Summary: Checking in on how the war is going...

Warning! Chapters 63-65 were all released back-to-back! Make sure you don't miss any of them!

Chapter 65: Warfare

Aayla was a little bemused, not to mention reasonably impressed, as she took in the orbitals of Sriluur. She only had a single division of Volition-class ships with her, along with their screening elements and a bunch of freighters. The reason for that, though, was blatantly obvious from a single glance at the tactical screen. A glance that would show anyone with even a lick of proper training at reading it that Sriluur had already been conquered. The impressive part of that was that, while the individual who had done it had gotten plenty of support from the League, the Weequay in question wasn't part of their military.

He'd been supplied with a number of surplus Munifex II Heavy Frigates that they simply didn't have the crew for at the time they'd done so. Along with a training cadre and plenty of monetary and logistics support. Yet, that was the total extent of it. Ships and logistical support provided for the taking of Sriluur, with the guarantee of the League that Sriluur would get both a seat at the table of the Liberty Council and the protection of the League of Free Stars. The very first world that would be joining in full, with its own proper representatives, aside from Tythe itself. A prestige that could, if they succeeded, lead the Weequay homeworld to being a major political power within the new galactic faction.

It had been a high-risk, high-reward opportunity. One that their charismatic but flamboyant ally in this effort had seized with both hands and run with. The planet was his homeworld, even if he'd not been back to it in years. When they'd approached him to offer support just after he'd betrayed his Hutt master of the time, fleeing with many of Porla the Hutt's best people, the former advisor for said Hutt had been planning to turn pirate or warlord. Instead, they'd convinced him there was an opportunity to be had with the League. But it was the man himself who had taken the leap from 'build a revolutionary cell out of the locals' to the much higher stakes offer of 'let me handle taking the whole planet and we'll join the League as a member.'

Apparently, for all his flamboyance and wildly erratic luck, Hondo Ohnaka was actually competent. He was also prompt to pick up her comm signal…even if he did so with a pair of panties dangling from his head and his shirt half unbuttoned.

"Ah, Lady Aayla! It is a fine and glorious morning you have found me reveling in! Why, you've found three of my companions reveling in it too! Isn't that right, ladies, gentleman?"

There were giggles from somewhere out of the holopickup's view, along with a deeper bass rumble that told Aayla Hondo was, at least, an equal opportunity hedonist. Now, if only his abundant companionship would keep him from flirting with her. While it was, honestly, fairly amusing most of the time, she had a feeling she was going to be sick of it before she left the system again.

"So I see. And it seems congratulations are in order, I take it everything went well?"

Hondo gestured expansively, a huge smile on his face.

"Quite well, yes! Oh, there were a few…rough patches. A betrayal or two, one or two minor complications involving who precisely was in charge of who. That sort of thing, you know? But, I am pleased to say that it all worked out! In no small part due to yours truly! With, perhaps, just a little bit of help from the laser sword wielding fellow you lent us! Really, quite handy with the thing he was, and far better than I at handling paperwork! Why I imagine he's around here somewhere…I think he was trying to figure out my new title! Personally, I'm thinking His Eminence sounds fantastic, don't you?"

Aayla chuckled and shook her head. Somehow, she suspected that poor Knight Tuvil was deeply regretting volunteering as Ohnaka's handler. They'd recognized early on that the renegade's basic personality meant they needed someone near him to avert or divert his more erratic behavior. The Tarnabian Jedi had been chosen from among those that volunteered for such assignments precisely because he was the unflappable sort. The type that could mostly take Ohnaka's chaos without blinking, while still remaining able to actively work with the Weequay. She would have to check in with the older Knight after this, as he was likely to give a much more…accurate…report of what had gone down.

"Well, whatever your new title will be, I trust you still intend to follow through with joining the League?"

The new leader, at least for now, of the planet Sriluur, actually sobered up a bit at that. Thankfully, he also nodded.

"Of course, of course. Not only could Sriluur not have been taken without your generous support…but we could not hope to hold it without your fleet to prevent the Hutts retaking our home. For that protection alone, we would gladly join. And the terms you've offered are quite generous besides."

