Twilight
While Rebellion forces have made inroads against the Galactic Empire's aggression throughout the galaxy, Tapani Imperium Forces have been slowly but regularly successful in recovering territory inside the Freeworlds Territory, Mecetti, and Barnaba Provinces. The Death Star, because its hyperdrive is still broken, has been used by the Imps as a permanent staging area for assaults into the deeper regions of the Tapani Sector, even as close as the skies of Procopia.
All hell breaks loose:
Once upon a time, the Mentats were annoyed that Palpatine broke his Death Star in the Mentis System, leaving it effectively parked in Mentis orbit. They very logically donated their services to Galactic Imperial repairs: in the process, right under the Imps' collective noses, they were going to use the Death Star's surplus computing power to craft a Final Solution, a navbuoy virus that would forever disconnect the Tapani Sector from Palpatine's more firmly-controlled Galaxy.
Pruneface found out about part of this plan, and converted it to a virus that would lead nuclear missiles after any hyperspace trail, to bomb any world not under his thumb. At the same time as the missile attack, Palpatine makes a theoretically impossible use of a Bene Gesserit technique to reactivate Order 66, swaying some of the TCs away from their chosen alliance.
Nobody gets quite what they wanted from this plan.
On the way back from a somewhat dull diplomatic mission, Danar and party are almost-missed by one of the nuclear missiles, and have to make an emergency diversion to a long-abandoned gas mining station, far off the normal travel paths through space.
Major points in Tapani Sector are now occupied by Galactic Imperial forces, to wildly varying degrees of success. Normal communications have been horrifically disrupted, making it a fight on either side to keep even boosted military channels operational. Hyperspace travel is nearly back to the early trailblazing days of uncertainty, as Palpatine's nuclear warhead missiles didn't all manage to follow the NavBuoy paths to realspace; the remnants might attack any vessel to wander by.
The only surety anyone has as to the status of survivors are daredevil reporters broadcasting weak, pirated signals, and the unsupportable yet imperturbable assertions of Vanya that the Jedi, the Dathomirian Witches, and Emperor Gregor still live. She insists that she checked up on them in the middle of the hottest drop in MSgt Yeager Lexics' career to date, when a strike team hit a backup comm platform on the seas of Procopia so they could (among other things) "appropriate" Hans Triken, designer of Palpatine's missiles.
A significant amount of the sector-wide damage is delivered via a lot of hyperspace-drive missiles, carrying Anti-Force Space Ferrets. Dragomir takes out several Vor-filled targets on Procopia right toward the beginning. Feyd whacks his jailers and goes looking for more victims anywhere nearby.
All the Bene Gesserits vanish.
One entire Tapani subsector has gone completely incommunicado, and not in a helpless way so much as a "screw you people, we're with Palpatine" way. Surprisingly, this is NOT Mecetti Province. We're going to have a big problem with House Vormelantha.
Aboard the gas mining station is a ghost: a vivid, interactive, eerie, translucent figure of a bearded human in a simple traveler's robe, not a holoprojection but a speaking man who knows the funerary customs of Clone Troopers.
His name, he says, is Qui-Gon Jinn.
The Conflict
Aftermath
- Most shipyards in the Tapani Sector took significant damage, if they survived the attack at all.
- Dendarii System took at least five direct missile barrages.
- More than 20 Counts died at a single cotillion when it was hit by a hyperspace missile with a nuclear warhead.
- Many of the agricultural and mining worlds of the Tapani Sector had their starports destroyed down to component atoms. Some worlds took additional damage, weakening their ecosystems.
- The Long Night began.
Belligerents
Strength
Casualties
Objectives
- Crush the Rebel Alliance in the Tapani Sector .
- Exterminate all Force Sensitive religions who have not sworn loyalty to Darth Sidious and the Dark Side of the Force.
- Gain total military control of all Provinces.
- Locate and capture Gregor Vortapani and his elder sister Katianna Vortapani.
- Wrest control of the 257th Clone Detachment away from the Jedi Order.
- Kill Aral Vorkosigan and Angelo d'Arcy in particular.
Strength
Casualties
Objectives
- Disconnect the Tapani Sector from the rest of Palpatine's Galactic Empire, thus limiting Darth Sidious's resources.
- Disconnect the Death Star from all potential support or allies.
- Isolate Alexander Kane. Starve him out. Literally.
- Isolate Darth Sidious from precognitive or distance-crossing data, thus limiting his choices.
- Put a firm halt to the ridiculously overlong civil war, or at least end its effect on the Tapani Sector.
- Silence the vapid chatter of the various propaganda channels on the HoloNet.
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