later, other Moffs offering careful congratulations with sector governors adjusting their posture and Imperial officials discovering, with official surprise, that the younger Jerjerrod had always been the stronger instrument.
The tunnel collapsed.
Realspace slammed back into being.
Before Orlan could issue the first combat order.
The sensor officer screamed. "Mines! Mines! Mines! Evasiv-"
The starboard side of the Unyielding Writ heaved under a hard, dirty explosion.
The deck kicked and the sensor officer was flung from her station and hit the floor in a tangle of limbs. Orlan's head snapped back against the chair hard enough to white out his vision.
For a couple of seconds the bridge was only shaking metal, alarm howl, and the deep structural complaint of a Star Destroyer taking damage it had not been ready to receive, without its deflector shields active the damage must be extensive.
Explosions continued, nearer and farther, some transmitted through the hull as dull consecutive punches.
Orlan forced the world into focus through pain and noise. "What the fuck was that?"
The sensor officer dragged herself upright, blood at her nostril, eyes wide. "Minefield, Captain. We reverted into a minefield!"
"Status of the fleet!"
Another officer, voice cracking, began reading from the chaos of partial returns.
The flagship had taken extensive hull damage before shields could activate and even then they still got hit and are now experiencing localised shield failures along one quarter. At least four other major ships were reporting injuries from the opening detonations.
Two smaller escorts were already gone from the board, and three more were tumbling with dead engines or breached reactors.
Remaining mines were still seeding the approach lanes in unpredictable clusters, forcing every ship to group up and to hesitate with every step.
Orlan frowned hard, wiped his mouth, and looked down, blood on his hand.
He started issuing rapid orders anyway tighten formation, cut speed, paint the remaining mines on the sensors, push gunners onto proximity defence, force the line back into shape before the locals could exploit the stumble.
Internally he was apoplectic, fury cascading toward Darnis with his fucking faulty intelligence, these are the specific coordinates he told me to take! The probability of there being a rat is lower than the probability that Darnis just wants to fucking kill him.
Curse that bastard and this entire cursed campaign: false intelligence, suicide attacks, no a hyperspace reversion into a mine field.
Every failure and punch stacking into a chain that should never have touched a Jerjerrod command.
His thoughts did not finish, the dashboard lit with new contacts.
Multiple signatures blooming into attack vectors from prepared local lanes and the nearby asteroids.
Orlan's face distorted as the recognition landed. "FUCKING ELYRIANS!"
Around him the bridge dissolved into shouted damage reports, fighter scramble commands, collision warnings, and the raw institutional panic of a fleet that had been caught with its pants down, three times in a row.
*Reza POV*
Reza stood in the command pit of the forward control node and reviewed the kill perimiter one last time.
Around him the local defence net glowed in layered arcs: mine density across the northeast exit, asteroid concealment pockets, pre-staged rearm haulers.
He did not allow himself the comfort of hoping the enemy would panic overly much. Panic was useful when it appeared, but plans built on it failed the moment a competent captain kept his nerve.
What Reza trusted was spacing, timing, and the simple fact that large fleets hated sudden confinement.
He checked the assets immediately under his hand.
In the asteroid belt, hidden under emissions control and rock shadow, he had all the remaining N-1s 130 Z-95 Headhunters, 50 mixed fighters drawn from local screens, 28 TIE bombers, 18 Y-wing bombers, 35 light attack skiffs reconfigured as heavy bombers, and 11 armed gunships.
Supporting them in close pockets were 6 Kom'rk-class assault craft loaded with Elite Mandalorian boarders for rapid insertion and 4 stripped haulers converted into munitions tenders and once things started going better they will be thrown into the mix as anti-screen ships.
The visible short-range line, held just far enough to remain flexible, consisted of: 6 Nebulon-B2 frigates
9 light cruisers
3 heavy cruisers
7 CR90 corvettes
10 other frigates and corvettes of various makes
31 system patrol craft like Firesprays.
all the remaining TIE fighters along with the remaining Komrks, Scyks, Z-95s and others totalling around 192 additional fighters.
