As the mass of Mawite fighters closed in from one side and the Brotherhood capital ships advanced from the other, streaking toward the invasion fleet like the jaws of some great interstellar beast snapping shut around their prey, there was a brief flurry of chaos and carnage. Then, abruptly, the
Emerald Undertow appeared to stretch wide... and vanish. It was the telltale sign of a ship jumping to hyperspace.
"Hah!" chortled Telemachus of Daedalon.
"Cowards. They ran as soon as they realized they'd been tricked." It would be much easier to mop up the rest of the enemy forces with their biggest ship fleeing the scene.
As it turned out, though, it wasn't a rout. It was a tactical maneuver.
The
Undertow reappeared beside the Monastery, or close enough that it could quickly reach such a position within the gas cloud. It then deployed some kind of energy field, a starship shield on a massive scale. It was astounding that a ship of only 5,000 meters could project a dome 20,000 meters in diameter, comfortably encasing both combatants in a field strong enough to disintegrate incoming craft. The Brotherhood ships did not test the shield's power. They intended to use the
Undertow's absence to wreak devastation on the still-flanked remainder of the fleet. The Monastery would fend for itself.
As the
Undertow began firing its heavy guns, huge shells slammed into the station. But the Monastery had been built as a defensive structure, and while it had few weapons - only a few cannon emplacements that could hardly hurt the massive
Undertow - it was covered in astoundingly thick armor plating. It was a tough nut to crack, and would be able to hold up for a while even alone. Certainly the enemy capital ship
could break it in time, but the station would not be idle while that happened. Even with its fighters launched, it was still the home of the Maw's most elite warriors, warriors who remained and hungered for blood.
As the H-1ME and Marinus Battle Droids landed on the station, they soon found that the monastery's occupants would not take their intrusion lying down. The elite
Knyghts of the Maw, clad in their
alchemically-fortified phrik armor, waded into the fray. Their wrist-mounted plasma blades and shoulder-mounted grenade launchers were deadly weapons indeed, especially in the close quarters of the station's unhallowed halls. The punishment they could take was immense, and the muscular uplinks within their armor interfaced with their cybernetics, keeping them much more mobile than the slow Marinus-class droids.
And a single thermal grenade could surely do terrible damage to a H-1ME swarm.
While some Knyghts fought back the borders, battling fiercely through the halls of a station that shook with each impact of the
Undertow's heavy shells, others
became borders. Loading up in Mawite boarding pods, they streaked out of the hangar bays and headed straight for the enemy capital ship. The pointed prows of their single-use boarding craft were designed to punch through the
Undertow's hull, allowing them to spill out into its hallways and begin killing whomever they encountered. After all, the
Undertow was projecting its shields far from its hull in order to isolate the Monastery, and thus could not use them against boarders.
Armed with the Force, cybernetics, and heavy weapons and armor, they aimed to wreak bloody havoc on those who had dared to attack their sinister home.
Meanwhile, the Mawite capital ships suddenly found a spreading cloud of gas and ion chaff blocking their view of the Silver Jedi fleet. Both sides fired blindly through the barrier... but there was a difference. The Alliance ships had still turned their flanks to the Brotherhood force, in order to unleash their broadsides, while the Mawites were approaching prow-first, a
much slimmer target. As a result, it was
far more likely that Mawite fire through the cloud would hit something than SJC return fire, simply because they had much more surface area exposed to their guns. It was a good thing the SJC ships were charging up their shields.
They were going to need them if they remained so exposed.
The ion and gas cloud
did force the two
Crucifix Is to break off their attempted ramming attack; flying through the ion chaff would have sapped their shields too badly for them to hold up well on the far side, and they might have been hit by friendly fire given that precise targeting had been blinded. Instead they paused in their advance and joined the blind fire. The result was a confusing exchange where neither side could be certain whether they were hitting the enemy, or how hard. It was certainly an unproductive way to do battle, dragging out any potential victory for either of them into a long defensive stalemate.
The Maw had no patience for stalemate. So while the Star Destroyers continued to fire through the cloud, the
Samael-class frigates descended, moving three-dimensionally so that they could angle under the nagnol gas and target the SJC fleet from below with their ion cannons. They would also be able to feed positional data back to the Star Destroyers, allowing them to fire more precisely through the cloud while the SJC fleet could not hit them back with the same precision. In effect, they planned to turn the enemy's little defensive "wall" into something that only disadvantaged
them, allowing the Maw to turn it back on them.
Meanwhile, the huge mass of Mawite fighters coming from the Monastery was hitting the SJC battle group from the other side, and was thus unaffected by the gas cloud. While the SJC capital ships had made no move to counter them, allowing them to close in and begin bombing the Picket Flotilla without any coherent response to their attack, the Alliance aces were doing their best to fight them back... not least the squadron leader that Telemachus of Daedalon was chasing. The Knyght could sense that the enemy pilot was planning something, but by the time he realized exactly what it was, it was too late to stop it.
Tren Chaar
's plan worked to perfection. Divine Eagles scattered, tossed end over end by the concussive force of the six combined missiles, and the much faster X-Wings and A-Wings had their opening to get behind the Mawite craft. What
had been a totally unified advance, like a wall closing in to crush the SJC ships, was forced to break off in a long series of dogfights that pitted the speed and agility of Alliance starfighters against the armored but bulky fighter-bombers of the Knyghts. That would certainly slow down their devastating attack on the Picket Line... but the Brotherhood still had the superior numbers by far.
"Clever," Telemachus ground out from between clenched teeth,
"but ultimately futile." He streaked in after Chaar's B-Wing, reaching out to the Force to anticipate his rival's maneuvers, using his cybernetic interface with his craft to react near-instantly. He was determined to punish his foe for ruining the perfection of his charge, his trap that was closing in to crush the life from the SJC fleet like one of Lao-mon's great serpents squeezing its prey. His beam cannons blazed in a constant stream, trying to carve the armor from the resilient heavy starfighter he pursued. He would have his revenge, he swore it.
Chaar would die, and the SJC fleet would burn in the Ace's wake.