De Imperatoribus Galacticis: Chapter the Twenty-Third.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

De Imperatoribus Galacticis

"On the Galactic Emperors"

Chapter the Twenty-Third.

(As continued from Chapter the Twenty-Second.)


Imperial Starfleet
Dantooine System.


The gallant sacrificial last attack of the Light had mercifully ended, and on a successful note. As they at last were repulsed and pulled back with more losses than before, but their squadrons and their honour intact and glorified, the two halves of the main body were entering range, and the grav wells had been established to prevent the escape of the Vong force.

Pellaeon studied the tactical situation for a moment, satisfying himself of the success of the Light forces and now their long-deserved disengagement, after an attack which he had not ordered, nor could he countenance, but, the Lights, having done it anyway, had made themselves praiseworthy in every way. That would not help the dead, but now it would help the living finish this war at last.

“Instructions to Starfighter Command: 'Recall all starfighters for refueling and rearming,'” Pellaeon ordered once he had satisfied himself that the Imperial Light was safely away from the action such that it would no longer need the protection and assistance of the Starfighter forces. They might well be needed in the upcoming engagement. In the meanwhile, the range was racing down toward the shortened distance at which the Imperial main body elements might engage with the full force of their heavy artillery.

“Range.”

“Fleet Signals: 'All squadrons commence fire on squadron-designated targets; all ships are to adhere to squadron-directed firing.'” Elise settled back, pushing aside an emptied cup of coffee, and crossed her hands in her lap. She watched the comms crew send the message and then settled into the chair at a slight and slumped angle, feeling rather tired, if still alert, as she stared at the great holoprojector before her, the dimunative figure of the woman who even simply her own section of the fleet controlled and directed one of the greatest assemblages of firepower in recent history.

The turrets swung out and locked into their targets. The missiles were prepared for rapid firing. Then from each squadron in turn came the fire orders, and at once great volleys were loosed. Energy washed out from the fleet in thunderous salvoes, the concussion of the guns firing, recoilling into the hull, reverberating noisily right up to the bridge of even the Conquérant. At their high sublight velocities the turbolaser bolts vied with the continuously accelerating missiles, in unending sheets of energized matter that rippled out from thousands of ships, to reach among their targets and detonate, and detonate again, each wave filling space with hundreds of thousands of brilliant spheres of fire and lances of laser energy.

Firing flak bursts, now, against the Vong light, the great number of detonations continuously obscured the enemy in the visual realm. The glowing contrails of the missiles and the brilliant burning of their main engines vanished at once into the brilliance of energetic fire and radiation and the invisible rays of the laser-heads which might light up at crazy refracted angles as they passed through a debris field or explanding cloud of plasma with a destroyed ship. The turbolaser bolts produced a green fire, what seemed more like a singular moving mass-wave of energy than any individual bolts, unless it was see head on; and then it was most deadly, and the result scarcely mattered.

At the designated point the containment fields eroded and collapsed. That was all there was to a flak burst; it happened automatically when the containment field collapsed, and so to create a flak burst once simply set the strength of the containment field so that it would decay and collapse at the right moment which had been calculated by the gunnery computers. Teratons of energy were thus loosed, creating constant energetic little suns which glowed briefly, for a second at most, as they filled up in a sphere of roiling plasma that burnt everything it touched, even the strongest rock. The sheer output of the hundreds or thousands of guns upon thousands of ships meant that there were two million such little suns every half-second, hundreds of millions a minute, detonating in the Vong light squadrons.

The fire was now coming on the Vong from both directions, with Pellaeon and Elise on the outside, pinning the Vong light in two portions, two fleets with the now retreating Imperial light in the centre. The Vong had to many problems to pursue them; they had finally, indeed, broken off the engagement with those brave men in their brave little ships, but it had been to late for them. The Imperials had got the range for their heavies, and it meant that this great emission of firepower had been prepared, and was being laid down, bracketing their enemies entirely. Whole squadrons of Star Cruisers took a single Vong light frigate under fire; they put thousands of flak bursts around it, and when they had finished a few seconds of fire they were ready to move on to another target, for it was no longer there.

Everywhere the Vong ships were dying. The lightest were simply vapourized in a mass of flak bursts, innards torn out by the piercing laser heads. The heavier ships survived as burned hulks, weapons and dovin basal projectors burned off their outer hulls, engines disabled or exploded outright by the backwash of plasma. The scale of the destruction could not be underestimated. It was entirely possible that within a single minute of action more than one thousand Vong ships had been disabled or destroyed. At this rate the Vong fleet would cease to exist in another twenty-five minutes, and escape was out of the question, for the Imperial grav-well equipped ships were spreading out, entrapping the Vong, guaranteeing that even if they did go to hyperspace within the sphere of gravity that the end result would be to just get dragged out, still in range of the Imperial guns—closer, in fact.

This state of massed slaughter continued for six minutes. The firing of the guns was constant, pressing the limits of their cooling mechanisms and capacitators, so soon after a hot action had already been fought. This was a massacre, but the utmost of effort on the part of the crews and the machinery was required to keep it that way. The weakness of the Vong ships in the flanks was made worse. Though they still had a numerical advantage over the Imperial fleet, there was simply no way that a 200 meter Vong frigate could stand up to the broadside of a 17,600 meter Executor, and such broadsides were fired every half second; by dint of that alone, each Executor was destroying a significant portion of the enemy fleet, switching fire from ship to ship literally as fast as the gunnery officer could manage with the aide of the powerful banks of computers.

