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This is not a meeting Hux has been looking forward to.
He is alone in the turbolift, a state of being he so often is not, these days. After Hosnian, after D’Qar, after the loss of Snoke and the disaster on Crait, the times he is left to his own devices are few and far between.
It’s not difficult to see why.
He tries to focus on the whirring of the lift, centering himself on the rush as he rises floor after floor through the dense superstructure of this edifice. If he runs through his plans, loops his thoughts to the positives: the Resistance is shattered, the New Republic is obliterated, and the legendary Luke Skywalker is dead in the ground; maybe he can keep his hands from shaking.
He does not quite manage.
The lift slides to a gentle stop and Hux pauses before he steps out of the doors. He stares at his reflection, his face a pale circle shining back at him in the thick transparisteel. Is his hair flat? Is his jacket straight? He can’t afford to look sloppy, not at this most critical juncture.
It makes him feel like a child, pawing at his clothing in the mirror, lest he be violently reminded of the standards he has to maintain. But it is necessary.
The doors slide open while he is fiddling with the button at his throat. Naturally, he is standing there.
Kylo Ren is not one for niceties. “What are you doing here?” he demands.
Hux has wondered, both privately and to Ren’s face, if there was some genetic aberration in his makeup that made him so unpleasant to be around. After all, both his parents were, to hear it told, gregarious and uplifting people, for scum. That was something Hux could respect. It didn’t make it any less satisfying to imagine Han Solo’s bewildered face as his corpse fell into the abyss, or the brokenness in the Princess’ wrinkled old eyes as she watched her last hope die.
“I have a meeting.”
“You have a meeting, what?” Ren seethes.
And this. This is the reason Hux is never left alone anymore. This is the reason his mind keeps circling around the myriad ways Crait might come back to haunt them. It’s also, in more ways than one, the reason he has arranged for this meeting.
But not with Ren. Kriffing hell, not with Ren. Ren is a petulant child who failed his way upwards into a position of power based solely on who his parents were. His “Force powers” wouldn’t be nearly as big a draw were it not for the kneecapping to morale having a Solo working for the First Order has been.
Ren is the kind of obstreperous man who expects to be addressed with his proper, ill-deserved title in every sentence. “I have a meeting, Supreme Leader.”
“No you don’t,” Ren mumbles, turning away from him. “I do.”
Hux struggles to contain his fury. A week ago, he would have jabbed back with something cutting, something to bring the brat down to size. A week ago, he would have felt confident in his footing in the First Order. A week ago, Snoke was alive.
What a difference a week makes.
“I can assure you, Supreme Leader,” Hux says, trying to walk past the hulking shadow of the other man, “I do indeed have a meeting. It is why I am here, and it is why I am ending this conversation.”
He doesn’t need to hear the rage building in Ren’s voice: he can feel the floor shaking underneath his feet. Taunting Kylo Ren has always been a dangerous game, but since the girl carved Snoke up like prime nerf steak, it has become deadly.
Ren takes one long stride towards him, hand outstretched, when the door at the other end of the hall slides open and a woman walks out.
“Supreme Leader, General Hux,” she says, her voice quiet but unwavering. She’s a slim little slip of a thing, younger than either of them, her uniform crisp with newness. She carries the standard datapad for a personal attaché, which she glances at once. Turning on her heel, she steps back through the doorway. “The Admiral has been expecting you.”
Hux begins to follow, but Ren brusquely shoves past him. The Supreme Leader must enter first, even if he has apparently been double booked. The Force doesn’t give you eyes in the back of your head, though, so Hux takes a moment to thoroughly roll his own.
It doesn’t, right?
As soon as they’re in, the aide disappears. Hux doesn’t even hear her footsteps as she walks away, and he has to wonder why a simple assistant needs to move so silently. It’s a question he thinks he knows the answer to, but he doesn’t like the implications.
He’s still trying to unravel the mystery when he walks face-first into Ren, who has stopped short. Hux wrenches his mouth shut to bite back the retort bubbling up within him, but Ren doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t even turn to roughly shove Hux aside. He merely stares forward. Hux grumbles under his breath, trying to surreptitiously unruffle his jacket again , and steps to his side.
