The Force Wills: Chapter 14 Snippet

Chapter 14 is complete and is now undergoing polishing. I'm aiming for this one to come out in full for patrons on Monday 25th April.

Chapter 13 will go public on 29th April.

I'm aiming to adopt a general fortnightly release schedule. If something is ready before then though, it'll be released. As always, my muse and real life influences things.  

In the meantime, to tide you over for the weekend, here's a short snippet from Chp14:

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

I stood in front of the command chair on the Resolute’s primary bridge and regarded the view outside with both satisfaction and frustration.

Senator…

Padme’s prediction on how long the Senate’s dithering would take had been off by two weeks, and now here we were, two and half months later, on the final hyperspace leg to Ryloth.

The Resolute stood as the flagship of a task group of five Venator-class Star Destroyers, accompanying us in a wall formation. They were Redeemer, Defender, Avenger and Colossus. It was our job to break the blockade and maintain aerospace superiority for the ground forces as the invasion continued.

Obi-wan’s own flagship had been unable to make it. Not due to enemy action but instead technical issues with the Negotiator’s hyperdrive had cropped up and it couldn’t be fixed in time before the scheduled departure of the invasion. He was therefore assigned to the ground component of the task force along with Mace Windu.

I spotted Anakin entering the bridge and a quick glance at the command chair holo showed we still had twenty three minutes till we reached the Ryloth system. It was hard not to feel nervous about the coming battle. This would be the first time my planning, ideas and actions would be affecting such a great amount of people, not just the large task group, but the homeworld of a very significant major race of the Corusca galaxy.

Thankfully, I wasn’t bearing the burden of overall command, not for something this important, that fell to Anakin.

“Relax snips,” he said to me with a mild smile.

I merely nodded and worked in tandem with the Force, settled the annoying butterflies in my stomach and the twitches along my spine.

“How’s the Resolute faring?”

“There hasn’t been a problem in the last twelve hours, so I’m confident she’ll pull through for us when it counts.”

“I really hope you documented your troubleshooting, master.”

“Of course,” he nodded.

It had been a bit of struggle in the beginning when we had overseen the engineers and scientists at the shipyards to get Anakin to slow down a bit and actually document what he was doing. His genius technical acumen, which was most definitely aided by the Force, had been enough to often baffle everyone.

“Intelligence report just came from the shipyards,” I lifted a datapad from the command chair and handed it over.

Anakin frowned as he quickly perused it, going over the major points.

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