Behind that, still withheld from first contact, waited the rest of the fleet with the heavier follow-on elements like Iron Reaver, all the gozantis, heavy cruisers, light cruisers and all the armed haulers we have and the cannons from the dockyard.
Yes, they on paper now have more ships if they lose more ships in the mine field but their ships are of better quality and make. At least our fighters and bombers outclass theirs but the three star destroyers themselves in a head to head battle against our entire fleet would either win if they get some lucky shots or cause most of our fleet to be disintegrated before they fall.
Bad for us, they are not by themselves they still have dozens of other ships.
Good for us, most if not all of them are damaged or will be from the minefield, plus the exhaustion and the mental toll of being on alert all the time and already losing in two skirmishes.
The plan was clean in concept and vicious in practice.
Let the Imperials revert into the mines, let the first detonations force them to tighten up if they don't, they risk hitting the mines.
Once their captains compresses formation to avoid further mine strikes, we hit them from three vectors at once and drive them into an even denser knot or force them to desperately start evasive manoeuvres which will just result in more mine damage.
But if they are all nicely clustered up it will restrict their manoeuvre lanes which means a restricted broadside.
Restricted perimiter meant wasted turbolaser superiority, of which they have a hell of a lot more than us.
Our fighters and bombers will fill the battlespace with constant motion and target saturation, while boarding team would slip into the scars.
If the enemy lost enough ships to mines, boarding, and direct fire, the rest of the fleet would come in for the mop-up. If somehow the Imperials punched through the first cage, they would not get a noble decisive clash.
He would kite them inward, bleed them toward the dockyard batteries and the ground-based cannons on the mining moon and Elyria itself, and make every kilometre of advance more expensive than the last.
A sensor officer looked up. "Reversion signatures. Multiple heavy mass shadows. They're coming out."
Reza's mouth barely moved. "All units hold until the first mine blooms."
The Imperial fleet tore back into realspace in a staggered, aggressive surge.
They hit the field almost at once.
The first explosions walked through their forward edge in dirty white flashes. A corvette went up so hard it became only expanding metal and fire.
A light cruiser staggered sideways with its bow shields collapsing. Larger ships began correcting hard, captains doing exactly what trained captains did when navigational murder appeared under their hulls: they closed ranks, cut reckless lateral movement, and tried to push through as a fist rather than a scattered hand.
Reza watched the compression form and felt the satisfaction settle in cold and precise. "There," he said. "Vectors one through three, launch. Drive them together."
The asteroid belt came alive.
Fighters, bombers and others spilled from rock shadow in crossing lanes while the bombers climbed into attack angles behind them.
From three prepared directions the light capital line accelerated in, frigates and corvettes spearing toward the Imperial flanks and nose in staggered intervals.
The first fighter wave did not attempt glamorous long pursuit curves.
They cut in close, forced interceptor responses, and dragged TIE formation integrity into chaos over a fleet already worried about mines.
"Bomber groups A and C, mark the Victory-class with the damaged starboard plating," Reza ordered. "Group B, seed ion pressure across the nearest Arquitens cluster. Corvette packs, kill recovery craft and any ship still bleeding atmosphere."
The battlespace became a lattice of colliding intentions.
Imperial turbolasers, as hindered as they were carved huge, brilliant lines through the dark, but too many of them were forced into overlapping fields where friendly hulls crowded one another.
One Star Destroyer fired a full broadside through a lane that a panicked escort had drifted into half a second earlier; the escort's shields took the spill and flared a violent warning.
A CR90 used that exact confusion to slip beneath a heavy cruiser's depressed guns and rake its lower hangar seam.
Mines continued to detonate in irregular pulses whenever an Imperial captain, seeking room to manoeuvre, edged into an unswept pocket."
Boarding windows opening on the crippled Heavy cruiser and the trailing Victory," a Mandalorian channel reported. "Kom'rks moving under bomber cover."
