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That was a revolting and horrifying thought, and Harry felt his mouth set firmly. "All right, so are we going to take prisoners here, Master Fay? We might not be able to fight these ships as well as we could, but I think we still have this group outgunned."
"Not so much," Master Fay replied softly, her eyes not opening as she addressed the bridge. "There is another group coming in from behind us."
Taking this as given, Harry quickly shifted the ship around such that the two Lucrehulks had their engines facing one another so that neither had a blind spot which wasn't subsequently covered by its fellow. That surprised the attackers, but they soldiered on. This wing of the assault was another three dozen or so makeshift merchant vessels, with three squadrons of starfighters.
These were pure starfighters; none of them had proton torpedo or concussion missile launchers. But the gunboats in the first wing of the attack did have concussion missiles. They roared in with the starfighters from all around the two massive Lucrehulks, covering the starfighters and sometimes dying under the blaster bolts from the Lucrehulks, but landing heavy hits with their missiles on the shields.
Mak cursed, trying desperately to keep his voice down so that Master Fay couldn't hear as his fingers danced over the controls. This was the first time he had been in a space battle, and he was finding that even with his Force Precognition he simply couldn't predict the moves of the attacking ships. They were almost always somewhere where his fire wasn't. Kass was having a slightly better time of it.
Padme and her maids weren't having any better luck at first, but Mak's first move had bought them some time. The automated secondary weapons were now on full defensive fire mode, and many of the starfighters and even a few gunboats had died to their fire.
Next to Mak, Harry was busy with the shields, while beside Harry Aayla was trying to keep their ship and the Wookie's ship together. The Wookies, unmindful of tactics, had raced forward, trying to get to grips with the attackers. But the Lucrehulk just wasn't very quick, and without Aayla keeping their ship following the Wookies, they might have been surrounded. But the shields of the Lucrehulks were up to this fight so far, creating something like a stalemate.
"These ships don't have enough firepower to get through our shields at full power," said Harry, glancing over to where Master Fay was sitting in the captain's chair, her eyes closed and her hands folded in front of her. Then his Force senses tingled, and he looked back at the radar screen. "We have more incoming! They look like capital ship-sized proton torpedoes!"
Proton torpedoes were primarily weapons designed to take on capital ships and could come in a variety of sizes. They weren't as quick as concussion missiles, so weren't utilized very often against starfighters and were sort of overkill on most pirate vessels, hence why most gunboats didn't carry them. However, the two Lucrehulks had no fighters out, for the moment anyway. Judging from what little Harry could hear from the other side of the coms, the Wookies were trying to get at least a few of the Vultures still on their ship up and running.
"Lisher was correct," she said after a moment, as the ship rocked very slightly. "They are Trandoshans, all of them. This isn't even a pirate fleet; this is a privateer fleet."
Even as busy as he was, Harry understood the difference there, though he had to say, "That's nice Master, but I don't think what kind of fleet they are really matters."
"At the moment it doesn't overmuch, but the type of minds I am dealing with does. Trandoshans are just different enough from most sentients in terms of how they think that it will take me a little bit longer to effectively use my Force powers on them," Fay replied calmly.
That calmness reached out to the padawans and the Nabooans, even the Wookies as they raced onto the bridge, calming all of them down and letting the padawans once more find their center. Their defensive fire immediately got better. Kass and Mak knocked down several more incoming proton torpedoes, as well as several starfighters.
Harry nodded, glancing over at Aayla and reaching out once more telepathically. Should we try to use the "Falcon and the Eagle?"
"No, Harry!" Aayla said, not looking away from her controls. "There are too many gunboats out there, and they're too close. All of them can't have shot their magazines dry. I don't know if we'd be able to get out of the hangar bay without coming under fire, and we still haven't finished working on toughening their armor up enough!"
"I think that's going to be our priority going forward, love," Harry replied. "I'll convince my mom that a decent offense is the best defense at this point. We just can't fight with this ship like this, not against an even opponent. And if we can't bring in enough people to run the ship, we're toast."
"Not this time, Harry," she replied, even as Harry's fingers danced around the bottoms of the shield controls, using his Force Precognition to reroute power from one shield quadrant to another as it came under fire. More proton torpedoes hit, the energy flaring out over the shielding, but because of Harry's work they were not able to penetrate. The turbolasers under Mak's instruction lashed out, destroying several gunboats.
"What should be my priorities be here?" Master Fay asked the crowd of younger Jedi. She couldn't concentrate both on targeting individual minds out there and keep the entire battle in her mind; getting into the Trandoshan's strange psyches was too hard.
Just then the other Lucrehulk twisted slightly. The reason for this became apparent, however, when the massive hangar doors at the front of the ship opened, and over a hundred Vulture fighters were suddenly launched into space.
The effect on the battle was instantaneous. The attackers broke, the gunboats and starfighters putting themselves between the attacking Vultures and the retrofitted merchant ships and freighters.
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