James Luceno - Tarkin

Anora rocked her head from side to side. “Or they appropriated his ship.”

“They could have.” Teller plucked at his lower lip. “Still doesn’t make sense, though — not if we’re invisible to the Predator ’s sensors. Or are you saying that Tarkin’s got some secret way of locking onto us?”

Cala spoke to it. “We disabled the slave circuit when we silenced the stormtroopers’ comlinks and the ship’s comm.”

“Maybe Tarkin is a telepath, along with being a ship designer,” Salikk said.

“Vader,” Hask rasped. “Va-der.”

Teller locked eyes with her. “Vader has a way of neutralizing stealth technology?”

Hask spread her slim, furry hands. “Who knows what’s inside that helmet of his? Besides, what other explanation is there?”

“We should have launched sooner,” Cala said. “We’d be out of the system by now.”

Teller shot him a gimlet look. “A couple of jumps from here, I’m going to remind you that you said that.” He glanced at Salikk. “How soon until we can go to lightspeed?”

The Gotal studied the navicomputer display. “As soon as you give the word.”

Teller took a breath and let it out. “Let’s see them try to track us through hyperspace.”

“Is this ship fast enough to close the distance?”

Darth Vader pulled the yoke toward him. “It is faster than most, Governor, but unfortunately not as fast as yours. We need to disable the corvette before it can elude us.”

Tarkin despaired. As disturbingly well armed as the late crime lord’s ship was, disabling the Carrion Spike was easier said than done. If the ship was, in some sense, a measure of his standing in the Imperial hegemony, then his vaunted reputation just might go down with her.

They were at the edge of the Murkhana system, the eponymous world well behind them, already a memory, and a bitter one. He and Vader were sharing the controls, Vader wedged into an acceleration chair made for a much smaller being, Tarkin strapped into the copilot’s chair. Crest and the other stormtroopers were amidships, manning the ship’s quad laser cannons.

Never having shared a cockpit with Vader, Tarkin was astonished by the Dark Lord’s piloting skills. Though perhaps he shouldn’t have been.

The sound of Vader’s slow, rhythmic breathing overwhelmed the cockpit as he indicated an area dead ahead and slightly to port. “There.”

Tarkin saw nothing but star-studded blackness. Nor did the ship’s instruments register the Carrion Spike , which was obviously running in stealth mode. He couldn’t imagine how Vader was managing to track the ship, but was for the moment content to be mystified.

“Why are they still in system?” he said. “They can’t have shipjacked it for a joyride.”

Vader glanced at him across a center console. “They were convinced we couldn’t follow them. They are merely taking time to familiarize themselves with the instruments.”

“Then they must know that we’re tracking them.”

“Indeed they do.”

Tarkin found himself actually warming to Vader, especially after what had happened in the Sugi’s headquarters. No sooner had word arrived that Sergeant Crest and his stormtroopers were in possession of the Parsec Predator and the codes necessary to launch her than Vader exacted his revenge on the crime lord for having been kept waiting. Tarkin knew merely by the gasping sounds that began to erupt from the Sugi that Vader was performing that thumb-and-forefinger dark magic of his to crush the crime lord’s windpipe. By then, too, the ambassador’s stormtroopers had rushed into the headquarters, unleashing flash grenades and blaster bolts that had caught the Sugi’s underlings by surprise. At one point Vader had asked them whether they actually wanted to die for their leader, and it was when they replied with weapons that Vader drew his crimson-bladed lightsaber from beneath his cape. Tarkin had witnessed numerous Jedi wield lightsabers during the Clone Wars, but he had never seen anyone put an energy blade to such determined purpose or achieve such rapid and lethal results. Two stormtroopers had died in the exchange, but all the Sugi had paid with their lives; Vader’s blade had even reduced the repurposed battle droids to useless parts.

“The ambassador owes you a big favor,” Tarkin had told Vader at the time.

Now he said: “Surely we weren’t lured all the way to Murkhana just so the Carrion Spike could be shipjacked.”

“And why not?” Vader said. “Stealth, firepower, alacrity.” He paused as if he were about to ask a follow-up question, but said nothing further.

“Granted it’s one of a kind, but what is their plan? To strip and sell it for parts? To have it dissected and replicated?” Tarkin heard the words tumbling from his mouth in a rush and got control of himself.

“A flotilla of Carrion Spikes ,” Vader said, clearly dubious.

Tarkin gestured in dismissal. “Not without the help of the top engineering conglomerates in the galaxy. More to the point, whoever they are, they now have the corvette, as well as a capital ship.”

“You are convinced that the piracy was carried out by the same beings who attacked Sentinel.”

“I am. Anyone with skill enough to create counterfeit holovids of ships and beings and to interrupt Imperial HoloNet signals would also have the skill to wrap the Carrion Spike in a mantle of silence, disabling not only the ship’s slave system but also her various communications systems, including comlinks and helmet radios.” He paused briefly. “Vice Admirals Rancit and Screed were correct about the cache being part of a more far-reaching plan. If the cache was merely the lure, then the plot is still unfolding.”

“Then tell me how to disable your ship, Governor.”

Tarkin firmed his lips. “There is a weakness. If the thieves can be persuaded to lower the shields, concentrated fire on the spine where the main fuselage meets the aft flare should do the trick. We were never able to resolve the problem of properly safeguarding the hyperdrive generator while the power plant is supplying the ion drives, the deflector shields, and the weapons. It’s not so much a design flaw as an accommodation to the ship’s size in relation to her armament. Even Sienar Fleet was at a loss.”

“I will bear that in mind,” Vader said, though mostly to himself.

“Frankly, Lord Vader, I’m more concerned about what the Carrion Spike ’s weapons can do to us while we’re attempting to line up what has to be a very precise laser blast.”

“Leave that to me, Governor.”

“Do I have a choice?”

Abruptly Vader poured on all speed, accelerating away from the system’s outmost planet and taking the crime lord’s ship into the starry space he had indicated earlier. But then only to loose a guttural sound of anger and frustration.

“They’ve jumped to lightspeed!”

Tarkin ground his teeth. The situation was growing worse by the moment. In star systems lacking nearby hyperspace relay stations, a ship’s pilot had to navigate by beacon or buoy, unless the ship was equipped with a sophisticated navicomputer of the sort the Carrion Spike boasted, which could plot jumps well beyond the next beacon, all the way to the Core if necessary. According to the Predator ’s inferior device, the Murkhana system had no fewer than a dozen jump egresses, and most of those were into other Outer Rim systems where beacons were still more plentiful than hyperspace relay stations.

Vader broke his protracted silence to say, “They have jumped, but not far.” He stretched out his left hand to enter data into the ship’s navicomputer.

Tarkin was nonplussed. Then it dawned on him: Vader wasn’t tracking the ship; he was tracking the mysterious black sphere he had had transferred to the Carrion Spike !