Tarkin Read online

  “You’re speaking from personal experience,” Tarkin risked saying after a long moment of silence.

  “Of course I am,” Palpatine told him. “Our homeworlds are different in the sense that mine wished no part of galactic politics, while yours has long sought to be included. But I knew from early on that politics could provide me with a path to the center. Even so, I didn’t get to Coruscant fully on my own. I had the help of a … teacher. I was younger than you are now when this person helped me realize what I most wanted in life, and helped me attain it.”

  “You …,” Tarkin began.

  Palpatine nodded. “Your family is powerful in its own right, but only in the Seswenna. Outland forces will soon have the sector’s pirate pests on the run, and what will you do then?” His eyes narrowed once more. “There are larger fights to wage, Cadet. When you graduate, why not visit me on Coruscant? I will be your guide to the Senate District, and with any luck I’ll be able to change your mind about politics as a career. Unlike Coruscant, Eriadu hasn’t been corrupted by greed and the welter of contradictory voices. It has always been a Tarkin world, and it could become a beacon for other worlds wishing to be recognized by the galactic community. You could be the one to bring that about.”

  As it happened Tarkin wouldn’t enter politics for many years, though he did accept Palpatine’s help in gaining admission to the Judicial Academy. There—and precisely as the senator from Naboo had predicted—his fellow cadets had initially viewed him as a kind of noble savage: a principled being with abundant energy and drive who had the misfortune of hailing from an uncivilized world.

  In part, Tarkin’s father and the top echelon of the Outland Regions Security Force were to blame. Eager to impress the Core with their achievements and the fact that they were willing to contribute one of their finest strategists to the Republic, Outland’s leaders had personally delivered Tarkin to the academy in one of its finest warships, its glossy hull emblazoned with the symbol of the fanged veermok and Tarkin himself turned out in the full regalia of an Outland commander. His arrival caused such a stir that the academy’s provost marshal had mistaken him for a visiting dignitary—which, while certainly the case on worlds throughout the embattled Seswenna sector, carried no weight in the Core. Were it not for Palpatine’s influence once more, Tarkin might have been dismissed from the academy even before he had been enrolled as a plebe.

  Tarkin understood that he had neglected to heed the lessons he had learned at Sullust and had committed a tactical blunder of the worst sort. Both on the Carrion Plateau and in Eriadu space he had grown so accustomed to flying boldly into confrontation and announcing himself with flourish and dash that he hadn’t stopped to consider the staid nature of his new testing ground. Instead of sowing chaos of the sort that had so often served his purposes on land and in deep space, he had succeeded only in rousing the instant scorn of his instructors and the ridicule of his fellow plebes, who took every chance to refer to him as “Commander” or to offer facetious salutes when- and wherever possible.

  Early on, the derisive teasing led to brawls, which he mostly won, and also to disciplinary action and demerits that sentenced him to remain at the bottom of the class. That a plebe could be expelled from the Judicials for standing up for himself was something of a revelation, and perhaps he should have seen it as emblematic of the stance the Republic itself would adopt in the coming years, when its authority would be challenged by the Separatists. But he couldn’t keep himself from answering fire with fire. Gradually he came to suffer the mockery of his peers without resorting to retribution, though demerits would continue to accrue owing to mischief making and impulsive outbursts. Even so, he refused to allow himself to be cut down to size, choosing instead to bide his time and wait for an opportunity to show his peers just what he was made of.

  Halcyon would prove to be that opportunity.

  A Republic member world located in the Colonies region, Halcyon was suffering a crisis of its own. A cold-blooded group of would-be usurpers clamoring for the planet’s right to manage its own affairs had abducted several members of the planetary leadership and was holding them hostage at a remote bastion. After attempts at negotiation had been exhausted, the Republic Senate had granted permission for the Jedi to intervene and, if necessary, to employ “lightsaber diplomacy” to resolve the crisis. Tarkin was chosen to be one of the eighty Judicials the Senate ordered to attend and reinforce the Jedi.

