When the attack had just begun, Sergeant First Class Kohn Vestrala had never heard an alarm like this before.
It was neither a standard enemy attack warning nor a yellow alert for pirate activity. It was Black Peak—the Imperial Navy's highest-level alert code, one that had always existed only in military manuals and had never truly been sounded.
The last time the Black Peak signal had rung out was the day the Galactic Republic fell, the day the Jedi Order rebelled... the day Order 66 was issued.
Before that, it had been during a brief Sith Empire raid thousands of years ago.
And this Black Peak signal meant only one thing—the Imperial Center, the planet Coruscant, was under attack!
Back then, Kohn Vestrala had only been an ordinary student at the Imperial Naval Academy. Back then, his instructor had said it was the Republic's final disgrace.
Then the next day, the Republic was gone.
Now, that same disgrace had come to Kohn Vestrala, and they were the ones who had to bear it.
[All combat personnel to stations! This is not a drill! I repeat, this is not a drill!]
Captain Sain Kolonos's voice rang through the shipwide broadcast. Kohn Vestrala had never heard him speak in such a tone before. That deliberately suppressed tremor was like a string stretched to its limit. It smelled of fear.
The threat that had once seemed so distant and unreal to the Core Worlds, the threat that had once existed only in Imperial propaganda manuals, had finally appeared before them in the flesh!
"Move! Move! Move!! Get to your stations immediately! Now! Double time!!" The commander of Kohn's gun crew ran over, shouting at the top of his lungs.
At the same time, large numbers of soldiers bearing the Imperial Intelligence