Into the Chaos Ch. 05

I just stood there, embracing her as the jerks of her hips made my dick move inside her, causing her over-sensitive body to explode in yet another orgasm.

The feeling of her writhing in orgasms again me, along with the caressing feeling of her milking pussy around my dick made me groan as well, coming closer and closer to my own orgasm with each jerk and spasm.

"I'm getting close." I warned her with a groan.

Iska reached back and held me close, as she moved her ass in circles, adding to my pleasure, obviously wanting me to come.

That did the trick and with a final moan, along with a few involuntary thrusts that sent my dick even deeper into her, I emptied myself in her, sending spurt after spurt into her pussy, while trying not to fall.

The sheer feeling increased the force of her orgasm with each jet of semen that hit her insides, making them stronger and when I was finished, she stood still for a moment before she slid out of my embrace and let herself fall onto the bed, utterly exhausted.

Exhaling a breath I hadn't even known I had been holding, I smiled at the sight of her beautiful body on my bed and lay down beside her, using a hand to gently caress her body while waiting for her to recover.

It took a while before she turned to look at me. "That was without doubt the best sex I've ever had."

I nodded. "It was fantastic."

She was silent for a moment, before saying. "I hope you're not done for the day, because later I intend to crawl on top of you and ride that amazing dick until we both come again."

That made me grin. "Sounds like a good plan, but you might want to take a nap first."

Iska turned and gave me a full-body hug, pressing her breasts against my chest. "Not alone. Tell the computer to wake us in about an hour and we can take a nap together."

That sounded like an excellent plan and I hugged her back as I ordered the computer to wake us after an hour. Then we lay back and fell asleep.

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Droids, ships, and location

"Use every asset at your disposal to the best of their abilities, to ensure success."

Vice Admiral Zedais, CEDF

It took almost a week before Resa walked into my office, smiling widely. "The simulators are working again, sir."

"Good work, Resa. What was the problem?" Knowing Resa's tendency to go technical on me, I hurriedly held up a hand. "In ordinary terms, please. I'm not a computer programmer."

That made her chuckle. "Fair enough, sir. The stats of every non-Tandankin produced Imperial starfighter was slightly worse than they should have been. That could have been an innocent error, but after some tests, it still wasn't quite right, so we looked at the programming and after a few days of searching we found the somebody had inserted a line that made all Tandankin produced starfighters better than they really are."

"It was added later?"

"Well, the first part was most likely there from the start, but the last part was without doubt added later, sir." She explained. "I think they were made by two different parties. Mostly because the first piece of programming is hard to notice, but when the second part was added, it simply made the simulation a bit unrealistic."

Nodding, I leaned back in the seat. It could be a ploy by Tandankin to sell more ships, but it could just as easily be a sabotage, designed to make the Empire choose the lesser capable fighter, making space combat just a bit easier for the Republic and whoever else the Empire was fighting. Not that the Tandankin produced craft was a disaster for the Empire, but in my opinion, the Empire would be considerably more dangerous if they made as many S-13a as they had Supremacy-class.

"Excuse me, sir, but may I make a suggestion?" Asked Resa, interrupting my train of thought.

"Always."

"The fleet needs about two thousand gunners to be effective, but at the moment, we only have about one tenth of that, including those being trained."

"I'm painfully aware of that."

She smiled at my comment. "Yes, but are you aware that we have what potentially is three thousand gunners here?"

That made me sit up in the seat again. "Please, explain."

"Both Dreadnoughts carry four KT400 droid dropships fully loaded with Mark IV Sentinel droids, for a total of three thousand two hundred droids." Resa explained. "I know that they're quite stupid, but they are humanoid shaped, with hands that can operate the guns. They also have excellent reactions, and it won't take much to reprogram them to operate the guns." She shrugged. "I know that they need to be controlled by a droid control unit, but we can easily use the ships net for that until we can install some local nodes, and if we place a living person in charge of each gun or battery, we have someone that can make both independent decisions and aim the battery, effectively eliminating the weakness of using droids as much as we can."