The anatomy of the destruction of a fleet was played out in all its grim power. The Imperials were bringing their fighters back in, which was scarcely a respite for the Vong, who did not have the time or resources to bring their coral skippers back in for refueling and rearming under this sort of slaughter. Without the Imperial Starfighters to provide coverage for their heavy ships, however, there was one thing they could do, and so the order was given and, desperately, the coral skippers were sent out as kamikazis.

Light frigates and the sort made much better kamikazis against large targets, as they could easily repulse the intense fire of the CIWS guns. The coral skippers were much worse off. They were small enough to be destroyed by rapid and intense barrages from countless small guns, and they could do questionable damage without heavy loads of prepared explosives. But they might do enough damage to buy the two Vong fleet elements enough time to get through the enemy grave wells, to escape from the centre of what had become a murderous trap. Or... For the lately arriving reinforcements from the Outer Rim to get there and salvage the situation.

Those six minutes passed with agonizing slowness, and then the first ray of hope crossed into the minds of the Vong commanders. With a flicker of pseudomotion five hundred fresh Vong ships were yanked out of hyperspace by the grav sphere set up by the Imperial projectors. They were the advanced elements of the reinforcements, and over the next three minutes another five thousand ships followed them. In the same time, however, an additional almost 2,800 of the Vong ships existing in the light fleet had been crippled or destroyed. The Vong fleet coming in, however, was much closer to the Imperial forces—particularly, to Elise's half of the fleet—and most importantly contained another 1,000 heavy ships in its numbers. They also began to promptly launch waves of coral skippers which were hurtled out at Elise's forces.

Yuuzhan Vong were realistic enough when that realism was forced on them by the grim necessity of a losing battle. The commander of the reinforcements at once ordered the force of light enganged by Pellaeon to close and make suicide attacks on that portion of the Imperial fleet; he would only have a chance to extract one half of the light forces, and that would be the closer one, so the other half must sacrifice itself to keep part of the Imperial fleet pinned up so that his plan could work, and that was precisely what he instructed as his ships raced in to close to gunnery range with Elise's immediately.

Elise had about eight thousand ships under her command in all. The smallest were several thousand VSDs, the rest were larger, though some of them were not high quality ships at all, but the retrofitted and jury-rigged Star Destroyer and Star Cruiser-scale warships of numerous minor powers, frequently representing hundreds of nations that had just two or three such vessels for prestige purposes. Still, they had already destroyed close a third of the Yuuzhan Vong Light force that had existed when the main body of the fleet engaged it (it had been stronger, but of course had lost many ships in the long fight with the Imperial light), and though Elise was now outnumbered about two-to-one she still held an advantage in firepower.

“We'll get between them,” she said to her chief of staff, pushing herself up from her command chair in a moment of abrupt alertness.

“Place ourselves between two fires, Admiral?”

“We've got guns on the starboard side of our ships the last time I checked,” Elise snapped back with some of her old impetuousity, suitably chastising her Chief of Staff. “I'm not going to let them combine against us—or escape!--save by running straight through the main body of this fleet.” A pause, and brief calculation: “How long until the starfighters are rearmed?” It had surely been ten minutes since they had been recovered by now.

“All of them, Admiral?”

“All of them. They won't have the kind of effect we're going to need if we send them out in penny-packets.”

Her COS brought up the data from the sectional commander of the Starfighter forces in a moment on the long bank of consoles around the holoprojector. “Fourteen minutes, Admiral.”

“That's good enough.”

“It'll take another three to launch.”

“I'm well aware of that,” Elise replied, teeth gritted. “We'll just have to stand the attacks of their coral skippers until then without starfighter support.”

“Understood, Adm..”

The collision klaxon sounded. “Kamikazis inbound!”

Elise darted forward and grasped hard onto the rail around the holoprojector, just in time, too, as a brace of a hundred or more coral skippers burst through the outer screen and raced in the last half-second of distance at high relativistic velocity toward the Conquérant. CIWS took out more than sixty, even with such little warning. The remaining fourty-seven rammed into the shields of the great Executor-class ship within a quarter-second of each other. She rattled all around Elise, and several negligent officers had their hands wrested loose from what they'd grabbed and were sent flying across the flagbridge.

Despite that, her Chief of Staff had already moved to the communications bank from the moment he could stand and was relaying Elise's orders promptly, without a moment of hesitation from his own doubts, and they in turn were immediately transferred by the men manning the control banks for the fleet comms, secure in their shock harnesses.

But the report came up from the command bridge just a heartbeat later: “The Captain reports shock damage only, Admiral.”

“About what I expected,” Elise said, loudly, and with a laugh. “They don't have a clue about the kind of kinetic shielding we've got—anyone remember the Executor Incident?”

“When the rebels programmed the hyperdrives of three ISDs to make their jump directly into the Executor on her maiden voyage, Admiral?” Came the shakey voice of Commander Hallsburg.

