5/26/2

Kylo and Schiff have a standing weekly debrief. It's tomorrow, in the morning, and to say that Schiff is worried when he has Kylo on his comm asking for an earlier meeting is an understatement. What can't wait until tomorrow?

As of this point in time, nothing good has come from Kylo deciding he needed to chat ahead of schedule.

"You can bring Thea, if you like," Kylo adds, hoping to ease the worry, and also get an idea of what she might know about this stuff. After all, if she's the 'bright boys' who finds the gold in the data, it might be useful to have her looking through what's likely to be reams of information.

It's true Kylo doesn't know absolutely everything about the Empire, but he does know they kept records about everything. And apparently, she's the one who's good with records, so...

"Is this… a social call?" Schiff asks, completely off foot, and not even remotely relaxed by that. Now he's starting to wonder if Kylo's getting some idiot idea about easing him out with a quiet dinner and dropping hints about retirement.

Kylo, taking a moment to answer that, very aware of the fact that everything he says outside the bubble of his own rooms, is likely recorded and heard, says, "It's a history lesson, and maybe some advice."

Schiff gets that whatever it is, Kylo doesn't want to talk about it on an open comm. Which makes him more nervous, but history lesson at least tells him it's not about sending him onto greener pastures, so it's nervous that he's less worried about. "We are available at your pleasure, Master."

"Thank you, Grand Admiral. Tonight, supper time?"

"Certainly. I'll let Thea know."

Just a nice dinner between a leader and his second-in-command. Officially, that's Schiff's rank. Kylo's fairly sure that if something were to actually knock him out for good, Schiff and Kinear would split it between them, and probably install Jon and or Rey to be the young, attractive, presentable face of the Order.

But, on the org chart, it's him, and then Schiff.

So, they might have dinner together, with their wives. Why not? (Actually, why the fuck not? They probably should do things like this.) Rey smirks at him as he's thinking that, feeling like they should be doing something, but… He told C8 that he'd like to have dinner with the Schiffs and now there's a very nicely laid table, with food on it, overlooking the courtyard, so…

Nothing for them to do but stand around and wait. "We should cook next time," Kylo says.

"You want to cook for other people?"

He shrugs a bit. He might like that. "It'd be something to do while we wait." He definitely wants that.

She nods at that. "True…" He's sort of just walking around the table. "You're nervous."

"I know."

"Maybe… figuring out why?" She gives him a look, indicating that that's probably why he's feeling so off, and cooking would only be a distraction.

"I know why, too." I want to be distracted.

She looks at him. Talk about it. It'll probably help.

He stops pacing, and says, "Okay. Possibility one: Hux is just wrong. Fine. That can happen. Anyone can be legitimately wrong when given a collection of facts. Sometimes you put two and two together and you honestly think the answer is five. Possibility two: Hux is wrong, but he's lying. Why? What is he trying to set up? What's in his rooms that he'd throw that at me to keep me off of it?"

"Well, that you can find the answer to fairly easily," Rey says with a knowing look.

Kylo sighs. Because he can. It'd take him all of a minute and a half to get back there and start tearing through everything. "Except for possibility three: Hux is right. In which case he gave me something valuable, and I don't want to burn the exceedingly fragile bridge that we might have, because…"

"Because…"

"Because if he's right then… I don't… It just feels like if he's right, then he also matters to this somehow."

Rey inclines her head. "Fair enough. Takes a ghost to fight a ghost, maybe?"

That gets another sigh. "You'd think I'd have enough of the boogers I wouldn't need Hux, but… If there's one thing Sno—patine wouldn't expect, it's a fucking shade of Hux to pop up." If he's out there, he's probably trying to line up another go at Luke.

Maybe. You want me to seek out Luke, see what he knows.

Kylo blinks at that. Not yet.

"There is that." Rey says out loud. "And… well, if there's such a thing as a weapon you could use against a ghost…"

He inclines his head a bit. "Maybe. I don't know how much of the tech he handled himself versus how much of the tech he understood and was able to say, 'Make it do whatever,' and had other people make it do whatever. Sort of what I did with ships. I couldn't design one from scratch, but I certainly knew what it needed to do to work better. I know Hux had the idea for Starkiller, I know he knew enough about the Death Stars to see ways to make them better and more dangerous, but I don't think he engineered any of the main pieces of it."

She rests her hands on his. "Good reasons to be nervous."

"Yeah, that's the Hux side of it. And if he's right… So, where has the bastard been the last two years? Is he really dead? How'd he survive the first time? Is there a lab somewhere with a bunch of other clones in it? Two labs? A thousand labs? And if he's not dead, how do you get rid of something that keeps coming back from the beyond? How is he… possessing bodies? I mean, that was not in any of the 'how to use the Force' books I remember."

"You weren't reading Sith books."

"Yeah… Oh, here's more fun, what happened to Palpatine's things? Were they on the Death Star? Where was his library? Gods alone knows what might be in it, if it could be found."

"Ellie and Mirina might have an angle on that."

