Empire
by Warringer
Chapter 9
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Dark Lord of the Sith Darth Vader was kneeling in the empty communication chamber of his current post, being the not all that willing right hand of Great Moff Wilhuff Tarkin aboard the Death Star. However empty was relative as there was a flickering blue-green hologram looking down at him.
"You may raise, my apprentice," his Master said, his eyes looking at him.
"Yes, my lord," Vader said as he slowly rose from the ground where he was kneeling.
"You have felt the disturbance in the force before the destruction of Alderaan," Palpatine said, more a statement than a question.
"Yes, my lord."
The scarred, old face of the Emperor twisted into a mockery of a smile and he chuckled slightly.
"Good," he said and nodded." You will leave the Death Star and Tarkin now. Take your guard and take command over the Executor. Tarkin can deal with the Rebels on his own."
Beneath his mask Vader blinked. Before this, his Master had wanted him to make sure that no rebel would get away if the Death Star might fail, but it seemed that the destruction of Alderaan or maybe the strange disturbance in the Force had changed that. Through he had the feeling that it was indeed the disturbance he had felt before Alderaan.
Vader nodded after a moment.
"I am to investigate the disturbance," he stated and caused his Master to glare at him for a moment.
"Yes. Whatever it was that caused the disturbance, I want to know what it is and than I want to have it."
That sounded about right. And he was curious himself. Whatever it was, he had to fight down several urges lately he had thought he would have had under perfect control.
He nodded again.
"Yes, my lord. I will leave the Death Star immediately."
"Good."
With that the hologram disappeared from the chamber and Vader was left alone with his thoughts.
Into this a vision came down upon him. A man in a strange khaki colored uniform with several unknown patches and rank marking stood in front of him, smirking a slightly superior smile. On his head he was wearing a strange blue colored cap with an unknown symbol on it ans an ancient script Vader had last seen in the Jedi Temple.
The script said 'Wolf Pack' in front of the silhouette of three unknown ships, they had to be ships by the way they were positioned. And than there was a name tag on the uniform, saying 'Ramsey'.
Vader could feel how the man patted on his shoulder.
"So," the man said," The Empire strikes back to have the revenge of the Sith? You're never going to beat me in chess..."
With those words the man disappeared from the chamber, staring at the space where the man had been before.
After a while he abruptly turned around and stalked out of the communication chamber to make sure that he left the presence of Tarkin as soon as he could. He knew that he would have to fight down the urge to straggle the Great Moff after his victory over the Rebels.
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Vice Admiral Usagi Chiba had her arms crossed behind her back and frowned slightly as she walked down one of the corridors of her current flagship. Her Kinhiryuu, Nimitz, was still draped around her shoulder, but the micro-dragon managed to pick up her mood rather effectively. And he showed his irritation by glaring at random crewmen, setting parts of the wall to fire with his pyrokinetic ability or simply drummed his tail against her shoulder.
For a moment Usagi wished that he was intelligent, but in mind he was like the mix of a cat and a dog. Independent like a cat, but at the same time loyal as a dog and with the intelligence of a primitive primate.
Behind her she knew her two adjutants, the Commanders Drenth and Yakai Misano. One a Soloni, the other a Chibri. Both were members of rather unique races of the Commonwealth and their races were likely to be the most numerous races once they had started to colonize the surrounding space.
The Soloni were a sentient race that was basically a collective of carbon based micro-biotic life, contained inside a silicon based shell that could have many different shaped, based on the whim and the needs of a given collective. The collective Drenth was looking like it stepped out of a Giger painting, having the same technoganic look Giger was known for. The black gleaming shell that hovered two inch above the ground contained enough of the single biotics to make him more powerful as any computer of his size.
Luckily all they needed to live was light, water and any soil that contained silicon and carbon.
The Chibri on the other hand were a race that had evolved from rodent like lifeforms. However, they had developed a very humanoid shape, even through they were lucky if they managed to live more than fifteen years. Now with prolong treatments they could live as long as any human. One had never seen anyone being hyperactive when they hadn't seen a Chibri. And coffee actually slowed them down, so that they could work with humans or anyone else without being too fast.
They also shared the same fate as the Shin'bi when it came to their history and they had become a victim of slavers who sold them as pets. As result they had developed a very advanced military and within several generations, about forty years, their military code had advanced to be very much like that of humans, at least when it came to ground battles. Of course they had lost many of their number, but being rodent-based sentients, they were breeding like rodents and families with six and more children wasn't unheard of.