They were. Sriluur was the single most critical system in Northern Hutt Space. The primary entry point from that direction, sitting on the junction of three separate Hyperlanes. Out from under the boot heel of Hutt enslavement, the world stood to be incredibly prosperous for the locals. Which is how Hondo had gotten so many of those locals to sign on to his scheme. While the Weequay people hadn't been entirely enslaved in the same fashion as the Nikto, Klatooinians, and Vodrans, they had been conquered by the Hutts. With many of their people regularly enslaved by them, often sold out by their own families as Hondo himself had been.

The Hutts had also carefully limited how it could grow, not wanting the planet to ever be in a position where it could picked itself up and contest their rule. What should have been an immensely rich trade hub was not, as a result. Instead being mostly known for the mercenaries they hired out to the Hutts and other criminal elements. A state of affairs that had been normalized for so long that the locals would never have acted without one of their own, someone sufficiently charismatic and pragmatic, to convince them they could successfully break away. That said someone had already personally defeated one Hutt by scheming had only helped the perception of possibility, as had the military hardware he'd been able to wave around.

The League, in turn for their help, was getting basing rights in the system, among other things. Like many of those aforementioned mercenaries being turned into a military that could support their new duty to the League of Free Stars on the ground. In return for the ongoing support of such mercenaries, the League was going to be pouring resources into the system to help develop it as a new economic power. Given that the planet would also get representation on the Liberty Council to go with its commitments, the deal was more than fair all the way around. Something that Hondo was more than shrewd enough to realize. The man was, at the core, someone who was all about self-interest. In this case, however? Well, there wasn't much higher than ruler of his homeworld that even he could have hoped to climb. Particularly when that homeworld stood to become rich and influential.

"Good to know, Your Eminence. Do try to find your missing shirt buttons before I reach orbit, hmm? I'll do my best to keep our meeting short, but we do need to formalize everything for the record. It's not every day you become a founding world in a new galactic power, after all."

Ohnaka's smile grew bigger still, genuine glee in his eyes as he responded with his typical exuberance. Aayla settled back in her seat, happy enough to let him fill the air with chatter. Well, at least if he ended up as the planetary rep for Sriluur, council meetings would never be entirely boring…

... ...

Admiral Lin tsked with annoyance as she took in the data streaming in from Hosko. While small to mid-sized detachments of the fleet had managed to snap up a number of worlds around Nal Hutta that could have been an annoyance in time, she had spent most of the handful of days since reinforcements started arriving organizing a push towards Varl. Despite being the original Hutt homeworld, Varl wasn't really all that important in and of itself. It had been rendered desolate so long ago that only tradition and ego kept a small detachment of Hutt patrol ships, actual Hutt ships instead of mercenaries in this case, permanently protecting it. Mostly, those ships existed to shoo anyone away from the planet itself, and not much more. They did have some proper teeth, though.

The only reason the League wanted Varl was because of its position. The Ardos system in which Varl lay sat on the nexus of two hyperspace routes. One was relatively unimportant for their immediate purposes. Though it would be useful in the long run when they eventually needed to worry about the half of Hutt Space that lay to the galactic east. It was the other hyperspace route that was possibly the single most important in Hutt Space, as it provided the only access to the Hutt throneworlds. Aayla had already taken Sleheyron to the galactic north of the Bootana Hutta subsector, and one of the heaviest defensive detachments they had outside Nal Hutta itself was currently positioned there. Which meant that the actual Hutt fleets, which were of unknown size and power, could currently exit uncontested only from Gos Hutta, which was the southern shield world that protected Bootana Hutta.

Varl, as it happened, was situated directly to the galactic south of Gos Hutta. If they could establish another defensive redoubt in the Ardos System, it would pin the Hutt fleets, such as they were, inside the Bootana Hutta region. Eventually, sooner or later, they would need to tackle that region and the throneworlds there. But such was something they wanted to put off as long as physically possible, as every single one of those worlds would likely be a horrifyingly tough slog to capture. Just as importantly, the Hutts weren't likely going to be willing, yet at least, to send the defensive fleets belonging to those worlds out into the grinder. Eventually, they would have to, if the League managed to take enough of the region away from them. But right now, the Hutts would be more interested in using those fleets to protect their own skins while throwing every mercenary fleet they could find at their enemies.

