Time to face the music as I step off of the gunship to meet the four Jedi waiting for me, all of them members of the Jedi High Council. Not only is Master Yoda there, but I also recognise Master Ti, Master Koon and Master Gallia. I'm not sure what they want with me, but I highly doubt it is to thank me for having the foresight to have an army of my own.
"Master Yoda, Master Ti, Master Koon and Master Gallia," I greet them, "Or should I call you generals now?"
Okay, that probably wasn't the best way to start things off.
"Unbecoming of a Jedi, pettiness is," rebukes Master Yoda, "Yet to your comment, truth there is."
"And not for the better," I say, "I'll admit that I wanted the Jedi and the Republic to take a more proactive stance in helping people, but this is not what I wanted. Is there a reason why the Jedi Order has become the commanding officers of this clone army? Because I am concerned this is another case of the Senate expecting the Jedi to deal with a problem rather than ensuring the proper elements of the Galactic Republic are capable of handling it."
"The Jedi are the most fit to command this new army of the Republic," says Master Gallia as we walk towards the command centre, "As you of all people are fully aware, all Jedi are trained in leading soldiers into battle as an ancient legacy of the Order's past."
"How does that work with there not being enough Jedi to lead every clone legion?" I ask, "I just found out that there are currently twenty legions of clones for every Jedi Knight or Jedi Master with five times that number on the way."
"That will be the Chancellor's concern, not the Jedi's," says Master Koon.
"Speaking of which, is it true that the Supreme Chancellor was given emergency powers to form a new military for the Republic?" I inquire.
I am certain that this is true thanks to the impossible memories but getting some actual confirmation would be good. There is no telling how accurate my memories will be, especially once things change further as I act upon what I know.
"Been granted emergency powers by the Senate, the Supreme Chancellor has," confirms Master Yoda, "How you know this Knight Shan, we must discuss."
Yeah, I figured this was coming. Aria already mentioned my 'Force Vision' to Master Yoda and given how my predictions have proven true and how I acted upon them in the first place, it was only a matter of time before I had to explain it to the High Council.
"It was a strong enough Force Vision to knock me out to the point that I spent some time unconscious in the medical bay," I say "Colonel Belen can confirm as can the medical records of the legion and Knight Telis. The vision itself was odd, like I was watching a holonet flick or something like that. I saw Master Kenobi's mission to Kamino, his capture here on Geonosis, the failed rescue attempt by Padawan Skywalker and Senator Amidala, that Gungan convincing the Senate to give the Chancellor emergency powers to create a military and then after that, it was the battle here on Geonosis."
"And what you saw inspired you to come to Geonosis with your army?" asks Master Gallia, "Did things go that badly?"
"Master Windu's rescue attempt failed as badly as Padawan Skywalker's in my vision," I say, "All, but a handful of Jedi were killed by Jango Fett and the battle droids and it would have been all of them alongside those being rescued had Master Yoda not shown up with the clones. I'm not sure how, the vision didn't show me much, but it went from dozens of Jedi fighting to there being maybe twenty trapped and surrounded by battle droids in the middle of the arena. I decided that trying to avert that was worth the risk of whatever was waiting for us on Geonosis."
"Concerning, this vision is," says Master Yoda, "Been averted, fortunately the events of it have."
"There were some other bits, but I am not sure what to make of them or what is still accurate after I intervened here on Geonosis," I say, speaking the truth from a certain point of view, "I can say that Dooku is the Sith Apprentice not the Sith Master according to my vision. The Sith Master is a man called Darth Sidious who apparently operates at least partially on Coruscant."
"How certain of this are you?" demands Master Koon as my words fully focus the attention of all four Jedi Masters on me.
"I am certain that is what the vision showed me, but I cannot be certain that the vision is accurate," I answer truthfully, "At least in that regard. I believe that it did reveal the truth since the rest of the vision was accurate apart from the things changed with my actions and this wasn't something that I could have altered."
"What see regarding this in the vision did you, hmm?" inquires Master Yoda.
