System: E-9015 (TEMPORARY: AWAITING OFFICIAL DESIGNATION)
Coruscant Standard Time: 18:41
Gavrisom struggled to control his breathing as he hurried to the Implacable’s holocomm room. The Emperor personally contacting a military official who didn’t wield any political power was a rare occasion indeed. It usually ended up with said officer becoming either very powerful, or very dead – the latter far more commonly than the former. Still, making His Excellency wait would hardly increase his chances of survival, and there wasn’t any place in the galaxy where he could hide. He just wished he knew what he had done to deserve execution.
Entering the dark chamber, he sealed the doors behind him and kneeled before the holoprojector. A few moments later, an enormous image of the Emperor’s head appeared above it. He made sure not to allow any of his disgust to show on his face. As loyal as he was, he hated the Emperor’s overblown ego. Plus, looking at all of the deformed man’s wrinkles and scars at a hundred times life size was a less-than-pleasant experience. Putting on his most subservient expression, he asked, “What is your will, Your Majesty?”
“I have heard of your actions against these… ‘ponies,’” the Emperor replied. Gavrisom reeled. How could the Emperor have found out so quickly? The decision to carry out a Base Delta Zero operation was a major one, and he had sent a report detailing his reasons to Imperial High Command. But he did that less than an hour ago! Those bureaucrats shouldn’t have even gotten around to reading it yet, much less decided that it was important enough to forward to the personal desk of the Emperor!
Seeming to not notice – or, more likely, not care about – the admiral’s shock, the Emperor continued. “You will stop your attack immediately. I want that planet and a… sustainable… number of its inhabitants taken willingly and intact, Admiral. I believe that they will prove to be most useful assets to the Empire. I am making you that system’s governor, and granting you full authority to take whatever measures you deem necessary in order to accomplish that task. Do I make myself clear?”
“I, uh…” Gavrisom stammered for a moment. “Um… Yes! Of course, Your Majesty! As you will it, it shall be done!”
The Emperor’s visage twisted into a cold grin that showed his yellowed teeth. “Very good, Admiral.” Then his expression turned fierce. “Remember that I will not accept failure.”
The transmission cut off, and the newly-appointed governor released a sigh of relief. He noticed that he was sweating profusely, even though the temperature in the room seemed to have dropped by ten degrees.
Sector: The Imperial Sector
Planet: Coruscant
Location: The Imperial Palace
Time: 18:43
Dark Lord of the Sith Darth Sidious leaned back in his chair and steepled his fingers with a smile. He had sensed a disturbance in the Force as soon as the task force had emerged in-system, and he ordered any reports from that sector of space immediately sent to him. Reading the description of the natives, it had not taken him long to see the potential. An entire planet of Force-users, untouched by Jedi philosophy, ready for him to mold in his own image… Oh, yes, this was going to be very good, indeed…
Low-Earth Orbit
6:31 A.M., Canterlot Time
The Royal Sisters flew into the opening in the leading object that the strange vehicles had escorted them to. They had been surprised when both the objects and vehicles had stopped their attacks, and flat-out stunned when one of the vehicles flew up to them and the human inside made gestures indicating that it wanted them to follow it. They were suspicious, of course, but if this was an opportunity to end this conflict quickly and without further bloodshed, then they had to take it.
Landing in a massive chamber far bigger than the Canterlot Castle throne room, the sisters were almost immediately surrounded by a platoon of the white-armored humans with weapons trained on the alicorns. Luna snorted in disdain. It would take far more than that to even have the slightest chance of bringing down just one of them. Still, if it made them feel safe, she was willing to tolerate their presence. A moment later, the humans parted to let through another one of their number in a gray-green uniform and cap. The sisters recognized him immediately – Admiral Sturm Gavrisom.
He stood there awkwardly for a moment, rubbing the back of his neck with his left hand and not making eye contact with them. Then he shook himself, straightened his back, put his hands into the same clasped-behind-the-back position he had used during their earlier conversation, and looked steadily at the Royal Sisters. “Well then,” he said, still sounding rather nervous, “welcome aboard the Implacable. I’m hoping we can put all of this unpleasantness behind us and recommence negotiations?”
“Unpleasantness?!” Luna echoed back, outraged. “You threatened us, and then you tried to kill everypony!”
“And you have caused thirty-two families the horrible pain of knowing that one of their loved ones is dead and there isn’t enough left of him to bury,” the human retorted. “We all do what we think is necessary to protect those who depend on us, regardless of how distasteful it is.”
“Our actions aren’t remotely similar, and you know it,” Celestia said, joining the debate. “You came to our world, attacked somepony without reason, ordered us to submit to your tyrannical rule, and tried to massacre innocents when we refused. We simply did what we had to in order to stop those atrocities.”
“No,” Gavrisom replied, “I simply think on a far larger scale than you do. Remember, I’m responsible for the safety of over one hundred quadrillion beings. To me, a few hundred million civilian casualties is, while significant, within the boundaries of the price that I’m willing to pay in order to eliminate a threat to a population that is as many times larger than yours as your planet has individual inhabitants. And your displays of power in the Force, both on the planet’s surface and during the space battle, reveal that you most certainly are a threat to us. Plus, I’d hardly call General Aerin siccing his stormtroopers on that yellow pony ‘attacking without reason.’ From what he told me, she – I presume it was a she? – tried to use a mind trick on him. It was purely self-defense, totally justified.”
Celestia frowned in confusion. “A ‘mind trick’? You mean the Stare? And what’s ‘the Force’? Is that what you humans call magic?”
