Dark Clouds Rising

Military action

That's no moon!

The military academy and Naval Shipyard at Kapella System are destroyed by a planetoid-sized hyperspace-capable spherical battlestation known as the Death Star. Darth SIdious has really had quite enough of rebellion within the Tapani Sector.

At a secret Emergency Session of the Council of Counts, Regent Aral Vorkosigan announces that a state of war exists between the Tapani Imperium and the Galactic Empire. While the House of Lords debates the eventual response to Dragomir's invitation to surrender, it's up to Count Tsu Vorboccioni, Lord Danar Vorpadaran, and KitKat to sneak onto the blockaded world Mentis and extract the Emperor from his vacation.

In a desperate dogfight, teamwork gets one rather solid asteroid moving at just the right speed, at just the right angle, to smash into the Death Star's hyperdrive engines. Rebel Alliance forces streak away while the battlestation stabilizes itself. Gregor Vortapani takes official control of his Imperium while the Death Star limps into orbit around the Mentat homeworld.

Speaking from perfect logic, the denizens of the Mentis System assure Moff Alexander Kane that they already have preliminary thoughts on how to fix the hyperdrive. They even have plans to improve the entire Death Star design for the betterment of the Galaxy. One might even expect a ... Final Solution.

What Kane and Palpatine both fail to realize is that Mentats consider the Galactic Imperial Occupation to be the problem in need of solving. But then, these foreigners are not intelligent enough to detect Mentat sarcasm when it infiltrates their sensors....