"After he escaped Geonosis, Dooku went to Coruscant to meet with his master, Darth Sidious," I answer, "Sidious was an elderly human man who disguised his identity with a hooded cloak. Dooku delivered some Geonosian plans for a superweapon of some kind to Sidious so the Sith Master could keep them safe. Dooku's Sith name is Darth Tyranus according to my vision by the way."
"Do we know what happened to these plans?" asks Master Ti.
"I think they should be in the spire that the area was attached to," I answer, "Part of the reason I ordered it to be bombarded from orbit. If we are lucky, the plans got destroyed, but I will have my forces check nonetheless."
"Can your soldiers be trusted if they do find it?" asks Master Gallia, "I mean no offense, but if there are plans for a Sith superweapon, they cannot be allowed to fall into the wrong hands."
"For good or ill, my people are loyal to me," I state firmly and a little proudly, "The question isn't if you can trust my people, but if you can trust me."
"Trust you, we can," says Master Yoda before anyone else can reply to me, "With your methods and goals the council disagrees, but your intentions never."
Now that makes me feel proud and I can't help, but feel pleased to get a compliment like that from Master Yoda. Especially since a Jedi with my inclinations and beliefs rarely gets such things from the man who is a kindly grandfather to pretty much every Jedi.
"Thank you for your faith in me," I tell him as we reach the joint command centre that my legion and the clones have set up, "Now unless there is anything else, I need to attend to matters as the General of the 1st Republic Patriotic Legion."
***
"This is far worse than Oba Diah," I tell the others glumly as I look over the butcher's bill for the Battle of Geonosis.
There are four of us here in this meeting. Myself, Brigadier Telis, Commodore Thak and Colonel Belen. The most senior of the legion's officers and the very top of the command structure.
"You warned us that it would be going in," says Loren in an attempt to cheer me up or at least reassure me, "We followed you in any way without hesitation."
"And look where it got you," I say, "We lost the Wilful while the Hope and the Valiant are both going to need some dock time before they can be considered operational again. Plus, another half of our warships have taken some degree of damage and that is before you consider our starfighter losses. Force, we lost over a hundred Headhunters, a good twenty percent of our fighter force. We didn't quite lose one in five of our pilots but losing one in six isn't much better."
"We knew the risks, back when we first signed up with the legion," says Wol, "We are soldiers, General, and part of that is being willing to die. Did you send our people to their deaths for a good reason and did you do your best to ensure their survival without compromising the mission?"
"Yes and yes," I answer, taking a deep breath as I centre myself, "You're right, both of you. I don't like how bad things got, but I did my best to minimise them and things did go better as a result of our intervention."
Before today, the worst battle that the 1st Republic Patriotic Legion got into was on Oba Diah about a year ago when the Pyke Syndicate assumed that we wouldn't liberate some of their victims because they got transferred to the Pyke homeworld.
Wait, Oba Diah is where Master Sifo-Dyas, the Jedi who officially commissioned the clone army, died. On one of the moons, I think and the Pykes had a prisoner from that event as insurance against Dooku because Dooku was the one who had them kill Sifo-Dyas so he and Sidious could hijack the clone project.
But back to the matter at hand. We lost almost six hundred of our ground forces at Oba Diah along with a couple starfighter squadrons while two of the Corellian Corvettes got damaged in the process of landing our troops.
The Battle of Geonosis has turned out to be far worse. Hailfire droids took out the Wilful, one of the CR90 Corvettes that the legion uses as troop transports while it was landed and two of the Thrantas got dealt heavy damage by enemy starfighters. Outnumbered about fifteen to one by the agile, but fragile Geonosian interceptors, pretty much every starfighter squadron took losses fighting the enemy with the total adding up to over a hundred of our five hundred and sixty or so starfighters.
Ground losses were just as heavy. While the artillery was untouched for the most part, our armoured elements suffered losses with many vehicles being outright destroyed while others received varying degrees of damage. The infantry took a pounding as well with over thousand men and women dead and at least three thousand suffering injuries of varying seriousness.
As they directly followed me into the arena, Sky Company was hit the worst as more than half of them died in that arena and several more fell fighting alongside me and the clones. Barely a third of Sky Company survived Geonosis, but thankfully no other company is worse off than Sky.
