Believe! Obey! Fight! A Story of the Dark Empire

[Publius]

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.”

[Publius]

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

[VX-145]

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!

[Helical Mode]

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

[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.

[Publius]

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