“That's exactly the one. No hull damage—only a temporary loss of shielding. Expect more of that shaking, though, because there's more coming in.” She turned around and stepped back lightly to her command chair, settling into it and strapping herself in. None of the following explosions rocked the hull nearly as much, for more power had been routed into the kinetic shields as the danger of energy weapons fire faded and that of ramming attacks magnified.

As the Vong Light raced to escape under the cover of waves of coral skippers launching kamikazi attacks, the Imperial forces under Elise's command swung to interpose themselves between those desperate, savaged ships and their freedom in the form off the supporting squadrons coming up fast and already salvoing off missiles into Elise's fleet. The big guns continued to fire, rippling sheets of energetic flame racing across the void to detonate into those millions of points of light and heat and energy that shattered more and more of the desperately escaping Vong ships, now in clear and obvious danger of being cut off.

Despite the combination of kamikazis and missiles the CIWS and kinetic shielding of the Imperial heavies was scarcely burdened. Tens of thousands of coral skippers had already been knocked out, and close to equal numbers of missiles, and those numbers just rapidly increased. Out of a thousand, a hundred might get through to close range, and of those perhaps fifty hit the hull of a ship, but even a VSD could survive that and had a chance to continue fighting without any damage or risk if she could be shuffled to the centre of the formation to recharge her kinetic shielding in time. The losses thus ended up being trifling—so far. The Vong fighter strike from the reinforcement fleet was rapidly coming in.

Meanwhile, the Imperial Lights, their squadrons so depleted that where once there had been nearly fourteen thousand ships there were now rather less than three thousand five hundred capable of manoeuvring and holding station, had formed together the remnants of either Flank into a single action group and were, with great elan and renewed vigour, pushing up on the Vong Light which was under intense fire by Pellaeon's segment of the main body, and in a hopeless position. It turned out to be immensely fortunate that their bravery and confidence in victory was such that they were willing to take such mad risks, for those Vong light ships now sold themselves dearly.

“Admiral—the Hand of Thrawn!”

Elise looked as an image she would never forget was abruptly brought up on the holoprojector. It might have been replayed, it might have just been caught real-time, but none of that mattered. What did matter was the bravado of the display which came on, the suicidal madness. Ten Vong frigates hyperdrive rammed the Hand of Thrawn almost simultaneously, on the verge of snapping into hyperspace—to be inevitably dragged back out by the mass shadows thrown out by the Interdictors—but it didn't matter, because they never quite got there. Instead, they collided with the Hand of Thrawn in such a show of light and energy as even Elise, experienced in these great battles, had not seen before. It held the attention of the flagbridge for a moment, as the Hand of Thrawn disappeared into the immensity of that energetic event...

And then sailed splendidly out of it, hull untouched, every battery firing as rapidly as it could, kinetic shields still up. Applause broke out.

“Kriffed to the nine hells!” Elise exclaimed reflexively, in a way she hadn't sworn on a command bridge in more than a decade. “The Executor Incident, indeed!”

Then a second group of eight ships, some of them larger, slammed into the Hand of Thrawn at the same speed. Again she vanished into the cloud of radiation and energy and debris, and the bridge held its breath again, if perhaps not as greatly as before. And again, she appeared, unarmed, though in an acknowledgement of the burden it had placed on the starboard kinetic shields, Pellaeon's Flag Captain 'rolled the ship', presenting her other broadside to the Vong kamikazis. Her batteries did not even cease-fire, but instead a seamless switchover of the engaged turrets took place, tracking and continuing to engage for as long as they could bear as new batteries were in turn unmasked and commenced to fire throughout the roll.

The same sorts of ramming attacks were taking place against all six Executors in Pellaeon's force. More than a hundred and twenty Vong ships had expended themselves in this fashion—out of a force of about 7,800 left intact when the ramming efforts had begun—and they had not even scratched the paint on a single one of the great battlecruisers! And one of that, of course, counted the close to 150 similar such ships which had been destroyed by the excellent gunnery computers of the battlecruisers even as they raced in on the verge of lightspeed. Many more at the same time were destroyed by the guns of the Executors alone in the fleet proper, and of course all the other ships were firing continuously at their maximum output as well and wreaking a similar harvest.

The Superiour-class ships with Pellaeon's force—Elise had been assigned the weaker but more numerous Shockwave-class ships—were holding up nearly as well on their own, considering that unlike the cavernous docking bays of the Executor-class, these 8km heavy cruisers had a mere 144 starfighters, devoting much more of their internal space to the massive generators to power heavy shielding and countless ranks of hundreds of turbolaser turrets bearing batteries of the heaviest type. What that meant was that several hundred of the Vong Lights were lost in these efforts already—without a single thing to show for it!

It was a splendid showing by the grand ships of the Kuat Drive Yards, and Elise felt an overpowering emotion as she recalled that it was Mystrela's family who had created the yards, and guided the engineers, and overseen the construction of those vessels. Something of her spirit, of the toughness of the Kuati family spirit, lived on in them as they held up so well under the greatest test imaginable.

