—
Vader threw open the cockpit hatch, and the wail of alarms poured out in a gush. The attacking ship was not visible through the viewport. In the distance, he saw the glow of V-wing fire.
“She’s behind us,” one of the pilots said, not to Vader but to the copilot.
“Guns are gone. The deflectors are holding.”
Green beams passed over the ship, catching an escape pod in front of them and to starboard, vaporizing it. Vader clutched the sides of the hatch to maintain his balance. Another round of fire from the escort ship knifed over the shuttle. A second shot caught the shuttle’s wing and caused it to buck. The pilot turned the ship hard to port, half turning, and the escort whizzed past them, passing close enough that Vader caught a glimpse of the escort’s pilots: Twi’leks.
The Emperor’s pilot cursed as he weaved at speed through the dispersing but still-dense debris field from the Perilous’s destruction. He pulled up hard on the stick, but he was too slow. A piece of stray superstructure slammed into the shuttle with a boom and put a web of cracks in the cockpit’s large viewport.
Vader had seen enough. He took two strides forward and with one hand disconnected the pilot’s seat straps, while with the other he lifted him from his seat and heaved him aside.
“Leave,” Vader said, and took the pilot’s seat. To the copilot he added, “You, too.”
The copilot disconnected from his seat, wide-eyed, helped the pilot to his feet, and both hustled out of the cabin.
At a glance Vader took in the data provided by the instrument panel. The escort was closing for another round of fire. With the shuttle’s weapons nonoperational, Vader focused on evasion for the moment. Using the debris to his advantage, he swung the shuttle hard to port, then stern, then back again, changing altitude throughout, wheeling through the floating pieces of the Perilous. Cannon fire from the escort sprayed space with beams of green, but it went wide and high, striking debris and pods.
Vader let them close a bit, then slammed hard on the reverse thrusters, throwing him forward in his seat, and immediately reengaged the engines. The momentary stop had been enough. The escort streaked past and over him. He gave chase instantly, inverting the shuttle as he did. The shuttle was not armed, true, but Vader was not without weapons.
—
Isval and Eshgo cursed as they sped over and past the shuttle.
“That pilot’s good,” Eshgo said tightly. “Very good.”
“Where is he?” Faylin asked from the rear compartment. “What’s he doing?”
Isval realigned their scan. “Got him! He’s…”
She looked up through the canopy of the escort boat, eyes wide with disbelief, to see the shuttle, merely tens of meters distant and flying upside down. The ships’ cockpit viewports faced each other. Isval could see Vader, and Vader could see them. Vader made a gesture with his gloved hand, as if he were pinching off a bleeding artery, and Isval felt her throat constrict. Instinctively she reached for her neck, but there was nothing there, just the pressure, just the squeezing. She couldn’t breathe! She pawed at her neck, panicked now, legs kicking. Beside her, Eshgo was behaving the same way. She fought to draw breath, couldn’t. She clawed at her collar, squirmed in her seat, made a tiny gasp. Whatever held her squeezed tighter, tighter.
“What’s wrong?” Drim shouted from the back. “What is it? What is it?”
Her vision was darkening. Little bursts of light swam before her eyes. She remembered the sounds Pok had made over the comm when Vader had killed him—the long silence punctuated by the abortive gasps.
It was Vader choking her somehow. It had to be.
She glanced up and saw the Imperial shuttle, with Vader at the controls.
Someone was calling her name. Cham? Drim? Faylin?
She couldn’t answer. Her mouth wouldn’t work. She had no breath, no words. Her vision tunneled down to Vader, only Vader. She imagined herself reflected in the eyepieces of his helmet. Her world distilled down to his eyes and her anger, and that distillation gave her a moment of clarity.
She was failing, she knew, dying, but she wouldn’t go alone.
She lowered her hands from her throat and seized the stick. She jerked it back, and the escort boat went nose-up for the shuttle. Everything went black.
