Star Wars: Rise of the Battlemage - Chapter 185

The bridge was silent for a long time, all of us stunned at what we had just survived. Finally, after a long moment, Ahsoka reached out and took my hand in hers, pulling me against her for a long hug.

"That was... incredible, Deacon. I've seen worse strategies from trained generals," She admitted. "I know you couldn't feel it, but you really managed to get under his skin…"

I looked over at her as she talked, only to finally connect what I was really seeing to what it meant. Ahsoka was pale, shaky, and sweating, and as I reached out to wrap my arms around her for support, her legs partially gave out.

"Ahsoka! What's wrong?" I asked, looking over at the nearest droid and then at Vaz. "Get a medical droid up here! Now!" 

"I'm okay, Deacon, I'm okay," She assured me before Vaz could leave, as I dumped a few healing spells into her. "He tried to strangle you, in the end. I could feel him pulling on the Force, reaching out for you in his rage. I had to fight him off… even with him reaching across the distance… I almost failed."

I led her to a seat, the same one I had been sitting in, letting her down gently before kneeling beside her and taking her hand. 

"That's incredible, Ashoka," I said with a smile. "I had no idea that you could stop him like that. I was relying on Palpy wanting me alive. Thank you for saving me." 

She nodded with a weak smile before sinking into a meditative trance, which I could thankfully recognize at this point, or I would have assumed she had passed. I watched her for another few seconds before standing up and pointing toward a nearby BX. 

"You, keep watch over her," I ordered, the beskar armored droid stepping forward to stand by Ahsoka. "Which of you was Boxi's second in command?" 

One of the commando droids from behind me stepped forward, and I greeted them with a nod. We only had seven of their team left, though I had every intention of reforming the group completely. These BXs had solidified their position in the Skyforged until the day I died. Probably quite a bit beyond that as well. 

"Keep an escort with each of us and two on the slicers. They aren't allowed to touch any computer, console, droid, or anything that isn't food or water until we arrive at our destination," I ordered, turning to look the Rebels in the eye. "Don't try anything, or you'll spend the rest of the trip bound and stunned." 

The Duros simply nodded at my command, but the Quarren stood up angrily. 

"You are betraying your deal with the Rebellion?" he asked, his anger rising.

"No, I am not, despite having every right to do just that!" I shouted back, gesturing to the viewports along the front of the bridge. "Did you happen to catch all of that? That was a carefully planned ambush. Those Interdictors are rare and expensive, and yet Vader had three of them with him? They KNEW we would be coming here, and they knew we wouldn't have a fleet big enough to stand up to them. The ONLY REASON we are not floating space debris or sitting in cells at the tender mercies of Darth Vader is that whoever set that repair station and fleet up was greedy and a control freak. If their strange setup hadn't worked, if they had been a bit less greedy and the fleet was smaller…" 

"...W-what does that have to do with us?" The Quarren asked, having taken a step or two back as I shouted. 

Before he could respond, the Duros reached out and grabbed the Quarren's elbow. 

"Spies. Must have been spies," He said simply, shaking his head.

The Quarren's eyes went wide, and they sat down quickly, seemingly satisfied with my reasoning or perhaps too scared to push any further. Either way, I shook my head and walked away, retaking my place at the center of the bridge and standing in front of the oversized chair I had set Ahsoka down in. 

"What is our status?" I called out, a droid immediately perking up to answer.

"Shields at twenty percent and climbing," The droid reported. "Minimal damage to shields due to overloaded power systems."

"Do we have the parts and staff to fix that?" 

"We do, Admiral Deacon."

"Repair them unit by unit so that we don't lose any more functionality due to repairs," I ordered. "I'm not sure what is waiting for at the rendezvous point, but I want to be ready." 

"Yes, Admiral," The droid said, turning back to his console. Before I could peek over his shoulder to see how he was doing, another droid spoke up. 

"We have three hundred and sixteen Vulture Droids, eighty-seven Hyena Bomber Droids, and fifty-four tri-fighters docked in our hangar bay," they reported. "There are still miscellaneous other ships that lacked pilots and others that are in the ships holds."

