The Rise of the Empire

by John Jackson Miller

But he would destroy Gorse’s population in the process. And worse, he would ruin Sloane’s career.

  She wouldn’t allow that. And neither would the Emperor. The Emperor had no quarrel with destroying places for short-term gains or with dealing harm to rivals. But the galaxy and all its assets belonged to him—and he alone would decide where and when such actions were taken.

  That made her next command easy. Walking from her ready room onto the bridge, she knew the next moments would startle her crew as much as her would-be patron.

  “Channel to Count Vidian,” she said.

  Chamas, looking at her with a mixture of curiosity and concern, snapped his fingers. Count Vidian’s holographic image appeared.

  “Ah, Sloane,” he said. “You’re back just in time. I’m just about to detonate the charges and pulverize the moon.”

  “Then I am just in time,” she said, taking a deep breath before continuing. “Ultimatum technical crews—rescind the Detonation Control link to Forager.”

  “What?” The shimmering Count Vidian looked at her in surprise—as did the very real form of Commander Chamas, standing nearby.

  Sloane clenched her fist. “And all stormtroopers aboard Forager, in the name of the Emperor: Arrest Count Vidian!”

  IT HAD HAPPENED this way to the Jedi, Kanan remembered. Responding to some command from the Emperor, clone troopers had eliminated the Republic’s cherished fighting force. It had been a dark day—by far, the darkest in Caleb Dume’s young life. Kanan Jarrus usually avoided thinking about it.

  But seeing the stormtroopers turning on their master: That was both amazing and delicious. Even if the Imperials were also pointing their weapons at Kanan and his friends. More troops hoisted open the main door, bringing the total number of white-armored guards to a dozen.

  Up atop the bulk-loader, Kanan saw that Hera didn’t know what to think. But there was no mistaking Vidian’s reaction to the holographic captain.

  “This is a rash act, Sloane. Have you lost your mind?”

  “You’re under arrest for multiple violations of the Imperial legal code. Falsification of testimony to the Emperor. Profiteering without permission of the Emperor. Breach of faith with the Emperor. Attempting to damage or destroy strategic assets deemed vital to—”

  “The Emperor,” Vidian finished, anger rising. “You dare invoke his name?” He pointed at Kanan. “These—anarchists have poisoned your mind against me. They’re Gorse partisans, seeking to hinder our project.” He looked back outside the viewports at the moon. “A project that must go on!”

  “Forget it, Vidian,” Sloane said. “You won’t be destroying anything today.”

  Kanan could hardly restrain his response. His gambit had worked, after all.

  Vidian stared as the pair of stormtroopers approached him, as if deciding what to do. “I don’t think so,” he said. He looked over to a pair of his cybernetic assistants. “Restore the Detonation Control uplink.”

  Sloane snapped at him. “We already disconnected—”

  “You disconnected nothing. The injection towers, the logistical systems—you only installed them. My workers manufactured them—and my workers can take back control for me at any time.”

  “If that’s the way you want it,” Sloane said. “Death warrant extended to all workers on Forager’s bridge. Stormtroopers, fire!”

  The stormtroopers executed their order—and several of Vidian’s aides—immediately, at point-blank range. Vidian yelled something, but Kanan didn’t hear it. Blasterfire blazing all around, he hit the deck. Scrambling behind the smashed remains of the forklift cab, he saw Zaluna. She looked rough, her face a scorched mess.

  We’ve got to get out of here. He looked back to see Hera scrambling down the bulk-loader to the floor, dodging shots as she did. All around, Vidian’s droids and aides fell.

  Blaster in hand, Kanan considered joining in before having second thoughts. For an older man—if any man was still in that body—Vidian had worked into a superhuman rage. Whatever source powered the man’s limbs, it had yet to run out of juice. Shaking off a blaster shot from a stormtrooper, Vidian launched himself at his attacker, crushing the man’s helmet in his hands. A horrific scream later, and Vidian was on to another stormtrooper.

  Kanan spotted a newly opened portal to the side. Hera provided cover fire as Kanan lifted Zaluna’s body. He rushed to the exit and set her down outside the door.

  “Wait here,” he said.

  “That…a joke?” she muttered.

  “Sorry.” Kanan turned back to face the room.