"Authorized," Reza said. "Engines and power first. No going for the bridge unless the path is already gutted."
A gunship under local colours exploded under concentrated point defence, becoming a brief orange flower against the hull of an Imperial light cruiser. Two Headhunters died in the same sector a moment later while a a squad of Scyk fighters were obliterated by point defence systems and a group of TIEs when they got too close to the Star Destroyer.
Reza logged the losses without visible reaction and redistributed the nearest flight to keep pressure on the same lane.
On the central display, the three ISD-Is remained the anchors of enemy strength, turning their hulls in an attempt to shield smaller vessels and create safe cones of fire. Around them the rest of the fleet was being shoved into a tighter and tighter knot by mines on one side and continuous vector pressure on the other.
Every time an Imperial ship tried to expand the formation, fighters swarmed the exposed edge and light capital guns punished the movement until the ship drifted back into the herd.
"They're packing," the tactical officer said, almost under his breath.
"Good," Reza answered. "Keep them packed."
A pair of Y-wings broke through a torn escort lane and put torpedoes into the engine quarter of a damaged Victory. The resulting blast did not destroy the ship outright, but the drive flare stuttered into a wounded, uneven burn and the vessel's turning rate collapsed.
Reza immediately flagged it for isolation.
A corvette squadron began cutting off its support while one Kom'rk group used the sensor bloom of a nearby mine detonation to vanish against the hull and begin insertion.
The first phase was working.
Not perfectly looking at the constant casualty updates, they already lost 2 Nebulons and 3 C90s along with dozens of fighters and bombers. The patrol craft seem to be taking the worst of it, more than 20 system patrol craft are gone, 13 skiffs as well along with 2 light cruiser and 1 heavy cruiser who got maimed when 2 of the star destroyers focused their limited fire on it.
Reza rested one hand against the edge of the console as another Imperial escort died under crossing fire and the enemy's forward lines continued to grind against a trap that had no intention of giving them open sky.
"Hold the pattern," he said. "Bleed them here, if they break inward, we drag them into the batteries. If they stay, we carve them down by weight of contact."
Outside, under the cold light of Elyria's approaches, the fleet battle settled into its first true rhythm: mines forcing compression, fighters denying clarity, bombers hunting wounds, and boarding teams already moving into the dark seams of Imperial steel.
Reza watched the nearest Star Destroyer's shields flicker under successive strikes and allowed himself one thin, satisfied smile.
*Mira Bevin. Bevin Clan Leader POV.*
Mira Bevin felt the Kom'rk shudder as it cut under the Star Destroyer's shadow.
Through the side viewport the Imperial fleet was a moving canyon of steel and fire. The pilot threw them hard between a burning Arquitens and the underside of a Victory-class, so close that anti-fighter tracer fire lit the hull plating in stuttering green.
They climbed, rolled, and dropped again, skimming past docking spines and sensor vanes while the battlespace screamed around them. One near burst rattled the troop bay hard enough to knock a magnetic clamp loose.
Nobody spoke, talking wasted breath.
"Window," the pilot snapped. "Main ventral approach, thirty seconds."
Mira checked her rifle, the vibroblade at her hip, the compact charges sealed against her armour. She almost sighed at the lack of whistling birds. Those were for richer clans, better-connected houses, people who still had old vaults and older favours, they would be useful. While yes they whistle they are way quieter than a blaster bolt.
House Bevin had skill, hunger, and whatever weapons they could buy, steal, or rebuild. That would have to be enough.
The Kom'rk slammed into position near the primary docking hatch.
Mira went first, five warriors behind her in tight order.
The moment the last boots hit deck, the assault craft detached and pealed away back into the fleet melee, engines flaring as turbolaser wash chased it into the dark.
Then they were alone inside the presumed flagship.
The corridor smelled of oil, ozone, and too many bodies living too long in one hull. Mira raised a fist and the squad sank into motion.
They moved like a single organism.
