De Imperatoribus Galacticis: Chapter the Sixteenth.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

De Imperatoribus Galacticis

"On the Galactic Emperors"

Chapter the Sixteenth.

(As continued from Chapter the Fifteenth.)


Hapan Star Cluster
RHS Dragon's Field


Admiral d'Sevila bowed low in front of the holographic image that had formed, looming on the bridge, of her monarch's bust. “Your Majesty.”

Tenel Ka was not a well woman. Her condition had been improving but seemed, now, somewhat worse. Perhaps the news had not been good. Certainly the fractuous nobility of Hapes remained torn over continued intervention due to the massive losses previously suffered. But the successful defeat of the Vong forces pressing in on the Cluster had largely brought that to an end.

Something else, then, was troubling the Lady d'Sevila's Sovereign, and that was a matter only for speculation. But it was not her job to indulge in speculation. The military, at least, was professional enough.

“The situation has resolved itself. I have already given Admiral Ackbar permission to commence the attack. I am now formally ordering you to obey him as if he was in our own chain of command. All strategic and tactical operational orders will be from the Admiral to our fleet forces committed for this operation,” which were about all of them, short the sixty or so ships of the Royal Guard forces.

“I understand, You Majesty, and obey. All preparations have been made for coordination with the Republican forces and it now awaits but for Admiral Ackbar to issue the necessary orders.”

“All instructions shall be received through him, then,” Ka answered, somewhat distantly, and clearly indicating that they had already been given. “My thoughts are with the fleet, its safety and success.”

Admiral d'Sevila bowed again. “Your words will be conveyed throughout the Hapan forces gathered here, Your Majesty.”

“Very good. Carry on, Admiral.” The holograph disappeared, leaving Leyane to stuff her musings over the cause of the delay, and now the orders, to herself.

“Fleet signals coming in from the Republican flag,” her fleet comms officer reported a moment later, and, relieved at the distraction, she prepared to receive her orders, at last, for the offensive.


Imperial Centre,
The Despot.


A debate was raging in the conference room off the Despot's flagbridge. It was between Sule's civilian advisors and his military officers and it was because of a message they had just received from the Milky Way. An absolutely devastating one, to be precise. They had lost power in their home base to Hamner Davion. Somehow the man had gotten out of confinement and attracted the following of one of Elise's main fleet commanders—the later, of course, left her infuriated and she had to restrain herself from joining in the argument on Martina's side. She was unsurprisingly arguing to her husband quite passionately about the need to turn back and intervene at once.

Pellaeon, on the other hand, was appealing to Hamner Davion's sense of duty and the need to pursue the Vong fleet. The Vong had, indeed, retired—at the long end of a severed supply line (somehow) they could not remain for long and realized the precariousness of their situation. They had pulled back and left the Imperial Starfleet in command of the space over Coruscant, or, as the documents on the Imperial ships still called it, Imperial Centre.

Elise was really the only one other than Sule himself who remained silent. In her case, utterly silent, mulling the options as the command council was torn between the very real revolt behind them and the equally real and still quite viable threat ahead of them. Either situation seemed equally bad, and there was a certain demand to maintain Imperial legitimacy that seemed to insist they turn back and deal with Hamner Davion.

He had, after all, done more than just place himself in revolt. One could not place one's self in revolt against the Emperor, after all, and expect to live. Several powerful Admirals had tried that before Endor, and failed with predictable results. No, something more substantial was required against someone who had apparently claimed the Imperial title with repercussion. Hamner declared himself Emperor as well, resting it on his title of Grand Moff that had been legitimized by the Emperor's writ of conquest for the Milky Way, and thus placing himself as the legitimately ranking civilian leader of the Galactic Empire.

The problem to that was that he was exactly correct. In terms of civilian leadership and indeed the ability to command troops, the Grand Moff was the highest ranking individual, and in this case his title could at least be related in a shadowy fashion to Imperial authority due to the fact that, yes, the Emperor had approved the conquest, and yes, it included multiple sectors. It was not perfectly firm ground, though, and besides that, Sule held Imperial Centre and the support of most of the home galaxy.

With an extended conflict facing the Empire, however, those manufacturing resources back in the Milky Way, the manpower resources, the remaining fleets—all of it would be needed. It was now not available, but in fact represented the resources of a completely new enemy. That created an intolerable situation, and one that the prevailing wisdom, despite Pellaeon's best efforts, was seeming to lean in favour of dealing with first. The Vong, it was thought, would not be coming back any time soon. They were already on a shoe-string.

