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[Ashin Varanin]

The Pellaeon-class Star Destroyer had gone through more incarnations than just about anything. Even discounting the Mark One, which had first seen service seven hundred years ago, Pellaeon variants and refits added up to a considerable sum. One of the shipwrights that answered to the Empire of the Hand had told her that there was no such thing as a stock Pellaeon II. Waves of modifications and upgrades had kept the ship competitive for longer than expected, but in the process, some things had gotten lost.

The Pellaeon currently floating before her Star Destroyer's viewport was an early variant of the Mark Two. She'd left her Hammer-B LACs at home, replaced them with Warthog shipyard assistance vessels; a long Reclaimer space train floated nearby.

She'd already given the order. The Warthogs looped toward the drifting Pellaeon hulk, and she settled into her throne to watch the surgery.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

Three task forces, each comprised of three Eshan Drive Yards/MandalMotors Warthog shipyard support vessels, engaged with three separate aspects of the Pellaeon.

The first, and most pressing, also involved the most thorough deconstruction of the ship. Components had to be gleaned from every part of the Pellaeon. The Reclaimer helped with that, its third-to-last module disgorging spacetrooper construction crews and experienced salvagers. The Pellaeon II-class boasted a unique and often disadvantageous overdrive system, one that Velok, of all people, had put to good use at the battle of Roche. The system permitted many things, not least of which was that it permitted stupid commanders to get themselves killed. This particular hulk, in fact, had taken the brunt of a Republic offensive because of improper overdrive bank use.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

In many ways, the overdrive system's peripheral elements comprised components that they could get anywhere, for the right amount of money and with the right connections. They took it anyway, as much as was salvageable. The core bank was the crucial subsystem, and all other priorities bent to that, even in regards to the other two task forces. The hull itself bent away layer by layer under the influence of tractor beams and Koensayr KUT-42 'Stark' plasma torches. Over the course of four hours -- Ashin watched it all from the thronelike Admiral's chair on the bridge -- the task force made a passage from the massive overdrive bank to the outer edge of the derelict. The component floated free in a cloud of small transports, each carrying a portion of the peripheral components to the Warthogs and the Reclaimer. The overdrive bank found a place in the train.

Ashin Force shielded furiously, because multitasking.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

The second phase overlapped with the first -- the cannibalization of the anti-ion armor. No such thing could provide ideal protection, not even the modern version, and this armor was two technological generations old. But even so, it had been specced for a ship three times the size of her Xo'Xaan-class, and these ships had stood up against serious ion fire at Roche. Planetary grade.

The crews worked around the component egress routes -- a glorified name for 'very large ragged holes in an otherwise perforated derelict' -- to strip the anti-ion armor from the spaceframe. Plate after plate sloughed off the hull under the spacetroopers' tender ministrations. The three Warthogs conveyed them to the Reclaimer train.

Ashin watched while juggling little Force shields, because that was something she did.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

The hulk offered enough intact ion-damper plating to cover the much smaller XoXaan-class. It reminded her favorably of the early days of the Fringe, or her far earlier times in the Unknown Regions -- times when you had to scavenge, count your assets. Those were the memories she loved most, at least in regards to her career. Times when it was still possible that she could fail.

The Empire of the Hand had potential, serious potential, but what it lacked was operating capital. Frankly, this old hulk could be a valuable addition, even after she stripped out what she wanted from it. At the very least, hypertugs would come by later to tow the derelict, piece by piece, into Hand territory. But people of every stripe loved symbols, and symbolism beat one more old ship, every time.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

The third phase involved the Pellaeon II's recycling system. It wasn't so much that she wanted one like it on her new ship, the Grave Wind. She had no real need for a molecular furnace on her command ship.

Yet.