There had been a problem however. They hadn't become larger during their evolution and so the largest of them was ten inch tall. And to overcome their problems while fighting human sized opponents they had developed fighting machines they called 'Mobile Suits'. They were about as large as a human and more than one scientist had pointed out that they were actually looking very much like human sized Gundams or Veritechs. Of cause they were not transforming vehicles. And the influence of human media and anime, their Mobile Suits were patterned after Gundams during the last generations.
And last but not least was the reason why they had been a prime target of the slavers. In essence they happened to be superdeformed humans or 'Chibis' as they were called sometimes, very much like it was in anime. Large heads and unbelievingly cute, especially if they tried not to be. And they tried a lot.
Usagi stopped and breathed in deep as the door in front of her opened, allowing her to look into one of the briefing rooms of the command staff. Currently it contained only two people, Kyle Katarn and Jen Ors. Usagi stifled a short chuckle at the thought of what they would say if they knew what the Commonwealth knew. But on the other hand that knowledge was largely useless now.
"Mr. Katarn, Mrs. Ors," she said and slowly entered the room." I'm Vice Admiral Usagi Chiba, the commander of this fleet."
She pointed at the adjutants.
"My adjutants, Commanders Drenth and Yakai Misano."
Katarn raised an eyebrow, looking at Ors.
"You are giving droids military ranks?" he wondered.
"Wearenotdriods," came a high pitched voice from the standard RX-78 of Misano, which was rather slow for him when he was not on coffee.
"yes," came the rather gravely sounding voice of Drenth from multiple of the speaker like collectives all across his exostructure. "we can asure you that we are very biological lifeforms, through different to the non-collectives that seem to populate most planets."
Usagi sighed. She had known that something like this would happen. The Soloni were rather proud not to be 'non-collectives', as they called most other races, or AIs. The Chibri on the other hand didn't like to be seen as only their Mobile Suits. And the standard Chibri response to show that they were not robots, was to open their cockpits.
Usagi sighed again as she heard the light hiss of hydraulics as the chest plate of the RX-78 opened up and Misano stepped away from his pilot seat. He stood on the breastplate that had swung down and put his arms on his hips and glared at Ors and Katarn.
"How cute!" was the immediate response of Ors and Usagi had to fight the urge to bang her head against a wall as she saw the very adoring face of the Rebel agent. So much for being able to talk to those two without any problems.
Instead she looked on her watch. Only three more hours to go until they arrived at Yavin.
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General Jan Dodonna frowned as he looked at the transcript of the message that was received by the Millennium Falcon during their escape from the Death Star.
"Is this authentic?" he asked and looked at the various members of the Rebellion that were responsible for the agents and contacting them.
"As far as we can tell it is," came the answer.
Dodonna looked back at the transcript.
"Could Katarn have been forced to encode this?"
"Even if he would have been forced to do it, we know what too look at. He would have contained a secret message in it that would tell us that its a lie. There is a second secret message in it, but it says that the proposal seems to be genuine. We will have to wait."
He looked at the transcript again and than at the crystal that contained a copy of the Death Stars plans.
"And the Death Star? Have you found a weakness?"
Another of the analysts nodded.
"Yes, we did. There is a thermal exhaust port in one of the trenches of the Death Star. But its only two meters across. And its protected by a ray shield."
Dodonna frowned and leaned back in his seat, closing his eyes for a moment.
"We'd need a precision attack on..."
He was interrupted as a technician stormed into the room.
"General, an unknown ship just entered orbit around the moon!"
Dodonna jerked up and all but jumped from his chair.
"Imperial?"
"No, sir. It's a completely unknown configuration, but it has similarities with the Tartan cruisers, only much larger."
The technician swallowed.
"Its about the size of a Star Destroyer."
Without a word, Dodonna hurries out of his office and towards the main control room of the Rebel Base on Yarin IV. He wasn't surprised to see Princess Leia and the other commanders of the Base already being there.
"The X-Wing squadron has entered visual range of the unknown vessel. One of the R2 units is sending us a visual."
The main viewer of the command center changed from the tactical display to the image of an X-Wings frontal part partly overlaying the view on the unknown ship. Up close, it did look like a Tartan Cruiser, but on the other hand there were very large and very visible turrets all over the ships structure that couldn't be turbolasers. Two stubby structures stuck out from the main bodies sides and carried a number of what seemed to be fins or some kind. The darker gray color and the hexagon like segments of armor were absolutely unlike any design anyone had seen before, even on a warship.
