The Space Around the Shadow Hammer, Boz Pity, 2 Days Later

Anakin Skywalker stood on the bridge of the Resolute, watching the brief optical illusions of ships dropping out of hyperspace close by to the station. Their reinforcements. And they’d gotten a fair few of them now, he mused as he looked at the largest of their recent additions.

It was one of the newer Maelstrom-class Battlecruisers, the Principality, a ship shaped almost like the Venator it was based on except almost half again its length, and well over half again its width, with its dorsal hangar doors and most of the space set aside for carrier duties replaced by guns. Big guns.

But for all its size, its escort to this battlefield, 20 of the also rather recent Victory-class heavy cruisers, were no less important. They would provide medium-range heavy firepower that their Dreadnaughts and Acclamator-IIs could only hope to fully match, along with plenty of banks of concussion missile launchers, to allow the Venators to fulfill their best use case; long-range fire and carrier operation. Where Obi-Wan’s diversion that led to the capture of the Shadow Hammer, as the Seps had called it, was a strategic risk that paid off, this battle would have them operating in their element.

Of course, he wouldn’t just be sitting up here with Admiral Yularen watching as things went one way or another, he mused as the fleet, gently beginning to split off into the three maniples that the operation called for, began the operation to move towards the planet. No, he’d be with Titan Squadron, flying in the thick of it with all the other thousands of fighters that would help clear the way for their bombers. Getting a nice, long look at the Separatist’s reinforcements.

They’d been busy too, he thought after speaking briefly with Yularen and excusing himself from the bridge, as they shuffled around damaged ships and added to their defense. Three Lucrehulks were nothing to sniff at. But otherwise, the layout was the same; 5 ‘nodes’ of ships, anchored by 2 Providences that led the other elements of the node to be able to react quickly to any threat that was posed against another node close by. It was a standard defensive formation for both the Republic and the Seps. Which meant that they could exploit it.

He made his way to the Resolute’s hangar bay, one of 6 Venators in the center maniple’s group of capital ships, accompanied by the Principality, and found it buzzing with activity, fighters and bomber pilots getting prepped for the fighter screen that would be the opening move of the Republic’s battle plan.

Looking around the bay, he managed to pick out Luke working on his Z-95, talking with Thundercrack and another two pilots he couldn’t quite pick out from this distance. ‘No reason not to visit with him for a moment,’ Anakin thought as he made his way over to the man. Besides, maybe he’d have some more tricks that he could show him on how to handle his emotions. They’d been in chaos ever since he’d found out that Palpatine, his… well, he couldn’t call him a friend anymore. The man who’d been friendly with him, he decided, was really a Sith Lord pulling strings behind the scenes. Most attempts at following his Jedi meditation had their same muted, temporary effect, much to his frustration. Only the technique he’d remembered from Luke calming him down had any real impact.

Luke noticed him as he approached, as did Thundercrack, Starwarp, and Uric. The clones snapped to attention, Anakin returning the salute. “Keeping our newest pilot busy?” he asked with a slight smile.

Starwarp nodded slowly. “We were just talking about his flying during that last battle. Wondered if he might teach us a few tricks.”

‘I’m just amazed he was able to keep his promise,’ Anakin thought, remembering the all too showy way that Luke had shown he could. He’d have to ask about where he trained that made him so skilled.

But there were other things to worry about. “Well, I’m sure there’ll be time after we win this battle,” he said firmly. “Right now, we’ll be lifting off in 2 hours, and briefing in 30 minutes. I’ll see you there.”

The troopers nodded, saluting before they walked off toward their fighters. For long moments, Anakin found himself wondering what exactly to say.

“I have to say,” Luke admitted, “I’ve been involved in plenty of space battles in my time, but never something on this scale.”

“It gets pretty hectic,” Anakin agreed. “But I think you know to trust in the Force to guide you through what’s coming.”

Luke nodded. “It’s a trust in the Living Force that we’ll need more than ever,” he said quietly.

The Living Force. He’d heard Cal, Luke, and Mara mention it infrequently. But enough to pique his interest. “You’ve mentioned the Living Force a few times. Did you ever hear about Qui-gon Jinn?” he asked.

