by James Luceno
Vader tightened his hold on the lightsaber. “I had not heard, Master.”
He knew that Order Sixty-Six had not been hardwired into the clones by the Kaminoans who had grown them. Rather, the troopers—the commanders, especially—had been programmed to demonstrate unfailing loyalty to the Supreme Chancellor, in his role as Commander in Chief of the Grand Army of the Republic. And so when the Jedi had revealed their seditious plans, they had become a threat to Palpatine, and had been sentenced to death.
On myriad worlds Order 66 had been executed without misfortune—on Mygeeto, Saleucami, Felucia, and many others. Taken by surprise, thousands of Jedi had been assassinated by troopers who had for three years answered almost exclusively to them. A few Jedi were known to have escaped death by dint of superior skill or accident. But on Murkhana, apparently unique events had played out; events that were potentially more dangerous to the Empire than the few Jedi who had survived.
“What was the cause of the troopers’ insubordination, Master?” Vader asked.
“Contagion.” Palpatine sneered. “Contagion brought about by fighting alongside the Jedi for so many years. Clone or otherwise, there is only so much a being can be programmed to do. Sooner or later even a lowly trooper will become the sum of his experiences.”
Light-years distant in his inner sanctum, Palpatine leaned toward the holotransceiver’s cam.
“But you will demonstrate to them the peril of independent thinking, Lord Vader, the refusal to obey orders.”
“To obey you, Master.”
“To obey us, my apprentice. Remember that.”
“Yes, my Master.” Vader paused with purpose. “It’s possible, then, that some Jedi may have survived?”
Palpatine adopted a look of consummate displeasure. “I am not worried about your pathetic former friends, Lord Vader. I want those clone troopers punished, as a reminder to all of them that for the rest of their abbreviated lives they would do well to understand whom they truly serve.” Retracting his face into the hood of his robe, he said in a seething tone: “It is time that you were revealed as my authority. I leave it to you to drive the point home.”
“And the escaped Jedi, Master?”
Palpatine fell silent for a moment, as if choosing his words carefully. “The escaped Jedi … yes. You may kill any you come across during the course of your mission.”
Vader didn’t rise until the Emperor’s holoimage had derezzed entirely. Then he stood for a long moment with his sheathed arms dangling at his sides, his head mournfully bowed. Finally he turned and moved for the hatch that opened onto the Exactor’s ready room.
To the galaxy at large, Jedi Knight Anakin Skywalker—poster boy for the war effort, the “Hero with No Fear,” the Chosen One—had died on Coruscant during the siege of the Jedi Temple.
And to some extent that was true.
Anakin is dead, Vader told himself.
And yet, if not for events on Mustafar, Anakin would sit now on the Coruscant throne, his wife by his side, their child in her arms … Instead, Palpatine’s plan could not have been more flawlessly executed. He had won it all: the war, the Republic, the fealty of the one Jedi Knight in whom the entire Jedi order had placed its hope. The revenge of the self-exiled Sith had been complete, and Darth Vader was merely a minion, an errand boy, allegedly an apprentice, the public face of the dark side of the Force.
While he retained his knowledge of the Jedi arts, he felt uncertain about his place in the Force; and while he had taken his first steps toward awakening the power of the dark side, he felt uncertain about his ability to sustain that power. How far he might have been now had fate not intervened to strip him of almost everything he possessed, as a means of remaking him!
Or of humbling him, as Darths Maul and Tyranus had been humbled before him; as indeed the Jedi order itself had been humbled.
Where Darth Sidious had gained everything, Vader had lost everything, including—for the moment, at least—the self-confidence and unbridled skill he had demonstrated as Anakin Skywalker.
Vader turned and moved for the hatch.
But this is not walking, he thought.
Long accustomed to building and rebuilding droids, supercharging the engines of landspeeders and starfighters, upgrading the mechanisms that controlled the first of his artificial limbs, he was dismayed by the incompetence of the medical droids responsible for his resurrection in Sidious’s lofty laboratory on Coruscant.
