1 Year after the Treaty of Coruscant
It had finally reached a year since the treaty was signed and it was also time for Daimon to leave Coruscant. Things were looking good for the Republic and the Provisional Council.
A new Chancellor was already elected and had been in office for three months. Her name was Chancellor Mira Solen of Chandrila, a former educator and regional administrator who had entered politics fifteen years ago specifically because she believed the Republic's institutions were drifting toward the kind of concentrated authority that eventually produced men like Thrace.
She was sixty-one years old, sharp-minded, and possessed the particular quality that Daimon had found rarest among people who sought power: she was genuinely uninterested in it beyond what it allowed her to accomplish.
He had met with her twice in the months following her election. Both conversations had been productive in the way that conversations with capable people tended to be, meaning they had covered a great deal of ground without either party wasting the other's time with performances of authority.
She understood the treaty's constraints without resenting them, which was a more sophisticated response than he had expected. Most people who accepted limitations either rationalized them into something they could call a victory or nursed a private grievance that eventually expressed itself in ways that were predictable but still inconvenient. Solen had simply assessed the constraints, mapped what was possible within them, and started working.
The tribunal had concluded its first round of proceedings. 437 members of Thrace's inner circle had been convicted of varying charges. Nineteen had received sentences of imprisonment ranging from twenty to forty years. Six had been acquitted for insufficient evidence, a fact that had generated considerable public frustration.
Thrace himself had been convicted on seven counts, including conspiracy to fabricate a casus belli, unlawful conscription of civilian populations, and the suppression of democratic process within the Senate chamber. The tribunal had sentenced him to life imprisonment without the possibility of early release. He had said nothing during the sentencing. His attorneys had filed an appeal within the hour, but that would take years to process.
The outcome of his sentence was unlikely to change, and the process itself demonstrated that even the Republic's most catastrophic failure of leadership was subject to the law.
Daimon stood on the Senate plaza in the early morning. Lord Maxim stood several paces behind him, as he typically did when Daimon was thinking rather than working.
His transport was scheduled to depart within the hour. The Imperial garrison would remain for the duration of the stabilization mandate, commanded by a senior officer he trusted to maintain the supervisory role without sliding into the occupational one.
Authority had a way of expanding to fill whatever space it was given, and garrison commanders who were not actively monitored tended to interpret their mandates generously.
He had selected Commander Erevan Thoss for the role after reviewing forty-seven candidates. Thoss was a 357-year-old Gen'Dai officer who had spent most of his career in administrative and oversight postings rather than combat commands. He was not the kind of officer who won battles. He was the kind of officer who made sure the peace that followed battles was worth what the battles had cost.
Chancellor Solen had come to see him off personally, which he had not expected. She arrived on the plaza with a small staff.
"Emperor Daimon," she said, stopping some distance away. "I wanted to speak with you before you departed. Without the formal setting."
"Please Chancellor." Daimon replied.
She looked out across the plaza rather than at him, which he took as a sign that what she was about to say was something she had been thinking about for some time. People often looked away when they were thinking about how to put their thoughts into words.
"When I was teaching political theory," she began, "I used to tell my students that the most dangerous moment for any republic wasn't revolution from outside. It was the slow erosion from within. The gradual normalization of exceptions, emergency powers that never quite expired, and the oversight mechanisms that were quietly defunded over time."
"Thrace didn't happen overnight. He was the product of centuries of institutional decay that nobody wanted to spend political capital fixing because fixing it would have required admitting it existed."
"I'm aware," Daimon said. Cortana had already came up with a timeline of how things came to be present.
"What I want to say is this." She finally turned to look at him directly. "The reforms you've imposed will help. Structurally, they address the most obvious points of failure. But structures are only as durable as the culture that operates within them, and culture doesn't change because a treaty says it should."
"I'm telling you this not as a complaint about the treaty but because I want you to understand what you're leaving behind. I can rebuild the institutions. But I cannot guarantee the people inside them will be different."
"No," he agreed. "You can't. And neither can I."
"Does that concern you?" she replied.
"It would concern me more if you believed otherwise." He turned slightly toward the transport. "The fact that you're thinking about it clearly enough to say it to my face suggests the Republic's chances are better than the last two years and century would indicate."
Solen was quiet for a moment. "Will you intervene again? If things begin to deteriorate?" It was an honest question and deserved an honest answer.
"If the deterioration threatens Imperial interests or produces the kind of suffering that the last war produced, then yes." He glanced back at her. "But I would rather not. Intervention is expensive for everyone involved, and I have a considerable amount of galaxy left to manage."
She smiled at his response. "Then I suppose we both have incentive to make this work."
"We do." She nodded once, formally, and departed with her staff. Daimon watched her go for a moment, then turned back toward the transport. Lord Maxim fell into step beside him as they crossed the plaza. "She's better than I expected," Maxim said.
"Most people are," Daimon replied, "when they're given problems worth solving instead of performances worth maintaining."
They boarded the transport and took their seats. In the next few seconds, the engines activated and the pilot waited for everything to be ready. Through the viewport, Coruscant spread in every direction, an endless city that had served as the political center of the galaxy for so long that most of its inhabitants had stopped being able to imagine it as anything else.
Once the transport took off, Daimon continued watching the city until they ascended through the lower atmosphere.
He had spent a year on this world. That was longer than he had spent in any single location outside the Imperium in some time. Coruscant had a particular quality to it that most people who lived there were too accustomed to notice, a kind of accumulated historical weight that pressed down on everything.
Every plaza, every government building, every administrative corridor carried the residue of ten thousand years of decisions, most of them made by people who had believed, with complete sincerity, that they were doing the right thing.
As he was lost in thought, the transport broke through the upper atmosphere and in front of them was the Luminary. It was surrounded by the reduced escort fleet that would accompany Daimon back to Veldari. The majority of the invasion force had already been redistributed, some back to their home garrisons, others reassigned to the Unknown Regions stabilization effort or the ongoing integration of newly acquired territories.
"Any developments from the High Council?" Daimon asked as they docked.
Lord Maxim looked through his datapad as they exited the transport and walked through the corridors. "Grand Chancellor Thoryn reports that the tiered classification system has been finalized and approved. Forty-three worlds designated as immediate strategic priority, receiving full development investment within the first two years. A further one hundred and twelve designated as secondary, sustained on existing infrastructure with limited administrative support until the primary tier stabilizes. The remainder categorized as tertiary, with local provisional governors and minimal Imperial oversight for the foreseeable future."
"How did the local provisional governors respond?"
"Mixed, according to the reports. Some accepted limited authority as it was better than nothing. Others interpreted it as a slight and have been vocal about it in ways that Progenitor Vos describes as manageable but worth monitoring."
"Well, it doesn't matter what they think. They lost the war and now they're subject to the laws and culture of the Imperium. Any resistance, we will put out as soon as we find it."
Hearing this response, Maxim somewhat understood why Daimon was taking a much harsher approach with these situations than with the Republic. From his time by Daimon's side in the Republic, there were many times when Daimon just sat in silence, thinking about something.
He had seen this numerous times throughout the year and often tried to offer help, but there were some things that only Daimon could deal with.
And he knows how Daimon doesn't claim the title of God-Emperor, but sometimes he could see why the people gave him that title.