Into the Chaos Ch. 04

Resa turned her head to look over her shoulder at me. "Could you take me a little faster..." She shivered and paused as Elise did something. "... and harder than you took the Lieutenant?" She broke off with a moan, but then continued. "I would like that a lot."

"Sure." I managed to respond as I took hold of her flaring hips and started pounding her, watching my dick slide in and out of her. It not only looked natural, but the way her pussy clenched around my dick felt completely natural as well.

That I could feel Elise's hair against my balls like a soft brush each time I pushed into Resa only made the experience even more arousing and I could feel a tell-tale tingling staring deep within me. "I'm going to come soon!"

"Yes please!" Groaned Resa. "Come along with me!"

I grunted as I rammed my cock into her again and again, totally immersed in the feeling of thrusting into her tight wet pussy and the way it felt around my dick, as I raced towards my orgasm. I felt my balls tighten and knew I had gone past the point of no return, so I just kept going and a few seconds later I twitched in ecstasy as my throbbing cock erupted inside her.

Resa tensed and gave a soft cry as she came as well, her whole body shaking while her inner muscles milked my dick.

For a moment, there wasn't a sound to be heard in the lounge, but then Elise removed her mouth from Resa's clitoris and said. "Thalen, as soon as we have relaxed a little, I'm going to suck your dick until it's hard again, because that just made me even more horny!"

I pulled my dick out of Resa and let myself fall beside her on the sofa. "Deal."

-----------------------------

Several hours later, I was sitting in my cabin, taking a second look at the Imperial ships. The breakdown of the crew situation I had made with Elise Samko had given me an idea.

With one hundred and thirty jobs on the Delta-class carrier, we could, at least on the surface of it, crew it with about two hundred people, working twelve-hour shifts.

However, there were lots of jobs, that weren't needed to be fully staffed at all times, no matter what military doctrine said. Reactors was one of them. Incredibly stable, they didn't need more than one engineer unless the ship was involved in combat.

That brought me to what at least in the Chiss Navy was called a skeleton crew, which was the minimum number of personnel needed to operate a ship at its most simple operating requirements, which in other words was flying from one place to another.

Looking at the data on the screen, my brain worked on the situation, recalculating the number of crew needed to form a skeleton crew for each of the known ship types. Despite what Elise had said, warships were more complicated than commercial ships, resulting in a larger crew, but it was nowhere near the size needed to make them fully operational warships.

The Delta-class carrier could be flown with a skeleton crew of only fifty and with the captain doubling as a pilot, that even included an eight-hour pilot rotation.

The Epsilon-class repair ship was a type of ship I haven't encountered before, because CEDF didn't have them as part of the regular navy, but if you sent a task force into the Unknown Regions of space, giving them a chance to get repaired was good planning.

Like the Delta-class the listed crew was deceptively large, but most of it was repair personnel, engineers, droid controllers, and the like, while the crew needed to fly the ship was fifteen. Being a navy ship, the Epsilon-class was well armed, which meant about a hundred gunners, but they weren't needed just to fly the ship.

Almost identical to the Terminus-Class Destroyer, the Gage-class transports were heavily armoured, but lightly armed, military transport ships, designed to deliver its cargo at the destination intact. They also only required a crew of one hundred and twenty, which meant a skeleton crew of around twenty-four.

The two unknown ship types baffled me a bit. The computer had suggested that they were variants of the Drake-class Frigate.

That might be true, but if so, they were giant versions of the frigate, as the two largest of them was almost a kilometre long, while the six smaller versions were seven hundred meters long each.

That made the largest of the unknown ship types even larger than a Harrower-Class Dreadnought, the typical Sith command ship during the latest war.

However, while the design was different from a Harrower, there were several similarities between the two classes, aside from the wedge shape that most Imperial ships had.

One of those similarities was that none of the two classes didn't have the command tower most other capital Imperial ships have. A design choice I applauded, since having the most important part of the ship in the most obvious place, didn't really make sense, no matter how good the armor and shielding was.

