StarDestroyer.Net BBS

PROLOGUE: SHADOW HAND

It started years before, as the patient spider sat at the center of his web, calmly waiting for his prey.

It was an apt metaphor, suggested by the staggered transparisteel panes that made up the viewport behind his throne. Certainly, he had ensnared countless beings, who were always surprised to find themselves entangled in the silken threads by which he controlled the known universe. Hard power and soft power—authority and clout—force majeure and subtle misdirection—yes, his web was everywhere. And those who struggled against him never saw how the act of struggling merely entangled them further, bringing them to the attention of the apex predator.

He liked to meditate as he waited for the web to tremble. Often it was metaphysics, but not always; sometimes he conducted thought-experiments. He would design problems of strategy—or architecture, or music, or art, or even combinations of them—and then solve them, pitting his own formidable brain against itself. If they proved particularly novel or amusing, he would tap out the parameters and his solution in the keyboard built into the arms of his throne and send them off to be filed away.

Sate Pestage spent his days, minding the details of his master’s life. He updated the schedule—and maintained the correspondence—and planned the meals—and saw to the wardrobe—and kept the living quarters—and—and—and—

He saw to a myriad of myriads of details, living his master’s life. He ensured that the deadly spider wasted no time thinking about anything but what he chose to think about.

That was what it meant to be Grand Vizier unto the Galactic Emperor.

But he had played this role longer than that. For before he was anointed Grand Vizier, he had been the right hand of the Supreme Chancellor, and of the Senator before that. For decades he had stood at the spider’s side. He knew more about him than anyone else who had ever lived. Indeed, he was one of the only beings who had ever even heard the spider’s other name, the name whispered in the deepest recesses of the dark side.

Pestage did not know the Force, but that was the only thing he did not know. He was an alchemist, a metaphysician, a folklorist, an archeologist. He knew everything there was to know about the Sith, except for what it was like to be one. There was nothing in his master’s repertoire he did not know or handle.

It was a role that had existed for millennia. The Dark Lord of the Sith had always had his compeers, his colleagues who shared with him in his dread lineage and his dark works. But it was neither meet nor wise that the Dark Lord entrust them with the quotidiana of his life—a prescription for a short reign, needless to say. Hence the Shadow Hand, a catechumen who shared in the heritage of the Sith without the charism of being a Sith Lord himself. The Shadow Hand was the Dark Lord’s syncellus, his alter ego, his familiar—an extension of his power.

This was Pestage’s true role, for which his dignity of Grand Vizier was merely the exorasson—the outer cassock that concealed and protected his true garb. He was the Shadow Hand of a Sith Lord nobody in the galaxy even suspected existed.

And so it came to pass that as his master sat silently above the Sanctuary Moon of Endor, Pestage received an encrypted datamessage at 0300 local time on Coruscant, his master’s throne world. He was already awake, of course; he had been reviewing the minutes of the most recent meeting of the Ruling Council. He stopped what he was doing immediately to review the message, a transcript of a thought-experiment: how would the apex predator go about reclaiming the galaxy if catastrophe deprived him of his grip on the Empire?

It was a 64-point plan.

The message was titled “Symphony.” It spelled out in detail how different sub-plans—he designated them Harmony, Glissando, Diminuendo, Pianissimo, and so on—would work together to achieve his goal. Pestage read it carefully, and immediately downloaded it to the Imperial Personal Archive and deleted the original copy. It was one of thousands such datadocs.

A second datamessage arrived at 0313. It was not a thought-experiment.

Sate—

I want you to retrieve the BRT 2.7 we put in storage in Mount Tantiss and move it to my Citadel on Byss. Install Ranth’s WI/LL 6.16 kernel and Thrumble’s sixth-generation heuristic processors, but have Keldor excise the AI and modify the CPU according to the schematics I gave you in file 18:3:17/DS-LC27.1a. Use the zill’arı Jerec brought back for the control processors. Use the Acheron Configuration or the Phlegethon Configuration.

Take the new OS that Isk Isk and Gowix were working on and have Leth splice it with the neuroprint Yueh completed last month. Copy all of theHigh Command, service commands,and COMPNOR archives and my personal archives to the BRT. You can add the Ministry and the universities later. Configure the BRT for Brashin’s BHCI. OBL privileges and access.

I THE EMPEROR

The muscles in Pestage’s jaw worked as he digested this. His master had just spelled out a virtual copy of his own brain, run on the most powerful supercomputer in existence, with unlimited access to the entire Empire’s information architecture—complete tables of organization and equipment and an extensive library of war plans and case studies, not to mention the vast compendium of information collected by its spies and secret-policemen. All of this would be run through a program duplicating the spider’s own thought processes and given access to the Empire’s state-of-the-art command, control, and communications interface.

And it would have the absolute highest authority: “OBL” stood for Omnipotent Battle Leader, the statutory term for the Emperor and his Supreme Commander as the galactic command authority.

This was nothing less than a blueprint for an autopilot for the entire Empire.

Pestage looked at the title again. Disquiet tugged at his famously inscrutable sang-froid. He did not like the name his master had chosen for this project.

Six hours later his master was dead.

Trillions of people abruptly remembered that he had no heir, and there was no mechanism for choosing one. The Empire had been his web, and there was no other spider. It existed for him; it existed through him. It could not exist without him.

Pestage was a busy man. He left Coruscant in the dead of night on board a disguised cargo ship carrying the entire contents of the Imperial Personal Archive and memory cores containing the entire 922-quettabyte data record of the Galactic Empire. Only seventeen people knew he had gone, for he had left a clone behind to govern in his place as the increasingly insecure Regent (step 2 of Ouverture, the first part of the Symphony Initiative).

There was much that the clone did not know. Pestage had created him to be his catspaw, and he did not even know he was a clone. He was not a perfect copy; his memory had been tampered with to remove his knowledge of the spider’s last messages and the secret reserve the spider had built in the Deep Core.

But in his haste to relocate to the Deep Core, the real Pestage had missed one detail. The datamessages had been deleted immediately, but the comms log had not. The clone spent many sleepless nights wondering what his master’s last message had been. All he knew was that it had been about him.

The message had been titled “Shadow Hand.”

CHAPTER ONE

The atomic clock was not important. History would not record its serial number. Aside from the machinist’s mate who did maintenance work on it and his work center supervisor, virtually nobody ever even thought about it. It was not unique. It had been built by Bonadan Heavy Industries in a lot of ten million, and could be replaced at the drop of a hat. It was not even particularly expensive. It was a good quality device, of course—the Tagge family industries always produced quality work—built and installed under the terms of an unremarkable subcontract fifteen years before.

It did its work quietly, methodically, without fuss. Mercury ions within an electromagnetic trap stabilized a grau-quartz oscillator, ensuring that the correct frequency was maintained, allowing precise timekeeping with a drift of less than one nanosecond per standard month. It would be off by one second in about 82 million years.

At the appropriate time, the atomic clock’s measurement was read by a computer and compared to preset figures generated by the Master Navigational Computer. Upon confirmation that the figures were aligned within the permitted margin of error, the computer transmitted a signal to another computer, which compared the first computer’s figures against those of two other computers monitoring two other atomic clocks, and then routed these separate figures and a weighted composite to the Master Navicomp. Precise time values were as essential to astrogation via hyperspace as accurate astronomy.
The atomic clock did its work. The relaying computer did its work. The subnavigating computer did its work. The Master Navicomp did its work.

The dramatic imagination pictures turbines whining, pistons whirring. Surely something hums and glows. None of that happened, not really. There was a soft click, and then fifty million tons of complex mass and potential violence shifted from faster-than-light to slower-than-light: The Star Destroyer Avenger had achieved hyperspace terminus.

The Empire had entered the system of Balmorra.

*****

The Free Market of Balmorra was one of the foremost of the factory worlds, initially founded as a colony in the aptly-named Colonies Region, transplanted from far-off Humbarine in the Core. Unlike most of its fellow factory worlds, Balmorra was not a creature of monopoly; instead of a single megacorporation, the Free Market was host to more than a dozen mining and defense conglomerates, each of which boasted of hundreds of billions in annual revenue. The side effect of this was a political marketplace of ideas, an argentocracy where competition had prevented any one company from dominating the rest.

Balmorran shareholders—other worlds called them “citizens”—had come to be fiercely proud of this tradition of democratic self-rule. They fiercely resented attempts by outsiders to dictate to them. Despite longstanding ties to the Techno Union, the Free Market had declined to join the Separatists in the nascent Confederacy of Independent Systems until the Republic had ordered the companies to renege on their wardroid production contracts. This attempt to deny their goods to the Separatists instead drove them into the Separatist camp.

The end of the Clone War with decisive victory by the Republic and its immediate transmogrification into the Empire presented Balmorra with real danger of blowback, but the shareholders had responded pragmatically by overwhelmingly voting out the old FIBP-RPB coalition that had led them out of the Republic, and voting in the CRU-affiliated FPIB— “Palpatinism with a Balmorran accent” —and offering very generous discounts on army contracts. (The spontaneous donations to Coruscant-based charities and foundations associated with the leading figures of the Emperor’s court were also generous, albeit less carefully documented.)

Tanacharison Beltane, the wily and charismatic FPIB Leader, had been one of the first to grasp that there were actually several Empires. There was the paternalistic, deeply-conservative Empire, the locus of loyalty among the great Names of the galaxy. Men and women from ancient lineages who had been horrified by the disorder and corruption of the late Republic honestly saw the Empire as the best vehicle for bringing order to the galaxy and protecting the rule of law. These beings believed in honor and civilization, and could be trusted to keep their word and to respect the terms of agreements, whether formal or informal.

But there were other Empires, Beltane had seen. There was the opportunistic Empire, the careerist Empire, the revolutionary Empire. The key to survival for Balmorra was to see which star was in the ascendant, and to find a way to keep them away from the Free Market.

Beltane had proven adept at leveraging Balmorra’s factories to keeping the various factions from interfering with Balmorra’s internal affairs. He allied with the New Order Party in the vast Interstellar Renewal Union – Neo-Democrats coalition, and wore jackboots in public often enough to keep COMPNOR mollified. He encouraged Balmorrans to join the Imperial bureaucracy and armed forces, and invested the Free Market’s sovereign wealth in the great Numbers, the colossal megacorporations closely allied with the Empire’s ruling class. He made Balmorra a valuable asset that produced enough for the Empire that nobody on Coruscant was tempted to look too closely.