His alloy lower legs were bulked by strips of armor similar to those that filled and gave form to the long glove Anakin had worn over his right-arm prosthesis. What remained of his real limbs ended in bulbs of grafted flesh, inserted into machines that triggered movement through the use of modules that interfaced with his damaged nerve endings. But instead of using durasteel, the medical droids had substituted an inferior alloy, and had failed to inspect the strips that protected the electromotive lines. As a result, the inner lining of the pressurized bodysuit was continually snagging on places where the strips were anchored to knee and ankle joints.
The tall boots were a poor fit for his artificial feet, whose claw-like toes lacked the electrostatic sensitivity of his equally false fingertips. Raised in the heel, the cumbersome footgear canted him slightly forward, forcing him to move with exaggerated caution lest he stumble or topple over. Worse, they were so heavy that he often felt rooted to the ground, or as if he were moving in high gravity.
What good was motion of this sort, if he was going to have to call on the Force even to walk from place to place! He may as well have resigned himself to using a repulsor chair and abandoned any hope of movement.
The defects in his prosthetic arms mirrored those of his legs.
Only the right one felt natural to him—though it, too, was artificial—and the pneumatic mechanisms that supplied articulation and support were sometimes slow to respond. The weighty cloak and pectoral plating so restricted his movement that he could scarcely lift his arms over his head, and he had already been forced to adapt his lightsaber technique to compensate.
He could probably adjust the servodrivers and pistons in his forearms to provide his hands with strength enough to crush the hilt of his new lightsaber. With the power of his arms alone, he had the ability to lift an adult being off the ground. But the Force had always given him the ability to do that, especially in moments of rage, as he had demonstrated on Tatooine and elsewhere. What’s more, the sleeves of the bodysuit didn’t hug the prostheses as they should, and the elbow-length gloves sagged and bunched at his wrists.
Gazing at the gloves now, he thought: This is not seeing.
The pressurized mask was goggle-eyed, fish-mouthed, shortsnouted, and needlessly angular over the cheekbones. Coupled with a flaring dome of helmet, the mask gave him the forbidding appearance of an ancient Sith war droid. The dark hemispheres that covered his eyes filtered out light that might have caused further injury to his damaged corneas and retinas, but in enhanced mode the half globes reddened the light and prevented him from being able to see the toes of his boots without inclining his head almost ninety degrees.
Listening to the servomotors that drove his limbs, he thought: This is not hearing.
The med droids rebuilt the cartilage of his outer ears, but his eardrums, having melted in Mustafar’s heat, had been beyond repair. Sound waves now had to be transmitted directly to implants in his inner ear, and sounds registered as if issuing from underwater. Worse, the implanted sensors lacked sufficient discrimination, so that too many ambient sounds were picked up, and their distance and direction were difficult to determine. Sometimes the sensors needled him with feedback, or attached echo or vibrato effects to even the faintest noise.
Allowing his lungs to fill with air, he thought: This is not breathing.
Here the med droids had truly failed him.
From a control box he wore strapped to his chest, a thick cable entered his torso, linked to a breathing apparatus and heartbeat regulator. The ventilator was implanted in h
is hideously scarred chest, along with tubes that ran directly into his damaged lungs, and others that entered his throat, so that should the chest plate or belt control panels develop a glitch, he could breathe unassisted for a limited time.
But the monitoring panel beeped frequently and for no reason, and the constellation of lights served only as steady reminders of his vulnerability.
The incessant rasp of his breathing interfered with his ability to rest, let alone sleep. And sleep, in the rare moments it came to him, was a nightmarish jumble of twisted, recurrent memories that unfolded to excruciating sounds.
The med droids had at least inserted the redundant breathing tubes low enough so that, with the aid of an enunciator, his scorched vocal cords could still form sounds and words. But absent the enunciator, which imparted a synthetic bass tone, his own voice was little more than a whisper.
