Published: July 8th 2023, 8:36:04 pm
We emerged casually back onto the gaming floor of Szog’s Casino.
‘So how long do you think before the Hutt Council gets a recording of that meeting?’ I thought with amusement to Anakin.
‘Two or three hours, it’d depend how quickly they can get together. The hutts don’t really trust putting their meetings over any medium that can be hacked.’
‘And how long after that will we be attacked by goons sent by the hutt council, pretending to work for Ziro?’
‘That would be another two hours or so,’ Anakin chuckled.
‘So let’s take that time to have a bit of fun, Skyguy.’
‘You want to gamble?’ he asked, giving me a stern eyebrow.
‘It’s not about the gambling, it’s about the game and having fun with it, master. You know the concept of a high roller, well let me show you it’s opposite, the low roller.’
I typed in a question for M8 and stopped at an empty Sabacc table. “What’s the minimum bet?”
The very bored looking green twi’lek female, who was managing that table’s systems and wearing a red bikini analogue that would be right at home on Hapes perked up, “Uh, that’s twenty credits per hand, ma’am.”
I gestured to the table and smiled at Anakin underneath my helmet, ‘So what do you say, Skyguy? Remember, all work and no play, makes for grumpy Jedi. Grumpy Jedi make bad decisions, which can lead anger, anger to hate, which leads to the Dark Side.’
Anakin tumbled that logic in his brain for a moment, ‘Snips, you know what? I’m going to think about that one and we’ll play a few Sabacc hands, just to maintain our cover.’
‘Ha, you’ll find my logic is perfectly sound,’ I smirked at him.
Anakin pulled out the credit chits, ‘We’ll play for an hour and we won’t go over 500 credits cumulatively. Understood?’
‘No Force powers either, I want us to play fairly, Skyguy.’
‘All right, be prepared to lose, Snips,’ he laughed.
‘Bring it.’
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Anakin and I spent the next hour testing our RNG luck against each other. With our helmets still on there was no way of looking at each other's faces to see if we were bluffing and with our bond off limits except for briefly ‘speaking’, there was no way to even use emotional cues to guess.
Sabacc was essentially a Corusca galaxy spin on Blackjack, with the magic number or goal being 23. A further difference was that card values could push a player into negative and positive tallies, so a player could also aim for -22 and beat someone who had 21. If two players were tied with a score of -20 and 20, then the positive score would win. If a player reached over -23 or 23 then they Bombed Out and went bust. A deck had 76 cards and 60 of them were numbered cards divided into four different suits, with remaining cards being 16 special cards with different functions and value - such as The Idiot card, which was worth zero, just like a Joker card.
We were each dealt five cards and commenced with the four phases of a typical hand, Betting, Calling, Shifting and Drawing.
Betting was done into two pots of money at stake with each hand, the hand pot and the Sabacc pot. The former was won as usual, by winning the hand. The loser of the hand had to put more money into the latter pot. The Sabacc pot could only be won at the point someone got a pure sabacc score of 23 or -23 or managed to achieve an Idiot’s Array - the Idiot card, combined with a two card of any suit and a three card of the same suit.
The other bit of strategy came with the Shifting phase. Each card of a Sabacc deck was a small display device in its own right and could be changed in value and suit by the computer and dealer running the game. It was mainly a way to shuffle and change cards without having to physically do so. However, in the shifting phase, cards were also purposefully randomized by the dealer and computer. It was almost like a slot machine integrated into a card game. In this way, the hand of a player could dramatically shift for the better or worse and the challenge came if you could manage the shift afterwards by either drawing or discarding cards in the final phase of the hand.
It was also slightly more challenging for me as I had to also manage M8 speaking for me to the dealer. M8 eventually worked out a system where she would track my eye movement and display all the options in the HUD. I selected an option by moving my eyes to focus on the option and blinking three times. Sometimes the options she presented weren't what I wanted to do, so I had to take the time to actually type out the speech.
It was quite cumbersome at times and delayed the flow of play enough that I figured there had to be a better solution - one found in the Force.
There was the Miraluka - an entire near-human race that lacked eyes but made up for it by all of them being Force Sensitive enough to use it as an excellent replacement. There were in fact quite a number of them in the Jedi Temple on Coruscant - though most of them didn’t serve as full Jedi, but served the Order as teachers and administrators.
If they could use the Force as an alternative for eyes and see, couldn’t I use it as a replacement for my hearing?
Even when the neural shunts were taken out and my montrals returned to normal, I was fighting in a war, there was no guarantee my hearing wouldn’t be damaged again. I might also not be in a position to get medical care for it.
Okay, so theory, I can use the Force to see with Farsight, my Technometry also lets me perceive … wait…
If there was ever a moment I wanted to double facepalm, this would be it.
Farsight was not just sight. Did I not hear Master Sinube speaking whilst I was in the bacta tank? Did I not hear what the various channels the patients had been watching?
I closed my eyes for a brief moment, plunging my perceptions into Farsight, but then pulled right back and focused on myself.
