Tarkin Page 10

  The whole business had the taint of politics.

  Twenty years earlier, Tarkin had been on a career track to be appointed provost marshal of the Judicial Department when he resigned his rank and position. Coruscant at the time had been in the throes of an economic upswing for those senators, lobbyists, and entrepreneurs who had placed themselves at the service of the galactic industrial conglomerates. Availing itself of loopholes built into the free trade zone legislation, the monolithic Trade Federation was expanding its reach into the Outer Rim, as well as its influence in the Republic Senate. Against expectation, Finis Valorum’s supporters had managed to secure his reelection to the Republic chancellery, but Valorum was scarcely a year into his second term when the citizens of Coruscant began to place bets on whether he would be able to hold on to his office. Palpatine’s name was already being whispered as someone who might replace Valorum as Supreme Chancellor.

  Tarkin and Palpatine had had only sporadic in-person contact during the years of Tarkin’s service with the Judicials, but they had been faithful correspondents, and Palpatine had remained a staunch supporter of legislation that benefited Eriadu and the Seswenna sector. When Tarkin asked to meet with him on Coruscant, Palpatine made the travel arrangements. Tarkin was one of few people to be on a first-name basis with the senator, but out of respect for his elder and mentor of a sort, he most often referred to him by his title.

  “You need a new battlefield,” Palpatine said after he had listened in silence to Tarkin’s tale of disillusionment. “I sensed from the moment we met that the Judicial Department was too insular to contain a man of your talents—despite your having garnered a following superseding the one you attained at Sullust.”

  They were sitting in stylish chairs in the senator’s red-roomed apartment in one of Coruscant’s most prestigious buildings.

  “The Judicials are at the end of their tenure, in any case, as the Jedi seem to have become the Senate’s arbiters of choice.” Palpatine shook his head ruefully. “The Order has been given approval to intercede in matters it normally would have avoided. But complicated times beget wrongheaded decisions.” He blew out his breath and looked at Tarkin. “As I told you so many years ago at Sullust, Eriadu will always be a Tarkin world, no matter who resides in the governor’s mansion. Now more than ever, your homeworld needs the guidance of a leader who is astute in both politics and galactic economics.”

  “Why now?” Tarkin asked.

  “Because something dangerous is brewing in our little corner of the Outer Rim. Discontent is on the rise, as are criminal enterprises and mercenary groups in the employ of self-serving corporations. In the Seswenna sector, several lommite mining concerns are vying for the attention of the Trade Federation, which is determined to forge a monopoly in the free trade zones. Even on my own Naboo, the king finds himself embroiled with the Trade Federation and off world bankers with regard to our plasma exports.”

  Palpatine held Tarkin’s gaze. “Ours are remote worlds, but what transpires in those sectors of the Outer Rim could very well have galactic repercussions. Eriadu needs you, and, perhaps more to the point, we need someone like you on Eriadu.”

  Palpatine’s use of the plural was more than an affectation, and yet as close as their relationship had become, the senator never spoke in detail of those like-minded friends and allies he frequently alluded to. Not that that had kept his political opponents from speculating. Aside from the cabal of senators with whom he was often grouped—along with a following of devoted aides who had followed him from Naboo—Palpatine was rumored to have wide-ranging links to a host of shadowy beings and clandestine organizations that included bankers, financiers, and industrialists representing the most important sectors of the galaxy.

  “I’ve been away from Eriadu for many years,” Tarkin said. “The Valorum dynasty enjoys an influential presence there, and a political victory by me can hardly be assured. Especially given what happened on Coruscant.”

  Palpatine waved his thin hand in negligence and what seemed annoyance. “Valorum didn’t win the election; he was merely allowed to win. The Senate’s special-interest groups require a chancellor who can be easily entangled in bureaucratic doubletalk and arcane procedure. That is how loopholes are maintained and illegalities overlooked. But as regards your doubts, we have sufficient funds to counter the Valorums and guarantee your victory.” He fixed Tarkin with a gimlet stare. “Perhaps you and I could serve each other, as well as the Republic, by taking Valorum down a notch.” His shoulders heaved in a shrug of uncertainty. “With the backing of your family, you may not even need our help, but rest assured that we will bolster you if necessary.” Palpatine quirked a sly smile. “You will be Eriadu’s finest leader, Wilhuff.”

