It takes hours.
And because of that, people keep trying to leave Jakku.
When the first ship lifts off, Kylo gives the order. "None of them leave. Fire at will."
He's on the bridge of what's left of the Supremacy, watching tiny explosions all over the planet, and above it. Above are small ships, junkers, pirates, thieves, running for their lives. Below… There were two hundred battering ram cannons in his arsenal. Getting them into position so he could fire them from orbit took effort, and not an insignificant amount of ingenuity from his engineers. They are, after all, designed to be placed on the ground and fired at a shielded target.
But, they could be roped into service, welded to some of his medium sized fighters, triggered from the air, and they are doing the job.
Slowly.
One explosion at a time.
The planet comes apart, slowly, too. Gravity tries to hold it together, the speed it's turning at tries to steal pieces away. The pressure inside causes molten rock to spew out, volcanos big enough to view from orbit. Eventually, it shakes apart, one chunk at a time, hurtling off into space.
Hux is standing next to him, hands clenched behind his back, eyes dark with lust. He's enjoying this, licking his lips, breathing hard. Kylo can feel that as soon as he's relieved from duty, he'll find a woman.
Kylo can also feel that, given free rein, Hux would do this all the time. He'd be blowing up planets just to show that he could. And when it got old… When it no longer thrilled him… Kylo's not sure what would come next, but he's also not worried about it. He'll kill Hux long before it's an issue.
Kylo's enjoying this, too. It's not sexual for him. There's no stiffening thrill to this. It's hate. Rage. Hot, sticky red, pulsing through him. The flashes of that night… nights… he got off of Rey pour through him, and they feed his anger, and the pulses below, each and every shot, slowly chiseling a planet to pieces makes him want to shout in triumph.
He stands there until there's nothing left but thousands of shards of rock, working their way into forming an asteroid field.
And when it's done, he turns his back on what used to be Jakku, and wonders how long it will take for Rey to find out.
"It will be even bigger, grander than Starkiller base! It will be able to destroy an entire galaxy in one press of a button."
Kylo's so bored he wants to cry, and this moron, speaking with glee in his eyes, and a sexual lust for death, is not helping the situation. (Why this is the engineer Hux sent to him is not a mystery to Kylo.)
"Could you, really?" Kylo asks, voice cold, using his command of the Force to make the man tell him the truth.
"Yes… My Lord… At least… We haven't, can't, test it, but the math suggests it would."
Kylo pulls him close, lifting him with the Force, adding just enough pressure to make it hard to breathe, not so much as to choke the man.
"What would be the point of destroying an entire galaxy?"
He's obviously never thought that through. Fear is pouring off of him, and he's unable to speak, but not from anything Kylo's doing to him.
"We're sitting in the middle of it, and even if we weren't, the gravitational effects of destroying an entire galaxy would ripple through the entire universe."
The Engineer blinks at him, too terrified to speak.
"Do you work alone?"
"No… My Lord," his fear is ripe, and he's about to mess himself.
Kylo nods. With one fast action, he snaps the man's neck and lets him drop to the floor. He spends a moment staring at the corpse on the floor, and then calls for Hux.
A few minutes later, Hux is before him, and a janitorial droid is removing the engineer.
"I take it he didn't have the answer you wanted?" Hux asks, glancing over as the droid drags the body out.
"He didn't have the answer anyone wanted. Bring me his partners. Tell them they're being invited to present their findings to me. Have them bring all of their notes."
"And then do what with them?" There's a gleam in Hux's eyes that Kylo doesn't like. The Mad Cur… maybe he meant Hux, maybe Snoke had meant Kylo, either would have worked. But right now, the Cur in question is Hux, and he looks interested in biting the hand that feeds him.
"I'll take care of them from there. I'll also need a fully supplied science ship, too."
Hux is interested in that, too. And Kylo doesn't mind if he thinks that he's using the Engineer's co-workers to build something he wasn't willing to. He also doesn't mind if Hux thinks that this is a team he can subvert to his own means. He'll find barren soil there if he tries.
"You have a meeting with our bankers in an hour," Hux adds.
"Of course I do." He nods, and Hux leaves.
He should spend that hour reading the reports their bankers have sent. They're, for the time being, willing to work with him. Apparently they aren't sure if he's better or worse for them than Snoke was. And, he's more than aware enough to know that if he doesn't make them feel safe, they'll turn on him and find his mother in a matter of hours. After all, they all know her from back in the day. When she was on the rise, they were more than happy to offer her all the credit she needed. And when she fell, they happily gave it all to Snoke.
