A/N: Had a wedding to got to, but I am back now.
Also check out the updated Galaxy map below.
(Galaxy Map)
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"Open Fire on that building!" Shouted Karnoss as the Ascendants standing amongst the crowd aimed their weapons at the building where the missile came from and opened fire.
The man that had been aiming his missile launcher outside of the window found himself under heavy fire as he ducked behind cover. "No effect on target. I say again, no effect on target." he spoke into his comm.
"Copy that," came a response. "We'll try to get you out of there, but the area is swarming with Imperials. If we can't get to you, then you know what to do."
The man pressed his back against the wall as blaster fire tore through the window frame above him. He looked down at the launcher in his hands. 'One shot remaining' he said in his head.
He knew what he needed to do. They had discussed it before any of this started, in a basement three levels below a market district, with a dozen former soldiers sitting in a circle under a single lamp. If you are caught and there is no escape, you do not let them take you. Not because capture was death, but because capture was something far worse. Capture meant information, and information meant the locations of the others.
He closed his eyes for a moment as he prepared for the next few minutes, which may be his last.
Meanwhile, it was getting difficult to determine who was just a regular protester and who were the agitators. The only effective option was to arrest everybody and figure it all out later.
"In the name of the Emperor, everybody is hereby placed under arrest and will comply with Imperial forces or face death!" yelled Karnoss.
But the crowd didn't listen, or it was more like they couldn't listen as they were running away in fear. So, the walls of war droids and Ascendants that were strategically placed all around the crowd began to advance forward.
The crowd began to fold inward as the droids closed in around them. People who had come to protest found themselves pressed against people they didn't know. The genuine demonstrators and the agitators panicked as the droids and Ascendants surrounded them and kept pushing them toward each other.
The children among the crowd were crying from chaos that was happening around them. A woman near the front stumbled, but she was quickly picked up by a stranger beside her, before the crowd could trample her.
Karnoss watched through his tactical display, monitoring the situation. "Platoon commanders, be aware of civilians on the ground. Anyone who falls is to be extracted from the crowd before they get trampled." he ordered. "I want this done without unnecessary deaths."
"Battle Marshal," Vex-9 called from beside him. "The individual in the upper floor of the building has not fired again. Thermal imaging indicates he is still present but stationary." As he said this, the man in the building had raised his gun to his head and pulled the trigger.
Within the next few seconds, the Ascendants stormed the building and found the corpse of the man who fired the missile launcher.
"Sir, he shot himself." reported the leader of the squad.
"What a coward," said Karnoss. "Still bring his corpse as we can still extract information from him." the Ascendant acknowledged and picked up the corpse of the man to bring it back to the base.
Despite the man being dead, the Imperium still had ways to extract information from people and whether they were dead or not didn't matter, especially when one had the power of the force.
Elsewhere within the city, several people began to make moves. Their plan was mildly successful in the fact that they got the Ascendants to use lethal force, which would serve as propaganda for their cause. They had expected collateral deaths among their own people, which was a small price they were willing to pay to advance their goals.
Three of the group's members were positioned in separate locations across Vauren's Hold, each carrying recording equipment rather than weapons. Their task had always been documentation, not combat. They had filmed the missile strike, filmed the Ascendant response, and were already transmitting the information to off-world contacts before Karnoss's forces had finished surrounding the square.
Vex-9 detected two of the transmissions within minutes with the third one managing to get through.
"We have a partial broadcast leak," Vex-9 reported. "Estimated thirty seconds of footage from the square, beginning at the moment of the missile impact. The footage has been transmitted to at least one off-world relay. I cannot confirm the final destination."
"What does the footage show?" Karnoss asked.
"The explosion, then the Ascendant return fire on the building. Following that is the crowd dispersal and the deaths of fourteen civilians in the blast radius."
"It does not show the missile being fired first. The recording begins approximately four seconds after impact." Karnoss sighed. Of course, something like this would happen. All he needed to do was inform command of the situation and then some higher ups would deal with the situation.
