Session #40: Dragons scarier than Tie Fighters.
The crew of the Dogfish had just jumped into the Keosnapi system at the end of the last session. To avoid the Imperial fleet that they knew to be operating in the system, they jumped into the back side of Keosanpi IV, a medium size gas giant with a spectacular ring system and many moons. The put the dog fish into the edge of the ring system and powered it down, and then spent the next 10 hours manning the comm system hoping the rebel agent would be able to activate the hyperspace distress beacon again so that they could pinpoint more exactly where the rebel agent on Keosnapi III could be found. The secret equipment the presumed rebel cell had installed on the ship duly detected the distress beacon, narrowing the location down to a 150km circle on the planet's surface. Following the methods, the smuggler had given them for blockade running they moved in on Keosnapi III, intending to get about 500,000 kilometers from the planet. However, they followed a fairly straight-line path between Keosnapi III and Keonapi IV and unluckily came within a few 10's of thousands of kilometers of a flight of Tie Fighters. Fortunately, they were moving cautiously and powered down the engines and the unsuspecting Ties zipped by on full burn without noticing the converted freighter. Long range sensor training was clearly deficient in the Imperial military.
Arriving about 500,000 km from the Keosnapi III after a "slow" 4-hour flight on sub-light engines (at what amounts to 4% light speed but let's not think about physics while playing Star Wars), the crew put the ship to drift and powered down most of the systems and then started manning the long-range scopes. From here, most things were a blur, but after about 2 hours of observation they managed to resolve a single pixel in orbit of the planet that had to be at minimum the largest ship or grouping of ships in the Imperial blockade. They debated plotting an in system hyperjump and jumping immediately but decided that a precision in system jump like would be too difficult to calculate in the two-hour window they had, so they decided to wait until the next window 12 hours from then. Jumping through hyperspace is not like dusting crops.
Twelve hours later the target area of the planet began rotating into the field of vision, just on the shadowed night side. They punched the hyperdrive knowing from observation that it would be about 2 hours before the presumed Imperial fleet completed its orbit of the planet. They jumped into orbit, only to find a Tie fighter picket. This time, the Imperials were more alert and the Dogfish crew less fortunate, and the Tie's barrel rolled and tightly turned to intercept the blockade runner - presumed hostile because its transponder was turned off. Four ties screamed down on the Dogfish firing their blasters with precision. But at this point, at 68 meters long and heavily armored and shielded, attacking the Dogfish is practically like attacking a small capital ship. The Tie's long-range fire was accurate but didn't even stress the operator of the shield console or shake the passengers. Overconfident as usual, the Imperial pilots had neglected to take an evasive approach but screamed down in a tight formation straight at the medium freighter, expecting to be able to damage it before receiving return fire. One of the pilots nearly paid dearly as the glancing hit from one of the Dogfish's two turrets destroyed his blaster array and caused his console to throw arcs of plasma as the capacitors exploded. The four fighters screamed together down at the Dogfish from close range, attempting to concentrate fire on the Dogfish's primary thrusters, but the poor angle, the fact that one tie had just lost its blasters, and the unexpected nimbleness of the ship as it rolled and swerved out of the attack caused the coordinated strafing run to miss entirely. Despite the attempts of the Tie's to evade fire, at this close range the gunners aboard the Dogfish proved lethal, scoring a glancing blow on the lead tie that sent it spinning out of control and blowing engine on the already damaged Tie, forcing the pilot to eject. The other two ties snap turned and sent more fire onto the converted medium freighter, but with only two Ties and a single angle of attack, their strafing run was futile against as heavily of armed ship as the Dogfish. As they passed over the top of the ship's hull, one of them exploded in a ball of plasma was it was caught in the fire of the Dogfish's port side weapon emplacement, instantly killing the pilot. The veteran flight leader though nimbly dodged the blaster fire of the starboard emplacement despite (or perhaps because) still not being fully in control of his ship.
It was at this point that the Imperial's realized that their coms had been jammed. The more junior surviving pilot transmitted in the clear that their comms where jammed and they couldn't raise the fleet. The two ships linked up and tried to evade the now pursuing freighter - hunters turned into prey - but a lucky shot struck the flight leader and exploded the nimble but fragile fighter. Amazingly, the veteran managed to eject right as his ship disintegrated. Seeing this, the junior pilot panicked and decided that only by speed was he going to survive this situation. He punched out on full thrust and started rapidly putting distance between himself and the much slower freighter but travelling in straight lines under fire from skilled gunners is not healthy. A blaster shot separated one of his energy dissipaters from this ship, and he too punched out as his ship disintegrated around him. But despite three pilots surviving the loss of their ships, the battle would not have a happy ending for the imperials. Concerned about operational security, the bounty hunters ruthlessly and in violation of the laws of warfare hunted down the helpless pilots - their distress beacons jammed - as they drifted in space and gunned them down like the terrorists the Imperials very much believed them to be. In space, no one can hear you scream.
The Dogfish now raced down to the planet's surface, anxious to get to ground before the bulk of the Imperial fleet and something more dangerous to them than line Ties arrived. The planet itself was pockmarked with many fires, burning through its verdant jungles, showing signs of orbital bombardment. This did have the advantage of filling the atmosphere with smoke that cloaked the descending ship from ground sensors. The area of the planet that the signal arrived from proved to be an upland river valley, about 1500m above sea level with peaks framing it as much as 4500m high. Surveying the dense jungle for a likely place to hide the ship, they decided against several sink holes before luckily finding a large cave in the side of a mogote, which with a nimble piloting check they squeezed into without incident, finding the interior almost ideally suited for hiding a large ship. They then sat down with the comms console expecting a long wait before the next signal. Unexpectedly, after only 30 minutes of listening, they got their second hit, which the computer resolved to a one square kilometer area only 48 kilometers away from their current hiding spot. After debating the best approach, they loaded up on their newly purchased speeder bikes and cautiously headed out into the nighttime jungle, moving cautiously owing to the difficult terrain and darkness.
The night proved less hazardous than feared, as the red dwarf companion star some 3 light months away from the Keosnapi primary bathed the night side of the planet in an eerie red light with similar brightness to a large moon. About a half-hour into their journey there was a brief scare when 4 tie bombers swooped out of the cloud cover and launched volley after volley of photon torpedoes at some target which fortunately proved to be about 7 kilometers away. They powered down their speeders and hid in the thick undergrowth, hearing but not seeing screaming Tie's nearby and the sounds of heavy battle occurring in the distance. After things quieted down, they continued their journey, the full scale of the Maavan conflict becoming real to them for the first time. Thirty minutes later and the bounty hunters arrived in a narrow lush valley, the center of which was dominated by an ancient cinder cone, it's sides now lush with ferns and cycads and they began to search for the agent they had been paid to recover. Thirty minutes of searching though proved futile, a kilometer of jungle proving to be easy to hide in. The party decided to make a temporary camp long enough to set up their sensors and get a good reading. Taro, the ex-Republic commando, took out his macronoculars and began to survey the surrounding foliage. To his surprise he discovered high in the fern trees only about 100 meters away a glint of metal and a hidden bivouac. But at that exact moment, a large pack of long-legged 3-meter-long lizards charged the hunters through the heavy undergrowth. Concealed by the bracken and moving, the gracile dragons largely managed to avoid the blaster fire and were soon right upon the hunters, slavering and pouncing.
Were it not for the fact the hunters are strong in the force, they might well have become lizard food that night. (To be continued...)