Luke’s brow furrowed a moment before he shook his head. “I can’t say that I have.”

“He was Master Kenobi’s master,” Anakin said, thinking back to the tall, kind, sagely man of his early youth. “He found me on Tatooine. Freed me, and tried to free my mother. Then… he died on Naboo fighting a Sith apprentice.”

Luke hummed quietly. “Obi-Wan never really mentioned his master to me. With how he talked about Yoda, I’d assumed he was his master.”

“I think you and Qui-gon would have gotten along,” Anakin said quietly.

It was silent for long moments before he shook his head. “Anyway, I’ll see you at the briefing,” he said as he began to walk towards an open space that often served as the briefing area. “Good luck, master Starkiller.”

“You as well,” Luke replied. “May the Force be with you.”

“And with you.”

. . .

Far above the green dome, mottled with blue, that was the world of Boz Pity, two fleets, alike in stature and power, released their clouds of fighter craft, swarming like insects as they composed themselves into something more orderly, more effective.

Admiral Yularen watched as Torrents, Aethersprites, and Headhunters began to peel away from their carriers, streaking past the frigates and corvettes that made up the leading edge of the maniple’s picket line.

“Any read on the Separatist response?” he asked his officers in the crew pits.

“Sensors are still adjusting for jamming,” one of them responded, “but we’re starting to pick up what are likely fighter launches in response. Time to target is 3 minutes for our leading fighters.”

“Very good, Lieutenant,” Yularen replied.

He glanced back as their fighters held at just ahead of the picket line, the enemy fighters clustered around theirs, and motioned for his Flag Captain to come forward, the young Mirialan man coming to stand at his side. “You’ve always had a better grasp at mass fighter combat than I have, Sayranan. What’s your read of the situation?”

Captain Kar Sayranan cupped his chin thoughtfully, studying both the dark, fuzzy cloud of fighters that had settled over the enemy picket line and a datapad that was slung over his shoulder. “Now that our sensors are clearing up,” the man said calmly, “it seems that they’re still launching fighters, along with what look to be bombers. They may intend to overwhelm our fighters with sheer numbers in order to get their bombers into our midst.”

Yularen nodded. “I see. What do you suggest?”

“I would recommend pulling about half of our current fighter complement back behind the picket line, increasing the layering of our defenses while giving those that remain just in front a loose formation. The corvettes and frigates will be able to engage at a longer range, thinning out the droid fighters before they hit our front-line fighters.”

Yularen nodded, looking back out at the battlefield. “Have half of the squadrons pull back to behind the picket line,” he ordered, “and have the remaining half take up positions above and below the picket line’s immediate front.”

. . .

Luke Skywalker listened to his orders, banking his starfighter alongside the rest of Titan Squadron and pulling back from their advance position to rest just before the picket line, spreading out to give the larger ships clear lines of fire.

As he turned back to face the enemy fleet, he marveled at his current place. Here he was, in the middle of the sort of battles that had almost become tall tales by the time he’d experienced anything close to them, fighting alongside some of the greatest Jedi the galaxy had ever seen!

And yet, the wonderment of it all was a muted, distant thing as, pulling out of his turn, he saw the great mass of droid fighters beginning to rise from their positions in the thousands to scream towards their lines.

“Just hold steady,” Anakin said over comms. “Let the picket line do its work before we dive in.”

Luke took a deep breath, steeling himself as he felt the unsurprising pull of fear at the sight of so, so many fighters.

He breathed again. ‘Fear is the beginning of two paths,’ he recited silently. ‘One to the loss of self-control. One to its completion. I will take the higher path, and leave fear behind for understanding.’

Fear became determination and caution under Luke’s intentional minding. The fighters heading towards them would be a steep challenge. There was every chance that, if he wasn’t very careful, he could die. But the Force would guide him, and Anakin, and all the pilots that, whether they knew it or not, turned to its guidance. And those that did would survive, and perhaps win.

