20231104 Crimson Rescue, Part I

We headed at top speed to Vox City, where the Sun Spear was allegedly located, carrying the pieces of the only Sword which could render it operational with devastating destructive potential.
 
Suddenly, two tie fighters appeared ... appeared to want us dead. I found more seatbelts than most people probably know about and strapped myself in tightly.
 
Sitting shotgun, I found this aircar had shields, and focused them primarily at the rear to protect us from the known threats.
 
Then I noticed, happily, that this land speeder had two blaster cannons. They look extremely large when you activate them and aim them backwards (and at your own face if you are seated in the "shotgun seat").
 
Dame Ysadora's, "What up?" received a reply from the tie fighter pilots over the comm. It was the usual until Almon overloaded their comm channel with childhood trigonometry songs in their sing-song ear-worm style.
 
Davish took that moment to swerve us into a bombed hole inside one of the skyscraper buildings. It was a really tight one for this land speeder - to say the least.
 
It was even tighter for the one tie fighter who followed us into the hole made by a weapon of war much earlier and (thankfully) blasted through the other side of the building.
 
I fired a few low-power shots from our laser cannons to the roofing, while D'Joy continued his earworm attack and Vanya waved a hand at much of the debris, aiming it at our adversary.
 
A window alerted us to the location of the other tie fighter outside the building, attempting to cut us off as we exited. The two of us Mentats combined efforts to predict the likely location at which to shoot. Then I shot.
 
So that great big solar panel on the side of the tie fighter zipped toward us like a buzz saw after I shot off the remainder of the craft.
 
The tie fighter pilot ejected to relative safety. He wore black with a stripe of bright red piping on his helmet, pant leg, and sleeve. Strange. Not Ravenguard at all.
 
Vanya jumped out of the landspeeder (as we careened basically straight down) to handle that whole buzz saw thing.
 
The other tie fighter attempted to catch our vehicle with a magnetic grapple line and failed. That gave me a great idea.
 
I pulled up the control for our tow line launcher and fired at the coordinates D'Joy (pseudonym: Heath Toffee) calculated for me.
 
It struck the building, changing our course dramatically. We didn't die. Davish used the line to reverse our direction and head back to pick up Vanya.
 
Vanya caught the line, whipped around as we did a barrel roll, and tried to head butt the tie fighter.
 
[The GM said, "Hmm... I know what I'll do! Yes, yes." ]
 
Several maneuvers later. The tie fighter had a bad pull drag on one damaged solar panel reducing his steering capability. And the land speeder leveled out a bit. Vanya opened the side of the tie fighter and said some things to the pilot.
 
We both smoothly came down to a soft landing on a landing field NNE of Vox City, with the Jedi surfing on top of the fighter.
 
We found someone or somethings using lights inside the long wrecked starship nearby, (Venitar class attack capital ship, predecessor of the Star Destroyer) the one that we suspect contained the smaller Sun Spear ship. I deduced that in the last 6 months this level of maintenance activity might have the capital ship flightworthy. (more likely arguably flyable but not flight worthy.)
 
BD-21 kissed the ground.
 
Vanya spoke with the pilot of the tie fighter and they (unexpectedly) separated on apparently amicable terms. That happens a lot.
 
Then we started to plan.
 
We hopped into the landspeeder and headed to Keenigs Cantina, then (under cover of buildings and oncoming darkness) turned toward the capital ship, until the slope got too steep for the landspeeder to safely travel with an untrained driver. Then we hiked.
 
First we saw the command bridge, a raised trapezoid. It had double wide blast doors / cargo doors close to the bridge. Four red-armored stormtroopers (not Ravenguard, like from the Choni Temple, working for Sargon) stood guard of an entrance door with an electronic keypad.
 
As we do often, "Heath" and I, "Reese", cobbled together a simulation of a Nightsister (with a whip riding a Rancor hunting for male slaves) attacking us and our wagon of maintenance supplies. We broadcast it on the local 911 emergency channel, then ran to the protective arms of the armored guards. We apparently sold our story well. They took us to MedBay to recover and sent a few guards to investigate. (That situation was not out of the realm of possibility in this area.)
 
The medic was as credulous of our story as the guards appeared to be. He gave me a light sedative. He succumbed to my electric slingshot, and we placed him on a pile of the most boring supplies charts to sleep it off. We got into the ship information network and found the location of Vanya's unsecure datapad.
 
Sammie Fadrel was the name of the young technician whom Vanya and Davish had acquired. He, like many others here, was only working a job to make a living.
 
It appeared these people would be able to transition to non-military work (with a dental plan) with a little coaxing and without a tyrannical evil forcing them to be here.
 
We quickly adjusted the schedules of all the maintenance workers and gave them a mandatory performance review meeting in a nonoperational cafeteria hall. The security troopers were generally patrolling for threats coming from outside the ship, not overseeing the workers, so seeing an empty room here and there would not be too abnormal.
 
At the convened meeting, the foreman (Gin Taaks) eventually spoke for the work crew after Vanya and I appraised their potential to escape the life they were currently undergoing and make a move to take the ship for their own (or to give to the Mentats) to repurpose it from a world-killing weapon. I described how the war would come to an end when this Sun Spear was taken out of the reach of the two wealthy kingpins who were after it, spending the lives of their hired soldiers and workers.
 
Admiral Croy and Sargon has a direct channel to the DT's.
 
And a signal from Danar came in right at that moment. "I've got to warn you about this! You have to know! This is REEALLY bad! There's these Bloodsmith Pirates Raiders working for Sargon. Look!" He had Von Dromos with him. Combat droids covered in organic skin that don't register as droids. A room of greenish bacta with metal skeletons with flesh being grown onto them. "They have infiltrated into the Bloodsmith Pirates at Port Etmar. We haven't figured out how to detect them. Do that Forcey thing! They have made a set of Jedi crystal goggles that can see them."
 
Vanya showed Heath and myself how to detect whether the people we saw were living or machines. (She couuld have done that ten years ago, and I would have been very interested to study the whole Force thing right then.
 
We decided our plan to take the DT's, take the Lieutenant, and take the ship in that order.