  Hera, even amid chaos, remembered what they most needed to do. “The comm console,” she called out, pointing past the latest melee. She leapt out from behind the forklift, even as Kanan bounded from the other side.

  Vidian was already there.

  The last stormtrooper had already fallen, Kanan realized too late. To a person, Vidian’s workers were all down, too—just more workplace casualties in the count’s machine. Only he, Hera, and Vidian remained here alive. And Vidian had just completed punching in a series of keys. “Detonation Control linkup restored,” Vidian said. “Just over a minute to spare.”

  It was the same smug, self-satisfied voice they’d always heard from Vidian—but the man himself was much changed. His tunic was in tatters; his artificial skin and nose had been scorched off his face, leaving just a charred silver mask. Sparks flew from his mechanical joints. Yet he was unbowed. He turned back to Kanan and Hera. “I don’t know what you told Sloane. But once the Emperor sees my results, it won’t matter.”

  “Your results?” Hera yelled. “Destruction and genocide!”

  Vidian snorted. “You’re going about this wrong, you know. You’ll never get anywhere against the Empire. You’re too undisciplined, too disorganized.”

  “We’ll learn,” Hera said, brandishing her weapon. “The people will stop you. We’ll stop you.”

  “We’ve had this fight before, the three of us. You don’t have anything that can hurt me.”

  “Maybe I do.” Kanan felt for the holder on his left leg where his lightsaber was hidden.

  “Nonsense,” Vidian said, waving his hand dismissively. “If you had anything, you’d have used it already. Right?”

  Hera looked searchingly at Kanan as Vidian turned back to the console. Kanan began to reach for his secret weapon—but then he paused. Something, somewhere told him: No, not that. Not now.

  Not yet.

  “Forget him, Twi’lek,” the cyborg said, reaching for the console. “He doesn’t have what it takes to stop me.”

  “But I do,” said Captain Sloane, hologram flickering back into view. Her expression was icy, her eyes narrow. “Ultimatum gunnery control, target the transmission tower and fire.”

  Now Kanan moved. Moved the way his instincts told him to go. He dived not at Vidian, but at Hera, bowling her over even as one of the viewports behind the count lit up like a hundred suns.

  If there was a sound, Kanan didn’t hear it. There was only light, and motion, and heat as Forager wrenched violently under the impact of the Star Destroyer’s turbolaser barrage. Rolling away from Hera, it took what seemed like an eternity for his eyes to adjust. The lights were out in the command center, and Vidian was staggering around like one caught in a hurricane. Kanan realized why, looking out the windows. It wasn’t just Ultimatum, now, but the TIE fighters pummeling Forager’s energy shield. The vessel was in one piece—for the moment—but every strike on the shield shook everything inside madly.

  Somehow, Vidian reached the console again. Kanan was ready to go after him, even shaken—but this time it was Hera who grabbed him, keeping him down close to the floor. He saw the reason. Forager’s superstructure was holding, but the transmission tower, visible through the room’s viewports, shook itself to pieces under a direct hit on the shield from Ultimatum.

  Sloane had called her shot, Kanan realized. And her gunners had done their jobs.

  His chance to destroy Cynda gone, Vidian howled and turne
d. He ran back through the main entrance, paying Kanan and Hera no mind. Finding his blaster on the floor nearby, Kanan rose to follow Vidian.

  Behind him, Hera called out. “Kanan, no!” He looked back. She was still getting to her knees near the door he had dragged Zaluna through, beneath the catwalk that had been damaged earlier. “We have to get to a—”

  Time stopped for Kanan. And then it started again, slowly.

  He saw everything. He saw the TIE bomber outside, unloosing its torpedo at Forager’s energy shield. He saw the bridge shake violently, in response. He saw the heavy durasteel catwalk, already weakened from Hera’s forklift entrance, snap from its moorings. He saw it fall toward Hera. Hera—not oblivious, but in no position to get out of the way.

  He recognized the obstacles between them—the debris and the bodies, lying across the fastest route. Without thinking, he swept them away with his mind, clearing a path. No barrier blocked him from Hera.

  And he moved. He moved faster than when he’d saved Yelkin, faster than he’d remembered moving in years. All in the hope of grabbing her and diving beneath the doorway.

