Star Wars - Ripples of the Void Chapter 5: Droids and Drones (Patreon)

Chapter 5: Droids and Drones

‘So far, so good,’ I thought to myself as I signed my name onto another digital document.

Well, to be brutally honest… things weren’t exactly ‘good’ in the CIS right now. Oh, we were doing a lot better compared to before, but the decapitation strike and loss of several important army and naval groups was something we still had yet to recover from.

We were improving, though. Many a traitorous general or admiral had been brought to heel, and a handful of planets who had broken away came crawling back when it was clear the Confederacy wasn’t going anywhere.

‘The main issue is that this is just a temporary reprieve,’ I thought to myself with a grimace.

The numbers didn’t lie: we had been critically weakened along several important fronts, and if we didn’t shore them up soon, then the Empire could strike deep into the heart of our defenses.

Only the fact that the former GAR was busy with its own internal issues kept them from attacking us right away.

‘Though with their new ‘Emperor’ in charge, it won’t be long before they launch more strikes at our undefended borders,’ I mused.

I hoped that Tarkin would take a few months to rest and recover. It wasn’t like the former Republic’s forces were unscathed after three years of brutal warfare and incompetent mismanagement.

Both of us needed time. Sadly, I knew Tarkin, both from meta-knowledge but also due to having faced him in battle a few times. The man who’d have been a Grand Moff in a different timeline and commanded the first Death Star was a brilliant military leader with a tactical mind, but he was impatient, quick to strike when he thought he saw weakness.

More than once, I had baited him by creating deliberate weaknesses in my combat lines, and ordered my droid forces to act in a certain way to taunt Tarkin and force a confrontation on my terms.

He’d wised up after the first two times I’d driven off his forces this way, but he never really managed to get over it. Tarkin’s greatest sin and weakness was his hubris, and right now, he’d named himself Emperor after what was essentially a military coup, just with a different name slapped onto it.

‘He won’t stand for the CIS’s continued existence. He also needs to show he’s doing something to the people who put him into power. Within the next five months I can expect an attack. And to that end, I need to start moving assets around.’

To that end, I pulled up some military requisition forms as well drafted some new orders for a handful of commanders.

I was going to reinforce the four most likely systems he’d attack – as well as several rear-line systems that could act as rapid response units. Putting troops and ships in those four systems would tempt Tarkin to attack them once he found out, and that was where I wanted him to go.

Once he’d made his opening move, I’d be able to rapidly send in the military assets I’d stationed behind in the rear-line systems as reinforcements. A simple plan, but one that would work.

And, in the event Tarkin didn’t take the bait? Then the four reinforced border worlds could act as springboards into the nearby imperial systems, which would force Tarkin to dedicate more troops to defending them, and thus pull resources away from the invasion of Confederate worlds.

‘A game of cat and mouse – or tookas and womprats – is about to begin,’ I mused.

To that end, I drafted an order to have a dozen Lucrehulk Battleships moved to the four forward systems to act as a bulwark. Three in each would make for a good starting point, and allow the systems to build up their defenses quickly.

Lucrehulk Battleships were large and powerful, but in my mind, better served as semi-mobile orbital stations meant for defending planets rather than acting as a battleship in a highly mobile task force. They were covered in weapons, but they were not designed for all out space combat.

They were also slow, meaning the rest of the fleet had to slow down to allow the lumbering behemoths to catch up, and guzzled spare parts, fuel and ammo like nobody’s business.

Still, despite all of that, Lucrehulks did have some good points. Like I mentioned, they worked great for defensive battles and were decked out in massive weapon arrays. They were also excellent invasion platforms, capable of holding entire armies within their cargo holds.

They could also be converted into factory ships with just a few modifications and tweaks, allowing them to build their own droids and weaponry, as well as pre-fab structures, allowing repairs to be done to damaged forces.

Plop a Lucrehulk over a planet or near an asteroid belt, and it could unleash hordes of mining equipment to strip it bare of resources if you wanted to deny the enemy access to them. Then, using those materials, build thousands of new droids, tanks, aerospace fighters, and so much more to reinforce the local area. That was my goal: to use the Lucrehulks as a lynchpin for the local defenses.

‘Plus, if I offer the captains of the Lucrehulks the chance to sell their services to the locals after meeting a certain quota of defensive build-up, I can help improve the planets infrastructure.’