She stopped talking and I nodded slowly as I thought it over. The Chiss Ascendency didn't use droids as gunners because we were far behind the both the Empire and the Republic in Droid technology. Our droids were little more than well-programmed robots, which limited their usefulness a lot when it came to warfare, but there really was no reason not to use the Sentinel droids as gunners. In fact, they were perfect for that role, as it didn't involve any independent or creative thinking. Something the sentinel droids were incapable of anyway.

"It's an excellent suggestion, Resa. However, why don't the major powers use droids as gunners? There might be some drawbacks to that that we haven't thought of."

She shrugged. "I think it's just distrust and tradition, which really doesn't apply in this situation. We don't have enough people to man the guns and the Sentinel droids can't think for themselves, so there's no need for distrust."

"You have a point." I admitted, as I realised, that I knew little about the droids we had. "Resa, what're the most important droids we have and what type of combat droids do we have?"

"Well, to start with the combat droids, we have the Sentinels I've already mentioned, but besides those, we have a lot of Mark 1 Sith War Droids." As she spoke, her holoprojector showed the droid type she was talking about, which happened to be one of the only droids I had heard about before.

The Sith War Droid Mark 1 was originally meant to repel boarders and was one-and-a-half meters tall and equipped with four spiked feet and four arm-mounted blasters. Despite their ship-based origins, they had been heavily used as ground attack units in the latest war.

"According to Chief Engineer Keller, this droid is typical for the Sith Navy, as they're used for and against boarding actions, but besides the database knowledge, I don't have any details on them. The former Imperials will know a lot more."

I nodded in agreement and gestured to her to continue.

"On the engineering side, we have the MZ-series Maintenance Droid, the T3 utility droid and the G4-series Heavy Fabricator. All three are good and stable droids that just get the job done." She smiled a bit. "The same can be said for the M3-M1 Medical droids. They're the most numerous medical droids in the universe and that is for a reason: It's the best medical droid in existence."

The picture changed again, and the next droid looked like something out of a horror vid. Resembling a large, flying octopus, it had six segmented arms, each ending in either a tool or hands for manipulating things. In the picture, it was shown to hover over a spaceship, so I assumed that it had a repulsorlift engine, allowing it to fly.

"This one I didn't know about until Chief Engineer Keller introduced me to it." Said Resa with a touch of regret in her voice. "It's the A2-MZ4 Zero G maintenance and repair droid, also known as a Squid repair droid. According to him, it's one of the most versatile starship repair droid there is, and the Epsilon-Class repair ship has twelve of them."

She paused for a moment as the hologram shifted, showing two naked humanoids. One was a handsome and well-trained young man, with wide shoulders and narrow hips, while the other was a good-looking human female with perfectly formed breasts, a narrow waist that flared out to generous hips and long legs. It was both an idealized version of a human female and almost the same way Iska and Shakka were shaped. A thought that made me smile to myself as recent memories popped into my mind.

"This is the DD Series Hospitality Droid." Resa explained, unknowingly dragging me back to reality. "They're HRD's or Humanoid Replica Droids, designed to take care of the crew's physical needs. Like me, they're constructed with biofibre and synthskin, but their skeleton is light-weight metal."

As she spoke, the hologram was replaced with the statistic for the DD Series droids.

I read them and chuckled. "Resa, comparing those DD's to you, is like comparing one of the old Hammerhead-class with the Dragon-class Dreadnought: In theory they do the same, but the Dragon-class is just so much better, that there really is no competition... and that is just the physical side." I paused and then asked. "How many of them do we have?"

"About a hundred on each capital ship, sir."

"Any chance that any of the droids are at your mental level? Not just the DD's, but any droid."

Resa thought for a moment before she said. "I honestly don't know, sir. It depends on a lot of different things, not at least their processor and memory, since any droid will need a heuristic processor in order to develop intelligent self-awareness."

I nodded. A heuristic processor was an advanced version of the standard droid processor, and it allowed a droid to learn by doing, rather than programming. This enabled the droids to reason through several potential solutions to tasks and formulate the best approach, which was why they were usually called higher intelligence droids out here in the Chaos.