Another thing they had in common, was that their point defence systems were rather hard to see with the naked eye. Either that or the unknown ship types didn't have a point defence, which was highly unlikely. Unfortunately, that made it hard to see how many lasers it had, which again made it impossible to calculate a reasonable crew number, but an educated guess would be around nine hundred people for the bigger ship and six hundred for the smaller one, not counting the gunners and flight support.

Of course, a skeleton crew would be a lot less, but until we got some better data, it was really nothing but an educated guess.

------------------------

Engineer Keller showed up before dinner and just from the look of disappointment on his face, I could guess the result of the test they had run.

"I'm sorry, sir." Said the engineer with a sigh. "The Master Engineer and I have been through everything and no matter how we do it, it simply doesn't work." He signed again. "If we could disengage it and had the spare parts, it wouldn't have been a problem, but jury-rigging the system while it's running is simply too dangerous. We'll end up frying the system and kill everybody." He tilted his head a bit. "Have you looked at the list of ships out there?"

"Not the one from the scans, no. Why do you ask?"

"Because it looks like there's a Republic Battlegroup out there as well," he said. "Complete with forty Hammerhead-Class cruisers and twenty-five Foray-class Blockade Runners. Unfortunately, they look just as beat up as the old Imperial battlegroup." He paused, but then added. "To be honest, sir, the list of ships out there is insane. There're ships from just about every space going civilisation you can think of going back of thousands of years, including the Republic, Sith, Mon Calamari, and even a few Mandalorians."

I felt a shiver run down my spine. If there was an obvious way out of here, someone would have escaped and returned later to plunder the site. The collected worth of the ships in here, even if only used as spare parts, would be enough to make thousands of people rich beyond their wildest dreams and the fact that it hadn't happened spoke volumes about the difficulties we were in.

It was not something I would say openly, so instead I said. "Well, that means that there might be a functioning null quantum field generator there. Unfortunately, that is not the most pressing problem. Do the parts from the republic battlegroup fit Last Chance's life-support?"

The engineer shrugged his shoulders. "To be honest, I don't know, sir. They're from the same area, but that is more than three hundred years ago, and the Heraklon-class was built by a relatively small company in the core-worlds. I'll have to investigate it, which again will take some time... Which I don't think we have." He paused for a moment, but then continued. "To make matters worse, I have just talked with the engineering team and the hyperdrives on the two prison or slave ships suffered the same kind of damage as Chariot and as they were built by Mandal Motors and Rendili StarDrive, the chances of finding spare parts out here are non-existent."

"I feared that much." I said, leaning back in the seat with thoughts whirling in my head. The whole situation was fucked up. Even if the Republic battlegroup had been relatively unharmed, we didn't have the time to find and start enough suitable ships to save people from dying. That left the new Imperial Battlegroup as the only way to keep everybody alive until we found a way out of here, and that by itself posed a huge problem, as the Empire naturally took a dim view of people using their warships.

Not only would it mark us as Enemies of the Empire, but there was a good chance that I would get exiled from the Chiss Ascendancy for risking breaking the alliance with the Sith Empire by stealing a whole Imperial battle group just to save some non-Chiss from dying. Unfortunately, there wasn't much I could do about that, as I just couldn't stand aside and let those people die when I had the ability to save them.

The five hundred Chiss that were here with me were better off, since I, as the commanding officer, would get the harsher punishment, but they would likely get demoted or have to spend some time in jail.

To make it worse, the old Republic ships that were here, were simply not designed to carry more than three hundred people each, meaning that it would take fifteen Hammerhead-class cruisers to carry all of us, and judging from the state of the old Imperial Battle group, there simply weren't that many functional ships.

That meant using the Imperial ships. They were our only ticket out of here, or at least to survival, but when we got out of here the Empire would want their property back and the trick would be to load the freed slaves off the ships and then deliver the ships to the Empire, as a good ally would do.

Sadly, with three Sith Lords and their fleets in the region, it also became a guessing game about which Sith Lord to deliver the ships to. If I delivered them to a Sith Lord and that Lord lost in the Sith power plays, making someone else Emperor, there was an even chance that the new Emperor would be angry at the Chiss Ascendancy for delivering the ships to the wrong Sith Lord.

