The Rise of the Empire

by John Jackson Miller

  Tarkin stared at the comlink. “What?”

  “It’s not here, sir. It must have launched.”

  “Impossible!” Tarkin said.

  “Where are your troopers, Sergeant?” Vader all but snarled.

  Again the reply was long in arriving. “Lord Vader, we have a visual on four bodies—two stormtroopers, the captain, and the comm officer.” Crest paused, then added, “Shot through and through, Lord Vader.”

  Vader clenched his right hand. “You’ve failed me for the last time, Sergeant.”

  “I get that, sir,” Crest said in a somber voice.

  Vader turned to Tarkin. “We sidestepped the smaller trap only to fall into the larger one, Governor. If nothing else, we now know the reason we were lured here.” Bringing his left hand to the brow of his helmet, he paced away from Tarkin and the ambassador, then swung back to them. “The ship is still in the Murkhana system.”

  Tarkin didn’t waste time asking how Vader knew that to be the case. Instead, he glanced at one of the stormtroopers. “The Judicial cruiser at the landing field.”

  The stormtrooper shook his head in a mournful way. “Not spaceworthy, sir. We’ve been waiting on replacement parts for the hyperdrive motivator for three months, local.”

  “I know where to procure a ship,” Vader said abruptly. He swept his arm in a gesture aimed at the stormtroopers. “All of you—come with me.” Then he turned and pointed to Bracchia. “And you.”

  Tarkin fell in among them as they hastened from the ambassador’s residence.

  —

  Tarkin had his doubts.

  At Lola Sayu, when Skywalker, Kenobi, and Ahsoka Tano had participated in rescuing him from the Citadel, Tarkin had taken issue with the Jedi strategy of splitting into two teams. Surrendering group integrity for twice the number of potential problems made little sense, and that was precisely the way the mission had unfolded. Tarkin’s general, Even Piell, had been killed, and the rest of them had nearly fallen back into the clutches of the Citadel’s sadistic Separatist prison warden. Now, all these years later, Vader had split their forces, and here they were allowing themselves to be herded at blasterpoint into the den of a Sugi crime lord while the stormtroopers were elsewhere in Murkhana City carrying out their part of Vader’s plan.

  So Tarkin had his doubts.

  But with the Carrion Spike apparently in the hands of shipjackers, and his captain, comm officer, and two stormtroopers dead, he had little choice but to go along with the subterfuge, in the hope that it would succeed.

  “I still don’t like splitting up the team,” he said to Vader as one of the Sugi was shoving him from behind.

  Vader glanced over at him, but as ever it was impossible to tell what was going on behind the black orbs and muzzle of his mask.

  The headquarters building was in better condition than most in Murkhana City, its graceful swirls of coral and undersea colors having either survived the war or been restored since. Initially Tarkin had taken the Sugi for an insectile species, but in fact they were short bipeds who affected armored powersuits. The suits provided them with a second set of legs and a segmented, barb-tipped abdomen, which gave them the appearance of mythological creatures. The soldiers, at any rate. Others in the dank hall Vader and Tarkin were escorted into stood on their own two feet and wore cowl-like helmets, with power packs of some sort on their backs. The outsized helmets made their large-eyed skeletal faces seem even smaller than they were.

  Twenty soldiers complemented the half dozen who were holding weapons on Vader and Tarkin, with several repurposed Separatist battle droids augmenting the hall group. Their apparent leader lounged on a gaudy throne of coral, clicking orders to his minions.

  Vader came to a halt five meters from the throne and spent a moment taking in the overstated surroundings. “You have done well for yourself since the demise of your former competitor, crime lord,” he said at last.

  “And for that I owe you a debt of gratitude, Lord Vader,” the Sugi answered in heavily accented Basic. “That is the sole reason I have allowed you entry to my abode—to thank you personally for killing my predecessor and persuading Black Sun to abandon Murkhana for safer realms.”

  “You are as insolent as he was, crime lord.”

  “Given that I enjoy the upper hand here, Lord Vader, I can well afford to be.”

  Vader folded his arms across his massive chest. “Don’t be too sure of yourself.”

