Several weeks before the battle, the Zann Consortium came into power on Ilum as Tyber Zann united pirate fleets across the galaxy under his command and coalesced them over Ilum. After amassing a modest fleet and setting the Galactic Empire into his crosshairs for destruction, Tyber calculated that he would never be able to take on the ferocious, multiheaded savage beast that was the Empire even with all the pirates and major criminal organizations in the galaxy, and set out to take the Rebel Alliance as his allies.