Star Wars Roleplay: Chaos

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Public Playing Ball with a Blackwall

The Blackwall. That extra protection the Sith Empire had. It was a problem. Not for her in the way it was for her father, well not entirely. The Sith Empire didn't matter much to her. They were Sith, sure, and they ran counter to her life as a child of a Jedi Master. And the sister of one who never claimed his rank in the Jedi, but acted just like one.

No. It was a problem for her as a Warden of the Sky. People were in both sides. And not all of them were supportive of the Sith Empire. But what made it worse? It was a blight on the freeness of hyperspace.

With a recent addition to her ships permissions, Kaia was not qualified to seek out bounties. Not in the way of the Judges of the Outer Rim, or the Mandalorians of today and of legend, but one who was able to help break through hyperspace issues and find planets people were looking for.

A navigation bounty really.

And that was why the Wandering Star was reverting to Real Space where it was. The boundary of the Blackwall. Near the Chommel Sector. Bound for Sullust. A world that held history for her family.

"Here goes…" she whispers to her droid as she deployed some probes.
 
The Sith will be hunted everywhere, not only within our borders.

Everywhere was really big, encompassing a very large Blackwall-ed area among others, but the Diarches had decreed and what the Diarches decreed they generally got. So to that end, Merion Oreno found himself in command of an old Naboo Jamillia-class cruiser, a strategic awareness and mapping vessel, poking around deep space near Omwat and Chryya. From here, Sullust's system primary was a bright star tinted slightly to the yellow. Extremely dangerous territory, many roving Sith patrols and raids. Grandmother had adjusted and attenuated her lines of communication once the anti-Sith decree went out, but she'd mentioned some competitive annihilation ritual called a Velgrath that sounded too complicated to spare much interest, but did add to the region's hazards. Bad place to be running around with a few hundred colleagues from the Chancellorate of Commerce in a ship with limited combat capability.

Right just now he could get used to this boat, show its age though it did. Even leaving the towed array undeployed to allow for a quick escape jump aligned to Chryya, he was overseeing a fifty-parsec sphere of old SUREC probes from the most comfortable command chair of his career. So all that hazard, anything within that sphere, he saw every bit and piece in range.

And more, there was someone else scanning. They'd see his SURECs by now. They looked to be using more modern gear but nothing that screamed Sith or triggered Merion's Isopteran sense of impending disaster.

Kaia Starchaser Kaia Starchaser
 
Damn her brother for getting her into the classics. The music, synthetized covers of old songs. As always when she was scanning local systems down, she got Ally to play some music. And today? A cover of an ancient song came on, and she started humming along. The StarMapper allowed her to control the probes fairly well, but with the Blackwall? Well, it was time to see what it could do. And with Starchaser Tech, there was always the chance of it exploding for doing too many different things.

Luckily the StarMapper was pretty lax.

What she didn’t expect to see, and it was clear in the way she half-shouted “Niamos!” before her voice trailed.

That was old tech.

Very old tech.

“Drifter, scan for ship signatures?”


And where did that one probe go. She played at the controls, and a handful were gone.

What was this Blackwall?

Merion Oreno Merion Oreno
 
The old ship's sphere of awareness shifted in the holofield. Merion got up from the command chair and circled around to peer at the holo from different angles. It contained not just the general sphere of awareness from the ship's active scanners, but the data from scout fighters and SUREC probe droids. In their day, forty or fifty years back, they'd been revolutionary — autonomous tiny vessels with Class Two hyperspace capabilities. The ships and SURECs were two tech generations old, obsolete these days across multiple axes, but their sensors had been elite back then and were still serviceable now, trustworthy against anything but modern stealth tech. The high-resolution strategic holotank gave him a reliable list of confirmed and probable contacts.

That list was shifting. Not in clear ways, but shifting nonetheless. The number of someone's probes out there — the tentative ID was the Starchaser Enterprises StarHunt model, even older than the SURECs but ultra-reliable and ubiquitous — was declining. Either someone was shifting their deployment in an attempt to scan down, say, Merion, or refugees, or Sith...or something was killing probes.

On cue, one of Merion's scout fighters disappeared from the screens seven parsecs out. Conflicting potential orders ran through his mind, but thinking about his own instinctive navigation abilities, he opted to assume at least some Sith had them too, or sensors as good as his own.

He'd aligned the cruiser and got it moving at a good clip to mitigate such risks, but that wouldn't be enough. He felt very sure of it in an Isopteran sense. Out here nerves weren't something to fight, they were instincts born of experience.

"Stutter-jump on my mark," he said, trying to keep his voice calm inside the mask. "Along our set vector, but only a light-year. All scout fighters to rendezvous with each other at a point one light-year farther along that vector."

"Probe loss, sir."

That came up as a little marker not far from the dead scout fighter or the disappearance of the unknown probe. Yep. Something out there with real stealth was killing things.

Kaia Starchaser Kaia Starchaser
 

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