  The Sugi dismissed the warning. “I have been apprised by my associates of your prowess, Lord Vader. But I doubt that even you could triumph over so many.” When Vader said nothing, he continued: “Now, what is this drivel about commandeering my starship?”

  Tarkin stepped forward to speak. “We take your meaning about being outnumbered. But perhaps there’s a healthier way to persuade you to do as Lord Vader asks.”

  The Sugi’s large eyes expanded. “I have not had the pleasure…”

  “Meet Moff Tarkin, crime lord,” Vader said. “Sector governor of Greater Seswenna and more.”

  The Sugi sat back in his chair. “Now I am impressed. That Murkhana should play host to two such luminary Imperials…Though many might say I would be doing the galaxy a favor by eliminating you here and now.” He fixed his gaze on Tarkin. “But you were saying, Governor Tarkin…”

  “That in meetings of this nature there are always alternatives to using brute force.”

  “I can’t imagine any alternatives that will convince me to surrender my fanged beauty of a starship, Governor Tarkin.”

  Cautiously, Tarkin drew a portable holoprojector disk from the pocket of his tunic. “If I may?”

  The Sugi waved permission.

  “Sergeant Crest,” Vader said toward the device. “Are you in the crime lord’s warehouse?”

  “Yes, Lord Vader. Ready to bring the entire place down on your command.”

  “Then you have redeemed yourself, Sergeant.”

  “Thank you, Lord Vader.”

  The crime lord’s expression approximated entertainment. “You can’t be serious. Or do you actually believe that I would surrender my ship for a warehouse full of weapons?”

  “Your Crymorah associates on Coruscant might encourage you to do just that.”

  “I’ll take my chances, Lord Vader.”

  “You’re right of course,” Tarkin said quickly. “But just now your warehouse contains more than weapons. We’ve arranged for your wives and brood to be present as well.” He called up an image of the Sugi’s family members huddled in a circle on the warehouse floor and surrounded by stormtroopers with raised weapons. “We understand that you are very attached to them. A product of your genetics, I suspect.”

  “You wouldn’t!” the Sugi said.

  His earlier doubts about Vader’s plan beginning to fade, Tarkin lifted an arrogant eyebrow. “Wouldn’t we?”

  The Sugi fidgeted in apprehension. “I can have both of you killed where you stand!”

  “We’ll take our chances,” Tarkin said, grinning slightly. “Your ship for their lives.”

  After a long moment of rapid clicking and nervous hand wringing, the Sugi broke the tense silence. “All right, take the ship! I will purchase a replacement. I will purchase twenty replacements. Just let them live—let them live!”

  Tarkin’s face grew deadly serious. “You’ll need to furnish us with all the necessary launch codes and order all of your underlings to leave the landing field at once.”

  “Then I will do it,” the crime lord said. “Whatever you ask!”

  Vader leaned slightly in the direction of the comlink. “Sergeant Crest, transport the crime lord’s family to the landing field and let me know when your troops are in possession of his ship.”

  “Let them live,” the Sugi repeated, rising halfway out of his throne in supplication.

  “Take heart,” Tarkin said. “They most certainly will survive you.”

  OUTBOUND FROM MURKHANA, the Carrion Spike’s new pilot and three members of the new crew wer
e gathered in the command cabin marveling at the wonders of the ship. The shipjackers— a human, a Mon Calamari, a Gotal, and a Koorivar—some standing, others seated in the chairs that fronted the curved instrument console, could hardly keep still, having pulled off an act of piracy that had been close to two years in the planning.

  The human, Teller, was a rangy, middle-aged man with thick dark hair and eyebrows to match. His long face was perpetually shadowed with stubble, and his chin bore a deep cleft. Dressed in cargo pants, boots, and a thermal shirt, he stood between the principal acceleration chairs, watching as the Gotal pilot and the Koorivar operations specialist familiarized themselves with the ship’s complex controls. The bulkhead left of the forward viewports bore traces of carbon scoring and blood from the brief blaster fight that erupted when the shipjackers had had to burn and battle their way through the command cabin hatch to deal with Tarkin’s defiant captain and comm officer.

  “Getting the hang of it?” Teller asked the Gotal, Salikk.

