Star Wars: Rise of the Battlemage - Chapter 220

It took three days in total for all of our outstanding ships to be cleared and sent to Nirn. The Imperial Escort Carrier from our rescue mission received a clean bill of health and a full stamp of approval from our inspection team on the first day, as everyone rushed to complete it so they could focus on the Venator, Nebulon-B, and the various repair and salvage barges. The smaller ships were cleared of anything suspicious relatively quickly as well and were sent off early the next day for our more detailed repair team to take care of. The Hutt conclave that was in charge of the salvage operation actually took decent care of their ships, but they would still need some work before they were up to our standards.

Still, I knew Orbor Fakkiv, the head of our repair teams under Miru, was extremely excited to get her hands on some of the repair barges. They would make repairing active ships much more manageable, especially the ships that we couldn't fit inside Boxi's Fury. The ships there were more focused on salvage would obviously go with the Salvage Fleet, even if our Salvage Fleet was more focused on recovery than pure salvage.

Once the Hutt-funded crew was taken away, earning a cool two hundred thousand credits in bounties, the now-freed slaves were given a chance to join us. About seventy of them did in the end, while the rest were let go. Regardless of where they ended up, we took the bounty credits and added our own two hundred thousand before dividing the total amongst all of them, which worked out to just over a thousand credits each. When they learned that, another twenty decided to join us. I happily accepted all of them, since all of them had a decent amount of experience with the Venator. A good number of the freed slaves would be joining Orbor Fakkiv and our repair teams, while the rest would probably end up as crew in the Salvage Fleet or the Fury as workers. 

The Nebulon was cleared next, taking a day and a half, while the Venator was last, taking the longest to check. Once the two ships were cleared of beacons and anything else that could reveal our location to the Hutts, as well as any major, dangerous faults, they were brought to Nirn. They were both carefully settled in around the Fury and Forge, which really put the new ships into perspective. While the Nebulon was simply outsized by the Forge, the Venator was dwarfed by the Fury. While it was still clearly an impressive ship, watching it float in space around the CIS battlecruiser really just hammered home how big it was. 

After all, the Venator was only about a hundred meters past being as long as the Fury was tall. 

Now that the two main prizes were safely in orbit around Nirn, it was finally time to decide if we were keeping either of them. For this, I gathered everyone interested in having a say on board the Fury, using one of several large, overly opulent meeting rooms.

Once everyone had settled in, it didn't take long for everyone to realize that no one was interested in keeping the Nebulon. While it was a decently armed ship for its size and had room for a squadron of normal starfighters, meaning we could probably fit more, it had a rather glaring problem. Once its shields were down, a single well-placed bomb would take the ship from damaged but salvageable to only worth its weight in scrap. Technically, the barrel of the ship that connected the aft and the fore was not as fragile as it looked, but it was still a glaring weak point, even with the extra layers of armor that the Hutts welded on. I refused to put my people on a ship that looked like it would snap in half if it turned too fast. 

While we were almost all on the same page for the Nebulon, the Venator was a very different story.

"It's too much ship for us right now," Tatnia said, shaking her head. "Between focusing on our self-sufficiency and keeping everything running, suddenly having to repair, maintain, and staff a starship like a Venator is too much."  

"I understand that it's a major investment, but this kind of opportunity will not come along that often," Captain Irsee pointed out. "Even as we expand and grow, capturing relatively undamaged capital ships of this size will not be commonplace."

"Miru, what was the final report on the Venator?" I asked, looking over at the young Twi'lek. 

"It's missing two of its heavy turbolasers, eleven of its point defense weapons, two of its proton torpedo launchers, and one of its secondary thrusters. All of that is on top of the starfighter control bridge, as well as a few patchworked systems I would want to stabilize before sending her out," Miru responded with a wince. "To replace all of those would probably take a solid… three and a half million credits... If we got really lucky. Thankfully, even if we don't get them fixed, the Hut teams were smart enough to fit the replacements evenly, so one side isn't more or less protected than the other. They also carefully removed and sealed everything that was replaced, so replacing them would actually be a relatively easy process."

"And the hull and other internal systems?" 