Grand Admiral Rae Sloane stands and surveys her empire.
Her back is to them, spine ramrod straight as she stares out the viewport of her office. Her hands are clasped behind her, the thick white gloves a match for her immaculate uniform.
Through the viewport, Hux can see the great concentration of the First Order fleet that she watches over: the Pulverizer, the Harbinger, the Absolution, and even Hux’s own Finalizer. Squadrons of TIEs work their way through drills, all coming in rather closer than one would expect for simple drilling. Transports move to and fro, ferrying battalions, weapons, and whatever else to the various parts of the fleet. Behind them all, the oceans of Yaga Minor shine as the planet continues its rotation.
Sloane watches everything in silence.
She does not move, she does not speak, she doesn’t even seem to breathe. Hux begins to worry, because Ren’s patience is about as developed as an infant’s, but he needn’t. Rae Sloane, he will begrudgingly admit, is one of the few people smarter than he, and she knows exactly what she’s doing.
Just before it would become rude, she pivots to face them. “Supreme Leader,” she says, not a hint of mockery or disdain in her contralto voice. She nods to Ren, a sight deeper than Hux ever would, her brown eyes sharp and strong. “I am pleased you could make it.”
Ren, who has all the grace of a dying Tynnan (and smells about the same), does not return her greeting. “Why is he here?”
Sloane does not smile. She does not fawn. Hux, who has known her most of his life, can’t see a single trace of whatever emotion is running through her. But for the fact that she had just spoken, her dark face could have been carved from stone.
“General Hux, like you, requested a meeting with me. Ostensibly, we are all trying to decide on a way forward for the First Order.” At this, she glances at Hux for the first time. He can’t help but bristle at the clear indication of his low position among the people in the room. “I figured it best if we three discussed this future together.”
“I don’t need him,” Ren snaps, air rushing out of his bulbous nose in a rage. He glares at Sloane, who is not cowed in the slightest. She stares back, devoid of emotion.
“One man does not an Empire make,” she replies. “I would know. We need to work together to ensure our victories continue.”
It’s a clever move, framing everything that’s happened as victories for the Order. It is also, on the whole, a lie, but Ren’s easily bruised ego is the size of a Star Destroyer, and must be carefully massaged. Hux has never been able to stomach the thought of acknowledging Ren as an equal, let alone a superior, and so the thought of propping him up makes him feel a little sick. It is simply not a skill he possesses.
But he is not Rae Sloane.
Ren breathes heavily for much longer than Hux would think it necessary to calm a grown man down, but he does eventually mutter some gruff agreement and storm forward to look out the viewport himself. He could almost be a match for her, were he not bristling with furious energy at all times.
You will never be Sloane, Hux thinks, wishing the glare he shoots at Ren’s back could set him on fire. Were he, perhaps, a hint more self-aware, he would note that a flawed temperament is something they share. But he does not, content to stare daggers into his rival’s back until Sloane finally, finally catches his eye.
“General Hux, I hear your hyperspace tracking technology is to be commended. From all reports, the Resistance fleet is a thing of the past.”
Hux almost preens. He has never quite been able to shake the feeling of pride and satisfaction he gets when someone acknowledges him. A remnant from a bygone era, when nobody saw the glorious potential he possessed. Nobody, of course, except the woman before him.
Ren’s fists clench behind his back, but he doesn’t say anything. It is a testament to how much he needs Admiral Sloane on his side. Of course, Hux had been hoping to speak to her alone, specifically to get her working against Ren. This whole rigmarole shows she is well aware of his intentions, and how little worth she thinks they have. It stings, but it’s not a new feeling. Sloane has been navigating politics for fifty years; her experience dwarfs both of theirs combined.
They call her many names, depending on who you ask. Grand Admiral of the Navy of the First Order, officially. She is the woman responsible for directing their entire fleet, and it is a task she takes to with the utmost seriousness. There is not a person in the entirety of the First Order who does not know who she is and what she expects from them. There is nothing beyond the First Order, and therefore there is only order.