As Luke centered himself, the droid fighters continued their mad charge. The picket line would open up at any moment now…

The blaster cannons of the corvettes, and the light laser cannons of the frigates, began to send bolts of brilliant blue into the approaching wave of metal and programming. The droids were packed in somewhat separated clusters, flying in a tighter formation than most biological pilots would have dared.

Every hit from the picket line sent one fighter up and caught its tight-knit fellows in the blast, sometimes taking out entire clusters and leaving what droids technically remained ‘alive’ spinning through space.

But there were still so many of them. The loss of ten, twenty, a hundred, it seemed to matter little as they barreled on. Luke tightened his grip on his joystick as he watched the fighters looking over them.

“Get ready, everyone,” Anakin said as the droid fighters began to come within range. “Break and engage on my mark. Don’t worry about them getting past you.”

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The droids came within range, the leading elements beginning to open fire…

“Mark!”

With that, Luke, and 450 other fighters on this front, kicked on their accelerators and charged into the fray. For now, Luke focused on the remarkably delicate task of trying not to get shot too much.

After several minutes of dodging, weaving, and pulling off maneuvers that required no small amount of skill mixed with the Force to accomplish, Luke began to notice patterns within the programmed fighters that they clashed against. For all their deadly potential, they still had to follow specific programming. Well-designed programming, for sure, but even the best programming was subject to the creator’s fallibility.

He turned off the atmospheric flight mimicry system, using the repulsors to help push him up and over a group of fighters that had begun to tail him, flipping the Headhunter end over end until his nose was pointing at the rapidly passing fighters, the aural simulators mimicking them screaming through space above the noise of long-range tubolaser exchanges.

He let the laser cannons roar as he fell behind them and engaged the mimicry system again, rendering a good chunk of the little ‘squadron’ into so much expanding gas and shards of metal.

‘How unsurprising,’ Luke mused as he looked around for his next targets, picking out a flight of bombers that had been trailing behind the wall of droid fighters, ‘you just have to outsmart them.’

He glanced to his right… and saw the frigates and corvettes of the Confederacy, a motley bunch of ships but no less dangerous for it, beginning to pull away from their fleet’s front lines, advancing on.

“Looks like we've got trouble incoming,” Luke said over squad comms as the ships, nimble and quick compared to their heavier brethren, began to open fire into the furball. “Stay sharp, or we’ll get cut to pieces.”

“Good copy,” Anakin said, “but I think we’ll be alright. The admirals are looking out for us.”

Luke glanced towards their lines… and had to suppress a slight shiver as he saw the Victorys and Dreadnaughts beginning to move up together, pounding the frigates and corvettes that dared approach them. It reminded him all too much of the Imperial Star Destroyers that had loomed large over any Alliance op gone wrong. But they were on his side, here, sending fire over his starfighter as he, and other pilots, began to use the ships of the picket line themselves as cover and concealment.

Swooping out from behind to catch a trio of bombers off-guard, he saw from the corner of his eye as three LAATs, dipping low under the plane of battle, began to streak away toward the planet. He hoped that they’d be safe. Mara had volunteered to assist with the commandos’ missions planetside and was now on one of the shuttles.

But for now, he had to turn his focus back to keeping the fighters busy enough to not notice a trio of gunships going past.

Looking around the battlefield, he saw a squad to their right, in disarray as they tried to deal with a particularly nasty snarl of fighters. The Force began to nudge him in that direction, pulling away from the fighters he was chasing to go and gather them up.

These ones were Honor Squadron, as he recalled, and he did as decent of a count as one could in the midst of pulling evasive maneuvers. They were down two or three members. One of them must have been their squadron lead.

“Honor Squadron,” Luke said as he saw, through the rapidly dispersing cloud of droid fighters, their capital ships moving into the gaps the three-pronged strike had left open, “form up on my flanks and follow me. We’re going to go protect those bombers that are heading towards the enemy capitals.”

“Yes, sir,” the clone pilots said one by one, forming up in a classic arrowhead formation, and started making their way towards the wave of Y-wings that was sweeping towards the capital ships.

. . .

Yularen watched, bracing himself against the impact of turbolaser bolts as the enemy fleet began to fill in the gaps left between the fleet’s maniples, frowning slightly as he watched the action unfold. Were they trying to reach for their Venators? The possibility was a real one.