A two-man patrol came around a service bend, helmets angled toward a status panel. Mira took the left stormtrooper from behind, vibroblade punching up under the back plate and into the gap beneath the helmet rim until the tip scraped the inside of the jaw. She held him through the spasm, lowered him quietly, and already the second man was dying under her companion's blade as it cut the throat.
They dragged both into a side locker, wiped the floor with a maintenance rag as best they could, and kept going.
At a sealed bulkhead one of her warriors crouched with a slicer spike. The door lights cycled from red to pale amber. Beyond it, a technical crew of three was arguing over a damaged conduit map.
One Mandalorian crossed the space in three silent strides and drove a combat knife through an engineer's ear canal until the hilt stopped against bone. Another caught a second man around the mouth and stabbed repeatedly into the soft armour seam at the armpit, short brutal thrusts that turned the struggle into twitching weight. The third tried to run.
Mira shot him in the spine at low power and finished him on the deck with her boot on his helmet and the blade down through the neck ring.
They sliced local terminals as they advanced, forcing secondary routes open, blanking compartment alarms where they could, and feeding false green status into adjacent sections.
A pair of naval ratings stepped out of a latrine passage and died before either finished inhaling to shout.
One had his face smashed into the bulkhead until the front of the skull collapsed under beskar-backed impact, the other was dragged back into the passage and quietly opened from groin to sternum, hand clamped over his mouth while he kicked himself to death against the wall.
Secondary fire control came first, they entered hard and silent, killed the four operators at their stations, and planted shaped charges into the targeting linkage trunks. Mira watched one officer try to reach a sidearm with broken fingers after a gauntlet strike shattered his hand against the console edge. She put her boot on his elbow, pinned it, and caved his chest in with her armoured boot.
Blood sheeted across the deck grating in a thick dark fan.
It was Vhett talking something about distractions and waiting for people to pass. When its just as easy to kill and hide the bodies, the ships massive and they are all busy why fuck around with distractions and waiting till a single man passed.
Sensors were next then life support junctions.
By the time they reached the third objective, the ship's internal pattern was starting to feel wrong.
They were setting the final charges on a life-support distribution node when the lookout signalled hard into cover. A large stormtrooper element thundered past the junction, full squad strength or better, definitely more than ten, moving fast toward where they would be heading next which was engineering and power.
The lookout came closer and leaned in close. "They found someone in the lower levels, they're fortifying the last vital rooms and consolidating their strengths, should we call in extraction?"
Mira exhaled slowly inside the helmet, three other boarding teams had already reported success on lesser ships. Two more were still fighting their way through objectives.
Four waited in reserve for the next opportunities. If her team failed here, on the capital ship itself, the shame would land on House Bevin with full weight, they would be known as the only ones who fucked up this easy assignment.
Because that's what it was, easy. Just be quiet, lay low and blow shit up and leave unlike in space where you can die any second to not only enemy fire, but friendly fire and collision with other ships or simply your ship just decides to die and your sitting duck.
Her eyes hardened behind the visor.
If she took the bridge and the captain, she could force a surrender. House Bevin would own the decisive act. Maybe as a prize they could even claim a Victory-class hull as prize-right when the killing ended.
She would love a star destroyer but not only other clans would object but the governor itself would, and the Imperium at large would not allow anyone outside their government to have a star destroyer on their hands.
"Change of objective we take the bridge. We end this from the top."
Helmets nodded once.
They went upward through service routes and shadowed maintenance ladders, avoiding the main arteries for as long as the ship still allowed stealth. they let a solitary officer with a datapad pass on the stairwell. While two stormtroopers at a checkpoint were drawn out by a tossed tool clatter and dropped in the dark: one stabbed through the throat slit, the other pulled over a railing with a wire around the neck until the frantic kicking stopped.
Maybe Vhett was right? As much as those words make me want to throw up, but its too late now, we have to do this now.
Near the final approach to the bridge tier, stealth ended.
A stormtrooper survived the first half-second of a takedown long enough to wrench sideways, fire a blind burst, and stagger behind a support rib. His communicator snapped live.