Then a junior officer gained access, with a message for Elise. It was handed to her, and she activated the padd, reading it slowly. The whole thing was completely ignored by the rest of the room as the arguments went on. Elise finished reading it in due time, and then read it again. Sule, at last, noticed her distraction.

“Elise, what is that report?”

“Your Majesty,” she said, feeling oddly calm despite what it portended. “Mystrela has placed her fleet at Talfaglio and is going to engage the main Vong force. She has indicated to me that she intends to 'hold until relieved'.”

Pounding silence overtook the room, slowly, but progressively and certainly, and it hurt more than the prior steadily rising noise. Sule continued looking right ahead at Elise, silent for a moment, and then he spoke again:

“What is your evaluation of this situation? Do you agree with Martina that we must turn back and defeat Hamner swiftly to guarantee Imperial legitimacy? Or must we pursue the Vong? I fear, Elise, that I cannot let Mystrela's action force my hand in this regard.”

Elise tensed for a moment, but then gripping her gloved hands together, and eyes hardening, spoke in the softest tone, nearly lost and yet discerned by the Emperor. “Sulla, also, dealt with the enemies of the State first rather than internal rebellion, and he died in his sleep after resigning the supreme post at the time of his choosing.”

Martina reacted as if stung; not in anger but in recognition of what she had ignored in the passion of the moment, and perhaps the desire to prove her own loyalty to her husband against her father. Sule did not precisely know what the two did about the event referenced, only some hazy story Elise had gotten halfway through after a dinner party a half-decade ago, at best: But it didn't matter. Their reactions told him all he needed to know.

“The fleet will prepare for immediate departure against Talfaglio, best possible speed. Grand Admiral Pellaeon, you have overall command. Grand Admiral Kalar-Leben, you have the First Battle Squadron and the second position.”

Kuati Forces,
Talfaglio System.


With a flicker of pseudomotion the Kuati-Corellian combined fleet was torn out of hyperspace by the gravity of Talfaglio. The big Kuati cruisers in the lead opened fire immediately as they appeared, firing along pre-planned trajectories. Green turbolaser fire swept down on the planet in vast sheets from naval artillery firing at teraton strength. By the time the Vong fleet coming in to the planet to resupply had even realized that they were under attack, Talfaglio had already been destroyed.

The waves of turbolaser fire slammed down through the atmosphere, burning it off in a superheated eruption of steam within three point four seconds. By that time the bolts had already struck the surface. The surface instantly ceased to exist. The slave farms, the production centres, defensive installations, equipment stockpiles—all of it vanished in a storm of energy before anyone on that side of the planet even realized what had happened. Fourty-five percent of the surface of Talfaglio down a depth of eighty-five kilometers was vapourized instantly by the flak bursts that erupted there. Below that a layer of liquified rock, instantly turned into molten lava, extended down for another twenty-seven kilometers.

A superheated wall of matter, essentially a vast plasma wave, swept around the planet destroying even the most hardened of the Vong centres that had been established there. Everyone on the surface was already dead from the shockwave and intense thermal energies that had raced through the atmosphere even as it was being blown off the planet, and indeed aided in that process. Within three-point-two seconds eight billion sentients were dead. The few thousands of survivors in deep shelters were dead in four. A vast eruption of superheated matter spewed up from the planet, glancing in a perverse light show over the shields of the trailing ships of the fleet with minimal effect.

By this time the ships of the combined fleet were already firing for effect into the vast array of Vong ships that stood before them, now trapped against the dead planet. With their dovin basals disengaged and taking on supplies, many of the ships close to the planet had in fact been damaged by the plasma eruptions from the surface as it was destroyed. Certainly, at least, the Yuuzhan Vong would never again use Talfaglio as a supply base. Ships, also, began to explode. The Kuati-Corellian combined fleet was outnumbered ten to one, but they had caught the Vong completely by surprise. Only Miat Temm of late had proven capable of such coordination, and as the Republic had not learned from C'baoth in time, nor had the Vong learned from Second Coruscant.

