[member="Travis Caalgen"]
Naboo, oh so many times in the last two decades, had come under attack from forces large and small, audacious and cowardly. The Relinquishor represented a significant threat, true -- but in many ways a foreseen one. Many years ago, His Majesty's Office had tasked Theed Palace Space Vessel Engineering Corps with evaluating options for the system's defense, and Theed Hangar had delivered in full. The station's bulk proved advantageous to the defenders: long before it reached Naboo, non-mass hyperwave transceivers with cross-channel hyperspatial radiation emission/detection functionality had noted its passage and speed. Immense silhouette, approximate Class Four rating: battlemoon or command ship. The Class Four hyperdrive rating also meant it took four times as long to get anywhere as a military-grade hyperdrive, giving Naboo plenty of time to scramble its long-prepared defenses. Due to the scale of the threat, extreme and well-drilled measures were authorized under the command of Assistant Director Amari Shambleau.
The operation received the code word PEPPERSPRAY.
The last bit of the Imperial Remnant's route was known: the hyperroutes in this area were few, well-travelled, well-mapped, and pretty much unavoidable. It wasn't hard to extrapolate the specific vector that they took coming into the Naboo system. At that point, S-3 scout fighters from Theed Hangar patrol flotillas deployed
TRUL and
INCIS probes at two specific points along that vector.
Time mark: 00.00.00
Point Aurek was one hundred astronomical units outsystem, and around it, a cloud of TRUL probes engaged their unique low-power gravimetric fields into a single contiguous region of subtle distortion. When the Remnant vessels passed through it, nothing happened...except that their courses were adjusted infinitesimally, decant points thrown off by a few dozen or hundred metres.
Time mark: 00.00.01
Point Besh was just outside extreme capital weapons range of Naboo high orbit. Two solid convex walls of INCIS tactical interdiction probes, dozens of them, created overlapping gravity wells to snare the Imperial fleet and battlestation out of hyperspace well in advance of their intended decant points.
Courtesy of Points Aurek and Besh, when the Imperial ships dropped out of hyperspace, they would do so roughly, early (at Point Besh), and out of position relative to each other. Collisions might result, or surprise, or really whatever. The confusion wasn't the main idea. The main idea was to use specifically tactical interdiction to keep the assault force from getting any closer to the planet.
Time mark: 00.00.03
And then, about a heartbeat later, before the tiny, nimble Point Besh INCIS probes could get targeted by the fleet's starfighters,
a single Naboo ship exited hyperspace right up against the back of the interdiction field. It was a precise and risky maneuver, but Theed Hangar had been training in Naboo-system microjumps for the better part of a decade. Interdiction fields could only help.
On the bridge of the cruiser RNS
Ferryman, AD Amari Shambleau tightened her fingers on the arms of her chrome command chair. The tiny tactical interdiction fields had brought the heavily shielded, lightly armed
Ferryman out of hyperspace about three hundred metres behind the obscene bulk of the battle station.
Time mark: 00.00.05
Four Imperial Star Destroyers hit Point Besh and forcibly exited hyperspace just behind the station, more or less around the Ferryman but a couple of kilometres away. They wouldn't be caught in the
Ferryman's upcoming effect; pity. They'd just be facing down the Naboo fleet, which outpaced them for meterage by a factor of roughly three -- plus the massive defensive stations that Naboo had purchased from ArmaTech.
"Engage," Shambleau rasped. On one of the monitors, the nearest convex wall of Point Besh INCIS probes deactivated, and the viewscreen grayed out.
Time mark: 00.00.10
Approximately nine seconds after exiting hyperspace, the battlestation and the
Ferryman vanished utterly, loosely wrapped in the deactivated half of Point Besh's haze of INCIS probes. That was what the two fleets - Naboo and Imperial - would detect: not a hyperjump, not a cloaking field...disappearance, and some utterly bizarre sensor readings. What a pity the Empire didn't have much respect for scanning.
From Shambleau's perspective, she was still staring at the massive station, which could now attempt to swat the
Ferryman like a fly. It would have to do so alone, however, because what surrounded them wasn't space, nor hyperspace. Instead it was a matte gray void, dotted with dark spots. A few kilometres away, a small
Laureate-class science ship was broadcasting something indecipherable on an odd frequency.
Time mark: 00.00.12
The haze of INCIS probes began interdicting again. Trapping both the battlestation and RNS
Ferryman, tail to nose, in Otherspace.
So far, Naboo forces had yet to fire a shot.