Taking the guise of a mercenary unit would lessen the chance of the Chiss Ascendancy getting into problems with the Sith, which was the most important part. I could survive getting exiled, but the Ascendancy couldn't afford to break the alliance with the Sith Empire.

Again, all these problems demanded that we found a way out of here and the Imperial Battle group was the key, as it would allow us to survive long enough to figure out how to do that.

"So, we go to plan B." I said slowly.

He looked surprised. "You have a plan B?"

"Yes. On screen, please."

The wall screen in the office snapped on, showing the newer ship-classes and I pointed at the area as I said. "The new battlegroup over here is not only outside the Ion field, but they also look reasonably undamaged." His eyes slowly grew wider as I continued. "We'll repair and restart one or more of them, move everybody off the Last Chance and into the new ships, followed by the people from the damaged ships."

"You're going to steal a capital Imperial warship?" He asked, a mixture of disbelief and hope painted on his face.

"Strictly speaking, we're not stealing." I said calmly. "The ships are dead, so we're salvaging them, and not only will it enable us to save the people on the Last Chance, it's also our only way out of here with everybody unless we find a way to repair the Chariots hyperdrive."

Keller looked speculative. "Well, sir... salvaging an Imperial Warship makes sense, even if it is considered theft of Imperial property, but it's better than a slow death here."

"Exactly, so go get ready to take a closer look at them."

"Yes, sir!"

"Good. While you do that, I'll go check on the two Kiltirin-class ships and the people there."

Keller nodded and stood from the chair. "See you later, sir."

*********************************

Freeing slaves

"Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something

you want done because he wants to do it."

Vice Admiral Zedais, CEDF

While the engineers made ready, I had Lieutenant Samko fly the Duchess to Kiltirin 2, where the crew had reported that some of the prisoners were finally coming out of their coma.

The prize captain, a Chiss named Hez'iman'cemu (Siman) greeted me at the airlock, looking relieved as he saluted. "Welcome onboard, sir."

"Thank you, Captain Siman. Any problems with the newly awakened people?"

"No, sir, but to be honest, I don't know how to treat them. Are they prisoners or free?"

"Free, but they need to stay in their cells for now, while we're working on a solution. I would also like to talk with some of them now."

"Yes, sir. I'll take you to what I think are the leaders. This way."

The cell he led me and my two Black Dragons bodyguards to, was a small two-man cell and as he had said in the report, the persons inside were indeed awake, so I asked the Black Dragons to stay outside the cell and walked inside.

One of them was a giant of a man, easily two-meters tall, with wide shoulders and huge arms. He was also bald and dark skinned. The other was just as big and bald, but with blue eyes and a light complexion.

They both turned towards me as I entered the small cell. "Hello gentlemen. I'm Thalen from the Dragon Defence Force. Could I have your names, please?"

For a moment, they just looked at me, but as I didn't look away or say more, the dark-skinned one said. "Arthur Waydar... Sir."

The light skinned one raised his eyebrows at that, but then said. "Caskey Titlow. Sir."

"Nice to meet you. You're obviously former military, so I would like your rank and service branch." I showed my teeth in a little smile. "The Zygerrians locked that part of the computer as we took the ship and we're still working on slicing it."

"Senior Mechanic, Imperial Navy." Said the dark-skinned Arthur Waydar, while Caskey Titlow said. "Gunnery Sergeant, Republic Marines."

That one of them came from the Empire and the other from the Republic made me pause for a moment, but then I asked. "How did the two of you end up in the same cell?"

"A string of bad luck." Said Arthur Waydar with a slight smile, but then turned serious. "It's a long story and not that interesting."

"I would like to hear it anyway." I said, leaning against the doorframe as I used a force power to determine if he spoke the truth or not.

With a slight sigh, the giant explained that he had done service on a Harrower-class Dreadnought that had been involved in a battle against the Republic Navy in what was later known as the First Battle of Bothawui. It was meant to be one of the first attacks on the Mid Rim, but the Republic had anticipated the attack and when the Sith fleet had arrived, the Republic Navy was waiting for them.

The Imperial Fleet was caught completely off-guard and the ship Waydar had been on was pummelled by enemy fire until the crew was forced to evacuate the dying ship via escape pods.