  “Thank you, Sheev,” Tarkin said, with obvious sincerity, and using Palpatine’s given name. “I will do what’s best for my homeworld, and for the Republic—in any manner you deem fit.”

  Palpatine’s words about Naboo and Eriadu turned out to be prophetic.

  After the Naboo Crisis and Palpatine’s election as Supreme Chancellor, many of Tarkin’s former Judicial peers would pin their hopes on Palpatine to keep the Republic from splintering. But the Separatist movement grew only stronger, and Tarkin and others were forced to accept that Palpatine, for all his talents, had come to power too late. Social injustices and trade inequities prompted hundreds of star systems to secede from the Republic, and local skirmishes became the norm. And then came war—a war that soon raged across the galaxy.

  Owing to its strategic location in the Outer Rim and its geopolitical alliances, Eriadu found itself in a thorny situation with regard to the Republic and the Separatists. Perhaps Governor Tarkin, too, should have found himself in a quandary. But in fact, there was never a question as to whose ambitions he was ultimately going to serve.

  Dawn the following morning, Tarkin went to the Palace landing field to ready the Carrion Spike for the voyage to Murkhana, only to find Vader and a contingent of stormtroopers already on the scene. Unencumbered by helmets or armor, most of the bodysuited soldiers were engaged in overseeing the transfer of a featureless black sphere from a Victory-class Star Destroyer into one of the larger of the Carrion Spike’s cargo holds. Some three meters in diameter, the sphere was flattened on the bottom, and evidently made to nestle in a hexagonal base that was also being lifted toward the corvette. Vader was pacing beneath the repulsorlift cranes in what was either agitation or concern. When the stormtrooper operating the equipment accidentally allowed the flattened sphere to bang against the edge of the cargo hold’s retracted hatch, Vader stamped forward with his gloved hands clenched.

  “I warned you to be careful!” he shouted up at the trooper.

  “My apologies, Lord Vader. Wind shear from—”

  “Excuses won’t suffice, Sergeant Crest,” Vader cut him off. “Perhaps you are aging too quickly to remain on active duty.”

  Tarkin couldn’t make sense of the remark until he realized that Crest’s was a face he had seen countless times during the war—the face of an original Kamino clone trooper. The bare-headed others comprising Vader’s squad were human regulars who had enlisted after the war.

  “It won’t happen again, Lord Vader,” Crest said.

  “For your sake it won’t,” Vader warned.

  Tarkin turned his gaze from Vader to the dangling black sphere, unsure about just what he was looking at. A weapon, a laboratory, a personal toilet, a hyperbaric chamber—some merger of the three? Had Vader become reliant on the sphere in the same way he was on the transpirator and helmet? Perhaps the chamber was nothing more than a private space in which he could temporarily free himself from the confines of the suit.

  Whatever the sphere was, it lacked a proper hatch, though two longitudinal seams appeared to indicate that the device was capable of parting. Tarkin glanced at Vader again: gauntleted fists on his hips, black cloak snapping in the wind whipped up by departing warships, the morning light reflecting off the top of his glossy, flaring h
elmet. He was being as short with his men as Tarkin had been with his during the jump to Coruscant. Worse, Vader was clearly as irritated as Tarkin was about having been tasked to head for Murkhana.

  Vader seemed to regain his composure as the sphere and its platform were successfully lowered into the cargo hold. A trio of stormtroopers was already uncoiling cables with which to link the device to the Carrion Spike’s power plant. Passing close to Tarkin on his way to the ship’s boarding ramp, Vader paused to say, “This shouldn’t take a moment, Governor. Then we can be on our way.”

  Tarkin nodded. “Take as long as you need, Lord Vader. Murkhana isn’t going anywhere.”

  Vader stared at him before marching off.

  That look again, Tarkin thought—or at least that suggestion of a look that always made him feel as if Vader knew him from some previous life.

