Private Institutional Memory

[Renata Westaway]

NEW STERANDEL, AEGIS - THE RENSACENT HEIRATE
NUMBER 10 ALDERNEY SQUARE
THE PRIME MINISTER'S RESIDENCE & OFFICE
0348 HOURS LOCAL TIME
​

The message came in through an old digital mail vector.

The chime had woken the Prime Minister. She had removed her sleep mask and checked the datapad, finding the digital mail app that she hadn't opened in years. She was surprised it still functioned, after so many iterations of the tablet she used. That was the best she could do in the moments after being startled awake a full hour before her scheduled wake-up call. Renata sat up, opened the message, and read through it. Instantly, the scattered reports and rumors she had been reading for weeks -- like a smattering of stars -- connected into a constellation, lines drawn between them, the picture clarifying before her eyes.

A new First Order.

Even thinking the name was a strange sensation in Renata Westaway's gut. She had been a girl in the turbulent times of Sieger Ren's First Order, barely having graduated and taken a government job when Dosuun had been sacked. She had spent half a decade trapped under the ruins of Avalonia as the Ssi-Ruuk Imperium scoured the planet for survivors and holdouts. They had come this time to destroy and to kill, not to entech and enslave, and the saurian invaders had done just that. The First Order -- exhausted after a decade of war against varied enemies, bloodied in two catastrophic defeats over the absurd little backwater of Skor II, and over-extended with an empire that reached from Dosuun to the Core itself -- collapsed under the sustained assault of the Ssi-Ruuk Imperium.

Most historians now placed the death of the First Order some months after the Sack of Dosuun. There had been efforts, however valiant, to keep the flame alive. Rausgeber, primarily, had sought to do so. Renata thought it had been because he wanted to be atop the pile for once, even if the pile was the corpses that once populated his government and military establishment. But as far as Renata Westaway was concerned, the First Order died at Dosuun. The last time anyone had heard from Sieger Ren -- really heard from. The day Natasi Fortan sacrificed herself in what had come later to be lionized as the Concordia Run. Recognizing that the only way to interrupt the interdiction of the system and allow reinforcements to enter and civilians to flee was to destroy the Ssi-Ruuk mothership, and understanding that in its overwhelmed state the Home Fleet could not accomplish the task, the Mother of the Nation had done what needed doing.

Her sacrifice was glorious and noble and heartbreaking and comically irrelevant. The interdiction fell, but the reinforcements did not come. The civilians fled, and so did the First Imperial fleet when it became clear the cause was lost. Perhaps millions of lives were saved -- for that day, for the days that followed -- but countless perished as the Ssi-Ruuk hunted down their hated enemy, ship by ship and world by world.

Renata didn't know it at the time, but being trapped in the darkness under Avalonia had been the best case scenario. It was awful, but the citizens that survived with her had come together in the most remarkable ways. They had built a civilization in those tunnels, formerly used by the underground rail system. Garden Street Station became a literal garden -- if you could call a pit where mushrooms grew a garden. Renata had put her engineering skills to use, building systems to recycle the air and filter water so that they could survive. Mostly unscathed. None of them escaped it entirely. A handful died on raids for supplies, a few more to illness. Renata lost an eye in a close escape from the scales. Nevertheless, they had persisted.

By some miracle, they were rescued. The Grand Moff's cousin had excavated the ruins of the city, dug out the entrance to the tunnels, and rescued them all. The refugees of Garden Street Station emerged to discover a reborn planet and a restored First Order. More miracles followed, none more astonishing than the apparent resurrection of Fortan herself. Then, improbably, the First Order rose again under two ambitious women who had refused to let failure be final and rejected the permanence of death itself. It had all been so thrilling, then. Renata followed happily, joined the government, worked hard. Fortan was Supreme Leader, her cousin the Grand Moff, Renata the Foreign Secretary. It had started off so promisingly, so optimistically.

And then it had all fallen apart again. Renata hadn't been across all the details, but there had been some sort of personal crisis with the Grand Moff. The Supreme Leader had stepped into the breach, but then she, too, was called away when it was discovered that her son George Vitalis had gone missing from the family estate on Galidraan. Natasi, too, had disappeared -- taken by whatever malevolent trap had seized George -- and in the absence of Natasi's stabilizing presence, the Moff Council had developed a collective lean and hungry look. Ambitious Moffs looking to make their moves and play their gambits factionalized the government. When Renata refused to play along, she had been forced to flee. Luckily for them all, Project Renascence had been underway almost since Natasi's resurrection. This time they were prepared.

