The amphitheater on the upper tier of Korriban's Imperial University could hold four hundred students. Tonight it held six hundred. They sat on each other's laps, crowded the stairwells, pressed against the carved stone walls where reliefs of ancient Sith lords gazed down with empty eyes at the living who dared to fill their silence with dangerous words.
Ceilert had arrived early enough to get an actual seat, which he considered one of the better decisions of his young life.
Professor Valdeen was not a large man. He was thin in the way of someone who forgot to eat because thinking took precedence, with close-cropped gray at his temples despite being barely past fifty. He wore no robes of ceremony. Just a plain instructor's tunic. He carried no notes. He never carried notes.
"The Sith Empire has fought the Republic," Valdeen said, his voice carrying without effort to every corner of the stone chamber, "for longer than any of your grandparents have been alive. Let us ask the question that apparently terrifies our administrators." He paused. Let the silence sharpen itself. "What have we won?"
The crowd was very still in the way crowds become still when they hear someone say the thing they have all been thinking.
Ceilert watched the professor pace. Slow, deliberate steps. He had attended seven of these lectures across the past semester and still felt the same tightening in his chest each time, that mixture of fear and something that felt uncomfortably like hope.
"Worlds burn," Valdeen continued. "Sons go to the front and do not return, or return as things their mothers do not recognize. The treasury bleeds. And the Lords who send them — they sit in their citadels and they commune with the dark side of the Force and they call this governance." He stopped pacing. "It is not governance. It is appetite wearing the mask of destiny."
Six hundred students exhaled as one.
Ceilert walked back to his dormitory with his friend Ossel.
"You know there are watchers in the crowd," Ossel said quietly as they descended the stepped streets of the university district, the orange-red stone of Korriban's architecture bleeding dark in the night.
"There are always watchers."
Ceilert thought about this. He cared. That was perhaps his central problem as a person — he cared about many things deeply and found no reliable method of caring less. He cared about philosophy, which had led him to the lecture. He cared about Valdeen's arguments, which had led him back seven times. He cared about what happened to people who said true things in places that punished truth.
"He believes that ideas are worth the risk," Ceilert said.
"Easy to believe that before the risk arrives," said Ossel.
The risk arrived on a Tuesday.
Ceilert learned what had happened the way everyone learned — through the ripple of whispers that moved through the dormitory halls before dawn, each telling slightly different but convergent toward the same terrible center. Professor Valdeen had been found dead in his study. His heart had stopped. He was in perfect health. He was fifty-two years old. His heart had simply stopped.
Everyone understood. No one said it aloud.
The protests began that afternoon. Ceilert went. He told himself he went because to stay away would be a kind of cowardice, which was true. He also went because grief needed somewhere to go, which was also true. Several hundred students gathered in the university's central forum, holding printed images of Valdeen, speaking his words back to the empty air where he was no longer standing.
It began peacefully.
It did not end peacefully.
Ceilert was never entirely certain of the sequence — things moved too fast and the crowd was too dense and afterward his memories had the fractured quality of something broken and reassembled by an unsteady hand. But he remembered the moment the mood changed. The way it shifted like weather, sudden and total. Students who had been weeping began shouting. Students who had been standing still began moving. He saw a young woman he recognized from Valdeen's lectures — quiet, studious, the type who took careful notes — hurl a stone through an administrative window with an expression of blank, remote fury that did not look like her own expression at all.
He did not understand it then. Later, in a cell, with time to think, he understood.
The Sith could move through emotion the way a hand moves through water. They did not need to be visible to be present.
The security forces were waiting. They had been waiting, he realized, which meant they had known, which meant the stone and the shattered window and the riot that followed had been a script performed by people who did not know they were performing it. Ceilert was caught in the surge, pushed, shoved, separated from Ossel, and then there were armored hands on his arms and his face was against cold stone and someone was reading him his charges.
Disturbing the imperial peace.
Agitation against the state.
Association with seditious elements.
He spent the first night in the cell trying to remember Valdeen's lectures precisely enough to reconstruct them in his head. He thought this was what Valdeen would have wanted. He thought this until exhaustion unmade him and he slept on the stone floor without meaning to.
They came on the eighth day.
Not with pardons. Not with lawyers or hearings or any of the administrative apparatus that was supposed to exist between accusation and consequence. They came with a form and a man in a military uniform who read from it in the flat voice of someone who had read it many times and found it neither interesting nor troubling.
The students arrested in connection with the Forum Incident were to be conscripted for a term of service in support of Imperial military operations. Their sentences were suspended pending satisfactory completion of said service. Failure to comply would result in reinstatement of charges and permanent notation in their imperial records.
The man folded the form. "Questions?"
No one asked questions. What question could you ask that the form hadn't already answered?
Ceilert looked around the cell at the people he'd spent eight days with. Ossel, who had been found half a block from the protest and arrested anyway because the definition of association was capacious when convenient. Maret, a literature student with ink-stained fingers. Hoss, who was twenty years old and had been crying quietly at intervals since the first night and had mostly stopped, which was either an improvement or wasn't.