My world exploded into a riot of sound, as if I just switched off a mute button.
“Ma’am? It’s the drawing phase,” said the dealer gently, giving a confused look to Anakin.
I nodded and focused back on my cards, “Sorry, got lost a bit in my thoughts.”
I could hear my own voice! The feeling of triumph surged in me.
Anakin jerked in surprise as the sound of my actual voice emerged properly from my helmet. He scrutinized me for a moment and I felt his mental probes and perceptions pushing on me.
‘Snips, you… you just spoke properly yet… What did you do?’ he thought to me. I shrugged and explained quickly in my thoughts. He eventually laughed silently in his mind at me. ‘That’s just… so you, Snips. Oh, just casually invent a technique for hearing with the Force whilst playing a hand of Sabacc.’
‘It’s just a spin on Farsight’s hearing component, master. Pulling it back to ‘Nearsight’ and getting rid of the visual aspect. I actually feel rather embarrassed that I hadn't made the connection before.’
‘We’ll discuss this in detail later, it seems we might be having visitors.’
A group of five goons; three trandoshans, two human men, all dressed up rather nicely, which wasn’t a surprise given the relatively posh environment. They wore badges which indicated they were actually part of the casino staff and were all armed with shoulder holstered blasters that were hidden from view by their fancy jackets.
“Can we help you, gentlebeings?” Anakin asked mildly as we continued our Sabacc hand.
“Yesss,” said the trandoshan who looked like the ‘boss’ of this security group. He not only took the lead in the conversation, but also had that feeling of ‘self-importance’ mixed with ‘ego’ that all leaders had at some level. “We’ve received a complaint from Ziro that you threatened him. He is a rather valuable client of thisss esss-tablishment.”
“I’m sure he is and we are relative nobodies who are playing at minimum bet, as your computer system has informed you. So you’d rather we leave.”
The floor boss simply smiled in answer, showing off his very sharp teeth.
I felt the Force surge from Anakin and he probed the minds of all the goons confronting us. Was he truly going to try…
I was buffeted by a wave of the Force.
“You will stop bothering us,” Anakin said flatly with such strength that I could feel the minds of these goons utterly bending under his will.
“We’ll ssstop,” said the floor boss, who’s beady eyes had rather comically turned inward to face his snout.
“You’re satisfied that we’ll be leaving in twenty minutes, just so my colleague and I can finish our friendly Sabacc game.”
The boss and his companions nodded slowly, “We’re satisfied.”
“Off you go.”
“We go,” said the boss and the five left without another word.
‘Might have overdid it a bit there, Skyguy,’ I winced. ‘Those guys are probably going to keep going for a few kilometers before they regain their wits.’
‘Not really feeling like giving Ziro any victories, even a minor one like that,’ Anakin grumbled in his thoughts. He turned to the rather wide-eyed twi'lek dealer and chucked her five hundred credits in chits and merely raised a finger to the mouth portion of his helmet to indicate silence.
She quickly snapped up the credit chits and they seemingly vanished, before she simply nodded at him with a small smile.
In the end our game concluded with Anakin managing to win with a margin of roughly ninety credits.
“Totally could’ve beaten you if it wasn’t for that final shifting phase. In fact, I think the dealer has a way to subtly favor whoever she wants,” I said, as we emerged from the casino and headed towards the speeder docks.
“That’s just the way luck fell, Snips,” he disagreed playfully. “Now, how about we just get ourselves a memento of our trip here. I think that curio shop we passed on the way will do.”
“Skyguy, that shop was just full of gaudy aurodium plated figures of the various members of the hutt council and other famous hutts of the past.”
“Yes, some of them were quite good, I think a Gardulla would do nicely for myself.”
I almost stumbled a step. Why would Anakin want a figure of the hutt that had owned him and his mother Shmi, when he was a young boy?
“Uh, Skyguy, are you sure-”
“It’s in the past, Snips. What better way for me to count coup, than to have her mounted on my cupboard.”
“I suppose that’s one way to look at it,” I acknowledged.
“Think of this as well, how many slaves do you think are here on Nar Shaddaa?”
“I couldn’t even begin to estimate. On Nar Shaddaa the form of it is different, there’s less need for a slave implant, when you’re in such a controlled environment anyway and you can be kept in-line and on this moon by your own needs - indentured servitude for example. That twi’lek Sabacc dealer for example, she didn’t have an implant, but Nar Shaddaa is all she knows, she was born and raised here. Perhaps she dreams and hopes of one day leaving for a better life and is saving up for that.”
“Even if she had the money painstakingly saved up to leave and doesn’t have it stolen from her, whoever owns her contract wouldn’t just let her walk away. There’s a moon full of thugs and low level bounty hunters waiting to jump into action for the hutts, who would track her down and bring her back. So she doesn’t even bother trying, she’s bound in mind. There’s no Master Jinn who will effectively buy out her contract from her ‘owner’. There’s not enough money in the galaxy to ‘free’ these slaves from the hutts. That’s not the answer.”