Natasi had been gone almost ten years, this time. By the time she returned, haunted by some trauma Renata could not begin to understand even if the Supreme Leader wanted to share it, her First Order had already dissolved into feuding warlords and collapsed in on itself. Something calling itself the Commonwealth had surfaced there in the ruins, capitalizing on the infrastructure work left by the old First Order and led by people unashamed to trade on old names for power. They seemed to be doing well and God bless them, Renata thought genuinely, though she would not repeat the mistake of relying on those people again. Project Renascence had flourished in secrecy in the Adytum system anyway, and even if she wanted to, they were her responsibility.

It had taken years, and more struggles than Renata could count, for the Renascent Heirate to be born. If Natasi Fortan was its mother, Renata Westaway was certainly its midwife. The Heirate was Natasi Fortan's state in every way that mattered: disciplined and martial, half-Imperial and half-Galidraani, but tempered by the justice and mercy she had tried to teach the old Order, and roughened by the frontier realities of Adytum. On paper, it ought never to have worked. Somehow, almost preposterously, it did. Despite setbacks and humiliations -- admission into the Galactic Alliance and then the Alliance's devastating collapse -- the Heirate still stood. Defensible. Coherent. The succession settled, with an heir and a spare and an energetic, attentive, devoted Sovereign.

To call the legacy of the First Order complicated was true for Renata Westaway, but that would be an understatement of gargantuan proportions when said of Natasi. She no longer ruled in its name, though she held the instruments of its authority -- the Seal and other regalia that made up what was referred to as the First Imperial crown jewels -- and still, technically, sat the Supreme Leader's throne. The First Order was a state in exile. Renata was no longer Foreign Minister of the First Order, but Prime Minister of a new government. Natasi, on the other hand, was both Queen of the Renascent Heirate and Supreme Leader-in-exile of the dead state.

Or it had been dead.

No, Renata told herself. It is still dead. Whatever these people call themselves, there is no continuity here. The message spoke of Order and Principle and Amnesty, and was signed by a name she had never heard of. The flag, the colors, the symbolism that accompanied the name -- these were not the First Order, not truly. The use of the name and symbology of the most recent Galactic Empire had not imbued it with the history or authority of the true Empire of old. It had certainly not saved it from its humiliating defeat by the Sith Covenant only months ago.

The First Order was still dead. So what was there to be done about this one? By the end of this rumination, she had showered and made it to her office, hair still damp, and had called for her security adviser. She perched on the edge of her desk and began to read the intel wires as she waited.

She didn't wait long. Her National Security Adviser arrived soon after 0415, bleary-eyed but alert, with a few aides and other staffers in tow. Renata didn't bother with a preamble, instead thrusting the datapad with the message to the adviser. "If I got this, there are probably hundreds -- maybe thousands -- of others from the old guard of the First Order that got it too. Are we seeing any movement? Any -- anything?" She sipped her coffee and winced inwardly as the acrid heat burned down her throat. Why am I letting this make me nervous?

Finta Black finished reading and handed the datapad back. "Not that we've been aware of. Communications networks are quiet -- the usual traffic for this hour. We can put feelers out. Set up sig-int triggers for 'First Order' and related variants. With a warrant, of course."

Renata didn't hesitate. "Do it. I'll sign an extraordinary warrant for it now." She reached into her desk and pulled out some forms, began to write. Finta cleared her throat, causing Renata to look up warily. "What?"

"Should we tell her?" Hilariously -- to Renata, anyway -- she half-turned, glancing over one shoulder at the portrait that hung opposite Renata's desk: Natasi Fortan in all her imperial regalia, gazing serenely down from above the mantlepiece.

"She knows," Renata said crisply and bent her head back to her work.

"You already told her?" Finta asked. "At this hour?"

Renata didn't look up this time. "She is the Supreme Leader, Finta. Even if she didn't get the message personally, her husband was Commander of the Royal Guard and I'm sure he got it too. Believe me. If I know about this, she knows about it." A pause as she scrawled her signature along the bottom of the page. She reached for the seal she kept in her desk and stamped the page, very officious. "I still want to be able to give her something up-to-date when I speak to her this morning, so -- get this going and keep me updated."