For her own fleet, things were going much better. There had been a dozen light destroyers lost at most to the incessant kamikazi attacks of the much smaller craft and the missile barrage of the enemy reinforcements. But now the armed coral skippers of the reinforcement wave had arrived, and they dove in to attack, unopposed by any Imperial Starfighters at all. What the Imperials did have to take them on—CIWS fire—they spewed out and back at them in great hosts of tiny energy bolts which served to flood the heavens in endless fire at close range. Moreover, since the batteries on the starboard side of the ships were not yet in range of the enemy reinforcements, they were all commenced to fire on close-in flak bursts as an anti-starfighter measure.

Nothing could be seen, or even detected, through that hail of energy thrown up off the starboard of the fleet. The bolts were a virtual carpet of energy as they detonated, a continuous wall of energy put up between the Imperial forces and the oncoming coral skippers. It seemed that scarcely twenty percent of the original numbers of the strike got through that murderous wall of fire death, but as soon as it did that twenty percent, tens of thousands of coral skippers, raced in, firing everything they had at keeping at close range to avoid such an intense and coordinated fire again falling upon them.

There were now less than seven thousand light ships left in the Vong force trying to escape out of the range of Elise's heavy artillery. Worse yet, they were coming straight in against the Imperial guns. But the reinforcements now had the range, and their plasma bolt cannons opened up with an intense barrage against the Imperial force, turning to present their broadsides. Elise was forced to immediately switch her fire to those ships, firing fully contained bolts in massed broadsides at the heavies. That brought a respite to the missile fire of the Vong reinforcements as well, but scarcely much of one, and it had done no good at all for the fighters. More ships-VSDs, ISDs, allied Star Cruisers--were being lost now from the efforts of those fighters, but not a single one of the great ships had been touched, and it was that striking arm of the fleet which truly mattered and was doing the true destruction.

Now the Imperial Lights were fully engaged yet again, more than three thousand of their number blasting away at the largely unprotected sterns of the Vong Light which were trying to ram to destruction Pellaeon's element of the Grand Fleet. They had a very great success, considering the distraction of the Vong Light and their by now total lack of starfighter support, and combined with the totally unabated massed fire of Pellaeon's squadrons their numbers had been further reduced to less than five thousand ships, and many more were lost as the gunnery computers of the Imperial vessels now had the exact ranges and patterns of fire necessary to cover the whole route of ships engaging in a hyperdrive ramming effort with turbolaser bolts, and were doing so. The weapons were sublight, but the ships still were, too, and the Imperials had experience with intercepting superlight weaponry with only sublight counterfire, and, of course, superlight sensor systems, which were now fully utilized.

Then Pellaeon's fighters were ready, and they were launched in wave after wave, racing in against the Vong Light, attacking with masses of proton torpedoes and heavy anti-ship rockets, wave after wave of hundreds of thousands of every type of starfighter available in the arsenal of what had been the Milky Way Empire. Most of the light ships still fighting were damaged in some way or another from the long combat and the constant barrage of flak bursts around them, such that they were unusually vulnerable to massed starfigher weapons. A malestrom of slaughter had developed.

Against Elise the Vong lights were now making a last deseperate death ride to try and break through, to preserve their numbers for the defence of the Worldships which were the homes of the Vong people. As they closed in, flak bursts were no longer necessary—the firing solutions were perfect, and full scale very-heavy turbolaser bolts plunged into the light ships, most with their dovin basals already badly depleted, and did horrendous damage. Countless of their number dropped out, crippled, more were destroyed, and still they had to pass through Elise's force. As they began this run, yet another weapon was directed against them. Tractor beams were used to slow many of the fleeing light ships, or in the case of the Executors with their huge reserves of power available for the tractor beams, throw up reverse energy fields of sufficient strength to stop the Vong light ships dead, their acceleration bleeding off into such energies that despite their anti-gravity systems the crews were instantly turned into pulped goo.

Into the wall of fire! The Vong charged through it, being fired at from every side, by every weapon in the Imperial arsenal. Countless hundreds of ships were annihilated, struck by hundreds of light bolts all at once, rent asunder by medium-level fire, or simply vapourized by the intersection of several of the heaviest bolts against their weak hulls.

Despite it all, somewhat less than three thousand of the Vong light ships managed to get through, most of them damaged. The slowed ones, not entirely crippled, were now giving the sole attention of the heavy portside batteries, and their massacre followed. For the Light which appeared to be on the verge of escaping, however....

“Mark.”

“Starfighter Command reports sectional starfighter forces are ready for launch, Admiral.”

“Starfighter sectional command is now ordered to launch all starfighters with orders to engage in a general purpose of the fleeing Vong elements,” Elise said, and clenched onto the armrests of her chair and smiled savagely. Immediately the starfighters began to erupt from the hulls of the ships in her forces in great hordes of tens of thousands, racing after the fleeing Vong ships loaded to the teeth with capship killing torpedoes and rockets.

Her main batteries on the starboard side were still ignoring the fleeing light forces and instead concentrating on the heaviest ships of the Vong reinforcement fleet, and that concentration of fire was beginning to show upon them, as well, even as it was doggedly returned by those Vong ships now locked into even a rescue effort which was absolutely hopeless. It did not take the Vong commander long to realize that those starfighters had doomed any chance of the Light to escape, and he cut his losses and ordered a general retreat, having sacrificed 90% of his coral skippers and 600 of his ships for a few dozen Star Destroyers.