Gavrisom rolled his eyes. “Ah, yes, you primitives do often call the Force ‘magic.’ And if ‘the Stare’ involves using the Force to suppress someone’s free will, then yes, it is a mind trick.”
“We are arguing over semantics, here,” Luna cut in. “We are not a threat to anypony. At least, not until you made us a threat by unjustly attacking us!”
The human shrugged. “A gram of prevention is worth a kilo of cure. Besides, that’s in the past now. You seemed to manage to throw up that planetary shield in time, so I highly doubt our attack did any real damage. And the Emperor himself has contacted me with an order to preserve your species. So, now that we’ve both gotten our grievances out of the way and established that neither of us have any further plans to attack the other, perhaps we can now work on creating a treaty that actually does benefit both parties?”
“How can we trust you?” Celestia asked. “This could all just be a trick to get us to trust you before you stab us in the back.”
“True,” Gavrisom admitted, “but if I wanted to do that, I could have just flooded this hanger with poison gas or vented it into space instead of meeting with you. We then could have destroyed your planet at our leisure. Oh, by the way, your planetary shield dropped a few seconds after we stopped firing, so I’m guessing it has a quite limited power source that needs to be conserved. The Force reserves of your people, perhaps? I’m quite certain that would run out long before our hypermatter supplies did.”
Celestia decided that she didn’t want to tell him about the Elements of Harmony, and she didn’t bother to ask what hypermatter was. Instead, she took his words to be evidence that he really wasn’t planning any treachery – at least, she accepted it for now. There was no way that she would instantly and totally trust somepony who had just tried to wipe out all of Equestria. “Alright,” she said. “Let’s negotiate.”
“WHAT?!” Luna exclaimed. “Sister, you cannot truly be giving in to this, this murderer, can you?”
Celestia extended a soothing hoof. “Calm yourself, Luna. I said that we’d negotiate, not that I’d give them whatever they want.”
“Very well,” the dark alicorn muttered. Then she looked the human right in the eyes. “But be warned – I will be watching carefully, and I will stop you if you show even the smallest sign that you still intend to harm us.”
“Then I will do everything in my power to give you no reason to do so,” he replied smoothly. He turned back to Celestia, having obviously come to the conclusion – and not a very incorrect one, Luna had to grudgingly admit to herself – that the Princess of the Sun was the only one to wield any actual decision-making power. “Hopefully,” he said, “my first proposal will be one that you can agree to without much bargaining. It would greatly serve the Empire’s interests, both in this system and beyond, to establish a base of operations here. I would like your permission to send the forces who would garrison the base to your planet’s surface. We can provide our own temporary housing, but I’d like them to have a week of unrestricted exploration of your world before deciding on a location to construct a permanent headquarters. This location would be restricted to a place that is neither privately owned nor has any previous construction upon it, so any historical landmarks will be preserved. In exchange, our medical personnel will assist your doctors and provide you with unrestricted access to all of our medicines and medical technology. How does that sound?”
“It sounds like you take me for a complete fool,” Celestia shot back. “Allowing you to send soldiers into Equestria in exchange for a little medicine intended for a totally different species? How could that possibly be considered a fair deal?”
Gavrisom smiled. “I suppose I shouldn’t have expected you to guess the true scope of our medical capabilities. Our medics are quite capable of operating on species other than humans, and I assure you they would learn how to properly treat your species quite quickly. Bacta has almost miraculous results, and it works on almost every species in the galaxy. Let me give you an example of just how amazing bacta is.
“I’m sure you haven’t forgotten the rather sad state of the right side of General Aerin’s face. Well, what you might not have guessed is that under his gloves and uniform, that entire side of his body looks the same, or worse. And he’s damned lucky that it does, too. You see, a few years ago, he got caught in a missile blast – you probably don’t know what missile is, do you? Well, suffice to say that it really messes you up if it hits you – as in, a ‘tears your limbs off and paints whatever remains of the walls with a paste of your innards’ sort of messes you up.
“Fortunately for him – or unfortunately, depending on how you want to look at it – he didn’t receive the full force. He didn’t get turned into giblets, but his guts were all torn up by shrapnel, and the only reason he didn’t bleed out before the medics got to him was because the heat of the blast cauterized most of his arteries. The left side of his body was covered in second-degree burns, and his right was charred and flayed down to his shattered bones in many places. Most people wouldn’t survive that, but he had two things going for him – the man’s more stubborn than a meat-fed bull reek in mating season, and he was only a few dozen meters from a bacta tank.
“He stayed in there for over a month, hooked up to an artificial heart and lungs and given his nutrition by IV while we grew replacement organs for him. The eye didn’t take, unfortunately. His optic nerves were too borked up for us to fix without years of reconstructive surgery, and he wanted to get back to the front lines as soon as possible. Still, we not only saved his life, but we restored him to a point where he could go back on active duty. For any society that didn’t have bacta, the only humane thing the medics could have done would be to shoot him in the head and end his misery. But we saved him. That is what our medicine can do for you.”
The two sisters had started looking incredibly sick at his description of what happens to someone who took a direct hit from a high explosive, and they didn’t seem to have recovered much. Celestia managed to swallow down her nausea long enough to admit, “Yes, those certainly are… impressive medical abilities.”
Gavrisom’s smile grew. “Does that mean that we have a deal?”
Celestia couldn’t shake the feeling that she was still getting the far worse end of the deal, that there was something very important she was forgetting to find out, and that she was giving them something almost as valuable as permission to wander Equestria and build a base, but she was too preoccupied with keeping down last night’s cake to devote too much energy to figuring it out. Instead, she just nodded.
“Deal.”