"Hostiles near the brig-"
The mandalorian who failed to takedown the trooper shot his blaster and it punched through his visor with a sharp crystalline crack and a smell of burning plastic silencing the rest of the word. The man collapsed in a clatter of armour.
"Move!" Mira barked.
The next two minutes were pure violence, they hit a corridor holding force of ten stormtroopers with a generous amount of stuns first and detonators after.
The first explosion tore two stunned troopers off their feet and slammed them into the ceiling hard enough to leave dented plating and a mist of shattered armour polymer, smoke curling from their forms, one of whom fell and folded like a blanket around the makeshift barricade.
Mira advanced through the smoke and shot a third through the chest as he tried to climb up from his knees, then closed and smashed a fourth's helmet repeatedly into a doorframe until the visor caved and the helmet along with the head inside lost shape.
One of her warriors vaulted the body that was splayed on a makeshift barricade, landed among three troopers, and shot them at extreme close range scorching armour deep enough to have smoke curling from the back plates of the armour.
Another Mandalorian took a bolt to the thigh plate, snarled, and answered by jamming a det-charge against a trooper's midsection and kicking him back into his squadmates before it blew all three into scorched wreckage.
They reached the bridge doors over dead men and spent and bits of heat-scarred armour.
"Charges," Mira ordered. "Breacher up."
They detonated the pre-planted explosives on the systems for chaos, then locked a breaching frame onto the bridge entrance. The squad stacked left and right. The device blew with a hard concussive punch and the doors peeled inward.
They went through into a wall of fire.
Once they did what greeted them was more than thirty stormtroopers who were waiting in prepared positions, and a heavy repeater emplacement opened instantly from the slightly elevated right side.
The first burst caught the warrior to Mira's right and shredded him. His beskar armour had looked pure in the hangar light, however as it seems it was not pure enough.
The repeater bolts punched through imperfect plates, walked up his torso, and turned the inside of his suit into a wet, rattling slaughter. He dropped in pieces of man and metal.
"Grenades!" Mira shouted, one warrior rose to throw. A precision shot cracked into her helmet and snapped her head back.
She staggered, lost the arc, and dropped the live grenade at their feet.
"Out-"
The blast heaved the entry team apart. Mira was flung sideways into a console base. Another warrior was blown clean over a rail into the lower officer pit. The air filled with smoke, blood aerosol, and the high sharp ring of overloaded audio systems in every helmet.
The stormtroopers took the opening and rushed.
Through the chaos Mira saw four of them pin one of her remaining warriors against the deck. Two wrenched at his helmet seals while a third jammed a blaster against his breastplate and fired again and again at the same point, trying to overwhelm the beskar by brute repetition and point-blank heat as she screamed and struggled.
The trapped woman fought like an animal, broke one trooper's ankle, and still could not get free before a second squad piled onto her arms.
Another Bevin warrior regained his knees only to take a stock strike across the collarbone and a blade into the gap under the arm, deep, he made a short sound and folded.
On the upper dais, the captain was shouting for the rest of them to be finished.
Mira went for him.
She expected an officer, a voice. A soft man elevated by rank. What she got was Orlan Jerjerrod stepping into the engagement with enough close-combat competence to survive the first exchange.
She slashed; he knocked the vibroknife wide with a hard forearm deflection and slammed a forearm into her helmet, rocking her balance. They crashed together through the command space in a brief, ugly grappling fight hands trapping wrists, knees trying to connect.
He was not better than her that was for certain. However, he was good enough to stall her.
That was all the stormtrooper needed.
A body hit her from the higher level and carried her off the dais in a violent fall into the lower officer section.
The impact drove the air from her lungs, the trooper tried to keep her pinned; she smashed an elbow into his helmet hard enough to rip it half-off and send it skittering across the deck.
The man beneath it snarled through bloodied teeth, seized her fallen vibroblade, and drove it down through her left hand.
The blade pinned her palm to the deck plating.
Mira screamed as he stamped his boot onto her other wrist, locked it there, and began stomping her helmet, reputedly.