Kylo looks interested.

"Palpatine's second mistress. They helped her fake her death, and I think she's been quietly off living under the scanners ever since."

He blinks. "C8—"

This whole time the droid has been unobtrusively standing near the table, waiting for someone to need something he could fetch. "Already on your list of notes, sir. I've also sent private communiques to Ladies Kinear and Frakes to get them working on that angle."

"Thank you. Probably a good idea to hunt her down to chat at some point, no matter what."

Rey's got the sense that that might end up being her job.

They both hear the lift settle, and then open, and for a moment Kylo's struck by something being off, that he can't immediately place.

And then he can. Schiff and Thea are in their casual, at home, just being people clothing. He's never seen Schiff out of his uniform, never so much as guessed that such a thing could happen. But… Right. These are people, with lives, and interests, and… worlds outside the reaches of the Order.

Thea's got a wide smile on her face, and she looks to her husband while she says, "I think you just melted their minds, dear."

Kylo looks a little sheepish at that.

Rey smiles. "Are you hungry?"

"Enough," Thea replies. "Dinner can be… variable, so lunch is always our main meal. But I have a feeling we're here more for company than because you wanted two extra mouths to feed."

Kylo snaps into action. "The company is especially welcome, yes." He sort of looks around at the table, realizing he still doesn't exactly know how to handle dinner with company. "Uh… We don't do this much. Normally we just sit down and eat."

"Then we'll sit down and eat, too," Josh says.

He and Thea join Kylo and Rey at the table, and Josh pulls out the chair for his wife. Kylo follows along, because that appears to be polite behavior here.

"Well," Josh asks, once everyone has a drink, and food on plates. "I have the feeling you had something specific in mind, and now that we're here in the part of the ship where you know you control who listens…"

Kylo nods at that. He takes a sip of his drink, and commits to letting the secret out. "When you joined us at the high command, you were backing Hux for Supreme Leader."

Schiff looks disturbed by that sentence. Not that Kylo knew it. He's said it to him before. He's disturbed because Kylo's apparently bringing it up after visiting Hux's chambers.

"Is there a question there," Schiff hedges, taking a sip of his drink.

"What did you think of him?"

He's definitely got Josh off foot, and Thea's certainly wondering where this is going, too. It doesn't feel bad or dangerous, but it's decidedly off.

"Didn't you work with him for almost a decade?" Thea asks.

"Yes, and I know what I thought of him. I want to know what someone who's actual professional military thought of him."

Schiff considers that. Kylo's fishing for something, but he doesn't know what. "What do you really want to know?"

Kylo feels Rey's hand on his knee, just a little touch, and it does help to diffuse the part of him that's annoyed that Schiff isn't just answering his questions. It's clear Schiff's trying to find the angles, so he can package his answers and… Manage the situation. He's trying to get himself into proper officer position, in charge and making the decisions. He doesn't like being the underling, in the dark.

"I'm asking what I really want to know, right now. You want me to make it make sense for you, and I will, but I want your opinion on Hux, first."

Schiff's not enjoying the game, but he'll play. "In Snoke's position, I'd have made him the next Orson Krennic."

Kylo doesn't know that name. He feels like he might have heard it once, but it's such a faint memory it's barely there. Rey knows she's never run across it.

"Galen Erso?" Thea asks, knowing Kylo mentioned him in their interview.

"I know who he is."

"Just about everyone did," Thea says.

"Krennic ran the Death Star project," Josh continues. "He had basically unlimited funding, and answered directly to Darth Vader or the Emperor in how he ran the weapons development department. He wasn't the tech genius Erso was, but he had the big picture, and enough tech to understand how to put the big picture together. If you'd put me in charge and dropped Lt. Hux into my lap, the first thing I'd have done is shot his father, and the second thing would have been to put him in my research and development department."

"Why shoot his father?" Rey asks.

"Because the man was filth. In the days of the Empire, he wasn't high enough up to notice, but by the time Lt. Hux was on the rise, his father was a pet of Snoke. If Josh gets to pick where Armitage went, he likely has discretion over Brendol, as well," Thea says.

"We've talked about this before," Josh adds. "Hux Sr. broke men. Like… animals. You hurt an animal enough and it'll eventually obey whatever you tell it to do, or it'll die rebelling. That's what he did to people, too. The reports on Hux Jr. indicate that Senior used him to test out some of his more advanced techniques and… There was obviously a brilliant mind there, one with great will power, exceptional organizational skills, rigid determination, and between Hux Sr. and Snoke, they probably wasted the best weapons designer this galaxy has ever seen."

Kylo and Rey think about that, and Kylo adds in his head to Rey, This is the sort of thing he was talking about how good officers work. They understand their men and use them properly.

Schiff continues, "Given proper funding and resources Hux could have armed more than just one mega weapon. You know, Kylo, you inherited the mess, we had Starkiller, we had The Supremacy and the rest of our fleet was in fairly sad condition. He certainly sent out the reports for how and why to spiff things, up, but… He could get Snoke to go along with Starkiller, because he loved massively fucking stupid weapons-"

"And massively fucking stupid ships…" Thea adds, clearly thinking of The Supremacy.