Governor Beltane was murdered four years after the Battle of Yavin, when a Balmorran New Order Party member stabbed him to death at the inauguration of the Orn Free Taa Select Subadult School in Bin Prime, screaming that he was a traitor who was sympathetic to the Rebel Alliance. This was true, but the woman hadn’t actually known that. She was just a catspaw for a certain Legitimate Businessbeing® on Coruscant who had decided that there was no reason he should not share in the Free Market’s profits.

The resulting political shakeup had seen support for the Empire crater, and the Empire had responded with massive election fraud, installing a puppet Governor in Beltane’s place. The government started looking increasingly like an Imperial regime with the serial numbers filed off. There had been no tears shed when Governor Brockmore died in a tragic turbolift accident. Or Governor Bel Gullaine in a tragic repulsorlift accident. Or Governor Smooberg in a tragic hunting accident. Or Governor Guthmann in an extremely unlikely but still tragic ’fresher accident.

The Empire had finally gotten tired of spending money on stealing elections, and just appointed an Imperial Governor outright. He didn’t even make landfall before dying in a tragic shuttlecraft accident.

At that point—the Battle of Endor having come and gone—Balmorra had obtained military aid from the Alliance of Free Planets, and Beltane’s son Hinch Beltane was triumphantly elected Governor of the Free Market, which was now well and truly free. Beltane had declared independence from the Empire, and Balmorra enjoyed prosperity unseen since the Old Republic.

Hinch Beltane had been kidnapped from his bed one night recently, and awoke to find himself on a blue-green world in the Deep Core, looking into the yellow eyes of the Emperor himself, evidently unperturbed by having been killed at Endor. Beltane was a practical man, and he could read the writing on the wall. He bent the knee and pledged loyalty to the Emperor, lest the Free Market fall victim to the war machines it had sold to Palpatine the evidently Undying.

No tears had been shed when Palpatine was killed again at Da Soocha. Beltane swiftly became the first person to declare independence from the Empire twice.

*****

The planet Byss probably did not exist. An inhabitable world so close to the central supermassive black hole at the heart of the galaxy was extremely unlikely; that such a world could be paradise was impossible. Yet it had beaten the odds on both counts—tranquil vistas stretched beneath a cool sky, bathed in blue-green sunlight. The world itself seemed like a dream, an Elysian reverie given form and substance. It had taken little effort on the Emperor’s part to transform it into a narcotic utopia.

Byss was his private retreat, behind the concentric protections of the Byss Security Zone, the Beshqek Sector Group, the Hyperspace Security Net, and the nuclear chaos that was the very nature of the Deep Core itself. It was the safest place in the galaxy.

Within months of the Emperor’s death at the Battle of Endor, he had returned to Byss, reincarnated in one of the bodies he had cultivated in the Clone Labs beneath his vast Citadel. For the dark side of the Force, death was an inconvenience. With Pestage at his side and the covert obedience of others outside the Deep Core—he called these agents-in-place Sotto Voce—he carried out his Symphony Initiative, manipulating the galaxy from behind the scenes.

He permitted the picayune rebel Alliance to take control of Coruscant, allowing him to prune the Imperial State of much of its dead weight. He implemented Diminuendo, drawing additional forces surreptitiously into the Deep Core even as he encouraged the fragmentation of what was left of his Empire, so that he might purge his legions of the pathologically disloyal and incompetent among their ranks. Many good and loyal servants perished in the process, to be sure, which was regrettable, but they had died in his service, and that was what servants were for.

He had been disappointed when one of his favorites, the blue-skinned humanoid Thrawn, had disobeyed his orders (issued before his death at Endor) to stay in the Unknown Regions beyond the galactic disc until he was summoned. Thrawn had instead felt it necessary to return to the galaxy proper to take command of the Empire, to restore order and honor his Emperor’s legacy.

The Emperor had liked Thrawn. He had excellent taste in art, and was one of the very few sapient beings who could carry a real conversation—to say nothing of his extraordinary talent at waging war. The Emperor had actually been touched by the alien’s loyalty to what he had thought was his master’s memory, but orders were orders.The grand admiral had been told in no uncertain terms to stay in the Unknown Regions until he was summoned, and he had emphatically not been summoned. He should have learned by now when to stand and when to kneel. It was a pity that he would have to die.

The Emperor was a psychopath, needless to say, and had been one long before his soul entered a genetic duplicate of his own body. His undeniable brilliance and situational charm were authentic, as was his genuine affection for his friends. Nevertheless, he was a cold-hearted narcissist who would sacrifice anything and anyone to obtain his desire. He would not hesitate to cut his best friend’s throat if he thought it advantageous to do so. He would reminisce fondly about him afterward, and be sincere about it.

So it was that when he had concluded that Thrawn needed to be terminated, the Emperor had plucked gently at certain strands in his vast web, setting in motion the warlord’s murder by his own bodyguard.1

He still thought of him as one of his favorites.

Shortly after the end of Thrawn’s War, the Emperor had carried out Sforzando, the sudden, massive strike on Coruscant that had toppled the New Republic in an instant, and then Morendo, the breakdown in Imperialist unity leading to the Time of Destruction, clearing away the most troublesome elements of the rump Empire and the warlords, making room for the triumph of Crescendo, by which the Emperor himself emerged from seclusion and reunited the Empire under his direct control, reclaiming his rule over the whole galaxy.

Then the Skywalkers had ruined everything by killing him.

Again.

For once, Pestage had not been at his desk. He had been walking in the hall reading from a datapad—he was reading the results of an audit of the Palpatine Foundation—when he heard the distinctive chime coming from his office, announcing that a datamessage from his master had arrived. As always, he stopped what he was doing and read the message immediately, adjusting the lamp to see better.

(It was not really a lamp, but a soulsnare containing the eternally screaming essence of Tyber Zann, an ambitious and talented gangster who had had the indescribably bad idea of stealing from the Emperor. His death had been protracted and horrifying. It made Pestage chuckle every time he adjusted the lamp.)

The message was not from the Emperor, but from Shadow Hand, that magnificently sophisticated heuristic decision tree the Emperor had had him build and had named after Pestage.

The Emperor’s body has been killed over Da Soocha V. The Grand Vizier President of the New Imperial Council is designated Regent in his absence, and will sustain all dignitaries and officers in their current offices. The Symphony Initiative will continue in CRESCENDO phase until further notice. Shadow Hand has spoken.

This was unsettling. Shadow Hand was not supposed to act on its own; it was supposed to respond to inputs from him or one of the three others with OBL credentials. It had no AI, no will of its own. He was sure of that. Once it received input, it answered as the Emperor would have done, but it could not take initiative.

Dangor, Pestage thought. Dangor must have informed Shadow Hand of the Master’s death.

Ars Dangor had served the Emperor nearly as long as Pestage had. He was cunning, subtle, ruthless, and utterly unscrupulous, a man capable of anything, a man who loved power and served the Emperor purely out of admiration for his twisted genius. Dangor had been the principal agent of Sotto Voce, and had held the Empire beyond the Core together for years, expertly manipulating some of the pettiest, vainest, most selfish people in the galaxy—all of whom hated him.

That went without saying, really, because everyone hated Ars Dangor.

He was first vice president of the Council and Pestage’s most dangerous rival. They had worked together for half a century—Dangor’s office was always next to his—and they had hated each other for as long as either could remember. Not a day had gone by in decades without one of them passive-aggressively insulting or sabotaging the other somehow. It never actually interfered with their work of ruling the Empire, because they were both consummate professionals who could not be sidelined by some idiot’s nonsense.

Ars Dangor and Sate Pestage were best friends. The day one of them died, the other would be inconsolable.

Pestage assumed that Dangor had already ignored protocol and summoned the Council to an emergency meeting. He headed to the Council chamber and emerged into the hallway at the same time as his counterpart. People called him the Grey Eminence because he always wore dark grey zeyd-cloth robes.

“Have you heard from the Boss?”

“No,” Pestage said. “The Master will reach out when he’s ready. You saw Shadow Hand’s orders?”

“Naturally,” Dangor pursed his lips. “I don’t care forit, Master President.I never liked the Will.”

“Liking someone is not a prerequisite for working with him, Master Vice,” Pestage said.

As they entered the Council chamber, six of the others were already there. By the time they took their seats, the rest had arrived by holographic proxy.

“The Council will come to order,” Pestage said. “Our Father the Emperor has been killed, and he has appointed me his Regent.”

“Have we heard from the Old Man yet?” Lord Vandron was the second vice president of the Council and head of the Ersatzstaat, thequangocratic empire within the Empire. Head of the ancient House Vandron, he had the true aristocrat’s complete disregard for manners; he was invariably caricatured in shabby old riding clothes and muddy boots. He was patient and thorough, and had been steadily renovating popular culture and society in the Core Worlds and Colonies for decades. He had very few enemies, because millstones grind slowly but finely.

Pestage, Dangor, and Vandron were Palpatine’s three most powerful viceroys—administrative, political, and ideological—and had been since before there had even been an Empire, ever since the icy Senex Lord had joined Palpatine’s official family during the Clone War. Pundits had referred to them as the “Law Offices of Purple, Grey & Ermine.” They had ruled on his behalf for so long that trillions of beings had long since stopped thinking of them as separate people. They were simply the Troika.

Before Pestage could respond, the distinctive chime came again, and each Councilman looked down at the datascreen built into the table in front of him. Green letters had already appeared against the black background:

The office of Supreme Commander of Imperial Forces is abolished and OBL authority assigned to the Military Executors of Operation SHADOW HAND, with the rank of Dark Jedi. All operations will continue according to plan.

Sedriss QL is designated Principal Military Executor and Master at Arms, Vill Goir is designated First Deputy Military Executor and Master at Arms. Baddon Fass, Zasm Katth, Kvag Gthull, Kam Solusar, and Krdys Mordi are designated Deputy Military Executors and Sergeants at Arms. Shadow Hand has spoken.

Sedriss! That sociopath?