Unfortunately, the Hutts weren't actually idiots, just arrogant. What she was seeing in the Hosko system proved that. Hosko, utterly unimportant as it was on its own, was the only world between Nal Hutta and Varl. Which made the large fleet gathered there, this time anchored by the Hutt patrol ships normally stationed in Varl, the first truly serious attempt to stop them from advancing. The previous fleet of pure mercenary muscle she'd smashed over Nar Bo Sholla had been an attempt to slow them down and bleed them a little. Nothing more and nothing less. She had known it at the time. For that matter, so had Aayla.

That, regrettably, wasn't what she was seeing with the Hosko system. It wasn't yet a do-or-die attempt to halt them in their tracks, but it was a serious attempt to make taking the system too expensive to be worth doing. Worse, someone had obviously been feeding data through their information blockade, as whoever was in charge of this new fleet clearly had at least some idea about the makeup of Lin's own line of battle. Instead of dragging in large capital ships which, until the enemy got a handle on how to defeat Null Torpedoes, would just be throwing those vessels away, this fleet commander had focused on missile platforms. Lots of missile platforms. A few frigates that Rana recognized as being missile-heavy designs were the largest ships in that fleet. Far more of it was made up of gunships, corvettes, and semi-military conversions of freighters into missile platforms.

It was a logical approach. Bringing heavy capital ships in without tactics or hardware adjustments to fight the Null Torpedo-Graviton Beam combo, was just a way to lose those ships for little gain. Clearly, someone had cottoned onto the idea that hundreds of missile sources, launched in waves and from multiple flanks by well-organized squadrons of missile boats, was a viable alternative. Or, well, it should have been a visible alternative. Rana was annoyed that the fleet she was seeing showed signs the Hutts were organizing and predicting. That they'd stopped panicking and flailing and started planning and acting instead of just reacting. That wasn't good. But, as for the actual tactic they were trying?

Rana's smirk was a hungry thing as she began planning her approach. It looked like it was time to show off another one of Hatsume's little surprises. Something they'd held back knowing full well that, sooner or later, someone was going to try exactly what they were seeing…

... ...

Admiral Rana's smirk had turned to a grim smile as her three-pronged attack dropped out of Hyperspace. She had to imagine whoever was in charge over there was more than a little confused, given that she'd left virtually all of her lighter ships behind. Charging into the system, deliberately aiming to crash into three of the five groups of dispersed missile boats, were single 4-ship divisions of Volition-class battlecruisers, each accompanied by nothing more than eight Siege-class frigates each and an admittedly impressive starfighter screen.

Missing were any of their Munifex II's, Defender IIs, and support gunships. The Defenders, in particular, must be conspicuous in their absence. One of the classic roles of a corvette in larger naval engagements was to screen larger ships by using turning their much-lighter weapons almost entirely into an interlinked point defense net. Good for anti-fighter and anti-missile screening for their assigned capital ships. Lacking the striking power of true capital ships, that was traditionally the best use for them in large scale fleet engagements.

Why, then, the enemy must wonder, were those critical pieces of the usual formula missing when it was clear Rana had possessed a very good idea what she was wading into. She could almost feel the enemy commander's confusion in the way that his or hers respectably tight formations failed to react for almost three minutes after hyperspace emergence. Someone over there was trying to figure out what was going on. Something only proven more thoroughly as only one of the two unengaged flotillas of missile boats lit off their drives and angled to flank the division aiming for the world of Hosko itself. The second unengaged set of ships certainly started moving, but they started moving much more slowly and toward the main Hyperspace jump point of the system.

Only one of Rana's divisions had come through that jump point, the others having taken the time needed to skirt the system in hyperspace, in order to come out at different emergence locuses. Doing that wasn't normal procedure, as hyperspace in general wasn't charted in exquisite detail like it was through the jump points that represented every hyperlane. But it wasn't actually that hard to do, either, not so close to a relatively bland star system like Hosko. Hokso Prime was a big enough star to have properly captured anything else with a big enough gravity eddy to bother a ship in hyperspace, meaning the hyperspace around the system was fairly clear. It was the routes between star systems, where there weren't stars or other major gravity sources to do that, that caused most hypertravel to happen along well-charted routes. If one was willing to accept the minor risk, you could just flat out orbit a star system in the near-distance of hyperspace, letting a star system's combined gravity well act as a sort of tether for you to swing around. The math would give most species a headache, but any decent navicomputer could handle it with without breaking a digital sweat.