The droid went on to start telling me where the starships in our hold came from, as we had taken on quite a few that had been stranded when I ordered their stationed ships to slam into the Executor. I cut him off when I realized what he was doing, instead asking my own question. 

"How many ships made the jump to lightspeed?" 

"We made the jump first, Sir, so we have no way of knowing," The droid responded.

"Then what ships seemed functional enough to make the jump?" I asked, shaking my head at the droid's response. "What ships still had shields?"

"The Dreadnought was down to ten percent when we jumped," A separate droid said, looking at a console beside the battle map. "The remaining Munificent was only lightly damaged. A single Diamond cruiser and several other ships were in similar circumstances. They may have jumped as well."

"How long until we reach the rendezvous sight?" I asked out loud to nobody in particular, quickly getting accustomed to the droids responding to me. 

"Eleven hours, fifteen minutes, Admiral."

"Good. I want everything ready for potential combat again," I explained, looking back out at the streaking stars outside the viewports. "Repair what you can, patch what you can't, and get everything ready for deployment. And someone find some food that is compatible with humans, Togruta and Shistavanen. Oh, and Quarren and Duros too." 

I let out a long breath as the droids began to move, sending out orders and doing their best to appear busy. I sat down in a seat near Ahsoka, my own legs feeling a bit weak. I had managed to pull so much bravado, spite, and out-of-the-box thinking that I could now feel my adrenaline rapidly fading, and I felt empty and hollow, tired beyond belief. Tatnia, who had been stun locked so much harder than I had, finally made her way to my side. 

"Boss…In case you were wondering, she was right. That was fucking incredible," she said, putting her hand on my shoulder. "I… I was completely frozen, and you… Damn, Deacon."

"I won't lie. Knowing the kind of things that I know made that much easier than it should have been," I explained. "But thank you."

"I must disagree," Vaz said, also stepping closer. "No amount of knowing things could have made that easier. I was certain we were about to die, it was only a question of how much damage we may do before they took us."

We sat there, mostly in silence, pulling strength from each other until a brunch of droids returned with some surprisingly high-quality shelf-stable rations. Ahsoka was still in her meditation, but all of us were too starved to wait for her to snap out of it. As we dug in, Tatnia brought up the subject I had put off in my brain for later. 

"What are you going to do about the Rebellion?" She asked, taking a sip of her drink and watching me closely. "The only people on our side who knew enough about this mission were just as much on the chopping block as us. So unless we managed to hire someone willing to lay their life down for the Empire…?"

"Which is a lot more common than you think," I pointed out. " Trust e when I say mind fuckery is Palps bread and butter." 

"Despite that, I believe Tatnia is correct, as you already know judging by your anger at the slicers," Vaz pointed out. "We did not know about this mission long enough to leak it properly. The Rebellion knew about it for weeks."

"Yeah, I know," I responded, shaking my head. "I mean, it's not surprising they have spies working against them. It's a big organization. My question is, why were we targeted specifically? Was that part of the deal or…?"

"You really think we were sold out on purpose?" Tatnia asked, her eyes widening slightly before narrowing dangerously.

"By the entire Rebel Alliance? No, of course not. But it's possible someone specifically did," I corrected. "And what happens when the Rebellion reaches that or whatever other conclusion is going to color how we interact from now on." 

"And if they react poorly?" Tatnia asked, looking at me closely.

"Then we stop giving them preferential treatment," I answered. "The bottom line is that they are too large of a chunk of our income to cut ties completely. But we would stop cutting them deals and start looking for other places to sell our loot. At the end of the day, it is going to take some rolling with the punches. For example, if we demand concessions due to the amount of danger we were put in, and they completely deny them? Then what?" 

I let the sentence hang, both Vaz and Tatnia wincing but still nodding in agreement. Internally, I was torn. I believed in the Rebellion, believed in the people and what they were trying to achieve. But working with them had been a constant struggle, first with Nevue and later with Draven. That wasn't to say every interaction had been an issue. General Syndulla had been nothing but helpful, and working with the rank and file had been fine. 

This, though, was too big to ignore. We had ridden a razor edge and only missed getting cut because of pure dumb luck. I clenched my fist to hide the tremor that ran up along my arm at the thought of what would have happened had we not had control over the fleet or if it had been a bit smaller.