After the fifth time she felt her mouth fill with blood as the world tilted.
Her vision went soft at the edges, a voice cut through the ringing.
"Fucking whore! Take her helmet off."
She was too disoriented to stop them as her seals hissed and the helmet wrenched free.
Recycled bridge air hit her face cold and sharp while blood ran from her mouth and from somewhere under her hairline. The ceiling lights flared into smeared white shapes.
All she could hold onto was the image of a Victory-class hull under Bevin markings. A worthy prize, clan elevation. A future bought in other people's terror.
She smiled through the blood at the thought of it.
From above, Orlan's voice came down almost reflective, almost bored beneath the adrenaline.
"Damn. She's pretty. Not as pretty as my second wife. About on par with the cold bitch that was the first one."
A stormtrooper sergeant, helmetless, breathing hard, asked, "What do you want done with her, Captain?"
Orlan snorted. "Do whatever the fuck you want, sergeant."
A gauntleted hand tore the vibroblade out of Mira's pinned palm in one brutal pull.
Her hand felt empty as pain flashed white through her arm.
Then a shape entered her blurry eye.
Metal, close, and descending.
There was a wet punch of agony, a bright interior burst, and then nothing at all.
*Reza POV*
For a short stretch, Reza allowed himself to believe the battle was bending cleanly in their favour.
"Two light cruisers secured and disabled," the boarding liaison reported. "One Arquitens under our control. Reactors limited, weapons down with crews surrendering in sections."
Reza nodded once, eyes moving across the wider board. "Sitrep from the remaining teams. "The answers came in uneven bursts.
The four reserve insertion groups remained on standby, still waiting for a viable target in the enemy line.
On one Victory-class, a boarding team had taken the bridge and was now fighting the ship itself, struggling with half-broken command pathways to force a full systems kill before Imperial counter-teams cut back in.
On a Dragon-class heavy cruiser, its one of the hulls that is carrying elements of the Imperial armoured division, the second team had sabotaged targeting arrays and crippled one engine, but the situation there had turned bad.
Imperial army units aboard had mobilized in force, compartment by compartment, and the boarding team was requesting extraction before it was pinned and erased.
"Pull them out," Reza ordered. "They already did enough damage. No point making them die a pointless death."
Then he opened Mira Bevin's channel.
No answer.
He tried again, this time there was a connection light.
"Status upd-" A different voice cut across the line, polished by command and thickened by contempt. "I don't know who the vermin I am talking to is, neither do I care. I hope you kissed your wife and hugged your children before you came out here," Orlan Jerjerrod said.
"You'll never see them again. When I'm finished, what's left of your little world can learn how the market works on Nar Shaddaa. There are always buyers for miserable survivors."
Reza's jaw clenched. "Fuck."
He was already turning toward the next set of orders when one of the tactical officers went rigid. "Captain… the Star Destroyers are moving."
A pause." They're moving through the mines."
Reza's eyes snapped back to the holodisplay, the Imperial formation had changed shape under pressure and pain, not into collapse but into discipline. Roughly three lines were forming ahead of the Destroyers, screening ships pressed into sacrificial runs while the heavy ships advanced through cleared or accepted-risk lanes.
Mines still bloomed at the edges, some escorts died or were crippled.
The Destroyers kept coming regardless, that was not even the worst of it.
Once the lanes widened, the Star Destroyers gained what every smaller force feared most from ships of that class. A clean field of fire.
Reza's first thought was sharp and arrogant, they must be running on some kind of fum- The thought ended when all three Destroyers coordinated a single concentrated salvo.
One of Reza's heavy cruisers occupied that lane, its shields held for a fraction of a second, bright as a struck star, then peeled apart under the overlapping turbolaser weight.
The follow-through carved the cruiser open from dorsal ridge to ventral frame, compartments vented in chains. The keel failed, in less than ten seconds a capital ship became a broken, burning mass trailing debris and bodies into the dark.
