[Episode 49253] [Episode 49253]*Fizz!* SLASH!
Jump! Twist, block twice, land, slash. Leap again.
Cologne was treating them all like new recruits, training them all over again. And, per her words, "Doing it right this time."
Admittedly, in the centuries of peace following the supposed death of the Sith, the Jedi had failed to meet the same kind of combat needs as they had hitherto encountered. But for a time the full training regimen of fighting had been required of all students. Then, as peace crept on and it became clear their typical threats were of a significantly lower threshold, the practice had slipped, becoming optional, even out of fashion as emphasis was placed in more cerebral pursuits suitable to the bureaucratic Republic.
Fat lot of good it did them, those cerebral types were fooled by the reemerging Sith just as fast as the clueless beginners. Some of them faster, as they were less open to change.
Cologne was of the Old School, where if you couldn't take on fifty armed attackers then you just weren't trying. It had taken the Empire two full legions, an armored walker division, and finally a small scale orbital bombardment to stun her long enough to slap her in a Universal Energy Cage. And even then, they'd lost an appalling amount of men to do it.
Ranma blocked two bolts, absorbing the third blaster shot as he brought his lightsaber up to block Ranko's downswing, then dropping two sidelong slashes at her abdomen before he leapt clear, sweat flying as he juggled three difficult Force tasks at once.
Ranko felt for him, the fruit-sized blaster drones would be floating after her next. But for right now it was he brother's turn to practice, and practice he would. The shots from the little globes couldn't maim or kill, but they weren't exactly set on stun either and using the Force to dissipate the energy of those shots you couldn't block was hell, especially dropped on top of the full-on lightsaber combat they were engaged in.
Ranma'd leapt into Amelia's field of the practice arena, not that they were tied to any set spots, but the chased quickly learned to lead their chasers on paths where they interfered with each other so the Jedi who was 'it' in a practice session wasn't set on by everything at once.
He blocked two blows, took a blaster shot in the neck, and the resultant pain took enough of his concentration to dissipate that he slowed so much his lightsaber met Amelia's neck at the same time hers touched his leg.
They'd powered down the sabers for these fights. They wouldn't just tickle. They were about the level of a power coupling - enough to drive the affected tissue numb for hours. Actually, playing with their power level had several advantages. First was obviously they didn't kill or maim each other. The next was the Force typically sensed danger in levels, and the higher degrees were always more easily sensed and reacted to. So the more powerful lightsaber attacks and blasters often distracted one from lesser threats that could still quickly disable - things like punches or kicks.
By playing practice on the lower settings, it attuned their senses to be just a bit more fine, teaching Jedi to react to lower threats as well as higher. As they progressed through training they would actually turn the power settings on their lightsabers and blaster droids down, to teach more of the same.
As Cologne said, "Anybody can hear a siren. Listen for a whisper. That is the mistake most Jedi make that leads to their demise; they wait for danger to be lifethreatening, ignoring the subtle warnings the Force is always giving of smaller dangers leading to greater threats yet to come."
Or, a boot to the face wouldn't kill you. But it'll sure make it harder to block the coming thrust of crimson saber that surely would.
Actually, Cologne was staring at Ranko with hard eyes. "Well, girl. What are you waiting for?" She jerked her ancient head towards the girl's brother, immobilized in one leg."Finish him!"
"WHAT!?" Ranko's eyes bulged.
Cologne breathed deeply, smiling softly. "Stormtroopers and Sith do not stop when their target is wounded. You may defeat him now. You surely will. But the practice he gains in learning to overcome these difficulties and fight on may easily save his life another time."
Feeling some returning peace, recognizing the logic of the distasteful statement, Ranko looked again toward her brother and once more raised her lightsaber. He nodded and set his shoulders.
She charged him, suddenly finding herself on the DEFENSIVE as her brother made use of the smaller target he presented in a half-crouch to more easily ward off her blows as he also pressed his own attack against her legs - an angle she was far less accustomed to attacks on.