Mystrela had to stop herself from holding her breath as she sat in a state of utter tension watching the holoprojector. It was like, indeed, breathing might break wide open the fantasy that spread out before them. Complete tactical surprise against a damaged and victualating fleet. Fire was concentrated by the squadron or flotilla and ships were destroyed, then more ships were destroyed, on and on in a progressive orgy of killing as massed fires chewed a vast, methodical swathe through the Vong fleet. Hundreds of Vong ships had already vanished into eruptions of full-spectrum radiation. In a dreamy dark silence, the grand assault fleet which had fought at First, Second, and Third Coruscant, the two thousand capital ships and twenty thousand escorts of the main concentrated Vong force—they were being destroyed.

The fighters swept down into the midst of the Vong and hit them hard whilst the Vong could not launch a single fighter in response. All of their ready fighters had been those in the recently-established defensive installations on the surface, and they had all been destroyed before an alert had even sounded. The fighters were a spearhead straight into the heart of the Vong fleet carrying on ahead and killing, striking as hard as they could as they swept through the arrayed mass of ships. Those which had been wounded at Third Coruscant died and those that had survived it were damaged. Then the fleet came, right into the heart of its foe, ships drawing inexorably closer.

Mystrela Estorav di Kuat had given the order, and now she sat in silence and watched its execution. It had been very simple, after all. “Close with the enemy and engage by squadrons.” This time there was to be no manoeuvring, and there were certainly no orders for breaking off. Attacking an unprepared fleet ten times their size, they simply deaccelerated into orbit with the enemy, and closed to point-blank range. Squadrons focused on single ships, pounded them to rubble, and moved on to the next. The flagships simply served to coordinate fire to prevent excessive concentration on a single target.

Of course it could not last. There was a strange sense of relief in what came next, as the Vong began to return fire, as the dovin basals started to form up their protective black holes. It meant that the damage done, also, was not some desperate fantasy. Those hundreds of ships turned to microscopic rubble and bursts of radiation were never coming back. They had been destroyed, at that, without the loss of a single Kuati or Corellian life. Indeed, the only innocents were those upon Talfaglio; and those slaves, the bio-control mechanisms of the Vong grown into their body, were beyond salvation anyway.

Second Talfaglio—for the New Republic had also tried to hold here, and failed as at Coruscant—had already become a bloodbath in terms of both lives and materiale and it had lasted so far rather less than five minutes. Now as the ships coasted to within dozens of kilometers of each other the heavy artillery began to have a terrible effect on both sides. It seemed impossible that any ship could survive in that malestrom, but somehow they held, shields layered and durasteel hulls riding through it confidently.

It did not last. The two fleets were now locked together in a mortal dance, the funeral games of Talfaglio. The damage began to tell, even as more grevious wounds were inflicted on the enemy fleet. Gradually the preponderance of fire came down against them. Gradually the energies built towards overload levels on countless layers of shields around the fleet. Finally one unlucky ship faced a mass of fire that overwhelmed its shields, and as they collapsed a hundred plasma bursts converged, detonating it in what was but the first flare that spelled doom to the Kuati-Corellian combined fleet.

She could not remain sitting, no matter how long the battle lasted. Mystrela got up and paced over to the holoprojector. The glorious and deadly spectacle was played out for her there, even as the flares of energy hitting the shields of the Hawk gave off their luminescent warning. Everything had been done in advance. The jump had been planned out before they had even arrived in the system; certainly the attack coordinates had been laid in hours before the microjump. The fleet had arrived and it had been perfectly placed, as expected. It was, indeed, a preternatural level of success.

The fleet had been positioned to prevent the escape of a foe ten times its strength. The ships closing were engaging only elements of the Vong force, which was stacked in against the planet to receive replenishment from the biological factory that Talfaglio had become. But now Talfaglio had been destroyed—annihilated by a fleet under the command of an Imperial officer, made up mostly of Imperial designs, and acting under the code phrase 'Base Delta Zero' as the relevant ships prepared for, and then engaged in, the lethal bombardment--and the effect of a fleet positioning desired for hasty replenishment meant to prevent the proper deployment of the Vong ships. They were moving in against the combined fleet haphazardly, and at very close range.