"And massively fucking stupid ships. That man never understood the idea of smaller. But Hux found any possible way to kill people interesting, and if you know how to harness a man like that, he's immensely valuable."

"But not a tactical command?" Rey asks. "If he was good at…" she gestures, meaning all of Armitage Hux's strengths.

"No, not tactical. Armitage may have always been… off. It's… likely, having known his father, that he was just born… wrong. Some people just… no empathy at all. Probably the best way to put it. Other sentients are tools to be used or toys to play with. But, if he wasn't always off, his time with Brendol certainly shaped him in that direction. There might have been a time when he was a good tactical thinker, at least in battle terms… He…" Josh is picking his words carefully, mostly because these are a collection of feelings he's never tried to put into words. After all, this isn't the sort of thing you'd put into a report, so he's never tried to verbalize them.

"Part of why we backed him was that he'd be predictable and we were fairly sure we could kill him, especially with Phasma out of the equation. We didn't have those advantages with you. That said, he was enough of a tactical thinker to take a lot of me and mine out, and we are not bad at this game."

"So, by tactics you don't mean bad at strategy," Rey says.

"Bad at seeing the how and why we fight," Josh takes a sip of his drink, and a bite of supper. "This is good," it almost looks like he's not really aware that he's said that, that it's just part of talking with people who are feeding you. However it worked, he's back on Hux, fast, "He enjoyed killing people too much. The whole has to survive, which means there's got to be a whole left to survive. That was the part of being an officer he didn't seem to understand. The other part is, why are we fighting in the first place? If the answer is: to kill all the fuckers who aren't us, you've got no business being an officer, either. Unfortunately, he had both of those issues."

"Have you heard of a Tyrrich victory?" Thea asks. She waits a beat while both Rey and Kylo shake their head.

"No reason why you would have, neither of you were formally trained military thinkers," Josh adds.

"General Jamie Tyrrich of Grandlaia Prime, he got himself embroiled in a war that no one remembers except for this bit: He won the battles, but he won useless battles and lost so many of his own men and material, he lost the damn war because there were no forces left after the last battle. A third party swooped in and took him and his opponent out," Thea says.

"Hux and Snoke take out the New Republic and the Resistance, and lose everything when Kylo pops up and takes over?" Rey asks.

"A lot like that," Josh says. "Though, technically, that's a coup."

"Why did the First Order conquer all of those planets?" It's a rhetorical question, from Kylo, and they understand that. "Snoke didn't do much of anything with them. Beat them to a pulp, and then took anything valuable, and moved on, used the valuable stuff to blow up more planets, and…"

"Right," Thea replies. "There was no reason, no good reason, to blow up the New Republic. They weren't even officially at war with us, and our people in the senate—"

"You had people in the Senate?" Rey asks.

"Of course. Not officially," Josh says. "But we had close to a thousand working the different angles, making sure the right people voted the right ways. There's a reason why we weren't officially at war. Why your mum couldn't get enough to go along to arm against us."

Neither Rey nor Kylo had known that.

"So, there was no real point to firing on them. There was time to build up, solidify, and actually rule our territory. Do like you are now, trade, grow strong, make people actually benefit from our rule, then if Snoke was going to be so hot to fight, go after the New Republic," Thea says.

"And then Hux is there, with his weapon, quivering to use it, and… To a degree, it's worked out. We're able to be here and be doing this because what's left of the New Republic isn't in a position to go after us. But, if you'd taken out Snoke with the New Republic in place, we likely could have gotten a functional peace agreement up and running if we kept to our territory," Josh says. "A weapon like Starkiller sitting in the background makes sure no one attacks you. You have time and freedom to do your own thing, because the reprisal you can bring is so strong no one in their right mind will hit you."

"And that's the kind of deal Hux couldn't understand or desire?" Rey says.

Josh nods. "Yeah. It didn't seem like he could stand leaving anything he considered an enemy alive. Probably because anything that might have been an enemy bit him, and hard. Hell, from what we know, everyone who was his friend bit him, too."

Thea smirks a bit at that. "Literally, if not figuratively."

Kylo remembers Hux saying to him You didn't know. And he wonders, how much of the image of those bruises was just for show, or was it something they liked that also worked well for building an image…

"But he was a good planner, good tactician if what you wanted was a pile of dead people, good… bureaucrat?" Kylo says, instead of his deeper musings.

"Yes. I mean, I assume you killed him because he was going to murder you, not because he was bad at his job," Josh says, like they're discussing the potatoes on his plate and not Kylo running a man through with his lightsaber.

"Yes. And I didn't like him, and…" Kylo fiddles with his cup for a moment. He can feel the shape of something, but… It's… like seeing a black hole too far away to focus on. Something is there, something shifting things, something… "Did he have cyanide tubes in The Finalizer?"