It was a trick that was honestly mostly useless outside military maneuvering. Even for smugglers it was utterly pointless in 99 out a 100 cases, as the backsplash of an exit from hyperspace wasn't that hard to detect. Any star system with a decent sensor net would detect you exiting into the system without much trouble, even if you went off-route and came in from a different angle. As, for that matter, would any ship with half-decent sensors. It also took time to pull such a trick, which explained the enemy's movements. It was a logical assumption that if Rana was going to be abruptly reinforced by her smaller ships, they would come roaring in from the main hyperjump point, rather than doing any fancy maneuvering. She could easily see the logic of the enemy commander, who was hoping that moving his final fleet element into such a position would allow them to ambush her lighter ships when they 'inevitably' showed up.

Pity for him that it was a wasted effort. Those lighter ships were still back in the Nal Hutta system, having been left behind entirely. The enemy commander's assumption had been a logical one, but ultimately incorrect. Rana wasn't trying anything fancy. She really was just charging down the missile boats in a frontal attack, and she really had left a normal part of her anti-missile screen behind in what seemed like a stupid ass decision.

Pity for the enemy commander that he didn't know she'd left them behind because those lighter ships hadn't been refitted with the new defenses Mei had worked out specifically for missile swarms.

It was something he was going to find out in…five…four…three…

"Missile launch! Many missile launches! Fifteen, twenty-seven, eighty-eight. Read…137 missiles ma'am!"

Fewer than she'd actually expected. Apparently, not all of the fighters had missiles. Or else they were husbanding them to engage her own fighter screen.

"Understood tactical. Engage as ordered."

Having been deliberately baiting such an attack, Rana's fighters were primed for interception. Enemy fighters were only a bit behind the missiles, but her screen would get a single pass at the missile wave before having to engage with their opposite numbers. Already prepositioned into an anti-missile intercept formation, the fighters filled space with plasma targeting the missile swarm, even as her own Cruisers and Frigates did the same with the Quad-Lasers that served as their primary point defense. Missiles died. Ten, twenty, fifty. Only 67 of them made it past the starfighter screen, but someone had been smart enough to target the entire barrage on just two Volition's. One of them being Rana's own Stalwart Starlight.

The bridge of the Starlight was tense, even as the Quad-Lasers and ECCM continued to strip away missiles. Eleven more of the 34 that we targeting the Starlight were brushed away by those traditional defenses. But the 23 remaining missiles weren't anything a Volition really wanted to eat, even if the heavy, multi-layered shielding of the class could have done it without breaking. After all, more missiles were already in space, and fewer of the second wave would be obliterated by defending starfighters which were now busy. Yet, even as the Quad-Lasers stopped firing at the first wave and shifted focus to the second, abandoning the attempt to take out the nearer missiles…one of the new surprises Mei Hatsume had come up with for the Volition and Siege class ships found the range.

In a rapid-fire spiral of ignition, counter missiles spat from the circular array Mei called simply a Hedgehog. These missiles were tiny compared to the incoming ship-killers. Based on the smart munitions called a 'whistling bird' used by some Mandalorian Clans, Mei had derided their use as anti-personnel weapons, saying that any half-decent armor would stop such small mutations cold. Of course, Miss Hatsume's definition of 'half-decent armor' meant power armor that would make a Mandalorian green with envy, but that wasn't the point at the moment.

Instead of using them as an anti-personnel weapon, Hatsume had upscaled the basic design, stuck them behind hidden panels on the Volition and Siege classes, and wired them to droid brains that were meshed together to create a counter-missile fire defense net. Relatively standard concussion missiles fired from anything smaller than a capital ship were around the size of a human. Exact sizes differed between manufacturers, but generally averaged around 2 meters in length and had a range under ECCM conditions of only around 2km.

Technically, most actually had the endurance for five times that range, six or seven for the better designs. But the longer they were in space, the easier it was to completely fuck their targeting sideways and upside down by isolating the targeting frequencies they were using and scrambling the unholy hell out of them. Two to three kilometers was the generally accepted maximum range at which you could realistically hope for a missile or torpedo to actually hit, instead of being defeated by electronic countermeasures.