On the upside, the battle was a success. Only three thousand clone troopers died while hundreds of thousands of battle droids were destroyed alongside thousands of droid vehicles. The heavy droid losses are mostly thanks to artillery and orbital bombardment either destroying the starships transporting them or blasting them whilst they were exposed in the Geonosis flats.
Speaking of destroyed Separatist starships, the legion did a number on them. Not as much as I would have liked since more than half of them got away, but we got over a hundred Techno Union Hardcell transports of maybe two hundred and fifty, twenty six of forty one Commerce Guild Diamond cruisers and twenty eight of the sixty Trade Federation core ships.
And then there were the Geonosians who took countless losses on the ground and lost seven thousand of the eight thousand starfighters sent into the skies. Of the remaining thousand, the vast majority were captured by the Republic when their pilots surrendered.
Even if the 1st Republic Patriot Legion was hit hard, we hit the Separatists far harder thanks to the element of surprise and being the only ones to have actual warships. Future battles against such long odds would be unlikely to go as well since I doubt I will be able to engage the enemy in exposed, unimportant land using mostly uncontested orbital bombardment.
Republic forces also captured seven of the Lucrehulk-class battleships though we only got the outer hulls as none of the core ships which made it into orbit went for them, instead choosing different outer hulls to escape with.
Of course, what happens with these Lucrehulks now is undecided and something that we will want to get our say on as soon as possible if we want to get involved.
"Alright, let's talk about the Lucrehulks captured," I say, "We got seven of them before they could jump out, one of them was captured by our forces whilst the others were secured by clone forces with some assistance from our forces. I want to keep them to use as mobile supply depots and starfighter bases. How viable is that?"
"We would need to get some more funding, but given the outbreak of war and our successes both here on Geonosis and in the past, I doubt we will struggle to get the funding," says Wol, "Whether or not we will get to keep the ships is the question. Judging by the normal laws for captured starships, we can certainly make an uncontested claim to one we took and we can make a claim to the other six through the Republic or the Jedi can make a claim of their own depending on which one of them is responsible for the clones."
"We should be able to take them," adds Aria, "The Jedi won't want them and by the time the Senate can weigh in, we can easily already have taken them for ourselves. Given that we took them while they are actively rebelling against the Republic, we can easily claim them as spoils of war. The only issue is if the Trade Federation tries to claim them on the grounds of them being stolen property, but that is iffy for them given the circ*mstances of how we acquired them. It would come down to politics in all honesty and with our political backers, we can drag things out long enough that we can get them by the virtue of having them and using them as part of the Republic war effort."
"I'm not sure about the legal status of seizing them, but I do have some questions about how many people it will take to crew them and how they will operate without those spheroid ships that we shot down on Geonosis," says Loren, "I'm no expert, but aren't those big sphere ships what controls the rest of it."
"We can run them on a skeleton crew until we can get enough recruits, especially if we just want them for mobile storage over using them as warships as the General intends," says Wol, "Without the core ships, the outer ring is a starship in its own right, perhaps more so given the hangar space and having hyperdrives onboard. The core ships are primarily for additional storage, controlling the droids and corporate activities. For what General Shan intends, we don't need the core ships and looking at the damage reports, I think we could probably salvage some."
"I thought we damaged them beyond continued usage," I say, "At the very least, we ensured that none of them will be capable of getting into orbit to reach the rest of the Lucrehulk?"
"We did, but not all of them have been damaged to the point that we can't patch up some degree of functionality to them," answers Wol, "None of them will be fully functional without some extensive repairs, but a few of the more intact ones could be patched up with spares from the more destroyed ones. In any case, we can operate the Lucrehulks to a degree if we can ensure that we get to keep them."
"The Jedi won't want them so take control of them for now," I tell Wol and Loren, "If any of the Jedi have concerns or objections, direct them to me or Brigadier Telis so we can handle them. Are you up for handling that Aria?"
"I am willing to convince the Jedi that it serves the interests of the Republic for you to make the use of the captured Lucrehulks," answers Aria primly, "At least I will contact you if there is a compelling argument why someone other than you should get them."
