"Pull us in front of him. He'll not risk a jump if he has to fly out through us."
At the loss of the first two ISDs Imperial fleet resistance had folded. You didn't land a depot spot if you had alot of courage. Without the arrival of Imperial E (Masticulator) they would've given up the fight right then. Corruption had fought on, but when they got its shields down and it looked like it was in danger their captain rolled over and played dead for them just like a puppy. Then the Gungans took out the new arrival. Imperial D was still putting up a weak fight trying to get out of there, but odds were now heavy in the Rebels' favor.
A flight of boarding shuttles flew in ragged gaps in the Imperial D's shields, getting hold in craters of the damaged hull. The droids would be all over them in moments. This battle was over.
As the guards to a transshipment facility, the Imperials were well stocked on alot of things. But since planetary assaults were not high on their list of possibilities as rear echelon forces, stormtroopers were in short supply, less than a tenth of what would normally be deployed.
Even clones had some limits on available supply, and the Emperor deployed them where he felt they were most needed. Supply depots were not high on that list. He needed them for planetary occupations, not watching vid chips waiting for some chance to do a customs inspection. A few hundred were enough and to spare for that kind of duty. If stormtroopers were going to be hanging around bored, the Emperor at least wanted them out in the public eye where they could impress people.
That view had cost him this supply depot.
The stations hadn't surrendered yet, but he had the force to take 'em. The cargo transports had learned this too late to flee, and were now suffering their 'last defender', Mancuso's own Dreadnought, to negotiate their surrender.
Trapped between the supply stations and the planet, they were caught deep in a gravity well and could not escape to hyperspace without several minutes accelerating out through the cruisers' convenient arcs of fire. Container ships took minutes accelerating up to speed. Having neither plentiful armor nor shields, and with cargo captains not generally the type to charge an enemy's guns, they were allowing themselves to be cowed. Especially when the TIEs added their weight to the argument to do what the Dreadnought said and their own craft were caught in between two potent, hostile forces.
The cargo captains had never wanted to be herded to the gravity well and trapped. But thus we see the weakness of an autocratic system. When the government swats anybody who hesitates to obey their orders, using an iron fist, people become very compliant, lest they be swatted, and do even intensely stupid things quickly and without objection, in the most extreme cases.
"Alright, everybody, let's get deploying droids. We've got stations and factories to take. Let's hop to it! And somebody get two of our cruisers to start pounding that defense platform! They'll scare better once we can prove they've not got any more defense at all!"
The platform, armed to deal only with light raids and smugglers, didn't mount the firepower of a single cruiser. It's resistance faded rapidly. Especially when Mancuso offered generous terms for surrender.
===========
Shampoo's strike team had landed on the depot station ahead of the droid assault forces by only a few minutes. She had a choice between taking a shield control node and opening the fields to allow her droids in unopposed, or stealing the march on the Dungeon ship huddled inside of the bay.
She opened the shields. Time was of the essence and her husband needed these stores of supplies.
The Dungeon ship lifted off trying to get away. Shampoo's face was stern as she watched it float out the dock, then dissolved in bouncing laughter when she saw it got ionized halfway out of the massive doors.
She'd saved the lives of friendly Jedi AND got the supplies for her husband! She was filled with laughter, unable to stop bouncing, dancing, hugging and gloating for minutes afterward.
===========
The last reluctant resistance failed when a science pod located in the inward core of their system at last got past their distraction with its report of the fatal news - their star was going nova.
The stations were boarded quickly, factories and all others, including the now-quiescent defense platform. Aboard the defense station the Gungans found records of the cure they were seeking stored at another facility elsewhere, and with hurried apologies set off for that immediately.
Two Flamberge ships went with them as a favor.
Amidala watched them go, heavy in heart, and with many messages traded between them before they went. She held in her hands the arcing, gemlike computer core she had presented to the Gungans as Queen of Naboo. It was now returned, full of all their records on technology and other data in case their cause should be lost.
None of the captured ISDs had much damage to drives, that stations and the cargo ships were all hyperspace capable. So they could all escape on their own.
Mancuso's Dreadnought stripped itself down to skeleton crew levels in order to provide officers and crew to command their captures, but there was too little time to replace all who'd worked there and so they settled for just having droids guard the real crews while moving their senior officers into captured prison ships (for the bad ones), or just empty cargo bays for the rest.
They got out of there barely ahead of the explosion.
Another fleet dropped out of hyperspace, pulled out by the extreme gravity wave of the nova, just an hour later. It was a couple of Imperial SDs, a host of cargo and rescue ships, all prepared to come snatch their brethren out of the grasp of the fires, come just a bit too late to do any good.
It turns out the hyperspace message pod was on its original programming when a frantic depot officer ordered it launched. It took the other end hours just gathering together a fleet meant to the signal of oncoming nova, and more than that to organize rescue materials, assuming that one or more of the stations had developed a flaw with their emergency hyperdrive.
The nova touched off in time to disguise the Rebels tracks and convince the rescue fleet that the initial gravity waves of the nova had caught the entire station by surprise, and by the time they'd gotten the old hyperdrives running the gravity was too intense to make a jump.
The Rebels fought with prisoner revolts all the way home on all the ships but one, but they made it undiscovered.
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(Posted Sun, 25 Apr 2004 19:29)
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