Beyond - Legends Empire of Ashes 2: Anger

Title: Empire of Ashes: Anger
Author: cthugha (Francesca Pallopides)

Timeframe: 6-9 ABY
Characters: Palpatine (clone), Carnor Jax, Ederlathh Pallopides, the artist formerly known as Ken the Jedi Prince, Sarcev Quest, Ysanne Isard, Airen Cracken, Hoole, Mas Amedda, Sate Pestage (not the clone), Cronal (petrified), Nefta, Jeng Droga, various other Palpatine cronies and reams of Legends characters
Genre: trying hard to be epic

Summary: Palpatine is dead. No, really. In Empire of Ashes, volume 1 (now retitled "Empire of Ashes: Fear"), he came back from the dead on Byss, only to die again as a result of a rather chaotic plot. Now Sarcev Quest, former Emperor's Hand and the brains behind that plot, is confident that the old man is really gone and the remains of his empire are up for grabs. Of course Ysanne Isard is still in the way, and there's the small matter of the New Republic chewing away at the Empire from all sides... but for the man who dealt with Palpatine, that shouldn't be too much of a challenge. Right?

---

Empire of Ashes: Anger​

Prologue: Remastered

(4 ABY)


Anakin Skywalker smiled at his children.

His son was standing tall among gigantic trees – his son, Luke, who had held firm against the Emperor; his son, who with his unremitting love had finally shown Anakin the way back to his own free will. Luke, smiling not with glee over a vanquished foe but with serene love for his father.

For a moment Anakin wondered how he must appear to him: as the pale, mangled man aged beyond his years that Luke had seen him as while he drew his last breath on the Death Star – or as the shining young warrior that Anakin felt like, now that he had returned to the light?

It did not matter. Luke had forgiven him, and his forgiveness had closed the whole wide arc of Anakin's tortured life. For decades he had been falling to pieces, inwardly as well as outwardly; but now, in death, he was finally whole again, thanks to his son.

Or nearly whole. Because there was another: another child of his, who had not yet forgiven him. Who might not ever forgive him, and with good reason.

Leia stepped up on the wooden platform behind Luke, her face flushed and her eyes wide with the excitement of the evening. Anakin remembered her fierce determination on the bridge of the Death Star before he had destroyed her home; he remembered her wailing afterwards, the echoes of her pain in the Force; and for some reason he remembered her smell too, even filtered through the rebreather in his mask. Leia, he wanted to say. Leia, forgive me. Or if you cannot forgive me, know…

His daughter looked over her brother's shoulder, but she did not look at him. Leia's gaze passed right through him into the shadowy depths of Endor's jungle as if he wasn't there.

Because you aren't there, Obi-Wan told him. None of us are.

Anakin could not pretend to understand how any of this worked. All he knew was that after he had closed his burning eyes for the last time, he had found himself surrounded by conflicting forces that tugged and tore at him, threatening to rip what was left of him apart. He would have ended up part of that formless maelstrom, his identity lost forever, if Obi-Wan had not come and helped him pull himself together.

His former friend and teacher had been an old man the last time Anakin had seen him. "I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!" he had said before Anakin struck him down. That too had gnawed at him for the rest of his life, until he saw the truth of it after his death. In this chaotic place, whatever it really was, his old friend and mentor was an island of stability, creating shapes and shaping forces in concert with Yoda, Qui-Gon Jinn and others.

And most impressively – perhaps most disconcertingly as well – they could open windows into the real world, the stable, material universe with which this place intersected in ways Anakin did not fully grasp. Here he stood, looking his son in the eye and trying in vain to meet his daughter's gaze; and all the while he was aware of the incredible powers Obi-Wan and Yoda were bringing to bear in order to make this fleeting interaction possible. It was as if he were looking up through the surface of a river, kept aloft and in place by the hands of his old Master, but always conscious of the currents tearing at them all.

Leia, Anakin wanted to say. Leia, forgive me.

But Leia turned away, kissed her brother on the cheek and went back to her revels. A core of fear opened inside Anakin, a hole, a crack. Obi-Wan radiated reassurance, but it was not enough. Tell her for me, Anakin wanted to tell Luke. Please, help her understand.

Luke smiled and turned away as well, following his sister. Anakin felt the crack widen. He had been almost there, nearly complete. This close to a good ending that would make his story whole. Nearly but not quite beyond the reach of fear – the fear that had dogged him throughout all of his corporeal life, the fear that had opened him up to Palpatine’s manipulations, that had kept him chained to the dark side.

Don’t be afraid, Obi-Wan told him as the window towards the material world slowly closed and the blue swirls of chaos crept in from the edges. This is not the last time you will see her. The story is not quite over.

Afraid so, I am, Yoda said. He was turning his gnarly head this way and that warily, looking for something. In fact…

Something grabbed Anakin by the ankles and pulled him down, away from Obi-Wan and Yoda, straight through the half-solid structures they had built around themselves and out the other side. He flailed and struggled, trying to keep himself together the way Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon had shown him, preventing his mind and personality from coming apart in a flurry of isolated thoughts and memories. It helped to think of himself as a body, a figure made of light, permeable but stable. Let the shadows pass through you, Qui-Gon had said. They cannot touch you.

But this one could. It dragged Anakin into the river of chaos, beat him and scratched at him, wedged its tendrils into the crack inside him and widened it with brutal pressure as he screamed. You’re mine, it said. You’re mine, you’re mine, you’re mine!

It was his master. Palpatine, or what was left of him, tore into Anakin with the same fury he had unleashed on Luke on the Death Star before the end. He was frightening to behold, free of the decrepit bag of meat that had been his body, a nexus of pure hateful energy. Anakin fought him, but he had no chance. He called for help from Obi-Wan, from Qui-Gon, even from Yoda. But the Chaos was no ordinary place; in fact it was no place at all except where someone powerful enough shaped a small part of it into the semblance of one. There was nowhere to run, because there was nowhere…

Nowhere, except reality.

Anakin stilled himself. He stopped fighting his Master; he called up the feeling that had been a constant for the last two decades of his life: that of kneeling in front of Palpatine, of submitting all of his power to a greater one. Then, he had acted out of fear; now he allowed himself a small sliver of hope.

I am, Master, he told him. Yours.

A sense of vindictive satisfaction grew within the thing that had been Palpatine. He was not here for revenge, Anakin realized as he let the familiar pain of submission spread through him. Palpatine still thought he could win. He meant to return to the material world and eat it up, then conquer the Chaos itself, as had been his plan from the beginning. Anakin was right where he belonged: he would be the first general of Palpatine’s chaos army, gathering his forces so he was ready to strike when the time came.

Anakin let the thought fill him with pride and longing as he bent his own will to his master’s. He excelled at that; he had plenty of practice. Good, Palpatine cooed. Good.

There was no ground to kneel on in the Chaos, not even an up or down to speak of. But even in his frayed, mangled state, the Emperor made it clear that wherever he was, was up. He looked down on his disciple with eyes the color of Force lightning.

Everything is proceeding as I have foreseen…

 

Recoil

(6 ABY)


Picture an attractor, like a magnet of enormous power. Put it in the center of the Galaxy and watch how bits of matter from all over the glowing disk are being pulled towards it, slowly at first as they shed the momentum of their previous courses, then faster and faster.

For a long moment, Darth Sidious was that attractor. Every being in the Galaxy that had ever felt the touch of the Dark Side was drawn towards him with inexorable force. Their minds became conduits for his will, their powers fed into Palpatine's like a billion waterfalls gushing into a river…

And then he died.

Picture the Galaxy righting itself, the old patterns of force and movement reasserting themselves, the inward movement of all those little specks of matter ending in confusion or reversing outright as the pull suddenly slackens. The Kaan Heptad had been broken and the body at its center had disintegrated. When the center cannot hold, things fall apart.


***


On a planet whose surface cracked under the pull of a bloated moon, where superheated gases geysered from the ground at random intervals, a man was racing towards a group of prefab buildings. “Groundquake!” he yelled at the top of his lungs. “Everyone out, now!”

Most of the colonists started moving even before his words reached them. Around fifty people came rushing out of their houses, some of them carrying children, two of them hauling a sick old man wrapped into his bedsheets between them.

They all looked to him for guidance. Gantoris suppressed his fear and pointed towards a basalt ridge. “Up there!” he called out.

He knew how he must look to them, standing erect on a slab of rock, his dark hair wild before the brilliant gases of the Cauldron Nebula. But none of them hesitated before following his command – none besides Warton. “Elva is still in there,” he said, pointing towards a container at the edge of their makeshift settlement. “She wouldn’t open the door…”

“Go.” Gantoris felt the ground starting to heave beneath his feet. He shooed Warton away with a wave of his hand, and the man fled up the ridge as if shoved. Gantoris was already leaping, anticipating the tremors in the ground, pushing himself off rocks the moment they began to move.

He should have known sooner. He should have sensed the groundquake before it was here. And he would have, if not for the Dark Man…

“Elva!” he called out moments before he reached the door. The container had been left here by the company back when they still believed the Eol Sha colony could be economically viable. Now it served as a privacy retreat used mostly by the colony’s women. But it was falling apart, and in a few seconds it would –

“Elva! Open the door!” he shouted, pounding on the corrugated metal, even though the rusty surface pierced his skin. “There’s a rockslide coming –”

And there it came, just as the metal bar that locked the door began to move. The ground beneath him sagged, and he had to leap up with all his strength to keep the onrushing rocks from crushing his legs. They crushed the freight container, though, and the woman within it, and the child within her, within seconds. Gantoris howled in pain and in frustration even as he danced across the rocks to keep from being buried along with the village. If only he had been faster – if only he had been there, instead of following his treacherous vision. The Dark Man had promised him powers beyond his imagination – the power to stop a rockslide in its tracks, to stopper a volcano, even to lift his people off this miserable world by the sheer force of his will…

But it had all been a trick, a distraction. And now Elva was dead, and her nameless child too, and Gantoris wished he could join them, to let himself fall into the still-rolling rocks and be ground up with them.