"Let's start with the ones that don't have a heuristic processor. That will make sorting this out simpler."

Resa nodded slowly. "The Sentinel droids and the Mark 1 Sith War Droids don't have one, so they're out. The same goes for the M3-M1 Medical droids, the Squid repair droids and any of the smaller maintenance droids. Also, some of the DD Series Hospitality Droids do not have a heuristic processor, while others do. That depends on the manufacturer and fortunately, the ones in this fleet are all equipped with a heuristic processor." She shrugged. "Most of the other droids have heuristic processor as well, but please remember that even without memory wipes, few droids ever become truly self-aware. To make it worse, true intelligence and sentience are difficult to detect. Mostly because the programming is so advanced, that it's hard to differentiate between true feelings or thoughts and programmed or learned responses."

"Any test we can make?

She thought for a moment. "Not one that is guaranteed to work every time."

"Well, use the two or three best tests and examine every one of our higher intelligence droids. If they show signs of sentience, I want them excluded from the memory wipes the lesser droids are normally given on regular intervals. They'll also get a rank in the fleet and a paintjob to show their rank and department." I smiled a bit. "Unless they're one of the DD-series, in which case, they'll get a uniform instead."

Resa looked at me in silence for a few moments, but then shook her head. "Commander Yaki usually says that you never cease to amaze her. I have to agree with her. I've never heard about anyone in command, who gave droids a second thought aside from the loss of resources."

"Well, I'm not used to machines with this level of intelligence." I said with a shrug. "But I will use every asset at my disposal to the best of their abilities and intelligent droids are more effective than a normal droid."

"No argument from me on that!" said Resa. "But I think that some of the crew will object to it."

"Most likely, so we'll have to educate them on that." I thought for a moment. "I'll have Captain Meistrin place it in the Rules of Conduct. That way, there can't be any doubt about it."

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I spent the rest of the evening re-running the Admirals scenarios, but with the correct stats on the Starfighters and the result was markedly different that the numbers the Admiral had gotten.

Now both the Super Sting and the Nightsinger outscored the Supremacy-class, with the S-13a emerging as the winner, by a slight margin.

Then I ran the scenarios again. This time at high speed, using different formations, tactics, or ship composition each time. The results were initially not that good, until I abandoned the swarm formation and tactics and went for a more conventional wingman tactic. Then the results improved again.

That baffled me for a bit. The Super Sting and partly also the Nightsinger was built for the swarm tactic, so they should excel in that. Then I realized that I was looking at the wrong things. It wasn't the starfighters, but the pilots. The Imperial pilots we had were used to the Swarm tactic but were not up to speed yet and were in the wrong starfighter, while our new pilots hadn't had the swarm tactics drilled into them like the Imperial pilots had. Something the program had clearly taken into account.

Changing the parameters and reassigning the pilots didn't take long and then the show was on again. The result was impressive, as the effectiveness of the fighters went up by ten percent and the number of casualties went down by fifteen percent.

I tried other tactics and scenarios, but the numbers stayed the same.

The chime at the door interrupted me. "Yes?"

It opened and Resa walked inside, lifting an eyebrow when she saw me. Then she quickly looked around and back at me. "According to the computer, you have been running the simulator for nine hours straight, sir. Don't you think it's time to get some sleep?"

I stood from the chair and stretched before I said. "You're right. I'll go to bed now."

"Good."

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For once, I slept late and was having an early lunch in the cabin, when Tavune asked if I could come to the bridge, because there was something I needed to see.

Twenty minutes later, I walked onto the bridge, freshly showered and a lot more awake than I had been when Tavune called.

The young Chiss was looking at the giant star map on the bridge along with Trine Karnos, one of the human pilots, when I arrived. "What was it you wanted to show me, Mister Tavune?"

The young man saluted. "I think that we have finally figured out where we are and how we got here, sir!"

"Very good, Mister Tavune. Please continue."

