There was shouting. Noise, but more so, pain. His head hurt and his vision was blurred. Had he been unconscious? If so, he couldn't identify the break – though that didn't say much; he couldn't identify anything at the moment. Falling, sliding, tumbling, thud, pain. Had he been concussed? He was alive, at least.
Tarkin's limbs were splayed at all angles, or his brain thought they were. He was lying on his stomach, nose and forehead resting on the floor. That much he knew. Everything else - even such base senses as touch - were lost in a raucous din of shouts that Tarkin couldn't make out.
He made to push himself up, but a jagged spike of pain lanced through his wrist and up his arm. Tarkin groaned, and everything seemed to come into focus. He jerked his hand away, and the remaining arm quivered, then folded beneath him.
Tarkin dropped onto his stomach with a grunt, then rolled onto his back so he could grasp his sprained wrist. He stayed that way for a few seconds, sucking air through his teeth until the pain subsided to a dull throb. Then Tarkin craned his neck to look around.
It was a disaster. People were on their feet, moving about, framed in barely distinguishable silhouette by the meagre light bleeding from the primary viewscreen as it sat idle. Movement was good; movement meant life. What wasn't good were the bodies that they were converging around. Shapes on the floor that Tarkin wouldn't have noticed if he weren't also lying on the floor, where the angle of the viewscreen's paltry light outlined their edges.
There were three of them, and though he immediately realized the ludicrousness of the thought, Tarkin's first reaction was to wonder how difficult it would be to replace any member of his staff if they were dead. That much was indeed correct – if a bit pre-emptive – but the thought which had accompanied it was almost laughable, more like a product of shock. He had thought of how much more difficult it would be to delegate the Death Star's operations if any member of his staff had perished. As if there was any hope the station still had operability to be delegated.
Tarkin jammed his good arm beneath his back and pushed himself up into a sitting position. From there, he climbed to his feet. His whole body felt sore, but that he could feel it at all was marvellous. The battle – which had hardly seemed like one at all just a short while before – had ended in disaster, but the station seemed to be holding together and they were still alive… for the most part.
Cradling his injured wrist across his front, Tarkin moved to the bodies and their attendants. The toes of his boot seemed to trip against the floor with his very first step and Tarkin staggered, falling to one knee and looking for what had tripped him. The floor - of course - was as smooth as ever, and Tarkin realized that the station's artificial gravity was not pulling him squarely down, but just a little toward the back of the room. The entire room seemed to be an uphill slope, the artificial gravity now too underpowered to both negate the coreward pull of the station's mass and produce its own pull toward the floor. That didn't bode well for the state of the Death Star at large.
He righted himself and continued to approach the cluster of officers. In the almost-darkness of the Overbridge, Tarkin had to squint to make out the three prone figures, but finally he was able to identify them.
The first was a trooper; the one who had manned the eastern crew station. He was quite clearly dead; eyes staring sightlessly, limbs resting at awkward angles, his head lolling to the side. There was a something like a bone fragment protruding from the exposed flank of his neck, though it didn't break the skin. Tarkin thought it was him that he had seen catch his head on a console.
Next to him was Hurst Romodi. A long wound had been opened on his forehead at the center of a large bruise, and blood was pouring into his eyes and across the floor. Bast was attending him; dabbing at the flow of blood with the sleeve of his uniform. Romodi looked conscious, but dazed. He moved his head from side to side and made vague attempts to prop himself up with his arms, each time being coaxed back down by Wullf Yularen.
Tarkin's eyes slid to the third man, and there he found a piteous sight. Trech Molock's arms were twitching feebly, but his legs were splayed at painfully odd angles and completely still. His head was rolling back and forth, cradled in Siward Cass's lap. The communications officer was trying his best to hold Molock's head still, but was fighting an uphill battle as he continued to thrash. His eyes flitted to and fro in a way that Tarkin had only ever seen among the feverish. Small trickles of blood were running from both corners of his mouth and one nostril, streaking down his face and staining the legs of Siward's uniform.
It was a sight to behold. Romodi was stunned, maybe even concussed… but Molock was dying.
Motti was standing away from the commotion, a bruise marring the right side of his face. He seemed disoriented; blinking repeatedly and looking around, his eyes landing everywhere but on the scene in front of him. Zi Sturgist brushed past Motti, carrying a medikit from a wall-mounted first aid station, and the resulting jerk of surprise seemed to break his reverie.