But there were still others who needed him. The colony depended on him and what meager powers he had. He looked up at them standing atop the ridge, watching breathlessly as he eluded the last shudders of the groundquake. It would take them weeks to excavate what was left of their homes, but they would do it, as they had before. Eventually they'd all be ground to dust; but as long as they could, they would endure.


***


On remote Kesh, the uvaks still circled the temple. They cawed loudly as their leathery wings stirred up the air, exhausted nearly to the point of death but unable to stop.

Inside the temple, Darish Vol stared at the Grand Lord and his peers in shock. What had they done? No – what had they been about to do?

The Grand Lord himself seemed as confused as he was. “Gone,” he mumbled through his expansive beard. “He's gone.”

“And we are not,” Delaris Raagesh snarled. “Why did you stop? Kill them.” He drew his shikkar across the throat of the Keshiri servant kneeling at his feet. Blood geysered out, spattering Darish's feet. “What are you waiting for?”

“He’s gone,” Grand Lord Khai repeated. “The one who called us.”

“And what if he is?” Blood dripped from Raagesh’s blade as he pointed it across the room at the Grand Lord. “He showed us the way. Don’t you want to get off this rock? Don’t you want to rejoin the Sith in their glorious rule over the… ackhhh…”

Darish Vol’s blade had found its mark, piercing his fellow High Lord’s windpipe with his usual precision. Everyone’s eyes turned to him as High Lord Raagesh crumpled to the ground next to his sacrifice.

Darish Vol remained perfectly still, his own gaze fixed on the Grand Lord on the far side of the circle. This was the point on which the Tribe's fate turned, he knew. If Grand Lord Khai ordered them to continue the ritual…

“Not now,” the Grand Lord said. “Not yet. We were acting in haste.”

“We were forced,” Xerven Rhea said, his voice thick with righteous wrath. And he was right: Darish remembered now. How he had rushed to the uvak stables with a mad urgency as if his limbs were not his own; how he'd torn down the stable walls, leaped on his uvak and taken the others along with him; how all the High Lords had arrived at the temple with an unprecedented unity of purpose and assembled around Grand Lord Thallis Khai in the hold of the Omen, the ancient starship that had brought the Tribe to Kesh millennia ago.

The ship had not flown in five thousand years. Its engines were broken, its hull cracked, and it was encased within a temple that had grown around it. But just moments ago, they had been about to raise it to the skies by the sheer force of their combined will.

Most of them, possibly all of them, would have perished in the attempt. But under the influence of the Call, even a tiny chance that one of them might make it to the Caller had been enough to make it seem not merely worth it, but inevitable. Their exile had to end, and if it cost the lives of every High Lord or even the Grand Lord himself…

And of everyone else on Kesh.

Darish Vol briefly looked at his feet as the realization twisted his features. He was standing in a puddle of blood: Delaris Raagesh's human blood mingled with that of his Keshiri sacrifice. More Keshiri, bound and gagged with the Force, were kneeling in front of each High Lord or Lady awaiting their deaths. Through a Sith ritual, the knowledge of which the Caller had shoved into their minds, those deaths had been supposed to start a chain reaction that ripped the life energies out of every creature on the planet, to supply the power needed to break the Omen free and heave it into orbit…

Not now, the Grand Lord had said. Not yet.

Darish exchanged a glance with Xerven Rhea next to him. Now that the ritual was known, it would be used – in time, whenever the Grand Lord and enough of his allies felt ready. They would sacrifice everyone for a chance at the stars, eventually, now that they knew they could.

Darish and Xerven Rhea drew their lightsabers at the same time. Most of the others were still stunned and confused; they fell quickly, without putting up much of a fight. Thallis Khai himself proved more of a challenge, but together the two High Lords – one young and ruthless, the other wily and old – beat him down anyway.

The uvaks still circled when everyone in the temple was dead. Darish and Xerven looked at each other across the smoking corpse of their High Lord. Now only two people remained who knew the secret of the ritual – and it would have to die with them.

Xerven Rhea turned off his saber. “No word,” he said darkly, holding Darish Vol's gaze. “To anyone. Ever.”

“Yes,” Darish agreed and swung his lightsaber in a wide arc. High Lord Rhea's head and body, neatly separated from each other, joined the others’ on the floor.

Outside, the uvaks had stopped cawing from exhaustion. One of them fell, its leathery wings grazing the temple wall before it crashed headlong into the courtyard. The others circled for a moment longer; then they fled.

Most did not make it home.


***


In deep space, on an artificial planet that revolved around its axis once every five hours, Lord Hethrir waved for a chair. He did not spare a glance for the helper who brought it, or for the slaves arrayed in front of him who were watching his change of mood with confused trepidation. Instead he looked toward the pole, to the point in the sky around which all of the other stars seemed to rotate, and reflected.

Emperor Palpatine had always been a fickle master. Hethrir had served him out of necessity and convenience, but he had made sure to craft his grander plans in such a way that they did not depend on the Emperor's continued patronage.

Now the Emperor was gone, burned out in an astounding display of power, but burned all the same. That changed the landscape but not Hethrir's plans; his goals remained the same, only the path towards them shifted a little.

He stood abruptly, sending a wave of fear through the assembled slaves. Hethrir ignored them and turned to his helpers instead, who were looking at him with worry and anticipation in their eyes. To their credit, however, not one of them asked the question that must be burning in their throats.

Hethrir answered it anyway. "A great thing just happened," he said. "The old Empire has died for good. Its agonies are over." He raised his arms in a grand gesture, feeling renewed purpose coursing through him. "Assemble my faithful and the crew," he called out. "I mean to rename this ship." He did not add that he intended to seal the naming ceremony with the blood of the frightened slaves trembling behind him; that was implied. "For today, the new Empire can finally be born!"


***


Above Dathomir, Warlord Zsinj watched the streaks of fire fade and the smoke dissipate in the atmosphere. “You're sure we got them all?” he asked General Melvar.

“Reasonably sure,” the general said, frowning. “I wonder how they planned this, though. Intelligence saw no preparations for a breakout attempt, no indication the tribes were even communicating.”

And yet, minutes ago, witches all over the planet had suddenly banded together and hijacked every vessel that was capable of making orbit on Dathomir, plus a few that would never have made it out of the atmosphere anyway. Almost as if they were running away from something, Zsinj thought; but that didn't make sense.

They had shot them all down, of course. “Make absolutely sure,” he told Melvar. “And have someone draw up a plan for orbital bombardment.”

“Right away.” It was hard to tell with Melvar's pasty face, but Zsinj assumed the prospect pleased him. “Major settlements?”

“No, random. Indiscriminate. Make them wonder and cower in fear, not knowing where we'll hit them next.” Zsinj nodded, picturing the rain of fire that his Star Destroyers would unleash, turning forests to ash and lakes to steam. “And from now on, full interdiction. No spaceworthy vessels on the surface, ever. Shoot down anything that comes up, burn anything that goes down.”

“As you say.” Melvar left without further ado. He favored clean solutions, Zsinj knew; he would have preferred to wipe out the witches entirely long ago. But they were a resource, if a volatile one, and Zsinj didn't like wasting resources.

Which reminded him. There was one witch still on his flagship: Lanu Pasiq, taken down by half a dozen stun bolts when the breakout attempt started. She had been very useful since she’d left the Inquisitorius and cast her lot with him.

With a sigh of regret, Zsinj went to kill her.


***


In a freighter drifting among the stars of the Galactic Core, a millennia-old woman was fighting an even older man. The man lived inside her, a parasite, a prisoner – and he had almost broken free.

“He's dead,” Celeste said, clutching at the amulet whose insectile legs gripped her throat. “It's over. Stop.”

“It is not over.” There was a greed in Karness Muur's voice, a hunger that Celeste Morne hadn't felt in decades – not since Darth Vader had opened the coffin where she had been trapped for four thousand years, and the Sith Lord inside her had tried to latch on to him instead of her.

She'd stopped him then, keeping Muur trapped inside of her, for the sake of the galaxy. Together, Karness Muur and Darth Vader would have wreaked destruction on an unimaginable scale, transforming the population of entire planets into monstrous creatures wholly subservient to them. The light of freedom would have gone out in the galaxy forever, and the balance of the Force irretrievably lost.

And yet somehow, this had been worse. The man who'd called to them, who had compelled both Celeste and the Sith spirit within her to come and add their strength to his, had been Darth Vader's former master – but he was unlike Vader in nearly every way. Where Vader was driven by a pained need to impose order on the galaxy, to bring the vicissitudes of fate under his control, this Sidious did not care for order at all, except as a means to destruction. A galaxy with Vader in power would have been a dark, oppressive place; but it would still have had life within it, and as long as there was life, there was hope.

But if Sidious had attained the powers of Karness Muur, he would have eaten the galaxy whole. He would have used the Rakghouls to kill everyone in his way, then everyone else, and then turned the Rakghouls onto each other to feed off their deaths. In the end, nothing would have been left except dead stars and frozen corpses, while Sidious went on to ravage the Chaos itself.

Celeste shuddered, wrapping her arms around herself. Karness Muur had stopped tearing at her mind, perhaps sobered by the same conclusions. He was a Sith of the old kind, obsessed with power and domination, dangerous enough on his own… but he had nothing on Darth Sidious. If he had longed to serve him just minutes ago, it had been out of awe and naked compulsion. Now, on reflection, however…

“Go on,” he told Celeste. “Keep on the same course. The place is still there.”

“But…”

“But Sidious is not. Which is a good thing. But the others are.”

“The others?”

“Didn’t you feel them? A whole cabal of darksiders, breeding monsters and plotting their reconquest of the galaxy. I want them. We need them.”

Celeste could feel the pull: the longing for company, for relevance, even for power. It was weak compared to the pull Sidious had exerted on her, making her strap down in the pilot’s seat of her old freighter and plunge it into the Deep Core to join him – but it was a pull nonetheless. A direction.

