Space became a tomb of light.
From the command tower of the Death Star, Emperor Palpatine watched the tapestry of warfare unfold beneath him, eyes narrowed into slits of malignant amusement. The Unknown Regions had vomited a new horror into his galaxy, and the Yuuzhan Vong would learn quickly what it meant to meet manufactured divinity.
"Target the primary armada," Palpatine said, voice dry as ash. "Neutralize their flagship fleets. Leave nothing."
Grand Admiral Thrawn, aboard the Chimaera, executed the Emperor's will with ice-cold precision. Under his command, Imperial squadrons funneled the Vong into killing fields, luring them toward pre-set trajectories and into the arc of the Death Star's full wrath.
From hyperspace, the Emperor's hidden dreadnoughts pummeled Vong formations, but it was the Death Star that would end the debate.
The first target was horrifyingly beautiful: a Vong worldship the size of a small moon, skin of pulsating flesh and barnacled metal, a living citadel housing millions of warriors and their sacrificial engines. It moved like a slow predator, spewing tendrils of living craft into the void.
Palpatine's finger closed on the console.
"Fire."
The superlaser flared like a newborn sun. For a single, terrible heartbeat, a strand of white-hot energy connected the Death Star and its target. Then the beam widened, focused, and contacted living hull. The worldship spasmed, bone and sinew blackening under the beam's heat. For a moment it held then the living mass ruptured, an explosion unlike any warship detonation: living tissue, organ-metal, and bone erupted into a bloom of bloodless fire.
Fragments of biocarapace and screaming life fell like meteorites. The shockwave shredded nearby tendrils and flung whole squadrons into ruin.
Thrawn's tactical screens showed it clean: the flagship gone, the armada in disarray. But the cost registered in other metrics gravitational anomalies, biological plumes, Vong pathogens flaring into spaceborne clouds. Sensors, hardened by Imperial engineering, warned of unpredictable contamination.
Palpatine smiled inwardly and gave the order again.
The Yuuzhan Vong adapted fast. They sent living rams into the Death Star's line of fire, biomatter that swallowed the beam and slowed it, throwing up regenerating crusts. They launched parasites that bored into hulls and overcame systems with biological corrosion.
Palpatine answered with escalation.
First a worldship, then a system. A planet that had become an orbital staging ground a gray world ringed with spawning platforms and nauseous temples turned its face to the superlaser. The Death Star folded its energy into the planet's mantle. The world did not merely burn; it unmade itself. Continental plates melted and reflowed; oceans boiled; sky turned to a roaring sheet of incandescent ash. From Coruscant and across the Core the broadcast feeds showed the same thing in horrified loops: a planet stopped being a world and became a clean, white wound in space.
The Death Star's beam carved away Vong bastions, sterilized biological nests, and snapped the spine of invasion columns. Where the Empire's fleet could only pound, the superlaser annihilated.
But annihilation begets consequences. The light of devastation illuminated the moral ledger in the hearts of billions. Worlds that had been neutral watched their neighbors vanish in a single, surgical strike. Entire species collaborators, coerced populations, innocent bystanders were consumed. Palpatine proclaimed the action a necessity. To him it was calculus: numbers saved against numbers extinguished, victory secured by the coldest arithmetic.
For a time, the Yuuzhan Vong fleets retracted. Their arrogance shattered into something like caution. They mourned their dead with the ritual fury of a people who worshiped sacrifice. Their priests called in new horrors, more extreme devotions, and they adapted slowly, turning away from devices that drew focused energy and toward dispersed assaults swarms, living mines, drive-tore probes that escaped the Death Star's line of fire.
Thrawn, for the first time since the Emperor birthed the Death Star, found himself in a nuanced, perilous ballet. The weapon that had guaranteed immediate supremacy now forced tactics on him he had not wanted: protect the beam platform at all costs, shepherd targets into alignment, and mitigate the biological fallout that threatened to poison star lanes and destabilize entire systems.
"Containment protocols must be enacted," he ordered. "Seal affected sectors. Quarantine by force if necessary."
Up on Aeloria, Bail Organa and the leaders of the shadowed Resistance watched the feeds and felt the world tilt. The Death Star's light had saved them from immediate annihilation whole fleets and stations that might have been ground into the Vong's living hunger were now vaporized before they could be used. But Bail's face was ashen.
"You see what means," he told Tyra. "If Palpatine survives this, he will have the moral authority of those saved and the terror of those lost."
Tyra's jaw hardened. "We use the distraction. Hit their supply runs. Move the children and the engineers. Grow while they are distracted."
On the holonets, Palpatine's voice was everywhere. He did not hide the Death Star's use; he celebrated it. Images looped of Vong worldships shuddering, of Imperial forces reclaiming vital lanes. He framed his slaughter as salvation: The only path to survival was total eradication of the invader, and he alone possessed the means.
"Look," he said to a mesmerized galaxy, "and remember who protected you when the world burned. Submit, and you will survive."
His words dug into the fabric of galactic politics. Some systems rallied fearful, pragmatic. Others stared at him with widening horror.
While Palpatine's throne echoed with triumph, the leaders on Aeloria planned a reckless counterstroke. Thrawn's victory and Palpatine's reliance on the Death Star had drawn Imperial tactical thought into a predictable channel. The Resistance would use that predictability.
A small fleet rebuilt, repaired, and rearmed in secret would attempt what had never before been needed: a strike on the Death Star's supply lines, the hidden convoys ferrying kyber reserves and Star Forge components from Exegol. If they could sever the logistical heart slow the small-sun reactor maintenance the superlaser's cadence could be reduced. It would not kill the Emperor's power overnight, but it would buy time.
Tyra, Rendar, and a handful of hole-slicers volunteered for the mission. It was a suicide plan if discovered, their fleet would be crushed. If they succeeded, the spark of insurgency might not merely survive; it might grow.
Bail looked at them and saw the price they were willing to pay. "Go," he said. "For the many."
The Death Star had proven terrifyingly efficient. The Vong tide had been blunted by a single beam, by a single mad calculus. But it had also changed the war irrevocably.
Palpatine achieved a terrible stability. His rivals were cowed; the Core bent anew to his rule. Yet each world that had been obliterated lay as a witness to his method. Where the Emperor had intended to consolidate power through order and benevolence, he had cemented it in ash and scream. The galaxy's moral weather shifted toward fear; and in fear the Emperor planted deep roots.
In the swamps of Dagobah, Yoda felt the tremor in the Living Force. He tasted smoke and bone. The Force was ruffled now carred by unnatural blows, whispering of wounds that took generations to heal.
"Dangerous the tool is," Yoda muttered into his moss and mud. "Power, absolute, corrupts. Yet danger greater still approaches. Prepare, they must."
The Death Star's beam burned still in the reports that followed: a sky full of an instant-death light, a world that would never again be home, the echo of a strategy that made monsters of men. Palpatine had used godlike power and, for now, it had worked.
But power like that begs retaliation, breeds hatred and cunning, and forces unlikely alliances. The Yuuzhan Vong adapted. The Resistance retooled. Hidden cells multiplied in the quiet darkness between systems. Thrawn altered his games.
And in the black beyond the Core, where stars end and nightmares begin, the next wave of living ships gathered, unbowed and the galaxy held its breath again.