Death throes of the Cartels : Episode II

I hated to admit it, but the Indomitable didn't stand a chance in space. Where ever the Hutts had dug up the ships they were using to attack Naboo, they had been surprisingly well maintained. They weren't up to modern standards, but they came a lot closer than they had any right to, old systems sporadically gutted and modernized by the Hutts... Three star destroyer class ships, plus the several dozen cruisers they had were just too much for the Indomitable's shields. My only chance of providing aid to Naboo was to bring the Indomitable into the atmosphere, where the outdated ships couldn't follow, and I'd be able to concentrate my shield energy. Unfortunately, Lucrehulks were not designed to fly in the atmosphere. Their engines were powerful, yes, but faced with an atmosphere, they just couldn't overcome the air resistance of a habitable planet.

Once I entered the Atmosphere, the Indomitable's own weight would slowly start dragging her down no matter how she flew. So I aimed for Naboo's Oceans. In theory, in a worst-case scenario with all alternatives exhausted, a Lucrehulk had been designed to be seaworthy. The damn things were some of the most expensive ships in the galaxy, the Trade Federation wanted to make damn sure that every option had been exhausted before scuttling one. In theory, a Lucrehulk in trouble could land in a large body of water and await recovery by the Trade Federation.

In practice, no Lucrehulk had ever sustained the kind of damage that would make testing the theory an appealing option. Not one. And even if they had, it was a near statistically impossibility for the damage to occur in orbit of a planet with a sufficiently large body of water, pirates tended to lay their ambushes in systems with no habitable worlds to avoid their quarry making landfall and digging in. A lot harder to defend a grounded ship on an airless rock, where there was no atmosphere to diffuse orbital bombardment. Finally, even if all those conditions had been met, the Lucrehulk was only seaworthy as long as there weren't any holes in her lower decks.

Even the Indomitable's reinforced shields couldn't stand up to the sheer firepower the Hutt fleet had in orbit of Naboo. They would fail. The only advantage I had in getting her to water would be that I wasn't going to wait until she was already damaged to try and float her, I was making a straight run for the Planet.

She came in on an approach that would only expose the upper half of the ship to the Centurion-class battlecruisers. They ripped into my ship, their combined firepower overwhelming her shields and tearing into the hull. Even then, I had to divert shield power to the lower decks to prevent the Hutt cruisers from tearing chunks out of them. The Trade Federation could probably recover the Indomitable from the surface of the ocean. They definitely couldn't recover her from the ocean floor.

There was no guarantee the Indomitable would survive the landing attempt. Hopefully, I had her on a narrow enough angle of entry that the Indomitable would have enough time to lose speed, but there was no way to be sure.

Unfortunately for me, the moment we hit the atmosphere, the impact threw me out of my seat. I slammed my head into a console and lost consciousness.

-----

"Captain Montoo is unavailable, Commodore. I have the command for now. What do you need?" the Twi`lek on-screen, Madeen, informed him.

Commodore Sydrian nodded slightly, thinking for a moment. "I was told you were able to punch through the comms jamming, have you been able to contact any reinforcements?"

The arrival of the Indomitable was a blessing, truly, but despite her impressive security complement, the invasion was planet-wide. Cities and towns across Naboo were getting hit, and a single Lucrehulk lacked the numbers to send air support to everywhere that needed it. Her compliment during the Naboo Plasma War might have been able to do it when almost every last square inch of storage space had been used for military equipment, but now she barely had a fifth of those numbers.

That said, he certainly wasn't complaining. The fighters and bombers that had been swarming his destroyer pack had been ripped apart by the Indomitable and her droid starfighters, and he had been able to shelter his ships in the waters inside the Indomitable's cargo ring. He didn't have to worry about getting bombed from orbit anymore, not after seeing the floating Lucrehulk casually shrugging off a sustained five-minute bombardment. And counting.

"We've already contacted Queen Amidala. Unfortunately, both the RORSF and the Naboo expeditionary forces are bogged down by a sudden Hutt offensive. It's going to be a while before they can afford to divert ships back here without risking losing ground. If the Hutts manage to retake ground... who knows how many could die in reprisals."