All of this preparation, therefore, could but conceal the terrible fact of the deployment. With the combined fleet so spread out, and enemies so numerous, an orderly retreat was impossible. They would either hold until they were relieved, or they would not leave Talfaglio. Mystrela had gone into the battle with doom upon her. The combined fleet was ultimately her responsibility—she was an Imperial officer, and Thracken Sal-Solo knew little of the manoeuvring of vast fleets. She had gotten the necessary plots from Miat Temm to insure that the fleet arrived in the proper position. The fleet gunnery officers had worked out the firing plot against the planet—to insure that the Vong fleet was not resupplied even if everything went disastrously wrong—to be launched blindly, upon fixed coordinates the instant the ships were pulled out of hyperspace by the grav well of Talfaglio. And carefully, ever so carefully, the deployment of the squadrons had been planned to achieve this, to block a fleet with nearly ten times their numbers. But that was all they could do.

It was something valiant, the act that Mystrela had put her fleet up to. The Corellians, excellent men, excellent officers, willingly fighting alongside the Kuatis, both engaged over worlds not their own for causes greater than their own. They had not questioned, despite what they all must know. They had faith in that cause that had overcome their private lives and aspirations and they acted upon that faith. It was a splendid thing, terrible to behold in its magnitude. They had drawn a line, drawn it in their ragged force of ships, and coloured it with the brilliance of their energy fire. The striking fist of the Yuuzhan Vong could only escape from the pyre of Talfaglio by destroying them all, and that was precisely what it was doing—but each and every life would come with an incomparable cost to their black foes.

The Kuati fleet was staffed by professionals. They were not even, in many cases, Kuatis. Those who were had no reason of their own, in this case, to risk their lives. No personal thing motivated them. Kuat was not in danger, nor were the other homeworlds of many of these men, except in a vague and vast strategic sense that is rarely recognized nor felt deeply by the individual. The grand advances of the Vong had come to an end, replaced by intricate and bloody stalemates in which the fate of the civilised universe hung on the brink of oblivion at every manoeuvring order given to a fleet. Now that period had also ended. In the sweep of the turbolaser fire that had destroyed Talfaglio, a war of annihilation had begun, and Mystrela had shown herself willing to write the declaration in her own blood.

There was no personal reason for her to do this. She had grown up the pampered daughter of the most powerful family of one of the most powerful nations of the galaxy. Her serve was exemplary and from the moment of the Milky Way expedition her promotion, through the years and by the battles, was guaranteed to a high office. Her best friend and personal mentor was at that moment one of the two Grand Admirals of a revitalized Galactic Empire. In all liklihood, Mystrela had the genius and the skill to replace her there in due time, or even surpass her, as demonstrated by her recent accession to the Directorate. Her ambition and the liklihood of its success demanded prudence.

Her private life, beyond that of her public service and family connections, was something unfulfilled but at the same time filled with possibility. She was still young in appearance, promoted rapidly by the exigencies of circumstance in the Milky Way and preserved, as might be expected, by the briar patch treatments. Despite disdaining the impersonal tradition of the nobility of her nation to take what was in effect a trained concubine, as her own mother had been, there was no reason for her not to choose from among the wealthiest and best men of the Two Galaxies at the whimsy of her heart. Sule's position and patronage guaranteed that she could violate any custom of the Kuati people that she desired and remain in power. She had every reason to live, but she chose death.

This choice could not be ascribed to any sort of personal aim or suicidal impulse, then. It was instead motivated by the highest ideals of the human spirit. Mystrela had led her fleet forward and positioned it to hold because she faced the darkest and most inhuman of sentient races, those who had completely abandoned any pretence of morality, of that primal and natural force which had guided all sentient races for all time. The Vong, despite their physical similiarity to humanity had surpassed in inhumanity even the most inhuman of races; the Horta, or the Hutts, both had emotions and instincts in a range that could be instinctively grasped by all. The Vong had none of these; they had been rejected and perverted and it was proven for all to see in the swathe of madness, horror, terror and death which they had strewn across the galaxy.

Faced with such a monstrous thing as the Vong, confronted with their behaviour and their intents, some spirits are twisted by then and fall into the depths of depravity themselves, into delusion and self-loathing, terrorized by the prospect of what they see, of the lowest lows of sentient beings which have been attained by those who stand before them, ready to destroy all that they might comprehend. Others, however, rise to heights which are themselves not human. They transcend the desires and needs of mortal flesh so that those who are unworthy and incapable of such sacrifice may live. There is nothing scientific about this process, this winnowing. It is not replicated, in either direction, in the behaviour of animals. It cannot be rationally understood. This quality of sentient nature is what truly distinguishes ourselves from animals.

