Don't Stop Me

[Laira Darkhold]

Benji was hard at work on a project trying to immunize vehicles from EMP and Ion weaponry they might encounter, and other than a scrubbed idea of lead lining the entirety of the vehicle he hit a duracrete wall he couldn’t seem to budge through, something that was incredibly irritating for a man like him. He was so used to being able to conquer projects like this that hitting a wall was infuriating, and to hit that same wall at every turn with each new idea was even worse for him. He knew it was possible, it had been done years ago, and I’m sure that some of the more advanced ships out there could circumvent these problems, but he hadn’t figured it out yet. Finally he started doing research in to ships and vehicles that had succeeded in defeating these problems, but it was long and arduous work for him to dig through the HoloNet and endless databases looking for a needle in a haystack. After a few days he approached me in the workshop, “Draco, I finally found a vehicle that has the systems I want. The old AT-TE’s had a system. I need you to go out and get a full scan of one of those.”

 

[Laira Darkhold]

“Take a proper full spectrum scanner and get as many proper scans of one of those beasts as you can. I need as much data as is possible in order to try and discover how they handled the electronic overload. Do you think you could handle that.” He asked me, fairly serious about acquiring the equipment. I needed to know where to find it, but pretty much any battlefield would have at least some hulls sitting around.

“I guess I can find one and go get you scans easy enough. Got any idea where to find a mostly intact hull?” I asked, hoping he already had some leads. Of course he didn’t disappoint me.

“Saleucami had a military dump where they put most of the excess Clone Wars vehicles when the Empire replaced them with updated equipment. If I were you I would start investigating there. Saleucami isn’t aligned so it shouldn’t be too hard to land there and shouldn’t be too difficult to find the military depot.” He said, assuredly having done research into where to find the vehicles.

“Alright, Saleucami is where I will go. I can do a decent investigation of the planet; even ancient military depots shouldn’t be too difficult to find. I’ll get heading out right away.”

 

[Laira Darkhold]

The flight out to Saleucami wasn’t very bad, just a few hours away from Jabiim and Saleucami was a fairly undeveloped world. Ground control was slow and sluggish to respond to my hails, but they covered their bases fairly well. They let me land at the old Imperial Fortress from centuries ago, so that would hopefully hasten my search. As I descended the ramp I noticed the overgrowth that had reclaimed the entire area but most of the buildings were still standing in a state of disrepair. I had trouble finding the armory and once their only run down, over used Imperial walkers in the bays. A depot would be nearby though if any sane person planned the outlay of this base. I used some recon droids to search multiple buildings at once but even still the search was slow going. Most buildings had to be scaled or climbed to properly investigate, and few things weren’t covered in moss and underbrush. Man how I wished a directory had been keep through the four hundred year darkness, but of course with most planets having been out of contact with each other this wasn’t exactly an area of great importance. It had been vacant since well before the four hundred year darkness and no it was little more than a remnant of eons past.

 

[Laira Darkhold]

Three days of searching had yielded only minuscule results in tracking down even a partial AT-TE and I was beginning to lose hope in this little endeavor. Just when I was getting ready to leave and have Benji find me another place to check out one of the recon droids found something. It beeped over the comm saying object in question located. It was almost twenty kilometers east of my position so I had to use a speeder bike to make it to the droid in a reasonable amount of time. I brought the sensor equipment on the back of the bike just in case it was correct. When I arrived the droid was overlooking a small canyon filled with grass and moss, with thousands of small creeks running through it from recent rains. Sure enough in the canyon there were easily a dozen AT-TE walkers along with numerous other Clone Wars era technology in the canyon, discarded after being scrapped for easily reused parts. Driving down the canyon wall wasn’t exactly difficult, but traversing the terrain on foot proved to be a different matter. After dismounting I discovered most of the moss had grown to cover up small pitfalls and holes in the ground where there were spaces in between vehicles and their parts. I almost broke my ankles a couple of times, and they were certainly sore from trying to walk around on the vehicles.

 

[Laira Darkhold]

Gathering sensor data wasn’t too difficult. Once I found my way into an AT-TE I took full scans of the vehicle in several places and then moved to the next one, quickly and efficiently. About thirty minutes a vehicle wasn’t too bad sitting in these pieces of crap. They were over eight hundred years old, so I don’t know exactly what I expected, but I had figured in order to get reasonable, usable, data the vehicles would need to be more usable in the first place. Most, if not all, of these AT-TEs couldn’t turn on even auxiliary systems at emergency power. The one or two that could power on lights or anything were where I assumed I would get the best data. After six hours of bouncing around on AT-TE’s I had the data that I could gather for them and set out back for the ship. Benji would appreciate these scans, even if they were hardly usable. And you never know, maybe he can cobble together a full picture from all the data I took.

Arriving back at my ship, recon droids and sensor unit in tow exactly how I wanted to end this long trip out in the middle of nowhere. I hoped this was the last long run Benji was gonna send me on, but I knew that to be false. Eventually there would always be more to do. I powered up the ship and left the rock that is Saleucami behind me.

