Chapter 1

"Exiting hyperspace… now."

The Chiss frigate flashed back into realspace in a system that the Ascendancy only knew by an alphanumeric code from their stellar cartography databanks. As usual with being on patrol, they began with a sensor scan; the young Ensign at that station settled himself down for another boring watch, as no artificial energy sources, nor anything of note to the Ascendency was expected in this backwater. He suppressed a yawn and prepared the standard scanning cycles as the vessel settled into its normal patrol pattern.

Even though this system was on the very edge of Chiss-controlled space, there was no one out this way to threaten the Ascendancy. The only dangers lay corewards and… elsewhere, very much not in this direction. Alas, the CEDF was tasked with patrolling all of Chiss space, so that was what they did. It was their duty.

Backwards or not, space was vast, so it still took them more than an hour to move past the half-way point of their patrol run. The Ensign snuck a glance at the chrono set into his console, but it was still nearly twice that time before he could go off-duty. He yawned again behind his hand, reached over to where he had a cup of the Chiss equivalent to caf and took a sip. Another glance at his scopes, another big fat load of nothing. He sighed and tapped the console with his index fingers before readjusting his position and sitting up as straight as he could manage. This was not because he could see the frigate's commander—a particularly striking representative of the Chiss female form—walking by, but because for all this being as boring as watching paint dry, he was an officer …a Chiss officer.

Though largely unknown to the wider galaxy, the Chiss were a martial people. They always had been, even in the days of primitive weaponry. Now, thousands of years removed from that time, they had expanded outward from their ice-bound homeworld into the starry void of what most called the Unknown Regions. Occasionally they would have contact with a trader from some place like Corellia and there were local groups—pirates and slavers not the least among them—but mostly, the Chiss supremacy in this section of the galaxy was unchallenged. Of course, there was that other danger, that other threat, but they were elsewhere.

"Status?"

His commander's voice came from the left, so he turned towards her and shook his head. "Nothing but white noise, Ma'am."

She wasn't known to display much emotion, but he knew that she was as annoyed about this posting as he was bored with it. What was worse, he knew that it wasn't really anyone's fault. Someone had to do it, and this cycle, the lot had fallen on them, that was all.

"Keep on it, Ensign."

So he did. For most of another hour he ran the scans he was supposed to run, half of his mind on lunch in the mess that he was looking forward to. He yawned again and tapped the blank surface of his console with his middle finger, imitating the beat of a popular ditty that was making the rounds. While making her rounds of the bridge, the commander did notice this; she disliked such distractions, but given the nature of their mission, she decided to give the officer some leeway. Their screens and scopes displayed quite a boring stretch of black.

Nothing, nothing, more nothing, even more nothing, a big, fat load of no-

His train of thought halted when one of the lateral magnetic anomaly sensors registered a faint ping, indicating an artificial metal source. With a sigh, the young Ensign redirected some of his more sensitive, short-range arrays towards the contact, and that was when he really began to pay attention. The debris was definitely artificial, and scattered over the surface of a small moon at the very edge of this system's habitable zone.

Time to notify the commander. He called out his contact, and a very short time later she was standing behind him, studying the readouts over his shoulder. A small part of his mind was distracted by her being so close, but he ruthlessly quashed those feelings. They were, after all, entirely inappropriate.

"So?"

"It looks like the remains of a ship. No energy sources I can see from here, but these are clearly alloys used in ship construction pretty much anywhere in the Core Worlds."

"An intruder then?"

"Yes, Ma'am."

"So what destroyed them?" she asked.

The Ensign knew she wasn't expecting an answer and instead focused even more of his sensor systems on the target. He was increasingly frustrated when they told him nothing really new, so after waiting for a few seconds he spoke his analysis aloud. "Commander, this is on the extreme edge of the habitable zone. If we want more information, we'll have to get a lot closer than this."

She considered for a few moments before obviously deciding to listen to the advice of her Primary Tracking Officer. "We'll do that. Helm, prepare to execute a microjump to the location Tracking will give you."

"Yes, Commander."

Once closer to the moon, the Ensign's scopes became a lot clearer. "It's definitely a medium-sized freighter of some kind. By the spread of the pattern and the condition of the wreckage as I can see it, this happened a few months ago, no more than five or six at the outside."

"Did they crash? An accident or malfunction of some sort, perhaps?" his commander asked, trying to ascertain if there was something that could pose a danger to her ship and crew… or the Ascendency as a whole.

"I… don't think so. The pattern indicates a high-speed impact, but it's spread too wide to have scattered because of that. To me it looks like this debris was scattered in space and just so happened to impact here. There might be more out there somewhere, but it's been dispersed by now."

"Which means we would never find it even if we tried."

The Commander sighed and walked back over to her command chair. "So is there any way to tell where they came from?"

"It's definitely from the Core Worlds, going by the materials alone. The fragments we can see without going down there are too damaged to tell what make of ship. Any estimate would be sheer guesswork."