Neither can it be explained by any particular instinctual motivation. There was no personal reason, save revenge among a few, for the crewers of the fleet to obey their orders, for the officers of the ships not to order a retreat. The majority had no explainable reason which might cause them to stand and fight at this place, over dead Talfaglio. There was no distinguishing characteristic which could be identified as a qualifying reason, as something which made them stay where others would have fled. They came from all nations and species. They came as mercenaries and as civic volunteers. From every walk of life and from every level of economic status; no group would be unable to claim their representative at Second Talfaglio. There it was that they fought, and there it was that they died.

Such courage, such purposeful sacrifice, lay dormant within them all. It was brought forth by a few, a necessary few. The ranking officers of the fleet were of a quality of character which was required for the sacrifice. That had demanded it of those they commanded, they had placed the deaths of tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of those who relied upon them upon their consciences. They had done it ready to lead the way and die, themselves. They had placed those demands before the myriad personnel of the fleet, and within them, within that nameless mass, to great, so lost amongst mass death, to eulogize properly—the character, the strength of Will had been found to rise up and meet them. They rose above the human condition and gained a sort of collective immortality through the memory of their sacrifice, a sacrifice made to the ideals of common civilisation, bodies flung forward to hold the line in the name of a moral code that runs through us all, intangible but iron-clad.

There were war criminals and murderers among them, racists, tyrants, and savage butchers. Sinners great and petty mingled with the innocent. In that moment it did not matter; the past was gone for them and they lived in an eternal present, a place where even the worst of crimes did not exist. Those trivialities would be washed away, expunged in that moment of perfect self-sacrifice, the spilling of their own life's blood washing away in one immortal instant the accumulated evils of mortal lives. Saints and sinners, it did not matter: They would stand as equals among those who had gone before and those who would come after, the ones who had found it inside of themselves to stand up and be counted on their day of judgement.

The battle had now lasted for more than six hours. The surviving ships of the Kuati-Corellian combined fleet were struggling to contain their Vong opponents. Two-thirds of the combined fleet had already been destroyed, and all of the surviving ships except for the interdictors stationed well back to delay the escape of the Vong, had suffered damage. Almost all of the fighters were gone, but the enemy themselves had few left to harass the remaining ships of the combined fleet. The world below churned in its tumultuous death throes, as above the sky was lit by the vast fires that arced in the vacuum, lances of energetic death. They killed and maimed indiscriminately and in mass; bodies vanished in moments or were left frozen in the fastness through explosive decompression. Great chunks were torn from the hulls of the heavy ships, but they doggedly fought on.

Inside a strange sort of act prevailed. On every ship the efforts to save the wounded, to make repairs, to lay on their shots in the same old way, all of these things were made. There were no deviations because they were doomed, there was no abandoning the effort for life. They fought on as hard as they could and they struggled for life as hard as they could, even where it was fruitless. They did not die waiting for their deaths, but frozen in the height of the utmost human activity, struggling for their lives even as they laid them down. There would be heroes on this day, but they would receive no enervating adulation, no supine flattery. The exact details of their last moments, of their deeds and their valour as their doom approached—none of these things would ever be known. Instead, the glory of their sacrifice would be recorded in the shattered hulks of the enemy, that they would drift for eternity in the vacuum, over a pyre of a world, a pyre that would stand in monument to them for all time and who's magnitude was only suited for the scale of deed and the greatness of humanity that it represented, more terribly splendid than any grandiloquent remembrance.

“We've got it as confirmed as it will ever be, Admiral,” Captain di Syminar reported quietly on a darkened flagbridge, a position now in grave jeopardy and from which the great rents in the hull armour could be clearly discerned forward. As he spoke he brought up and highlighted a sector on the miraculously still-active holoprojector, and in turn highlighted one ship in that area, damaged in the heat of the action but not as greatly as the ships that covered around it protectively. “The enemy flagship.”

“Not at the heart of the action, I see,” Mystrela murmured. “But not unaccessable, either. Inform the bridge to close and engage—and have comms signal President Sal-Solo. We should share the honour of dealing with the enemy flag.”

“Of course, Admiral,” di Syminar replied—the title 'Director' had been dropped now, and things would end with that more honourable appellation--and began to turn away. But then Mystrela raised up her hand, scuffing a boot lightly on the floor such that he turned back to her quizzically.

