A/N: Hux and Cheskar are in a conference room on Starkiller, discussing a meeting Snoke had told Hux he needed to attend. Hux thinks his attendance is unnecessary, so he's griping about it to his underling. He'll be leaving in the morning.

"I don't know why he wants me there for this meeting. I looked at the attendance list and it doesn't make much sense," Hux lamented to Cheskar. "There's no one on the High Command there. Why would he have a military operations meeting and leave out the top level leadership of the organization? They should be there, not me."

"Are they still alive?"

"Yes, they're still alive! At least I hope so. It's not like I would know, though. Running an obituary column would be bad for morale." He thought about it. "I know Admiral Nayta is alive. She found this planet. She was alive then."

Cheskar nodded, pouring themselves some tea. "Maybe she's out doing more planetary surveys."

"And that's another thing," Hux said after watching Cheskar scoop an obscene amount of sugar into their drink, "why would he send his foremost admiral out on geological surveys? Of all things! It makes no sense!" He was louder than he needed to be, just for emphasis.

"No, that makes sense. At least to me. It's a good idea."

"How?"

"This planet?" Cheskar asked, pointing downward at the world they were on. "Is there anything more important to the Order right now than this planet?"

"But anyone could have found it!"

"No. You send your best people when things are this critical. That's how you do things."

"You don't send a star destroyer when a TIE fighter will do. You conserve your resources."

Cheskar pressed their lips together. "The military does, yeah. So that's how you're trained and it makes sense because you never know if you might be attacked. It's life or death. But my training is that if you have a resource, you use it. And you use it over and over because that's efficient and efficiency is the difference between a sort-of success and a big success."

Hux frowned at them but said nothing. Cheskar continued, "You see, this planet? Finding this planet? You have to make sure you send someone who's going to get the job done right the first time. Who won't get distracted. Who won't decide, 'Oh, here's a nice forest world without any intelligent life, I think we'll all take shore leave here, or maybe ground exercises.'"

"Ground exercises maybe. But shore leave? In the middle of a mission?"

"I don't know what you military guys do!"

Hux laughed. "Sometimes I forget how deficient the technician training is."

"Deficient? Ha!" Cheskar leaned forward. "Tell me how Coruscant was built."

"I … it's … It's millennia old. That doesn't matter."

Cheskar grinned, assured of victory. "And you don't know, do you?"

"I don't … need to know. It-" He shook his head.

"What do you learn in military history anyway? Just what the military did, right? Leaders, battles, dynasties, politicians maybe?"

"Yes." Hux took a drink of his unsugared tea. Cheskar had introduced him to the drink. It was good if you didn't saturate it with sweetener. Hux wasn't sure what the other officers were taught about military history. He'd barely passed the prerequisites based on his father's skewed lectures and skipped the formal military history curriculum altogether. But that wasn't something he admitted to anyone. Let Cheskar think he'd learned what he was supposed to have learned.

Cheskar held up thumb and forefinger a small width apart. "That's this much of history. The history of conquerors is not the history of the entire galaxy. You are missing so much! We're not the deficient ones. You are!"

"Pssh. I know the important things." Which was word-for-word Brendol Hux. Armitage knew how wrong it was, but he didn't know how else to respond to the accusation.

"Important? No, you don't. You can't have conquest without weapons. You can't have weapons without technology. You won't have technology without industry. You won't have industry without commerce." Cheskar ticked them off. "You won't have commerce without indulgence. You won't have that without the meeting of basic needs like food, shelter, and safety. It's a flow chart. You know the end point and that's all you know. You don't know everything else that's required to get there."

Hux grimaced at being essentially being called ignorant and short-sighted, but neither of them listed 'tact' as a strength. They were a couple of nerds arguing about how the world worked. Hux explained, "If you're at that point, then you directly control people's safety. It closes the loop and you have a cycle, not a flow chart. You don't need to know any of the rest if you can control that one step." It was more of his father's bantha poodoo, but he wanted to hear how Cheskar tore it apart. His voice was uncertain, like he was asking a question rather than asserting the truth.

"You know that's wrong."

"I do not." Hux's tone shifted to a warning, because calling him a liar was a step too far. Especially when Hux was pretty sure he was wrong. He just didn't know how to articulate it.

"I can prove it."

"Do so."

"You became an engineer."

"What difference does that make?"

"You told me you did it so you'd understand how things worked. You know it's important. You can't just rely on someone else to know things for you!"

Hux sighed. He'd been hoping for more of a deconstruction of Brendol's way of thinking, but he wasn't going to get that without telling Cheskar what he wanted and that wasn't going to happen. They were at an impasse for now, but it gave him things to think about. "There is only so much I can know. This is tiresome. What were we even talking about?"

Cheskar shrugged. "Admiral Nayta, the High Command, and the importance of assigning your best people to your most critical projects, instead of putting your success in the hands of someone who might not be up to it. Nayta got it done. That's what matters. I think Snoke putting her to it wasn't the underutilization of a resource, but instead a huge compliment to her, that he entrusted her with this important a mission."

Hux gave Cheskar a flat frown that by now, Cheskar understood to be capitulation. Cheskar leaned back and nodded to themselves. Hux pulled over his datapad and looked at the list of names. "So the reason why the High Command is not at the military operations meeting is because Snoke thinks this sort of thing is beneath them?"

Cheskar came forward again. "You told me Snoke didn't care if the harvesting missions continued. He's gearing up for something big in five years and he has no interest whatsoever in getting bogged down, distracted, or waylaid between now and then. When this big gun is up and running and he's got his flagship done, he'll still have a fleet of Resurgents, some dreadnoughts, all the old imperial star destroyers, the Eclipse, all that stuff. It will still be here. Unless some idiot gets it blown up in the meantime."

Cheskar reached out to point at the datapad. "That's your proof of his priorities. You are in this meeting. Drewmill is in this meeting. Why? Neither of you have anything to do with military operations, but both of you are heading up projects you were told were Snoke's highest priorities. He wants to make sure you know what's going on. But what he doesn't need is the High Command pushing an agenda."

"Hm. You might be right. Some unidentified Knight of Ren is in the meeting, too."

"I don't know anything about those guys. Maybe they can't be effective observers without knowing the big picture? But I do know I'm right on the basics here. They don't teach you guys squat about bureaucracy or good administration. You know," Cheskar smiled and leaned on their crossed arms, "in our classes, they told us that was on purpose."

"Did they?" Hux gave him a guarded smile, remembering telling Dean Muhale that this was her chance to strike at Brendol. Would he have had Brendol killed if he hadn't already succeeded in rebelling against him and gotten away with it? Probably not. He certainly wouldn't be sitting here listening to a subordinate challenge his assumptions.

"They did," Cheskar confirmed.