“Master, where are you going with this?”
Anakin looked around as we neared the curio shop, “Being here, seeing and feeling this moon through the Force, it’s reawakened … something I’ve held close since I was a child and brought to the Jedi. The reality of the galaxy and circumstances have tried to stomp it out, always delaying it, but I swore that I would one day free the slaves of Tatooine. Then I learned of all the other worlds of slavery that existed, how prevalent it was in the Outer Rim. What could even the most powerful Jedi do against all that?”
“Master,” I sighed, this was a problem I had also wrestled with. “Practically, realistically, it would have to be done with two methods working side by side.”
He frowned, “Two?”
“Yes, the first is with economics. It would require a combination of helping to build up the technology bases of slavery worlds, to the point where slavery becomes inefficient and less profitable. Then for those that refuse… economic isolation.”
“Cutting them off from all Republic trade, you mean?”
“Yes and heavily penalizing any company for doing business with a slavery world, I’m talking about a level of fine that would send company stock prices falling into the ground at the mere mention of them being applied.”
“With all the senators in their pockets and representation that they have in the Senate, Snips. Good luck getting that law to pass.”
“That’s why you have the executive do it, assuming of course it’s not occupied by you-know-who.” I struggled somewhat to contain my giggle.
“So, assuming you can ram those measures through then, what else?”
“The obvious and what everyone immediately thinks about when slavery abolition is discussed. You need an iron fist as the final tool to end it - something for the GAR to do after the CIS issue is settled, don’t you think?”
Anakin put a hand on my shoulder and I felt his smile and approval of the idea. “Come on, Snips. Let’s get our trinkets and get off this rock.”
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“An interesting solution, Skywalker,” said Master Sinube.
The old cosian’s life size hologram was projected onto the meditation couch of the Xanadu, as it flew through hyper along the Kleeva Hyper route. One which would allow for a faster return to Coruscant, due to the way the hyper routes twisted about heading west from Nar Shaddaa, giving us an intercept with the Hydian Way in four days and potentially shaving a full day off the total travel time.
“It was the only way that didn’t involve wading into the current mess of hutt politics, Master.”
“Threatening a hutt with imminent poisoning while undercover is not exactly the Jedi way,” Sinube pointed out gently, but I didn’t really sense he was condemning the action.
“You’re correct Master, if we were acting as Jedi Guardians,” Anakin folded his arms and gave a pointed look at the master.
Sinube chuckled, “Yes, the realm of the criminal underworld is often best ventured via the shadows. I just want to extend my thanks for your warning to Draasa, it saved his life and the lives of quite a few others at your meeting place. It turns out that his identity had been compromised by slicers working for Jabba and a very public hit had been taken out on him.”
“Will he be alright, Master?” I asked with concern.
The master frowned at me for a moment, before a small knowing smile adorned his leathery brown face, “Of course, padawan. He has a full dozen different identities and appearances he can jump into on short notice, that I know of. He might as well be a changeling.”
“Good to hear,” I said with relief and smirking right back at the old cosian.
“As the Master who technically sent you on this mission, I will take the liberty to report to the Jedi Council on this matter. You two just get yourselves back home safely.”
“Understood, master, thank you,” Anakin nodded with some relief.
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Thirty-six hours later we made a small course correction, that would take us briefly south along a small hyperlane called the Trax Tube, before intercepting the Nanth’ri Route, that headed with a rather winding route west and would get us on the Hydian.
We had barely spent eight hours on the Nanth’ri when Anakin woke me from my sleeping shift a number of hours early.
“Master?” I blinked awake with bleary eyes.
“Sorry to wake you, but we have a situation, up you get.”
I nodded and threw off my blanket, blearily getting out of my ‘bed’ and resetting it to turn back into the starboard rear passenger seat. I yawned and stretched at the same time.
“So what’s happening?”
“You don’t want to get dressed perhaps?” he asked mildly.
I looked down, I had a comfy boobtube for support around my chest and panties…
“Are we meeting anybody in the middle of interstellar space in the next ten minutes, Master?”
“No,” he laughed. “Suit yourself.” He tapped a few buttons from the pilot seat.
A large holo of the galaxy appeared over the meditation couch and zoomed into local space around the Nanth’ri Route, before focusing on the Mimban system, which was less than two days ahead of us.
“Mimban?”
He nodded, “I received word from the Council. The Separatists have staged an invasion of the world less than six hours ago.”
I blinked a bit in shock and lightly slapped myself on the cheek to check I was awake. “How?”
“That is still being pieced together definitively, but they have reason to believe this was done via intentionally mislabeled and scan jacked cargo shipping. Mimban is one of the primary sources of hyperbaride in this part of the galaxy and primarily supplies Corellia’s shipyards and industry. There’s shipping going back and forth constantly.”