“It has been a pleasure to have you on my staff, Captain.”

“Thank you, Admiral. I have been honoured to serve under your command.” He brought his hand up and saluted, heels clicking as Mystrela returned the salute, and then he turned away and went to deliver the last orders.

The Hawk of Trinadora accelerated into the centre of the enemy fleet, her exhaust trails gleaming like the fine plumage of a bird of prey diving in for one more kill, and thus she did.


CSS Unurandi,
Talfaglio System.


“I want full thrust in thirty seconds!” Thracken Sal-Solo shouted as the last of the shields on his flagship failed, the hull already blasted and pitted all along the port side. “Stand by to reorient one-eighty degrees with starboard thrusts and begin an immediate full power burn!”

The orders—countermanding Captain Indovir just below him—brought the bridge up short. The message with the coordinates of the enemy flag and the invitation from Admiral di Kuat to proceed with the attack against it had been received just seconds earlier. Captain Indovir had already ordered that the course be plotted and prepared for implementation, and had just then been approaching Sal-Solo to announce it to him and request permission to proceed forward.

There was little Corellian fleet left. The Unurandi had lost her flagbridge—which Admiral Candrak had wisely ordered Sal-Solo off hours before to prevent him from interfering in the fighting of the fleet—and the massive damage she had suffered was yet lighter than that of many of the Corellian ships, which were generally older or simply not built for heavy combat when compared to their counterparts in the Kuati fleet. Candrak was dead, but it didn't matter. This had been a squadron fight for a long time now and that wasn't changing. Squadrons, or flotillas, or divisions, or single ships. They fought on until overwhelmed and destroyed, until their engines were blown out, their guns all knocked out, shields gone, pounded into rubble or blown apart with the detonation of their reactors. It was the same through the whole fleet, and the survivors were succombing all the faster now.

Despite all that, they were still inflicting better than they got. Hundreds of ships of the combined fleet had been destroyed—the figure was thousands for the Vong. The price that was paid for that utter reversal in the ratio from earlier engagements was in their utter commitment to fight to the death at point-blank range. Now that perfect commitment—broken, surely, in the lower ranks at times, but never enmasse nor by the critical officers of the fleet—was put to the test.

Sal-Solo had been tried and found wanting. Captain Indovir stepped up to him, glancing to the red pinstripe that ran on his uniform trousers, and reminding himself mentally what that really meant. “Your Excellency, we cannot abandon the Hawk of Trinadora when they are proceeding to attack the enemy flag. They shall need our support to succeed in breaking through.”

“That is a suicide mission they are on, Captain! Don't you understand—this whole fleet is on one! None of us shall survive if we do not break off immediately.” Cowards have one deadly and truly twisted virtue: They speak the truth that everyone understands but which by mutual consent, no others shall voice. All around the bridge there was a further, half-imperceptible tensing.

“I understand perfectly,” Captain Indovir replied. “And I know, also, that I cannot abandon Admiral di Kuat for that reason. I will not let her fail, Your Excellency.” His hands fell to his sides, then, almost nonchalantly.

Sal-Solo nearly looked as if he were to rage at his flag captain. But instead he took on a reasonable voice. “Captain, unless we retire, there is little chance that anyone shall ever know the story of this battle. Our hyperdrive is intact. For the dead here to justly be recognized as the heroes that they are, we must retire and bring word of this engagement out for the universe to hear and praise.”

“Dead heroes don't need that kind of fame, Your Excellency. They have another sort of it that they might claim.” As he spoke, Captain Indovir, commanding officer of the Corellian Security Starship Unurandi, drew his service blaster pistol and fired twice into the chest of Thracken Sal-Solo. Then he turned back to the stone silent bridge below, and gave his final orders:

“Full thrust, right ahead. I want to overtake the Hawk and blast a path through for them!”


Talfaglio System


In another hour and a half it was over. The battered Vong fleet had been utterly victorious. Every single enemy ship had been cleared from the Talfaglio system. The interdictors had been destroyed and the path for the fleet to escape was now open. But it was a savaged fleet, further depleted from the height of its strength, with many more ships beyond those destroyed, suffering from a variety of damage. Its fighter strength was almost totally gone. But most of all, it was not leaving quickly, for the efforts to organize the fleet were completely themselves disorganized.