"Gods, that fucking maniac." Josh still feels cold when he thinks of what they found in the air processing systems. "No. Just the Supremacy. Trust me, after we found them, I immediately ordered a full audit of every system we've got. So far, no new surprises have turned up, but who knows what else the fucker may have hidden."

"There's something," Kylo says. He knows that's important. He doesn't know why, not yet, though. He can feel Rey turning ideas over in her mind, aware of the same shape he's feeling.

"You want to tell me why you're asking?" Josh asks.

"You absolutely won't like it," Kylo replies.

"I run into things I don't like every day. What's one more?"

"You know I visited his rooms?"

Schiff nods.

Kylo rolls his eyes. He almost asks how he was tracked, and then realizes that his handprint will open any door in this fleet. And his handprint likely sends a report to Schiff and Kinear and anyone else bright enough to hack the system to get that information.

"What did you find," Schiff asks.

He could lie, or hedge, leave out the whole ghost aspect, but… Hux wouldn't just leave information like that out to be found, so… "Him."

Schiff looks horrified. Thea doesn't. But she comes from a world where ghosts are real, and Schiff, for all his years of working for and by Force users… He doesn't. "He's… you killed him."

"Oh, I killed him, all right. That's done very little to get rid of him though. I've been seeing his ghost since… A week? Two? Not long after he died."

Schiff blinks very slowly. He takes a deep sip of his drink, but it's just fizzy juice. Not what he's hoping for.

"Hux has been haunting you?" Thea asks.

"Well, I'll admit that for quite a while I wasn't sure if he was real or if I was just imagining him."

He sees Schiff shift a bit, press something on his cuff, and shift again.

"Did you just turn off your personal recording device?" Rey asks.

"Yes, and erased the last twenty minutes. So… Ghost Hux has you… wondering… something?" His voice is strained, and he looks very much like he wants to dump at least three shots of whatever lives in that little flask inside his jacket into his cup of juice. "You're right. I don't like this on an entirely new and more intense level of not liking than I usually do."

Kylo nods. "And, I'm fully aware of how insane this sounds, but… I mean… Death isn't… exactly the same for me as it is for everyone else."

"I know, but… I thought… Don't you have to be a Jedi or something to leave a ghost?" Though he's looking at his wife as he says it.

Rey shrugs.

Thea's shaking her head, no. "Just a lot of tenacity. And that was Hux."

"I always thought it worked that way," Kylo says. "I mean… We'd sometimes get ghosts at Luke's school, so it's… normal for me. But they were all Jedi masters, so… That's part of why I wasn't sure about Hux, at first."

And then you saw your father? Rey thinks. Kylo hadn't mentioned that he thought he might have been imagining Hux at first.

Yeah. I figure if he's back, Hux could be, too.

"And what's Ghost Hux saying that's got you talking to us?" Thea asks.

"Something you're going to like even less than Ghost Hux."

Schiff does take his flask out and doctors his juice, and pours a shot into Thea's as well. He tilts the silver ovoid toward Kylo, who shakes his head, and Rey, who likewise declines.

Then both Schiffs stare at Kylo, waiting for him to go on.

"We were talking about Snoke—"

"What had you thinking about him?" Thea asks.

"Personal stuff," Kylo shakes his head. He's not about to get into his current musing of how much of himself is him versus everyone around him. Let alone how he sometimes… misses… that's probably the word, Phasma, and he just wondered what had happened to her.

"You discuss personal stuff with Hux?" Schiff's still trying to get a feel for this relationship.

"Rarely, but…" He understood… understands… what it was to be Snoke's toy in a way you don't. And again Rey squeezes his knee. There are some experiences that can only be shared, not talked about. "We were. He told me that at one point he'd gotten a hold of some of Snoke's DNA, and that he was a clone."

Schiff's lips press into a thin, white, bloodless line. Thea's eyes go wide. They've got the implications of that a lot faster than Kylo did. He nods, once. "Why ask me what I thought of Hux, then? Shouldn't you be asking about the Emperor?"

"I intend to do that, too. But, unless I've deeply misunderstood what we do with bodies here, I'm in a situation where I can't verify what Hux told me. I could possibly locate his reports, but… They're his. If he's lying to me about it—"

"Yes, he's enough of a tactician to have made sure that he'll have the backup documents, and then some." Schiff rubs his forehead. "I guess, on Hux, the first two questions are what are the upside of him lying, or telling the truth?"

"If it's any help, he didn't mention it until I had told him something about Snoke. That Snoke wasn't interested in me, not as me, but as a way to get revenge on Luke Skywalker. That… slipped the last piece of the puzzle into place for him, and he told me his theory that Snoke was some sort of meat puppet for Palpatine."

Schiff sighs long and deep. "Fuck," he says it quietly. He drums his fingers a bit, thinking. "I'll admit, I don't immediately see an up or downside to him lying about this. Can't see a reason to make this up. Especially since he's not exactly, well… In a position to do much. I can see reasons for him to not mention it if it's true… I mean… He still doesn't like you, correct?"