I nodded in understanding, hyperbaride was the element when it was refined enough and made into an alloy, that you got a superconductor in Coruscan technology. It could also withstand high temperatures, flux densities and was used in radiation shielding.
“So no dealing with the CIS Navy, they didn’t break through the southern lines in catastrophic fashion or find yet another ancient hyperlane that outflanks our defenses?”
“No, not as far as we know,” he qualified. “From the amount of war droids we’re dealing with here, this is a long term plan that’s been in the works for months. The thinking is that the CIS is doing this to disrupt the hyperbaride supply and number of other strategic materials that is mined from the planet.”
I fiddled with the hologram, zooming it in further to focus on the planet itself and the intelligence scans. I rubbed my eyes wearily as I digested what I was seeing.
“Estimated 218,000 droids. They managed to smuggle an entire CIS army group onto Mimban?”
“Yes, with surprise on their side they utterly overwhelmed any potential resistance from the locals. Thankfully, the native Mimban are very good at blending in with their world’s terrain and they mostly live in hidden underground settlements anyway. The surface structures are only for mining and interacting with off-worlders.”
“So there’s a potential resistance force that can be organized, which is where we come in?”
“The Resolute and the 501st are on the way, along with Jedi Master Laan Tik and his 224th Armored Division. We will arrive first and infiltrate the planet, make contact with the Mimbanese, get them organized into a liberation militia. We might even be able to make a few pre-emptive strikes in the four days it takes for our reinforcements to arrive.”
“Any indication on what weapons the locals have?”
“They’re generally adept with technology at galactic standards and have been trading for decades ever since they opened the mines. So we should expect various flavors of blaster pistols and rifles for personal defense and hunting. For heavy weapons, I suspect we’re going to have to improvise, Snips.”
“Yes, well we wouldn’t want to make this too easy, now would we?” I commented sarcastically with a smile.
“Of course,” he said matter-of-factly, playing along. “Where would the fun otherwise be?”
“Did the Seppies manage to bring any armored units?”
“Nothing ridiculously big, can’t exactly easily dismantle some of those monsters they use and reassemble them. I can see them doing that to Hailfires though.”
I winced, the long range missiles on those IG-227 Hailfires and their twin forward auto-blasters were nasty weapons, combine it with the speed imparted by those hoop wheels and it made for a nasty package to fight if you had no air support or equally long range weapons. They didn’t have much armor, once you got close enough a grenade would be enough to take one out - it was getting close and avoiding the auto-blasters that was the problem for the average infantryman without heavy weapons.
“We’ll have to see what we can get on the ground once we contact the Mimbanese, I’ll begin thinking of some plans based on worst case scenarios, master.”
“You do that, I’m already scheduled for a holocall with Master Tik, Rex and Admiral Yularen within the hour, I’ll sort the GAR side out.”
“Might as well contact HK as well, master, he can arrive even earlier.”
“Has he been bothering you for more chances to destroy ‘inferior droids’ again?”
I nodded with a laugh and waved off the holo, before taking a seat on the meditation couch, adopting the typical meditation posture.
I fell into my mind, beginning the meditation and began to explore the probability lines, as well as what could be done based on what we knew.
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We emerged from hyperspace two light seconds from Mimban and cloaked immediately.
In so doing we avoided the mess Anakin and I had foreseen would be waiting for us, in this case using common sense.
The orbitals around the planet, especially near the common hyperspace exit, was a clusterfuck of cargo ships and bulk freighters. The surprise invasion of CIS war droids seemingly sprouting from the planet below had caught them all flat footed. Some were stubbornly waiting to receive their loads from Mimban and not moving. Some were stranded because they had been riding on the narrowest of fuel margins to save cost and now couldn’t refuel from planet-based dumps. Others had heavy machinery imports for the mines that were waiting to be delivered.
The chatter directed towards the latter group on the common frequencies was quite unpleasant and nasty, since that was the vector through which the CIS had delivered their invasion.
Even as we watched, some ship captains decided enough was enough, taking the hit to their bottom line and jumped to hyper to return to their ports of origin.
“I’ve got the encrypted beacon from Intelligence, master,” I announced, working on the com panel from the co-pilot seat.
“Nice to know Republic Intelligence is on the job,” Anakin said sarcastically. “I wonder if they actually knew this was happening and decided to just watch.”
“It’s entirely possible,” I worked my panel and began the download. “Maybe they wanted to study how the CIS would do this akul tadaan.”
“That Togruti is a little too deep for me, Snips.”
“Sorry master,” I said sheepishly, waiting for the progress bar to fill. “It’s the story of a hunter named Tadaan on Shili, who wore the pelt of an akul he had just slain, to sneak into the pride’s den and take back the food the beasts had stolen from his tribe. Totally fictional of course, akul have eyes. They are cunning and clever, they would’ve instantly spotted him.”
“I see. So RI decided to let the invasion happen, disrupt the shipbuilding of an entire critical sector, just to see how the CIS do it.”