-----

Notes

1. “I don’t think it was an accident that I noticed that Decon III acting strangely outside the dukha. It wouldn’t be the first time Palpatine hid his hand from the puppets as well as the audience.” —Leia Organa Solo, The Palace Years

Holy shit.
As ever, the look into the Imperial court is fun, and I'm looking forwards to more. Can't believe you did Tyber Zann like that, though it does explain where he went after Forces of Corruption. Might also have been motivated by Zann besting Thrawn in that campaign :V
Also, BHCI mentioned!

My jaw dropped when I saw the date of posting. Welcome back, Publius!

CHAPTER TWO

• Balmorra has rebelled and will be retaken immediately. Military Executor Sedriss, First Deputy Executor Goir, and Deputy Executor Mordi will take AVENGER Battle Group augmented by Task Force 74, Task Force 419, and 1,207th Imperial Army Group to carry out pacification. Debellation of outer system authorized, but infrastructure will be seized intact. Shadow Hand has spoken.

---

The Empire had entered the system of Balmorra.

The Free Market was defended by a massive network of defense platforms, space stations, mines, spaceborne weapons emplacements, interlocking fields of surface-to-space missiles target zones, clouds of free-floating antimatter, and the like. It was a Fortress World, after all, and did not lack for credits to make itself as unappealing a target as possible.

The Empire brushed this aside like a Rancor annoyed by a sapling.

An Imperial Star Destroyer carried enough firepower to render an entire planet uninhabitable. One was an invasion force; a dozen was an encyclopedia entry on the destruction of a world. Two dozen were death beyond reckoning.

The Empire had come to Balmorra with forty Star Destroyers, plus cruisers, destroyers, Interdictor and picket ships, amphibious landing ships, and maritime prepositioning ships.

The bridge of the flagship Avenger was exactly the same as every other bridge in every other Star Destroyer in the Imperial Starfleet. The lighting was the same. The layout was the same. The people were the same. The Quartermaster of the Watch stood here, the Boatswain’s Mate of the Watch there, the Officer of the Deck and Junior Officer of the Deck here, the Helmsman and Lee Helmsman there, the Port Lookout here, the Starboard Lookout there, the Forward Lookout up there, the After Lookout back there, with the Signalman of the Watch and the Corporal of the Watch.

Officers and ratings performed their assigned tasks crisply and unquestioningly. Orders were given, repeated, and executed. These were consummate professionals, exquisitely trained and entirely interchangeable.

The Commander of the Fleet strode for’ard, his Captain of the Fleet, the Flag Captain, and the Tactical Action Officer trailing just behind him. They probably all had names.

“My lord, the Avenger has achieved hyperspace terminus. The Fleet signals their readiness. We are ready to annihilate the planet on your command.”

The officers probably had names, but the three men the Commander addressed did not know them. Two of them wore black armorweave chimeres and cowls with blackened ultrachrome body armor, with a series of qorlandir disks at their gorgets—the livery of the Military Household of the Galactic Emperor. The third was a greasy-looking, disheveled corpse, clad in scuffed leather and riding kit, a weapon strapped to his hip, emitter upward, like a Swooper wore his vibroblade, ready to draw and shiv somebody in a heartbeat.

The Empire was ruled by psychopaths, sangfroid men and women who had calculations where normal people had feelings. They were ruthless but practical, balancing their lusts with foresight, knowledge of consequences, and a sense of what they could get away with. They played Firepath with worlds, imitating the best and greatest among them, the Galactic Emperor who bestrode the narrow galaxy like a colossus. Little Palpatines.

This man was not like them at all.

This was a sociopath, a hot-blooded, violent man who would kill because he was angry, yes, but also because he was annoyed. Or bored. There was something missing inside him, something important. He breathed and ate and slept, but it was all autonomic, things that were done because they couldn’t not be done. He was an outline of a sapient being, an incomplete sketch. A caricature without internal life. If you took the time to look into his eyes, you might realize with horror that he simply was not there behind them.

The greaser turned his cadaverous eyes to the Commander and wondered how much pressure it would take to remove the top of the man’s head at the hinge of his jaw. He had no respect for anyone who could not beat him in a fight, which was as much to say as he had no respect for anyone.

“I never trusted Beltane,” he said to nobody in particular. “He thinks war machines are the reason the Empire wins wars.” He showed the officers his teeth. “Weapons don’t kill people, you know. People do. I don’t even know how many people I’ve killed this year.”

The Commander swallowed, opened his mouth. Closed it again. Tried again.

“My lord, we have established contact with Governor Beltane as you commanded.”

“Good, good,” the dead man said, throwing his arm over the man’s shoulder and giving what he thought was a friendly squeeze. “Pipe ’im through to the front viewport here.”

The Commander’s muscles tensed as he resisted the urge to shudder. His heart rate increased and his breath came shallower, pulling in extra oxygen. His mouth went dry and his adrenal glands began flooding his system with epinephrine, the better to prepare his body to fight or flee in response to the obvious threat. His apocrine glands began to sweat, interacting with the bacteria on his skin. But he was a professional, and the officers standing next to him were unaware of all of this.

The greaser, though, could feel it, hear it, smell it, taste it. He recognized the fight-or-flight response and the man’s disciplined effort to ignore it, and nodded to himself, releasing the man from his grip. Not bad.

He liked to seem friendly because he thought it made people easier to ambush, and the Commander was obviously pretending to be friendly in return, so—success.

His two deputies recognized that their principal was terrible at seeming friendly, but was utterly incapable of understanding both that he had failed and why he had failed. One of them smiled thinly, amused that the botched attempt at bonhomie actually fed into the greaser’s reputation as a dangerous lunatic.

The Commanding Officer nodded to the Officer of the Deck, who passed the word to the Signalman of the Watch. Three seconds later the for’ard viewport—for’ard, not front—changed from the Free Market sprawled below the Avenger to show Governor Hinch Beltane, impeccably dressed in a crisp Imperial uniform—he was a reserve lieutenant general—seated at his desk.

“Executor Sedriss,” the governor said, nodding a curt greeting. “I trust you have a reason for destroying billions of credits of Free Market property?”

They’d met before, when Sedriss wandered into an exclusive restaurant on Coruscant. Beltane had been summoned for consultations that had never actually happened; the Imperial State liked to remind its client kings that they weren’t important. Sedriss, a Chartered Imperial Assassin whom the Emperor kept around because Darth Vader couldn’t be everywhere, had killed a waiter in front of him.

Beltane had asked what the man could have possibly done to justify beating him to death with a drink tray, and Sedriss had looked at him blankly, the tray raised overhead suspended mid-blow, before admitting, “Y’know what? I don’t actually remember.”

“Don’t play innocent, Beltane,” the greaser said. “You’re a traitor. You know it, I know it. So let’s cut to the chase. Come quietly, or there’ll be trouble.”

“I don’t understand your problem, Executor,” the governor said, unperturbed. “Nothing needs to change. We are honoring our contracts. Our factories are supplying your most advanced armor. You need us.”

One of the greaser’s deputies grunted. “Leth’s new war droids are due,” he whispered to his principal. “The new SD-10s—”

Sedriss waved this aside, didn’t even look at his deputy. “This isn’t a negotiation, Beltane. Surrender, or I’ll come down there and destroy everything you’ve ever loved.”

“Surrender? You must be joking.” Beltane leaned forward and pointed a finger at the dead man. “Do you have any idea how long I’ve waited for this moment? How long I’ve prepared? I’ve had more—”

Sedriss looked bored—he rolled his eyes—and mimed flicking a switch; the comms channel cut out instantly.

Beltane stared at the viewscreen, nonplussed despite himself.

The channel had been closed from Beltane’s end.

CHAPTER THREE

• High Admiral Banjeer will take ABHARTACH Battle Group, augmented by APTRGANGR Battle Group and DRAUGR Battle Group to Anaxes to remind Thalassocracy of their oath of allegiance to The Throne; failure to comply will be met with main force. Debellation of outer system authorized at Commander’s discretion, but core infrastructure will be seized intact. Shadow Hand has spoken.

---

Thirty seconds later the bombardment started. Not the capital ships with their massive guns, mind you, because that would have accomplished nothing. A Fortress World like Balmorra was defended by impregnable ray shields, strong enough to deflect any bombardment. No, this was launched by a pair of the Fleet’s venerable siege weapons, the ugly but supremely practical bomb. Two kilometers long, awkward, and ugly, a bomb was little more than a colossal slug-thrower, an artillery piece with engines attached. It fired massive, thousand-ton pieces of shot at near-relativistic speed, at a rate of about nine hundred slugs per minute.

The functioning of particle shields is very complex, but the basic idea is actually very simple. An energy field is projected—action at a distance—to intercept and deflect any kinetic impact. But there is a basic problem: a collision with a shield is still a collision, and the kinetic energy imparted from the impacting object to the shield must go somewhere. No matter how powerful the shield is, some of that energy is passed from the point of impact to the shield generator itself—action at a distance. Enough physical impact will physically move the generator, even if the impacting object is destroyed and the shield is intact.

A few hundred million sthènes of force imparted by a pair of bombs in low orbit will rip a land-based shield generator right out of its moorings.

Six minutes after Sedriss rolled his eyes, Imperial landing craft had made landfall outside the capital city of Bin Prime.

One minute later, the breach force was deployed, consisting of a company of the Empire’s much-feared, four-meter-tall SD-9 Behemoth war droids and their supporting infantry. Repulsortanks and crawlers were all well and good for open spaces, but mobility would be an issue in the urbanized environment of Bin Prime, and SD-series droids—armed with heavy repeating blasters, plasma cannons, and ionization shields—were devastating in urban combat.

Ten minutes after Sedriss hung up, thirty-six thousand stormtroopers had deployed to the west of Bin Prime, with another forty thousand to the south. Surface Officer Training Doctrine ordinarily called for extensive artillery bombardment prior to direct engagement, but Sedriss had decided he didn’t want to wait. The faster Beltane’s command and control cell could be neutralized, the easier it would be to seize the rest of the planet.

The Executor would trade ten thousand fatalities for speed.

