Saga of the Bridgers-Year 4

Chapter 28: Tower Assault

July 16.

The last few days had been frenetic, to say the least. Iulius had spent all of his time reorganizing the forces of his ragtag coalition that was about to storm the Yavzakh tower and put an end to the war. He had already confirmed with Kimby and Kimovir the most important thing in his mind: what was going to happen when they severed the connection between the Surveyor and the Yavzakhs?

Luckily, the Carunoans had managed to kill some of them in the past, and thus the answer was already known: the Hybrids and other creatures would become empty shells, as if they were already dead inside.

In this, Iulius saw a tremendous opportunity: not only capturing the Surveyor would destroy the Yavzakh army entirely, but there would also be plenty of alive specimens to experiment on and intact structures from which the Humans could study the alien technology.

True, it was relatively ineffective against the Imperial equipment, but the scientists could still learn something new. At the very least, it would allow the Carunoans to build anew.

Because Admiral Tanis had also worked to find all the various survivor groups around the planet via radio. His hope was that the Carunoans would create a unified government which would then swear allegiance to the Empire, once the alien threat had been removed.

For the moment, though, he had more immediate problems. First of all, the language barrier.

It turned out, that in the other bases of the resistance there were combatants from all over the planet, some of them barely spoke Imirgesh, meaning that, right now, the coalition was a linguistic shitshow.

Eventually, Iulius had decided to keep the Imperial forces and the Carunoan Joint Force (as it had been temporarily renamed by Iulius himself) separated, and the few Carunoans who could speak both Galactic Standard and Imirgesh had to be preserved as interpreters.

Still, the Carunoans were very much eager to fight. Iulius was a bit surprised to discover that they still had a handful of vehicles in the three bases around the tower: some flying machines working with propellers, called VTOL, and even a couple tanks that were added to the armored division.

Iulius had decided the tactic: the minor vessels of the fleet, like the Tartans and other vessels that would be more effective against minor aircraft were to be deployed in a 5 km radius around the tower, to prevent possible Yavzakh reinforcements from other continents. The Admonitor and the Devastator, Vader's Star Destroyer, were escorting an Acclamator-class cruiser transporting the armored division of 6 AT-AT, 10 AT-ST, 18 TX-130 hover tanks and what little the Carunoan still had for an armored company.

Together, this vehicles were to form the spearhead of the offensive, attacking from the south. Two task forces of similar strength, including the warships, were to attack from North-East and West, with the intent of taking one Mauler each, since those machines were the only thing in the Yavzakh arsenal that posed a real threat to Imperial forces.

At least, the coalition had the crucial advantage of air superiority, since the TIE Fighters had already proven to be much more agile and powerful than the Yavzakh ones and the Human pilots could use their individual talents to outmaneuver their opponents, something that mind-controlled Hybrids weren't able to do.

Iulius had also decided to adopt a type of low-power orbital bombardment that Thrawn taught him. It implied the Star Destroyers using their smaller turbolasers at the lowest amount of energy as possible to provide a very precise orbital strike. He had all the AT-AT link their range-finders to the systems of the respective Star Destroyers to request backup, especially against the Maulers.

"From the intel given us by the Carunoans, the only real weak-point of the Maulers are these reactors on their back." Iulius explained to the officers of the Admonitor, which included the leaders of the TIE squadrons. "If possible, aim at them."