She tightened the straps of her pilot’s harness and let her gaze flicker over the controls. Space was thick with stars here, and riddled with gravitational anomalies; but her sensors showed a zone of relative calm up ahead. If she swung the ship around that blue dwarf at this speed…

She set the course, her fingers dancing too quickly for even her own eyes to follow. Then she reached down to her belt and unsnapped her lightsaber.

“What are you doing?” Karness Muur said. “We need to…”

“There is no we,” Celeste Morne said, and plunged the lightsaber into the console in front of her. The controls melted instantly, then the nav computer burned out with an acrid hiss.

Karness Muur screamed in frustration, but Celeste only smiled. “I’m staying here, in orbit around this blue star,” she said, gazing out through the viewport at the dizzying panorama of the Deep Core rushing by. “And you will stay with me, my prisoner forever.”


***


On Byss itself, the Royal Guardsman Carnor Jax broke down from exhaustion when he finally reached the throne room level of the Citadel. He had run, leaped and climbed straight up for kilometers, buoyed by the Force and the need to warn Palpatine of the attempt on his life – but now Palpatine was dead, and Carnor Jax had no strength left.

Get up, a voice spoke in his head. It was Nefta, the ancient King of Ord Radama, who had given him wine to drink so they could share their thoughts without anyone listening in. Get up and catch her.

Groggy, Carnor Jax raised his head. Someone was racing towards him, shooting out of the Emperor’s throne room like a bullet. He struggled to focus, but in the gloom of the cavernous chamber he could only make out shadows. Swirling robes; a triangular headdress…

Lumiya.

The hulking Sentinels that were supposed to guard the throne room stood mute and unmoving, bereft of the will that had animated them. Lumiya dashed between them, heading for the landing platform, trying to escape.

She had killed Palpatine, or she had helped to kill him. In a moment, as soon as they had overcome their shock, the Emperor’s disciples would be upon her.

With an animal groan, using the strength Nefta funnelled into him through their connection more than his own, Carnor Jax launched himself into her path. She bouldered into him without stopping, and together they went down in a mad tangle of limbs and clothes.

Good, Nefta said. “Good,” Lumiya hissed into his ears. “Stay here. Make sure all of the clones are dead. Find out what you can.”

Now brace yourself, Nefta told him. Before Carnor Jax could wonder for what, Lumiya slammed her mask against his temple. Pain exploded in Carnor’s skull, and he brought his knees and elbows up on instinct to defend himself.

Lumiya rolled away, blood dripping from her mask. His blood. Carnor Jax howled in unfeigned anger and pushed himself up to lunge at her, only to rear back when her lightwhip hissed to life. Its tip singed his sleeve when she flicked it at him; on the backswing it grazed his thigh. Carnor Jax crumpled, defeated soundly enough that no one could argue otherwise, and allowed the pain to consume him.

Stay. Make sure all of the clones are dead. Find out what you can.

She would be in touch, Carnor Jax knew. And together, with Nefta’s help on Byss and Sarcev Quest’s on Coruscant, they would claim what was left of the dead tyrant’s empire.


***


On Coruscant, Sarcev Quest wiped away his pathetic tears, allowed himself another shudder at the memory of Palpatine's violation of his mind and his emotions, then quickly ducked into the nearest of the secret passages behind the walls of the Imperial Palace when he heard voices and footsteps approaching. Pulling the wall panel closed behind him, he leaned against the wall and took a deep breath.

So that was done. The resurrected Emperor was dead – and so were all his clones, consumed in a firestorm that must have obliterated the entire system where Palpatine had chosen to hide out from the galaxy.

It was a pity about Carnor Jax; but the guardsman had done his part. Now it was time to look toward the future. A future without Palpatine pulling the strings from behind the scenes; a future in which everything was up for grabs.

Standing tall and purging the last tendrils of inebriation from his mind, Sarcev Quest went to destroy Ysanne Isard.

 

The Remains of the Day


Unlike his clone, the real Sate Pestage was not insane. He was old, yes, and sometimes a thread of thought would escape him or a movement he had begun would go nowhere; but that was fine in his position. He had nothing left to prove to anyone. No one wanted his job.

Right now, his job was to take stock of what was left of his master's domain. Not the organic matter in the Citadel or the breeding grounds around it; he was happy to leave that to the darksiders and life-eaters in Palpatine's entourage. Pestage was looking outward, to the stars.

To help him, he had one overworked sensor officer, a droid with too many limbs, and a literal rock. “Corporal Seerdon,” he said. “What is this about ‘gravitational shifts’ and ‘astrographic realignment’?” Of the few ships which had survived the solar storm, a growing number were reporting navigational troubles of a puzzling sort. Byss Orbital Control, in a last gesture before being obliterated, had ordered all surviving ships to take cover in a narrow cone behind the planet’s night side. There they sat now, a cluster of blips of various sizes in the holographic display that took up the center of the room, looking like frightened animals huddled behind a tree – but apparently not even the bulk of Byss was enough to shield them from whatever was still going on out there.

“I’m not entirely sure, sir,” the sensor officer said, looking back and forth between the two datapads he was holding in his hands and the console in front of him. “It seems there is a mismatch between the actual gravitational forces acting on the ships and what their nav computers tell them ought to be the case…”

The droid made a whirring noise and plugged one of its limbs into the console next to Seerdon. “There is a star missing,” it declared after a moment.

“A star?”

“This system used to have two stars.” There was more whirring. “Beshqek, an O-type star, and Byss, its blue dwarf companion. The latter is gone.”

“Gone.”

With a voice even more jarring than the droid’s, the vocoder attached to the black cube of rock came to life. “It fell into the bigger star,” the rock said. “Causing it to go critical.”

“That… does make sense,” Corporal Seerdon said, squinting at one of his screens. “These readings indicate that Beshqek’s mass is slightly higher than it used to be. Just short of criticality, actually. If enough mass was lost in the ejection incident…”

“Can we expect it to hold?”

“Yes,” the rock said. – “I suppose,” Seerdon said. – “Assuming net mass gain no greater than eighty megatonnes per standard year, the star should remain stable for approximately two billion…”

“Good enough,” Pestage cut the droid off. “So we are short one star. Seerdon, have someone do the calculations and send the updated nav data up to the fleet. FourDee –”

“Already done,” the droid said. It had started out as a medical droid almost a century ago, Pestage knew, but its long and varied history of service had made it more versatile and more proactive than most of its peers.

“In that case, Seerdon,” Pestage said, putting emphasis on the name, “relay orders for the fleet to spread out as radiation levels allow. We have been attacked; we must expect a follow-up assault. FourDee, in short and simple words, how many ships do we have left?”

“Two hundred sixty-five,” the droid said immediately. “Less than six percent of our previous strength.”

Pestage nodded. It was a habit he had picked up centuries ago: instead of cursing, nod. It signals confidence to others and helps you accept the truth instead of railing against it. “What about the fleet that arrived just before the incident?”

Seerdon typed. “Delvardus. None of his ships seem to be in evidence…”

“Coincidence?” FourDee said.

“Here.” Seerdon called up the data on the console screen. “They jumped out as soon as the suns’ radiation signature became unstable. Towards… Prakith? In that direction, anyway.”

“Hmm.” Pestage steepled his fingers. “Suspicious.”

“It wasn’t him,” the rock said.

“What?”

“The attack. It was not Delvardus. He doesn’t have the skill, or the competence, or the drive.” The rock’s voice sounded dismissive even through the vocoder unit. “And I felt his fear and confusion before he fled.”

Pestage narrowed his eyes, regarding the slab of black material. The rock had formerly been Cronal, the secret head of Imperial Intelligence, and – under the code-name “Blackhole” – one of the Emperor’s most effective agents. Through some calamity involving Luke Skywalker and a planet of living rock, he had been encased in the meltmassif that he’d tried to fashion into his tool. How he was still alive was a mystery to Pestage; but at least he was mostly inert now. In his previous state, Cronal himself would definitely have had the skill, the competence, and most of all the drive to engineer a solar apocalypse; but as a rock sitting atop a planet in the literal line of fire, not so much.

“That’s good to know,” Pestage said. “Any other things you… felt?”

“Lumiya. Shira Brie.”

“Yes, we know about her. We have ships scanning likely spots along her exit vector.”

“They won’t find her. She can chart her own paths.”

“Maybe not. In any case…”

“Oh, wait, there’s a transmission,” Corporal Seerdon cut in. Then, noticing he had just cut off Sate Pestage, the Emperor’s successor by default, he flinched. “Sir,” he added.

“Go on.”

“From, uh, Superior General Delvardus, sir. Sent right before the jump. Stellar instability detected, recommend immediate evacuation, decamping to Kampe system. Glory to the Emperor.”

Pestage nodded. Glory, indeed. “FourDee, see if you can make hyperwave contact. Call him back here. Reassure him that the star is stable. No, wait.” He stabbed a spindly finger at Seerdon. “You tell him. From the observation platform. Make sure the star is visible in the background.”

“I… yes, right away, sir.” Visibly pale, the corporal gathered up his datapads and hurried out. When he was out of earshot, Pestage turned to the droid. “Radiation levels on the platform?”

“Survivable,” FourDee reported immediately. “For around three standard minutes.”

“Long enough to convince the Superior General, hopefully.” Pestage stared down the vaulted hallway through which Seerdon had left, momentarily losing his train of thought. He’d been waiting for something… but for what?

Oh, that’s right. For the other shoe to drop.


***


While Pestage turned his gaze back up towards the skies, a group of nine beings descended into the subterranean bowels of the Citadel. A circular platform, like a disk cut from the floor, had lowered them to near ground level; but from there on, the only conveyance further down was a single-person turbolift meant for the Emperor himself.