The main gates of Bin Prime’s western quarter opened, and the Balmorran Defense Force released their strike force into the teeth of Sedriss’s men: the combat debut of the new SD-10 Leviathan war droid, designed by the Emperor’s Master of Imperial Projects, Dr. Umak Leth. The sleek obsidian-plated giants took full advantage of Leth’s genius for unorthodox power supplies, and featured a panoply of innovative features like self-healing metals, point-of-impact shields, and the latest fast-reaction servos.

Beltane had taken the liberty of having his engineers modify Leth’s design to install a complete Behemoth M24A7 VerboBrain, slaved to the Leviathan’s own M24A10. The result was that the newer model knew exactly what the older model was thinking, and how to counter it perfectly.

The Imperial Ground Force Commander—traditionally and very unofficially known as the “HMFIC”—noticed the SD-9s were taking an abnormal number of direct hits to center mass, incapacitating them. The damage to his breach force and supporting light walker force was alarming. He ordered more stormtroopers forward to engage the enemy strike force, knowing full-well that it could take up to a hundred men to bring down a well-supported SD-9. He would probably lose more than that, seeing that the SD-10s were clearly more effective.

He had no choice. He durst not move his heavier forces forward without a protective infantry screen—movement without fire support is suicide—and the attack order had already been given; Surface Officer Training Doctrine made him personally responsible for implementing that order à l’outrance.

The Empire had a decisive advantage over every enemy force in the galaxy when it came to heavy artillery and heavy cavalry—the notorious MΘ4 Berserkr warbot, affectionately known among the Empire’s soldiery as the “GRKA,”1 was synonymous with “no survivors”—but the Force Commander’s hands were tied by the attack order he had been tasked with carrying out. Sedriss wanted the city taken fast, and he wanted it taken intact. That meant no big guns and no GRKAs.

His command Chariot shook as Balmorran light mortars began to find his range. The Force Commander grabbed the oh-shavit handle at his right and tapped at the keys on his BHCI terminal. He ordered forward three troops of XR-85s—fast-moving tank droids that could at least partially screen themselves—and passed the word to the REMFIC in one of the massive amphibious landing ships still in orbit, requesting fire-release for his heavier artillery.

---

Sedriss had retreated from the bridge to the Combat Information Center abaft of it, where he could more pointedly ignore the Fleet Commander and the Surface Marshal Commanding. (She wasn’t even physically present, anyway, just a quarter-scale holoproxy.) He was leaning over the shoulder of a very uncomfortable Surface Surveillance Coordinator, studying the schematics of Bin Prime’s environmental controls, and thinking about flooding the whole city with aerosolized C4H10FO2P, or maybe C2H6Hg. The latter would be more amusing, certainly, but it’d be a persistent environmental pollutant, and the organophosphate would be much easier to clean up.

He didn’t actually care about that, but deep inside of his head there was a little voice—it wasn’t his—that told him he should pay attention to details like that anyway. He always listened to that voice, because he was pretty sure it would kill him if he didn’t.

“My lord,” the Surface Marshal said. “Signal from Landing Force One, requesting fire-release for heavy—”

“No.” He didn’t even look up from the screen he was leaning over.

She licked her lips. “My lord—”

“Talk to me again and I’ll kill you.”

One of the Intelligence Officers on the Staff approached one of the cadaver’s deputies, the one with the tinted glaspecs that tended to catch the light in such a way as to seem opaque. Krdys Mordi’s eyes were very sensitive to light, so he rarely went without them.

They made him look like the kind of coffeine-house poseur who assaulted innocent bystanders with wretched poetry. Nobody had ever said this to him because he had risen to the Emperor’s Military Household from the Strategic Insertion battalions, and it seemed imprudent to wound his amour-propre.

“Lord Mordi,” the Intelligence Officer said, handing him a datapad. “Priority intelligence report, category Gamma. BHCI analysis confirms the entire production run of SD-10s has been deployed. More than 50% have been deployed to zone 7G in the Western AOR.”

Mordi unconsciously pushed his pince-nez up the bridge of his nose as he took the datapad. “The shaping operations in that zone have hit their checkpoints?”

“Yes, my lord.”

“Are our forces significantly entangled with the OPFOR?”

“No, my lord.”

“Good,” Mordi said, adjusting the settings on the datapad. “Surface Marshal, signal the HMFIC at line ‘Veers’ to conduct a fighting withdrawal to the previous checkpoint. He is not to disengage, and he is not to unlimber his field arty.”

“Yes, my lord.”

A gleaming infinity sign appeared on the screen behind Sedriss, the reflection of Mordi’s glaspecs.

“We’ve set all conditions for DP7,” Mordi said quietly.

“Sounds like an astromech,” Sedriss said irrelevantly.

Something inside them shifted, and they were the same person—or at least, two fingers of the same glove, with the same hand animating them both. Sedriss shared Mordi’s thoughts, and he understood: Beltane had already deployed the flower of his defensive force, and was pursuing the Imperial ground forces as they enacted a retrograde maneuver.

The interchangeable men of the Imperial breaching forces had created the perfect conditions for launching the Imperial exploitation force.

Victory was at hand.

“Ahh,” the cadaver said, rearing up to his full height. “Release the Shadow Droids.”

---

They emerged silently from the ventral flight bays of the flagship and her five nearest consort Star Destroyers. Their sleek frames were coated in stygian-triprismatic polymer, making them nearly invisible to scopes, and they carried a formidable suite of weapons. They arrived at Bin Prime within seconds of emerging from the flight bays, with the practiced ease of experienced pilots—because that was precisely what they were.

From the twisted imagination of Umak Leth had come these murderous wonders, the distillation of the fighter pilot to his purest form: the brain of a fallen Imperial ace in a nutrient bath, hard-wired to the avionics and tactical computers to achieve the apex of human aviation.

They were fast, ruthless, and deadly, and need never again feel a cramp or thirst or hunger or worry about g-forces. No longer need they call out positions or priorities; now they communicated via a blizzard of digital code and instantaneously coordinated their flight paths and target distributions amongst themselves and with the command ship.

There was a whisper of a rumor that the Emperor had imparted something more to his fallen aces. Perhaps there was a dark side to these cyberpilot brains.

The SD-10s did not see them as attack starfighters. In fact, they could barely see them at all, registering them as hazy silhouettes approaching them at supersonic speed. The weapons emplacements were all but invisible to their sensors. The M24A10 VerboBrain had just enough time to categorize them as possible threats before the Shadow Droids began turning the newest model of SD-series war droid to very expensive scrap.

“Kriff, there’s something new—!” one of the Balmorran company commanders shouted into his comm-link before the Shadow Droids’ sonic booms knocked him to the ground.

The Shadow Droids released a perfectly-coordinated barrage of concussion missiles into the city walls, breaching them about seven kilometers south of the Force Commander’s position. They had already regrouped and made a second strafing run ten kilometers north of the first breach by the time the Balmorran defenders had begun to respond.

---

Governor Beltane had left his office and entered the Free Market’s master war room. Officers and other ranks bustled about, adjusting contact plots, passing orders, doing the hundred thousand things that must be done to run a war. Beltane himself had nothing to do as these professionals did their work. He was by law the Commander in Chief of the Balmorran Defense Force, of course, but he was not a serving officer, and he had no direct role to play in the running of operations.

A war machine was like any other well-designed machine; once it was built, you stepped back and let it do what it was designed to do.

The Chairman of the Defense Staff brought him a datapad full of inputs from the forward positions.

“I don’t know what the hell those things are, but they’ve made an absolute mess of the SDs. No clue what we’re looking at. Scopes aren’t really showing much of anything.”

“I see,” Beltane said, manipulating the datapad. “Oua-k’on-dah,” he murmured. “How much of the production run is left?”

“Less than a quarter,” the Chairman said. The lighting in the room made the birthmark on Beltane’s face look almost green, which seemed appropriate given the sickening contents of the datapad. “Our strike force has been cut to ribbons.”

“Outstanding performance, though. They were doing great until they were annihilated,” Beltane said to himself. He snapped his fingers to draw the attention of one of the runners, and handed her the datapad. “Take this to my Production and Marketing Secretaries. Once this is finished, I want a comprehensive review in ten days.”

“You have no idea at all what they are?”

“No, Master Governor,” the Chairman said. “We’re not even sure what they look like. They’re… well, not cloaked, exactly, but….” He spread his hands helplessly.

The fact that nobody knew what these hazy sensor contacts were was troubling. Balmorra was one of the Imperial military-industrial complex’s crown jewels, and had been intimately involved with a number of secret projects. The Imperial Department of Military Research had a major R&D site in the southern hemisphere, tucked away in the Almorand cliffs, and Beltane had even negotiated a deal allowing IDMR to keep using it after he’d declared Balmorran independence the first time.

“They’re cheating,” the Defense Staff Director of Logistics said darkly, standing behind the Chairman. “Damn Imp bastards are cheating! Lousy murglak-suckers. They’re bypassing their own supply network!”

“They would hardly be galactic rulers if they didn’t,” Beltane said calmly. “Warthan’s Wizards must have another black site somewhere in the Deep Core, to handle the projects they don’t want to entrust to us hirelings.”

“To be fair,” the Chairman said, “We’re clearly not loyal enough to be trusted with black projects.”

Beltane actually smiled at this.

Hinch Beltane wasn’t an aristocrat, and he didn’t play Firepath. He was a man of the bourgeoisie—the high middle, to be sure, but still the kind of man who looked at price tags. He played sabacc. He knew a weak hand when he was dealt one, and the fact of the matter was that Balmorra was always going to lose this battle in terms of raw power. It wasn’t in the cards.

But a good sabacc player doesn’t play his hand; he plays the other players. Sedriss wasn’t a man who cared about body counts or OpPlans or balance of costs and benefits.

Y’know what? I don’t actually remember.

Beltane’s plan had always been to outmaneuver the enemy commander, not to overpower the enemy forces. The stakes were high, but he was confident in his play. He’d hoped his initial hand would be interesting enough to lure Sedriss from the playing table to the negotiating table. But it was not his only hand. He had another trump to play.

He was all in.

“IDMR aren’t the only ones with secret projects, of course.”



