Nothing lasts forever. After the tragic ending of the mission on Malachor, a rift seems to separate the Bridger siblings as they keep fighting for the Rebellion. While their father, Jordan Bridger, has managed to mobilize military help from the Milk...
The news of the Empire's sterilization of Geonosis was indeed a political earthquake across the galaxy. Not that the Senate had any power to do anything against the Emperor, and condemning the fact openly would be considered treason, because the official line of the Imperial Government was that the canisters were fabricated by terrorists and seditious that only wanted to smear the Empire reputation.
Many senators, however, started to silently feed information, funds and a web of contacts that would help the rebels hide from the Imperial radars.
The Emperor, on the other hand, couldn't simply remove Senators without a reasonable excuse, because that would mean incite their worlds to rebel, or at the very least boycott the Empire.
And the news of the genocide reached the Milky Way too, giving a huge boost to the military build-up: now thoroughly convinced that the Empire must be destroyed at the first opportunity, every single species of the Citadel Council had finally agreed to a full-scale war, throwing their full economic and political support behind the Empress and the Systems Alliance. Among the ever-dutiful Turian population, many workers had started to voluntarily prolong their shifts to increase the production rate of the hyperdrives for the fleet and the recruitment offices were literally flooded with recruits.
The citizens of the Imperial Federation had understood that the Empire was a threat to their very existence, and if it was allowed to crush the rebels and stabilize in Andromeda, they might come back and cause death and destruction on a scale unseen since the Reaper War. The new generation of men and women born in that Golden Age of the Federation had understood that this was the great task they were called to fulfill, just like their fathers did against the Reapers.
And Benedetta wasn't being idle. The Empress had started a tour of the major worlds as well as the minor colonies of her vast Empire, emboldening the population with passionate speeches or with her mere presence, with her popularity skyrocketing as she became the symbol behind which the peoples of the Federation were rallying against the evil Empire of the Andromeda galaxy.
The rebels appreciated to know that, since the production of the hyperdrives was improving every day, thanks to the eagerness of the workers and their quick-learning of how to build the devices, it seemed likely that the invasion of Lothal might happen a month earlier than initially anticipated.
Benedetta also informed the rebels that the first land division of the newborn "Free Galactic Army" (which was a temporary name), made up of the refugees from Andromeda that enlisted in the Federal Armed Forces, was being trained back on Earth, where the variety of ecosystems was perfect to keep diversity of environments to train in.
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The unit was composed of 6500 soldiers, organized into 2 mechanized infantry regiments with new APC and light vehicles built for them, 1 artillery regiment and even an armored battalion.
The weapons were built by some engineers of BlasTech Industries that deserted from the Empire and had been rescued by the Rebels over the last months. The Federal government had allowed them to establish a factory on Hìlios, the colony that had been attacked by the Empire, because it was the closest to the wormhole and also to boost the economy of the colony as the factory employed local workers in the assembly lines, paid by the state just for this occasion.