“They’ll probably justify it as necessary to prevent similar attacks in the future, especially because they want samples of the scan hijack technology used that made this possible.” The computer beeped a notification. “Download complete. We’ve got the latest scans and updates on the situation below.”
“Good, I’ll put us into a high polar orbit for the moment, then we’ll take a look.”
Mimban was a world of rainforests, swamps and a perpetual overcast condition due to the high ionization level of its atmosphere. From orbit the world looked like a dark green-brown orb that was constantly flashing with lightning strikes between its clouds and occasionally the ground. It was actually quite pretty to look at, almost a disco ball in space.
About the only breaks in that terrain was the large clearings around the mines and the infrastructure to support them, which included small towns that had sprung up to support the offworld workers. It was here were the CIS army had concentrated themselves across the Nanth flatlands of the main continent and in mining towns all over the southern marshes.
There were a total of 210 active mines sprinkled across the planet.
The tactical droids in charge down there could’ve easily assigned 1038 droids to each mine and the infrastructure around it. Logistics and the Trojan Horse manner of the invasion, including the need for secrecy forced them to paint a different picture.
Scans showed only 105 mining towns had war droid occupation forces in them, their numbers ranging from 4000 in a single town to one of the major mines that had a whole division occupying it.
The first acts of the invasion the droids performed had been to naturally secure any power generation that served the towns. These were generally small modular fusion power plants the size of a large house, that were fed by integrated hydrogen extractors. As long as the planet had a breathable atmosphere and the extractors were kept in good repair, the droids would have all the power recharge they’d ever need.
The only good news from the scans was that no armored units had been spotted yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the droids were assembling them in any empty warehouses they could find. It would only be a matter of time before those entered the playing field.
The cards of war dealt on the table before me were not painting a pretty picture.
Anakin looked at me grimly and I could tell he saw it too.
“Should we wait for Resolute or go down now, master?”
He didn’t answer at first, either way, we would lose something we didn’t want to.
We wait, the more time the droids had to entrench and build up their armored units, the harder the later battle would be. We go now, contact the Mimbanese, get a militia going as quickly as possible and fight, where no doubt many local fighters would perish in the process.
There was no good answer here.
“If we want to keep local support after this is all over…”
He began flicking switches and took the flight yoke in hand, pushing down on it. Starting the process for the Xanadu to execute a stealthy atmospheric slip.
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Finding a Mimbanese underground settlement was not going to be easy. When the Xanadu arrived at a hundred meter altitude above the rainforest canopy that bedecked the land below, it was clear that we wouldn’t find one in a million years conventionally. Lifesign scans registered the entire rainforest below as a dense collection of life. Any sentient would get lost in the clutter and I would happily award a fortune to the person who could build a detector that would penetrate more than half a meter into the ground.
So we fell back on the Force for guidance on where we needed to go. I cast out my senses for sentient life and backed that up with Farsight, whilst Anakin did the piloting and used his own generalized senses and neophyte levels of foresight to help.
No off-worlder had ever set foot in a Mimban settlement, as far as was known. No maps of them existed and estimates on the actual population count were probably wildly wrong given the wide range of figures that had been theorized.
It was tempting to use one of the mining towns as a starting point, but we resisted. Mining was an off-worlder pursuit, something the Mimbanese had only allowed within the last hundred years, when their outright murderous xenophobia had mellowed down to only a mild hostility and fierce protectiveness of their own culture.
We made our starting point therefore, the one thing that all early civilizations, towns and cities were founded near; a large fresh water source.
Soon the Xanadu was steadily coasting over the largest river within a thousand kilometers of our initial entry vector, in the north-west sector of the largest continent.
It took five hours of searching but at last we caught the edge of a large cluster of sentient life and emotion, roughly twenty kilometers west of the large river’s flow. The closest mining town and enemy droid presence was sixty kilometers due south.
We changed course for the Mimbanese settlement, doing a low altitude skydive just five kilometers from it.
We engaged our bootjets just above the forest canopy, then threaded our way through that with lit lightsabers cutting our way through and to fend off a number of nasty critters that made their home up there.
Finally we set foot on the soft, wet soil of Mimban.
Towering over us were seemingly endless green trees with quite a number of exotic ‘alien’ colors mixed in. Flying, creeping and skittering animal life was in abundance everywhere and made a disjointed orchestra of sounds that was somewhat overwhelming to my ‘Force Hearing’.
I deactivated and clipped my sabers to my belt when it was apparent none of the larger predatory animals were interested in lunch.
“Snips, we couldn’t have jumped a little bit closer,” Anakin complained over our com subnet.
“That would be rude and seem invasive, master, we must knock on their door, so to speak. We want to be allies after all.”
He accepted the point and after a bit of orientation, led the way further, keeping his lightsaber in hand to help cut our way through any dense bits of foliage that got in the way.
We moved openly and slowly, even though we could do a fair imitation of a Naruto type ninja traversal through this forest.
It didn’t take more than twenty minutes of walking and hacking our way through at ground level before I sensed that we had been detected by a camouflaged spotter that was perched high in a tree, not twenty meters from us.
