James Luceno - Tarkin

Teller clenched his jaw. “We’re not revising anything. Not now, not anytime.” He glanced around him.

Artoz and Salikk nodded, then Cala and Anora, and finally Hask.

Teller rolled his head through a circle to work the kinks out of his neck and nodded to Hask. “You’ve got the comm board.” As Cala stood up from the chair, Teller added: “Doc, you and Cala better get yourselves positioned.” Then he turned to Salikk to say: “Jump us to Galidraan.”

Seated in the copilot’s chair, Tarkin watched Vader expectantly as the Predator emerged from hyperspace.

“Full ahead,” the Dark Lord said.

Tarkin was glad to oblige, though he saw nothing through the viewports but star-strewn space and nothing on the sensor screens but background noise.

One moment Vader’s gloved hands were clamped tight on the yoke, then they flew to the navigation console. “They’ve jumped to lightspeed again.”

“Just as I would have,” Tarkin said.

Vader fell silent, then lifted his head as if just roused from a nap and swiveled to the navicomputer display, the fingers of his left hand punching the control pad keys.

“Galidraan,” he said at last.

Tarkin gave him a moment to complete the request for jump coordinates. “The chamber,” he said. “That’s how you’re tracking them.”

Vader glanced at him, as unreadable as ever, but said: “Very discerning of you, Governor.”

Tarkin called up a star map of the Galidraan system and began to study it. “An even shorter jump. Two populated planets.” He frowned in uncertainty. “Why not jump farther afield? An error in judgment?”

Vader made no reply.

Tarkin retrieved additional information on the system. “An Imperial space station in fixed orbit at Galidraan Three.” The onscreen image of the station showed it to be an outmoded wheel with numerous space docks radiating from the perimeter.

“There is little point in alerting the station,” Vader said, “as we will arrive long before a subspace transmission.”

“The station won’t be able see the Carrion Spike coming, in any event.”

Vader grunted and reached for the hyperdrive control arm. Beyond the viewports the starfield elongated, and the Predator leapt to lightspeed.

Tarkin sat back in his chair, allowing his vision to adjust to the mottled corridor the ship had entered. No past or future here, he told himself. Time’s blank canvas. And yet he couldn’t keep his thoughts from running wild and in all directions.

Reflecting on Jova’s sage advice, he could recall countless instances of each scenario playing out during his years of training on the plateau. Animals had escaped despite the team’s best efforts to track and hunt them down. Others had hidden and sprung from concealment, on one occasion nearly making a meal of the Rodians had Jova, Tarkin, and Zellit not come to their rescue. Some with braying calls had summoned reinforcements too numerous for the humans and Rodians to compete with, and they had been the ones to go hungry. And yes, there had been numerous instances of hunted animals skulking off to sniff out more vulnerable game, softer targets. In deep space, similar circumstances had transpired. Pirate groups had gone hungry, sounded calls for support, abandoned the Greater Seswenna for less fortified zones, and employed every method of concealment, taking every advantage of the glower of starlight, the glittering tails of comets, iridescent clouds of interstellar gas.

Again Tarkin tried to assemble all the pieces: the counterfeit distress call, the sneak attack on Sentinel, the bait set out on Murkhana, the theft of the ship, and now the flight.

But to where? To what end?

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Vader prepare the Predator for the transition to sublight. The timeless corridor narrowed and vanished and the starlines compacted to pinpoints of light, skewing slightly as the ship reverted to realspace. No sooner had Vader engaged the ion drives than proximity alarms began to squeal and something large and white caromed off the forward deflector shield.

Tarkin quickly captured an image of the object on one of the display screens. It was the mangled and frosted body of a stormtrooper.

In the middle distance, fiery explosions flared at the edge of Galidraan III’s atmospheric envelope. Plumes of incandescence, like stellar prominences, erupted into space.

Vader firewalled the throttle and the Predator raced deeper into the system, the space station coming into unassisted view, an arc of its silvery rim blown wide open and hemorrhaging gas, flames, objects, and bodies. The source of the destruction was invisible to the naked eye and the Predator ’s scanners, making it appear as if green packets of bundled energy were being fired from deep space. Even so, particle-beam weapons emplaced along the station’s curved outer surface were returning fusillades that streamed futilely into the void. Like some sea creature lunging forward to chew flesh and withdraw before it could be counterattacked, the invisible menace continued to advance and retreat, its lasers opening surgical lacerations along the spokes of the wheel as if intent on separating the rim from the hub. Larger explosions blossomed, along with dense clusters of superheated ejecta.

Tarkin bent to the controls, searching for a heat signature, gravitational flux, evidence of propellant glow, anything that might pinpoint the location of the Carrion Spike , all the while well aware that the ship was beyond his efforts to track. She could conceal herself from any sensor, contain her own reflection and heat, accelerate out of danger, maneuver beyond the capacity of any ship her size. But worse still was Tarkin’s realization about her new crew: They weren’t mere shipjackers; they were, as Vader had intuited early on, dissidents. Partisans with a deadly agenda to fulfill.

Flights of ARC-170 and V-wing starfighters, like swarms of stinging insects, were accelerating from the station’s launch bays in search of the veiled thing that was pummeling their nest. Keeping to the edge of the battle to avoid being inadvertently targeted, Vader abruptly veered the Predator starboard in an obvious attempt to parallel the curving storm of destruction the Carrion Spike was sowing.

Tarkin saw a rash of melt circles erupt along the station’s already pockmarked hull, an efflorescence of globular explosions.

Vader changed vectors and decelerated to match the Predator ’s speed to that of the Carrion Spike . “We have you now,” Tarkin heard him mutter.

Through the viewports, he could see the ARC-170s and the V-wings playing a dangerous game with their opponent, speeding directly into hails of energy bolts in the hope of forcing the Carrion Spike to betray her location, and sacrificing themselves in the process.

His hands tight on the yoke, Vader called out, “Sergeant Crest, prepare to fire.”

The stormtrooper’s voice crackled from the cockpit nunciator. “Standing by, Lord Vader. But we have no visual on the target.”

“Follow the tracers back to their source, Sergeant, and pour all the power of those quad lasers toward the point of origin.”

“Shots in the dark,” Tarkin said.

“Only from your vantage,” Vader said; then he took his hands from the steering yoke and turned to him to add: “Your ship. Flank speed.”

Tarkin pulled the copilot’s yoke into his lap and began to slalom the Predator through the debris field spewed by the crippled station. At the same time, Vader swiveled to position himself at the controls for the forward guns. Wary of allowing the ion engines to overheat, Tarkin slued the ship through clusters of slagged alloy, incinerated starfighters, and tumbling bodies.