James Luceno - Tarkin

“No one asked them to like you, Squad Leader,” Vader snapped. With a swirl of his cloak, he climbed aboard the gunship, followed by his personal stormtroopers.

Tarkin paused to comlink Carrion Spike ’s captain. “We’re leaving four stormtroopers to guard the ship. Keep the comlink open and contact me at the first sign of trouble.”

“Acknowledged, Governor,” the comm officer said.

Vader extended a hand to Tarkin and pulled him up onto the deteriorated deck plates of the gunship’s deployment platform.

“Go,” the Dark Lord shouted to the cockpit crew.

The gunship lifted shakily off the landing field and began to wheel toward the heart of Murkhana City. Placing himself behind one of the door gunners, Tarkin grabbed hold of an overhead strap and peered out the open hatchway.

He wasn’t surprised to see that most of the city’s charred, devastated buildings had yet to be demolished. Facing sanctions, the local government had not been able to grow the economy, and the substantially reduced population had been forced to rely on black marketeers for goods and resources. Rusting remnants of the war, carbon-scored Hailfire, spider, and crab droids stood idle in the desolate streets, picked clean of usable parts by gangs of scavengers. Scattered among them were a couple of burned-out Republic AT-TE and turbo tanks, along with a Trident transport. The hulk of a Commerce Guild warship protruded like a broken tooth close to what remained of the Argente Tower, which was itself a husk.

Breath-masked residents scurried for cover as the gunship raced over glass-littered avenues, past boarded-up storefronts, toppled monuments, and gloomy cantinas. Packs of famished animals roved the alleyways, and nearly every street corner hosted crews of smugglers and hoodlums. Tarkin caught glimpses of limping war veterans — Koorivar with broken cranial horns, Aqualish with missing tusks, and Gossams with crooked necks — along with children stricken with hideous birth defects.

As the gunship veered through a turn, a hunk of twisted metal slammed into the hatch’s retracted door, hurled by a young woman who had stepped boldly from a lopsided doorway and stood in the street, hands on hips, as if challenging the Imperials to reply.

“Permission to exterminate, sir,” one of the stormtroopers said, his blaster rifle braced against his shoulder.

Vader stretched out his gloved hand to lower the weapon. “We haven’t come all this way to instigate a riot.”

And yet two city blocks later, catching sight of defaced military recruitment posters and walls vandalized by hand-scrawled insults aimed at the Emperor, he turned to Tarkin to say: “We should put this place out of its misery.”

“Too magnanimous,” Tarkin said. “Though it may come to that.”

The gunship began to shed velocity as it crossed a cratered plaza; it came to a hovering halt in the middle of a broad concourse obstructed by a collapsed coral archway.

“We’re here, sirs,” the squad leader said.

“Which building?” Tarkin asked, then followed the line of the stormtrooper’s extended hand to see a squat structure with rounded corners three blocks away.

“Originally the property of the Corporate Alliance, sir,” the squad leader continued. “A medcenter, until it was used to house a deflector shield generator that protected a vital Separatist landing platform.”

“And the current proprietor?”

“Unknown, sir. The place has changed hands several times since the end of the war. Identities of the various owners are buried under layers of phony documentation.”

“You have been maintaining surveillance?” Vader asked.

“Continuous since receiving orders from Coruscant three weeks back, Lord Vader. But we haven’t observed anyone coming or going. The locals tend to steer clear of this entire area.”

“Then you have no one in custody.”

“No one, Lord Vader.”

Tarkin’s eyes clouded over with suspicion. “Yes, but who might have been watching you while you were watching the building?”

Vader nodded. “Yes, Governor, it might very well be a trap.”

The stormtrooper indicated several nearby buildings. “We’ve installed rooftop snipers there, there, and there, Lord Vader.”

“Are you carrying remotes?”

“We have a couple of AC-ones onboard, along with an ASN retrofitted with a holotransmitter.”

“Those will do. Prepare them.”

The gunship touched down and Vader stepped from the deployment platform, all but floating to the buckled street. When his stormtroopers had followed, he turned to Sergeant Crest.

“Take four of your men and trail the remotes inside. We will monitor the holofeeds from here. Perform a full reconnaissance of the building, but do not enter the room where the devices are said to be located until we follow on your all-clear.”

Crest saluted and pointed to four of the stormtroopers. By then the spherical remotes had already been tasked and were whirring off toward the building. The squad leader placed a handheld holoprojector on the deployment platform deck plates and enabled it. A moment later the device began receiving transmissions from one of the remotes. While Vader paced, Tarkin watched as illuminated views of narrow hallways and short staircases resolved above the holoprojector. The squad leader shifted feeds from one remote to the next, but the views and sounds remained largely unchanged: puddled hallways, dark stairwells, dripping water, creaking doors, indistinct noises that may have come from still-working machines.

Almost an hour passed before the voice of Sergeant Crest issued from the comlink of one of his subordinates. “Lord Vader, the building is clear. We’re holding at the head of a corridor leading to the device storage room. I’ve tasked one of the remotes to guide you to our position.”

Leaving the local stormtroopers to establish a perimeter outside the building, Tarkin, Vader, and the remainder of the Coruscant contingent entered, glow rods in hand as they trailed the tasked remote through some of the corridors and up and down some of the stairways they had been shown earlier. In short order they had rendezvoused with Crest and the others, fifty meters from massive, retrofitted sliding doors that appeared to seal the storeroom.

Vader gestured for the squad leader to send one of the remotes down the final stretch, then to follow with four of his troopers. Tarkin tracked their wary advance on the sliding doors, which Crest parted just widely enough to allow passage for the remote. When after a long moment the remote exited, Crest signaled for Vader, Tarkin, and the others to proceed.

First to reach the sliding doors, Vader came to a sudden halt.

“The remote found nothing untoward?” he asked Crest.

“Nothing, Lord Vader.”

Vader’s breathing filled the corridor. “Something …”

Tarkin watched him closely. Vader’s exceptional instincts had alerted him to a threat of some sort. But what? He began to think through the holotransmissions of the remotes’ dizzying exploration of the confused interior of the building. On every level the surveillance droids had reached dead ends similar to the one he, Vader, and the stormtroopers now faced. Did that mean that the storeroom was several stories high? Perhaps it had been an atrium before it became a storage space. Tarkin thought back to the squad leader’s description of the building: “A medcenter … Housed a deflector shield generator …”

Tarkin couldn’t imagine such an enormous piece of machinery having been assembled in place. Which could mean—

“Lord Vader, this isn’t the primary entrance,” he said.

Vader turned to him.

“Who would be fool enough to haul communications devices through these corridors and up and down these stairways?” Tarkin gestured upward with his chin. “I suspect they were delivered here through a rooftop access. The sliding doors could lead to an ambush of some sort.”