M8 didn’t detect any radio signal, but somehow the spotter alerted all his fellows around the entire perimeter, as I could sense alarm and alertness spreading like a slow wave across every sentient ahead of us. It soon made it all the way back into the settlement itself.
“We’ve knocked on the door, master.”
“I sense it too,” he nodded.
It only took the Mimbanese a mere eight minutes to organize a response and a further five before we were being silently shadowed at ground level by eight of them, who were slowly boxing us in.
Their forest craft, movement and camouflage was very impressive and had we not been Jedi, we would’ve been totally clueless they were even there.
Anakin stopped as we passed around a large tree and there before us, leaning quite casually against another tree ahead of us, was a blaster rifle armed Mimbanese that was intensely glaring at us. He at least hadn’t raised the weapon, merely cradling it and leaning its barrel against his shoulder. His comrades in arms in the deep shadows had us in their sights though.
“You-gh walk clumsy, loud, stupid,” said the Mimbanese in broken Basic. They were clad in dull browns, greens and what I would call a ghillie suit made out of natural materials. Their dark eyes were concealed under goggles and the red skin of their faces was barely visible behind balaclava type masks.
Anakin carefully twisted then pulled off his helmet and I followed suit just to make it abundantly clear that we were not droids.
It helped reduce the tension in all our ambushers by a considerable margin.
“That was the idea,” Anakin said. “My name is Jedi Knight Anakin Skywalker, behind me is Padawan Ahsoka Tano. We’ve come as the vanguard of a Republic Army relief force that is less than four days behind us.”
“Come to fight droids?” the leader asked.
“Yes,” he replied simply.
“Good, me Iasento,” he thumped his chest. “Leader of this Zhamor Tribe.”
“Well met, Iasento,” Anakin bowed his head. “Will we talk here?”
“No, guest you are. The Maher will speak for Zhamor, this language, not good for me. Come. Come.”
Iasento made a number of hand signals including a whistle that sounded exactly like one of the flying animals of the forest. I sensed the sharp intent of danger surrounding the Mimbanese die down as they lowered their weapons.
He pushed away from the tree and simply began walking silently in the direction of the settlement and we hooked our helmets on our belts, hurrying to follow.
His warriors converged and kept pace along the sides, always remaining just out of sight.
Soon a sharp hill came into view and we were right on top of the underground settlement at this point. Iasento did not lead us into some cunningly hidden entrance, but instead stopped near one of the tallest and thickest trees I’d seen thus far in the forest. He fiddled with a dense cluster of natural vines and pulled from it a hand-made rope that snaked all the way up into the dense canopy.
“We climb,” he declared, with swift hand pulls and bracing his legs against the trunk, he ascended with a frankly astonishing speed for someone only using muscle power and technique. He might as well have been going for a brisk jog with the casual effort he displayed. He then disappeared from view up above by climbing on what had to be some form of camouflaged platform.
Anakin tested the rope briefly, but decided to do a demonstration and abruptly burst up into a Force Jump that carried him most of the way up, before grabbing a hold of the rope to get him up the last bit. The warriors around us didn’t react physically, but I could sense their awed astonishment at the clearly supernatural feat.
I repeated that feat when it was my turn, Force Jumping and using my arm strength and bit of self-TK for the last few meters.
On the hidden platform, Anakin and Iasento were already sitting down with another person who was from all appearances another Mimbanese; same outfit, ghillie suit, armed, but I sensed immediately that this was not a native.
“Ah, welcome, welcome, padawan” said a human male voice, with Basic accented in… Hosnian? “Have a seat,” the man said genially, gesturing to a small flat cushion in the seating circle. I sat down side-saddle as my armor didn’t allow for folded legs. “Well, introductions are in order. I am Professor Jarvet Diesha, University of Chikua City.” He removed his mask and goggles, revealing a man who on the surface looked in his early thirties, bald, with rather startling green eyes and a high cheek boned face with faint dimple lines. I sensed he was much older than he looked, most likely a case of biosculpting and even some gene editing.
Anakin took the lead, introducing us both. “So I take it you’re this Maher?”
Diesha nodded, “It’s the Mimbanese name they gave me. They aren’t given names at birth, true names are awarded based on merit and deeds for the common good of the tribe. Maher is what I eventually was awarded.”
“You’re an academic? Studying them?”
“Yes, for about just under a decade and I lived with them for the last eight years, I’m an interstellar biologist with a specialization in sentient life. So I take it you’re part of the Republic’s response to this rather unexpected droid infestation?”
He nodded, “Correct, with the 501st Legion and 224th Armored on the way with two Star Destroyers in support.”
“Well, I hope they’re up to it,” Diesha shook his head ruefully. “It’s so strange to think of the Republic with an actual army.”
“You don’t get much news out here of the greater galaxy, do you?” I asked.