  Except time moved faster, too—faster than his hopes. He reached her too late, just as he’d been too late to save Master Billaba. The Force had been too late for many that day. But it was with him now, as he slid to the floor by Hera’s side. Hera, knowing the danger she was in, put her hand up as if to shoo him away, to safety. Kanan looked instead upward, waving with his hand—

  —and suspending the giant catwalk in midair, centimeters from his and Hera’s heads.

  She stared at it, dumbfounded—and then at him. Self-conscious, Kanan shoved at the air, pushing the levitated mass off to the side. It landed with a colossal crash.

  Forager shuddered again under the Imperial attack. The view outside was a thing of perversely wondrous beauty, he thought: flashes of light before the moon as the starfighters made their runs. But it all paled before the look he saw here in the darkness, in Hera’s eyes.

  “But—” she started to say. “But you’re—”

  With a wry smile, Kanan put his finger to her mouth. “Shh. Don’t tell anyone.”

  She looked at him for a long moment in wonderment before understanding came to her—and a gentle smile came to her face. She nodded. “Let’s go.”

  THE LIFE POD SOARED from Forager. Kanan hunched over the small circular viewport and looked back at the collector ship. Several other small pods were jettisoning away, he saw—and the Empire was watching every one.

  “TIE fighter on our tail,” he said.

  “We don’t have a tail. We barely have an engine.” Hera guided the small stick directing the vehicle. It was about the only control she had. “I think the TIE’s just following.”

  “I know.” There wasn’t anything to do. Kanan turned from the viewport and returned to dabbing gingerly at Zaluna’s burnt face with a bacta-infused pad from the medpac.

  Ultimatum was still pounding away at Forager; as soon as it finished, Kanan knew it would likely begin sweeping up all the life pods. Sloane would be looking for Vidian, but she’d find Kanan and company instead.

  “You still can’t see?” Kanan asked Zaluna.

  “There’s nothing good to see anyway,” she replied.

  —

  Vidian waded through a river of acid. It was everywhere on the factory portion of Forager: ankle-deep in some places, waist-high in others. It was destroying the flooring, and had already eaten into the bulkheads below; he anticipated explosive decompression at any minute.

  The crossing had started as a panicked mechanical run—and then slowed to a hideous slog as his legs wasted away to skeletal struts. His arms had been further damaged, too, in the trip. There had been no other choice, no other way to his destination.

  He’d remembered something. The intruders had come in a baradium hauler. It was intact, he saw through the few still-functioning surveillance cams: ready to go. He would use it, eschewing the one-trip life pods. The freighter might be lost in the confusion, he hoped; he might be able to make it to one of the drill sites on Cynda, where there was still time to detonate the explosives and meet the Emperor’s quota. He would find a way.

  This was Baron Danthe’s doing, somehow. It had to be. It was impossible to imagine a few would-be rebels and a substitute captain could’ve reduced his reputation and career to shambles. Detonating the moon, he was sure, would restore him—between the moon and the sunward side of Gorse, the Emperor would have thorilide for a thousand fleets.

  And if it didn’t, the freighter still had hyperdrive and a full cargo of baradium-357. That was an important resource, and something to build upon someplace else if necessary. He had come back from nothingness, before. Perhaps it wouldn’t take twenty years this time.

  But he wouldn’t have to do that. He would finish the project.

  Vidian staggered on failing limbs into the landing bay. The place was a mess of fallen beams and bulkheads—but the troublesome freighter was right where it was supposed to be, ramp open. He thought it ironic that it, of all things, would be his deliverance.

  Reaching the ramp, Vidian looked out through the landing bay’s magnetic field. Forager, tumbling out of control, now, was turning to face Cynda. Convenient for a quick trip, Vidian thought. Efficient.

  Vidian staggered up the freighter’s ramp—and then could go no farther. He looked down. There, on the landing deck slumped against the side of the ramp, was Skelly. The man was a battered, bloodied mess—and yet he had summoned the energy to reach for Vidian’s leg strut as he’d walked up the ramp. Skelly clutched Vidian’s onetime ankle now in his right hand.

  The count tried to shake him off, but couldn’t. “Release me!”