As a rule, that was something not encouraged in either branch of the Chiss military. They did not seek out contact with other species, something that had gotten one of their more brilliant commander's in trouble over a decade before. That said, they did monitor groups of interest to make certain that the Ascendency was kept safe from outside intrusion.

Waiting for his commanding officer to decide what to do next, the Ensign decided to do something that he hadn't considered before. He took control of the best visual sensors installed on the ship, zoomed in as much as he could and began to inspect the fragments one by one. Of course, they were too damaged to make out anything but that it had been a ship of some sort; eventually what had been a desperate throw of the dice rewarded him however. ON one of the largest fragments he discovered some sort of insignia. More than half of it was missing and it was badly discoloured from blast damage, but enough was visible to let him make out a dark red and dark blue-spoked wheel with the remnants of a white bird superimposed on it.

The Ensign allowed himself a grin. "Well, at least we know who it belonged to."

The commander crossed the bridge again and grinned as well. "Put it up on the main screen."

"The Republic."

"Do we report this?" her second in command, only now reaching the bridge, asked.

"This is a clear intrusion by those… people into our space, so of course we will call it in."

Not much love was lost between those two, everyone aboard knew it and nobody openly admitted it.1

"What's more," the Captain continued in a cold voice that sent shivers down the Ensign's back, "something destroyed that ship and I want to find out what it was. Whatever that might be may pose a threat to the Ascendancy as much as the crew of that ship." She pointed at the screen where the burnt Republic insignia was still visible. "Look well and remember this symbol. They are interlopers."

The officer visibly deflated and muttered something the Ensign couldn't hear before moving to his own station.

"So, what are the conditions down there?"

"Marginal for habitation, Captain." the Ensign replied after checking his own readouts. "It won't be a pleasure cruise, but we shouldn't need suits."

"Good. All teams should go armed, despite lack of lifeform readings."

It took them about an hour to recover the large fragment with the insignia on it while the Captain talked to someone higher up in the hierarchy. Orders were to remain and analyse the debris as best they could with their on-board equipment before a freighter appeared to take the recovered pieces back to Csilla for further study. As the Ensign got off-shift and headed for the mess, he mused that this hadn't been such a boring patrol after all.

If you were in the Fleet, you had to be blind not to know that the Rebel group that had so grandiosely termed itself the last remnant of the Galactic Republic was hiding somewhere in the Unknown Regions, using a few old ships to launch raids on Imperial supply convoys. So why was the Government so concerned with them? Was there more to them than a few stolen freighters and a lot of talking? Was there something to the rumours that a few Jedi had survived the battle of Yavin and maybe found their way to that so-called remnant of the Republic?

What was sure was that Admiral Arilani had no idea just exactly where the Rebels had their base, or the frigate's commander wouldn't have been given the order to try and recover any astronavigation data that might have survived.

Closer to home was the issue of what had destroyed them? The fragment of the hull that had shown the insignia clearly indicated that the damage had come from the outside and had used some sort of energy weapon. Someone had attacked and destroyed them.

But who? The Empire?

Unlikely. Not only was this system clear on the far side of where the Ascendancy faced the core of the galaxy, but going by the Intelligence briefings she'd heard before setting off on this patrol, Palpatine was actively courting the Ascendancy and taking great pains to not offend them. So who was it? Few… or rather more none of the various smaller powers in the area would risk angering the Ascendancy by attacking someone else, even a few scummy rebels, within their space.

And what were these people doing here in the first place?

Scouting out Chiss borders maybe?

Then there was the chance that... they had something to do with it. And if that was true, then war was around the corner. And it would be a war that the Ascendancy would be hard pressed to win, even if any hypothetical alliance with the Empire were to happen.

"Commander?"

It was her chief engineer, approaching her as she was about to step through the hatch back onto the bridge.

"What is it?"

"Commander, we have analysed the wreckage, and… it's not good."

She frowned and motioned for him to continue.

"First, it was definitely hit by weapons fire—the blast pattern and the type of damage makes that obvious enough. All this happened maybe four or five months ago; we've been able to confirm that much, at least."

"How? The moon doesn't have atmosphere, so there wouldn't be any corrosion."

"There was… organic residue in a few partially protected nooks and crannies."

She sighed at that. "What else?"

"It really appears to be a small freighter. Sullustan or Corellian maybe, but that's about all I can tell you."

She nodded. "Thank you. Return to your duties."

There was little more to do now than wait for the transport. Somehow she knew that this wouldn't be the end of it, but she had no idea just what had been started by her discovery.

tbc

So here we go again!

The newest Episode is, I think, a good place to make an official statement: I like the new movie in spite of it's flaws, but I vastly prefer Legends. That's what I grew up with and that's what I will exclusively write in. So with everything, you can from now on assume Legends unless I say different.