The Old Maid of the Empire, from her detractors. She took the weight of the splintering Empire upon her shoulders after the Emperor’s death over Endor and navigated the scattered remnants together into what would eventually become the First Order, mercilessly dispatching those who would seek to carve themselves free from her vision. She has spent her entire life in service of this vision, and she has earned limitless respect.
The Emperor’s Eyes, from the whispers of those who still see shadows of Palpatine in everything. There are those who believe that Sloane is acting on the orders of the Emperor, resurrected by some dark power and watching everything from the shadows. She watches, she waits, and she reports to him and him alone, they say, enacting his will where he cannot. These people are, of course, idiots, but they are right on one thing:
Sloane sees everything.
It’s almost ironic; Sloane is the most visible person in the First Order. She is part of High Command, the face of their propaganda, immediately recognizable in her stark white uniform, her bushy hair (once black as night, but now a steely gray) bound at the nape of her neck. Thanks to her efforts to fight back against the fledgling New Republic thirty years ago, even they know who she is. She cannot go anywhere without the galaxy knowing.
But still, nothing slips past her. Nothing at all. Were it not for Snoke, she’d be Supreme Leader. His mysterious rise (and sudden fall) left those who had been expecting her to lead shocked, Hux included. But there’s no going back. Snoke lived, and then he died, and now an imbecile rules them. Even so (and this is the part that fills Hux with particular joy), the great and powerful Kylo Ren needs Sloane’s approval to do what he wants.
Not officially, of course. The Supreme Leader can do what he pleases, order troops to whichever backwater holes he desires, and there isn’t a thing anyone can do about it. But Admiral Sloane, she is esteemed. She is trusted . Even her detractors (and there are very few of them left) trust in her leadership. Her tactical prowess is beyond reproach, and her storied career has given her the true loyalty of the vast majority of the fleet she commands.
She is Ren’s subordinate, technically, but with Snoke’s death, there isn’t a single person in the First Order with more political power than Admiral Sloane, and even Ren-- bull-headed, imbecile Ren-- understands this. It is the only thing keeping Hux from fleeing this meeting at speed.
Sloane turns back to watch the fleet, and Hux takes a position on her other side. They are silent together for a moment.
“We have many things to consider,” Sloane says, her eyes fixed somewhere in the distance. “With the destruction of Hosnian Prime, the New Republic is broken, perhaps beyond all repair.”
“Have they surrendered yet?” Hux asks, trying to meet her eyes in the reflection.
She doesn’t look away from her vigil. “Of course not. Despite the deaths of their entire chain of command, they still hold out for the future. They will have to be dealt with.”
“But the Resistance is gone,” breathes Ren, who appears to be shaking with the effort to stand in one place for longer than a whole two seconds. “They are dead or dying. I will wipe them out. I will control the galaxy.”
Sloane gives his comments longer to breathe than Hux’s. “The Resistance is broken, yes. Their base on D’Qar is destroyed, their fleet is in pieces, and what was left of their army died for nothing on Crait. But they are not gone.”
“They are gone,” Ren seethes, turning to face her. “The Resistance is gone. The Republic is gone. Luke Skywalker is dead by my hand. There is nothing they can do to stop me now.”
“Supreme Leader,” Sloane states, “I am going to give you some advice. It is, of course, at your discretion to find it worthwhile or not.” She does not look at him, letting him snarl and seethe while she waits for his answer. Once again, Hux has to admire her unbreakable will.
He remembers, then, the last time someone tried to assassinate her. Some Moff, or colonel, or captain, got it in his head that she was too old to lead the fleet. Too stolid, he said, too mired in her ways. She had to go.
He couldn’t strike at her on her ship, of course. Barring Snoke’s Supremacy, Admiral Sloane’s Eclipse was the crown jewel of the fleet. The very last Super Star Destroyer in the galaxy, Sloane had commanded her from the birth of the First Order onward. The loss of it would be a terrible blow to the First Order, and besides that, the crew would have gone rogue at the first hint of a threat to their commander.
He’d waited until she was away from the Eclipse, visiting Starkiller Base to inspect its progress early in its development. A bomb went off under her transport, many people died. Sloane was not one of them. She’d known about it, as she knows about all things, and waited for him to reveal himself.