Now, to, the Vong Light entrapped by Pellaeon were almost totally destroyed. But at the same time they had battered the kinetic shielding of the heaviest ships in his force so much that at last a few of their number got through. In a hideous display of pyrotechnics and with the instant death of hundreds of thousands of Imperial Starfleet personnel, one of the Superiour-class Heavy Cruisers went up in a violent flaring explosion, erased from the galaxy with the loss of every crewer aboard her in a half-second of heat and radiation as multiple relativistic kamikazi-frigates got through after her shields had been battered down by many others beside.

Two more got through the Executor-class Tonnant's kinetic shielding before her captain could complete his roll to present the kinetic shielding which had been recharging on the protected side of the ship, following another fourteen or so ships which had slammed all along those shields to batter them down for the last six, and then those last two which made it through. The result was devastating: One hit far forward, blowing off more than four hundred meters of the bow, and another punched through her superstructure as it was presented to the enemy during the roll, at the weak point of the hangar bays right below. It ripped through the whole of the superstructure and the hull there, annihilating all of the Tonnant's hangars—less severe than it could have been, for all her starfighters and armed craft were launched at the moment—and literally blowing a hole straight through the middle of the ship. But an Executor was built with her strength in the V of her flanks, and so no critical structural components were lost, and the ship completed her roll, recharged shields presented to the enemy, and immediately commenced to fire again with 75% of her main batteries operational.

Compartments vented to space or filled with deadly gasses were sealed off. Damage control teams were assembled out of all surviving nonessential personnel and sent in to reinforce the designated damage control teams already moving into the affected areas. All droids with secondary damage control capabilities were immediately dispatched. No gunners left their posts as long as the batteries were operational, and if fire or poisonous gasses threatened their position, the turret was sealed to its own internal air supply and the gunners continued to fight their guns, even cut off from the rest of the living ship and surrounded only by the dead. The transverse and longitudinal armoured bulkheads served to prevent a spread of the damage from the immediately affected areas, and all fires were quickly brought under control.

On the outside the Vong lights under Pellaeon's guns were all but finished. The fleet continued the maximum fire into the, the starfighters continued to attack, the Imperial Light behind them were likewise firing with the maximum rapidity that the gunnery of their battered ships could manage, and a hail of fire was coming in from every angle against ships far to weak to stand against it. The last minute was punctuated by what seemed a great rolling sequence of flares as the last hundreds of ships went up within mere tens of seconds of each other, half a minute at most, and then it was over on that side of the battlefield.

Elise's fighters closed the range. They tore into the remaining fleeing Vong Light. Hundreds of thousands of fighters here, too, all fully armed, their warheads overhauling and exploding among the Vong, sending pulses of laser energy in every direction, around the dovin basals, piercing deep into hulls. Steadily the ships fell behind as they lost more and more power, and then the starfighters raised on to attack other Vong ships with missiles and guns in turn. The attacks continued this way with the Vong gamely fighting back, destroying thousands of Imperial Starfighers in the process; but this lasted only for so long. With the reinforcement fleet retreating, Elise's gunners soon lost the range on it, and switched their fire back to the remaining Vong light.

In another four minutes it was over. Two hundred of the Vong Light escaped; the rest were destroyed. The battle of Dantooine was over. It had seen the destruction of 54,000 vessels greater in length than 200 meters, and 43,000 of them had been Yuuzhan Vong—with the majority of the Imperial losses falling among the light and less important ships. The offensive power of the Vong had been broken forever, but the heart of their dark nation still lived.


CINCF Flagship
Torpedo Sphere Ulaumai,
Coreward Hyperspace Trajectory


Hamner Davion had mustered his top commanders around himself in the briefing room. Each entered and bowed in turn, and then he activated the holoprojector. What need not be said was that much of the presentation had been prepared by Harlann Quir, waiting with the self-proclaimed Emperor and now the second highest ranking naval officer in the force. Rano Inaras was not altogether that pleased about the swift promotions of the old Captain, but he had the Emperor's ear and that was that. Inaras, after all, could scarcely go back now. The briefing was quite tense, for their forces consisted of little more than 9,000 ships, and many of them were new, this cruise serving as their shakedown run, or jury-rigged patrol vessels made out of the hulks of old Milky Way warships.

But that wasn't going to be all of their fleet. Moreover, they had a great preponderence of firepower in the Torpedo Spheres of the fleet, numbering in their hundreds, and in a set-piece battle these would still be very useful. It was a set-piece battle that Hamner Davion intended to fight, at least after his move of strategic aggression had been completed, the move that they were already on. The destination of the fleet was of course Coruscant, and many other fleets were moving in unison in to combine with it. There they would make their stand, all for differing reasons, but animated by a common desire to halt Sule.

“Greetings, Gentlemen,” Hamner began.

“Your Majesty,” they rumbled back, and then fell silent as he began to speak.

“The situation is simple. We're arriving at Coruscant with sufficient force to take the planet—even through the planetary shields—by coup de main. We've got more than enough Torpedo Spheres with us to crack the shield, that's one advantage of our fleet composition, and we've been able to draft many ground army contingents from the Milky Way territories to use for the assault. The conquest of Coruscant will raise popular legitimacy in our favour in the way that no other act could, and will provide a unifying purpose to the fleet, to hold it against Sule's counterattack.