Hedgehog missiles were less than one tenth the size of a 'proper' missile and only had around 500 meters of drive endurance. They didn't have even a single gram of explosive ordinance, either. They were all brutal acceleration and targeting links. But, frankly, they didn't need anything else. Hundreds of the Hedgehog missiles fired in a blistering stream, each smart munition controlled by a combination of its onboard targeting computer and a datalink to the droid brains dedicated to tracking the incoming missiles with pinpoint precision. Their weapon? Nothing more than brutal acceleration and their own mass.

After all, concussion missiles weren't exactly durable, now were they?

Every single remaining missile from the first wave was hit by at least three counter missiles, utterly shredding those missiles before they came close enough to do any damage. The second wave didn't do any better. Nor did the third and fourth. There wasn't a fifth wave, since every single missile boat had been ripped to shreds by the main guns of the utterly untouched capital ships before the enemy could get one off…

Admiral Rana Lin's smile as the frigate she suspected had been the Hutt commander's ship fled the system without engaging was grimly satisfied. Eventually, the Hutts would find something that worked. But until they did, Rana was more than happy to show them, and the rest of the galaxy for that matter, just how little they properly knew about naval warfare…

... ...

Specialist Riley Hoskie did her best not to grin like a maniac as she charged the defensive position that the combined mercs and local security forces were trying to set up. To their credit, the mercs defending the main shipyard of Hoersch-Kessel Drive, Inc. were already adapting. Taking the orbital yards around Nimban intact wasn't proving a particularly easy task. A fact that was one major reason that they'd originally bypassed the world in their surge through Hutt Space. Given that it was the only truly large ship manufacturer in Hutt Space, however, taking it needed doing and the bosses wanted the yards as intact as possible. They were, after all, big enough to manufacture both the Trade Federation's Lucrehulk-class and the Banking Clan's Munificent-class. They were, in fact, the original manufacturer of both, even if some of the ships were now built elsewhere as well.

Which is why Riley was getting the chance to throw her Striker at the hardpoint that the locals had turned the cross corridor into. The choke point had already turned back a squad in Power Suits. The heavy repeating blasters were bad enough, but the locals had brought up missile launchers despite the risk of using them in a shipyard. Even now, as Riley barreled down the passage, her forward shield screen soaking the fire from the repeaters, two shoulder-launchers spewed missiles out from behind the defenses.

Unfortunately for the locals, Riley's Striker had something that the Power Suit boys and girls didn't. The micro-missile launcher on her shoulder flared to life, firing off a stream of smart munitions that shot down both the incoming missiles. The Striker model of mech was one of the few that had seen thousands of hours of action already with the Shattered Shackles, and that active defense had been added to the Striker II line, which was the now the main Striker Model in service. It did its job now, knocking out the only serious threat to Riley's mech, her forward shield only just barely dipping into the yellow as she reached the barricades and rammed them in a shoulder check. She'd been chewing into them with both Fusion Gatlings as she ran, shredding them enough that the new full-contact impact caused the barricades to come apart with a rending screech.

Seeing her shield icon flicker red, Riley reversed course, pushing off the remains of the barricade with one leg. A moment later, her partner Nikkoli, who had been hiding behind her own charge, punched through the hole she'd made. His mech wasn't equipped with the dual gatlings Riley preferred. Instead, he had just the one gatling on one arm, and a Fusion Pike in the other. Now, he raked fire from the gatling over the scrambling defenders even as he sliced through one of the mounted repeating blasters with his pike. The defenders poured everything they had into him and his shield power fell like a homesick rock…but he'd done his job just as Riley had. Half the defenders were down and the repeaters were silent. The original squad of power suited troopers that had called for support, resupplied with more droids as a new screen, boiled in around him.

They let Nikkoli and the droids with their tower shields soak the damage, pinpointing their own shots through the gaps in the shield wall. Rapidly, the defending fire began falling silent, until the last of the enemy threw down their arms with a cry of surrender. Selectors were flipped and stunners lanced out, dropping the surrendering troops. Checking the telemetry, she saw that Nikkoli had gotten a bit cooked there at the end, his shield actually knocked down entirely.

"Status Check. Basher Three, report."