  “That one…doesn’t let go,” Skelly said. He coughed. “Don’t…mind me. I’ve just been…out here looking…at the moon.”

  “Don’t get used to it,” Vidian said, straining to keep climbing. But his acid-damaged legs couldn’t give him any leverage.

  “Sorry, Vidian. Blowing things up…is my job. Guild rules, y’know.” Skelly shifted around—and now Vidian saw the device in his other hand, connected to a long microfilament line. Vidian’s eyes followed the line up and into the doorway of the ship. “I told Kanan…we wouldn’t need my bag of tricks,” Skelly said. “But I didn’t say…I wouldn’t come back for it.”

  Realization came quickly. “No! No, don’t!”

  “I don’t take orders from you.” Then Skelly looked out the landing bay entrance at Cynda. He winked. “I saved you, sweetheart!”

  He pushed the button.

  —

  The flash blinded Kanan at first. The explosion began at the rear of Forager, quickly consuming the landing decks and ripping forward. His eyes adjusting, Kanan recognized the familiar characteristic color of a baradium explosion. But this was bigger and more energetic than he’d ever seen.

  “Hera, go!”

  There was little she could do, except put the life pod’s reentry heat shield between them and the blast. The TIE fighter pursuing them was slower to react. Superheated particles from the explosion ripped through the vessel’s hexagonal wings, causing the starfighter to tear violently apart. A shock wave comprising not air but plasma and matter expanding outward from the blast zone slammed into their life pod.

  Shaken by the impact, Hera fought with the controls, angling the life pod to catch the wave. All around, Kanan saw more effects of the blast. Less fortunate life pods were disintegrating, as were their TIE pursuers. And the electrostatic towers that had been Forager’s spokes were flung off in all directions—including toward Ultimatum. A long, ragged beam slammed off the surface of the Star Destroyer’s hull, opening a fiery gash.

  It was enough distraction for Hera, who took the chance to make for Gorse’s atmosphere. She powered down the interior cabin lights, and the life pod went dark as it soared, just another piece of debris.

  In the darkness, Hera reoriented the vessel so the passengers could look back at Forager�
��s remains. There wasn’t much to see. Kanan had no doubt that Expedient with its shipload of baradium-357 was the reason. “Very naughty baby,” Kanan said.

  Zaluna shuddered. She hadn’t seen the explosion, but she’d felt it. “I—I was hoping Skelly might have survived earlier. That he might have made it.”

  Hera held her. “It’s okay. We got out. Maybe he did, too.”

  “No,” Kanan said, thinking aloud. “He didn’t.”

  Somberly, Hera looked out at the firestorm in space. “The landing bay must have taken a hit from the Star Destroyer.”

  Kanan shook his head. “No. Skelly did that.”

  “If you didn’t see it,” Zaluna asked, “how do you know?”

  Hera studied Kanan for a moment. He had gone silent. “He just knows,” she finally said. “He just knows.”

  She turned back to the controls. The life pod sank into the clouds of Gorse’s endless night.

  FINAL PHASE:

  DAMAGE ASSESSMENT

  “Emperor’s robotic mining plan for dayside brings new era to Gorse”

  “Baron Danthe granted oversight of industrial region”

  “Vidian’s HoloNet site goes dark as disease relapse claims him”

  —headlines, Imperial HoloNews (Gorse Edition)

  APART FROM HER promotion ceremonies, Sloane seldom had use for her dress uniform. But this night was different, and it was always night on Gorse.

  The regional governor was here in the mayor’s regal residence—easily the nicest place on the planet. She recognized several other Imperial captains and an admiral; he had brought with him a Moff, one of the highest authorities in the government. They were all here to drink and gab and celebrate the most important event in the history of industrial production of thorilide: the opening of the sunward side of Gorse to Baron Danthe’s heat-resistant mining drones.

  It was a huge moment for the world, liable to transform its economy in amazing ways. Gorse’s refineries would be necessary; not even the Emperor would destroy the moon and devastate the planet for a onetime benefit when the long-term reward was much richer. And it was all being directly attributed to a discovery by Sloane and Ultimatum’s science team. It wasn’t, of course; she had simply passed along Vidian’s secret report to that effect. But she was being given the credit, and would take it—alongside her crew.