—Chapter 25: Madame Ren—

Hux needed privacy. The facility, now crawling with cloned stormtroopers, hummed with activity, and there were very few corners of the grounds that weren't occupied. Only two chambers still contained incubating clones—the rest were either heading to the armories, or were already armed to the teeth and standing by for deployment.

Chamber Eleven had been emptied some time ago, so it was in that general direction that Hux went to research his suspicions. Besides the beating of his own heart in his ears, the only noise Hux could make out was the hum of the equipment as he furtively entered an office along that hallway. In the neighboring chambers, the youngest clones were still developing—those that, as of this morning, had been rashly accelerated to the developmental equivalent of thirteen years old, but which had since been even more recklessly matured.

Checking the hallway both in front of and behind himself, Hux made sure he was alone before turning the door handle and stealing into the small control room. He closed the door all the way before releasing the handle, making sure to be as quiet as possible, and seated himself at the computer console. It didn't take long for it to boot up, and soon, Hux was accessing the relevant files.

Hux clicked on a folder labeled "Clone Development". Several subfolders appeared. One of them, "Batch Records", appeared to just contain information on the acceleration rates of given quantities of clones housed in particular facilities, organized by date of creation. There were currently records for only three batches, one of which continued to gestate in Chambers Eight, Ten, and Twelve, but the others already roamed the facility.

Hux already knew everything he needed to know about the development of those clones. Reckless. Irresponsible. Obtuse. He didn't read any further. Sharna Ren didn't concern herself with the gross physical and neurological risks associated with rushing the development of complex organisms. Such technological ignorance and lack of foresight infuriated Hux—he was sure it would bring about the end of the First Order if he couldn't regain control over the direction of its leadership.

Among the other subfolders he found: "Genetic Templates", "Technical Specifications", "Corporeal Analysis"... None of these folders held any interest for him. He was getting impatient.

Finally, something promising: "Conditioning Parameters". Hux was hopeful that the documentation therein would tell him what he wanted to know. He located the protocols with information on the desired mental traits and characteristics of the cloned stormtroopers. Among the complicated code, he found a prioritized list of dispositions:

1. Loyalty to the Supreme Leader

2. Loyalty to the First Order

3. Self-preservation

4. Disinclination toward personal weakness

5. Disinclination toward weakness in comrades

6. Default genetic inclinations resume, barring contradictions with above priorities

In any particular circumstance, the trooper's actions would be determined first by whatever best suited priority number one. Most of what Hux saw here was pretty boiler-plate stormtrooper, with one exception: Stormtroopers were supposed to prioritize loyalty to the First Order above all else—including their loyalty to the Supreme Leader in specific. In fact, Hux didn't recall anything about loyalty to the Supreme Leader being on this list at all. Weren't loyalty to the Supreme Leader and loyalty to the First Order supposed to be the same thing?

Well, not when it came to me and Kylo Ren, mused Hux. Still, that was the assumption that would have undergirded whatever decisions the programming team would have approved; the Supreme Leader's needs and those of the First Order were supposed to be one and the same, with few exceptions.

Huh… thought Hux.

Just then, sirens began blaring throughout the facility, red emergency lights flashing above the door, and visible through the office window into the hallway. Hux nearly jumped out of his skin at the shrill interruption, and he cursed in surprise.

Hux was just getting up to go see what the fuss was about, when he happened to glimpse a folder marked "Special Instructions". Dammit, if I'm going to do this, now's my only real opportunity, he thought, and he returned to his seat at the computer, ignoring the cacophony as best he could.

To his surprise, this folder was password-protected. With irritation, Hux hastily entered his administrative override password: HuxReignsSupreme.

Nothing.

Hux sneered. "Typical." He tried his password again, but still nothing. I don't believe it…

Sharna Ren had somehow locked him out. It had to be. Angrily, Hux shoved the chair away from the console and stood up, furiously cursing at the equipment. He was about to abandon his efforts and see to the alarms, but an idea came to him first.