  The twin-horned, flat-faced humanoid nodded without taking his heavy-lidded scarlet eyes from the instrument array. “She flies herself,” he said in accented Basic. A native of the moon Antar 4, he was short and dark-skinned, with tufts of light hair on his cheeks and chin. He wore an old-fashioned but serviceable flight suit that left the clawed digits of his sensitive hands exposed.

  “It will fly itself, but we’re going to tell it where to go,” Dr. Artoz told him.

  The Mon Cal wore a flight suit whose neck had been altered to accommodate the amphibious humanoid’s high-domed, salmon-colored head, and whose sleeves ended mid-forearm to allow passage for his large webbed hands. Pacing the length of the instruments console, Artoz was pointing out individual controls, his huge eyes swiveling independently of each other to focus simultaneously on Salikk and the ops specialist, Cala.

  Teller had known all three of them for years, but what with Salikk’s sweaty scent and the saline smell Artoz emitted, he was grateful for the spaciousness of the Carrion Spike’s command cabin. Then again, from what he’d been told by his nonhuman friends, humans weren’t exactly a picnic when it came to body odor.

  “Computer-assisted fire control for the lateral lasers and in-close weapons,” Artoz was saying, indicating one set of instruments after the next. “Full-authority navicomp, stealth system initiator, sublight ions, hyperdrive.”

  “State-of-the-art Imperial technology,” Cala said. Jutting from a headcloth that fell past the Koorivar’s shoulders, his spiraling cranial horn was twice the height of Salikk’s conical projections and thicker than both of them combined. He wore pouch-pocketed pants not unlike Teller’s under a roomy tunic that reached his thick thighs. “This corvette will easily exceed a Star Destroyer.”

  “Nothing less than what I promised,” Artoz said, though without a hint of self-importance. He gestured to the auxiliary controls. “Sensor suite, rectenna controls, alluvial dampers, reverse triggering acceleration compensator—”

  “Which one empties the toilets?” a second human asked as she stepped through the scarred cockpit hatch. Fit and scrappy looking, she had a narrow frame and skin the color of a tropical hardwood. Her short curly hair was naturally black but had been lightened to a mishmash of brown and blond. She wore a white utility suit and ankle-length ship-tread boots. The Zygerrian female who followed her into the command cabin was also slender, though somewhat taller, and distinctly feline in appearance. Pointed, fur-covered ears sprang straight up from the sides of a narrow-nosed, triangular face. Her innate exoticism was enhanced by reddish coloring.

  Teller turned to them. “Everything locked down back there?”

  The woman, Anora, nodded. “The outer hatch is fully sealed. The air lock, not so much.” She gestured with her pointed chin to the Zygerrian. “Hask’s going to keep working on it—since it was her blaster that did the damage.”

  Hask snorted. “When she slammed into me.” She spoke Basic flawlessly, but with a thick accent.

  Anora showed her a long-suffering look. “You were supposed to keep the safety on.”

  “For the last time,” she said, “I’m not a soldier, and I’ll never be one.”

  “Plenty of blame to go around,” Teller said, cutting them off. “The holocams survive?”

  Enthusiasm informed Hask’s nod. Her head bore a symmetrical pattern of small spurs. “They’re in the main cabin. I’ll get started slaving them to the HoloNet comm board—”

  “As soon as she’s repaired the air lock,” Anora said, blue-gray eyes bright over her smile.

  Hask ignored her. “Nice of Tarkin’s stormtroopers to carry some of the storeroom components aboard. I thought we were going to have to sacrifice them.”

  “We have Tarkin to thank for a lot of things,” Teller said. He swung forward in time to catch the end of Artoz’s instrument rundown.

  “Air lock overrides, blast-tinting for the viewports…What else?”

  “Do all the Emperor’s Moffs rate one of these?” Anora asked, running a hand over the console in appreciation.

  “Only Tarkin,” Artoz said, “as far as we know.”

  “A testament to his friendship with Sienar,” Teller said.

  “Sienar Fleet Systems wasn’t the only contributor,” Artoz amended. “The company’s design sense is all over the corvette, but every shipbuilder from Theed Engineering to Cygnus Spaceworks played a part in outfitting it.”

