Summary: A glimpse of combat groundside! Not everything is space battles!

Chapter 59: Siege

-Surface of Nal Hutta – Half a Day Into the Ground Assault-

Izuku frowned as he looked over the battle display with General T'san and several of his staff. So far the fighting on the surface of Nal Hutta had gone mostly in their favor. The quantity and quality of the hardware they'd brought with them had allowed them to swiftly seize control of smaller cities and force surrenders out of various Hutts. For all their brilliance in space for this campaign, however, he could admit they'd made a mistake here on the ground. Uncertain of a lot of their largely-untested-in-battle hardware, they'd given the idea of repeating the same sort of blitzkrieg rush that had been so effective in space a pass here on the surface. Instead, they'd landed and fortified positions to attack from. Unfortunately, in doing so, they've given the Hutts and their advisors time to react.

Time they'd used entirely too well.

Grudgingly, he had to acknowledge that the Hutts had proven to be both paranoid and competent. The competence undoubtedly came mostly from the people they hired, rather than from themselves, of course. But the fact remained that the Hutts had hired some seriously competent people to put together a comprehensive and paranoid defense network. One that had been in place, constantly updating and building over old networks, for millennia. The evidence of that was right in front of him as he looked over the holotank showing the battlespace around the capital city of Bilbousa.

Bilbousa City might look like a sprawling mess, but it was clear that someone had chosen its location carefully in the ancient past. Surrounded mostly by swampland, it was nearly impossible to reach it with their mechs without half of them sinking into said swamps. Worse, it had a potent theater shield, of the right type and power to disrupt repulsorlifts. Meaning they couldn't just go over the swamp, either. Combined with a rather disturbing amount of hidden heavy weapons emplacements and the fact the defenders had proven willing to knock down entire rows of buildings just to create obstacles for attackers? It was no wonder that the initial assault on the city had run into problems and been pulled back.

Frankly, if it wasn't for that fact some of their best 'ground' units were Gungan-designed and therefore fully capable of aquatic traversal, they might have been forced to either batter the shields down with ruinous force or wait the bastards inside out. As it was, their tanks and APCs were both capable of that sort of aquatic movement, and Mei had overengineered the Lancer-mechs to be the same. They could get into the city. The trouble was doing so in enough numbers that they didn't just get picked off by the numerous emplacements. Which was the goal they were all studying the maps trying to figure out a strategy to achieve. Finally, Izuku sighed and voiced what he was pretty sure they were all thinking.

"I think we really only have two options here. One, we sneak a team in with a way to disable either the shield or a few key emplacements, or else we accept ruinous losses by sending wave after wave to batter our way through their defense-in-depth. The latter option isn't just crude, but also potentially crippling to the forces we're going to need on other battle fields…"

General T'san nodded, and the various members of his staff nodded right along with him. None of them looked happy, and it was one of his junior officers that spoke up next. The Twi'lek tapped a key that highlighted what data they had about the shield generators and power stations.

"I think the shields are a no-go, honestly. These paranoid bastards have backups for the backups as far as the generators themselves go, all of them at different clan compounds. I doubt they each even knew about the others, before now. We'd never get enough of them all at once, and the situation with the power stations is even worse. Every single major Hutt clan base has its own fusion plant, and several of the minor ones have them too. We could disable seventy percent of them and they could still power both the heavy weapons and the shields."

Unhappy looks turned to pained expressions as the younger officer pointed out the problem. In this case, the Hutts' paranoia against each other had bit them on the ass. All of the major clans had taken their own, individual precautions, all of which were now operating at least more-or-less together. There were undoubtedly chinks in that cooperation that would prove a liability during the actual fighting. But the hodgepodge, decentralized infrastructure had created an accidental nightmare for saboteurs. General T'sun spoke next, tapping the controls himself to shift the highlights away from the shields and power and to the known weapons emplacements.

"I agree. There's no real point in even trying to take down the shields via commando teams. It wouldn't just take one miracle, but several dozen. Instead, I think our only choice is to focus our sappers on taking out a few key weapons emplacements. The city is poorly planned, and there are a number of places where only a handful of defensive guns can target a particular spot on the perimeter. If we can strike at one or more of those points, we can create a beachhead in the city. Seize a section of the city and use it to rally troops in before pushing out into the rest. It will be slow, but doable, particularly since we should be able to bring the heavy mechs in via barge if we have a secure place for the barges to land."