“No, I return to one of the towns to submit my research for transmission maybe once a year. I knew trouble was brewing after Naboo, but a full scale galactic secession war, that I never imagined. Then not a half year later, Mimban’s suddenly up to its neck in war droids.”
“What can you tell us about the situation on the ground?” Anakin asked.
“Iasento’s warriors just recently came back from scouting the nearest occupied town. The droids have been thoroughly jamming conventional communications. None of the Hachas - the underground tribal settlements, can really talk to each other anymore. The only reason we know that it was planetary wide, was the various towns screaming for help before the jamming fell.” Diesha rubbed his bald head in agitation, “The closest town from here is called Miststar. As far as we can tell, there’s roughly seven hundred droids holding it, which might not be accurate as the warriors couldn’t stay too long for observation. They were beginning to send out patrols into the forest.”
“Was anything observed about the town population?”
“There was a curfew in effect. No one is allowed to leave their homes. There was some resistance observed from the town locals, they are armed, but it didn’t go well. The droids began making examples of those who resisted and the townsfolk capitulated rather quickly after that.”
Anakin looked at Iasento, “What do you intend to do?”
The Mimbanese leader huffed in laughter before rapidly speaking in their native tongue. It reminded me in cadence and tone of some very old natural languages from Earth, even including some tongue clicks.
Diesha gave a lopsided smile, “His tribe will fight to free their world. However, he knows it will take more than just the Zhamor. He wants to create an army of their people, to drive the invaders off.”
“The Jedi and Republic will certainly welcome the help, Iasento. With the droids so widespread and their numbers, this will not be a quick fight… we could be looking at years of fighting that lay ahead.”
Iasento thumped his fist against his chest, giving a quick rapid reply.
“They know and if that is the price of freedom, they gladly pay it,” Diesha translated.
“Very well,” Anakin raised his palm and a flat holo appeared of a town roughly nine square kilometers of surface area, with a multi hectare mining complex attached to its eastern end. “This is a current passive scan that our ship is taking of the town. Xanadu, high energy sources that are most likely active droids, please.”
A lot of small moving dots began to slowly resolve all over, most walking in distinct formations typical of B1 droids.
“How is your ship not getting shot down?” Diesha asked in astonishment, while Iasento eagerly studied the holo.
“It can be very stealthy when it needs to be,” Anakin said vaguely.
The Zhamor leader looked up and spoke rapidly.
“He asks if he can get a copy of the data and if this sensor feed can also be shared to his technicians.”
“It can,” Anakin agreed. “The Xanadu will be our eyes in the sky. We’ll need every advantage we can get in dealing with these numbers of droids. However, before we can set off, we need to spend at least a day or so teaching and training your warriors in the way these droids will fight. When was the last time your people fought in any kind of conflict?”
“The last major intertribal conflict was eighty years ago, Iasento’s father fought in it,” Diesha explained.
“A lot of the tactics you’d use against other flesh and blood sentients do not apply here. The camouflage you use for example, will not work against a B2’s sensor cluster, since they use a combination of thermal and life signs detector to spot targets. BX commando droids are even worse and droideka’s personal shields will laugh at small arms fire, unless you use accurate volley fire in large numbers. Take our armor for example, you see the pattern?”
“It is rather eye-catching, it’s a fractal pattern if I’m not mistaken?” Diesha asked curiously.
“It’s something new we’re testing, B1’s visual sensors are mass manufactured, cheap, not the highest resolution and use simplified visual code. When you expose them to a pattern like this, their vision should go blurry. Imagine trying to shoot something when you have smudge in your eye.”
This idea had come from Anakin and I brainstorming ideas on the trip to Mimban. A quick bit of design work with Xanadu’s help and uploading it to our smart paint applicators. If this worked, Anakin was all but itching to apply it to every armor piece that the 501st wore.
“I get the idea,” Diesha smiled. Iasento asked a quick question. “Could this be applied to fabrics and still work?”
“It’d depend on the resolution you can achieve. If you have some form of fabric dye printer with a computer interface, then it could maybe work.”
Iasento thumped his chest again, “Good, agreed, you teach, we learn. We fight!”
Anakin smiled and thumped his own chest, “We fight.”
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It wasn’t long before Anakin and I were facing just under three hundred of the Zhamor tribe warriors, all gathered under the misty rainforest canopy, a few hundred meters away from the settlement.
Naturally, we weren’t invited to see the inside of the place. That was a privilege Deisha had to earn over years and a lot of blood, sweat and tears.
“Is this all the Zhamor has in terms of warriors?” Anakin gestured after looking over the seated mass of Mimbanese.
“No, these are just a first cadre, who will take what you teach them and in turn pass it on to others,” Diesha explained.
“All right, ready Ahsoka?”
I nodded and prompted M8 with my vambrace touchpad to begin using my armor’s holoprojector to display a life sized B1 droid next to me. We could immediately feel the warriors' contempt for it.