Nikkoli's voice was calm and composed as his report came back almost immediately.

"Still good to go, ma'am! Lost 3% of the ablative armor in the last few seconds, but no damage to the shield arrays. It's already back up and recharging. Might need a power top off if we do another breech like that, but I'm good to go for now."

Riley nodded. That matched with what his telemetry was reporting, but it was always better to make sure.

"Got it. We'll stay here until your shields are in the green, see if these boys and girls need anything else punched in the face. If they don't, we'll queue up again for the action list and move onto the next hotspot command forwards to us. Wait one and keep your eyes peeled as I check in with Basher 1 and 2."

As soon as she got confirmation, Riley shifted channels, reaching out to report their status to Corporal Lefutit. Progress wasn't the quickest, but so far the locals hadn't shown any sign of being fanatical enough to destroy the shipyards if they started losing. Which meant that, sooner or later, they'd have them in hand for their own production. All with minimal casualties because of the nice toys that the bosses had given them to play with!

Best. Job. Ever.

She even got dental benefits! For kicking other people in the teeth! How weird was that…

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

A/N 1: So...I don't like Hondo, as it happens. He annoys the fuck out of me in the same way Jar Jar (who doesn't bother me, oddly) annoys a lot of other people. I was actually a little irritated to discover that there was a completely legitimate use for him in this story. The background bits I included for him? Completely canon. He was a slave that escaped, set himself up as an advisor to a Hutt, then betrayed that Hutt and took most of Porla's best people with him to make his gang. To my mild annoyance, the timing actually lines up more or less right for that to have happened while the League was building up local revolutions. Which made him a 100 percent canon, 100 percent logical recruit...who would ABSOLUTELY escalate and double down. Since I know a lot of other people-who-aren't-me like him, I decided to include him and treat him fairly. Just...don't expect him to show up super often due to my not being a fan of his everything.

A/N 2: The Hedgehog system was actually the last of the major space-based tech advantages I gave the League. Those advantages are 1) The Null Torpedoes 2) Graviton Beams 3) Mass Accelerator Spinal mounts of the Siege Class that have been mentioned but not really show in detailed use. 4) The Hedgehog missile defense system. 5) The Toru-Class, sort of. It's currently only a half-effective stealth ship. 6) You could technically count the QECs, but only sort of, as everyone else has access to an equivalent in the Hypercomm. The only real advantage of the QECs is security. 7) The Particle Beam system of the Orbital Defense Stations, which hasn't come into play yet but will be a very nasty surprise for whoever first runs into it.

These advantages were given to them as a way to help them fight a massive uphill battle. But many of them will prove to have limitations and soft-counters. They aren't going to steamroll everyone with them. Which is actually the point in me showing their R element continuing to turn out advantages as fast as they can. They are going to NEED them.

Notably, the Hedgehog in the one system that I think is the SMALLEST jump, in-universe. Star Wars fleets already have the concept of point defense. I see the only reason for them NOT to have something like this system already as being that it's technically quite materials intensive. Putting another strain on logistics.

A/N 3: Yes, the micro-missiles the Striker uses are essentially the same system as the Hedgehog. In fact, a piece of background information that might never make it into the fic is that the Striker's micro-missile defense system was developed first. Mei made it in response to losing some Strikers in anti-slaver raids for the Shattered Shackles to shoulder-launched missile systems. She then realized it could be scaled up into a capital ship anti-missile-swarm defense and did so. This is part of why the Hedgehog doesn't show up on smaller ships, as it's technically a refit/add on in a lot of cases. Also, the smaller ships just don't have enough physical space to get away with storing hundreds or thousands of counter missiles. Even small ones.

A/N 4: Yeah, you probably know this once by now. Once per release, I point out that I have a Patreon Page with Early Access content. In example, I just released chapters 66-70 of Displaced Hero there, adding just shy of another 16,000 words which will remain in Early Access until next month. Similarly, there are at least a few Early Access chapters there for ALL of my stories, though NONE of them are ever permanently paywalled. All fanfiction content I make ends up here (or on Fanfiction.net and Questionable Questing) eventually, as new content for each story is released. Typically, there are around 45-60,000 words of additional early access content for patrons. As well as chances to vote in polls that influence which stories are updated, pairings, and other such things.