Next Move

In the time that followed, the Galactic Republic and the Confederacy of Independent Systems continued battering each other senseless, with the flames of war spreading across hundreds of planets.

Yet the fighting on those hundreds of planets was only a direct confrontation between the Republic and the Confederacy. In fact, because the Confederacy of Independent Systems had brazenly declared independence and launched a civil war, conflicts had erupted within most planets across the Milky Way Galaxy.

Over the Galactic Republic's 25,000-year history, it had accumulated too many contradictions to count. The Republic had never truly known peace during its founding era—or rather, in those 25,000 years, the only genuine peace had been the most recent thousand or so years.

The Eternal War, the Infinite Wars, the Hyperspace War, and the two Sith Wars—those were merely the great wars that swept across the entire galaxy, to say nothing of the countless local wars and armed conflicts. The dead and wounded from that process could no longer be measured in numbers.

And the economic scale of the entire galaxy was equally immense. Countless families and social classes had risen, while countless others had declined; countless people had grown rich overnight, countless others had gone bankrupt, and even more struggled amid exploitation and labor. No one could calculate how much hatred and sorrow had accumulated within it all.

But the Galactic Republic's strength had suppressed all those contradictions. As technology and civilization continued to advance, the cost of letting those contradictions erupt grew ever higher. In the Cold Weapon Era, people could raise a cry and rise up with nothing but poles and farm tools. But by the age of firearms, an insurmountable gulf already stood between the power of the state and ordinary civilians. And in the interstellar age, could you really