They weren't the only ones to do so and when the Imperial Fleet was obliterated, they were taken as prisoners of war.

When the Republic Fleet left the system again, they were taken along to the Republic to join a prison camp, where they stayed for the rest of the war.

When peace came with the Treaty of Coruscant, they were finally returned to the Empire, only to be court-martialled for leaving their ships without orders to do so. The higher-ranking officers from the fleet, who were everybody above the rank of Lieutenant, had been sentenced to death and the rest had been sentenced to slavery.

After that, Arthur Waydar had worked in the Duranium refinery at the Nodia Prime labour camp for about two years, but as the mine yielded less and less ore, he and the other slaves had been loaded into a Zygerrians ship and flown away to an unknown destination. Then there was the hiss of gas being released and everything went black.

After the Senior Mechanic had finished his tale, Caskey Titlow took over, explaining that he had been taken prisoner of war during a battle in the Outer Rim, when his ship had damaged so bad, that they had to use the escape pods.

The Imperial Navy had collected the pods and sent the survivors off to a slave camp and later to production facilities, both at the Nodia Prime labour camp. That's where he had later met Arthur Waydar and after a while, the two had become friends.

"Excuse me, but the story out here is that the Empire execute prisoners of war?"

"I'm sure some do." Said Arthur Waydar with a shrug. "But mostly it's Republic propaganda. Killing those who surrender or get caught just makes the enemy fight to the last man."

I nodded slowly. "Is everybody here from the Nodia Prime labour camp?"

"Yes." He said shortly and then asked. "What happens now?"

"That depends on a lot of things but let me start off by saying that the only reason that you're still in this ship is that we don't have anywhere else to place you." I said and explained the situation to them.

"So," said Caskey Titlow in a resigned tone when I was done. "We're in a broken ship in a box system with no way out at the moment?"

"Yes, that's about it." I admitted. "We'll get out. It's just a matter of time."

Arthur Waydar studied me for a moment and then said. "You're confident about it. Aren't you worried that we'll run out of food?"

"I was in the beginning, but with the number of wrecks in this system to get ship food from, it'll take years before we run out." I said truthfully and changed the subject. "Captain Siman seems to think that you're the leaders of the former prisoners on this ship. Is that correct?"

They exchanged glances and then nodded. "I guess we're the closest thing to leaders here. Why do you ask?"

"Command structure. When I need the people here to do something, I want to know who can make it happen." I said with a shrug. "What about the other ship? Since you're all from the same facility, I assume that you know who's on board which ship."

"Roughly, yes." Replied Caskey Titlow. "All the men are in this ship, while all the women are on the other ship."

"Any idea who leads the women?"

Again, they exchanged glances, but then Arthur Waydar said. "That would be Betty Nagos, sir. She's a Pantoran and a former Operations Officer on the Hammerhead cruiser Lightning Strike..." He hesitated for a moment, but then added. "... and my wife."

-------------------

Twenty minutes later, we stepped onto Kiltirin 1 and went directly to the cell that held Betty Nagos, accompanied by the ship's prize captain, Lieutenant Jay Barlee. Captain Barlee was a middle-aged human male and had been one of the slaves we had liberated from Mahaw.

"How long is it since the two of you talked?" I asked Arthur Waydar as we walked.

"A couple of weeks." He said with a sigh. "They separated us about two months ago, but we could talk through the fence."

I gave him a short nod and then asked. "Captain Barlee, who's in the cell with Betty Nagos?"

"Nobody." He answered immediately. "For some reason some of the two person cells are only occupied by a single person."

We were almost by the cell, so I stopped and looked at the dark-skinned giant. "Senior Mechanic Waydar. I suddenly remembered that I haven't had any food since breakfast, and I think I will go to the mess and eat some there. That will take about an hour. After that I would like both you and your wife to join me on the Duchess."

Looking at Caskey Titlow, I continued. "Gunnery Sergeant Titlow. Would you please join me in the mess? I would like to hear some more about the worlds where the republic people come from, while the Senior Mechanic spends some quality time with his wife."