Too many worlds in the CIS were rural and had limited technology and infrastructure and needed many decades, if not centuries, to bring them up to even Mid Rim standards. By allowing them to buy and use CIS technology, I could hopefully jump start this process. Plus, it would please the Trade Federation and Capitalist faction.

‘And speaking of military reinforcements, I need to place another order for some Droidekas and Scorpeneks,’ I thought. ‘If I can get some now, I can have them deployed with the Lucrehulks to help slow down the Empire when they inevitably arrive.’

I was personally a big fan of the Destroyer Droids (nicknamed Droidekas) and Scorpenek Annihilator Droids. The former were fast moving (when rolled up into a ball) combat druids with duel, rapid-firing blasters and powerful personal shields that could deflect and absorb considerable abuse. When fully unfurled, they were a little under six feet tall.

The latter were larger cousins of the Droidekas, standing eleven and a half feet tall with four insectoid like limbs and armed with two dual, rapid-firing laser cannons, as well as a larger version of the shields used by the smaller Droidekas.

The Annihilator Droids were only deployed late in the Clone War, but a single one had been able to wipe out three whole platoons of clone troopers. Mostly thanks to ambush tactics and a lack of familiarity with them, but still, they were vicious.

They could be used as counters to large groups of infantry, but also more than capable of taking down armored units and even acting as a mobile anti-air battery thanks to the way its cannons were positioned. They weren’t fast, as they could not coil up and roll, but they were still deadly weapons and excellent tools of war.

‘The only problems are that their shields are lethal to organics so normal people can’t use them to defend themselves,’ I thought to myself. ‘And their droid brain is located behind their big red ‘eye’, so a sniper or well-placed rocket can instantly one-shot an Annihilator and take it out of the fight. Plus, they are expensive to build and maintain.’

But the real reason there was a problem with these droids was because the only ones who could make them were the Colicoids. I did not like the Colicoids. They were carnivorous insectoids that looked a lot like the Droidekas that they had manufactured.

Now, being pure meat eaters isn’t a bad thing. Plenty of species were obligate carnivores. The issue was that the Colicoids were cannibals, more than willing to devour their own kin as well as any aliens – sapient or otherwise – they came across.

Technically, the Colicoids and their world, Colla IV, were part of the Confederacy. But, in practice, they were xenophobic and isolationist, and only traded with other species to acquire resources. Namely, meat. Alive, dead, sophont or not, didn’t matter to them. Which made dealing with them… distasteful, to say the least.

‘But I need them on my good side if I want to be able to acquire the rights to manufacture their droids,’ I thought bitterly.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t likely to happen any time soon. The Colicoids knew the CIS needed their droids and assorted armaments as well as their manufacturing prowess, and were happily to sell their products to us, but letting us build our own versions? No way. It was their main source of leverage over us.

‘And that means I have to talk to them,’ I thought, more than a little grumpy about it.

Even so, I sent a message to the Colicoid Congressman so he could inform the Hive-Queens about my trade offer, and then went back to work signing and filing.

So much work ended up on my desk. Though I’d thankfully reduced the amount of it by delegating most of it to my secretaries. If not for them sorting through and removing the stuff I didn’t need to bother with, I’d have three times as many digital files to deal with!

A couple hours later, a buzzer rang, informing me that the person I’d just summoned had arrived, and with the press of a button my desk I let him in.

The representative of the world of Colla IV resembled the Droidekas in that he sort of looked like a centipede curved up into a ‘C’ shape, with four large, thick legs supporting his frame and a single pair of arms that ended in large, scythe-like appendages.

That was where comparisons began to differ. Their heads were flat, and they possessed a pair of compound eyes and long antenna. They had a stinger built into their abdomen, but generally kept hidden. Their entire bodies were sheathed in thick, chitinous plates that ranged in colors from red, to brown, to black.

In the case of Congressman Tessarez, his carapace was cherry red with faint yellow streaks along the edges of the plates. And, while most Colicoids wore nothing, Tessarez had chosen to don a simple but expensive shirt that covered his upper torso, while also decorating himself with a few silken ribbons to blend in with the rest of the garment wearing species of the CIS.

Not that it did much to hide the fact he was a giant, centipede-like bug with a taste for raw flesh. Tessarez let out a click that the translator I’d installed translated for me.

“Tessarez-Speaker greets the Hive-Master of the Confederation,” he said, giving a vague approximation of a bow. “How may the Hive-Mothers of Colla and the Colicoid Creation Nest be of service?”