He pointed at a system on the local galaxy map. "This system is called Tetra 7 and it's located on the hyperspace route from Epsilon Eta to Centauri 21 and to be honest, sir, it's a death-trap waiting to be sprung. Tetra 7 has three stars, one main star and two minor stars, and it's the stars position in relation to each other, that determine if the route is open or not." He zoomed in on the map and continued. "Two thirds, or about 66 percent, of the time, nobody would notice it, but the last 33 percent, the third star is in a position where it the gravity fields draw plasma from one sun to another. That causes a ripple in Hyperspace and that is what we think caused us to be thrown off course directly in the direction of this system."

Looking at the map, I nodded slowly. So far it sounded like Tavune was on to something. "Keep going, Mister Tavune."

"Yes, sir." He said with a proud little smile and pressed some keys. A ball formed field showed up on the 3-dimensional map. "I talked it over with Astrogator Jander San and he calculated that this is the maximum distance we could have been thrown. Unfortunately, that's where I got stuck due to the sheer number of systems, but Lieutenant Karnos came up with an excellent idea. If we removed all non-pulsar star systems, along with systems not in a direct line from Tetra 7 it would narrow down the search a lot."

This time it was Karnos that operated the controls and a moment later, most of the stars disappeared, leaving only about twenty in the ball-like field, with most of them being concentrated within a nebula called Labyrinth. As usual the info showed up next to it, but there wasn't much. Apparently, it was difficult to navigate inside the nebula.

"Once we removed those systems, we went over the remaining one by one and this, sir, ..." said Karnos in a pleasant soft voice, as she highlighted a system. "... is where we think we are. The system is a box system called Trap and according to the comments on the map, it's named that way because once you go into it, you're never going back out."

"One thing more, sir," added Tavune. "One of the comments described that they were thrown off course in hyperspace and ended up outside the field. " He zoomed in on the highlighted system and somewhat to my surprise, it had three planets outside 'the box'. The nearest one was a rock type while the two others were gas giants. None of them was close enough to the flux to affect it.

"As you can see, the system has three planets, which is unusual for a pulsar to say the least, but it gave us a chance to confirm our guess. I asked Resa and she agreed to reconfigure the gravity sensors to a much tighter area and then do a three-hundred-degree sweep. It took a while, but a few hours ago the result was in and there are three planets, one small and two giants, outside the box in this system." He was smiling now. "I think that makes it highly likely that we're in the Trap system in the Labyrinth nebula, sir."

Thinking it over, I agreed. Pulsars were formed after a star went supernova and for that reason, they rarely had any planets, and it was even more unlikely, that such a rare occurrence would result in the exact same number and type of planets as the Trap system on the map.

Using the gravitronics was also a brilliant idea. Though relatively short-ranged, gravity waves were not affected by the ion-radiation of the pulsar and thus the result of the scan could be trusted.

"I have to agree. Excellent work, you two." I paused for a moment. "Now delete it."

They both looked at me open-mouthed, though Trine Kanos recovered first. "Excuse me, sir?"

"Delete it." I repeated. "Look, now that we know where we are, navigating will be a lot easier. However, if the knowledge of this... " I gestured at the screen showing some of the ships in the graveyard outside ... "becomes commonly known, it would be a catastrophe. Various factions and planets will try to claim it, due to the extreme wealth these ships represent in spare parts alone. Wars will be fought over it and countless lives will be lost."

Trine Karnos nodded slowly. "The same would happen in the Outer Rim... or any other place in the galaxy for that matter."

"Exactly." I agreed. "But there're Sith out here in the Chaos now and if they hear of this, they will come searching for old superweapons and they will bring part of a fleet that made half the galaxy kneel before them. They will conquer the nearest planets, enslave the population, and force them to work on salvaging the ships in the graveyard once they have found a way in here."

The two young people looked at each other, nodded and pressed a few buttons. A moment later, the screens went dark.

"Done, sir." They said in unison.

"Thank you. I know that the two of you have put a lot of work into this and I'm extremely proud of the way you discovered the location, but some knowledge is simply too dangerous to share with everybody."

Reaching into the force, I examined them briefly, but both seemed to have understood the seriousness of the situation.