Sydrian grimaced at the thought. They were already more than willing to bomb their own civilian population centers just to prevent them from being liberated, the only reason they hesitated being Tarkin's "head for an eye" policy. A Hutt killed his slaves and hostages, and Tarkin dropped a cobalt atom splitter on his palace.

With some of the Hutts still choosing to kill innocents out of spite despite that threat, even Queen Amidala was no longer willing to object to Tarkin's targeted brutality.

"That said, the Trade Federation is mobilizing a strike force. It's been a very long time since a Trade Federation partner has been attacked, but the Charter hasn't changed. We will not stand for this. You can expect a full fleet within a week. The TFS Supply and TFS Demand are diverting to pick up a division of Neimoidian Security forces, and will be here by the end of the day."

"You mean Trade Federation Security forces, don't you?"

"No."

-----

The Supply and Demand were no more able to win the orbitals on their own than the Indomitable had been. They were, however, rated for atmospheric flight. Better still, unlike the Indomitable, they knew exactly what they were getting into. Where as the Indomitable had been forced to make waterfall on the first possible trajectory it could calculate, the Supply and Demand were able to plot their hyperspace course to come out on the opposite side of Naboo as the bulk of the Hutt invasion fleet. They still encountered stiff resistance on the way down, but the blockade was much thinner here, owing to the Hutt's desire to focus their fleet above Theed. The two modified Venators were even able to destroy three cruisers on the way in.

Once in the atmosphere, they were safe. They were able to concentrate shields to protect from orbital fire, said the orbital fire would be weakened from atmospheric diffusion, and hitting a moving ship from orbit was no easy task anyways. Under ordinary circumstances, the Hutts would simply send in ships after the two Star Destroyers.

These were not ordinary circumstances. Many of the Hutt ships were not capable of entering the atmosphere. While the Galaxy could generally be regarded as technologically stagnate, technology had been moving forward. Slowly, almost at a crawl, but it had moved forward. For instance, the Hutts did not have a single ship larger than a cruiser capable of entering the atmosphere present at Naboo. Not one. The ships present were all built prior to the Ruusan Reformation. They were all much more heavily armed than any treaty-compliant ship and had been relatively well maintained by the Hutts, but much of the technology needed for large scale atmospheric flight did not exist prior to Ruusan reformation, and one couldn't exactly retroactively make a capital ship aerodynamic.

Given that the broadsides of the modified Venators could rip apart cruisers with two or three volleys, that simply was not an option. Worse still, the main batteries were rail guns, not turbolasers. In space, the effective ranges of turbolasers and rail guns were roughly the same. Yes, turbolaser fire would eventually diffuse even in space, but by the time that happened, even the clumsiest of capital ships could dodge oncoming fire with half a second's worth of thrust, a problem that rail guns had as well.

In atmosphere... kinetic projectiles had always enjoyed a massive range advantage over equivalent blasters. The main guns of the Supply and Demand were more than capable of hitting orbital targets. After a few volleys demonstrated this, the Hutt ships were forced to move farther away from the planet, at the cost of no longer being in range to bombard ground side targets. Neither side was able to hit the other. The Hutt ships couldn't enter the atmosphere, and the Trade Federation ships couldn't leave. The battle would be decided on the ground now.

It was perhaps poetic that it would be on Naboo of all places that the Galaxy would be exposed to the vast differences between Trade Federation security, and Neimoidian security.

-----

General Panaka had never imagined being thankful for Amidala negotiating a lasting alliance between the Naboo and the Gungans. Gungans were, in Panaka's experience, best experienced in very small doses. That opinion changed when Gungan shield generators had been the only things stopping the Hutt invaders from bombing Naboo from orbit. Oh, they had certainly tried. They had been cut off from all contact with the outside galaxy for two days before the Indomitable arrived. The Hutts hadn't even attempted landing troops on the first day, spending it entirely on trying to bomb every major population center on Naboo from orbit. Despite that, the massive planetary shield generator built jointly between the Gungans and the Naboo in Theed held firm.

On the second day, the Hutts decided to land troops to slaughter civilians in the old fashioned way. In the cities, the mercenaries ran headfirst into the Naboo Royal Army, many veterans of the previous invasion, and equipped with state of the art armor and weapons. Some even had prototype personal shield generators. They had only just barely gotten the costs low enough for general production, but they had solved the radiation problems in existing models. Ironically, the solution had come from reverse engineering Jedi Civil War era models, who had apparently solved the issue of being too expensive how they had solved all money issues at the time. Screw the expense, we'll pay our debts after we win.