"He still hates me. It's not like we… parted on good terms," Kylo's voice is dry, but there's enough of a joke there to get a smile out of Thea.

Schiff's still thinking through the angles. "I can completely see how, if he thinks this is true, that he wouldn't mention it. Just let the bastard pop back up again and take us all out, but… Oh. He hates Snoke even more than he hates you, correct?"

"And likely thinks he needs another Force user to fight him appropriately," Rey adds.

"That works. He'd turn anything into a weapon if he needed one, so he'd have no compunction against turning you into one if he could," Schiff says.

"Not much turning needed there. Not exactly like I'm some soft, gentle pacifist who's never held a weapon," Kylo says.

"Good point." Another deep drink as Schiff thinks. "If the bastard was Palpatine… How'd he do it in the first place, and is he still out there, or did you somehow manage to actually kill him?"

"That was the crux of it. How did you find him in the first place?" Rey asks.

Why the Schiffs are here is now very apparent. He's the first of the Imperials who went in with Snoke on any major scale. If anyone knows…

"When the second Death Star went, I knew we were fucked. Getting that thing up and moving was… fucking stupid. Again, big, stupid weapon. We were stripping systems right and left to get the material up to build it, and putting way too many men and hours into it. The Navy of the Empire was hurting by that point. We'd been shorting men and material for years and that's… Well, exactly what you ran into here.

"I mean, what the fuck were we going to fight with a Death Star? The Rebellion won every bloody time we fired the damn thing, and it wasn't like we could take them out with it. But we could have gotten a five-billion-person army up with those kind of resources. Could have had people on every bloody planet we wanted to control. Could have…

"Again, you're seeing it with what you're doing now. You win against a fucking rebellion by being good enough at the job of running things that people don't want to rebel. If we'd had people on the ground and in the skies, keeping goods running and food in mouths and crime down…"

"People like security and order," Thea says. "They may not love the idea of being ruled but if you do it right, you keep rebels to the edges, and use them to make yourself more secure. But instead of doing that, we ended up with a second DeathStar." She shakes her head at the idiocy.

Josh adds, "Tying up those sorts of resources is a logistical nightmare.

"And them, boom! Number two is gone, the old bat was last seen on it, and I got me and mine out. At first, I was thinking we'd regroup, and then go after the Rebellion. Name myself Emperor. If anyone was in position to do it, I was… but… wiser heads prevailed."

"Thea told you not to be a twit?" Kylo asks.

Thea's smiling at him, looking very pleased with him, and Schiff, who gives her an affectionate pat, says, "In almost those exact words. She was still planet side and could see how fast things were changing. It was convenient to blame every bad thing of the last twenty years on the Empire, and the blame was flying, fast."

"You obviously don't remember the first few years after the Death Star, and you weren't born, yet, and my guess is no one told either of you too much about it, but… Outside of Coruscant and a scattering of other core worlds, there weren't enough Imperial troops to really matter. But, when the Empire was at its height, they didn't need people on every planet every day. Get an insurrection somewhere, and two days later ten thousand troopers could land, crush it flat, stick around for a bit, and then move again.

"But once the Second Death Star went, the Imperial Command that was in charge of moving troops around to do stuff like that went, too. So, all of these tiny outposts of maybe two hundred men were left to their own devices. A lot of them did not make it out. A mob can take out a military fortification if reinforcements aren't coming," Thea finishes.

"I got as many of them out as I could," Schiff says. "For six months we hopped around grabbing people, including Thea and our family. And once she and more of what was left of the Empire joined me, and we scooted for the uncharted regions. I got my start in the Republic's Exploration and Cartography division as a navigator, so I had some tricks up my sleeve, and used them."

"Didn't hurt that you knew which charts to delete from the official records," Thea adds.

"Really didn't. Once I had my my kit up and going, what was left of the Empire had extremely edited charts. And it also didn't hurt that most of the people who'd been part of the exploration division were with me on the trip, not tracking me."

"My Dad said he couldn't catch you guys because you knew the territory better, and didn't care if you paid for supplies."

"That was the idea," Schiff nods. "The man who can live off the land more efficiently wins the chase. I was going to win and that was that. We were still getting news. We saw what was happening to Imperials…" He takes another sip. "I had four million men under my command at that point. A lot of whom followed orders. The kind of orders that got you killed if you didn't follow them. And then the New Republic was killing people for following them and… Not on my watch. They were good soldiers, and they weren't going to die for doing their jobs, not just because the regime changed."

Kylo can feel Finn's words. You bought your life for too high a price. He decides not to think about that right now. "How long were you out there before you found Snoke?"

"Three years. It's called The Uncharted Region, but that's not strictly true. That's part of what I was doing for the Republic, charting away. But there are charts and there are charts, and this was… 'The not-very-well-charted region.'"

"The, 'You can't use hyperspeed because that planet's right in your path and no one noticed it, yet,' region," Thea adds.

