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And they hated the idea that they had failed their people so badly as to let them be taken off to be slaves.
The sound was matched with an exuberant roar from the Wookie contingent, causing Dooku to smile a wintry sort of smile. Defending the slaves would not be an issue with this group, though his next statement would be rather hard to follow up on. Or it would be if not for Master Fay's unique gifts with telepathy. "We also want at least a few prisoners from among the installation technicians and workers. We Jedi will handle that part of the operation, however, along with our infantry force."
Master Dooku gestured to one side, and the leader of the Wookie contingent stood up from among his fellows. The fact that there were so many so-called leaders among such a small force made Harry wonder about how the Wookies decided such things. "These Wookies and their families and tribes have graciously agreed to join us in this endeavor. We will be leading them into the installation and the space fortress however we can, but I refuse to make plans of that nature this far removed."
Again that brought some nods of approval from the soldiers around them, and Dooku ended the meeting with, "We leave within the next hour. I suggest you all get some food or rest, and then head to your ships."
OOOOOOO
Quinlan and his force of starfighters came out of hyperspace, racing deeper into the targeted system as their scanners scanned the region before them. It was a small system as they had expected, dominated by a brown dwarf star as Master Fay had been able to sense through her force meditation. That woman's ability is uncanny. I wonder how many other Jedi could've discerned the amount of detail she was able to get with the Veil of the Dark Side pressing in on us as it is. That answer would be not many, Quinlan thought, feeling despondent for a moment.
Looking down at his sensors, he saw what he had expected to see, again thanks to Master Fay. At least one large space station orbited around a small planetoid, the only other solar body in the system. There weren't even asteroids, barring a few scattered rocks in the outskirts of the system, which they had already flown past. It was more of a moon than a planet really, with two large bio-domes on the surface directly abutting each other.
"Astromech droid, what can you tell me about that space station?" Quinlan asked.
The beeps and woops of the reply of course meant nothing to Quinlan, but one of the instruments in the cockpit was a translation device, which translated the astromech's noises into words on a screen. The gist of it was that the droid couldn't tell him anything about the space station, since it was not matching up to any known stations, though there were bits and pieces of it that did.
"Why am I not surprised?" Quinlan said, shaking his head. In the Outer and even in the Mid Rim, that kind of construction was all too common. It wasn't safe, and it would never be as nice, as clean, or as safe (which in Quinlan's opinion bore repeating, given space and all the myriad ways it could kill you) as a purpose built space station would be, but it would be cheap, which unfortunately was all too important to most star systems out here.
The astromech's continued beeping brought Quinlan out of his musings about economics and need versus safety. By this point the defenders of the system were aware of them and had already formed up their defenses in preparation. The numbers were coming in as he looked at his sensors. Ten Corvettes or, as Quinlan knew them to be, refitted small freighters; two frigates, again simply refitted medium-sized freighters; three squadrons of mixed starfighter types; and a dreadnought.
This last was a very unwelcome surprise. It was an old-style dreadnought, but it was the only made for military action ship in the system, and it didn't look as if it had been modified all that much. "Four heavy turbolasers, heavy shielding, sixteen quad lasers, four tractor beams," Quinlan mused. "That could be a challenge."
The opposing fleet had come out to meet the attackers even as the Jedi contingent's starfighters began to turn away, not making to jump out right away, which should have made the defenders think. It didn't. Instead the seeming sign that the attackers were leery of combat seemed to have lulled the defenders into a false sense of security. After all, they had three squadrons of mixed starfighters and thirteen capital ships against two squadrons of starfighters. They must've thought that their birthdays had come early.
Moments later, however, Quinlan felt the faint touch of Master Fay, controlling the gestalt between her and the other Jedi in the task force on his mind. A moment later he smiled grimly as an idea of how to take care of the dreadnought occurred to him. "All starfighter pilots connect your missile systems to mine. Five seconds from mark, instigate plan turnabout… Mark!"
With that Quinlan gunned his starfighter's engines, streaking forward faster than his fellows, who had noticeably slowed their headlong charge into the system as their sensors picked up the defenders ,as if they were now second-guessing themselves, unsure what to do.
It was a little known fact that proton and concussion missiles had about half again the controlled flight range of a starfighter's lock-on systems. You could also connect various starfighter computer systems together into a limited datanet. For short amounts of time anyway. After all, a datanet like that wouldn't help starfighters while they were in dogfights where individual skill and dexterity as well as training with your partners mattered far more than whether your computers were speaking together correctly and keeping track of everything. But at range, that was a different story.
Turbolaser and quad-laser blasts began to pepper space all around Quinlan as his starfighter ducked and dodged with his Force-given preternatural reflexes, zooming forward as the two squadrons with him broke, streaking away and to the sides of the incoming defenders.
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