22. Friend

                                    

                                          
The incident at Yavin was not going to happen again.
                          
That was what high command had told us in a fleet-wide briefing in no uncertain terms.
                          
There was going to be no place in the galaxy that they could hide from us anymore. Our new prime directive was to root them out at every turn and run their resources dry. Every world that harbored them would be torched, every government dismantled, every strip of independence ripped from their hands.
                          
Probes were launched, fleets deployed, garrisons assembled. It was a galaxy-wide manhunt. We rooted them out in their nests, and Maelstrom Squad saw more action in those following months than we had seen throughout the entirety of the war. For a while, there was a glory in it. Everything we did that would be looked at later as potential war crimes felt so... so justified. For every Rebel we killed, we told ourselves that we were paying them back for every man and woman killed aboard the Death Star over Yavin. Every good Imperial that died that day was avenged with the blood of ten Rebels, and it felt so right. For the very first time, I felt like my killing had a purpose, a genuine meaning, and that the bloodshed I was doing was righteous. I had been betrayed, and there was a part of me that saw this as revenge. I couldn't hurt Ves. I wouldn't, but I could hurt the people that my wounded, jaded mind told me stole her away from me.
                          
It scares me how eager I was to keep killing, even in the name of vengeance. I caught myself enjoying it after a time, and that was the worst thing about it. We were angry and thirsting for a win to redeem the loss of the Death Star and some of our most beloved and seasoned commanders. Yet I'd come back to my quarters at the end of a mission and look myself in the mirror, and the whole time I tried in a thousand different ways to justify what I had done out there. People die in combat. I was a soldier. I killed people. It was my job to kill them to defend the Empire, but some of what I did had no justification other than "I had to be sure".
                          
It's a part of my life I don't want to remember. I'm leaving it at that.
                          
It took little prodding from master orators like Moff Kaine to unleash us upon the Rebellion like the dogs of war we were. He chose all the right words, all the emphatic gestures, the perfect tone, to make a man want to kill. In that sense, he had more power than the Emperor could ever dream of having, and after his first speech, it became abundantly clear where Sevens' natural charisma came from. Our Admirals had a way with words. Our Generals didn't need haughty speeches to push us into a near-fanatical level of devoted carnage.
                          
Everything seemed to be building up like this was the beginning of the end. Most of the time, I figured it was me being stupid, but there was an air to this war that told me we were heading to a conclusion. The war had kicked into full swing with our defeat at Yavin. It had shown us that we weren't invincible.
                          
That wasn't a good thing.
                          
We had been prepping for the next leg of missions when a fleet-wide transmission had been broadcasted. We had found the rebels - or, more precisely, Captain Piett had found the rebels, to give him due credit.
                          
Hoth.
                          
A frozen wasteland of a planet in the middle of nowhere, uninhabited for several thousand years except for wampa and tauntaun. 
                          
General Veers and Colonel Starck had been summoned and told to prepare to launch our AT-ATs for a full-force assault on the planet and whatever rebel base was there. We were pinned to assist in the assault on account of not only our lovely certifications going "We can do awful conditions" but also that Peek had garnered a reputation as one hell of a codebreaker, and if this base had anything in it, we were going to find it. Thesh had once been tasked with overseeing walker operations in extreme conditions, and my experience on Mimban put me as his second-in-command, and this time, Aurek didn't protest.