Schiff nods. "Exactly. I know the terrain better, and I have faster ships, and I can carry more fuel, and I have enough navigators to keep moving 'round the clock."

"Did you have a destination?" Rey asks.

Kylo didn't think of that question, but he can see how important it is, and he can also see how it's got Schiff thinking.

"Yes. But as I was getting closer, I began to notice that everywhere I intended to gather supplies was cleaned out." Another sigh. Kylo can feel Schiff realizing how much this would make sense if the Emperor were running things.

"Like someone who had access to your charts was moving around?" Kylo asks.

"Or like someone who had access to my charts had been using that area for a while. We began to run into ships that looked a lot like our own. A few times I was hailing what I thought were parts of my own navy before they started shooting at us."

Kylo sighs. "When you were charting, did you know about Snoke?"

"Not then. I don't remember mentions of him. But we also weren't exactly chatting up the locals. We were mostly just flying by, marking what we were finding and where it was. Too much territory, not enough resources. We didn't have the ability to really stop anywhere and get the feel of the place."

Kylo can understand that.

"So, you first learned about Snoke when you were in the Uncharted Regions after the war," Rey asks.

"I feel like that has to be true, but it also isn't. I…" Schiff looks angry. "But I would, wouldn't I? He could just wave his fucking hand, 'You've heard rumors of me before. I've been around forever' and boom, I'd believe it, wouldn't I? Wouldn't even have to be me, just do it to some underlings and let it spread…"

"Concretely, the first time I can remember us talking about Snoke, was when he'd actually gotten into a fire fight with a few ships that looked so much like Imperial cruisers that he had to call off the attack because he didn't know who he was hitting," Thea says.

"The first few times, I legitimately thought I was going against another Admiral, but best I knew we were all accounted for, one way or another. Still, not like faking dead is that hard, not in a war. Not when the entire high command blew up one day," Schiff says.

He eats another bite. "I guess it was two years in, and the same playbook I was using against your Dad and the rest of the New Republic hunting me was being turned on me. Suddenly, I'm the one who doesn't know the territory as well, and I can't live off of it, and… We did it for a year."

Thea squeezes his hand. "We hit the point of either go back to New Republic space and take the war criminal labels, or see if Snoke would ally. We had more ships than he did, but he had the resources to keep them flying."

Schiff looks from Kylo to Rey, very aware that both of them were raised on the New Republic side of things. "The whole has to survive. That's the job. Right or wrong, you keep your people alive. My enlisted were looking at, at best, years on Caldonia for war crimes. My officers were looking at execution for war crimes. We followed orders. And maybe we shouldn't have, but…

"They were my men, and I was going to get them through. So, I sought terms with Snoke, and bought our lives with an alliance."

"Pat went to the Republic," Rey half says, and half asks.

"Pat was a regional governor at that point," Thea says. "The hottest thing he got involved in was offering support when Tarkin's command came in looking for your General Threepio. Even the New Republic wouldn't convict a man for following the orders of a duly elected government he was sworn to uphold if those orders didn't involve 'war crimes.' Which isn't to say they didn't try. Jury of two hundred and one, and one hundred and three voted to acquit."

"That was part of his plan, get as far away as possible, and then send in glowing reports. As soon as the First Order began creeping back into the charted regions, I ripped that play right out of his book and began using it. There's a reason, beyond the fact that Snoke never really wanted me too damn close, that I made sure I was out in the middle of nowhere."

Kylo nods. "You were… fourteen days out when you rejoined the high command?"

"Something like that," Schiff says.

"So, Snoke didn't want you too close?" Rey asks.

"We met a few times in person, but after that, he was content to keep me away and send me the occasional order. I was happy to move away from him, too. There was a good decade there where I wasn't so much part of his command as more near it."

"We didn't attack them, they didn't attack us, and Josh basically carved out his own territory in the Uncharted Region," Thea says.

"Why not just stay there?" Rey says.

"Four million men was getting close to five million at that point, and a lot of them wanted to go home. As much home as home was left by that point. And the Uncharted Regions weren't home. We couldn't blend there. Humans are not the dominant species out there."

"We were surviving, but not really living," Schiff says. "So, when Snoke began to make his moves on the Rim, we went for it. It was time to retake what was ours."

"Did you wonder why he wanted… well… New Republic territory?" Rey asks.

Thea and Josh share a look. Thea's the one who says it, "If you've ever been in the Uncharted regions, you very quickly come to the conclusion that there's a reason why no one's ever bothered to spend much time there. It's… Oh… You're from Jakku."

Rey nods.

"Jakku would have been an industrial paradise compared to a lot of the places in the Uncharted Regions. There had to be… Well, more… out there. Obviously Snoke got someone to build him ships, too. But we never found it."

"A big part of why it's uncharted is that a lot of the local populations are not space-going, yet. Part of why fuel is so important out there. If you can't condense your own crystals, and you fuck your hyperspeed calculation, it's possible to find yourself literally a million light years from the nearest person who could have sold you fuel."