-----

Notes

• Giant Rampaging Killer Astromech

CHAPTER FOUR

• Warlord Teradoc will take LANCET Battle Group at the head of his forces to Corellia to remind Diktat of his oath of allegiance to The Throne; failure to comply will be met with main force. Debellation of system and mass reprisals authorized at Commander’s discretion. Shadow Hand has spoken.

---

Shadow Hand dwelt—so to speak—in a sprawling complex nine kilometers beneath the Imperial Citadel. Access was tightly restricted; a sophisticated system of isometric security controls made it virtually impossible for anyone to get within two kilometers of the core structure without being affirmatively cleared to approach. There were more than a thousand autoturrets with overlapping fields of fire, and the entire section was permanently flooded with cryogases spiked with nerve gases. The incautious as well as the ill-disposed would meet with a swift and painful death.

The central core contained the supercomputer and slave computers wherein Shadow Hand lurked, constantly downloading information from the rest of the known universe, filtered through a series of firewalls, mirror drives, and sanitization locks that protected the system from infection and compromise. It was the most powerful and most carefully protected automatic data-processing system ever created.

The system itself was tended by the Grand Vizier’s infamous TechnoDrones, lich-like things in white clean-suits and chrome-woven disc masks. Nobody knew precisely who they were, or what had been done to them, or how many crimes against sapience Pestage had committed in creating them. People hated the sight of them, with their jerky, uneven movements their hunched-over posture and their ghastly whispering, clicking voices. Shuddersome, uncanny: Undercranked insects shaped like men.

One of the TechnoDrones had entered the terminal room, a dark, sepulchral space at the center of the complex. It was quiet, and it was cold. A chair was situated in the center of the room, with a keyboard and datascreen built in. Opposite that, at the far side of the room, was the single red lens—the sole source of illumination in the room. Shadow Hand’s electronic eye.

It was here—and only here—that Shadow Hand could be approached, and that, only by those with the proper credentials.

There were four such people.

The Drone was not one of them.

In fact, the Drone was not even itself anymore. For all that had been done to it to make it what it was, it was still a living being—this was advantageous for certain tasks to which it was assigned, although nobody cared to hear an explanation as to why—and still subject to the more invidious arts of those who walk on the dark side of the Force. Its nervous system had been hijacked; its consciousness had been displaced. Whatever the Drone was normally, it was now no more than a puppet for another, far more malign intelligence.

Restrictions mean little to those who whisper cantrips and peer beyond the vale. Not being one of the four people permitted to question Shadow Hand hardly seemed like a reason not to use Shadow Hand’s own architecture to do so anyway.

Let Pestage find another Drone when all was said and done. There are always more drones wherever it is drones came from.

The Drone seated itself and queued up the interface. It navigated to the complete record in the action logs relating to the General Order that had named Sedriss to his current lofty perch. The baleful red eye stared at it.

Why is Sedriss military executor? the Drone typed.

The workstation chimed as the green letters formed against the black background.

• Executor Sedriss will implement Operation SHADOW HAND according to the Emperor’s will.

This was not a real answer; it was no more than a restatement of the military executor’s job title. The Drone tried again. Why was he chosen?

• It is not a Councilman’s place to question what pleases the Emperor.

The Drone rocked back in its seat—it had been recognized! How? Was it possible that—?

It paused and regarded that remorseless red eye. Was it possible? The Drone typed Are you alive? After a moment, it added, Have you returned?

• Shadow Hand speaks for the Emperor.

The Drone’s body twitched as some of its autonomic functions adjusted while the controlling intelligence sat a moment in silent thought.
Sedriss was clearly where he was because it was the Emperor’s pleasure—or would have been, according to the copy of his brain running on Dead Hand’s server. Neither the dead man nor his mortmain effigy was going to explain why.

Why would it please the Emperor? Sedriss was not a warlord. There were far better candidates for the job of ruling the Empire’s military and naval forces. Shadow Hand was the Empire’s battle computer and autopilot. Anybody could follow the Shadow Hand Strategy. Why Sedriss?

What if it was not really about waging the war at all? What if the man, the violent, dangerous man, had another purpose? What if he was merely a pawn in a much more personal game?

Sedriss was incapable of altruism, incapable of remorse. He was irredeemable.

Is he a trap for Skywalker?

• Shadow Hand has spoken.

The conversation was ended—the Emperor had never liked being pressed. But his decisions were rarely so outrageously selfish.

There was no need for putting this appalling thug in power, no need for antagonizing and threatening the Empire’s ruling class. The only reason he was there was because of this—this unnatural thing in the dead Emperor’s basement, this thing to which his entire Empire had been mortgaged. And for what? One more step in his private vendetta against Skywalker? The rest of us must suffer so that Skywalker can be entangled yet again in the spider’s web?

Skywalker. Always Skywalker. It was always about Skywalker. First the father, now the son. It would ever be so, so long as the Empire remained in the dead man’s grip.

There are other ways to achieve your goal, the Drone began to type.

The system chimed before it could finish typing.

• Shadow Hand does not speak twice.

It had just enough time to read this message before the chair’s security system struck.

The neurological damage was quite severe, but the TechnoDrone’s modifications proved somewhat resistant. The chair struck again, and the Drone lurched to the side, even more a parody of the human form than it already had been.

Well, no matter. That was what drones were for. The controlling intelligence disengaged from the fatally damaged nervous system, leaving what was left of the Drone to die in a heap on the floor.

The last thing it saw was Shadow Hand’s electric red eye, regarding it dispassionately.

The light seemed to flicker, just a bit.

Like a blink.

CHAPTER FIVE

• High Admiral Jeratai will take CARNIFEX Battle Group, augmented by SCINTILLATOR Battle Group and REFULGENT Battle Group to Corulag to compel surrender and rendering of hostages; failure to comply will be met with main force. Debellation of system authorized at Commander’s discretion. Shadow Hand has spoken.

---

The Shadow Droids had decisively altered the state of the battlefield, wiping out the Balmorran strike force and breaching the city’s defenses. The Imperial ground forces were making a general advance, and would enter the capital any minute now.

Sedriss and his deputies were clustered over the Aviation Control Officer’s console to monitor the performance of the Shadow Droids when abruptly all three straightened up and turned to face the planet in unison.

“What the hell is that?” Vill Goir said.

“I don’t know,” Krdys Mordi said, frowning. “I’ve never seen one before.”

“I want a closer look,” Sedriss said, stepping back to the Surface Surveillance Coordinator’s post.

The CIC watchstanders nervously traded silent glances. The three men in black weren’t looking at anything.

A man-o’-war is emphatically not the same thing as a merchantman. Certainly, they have features in common—bow, bridge, engines, sensor mast, even a few weapons emplacements—but the control systems are not interchangeable, and the versions found on a man-o’-war are far more powerful and complex. Your workaday spacer can pilot a tramp freighter or even a barge, run its scopes, sure, plot a course on its navicomp. These skills do not translate to standing watch in the CIC or bridge of a warship.

The Imperial Navy required a year of training and dozens of chops on a PQS before a sailor stood a grueling board, and only then could he stand a watch by himself. An operations specialist second class like the unfortunate SSC in the Avenger’s CIC had spent years learning to control the powerful suite of scopes built into a Star Destroyer’s mast. He could spot microfractures in the hull of a submersible at the bottom of an ocean if he knew where to look.

Sedriss did not know how to do any of that, but he didn’t see any reason why that should stop him. The greaser leaned over the OS2—he man could smell the peppermint on the Sedriss’s breath, strangely contrasting with his body odor—and rested his hand on the petty officer’s shoulder.

The sailor felt pressure behind his eyes and his mind went blank; his eyes rolled back and he lost consciousness. His hands moved unerringly to manipulate the dials and switches at his terminal. It took seven seconds to find exactly what Sedriss wanted to look at, and patch it through to the main monitor in the CIC. The Executor turned away from his meat-puppet and forgot all about him again. He felt lightheaded as his own consciousness reasserted control over his nervous system. His nose was bleeding.

The Balmorrans had released a swarm of eight-meter-long mechanical beetles, which apparently packed quite a punch, based on the mass casualties they had already inflicted on what was now the Imperial forlorn hope.

“Surface Ops tactical computer doesn’t recognize that platform at all,” the Avenger’s Marine Officer of the Day said. He was studying the BHCI tactical plot rather than the main monitor.

“Why haven’t the Shadow Droids—ah,” Goir said, as a pair of the stygian cyber-aces strafed the foremost beetles.

“That doesn’t seem to be doing anything,” Mordi observed unnecessarily.

“Point-defense shields, I guess,” Sedriss said. “I want conks on that thing.” Particle shields were much harder to maintain than ray shields at virtually any scale.

The beetles had evidently decided that just because they had a hard time seeing or tracking the extremely fast Shadow Droids was no reason to give them a free pass, because they were clearly attempting counterfire by tracking the trajectory of the incoming laserfire and anticipating where the enemy would be. The Shadow Droids were frustrating this by moving rapidly along all three axes. The first two strafers held the lead beetle’s attention while a third Shadow Droid approached at speed and launched concussion missiles.

Sedriss was annoyed to see a burst of chaff and close-in weapons fire from the beetle slap the missiles out of the sky before they could impact.

The three men in black flinched in unison an instant before the monitor showed the beetle rear up and pluck the third Shadow Droid from the air with a pair of huge pincers mounted on manipulator arms, tearing the pylons off the body.

“What the hell are those things,” Sedriss said angrily, “and why do I not already know?”

Every heart in the room was beating much faster.

---

Hinch Beltane was not an engineer, but rather something much rarer: He was a creative collator, a man who read voraciously, who understood what he read, and who could relate it to other things he’d read. He was intimately familiar with the capabilities of the Free Market’s constituent companies, with what their factories could do, and what they were doing. He had studied the schematics of every product Balmorra was producing for the Imperial war machine, and he had filed away every last waldo, servo, and widget.

He had also taken the time to be certified as a Market Research Officer, which meant he was qualified to view raw intelligence rather than the executive summaries the Governor of the Free Market usually received. He had made it his business to study what the Empire was up to in their black site down south, and what the Free Market’s spies—both government and industrial—had found about the Empire’s work offworld.

Beltane did not design things himself. But he knew what was possible, what was available, and what he could have his engineers do. He was a modular genius.