"It's all in pretty good shape for the most part," She responded. "They must have been pretty close to calling it done. Either way, system-wise, the biggest loss is the Starfighter command bridge, but I think we can recreate that somewhere else in the ship. Unless you want me to try to rebuild it completely."

"No, I don't. I don't like the bridges up there, to begin with," I confessed. "If there was a way to move the bridge somewhere with more protection, I would." 

"While it's nice to hear that it's mostly intact, that doesn't change the fact that this is too much for us to bring in right now," Captain Gimbel said, seeming to agree with Tatnia. "This is not a CIS ship, it has not been built with droid labor in mind. While we could still use droids for a good percentage of low-difficulty jobs, it will not be like the Forge or the Fury. We would end up needing to hire several hundred crew members to work with the droids."

"Is that true?" I asked with a frown. "Miru?"

"... at a base level, yes," She responded. "We could fix that by overhauling the central computer, hardwiring a more significant portion of the ship's systems, upgrading most of the ship's control hardware... and a lot of other work."

"That sounds expensive…"

"And time consuming. We would probably have to borrow a ship berth from the Rebels, too," She explained, shaking her head. "Depending on what quality we go for… anywhere between seven to eight million. And that doesn't include the repairs that already need to be done. It would likely take more than a month, maybe even two."

"That... We can't afford that, especially not right now," I said, shaking my head. "We are already burning money at an insane rate, which we will desperately need to make up for. We also can't afford to take on that amount of new members. We are already growing at a fast pace. Between the freed slaves and eventually staffing the new Raider and Imperial Escort Carrier, not to mention new starfighter pilots for each…"

"We would need between two and three hundred crew for the Venator," Captain Gimbel repeated. "They would need to be trained as well, and would likely come with various families..."

"So… we either mothball it until we can afford the nearly eleven million credit overhaul and repair, or we sell it," I said with a frown. "I'm not sure I like those options, but it seems that we don't have much choice. Does anyone have anything to add?" 

"What about your mission?" Nal asked. "Suggested you had something in mind to make money." 

"I do. I planned on killing and robbing Jabba the Hutt," I explained. "We would drop down in the desert, hike to his base, and clear it before they had a chance to spread any rumors that we were the ones responsible. If we disguise ourselves, play it safe, use our heads, and kill everything that could tell the Hutts it was us, we could avoid any harsh reprisals."

"And you're sure that Jabba has that many credits hanging around his base?" 

"Yes, he keeps a significant amount of treasure at his palace," I explained. "It's not just credits, more gems, rare artwork, and the like, but with the right contacts, we could sell it all relatively quickly." 

"So your big plan is to rob and kill Jabba?" Tatnia asked, reaching up to run her forehead. "I really should have seen that coming."

"What, do you think we wouldn't be able to?" I asked, raising an eyebrow. 

"Oh, no, I think any of our ground teams could take on any merc that Jabba could pay for," She assured me. "But there is more to his power than just the mercenaries around him. He is bound to have a few ships in orbit. Maybe not a full fleet, but…"

"Once word of his death spreads, it's going to be chaos," I pointed out. "No one is going to want to carry on his legacy or get revenge. The only thing people will care about is grabbing as many pieces of his empire as they can. Not to mention, if we can get Racer into Jabba's sensitive computer systems, we might even be able to drain some of his accounts. The likelihood of a crime syndicate of that level starting back up if all his treasure and a chunk of his money vanishes goes down a whole lot."

"If we drain his coffers… would that not be enough to grow our independence and modernize the Venator?" Nal asked with a frown. "It should be a substantial amount."

I frowned, stroking my chin as I considered the problem. Even if we had the money right now, the delay before we got our ship was considerable, not to mention the cost of a favor from the Republic. Still, I didn't want to give up the ship. Captain Irsee was correct, finding ships like the Venator would be rare, even as we started to grow. Capital ships were nearly impossible to capture without severely damaging them, and just boarding and clearing a ship as big as Star Destroyer or even something closer to the Nebulon was a big deal. This capture had been a special case, not one we could find again for quite some time.