With a last surge of desperation, Hux, standing over the keyboard, tried a different password: MadameRen.

Success.

He smirked. Hurriedly, he scanned through the information that had been programmed into the stormtroopers, looking to see just how much damage Sharna Ren had done in her short tenure as Supreme Leader. What he found wasn't surprising, but it was grim. Sharna Ren had made vast wholesale changes to the stormtrooper programming, paying little attention to the subtleties such conditioning required. She had used a battleaxe where a scalpel was required, and now those troopers were out there. Armed and ready for combat.

There was no question about it now. Armitage Hux was in big trouble. They all were.

—

When the alarm started going off, Sharna knew her moment had come. She had hoped to reel in her leash on General Hux before that happened, but he had apparently made himself scarce—none of the other officers knew where he'd gone, and he hadn't reported in anywhere. All of this caused her a modest amount of concern, but she was confident the safeguards she'd put in place would prevent him from getting away with anything too deleterious. She didn't exactly want him to die (he still had his uses), but if it came to that, oh well.

Prarathi and Lorim Ren had been instructed to guard Chambers One, Two and Three, where the bulk of the Corellian children were being housed. Sharna was headed downstairs on her way to the docking bay. Before her confrontation with Kylo Ren, she wanted to make sure she was surrounded by plenty of stormtroopers, and all but the last batch had finished in the armories. Her army had grown by six thousand in the span of just a few hours, and by the end of the day, that total would be nine thousand.

By the end of the week, if fresh embryos could be copied tomorrow, a conservative estimate would add another twelve thousand soldiers to her army's rosters. Damn, I hope we have enough munitions and armor ready for all the soldiers I have planned, she thought.

First things first, there were competitors for the throne out there who needed to be neutralized. Kylo was a troublesome foe indeed. Sharna's ace in the hole, however, lay strapped to her mobile prison, trailing just feet behind her, surrounded by two stormtrooper guards and Simeon Ren.

Sharna had never known Simeon to be much of a fighter, but he had never failed to return from his assignments with positive results. In spite of his terseness and lackluster bearing, he had at least performed his recent duties adequately, and appeared to accept her authority. In future, she would give all the interesting assignments to Prarathi and Lorim, but Simeon would make for a reliable servant. Someone good to keep near at hand. If his fighting skills should prove insufficient to the demands of his post, well, there were others who could fill that role.

Sharna Ren was excited, looking forward to the confrontation. Kylo Ren had been a formidable fighter in his time, but now she not only knew his weakness, she had that weakness incapacitated and at her mercy. Kylo Ren's feelings for the girl would leave him exposed. Sharna had always considered herself his equal, but now he would barely be a nuisance, even with the aid of whatever rabble he may have chosen to bring along.

This should be easy.

—

"That didn't take long," sighed Finn.

"Damn, it sure didn't," agreed Poe, wincing in response to the ear-splitting alarms thundering throughout the hangar. "Hopefully he won't be too much longer with this…"

"Yeah, preferably not. Luckily, I doubt they'll look for us here. I mean, they must know that only idiots would hide in the narrow aisles between pallet after pallet of high explosives…"

"Yeah, idiots," agreed Poe morosely. He looked up and down the wall of thermal detonators, then back at Ben, who had been mentally mapping the area scouring for Rey for about the last minute or so.

This was not their first choice of hiding place, but it was the first one they found. The wall of incendiary devices was quite expansive, but they'd managed to find a group of pallets with enough gapping between them that they could squeeze inside single file. They didn't love the idea of hiding behind the explosives, but the reality was that if any of them went off, they would all go off, and the entire hangar would be obliterated no matter where in it they happened to be hiding.

They just hoped the First Order gave them credit enough not to think they'd find them by peeking between the munitions.

From this cramped and volatile, but private space, Ben was able to focus long enough to look for Rey's specific signature. Whatever had been done to Rey had dimmed the radiance of her Force signature, and the white noise of all the other people around them made her a bit harder to locate. Picking her out of the crowd took a lot longer than it should have.

