“As your adviser, I strongly advise you to sit and drink your tea. And I also advise you to find a second adviser. Hostis…” Her words trail off, broken by a fracture of grief. The chancellor knows that her two advisers did not get along very well professionally, often fighting fiercely from two diametrically opposed points of view. But at the end of the day, they were friends. They drank together. They ate together. Their families did the same. Then his life was cut short by an assassin’s blaster on that fate-dark day. “Hostis is gone, and we need someone like him. We need his voice.”
“Yes.” A pause. “That will come. For now: numbers.”
“The numbers are sixty-one, thirty-nine.”
“I assume I’m the lower number. Unless some grand inversion has happened and no one told me.”
“Correct. You’re at thirty-nine percent Senate approval at present polling. But polling is notoriously unreliable—”
“Senators are notoriously unreliable, too, and yet they form the bedrock of our democratic system. I will do better.”
And yet how can she? She’s losing. Day by day, her numbers wane, perhaps understandably. Liberation Day came and, with it, the attack on Chandrila. When the dust settled and the corpses were counted, she came out of surgery to find many friends and colleagues dead. And soon after began the accusations: She was too soft, militarily, and couldn’t protect Chandrila when it needed to be defended. (Never mind the fact that the type of attack orchestrated against them was so far beyond comprehension and so subversive that ten navies couldn’t have stopped it.) All that was made worse by the fact that she invited Grand Admiral Sloane planetside for the day’s events. Which to many meant she was culpable in what happened.
Even still, the true shape of that plot against them is hard to see in full. Was Sloane a part of it, or just a pawn? Was Sloane really once the Operator? Did she betray them, or was she herself betrayed? Where did Tashu go? Where did Sloane go? Endless questions. Few answers.
It hardly matters, now.
The Empire has fled to some corner of the galaxy, and even with all her resources Mon hasn’t been able to figure out where. And that makes her look weak. Her failures are a fattening meal for a hawk like her opponent in the coming election.
Tolwar Wartol: her opponent, and an Orishen. A tough, strange species, the Orishen. Two parents yield two children—one apiece—and upon giving birth, those parents die to give their progeny life, thus ensuring that the number of Orishen that exist now is a number that does not grow. (How they ever came to any number at all remains a mystery, one that none of the Orishen seem ready or able to answer.) They were a pacifistic species, once. Agricultural, mostly. Their world, Orish, was lush; though Mon has never been there, she’s walked through virtual holoscapes serving as an archival memory of that world and found their planet to be a pastoral haven. At least, until the Empire came. The Empire enslaved the Orishen. They worked the inhabitants hard for food. Strip-mined the surface. Drained the soil of nutrients.
Then one day, the Orishen fought back. Over years they’d hoarded bits of pesticide and fertilizer.
They made a bomb. And they used it.
That bomb destroyed those Imperials on Orish. It also poisoned the world: the ground, the water, even the atmosphere.
Now few Orishen are left. Thousands at best, no longer living on their world but above it, in a skeletal framework of tubes and stations.
Tolwar Wartol is one of those survivors. She’s read his memoir. He was a chemist, once, and helped to make the chemical weapon that would destroy their world. In the book he tells stories of the beauty of his world, ruined. How the bodies clogged the streams. How they had to build massive tombs for those of their own they lost. And he also tells the story about the day that the Empire fled—they abandoned Orish and its people, because what was once of value to them had been ruined. Wartol described that day as a “triumph.” And proof of what must be done to combat the Empire.
Wartol brings that survivor spirit to his politics: He offers the galaxy a well-earned assurance that he above others knows what sacrifice is and what must be done to preserve life and freedom.
He is charismatic. He is full of anger. His anger is righteous—
But is it right?
Either way, he commands every HoloNet news cycle. Attacking Mon at each turn. As he should, she supposes, if he really wants to win.
But she wants to win, too.
“I intend to continue on as chancellor,” Mon says. “But I’m not yet sure how we win. So, adviser—advise me. Let’s hear it. How do we win the election? How do I convince the Senate to vote for me over him?”
Auxi takes a seat on the other side of the desk. She purses her lips, hmming as she thinks out loud. “You’re ostensibly doing the right things already. You’re apportioning resources and infrastructure for worlds afflicted by the Empire—and afflicted by the vacuum of leadership now that the Empire has been pushed back. You’ve kept the military strong despite the loss of Imperial threat, but you’ve also made sure that the New Republic military isn’t too strong, so it doesn’t look like you’re trying to enforce your will on a weakened galaxy. Kashyyyk—”