Sturgist dropped to his knees between the two injured officers, opened the medikit, and passed a pair of bacta patches to Bast. The later took them in his bloody hands and immediately applied one to the seeping wound on Romodi's head, who gasped in pain at the pressure on the bruise encircling his cut. Sturgist then turned his head to Molock and his attendants, but he didn't produce anything from the pack. His fingers ranged over its contents, feeling sightlessly for something that might aid the man, but it seemed Sturgist knew what Tarkin had ascertained the moment he'd laid eyes on the extent of Molock's injuries; there was nothing in the medikit - or perhaps even the whole station - that could save the man now.
"Put him on his side," Tarkin ordered. "Make sure his breathing is unobstructed, and watch for any changes." It was the only first aid he could think of as being at all helpful. At best, he expected it would keep the man's final moments easier than they might have been otherwise.
Sturgist and Cass both glanced at him. The later nodded and said "Yes sir, right away." Then the two men gently coaxed Molock onto his side.
A moment later, Molock gave a wet cough and spat up a thick red substance onto the floor. Likely, it was blood combined with vomit or some other bodily fluid. It made Tarkin all the surer of Molock's impending expiration.
He frowned, and looked at Sturgist again. "Is there a splint in that kit?" he asked.
Sturgist looked around at Tarkin for a second, appearing confused. He took just long enough to process the question that Tarkin was about to repeat himself, then gave a small start and looked down at the inventory of the plastiform container.
"Yes sir." Sturgist plucked what looked like a padded armband and attached interface from the kit, and held it out to Tarkin.
He took it and put his injured arm through the loop hollow of the cylinder, making sure to center the band over the point at which his wrist seemed to be sprained or broken, then keyed the option on the interface for setting a forearm. Immediately, the band gave a hiss of shifting air and shrunk until it encircled his limb with a gentle grip. Then the padding inflated, consuming the entirety of his hand and immobilizing it. The arm was now essentially useless, but it would spare him from any further injury until they could reach a medbay, or… or what?
What happened now? The Death Star was crippled; little better than a metal hulk floating in space. Who knew how much of the structure was intact, or how many of its crew had survived. Would there be a medbay aboard still functioning, or a space that could be called stable enough - safe enough - for them to await rescue?
Well, the answer seemed obvious. The station was unsafe. Its gravity system was clearly only partially functional, and could fail or malfunction at any second. Its life support systems were already running on reserve power, but it was quite possible that they were damaged beyond operability, and the air they breathed was already beginning its transformation to a stale poison. No. It seemed clear that they would need to be more proactive. They needed to get a signal out that the station had been crippled, and then they needed to evacuate get the call out that would summon rescue ships for the rest of the Death Star's crew.
Tarkin looked down at the trio of bodies again. Romodi seemed more lucid, and was no longer trying to sit up. Molock's thrashing was slowing, but blood was now flowing freely from both nostrils. He was minutes away from death and suffering immensely.
"Sturgist," Tarkin addressed the man again. "Are there any heavy anaesthetics in that kit? Nyex; Symoxin; Comaren?"
The officer plucked a small applicator from the top of the pack's innards and read the label. "Ten standard doses, Nullicaine. Would that suit you, sir?"
Tarkin shook his head. "Nullicaine isn't strong enough. We need a narcotic."
Sturgist glanced at him, looking wary, and then rifled through the kit. Eventually, he produced an even smaller applicator and reported its contents to be Symoxin, five standard doses.
"That should do fine," Tarkin said, but then held up a hand as Sturgist made to hand him the apparatus. "Not for me. If you'd be so kind, please administer the whole quantity to Chief Molock."
Sturgist looked up at him sharply, surprise and alarm written across his face. "What?"
Tarkin ignored the disrespect implicit in Sturgist's brusque address of him, and gestured at Moloch. "High General Molock will not be with us for much longer. Ease his suffering and quicken his departure, for his sake."
The other man looked down at Molock, and a hesitant "Uh" escaped him.
Tarkin frowned at Sturgist, then plucked the applicator from his hand. "Very well then. Help steady his head."
Sturgist didn't comply immediately, first looking at his hand stupidly as if he hadn't noticed that Tarkin had relieved him of the narcotic. Then, slowly, he leaned forward and grasped Molock around the sides of his head. Through the combined efforts of him and Cass, they managed to hold Molock's head as close to stationary as could be expected.
Dropping to one knee, Tarkin used his splinted arm to pull the wrinkled skin on Molock's neck taught. He used his other hand to twist the applicator's end and extend its needle, then inserted it into Moloch's jugular vein. He gave the applicator's activation button five slow, deliberate presses, checked the readout that all five doses had been transferred, and then withdrew the applicator.
