With the death of our beloved Emperor, our own Empire was cast into disorder. It gave strength to the illegitimate, and emboldened them with a fraudulent claim of bringing peace and justice to the galaxy—and yet, for so long, who have been the champions of peace? The only war visited upon the galaxy has been the one brought by the criminal Rebel Alliance.
Scattered and lost, we could have perished. After attacking Chandrila and injuring the fraudulent politicians who seek to steal the sanctity of our galaxy, I brought us here to Jakku, unifying our people and our powers in this faraway world—a hard world that has tested our mettle and forged us and sharpened us into a stronger blade. A blade with which we will slit the throats of the traitors that crawl on their bellies toward our door. Soon they come! Soon they try to finish what they started. They want to end the Empire. They want to set up as a tumor on a healthy body, leeching the blood while growing fatter like a parasite. They deny our legitimacy. They lie about the stability and sanity we created for the galaxy. For those are their truest weapons: deception and delusion. We must not give in. We must not believe that they are right. We must see them as they are:
Brutes and barbarians! They are subhuman. They are alien to us in the truest sense of the word and are deserving of no mercy from us. This is our zero hour, and I call you now to do your duty by the light of the glorious Galactic Empire. The battle to come is not a fight for Jakku or even a fight for the Empire. It is a fight for all the galaxy. If we fail here, we fail everywhere. We fail our loved ones. We fail our children. We fail all who crave constancy and light in these dark times.
We pursue no other aim than freedom from oppression, liberty from lies, emancipation from depravity.
Today is the day we fight back and reclaim our galaxy.
Today is the day the New Republic dies at the Empire’s hand.
Today we take our future!
(If only they knew what that future meant.)
And then it’s as if the galaxy is listening, as if the Force is truly on his side, for what occurs is an event of such theatrical synchronicity that Gallius Rax nearly drops to his knees and weeps like a baby—
The attack begins.
Thunder ripples as the New Republic fleet spears the sky, already launching a fusillade—and the Imperial fleet above fires its own in response. Far above their heads, turbolasers slash the sky. Torpedoes corkscrew. Javelins of heavy plasma fire slices open the blue.
Rax bellows one last entreaty:
The battle is upon us. Go! Go and drag them down to the ground and break their necks with your boots! Take their heads! End their tyranny!
And now he must go collect the others and board a ship before it’s too late. The Observatory beckons, and it is time for his egress.
—
No, no, no…
Sloane is on her knees. Her hands are bound. So are her ankles. Brentin has fallen over, letting himself topple to the side and curl in on himself. The two of them are up on the roof of the Empire’s command building, underneath the flap of a tent. They are alone. No one watches them. At first, Sloane thought, How strange, but now she sees: She has nowhere to go even if she could get free. As she and Brentin are forced to sit there and stomach Rax’s speech, she tries to understand what’s even happening here. Why let her witness this? What is she even meant to see?
The man’s speech is base and dull and full of the pompous rhetorical milk on which Gallius Rax is fed, and yet—it works, doesn’t it? Sloane feels it in her own belly. The trumpeting, triumphant roar of an Empire spurned. The fear of a New Republic ascendant. The certainty of being in the right and committing violence against those in the wrong…
And with that, a tiny mote of doubt plants inside her belly. The seed grows fast tendrils, and she wonders: Am I the product of confidently championed lies? Was this my Empire all along? Will it die here on Jakku?
As Rax’s rhetoric finishes, the sky opens up and—as if perfectly timed to the conclusion of his speech—the battle begins.
Capital ships rage in the planet’s orbit. Weapons fire drums like thunder. Specks appear in the sky and turn from translucent ghosts to buzzing black flies—starfighters spilling out of the New Republic ships. Already they enter atmosphere, scoring the ground with plasma.
And the Empire roars to meet it. TIE fighters lift off and in moments are launching forth like rocks from a slingshot. Soon the sky is chaos. Fighters erupt in flame. Laserfire rends the air. X-wings and TIE fighters dance in and around banded clouds while Imperial walkers turn to march out into the desert, ready to protect the base at any cost.
The battle in the skies has begun and soon, the ground war will rise.