Dressia - former Coalition of Free Stars world
Dressia has been a pretty hot world in terms of resistance. The people constantly protested to become independent from the Imperium, despite their government losing the war. However, these protests and acts of resistance could not be coordinated as their leaders were either dead or sitting in an Imperial prison.
This stopped any massive acts of insurrection from happening throughout the region, but it still did not stop the people of each planet from protesting themselves.
On Dressia specifically, protests were massive and happened almost every day.
An Ascendant division commanded by Battle Marshal Karnoss was sent to this planet for this exact reason. Their orders were to ensure order and assist the War Droid General present on the ground.
War Droid General Vex-9 had been managing the situation on Dressia for six weeks before Karnoss arrived, and the General's assessment reports had been, in Karnoss's professional opinion, admirably honest about the limitations of droid command in a situation that was fundamentally not a military problem.
Vex-9 could suppress a riot. It could establish perimeters, disperse crowds with non-lethal deterrents, and calculate the minimum force required to restore order with a precision that no organic commander could match. What it could not do was understand why the crowds kept returning the next morning after getting beat and hit with non-lethal equipment the day before. That particular question fell outside its operational parameters and Vex-9 had been forthright enough to say so in its reports rather than pretending the question didn't exist.
Karnoss had appreciated that. Droids that overclaimed their own competence were considerably more dangerous than droids that knew their limitations.
He arrived in the capital city of Dressia, a place called Vauren's Hold by its inhabitants, in the early hours of the morning before the daily protests typically began. The city was quiet, probably in preparation for the afternoon riots.
Vex-9 met him at the landing platform. The General stood 6ft 6in, its chassis was dark gray with none of the ceremonial markings that some of the older droid commanders had accumulated over decades of service.
"Battle Marshal Karnoss," Vex-9 said. "I have prepared a comprehensive briefing. However, I will summarize the central problem first, since the briefing contains a great deal of data that supports a conclusion I can state in two sentences."
"Go ahead," Karnoss said.
"The people of Dressia are not protesting because they expect to win. They are protesting because they have nothing else left to do that feels like resistance. Suppressing the protests addresses the symptom without touching the cause, which is the reason I have calculated why the protests continue regardless of suppression."
Karnoss looked out across the city from the landing platform. Vauren's Hold was built on a series of elevated plateaus connected by wide transit bridges, and from this height he could see perhaps a dozen districts below him. It looked like any other city. Functional architecture, transit lines, and early-morning workers beginning their routines.
"What do they actually want?" Karnoss asked.
"Their pre-war governance structure restored. Specifically, they want the Coalition's regional council system, which allowed individual worlds significant administrative autonomy. They are not, according to my analysis of protest communications, primarily motivated by opposition to Imperial culture or the Imperial faith. They are motivated by the loss of self-determination. The cultural and religious objections are present but secondary."
Karnoss thought for a moment. He had commanded Ascendant forces in seventeen different post-conquest stabilization operations over the course of his service, and the pattern Vex-9 had just described was not unfamiliar to him. People who had lost wars did not always know how to articulate what they had actually lost. They reached for the nearest available vocabulary, which was usually cultural or religious, because those were the terms that felt personal enough to justify the intensity of what they were feeling.
The actual wound was usually something simpler and harder to name. The sense that their lives were no longer fully their own. That decisions affecting them were now being made by people who did not know them and had no particular reason to care whether the decisions were good ones.
"Have you made any contact with the protest leadership?" Karnoss asked.
"There is no formal leadership. The Coalition's political structure was dismantled following the conquest, and its prominent figures are either imprisoned, dead, or have withdrawn from public life. What exists instead is a distributed network of community organizers, former local administrators, and what I would characterize as ordinary citizens who have discovered they are capable of coordination when sufficiently motivated."
"Hmmm. Interesting, but let's go into this briefing so me and my men know what we are getting into."
Vex-9 turned around and led him to the briefing. The briefing was long, but it was informative. And when it came to new environments, it was best to be the one with the information to prevent unnecessary casualties and have the advantage.
At the end of the meeting, Karnoss understood most of what was happening and what he needed to do. The protests would never stop unless they were hit with some overwhelming force. They had become too accustomed to the War Droids restraint that they thought they were gaining some ground.
Karnoss was going to prove them wrong, so he had the 10,000 Ascendants he brought with him split up into various platoons of 20 Ascendants and had them march through the streets. With there being 10 major cities on the planet, Karnoss had sent 1,000 Ascendants to each city under the command of their commanders.
They would now begin their pacification process.
A few hours passed since the morning, and during that time the people saw the Ascendants and some started to panic. The Ascendants were well known as they were the ones who conquered their worlds along and inflicted brutal casualties on the planet's defenders.
But even with all of this, some people saw this as an opportunity.
Once it hit noon, the protesters started to gather, though it was a smaller number than their average. They would usually get around 200,000 protesters every day. Today, there were only around 100,000. This meant that Karnoss's plan was working already.
But what he did not expect was that the people that were gathered today weren't here just to protest. Most of them witnessed the brutality of the Ascendants during their invasion or lost family members to them in the war. These people were fueled with rage and were out for vengeance.
Some thought that by directly attacking the Imperium's most elite warriors, they could finally get through to them. But like most good causes, it was always ruined by the few bad actors.
"We want Freedom! Restore our government!" The chant began, spreading outward through the gathered crowd.
Karnoss watched from a command position three streets back, his tactical display scanning for anything out of the ordinary.
"Crowd composition has shifted from previous days," Vex-9 reported. "I am detecting a higher proportion of adult males between the ages of twenty and forty-five. Thermal imaging indicates a number of individuals carrying concealed objects consistent with improvised weapons. Approximately twelve percent of the current gathering shows behavioral markers associated with pre-attack agitation rather than protest participation."
"The other eighty-eight percent?"
"Genuine protesters. Families in several cases. I am detecting children in the crowd too."
Karnoss thought for a bit before he made his decision. "6th Platoon." he called.
"6th Platoon here." came a response.
"I want you to go into the crowd and assist the droids with arresting these designated targets." he said, sending them the targets that they had identified.
"Confirmed," Came the response a few seconds later.
From the Imperial side, several dozen droids and Ascendants had moved forward, forming a path through the crowd and towards the targets.
The crowd noticed the movement immediately. Their chanting faltered and was replaced by silence. Most of the genuine protesters stepped back instinctively. They had learned over six weeks of daily demonstrations that the droids moved with purpose rather than aggression, that if you were not the specific target of their attention they would pass through you like water around stone. The families with children began pulling backward toward the edges of the crowd.
The twelve percent did not step back. Three of them had pulled the improvised weapons from beneath their clothing; crude incendiary devices assembled from scraps and threw them toward the nearest droid units. Two of the devices failed to ignite. The third hit a droid in the chest and created a flash of orange flame that didn't really damage the droids.
"Non-lethal suppression authorized," Karnoss said on his communicator. "Ascendants hold positions unless fired upon directly. Let the droids handle the containment."
The droids responded and began rushing into the crowd. The frontline that was filled with Ascendants started to push the crowd back, now that explosives had been used.
But, from one of the buildings, another agitator, part of a group of former soldiers who had fled the war and managed to hide among civilians, held another weapon.
In his hands was a missile launcher he had taken with him when he fled. His group had been waiting for a moment like this.
"Got target lock, preparing to fire." he said.
A few seconds later, his finger squeezed the trigger and the missile hit one of the Ascendant's right in the chest. The result of the explosion sent a few Ascendants flying backward and killed a dozen protesters who were standing too close to the blast radius.