Chapter Text
He hated the Mandalorians. The way they tore across the galaxy and blasted planets and people, leaving devastation in their wake, like the plains-locusts of Ord Radema. Only Bao-Dur found the locusts far more forgivable. They were animals, not knowing what they did; they acted on impulses coded into them by biology, and they served a vital role in the ecosphere. In a few years, new life sprung up in the plains the locusts swept clean. In contrast, the Mandalorians fought because their culture demanded it. They knew what they were doing, and they reveled in it anyway. Nothing flourished where they had been, except the fruits of pain and suffering and the flowers of sorrow. Worse than animals, he’d thought at the time, and he still believed it of them even now.
That hatred had given him the desire to join up with the War. At the time, he’d told (his surviving) family and friends that he’d joined because he needed to stop them from hurting any more people. In truth, his motives had been far less pure. He’d wanted to strike back against the Mandalorians. To make them feel the same pain they inflicted on other people, other worlds. So he’d exulted in every Republic victory, every planet reclaimed from their terror, every huge blow to their war machine. Every Mandalorian dead was a good thing, another Mandalorian who would never cause more death and destruction.
The war hadn’t been quickly or easily won, though. The Republic had been on the defensive, its counterattacks the weak swings of an unprepared boxer, and its successes limited and often overridden within weeks. The intervention of the rebel Jedi faction, led by Revan, had made it progress much better, as she called more soldiers and more ships to her side, swelling the ranks of the warriors and bringing in Jedi to organize and coordinate. They were more efficient fighters. And yet there were still agonizing months where the war was back to fighting in the trenches, like on Dxun.
The Jedi generals sat at tables in the briefing rooms, discussing the broader strategy of the War as dejarik, like it was just a bunch of moving game-pieces across a giant board. He’d overheard them one day when he was repairing a power system relay in the briefing room next door. They’d been unable to start the noise isolation systems because of the conduit damage. And for whatever reason, they’d kept meeting there rather than moving to a different room. And so he overheard the dispassionate way the Jedi talked about reassigning the fourth division to Dxun, knowing it would fall to the Mandalorians in the end, but hoping to buy a few more weeks to reinforce the depot at Ord Mantell so the supply lines could stay up. The Jedi in the room eventually agreed on the decision - all but one. But he was overruled.
Bao-Dur walked away from that meeting feeling unsettled. The Jedi were heroes of the Republic, champions of peace and order and justice. While many sat back idly, watching, the Jedi who had come to join the Army and Navy had done so in order to help save the Republic. He’d imagined they’d done so out of compassion, because they wanted to save lives. Hearing them talk about throwing them away so coldly sat in his stomach like he’d swallowed a lump of agrinium.
He couldn’t think like that about other people. As a child, he’d never had a taste for those games, couldn’t abstract his fellow soldiers to pieces to be sent somewhere to die to buy a few more turns, couldn’t bring himself to sacrifice one planet to save a dozen more. When he played, he always tried to protect everything he started out with. And whenever he did that, he lost horribly. So he stopped playing.
The decisions of fighting the War were complicated and messy and hard to think about. He found himself grateful he was an engineer, and not one of the higher-ranked officers whose job it was to weigh in on those decisions, to make the choices of who would live and die according to the grand plan.
It was nice being down in the Engineering Division. It was systematized and made sense. He loved to look at tiny components and painstakingly put them together, assembling wires into circuits, and circuits into a sub-system, and a sub-system into a system, until eventually it all became a larger piece that worked. His brain worked in systems, puzzles something to be taken apart, analyzed, and slotted back together. Troubleshooting was tweaking all of the variables until the solution was presented. It was simple and clean.
There needed to be a decisive way to win the War. The generals and admirals and Jedi, with their talk of the Republic forces as dejarik pieces, couldn’t find it. But maybe if you looked at it as an engineering problem...
So he’d started looking for an engineering solution. At first it was a small puzzle to occupy himself with in his spare time, thought experiments he could turn over in his mind during the down period between evening meal and sleep. And then, as the war dragged on and the Mandalorians were still not stopped, it began to consume him. He thought of it obsessively as he showered, as he ate, as he tried to fall asleep at night.
The solution came to him, late one night in a corner of the mess. Pieces of technical information that he’d had for months, that had seemed irrelevant to his direct assignments, but had been interesting enough to stick into his brain. Here was a hypothetical shield design that anchored in mass shadows but the numbers said he couldn’t get to work on anything smaller than a decent-sized moon; there was a concept of amplifying gravitic attraction that he’d wished could be reversed to repel projectiles instead; a dozen discarded research concepts that, when you put it together…
He didn’t sleep for two days while he finished the concept. When it was done, he looked at it, found it elegant in its design. Then he ran it through the simulators, and watched what it did to the simulated planet.
Nothing on the surface would survive. Anything in the inner system would be sucked into it. A perfect trap from which there was no escaping. A perfect weapon to strike a single, decisive blow. To destroy everything on the planet - to kill all of the troops that would be there -
It was an elegant solution, and a horrible creation.
The longer he looked at it, the more certain he knew it was the answer to the hatred burning in his heart, to his bitter need to end the Mandalorians. This was the way to end the war. To stop the Mandalorian threat once and for all. To prevent them from overrunning the galaxy like plains-locusts. It was the right thing to do.
He knew if he submitted the designs up the normal chain, it would get ignored. But perhaps if he showed it to someone who could make sure it was seen...who would know its potential. He thought of the meeting weeks ago where he’d overheard the Jedi discussing allocating their forces, thought of the one who’d protested throwing lives away to prolong the war. That Jedi wanted it ended quickly. Maybe he would see how useful this was.
Bao-Dur squared his shoulders, picked up the datapad, and set off to violate protocol and speak with a Jedi.