The weaponeers of Ix had developed a number of excellent laser cannon that were too complex and expensive for mass production on the scale the Empire needed. The mechanicians of Metalorn had developed some extremely powerful telepresence manipulators for experimental use in the lab studying the White Dwarf in the Outer Rim, a project that had been shelved in the wake of the Emperor’s death at Endor. Most fascinating of all, Umak Leth had published a monograph on a hypothetical power system that would use a battery of absorptive cells to create what he called molecular shielding.

These things were completely separate, but Beltane couldn’t think of any reason they needed to be.

The first art of war is secrecy. The enemy must never know your strengths and weaknesses, your numbers and your dispositions, your capabilities and liabilities, until it is too late. Balmorra, with its separate companies each with their own inventories, was uniquely capable of secrecy with respect to the Governor’s brainchild.

The foundries of the Free Market had produced billions of walkers and war droids of various shapes and sizes for the Empire and its client states. At Beltane’s behest, each of the companies produced part of his secret weapon, to be finally assembled by his own clandestine division in Balmorran Arms, Inc. The result was a particularly nasty behemoth called the X-1 Viper Automadon.

It resembled a mechanical beetle eight meters long and six meters tall, although only two of its six limbs were legs. It could run up to sixty kilometers per hour, and had a vertical leap of twenty meters. It had heavy armor plating and a suite of electronic countermeasures and counter-countermeasures, as well as point-defense systems incorporating both soft- and hard-kill features. It was the culmination of several concurrent schools of military engineering—and it showed.

Chin-mounted Class II carronades gave it the same kind of punch as the Empire’s All-Terrain Armored Transport family of walkers, albeit without the range and accuracy. Metalornic pincers were mounted on manipulator arms abaft of the Automadon’s head, with enough mechanical strength to rip a GRKA in half. Offsetting the carronades’ short range were two omnidirectional Ixian heavy repeating cannon and a grenade launcher, directly integrated into Leth’s hypothetical molecular shielding—enemy fire would be absorbed and redirected straight to the Automadon’s turbocharged weapons systems.

The Automadon was far too expensive and complex for mass production at the Empire’s scale, but that wasn’t a problem at Balmorra’s scale.

Beltane had intended to offer the Automadon to the New Republic—now universally known once again as the Rebel Alliance, in light of its crushing defeat at the hands of the Shadow Hand Strategy—but they had not been combat-tested yet.

This had seemed as good a chance as any.

---

“Okay, Beltane, you’ve made your point,” Sedriss said. “What do you want for your steel beetles?”

“The Viper Automadon, actually,” Beltane said, signing his name with a flourish. He was ostentatiously doing datawork at his desk, as though Sedriss’s call had caught him during a normal working day. He looked up at the holocamera. “You can have them cheaply—all I want is Balmorra’s freedom. No more, no less.” He held up a hand to forestall a reply. “Once the Free Market is truly free, we will sell them to you on a contract basis, if we choose to do so. As an opening figure, I would guess—oh, let’s say about 50,000 per unit?”

Sedriss ran his tongue across his teeth. “The Emperor doesn’t do business with free planets.”

Beltane put his stylus down and folded his hands atop his desk. “The Emperor doesn’t do business with anybody,” he said coldly. “He’s dead. Do you want my Vipers or not?”

Sedriss cocked his head and regarded the bald man on the comm screen in front of him. Behind him, Goir and Mordi were rubbing at their shoulders in exactly the same motion, as though somebody had dislocated them. Beltane was surprised that none of these men had reacted to his gibe about the Emperor.

“Yes, well…” Sedriss said finally. “Your point ’s well taken. Okay, yeah. Sure. I’ll send some guys down in an hour to draw up terms.”

Beltane somehow did not smile. “Executor Sedriss, you are a man of fine perception,” he said, and hastily cut the channel before the walking cadaver could do so again.

“I don’t understand why you’re giving up so easily,” Goir said to his principal. He had joined the Military Household from the Navy’s Fleet Regiments, and had participated in much lengthier amphibious assaults. “We haven’t even tried naval gunfire. Why not just vaporize them and be done with it?”

“I agree with Goir,” Mordi said. “We haven’t even deployed our field arty or the GRKAs. We can still take Bin Prime and kill Beltane easily. Once word of this gets out, our other weapons worlds may get similar ideas.”

“War’s more than just vengeance, Mordi,” Sedriss said, shrugging. “I like using the enemy’s resources to destroy him.” He cracked his neck and worked his shoulder—the same motion as the others. “Anything fast enough and smart enough to catch a Shadow Droid is something worth having.”

He turned to the stunned-looking Fleet Commander and the miniature proxy of the REMFIC. “I want those new warbots for the Empire, and I want them now. Get your wagyx down there and agree to anything Beltane wants. Give him the keys to the Senate Hall if he wants ’em. I don’t care what it costs. Get me those war droids and the men who designed them.”

Neither of them felt the need to ask any questions. They bowed, and fled the dead man’s presence as quickly as dignity allowed.

“The Balmorrans do tend to overengineer their original designs,” Mordi mused. “There’s probably room for improvement.”

“Leth will have a field day when he gets his hands on them,” Goir conceded. “And after?”

Sedriss showed his teeth. “After, we kill everybody on this entire planet.”

“They’re not going to be happy about this on Byss,” Goir said.

“I don’t give a rat’s yx what they like on Byss,” Sedriss said, rolling his eyes. “This is my decision, and if they don’t like it, they can just count their teeth.” He snorted. “What ’re they gonna do, fire me?”

CHAPTER SIX

• High Admiral Yzu will take 15th Deep Core Reserve Fleet to Kuat to compel surrender and rendering of hostages; failure to comply will be met with main force. Debellation of system authorized at Commander’s discretion, but core infrastructure will be seized intact. Shadow Hand has spoken.

---

The New Imperial Council was not the government. That machinery still existed beneath them—far beneath them—the durable ministries and agencies, plugging away at the endless task of administering all of the Known Galaxy. Despite the chaos and the wars, taxes were still assessed and collected, licenses were still issued and renewed, fines and fees were still levied. The Council of Ministers still met, even as it always had, throughout the tumult and the confusion that followed the death of the Emperor at Endor.

No, the New Imperial Council was the apex of power, all power, unrestricted by law, charter, or constitution. There was no more Ruling Council, no more Senate. These were the rulers of the Empire.

Sedriss was not well liked among these people.

Since time immemorial the galaxy had been dominated by the Names and Numbers, the powerful families and gigantic multistellar megacorporations that wielded power and influence throughout the Known Galaxy. They had not gotten rich by writing checks.

To force their will upon others and defend themselves from others’ will, the Names and Numbers kept housecarls, their own private armies of soldiers, bodyguards, and enforcers. But not all enemies posed problems that could be solved by housecarls; for them, the Names and Numbers kept what was euphemistically known as a chapter.

The rest of the galaxy called a chapter a private stable of assassins.

The Emperor had his housecarls—the Armed Forces of the Imperium, among others—and he had his chapter. Chartered Imperial Assassins like Gauer, the Neuras, and Ennix Devian were always loitering around the Imperial Palace, lurking at the very edge of the crowd. They were there to remind the ruling class that the Emperor had troubleshooters.

To keep the shakers-and-movers in their place, the Emperor would task his chapter with the occasional random assignment, killing this senator or that advisor for literally no reason. They were terrorists, terrorists par excellence, whose job was to terrorize the most powerful beings in the galaxy.

Sedriss QL was the worst of them.

The others of the Emperor’s chapter used chaumurky or chaumas, garrotes or monofilament daggers, venomous darts. They struck in the middle of the night, or in the antechamber outside the throne room—swift, circumspect, according to the forms.

Sedriss fought like the Swooper he had been: a thug. He beat people to death, shivved them in the kidneys, slashed their throats. Once he had ambushed one of the Emperor’s advisors at a restaurant, stabbing the man to death with cutlery in full view of the holopaparazzi.

It was not enough that he dealt death. His victims suffered ignominious, violent, common deaths.

He was a peasant who dared to make lords feel fear.

---

Everybody who was anybody knew Sarcev Quest.

He was not a high-powered ‘Hand’ at court—he had no party or faction of his own; no constellation of clients, no claque of hangers-on for him. He was something like a free agent, a likeable and charming fellow with connections to all the factions. He knew people everywhere, and he seemed almost eager to do favors for others without ever asking for anything in return.

In particular, he was an excellent conversationalist with a knack for headhunting new talent. There wasn’t a court party out there that had not at some time or another been pleasantly surprised by a fresh face on their metaphorical doorstep with a note from Quest saying, “You have been looking for a new frois-d’art sous-chef, and Blanksworth here seems the perfect fit for your household….”

Despite his lack of pedigree, he was welcome in all the best houses. He knew the forms and the customs. He played the game. They called him the Arbiter of Elegances.

Shortly after the Battle of Hoth, when Pestage had taken over the presidency of the Ruling Council from Dangor, Quest had been given a seat on the Ruling Council, a sop to the factions currently out at court. If they could not put their own man in the Serenissimus, at the very least they could rely on Quest to keep an eye out for their essential interests. Everybody liked him; most of them even trusted him.

When the Emperor died, Pestage had faced a brief insurrection from among the court, who had threatened to pack him off to the disintegration booth if he did not immediately retire to Byss. The wily old Purple Twin had agreed, and then promptly turned around and had Imperial Intelligence liquidate the putschists. It had been Dangor and Quest—as different as night and day—who had forged the uneasy truce between the new Regent and the rest of the court parties who had survived the Night of the Lanvarok.

Over the years that followed, when Pestage and Isard had passed from the scene, it had been Dangor and Quest who had held the ruling class together as Convenor and Moderator of the rickety, bilious coalition called the Emperor’s Ruling Circle. Quest had been the first to back the claims of the newly-returned Grand Admiral Thrawn, Quest had been the one who persuaded the Grey Eminence and the rest to install the blue-skinned Warlord from beyond the Outer Rim as the shogun of the Empire.

When the Emperor returned from his years of occultation on Byss, Quest had been seated on the New Imperial Council, as the de facto dean of the court and viceroy of the old ruling classes. His presence was reassuring to the kind of people who had a hard time adjusting to the idea of the Emperor revived or who blanched at the new brutality of the dark-side-suffused regime on Byss.