“We're expecting around ten thousand Republican warships, five thousand from the Durrano Sector and their allies, and another four thousand from the Hutts, all Corvettes or larger. In total we should have at least twenty-eight thousand warships awaiting Sule at Coruscant, and probably somewhat more than that; a fleet close to numerically comparable to that he went into battle with at Dantooine, though greatly inferior in firepower. We expect that Sule's fleet will have been seriously attrited by the fighting at Dantooine—the battle is over, and we know he won, but we have no idea of the actual damage to his main force—which will certainly aide things in give us a better advantage in fighting to the victory against him.

“Because of the unreliability of our allies, the plan is simple. We're going to stand our ground at Coruscant and fight defensively, to attrite Sule's fleet and gain control of the planet while we work politically to make additional sectors renounce his rule and steal his support base out from under him. To do this the fleet will fight supported by whatever additional fighter squadrons we can bring in and station at the system defence bases around Coruscant, or capture intact, and the same for all of the orbital and surface anti-ship defences. Minefields will also be used; in short, we are turning Sule's tactics at Third Coruscant against him, gentlemen, and that doesn't require any genius from our part, just great firmness.

“Are there any questions?”

Rano Inaras was the only one to speak up, of course. “Your Majesty, I beg pardon, but what of the Vong forces? We were given to understand that this Nom Anor fellow who served on the Imperial Council after the failure of the Imperial Restoration of Palpatine believed that he could lead a communitarian rebellion among the Vong lower masses which might deliver into our hands several thousand additional ships at least.”

“We are not going to count on those, Grand Admiral. It is simple; no-one in the galaxy shall stand the thought of Vong warships over Coruscant. Their presence would give three time's an advantage to the enemy as they give to us by the great popular sentiment they would provoke against us. They do provide a useful strategic reserve if Nom Anor succeeds, but nothing more than that, at least for this battle. Part of the real reason that We supported recognizing the independence of the Durrano Sector and its Confederates is for the chance to gain a propaganda victory by being the architect of overthrowing the Vong from within; this would greatly help to collapse Sule's popularity at having handed the Vong many military defeats.

“That, and the long-term uses of those ships, made the agreement worthwhile, but we must have no expectation of relying on them in the upcoming fight. We must trust to our fresh forces, whereas Sule's have just been in heavy combat and suffered great damage and losses; and we must trust to the steadfastness of our men and of the defences we shall throw up around Coruscant from the moment we take the planet.

“That is all, gentlemen. We are going to arrive in six hours.”


Vong-occupied Outer Rim,
On the Worldship of
Supreme Overlord Shimmra.


Jaina pushed herself to her feet. She rocked back naturally against Miat, settling against her, leaving her weight thoughtlessly in the woman's arms. Though wounded, Miat held her readily, and smiled down to her and whispered something in her ear, a hand stroking through the long locks of her rusty red hair, before her eyes turned back. Back, to silent, tortured Jacen. Back to a man forged in pain, who had resisted the worst temptations imaginable which had been offered to him to embrace that pain, and had come out of the forge with clear views of his morality, but a certain understanding of something deeper than that; it was to the later that Miat Temm now appealed with her explaination, which was given both to Jacen and to Jaina, for the later had walked the course without fully understanding it, and now she would be told her destiny.

“A long time ago, there was a Sith Empire. It was an imperfect creation, a melding of the natural cults of the Sith people—who understood what the Jedi had by then already entirely forgotten—and the Jedi Heretics who settled among them. These Jedi heretics would ultimately be the undoing of the Sith cults, and with them, the knowledge of the ages, which has since then been maintained by many others in various forms, but never by the Sith themselves—for they have been corrupted and lost to the universe by the melding of their teachings and those of the Old Sith.”

“By Evil, in short,” Jacen replied simply. “Those Jedi heretics you speak of..”

“Well, when it started out,” Miat smiled warmly, “They had the best of intentions. They did right up until they passed on from this world, and after all, they defeated the corrupting factions within their ranks when they committed their great sin.”

“Great Sin?” Jacen began, mind racing with history, with the Sith Empire as a legendary force in the Unknown Regions.. And with a dark and gathering suspicion.

“I can sense that you feel a path correctly; yes, the Vong are creations of the True Sith Empire, when it passed beyond this galaxy and into others after it had been driven away by the Jedi Order. The Gods the Vong worship are their twisted memories of the Sith responsible for creating them.” A pause, and her voice grew more severe: “But those were the doomed Sith, those corrupted by the teachings of the Jedi. In a civil war they were overthrown and destroyed by the Sith who held true to the original teachings of the first cults. And then the Sith turned inward, and attained their goal, such that they are no longer.”

“Why did they not destroy the Vong also, if what you say is true?”

“Because they were merciful people, and could not bring themselves even to annihilate these abominations, created by the twisted ignorance of their factional rivals who thought that they could shape the whole universe to their philosophy. Just as you Jedi have tried to shape this whole galaxy to your philosophy of nothingness.”

“That's dangerous territory upon which you walk,” Jacen said, but he deactivated his lightsabre, then, and offered a somewhat more meek smile to Jaina, who then looked up to Miat with serious eyes.