—
Vader sensed the danger a fraction of a second before the dying Twi’lek flew the escort boat into the shuttle. He slammed on the stick hard right and back, but the shuttle was not as maneuverable as his Eta-interceptor and responded too slowly.
The escort slammed into the shuttle’s belly and set it to spinning, aft over bow, the stars and planet in the viewport whirling past in a maddening spiral. Metal groaned and alarms screamed, but only for a moment before the shuttle lost all power. Vader sat in the pilot’s seat, holding a dead stick in a dark cockpit. His armor compensated for the darkness by activating the light amplifiers in his helmet lenses. The sound of his respirator filled the quiet. Space through the viewport was a dizzying panorama of shifting images: Ryloth, debris from the Perilous, pods, Ryloth’s distant moon, stars. Ryloth grew bigger with each rotation of the shuttle. The ship was falling toward the planet.
Motion flashed into Vader’s field of view for a moment: the escort boat. It still had power but was heavily damaged from the collision. It spiraled toward Ryloth, smoking, burning, coming in at too steep an angle; it would break up in the atmosphere.
He focused not on the churning perspective through the viewport, but on the fixed point of the instrument panel. Calm, immersed in the Force, he tried to reactivate emergency power, but without success. He rarely had to call on the mechanical talent he’d possessed since childhood, but it would serve him well now. He had only a short time before the ship hit the planet’s atmosphere. And if it hit while spinning out of control, they’d burn up.
He set about redirecting all latent battery power in the ship to the thrusters. He needed only a few moments of thrust to straighten the ship, then rudder control for the reentry. His fingers moved quickly over the instrumentation. Ryloth grew larger with each passing moment.
A memory stabbed him, as sharp as a blade. He’d floated alone in an escape pod over Ryloth once, spinning high over its surface, after crashing a cruiser into a droid control ship. Another name bobbed up and broke the surface of the sea of memory.
Ahsoka.
He’d called her “Snips” sometimes.
He pushed the errant recollection aside and focused on his task. In moments he’d redirected enough power from backup batteries for at least a few seconds of thruster operation.
He did not hesitate. He fell into the Force, looked out the viewport, let himself feel the motion of the ship, and activated the thrusters.
The ship’s spin slowed and its angle flattened. Another quick burn stopped the spin altogether, and the shuttle was on a path that would at least allow for reentry. And he still had a small amount of battery power left.
Behind him, the door to the cockpit slid open and he sensed the presence of his Master.
“The ship is nearly powerless,” Vader said. “I will get us down, though.”
“No doubt,” his Master said, and sat in the copilot’s seat. “We have been in situations like this before, you and I.”
Vader said nothing, though his mind turned to a battle over Coruscant, shortly after he’d killed Darth Tyranus. As always, his Master seemed to fill all available space with his presence and push against Vader with his power.
“Over Coruscant,” his Master said. “And…at other times.”
Vader glanced over, but his Master’s hooded eyes stared out through the nest of his wrinkled face and revealed nothing.
Ryloth filled the viewport as the ship descended. Seeing the mottled browns of its surface, the smears of green and tan, dredged memories of other times up from the sludge of his distant past, names he rarely thought of anymore. Anakin. Mace. Plo Koon…
The shuttle hit the atmosphere too sharply and skippe
d and bounced, the metal shrieking under the stress. He burned the thrusters for a fraction of a second, righted the angle of approach, and reduced the jarring bumps to mere vibrations. Flames from the friction of atmospheric entry sheathed the ship. Fire surrounded them. Fire.
Mustafar.
Obi-Wan.
He used his ever-present anger to burn away the memories, but the charred husks of the past clung to the forefront of his consciousness.
Padmé.
He rarely allowed himself to think her name.
His rage slipped his control and he squeezed the control stick so hard it cracked. His breath came hard, fast, loud.
He felt his Master’s eyes on him, always on him, the weight of them, the questions they carried. He knew his Master could see into him, through him.
“You are troubled, my friend,” his Master said, his voice calm while the ship screamed through Ryloth’s stratosphere.