The Empire was going to make soldiers of them.
Three months on a processing world whose name Ceilert forgot within a week of leaving it.
They were not made into soldiers exactly. Soldiers were made over years, or so the genuine soldiers implied with their eyes when they looked at the conscript units. What they were made into was something that could hold a weapon, follow a formation, march without falling, and follow orders quickly enough not to get the person next to them killed along with themselves.
Ceilert was not a physical person. He had spent the last six years in libraries and lecture halls and small rooms with books. His body had not been consulted on this new arrangement and registered its protest continuously. His feet blistered and the blisters tore and new ones formed beneath. His shoulders ached from the pack weight. He fell asleep in the evenings with the helpless totality of a man falling off a ledge.
But he learned. The discipline of it surprised him — not the military discipline imposed from outside, but something internal that he hadn't known he possessed. When things became bad enough, the thinking mind retreated to some quieter room inside the skull and the body simply continued. It was, he thought in the marginal hours before sleep, not entirely unlike the experience of writing through a difficult section of an essay. You stopped feeling it and started moving through it.
Ossel adapted faster. Maret struggled more, which she attributed to nothing because she had largely stopped speaking, which worried Ceilert more than the training did.
Hoss discovered, to everyone's surprise including his own, that he was an excellent shot. He stood in the marksmanship evaluation looking at his target scores with the expression of someone who has received news that complicates their self-understanding.
"Well," Ossel said.
"I know," said Hoss.
The troop carrier was called the Immovable Principle, which Ceilert found blackly funny. He mentioned this to Ossel, who allowed that it was somewhat funny, in the way that things are funny when no other response is available.
There were nine hundred conscripts in their contingent, distributed across three carriers traveling in convoy with a larger military formation. Ceilert had heard the name of the planet they were going to but it meant nothing to him — a designation more than a name, an old world, prehistoric in its significance, rich in something that the briefing officer had described with a series of resource-extraction terms that Ceilert recognized as euphemisms for worth dying over.
The Cathar and Ratan had allied to hold it. This was, the briefing officer explained, an unusual alliance, as the two species did not historically enjoy close relations. They were held together by a shared and comprehensive hatred of the Sith Empire, which Ceilert found he could not entirely fault them for.
In the corridors of the Immovable Principle, in the berths too narrow and the air recycled too many times, the conscripts existed in a state of managed dread. The genuine soldiers kept largely to their own sections. The officers were elsewhere doing officer things. The conscripts were left with their thoughts and each other, which was a combination that produced long and circling conversations that tended to arrive at the same destinations regardless of their starting points.
"They're going to use us for the charges," said a young man named Fereth, who had been arrested for distributing printed copies of Valdeen's lectures. He had the kind of face that looked permanently unsurprised by bad news, which had turned out to be an adaptive trait. "I heard two of the training officers talking. Human wave tactics. Conscripts up front."
"That's not a confirmed —" Ossel began.
"Fereth's right," said someone from across the corridor. "My bunkmate has a cousin in the logistical corps. They've done it before. You send the untrained units in first. The enemy burns through their ammunition engaging you. Then the real soldiers advance through what's left."
What's left, Ceilert thought, meaning us. What's left meaning the parts of us that weren't the other parts.
"There has to be someone who sees that this doesn't work," Maret said. She had started speaking again, which remained a relief even when what she said was this.
"There are always people who see that things don't work," said Ossel. "The question is whether seeing it is sufficient to change the behavior of the people doing it."
The carrier moved through hyperspace. The conscripts did not sleep particularly well.
Outside, the convoy approached the system where the Cathar and Ratan waited with their ships, and their weapons, and their reasonable grievances, and no particular interest in being resources controlled by an empire that had not asked them.
Three ships were shot down during the system entry.
Not their ship. Ceilert stood in the observation corridor with fifty others and watched them fall — the long, flaring lines of burning carriers dropping toward atmosphere, and then he stopped watching because he understood that watching was a form of previewing something that might happen to him and he preferred not to preview it.
"We should feel lucky," Fereth said.
"Yes," said Ceilert. He felt many things. Lucky was somewhere in the mixture. It was not the dominant note.
The planet was wet in a way that seemed almost aggressive, as though it had decided to be wet and committed to the decision fully. The rain began when they landed and did not introduce itself as temporary. The soil was red-brown and deep and soft and would have been beautiful in a botanical sense if it weren't also the surface you had to walk through carrying forty kilograms of equipment to a camp site that didn't yet exist because the camp hadn't been built yet because the conscripts were going to build it.
They built it in the rain.
This was, Ceilert discovered, the core of the conscript experience in this particular theater: the labor that slaves usually performed for military formations had been assigned to them instead. The real soldiers — the trained ones, the ones who had chosen this or at least not been arrested into it — ate and rested and prepared for actual military engagement. The conscripts dug trenches and erected prefabricated structures and moved supplies from landing points to storage and back and then to somewhere else because the first location had been wrong.