You are alright, yes?

Yes.

“I have a question, Miat,” she whispered, straightening herself slightly, an arm wrapped around the older woman. “Why would force users create a people blind to the force?”

“Because they desired to destroy the force.”

Silence once more reigned. Neither Jaina nor Jacen could entirely comprehend that simple statement, so brutal in its analysis and yet so alien to their own point of view. But Jacen grasped the logic of it quickly enough:

“The force comes from all living things—but it's not in the Vong. Nor any of their biological machinery; and this is what they convert planets to, killing the force biosphere by biosphere... I am not sure if your history is true, but you have convinced me of that. The Vong could indeed have been created for the purpose to which you propose, as a grand virus to spread across the universe, shattering the bonds of the force and slowly, inexorably, killing it.”

“You are beginning to understand, then,” Miat smiled.

“But why!? It makes no sense for someone to destroy the source of their own power..” Jaina looked accusing to Miat.

“That is what I desire to do, Jaina, for it is what will give me true immortality.”

That had their attention. “True immortality is in the force,” Jacen said—the statement intended as more of a question even though it was not phrased as such.

“After a fashion, it is, yes. Souls seperate from and merge with the force, being recreated endlessly; there is no true immortality in it, just the immortality of Unity with the Whole, and perhaps of reincarnation. The soul goes on but the distinctiveness of the individual is impermanent, a shifting nothingness which even in the most tainted of force users lasts for only a short time.”

“Tainted? I have encountered the souls of Jedi Knights and Masters who have been anything but tainted.”

“Oh, come now,” Miat countered: “Yoda in his arrogance stepped close to the dark side, as did Qui-Gon and Mace Windu and Obi-Wan Kenobi many of the other old masters. Your Grandfather embraced it. That is why they retain a shred of their individuality for a while after death—because they have tasted another path, however corrupted it is, and exist as ephemereal shades out of that knowledge for a while before they, too, are submerged into the force, and their souls reincarnated.”

“And the souls of the Dark Jedi—you seriously say that they linger on for centuries or millennia because of their closeness to some other knowledge?”

“Yes, Jacen.” A pause, a breath taken. She was expending a great deal of energy to ignore the wounds that she had suffered, but Miat Temm did not mind now. “But they are still just ephemereal shades, not the true form of immortality of the unique individual which may be gained.”

Jaina was ready to take the plunge, and so she turned, and looked straight on to Miat in fear and questioning. “Then how is this immortality of your's gained?”

“By removing the force from yourself, entirely.” Miat laughed, then, gripped in the revelation. “The end goal of the cults of the True Sith was not power or conquest of others, but to conquer themselves--to drive the force out of their bodies, out of their souls, so that their souls would exist forever as unique and distinct individuals, never to be submerged and remade, reincarnated through the power of the force! They chose to be eternally seperate from the rest of life in the universe so that they could exist in eternal individuality, their existence as distinct individuals never ceasing.

“And that, oh twins, is the choice that you have made—Jacen, you to lead the Jedi Order,” a fond smile to Jaina: “And you to reestablish the True Sith cults. That is how balance shall be at last restored to the force after many thousands of years of chaos. The two evils shall be annihilated, and everyone who wishes to progress forward into the force must make the dreadful decision, to have their existence washed away that their soul might be born anew in the Unity of the force, or to pursue a lonely eternity of their own existence!” A hacking cough, and she grinned brightly to Jaina. “We have no good choices, my dear, but we shall have at least the same comfort as the shades of the dead in Hades.”

“Why should I turn to such a horrible path?” Jaina asked morosely. “What has come over me that I should turn to it?”

“Your own decisions,” Miat replied simply. “You availed yourself of the powers of the Sith before we even met; when you escaped from the Vong when your brother, here, was captured, and Anakin fell dead. I did not choose your path—you chose it for yourself before you met me. I just came to you, and made sure that you would not avail yourself of the path of the Dark Jedi, which leads to madness and failure, to submerge in the force and the horrid penury of the soul for one's crimes, to the dissolution of All. You have made yourself into a Sith, and I but stand as the voice to insure that you are a pure one.”

“But it is such a lonely fate! How can you think of existing for the aeons in which the universe shall persist, that whole time, existing as a thing in itself, unable to interact with all that is around you?”

Miat laughed merrily. “But, Jaina, you can do anything you Will in that state; you cannot affect that which is not your Will, but if desire to speak to someone, and they desire to speak with you, that interaction is there; it will never fade, the power never to disappear. Your Will is your reality, but so are the Wills of all others, either for eternity or until they submerge into the force, and that is the interaction you shall have, the interaction with that which Wills to be with you.”

Jaina nodded, a bit shakey as she digested the implications, and the first grave and dreadful thought came to her, about what that meant. “But those who choose the other path—they are submerged into the Force, they will never be able to Will again to interact with you.”

“That is true,” Miat agreed in a grave voice. “Those who have gone before, those who shall come after; they are your compatriots in the halls of immortality. So are those who still live. But those who die and choose to go into the force, you will never interact with them again. Their souls shall be reincarnated, but they will not remember you.”

“To be sundered from my family forever..”