"Okay. Here is the plan," I said, leaning back. "We sell the Nebulon and anything that we brought back in Venator that we don't want. The Venator gets put aside until we at least finish the raid on Jabba. Depending on what we earn, we can revisit if we are going to either sell it to the Rebellion or refurbish it then."

We would have to make significantly more than twenty-five million credits," Tatnia pointed out with a frown. "A significant portion of that money is already claimed to pay for our work in self-sufficiency."

"You are correct," I said with a nod. "Making that much money is not a guarantee. In fact, it leans more toward the unlikely."

"Could we not just keep it mothballed until we can afford it?" Lieutenant Finder asked.

"It's on the table," I agreed with a nod. "But we can discuss it more after the mission is over."

I looked around, and people seemed satisfied with the idea. I desperately wanted to keep the large capital ship, but if we couldn't get the money to make it work, it would end up just causing more problems than it was worth. 

With the larger ships settled it was time to move on to the cargo that the Venator was carrying. The Hutts had clearly intended to bring all of the salvage loot from the battlespace at once because the hangar was stuffed with all sorts of goodies. In total, there were a whopping forty-seven fully repaired ARC-170s, twenty-three LAAT gunships, and seventeen Y-wings, all of which had been salvaged and mashed together from the battlespace. They also had a frankly insane amount of Clone Wars Era weapons, armor, and equipment. On top of that, the IEC had an entire squadron of TIE Hunters, along with four TIE Bombers and a ton of Imperial equipment that we had no use for. 

Considering we were sitting on somewhere around twelve million credits in starfighters, I was feeling a bit stupid for insisting that we would no longer sell them to the Rebellion. Thankfully, we quickly decided that we would be keeping both the LAATs and ARCs. The ARC-170s were heavy, sturdy starfighters with powerful shields that would definitely fill the role of tank to the A-wings interceptor, while the LAATs were packed with weapons and could carry thirty troopers at once, making them stand-out transports and absolute terrors as support vehicles.

The ARCs would be split into three squadrons, one would go on the Whale Shark on top of its existing two A-wing squadrons, while the rest would be stored in the Fury. There, Miru could spend a good chunk of time studying the design and potentially coming up with a production line for an updated version. We would also spend some time looking for some official blueprints to start from, rather than cobbling one together by dissecting a few of them. Once she succeeded, we would slowly replace the old ARCs with the new upgraded ones, keeping the old ones for parts since there would likely be a lot of crossover between them.

The squadron of TIE Hunters and Bombers would go up for sale, along with the IECs stock of parts for them. While they were impressive little interceptors, the fact of the matter was I was trying to set up a uniform starfighter corps so that they would be easier to train and repair. The Y-wings would also go up for sale, but the Rebellion would get first dibs on the rest of the supplies and equipment from the Venator. In total, we were looking at about three million credits in supplies and another three and a half for the remaining starfighters once they sold.

By the time the logistical meeting was done, it was late on the fifth day after responding to the 2nd Group call for assistance. I was recovered, rested, and had spent some time down on the surface of Nirn. I had also given my stamp of approval on some of our mining projects, the farm locations, a new road of triple homes for families, and smaller apartments for incoming new members. 

I was quickly coming to terms with the fact that, despite having other people taking the lead and running things while I was busy, the entire population of the planet, as well as the members of the Skyforged, saw me as the leader of both the Skyforged and Nirn. I had, at first, wanted to separate the roles, in no small part, because I assumed people would like the option to self-govern or at least would prefer a leader who wasn't off being a mercenary. Now, I was beginning to see that, especially in this early stage where the colony was still young, having someone, IE, me, be able to make clear decisions without bickering back and forth was vital.

I didn't exactly like it, more responsibilities were not something I wanted, but this was something I wasn't willing to just pass the buck on. Besides, it wasn't exactly a new responsibility, nor was it a surprise. I would do my best to help my people, both on the planet and off, grow and prosper to the best of my abilities.

It wasn't until the day after that meeting that I called together Tatnia, Nal, Corvak, and his second in command, as well as some captains from 3rd Group, since they would most likely be assisting, to discuss the assault on Jabba's palace, his killing, and the raiding of his resources.