The Story of Commander Gherant
Commander Erat Gherant, Commander of the HIMS Executor
Everything had been going well until the Rebels started to concentrate all their fire at his ship. The Imperial Fleet was much stronger than the Rebels', but they had been ordered only to prevent the Rebels from escaping the battlefield. It made little tactical sense, but perhaps his Imperial Majesty was simply sitting back and watching the fireworks as the Death Star II destroyed the Rebel Cruisers one by one.
Commander Gherant was monitoring the shields, which were being strained to their limit. In the otherwise insignificant moment which followed, Commander Gherant, officer of the Imperial Fleet and Commander of the Capital Ship Executor, made a decision which would change history. No knew the significance of his simple thirty metre walk. No one would ever know. But he made the decision nonetheless. Commander Gherant excused himself from the bridge to go the refresher station. Fifty seconds later, as he was washing his hands, a damaged and out of control A-wing starfighter somehow evaded the point-defense batteries protecting the Bridge Tower and crashed through the forward windows of the Executor's Command Bridge, splitting a shocked Admiral Piett in two before hitting the central walkway above the crew pits. The impact deflected the A-wing upwards and made it tear straight through the center of the Bridge Doors, stripping off what was left of the wings and engine struts before it hit the wall of the main corridor of the bridge tower, exploding spectacularly.
Commander Gherant was drying his hands when felt the floor vibrate with the force of something hitting the deck plates before he heard the screeching tear of metal as the A-wing tore through the Bridge Doors. He faintly heard the distinctive whine of a starfighter engine before it head the interior of the Main Corridor and exploded with a deep bass rumble that shook the refresher station, the water sloshing out of the toilet as the entire bridge tower reeled from the internal impact and explosion. He rammed the bolt on the door across and stepped out, striding out of the side corridor where the refresher stations were and into the Main Corridor.
The white walls had been scorched black and a fire was raging and the atmosphere was venting out through the Bridge, where he could see that a starfighter had crashed through. Sirens sounded as the bulkhead doors began to close, threatening to leave him stranded in a corridor which was on fire and open to the vacuum of space. He sprinted through the flames to the bulkhead doors and tried to climb through the shrinking diamond shaped hole in the center. As he struggled to get himself over the edge a pair of gloved hands pulled him through a couple of seconds before it closed.
A pair of Stormtroopers were on the other side of the doors. They helped him to his feet, rushing him towards the turbolift doors. One of them patted out at the small flames where his Uniform had caught fire and the other keyed in an emergency override and ordered the turbolift car to take them straight to the Secondary Command Bridge on the grounds that the Command Bridge had been destroyed, which the ship's computer confirmed. The turbolift car raced off towards the Secondary Command Bridge as the Executor began to veer towards to Death Star with its Bridge Tower on fire.
The turbolift car came to a halt and the Stormtroopers helped him into the Command Chair on the Secondary Command Bridge. The Secondary Bridge required high ranking officers such as himself to authorise its use over the Main Command Bridge to prevent unwanted hijacking, piracy and the like. He felt faint, but he managed to key in his authorisation code and brought the Bridge up to operational status. The crew at the Engineering and Engines substations watched as their stations came online and then wrestled with the ship to try and divert it from disastrous course. The ship accelerated and used its main engines to skim the surface of the Death Star and avoid a collision. Commander Gherant knew that Lord Vader probably wouldn't approve, but the Death Star's shields could handle anything the Executor, or any other Capital Ship in existence, could throw at it. The Executor, on the other hand, would surely be destroyed if it were to hit the Death Star.
The pursuing Rebel forces had declined to follow the Executor towards the Death Star II and left it to its seemingly inevitable fate. Admiral Ackbar cheered at the Executor's certain destruction. Something had finally gone right today. He turned his back to the Executor's death throes and concentrated on the battle once more.
The Executor decreased the angle of its suicide run at the Death Star until its engines were bearing upon the Death Star's surface. The Super Star Destroyer slowed its arc of descent until it stopped a kilometre from the surface of the Death Star II and curved upwards and away from the massive Battle Station. The Executor hung back from the action, determined to avoid further punishment at the hands of another concentrated Rebel assault. The Executor may have been the strongest ship in the Imperial Fleet (Death Star aside) but it wasn't invincible. The SSD took a detour around the main body of the battling Imperial and Rebel fleets. Commander Gherant wanted to avoid further combat until the shields could be brought back online and recharged. Because Admiral Piett was undoubtedly dead, by default Commander Gherant, covered in soot with burnt pants and second degree burns on his skin was now in command of the Imperial Fleet, though the Emperor's orders still stood: He was to contain the Rebels and prevent them from fleeing.
Less than ten minutes after he had left the Main Bridge to go to the refresher station, the Death Star II's shields went offline. He had been under the impression that an entire legion of Stormtroopers was guarding the ground based Shield Generator; obviously the rebels must have landed much larger ground combat force than anticipated, or perhaps they had managed to capture some Imperial artillery. Regardless of the facts, the Death Star II's shields were down, and Piett had told him what the Rebels' plan was likely to be, i.e. pilot starfighters into the superstructure of the Death Star II and destroy it from the inside. The Rebel ships were beginning to disengage from combat and were pulling away. Commander Gherant was uncomfortably aware of the damage the Death Star II could cause to the fleet if they were still in their current positions and it were to explode. But if he was to move the fleet and nothing happened, Emperor Palpatine would have him executed. What now? He decided that, for the safety of his ship, and himself, the Executor was best off in a supporting role a good distance away from the Death Star and the main battle. In what role? He thought quickly and diverted more ships to the main battle, assigning the Executor the job of preventing the Rebel fleet from retreating.
Five minutes later, the last of Rebel ships had disengaged and he had ordered the fleet to pursue them, including the interdictor cruisers at the edges of the battle. He ordered the Star Destroyers at the head of the pursuit to open fire on a retreating Mon Calamari cruiser. No sooner had he finished his order than the Death Star II exploded. The battle damaged Star Destroyers at the tail end of the Fleet and most of the Interdictor Cruisers were destroyed. Gherant muttered a silent curse. The Rebel forces now outnumbered his, and most of their fragile TIE fighters had been destroyed in the explosion of the Death Star. This battle was no longer worth fighting. His Fleet had taken too much damage to be able to take on the remaining Rebel fleet and win. Commander Gherant ordered the fleet to halt, load all TIE fighters and standby to jump to Hyperspace. The more powerful navigational computers aboard the Executor calculated the easiest route out of the Endor system and fed the information to the other ships in the fleet.
Disappointingly, only a fraction of the Imperial Fleet jumped into hyperspace with the Executor; the rest jumped independently, fleeing as fast and as far as they could. An hour later, all the ships that could had hyperspaced away, leaving behind billions of fragments of debris and ship parts, millions of bodies and parts thereof, a few dozen stranded TIE fighters and five Star Destroyers. Aboard the Star Destroyer Eleemosynary Grand Admiral Teshik ordered his ships to stand fast against the illegally ordered retreat as the fleet was under his command now. He stared out the Bridge Viewport, his artificial eye in tracking mode, at the oncoming swarm of Rebel ships, which far outnumbered his own.