“To keep them alive forever!” Miat countered. “If you believe, as I do, that the Force is not a true and worthy life but instead a horrible melange, a gestalt which ends all that matters about you, then your memories of them are the only part of your family which will survive forever, and is it wrong to preseve them? I think not.”

“So it is..” Jaina sighed heavily, and looked to her brother, standing there stiffly.

Jacen spake thusly: “Your words are not spoken in falsehood, though they may be deluded. At any rate, I can only judge by seeing if you seek the power and the evil of all the Dark Jedi who have gone before, or if your declaration of being Sith is indeed different from what they have claimed and done. And I do not want to let my sister follow your path until I know these things.”

“You cannot decide for me!” Jaina snapped.

“No, no sister I cannot,” Jacen answered, keeping his eyes level. “Nor do I believe that Miat's evaluation of what happens when one dies, and goes to the force, is accurate—though her alternative may well, I admit, be a legitimate one. But I will need to see proof.”

“You will see it,” Miat promised. “And then you and Jaina shall fix the two errors.”

“Detail these two errors.”

“Of course.” The proud witch straightened and recited the list as a judgement from the heavens: “The Jedi have suppressed knowledge of the true path of the Sith nearly since the start of the Old Republic, to maintain a monopoly on the knowledge of the force. This is their fault; it must be wiped away. The Sith and Jedi must coexist as the two paths which lead to immortality, each of a different kind.

“The fault of the Sith is thus: That they combined the desire of the Jedi for Unity with their own philosophy of Individuality, and so sought to master the galaxy, and in the case of the rebels among the Old Sith, the whole of the universe, through the device of the Vong.

“These two faults are what had to be rectified, and your grandfather set in motion a path of events that led to this point, to you two twins, who must take over and lead the two paths.”

“Then what of those who desire to follow neither path, yet are still sensitive to the force?”

“They can exist safely, at low levels of power, without becoming corrupted. But they can never be allowed to gain true power, power which would lead inevitably to corruption into a mingling of the paths, and it is a mingling of the paths which has brought this evil upon us. You 'New Jedi' who have learned on the laxity of your uncle must be kept from the true powers of the force for this reason; you Jacen, must leave them and refound the Jedi Order on its oldest principles, according to vigorous application. And you must never let the Jedi Order be involved in the affairs of state again.”

“And for me?” Jaina asked.

“You must give those who cannot stand the thought of Unity with the Force their alternative. Within my stealthship are the materials of the eldritch knowledge of this path, which shall lead you down and upon it. You must teach them to reach a level of ability, so great that the force can be expunged from them in one great effort.”

“What happens, though, to those who expunge the force from themselves like that?” Jacen asked.

Miat smiled wryly. “The expungement is short-lived, for in the moment that it is done, the force already begins to try and creep back into them. That is why the Vong are failing; their lower classes are becoming corrupted with the force. The efforts of the schismatics of the Old Sith were doomed to fail, because you cannot have living unlife surrounded by life; the life will creep back in and win out. So at the moment you expunge the force from yourself..”

“You must die,” Jacen concluded grimly.

“That is correct.”

“Then how will you show me the validity of your path?”

Jaina's eyes widened, and she looked accusingly from her brother back to Miat, who had a peaceful countenance on her face, one that held a horrible truth in it; but her eyes met Jaina's, and she spoke gently:

“Remember to want me around, Jaina, please never forget.”

Jaina mastered herself, and nodded tightly, swift and simple. “I will.”

“Then help me to reach Shimmra, Skywalkers, and I shall do the rest. The abomination ends here.”

There were sounds at the entrance to the prisoner block. Miat at once stepped away, her request, or command, hanging on the air, and brought up her lightsabrer and activated it. Jacen at once activated his, and then at last, grimly, Jaina followed. The three advantaged as a wedge toward the sounds, and were confronted by the press of an investigating group of Vong, from the elite guard of the Supreme Overlord, entering the room.

They ran forward, and met the Guard in battle. They were better than the warriors that Jaina and Miat had fought, but now they had Jacen with them, and the three Jedi together were worse again by many times than simply two. Swarms of thud bugs were sent against them, and their powers shattered them all in the air, as Jacen cleaved his way through many of the warriors with the certainty of the righteousness of this killing now fixed in his mind as a holy commandment; Jaina and Miat, regardless of the distractions of their use of other powers, followed suit.

Steadily they pressed forward, unstoppable, killing all in their path. They advanced into the guard, into the thick of fighting, into the blocking and thrusting and parrying and slashing with their lightsabres that ended in one stroke, perhaps two, in death for so many of these best of the Vong warriors. The press was so great that the bodies of those they killed frequently remained upright, and yet they fought on through them, becoming in the meanwhile covered in the blood and entrails and torn flesh of the dead Vong who's bodies they brushed alongside, forcing the living back with the swirling of their blades, those same cuts ending their lives, forcing the path open, the path toward Shimmra. Together, united, they were unstoppable, and bore down upon the ruler of the Vong, the dead coming to claim their own vengeance with an escort of twins, in an irony that the Vong might have appreciated it, were it not their own doom bearing down upon them with each bloody and burning stroke of the lightsabre's blade.




De Imperatoribus Galacticis will be continued in The Apotheosis of Miat Temm

[phongn]

Everyone must now read DIG, damn it!