There was agreement all around the table, and soon they were discussing which points they thought were the most vulnerable for such an assault. Ideally, they wanted at least two or three such points, to divide the defenders properly…

There had been some token protests when Izuku decided to lead one of the sapper teams personally. General T'san and others had pointed out that he was effectively the commander and chief of their entire faction. Losing him would, in some ways, be actively worse than the Republic losing their Supreme Chancellor in a time of crisis. It was even, technically, a sound argument. But, well, there was also a good reason that the protests had been token and only half-hearted.

Logically, they knew their ultimate boss shouldn't really be pulling behind-enemy-lines commando raids.

Practically, they knew he was the single most qualified person on the planet.

The nascent nature of their entire military, and the resulting lack of enough true experts in any one field, meant that for a mission like this they needed to lean on the ones they could call on. That meant that each of the three strike teams going in to act as saboteurs were made up of a combination of Jedi and veterans of the Karazak assault. Master Nico Diath was leading Alpha team, Knight Terish from the Almas Jedi was leading Beta, and Izuku was leading Gamma. Which had, at least, the least dangerous of the three targets as best they could determine. The various officers had succeeded in getting at least that amount of concession out of him.

That still didn't exactly mean their assault was going to be easy.

Thanking Mei once again for the fact his armor was very thoroughly sealed, Izuku slipped out of the sewage line that his team had infiltrated through. Each of them were radiating raw relief that their own less custom gear had prevented any…contamination. Their potent feelings in the Force causing Izuku to grin just a bit, even as he pushed his Force senses farther outward to sweep the facility above them for living minds. Thankfully, as expected given that the outer sections of the city had been forcefully evacuated by the Hutt forces, he found no sentient minds. There was some risk of droids, but he doubted they'd have wasted security droids on a waste treatment plant, and anything else they should be able to safely jam without triggering any alarms. He keyed his comm as he finished his careful sweep.

"It's clear as far I can sense. Knight Usai?"

The senior of the two Iron Knights in his group was quick to respond.

"Agreed. No sentient minds present. No droid broadcast signals detected either."

Izuku nodded, his own armor had noted that for him, but the Iron Knights had a unique ability to detect other droids almost like they were sentient minds. Which meant there likely weren't even any service droids still active in the shut-down plant. That was excellent.

"Right. Stack up. We take this careful. Room by room despite the scans. We can't afford to fuck this up and we have a solid twelve hours to get in place. Slow and steady wins this race."

Murmurs of agreement came back over the short-range comms even as the group obeyed the order, stacking up on Izuku as he started moving them through the treatment plant…

... ...

The rooftop was quiet as a grave as Izuku's group waited out the last minutes of the synchronized timer. He and Knight Ersai, the junior of the Iron Knights in his group, were the only ones up on the roof. Eight of their twelve veteran commandos were hidden in pairs at other points along the road leading up to the large weapon emplacement they were targeting. Not a pop-up installation like many of the nasty surprises had been, this particular emplacement was part of the dedicated city defense network, and a much nastier piece of hardware as a result. The paranoia induced by having such a piece of hardware active during their own coming and goings was also why the Hutts had shelled out for a top-flight security suite. A suite which was what had so far prevented them from getting their team any closer.

On the ground, at least.

Using the rooftops and generous application of both ECM and Force Stealth, Izuku and Ersai had managed to slowly work their way into their current position. Likewise, Knight Usai and their four remaining commandos had managed to find a tunnel running under the facility and had slowly cut their way up through several unrelated subfloors of city planning. They'd be detected when they cut their way into the actual weapon's emplacement from below, of course. But they'd be doing it several seconds after Izuku and the surface group hit the emplacement more or less head-on. With any luck at all, Usai and his commandos would be relatively unopposed as the defenders reacted to the more obvious and in-your-face threat.

