"How long?" Palpatine asked.
"Do not strain yourself, lord," one of the cultists said. "Your attempt to possess the Snoke body will have weakened you-"
"I am well aware of my limitations," Palpatine snapped, then turned to the Final Order engineer. "How long, commander?"
"That depends, my lord," the engineer replied, his voice firm. "For the whole fleet… fourteen years. A single ship could be completed in eight. One ship coming online at a time in sequence, the first ship will be finished in nine years and the whole fleet in sixteen."
Palpatine frowned.
"The whole fleet, then," he said. "The might of the Final Order will blaze a path across the galaxy, and all will obey the Sith or perish."
"It is as you command, my lord," the engineer said, saluting.
Palpatine waved him away, then gestured, and a hologram of the Star Destroyers currently under construction formed in the air above him.
They were vast ships, for line vessels, and the Sith Eternal were building one thousand and eighty of them.
One thousand and eighty!
Never again would rebels exploit a single point of failure and destroy his most powerful and only superweapon… a fate he had experienced twice, now, and each one burned like a canker in his heart, the fury suffusing him and lending him strength.
At his insistence, Palpatine's spies in the wider galaxy, outside Exegol, had found for him the names of every single person who had been directly involved in the attack on both Death Stars.
Han Solo, Chewbacca, Leia Organa Solo, Evaan Verlaine… all of those names were of people he hated. And Palpatine would see them destroyed, one way or another.
But there were four names for which the Dark Lord of the Sith reserved his greatest hatred. The true, simmering passion that Palpatine held for those who had truly thwarted his plans.
Landonis Balthazar Calrissian. Nien Nunb. Wedge Antilles… and, more than anyone else, Luke Skywalker.
If there was anyone who Palpatine wanted to destroy, it was Luke Skywalker… not merely to see him dead, but to humiliate him. To tear him down. To reduce all his triumphs to smouldering ruins.
Break the New Republic. Destroy the New Jedi Order. Turn his own family against him. Shatter his will.
That was what Palpatine would do, to Luke Skywalker.
And then – and only then – would the galaxy burn, worlds submitting to the rule of the Sith or being destroyed.
Thinking such pleasant thoughts, it took a moment for Palpatine to notice the flashing red alert on the side of the holodisplay.
"What is the meaning of this?" he demanded. "Explain it!"
"We've picked up ships, incoming," an officer said, looking up from his displays on the other side of the room. "Lots of them – Rebel ship classes!"
Palpatine's hand waved, and the holodisplay reconfigured to show the Red Honeycomb Zone and the tactical displays.
Sure enough, ships were coming through. Two Mon Cal star cruisers, first, then frigates and cruiser class vessels, disgorging a cloud of snubfighters from their hangar bays.
Sith Eternal TIE Fighters were already taking off, but Palpatine could see the difference between the two forces – the Sith Eternal was a secret military and had never actually fought in battle, and it had been aiming for a projected readiness date over a decade in the future.
The New Republic fighter corps was no such easy target. Even without their shields, their skill and training were clearly superior, and the first pass saw a dozen Sith fighters go down in blazing, burning wrecks. A dogfight was already beginning, but it was a dogfight that could only go one way.
But how had this happened? Exegol was secret! With the hyperspace anomalies protecting it, the only way to visit the planet would be to not only know where it was but be shown…
...unless, that was, someone had a Sith wayfinder.
Suddenly gripped by a cold rush of fear that prompted a surge of utter hatred, Palpatine reached out with his mind towards the New Republic strike force as it became haloed in laserfire and explosions.
He could sense a Sith Wayfinder. HIS Sith Wayfinder! The one that had been in his throne room during the Battle of Endor.
Pushing harder, Palpatine located the dancing spark of the wayfinder, alongside a sickeningly familiar presence – a presence ducking and dodging and rolling, as it locked onto and destroyed one TIE Fighter after another.
"Skywalker!" Palpatine shouted, then coughed. "SKYWALKER!"
"Watch out, there's another fighter flight taking off from the hangar system to port," Nien Nunb said, pointing.
"Got it, keying them in," Lando agreed, his gaze flicking between the displays of the Raddus flag bridge. "Hey, Wedge, you want to take those fighters and the battleline will kill the hangar for you?"
"Copy that, General," Wedge agreed. "Red leader to Red Alpha flight, follow me in!"
Six X-wings rolled to follow Wedge in, and Lando checked over the displays again.
"Well, I'm no expert but I think we caught them with their pants down, Admiral," he said, glancing back at Leia. "No more than one in fifty of the capital ship turbolasers are working, and most of them seem to still be under construction."
He whistled. "It's a damn good thing we caught them when we did, though, I'm reading over six hundred ships in states of construction and there's hundreds more building slips."
The Raddus jolted as a volley of turbolasers hit, then the radio crackled.
"Gold leader here," Verlaine called in. "Princess, I've got eyes on where that fire's coming from, looks like a turbolaser testing facility with some working cannon. My boys and girls will fix that little problem."
Nien made the adjustment before Lando got to it, and a double volley of proton torpedoes blasted the facility to pieces.
"It's certainly a damn good thing we found them before they finished," Leia agreed. "How did you do it?"
"Well, our lead ran out on Kijimi," Lando said. "Then I realized nobody had actually checked the wreckage of the Second Death Star, and unlike the first the second's armour wasn't in place to contain the explosion. I thought it was likely some of it had come down intact, so Luke and I went over to find it and that's how we got here."
"I'm picking something up-" Nien reported, then they all looked out the window at once as a flare of lightning crackled up from a hole in the ground. It gripped a New Republic corvette, lightning crawling over the surface and ripping chunks out of it, and when the bolts stopped the engines had been disabled and most of the CR90 crashed seconds later.
"Skywalker here, I'm on it," Luke said, his X-Wing shooting past and shooting down one of the last enemy TIEs. The Jedi Master's snubfighter kept going, rolling into a complex manoeuvre and spitting laserbolts down the chasm, then the lightning came back up again – and Luke's ship absorbed it, glowing bright white as the energy was corralled and neutralized.
"I don't know about you, but that looks like the main event as far as I'm concerned," Lando noted.
AN:
If you go for a booming strategy, you're quite vulnerable to being rushed down.