“I greet you, Tessarez-Speaker, and thank you for the prompt response,” I replied. “I wish to place a large order for new Destroyer Droids and Scorpenek Annihilator Droids. As well as plenty of Pistoeka Sabotage Droids and Aegis Shield Generators.”

The Aegis Shield Generators were an invention of mine. Sort of. I’d taken the idea from the Gungun’s energy shields – the ones their foot soldiers had carried – and decided to give the same to some droids.

In the last year of the war, a large number of B2s and BXs were given miniature experimental forcefield generators. These were attached to one of their arms, near the wrist, and were meant to act as a sort of riot shield that the Battle Droids could raise in front of themselves and continue to fire through.

And it worked! These shields, dubbed ‘Aegis,’ used up less power due to being a single pane of energy instead of an all-encompassing bubble that rooted you to the spot, and allowed for better mobility.

Add in the fact that B2s had their blasters built into their hands, the shield being on a wrist let them shoot without worry.

It did have some issues with overheating and causing the micro-missile ammo to prematurely detonate if they were stored too close to each other… but aside from that, my experiment had succeeded in creating a deadlier droid.

Sadly, the only ones who could manufacture these Aegis personal shields was the Colicoid Creation Nest due to their own pre-existing energy shield technology.

Say what you wanted about the Colicoids, they were one of the few species who’d managed to reinvent personal shield technology that could be carried by people or mounted on vehicles after it got ‘lost’ for the umpteenth time.

A shame that their technology was lethal to all organic life. You’d be lucky to get off with just tumors after a minute or two being in close proximity to a Colicoid energy shield.

‘Though that aspect could be useful if we weaponized it,’ I mused to myself before shaking my head.

Nope! No war crimes! I’d committed more than enough for a lifetime, I was not about to start thinking of ways to use personal energy shields to kill people!

‘Even if it would be so easy, and could be incorporated into a tractor beam-like set-up, killing anything organic caught with said tractor beam…’

I quickly shut that line of thinking down and focused on something else. Like stealing more ideas from the Gungans.

I’d considered trying to acquire the specs of Gungan plasma technology from Naboo, but it didn’t seem like it would be very useful. For one, their shielding was inferior to what the CIS had, albeit less lethal to organic life. Secondly, it needed those plasma balls to work, and with Naboo being part of the Republic first, and now the Empire, well… it made it kinda hard to get access to stuff.

So, for now, the Colicoids were the clients I had to work with if I wanted forcefields on my droids.

“Ah, preparing to defend the Confederation’s hives, yes?” Tessarez gurgled, unaware of the thoughts that had run through my head. “You are very good at what you do. But of course, you need our help for it. What can you offer us?”

“Credits, obviously,” I drawled. “But aside from that… a thousand tons of Bantha flesh, five hundred tons of Ronronron, five hundred tons of Champa Eel, a hundred tons of Rancor, and hunting rights on Verlox III for one year,” I replied.

When dealing with the Colicoids, you had to offer up meat of some sort alongside cash. They didn’t care much for credits. The more exotic the flesh, the better.

“A large order indeed,” Tessarez clicked out, and I could practically see the drool on his mandibles. “Planning an offensive, are well?”

“I prepare to defend the Confederacy, as you already guessed,” I replied, not bothering to confirm or deny my exact plans. Let them think what they wanted.

“Very well, a strong and wealthy Confederacy is tolerable to the Hive-Mothers’ interests as well,” the insectoid alien said, antenna wiggling. “Send us the order, and we shall provide you with what you desire.”

“A pleasure doing business with you again, Tessarez-Speaker. And to many more deals in the future,” I replied, giving him a nod.

He made a sound like a hundred dying wasps before scuttling out of my office, and I did my best not to shudder until the doors had slid shut behind him.

111 &&& 111

With Destroyer and Annihilator Droids back on the menu, as well as Aegis Shield Generators for the elite B2s and BXs, there were now even more things to get sorted. Namely, the establishment of new factories to churn out blasters, ammo, and other weapons of war.

My hands were starting to cramp from all the writing and signing I had to do for it all, but at long last, the tower of data-slates, flimsi sheets, and assorted electronic documents were handled.

“Okay, Nail, I’m off to my next item of business,” I announced, standing and stretching. Though quite a bit of me was metal, now, the organic pieces still ached something fierce after sitting around for days on end.

Only the extremely ergonomic chair my uncle had commissioned for himself when he had to do Head of State stuff kept my entire body from creaking and crackling like a dry leaf with every movement.