"All units fall back!" Reza snapped. "Break contact lanes, widen dispersion, do not remain in their field of fire. Move!"
The withdrawal bought survival but the price was paid in blood.
In the time that followed, the Imperial force reorganized into a wounded but advancing hunter line. forty-seven ships remained in effective pursuit strength, battered and angry, pushing after Reza's light elements with the three ISD-Is as the spine.
In those same minutes Elyrian losses mounted hard: three CR90s destroyed, two Nebulon-B2s crippled out of the fight, five light cruisers lost or rendered combat-ineffective, and a brutal slice of the fighter screen erased.
The N-1 count alone dropped to sixty-three from a hundred.
Gunships suffered worse than the tougher system patrol craft, with eleven destroyed while trying to cover the retreat through overlapping point defence and secondary battery fire, most of which were the Correlian DP gunships.
Reza kept them moving, dragging the Imperial line deeper into prepared space, forcing them to chase into the growing shadow of Elyria's fixed defences.
"Dockyard batteries, free fire the moment they enter your outer range." The dockyard answered with long, punishing turbolaser arcs. Then the rest of the hidden assets came out from the dark side of the moon.
Iron Reaver led the reveal, she drove into the battlespace with her came the Acclamators on either side, the remaining cruisers, armed haulers, frigates, gunships, and every ugly makeshift combat hull that could still aim a weapon.
At the same time, concealed forces from the moon in hidden craters began pouring into the void: hundreds of Vulture droids rising in dense attack clouds, Hyena bombers sliding into high attack vectors, Munificent-class frames powering into supporting lines, and droid gunships accelerating toward the contested lanes.
The balance of numbers shifted.
Fighter and bomber superiority swung hard toward Elyria. Supporting cannon fire now came not only from ships but from the dockyard and, as range closed, from planetary and lunar orbital batteries as well.
The first full contact after was ugly enough to strip any remaining comfort from the board.
Imperial gunners, bloodied and vicious, focused fire with the discipline of people who knew they had one path left: forward.
A local frigate died under two converging barrages.
A droid gunship wing was shredded trying to break a TIE interceptor screen.
One Munificent took a deep hull strike and had to fall out of line, trailing burning atmosphere, fucking CIS junk, cant even handle ten minutes of combat.
Reza moved ships like a man playing with live blades, shifting damaged hulls back, feeding fresh ones into temporary lanes, ordering bomber groups to ignore dangerous targets and keep hammering engines, sensor blisters, and recovery craft and finish off any ship that's half way dead already.
"Auralis flights, cut their fighter reinforcement loops. Do not chase strays outside the main body."
"Kom'rks, hold unless a capital hull shows a real breach."
"All heavy ships, paired fire on the leftmost Victory. Strip her shields before they recharge."
Losses continued on both sides. An Imperial Arquitens broke in half under dockyard fire and bomber follow-through. One of Reza's light cruisers, caught too long in an ISD's secondary battery arc, lost most of its upper decks and had to be abandoned while escape pods punched away into the dark.
Vulture swarms died by the dozens and still kept coming, their value measured not in survival but in the constant pressure they put on Imperial targeting priorities.
Also last of the Vesk mercenary cruisers have gone dark, at least they wont have to pay them anything after this.
The damage on the enemy line was beginning to show, too many escorts were limping or just firing sporadically, trying to preserve their power, with one of the ISD-1s openly smoking on multiple levels and half its gone disabled.
Another ISD still carried visible hangar scarring and unstable shield bands from earlier punishment.
It was not enough, no-where near enough yet.
Reza was about to order fresh boarding attempts onto the now more alert and more damaged hulls when a different alert cut across the pit.
"Captain, army transports are shifting into descent posture. Trajectory aligns with the mining moon. Target concentration: Durak's Hold and its surrounding areas."
Reza's stomach went cold for half a second.
If they take the civilians hostage and put them around the orbital canons as living shields they will be able to turn those guns against us.
He snapped a transmission groundward. "Durak's Hold, prepare for landings. Activate defence lines and droid support, get every unit into position."