  “Not to mention Tarkin himself,” Teller said. “The Moff was designing ships for Eriadu’s Outland Security Force when he was nineteen.”

  Hask made a sour face. “More Prefsbelt Academy legends.”

  Anora shook her head negatively. “True by all accounts.”

  Teller perched on the arm of one of the secondary acceleration chairs. “The way I heard it, Eriadu was losing a lot of its lommite shipments to a pirate group that had fortified the bow of one of their ships to use as a rostrum—a kind of battering ram—after destroying too much cargo with their lasers.”

  “The pirates weren’t acquainted with ion cannons?” Salikk said from the pilot’s seat.

  Teller glanced at the Gotal. “Seswenna’s ships were too well ray-shielded for that—another Tarkin innovation, I might add. Anyway, he designed a narrow-profile ship with cannons that could swivel on pintles to direct all firepower forward. Confronted the rammer bow-on.”

  “Damn the particle beams, full speed ahead,” Hask said, still refusing to buy into the legend.

  Teller nodded. “Burned through the pirates’ armor like a knife through butter and blew the ship apart.” He turned to point to toggles on the control console. “Same system here.”

  Cala grinned. “Should come in handy.”

  “We can hope,” Artoz said, giving the console a final appraisal with his right eye while his left remained fixed on Salikk. “Proximity alarms, hypercomm unit, Imperial HoloNet encryptor…”

  “Why is it called the Carrion Spike?” Anora said.

  Teller drew his lips in and shook his head. “Not a clue.”

  Everyone fell silent for a moment, gazing through the viewports at the Murkhana system’s small outermost planet and the vast starfield beyond.

  “I still can’t get over Vader being there,” Hask said finally. “I mean, why would the Emperor send him to escort Tarkin?”

  “Vader paid Murkhana a visit just after the war ended,” Cala said. “Executed a Black Sun Twi’lek racketeer, among other acts.”

  “Still,” Hask said. “Vader…”

  “Stop calling him by name,” Anora said harshly; then softened her tone to add: “He’s a machine. A terrorist.” She looked at Teller. “You took a real risk having him and Tarkin walk right into that sliding door ambush.”

  Teller shrugged it off. “We had to make the scenario ring true. Besides, their getting themselves blown up wouldn’t have affected our plans one way or another.”

  “The Emperor wouldn’t have been happy losing two of his top henchmen,” Cala pointed out.
r />   “He’s not going to be happy either way,” Teller said.

  The console issued a loud tone, and Cala lifted his eyes to the display. “Uh, Teller, we’ve got a starship on our tail.”

  Teller’s dark eyebrows quirked together. “Can’t be. You certain you have the stealth system enabled?”

  The Koorivar nodded. “Status indicators say so. We should be invisible to scanners.”

  Everyone crowded around the sensor suite. “Put the ship on screen,” Teller said.

  Cala’s stubby-fingered hands raced across the keypad, and a black ship with forward fangs resolved on the display. “Waiting for a transponder signature…”

  “Don’t bother,” Salikk said. “That’s Faazah’s ship. The Parsec Predator.”

  Teller nodded. “The Sugi arms dealer.”

  “Murkhana’s most wanted,” Salikk said.

  Cala ran his gaze over the sensor indicators. “Matching our every move.”

  Teller stared at the screen and scratched his head in bafflement. “I’m willing to entertain explanations.”

  Artoz spoke first. “Perhaps this Sugi is simply heading for the same jump point we are.”

  Teller nodded to Salikk. “Put this thing through some maneuvers, and let’s see what happens.”

  The corvette changed vectors, slewing to port, then to starboard before rocketing through an abrupt, twisting climb that delivered them swiftly to the dark side of the impact-cratered planet.

  Everyone fell silent again, waiting for the Koorivar’s update. “The Predator’s still with us, just emerging from the transitor.” Cala swiveled to Teller. “And here’s something strange: We’re not being scanned.”

  Teller and Artoz looked perplexed. “You stated that it is matching our every maneuver,” the Mon Cal said.

  “It is,” Cala emphasized. “And I repeat, we’re not being scanned. No sensor lock, no indication that we’re being observed.”

  Teller traded glances with Artoz. “A homing beacon?” he suggested.