Not only had she had him executed, she had the entire crew of his ship, his office staff, and anyone else affiliated with the plot brought to the bridge of the Eclipse, where she personally executed them, one by one, leaving the main mutineer until last. At that point, he’d been a sobbing mess, pleading for his life.
Afterwards, seeming to take pride in her reputation as being the lone holdout of Imperial idealism, she had her flagship renamed the Last Bastion. Hux reminisces, sometimes, about the look on the man’s face as Sloane pulled the trigger when he needs a lift.
“Fine.”
Sloane nods, terse. “For the first time in a generation, we are in possession of the strongest military force in the galaxy.” She waves towards the fleet, though her tone does not match the gravitas of her words. “We have overthrown the Republic, and whatever forces they could have mustered were destroyed alongside them. At Crait, you broke the Resistance’s spine. It will take them months, if not years, to recover.”
“But they’re all dead,” Hux interjects.
Sloane gives him a fleeting look, only a second long, but with enough ice to chill his blood. “No, they are not.” She sighs, which is so unlike her Hux knows it’s an act. “Allow an old woman to ramble for a moment, would you?”
She turns away from them, her boots clicking on the cold floor as she paces her office. It is an austere room, with no touches of personality, despite the fact that she has been in command of the Last Bastion for three decades. The pacing, as well, is unlike her. Hux quietly marvels at how far she is willing to go to keep Ren from popping a gasket.
“We have won several victories,” she begins, “but we have made grave errors in the process. For the third time, I have watched megalomaniacal men build oversized weapons of death that one man in a snubfighter has destroyed the second he caught wind of it. I am tired of this foolishness, gentlemen. It does not work.”
Hux expects Ren to protest this, lose his temper at the disdainful description of his master. To his surprise, Ren stays silent. His eyes track Sloane’s movement in the transparisteel, but he says nothing.
That’s… suspect.
“For a great many people, Starkiller Base was our everything. I am not so sycophantic. I knew very well it would fail. It was why I voted against it.” Both men start in surprise. Hux had never heard about that, despite being closely involved with the project from the onset.
Sloane waves their shock away with a flick of the wrist. “It doesn’t matter. I was the lone dissenter. The base was built, and the base was destroyed. It is time we finally gave up on superweapons.” She returns to her initial spot and juts her chin out at the slowly spinning planet. “Our fleet, our army: those are our true weapons. When we rely on them, we are successful. The destruction of the Raddus shows that clear as day.”
Hux, who would not call the last act of the Resistance flagship a victory for the First Order, per se, feels a residual shudder roll across his shoulders. The loss of the Supremacy, the loss of Snoke…
“You are both here because you understand. Without the fleet, the First Order is nothing. I am willing to help move forward with our goals, but it is paramount that we reexamine what those goals are.” She turns to face Ren fully, only coming up to his massive nose. “Supreme Leader, the Resistance is not gone, and I will tell you why.”
“On Crait, you killed Luke Skywalker. And while I am sure that was a potent victory for you personally, in the grand scheme of the galaxy, it was not.” Ren balloons with indignant anger, but Rae holds up a gloved hand. “Please do not mistake me: it is better for us that he is dead, because he may well have become a problem. But what we need to remember is this: the instant the fight against the Empire lost its personal connection to him, Luke Skywalker pivoted to his quest to collect Jedi trinkets and rarely involved himself in galactic affairs again. He was a hero, yes, but he was not a leader.”
She pauses. “Leia Organa is.”
Hux isn’t sure that he likes anything. Certainly, there are things he enjoys : the way Phasma interrogates captives (Phasma...), vintage Corellian wine, the look on Ren’s sallow, priggish face when he realizes once again that some nobody has outsmarted him. But liking? Liking is difficult. Liking requires putting that person or that thing higher in one’s esteem than oneself, and that cannot happen.
Inasmuch as he can like someone, he likes Sloane.
Sloane was his first ally against his brutish father, the first person to see more than the bastard son of a kitchen wench. She was the one who set him up to succeed, and he has spent his life trying to prove he was worth the effort.
