"Main systems status," Commander Yeks requested.
"Systems are working at full nominal capacity," Technician Hume replied, inspecting the systems. "Plasma containment bubble is retracting on schedule. We are at eighty-five percent of charge, firing sequence can commence in seven minutes."
"Good," Yeks said, sitting back, but he was thinking hard.
Thinking about what his job would be, soon.
Starkiller Base had fired the opening shot of the war, the devastating opening shot that had destroyed Hosnian Prime, but after that everything had become… all too routine. The Resistance had been located, but they'd known they'd been located, and after someone had managed to escape Starkiller Base and the Resistance had fled D'Qar before Starkiller Base had been able to fire, any hope of ending the Resistance with a single shot had gone.
Instead, the First Order military had been chasing after the Resistance, pursuing them relentlessly and fighting a war in the shadows, while Starkiller Base had been tasked with blowing up planets that were causing problems for the First Order.
Between the long duty cycle for the weapon, the inevitable need to run maintenance, and the way that every effort was being made to make sure that no prisoners could ever escape again… it had made the whole thing rather more like a monotonous data entry job than anything.
And now, with the return of Emperor Palpatine and the announcement of the Final Order… an entire fleet of destroyers, each with the power to destroy a world… would they need Starkiller Base any more?
Yeks was worried about his job, and it hadn't been all that fulfilling to begin with.
"What's the planet on the docket this time?" he asked.
"Naboo, I think," Hume replied. "There's reports that there are widespread anti-Sheev demonstrations on the planet."
"Who's Sheev?" Yeks asked.
"I wondered that as well," Hume answered. "It's the Emperor, apparently."
The com system crackled.
"This is the Supreme Leader," Kylo Ren's voice announced, echoing through the command space. "Give me a status update."
"Four minutes until firing, Supreme Leader," Yeks replied, glancing at the waterfall display.
"Good," Ren replied. "I want you to hold fire until I'm there, if I don't arrive by the time the charge is full. I want to watch this."
"At your command," Yeks replied, signed off, then leaned back in his chair and groaned.
"What is it?" Hume asked.
"The Supreme Leader is coming to watch," Yeks said. "...is he the Supreme Leader, still? I just realized I don't actually know. Emperor Palpatine is the Emperor, obviously, but does that mean that Kylo Ren isn't the Supreme Leader any more? Is he even the Leader, come to that?"
"Above my pay grade," Hume shrugged.
Yeks sighed.
"I'm wondering because I don't want to get shot for using the wrong term," he replied. "Whatever…"
He glanced at the stormtrooper guards, four of them.
At least they looked like they were ready for being looked at, and Yeks stood before adjusting his uniform to make sure he was spic and span.
"Three minutes," Hume informed him, then the door beeped, and Yeks stood at attention.
The Supreme Leader strode through, accompanied by his guards – then, all of a sudden, the guards stunned all four stormtroopers at once.
Two of the guards peeled off to strip the troopers of their weapons and equipment, and another took off her helmet – and Yeks did a double-take.
"That's the scavenger!" he said, aghast, as the doors hissed closed again. "Supreme Leader, what-"
"Shut up," Ren interrupted, and Yeks shut up.
Now that he was looking, though, one of the Knights of Ren looked very much like a kriffing wookiee.
"Where is the main gun aimed?" Ren added.
"Naboo," Yeks provided, deciding that shut up was a bad instruction to follow right now. "Chommell Sector."
"What a bastard," one of the still-armoured Knights of Ren said as he finished cuffing the unconscious stormtroopers, though Yeks was suspecting that none of them were actual Knights of Ren.
Not that he was going to make a point of that.
"The Emperor's from Naboo, did you know that?" the 'Knight' added. "Finn?"
"News to me," the other 'Knight' replied, now carrying all the weapons from the stormtroopers he'd immobilized.
"I have a new target for you," Ren declared. "New coordinates."
"Are you sure this is a good idea, Ben?" Rey asked.
The wookiee roared.
"I suppose it is a military target," Rey admitted.
Ren – or Ben – walked up to the command console, and typed in the new coordinates.
There was a subliminal trembling as Starkiller Base rotated, turning fast enough to make the ground shake and judder despite the inertial compensators, and the stars visible outside the screen pinwheeled overhead.
Palpatine drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair.
Where was his new body, exactly?
Everything should have been proceeding as he had foreseen, though Palpatine had to admit that it didn't always go quite according to plan.
Being thrown down a reactor shaft had certainly not been in his plans for that particular decade.
But the ritual of transference was foolproof – simply by explaining that killing him would mean becoming him, it would function as a means by which the Jedi who killed him became him.
Immortality, of the sort that even Plagueis had never contemplated!
Then he spotted a red light in the sky.
"Okay, that part of the plan is over," Ben said, as the screens flashed with the target destroyed message. "Now… what was the next part?"
"I don't know," Poe replied. "Our plan sort of ended here. Anything past this is a bonus."
"Improvisation it is, then," Ben decided. "Who knows. It might even work."
AN:
I'm just saying, if it had still been around at the start of TROS then it could have solved things quite nicely. It's not like the Rebellion hung around for a long time on a planet that was a known base of theirs.