But the action, even with all three of the Lucrehulks bearing down on their center maniple, was ultimately an unwise one. With their anti-fighter elements now competing for space with their far larger compatriots, the picket line had been diluted to near uselessness. It allowed their bombers to strike out and supplement their cruiser’s firepower with proton torpedoes.

His focus, for a moment, stayed on the flickering lights of dozens of concussion missiles launched from the Victorys homing in on a Recusant whose shields had just failed, raking it with explosive fire before it began to break apart. The ship was now a wreck instead of an enemy combatant, a barrier not only for the enemy ships to try and surmount but cover from their guns as well. He heard Flag Captain Sayranan give orders to adjust positioning slightly to allow for maximum targeting capability of the enemy capital ships.

“Sir,” one of the crew pit officers said, calling his attention away from the display of sundering firepower, “our front-line cruisers are starting to sustain heavy damage from the Lucrehulks. The battle line may be in danger of collapsing. They’re requesting orders, sir.”

Yularen nodded, looking back out the window to consider for a moment the situation at hand, and what responses he might have available to him. After a few moments, he came to his decision.

“Have the cruiser and frigate complements pull back from their forward position to take up a sphere formation around our Venators and the Principality. Then have us begin moving forward towards the Lucrehulks and focus our fire on them. I want to put as heavy of a weight of fire as we possibly can on them.”

As calls of compliance preceded the bridge beginning to buzz even more with the increased activity, Yularen looked out at the three massive, nearly circular ships, arranged in an inverse arrowhead as they sent turbolaser barrages towards them. They knew that there was more weight behind this central thrust than in the others, and were trying to defeat the fleet in detail.

‘Well, sometimes the correct answer to a tactical move is the simplest,’ Yularen mused as the center maniple became a durasteel fist.

. . .

Anakin Skywalker had shifted his focus away from paring down the swarms of fighters to guarding the bombers that were now beginning to weave through the burning wrecks to strike at those capital ships that were still up and fighting. As expected, the nominal middle of the battlefield had become an artificial asteroid belt, Republic and Separatist ships mingling in death to provide cover and obstacles only fighter-sized craft were nimble enough to weave through.

Luke had split off from Titan Squadron, and last he heard and seen, was taking up leading Honor as they escorted two bomber squadrons against one of the Providence destroyers. Their torpedoes hammered against the destroyer’s shields, supplemented by fire from a now much tighter ship formation, until at last, one of the Torrent’s concussion missiles slammed into the main bridge, the decompression and flash-ignition of the atmosphere within flinging fire, transparisteel, and the dead crew out into space.

“All fighter and bomber squads,” he heard what was likely one of the officers aboard either the Principality or the Resolute say, “focus heavy weapons fire on the Lucrehulk battleships.”

“You heard the woman,” he said to Titan Squadron as he pulled up and out of the debris field. “Let’s find a bomber squad or two and help them get to the pastries.”

They did so with little in the way of trouble, linking up with three squadrons of Y-wings and making a drive toward one of the gray and blue monstrosities.

The battleships, for all their heavy firepower, were remarkably short on much resembling anti-fighter defenses. And with most of their fighters either tied up in trying to keep their own bombers from being torn to shreds or floating in pieces as they tumbled through space… they were a perfect target.

The relatively light fire coming from the quad blaster cannons that tried to shoot them down did little in the way of dissuading the nimble fighters and bombers from flying close and tight to the battleship’s surface, tracing the circumference of the ship’s arms, then firing into the neck that connected the sphere suspended in the middle to the rest of the ship.

Wave after wave of proton torpedoes fell on the wavering shields like a crashing tide, at last breaching them as the ones launched after carved through the neck like a lightsaber blade. As the sphere began to float away, the guns fell silent, and Anakin, along with the rest of the fighters and bombers, peeled away from the floundering hulk as the capital ships flung fire at it to ensure its destruction was complete.

“Alright, boys,” Anakin said as he pulled a turn to bank to the right. “Let’s go see if the other Lucrehulks decide to wise up or not.”