  “We no longer speak of the Jedi,” Mas Amedda had said when they had watched Vader issue his warnings to members of Coruscant’s underworld. It struck Tarkin now that the Chagrian’s attitude wasn’t one that was confined to the Emperor’s court. In the five short years since the Order had been eradicated—Jedi Masters, Jedi Knights, and Jedi Padawans wiped out by the very clone troopers they had commanded and fought beside—the Jedi already seemed a distant memory.

  Despite their refusal to come to Eriadu’s aid against pirates, Tarkin had respected the Jedi as peacekeepers, but as generals they had proven failures. The Jedi Master with whom he had served most closely during the Clone Wars was Even Piell, to whom Tarkin’s cruiser had been assigned. Brusque and bellicose, the Lannik excelled in lightsaber combat, seeming to have integrated every possible fighting style, but he, too, had his flaws as a strategist. If Piell had deferred to Tarkin during their mission to investigate a hyperlane shortcut into Separatist-held space, they might have avoided capture and imprisonment, and perhaps the Lannik would have survived at least until the end of the war.

  The Force had endowed the Jedi with wondrous powers, but their biggest failing was in not having used the Force in all ways possible to bring the war to a quick end. By remaining faithful to their ethical code, they had allowed the war to drag on and spiral downward into a meaningless bloodbath. The conflict’s sudden conclusion and the Order’s decision to depose Supreme Chancellor Palpatine had taken nearly everyone by surprise. But Tarkin suspected that even if the Jedi had restrained themselves from rising against Palpatine in his moment of glory, the esoteric Order had doomed itself to extinction. Where their flame had burned bright for a thousand generations, technological might was the new standard.

  Tarkin had never been able to make sense of the Clone Wars, in any case. A battle on Geonosis, an army of clones springing up out of nowhere … Almost from the beginning he had suspected that an elite outsider, or a group of elite outsiders, had been tampering with or manipulating events; that the battles had been waged in support of a surreptitious agenda. In the meandering prewar conversations Tarkin had had with Count Dooku, the former Jedi had never made a convincing case for Separatism, much less for galactic war. If, as some claimed, Dooku had never actually left the Jedi Order, why then hadn’t the Jedi thrown in with the Separatists from the start?

  In their final meeting, only weeks before the Battle of Geonosis and the official outbreak of the Clone Wars, Dooku had tried to persuade Tarkin to bring Eriadu into the Confederacy of Independent Systems.

  By then Tarkin’s homeworld had transformed itself into a major trade center along the Hydian Way. With the Trade Federation monopoly on Outer Rim shipping broken as a result of the Naboo Crisis, and the loss of prestige suffered by Valorum Shipping as the result of scandals and Finis Valorum’s truncated term as supreme chancellor, Eriadu Mining and Shipping was prospering beyond the wildest dreams of the Tarkin family. Tarkin himself was just completing his second term as planetary governor and was being urged by many to run for a seat in the Republic Senate, even while many of his academy friends—convinced that a war between the Republic and the Separatists was inevitable—were urging him to leave himself open to the possibility that the Military Creation Act could be pushed through the Senate, and a Republic Navy instated.

  Count Dooku of Serenno had been most responsible for bringing the galaxy’s disenfranchised worlds under one umbrella. Tarkin had never known him when he had been one of the Jedi Order’s most dashing duelists, but they had met shortly after the count’s quiet disaffiliation, introduced to each other on Coruscant by Kooriva senator Passel Argente, who would himself go on to become a member of the Separatist leadership. Tarkin was intrigued by the tall, charismatic count, not so much because he had been a Jedi but because he had surrendered a family fortune that would have guaranteed him a place among the galaxy’s most powerful and influential beings. During that first meeting, however, they had spoken not of wealth but of politics and the escalating tensions that had been stirred by trade inequities and intersystem conflicts. Tarkin agreed with Dooku that the Republic was in danger of imploding, but he held that a supervising government—even if ineffectual—was preferable to anarchy and a fractured galaxy.