An acknowledgment came back almost immediately, already done.
Kael had issued the ground defence order five minutes earlier with reinforcements from Elyria already on its way.
Despite everything, Reza felt a brief, thin smile touch his mouth, the boy had come a long way.
Far enough to see the second knife while the first was still in motion, I should peel some fighters to harass their landing craft.
Then the naval board screamed for his attention again.
Two Star Destroyers had found one of the Acclamators, their combined fire hit in overlapping surges with the Acclamator's shields flaring and collapsing inward almost instantly it left the hull beneath them flashing under direct punishment.
Warning markers cascaded across its profile from bow to hangar belt.
Reza's frown returned hard. "Pull that Acclamator down-angle and feed smoke between her and the Destroyers.
All available interdiction craft screen her withdrawal lane. Planetary orbital batteries, correct your aim and put real weight on the nearest ISD wedge. We did not buy those cannons so you could miss a target the size of a Couruscant city block if. Fire as if you mean to keep breathing."
Around the Iron Reaver, battle continued to grind in fire and wreckage: droid swarms clawing for engine locks, Imperial turbolasers answering with fortress-thick salvos, boarding teams waiting for any fresh wound large enough to enter through, and below it all the mining moon turning under the fleet as enemy transports began their descent into true surface war.
Reza drew one slow breath, reset his stance over the console, and kept commanding.
*Kael POV*
I had just finished ordering additional reinforcements from Elyria to Durak's Hold when I allowed myself, for the first time in hours, to look at the wider battle without hunting only for the next emergency marker.
From the palace command tier the void war above the system was a living diagram of attrition. The three Star Destroyers were all damaged now with visible scarring, unstable shield bands, delayed battery cycles.
Their landing commitment was real, which meant troop hulls and support craft were spending themselves toward the mining moon and leaving more of the orbital force stretched thin.
That made it worse in the short term and more vulnerable in the longer one, ships disgorging soldiers were ships that were left open open.
Their fighter strength was effectively gone as a coherent screen, what remained were scattered flights and damaged leftovers.
Our bombers were still finding targets on the ship while the fighters were doing the two jobs that mattered most in a fight like this: forcing enemy targeting solutions to chase ghosts, and punishing soft points on larger hulls whenever a shield face flickered or a turret cluster turned too late.
At this rate, we were going to win, it was only a matter of time.
I hated that thought the moment it formed, because something was wrong.
Not on the board, no. Everything is going swimmingly so far.
But something under those things.
A pressure in the pattern I could not yet name, the kind of wrongness that did not announce itself as a red icon, only as a lag between what the battle should feel like and what it did.
I opened a direct channel. "Thorn. Palace status." A second passed.
Then another.
"Nothing unusual, Governor," Thorn replied. "All sections quiet, guard rotations are on schedule."
"Have every squad report in individually," I said. "Not by wing, not by floor summary. Squad by squad. And activate all internal security droids into guard mode."
There was a brief hesitation on the line. "Yes, Governor. At once."
I cut the channel and exhaled through my nose.
On the side display, the casualty list continued updating in cold text, one name held my eye longer than the others.
Mira Bevin. Confirmed lost during bridge assault on the enemy flagship.
I still could not understand what had possessed her to push for the bridge when the order had been explicit that no direct bridge strike were to happen unless the outcome was already guaranteed. Secondary command, sensors, engines, power. Those were the targets that won fleet actions.
A bridge run against an alert Star Destroyer was pride dressed up as initiative, and it had cost her team everything.
If we had crippled one of the star destroyers this battle would be going very differently.
I was still staring at the report when a distant explosion thumped through the palace structure.
Not orbital, that would have sent everything rattling, our shields or not.
It wasn't that far and it felt more internal.
The two guards at my door moved instantly, stepping in front of me with weapons raised and bodies angled to block the line from the door.
My hand was already under the desk, closing around the blaster I kept there.
I opened Thorn's channel again. "What was that?"