Battle for Earth
Chapter 1
The Imperial Star Destroyer Chimaera floated through space, it's impressive weaponry was deactivated. There was no longer any need for it. With the peace accords signed with the New Republic, the need for such weapons was all but gone.
Admiral Pellaeon, second in command of the Imperial fleet, looked out into space, trying to hide his nervousness.
"Calm yourself, admiral, the report shall arrive in another 10 minutes"
Pellaeon turned to the speaker; a being that had come so close to defeating the New Republic, but had been stopped. But not by the rebels, Pelleaon thought, and that one thought was enough to make his stomach churn with anger, an anger that had been with him for 15 years.
It hadn't been the rebels who had stopped the speaker, but a traitorous bodyguard, by the name of Rukh. Pelleaon remembered that day well, at the shipyards of Bilbringi. Rukh had first disabled him, Pelleaon remembered, and then went after the speaker, Grand Admiral Thrawn, perhaps the greatest military mind the galaxy had ever seen.
The only bright side, Pelleaon grimaced, was that Rukh had stumbled as he had gone to stab the Grand Admiral. The knife had still connected, however, in the stomach, and not the heart, which had been, at least Pelleaon believed, Rukh's intent. Before Rukh could rectify his mistake, a security guard had shot down the traitorous Noghri.
The initial belief was that Thrawn would be fine in a matter of days. A knife wound, though certainly serious, should have been easy to treat. However, the Noghri had coated the knife with something. A back- up plan, the admiral realized. Whatever the knife had been coated with, it had been enough to send Thrawn into a coma for the better part of 15 years.
Then, just a year- and- a- half prior, Thrawn had reawaken. By then, though, the Empire's fate had been sealed. The then Supreme Commander of Imperial forces, Admiral Pelleaon, had signed a peace accord with the New Republic, 3-plus years before Thrawn had reawaken.
When Thrawn had reawaken, he had been disappointed to here the news that the Empire had been defeated. However, he did not blame Pelleaon, not in the least. The people Thrawn did blame, apart from the New Republic, and the smuggler Talon Karrde, were Pelleaon's predecessors, people like Admiral Daala, who had sought to use the Empire more for revenge, and for personal gain.
Thrawn, having been defeated, turned his eyes away from the New Republic, and towards another target. His next target would not be easy to even reach, much less conquer. Thrawn had decided to try and accomplish something that he himself had almost personally stopped many decades ago, the Outbound Flight project.
Thrawn had set his engineers a task, a very hard task at that. He had told them to improve the hyper drive engine. Thrawn was after a hyper drive that could get his Star Destroyers, and other ships, to another galaxy, in an amount of time short enough that the ship's crews would all survive, and still be able to fight, if need be.
The engineers' report on their accomplishments, or lack thereof, was due at any moment.
"The engineers' report has come in, admiral, please join me in my private chambers."
Pelleaon followed Thrawn into Thrawn's chambers, a place that Pelleaon remembered quite vividly from Thrawn's campaign against the New Republic 15 years ago. However, instead of being filled with holograms of an alien species' art, it had a hologram of what was obviously an engine, but it was an engine that Pelleaon had never seen before. He could only assume that it was the Grand Admiral's newer and better hyper drive.
"Well, admiral, do you like it?" asked Thrawn, his red eyes glowing with a hint of victory in them.
"I… I wish I could say sir, I really don't know what it does, I have a rough idea, but the specifics…."
"This, admiral, is our newest hyper drive, named the Inter-Galactic Hopper, or IGH by its creators. If the engineers' claims are true, we should be able to make a jump through space, into another galaxy entirely, in the relatively short time of only 3 years."
"With this new tool, we will leave this rebel controlled galaxy, and into another, looking for troops, since our Mount Tantiss cloning operation has long since been silenced, and any forced conscription would send shock waves all the way to Coruscant, which in turn would lead to an investigation on our activities, something that I want us to fully avoid." Thrawn said, with a hard look in his Chiss eyes.
"Why would we want troops?" asked the only slightly bewildered admiral, for he thought he might know what was coming next.
"For the only reason we could possibly need them. For the destruction of the rebellion, and the return of the Emperor's New Order."