So when Ren turns to her with naked fury, his hand outstretched, Hux is deathly afraid she will end up gasping her last. He dashes forward, not even thinking, and bats the hand back down. Ren turns that outrage on him, but Sloane steps in.
“Gentlemen, enough.” She lays a hand on Hux’s shoulder, her grip like a vice, and spins him away from Ren. “I won’t obfuscate it any longer, Ren: you need me. You know the instant I die, three quarters of the fleet would blast you out of the sky before my body had even hit the floor. All three of us know it. So I am going to ask you to listen to me, and to keep from strangling either of us until I am finished.”
“Fine!” Ren howls. “Fine! ” He storms as far away from them as he can get and still hear, for which Hux is grateful.
Sloane addresses her statement to Hux, and he wishes she would roll her eyes or something, just to really dig the hydrospanner into Ren’s side.
“For her entire adult life, Leia Organa has been a thorn in the Empire’s side. We destroyed her planet, she singlehandedly engineered the destruction of the Death Star. We played on her need for a friend, she obliterated an entire planet’s economy in three days. We took her husband prisoner, she hired a team of nobodies to relieve us of our greatest supply of slave labour.”
Sloane slams her fist into her hand. “The instant she found out we were massing over Jakku, she moved to have us destroyed. She personally led the efforts to hunt down hundreds of Imperials for trial and execution. By force of personality alone, she set our plans in the Senate back fifteen years. And when we finally, finally managed to topple her from grace, she called in every last favour she had to create a militia dedicated specifically to foiling our designs.”
“Time and time again, Leia Organa has delayed, diverted, or thwarted our plans. She has risen from nothing, more times than I can count, to obliterate everything we work for. She is a woman with unstoppable charisma, drive, and tactical know-how, and she will always be there to stand against us. As long as Leia Organa lives, so does the Resistance.”
Sloane speaks now to Ren. Her voice doesn’t raise, but it can only be to him.
“We must kill her.”
To Hux’s shock, Ren seems reluctant. He’d have thought Ren hated his mother just as much as he’d loathed his father.
“I…” he stammers, “we… we should, yes.”
Hux stares openly at him while Sloane continues. “General Organa has to be our target. Our goal has to be to ensure her death. If she survives, Supreme Leader, she will stop us. We must work together, the three of us, to hunt her down and put and end to her. While she is alive, people will rally to her banner. They always have.”
“I can have our troops search for signs of her on every planet we control,” Hux offers.
Sloane nods. “We are the galactic power once again. We have the resources, we have the strength. Do we have the will?”
They both look to Ren, who stares off into space once more. There’s a war happening on his face, clear for all to see, but it would be gauche to mention it (not to mention likely to get him thrown into a wall), so Hux says nothing.
An eternity later, Ren looks up at them. His eyes are wide, his pupils are big, and both fists are clenched tight. “We do. All the First Order will know: General Organa is to be hunted down and executed. I will lead the search myself.”
Sloane looks on him with something approaching approval. “I am at your disposal, Supreme Leader.”
Ren spins away. “Have the fleet check all known Rebel systems. If they used the Crait base, they’ll use others too. Go from there.”
“Of course,” she replies.
He stalks out without another word, Hux watching silently. Only once he is sure Ren is out of earshot does he turn to Sloane.
She is back at the viewport, watching Yaga Minor spin once again. He steps up beside her, wanting to speak, but there are so many things clattering about in his head, he’s not sure where to start.
It is Sloane who speaks. Quietly, barely a whisper, but with that same fire he has come to known burns through her soul.
“Patience, Armitage.”
The reflection of her dark eyes bore unblinkingly into his.
“All in good time.”
A cruel, wicked, powerful glee courses through his veins, and he lets the ecstatic grin he’s been holding back carve its way across his face. He stands there, letting the elation fill his chest and sear his skin, the galaxy itself seeming to light up with the implications.
Sloane says nothing more, returning to her vigil, and Hux sees himself out. He feels like he is walking on air. Ren is still Supreme Leader, and Hux is still kowtowing to a prepubescent boy in a man’s oily skin, but it doesn’t get him down: big changes are on the horizon.
All in good time.