“No, Master,” Vader said. He sank fully into the Force and used the focus it gave him to exorcise the past from his mind.
He focused on the now, on safely landing a shuttle that was almost entirely without power. His armor regulated his breathing, and instead of being overcome by his emotion, he harnessed it and fell even more deeply into the Force. He channeled the remaining battery power to the in-atmo emergency rudder and used it to make their angle of approach shallower. He realized that there must have been ships falling out of the sky all across the planet, hundreds of them.
The smears of brown and green and tan gained clarity as they fell. He could make out features of the terrain in the light of the setting sun: gorges, ridges, canyons, dry riverbeds, all of them streaked past, the surface everywhere broken and cracked. A huge forest of trees rose from the parched ground ahead. It looked out of place, a lesion on the otherwise dead surface of Ryloth, but he knew the planet featured several large expanses of woods.
The ship careened straight for it, held in gravity’s unrelenting grip. The ground rose up at the ship as if the craft had been shot out of a blaster. He was still at too steep an angle, but the rudder controls barely responded, even to his strength. He managed to lower the in-atmo emergency flaps, and they helped flatten out the approach. The browns and tans disappeared. The forest filled the viewport entirely, under it, over it, like flying over an ocean of trees.
“Prepare for impact,” he said, but of course his Master had already strapped himself in.
The shuttle skimmed the top of the tree line, and Vader tried to use the thin limbs at the crown of the forest’s canopy as a makeshift brake. Limbs scraped the hull, some small, some large, and the ship lurched and bounced and slipped deeper into the canopy. The forward viewport was nothing but trees and leaves and the snap of thick branches. Metal screeched, scraped, the ship slamming into one tree after another.
They hit a large tree, the viewport cracked, and the shuttle careened to the right and down, hitting another tree as it fell, another, twisting upside down, righting, then hitting another tree and turning on its side. A limb twice as thick as Vader’s arm jutted through the viewport, shattering it, splitting the space between Vader and his Master. And then it was gone as the ship continued to fall through the trees, the craft’s speed and mass still cutting a swath through the flora. They struck another tree, another, before the ship finally slammed into the ground and buried itself on its side a meter into the soft loam of the forest floor. Soil exploded through the hole in the viewport and filled the cockpit to half a meter.
The sudden silence felt odd, a strange juxtaposition against the chaos of the preceding moments. Vader released his grip on the stick. The screech of one of Ryloth’s fauna carried from somewhere out in the forest. The light of the setting sun filtered dimly through the forest canopy, casting the ruined cockpit in deep shadow. Through his armor’s filters, Vader perceived the organic stink of the soil the ship had displaced in landing, the vegetable smell of the forest. Vader checked the instrumentation. Everything was dead, no power of any kind.
“Distress beacon is inoperable,” he said, then released the straps on his seat and lowered himself to the bulkhead, which now served as the deck due to the ship lying on its side. His Master released his own chair straps, flipped as he fell, and landed gracefully beside Vader on the bulkhead.
“That landing was far beneath your capabilities,” his Master said. “I’ve seen you do better in much more demanding circumstances. I fear your mind was not on the task.”
Vader considered his response for a moment. When he spoke, he did not bother to lie. “I was…thinking of something else for a moment.”
His Master nodded. “I guessed as much. And I’m pleased that you told me the truth, though I think it only a half-truth. In any event, your lapse has left four corpses in the rear compartment.”
Vader didn’t ask how his Master knew that four men had died. His Master simply knew things, many things, most things, and that was explanation enough. Of course his Master did not actually care about the dead men. He cared only about Vader’s failure, and Vader’s half-truth.
“It won’t happen again, Master,” Vader said, bowing his head.
“I should hope not,” said his Master, perhaps meaning the mediocre piloting, perhaps meaning something else.
Vader turned and took a grip on the door that opened onto the passenger compartment, thinking to pry it open.
“You said you were thinking of something else,” his Master said, using the tone he sometimes used when setting a verbal trap. “What was it?”