Not that they intended to be purely a distraction, of course. The weapon's emplacement was hardened and armored, but didn't have shielding down at street level. It did have its own shield protecting it from indirect fire from outside the city. But it didn't have one pointed in, which meant that the heavier ordinance they'd managed to bring with them should be able to crack the exterior. Which, in turn, should let them make a good go of fighting their way in. It was to be hoped, however, that they wouldn't need the frontal assault to be the ones to succeed. Doing so would likely mean both losses and that they didn't have enough time to extract. Hence why the two-pronged approach was planned from the start. If the underground team could plant the explosives fast enough, they could all pull back and break for the exit in the sewage plant, or else go to ground in one of several locations they'd scouted in the hours they'd had to work with.

The clock, having ticked away the inevitable last minutes in silence, finally hit zero.

"Execute."

Izuku was already moving even as he spoke the single word command over the team's encrypted channel. He leapt from the rooftop, the building he was on only two stories compared to the six of their target. Not that it mattered. It might have been a bit far for some Jedi, but Izuku himself had been capable of at least short-distance flight since before he came to this galaxy. Having learned to consciously tap the Force for additional stamina, he could even have easily covered the distance between their forward base and the emplacement. If not for the complication of the energy shields between them, at least.

Knight Ersai, meanwhile, had taken the rooftop with him instead of Usai for more reasons than just adding the senior Knight to the underground team as superior support. All of the Iron Knights had been upgraded heavily on Izuku's credits, but he'd pointedly allowed them a great deal of individual choice in those upgrades. Beyond basic systems they all shared, each Iron Knight had been given the chance to pick and choose a wide range of systems for their droid bodies, a means of helping them express their individuality and enhancing their personal combat styles all in one gesture. Knight Ersai, as it happened, had a high-mobility combat style and had chosen to add jump jets and maneuvering thrusters to his body's legs and elbows respectively. It aided him massively in his personal version of Ataru…and just so happened to allow him several minutes of pure flight.

The result was that both of them reached the fifth floor of the weapon's emplacement just seconds after the effects of the far faster shoulder-mounted Null Torpedo faded. One which a commando had fired from a block away at Izuku's execute command. Despite their usefulness, they didn't have very many of the shoulder-mounted version of that weapon. Unlike the larger versions that could be mounted on ship-sized launchers, which could be produced in relative bulk without breaking the bank, miniaturizing the design enough squeeze one into a shoulder mounted system was extremely expensive. As in, you could buy a class one hyperdrive, albeit not an overly special one, for the price of the torpedo that one of the commandos had just fired. Worse, Null Torpedoes were one of the very few things they'd discovered that the Infinite Engine Seeds actually couldn't make on their own. Something about them was too fundamentally unreal for the Force-driven engines to work quite right with them.

Understandably, they didn't have a large supply of the shoulder-mounted version as a result. But one single-use launcher each had been spared for all three commando teams, and this one had been fired before Izuku even got the full execute order out. The section of reality that simply ceased to exist was smaller, of course, and thankfully the Force could at least detect where its edge would be. Interestingly, the fact that the Force could do that was fascinating evidence that the Force could learn, since it hadn't actually been able to the first few times they'd tested the larger scale torpedoes. Indeed, Aayla's expression at feeling consternation from the Force had been an amusing one.

That ability to learn was important here, as Izuku and Knight Ersai had timed their flying leaps perfectly, diving right through the new hole in the two-meter-thick armor of the emplacement just as the effect faded to harmlessness. The result, predictably, was that absolutely no one inside had the slightest chance to react as the pair of them raced inward. Internal security turrets, far faster to adjust than their organic compatriots, did open up on them as they passed the outer ring of the emplacement's internals. Those turret's shots were easily blocked by Izuku's shields, even as Knight Ersai returned fire with micro-missiles. That, too, was a nice thing about the Iron Knights. They were far more willing to adopt weapons beyond their Glow Sticks of Doom.

The security turrets ceased to exist just in time for the entire building to shudder as more conventional high explosives hit the main doors at street level. Conventional or not, the satchel charges the commandos down there had employed would be more than enough to blow the door, forcing the enemy to split their attentions. Seconds from now, the much quieter entry of the underground team would start as the third point of assault.

