A/N: This was backstory for some scenes that never made it into Happily Ever After. This is also the rediscovery of hyperspace tracking, which was shown in TLJ and mentioned when Jyn Erso was reading through file headers on Scarif in Rogue One.
Hux stood with lips pursed and fists on hips, watching as the huge construction droids deployed as they were supposed to. In this particular area, they were beginning the stage of secondary clean-up – moving stone that had been missed by the main excavators and finishing out the shaping as needed for the conduits that would be placed later.
Further down the immense chamber, primary excavation toiled busily. That area was not environmentally friendly for humans – due to sound, mainly, but also suspended particulate matter and the high temperatures as they dug into the mantel of the planet. He monitored the primary stage by remote surveillance when he needed to. But here – here he could look at in person.
Witnessing it in person was something Hux felt was necessary, although he couldn't explain why that was. Things simply seemed to work better when he did. 'A watched pot never boils' was the old saying, although in this case it was more like 'a closely monitored project doesn't fuck up.' So here he was.
With a heavy exhalation, he turned and stalked back to his office. It was more like a shuttle than what most would think of as an office. Starkiller Base was immense. With the near-exponential growth rate of the self-replicating construction droids, it would soon span the entire planetary interior. After that, the interesting engineering stuff would happen. For years now, the main measurable progress had been simple digging.
Rather than move his information, displays, work centers, and resting area on Starkiller from place to place, he had elected to move the entire office. Once the main access tunnels had been drilled to the primary subsurface area, this had been a feasible solution. Before then – well, he'd found a new interest in long-distance running when he wasn't being ferried around. Running from place to place wasn't very dignified, but until recently there hadn't been many people to witness it. The population had expanded rapidly of late and now he only ran as part of his necessary self-maintenance exercise.
Back inside the sealed ship, he turned on the main wall display, changing it from the night sky of Lanson Down to a graph that tracked the various milestones and deadlines associated with the project. He pored over them meticulously. He'd been punished within an inch of his sanity for being late and they were still late.
He went over each area one at a time. His main function had long since ceased to be coming up with ideas or actually finding solutions, and instead turned to managing others who did the grunt work of making things happen. The mechanical engineers – Cheskar's team - were the current bottleneck, working their hardest to transfer prototype designs to planetary scale. It wasn't as easy as just drawing things bigger, as Hux well knew. The Droiders (the excavation team) were actually ahead of schedule, but it didn't matter much if the rest couldn't keep up.
He looked at the productivity indicators for the various project leaders and considered, again, Snoke's reaction were they to continue to lag. He knew he could push them harder. That would increase the possibility of mistakes. Most of them were already working insane hours, voluntarily, because they knew what would happen if they didn't. Those who hadn't seen torture or death before their eyes had heard about it. Everyone was motivated. He sighed. He had to find a balance that he could stand behind, that he was willing to die for, because that was what it came down to.
If there were no further delays, then they should make the next set of deadlines. Anywhere he could save time would help, though. He clenched his hands into fists where he'd joined them behind his back. He didn't see anywhere that his personal attention and emphasis would improve things. He could easily interfere and make things more difficult. Stressing his people was counterproductive, he reminded himself. He would save that for genuine emergencies. The possibility of Snoke's ire (and the consequences of such) did not constitute an emergency. He exhaled heavily again.
It didn't matter whether Leader Snoke agreed with his management style. Ironically, this was precisely because Leader Snoke was a telepath who routinely used that power to abuse and violate his subordinates. If he knew (or could know) for an absolute fact that Hux had done his best in every way, then Hux's best in every way was an armor against anything Snoke might sling at him.
He had passed the stage where Snoke's mockery of his weaknesses stung him. Broken, Hux had accepted his failings as features. Snoke could accept them, change them, or rid himself of Armitage. If Hux was already doing his best, then it didn't matter to him what Snoke decided to do. He had reached a stage of dangerous resignation.
It wasn't even Snoke that mattered to Hux. The larger issue was the First Order itself. Hux never lost sight of why he endured his superior officer. He knew, more than any other, what the goal of the Order was and how Starkiller Base furthered that mission. Completing this project to Snoke's desires advanced the Order as a whole. Hux and Snoke were in accord in this manner – while Hux could only guess at Snoke's deeper motivations, advancing the Order advanced Snoke. That was why Hux obeyed.
He turned off the screen and stared briefly, soberly, at the starfield that replaced it automatically. If there was no directly-related Starkiller work to be done, then what was the best use of his time? Internally, he reviewed his next meal time (an hour away), his need for rest (not particularly), his need for exercise (regularly scheduled, not until next shift). He'd already reviewed Phasma's report on the cadet's training at the start of shift. He'd skimmed the captain's logs for the three star destroyers on permanent picket duty around the planet. He'd read Opan's latest report on internal security and Birnham's on morale.
He reached out and turned on the screen again with a slow, deliberate movement. This time, then, he would use as his own. He'd been overstressed. It was counterproductive. He strayed from what Snoke had assigned him.
Hux settled into a chair and pulled up a database he'd been picking his way through for years now. It was one of those pet interests that annoyed Snoke to no end with him, and whose disparaging statements about which Hux largely ignored. If he had, in fact and in good conscience, fulfilled his duty in regard to Snoke's commands and the normal scope of his work, then he felt himself free to pursue his interests. They were, after all, the reason for the Starkiller project. And Hux had a long history of being selective about his orders when they seemed counterproductive to the overall mission. This was what he told himself.
He'd done it in seeking out training and educational programs his father had dismissed. Now he did it by ignoring Snoke's belittling of his hobbies. This hobby he had from Thrawn, a creature of deep strategic thought, intelligence, and admirable wiles. Thrawn had given Armitage a copy of the Tarkin Initiative database.
It wasn't supposed to exist at all. Hux didn't know exactly how Thrawn had come into possession of it, but it contained much of the collected research of the later-stage Empire, research directions informed by Palpatine's understanding of the Force. It was amazing what could be developed when one already knew what was possible and not, via supernatural means. That the very emblem of the Tarkin Initiative was a kyber crystal was not lost on Hux.
Hux himself detested the means, but he had to give credit to what it had yielded. But then Scarif had been destroyed, followed by the Death Star, followed by the emperor, followed by the Empire. No one had continued their research. Salaries were gone, facilities in tatters, Palpatine dead, chain of command shattered. There had been no mission, no leader. From the ashes, the First Order had risen to finish what the Empire had been made to do – to bring order, prosperity, and justice.
And so now, Armitage Hux used his free time to scour their collected research archives to see what could be salvaged to advance that mission. He scrolled over to the section on hyperspace. He liked that area. He had from the start. That and the Jedi stuff, precious little there was on them. He'd long since exhausted what there was about kyber crystals, holocrons, and related things. Then he'd moved on to hyperspace. It was like a space outside of space – a place that could take him anywhere he wanted to go. Such as … away.
He sighed, swallowed, and slumped in his seat, eyes moving steadily over the text on the screen where it described the attenuated trails left by objects that passed through hyperspace. The document described it as a shadow, but it seemed to Hux more like a sliver of light. He wondered if it would be possible to track ships using these thin slivers. It seemed to be what the original researcher had been aiming at.