As he spoke, he saw that, to some extent or another, the two remaining vessels were, the ships beginning an agonizingly slow turn to try and make their way towards one of the other maniples that, thanks to the middle taking up so much attention, were making good progress.

“Come on,” Anakin whispered to himself more than anything. “Just a little more…”

. . .

Admiral Yularen watched as the Lucrehulk continued to disintegrate under the fire of the guns for a moment longer before tasking their fire to more lively targets, satisfied that the Federation starship was destroyed.

There weren’t many targets left on this front of the battle. Most seemed to have given up on the center’s sphere of resistance, turning their attention towards other, less well-defended targets. It left them in a good position with few guns focused on them. And an opportunity.

“Have all remaining combat-worthy ships make their way towards the planet in two parallel lines,” he began. “Once the enemy fleet’s back line has been crossed, turn and engage the ships on each flank. We’ll encircle them and defeat them in detail.”

“Sir,” Sayranan said, “that’s likely to put the leading elements in range of the planet’s anti-orbital cannons. Our victory would come at a great cost.”

Yularen nodded. That much was true. But it didn’t render the idea completely unsound. “Contact the admirals leading the other maniples. Relay the plan to them, and recommend that they begin backing their maniples off until we’re beyond the range of the planet’s defenses. I don’t think droids can feel desperate, but they may see it as a tactical opening to try and further press us back. Have us begin doing the same as soon as they acknowledge.”

Sayranan nodded. “Yes, sir. Right away.”

With that, the Flag Captain turned away and made his way to the communications console behind them, Yularen watching the battle as he heard the man carrying out his instructions.

At first, they remained where they were, the maniples to their left and right doing much the same. Then, slowly, far more slowly than if they were to turn, the planet and the wreckage of the battle began to recede. He kept his eye on those Separatist ships that were still firing on them. He conceded that all too much of this plan he’d come up with was reliant on the enemy fleet pursuing them. ‘Come on…’

Then, he saw the Separatist line beginning to move with them. And he allowed himself a small smile. “Inform our leading cruisers of their orders to begin encircling the two fleets,” he said. “We’ve got them now.”

. . .

Luke watched as the fleet continued to back off, their maniple’s heavy cruisers beginning to pull away from the tight formation that they’d taken earlier, and couldn’t help but wonder for a moment as he and Honor Squadron found another Aethersprite, red and white with accents of green, leading Stalwart as they mopped up what bombers remained here in the center of the battlefield. That would be Ahsoka, he thought.

She’d probably appreciate help with the squadron of droid fighters that was weaving their way through the wrecks to come up behind them. Luke decided to remedy that potential surprise as he led Honor Squadron towards the fighters.

As they went, Luke glanced at the cruisers that were beginning to move past them, and the strategy clicked in his head. This was a classic encirclement strategy. If the Separatists were smart, they'd slip under the majority of the guns and try to escape the entrapment. How well that would work depended on a number of factors, many likely out of the Separatists’ hands now.

Honor Squad swept over Stalwart to rake through the vulture droids, most of them going up in the first few moments. A few of Stalwart’s fighters turned to assist them, the battle over almost as quickly as it began.

“Thanks, Starhopper,” Ahsoka said as they got above the debris field, getting a fine look as the fleet closed its twin jaws around the Separatists. “That would have been bad.

“No problem,” Luke replied as he led Honor on a somewhat leisurely patrol, Stalwart following his lead. After a moment, he blinked. “Starhopper?”

It was silent for a moment before some of the clones chuckled. “Oh,” Ahsoka said somewhat sheepishly. “I… kinda have a habit of giving people nicknames. You can ignore it if you want.”

Luke smiled slightly as he began a turn over to the left. “It's the most unique nickname I've ever gotten. I appreciate it.”

“Thanks,” Ahsoka said after a silent moment. “I guess the battle’s mostly over, isn't it?”

“Up here, at least,” Luke said as the number of enemy capitals began to decrease more and more rapidly. “Now we've got to worry about ground warfare.”

He silently hoped Mara was going to be okay. With commandos under her command… she should be, to some extent or another, in her element.