  For some eight years following his leave-taking from the Jedi Order, Dooku was scarcely heard from. Amid rumors about his fomenting political turmoil on a host of worlds, most people were convinced that he had gone into self-exile, intent on founding an offshoot of the Jedi Order. Instead he had staged a theatrical return to public life by commandeering a HoloNet station in the Raxus system and delivering a rousing speech that condemned the Republic and essentially set the stage for the Separatist movement. Moving about in secrecy—some said one step ahead of assassins hired by Republic interests—Dooku became the focus of galactic attention, backing coups on Ryloth, meddling in the affairs of Kashyyyk, Sullust, Onderon, and many other worlds, and spurning all opportunities to negotiate with Supreme Chancellor Palpatine.

  Chiefly because of its location at the confluence of the Hydian Way and the Rimma Trade Route, Eriadu became something of a contested world early on, and as adjacent and neighboring sectors seceded or joined the Separatists, Tarkin found himself pressured by both sides to declare his loyalties. Dooku went out of his way to meet with Tarkin on several occasions, as if to demonstrate that he had taken a personal interest in Eriadu’s future. In fact, having already laid the groundwork for the creation of a southern Separatist sphere by bringing Yag’Dhul and Sluis Van over to his side, he needed Eriadu to seal the deal. If Dooku could achieve in the Greater Seswenna what he had achieved elsewhere, he could effectively collapse the Core back into itself, reversing the expansion that had resulted from millennia of space exploration, conquest, and colonization.

  At each meeting Dooku had emphasized that for most of its history Eriadu had either been ignored by or been at the economic mercy of the Core. Having forged its own destiny, it owed no allegiance to Coruscant. But on the occasion of their final meeting, threat replaced persuasion. Recent turmoil at Ando and Ansion had left the galaxy staggered, and Dooku seemed caught up in the feverish rush of events. Still, he had arrived on Eriadu in his usual caped finery, elegant and urbane. At Tarkin’s residence overlooking the bay and the glittering lights of the distant shore, they dined on foods prepared by Tarkin family chefs and rare wines provided by the gray-bearded count. Even so, Dooku was restless throughout, ultimately dropping his guise to storm from the long table to the balcony railing, where he whirled on Tarkin.

  “I need an answer, Governor,” he began. “This is a pleasant evening and I have always enjoyed your company, but circumstances demand that we conclude the matter of Eriadu’s commitment.”

  Tarkin set his napkin and wineglass down and joined him at the balcony. “What has happened to bring this to a head?”

  “An imminent crisis,” Dooku allowed. “I can’t say more.”

  “But I can. I suspect that you are now close to persuading your secret allies to initiate an economic catastrophe.”

  Dooku’s response was limited to a faint smile, so Tarkin continued.
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br />   “Eriadu’s friendships are wide ranging. Nothing happens in this or any other sector without our knowledge.”

  “Which is precisely why your world is so important to our cause,” Dooku said. “But sometimes economic pressures are not enough to guarantee success—as you well know, Governor. Or do you believe you could simply have bought off the pirates who harassed this sector for so long? Of course not. Eriadu established the Outland Regions Security Force to deal with them. You went to war.”

  “Is war what you have in the works?”

  Instead of answering the question directly, Dooku said, “Consider Eriadu’s current situation. I realize that you have been successful in shipping lommite through Malastare, and circling around Bestine to reach Fondor and the Core. But where will Eriadu be when Fondor opts to join the Confederacy?”

  “Opts to join, or falls to you?”

  “Join us and you can continue to transact business in Confederacy spheres—through Falleen, Ruusan, all the way to the Tion sectors.” He paused. “Is your friend and benefactor on Coruscant in any position to offer you a similar guarantee, with the Core contracting around him?”

  “The Supreme Chancellor is not required to bribe me into remaining loyal to him.”

  “As a complement to previous bribes, you mean. In allowing your illegal actions in the Seswenna to go completely unchecked since you abetted in the undermining of Finis Valorum.” Dooku snorted in scorn. “A strong leader would never have allowed galactic events to reach a point of crisis. He is weak and inadequate.”