Tsavong Lah was dead, and in his place a collection of equally-ranked commanders were bickering over who had the proper authority and seniority and the efforts to get the fleet in order for the escape were failing accordingly. Headless, the mass of more than ten thousand ships flailed about over the corpse of Talfaglio, until it had no more time in which to flail.

In the outer system there was a wave of simultaneous instances of pseudomotion. Five hundred frigates led the vanguard of the Imperial Grand Fleet, and five seconds out the great and solid wall of ten Executor-class battlecruisers followed them in, serried ranks gleaming in the reflected light of a distant star; behind them came countless formations of cruisers, carriers, destroyers, frigates, and corvettes. Line after line, stacked rank on stacked rank. The host of a galaxy arrayed itself between the battered Vong fleet and safety as the interdictors powered their grav wells and the route was sealed off.


First Battle Squadron Flag,
Executor-class Battlecruiser Conquerant,
Talfaglio System


With ten Executors formed under command, Elise had by far the most powerful segment of the Grand Fleet, reconstituted for the pursuit, besides her position as second in command should anything befall Grand Admiral Pellaeon. That mailed fist of the Imperial Starfleet stood highlighted in glorious repose by the minnows of starships that surrounded its ordered and elegant mass.

Elise sat on the flagbridge of the Conquerant in a rigid silence that would have done her student proud. The reports from the system were very clear. The annihilated planet, the rubble of the Vong fleet, and the equal destruction, no, the total annihilation, of the Vong's enemy—the Kuati-Corellian combined fleet that had opposed it, under Mystrela's command. A weight forced her silent stiffness that was deeper than one could bear.

It had been Mystrela whom she had taught everything she had known; the illegitimate daughter of a whore guiding the patrician di Kuat as she herself had learned and matured, in that equalizing and open land beyond the stars. The Milky Way had given them both their opportunity, Conquistadoras grown powerful off the spoils of a thousand nations. They had both taken their opportunities, and had attained their respective seats of power as two galaxies were torn apart by civil war and invasion.

Mystrela had grown up. The reserved weapons officer she had known more than two decades ago had found her own calling, had burst forth from the shadow of her mentor. It was in a way that Elise found deadened her heart, as if it could be further destroyed. Her family was gone to the mad fury of the Vong, and now she had lost the woman who might have been for most purposes her daughter, despite their rather slight difference in age: Elise had raised her in the ways that counted, and in turn Mystrela had put her back together—saner, and wiser--after the disastrous battle of the Dark Belt when Harlann and most of the old guard from the FSC-956 had been killed in action.

Mystrela had chosen a sacrifice which in its astounding commitment, audacious fortitude, and, ultimately, noble doom, had placed fourteen thousand battered ships, without fighter cover and low on fuel and plasma charges, directly into the face a replenished Grand Fleet. It was something that Elise could never outshine and she was glad of it, so very glad, for that one comfort in the knowledge that Mystrela's name would far outlive her own.

A holo-com from the Fleet Flag, the Hand of Thrawn under Admiral Pellaeon, came through and Elise involuntarily tightened her gloved fists even more. One finger worked itself free, at least, in an ingrained commitment to duty, and keyed the holo-com on. The face of Pellaeon that appeared had in it a look of understanding, however, as complete as her own: An understanding forged in years of hard and bloody battles and countless defeats. He began to speak, but Elise held up one of those gloved hands, just in time.

“Words are hideous to their memory,” she said softly, turning and looking out to the view-screens of the bridge.

A moment of silence, then: “The fleet is being deployed to keep them trapped against Talfaglio. I want your squadron to go in and flush them before they can organise themselves in some fashion approaching coherent.”

A faint trace of a smile could be seen for a moment upon the side profile of Elise's face before it vanished again as swiftly as it had appeared, seeming as if it were, indeed, an apparition of the mind. “With pleasure, Sir.” Mystrela's sacrifice had transcended the personal—Elise's revenge would be the epitome of it, carried out in the cool and methodical fashion that circumstance demanded.

As the image of Pellaeon flashed away, Elisa rose and stared out once more to the flagbridge's view-screens. The words were hideous, ripped off, and butchered by her weak tone, and she hated doing it, speaking such imperfection, even as she felt compelled to do it. But they could not, at least, be called cliched—not even in the height of the enervation of Terra's society could someone manage to call them that. They were said under her breath; not, certainly, in the way of someone being flippant or annoyed. Not a mutter. Rather, words barely echoed because the one who said them could not muster the energy to speak louder. For in that simple declaration was loaded millennia of meaning, a pithy utterance that somehow still captured a sacrifice of that awesome and horrible magnitude:

“Thermopylae had her messenger of defeat, but Talfaglio had none.”