  Never having seen let alone served alongside a Jedi, he was fascinated from the start. His theoretical grasp of the Force was as keen as that of most of his academy peers, but he was less interested in furthering his understanding of metaphysics than in observing the aloof Jedi in action. How adept were they at tactics and strategy? How quick were they to wield their lightsabers when their commands fell on deaf ears? How far were they willing to go to uphold the authority of the Republic? As a self-considered expert in the use of the vibro-lance, Tarkin was equally captivated by their lightsaber skills. Watching them train during the journey to Halcyon, he saw that each had an individual fighting style, and that the technniques for attacks and parries seemed unrelated to the color of the energy blades.

  At Halcyon the Jedi divided the Judicials into four teams, assigning one to accompany them to the fortress and inserting the others on the far side of a ridge of low mountains to block possible escape routes. While Tarkin saw a certain logic in the plan, he couldn’t quite purge himself of a suspicion that the Jedi merely wanted to rid themselves of responsibility for law enforcement personnel they clearly thought of as inferiors.

  What the Jedi hadn’t taken into account was the fact that Halcyon’s usurpers were a tech-savvy group who had had ample time to prepare for an assault on the bastion. No sooner were the Judicial teams inserted into the densely forested foothills than the planet’s global positioning satellites were disabled and surface-to-air communications scrambled. In short order, Tarkin’s team lost touch with the two cruisers that had brought them to Halcyon, their Jedi commanders, and the other Judicial teams. The prudent response would have been to hunker down while the Jedi attended to business at the fortress and wait for extraction. But the team’s commander—a by-the-numbers human with twenty years of Judicial service whose piloting and martial skills had earned him Tarkin’s reluctant respect—had other ideas. Convinced that the Jedi, too, had fallen prey to a trap, he got it in his head to strike out overland, traverse the ridge, and open a second front on reaching the fortress. This struck Tarkin as pure arrogance—no different from what he had seen in some of the Jedi he had come to know—but he also realized that the commander likely couldn’t abide being stranded in a trackless wilderness with a group of raw trainees.

  Tarkin was immediately aware of the potential for disaster. The commander’s datapad contained regional maps, but Tarkin knew from long experience that maps weren’t the territory, and that triple-canopy forests could be confounding places to negotiate. At the same time, he realized that the opportunity for finally proving his worth couldn’t have been more made to order if he had designed it himself. Mission briefings had acquainted him with the local topography, and he was reasonably certain he could follow his nose almost directly to the bastion. But he decided to keep that to himself.

  For three days of foul weather, mudslides, and sudden tree falls, the commander had them stumbling through thick forest and bogs, occasionally circling back on themselves, and growing increasingly lost. When on the fourth day their blister-pack rations ran out and exhaustion began to set in, all semblance of team integrity vanished. These scions of wealthy Core families who thought nothing of journeying across the stars had forgotten or perhaps never known what it meant to stand or sleep beneath them, far from artifical light or sentient contact, in an isolated wilderness on a far-flung world. The frequent, intense downpours disspirited them; the hostile-sounding but innocuous calls of unseen beasts unnerved them; the overhead roar of swarming insects left them huddling in their confining shelters. They grew to
fear their own shadows, and Tarkin found his strength in their distress.

  The chance to show just what he was made of came on the pebbled shore of a wide, clear, swift-flowing river. Off and on for some hours, the team had been moving parallel to the river, and Tarkin had been studying the current, making parallax observations of objects on the bottom and observing the shadows cast by Halcyon’s bashful suns. Hours earlier, downstream of a waterfall, they had passed a stretch they would have been able to ford without incident, but Tarkin had held his tongue. Now, while the commander and some of the team members stood arguing about how deep the water might be, Tarkin simply waded directly into the current and trudged to the middle of the river, where wavelets lapped at his shoulders. Then, cupping his hands to his mouth, he yelled back to the team: “It’s this deep!”