None of the nine trusted the others enough to send any one of them down ahead. They had all pledged allegiance to the same master, and a short while ago they had been willing and about to give all of their lives in his service… but their master was dead, for the time being, and they were going to see what was left of him. Depending on what they found, each expected the others to stab them in the back – either to curry favor with Palpatine when he returned, or to grab power for themselves.

So they all took the stairs, keeping each other within sight with the same vigilance with which they scanned their surroundings for threats and traps. The tallest of them was the most confident: Mas Amedda, a horned Chagrian whose natural gravitas still commanded respect despite his age, had lived in the Citadel and ruled it in the Emperor's place for decades. Even he could not claim to know all of the secrets Darth Sidious had hatched and hidden in the depths of his domain, but he had been down here and lived before, which was more than anyone else could claim.

He was accompanied by another tall figure, this one wearing the uniform of a Royal Guard but with the helmet and pike of one of the Citadel's own Sovereign Protectors. The pike and helmet's previous owner had been slain by Lumiya during her escape from the throne room; when Mas Amedda had told Carnor Jax to follow him, he had granted the guardsman use of the equipment for the duration. Since Carnor's function in this expedition was to go in first whenever any of the others felt a prick of danger or a hint of uncertainty about a room they were about to enter, the added protection seemed only appropriate.

Following behind the two on the wide, curved stairs were the two shortest members of the group: T'uaz and K'iaz, the last priests of Trinta, occasionally chattering quietly to each other in their incomprehensible language. Their round, simian-like faces made them look deceptively merry; those faces, and the brothers’ chittering laugh, were the last things many a sentient had witnessed when they were on a hunt. Watching them from behind was Sa-Di, late of Coruscant, who had brought Baddon Fass with him as backup. Fass, brooding and angry as usual, could be expected to erupt into random violence at any moment; but at least, unlike the two horned priests, Sa-Di was reasonably certain he did not have his own agenda.

Jahar Nefta and Jeng Droga were next. The former wore a permanent expression of disdain on his ageless face, while the latter was looking around with eager curiosity, his broad jaw working in the same rhythm his fists clenched and unclenched. Both of them were confident that when it came to it, they could take out everyone else in their group – except, perhaps, the boy behind them.

The boy did not, by any convention or agreement, belong with the group. No one had asked him to come, or told him to, or given him permission. But when he had trailed along with them wordlessly, stepping onto the platform just as it started to descend, no one had dared object.

They had all felt his wild, untamed power when Sa-Di had brought him into Palpatine’s throne room in an energy cage. They had all watched as Palpatine had ground his face into the floor, beating the boy down without mercy until he broke and swore to serve him. And most of them had noticed, as they watched, how close of a match it had been. Even the Emperor himself, here in the center of his power, had barely managed to contain this boy.

No one knew who we was, or how he would react to whatever they found down here. But as they descended into the thickening darkness, they all kept an eye out for escape routes, heavy objects they could drop on him, and weapons they could use against him if push came to shove.

The staircase completed a full circuit around the outer walls of the Citadel’s basement, then widened into a domed hall before the gate that blocked access into the deeper levels. The group spread out on instinct, their gazes covering every angle of the room. Of the nine, only Jeng Droga and the guardsman Carnor Jax were carrying visible weapons, but all stood ready to defend themselves. The hall, with its bare walls and gently sloping floors, seemed innocent enough at first glance, but everyone who knew Palpatine realized it was a killing ground.

The moment the boy lifted his foot off the last of the steps, an energy field crackled to life behind him. He snarled, whirling around. The field cut off the way back up, and its red light cast menacing shadows through the room.

At the same time, two dozen circular holes opened silently in the ceiling and the walls. The turbolaser emplacements behind them, each strong enough to punch holes in a Star Destroyer, came to life with a threatening hum. They did not need to aim; one shot from each barrel would incinerate everyone in this room.

Mas Amedda held up a hand and spoke a quiet word, and the holes closed again. The force field remained in place, however. “Guardsman,” Amedda said, indicating the gate on the far side of the room. “Step ahead.”

Carnor Jax approached the gate without a word. It was made of the same material as the walls, slightly recessed and with a vertical line running down the center. There were no visible controls, but when he put his gloved hand on the cold metal it opened without a sound – just wide enough to let him pass.

He stepped inside, hefting his pike. The helmet he was wearing had a filtered air intake and was closed at the bottom, more like a stormtrooper's than a Royal Guard's; but the smell of death seeped into Carnor's nostrils all the same. He stood in a dark room, lit only by the weak flickering red that followed him in through the door, and he was up almost to his ankles in mud.

No, not mud. Organic matter. Some of it was the clotting blood of various creatures, he supposed, but there were living bits squirming around in it as well: thumb-sized tadpoles, blue at the head end and black at the tail, struggling to squirm away from his boots in the thickening liquid.

He crushed one with his lance – and caught a flicker of alarm from Mas Amedda just outside the door. Interesting. More interesting, however, and much bigger, was the creature blocking the way ahead of him. At first glance it looked like a heap of enormous snakes covered in scales and spikes; but when it stirred, Carnor realized that all of its parts were connected.

A limb that frayed out into three segmented flaps patted the muddy ground in his direction. Its movements were sluggish and uncoordinated, and the waves of agony rolling off the beast clearly told Carnor it was dying. He took a few careful steps closer, keeping his pike gripped in both hands. There, in the flickering shadows, was a head three times his height, with an enormous shock collar affixed to the serpentine neck behind it. Carnor had never seen a beast like that, and he would be glad to never meet one at the height of its powers.

“What are you waiting for?” Mas Amedda said. “Kill it.”

Carnor Jax circled around the front of the creature, squinting at it through his helmet. It had five or six limbs, each large enough to swipe a house away, and a tail sporting long, curved spikes that lay curled up across its back. Its armor was the color of coral, painted a deeper red by the light filtering into the room, except where the beast’s head and limbs had been burned black along one side.

A force field, Carnor surmised. It must have been trapped in an energy cage of some sort, and pushed against the force field without caring about the pain until it shorted out. Now that he knew to look for it, he saw the fissures where the field had cut into the creature’s armor, multiple straight lines running across its body. He spotted the dents in the wall where it had thrashed, the gouges in the floor where its tail had struck.

He raised his spear, took aim at one of the charred fissures in the limb nearest to him, and struck. The creature groaned – a deep rumble that shook the cavern – and tried to pull the limb away, but failed.

“It’s dead enough,” he said. Mas Amedda, a tall shadow in the doorway, nodded and made to enter. “Wait,” Carnor Jax cautioned. The creature’s moan had awakened a presence nearby: a mass of fear and anguish somewhere in the darkness behind him. He whirled around, increasing the light amplification in his helmet. The room narrowed there, with machines of indeterminate purpose encroaching from all sides. Some of them were still warm from before all the power to this level had cut out; but the only source consistent with body heat was a large gray box built into the machine array along the wall. If it hadn't been roiling with fear in the Force, Carnor Jax would have assumed it was a reinforced computer casing or a safe.

The presence was confusing, as if thousands of minds were crying out in terror and struggling against each other at the same time. It gave Carnor Jax a headache that grew stronger the closer he came. Are those insects in there? It doesn't feel like bugs… But what else could fit in there in such numbers? And more importantly, what are they afraid of?

“Don't,” Mas Amedda's voice rang out behind him, sharply, when he came close enough to touch the metal casing. “Leave it.”

“Something's in there,” Carnor Jax said.

“As it should be. The box is mechanically locked. It can't get out.”

“Do you know what it is?” Jax stepped back, feeling his headache ease. “It's terrified of something.”

“Only of itself. Move on. There should be an exit behind the creature. Is it clear?”

Reluctantly, his spine prickly with anticipation, Carnor Jax turned his back on the box. Relax, Nefta's voice reassured him. It's just the Constable. He locked himself in there so he wouldn't absorb the beast.

The words meant little to Carnor, but he allowed himself to focus on the space behind the dying creature. There the walls had been dented by its furious thrashing, and a piece of floor had been ripped away, bent back like the lid of a tin can. The muddy liquid ran deeper here, slowly leaking away into the spaces beneath the floor of this chamber.

Sidling along between the wall and the beast, which was still groaning and shifting weakly every once in a while, Carnor Jax finally found the access gate to the stairs further down. It was a reinforced durasteel hatch, much like an airlock, of the type one would expect to see in a bioweapons research facility – built to remain hermetically sealed if anything went wrong.

Something had very much gone wrong here. Stepping carefully to avoid the muddy pits and the tadpoles squirming in them, Carnor Jax returned to the gate to report. “The exit is there, but it’s dented and stuck. I’m not sure we can…”

Jeng Droga pushed to the front of the group and shouldered past the guardsman. Stomping through the mud, he circled around the dying beast without sparing it as much as a glance. Moments later, his lightsaber came alive behind the body and bathed the room in the color of blood.

By the time the others had squeezed into the room and followed him, he had cut a deep furrow into one side of the access gate. Sa-Di joined him, handling his blue-bladed lightsaber with three fingers as if reluctant to use such a crude tool. It melted into the metal just as well, but it would clearly take a while until the way was clear.

Carnor Jax used the time to converse with King Nefta in silence. Find out as much as you can, Lumiya had told him; so he asked Nefta about the Constable in the durasteel closet, and about the tadpoles underfoot. Nefta’s answer to the former question was curt and dismissive: the Constable of Homunculi was an old servant of the Emperor’s whose usefulness was now reduced to breeding various experimental creatures and absorbing unneeded organic matter. The answer to the second question was more consequential: the blue-and-black tadpoles, apparently, were Mas Amedda’s children.

To demonstrate, Nefta stepped on one of the creatures as if by accident. There was a squelching noise as it popped under his boot, and Mas Amedda flinched. He did not turn around, but the way his lethorns thickened at the back told Carnor Jax that he was spoiling for a fight.

He’d prefer no one know about it, Nefta told him. Least of all his master.

Carnor grinned under his helmet. Now that was useful. He felt tempted to squash more of the little creatures, just to see how far he could push the old Chagrian, but he restrained himself. He was here to learn, not to fight – for the moment.