As long as the credits move, as long as they get to trade with whomever and whatever they like, they'll back any player who looks like they can win.
And right now, that's him.
And if it ever isn't him, they'll stab him in the back.
He snorts a dry laugh. The same way he stabbed Snoke.
And for a moment, he thinks that it would be a relief. Fail badly enough, and all of this will be over.
The next Engineer is less of a disappointment. Likely, though, because Kylo has more of his own plan of what to do next.
"We went over the plans of the original Death Star, and the Starkiller base, and we've drawn up a—" The Engineer in front of him is calling up an image of a gargantuan, mega-planet-sized monstrosity designed to kill people by the billion.
"No," Kylo says.
"But, My Lord, this..." This Engineer is intelligent enough to stop speaking before Kylo raises a hand against him.
"The original Death Star was destroyed by an idiot with an X wing. The second Death Star was destroyed by a half dozen idiots with a flying piece of trash that only stays aloft because the Force wills it to. Starkiller was destroyed by four morons and a few explosives. Putting enough power in one place to destroy a whole planet or system in one shot makes for an immensely unstable platform where the tiniest little thing can take the whole system down. We are not doing this again."
"But… My Lord, there's no way to destroy a planet without a massive—"
"No. Smaller. I want something that can take a large city off a planet. Turn a hundred kilometers, square, to dust."
The Engineer nods. "We can do that."
"I want it small enough to fit on a fighter." He's seeing his battering ram cannons on fighters, knowing that's the seed for what has to come next.
He's thinking hard. "Doable, I think. Maybe a small bomber, but not bigger than that."
"Good. I want thousands of them. I want them on every dreadnaught. I want them on my destroyers. I want them to be legion."
The Engineer starts to get it as Kylo's speaking. "Hundreds of them per destroyer… Maybe it only takes twenty or thirty of them to hit… But if they hit at the right spots..."
Kylo nods. "Boil the oceans, and a planet is dead. Shoot for the weak spots, and it will crack. We don't need a weapon the size of a moon to kill a planet. We just need enough small ones to hit it hard."
Kylo looks at the floating green orb in front of him. He passes his hand through the hologram, and it vanishes.
"We built huge weapons and put massive targets on them. The Rebels and then Resistance could destroy them, because they could focus everything they had and attack one thing. And we couldn't fight them properly because they were so tiny and few. Now we go small. But we won't be tiny and few. An X wing could take out a Death Star, but no X wing, no matter how well-piloted, how lucky, how blessed by the Force, can take out a thousand other fighters."
The Engineer is grinning. "You don't fight ants with a blaster. You fight them with more ants."
"Exactly."
"I'll have plans for you, soon, My Lord."
"Excellent."
Soon is three weeks away. Not as fast as he would have liked, but, realistically, faster than he should have hoped.
Kylo looks over the plans. Then he smiles. "These are good."
His Engineer just about does a cartwheel he's so happy to hear that. "All we need now is a place to build them."
"I'll arrange for that. You may leave."
"Thank you, My Lord."
Hux watches the engineer leave. He rereads the plans. "The cost projections are high."
Kylo shrugs.
"The Xixnia system has the raw materials we'd need. They're peasant miners, non-human, barely scratching a living out of the planets. We could dominate them in seconds, and strip everything of value in weeks. That would drop your cost projections."
Kylo almost agrees to it without thinking. That's just how the First Order does business. Find a system, take what they need, destroy whatever they don't so someone else can't take it later. But he doesn't. Something stops him, for a heartbeat, and instead of an absent nod: "Split the difference. Bring in overseers, hire the locals, pay them well-enough. Less expensive than a core world, not as cheap as slave labor," comes out of his mouth.
Hux is perplexed by this. "Why bother? We can take more easily than we can pay."
Kylo's perplexed by that, too, but a reason comes to him easily enough. And once he's said it, he knows it's true. "Rebellions are born in slave camps, Armitage. Loyal subjects are made of well-treated, well-paid men."
"They aren't men. They're barely dogs."
"Then buying their loyalty will come cheap. Pet a dog's head, offer him a bone, he loves you forever, and he savages those who seek to harm you. Beat him, and eventually, he bites your hand."
Hux and Kylo share a long look, both of them thinking of Snoke.
Hux nods his head. "It will happen."
"Good."