He could take food through his mouth, as well, but only when he was inside a hyperbaric chamber, since he had to remove the triangular respiratory vent that was the mask’s prominent feature. So it was easier to receive nourishment through liquids, intravenous and otherwise, and to rely on catheters, collection pouches, and recyclers to deal with liquid and solid waste.
But all those devices made it even more difficult for him to move with ease, much less with any grace. The pectoral armor that protected the artificial lung weighed him down, as did the electrode-studded collar that supported the outsize helmet, necessary to safeguard the cybernetic devices that replaced the uppermost of his vertebrae, the delicate systems of the mask, and the ragged scars in his hairless head, which owed as much to what he had endured on Mustafar as to attempts at emergency trephination during the trip back to Coruscant aboard Sidious’s shuttle.
The synthskin that substituted for what was seared from his bones itched incessantly, and his body needed to be periodically cleansed and scrubbed of necrotic flesh.
Already he had experienced moments of claustrophobia—moments of desperation to be rid of the suit, to emerge from the shell. He needed to build, or have built, a chamber in which he could feel human again …
If possible.
All in all, he thought: This is not living.
This was solitary confinement. Prison of the worst sort. Continual torture. He was nothing more than wreckage. Power without clear purpose …
A melancholy sigh escaped the mouth grille.
Collecting himself, he stepped through the hatch.
* * *
Commander Appo was waiting in the ready room, the special ops officer who had led the 501st Legion against the Jedi Temple.
“Your shuttle is prepared, Lord Vader,” Appo said.
For reasons that went beyond the armor and helmets, the imaging systems and boots, Vader felt more at home among the troopers than he did around other flesh-and-bloods.
And Appo and the rest of Vader’s cadre of stormtroopers seemed to be at ease with their new superior. To them it was only reasonable that Vader wore a bodysuit and armor. Some had always wondered why the Jedi left themselves exposed, as if they had had something to prove by it.
Vader looked down at Appo and nodded. “Come with me, Commander. The Emperor has business for us on Murkhana.”
Shryne squinted against the golden wash of Murkhana’s primary, which had just climbed from behind the thickly forested hills that walled Murkhana City to the east. By his reckoning he had spent close to four weeks confined with hundreds of other captives to a windowless warehouse somewhere in the city. Hours earlier all of them had been marched through the dark to a red-clay landing field that had been notched into one of the hills and was currently swarming with Republic troops.
On its hardstand sat a military transport Shryne surmised would deliver everyone to a proper prison on or in orbit around some forlorn Outer Rim world. Thus far, though, none of the prisoners had been ordered to board the transport. Instead, a head count was being conducted. More important, the clone troopers were obviously waiting for someone or something to arrive.
When his eyes had adjusted fully to the light, Shryne scanned the prisoners to all sides of him, relieved to find Bol Chatak and her Padawan standing some fifty meters away, among a mixed group of indigenous Koorivar fighters and an assortment of Separatist mercenaries. He called to them through the Force, figuring that Chatak would be first to respond, but it was Starstone who turned slightly in his direction and smiled faintly. Then Chatak looked his way, offering a quick nod.
On their capture at the landing platform, the three of them had been separated. The fact that Chatak had managed to retain her headcloth perhaps explained why her short cranial horns hadn’t singled her out as Zabrak and raised an alert among her captors.
Assuming that the conditions of her captivity had been similar to his, Chatak’s being overlooked made perfect sense to Shryne. Rounded up with hundreds of enemy fighters following the still-puzzling deactivation of Murkhana’s battle droids and other war machines, Shryne had been searched, roughed up, and marched into the dark building that would become his home for the next four weeks—a special torment reserved for mercenaries. Any who hadn’t willingly surrendered their weapons had been executed, and dozens more had died in fierce fights that had broken out for the few scraps of food that had been provided.
It hadn’t taken long for Shryne to grasp that winning the hearts and minds of Separatist fighters was no longer tops on Chancellor Palpatine’s list.