She'd never gone wrong stashing unique components and assets in out-of-the-way places, keeping gamepieces available long after others thought they'd outlived their usefulness -- being the pack rat of supervillains. And she could readily admit that a molecular furnace, even orders of magnitude smaller than the core unit of a World Devastator, was ineffably useful. So the Pellaeon's recycling system got checked out and cut out and shipped out to the territory of the Empire of the Hand, while Ashin practiced surrounding her hands, her face, her gut with translucent aural sheets of Force protection.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

Ion armor, overdrive bank, molecular furnace -- each, in its way, important or valuable as an acquisition. Each rare enough that she'd come this far into the territory of other Imperial splinter factions to find what she needed, using sources they could never have duplicated. But the main issue was the ship itself.

A XoXaan was crew-intensive to a high degree. At a third the volume of the Pellaeon, it boasted comparable maximum and minimum crew numbers -- truly a marvel of Sienar engineering. That was not, all things considered, either realistic or desirable for a ship into which she intended to cram these new components, without appreciable loss of guns or gun function.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

The Grave Wind was not this ship. Under the aegis of the Empire of the Hand, it sat in another shipyard, in pieces. An experiment, ambitious and likely flawed, aimed to reduce the Grave Wind's crew count to something manageable while freeing up space for the new components. She had access to the Lwhekk shipyards in Fringe territory, the largest yards in the Unknown Regions by far. They always had room for a ship of hers. They were no SFS or KDY, true, but she trusted their work. Iron Crown delivered.

She'd pondered, more than once, the possible privatization of Iron Crown, or the chance to open it up to public sales. Iron Crown's tech backlog eclipsed most companies' rosters. The loss in security could prove fatal, but the profits -- the profits could be astronomical.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

Tugs, transports, and salvage ships began to arrive, reverting from hyperspace a couple of kilometres away. They converged on the old Pellaeon as Ashin's Warthogs disengaged. The Reclaimer space train began its forty-acre turn, each car-component loaded to the gills with sheets of ion plating, overdrive bank elements, and the Pellaeon's overkill recycling system. The XoXaan Sword of Empire watched over it all like a Danger Arceneau-scale mother hen, confident in her assets (a XoXaan, much like Arceneau herself, just brought so much more to the table than comparable ships).

In due course, the flotilla broke away from the derelict. The Warthogs returned to the fold -- the hangar bay of the Sword of Empire. They'd taken the place of dropships, or, in Ashin's case, the Hammer-B LACs she'd ordered built from dropship spaceframes.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

The next step would be the reclamation of a generator, a very specific generator. The Fringe Confederation owned the Roche generator; she couldn't get that. But she could make use of some recent connections to sort through a decommissioning yard, quietly. A yard that held retired starships and the derelicts of past battles.

She did not take the Sword of Empire, or any other Hand- or Fringe-affiliated starship. Instead, she went on an S90 MAAT, preceded by a raft of connection-makers and gladhanders, and accompanied by fully licensed salvage experts. She did not go under her own name. At all.

She did, however, see some element of necessity in showing up, to supervise in person. Permits forbade her or her people to take weapons, but if they wanted to go to the trouble of extracting less directly harmful components, that could happen.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

Without its guns, a Watts-class was nothing special, and its guns had been ripped off after a Dark Blade's hypervelocity gun cored its bridge. The guns had gone to better ships, less fragile ships that might -- just might -- help the Republic get out of Dodge (Dodge being the embattled Core Worlds). Frankly, the Republic was in a shambles, and that meant opportunity. It meant the kind of opportunity that made just about everyone happy.

Her salvage crews laid into half a dozen ships, two of them dead, decommissioned, weaponless Watts-class vessels. She had no intention of trying to steal them; that would attract far too much attention. The Watts-class, however, boasted a unique kind of solar ionization reactor, developed in concert with the Valen campaign. Difficult, perhaps lethal to remove -- for Republic salvage crews. But Ashin and her people had acquired the Roche reactor, worked closely with the Black Hex reactors -- they knew how to deal with highly volatile power sources. They'd practically written the book on it.