And then Sa-Di and Jeng Droga stepped to the sides, prompting everyone else to do the same, and pulled a thick slab of durasteel out of the hatch. It came to rest against the carcass of the beast behind them, the red-hot edges sizzling as they touched its scales and the wet ground. The beast groaned again, even more weakly than when Carnor Jax had stabbed it, then sighed what sounded like its final breath. It was an impressive creature, and a pity to see it die, but no one cared.

The way into Palpatine’s cloning chambers was open, lit by the blades of Sa-Di’s and Jeng Droga’s lightsabers. Nine pairs of eyes stared in through the gap – into the face of Palpatine himself.

No, not the face, Carnor corrected himself with a shudder. The faces.

More than a dozen clones of Palpatine, still wearing the mottled green membrane that had protected them inside the Spaarti tanks, lay piled at the top of the stairs. They must have been trying to get through the door, clambering over each other in a frenzy, scratching and pounding at the durasteel with naked hands. At second glance, Carnor realized not all of them were fully grown. They must have been decanted early when the solar eruption had scrambled the electronic systems in the Citadel…

They weren’t decanted, Nefta said in his mind. They broke out.

With a pang of unbidden empathy, Carnor Jax understood. He remembered the moment the Emperor had suddenly reached into his mind and grabbed him, pulling him towards him with irresistible force. These clones were not Palpatine – they were not even people, really – but incomplete or not, empty or not, they must have been gripped by the mad compulsion the same way. They had destroyed their tanks from the inside and rushed to meet their master… only to die here, whether of exhaustion, exposure outside the nourishing medium of the Spaarti tanks, or from the backlash of Palpatine’s sudden death.

Wrong again, Nefta chided him softly. He leeched them dry. He was so desperate to save himself that he ripped every last bit of life out of his clones… for what little good that did him.

Carnor Jax held his breath, and not only to keep out the stink that filtered through his mask. Sa-Di had stepped halfway into the gap he’d helped create and was sticking his lightsaber through it to illuminate more of the room. The helmet’s light amplification let Carnor see more of the chambers behind them than most of the others. The stairs were slick with liquid from the cloning tanks, where they weren’t covered by bodies – dozens of them, some so small and malformed they were barely recognizable as human. Further down, the blue sheen of Sa-Di’s saber reflected off the shards of cloning tanks strewn all around the chamber.

All of them? Carnor Jax asked in shock.

He felt Nefta’s senses expand as the old King invited him in to experience the Force the way he did. The seven beings clustered around them tasted of life in various intensities, with the boy who called himself Qaga Lok the sharpest tang, and the two simian-faced priests strange lumps of alien flavor. Sa-Di was tight and balanced, his protegé Baddon Fass a bitter whorl, Jeng Droga a vomitous acidity, and Mas Amedda dull in the Force but with broiling emotions under his blue skin. And behind them, the deep well of life that had been Palpatine’s gigantic pet was finally running dry.

But the spaces beyond the door, the warrens of cloning chambers whose dimensions revealed themselves to Nefta’s prodding senses cavern by cavern… those were empty of life. Echoes of pain, need, and confusion still lingered in some of the inert tissue, and a few stray flocks of bacteria struggled to survive in the antiseptic cloning liquid; but none of the clones remained alive.

A chill crept up Carnor’s spine. This had been Palpatine’s final contingency, the secret to his apparent invulnerability. His clones, bred here in the heart of his sanctum in large numbers, had all died before his spirit could take possession of them. And without them…

Don’t underestimate him, Nefta told him. But there was an undercurrent of astonishment to his words, Carnor Jax noticed; Nefta had not expected this either.

He was about to reply when one of the Palpatine clones piled on the stairway opened its eyes and raised its head. Gasping, Carnor Jax raised his spear and backed up against the cooling body of the monster.

“Master!” Mas Amedda exclaimed, dropping to one knee. He accidentally squashed a tadpole as he did so, but for once he didn’t seem to care. “We came to find you…”

Sa-Di and Jeng Droga had pulled back their lightsabers, holding them at the ready like an honor guard; but Carnor Jax thought that Sa-Di at least still seemed prepared to strike if he felt threatened. T’uaz and K’iaz were looking at each other, mumbling softly. Baddon Fass squinted in confusion, while the boy Qaga Lok clenched his fists.

Then the clone’s head imploded.

Amedda and Baddon Fass reared back – and Jeng Droga rounded on the boy, stabbing his lightsaber at Qaga Lok’s face so its tip almost touched his nose. “What did you do!” he exclaimed.

Calm, King Nefta projected. Carnor Jax gripped his pike but held back, observing. The clone, its head half its previous size, had settled back onto the others, clearly dead.

“It wasn’t him,” the boy said. “Just a body.”

“You…” Mas Amedda gasped. The simianlike priests murmured. But Sa-Di, Carnor Jax noticed, was smiling. “Good,” he said. “You passed the test.”

He lifted the corpse’s head using the Force, Nefta confirmed Carnor’s suspicion. And pulled up its eyelids. Disgusting, but effective.

“You did this?” Mas Amedda said, standing and wiping gunk off his knee. He pulled himself up to his full height and towered over Sa-Di, who returned his gaze without concern. “Yes,” he said simply, turning off his lightsaber. The shadows deepened as he clipped it to his belt. “Palpatine isn’t here. It’s clear what we must do.”

Jeng Droga had lowered his lightsaber but kept it on, gripped in his massive fist. “Go look for him,” he said.

“Exactly.”

Mas Amedda’s lethorns twitched in agitation, but he stroked them down. “Agreed,” he said, turning his back on the dead clones of his master. “I will provide you with coordinates. Places to start.”

The priests of Trinta nodded. “We shall hunt,” K’iaz announced.

Nefta inclined his head as if in agreement. You do realize what they’re doing, he told Carnor Jax without looking at him.

Keeping the hope alive, Carnor replied. The illusion.

And in Amedda’s case, getting his rivals off planet, Nefta added. He is terrified.

“But not you, Qaga Lok,” Sa-Di said. “You have a different path.”

Everyone seemed to hold their breath – and their weapons – as Sa-Di addressed the boy. Qaga Lok set his jaw. “You do not tell me what to do,” he growled.

“No,” Sa-Di agreed. “But I can get you to Darth Vader’s castle.”

 

Punishment


The President liked to detour through the Imperial Palace's Grand Corridor on his way home from work. His work was split between the northernmost wing of the Palace and its dungeons, and his home was a government flat accessible via a private speeder loop. Rationally, there was no reason for him to ever be seen by anyone except those he worked with directly.

Unlike most everyone else in the Palace, the President did not crave the company or the approval of his fellow beings, nor did he aspire to any other station than his present one. There was no political gain from letting himself be seen here in the halls of power, even if anyone were to recognize him.

No, the President's stroll through the Grand Corridor was purely for his enjoyment. He walked at a leisurely pace with his hands in his sleeves, letting his gaze drift over the denizens of the Imperial Palace. Stiff-necked bureaucrats were hurrying from one meeting to the next, taking care to seem perpetually stressed to emphasize their importance. Two voluminous men, both dressed in pitch-black robes with velvet trim, displayed their power by holding their conversation in the middle of the corridor, making everyone else curve around them. A trio of droids was waiting for them to move so they could sanibuff the floor where they were standing, but they would have to wait a while. Under one of the ch'hala trees lining the walls, a perfectly coiffed woman in a silky dress was watching the pair from the corner of her eyes: a Baldavian lip-reader, the President surmised, sent to spy on the two in the mistaken belief that anything of consequence was discussed here in the corridor.

Further along, walking due south from the Grand Convocation Chamber, the President recognized Lord Vandron in conversation with a visibly frightened army general. The President allowed himself a small smile as he passed. As the head of COMPNOR, the Empire's ideological wing, Crueya Vandron could make or break careers at any level of the Imperial hierarchy; everyone, with the possible exception of Ysanne Isard herself, was afraid of him.

The President gave him a friendly nod in passing. Vandron frowned without recognition; then he was past and instantly forgot the encounter. He had sent many sentients into the President's care over the years, but even Crueya Vandron preferred not to think about the Department of Punishment.

A lady walking a young girl shot him a glare and pulled her charge out of the way. Apparently she thought his toothy grin was meant for them. “Ow, aunt Vita!” the girl complained. The President winked at her, making a mental note to update the visual files in his diagram of the Imperial family. Most of the branches on the late Emperor's family tree, sparse as it was in the first place, had been chopped off over the years; only a few, like the young Ederlathh Pallopides, had survived the most recent rounds of pruning. She was growing up fast, a far cry from the toddler face in the Department's archives. It might be a few years yet before the various factions deemed her enough of a threat to send the girl his way; but it never hurt to be prepared.

Nursing these cheerful thoughts, the President of the Department of Punishment finished his circuit of the Corridor. The hallways running perpendicular to it, being more functional and less geared towards representation, contained slidewalks of different speeds. The President stepped on a northbound one, choosing the middle lane to keep out of the way of the scuttling bureaucrats while still making reasonable headway. A long time ago, one of his torturers – a despicable reptiloid named Vengnar Heiff – had quipped that all paths in the Imperial Palace ultimately led to Punishment. It was not literally true, of course, but only two quick slidewalk changes later, the President was standing in front of the speeder loop reserved for his personal use, accepting the mechanical salutes from the two guard droids on either side of the entrance.

The hatch opened at his command, and one of the guard droids climbed into the speeder ahead of him. Once its security check was complete, the President followed. Only when the hatch had sealed shut behind him, with the reassuring sound of durasteel rods settling into their grooves, did the guard droid depart from his usual routine.

Instead of starting the speeder, it swiveled its head around to point its main optical sensors at the President. “I have a message for you,” it said.