"Have we confirmed that Dooku got away?" I ask.
"Unfortunately, Count Dooku was able to successfully get away," says Loren, "We spotted him fleeing the arena-spire on a speeder bike and he sacrificed enough of the Geonosian interceptors that our own starfighters weren't able to take him down."
"We noticed him escaping off-world, but by the time we spotted his starship, he was too far out for us to catch before he jumped to hyperspace," says Wol, "While Dooku escaped, we confirmed the deaths of the other members of the Separatist Council that General Kenobi identified prior to his capture."
"Nute Gunray, Rune Haako and the leader of the Geonosians were killed by our forces on your order in the arena during the initial rescue attempt," adds Loren, picking up where Wol has left off, "We found the bodies of the others in the rubble left by the orbital bombardment while our forces were looking for the plans for the Geonosian superweapon that Dooku and his master want."
"What about the weapon?" asks Aria, "Did you find the plans for it?"
"No, we did not," answers Loren, "There wasn't much electronic equipment still working and we found nothing of the sort on what remained intact. I can see two possibilities for what happened to them. It was destroyed in the bombardment or Dooku was able to escape with it."
Well, that is a lot to take in. The Death Star plans won't be relevant for decades or at least they weren't until both of the…other timelines so I can worry about that later. The death of the Separatist Council is a bigger concern since nothing like that happened until the end of the Clone Wars when Darth Sidious decided that they had outlived their usefulness.
No more Nute Gunray means he won't try to coerce Rodia into leaving the Republic in an attempt to kill Senator Amidala, which means Umbara won't defect after their Senator gets murdered. And I'm not sure what the death of Wat Tambor means for Ryloth either as I have no idea if the invasion I can remember will go ahead without him behind it.
"There is another thing I should mention, General," says Wol, "The Justice was able to track the hyperspace route of one of the escaping Lucrehulks. While we cannot determine where it will go next, we have identified the star system that it has escaped to. I am planning to send one of our gunships to check out the system and see what the Lucrehulk is up to. If possible, we might be able to destroy it before it can link up with more Separatist forces."
"Is the legion up for that?" I inquire, "We took quite the beating here on Geonosis."
"We would have to send a reduced force of course," admits Wol, "But the chance to eliminate an isolated enemy battleship along with the legions of droids aboard it is a chance we cannot afford to pass it up."
"I can't help, but agree," I reply, "Alright Commodore, send one of the Corellian Gunships to investigate."
***
As Aria and Wol file out of the meeting room, Loren stays behind for a private word. Not something he often does, but it isn't out of character either.
"How bad is it?" I ask him.
"I'm not sure," answers Loren, "Honestly sir, it would be easier to show you then explain."
"Lead the way then," I tell him and then as I follow him out of the meeting room, I ask, "You brought whatever it was aboard the ship?"
"Yes sir," answers Loren, "Into Sky Company's quarters. They got the most spare space and can be trusted to keep their mouths shut. Not that I distrust the Jedi or the clones, but the Jedi don't trust all of us and the clones are too much of an unknown."
"You mean that Jedi don't agree with me," I correct him.
"Yeah, the Jedi don't agree with us," says Loren and as we walk towards the quarters of Sky Company, we discuss how many of our vehicles we will need to replace and with what.
After the rest of today, it is a nice change. Talking logistics with Loren, one of the men who have been with the legion since the start, is a relaxing change from the droids, bugs and death of Geonosis that have dominated the rest of the day. Eventually, the conversation comes to an end as we reach our destination and Loren raps his knuckles against the door.
"I've brought the General," says the colonel and the door promptly opens with a pair of Sky Company soldiers waiting on the other side.
"Captain Vora is keeping an eye on the prisoner with Corporal Vakui," says one of the soldiers and that certainly gets my interest.
What sort of prisoner did the legion find on Geonosis that Loren feels the need to keep secret?
"Good work troopers," says Loren as we enter the room, "Continue to keep an eye out for now."
"Prisoner?" I inquire in a quiet voice as Loren and I make our way through the far too empty quarters of Sky Company.