"It's moot talking about it for now," I explained. "We will meet up with the Rebel fleet at the emergency rendezvous point, as well as the Chariot. Let's just… take some time to relax and unclench, right?" 

Vaz and Tatnia nodded, and together we finished eating, before both of them, still dressed in their armor, went to explore the ship, a pair of BXs going with them. Meanwhile, I walked around the bridge, watching the droids work. Eventually, I ordered them to calculate another hyperspace jump, this time out of the rendezvous location to a point in deep space a decent distance away. I was not about to get caught with my pants down again. 

Eventually, I sat down at the base of the chair, where Ahsoka was meditating, closing my eyes and resting. Once I stopped moving around and pacing, it didn't take long for the exhaustion from our escape to take over and put me to sleep. I woke up briefly when Ahsoka broke out of her meditation and slid down to sit beside me, putting her head on my shoulder, and both of us falling back to sleep again. 

Eventually, Tatnia and Vaz returned, having spent a few hours sleeping in some of the few organic crew quarters on the ship. They both gave us a light ribbing for just sleeping at the base of the chair, but we just shrugged it off. 

Or we did once I healed away our stiff backs and neck pain. 

"We need to decide if we are keeping the Lucrehulk," I reminded them as we all gathered around on the bridge. "It's fully crewed, has parts to repair itself significantly, and has a ton of resources on board. And it dwarfs the hell out of Omega Station and would make a good movable base of operations."

"It's a lot of ship, boss," Tatnia pointed out with a frown. "Even with it already being crewed. It's going to take a lot of fuel and put a huge drain on our cash." 

"Well, first off… if we keep it, I plan on selling our rights to Omega Station," I explained. "I'm no longer comfortable having the Rebellion looking over our shoulders, and getting off Omega Atation would stop that pretty immediately."

"That... would help," She admitted. "Is that all?" 

"Well… as far as I'm concerned, the for all of this, Rebellion is due short change compared to the Skyforged on this one," I explained. "I'm thinking I claim the Lucrehulk simply because we are the only reason we got anything out of this whole clusterfuck. Then, I could demand that they pay out my cut from the rest of the ships. Now I can't demand full price because I don't think they could handle that all at once and because, as much as it might irk me, their men did take part in the mission, and their slicers did crack the core. I think we could have probably done it ourselves, but we didn't."

"Do you plan on selling everything but the Lucrehulk?" Vaz asked. 

"No. I want the Dreadnought as well." 

"The Dreadnought, too?" Tatnia asked, rubbing her face. "You realize just the other day you declared that any ship we got that we wanted to keep would be mothballed until we could properly maintain it." 

"And with a fully robotic crew, we can," I pointed out. "Both ships are in good condition, and we can work on finding some old battlefields with parts if need be. If that doesn't work, and they start to run down or start to drain our resources too heavily, we can land them on Nirn's moon or put them in orbit."

"So you would sell the rest of the ships to pay for fuel and maintenance?" Vaz asked. 

"And some of what we have inside the hold," I added. "I have very little interest in B1s. They are not reliable enough in combat. That means we need a fraction of the transportation available on the ship. I would sell maybe seventy-five percent of the B1s, along with plenty of weapons and vehicles for them. We also have a bunch more C-9979s in storage that I couldn't send out to hit the Executor. If we clean up and sell everything we don't need, we could make a good chunk of money." 

"Assuming the Rebellion is willing to go along with this." Tatnia pointed out. 

"At this point, they don't have much choice," I explained. "They are lucky I'm giving them a chance to benefit from this cluster fuck at all." 

"I'm not sure they will see it that way." 

"And I don't particularly care," I responded, shaking my head. "Their bullshit nearly got us all killed, and we lost out on an incredible haul. I have every right to tell them to go pound sand."

I paused for a moment, letting out a long breath and rubbing my face before continuing. 

"If we do decide to keep this ship, I'm renaming it," I added after a pause. "Boxi's Fury."

All of them smiled at that, nodding in agreement that it was an excellent name to honor the droid.