The President wasted no time. As the man in charge of incarcerating, torturing, and disposing of the Empire’s domestic enemies, he knew many powerful people would love to see him dead – that is, if they managed to remember he existed. Nobody knew his name, because he had not used it in years, even privately. Fewer people still knew what he looked like, let alone where he lived or how he traveled there. But a determined enemy – like Isard, for example – might be able to find out and switch her droid, or change its programming, or activate some hidden subroutine that his Department techs had missed.

So when the droid threatened him, he slapped the panic button set into the speeder door with one hand and drew his holdout blaster with the other. By the time he noticed that the button was deactivated, he had already pulled the trigger three times.

Nothing happened, except that the droid reached out and took the blaster from his hand with an almost apologetic gesture. Shaking it slightly, the droid demonstrated that the power pack was loose before pulling it out entirely. “Do not be alarmed,” it said evenly. “It is only a message. Listen.”

The President ducked behind the backrest of the driver’s seat as well as his stature allowed, knocking his hat down in the process. He could not care less about the hat; it was merely an affectation that made him blend in with the other dignitaries more easily. To his surprise, no blaster bolts followed, and the security droid’s metal hands did not try to pull him out of his pitiful excuse for a hiding place.

Instead, the droid spoke – in a synthetic voice that was not its own, but also impossible to trace back to any specific person. “Your life and position are at risk,” it said. “Emperor Palpatine is alive, on Byss.”

Slowly, suspiciously, the President sat up. “Repeat that.”

“Emperor Palpatine is alive, on Byss.”

“And?”

“Your life and position are at risk.”

The President picked up his hat and placed it on his head. “Is there more to this message?”

The droid’s head swiveled back, and the speeder’s repulsorlifts hummed to life. “Stop,” the President said. “Who gave you this message?”

“What message, sir?”

So that’s how it’s going to be. Fighting a tremor, the President settled back in his seat. The speeder began moving, the routine of his day resuming as if nothing had happened.

But the Emperor was alive, on Byss. And if the rest of the message was true as well, Palpatine was displeased with something the President had done. He could think of a lot of things. Almost everyone in the Palace had used the confusion after Palpatine’s death to send one or another of their long-time rivals to the Department of Punishment.

In accordance with his station, the President had not chosen whom to punish. But he knew well that Palpatine had no mercy for accessories. If he was mad at Isard, and the President had carried out Isard’s orders, he could not expect to be spared.

So he would need to make arrangements. He would have to find out if Palpatine really was alive, figure out if anything could be done about that if it turned out to be the case, and arrange his own disappearance in the event the previous option was unachievable. It was a sad prospect, for though the President had no ambitions beyond his present station, he also had no intention of ever giving it up. He identified with his station so much, in fact, that he had privately renounced his name and referred to himself only as the President. Giving that up was… unthinkable.

No. He would have the droid melted into slag as soon as he arrived at his apartment; and then he would figure out a way to kill the Emperor.


* * *


Elsewhere in the Imperial Palace, Ysanne Isard sneered at Sarcev Quest. “Placate the Moffs?” she said. “You can’t be serious.”

“I said to bring them back into the fold, not placate,” Quest corrected her with strained patience. “Bring them to heel, if you will.” If it makes you feel better.

Isard’s eyes flashed, one red and one blue. The head of Imperial Intelligence, and the Empress in all but name, she did not appreciate being manipulated. But unlike most in the Imperial Palace, Sarcev Quest had no desire to be appreciated by Isard. “Those who have any loyalty to the Empire ought to submit themselves to me. I will not be seen reaching out to them.”

“And you will not.” Quest would have laid his hands flat on her table if he didn’t suspect that she might call in her Royal Guards the moment he did. “On the contrary. You will be seen to kill them.”

Isard’s gaze became piercing. “Explain yourself.”

“The Moffs you’re keeping downstairs, in the DOP?” Quest had made sure to keep stock of the new arrivals in the Department of Punishment since the end of the Triocolus insurrection. “Muzzer, Thistleborn, Dunhausen… I was wondering what you were planning to do with them. Show trials?”

“And give the appearance that there is anything to debate? Never.” The Central Committee of Grand Moffs, led by the now-deceased Bertroff Hissa, had declared the three-eyed mutant Triocolus to be Palpatine’s true heir, defying Ysanne Isard’s authority and creating their own parallel administration in exile. “They are traitors. Once they’ve told me everything they know, they’ll die.”

“That’s what I figured.” Quest leaned back in his chair. It was uncomfortably narrow and felt as if it was about to collapse under his weight: one of the many ways in which Isard tried to make even the few people she allowed into her office feel uncertain and defensive. “So, public executions?”

Isard gave no outward sign, but a flicker in the Force told Quest she had not actually considered that. “Perhaps,” she said. “Why do you care?”

“Oh, I was just picturing what it would be like to talk to the Moffs – those who, as you say, have enough loyalty to the Empire left to attend the Conclave – against the background of Muzzer and his ilk swinging from ropes.” He let his gaze drift past Isard, through the tall window at the back of her new tower office and across Imperial City. “Say, if you had them strung up across the main thoroughfare in Column Commons over there. So that all the news stations and all the bureaucrats on their way to work would see them slowly get picked clean by the hawk-bats.”

Isard’s Force aura rippled with disgust, but she gave him a tight-lipped smile. “I see,” she said. “I will consider it.”

You will do it, if only to show me that you’re capable of it. “So I have your leave to attend the Conclave?” he said.

“I am not authorizing you to make any deals in my name,” Isard said.

“Of course not. Starpyre would be the appropriate representative of this government, I suppose? I was thinking of going as his aide.”

Isard’s stance softened, but only by a little. “I’m not giving that idiot any authority, either.” Tann Starpyre was the head of the Diet of Planetary Governors, a mostly ceremonial body that had seen an abrupt increase in its administrative duties when the Grand Moffs had gone rogue. More than anyone else, he would be glad if some accord with the remaining loyal Moffs could be reached. “But if you’re going to Axum…”

“I will try to reach Kiez.” Quest smiled inwardly; he had planned to dangle that bait in front of Isard if she proved reluctant, but if she was eager enough to suggest it herself, so much the better. “Inofficially, of course.”

“No begging.”

“I will sound out the possibilities.” The Eighteenth Imperial Diplomatic Conclave – mostly a propaganda event to display Imperial unity across sectors, regions, and even species – was to be held on the nearby Core World of Axum, home to some of the oldest aristocratic families in the galaxy. Apart from that distinction, Axum itself was strategically uninteresting – except that it shared a sun with Anaxes, the primary fleet base of the Empire, popularly dubbed the “Defender of the Core”. Anaxes was home not only to the Imperial War College, but also to the largest warship within the nominally loyal Empire: the Super Star Destroyer Whelm under the command of Admiral Feyet Kiez.

Kiez considered himself a loyalist – not to Isard personally, but to the idea of a unified Empire. As long as there was an Imperial government on Coruscant, he would stand by it, at least in word if not in deed. But when Isard had panicked not long ago, fearing that Superior General Delvardus and others would make a push towards the Core, Kiez had stubbornly kept the Whelm at Anaxes despite her command to send it to Coruscant’s defense. He had stopped short of defying her openly, citing refits and lead times and tactical considerations and leaving it open whether he would come to her aid when the time came… but his refusal to place the Whelm in her hands right away still gnawed at her, notwithstanding the fact that the invasion had failed to materialize in the end.

Isard wanted a Super Star Destroyer. Two of her biggest rivals each had one: Warlord Zsinj with his Iron Fist, and Grand Moff Ardus Kaine with his Reaper. Meanwhile Ysanne Isard, leader of the true Empire, had… not quite one. The Whelm was there, but whenever she wanted to use it, it remained beyond her reach. Not long ago, she had briefly had Jerec's Vengeance in her grasp, only to lose it again soon after. And the massive Eclipse, moored at Kuat, seemed to be further from completion every week.

Well, and then there’s the other one; but I’d better not even think about that disaster waiting to happen.

“You are welcome to use your…” – Isard waved one hand dismissively – “…the Force talents I am sure you possess, if you think it may help the cause.” That rankled her almost as much, Quest could tell: Force users made her uneasy, and having to rely on help from the Force felt like a defeat to her. “But here, too, there can be no impression that this is in any way up for debate. If you can make him come to his senses, do. But you do not negotiate on my behalf.”

“Understood, madam.” Quest stood, resisting the urge to stretch and work the kinks out of his spine. No, he was not going to Axum to negotiate; and least of all on her behalf. “I am looking forward to seeing the Moffs react to the images we discussed. And who knows, perhaps they might help to sway Kiez too.” In what direction though – that is another matter. “I will keep you apprised of any new developments.”

“Of course you will,” Isard said coolly, turning away to look towards the Column Commons. “Dismissed.”

Quest walked out of her office, nodded to the Royal Guards flanking the door, and waited until the door had shut. Then he finally stretched, his joints and vertebrae popping. He was almost done when the communicator on his belt – blocked from receiving or sending any data in the secure environment of Isard’s office – gave a tiny, almost imperceptible click.

Sarcev Quest smiled, and not just because his back had finally stopped aching. That click had been the sound of a primitive radio receiver switching to a different frequency because the one it had been tuned to had reverted to white noise. It would not mean anything to anyone, unless they knew that the signal which had just stopped – a simple sinus wave – had been emitted by one particular guard droid assigned to work in the Department of Punishment, many levels down from where Quest was standing.

If that signal had stopped, that meant the droid’s cognitive module had been destroyed. That, in turn, meant that the President of the Department of Punishment had received Quest’s message, and reacted accordingly.

Now all Quest had to do was watch what fate befell the President… without thinking too much about what precisely the man was a canary for.

Leave the thinking to him, and the plotting, and the worrying. If he keels over suddenly – that’s when I’ll have to start to worry.

 

Is this a reference to HandofThrawn45's fanfiction Hour of Judgment? Isard does indeed possess Vengeance in that story, albeit only for a couple weeks.