"One-way trip," Thea says.

"Did you know the Emperor?" Rey asks.

"Not the way Ellie did," Josh replies.

"I think that's a fair answer for pretty much anyone who wasn't whispering secrets with his lover," Kylo replies. "You know what Rey was asking."

"I wasn't part of his intimate circle. I hit flag rank after the First Death Star, and only had a few years of reporting directly to him. I don't think he much liked me, but after the First Death Star he was low on men who could take an Admiral's command and not fuck it up, so that was that."

"Did Snoke… feel like him? Act like him?" Kylo asks.

Schiff takes a deep breath, and another drink, before saying, "Kylo, I don't know what… other Force users feel like to you. I know both the Emperor and Snoke made me feel nauseous and jittery. They set off my run/fight reaction. I assumed at the time that that was just being near someone with immense power I couldn't defend against or understand."

"Do you feel that way around me?" Rey asks.

"No," Schiff replies. "But I used to feel that way around him," he nods to Kylo.

"When did it stop?" Kylo asks.

Schiff takes a moment trying to figure that out. "I think it was gradual. I don't remember it just switching off. I do remember Pat saying that if we approached you like we were genuinely interested in you succeeding and that we were here to make that happen, that you'd take it well. I know I tried that. I actively shifted how I was thinking and feeling at our next meeting, and the one after that you were telling me that I could start looking for planets we might be able to get alliances with."

Kylo nods. He remembers that. The claws of Snoke… Palpatine… didn't all release from his mind at once. He had to… rebalance himself.

Shit.

Kylo?

What was the first thing you said to me after Crait?

Rey thinks, remembers, and almost says out loud, Shit.

Yeah.

Snoke is dead. You shouldn't be here. They're both hearing her words to Kylo after the battle of Crait when he'd appeared before her. If he hadn't been lying about bridging their minds, the bridge not collapsing might be a very good sign the bastard is still out there somewhere.

Thea can see them thinking to each other, and takes a few bites, waiting for them to get done, and then says, "They used language in very similar ways." She gestures to the ship. "Obviously, very similar aesthetic sense."

"Different goals?" Rey asks. "I mean… The Emperor wanted… something, right? An Empire. Mirina and Ellie talk about him going insane."

Thea and Schiff think about that for a few moments.

"It's a good question, Rey," Thea says. "If Palpatine became Snoke… Then Snoke would be starting off a few years past where Palpatine had gone 'round the bend."

"Do you think the physical body would effect the mind?" Schiff asks. "Given what was going on with Snoke's body, it's likely the brain may not have been in excellent shape."

"What was going on with his body?" Kylo asks. "Hux's best bet was he was a clone forced to mature too fast, and that caused the mutations."

Thea's the one really thinking about that. "That's… an intriguing possibility. Pat's the one who knows more about clones. He was a trainer for the Clone Army, so he actually worked with a lot of them."

"Why did the Empire stop using clones?" Rey asks.

"Expensive," Schiff says. "Regular humans are fairly easy to get. It takes twenty years to get them properly grown and trained, but you can generally find them all over the place. The clones took ten years to mature, but they were very expensive, and… look, you give Pat a legion of Clones, and he'll take over the bloody galaxy. They were exceptional warriors. But without a good leader, they were just extremely expensive cannon fodder, and they got used for cannon fodder a lot."

"Hux Senior," Thea says. "He found a much less expensive way to turn humans into clones. Cannon fodder clones. Kidnapping babies is a lot cheaper than splicing DNA into empty egg cells and culturing them into zygotes and from there into babies and people. With the clones, maybe one out of hundred was defective, and with the Hux method it was closer to 20%, but children are cheap, and clones aren't, so…"

"He was just starting to put his methods into play when the Empire fell, and by the time I was fully on board with Snoke, he was a General in charge of 'recruitment and trainee development.'"

"That should have been a hint," Thea says. "Who else was there? A few of the designers… Some of the weapon's men…"

Schiff is nodding. "The ones who weren't stationed on the Second Death Star. He liked big, stupid weapons, but he always had some people in reserve. There were a few munition dumps and ship yards, off the official books. I raided them on the way out. Most people, even of my rank, didn't know about them, but Thea could read the numbers, and knew credits were seeping out in big enough numbers that something else had to be out there."

"Just had to follow the accounts, and there they were," she says.

"Could you do that again? Go looking through the numbers, find what might be hidden in the Uncharted Regions?" Rey asks.

"I'd need new numbers. I had access to everything that the Emperor put down, and he kept a lot of records."

"Off-the-books," Kylo says. "But he liked records. Would he have really had off-the-books stuff?"

Schiff sighs. "It'd be out of character, but not impossible. But it doesn't matter if he had it on-the-books if the books were physical and the only copies went with him to the Death Star. He might have somehow gotten out with his magic, I doubt his record keeping did."

"Well…" Thea says, thinking… staring at Kylo. "You'd also want to know how he survived, how he got out of his body, the Force stuff, right?"

"Among other things," Kylo says.