  After that, the commander kept him by his side, and eventually surrendered point to him. Navigating by the rise and set of Halcyon’s twin suns, and sometimes in the sparing illumination of the planet’s array of tiny moons, Tarkin led them on a tortuous forest course that took them through the hills and into more open forest on the far side. Along the way he showed them how to use their blasters to kill game without burning gaping holes in the most edible parts. For fun, he felled a large rodent with a hand-fashioned wooden lance and entertained the team by dressing and cooking it over a fire he conjured with a sparkstone from a pile of kindling. He got his fellow plebes used to sleeping on the ground, under the stars, amid a cacophony of sounds and songs.

  At a time when the Clone Wars were still a decade off, it became clear to his commander and peers that Wilhuff Tarkin had already tasted blood.

  When they had walked for three more days and Tarkin estimated that they were within five kilometers of the usurper’s fortress, he fell back to allow the commander to lead them in. The Jedi were astounded. They had only just put an end to the insurrection—somehow without losing a single eminent hostage—and they had all but given up on finding any members of the Judicial team alive. Search parties had been dispatched, but none had managed to pick up the team’s trail. Relieved to be back on firm ground, the cadets were at first reserved about revealing the details of their ordeal, but in due course the stories began to be told, and in the end Tarkin was credited with having saved their lives.

  For those Judicials who knew little of the galaxy beyond the Core, it came as a shock that a world like Eriadu could produce not only essential goods, but also natural champions. A clique of congenial cadets began to form around Tarkin, as much to bask in the reflected glow of his sudden popularity as to be taught by him, or even to be the butt of his jokes. In him they found someone who could be as hard on himself as he could be on others, even when those others happened to be superiors who shirked their responsibilities or made what to him were bad decisions. They had already witnessed how well he could fight, scale mountains, pilot a gunboat, and succeed on a sports field, and—as crises like the one at Halcyon grew more common—they grew to realize that he had a mind for tactics, as well; more important, that Tarkin was a born leader, an inspiration for others to overcome their fears and to surpass their own expectations.

  Not all were enamored of him. Where to some he was meticulous, coolheaded, and fearless, to others he was calculating, ruthless, and fanatical. But no matter to which camp his peers subscribed, the stories that emerged about Tarkin in the waning days of the Judicial Department were legendary—and they only grew with the telling. Few then knew the details of his unusual upbringing, for he had a habit of speaking only when he had something important to add, but he had no need to brag, since the tales that spread went beyond anything he could have confirmed or fabricated. That he had bested a Wookiee in hand-to-hand combat; that he had piloted a starfighter through an asteroid field without once consulting his instruments; that he had single-handedly defended his homeworld against a pirate queen; that he had made a solo voyage through the Unknown Regions …

  His strategy of flying boldly into the face of adversity was studied and taught, and during the Clone Wars would come to be known as “the Tarkin Rush,” when it was also said of him that his officers and crew would willingly follow him to hell and beyond. He might have remained a Judicial were it not for a growing schism that began to eat away at the department’s long-held and nonpartisan mandate to keep the galaxy free of conflict. On the one side stood Tarkin and others who were committed to enforcing the law and safeguarding the Republic; on the other, a growing number of dissidents who had come to view the Republic as a galactic disease. They detested the influence peddling, the complacency of the Senate, and the proliferation of corporate criminality. They saw the Jedi Order as antiquated and ineffectual, and they yearned for a more equitable system of government—or none at all.

  As the clashes between Republic and Separatist interests escalated in frequency and intensity, Tarkin would find himself pitted against many of the Judicials with whom he had previously served. The galaxy was fast becoming an arena for ideologues and industrialists, with the Judicials being used to settle trade disputes or to further corporate agendas. He feared that the Seswenna sector would be dragged into the rising tide of disgruntlement, without anyone to keep Eriadu and its brethren worlds free of the coming fray. He began to think of his homeworld as a ship that needed to be steered into calmer waters, and of himself as the one who should assume command of that perilous voyage. The time had come to accept Palpatine’s invitation to join him on Coruscant, for his promised crash course in galactic politics.