 

Well spotted! Yes, this story is intended to mesh with Hour of Judgment and other HoT45 stories; I've slightly reworked the first volume on ao3 to fit with those stories as well (mostly resolving timeline issues around Jerec's death and Tycho's capture). Empire of Ashes is now part of the ReExpanded project where we collect and write Legends-compliant stories that also mesh with and reference each other.

 

That's fantastic news. Now I've got an excuse to go re-read volume one! So happy to see you're back at it with this series!

 

Food and Limerence


Two large ships hung over the planet Druckenwell, each serviced by a small fleet of repair and supply vehicles, from tiny welding droids to munitions freighters. One was the New Hope, an ancient dreadnought reclaimed and refurbished to serve as the New Republic’s headquarters in this region of space. The other, eclipsing her in size but far more damaged, was an Imperial II-class Star Destroyer that until recently had borne the name Bron’s Hammer. Captured during a skirmish in Milagro system, some ways Coreward from Druckenwell along the Corellian Run, it had been renamed the Crynyd in honor of the Rebel pilot who had crashed his A-wing into the bridge of Darth Vader’s flagship Executor during the Battle of Endor.

Crynyd was still a wreck, empty except for the predominantly mechanized repair crews slowly patching its numerous wounds. The New Hope had been damaged in the same engagement, but despite a few remaining hairline cracks and burned-out systems, the dreadnought was bustling with activity, crammed full with troops, materiel, representatives and strategists preparing for the next offensive against the Empire. No one except a select few knew where this offensive was going to happen, but everyone could feel that it was close. Sentients of dozens of different species whispered, hissed, clicked or gestured about it, all the while honing their skills, cleaning their weapons, and getting their equipment ready for the inevitable call to arms.

The only place aboard that was comparatively cool and quiet was the maintenance corridor running along the ship's starboard power line, close to the hull. A group of sentients came jogging down the narrow aisle, ranging in age from twelve to twenty-six, all clad in military fatigues with the sleeves and legs rolled up despite the chill. A young human girl led the way, followed by a young man with short red hair. “Careful,” the girl called out when the path curved downwards. “Keep your heads down… a little tight here.” She was audibly out of breath, but still set a good pace for her older companions.

Where the corridor sloped up again, they passed a tentacled Kloperian who was arguing with a droid. The girl in the lead swung around its pale trunk, and the red-haired man did likewise; but the third in their group, an armor-plated Hortek of impressive size, made the Kloperian shrink back instinctively.

“Oh yeah? We're working too,” the Hortek said, as if responding to something the Kloperian had said. “We're working out.”

“Leave it alone, Kiki,” Pash Cracken called over his shoulder. The final member of their group, a slim young human named Kento Decar, mumbled an apology as he passed. Since the planet Kloper had joined the New Republic just over a year ago, the many-limbed Kloperians had become a staple aboard ships across the fleet thanks to their talent as starship mechanics.

The Kloperian was still muttering to itself when the joggers approached a sharp bend in the corridor up ahead. Here the power line looped around the dreadnaught's bow, the corridor passing just under the bridge, which was evident by the many secondary lines branching off vertically to either side of the walkway and disappearing into the ceiling.

“But you are not a saboteur,” the Hortek everyone called “Kiki” said. Her real name was Toggettakk, but pronouncing that correctly tended to be hard on human larynxes. “Are you, Bhindi?”

“No… I'm not,” the girl replied between breaths. “But… stop!”

“Really, Kiki,” Pash Cracken said. “We've talked about this. Stay out of her mind.”

“No – stop.” Bhindi came to a halt and extended her arms to the side, panting. Coming up next, Pash barely managed to avoid barreling into her. Then Kiki slammed into his back, and he stumbled against her anyway.

Bhindi didn't complain. Instead, she held up one finger, calling for silence. “What is it?” Kento Decar asked from the rear, only to be shushed by everyone else.

There was a ping, then a grunt and a sigh. A small plastoid ball came hopping across the metal grating. “Hooly?” Bhindi called out. “That you?”

There was another grunt, arguably affirmative. “Stop shooting for a moment, will you?” Bhindi said. “Coming through.”

With that, she started running again, even though her fatigues were soaked with sweat. Pash exchanged a glance with Kiki and Kento, then followed her around the bend into the port service corridor. Stormtrooper silhouettes had been painted on the curved wall, and looking over Bhindi's head Pash spotted an elderly man handing a folded-up sharpshooter rifle to a Sullustan. “Tech Sergeant Hooly,” Bhindi introduced him in passing, slowing down just enough to wave to him. “Great teacher.”

Hooly gave a slightly embarrassed shrug. “Pack up, Dian,” he told the Sullustan. “Almost time for your morning briefing anyway.”

They met two more Kloperians on their way down the New Hope’s port flank, each with its long neck and at least three limbs stuck deep in a maintenance hatch. The dreadnaught was an old lady, Pash reminded himself: already old before the Clone Wars, she'd been parked above Churba as a war museum until the Rebel Alliance had abducted her and given her the first of many overhauls, more than six years ago. As far as Pash was aware, lately the New Hope had been kept behind the front lines for the most part, serving more as a platform for diplomacy and strategy meetings than a war vessel – with the exception of an Imperial surprise attack above Milagro a few months ago. But the level of activity even here behind the walls suggested that she was about to go to war again… as were they all. But where?

“Lambda sector, I'm telling you,” Kiki said from behind him. Unlike everyone else in their group, she was not even a little short of breath. “This time we take Rintonne for real.”

“You've never been at Rintonne, Kiki.”

“That’s why they didn't take it the first time. With us there, Moff Lankin can go kriff…”

“Language.”

“Well, you know what I mean. What do you think, Bhindi? Your father say anything about the Lambda?”

“Stop,” Bhindi said, slowing down more gently this time before turning around with her arms wide. “And no, he didn't. He's down on the surface, doing I don't know what.”

“Why are we stopping?” Kento asked, peering past Kiki's hip. “More sharpshooter training?”

“No, the area is off limits.” Holding her side with one hand, Bhindi jabbed the other thumb behind her. “Guard droids. And autocannons. Live fire… at least that's what they say.”

“This close to the reactor?” Kento said skeptically. “Stun blasts, more likely.”

“Reinforced bulkheads, though.” Kiki knocked on the inner wall; even her armored knuckles only produced a muted sound.

“Let me try.” Pash stepped past Bhindi before she could stop him. There was a vertical kink in the corridor here, with metal stairs leading up to the forbidden section. “Pash!” Bhindi cried out, but the red-haired young man had already poked his head up into danger. Servos whirred and a droid foot clanked; then a mechanized voice said, “Authorized.”

“You can come up,” Pash called down to the group. “It’s fine.”

“Of course,” Kento Decar said, rolling his eyes. “He’s got clearance.”

“And no, you’re not getting clearance just because your dad is in Intelligence too,” Kiki told Bhindi. “You’re immature.”

“I’m not…”

“She means you’re too young. And you are.” Squeezing past her, Kento skipped up the stairs. Annoyed but still curious, Bhindi followed.

The upper portion of the corridor was gloomy, lit only by the dark red warning signs promising death by blasterfire to trespassers. But in response to Pash’s presence, the automated laser cannons had settled into their default state, barrels pointed along the ceiling, and the two hulking security droids stood aside with their four blast arms at their sides. Pash gave them a mocking salute as he walked past them, then opened the blast door ahead with a fingerprint.

Bhindi tried to suppress her jealousy. After all, she had shown him the secret passages she used for running; it was only fair if he got to show off a little too. “Let me guess,” she said as she stepped through the lock into a warm, dark room. “Your father’s office?”

“Hush,” a female voice said softly. Squinting in the low light, Bhindi could make out a frail-looking near-human seated at a table next to a closed door. She was a Lyunesi, Bhindi realized, a species known for their skill in intercultural communication. “The general is asleep.”

“I’m not,” an annoyed male voice sounded through the door. “Turn off the bed, will you? And let Pash in.”

“You need to sleep, General Cracken,” the Lyunesi said; but the expression on her delicate face showed that she knew it was futile. “Brace yourself, sir.”

Pash opened the door, and Bhindi stepped closer to look. Even though her father often worked closely with General Airen Cracken, she had never been in his office, let alone his personal quarters. Hiram Drayson liked to keep his rooms spotless and clean; by contrast, Cracken's den was a frightening mess. The walls were covered with shelves, sketchboards and screens; on the floor were projectors, datapads, boxes, and two or three small droids in various states of disassembly. The desk was piled high with flimsi and data disks, and the bunk in the back had been converted into another storage shelf.

Apparently, the general had been sleeping – or not sleeping – in midair, suspended in a repulsor field that his Lyunesi clerk was now slowly turning off. As he sank toward the ground, Airen Cracken carefully placed his feet in two of the rare patches where the floor was clear. “Thank you,” he said – not to the clerk, but to Pash. “Onn gets a little overprotective. But I’ve been using the time to think. Come in here, all of you, and check my logic.”

“Um,” Kento Decar said, uncomfortably shifting his shoulders. “Sir, we were running. We kind of stink.”

Airen Cracken gave him a look, and the young man tucked his arms down and obeyed. Moments later they were all crammed into Cracken’s room, trying not to step onto anything or breathe too much through the nose. The clerk, Onn, gave Bhindi an unreadable look before she shut the door behind them and a privacy field shimmered into existence along the walls.

Bhindi, perched awkwardly between a shelf and a box, held on to Pash’s arm for balance while his father clicked the backlights of a sketchboard on. “Food,” General Airen Cracken said without preamble.

“Thanks, sir, but I’m not hungry,” Kento said with a slight nasal tint to his voice.

“Not for us, fool,” Kiki chided him. “For… what’s that planet?”

“This? This is Druckenwell.” Cracken tapped a circular squiggle in the bottom right corner of the sketchboard. “Druckenwell’s fine for now. Imports from Kinyen were a little tight while the Grans were supplying Sullust at the same time, but with Sulon liberated and Delvardus no longer harassing the shipping convoys, there’s enough to go around. For Druckenwell, in any case.” He tapped two more circles along a line that ran diagonally across the board, towards the upper left. “Milagro, well, it’s glassed. No food production, but no food required either, alas. Spirana, you saw.”