Vader left off the door and turned around. He stared into his Master’s wrinkled face and this time offered no half-truth. “The past. My old life.”
His Master stared back at Vader, his dark eyes like deep holes, and exhaled softly. “I see.”
“It means nothing to me,” Vader said, waving his gloved hand. “Stray thoughts, nothing more.”
“Hmm,” his Master said. “The past is a ghost that haunts us. Ghosts must be banished. Lingering on the past is weakness, Lord Vader.”
“Yes, Master,” Vader said.
Seeing his Master was done with the lesson, Vader turned back around, took a grip on the door, and heaved it open. He had to kneel to see into the passenger compartment. The bodies of the pilot and copilot lay not far from the door, eyes open, their limbs sticking out from their bodies at improbable angles. The landing had broken them.
The four Royal Guards lay strewn about the passenger cabin, two of them still strapped into dislodged seats.
“Lord Vader,” the captain of the guards said, freeing himself of the straps. “Where is the Emperor? Is he—”
“He is here,” the Emperor said from directly behind Vader, though Vader had neither heard nor felt him approach. “And unhurt.”
“Get up,” Vader said, and the two who’d been strapped into their seats rose to their feet, wobbly. The other two remained on the deck. To Vader’s surprise, the leg of one of them twitched in his armor. He wasn’t dead.
“There are only three dead here,” he said to his Master.
“Are there?” his Master asked.
The leader of the guards knelt and checked his fellow. “He’s unconscious, my Emperor. He didn’t strap himself in and was thrown about during the landing.”
The wounded guard groaned. His gloved hand opened and closed.
“Kill him,” his Master said.
The leader of the Royal Guard, conditioned to obey any order of the Emperor instantly without question, did not hesitate. He stood, drew his heavy blaster, and shot his comrade once in the head, leaving a dark, smoking hole in his helmet.
“And now there are four,” his Master said.
Vader did not miss the point. He turned to face his Master, his respirator loud and steady.
The Emperor shook his head with false regret. “He was stupid. And stupidity, like nostalgia, is weakness. I cannot abide weakness in those close to me. It’s a shame, really. But sometimes we must make hard choices. Lead us out now, if yo
u please, Lord Vader.”
Vader activated his lightsaber. While it sizzled, his Master stared, expressionless, into Vader’s face.
Vader drove his lightsaber through the bulkhead and used it to cut a door in the superstructure. He stepped through first, followed by the pair of Royal Guards, then his Master.
Dried leaves and fallen limbs covered the soft loam of the forest floor. Trees with smooth-barked trunks rose seventy meters toward the sky, blotting out the last of the day’s light. The partially exposed root systems were so large they formed knotted tangles of twisted wood as tall as Vader. The canopy above rustled in Ryloth’s constant winds, as if the entire forest were gossiping in whispered tones. Something large fluttered high above, disturbing leaves. In the distance, out in the dark, some native fauna howled as the day died.
“Check the survival kits,” Vader said to the Royal Guards. “See what’s salvageable.”
They did not obey until Vader’s Master gave them a nod. When they’d gone, Vader turned to his Master and tried to keep his tone deferential.
“Are you testing me, Master?”
“Testing you? Is that how you perceive things?”
“Am I wrong?”
His Master smiled and reached up to put a hand—a hand that could emit Force lightning—on Vader’s shoulder, the gesture both a sign of affection and an assertion of power.
“We are, all of us, always being tested, my friend. Tests make us stronger, and strength is power, and power is the point. We must pass all the tests we face.” A long pause, then, “Or die in the effort.”
Vader could not read his Master’s face or the meaning behind his words. But then again, he rarely could.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The communications center buzzed with the sound of orders, but behind them was the low background murmur of collective disbelief. The air smelled of sweat, of distress.
“What is happening up there?” a lieutenant asked.
“Status on the Moff’s shuttle?” asked another.
“Tri-fighters, now? How many?”