The crowd in the square was largely subdued now, several thousand people sitting on the ground while droid units processed them into small groups. The Ascendants had pulled back to a perimeter position while a medical team was already working on the civilians injured in the blast, which included three children.
It was a sad thing to have to watch, but the Ascendants had seen worse. Of course, they felt bad, but they were trained to place their duty above their emotions no matter what.
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Veldari - Capital of the Veldari Imperium
It has been two days since Daimon returned to the planet. In this time, he spent most of his time working together with the other Progenitors with managing the swath of territory that they just took. His thoughts always wondered to how the Roman Empire fell from barbarian invasions, economic crises, and internal political decay.
Now imagine that, but in space on a galactic scale, only his empire didn't have much internal political decay or barbarian invasions, but they were going through a small economic crisis. The needs of the newly conquered systems demanded a lot more than what Imperium was able to produce.
This was mainly because of the fact that they were terraformed yet so they required constant shipments of certain amounts of materials and other items to these worlds. Then there was the need to rebuild the infrastructure of these worlds after they were destroyed from bombardments or ground invasions, and the need to integrate the population.
The former Republic worlds were relatively easy as most of them were small to medium sized colonies with a few densely populated worlds. The populations of these worlds only joined the Republic in the last few centuries so they didn't have a long history of being under the Republic making it easier to integrate them into Imperium society.
But the main problem lies with the Unknown Regions. The former territories of the Theocratic Dominion of Kalyndra and the Coalition of Free Stars were proving to be a problem. Most of these worlds were severely crippled from the war with mass poverty basically everywhere. Some of them were just extremely resistant to Imperial rule and didn't want to cooperate.
He had methods to force cooperation; the problem was it just took time and resources. Both of which he has, but how long can things stay like this before a massive insurrection breaks off and now, he has to send in more soldiers to the regions.
The answer was not long enough to allow him to rest easily.
As he was reviewing the latest economic projections, Cortana had materialized above the desk terminal. "You've seen the Dressia footage," Daimon said before she could speak. He had already seen it himself but had more important matters to look at before he got back to it.
"It reached fourteen Republic news networks within six hours of the transmission. The Imperial Information Directorate has issued a formal counter-narrative with the full sequence of events, including the missile strike and the identities of the agitators, but the original clip has already been shared approximately two hundred million times across both Republic and Imperial social networks."
"What's the sentiment breakdown?"
"Within the Republic, predominantly negative toward the Imperium. Within Imperial space, it is relatively simple. The core worlds show strong support for Karnoss's handling of the situation. The outer territories and newly acquired regions show higher rates of sympathy for the Dressian protesters." Cortana paused. "There are also a number of Imperial citizens asking why the Ascendants were placed in a crowd that contained children, though they're only a minority of the citizens. But a loud minority can get annoying pretty quickly."
Daimon nodded his head at that statement. A loud minority was what caused problems for an empire. Most people just went about their normal everyday lives; however, the loud minority was always the ones with something to say about everything no matter how big or small it was.
Setting down the report he had been reading, he pulled up Karnoss's after-action report and read through it again. The Battle Marshal had documented everything correctly, including the delayed broadcast, the prior intelligence on agitator presence, and his own order to minimize casualties. The report was thorough and honest, which meant Karnoss understood he had walked into something designed to produce exactly the outcome it had produced.
"Where is the footage originating from in terms of the off-world relay?" he asked.
"We've traced it to a communications node in a system bordering former Coalition space. The node itself appears to be civilian infrastructure, but the transmission routing is not consistent with civilian use. Someone with military or intelligence training set it up."
Daimon guessed this was the case. Since they had lost the war, now the remnants of the old empire would fight a different type of war. Down the line this would probably give rise to numerous insurrection cells spread across these systems.
But the problem with that was the fact that they severely underestimated the Imperium's intelligence gathering abilities and how far Daimon was willing to go to bring about order.