Up until this point, Izuku had been using a light battle meditation to help coordination of the entire operation. But, as they arrived at the doors to the facility's command room, he had to put most of his focus on the already-closed blast doors right behind where those turrets had been. He and Knight Ersai both plunged their lightsabers into the heavily armored doors opposite of one another, and began cutting a way in. Slowed for the first time, it was here that there was a chance for security to react, and both of them sensed frantically racing sentients converging on them from multiple directions. They weren't going to get through the blast doors fast enough.

No matter. That hadn't been the plan anyway.

Honestly, they'd just needed security to take the threat seriously.

Keeping up that very visible threat, it was only Izuku who pulled away from the effort to cut through the door, whirling to face the security teams that came pouring out of cross corridors into what should have been a defensive choke point for the emplacement's defenders. Instead, it became one for Izuku. Four of his six hexagon shields linked together with a mental twitch, forming a mobile cover for himself. The other two started flitting about blocking blaster shots aimed at Knight Ersai, instead.

Letting his lightsaber drop in midair, deactivating and hovering there, Izuku telekinetically ripped the ruins of the defense turrets from the wall and flung them at the security teams at high speed. The move had effectively created two fields of fast-moving shrapnel along with the turrets themselves, and virtually all the defenders already in the corridor went down. There were two that remained, both wearing armor heavy enough to have survived the shrapnel storm and having gotten lucky enough not to be hit by the bulk of the turrets. Those two didn't last more than another heartbeat as he simply picked them up with the Force and sent them screaming down the corridor to bowl over the next team that tried their luck.

Grimly, he drew a pair of heavy blaster pistols from his hips and unloaded into the mass of bodies. He still wasn't particularly comfortable with what was near enough to wanton slaughter like this, but he understood the stakes. Besides, his orders had killed far more people in orbit than could possible be in this entire weapon's emplacement. The thought was distant and disconnected enough he wondered if he should be finding a therapist. Maybe Master Fay was available? She'd certainly done a better job than any of his therapists back on Earth had…

... ...

-A Day and a Half Later-

Izuku watched with something very much like exasperated amusement as the enemy tried to bring down the Lancer model mechs that were ripping their way into yet another Hutt Palace. The Liberation Army controlled over sixty percent of Bilbousa City, now. Two of the three commando teams had succeeded. With the third technically achieving their objective only for General T'san's forces to discover in the assault that there had been another paranoid layer to the defenses on that particular section of city. He'd wisely pulled that portion of the assault back, focusing instead on the two more successful weak points. Fighting had still been fierce, and the enemy actually had managed to disable one of their four Lancers. An impressive feat considering just how insanely tough Mei had made the somewhat ridiculous-seeming platforms.

It hadn't been enough to save the city from them, though.

Both sectors of the city that had been breached had become beachheads, with teams of Striker Mechs brought in by Gungan APCs capturing big enough sections of city for barges to start floating in Tigers to join the Gungan Grank tank, named after some predator that lived in the Gungan swamps. Once a few of the Tigers had joined in, there was simply nothing left in the city that could stop them, and a slow advance to seize everything had started. Some Hutts had done the smart thing and surrendered. Most had ordered their more loyal or desperate mercs to fight to the last, undoubtably hoping there would be a relief force coming from off world.

Unless something drastic changed, however, their hopes would be for naught. Ninety percent of Nal Hutta was under their control at this point, and new orbital defenses that pointed both out and in were already being deployed over the world. For all intents and purposes, Nal Hutta had fallen. Not without taking a bite out of their ground forces, to be fair. But even there, their use of droids as a front line, combined with the comprehensive array of tanks, mechs, APCs and more, had kept their sentient casualties light. All while teaching General T'san, Izuku, and many other field commanders, a lot of lessons about this sort of fight.

For better or worse, it also meant that it was time for Izuku to get back into space. They had a lot more worlds to conquer and an entire galaxy of political fallout to deal with. While he was somewhat looking forward to the former, it didn't stop his utter dread about the latter…

... ... ... ...... ... ... ...

A/N: So...I'm not great at describing ground combat, apparently. This chapter was rough to figure out and write. I hope it came out okay? I have a better handle on fleet maneuvers and fleet combat, and Izuku really shouldn't be on the ground that much. So it isn't that big an issue. Even if it disappoints me I can't play with the shiny mechs and power armor as much as I'd like T-T.