Backing off, she reanalyzed her position and was soon using Force-boosted jumps to take advantage of his reduced mobility to come at him from back, sides, and the opposite of any direction he twisted to. He caught her by surprise again by responding with a jump, but on only one leg she saw a disadvantage and slashed lightning fast into the opening.
He fell senseless to the ground at her feet.
Panting, worn out and physically exhausted, Ranko wiped sweat from her brow and barely just reignited her saber to ward off twelve shots from the blaster drones, then stared as if doubting her senses as two fresh Jedi stepped out onto the field of packed dirt, igniting their own sabers and orienting on her.
A quick glance at Cologne saw the old woman chuckling. "Sorry child, but if we could always count on being fresh at the start of battle we wouldn't have lost as many Jedi, would we?"
Ranko made no reply, too busy blocking and evading, adapting threads of the Force to augment her tired body in ways she'd never thought to do before.
Still, even as she exulted in the new technique, pressing her newly-energized body into tight spins to deflect blaster bursts as she maneuvered to face her two foes, Ranko barely had time to blink as a third saber ignited just as the weapon touched her neck.
"Shampoo very sorry, but great-grandmother order." The purple-tressed Jedi told Ranko's slumped and sleeping body. "She teach lesson to Shampoo long ago: Always watch for new foe even as battle ones you know."
The elder spoken of activated her own dark-green saber and closed on her descendant even as the drones and other Jedi circled, watching for openings. Shampoo sighed, Force a flood within her, even as she calmly recognized that sooner or later she would be joining those already carried off the field by medical droids, to awaken in bacta treatment recovering from burns.
After this there would be long periods of non-sparring practice, where Cologne taught them more of the essential moves and form. But now was where she and other Jedi learned to first need, then later implement those instructions.
And besides, it hurt nothing like the real thing. Shampoo was glad to have the discomfort now and live later. Too many of her friends hadn't been so wise.
===========
"Do you have the fleet tactics down yet, Ranchan?" Ukyo, Jedi healer turned reluctant warrior asked of her patients as they revived in the medical center.
Dripping wet, Ranko sighed sleepily as Ranma rubbed burn ointment into her neck and shoulders. She'd gotten him good earlier and now it was her turn. "I don't like getting shot at by fighters." The redhead agreed, as her part of this conversation.
Ranma himself felt no burns. On top of Ucchan's ministrations and his sister rubbing in the ointment, he had his own healing ability. He might not be in Ucchan's league in helping out others, but he could soothe his own wounds pretty fast. "Yah, sorry Ranko. There's no easy fix for that. We could carry fighters if I could build or buy any, but they're restricted. The Empire tracks their sale too well, and the plans for modern starfighters don't come cheap."
Ukyo regarded him over her steaming cup of greenish fluid. "I thought you said Bail Organa had access to some. If he's got starfighters, he must have maintenance plans."
Shampoo was brought in on a stretcher, which floated back out to await more claimants to its services, the droids chirping to themselves. Ukyo stripped off the unconscious girl's shirt to start working the healing ointment into a nasty-looking slash of burned skin across the girl's shoulders, while still listening to his response.
Ranko merely moaned pleasurably as her brother got a sore spot just the right way. Her brother's magic fingers did their work as he spoke. "Yah, but production plans aren't quite the same thing. We could make them, of course, but if we're going to do that I'd rather have something more impressive than his Y-Wings."
Soothing the girl's skin almost smooth again under her fingertips, Ukyo shrugged. "Well, he could get those plans, couldn't he? The same place he got the ships?"
Ranma's hands found that spot right at the back of the hips that got his pregnant wife/sister mewing. Freezing, he moved his hands elsewhere for now. "Probably. But it doesn't get me production machinery."
Having stripped her newest patient, and finding only three small blaster burns, Ukyo had to wonder at how the amazon Jedi had been taken down. "You're going to have to have the stuff eventually, you know."