It also hadn’t taken long for him to give up worrying about being found out, since he had been placed in the custody of low-ranking clone troopers whose armor blazes identified them as members of companies other than Commander Salvo’s. The troopers had rarely spoken to any of the prisoners, so there had been no news of the war or of events that might have prompted the High Council to order the Jedi to go into hiding. Shryne knew only that the fighting on Murkhana had stopped, and that the Republic had triumphed.
He was considering the advantage of edging himself closer to where Chatak and Starstone stood when a convoy of military speeders and big-wheeled juggernauts arrived on the scene. Commander Salvo and some of his chief officers stepped from one of the landspeeders; from the hatch of one of the juggernauts emerged commando squad leader Climber, and the rest of Ion Team.
Shryne wondered about the timing of the commander’s arrival. Perhaps Salvo was determined to have a close look at each and every prisoner before any were loaded into the transport. That Shryne was farther back from the leading edge of the crowd than Chatak and Starstone were meant nothing. Given the amount of time they had spent with Salvo, he would have no trouble identifying all of them.
Oddly, though, the commander wasn’t paying much attention to the prisoners. His T-visor gaze was fixed instead on a Republic shuttle that was descending toward the landing field.
“Theta-class,” one of the prisoners said quietly to the mercenary standing alongside him.
“You don’t see many of those,” the second human said.
“Must be one of Palpatine’s regional governors.”
The first man sniffed. “When they care enough to send the very best …”
The shuttle had commenced its landing sequence. With ion drive powering down and repulsorlift engaged, the craft folded its long wings upward to provide access to the main hold, then settled gently to the ground. No sooner had the boarding ramp extended than a squad of elite troopers filed out, the red markings on their armor identifying them as Coruscant shock troopers.
A much taller figure followed, attired head-to-foot in black. “What in the moons of Bogden—”
“New breed of trooper?”
“Only if someone furnished the cloners with a donor a lot taller than the original.”
Salvo and his officers hastened over to the figure in black.
“Welcome, Lord Vader.”
“Vader?” the merc closest to Shryne said.
Lord, Shryne thought.
“That’s no clone,” the first human said.
Shry
ne didn’t know what to make of Vader, although it was evident from the reaction of Salvo and his officers that they had been told to expect someone of high rank. With his large helmet and flowing black cape, Vader looked like something borrowed from the Separatists—a grotesque, Grievous-like marriage of humanoid and machine.
“Lord Vader,” Shryne repeated under his breath.
Like Count Dooku?
Salvo was gesturing to Climber and the other commandos, who had remained at the juggernaut. From inside the enormous vehicle floated a large antigrav capsule with a transparent lid, which two of the commandos began to guide toward Vader’s shuttle. As the capsule passed close to Shryne, he caught a glimpse of brown robes, and his stomach lurched into his throat.
When the capsule finally reached Salvo, the commander opened an access panel in its base and removed three gleaming cylinders, which he proffered to Vader.
Lightsabers.
Vader nodded for the commander of his shock troopers to accept them, then, in a deep, synthesized voice, said to Salvo: “What were you saving the bodies for, Commander—posterity?”
Salvo shook his head. “We weren’t issued any instructions—”
Vader’s gloved right hand waved him silent. “Dispose of them in any fashion you see fit.”
Salvo was motioning Climber to remove the antigrav coffin when Vader stopped him.
“Have you forgotten anyone, Commander?” Vader asked.
Salvo regarded him. “Forgotten, Lord Vader?”
Vader folded his arms across his massive chest. “Six Jedi were assigned to Murkhana, not three.”
Shryne traded brief glances with Chatak, who was also close enough to Vader to hear the remark.
“I’m sorry to report, Lord Vader, that the other three evaded capture,” Salvo said.
Vader nodded. “I already know that, Commander. And I haven’t come halfway across the galaxy to chase them down.” He drew himself erect with a haughty air. “I’ve come to deal with the ones who allowed them to escape.”