They felt free to talk in front of him.

---

The High Presence of the Valideh Sultan Shahbanu was an old woman, probably the oldest human being in the galaxy. Nobody knew precisely how old she was, or even what her real name was. She had been married nine times to the highest of the galactic aristocracy, the Old Families and the Houses Major, and had children with every one of her husbands, high-born children who married into other Ancient Houses. She was a grandmother and great-grandmother two hundred times over whose descendants were found in more than half of the Names.

They were all frightened of her.

She was the only woman to sit on the New Imperial Council, and was for all intents and purposes the Emperor’s vicereine of Society, despite being a figure who was almost never mentioned in the NewsNets. She was fond of Quest, had been ever since he had handled certain delicate arrangements involving one of her great-granddaughters. The Arbiter of Elegances was always welcome in her tea house.

He was amused to find it full of people whose professional backgrounds would not suggest that part of their day included waiting upon a supercentenarian dowager.

Let us see, he thought—it was always good to know who was cooling his heels where—mostly a family affair.

The Valideh Sultan was sitting in her curule chair, her spine as stiff as a durasteel rod, her diaphanous black veil lifted to allow her to drink from her ten-thousand-year-old tea bowl. Sitting on the floor to her left was one of her grandsons, Director of Imperial Intelligence Reynart haut Messervy; to her right, great-granddaughter Feena Beruss-Tagge-Asta na-Baroness D’Asta, and off to the side grandson General Nils Immodet y Ashen, great-grandsons Fleet Admiral Arhul Banjeer-Ozzel, Admiral Tannon Banjeer-Okins, Vice Admiral Orman Banjeer-Banjeer, Rear Admiral Llon Banjeer-Holt, and High General Anakin Praji. Quest was surprised to see among the family a pair of near-humans, the Devaronian chief of the Galaxy Labor Front, Lord Manos, and the Myke pirate-king of the Kimlaw, Norym Kim.

Well, now, that’s interesting, Quest thought. The Old Grey Lady’s no High Humanist, but she doesn’t usually feel much need to seek friends outside her own family tree.

They drank tea and kept the conversation light. Quest recognized that the Valideh Sultan’s descendants were using one of their private languages—they didn’t know he could read it. Everyone appreciated Quest’s observations on the tea accoutrements. He actually knew the story of the slight arrowhead chip on the tea bowl Feena D’Asta was using.

There was a lull in the conversation, very slight—five seconds, little more than that, when Lord Manos took a deep breath, and said something direct.

“The Dead Hand gave Sedriss the Balmorra mission,” he said, looking embarrassed to have to talk shop. It did not escape Quest’s attention that he had called Shadow Hand by its unflattering nickname.

The Valideh Sultan’s lips tightened, and she put her bowl into the hands of her grandson at her side. “Sedriss,” she said, like it was a curse word. “The man is completely unfit for command.”

“He’s—ow—he’s not ‘in command,’ ma’am,” Messervy said—the tea bowl was still hot. “He’s just the Executor of Shadow Hand.”

“Why does he call himself that?” D’Asta asked, handing the Valideh Sultan a confection. “I thought the title was ‘Supreme Commander.’”

“It was,” one of the Banjeer-hyphens said. “But the Dead Hand abolished the old office.”

“Dead Hand gave him the new title,” another hyphen said, upstaging his cousin—everybody was keen to be seen as helping cousin D’Asta, the matriarch’s favorite, heiress to one of the largest fortunes in the galaxy, with housecarls to match— “to show that he is the executor of the Emperor’s will.”

“His last will,” a third hyphen muttered, “and testament.”

“Stop that muttering,” the old woman said, and the third hyphen sat up straighter. His cousins looked at him carefully out of the corner of their eyes.

“I don’t think Sultanim meant ‘command’ literally, Director,” Quest said, helping himself to a confection. She smiled at him approvingly; she was not accustomed to explaining herself to anyone. “And I regret to say I do not understand why he’s in the position he is. He has no idea what he’s doing.”

“He knows exactly what he’s doing,” Kim the pirate-king said, adjusting the fall of his tunic. “And so does my friend the Councilman.” There was just a hint of acid in his voice—Nim was wealthy, powerful, and very talented, but had never enjoyed a position at court commensurate with his abilities, despite having the Emperor’s favor. A man who conquered five sectors before Endor should have been a White Glove at court, but the snobbish Core Worlders had never been able to see him as anything but a kind of housecarl-for-hire.

“Oh?” Quest raised his eyebrows in polite interest. “What is it that he is doing?”

“He is a terrorist,” Kim said, looking Quest dead in the eye. “And you know it. His job is to keep the Forces in line while the Emperor is… indisposed.”

“I don’t think we need any such thing,” one of the hyphens said. Banjeer-Banjeer, probably. Despite the fact that the hyphens were not first cousins, it took a good deal of effort on Quest’s part to tell them apart.

“The Imperial State has always tested the loyalty of people who have given no reason to be questioned,” Manos said obliquely, holding up his tea bowl to admire the way the light played across its surface. Everyone knew what he meant—Manos had risen to his present lofty status by ruthlessly applying Imperial ideals to the complex web of organized labor throughout the Known Galaxy, and he had encountered quite a good deal of the xenophobia common to the humanocentric ruling classes.

“No tears will be shed if he does not return from Balmorra,” the Valideh Sultan said, and the conversation was closed.

---

Fifteen hours after Sedriss had left for Balmorra and an hour after the Valideh Sultan’s informal tea gathering had concluded, Quest was on the links outside Eternia with the polymath Dr. Sigit Ranth and two of the Emperor’s dark side adepts, Savuud Thimram, the Chandrilan castellan of the Imperial Citadel, and Quest’s fellow Councilman, Nefta naKeto, the High Prelate of the Krath.

“Well, I don’t think anybody would shed any tears if the bloody Nek doesn’t come back,” Ranth said while lining up his stroke. “There’s a nautical expression, I think: ‘Shipmates slip down ladderwells.’”

“I think you underestimate how steady on his feet the little greaser is,” Thimram grunted, shading his eyes as he followed the progress of Ranth’s ball. “Beside which, I don’t think the Emperor will be pleased if he returns to find his handpicked shogun has had an accident.”

“Fine shot, Ranth,” Nefta said as he drew his club from the bag floating in air beside him—he didn’t like having sapient caddies.

“No, not that one,” Quest said. “Not this close to the green. You want your 9 iron, Nefta.”

The High Prelate glanced at him, thought a moment, and switched clubs. “Anyway, he’s not the Emperor’s choice, Thimram,” he said, clearing his throat as he began to line up his own shot. “Shadow Hand picked him.”

“Who are you, Krylenko?1” Thimram said, rolling his eyes. “A distinction without a difference. You know perfectly well the Emperor is unlikely to disagree with Shadow Hand when he returns.”

“Yes, of course,” Nefta said. “Of course. When the Emperor returns.” He let fly his club, then cleared his throat and said as casually as he could, “We must of course face the unpleasant reality that he may choose not to return any time soon.”

That’s an interesting way to phrase it, Quest thought.

---

“It’s good of you to meet me for a working lunch, Councilman Quest.” Admiral of the Navy Gehrls, First Space Lord/Chief of Naval Operations, rose from his chair to greet Quest as he entered the admiral’s office twenty minutes after leaving the links. They did not shake hands; Naval Regulations prohibited it because of the once-common practice among Core Worlders and Colonists of poisoning their enemies with weaponized signet rings.

“The pleasure is mine, of course, Admiral Gehrls,” Quest said, bowing at the shoulders. “I am always happy to help you any way I can.”

“Yes, of course,” Gehrls said. “Of course. I know that. I hope you like rilk-beef, Councilman. Like many of my brother-officers, I picked up a taste for cold rilk sandwiches in my ’naxes days.” A naval shibboleth, that; Quest knew that it was considered lubberly to pronounce the first A in Anaxes. Like nearly all his fellow Fondorians, Gehrls was a Navy Man from the top of his cap to the soles of his boots.

The rilk was excellent, but that was no surprise considering that the ship’s cooks working for the 1SL/CNO were invariably the best cooks in the Imperial State. They rotated between OpNav and the Palace.

“I’ll follow any orders the OBL gives me,” the Navy Man said after a moment of eating in silence. “The same is true of my brother heads of service in the Army and the Marines.”

He probably doesn’t mean anything by omitting Intelligence, Quest thought.

“I know that, Admiral. It goes without saying,” Quest smiled as he took a bite from his sandwich and wiped his mouth with his napkin. “And I’ve been around long enough to know you wouldn’t say it unless you want to be sure your real point is not misunderstood. Come now, you can tell me anything.”

Gehrls pursed his lips, made a decision, and proceeded. “The Principal Military Executor concerns me, Councilman, I won’t lie. I don’t like the way he treats my officers. He’s erratic and, to be perfectly frank, I think he’s mentally ill. I’ve had reports he hears voices. He has conversations with people who aren’t there.”

“I see,” Quest said. “That does sound—well, Admiral, let’s be honest, lots of the Hierarchy do that.”

“I know, Councilman, I know,” Gehrls said, swallowing another bite. “Listen: Firmus Piett was a friend of mine. I myself served under both Lady Darys and Lord Tremayne. I know all about Seledrood’s Law.2 That’s not what this is.” He leaned forward. “I’m concerned that he is genuinely psychotic, and poses a real and present danger to my Starfleet.”

Gehrls was a serious man, a hard man. If he thought Sedriss posed a threat to the Navy, it was not an opinion he’d arrived at lightly. His invocation of Seledrood’s Law underlined the seriousness of the problem—dark-side magi tended to resent criticism.

“With Lord Vader and the others—Lord Jerec, Lord Tremayne, and so on—you at least knew what was expected of you, and what to expect. This man Sedriss—” he clearly had difficulty with the idea of calling him Lord Sedriss— “To be honest, if I didn’t know for certain the man has OBL authority, I’d have him confined to sick bay, or just plain shot.”

Quest chewed literally and figuratively. “I see,” he said finally. “There’s nothing I can do directly, of course, but I will raise the matter with the rest of the Council, and with Shadow Hand itself if need be.”