Having finished with his sister, and she was laying contentedly in a half-doze, listening as she floated in catlike pleasure, Ranma switched to help Ukyo. "Sure, eventually. I've just got so much stuff to do now."
She found the problem, hidden by Shampoo's hair, and began directing Ranma to help her heal the injuries and save Shampoo the headache they'd earn her later. "Is there any other option?"
Amelia stepped back in from her bacta bath, rubbing the slight sore spot on her neck as she held the towel that covered her modesty. Seeing the others busy, she hiked up her towel and began working on the next patient the medical droids just brought in, listening all the while to the ongoing conversation so she wouldn't be left out.
"Ask an admiral." The boy huffed good-naturedly. "As an engineer, I can only say they taught us to build two things to deal with starfighters - more fighters, or screening vessels. Basically corvette sized ships specifically armed to take down fighters."
Amelia looked up from her work healing the latest patient. "But mister Ranma, if it's just guns couldn't you put some on those Dreadnoughts of yours?"
"Lasers nimble enough to slap down starfighters ain't strong enough to slug it out in cruiser to cruiser death matches. Just like turbolasers couldn't hit most starfighters if the pilot was half blind. There's only so many guns you can squeeze on a ship's frame, so good at hitting one target typically means you suck at the other. And trying to do both means you really don't do either one well."
Ukyo left him to finish up Shampoo, transferring to the new patient, who was surprisingly Cologne. That meant the rest were heading to the refresher stations in their rooms, because it must've taken everyone left to put the old girl down. "So the answers are fighters and corvettes. Any chance you'd find some floating in the yards with the other decommissioned stuff?" Ukyo asked, going to work.
Ranma shrugged, working at last to awaken the purple-tressed amazon.
"Corellian ships are so dang adaptable you can reconfigure them to do just about anything. That means they almost never get decommissioned, only reassigned different duties. The ones you aren't using for one thing can do something else until there aren't any something elses, which never happens. The Marauder is a design almost unique to the Corpsec, so the two best corvettes... no, I won't find much if any of either one floating among the hulks of a mynock-paste(1) yard."
"So, it's back to fighters, then." Amelia concluded.
"Looks like it. As you said, Ucchan, we'll need some eventually. I just don't know how we're going to get started on a fighter program." The lone boy among them concluded.
"Well, getting plans from Alderaan would be a start." Ranko groaned, deciding she had to move again and stretching as she sat up, sliding her legs off the bunk.
"True." Ukyo and Amelia both agreed.
Shampoo sat up, rubbing her head. "Ow, Shampoo not expect great-grandmother use Force Cyclone on her. Not know how defend yet."
"You didn't get mobbed by thirteen Jedi who'd come to expect the same if they waited their turns individually." Cologne groaned, staying right where she was while Ukyo got yet another set of stun-burns after dealing with the top layer. "I'm going to have to praise their original thinking, but find some way to get on with their training anyway."
The others present all met eyes.
"Good luck." Amelia whispered.
(1) No terrestrial insects, so no moths, so no phrase "mothball." And if you aren't using a ship then you can probably smear their power cables with a substance inimical to energy and thereby noxious to the ever-present mynocks. Clean the paste off to get the best use out of the ships later.
===========
The next day, after cleaning up and a number of recreational activities, and completely to his surprise, Ranma found himself at the head of a room in front of twenty Jedi; ranging from the tough-as-ion-welds Cologne to the pretty and young Amelia, with his local girlfriends, Naga and some strangers thrown in the mix. Most of them had been rescuees from the dungeon ships and whatever lives they'd found up to now couldn't be returned to.
All of them were looking to him for ideas on what to do.
Uncomfortable with the idea, the boyish Jedi, still young himself, played with his collar, then got on with it. "Um, okay. Well, most o' you know me. An if yer lookin fer somethin to do I can give ya ideas."