The Executors advanced towards the Vong fleet. They broke through the sporadic jamming and commenced firing at maximum range with massed salvoes of missiles. As this concentrated fire blasted a path through the lighter ships milling about the edges of the still-reorganizing fleet, the force gunnery officers carefully selected and planned coordinated fire against their initial targets with their professional detachment and precision.

A green wave swept out from the ten massive battlecruisers, and then another, and then another. Every two seconds a salvo of thousands of the heaviest turbolasers in existence thrummed clear of those ten ships and swept at unfathomable velocity into the concentrated body of the surviving Vong capital ships. All ten vessels concentrated their entire batteries on a single vessel at one time. Not even the dovin basals of the Vong heavy ships could mitigate that in any meaningful way, and one after the other the surviving command ships were battered into pieces by torrents of teraton-level energy, annihilating what control and efforts at coordination remained in the enemy force.

With the coordinated jamming emanating from the Imperial Starfleet, the Vong did not succeed in targeting and engaging the First Battle Squadron until they were very close in. By that time most of the heavy batteries in the Vong fleet capable of threatening the battlecruisers in any measurable way had been destroyed or knocked out of action, and the light ships were to uncoordinated for a swarm attack. But stubbornly the Vong did not yet flee. They stood their ground and fought, and those great batteries ripped through light ships with sufficient intensity to vapourize some and tear asunder others.

Steadily, all around, the whole fleet was closing up in a noose to counter the refusal of the Vong to flee. The battlecruisers then pulled back—still firing constantly the whole while, straining the limits of their guns and accepting the percentage that overheated, sometimes with deadly consequences, to keep up the maximum rate of fire. The firing continued, and continued, a hailstorm of death that never once ceased and indeed seemed, however falsely, to simply grow more intense.

The Vong fleet was now in a killing ground. Surrounded, it had no hope of escape, and when finally isolated ships attempted to do so they were shredded under massed fire. A few that somehow got clear were picked off by the missileers hanging back from the main fleet. Compressed into a smaller and smaller area the surviving ships were sometimes indistinguishable from rubble. After thousands had been destroyed someone managed, incredibly, to start to organise the survivors yet again, but it was far to late for that; the effort failed in short order.

At last all of the remaining ships were badly damaged. Some still tried to break out and died like the others. Some more stood their ground as best they could and traded blows up until the bitter end. A few Imperial warships were lost, then; more were lost when a couple of the remaining vessels with engines fully intact accelerated on suicide courses, but not, altogether, that many by far. The majority of even those ships were simply annihilated by the sheer mass of firepower.

Then the end came. A whole fleet of more than twenty thousand ships had in five battles been worn down and then annihilated. It was a scale of combat perhaps only matched since the Clone Wars by the the Imperial Civil War, and perhaps not then, either. Triumphantly the Imperial Starfleet paid homage to the fallen of Talfaglio in the carcasses of their killers, and thus the tide was turned. Sule had fought to preserve his nation rather than his power, and he would be rewarded for it.

[Sarevok]

Slightly off topic here. I think you should finish posting the special editio of Fist of the Empire. It' s an awesome fic.

[darthdavid]

Great as always.

[LordShaithis]

Fucking kick-ass. Nobody writes combat like Marina.

[Andrew J.]

It's good, but you might want to consider changing the phrasing of that first sentence.

[darthdavid]

but you might want to consider changing the phrasing of that first sentence

Perv .

[phongn]

An excellent chapter as always, Marina. Mystrela's death was most unexpected, nevermind your "one minute BDZ" operation done. You somehow always manage to keep us on our toes

[LordShaithis]

But where's my Miat/Jaina love, damnit???

[phongn]

But where's my Miat/Jaina love, damnit???

Don't you mean the Jag/Jaina/Miet threesome?

[LordShaithis]

Now now, trying to be a bit classier than all that. Heh.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

It's good, but you might want to consider changing the phrasing of that first sentence.

Eh, a little awkward, but technically correct so I'm keeping it.

P.S. Thank you all very much, and, you are also all indeed perverts. That is all.