In the outlands, they ran into the Naboo Home Guard. While many of the Militiamen from the Plasma War had joined the newly formed Naboo Royal Military, most had gone back to their old lives, signing on instead with the Home Guard, who would be called to action in the event Naboo was ever attacked again. There was no more of the ragtag, cobbled together from loose ends gear of the old militia. Their equipment was modern, uniform, and no one was forced to go to war wearing Sith battle armor.

Of course, when the time came for the Home Guard to defend their world, some decided to wear their "family heirlooms" anyways.

In Theed itself, which bore the brunt of the Hutt invasion as they sought to shut down the planetary shield generator, they ran into the Royal Guard, led by General Panaka. The Royal Guard answered directly to the Queen, serving as her personal bodyguard and defending the Royal Palace. As direct subordinates of the Queen, their armor was entirely chrome, rather than the primarily gold uniform of the other branches.

Thus Panaka was on the frontlines, coated head to toe in chrome armor.

"They're bringing up a repeater!" someone shouted, his voice digitally scrambled by his helmet, and translated by Panaka's own.

"On it!" came the reply. A man hurled a grenade, landing it right at the feet of a mercenary trying to set up a repeating blaster on a tripod. The handheld plasma bomb vaporized both man and gun.

Panaka fired his blaster at a man carrying a rocket launcher. After a quick scan of his surroundings, he pounded his fist on the Chrome hover tank his team was supporting.

"That's the last of them, clear these streets!"

The hover tank surged forwards into the intersection, mowing down the slaver scum with rapid-fire blasters. A Hutt tank tried to fire on the Naboo hovercraft, only for the tank to jerk sideways and retaliate with it's main gun. The Hutt crawler exploded violently, leaving only burning wreckage.

"Move up! I want that landing zone clear before Montoo's reinforcements get here!"

A Hutt fighter screamed overhead, dodging a pursuing Naboo starfighter with surprising skill. Unfortunately for the mercenary pilot, ground fire from defensive turrets proved too much, and the fighter crash-landed in the street in front of Panaka. The General didn't even have to say anything before the tank fired and blew the wreckage up.

"Clear!" said one of the Royal Guard. The call was soon echoed by the other troopers, finding no signs of the invaders around the landing site.

"Nicely done, troopers. Corporal, let the Trade Federation know Zone one is clear."

-----

Colonel Sykes growled as yet another squad of mercenaries came down the road. Now that he had broken through the Hutt lines surrounding Theeds, he and his men had been told to clear a landing zone for a Trade Federation security team. Unfortunately, the damn Hutts were following him into the city and did not stop coming.

His gunner fired the main gun at a civilian hovercraft the Hutts were using for cover, detonating it and killing the scum behind it. On either side of his tank, Naboo Army troopers picked off the attackers as they came, stopping them from bringing up anti-tank weapons and ruining Sykes's day.

"Sykes here, Zone seven is not clear, we don't have enough men to push back!"

The voice that answered had the distinct accent of a Neimoidian. "This is Sigma Squad. Hot landing confirmed we are airdropping."

A transport ship raced past his position, a sonic boom following it's wake moments later. Sykes had just been about to ask for clarification over the comms when they landed.

Eight massive figures slammed into the road violently, their impact leaving deep craters in the streets. Each one easily stood over eight feet tall, clad in so much armor that Sykes wondered if they were actually droids. The hydraulic hisses that accompanied their movements seemed to suggest the latter. Their weapons were equally massive. Six of them carried "rifles" so massive Sykes suspected replacing his tank's main gun with one would be an upgrade. Of the other two, one carried a massive rotary blaster, while the other...

Is that a kriffing Turbolaser?

The weapon in question was the largest of the lot, carried underhand like the rotary gun, and hooked up to a massive power unit mounted on the trooper's back. Sykes had his answer when the soldier carrying it fired down the road, ripping right through an oncoming tank, destroying both it and the one behind it.

The cybernetics-enhanced Neimoidian super soldiers began a slow advance down the road, slaughtering the invaders with contemptuous ease.