Schiff knows where Thea's going with this. "He wasn't much of a record keeper."

"I know, but… Do you have a better idea?"

"No."

Before Kylo can ask, he says, "Mustafar. Vader's home. Gods alone know what you'll find there."

"That's part of it. The other part, and you'll have to forgive the fact that this feels like the universe trying to spite you, but New Alderaan," Thea says. "Before it was New Alderaan, it was Glendivia IV, and it was the Emperor's pleasure palace. For all I know, they razed his home and lands, but…"

"Naboo," Schiff adds. "He had a home on Naboo and one on Coruscant. I know the Coruscant building was raised. Nothing is left of it. I don't know about the Naboo one."

Kylo doesn't know what to do with that. It's so much, all at once, and he's just… whirling.

Rey has his hand, and she slows herself down, pulling him with her.

"What's Mustafar?" Kylo's finally able to answer.

"Hell," Thea replies.

"It's a collection of volcanoes barely held together by a thin crust. It used to be a mining planet, but when Vader all but died there…" Schiff stops mid sentence. "Did you not…"

"I didn't know," Kylo says with a swallow. Because he hadn't known Vader. He'd known Snoke/Palpatine's ideal of Vader, designed for him to know. "I… Obi Wan maimed him, I knew that, but…" Only after Snoke 'died.' Only after he set his mind to trying to figure out who his grandparents had been.

I've been blocked from you your whole life… He can remember Anakin saying that. That would lean toward Palpatine being dead. The person who benefited from Anakin not being near was gone.

A deeper, colder feeling settles in Kylo's guts, Or he found someone else. Or I've been moved from the asset to enemy category, and he's got another one he's playing with.

Rey's fingernails bite into the palm of his hand.

"Mustafar is where Anakin became Vader," Thea says. "He fought Obi Wan, lost, horribly. The Emperor 'rescued' him, and then resurrected him, I guess. After, he made his home there."

"None of us were brave enough to ask why," Schiff says.

But Kylo knows. "Hate, rage, shame, pain, they're fuel. Where better to steep in them than where he lost his wife, his children, his brother, his body, and his life?"

Rey's voice in his head. You aren't going there.

I—

No. I'll go. You don't need to be there. I'll go where the dark is overpowering, and you can go where the light leads to stagnation.

He kisses her hand.

Thea and Schiff don't comment on the silent conversation.

Thea does take another bite, and then says, "You know, Snoke had/has records, and the one thing I haven't done is gone through them with a fine-tooth comb, looking for what he might have been hiding."

"Why not?" Rey asks.

"The logistics of it. Keeping track of where all the bodies were buried in the Empire was about making sure we had an escape plan."

"When the Emperor fell our youngest three were still at home," Josh adds.

"But now, our kids are off, taken care of, same with the grandkids, and we're both well past the age, and for that matter, most of the good commanders are gone, to make running worth it."

"The same reason why I didn't run when Snoke died," Schiff says. "When the Emperor went, I had a full command I could trust. In ten years, Hashmir, my second-in-command, will have that kind of set up again, but I don't, and for that matter, haven't really had, for close to fifteen years, that sort of set up."

"There's a point where you resign yourself to going down with the ship, and we're well past that, so there wasn't much point to finding the treasure that'll let you run. But, I could do that. I've got the access, I just haven't used it. If he was making records of where the money was going, I'll find it. And maybe there'll be answers there."

Maybe, Rey's voice in Kylo's mind. If he didn't learn from his mistakes the first time.

If he didn't think he made them, Kylo thinks.

"Kylo," Schiff says.

"Hmm," He's thinking about the Emperor, who might have been, probably was, Snoke.

"Let's talk tactics. You can't drop everything to go after this. She can't, either," Schiff adds. "If he's out there… He's got an image of you that's a few years out of date, and subtle and crafty aren't part of that image. Patient and strategic also aren't part of it. So, right now, your major tactical advantage is that you've got better intel than he does. So, you need to use it."

"Which means?" Rey says.

"Which means you're still on Handsome Princing duty. This gets shunted to your off time. He'd expect you to do what you want to do, drop everything and go after him. He expects your anger and hate to drive you, brain checked out.

"So, if you want him to not know you're onto him, this has to go to the background. When you visit New Alderaan, get an unscheduled day to go explore, and go looking then. Same with Naboo. It's on the list of places you're going, so… Let your handlers know that you're hoping to have some time to just be and go under the scanners. That you're looking to have some down time, and then slip your handlers and have some down time."

"Mustafar… That's got to be an unofficial trip, or…" Thea's not sure if she should say it, but she does, "Or call your grandfather and talk directly to him. If anyone could be recruited to your side against Palpatine, he's likely at the top of the list. He threw him in the reactor the first time, I can't imagine his opinion has improved."

"And if it takes a ghost to fight a ghost…" Schiff says. "I guess that's the long-term issue. If he is out there, how do you get rid of someone you've killed twice if they refuse to die?"

That's the question none of them like.