 

[Laira Darkhold]

The stormy world of Jabiim felt like home now. After all these months of living here full time, always coming back to the shop when I had down time and working on projects with Benji and Kira, and just in general living here. It actually felt like a home, and the guys felt a lot like family. It felt good to get home. I buzzed over the comm-link to ground control, which were pretty lax with my airspace. They didn’t much keep up with it since Benji installed a sensor net and had started working on putting CIWS systems on the building to defend against possible intruders. They buzzed back a simple ‘Clear’ without really checking my identification. I guess other than having the holoNet read the area as restricted airspace they didn’t feel the need to warn anyone about possible countermeasures or they felt anyone who blatantly went in the area anyway deserved what they got. The countermeasures would register me as Friend and stand down allowing me to land without any real problems. With the rain, temporarily ceased I could see Benji and his wife Yadira waiting on the landing pad for me. I guess they got worried that I was away for so long, that they wanted to see me right when I got off the ship.

 

[Laira Darkhold]

I descended the ramp, triumphantly in my opinion, and they were excited to see me. Benji had come out for the data, while Yadira mainly just wanted to check in. She and I didn’t get to talk much since I was normally out doing something or fighting, or I was here working on a project with Benji. She’s probably the sweetest woman in the galaxy, fully supporting Benji and me uprooting her from her longtime home and dragging her out to the outer rim. After I sat and ate a meal with her and Kira I decided it was best to go and see if Benji had what he needed for his project. Not too long ago I wouldn’t have bothered to help him and would have just left him to his work. I guess it was good that I had grown up and become respectable.

I walked into the workshop, “So how’s the data? Did you get what you wanted from it?” I asked as I found a seat near the work bench he was at. He studied the data carefully before bothering to look up and reply to me. He seemed almost transfixed by what I had brought him. I couldn’t exactly tell whether that was a good thing or a bad thing based off his facial expressions.

 

[Laira Darkhold]

When he finally finished studying the data, he looked up to answer my question, though it had been a solid ten minutes since I asked it. “I think so, what I am seeing is a fairly simple design feature and a fairly simple modification that granted it resistance. The talk of immunity to Ion and EMP weapons seems to be rumor that has become stated as fact. I doubt the droids had the time or ability to hit these beasts with numerous Ion blasts on the battlefield to see one go down, and it was more effective to simply gun them down with turbolasers or kinetic penetrators that sitting there and constantly firing upon them with an Ion cannon. It could withstand several Ion blasts or EMP pulses before becoming effected by them, so unless you had a dozen EMP grenades you would end up wasting your time.” That sounded good. Not as good as full on immunity to Ion weaponry, but better than ending up a sitting duck because you got careless and got hit by an Ion beam. “I think I can replicate the design without much effort. I am pretty sure they just made the parts in house and the biggest problem is that the vehicle will have to be rewired upon modification.”

 

[Laira Darkhold]

Benji, as always, dove head first into working on the project once he had a good idea of how to do what he wanted. He needed to design a wire sheathing to cover the electrical wires with and develop a system of electromagnetic shielding to cover the interior of the vehicle. He had some pretty good ideas about how he was going to accomplish both things, but it already had several drawbacks. The first was that it required a complete rewiring of every vehicle that would be equipped with the system, which is costly and expensive, and that the electromagnetic field required hull integrity to be truly effective the way it was designed. He did install redundant fields covering the main engines, allowing for power to be maintained even if power to the rest of the vehicle is removed and its electrical systems shorted out. Long ago tanks were used without direct use of electricity so I want to have an option to continue at least base operations under no power. Benji was fairly accommodating, securing the compact fusion drive in a dual layer field to protect it, but even then it could be affected if repeatedly struck or damaged by Ion weaponry, it was simply far more resistant than normal equipment.

 

[Laira Darkhold]

After he had what was effectively a working model, basically just a landspeeder he kitted out with the help of Kira and myself, he wanted to show us how it worked, and how effectively it worked. “Alright kids stand back and watch. Here comes the pain.” He said, firing an Ion beam at the small vehicle. Right after the beam struck he ran out to the vehicle and drove it around for a second. Then he came walking back to the group. “What do you think?” He said. I wasn’t necessarily impressed with a thing surviving one Ion blast.

I kind of mumbled around and look at the others real fast. “One blast? That’s it?” I was a little disappointed but without responding verbally he activated the Ion cannon again and rattled off three more bolts into the vehicle, all good close range hits. Then walked back over to it and drove it around again.

“Happy with that, tin man?” he asked very sardonically as he strolled up, triumphant and with a big beaming smile on his face. “Four Ion blasts to a landspeeder not designed to survive one, image how a tank will handle with this thing. It could theoretically survive indefinitely unless its main engines were overloaded rapidly.” He finished. I had to admit I was impressed with how it preformed and how he promised it would continue to do so.