---

Twenty minutes later Quest was sitting down to a more sumptuous lunch at one of Eternia’s most exclusive restaurants, Sodor’s—the main course was norlas rouge grillée, liuli, priyo vert et rakveh braisées—with a more interestingly diverse crowd. Foremost among them was his colleague Councilman Fa-Ru ni Sa-Di, a bocor with a particular talent for mind control and somatic displacement, who had a particular fondness for Sodor’s wine selection. Next to him, both in seating and in rank, was the Duke of Burr Nolyds, the Lord Justice President of the Supreme Court. He had been Wilhuff Tarkin’s university roommate and lifelong best friend, and was the Valideh Sultan’s eldest living cousin.

To Quest’s left sat the phenomenally wealthy Mahd Windcaller, the chairwoman of Millennium Entertainments, the largest media corporation in the Known Galaxy and one of the primary sponsors of the Corporate Sector Authority; she had been one of Palpatine’s strongest backers since before the Clone War, but didn’t look a day over thirty. To Quest’s right sat Kooloota-Fyf, the Master of the Shipbuilders and Astromechs Guild, whose support had proven essential to the construction of the Emperor’s secret strategic reserve in the Deep Core. He had been a reliable ally of the Emperor for decades. Both of them were powerful and influential, but neither had ever been given a seat at the highest table.

Quest idly reflected on the concept of relative deprivation—the resentment created by a perceived disparity between one’s own rewards and the rewards received by others, regardless of how extensive or munificent one’s own rewards objectively were. A man given one billion credits will feel slighted if someone else is given two.

Their group was rounded out by the balding, paunchy Dr. Umak Leth, the Master of Imperial Projects who was as brilliant a conversationalist as he was an inventor—he also happened to be clinically insane—and the balding, paunchy businessbeing Phil MacZaxxar, the President of Ayelixe/Krongbing Textiles, the largest textiles and uniforms manufacturer in the universe, clothier to the Empire and its client states and another Corporate Sector Authority primary sponsor. McZaxxar was Windcaller’s childhood friend and was basically part of her wardrobe. He was rumored to have once disagreed with her when she wasn’t present.

Leth had been dazzling everyone with a surprisingly bawdy lecture on hyperspace anomalies in the sky visible from their table—he was frighteningly intelligent—when he abruptly stopped talking and started staring at his entrée, mumbling something about fractals. Fyf, a longstanding admirer of Leth’s lucid periods, casually leaned over to take the Master’s utensils. His intelligence was unfortunately not the only thing about Leth that could be frightening.

The table was awkwardly silent for a moment while they waited to see if the savant would continue.

“Has anyone heard from the Chief?” Windcaller asked finally, as she worked with knife and fork. She was fond of war to the knife and fork, and had been calling Palpatine ‘The Chief’ since she first met him in 500 Republica, before he was elected Supreme Chancellor. “I know it’s only been a little while since he died, and it was months after Endor before he returned to us, but still….”

“It seems logical he would return sooner, given that Da Soocha is much closer to the Core than Endor,” Fyf said, fidgeting with the napkin and cutlery at his place setting. Givins rarely ate in mixed company, but Fyf had long found it advantageous to join humans and near-humans for meals regardless. Usually he just drank—alcohol had very little effect on his metabolism, so he could drink most of his colleagues under the table if he chose to.

“I’m fairly confident that that is not how it works,” Quest said, cutting into his entrée.

“None of us knows how it works,” Windcaller said. “Pestage knows the theory, of course, but even he doesn’t know. It’s all metaphysical babble to me.”

“Well, you know,” MacZaxxar began, clearing his throat. “I was talking to T’iaz the other day, and he says—”

A groan went up around the table. T’iaz was one of the more bizarre of the Emperor’s dark side adepts, an initiate into the Science of Darkness who inhabited multiple bodies at once. He claimed to come from Outside—either another galaxy or another dimension, he was rather unclear about that—attracted to Byss by the Emperor’s power. He was oddly naïf in some ways and frighteningly shrewd in others.

Well-Dressed Phil was fascinated by him. (Them?) He managed to introduce the topic to nearly every conversation he had.

“Again with the entity,” Windcaller said, rolling her eyes.

“I cannot help but think—” Burr Nolyds began.

“Nobody cares what you think, Burr Nolyds,” Sa-Di snapped, reaching for his wine glass. “You’re only invited to round out the numbers.”

Burr Nolyds was infamously acid-tongued from his seat on the bench, and his terrible temper was legendary. Many, many men and women had died for offending him, and countless more as innocent bystanders in his violent court feuds.

But when a Councilman told him to shut up, he shut up.

“Anyway, to answer your question, Windcaller: No, nobody’s heard from him,” Sa-Di said, draining his glass and signaling for a refill. He was not like the rest of them: He was himself a dark side adept, and had been one of the Emperor’s closest friends. He had been drinking a lot since the Emperor’s death, even more than usual. “Maybe none of us ever will. Maybe we’re stuck with the Dead Hand forever.”

---

Nineteen hours after Sedriss left for Balmorra, Quest was at The Establishment, a well-heeled gentlemen’s club about three kilometers from Sodor’s. The cocktails were good, but they did not pair well with the excellent meal he’d just had, so he was nursing his drink.

Minister President Xandel Carivus had just Kissed Hands to take over as head of the Council of Ministers, his lifelong ambition, and he was in a generous mood, buying drinks and cigarras for everyone in sight. It had taken ten minutes for Quest to bring the conversation to something more interesting than Carivus’s big plans for reforming the §167(b) exemption. The man was a formidable and formidably boring master bureaucrat.

The Establishment was favored by a truly eclectic membership. The champion datapusher had somehow assembled a drinking party that included a dark Jedi, two Councilmen, and the Empire’s chief executioner.

“Oh, Sedriss’s horrible of course,” Carivus said, gesticulating with the tumbler in his hand. “Nobody’d shed any tears if he didn’t come back from Balmorra. But there’s nothing for it, you know. We can’t dismiss him—Pestage would never allow it.”

“I fear you’ve not given the matter enough thought, Minister President,” said Gwellib Ap-Llewff, the towering Volyari ex-Jedi and High Inquisitor who had joined them to share a drink. He had been one of the first members of Darth Vader’s own chapter, and unlike most inquisitors he still enjoyed the company of normal people.

A man raised in a cloister has a strange fondness for small talk, Quest thought.

“Sedriss’s commission is not the problem, but the man himself,” Ap-Llewff continued. “As my Lord Vader used to say, ‘When there is a man, there is a problem. No man, no problem.’”

Carivus stared at him over the top of his tumbler, mouth agape.

“You of all people know that killing Sedriss will be much more easily said than done,” rumbled Atha Prime, the last of Quest’s fellow Councilmen currently on Byss (not counting the Troika, of course). He was not drinking—like Darth Vader, he did not take food or drink in front of witnesses—but he had joined them at the bar anyway because he found studying people’s mannerisms amusing. People-watching was an obvious but nevertheless unsettling hobby for a genetics master to have.

Ap-Llewff smiled on the left side of his face but not the right. “Naturally. As you say, Prime, I know a great deal about killing people,” he said, to Carivus’s overt discomfort. “I have a number of inquisitors who should be able to do the job.”

He said “should,” not “would” or “could,” noted Quest.

“Nobody is killing anybody right now,” said the other dark-side magus, Lord Hethrir, the Procurator of Justice. Like Ap-Llewff, he had been one of Vader’s handpicked protégés. As the chief executioner of the Empire, it was a capital offense to publish his image, and he was probably the only person in the city who knew more about killing people than a high-ranking inquisitor. “At the very least, he must needs take Balmorra back first.”

---

It amused Sarcev Quest that so many people trusted him, because they were supposed to. Even the dark side adepts he’d met could not detect him for what he really was. He’d been carefully trained by Imperial Intelligence to infiltrate the court and Society, and had been personally chosen by the Emperor himself as an Emperor’s Hand.

“Sedriss is a problem,” he said. “He’s become the focus for a great deal of resentment, and there are serious concerns about his sanity.”

He had decided not to share the frequent expressions of dislike that had been uttered about Shadow Hand.

“I see,” said Dangor, sitting in one of the nerf-hide settees in the Grand Vizier’s office. “How serious is the opposition?”

“There’s talk of having him removed permanently,” Quest admitted. “I know the Emperor’s Household is formally exempt from the rules of kanly, but it wouldn’t be the first time a War of Assassins has been run illicitly, especially in light of Sedriss’s, ah, unique background.”

“Yes, yes, we all know that,” Vandron said, waving this aside from the other settee. Quest the billionaire was by far the poorest man in the room, and the only one in the room without a chair. He was also the only one without his own chapter.

Officially, anyway.

“Shadow Hand has spoken,” Pestage said simply, leaning back in his desk chair. “It does not speak twice. Sedriss is where he is because it is the Emperor’s will. He will not be removed.”

“Not officially, at any rate,” Dangor added.

“Do you think there is danger now?” Pestage asked. He was familiar with the court’s more dangerous moods.

“I don’t think so,” Quest said. “Not just now. The danger is very high overall, and they will probably move against him soon, but not yet. Sedriss is a lot of things, but first and foremost he’s as ruthless and stubborn as a Nek when he’s been given a mission. A straightforward task like subduing Balmorra is something he can be trusted to handle.”

Quest thought a moment, and then added, “In fact, I think that’s probably the only thing keeping him alive.”





------
Notes

1. Arkady Krylenko, Attorney General for the Imperial State, was probably the greatest lawyer of all time, and won every single case he ever argued. He was so despised for his pedantry and absolute lack of scruples that the Imperial ruling class deliberately abandoned him during the capture of Coruscant, in the hopes the Rebels would lynch him. His acquittal during the war crimes trial that followed was decisive in persuading hundreds of worlds to trust the New Republic: “You can tell the New Republic’s legal system is fair,” Krylenko told the holoreporters outside the courthouse, “because the prosecutor couldn’t prove his case. No court in the Empire has ever let lack of evidence get in the way of a guilty verdict.”

2. “Fleet admirals have it made. They only have to worry about the success of their subordinates, their Moff, and guys whose name begins with ‘Lord.’” — The late Captain Jaso Seledrood