"Well, I found Rey, but she appears to be in the custody of two Knights of Ren and a couple other guards. Plus, there are literally thousands of stormtroopers swarming this place," lamented Ben. "I'm not sure how we're supposed to get around without being overtaken."

"You couldn't, like, use the Force on them or anything?" suggested Finn.

"You mean, like, tell them to all go jump in the ocean?"

"Hey, yeah!"

"Sorry, no."

Poe considered their situation. "Did she give any insight as to how we might spring her?" inquired Poe.

Ben shook his head dolefully. "She still doesn't respond when I try to talk to her."

Poe's consternation showed on his face. "So after all we did to get in here, there's no way to get to her without getting killed?"

"Well, there's some good news," offered Ben.

"Which is what?" asked Finn.

"They're coming to us."

—

Sharna Ren strode towards the docking bay through the open-air promenade between the two buildings. The weather on this island was terrible, as always seemed to be the case on Kamino, but she wanted to soak up some of the grandeur of the throng of silvery stormtroopers that stood at magnificent attention between the two buildings. Looking at them, she was reminded of a hall of mirrors—each individual was, quite literally, an exact copy of the one before it, and the impeccable sense of order each had been programmed to uphold demanded that their posture and spacing in their formation be perfectly identical from trooper to trooper.

It was glorious. Her armies would long be remembered for their perfect constitution and discipline. No leader before had achieved anything like this, and she would set the bar high for all who might follow.

Though the alarms themselves had gone silent after about a minute of total blaring after some patrols had failed to check in, red lights had continued to flash all around the compound, indicating that lockdown protocols remained in effect. When additional, new alarms began to sound, Sharna was just annoyed.

"Yes, there's an intruder, we get it already. You," she pointed at one of the two stormtroopers guiding the helpless Jedi, who immediately perked up at the attention. "See what that's about. If it's nothing new, tell them to shut it off. I can barely hear myself think with all this racket."

The stormtrooper nodded and surreptitiously got on his commlink, speaking low so as not to disturb his leader. Sharna proceeded to further admire her legions of soldiers as she sauntered casually alongside the rows of glistening chrome armor. Due to the wailing of the alarms, she didn't hear the scream of the starfighter until it was immediately overhead.

"Supreme Leader!" cried the stormtrooper. "Air raid, ma'am! Two frigates were spotted in local space and have deployed fighters! What are your orders?"

Sharna Ren didn't love the unexpected complication, but looked at it as an opportunity to really see what her new units could do. Projecting her metallic voice throughout the huge open space and into the minds of her legions of soldiers, she issued her first military orders as Supreme Leader:

"First Order soldiers! The moment has come for you to truly show the galaxy what becomes of those brazen enough to openly defy my rule! Take to the skies and blast them out of their puny ships! Don't let up until you have annihilated them all! Go!"

Of the several thousand stormtroopers that stood before her, most, but not all, turned immediately on their heels and headed for the hangar where the TIE fighters were parked. Then, a disturbing thing occurred. As other clones passed those who did not immediately turn and march toward the ships, vibroblades were activated, and the hesitating individuals were carved in half. Though her mask did well to hide her shock, Sharna's mouth literally hung open as she observed the units' actions.

Then she realized: insofar as their programming was concerned, this may be how her instructions prioritizing a "disinclination toward weakness" would manifest itself. Well, that's a bug I'll have to work out later, she thought dismally. Hopefully it wouldn't cost her too many units in the meantime.

The weirder thing to Sharna was actually something else entirely; this culling behavior could be explained by overzealous adherence to a boldly written program, but to her, what was harder to explain was why some of the units didn't immediately follow her orders in the first place. Loyalty to the Supreme Leader was job one, and she was the Supreme Leader. That much was simple.

Add that to the list of things that would require her attention later.

With a sigh, Sharna Ren proceeded toward the hangar interior, stepping over dead clones as she went. The spacious docking bay, once it was emptied of all of its TIE fighters, would be as a good a place as any for her showdown with Kylo.