After escaping near destruction on Atollon, the Rebellion is in dire strait, but hope is not yet lost. Following her promotion to Grand Marshall of the Rebellion, Jaral Bridger is set on beginning a massive guerrilla campaign across the Outer Rim, s...
Establishing a base had been surprisingly easy. From the bridge of the Admonitor, Iulius coordinated the efforts of the various Army and Stormtrooper battalions sent to the surface of the planet to establish a fortress, with six outposts interconnected by covered trenches.
For now, the Hybrids had only sent what seemed to be scouting parties against the base, which had been easily driven off, however, the scanners indicated that they were amassing forces in the region. Iulius had found a simple way to delay them: every time they spotted a large enough formation, he sent one of the Star Destroyers to bomb them from orbit. After around 3.000 of them had been wiped out two days before, it looked like the Hybrids were starting to dig tunnels to approach the base, which could have been more difficult.
The Imperials could have simply glassed the planet, but Iulius wanted to make contact with the Humans on the surface. He had hoped that establishing the base and see other Humans from space would convince the indigenous to come out in the open, but so far nothing.
Perhaps there were no more Humans in that part of the planet.
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Ulterior studies on the killed Hybrids had only brought marginal results, though there was an interesting aspect: it seemed like all those creatures were Humans mutated through some sort of virus, but there were also many specimen that had the same exact code, sign that they probably were also using some sort of cloning technology.
And after the bombardment of three days before, the Task Force had discovered that there was a much greater variety than just the Hybrids and the Steel-Heads: among the corpses they found the literal pieces of a creature that must've been massive and couldn't have been born by mutating a single Human, plus they also found some four-legged walkers, smaller than an AT-ST, but they seemed to have been designed to be fast and able to pass over any terrain.
Iulius had a lot of questions, though he believed he had part of the answers. He was sure, at this point, that the Hybrids were created by another species, perhaps the Grysks, and used to convert the population of that planet into slave soldiers.
The cloning technology could mean two things: either the indigenous had found a way to cure the virus, forcing the Hybrids' masters to use cloning, or maybe the number of indigenous had shrunk so low, and they became so good at guerrilla fighting, that trying to capture them had become just a pain with more losses than gains.
The concentration of hybrids seemed to be higher in the cold regions of the planet, which confirmed the thesis of the imperial scientists that those monsters largely preferred low temperatures to counter the body heat given by their increased metabolism.
The Admiral was now with the communication team, listening to the few transmissions that could be heard from the surface.
By listening for days, the protocol droid had come up with a rough vocabulary for the language used in the transmissions. Since the indigenous Humans were still separated into different nation before this catastrophe, Iulius assumed that what he was hearing was simply the trade language, and not everybody down there would be able to speak it even if he managed to make contact with the locals.
