Polaris: An Attempted Coup D'état During The First Wave of Invasion

The essence of the conflict between the Emperor and the upper echelon of imperial officers was the difference of their views regarding the upcoming invasion into the Dominion Sphere. The Emperor believed for it to be time for his theory of superiority of imperial denizens over the rest of humanity to be proved in practice and, using his authority, ordered the invasion to begin.
On the other hand, certain senior members of the army command and the most influential imperial families pointed out that it couldn't be a proper time for conquest of such scale; not all barbarian worlds on the outer reaches, they said, were pacified yet - with the Emperor's finest troops waging war in the Dominion, the barbarians would surely seize the opportunity and strike at the imperial planets, now much less protected.

In truth, this was just an excuse; a long war of pacification, conducted prior to the First Wave, had left barbarians weakened and shattered into bickering factions, unable to threaten the Empire. The actual reason for the elites' opposition was the fact that the Emperor's family, disliked and envied by many already, would be elevated even more by a successful conquest, weakening their rivals' positions further. Such state of affairs had eventually led select officers to rebel against the current ruler.

It took the officers a long time to prepare the rebellion. One of them, a garrison commandant of the capital planet of Polaris Prime, used his position and half a year to replace regiments loyal to the Emperor with regiments loyal to him and his associates. By the moment the First Wave started, there were almost no Emperor-loyal forces on the planet.

As soon as the First Wave started, so started the rebellion; over 40 garrison regiments of Polaris revolted and rushed to take control of the capital city complex and the barracks. A comms disruption, caused by a traitor commandant, left the loyalists divided, then defeated one by one; a similar fate was shared by the Imperial Legion members who were at the capital at that time. In under twelve hours, the insurrection took the orbital elevator, the spaceport, and the command centers of orbital defense and long-distance strategic communications. The General Staff bunker was among the few objects not captured, yet it was rendered unable to participate as well; deprived of comms and blocked with directional explosives, the staff couldn't do anything but spectate.
Having had taken most of the capital over, the rebels were preparing to storm the Imperial Palace.

The Palace was a giant complex measuring several hundred square kilometers, with its own security forces, power supply, and comms; however, the latter were useless. Several months prior to that, probes able to suppress interstellar communication were secretly launched into orbit - to be activated at the same time with the signal to start the revolt.
It was the security force that posed the greatest obstacle; the Palace Legion, the Emperor's own bodyguards, their numbers rivaling the planetary garrison and being only two times smaller than the rebelling army.
In 56 hours after the rebellion had started, the assault on the Palace began.

Wave after wave the attacking armies surged upon the Palace, while it responded with gun posts. Every wave, a part of the Palace's defenses was destroyed. In about a day, twelve regiments reinforced the rebels.

It was a critical moment of a section of the Palace's defenses falling when a third force entered the fray; not expected neither by the besiegers nor by the besieged, a strike targeted the rebels' rear. These were small groups of imperial troopers harassing the revolt's forces, preventing them from making a concentrated effort.

It was only long after the rebellion, during the investigation, that the unlikely savior's identity had been revealed. A week before the revolt began, a regiment had based itself temporarily on Polaris while in transit from the outer reaches; prior to that, it had suffered several defeats from the barbarians, resulting in heavy losses. It was commanded by Alexey Dolgorukiy, a young colonel, once a soldier of that very regiment. Scheduled to receive reinforcements and vehicles at Claus-7, an imperial drop troops training base, it soon found itself stuck at Polaris due to the garrison commandant's sabotage.
Having had themselves stationed in barracks near the spaceport, the drop troops enjoyed a rest from clashes against barbarians for seven days. On the eighth day, everything went awry; first they were preparing to board the transports heading away, but then a rebel regiment appeared, capturing the spaceport.

Initially surprised, the troopers pulled themselves together. Spreading his regiment out and engaging outnumbering line infantry units, Dolgorukiy used his personal comms channel to connect with the General Staff; the rebels, devoting the most effort to blocking interstellar signals, had forgotten about planetary communications. Before the bunker side of the channel fell to directed explosions, the Staff managed to get Dolgorukiy up to date, share a detailed plan of underground passages with him, and order him to stop the rebels from taking the Palace.

Understanding that any resistance without outside support would be futile, Dolgorukiy decided to find a way to tell the outplanet forces of Emperor-loyal Order lords about the situation. As all planetary transmitters were rendered useless, he assembled a team of most experienced drop troopers and spaceport technicians and ordered them to repurpose an orbital silencer into a transmitter instead, then use it to send a pre-recorded message, while the rest of his regiment was leaving the spaceport via the underground pathways.
His initial plan involved getting into the Palace and waiting for the response together with the Legion. It proved impossible, as the Palace was separated with impenetrable walls and defenses even underground, and therefore Dolgorukiy launched a guerrilla war in the attacking armies' rear.

For three days his soldiers distracted the besiegers' attention; three days that proved crucial. Before it could be possible for the rebels to capture the Palace and kill the Emperor, an assault fleet of three imperial lords who had withdrawn from the frontlines after receiving Dolgorukiy's report descended upon them. During the following seven days, with the help of more commanders arriving, the rebellion was crushed, with only a handful of participants able to escape.

It was about that time Helen Pyriel, now an ex-legionary, began her contacts with the Advisor Corps.

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