“This is the B1 droid,” said Anakin, projecting his voice with the Force, so it reached every ear perfectly. Most of the Mimbanese here could at least understand Basic, but Diesha was also speaking a translation after each sentence to prevent misunderstandings. “It might not seem all that impressive individually, but they are usually used like this.”
I changed the holo to a large flatscreen showing an overhead view of an entire platoon of B1 droids raining a storm of fire down on a clone position on Christophsis.
“It is rare to catch a single B1 alone on the battlefield. The CIS are a big believer in the power of quantity. When you fight them, it’s best to use explosives or ambush them with massed fire.”
“The Mimbanese know the power of chemistry quite well, Master Jedi. They can cook up some nasty things with the local minerals they mine themselves,” Diesha pointed out.
“Good, we’ll need it. Next.”
I displayed a B2 and for the first time I began to sense apprehension and fear from the warriors in front of me.
“This is the unit you’ll need to watch out for the most. Your weaponry are blaster rifles and pistols that you’ve personalized and are optimized for fighting organics. They’ll do little but scorch a B2’s armor plate. That’s why the Republic Army uses BlasTech DC-15s which specially hyper ionize the plasma bolt, so even if it doesn’t penetrate at first, it’ll potentially short circuit the internal systems of a droid. You don’t have that, so you must aim for the red sensor cluster in the left shoulder of the B2. It’s the only weak spot that your weapons will penetrate and it will at least mission kill the droid into being unable to shoot accurately or see.”
I changed the holo to show another overhead shot of B2s in action, taken by a camera drone on Ryloth.
“Note how fast their wrist blasters fire and never get close to one, they will use their left arm to smash you dead with one hit. This is also the droid model with the most variants you will see in the CIS Army.”
The holo changed to show a new variant that I had not personally encountered yet, but had been seen in some battles in the northern parts of the galaxy.
“This is the B2 Grapple, it’s optimized for close quarters fighting, with an electrified vibropincer for a left arm, as well as the standard wrist blaster. It can smash through walls easily and will impale you, then electrocute you just to make sure.”
I changed to the next holo, which showed the B2-HA.
“This is the HA Droid, a B2 which has a left arm for firing homing rockets that can target infantry and mechanized armor. If you ever see these, you either run or make sure you never put yourselves in large groups, tight formations or gather in a single building. These droids generally will target strong points and fortifications.”
Next was the B2-RP.
“This is the Rocket Droid, yes, these are jetpack equipped B2s that will fly after you. For the moment, we will strive to avoid these if at all possible. Until we can arm you with shoulder portable rocket launchers you cannot fight these if they are in the air. Best thing to do in the meantime is to have prepared positions to lure these into and only engage when they have landed.”
The lecture continued in this vein for another twenty minutes and we wrapped things up when we sensed that concentration was beginning to wane among our pupils.
We moved on to the more practical marksmanship portion to see how well these Mimbanese could shoot, whilst simulating being under fire.
We achieved this by having fifty of them shoot directly over the prone positions of those aiming downrange at makeshift stationary targets that had been set up.
I’d normally have been a bit worried the mass energy discharges would be detectable by the enemy, but with Xanadu on overwatch and keeping a close eye for sensor emissions, that wasn’t an issue yet.
The Mimbanese marksmanship was what you would expect from people who didn’t do soldiery as a primary profession. For all that Iasento had called these guys ‘warriors’, I sensed they had middling experience at best firing their weapons and they were more at home being hunters in the rainforest than soldiers. We could work with that though.
In this way, we identified the best shooters and I ended up with a smaller company of about sixty, which I took off to one side and began running a few more specialized drills
Using M8’s holo system, I had them shooting fast moving holographic drones. I also began to teach them what to expect when fighting alongside a Jedi. It wouldn’t do for them to be startled or gaping at supernatural TK and get their heads blown off in the process when they forgot to duck. I also showed off my lightsabers and taught them a few attack formation drills so they would get used to fighting in close formation with me.
After a full hour of such drills, I dismissed them and had them rejoin their fellows.
“So what do you think, Snips?”
“Honestly, Master, it’s better we play to their strengths. We’re not going to turn them into something even approaching a competent soldier in the little time we have. We have to lure the droids out of the town, get them chasing us through the trees into prepared kill zones and traps. Until the clones arrive, we’re going to have to fight asymmetrically.”
Anakin combed his fingers through his now perpetually wet hair in annoyance. “You have a point. I just really dislike your idea of such warfare, Snips. Give me a straight fight any day.”
“It will work, Skyguy.”
Thunder echoed through the trees and rain began to now truly fall and filter through the overhead canopy. A low level roar of noise began as droplets hit the trees, branches and leaves. I winced as the fat icy drops hit my montrals and lekku. I grabbed my helmet and put it on as quickly as possible.
Anakin bore the assault stoically and looked up, “This is going to be a miserable campaign if this keeps up.”
“Better tell Rex to pack out the wet weather gear when they arrive, master.”
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A/N: Bridging chapter to the next arc - The Battle of Mimban. Have a great weekend.