“Yes, sir. I shall notify you if anything comes up,” my former Super Tactical Droid turned secretary-bot assured me, already hard at work filing and handling everything I’d just finished with.

Leaving him to the job, I stepped out of my office, the soft ‘swish!’ of the doors announcing my presence to the collection of secretaries outside.

Running the Confederacy took a lot of work, and a lot of manpower. As such, I had converted the waiting room in front of the Head of State office into a secretary pool, where a dozen women of varying species and a dozen droids were hard at work coordinating this and that and everything that came to me and needed doing.

Matters that absolutely had to come to my attention were sent on to Nail, while everything that didn’t need me to handle it was passed on to the relevant government department and officials. It streamlined things and made sure I wasn’t overwhelmed every day by busy work.

‘Thank God and the Force for delegation,’ I thought with a private chuckled as I strolled towards the shuttle bay, my bodyguards following along.

I had two Magna Guard droids, but to show I was dedicated to the new military reforms, I also had two organic guards. Both humans, but there were guards in the security detail who were a bunch of different species from across the galaxy.

As for the humans, one was a local from Raxus, the other from Onderon. They were both well-trained commandos, having been soldiers during the Clone Wars under Colonel Coburn Sear, so they knew their stuff.

Inside the hangar, I boarded a silver and gold Sheathipede-shuttle equipped with all the luxuries a man of my status deserved. It wasn’t going to be a long ride, just a quick jaunt to space.

Raxus Secundus lacked a moon, but it wasn’t devoid of celestial objects. Dozens of warships guarded the planet, alongside two dozen Lucrehulk battleships, a dozen of each stationed above each of the poles, acting as military bases and orbital factories and refineries in order to avoid polluting the planet below.

It was to one of these Lucrehulk my shuttle brought us, and we stepped out, being greeted by a brown Leyakian in a lab coat accompanied by a few other aliens.

“Welcome, Head of State Dooku,” the Leyakian said in greeting, giving a tiny bow which was mimicked by the rest of the staff who’d come to greet us.

“No need for that here, Director Iber,” I said, waving off the alien’s subservient gesture. “We’re all just working men and women trying to ensure the Confederacy stays strong. Do not feel the need to bow to me.”

My words caused the listening sophonts to all straighten up with a hint of pride, and the Leyakian nodded.

“Of course, sir. Please, come this way. We have many things to show you.”

“Wonderful,” I said, hands behind my back as I followed him into the station.

“The Limits of Science is working around the clock to bring the labs to full capacity, but we’re making sure to follow all safety procedures as outlined,” Iber explained as we went through a series of doors.

“And the funding is adequate?” I inquired.

As one of the research labs I’d ordered to be made, I didn’t want them running out of credits if they came up with something interesting or important.

“It is sufficient for now,” Director Iber replied. “I wouldn’t say ‘no’ to more resources, of course, but until we’re finished setting it all up, it would be a waste.”

I nodded in understanding, smiling and nodding at the men and women I passed in the corridors while also taking in all of the sights.

Room that had once held droid hangars and cargo bays were being converted into laboratories for a myriad of different research topics. There were robotics engineers working alongside physics professors to make better droids, and medical doctors exploring the potentials of healing nano-tech with the help of micro-biologists.

Dozens of scientists from just as many scientific disciplines had been gathered here on the Limits of Science as well as a few other research stations to push the CIS’s technology forward. Military uses were prioritized, of course, but anything that would benefit us was researched here.

A B1 battery pack that was ten percent more efficient than the current models, and five percent cheaper to manufacture? I wanted it. A new process for extracting certain minerals from asteroids? Make it. A more stable and powerful hyperdrive? Slap ‘em into every ship, damn it!

Anything to improve the foundations of the Confederacy was welcome, and the more that was discovered and invented, the better. We needed an edge over the Empire, who had a large population and industrial base to take advantage of. Superior science would have to give us the leg up against them.

Of course, I wasn’t about to just let them run wild! I knew scientists, and especially ones here in this particular galaxy. Nobody was going to create super-plagues, artificial black holes, or killer cyborgs on my watch! That was why every lab could be independently locked down and sterilized remotely, or detached from the station entirely and jettisoned towards the sun.

Just in case. I also had a Board of Ethics look over all proposals. And no experimentation on living subjects! Not without a lot of ground work with the Ethics people, at least.

So far, things were looking good. It was early into its existence, but I had high hopes for the Limit of Science. Especially since they’d already had something of a break though.