  Entering one of a bank of turbolifts that accessed the centermost of the Palace’s quincunx of spires, Tarkin was surprised when Mas Amedda charged the car to descend.

  “I would have expected the Emperor to reside closer to the top,” Tarkin said.

  “He does,” the vizier allowed. “But we’re not proceeding directly to the Emperor. We’re going to meet first with Lord Vader.”

  TWENTY LEVELS DOWN, in a courtroom not unlike the one in which Tarkin had tried to make a case against Jedi apprentice Ahsoka Tano for murder and sedition during the Clone Wars, stood the Emperor’s second, Darth Vader, gesticulating with his gauntleted right hand as he harangued a score of nonhumans gathered in an area reserved for the accused.

  “Was this where the Jedi Order held court?” Tarkin asked Amedda.

  In a voice as hard and cold as his pale-blue eyes, the vizier said, “We no longer speak of the Jedi, Governor.”

  Tarkin took the remark in stride, turning his attention instead to Vader and his apparently captive audience. Flanking the Dark Lord was the deputy director of the Imperial Security Bureau, Harus Ison—a brawny, white-haired, old-guard loyalist with a perpetually flushed face—and a thin, red-head-tailed Twi’lek male Tarkin didn’t recognize. Bolstering the commanding trio were four Imperial stormtroopers with blaster rifles slung, and an officer wearing a black uniform and cap, hands clasped behind his back and legs slightly spread.

  “It appears that some of you have failed to pay attention,” Vader was saying, jabbing his pointer figure in the chill, recirculated air. “Or perhaps you are simply choosing to ignore our guidance. Whichever the case, the time has come for you to decide between setting safer courses for yourselves and suffering the consequences.”

  “Wise counsel,” Amedda said.

  Tarkin nodded in agreement. “Counsel one dismisses at one’s own peril, I suspect.” Glancing at the Chagrian, he added: “I know Ison, but who are the others?”

  “Riffraff from the lower levels,” Amedda said with patent distaste. “Gangsters, smugglers, bounty hunters. Coruscanti scum.”

  “I might have guessed by the look of them. And the Twi’lek standing alongside Lord Vader?”

  “Phoca Soot,” Amedda said, turning slightly toward him. “Prefect of level one-three-three-one, where many of these lowlifes operate.”

  Vader was in motion, pacing back and forth in front of his audience, as if waiting to spring. “The liberties you enjoyed and abused during the days of the
Republic and the Clone Wars are a thing of the past,” he was saying. “Then there was some purpose to turning a blind eye to illegality, and to fostering dishonesty of a particular sort. But times have changed, and it is incumbent on you to change with them.”

  Vader fell silent, and the sound of his sonorous breathing filled the room. Tarkin watched him closely.

  “The Tarkin heritage will grant you access to many influential people, and to many social circles,” his father had told him. “In addition, your mother and I will do all within our power to help bring your desires within reach. But nothing less than the strength of your ambition will bring you together with those who will partner in your ascension and ultimately reward you with power.”

  Since the end of the war, Vader had on occasion been such a partner in Tarkin’s life, both in Geonosis space and in political and military campaigns that had taken them throughout the galaxy. Tarkin had long nursed suspicions about who Vader was beneath the black face mask and helmet, as well as how he had come to be, but he knew better than to give open voice to his thoughts.

  “Lest any of your current activities infringe on the Emperor’s designs,” Vader continued, “you may wish to consider relocating your operations to sectors in the Outer Rim. Or you may opt to remain on Coruscant and risk lengthy sentences in an Imperial prison.” He paused to let his words sink in; then, with his gloved hands akimbo and his black floor-length cape thrown behind his shoulders, he added: “Or worse.”

  He began to pace again. “It has come to my attention that a certain being present has failed to grasp that his recent actions reflect a flagrant disrespect for the Emperor. His brazen behavior suggests that he actually takes some pride in his actions. But his duplicity has not gone unnoticed. We are pleased to be able to make an example of him, so that the rest of you might profit at his expense.”