Chapter 78

Searching for the second death star was a bureaucratic mess. In a galaxy far, far away a single moon-sized space station was like a grain of sand on a beach. Usually, I would follow the money and use my labyrinth program to search the mountains of data to find the beast but gone were the days of The Republic and the ineffectual spending that would spread throughout the senate. Now were the days of massive mega projects like starship builders and mining projects that could only be staffed by thousands of prisoners. I followed several dead ends that led to a huge amount of cash spent on new energy shields. Now the Empire was mostly united they could afford to spend a lot safe in the knowledge that anyone who tried to siphon credits would have the complete attention of terrible people. I didn't even know if the second Death Star had started to be made. It was unlikely as the first Death Star was just a shell but I wasn't sure.

I've been alive for a thousand-plus years and throughout those long years I had tried to keep the timeline intact so I could gain benefits but now there were only twentyish years left of what I believed would happen. It didn't matter anymore. The timeline was close to finishing and one of the death stars had been destroyed.

Without a clue what was now going to happen, I relied on my intuition and decided to create a mess of the Empire so I could get a reaction and maybe follow it for useful info.

The time for protecting the timeline is over, now was my time.

My old world didn't have spaceships or intergalactic travel. There were no space wizards or gigantic creatures in space. My old world had basic technology compared to the Empire but there was one thing my old world dwarfed the Empire in, and that was cruelty. In all of its forms and infinite flavours, my old world had taught each citizen that they were expendables while promising with crossed fingers behind the back that each and every person had rights that were protected by god and the government. All lies.

I took a little joy in introducing new propaganda to this galaxy. Without the worry of keeping the timeline together, I interfered. Prisons that held the guilty and innocent alike lost their power and miraculously opened their cages with just a little fiddling. Public transport became unmanageable and inconsistent with the smallest tweaks in programming. These small interruptions wouldn't gather the attention of Palpatine but in some ways it made me feel better.

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A nasty but useful trick I liked to do was to find useful and creditable efficient people who ran the Empire's needs and wire huge amounts of stolen cash to their accounts. The response of the Empire was always over the top and shallow when investigating. They would destroy the innocent individual without much care into finding the truth and ruin a useful person that made the Empire work.

Tactically targeting people with cash wasn't the only thing worth doing. Simple honey pots were also highly effective. Threatening people with their dirty little secrets resulted in the Empire's secrets being revealed.

Forcing the Empire to punish innocent competent people helped to show how evil the empire could be. Most only saw the public transit running on time or the lower amount of wars being broadcasted on the news and they were happy but now they knew better as each person that was brutally punished was shown for all to see. The public didn't care that the rebels were being hunted and destroyed, as long as it wasn't them but they did care when normal people were kidnapped from their homes and never seen again. The Empire tried to blame it on the rebels but images of Empire troops were broadcasted to the galaxy.

It was a nice bit of work on my part. Having the rebels fight the empire alone was inefficient but having the public question everything the Empire does was another form of battle.

News stories were broadcast about people being unjustly imprisoned and forced to work at the risk of death and never able to leave, even when their time was up. Interviews from escaped prisoners found their way to the masses, stirring up sympathy.

This was the softer side of what I was willing to do to the Empire. The other side, the much darker side would turn the stomachs of the public and may cause Yoda to lecture me for hours. Every single dark thing the Empire did I would do better. Every assassination attempt by the Empire was met with not only the assassin but the employer as well strung up brutally tortured and killed. The galaxy was running out of murders for hire as the consequences of killing the wrong person were full retaliation. The galaxy became oddly peaceful as the local psychopaths had to choose between getting paid or staying alive. My Asura droids didn't have that problem. They were killing machines that used everything at hand to make sure of a successful kill. They were so skilled that they would wait days outside the hull of a starship waiting for their prey and then just detonate them out to space and disappear in the cold void of space. When you didn't need air, food, light or company there were any number of truly unique ways of killing.

All of this was just a side project while I searched for the second Death Star. My irritance at failing was soon discarded when I decided to attack the source of my problems, Palpatine. Unlike a potentially non-existent second death star, Palpatine consistently gives his position away. It was obviously a trap but one I was able to navigate thanks to Vader.

I only had to get ready, plan for my encounter and make sure I was able to escape if everything went tits up.