Aftermath: Empire's End (Star Wars: Aftermath #3)(84)
Hodnar Borrum walks up, hands behind his back, chin up. He suddenly looks ten years younger, as if the prospect of war is the food that feeds him the same way water wakes a wilting flower. Borrum says as they walk, “We will win the ground battle handily, Counselor.”
Randd is in hologram form (for he is currently aboard the Star Destroyer Inflictor), beamed by a projector held in the hand of Yupe Tashu. The grand moff says as his projection bounces: “Their fleet will be larger than ours, but we have the Ravager. Theirs is still a ragtag force—strategically ill fed and cobbled together of incompatible ships and squadrons. We are unified. And in that unification we will win this battle.”
“Excellent,” Rax says as he strides boldly toward the stage. And he means it. It is excellent. All of it. Even the part where they are wrong.
The general asks: “Where is Obdur? We should be considering our messaging during all of this.”
“Ferric has taken sick,” Rax answers curtly. It’s not a lie. Not really. Being stabbed to death in your bed is quite sickening. That moment serves as another success of Hux’s program. A few of the children have proven particularly effective, it seems.
His “advisers” want to keep on nattering at him. But what they have to say matters little, after all, and only serves themselves.
It is time to speak.
Rax shushes the others with a hand and strides past them, up a set of metal steps, onto the dais. The stage is small, erected at the fore of the base and looking out over the tens of thousands of troopers gathered.
Above, the fleet hangs like specters. Around him and the troops are TIE fighters, bombers, troop carriers, shuttles, transports, walkers.
The engine of war has thrummed to life.
The Empire awaits his talk, though truly, right now, he has one audience of note: Behind him and above him, on the roof of the command headquarters, he knows that Sloane and her rebel scum cohort sit.
Rax steps out in front of the podium and speaks. His image is projected large behind him, a massive flickering holostatue. His voice is beamed loudly over all of them so it is less like a man speaking and more like a god whose divine command comes as a crashing, crushing wave.
The speech that he gives is one he has been rehearsing for months. It is designed as a mechanism—the best speeches are performances meant not to give information or to convey truth but rather, to leave an effect. It is vital not to make his people think, but only to force them to feel. He does not want to leave them with uncertainty. They need only answers.
The best speech is not a question mark. It is an exclamation.
His voice booms as he speaks:
Loyal soldiers of the Galactic Empire, madness is at our door. Ruffians and barbarians of the Rebel Alliance have claimed for themselves a government of no legitimacy, a government given over to corrosion, chaos, and the corruption born of alien minds and radical terroristic teachings. It was our own Emperor Palpatine who showed us the weakness that presents itself when a Republic becomes sick with the disease of craven politics and the illness of elite oligarchs who force their agendas upon us.
With the death of our beloved Emperor, our own Empire was cast into disorder. It gave strength to the illegitimate, and emboldened them with a fraudulent claim of bringing peace and justice to the galaxy—and yet, for so long, who have been the champions of peace? The only war visited upon the galaxy has been the one brought by the criminal Rebel Alliance.
Scattered and lost, we could have perished. After attacking Chandrila and injuring the fraudulent politicians who seek to steal the sanctity of our galaxy, I brought us here to Jakku, unifying our people and our powers in this faraway world—a hard world that has tested our mettle and forged us and sharpened us into a stronger blade. A blade with which we will slit the throats of the traitors that crawl on their bellies toward our door. Soon they come! Soon they try to finish what they started. They want to end the Empire. They want to set up as a tumor on a healthy body, leeching the blood while growing fatter like a parasite. They deny our legitimacy. They lie about the stability and sanity we created for the galaxy. For those are their truest weapons: deception and delusion. We must not give in. We must not believe that they are right. We must see them as they are:
Brutes and barbarians! They are subhuman. They are alien to us in the truest sense of the word and are deserving of no mercy from us. This is our zero hour, and I call you now to do your duty by the light of the glorious Galactic Empire. The battle to come is not a fight for Jakku or even a fight for the Empire. It is a fight for all the galaxy. If we fail here, we fail everywhere. We fail our loved ones. We fail our children. We fail all who crave constancy and light in these dark times.
We pursue no other aim than freedom from oppression, liberty from lies, emancipation from depravity.
Today is the day we fight back and reclaim our galaxy.
Today is the day the New Republic dies at the Empire’s hand.
Today we take our future!
(If only they knew what that future meant.)
And then it’s as if the galaxy is listening, as if the Force is truly on his side, for what occurs is an event of such theatrical synchronicity that Gallius Rax nearly drops to his knees and weeps like a baby—
The attack begins.
Thunder ripples as the New Republic fleet spears the sky, already launching a fusillade—and the Imperial fleet above fires its own in response. Far above their heads, turbolasers slash the sky. Torpedoes corkscrew. Javelins of heavy plasma fire slices open the blue.