“Is this it?” I asked as Director Iber showed us to a workshop full of machinery and loose droid parts.

“Yes, sir,” he nodded, before looking around in frustration. “Where is… Neelia! Neelia, where are you?!”

“Ah, boss! Here, I’m here!” another Leykian called out, emerging from behind some large fabricators. They had slightly more yellowish skin and softer features with longer ear-horns, marking them as a female of the species.

“Our guest has arrived, and wishes to see what you created,” he informed her, and she brightened, glancing at me.

“Head of State Jarik! It’s an honor!” she rushed over and shook my hand eagerly.

“I’ve heard some interesting things about your invention,” I said. “Show me.”

Neelia was almost vibrating as she ran over to a workbench and held up a small droid that looked like a moth. It turned on and began to hover in her hands before moving off and flying around her head.

“Smooth,” I hummed. “And it’s a genuine drone? No droid brain or software?”

“None, sir!” she confirmed. “The Mimble Drone is fully controlled by me!”

She tapped the side of her head where a small metallic patch could be seen, and I was intrigued.

Drones were another blind spot in this universe, but one I actually understood. Why bother to use drones when you can slap a droid brain into something? But even a cheap AI core was more expensive than a remote-controlled drone, to say nothing of how it could relay information better.

Additionally, having organic minds on the other side of the machine could be quite helpful for the military, letting soldiers operate in different way that stiff, hard-coded droids could not. And just as importantly, it would help any droid-phobic people in the CIS to be a bit more accepting of them, if it was obvious that an actual organic sophont was directly controlling the machine.

“May I?” I asked, and Neelia waved a hand.

One wouldn’t assume it just by looking at me, but a fifth of my body was cybernetic, including a neu-core, or Neural Cortex Implant, that made up fifty percent of my brain. This was partly how I was able to avoid being predicted by the Force, since so many of my mental processes were run by the computer in my head.

Did it make me a cold, logical, heartless bastard who struggled to comprehend human emotions? Maybe. But growing up with Ramil as a father, and later Dooku as an uncle, hadn’t exactly made me the best at socializing, either.

Having a head full of future knowledge and an abject terror of knowing what was coming didn’t make for an easy childhood, either, and since I’d had to go through diapers and puberty a second time but with a fully adult mind… yeah, I’m not surprised I ended up like I did.

Setting aside some of my Isekai-induced neuroses for the moment, the neu-core also let me wirelessly access machines, controlling them if they had the proper uplink. With a thought, I sent my mind into the Mimble Drone and took control from Neelia, accessing the various systems and features it had.

I could see through the drone’s cameras, and while it was a little disorienting at first to have two points of view with one moving significantly faster than the other, I got the hang of it quickly. Honestly, controlling it wasn’t that much different from playing a VR video game. Just, you know, without hands on the controller.

“I assume the drone can be controlled without a Mind-Machine interface implant?” I guessed, earning a nod.

“That’s correct! The Mimble is special because its software is super compatible with pretty much every operating system out there! That’s the real beauty of the drone, in my opinion! Somebody could control one from a hundred-year-old data-slate running a GaliZone 400 operating system and it’d be just as smooth as if they used a custom-made controller rig using the latest version of HyperLynk-OS!” she declared.

“Cross compatibility… yes, that is a game changer,” I hummed.

The Mega-Corps didn’t like copyright infringement. They also really didn’t like it when people tried to mix and match products. Some, like the Trade Federation, outright made it impossible for their products to work with anything other than their own licensed devices, programs, and parts, protecting their products with DRMs that were closer to malware than anything else.

Take the Trade Federation’s B1. A very basic droid, but if you tried to swap one of its arms with, say, one from a protocol droid, then that arm would glitch out, and the whole B1 might just stop working.

Same issue with ship parts. A Corellian made cruiser wouldn’t work nearly as well with a third-party component or engine, or something taken from one of their rival shipyards.

However, the Mimble drone’s hard- and software was designed to be synched up with literally anything capable of remote access and control. A wireless video game controller could probably be hooked up to one and run it successfully.

“I love it,” I declared, letting the Mimble rest on my outstretched hand. “What do you need to start designing this OS for use in more drones?”

She began to excitedly babble about different computer programs and how long it would take to retool the current OS to work with other drones and even droids down the line, and I nodded along, listening with only half an ear.

Whatever she needed, she’d get. And in return? I’d have an army of machines even children could use to throw against whatever threat the Empire came up with.