Slowly but inexorably, the two derelict Watts-class vessels began to peel apart.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

A ship of this scale required a large reactor, so large as to be nearly inextricable, so large as to be the foundation of the entire vessel. One had to build the ship around the reactor. To extricate it, then, required much the same process as she and her people had used to remove the overdrive bank and the molecular furnace from the Pellaeon elsewhere. Precise incisions and careful use of small-scale tractor beams very, very slowly peeled back the cruisers' hulls layer by layer. Each Watts-class began to resemble a flower unfolding; six-way symmetry lent itself well to the stresses and crystalline matrices of durasteel. The complex flurry of small craft required a full management/scheduling crew, which was currently packed into the S90 MAAT -- a ship large enough to field a small army, a very small army, alone.

The solar ionization reactors, once extricated, resembled nothing so much as pincushions -- chubby torii with assorted protrusions, mainly control modules, broken connections and structural elements. They spun gently towards clear space, guided by very precise tractor beams from a double handful of smaller ships.

She watched from the MAAT's cockpit, practicing surrounding herself with a defensive aura -- Force Protection, her specialty -- without damaging the seat beneath her or the controls around her.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

The Grave Wind would be a tank capable of facing a One Sith-produced Dark Blade-class one on one. Highly durable, it would boast two reactors taken from decommissioned, destroyed Watts-class heavy cruisers and augmented with the Roche reactor technology that made the Starfall so insane. Its weapons loadout would be comparable to a Watts and somewhat less than a Dark Blade, both ships of comparable size. Its superstructure was being lengthened and its bridge tower largely removed; the shield generators would be recessed and turadium-plated, and the bridge itself located in the heart of the ship. Though solid and durable, the Grave Wind would be capable of odd maneuvers in certain circumstances, if the overdrive banks and Mandal Hypernautics components would be used properly and with foresight. One poor order on the commander's part could destroy the ship.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

Putting a ship together, altering a XoXaan-class Star Destroyer from the bones out, took a long, long time, even with shipyards as comprehensive as those that Lwhekk offered. These projects couldn't be put together on a whim, drafted in a day, accomplished in a week of review. That would just be unrealistic, and wouldn't fit the pacing of generations in starship technology. It wasn't as if multiple generations could be accomplished in a handful of years. That would just make no sense whatsoever.

So she worked on this particular project for a good while. Frankly, she'd set the wheels in motion a good while ago, left it to take its course during her hiatus on Korriban -- and now that she was Empress of the Hand, she could pick it up again. Long-term investment, more or less.

That totally made sense.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

When the ship came together -- a beautiful little Star Destroyer, heavy cruiser scale bordering on light ship o' the line -- bridge tower compressed down into the hull and repurposed -- bridge nestled in turadium shells, in the core of the spaceframe -- Ashin pronounced herself well pleased. It had wound up more like a pocket Chimaera than she'd intended when she'd begun, a Chimaera crossed with a pocket Chrysalide, and there really was nothing wrong with that if she used it right. The main issue, if issue it could be called, was the combination of Pellaeon Mark Two overdrive technology with three separate and specific components from Mandal Hypernautics. If she used them in the wrong direction, the wrong order, under the wrong influence, she would tear the ship apart and liquefy herself. If she used them right...well, who could know what might be possible in any given situation.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

All things considered, the ship might wind up absolutely useless at short range. Flanked, outmaneuvered, surrounded. She had a taste for short-range combat, but she'd built this one to match the tactics she'd employed at Serpena and Morellia. With a few Hood-class cruisers as escort, assuming she could get her hands on them in one way or another -- Fringe leadership/procurement ambiguity being what it was -- she could put her taste for sniper rifles to good use in an astrophysical sense.

Boring as it could be watching this ship come together, she very much felt sustained by the desire to give the ship a try. She very much wanted to go take a swing at the -- well, that would be telling.

So she sat on the bridge, under construction, and surrounded herself in a faint aura of green. It was entirely possible that she might be able to instil the ship with her own emphasis on stolid defense. It was also entirely possible she was trying to multitask to make this long process that much more interesting. It was also entirely possible that she was double-dipping.