And this ship was clearly a warship. And it looked more intimidating than any Star Destroyer could ever hope to look.
"Incoming communication attempt."
"Open the receiving channel," Dodonna ordered before anyone else could.
"Massassi Station," a human voice said," this is ICS Ticonderoga of the Interstellar Commonwealth. Please respond and take a visual connection. Massassi Station this is ISC..."
The voice continued to repeat the words being very patient in doing so.
Dodonna and the other generals looked at Princess Leia, who nodded and than looked at the screen.
"Open a transmitting channel," she said." This is Massassi Station."
The main viewer changed again, showing the smiling face of a human male in a khaki colored rather comfortable looking uniform. There were a number of color coded stripes on the left chest of the uniform and a number of other markings, including a small patch that seemed to be the name of the man.
"I'm Captain Marcel Deveraux, Interstellar Commonwealth Navy, commander of the Ticonderoga. We come in peace and want to talk to your leader."
The mans smile widened and he chuckled a little.
"I always wanted to say that," he all but muttered, but the microphones on his side picked it up.
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Ronald Tasker stared out into the undefinable medium of slipstream as the Corbin Space Jet Topaz made her way through the Galaxy and towards the planet of Corusant. Life had defiantly made a turn for the strange in the last few month.
He looked over to his partner, Dao of the Hakaden clan, one of the few Shin'bi before the Exodus to work for the Commonwealth Intelligence Agency. He had been partnered up with her for the last few years and as 'smugglers' they had worked for several shady organizations through out the Milky Way, always doing their job to inject false informations, strike teams and extracting informations to destabilize those organizations from within. And they had done some very good work during that time.
The Earth build Heinkel Space Jet hadn't been much of a problem as Heinkel had managed to grab a very large part of the market for private vessels throughout the Milky Way and so Space Jets hadn't been that much of an unknown sight. Add to that the very run down look of the Topaz and you had someone who looked the part of a shady 'smuggler', even if the ship in question was fitted with the latest in technology.
They had been lucky that their last 'job' had been to deliver informations back to Earth about several operations of one of the Milky Ways many criminal organizations, so they had been caught up in the Exodus and ended up here. Only to be about to get into their 'old' job, just more specialized this time.
They were going to infiltrate Black Sun, one of the large crime syndicates of the Galaxy, to gain information about them as well as disrupting their operations when the time came to build up a new Interstellar Commonwealth.
And than there was Charles...
"Credit for your thoughts?" he head his partner ask and he gave her a short glare.
He sighed in response.
"Just wondering if Charles will be able to keep his sentience when he spreads himself out over the Imperial Palace."
A chuckle came from behind them and Ronald turned a little to look at the holographic projection of Roger Moore in his James Bond days.
"I believe that I will be quite able to keep myself together," he noted with a dry grin," I have covered Europe at one time and keeps myself. An area like the Imperial Palace is not much of a problem."
The projection shrugged.
"I'm a little more concerned about being cleaned away or fried by dust repelling force fields. On the other hand I hope that I will give Palpatine an allergy."
Ronald snorted while Dao shook her head with a smile.
"Well, lets hope he develops an allergy against Smart Dust."
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Admiral Ban Danna sighed as he looked down upon his new orders. He had been quite surprised to hear that the universe they were residing was based on an Earthern trilogy of movies.
He shook his head. He had talked to Admiral Ryan and she had told him that they had some very useful knowledge about this universe, even if they currently only possessed star charts of the known parts of the Galaxy. But it had been enough for Nathan, Merlin and Seneca to interpolate the position of all known planets in the areas known as Wild Space or Unknown Regions.
And he and his fleet had been ordered to explore one specific area of the Unknown Regions and initiate First Contact with a race called the Chiss.
He placed his orders to the side and reached out for his keyboard and opened a file that contained a number of psychological profiles of Chiss and the Chiss race as a whole. Most of this informations were based on a number of novels.
As he looked at the file and the profiles he noted a few similarities between the Ferrons and the Chiss. The most striking similarities were the blue skin and the size of the both races, through their origins were quite different. For one the Chiss originated from an ice world, while the Ferrons came from a world that was considered tropical by most races.
Noting the fact that the Chiss were a rather xenophobic race, he knew the reason of Admiral Ryan and the President to assign the job to him and his small fleet. His race looked very similar to the Chiss and any diplomatic contact might be easier.
Danna leaned back as he finished reading the files. Now he had just wait for the Ambassador they were going to send him, who was to carry out the diplomatic things of this operation.