He turned to his display board, more comfortable now that instruments were involved. The screen lit up, bearing several corporate logos. "The Corporate Sector Authority, or CSA for short, has been my ideal place to hide. The Sith don't generally come here 'cause they're the Emperor's favorite toy, and the Empire gave this place autonomy. Course some sneak through as spies to keep an eye on the place, but that's rare as The Emperor's got normal spies enough to feel he's really got a handle on this area. So, things being as they are, he sends the Sith ta areas where he feels he need 'em."
Ranma visibly pulled himself together and swallowed his tangent, speaking more boldly instead of hiding behind his machines. The girls in the audience cooed as he resumed some of the confident poise that so attracted them.
"Ahem. The CSA and the corporations it represents are the backbone of Palpatine's New Order, and all his special projects run through the megacorporations. They need him to give them authority and he needs them for everything from building his navy to research projects and funding. Ukyo, Shampoo and a few others already work in some of those companies as auditors, able to look at all the data, forwarding it and some materials on to me. We could use dozens of you doing the same.
"Then there's the Auditor-General's office. The CSA spies on the Empire as much or more as the reverse is true, and the Auditor-General prepares that into a report to give the Direx Board, who runs the whole CSA. We need someone to 'help' the man, but in a position where they don't get caught. Because if we can just look through the CSA's spies, that will give us most of what we need to know about the Empire and its doings, and make dodging them a thousand times easier for us all.
"Then there's an idea Ucchan gave me, which is: We need someone in each of the main insurance companies. Valuable cargoes get insured as a matter of course. Insurance logs carry lists of those valuables, their protections, plotted courses, and all relevant details. The price of such info to a commerce raider is beyond measure, and with it we can strike exactly what we need with the least damage or risk to anyone. While we eventually hope to build most of what we need on our own, every credit of equipment stolen out of the Imperial war machine helps us twice: Once by diminishing what they build, and once for building things for us. In the same vein we'll need captains for the ships to be commerce raiders.
"Then there's training. Considering the personal risks we take just by being Jedi none of us should slack on that. Ucchan gave me our idea for that, and that is we've all tried to use our powers as little as possible to avoid attention from the Sith, but apart from knowing we're still alive the best they can do is get a limited sense of where we are, and that only if they're close enough. So we'll be equipping some Dreadnoughts as training vessels, and going to desolate systems far from our stomping grounds to do our training courses, then moving those spots. As we are doing now.
"Once we get the fleet up and going we can even start to lay ambushes. Sith travel in their private yachts most of the time, commandeering whatever Imperial resources are present when they feel they've found a Jedi. So what we do is lurk in the grav-well of a dirty star and let the Sith feel us. When they do they'll grab what's close and come, and if it's ships our cruisers can beat we pound them from ambush where the gravity well doesn't let them escape and let the Sith die of vacuum exposure just like far too many Jedi have done. If it's a group we can't beat, we slip quietly away without being noticed.
"Third main point is, we've got to start recruiting more Jedi. So if any of you know where others are hiding, now is the time to go get them and bring them back to safety and action. Also, our commerce raiders need to make a point of stopping dungeon ships and retaking those Jedi they've captured. We'll hide most of us outside the range of the Sith's senses in the new sectors we hope to create.
"Eventually, the Empire will respond to all these plans. So we need to be both aggressive and stealthy to get the most done for the longest time. What we'll probably have to do is pick a sector with an already shady Moff and do virtually all of our commerce raiding there. Then disappear once the sector government gets replaced, and hope what we got was enough to start our production on. In the long term the machinery to make things is worth a lot more to us than the things themselves, but don't turn up your nose at either. We'll want both."
Ranma stood, waiting for comments.
Cologne floated up beside him on a repulsor-pad. "Very well, if that is your plan, I will organize it."
See other episodes by Lionheart
(Posted Fri, 13 Jun 2003 03:16)
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