"Jango Fett survived," answers Loren, "Sort of. He wasn't dead when we found him, but he was definitely dying. Unconscious too so our people on the ground stabilised him and sent him up to the Freedom along with his armour."
The man has more to say, but he pauses as we enter one of the dorm rooms with four bunk beds, enough to fit eight people. In this case, there are three people waiting for us inside. Captain Vora and Corporal Vakui are in the sleepwear that doubles as off-duty casual wear for some, but despite their current lack of uniform, they both have a look of being on guard duty with alert eyes and a readiness to their stance.
The third individual is in a stasis pod and judging by how his armour is gathered off to the side, I suspect that Jango is naked inside of his pod.
"We could still kill him if you wanted to or we could hand him over to some kind of authorities," says Loren as I stare at the unconscious man, "As a Mandalorian warrior and bounty hunter, the man has racked up plenty of charges and bounties of his own.
"I wasn't aware that we had any stasis pods aboard," I say as I think about what this means.
Maybe things could have been different in the past, but right now Jango Fett hates Jedi and is aligned with the Sith so he is definitely an enemy. At the same time, he is the man responsible for the clones and his genetic data is important to continued production of the clone troopers. I'm also pretty sure that I killed his son along with Gunray and Poggle so he will hate me in particular.
But the Jedi also don't kill their prisoners so I can't do that and yet I can't afford to just let him go, even if I am letting him go by sending him to a prison. His genetic data is too important to the Grand Army of the Republic and according to the impossible memories, at least one attempt was made to destroy the current sample that the Kaminoans have and I think there might be long term issues with the sample that is currently on Kamino.
Nothing could be done about it in those timelines as Jango was long dead by then, but if he survived the battle of Geonosis, then his genetic material could be replaced by a fresh sample.
"The Freedom didn't, but the Colossus still had some stasis tech that got picked up a couple of missions ago so I transferred it over," answers Loren, oblivious to my internal debate.
"I want to get some genetic samples from the man," I tell Loren, "Given how dependent on Jango Fett clones that the Republic has decided to make their new military, it might be good to have some backup samples of the original's genetic data. And keep him secret and in stasis for now. I'm not sure how people will react if they find out about him or even who would be reacting to that."
"Will do, General," says Loren, "Any plans for the armour?"
"Do you think it would fit Vyssa?" I mutter as I think about just how many other changes that I am causing to the other timelines that I can somehow remember.
***
Some talking with some of the Jedi Council and then dealing with the aftermath of Geonosis. With the High Council members, Ben tried to keep things as close to the truth as he could without giving away that the 'Force Vision' wasn't really one of those.
Beyond that, we got butterflies everywhere. While Dooku escaped and possibly did so with the Death Star schematics, bombarding the place did take out the Separatist Council which will have some major changes down the line. That and Jango Fett survived if as a prisoner while Boba Fett died. The pragmatic thing to do would be to take some genetic samples and then deal with Jango permanently so he can't become a problem in the future, but the Jedi don't kill their prisoner and Ben is definitely a Jedi despite his unorthodox views.
With the casualties, I tried to do three things. First, make the Battle of Geonosis painful for the legion without being crippling. Second, make things hurt more for the Separatists without making it so one-sided that it makes characters in canon look stupid for not doing as much damage as in this fic. Third, have lighter losses for the clones and Jedi.
The end result is still a bloodbath, but the droids got heavier losses with plenty still getting away while the clones and Jedi had lesser casualties to canon, especially for the Jedi where two dozen died instead of two hundred.
Meanwhile the legion loses one warship, has another two crippled and many more damaged. Starfighters took over twenty percent losses while the ground forces got it worse with one in three becoming a casualty with a quarter of those being fatalities. So enough to leave the legion hurting and needing to regroup, but not so badly that it is crippled and unable to partake in the war for the time being.
Anyway, the next arc is going to be on an OC world where I got things sort of planned out, but I'm not going to say too much right now to avoid the risk of spoiling things.
Please point out any spelling or grammar mistakes that you spot. Please quote them in the thread and explain what you think is wrong so I know what you are referring to.
