A Link To The Blast
I'd been training on Blazing Chains with Rondaes and had gone through multiple sets of training dummies and a ton of blaster energy. "All right. That's enough, gimme a minute." I stared at the training dummies. "So you've thrown multiple blasters at a time at me, multiple different angles, an autofire blaster. I've heard the Teepo Paladins can deflect blaster bolts with other blaster bolts. Which gives me an idea."
Rondaes stared at me. "Another one of your ideas?"
"Hey, I might be on to something here," I replied.
"More like on something," she replied with a smirk.
I blew out a breath, called on the Force. It answered, ready as always. I fired a shot into the air and caught it, sent it into orbit around myself. "Go ahead, Rondaes."
She fired at me and I brought the bolt I had on an intercept course with the first. If I remembered pool from back on Byblos right, both bolts would bounce off each other and modify each other's vector. They'd told me it wasn't normal to compute the vectors in my head, but I just saw the lines they'd take and went from there. I have a funny feeling the Force was involved, but if I was doing it so well it was unconscious, I'd continue to not think about it and just do it instead.
Sure enough, the first bolt bounced off the second and both went into the floor. Was there any practical use here? Probably not yet.
"Hmm. Limited by maximum range. Could carry a heavy repeating blaster pistol and just keep it handy, but I'd have to refresh the orbiting bolts. Could arrange some kind of device to carry a brace of sniper rifles so I can keep a bunch of those in orbit, but even those don't last forever, both on range and ammunition."
I grinned. "Wait a minute. What if...what if I put together the biggest power generator I could find to power a Ground Buzzer with the auto-targeting set to droid energy signatures and attached that to a bunch of armor, shielding, and a set of repulsors?"
Rondaes rolled her eyes. "You'd have a target. A big ugly target."
"A big ugly target that could fire 12 shots per second, which is probably up near the Force-boosted reaction limit. A big ugly target that would be hard to kill and that could throw a lot of rounds downrange," I responded. "Come to think of it...didn't we just start building STAPs back at by the droid factory?"
It was amazing how much fuss throwing around General Grievous' name would get you. I'd headed down to the Rush-Box, where a man named Ruslan Sovium led a team of engineers whose job it was to put together ideas that need a practical version immediately, and told them that Grievous' squad wanted one. Well, that was true from a certain point of view.
I got the call that it was ready within about twelve hours. It looked like they'd applied a coat of paint to it, about the pale-yellow color of the inside of a bone. "Thanks," I told the lead tech.
"We do a lot of crazy things in Sovium's Rush-Box. Today we put a speeder on a gun. If we don't end this war, the war will end us," the tech said. "Now get to it."
I looked at the thing. It was big. Maybe twice my height and three times as wide, covered in slabs of armor with a blaster cannon hanging from it. I climbed on and looked at the cockpit. Yes, cockpit. There were only about three or four gauges on it: one for remaining reactor power, one for managing the shields, and one for the gun. "You've tested it?"
The tech nodded. "You sure you're not a weapons designer? This thing is nuts, and I'm going to have Ruslan bring it up at the next advisory meeting. It isn't some sort of fast attack speeder. You're basically flying an armored-up shielded-up gun. Does this particular bit of madness have a name?"
I grinned. "It's an
Equus-class personal speeder." Finally, those High Galactic classes over at Byblos were going to be useful. My own personal little joke about the call-sign Grievous gave me.
I flew the thing down the hallway into my training room and flipped the targeting over to manual, drawing upon the Force before firing at a pile of empty supply boxes for one second, focusing on redirecting as many shots as I could before powering down the gun and looking at the results.
Six of the shots had gone straight where the cannon was aimed. The other six had hit six other boxes. "Huh. I wonder what Master Tyro would think about this? Probably that I'm not quite up to speed. Then again, the auto-targeting will cover the other half when we hit the Foundry...oh, right, and when we go after anything belonging to the Seps."
A/N: Cross a
Heavy STAP with the
A-10 Thunderbolt and Blazing Chains. This particular little bundle of crazy has been bouncing through my head for the last week and I could finally let it out.
Also, yes, now the Reaper rides a 'pale horse'.