“I didn’t,” Bhindi spoke up. She knew Pash Cracken and his squadron had fought at Spirana, having been pulled in for that purpose from another assignment deep in Imperial territory. “What’s on Spirana?”

“Factories, mostly,” Pash said. “Biotech, fighter parts, even uniforms for the Imperial military. But by the time we took the planet, almost everyone had left.”

“Kermen obviously wanted to avoid another Druckenwell,” the general explained. “We took this planet with most of the facilities intact – the BlasTech complex, the droid factories, everything – and the personnel too. Your father,” he said, looking at Bhindi, “is down there right now working to get weapons production back to full capacity. Now of course Kermen could have glassed Spirana like he did Milagro to deny us its industrial capacity. But he didn’t. Care to guess why?”

“Because he's confident he will retake it,” Kiki said.

“Right, I forgot you can read minds. So instead, Kermen had everyone and their grandniece evacuated up the Corellian Run to Denon. We got Spirana, and frankly more data and intelligence than we know what to do with, but there’s no one there to operate the factories. No one who knows how. We’ve been bringing in talent of our own, of course, but it’s a ghost town and will be for a long while.”

“Meaning they don’t need much food either,” Pash said. “So where's the problem, then?”

His father tapped the last and biggest circle on his improvised map, the Corewards end of the diagonal line that Bhindi had surmised represented the Corellian Run. “Here,” General Cracken said. “Denon.”

“Oh,” Kento said, even forgetting to pinch his nose shut. “Oh!”

“We’re taking Denon,” Kiki said.

Bhindi felt Pash’s arm muscles tense. “So that’s why you didn’t want us to go back to Generis,” he said quietly.

“Generis can wait,” Kiki said, and Kento nodded in agreement. “As long as Grand Moff Kaine keeps his end of the deal. But Denon would be our first thrust into the Core since Brentaal…”

Bhindi tuned out the specifics of the debate. She could tell that Pash was reluctant, that he would have preferred to go back to Generis, where his squadron had been protecting a communications outpost in hostile territory, rather than lead his squadron into a battle in the Core. But Kiki and Kento were both visibly enthusiastic, and as she held on to Pash’s arm, Bhindi could feel his resistance crumble.

“Food, though,” he said eventually, once the others let him get a word in. “The problem is where we get food for Denon, isn’t it?”

“Yes.” His father nodded. “Once we take Denon, it will be cut off from Imperial trade routes, and its own food production… You all know what Denon is like, right?”

“Little Coruscant?” Bhindi spoke up, glad to finally have something to contribute.

“Yes, only not so little. It’s an ecumenopolis too, housing upwards of five hundred billion people – plus almost the entire population of Spirana, now. Compared to Coruscant, it produces a lot of its food insystem, in a huge network of orbital installations…”

“…but those are unlikely to survive our attack,” Kiki supplied.

“Kermen is hiding out behind Denon’s orbital fields,” Cracken confirmed, “hoping we won’t dare to destroy them.”

“Because if we do, we would leave half a trillion beings to starve,” Bhindi said, her throat tight.

“Which is why we need to open up alternative food sources before we take Denon,” Cracken said. “And have all of the logistics figured out. So here’s what I’ve been thinking – and just to be clear, this is all I’m going to have to kill you-level classified…”

When they emerged from General Cracken’s quarters some time later, Bhindi was sweating even harder than before; but her heart glowed with pride and happiness. In that cramped, sweaty chamber, she had been one of them: she had talked and plotted with Pash and his father and his squadmates, and they had taken her as seriously as they took each other. While Kento made a show of enjoying in the relatively fresh air in the anteroom, Pash clapped her on the shoulder. “Good work in there, Bhindi,” he said. “Now let’s all go and find a sanisteam, shall we?”

“You too, General,” the Lyunesi clerk called out without getting up from her chair. “And then you need to sleep.” When Bhindi chuckled, Onn reached across the table with a slender hand and tugged on Bhindi’s sleeve. “Take care of him,” she said in a low voice. “Don’t let him work himself to death.”

“Huh?” Bhindi said, confused. “Um, the general is Pash’s father, not mine…”

“No, I’ll take care of him,” Onn said, a merry twinkle in her dark green eyes. “I mean the one you love.” She nodded towards Pash, who was just opening the door back to the corridor for his squadmates.

Fresh sweat broke out all over Bhindi’s skin. “I don’t know what you mean,” she lied, and fled.

 

“This is punishment, right?” Hiram Drayson said. “I'm being punished.”

Lando Calrissian put his feet up on the table, so that the immaculate soles of his boots jutted up at the edge of his hologram. “Why would I punish you?” he said with a sly smile. “I'm not even cleared to know about the things you think you should be punished for.”

Drayson squared his shoulders, the recent loss of his secret commando unit during the hunt for Grand Admiral Makati still fresh in his mind. “I’m not in the mood for entertainment, Calrissian,” he told the General’s hologram. “And there’s important work to do here.”

“You’re on Druckenwell, right? Last I heard Rangoon and the Azur-Jamins had things well in hand there.”

“Oh, you’ve heard that, haven’t you?” Inat Rangoon was a cyborg with a long history in Alliance and New Republic Intelligence, and his involvement here was almost as heavily classified as Drayson’t now-defunct Alpha Black unit had been. “Let me guess, this is coming from Cracken?”

“This is coming from me, Hiram. When they asked me to host this conference, my first thought was to tell them they’re crazy.”

“It is crazy. There’s a war on – we might finally have a genuine shot at Isard and the Core – and we’re supposed to devote resources to a conference where they talk about holoshows?”

“Right? But then I figured, it makes sense. For one, we get to show people what freedom means. The freedom to think about stuff, to be critical of stuff and pick apart all of the propaganda that’s been thrown at us, but also to enjoy things together.” Calrissian took his feet off the table and leaned forward, suddenly earnest. “And I’ve seen what that propaganda can do, Hiram; I’ve experienced it firsthand at Mindor. It’s easy to discount those holoshows as silly stories, not worthy of our attention as strategists; but they have a real effect on what people believe, what people fear, and what people are willing to do. The Conference on Popular Entertainment is a way to get ahead of that.”

“To winning the propaganda war, you mean,” Drayson said, not bothering to hide his discomfort. Behind him, Druckenwell’s sun began rising out of the ocean, throwing long, crisp shadows into the room.

“Yes, but don’t worry; I don’t need you to be front and center. You leave that to me. I told them if I do this, I’m going to make it look good.”

“Well, you certainly know how to do that.”

“That’s right. And I’m going to make it big. Invite all of the big names I can get. Producers, actors and actresses, scholars, writers, musicians, everyone. We’ll be using the ruins of the local Jedi academy as a stage, and there’s going to be live shows, real mass events, holo exhibits all over the campus…”

Drayson shuddered. “That sounds like a security nightmare.”

“Right?” Calrissian’s grin widened. “And that’s where you come in.”

Drayson took a deep breath. He was in a large office in Druckenwell’s capital of Il Avali, with large windows facing the ocean. It was the early morning, and on the dark blue expanse outside freight barges and repulsor cranes were hauling materials to construction sites along the seaboard. A swarm of birds passed by the rising sun as Drayson watched, their shadows dancing briefly across his desk.

His desk was mostly empty, and not just because Hiram Drayson liked to keep his spaces clean. Calrissian was right: since Tinian I’att and her husband had returned to Druckenwell to aid Rangoon in restoring the planet’s economy, Drayson saw himself regularly outpaced by a woman with a literal baby on her hip.

“Oh, there’s no need to look so sour,” Calrissian said. “It’s going to be fun! You should bring Bhindi too.”

Drayson thought of his daughter, whom he’d left aboard New Hope in orbit on her own insistence. “She’s not the kind of girl who’s into holo stars,” he said, but the thought gave him a pang of uncertainty. Was she really? With everything that had been going on, it didn’t feel like he knew her all that well these days.

“There’ll be something to love for her on Obroa-skai, I guarantee it,” Calrissian said. “And she deserves some time away from all this military stuff, wouldn’t you say?”

Drayson gritted his teeth. “You’re playing dirty now, Calrissian.”

“That’s how I win.”

There was a long silence while Druckenwell’s sun continued to rise, filling the room with its glare. Drayson looked out at the brightening sky to where he thought he had seen the running lights of Crynyd and New Hope minutes before. “All right,” he said finally. “I’ll come.”

“With Bhindi?”

“Yes.”

“Great! Oh, and don’t forget to bring warm clothes. I’m told it’s summer here on Obroa-skai, but it’s still rather chilly.”

With a sigh, Drayson cut the transmission. Despite Calrissian’s assurances, it still felt wrong to be doing anything not obviously related to the war. But he was useless here, and after the failure of Alpha Black Ackbar was not likely to give him a new military command any time soon.

Using his personal secure uplink, he opened a channel to New Hope. “Bhindi,” he said when his daughter picked up. “Pack up. We’re going on a trip.”



~~~~~~~~~~
This is not so much its own chapter but an addendum to the previous one. The next one's going to be big...

 

Nice to see a moment of continuity in the ReEx. Drayson’s still feeling the sting of losing Alpha Black. It’s interesting to see Lando and Hiram interact here. Lays groundwork for Lando’s work with Alpha Blue in 16 ABY. I actually like Drayson quite a bit, so it’s a real treat to see him here.

 

Amazing

 

@cthugha
That you took the time to develop the President of the Department of Punishment is simply spectacular. Great reference to Vengnar Heiff too; their roles did seem to overlap.

It would be amazing if you ever want to write about some of the Inquisitors from legends. For instance, with his complexities and almost contradicting traits, Laddinare Torbin would make him a prime candidate for you to explore, even if the time frame doesn´t work for him in this particular story...