By the fourth day, Ceilert's boots had not been dry for four days.
By the eighth day he had a cough that didn't belong to him, something that had climbed into his chest and set up residence without asking. By the tenth day Ossel had the same cough. By the twelfth day the medical officer was moving through the camp with a look of compressed frustration, distributing antibiotics with the cheerless efficiency of someone managing a problem they had predicted and been ignored about.
"Take the full course," the medic said to each of them in turn.
"What happens then?" Hoss asked.
"You go back to work," said the medic, and moved on.
The patrol rotation put the conscripts on the night shift.
This made a certain institutional logic that Ceilert had come to recognize as the logic of systems: the people least qualified for a task were assigned to it during the hours when qualification mattered most and supervision was thinnest, because the people most qualified needed their rest to perform the tasks that would be done in daylight where they could be observed and credited.
He walked the perimeter at the second hour past midnight with Ossel on his left and Maret on his right, three people with humanities degrees and antibiotics in their bloodstreams, responsible for the security of two hundred sleeping soldiers who were presumably the empire's actual investment in this engagement.
The jungle made noise. It made noise continuously and with variety, the sounds of an ecosystem that had existed for millions of years before anyone had decided it contained resources worth fighting over, and would exist long after, and had no particular opinion about any of it.
"The charges," Ossel said quietly. Not a question. The charges had become the organizing center of every conversation that lasted long enough.
"Fereth says three of the squads near the eastern ridge went up last week," Maret said. "Full advance. The Cathar positions didn't move. They just —" She stopped. Resumed. "Fereth says there wasn't much left."
Ceilert thought about Valdeen. He thought about this often, in the particular way you think about something when it has become the fixed point around which everything else orbits. A man who had died because he said true things. True things that had led to Ceilert being here, walking a perimeter in wet boots on a world he couldn't have found on a map three months ago, next to friends who had not asked for this either.
He wondered what Valdeen would have made of it. He suspected Valdeen would have had something precise and cutting to say about the mechanism by which dissent was converted into military expenditure. He suspected Valdeen would have said it clearly, in complete sentences, without notes.
"I keep thinking," Ceilert said, "that somewhere in a room, someone drew a line on a map and said these people here will advance and these people here will wait and didn't think very hard about which category we fell into."
"That's almost certainly accurate," said Ossel.
"It doesn't help to think about it."
"No," Ossel agreed. "But you're going to keep thinking about it."
"Yes."
The jungle continued its noise. The rain had paused, which was the closest it came to stopping. Somewhere past the perimeter, in the dark between the trees, the Cathar and the Ratan held positions they had chosen for reasons of their own, against an empire they hated, beside allies they had chosen out of necessity and perhaps something that would become, in time, genuine solidarity.
Ceilert found he understood that better than he understood most of the briefing material.
General Yazba had been fighting the empire's wars for twenty-three years. She had a reputation that preceded her through corridors and across briefing rooms like a change in air pressure, the sense that something significant was about to arrive. She was not theatrical about it. She was simply, in the way of people who have survived long enough to understand what survival requires, entirely serious.
General Jabek was younger, noisier about his intelligence, and shared Yazba's conclusions by a different route.
They met on the twelfth day of the campaign, in the command structure at the camp's center, over tactical displays that showed the eastern and northern positions in red and orange and the body of evidence that was accumulating around the strategy that had been handed down to them.
"It's not working," Jabek said, which was the kind of statement that got officers relieved of command when said to certain superiors and was therefore being said, carefully, only in this room.
Yazba looked at the display. The three squads near the eastern ridge. The two near the northern approach. The Cathar positions that had absorbed the charges and flexed and then returned to exactly where they had been. "They're not stupid," she said. "They know what we're doing. They're not going to burn their ammunition engaging conscripts when the real units are two hundred meters back."
"So we've spent—" Jabek stopped. "We've spent those squads for nothing."
Yazba didn't answer that directly. She moved a marker on the display. "The jungle is the problem. And the solution. They know it better than we do, which means conventional advance gives them every advantage. We need to stop advancing and start learning." She looked at him. "Anti-guerrilla operations. Small units. Controlled engagement. Stop sending people into positions we haven't scouted into positions we can't see."
"That's slower."
"Yes."
"The ministry wants a resolution timeline."
"The ministry," Yazba said carefully, "is not currently standing in this jungle." She turned back to the display. "We do this correctly or we do it repeatedly. I've seen both. I prefer the former."
Jabek was quiet for a moment, looking at the markers that represented the eastern and northern squads that no longer required markers. "The conscripts," he said. "What do we do with them?"
"Stop putting them in front of things until we understand what those things are." Yazba's voice was not kind exactly, but it was something adjacent to honesty, which was close enough. "They're not soldiers. We turned them into soldiers' problems instead of addressing that fact."
The briefing ended. The orders went out through the command chain.