By the time of the fifth press, Molock's struggling had already begun to fade. After that his frantic thrashing quickly dropped to a feeble rocking, then a twitch, before ebbing to nothing. Molock's breathing slowed, became shallow, then hitched and ceased entirely. In the space of just two minutes, the overdose of Symoxin had done its grim, silent work.
Tarkin nodded a final respect to Molock's body, and then looked at Romodi. "Feeling well, Hurst?"
Romodi offered him a wane smile. "Not in the slightest, but I'll say yes if it'll make you put away that syringe." His voice was weak, and rasped like he was in desperate need of a drink.
Tarkin responded with an expression that was half grin, half grimace. "So long as you can walk, Hurst, I think I can stay these killer's hands." It was a weak attempt at humouring him, and it made Tarkin feel sacrilegious. But it was the one truth all military men knew; the closer one stood to death, the more irreverent of it they became. In a trooper's most dire hour, gallows humour could almost be called a tool of their trade.
"That's a deal I'd very much like to buy into." Hurst pushed himself up, and this time nobody tried to coax him back down. Even sitting up seemed to make his head wobble, though, and Tarkin gestured to Bast that he should help Romodi stand.
When Romodi was on his feet, swaying woozily but supported by both Bast and Yularen, Tarkin turned to Cass.
"We need to get a signal out and summon a rescue ship. A whole fleet of them, in fact. Would a communications centre still be capable of sending out a subspace transmission?"
Siward considered the question for a moment, then replied. "It's impossible to be sure until we try."
"Your best estimate, then."
Cass gave an apologetic frown. "I don't think it's likely. Subspace transmitters are difficult to properly harden against power surges. Those aboard the station not damaged by the reactor blowout will have been spared because the conduits connecting to them were severed instead."
"We need to get a distress signal out. The alternative is waiting for a search party to be dispatched days from now."
As if to accentuate the danger in that second option, a low groan rolled through the station, sending vibrations up through the soles of their boots that made Tarkin's legs tremble. Romodi's balance failed entirely from even that small disturbance, and he would have collapsed in a heap if not for the two men supporting him.
Tarkin steadied himself, and continued. "The commlink relays, if I recall…"
"Are not part of the emergency circuits, no," Siward confirmed, and Tarkin decided to leave the interruption unacknowledged. "Transmissions will only carry as far as the range of the commlinks themselves."
This, of course, was not a standard design aboard Imperial craft. It was another unique quirk of the Death Star's design; in a station so massive, the infrastructure required to keep systems functional scaled exponentially, taking up almost double the relative mass as the infrastructure of a Star Destroyer. With the expectation that any damage to the station capable of reducing it to emergency power would be so catastrophic as to likely destroy the Death Star outright, the design board had opted to omit lesser networks from the emergency power grid – such as the commlink relay system – so that the base life support and gravity projectors would function more reliably.
"Then start signalling," Tarkin said. "I'd rather we make contact with a functional communications centre from afar while we trek. Then at least we'd know that the Empire has been notified of our distress."
"Will we be… 'treking', then, sir?" Bast asked, apprehension layering his words.
"Down to the hangars, yes," Tarkin said, an amused smile playing across his face. "We need to find an escape craft that hasn't been dislodged by the gravity failures. Any shuttle should have a still functional subspace transmitter too, but it'd be faster, safer, and more sensible to deliver the message in person by that point."
Such a goal was more easily said than done. They were separated from the equatorial trench by several dozen kilometres and untold numbers of impassable or compromised hallways and turbolift shafts that would require improvised detours to surpass.
"We had best get moving," Tarkin said to the group at large. "We've a most unique journey ahead of us, and for that I'm all the more eager to be underway."
"Does that mean we're… leaving… Chief Molock?" Sturgist asked.
Tarkin levelled him with a steely look that – though unambiguously neutral – managed to convey the breadth of his contempt for such a foolish question. "Are you volunteering to carry him, Sturgist?"
Zi bowed his head in acquiescence. "My apologies, Grand Moff." He made toward the Overbridge exit, taking care to step wide around Molock's body as he did so.
Tarkin watched the officer for a few moments more, wondering if Motti had handpicked him just to be privy to the intriguing function of his collapsible spine. Then he too began to move, joining the rest of his staff as they exited the Overbridge. Behind them they left the bodies of Trech Molock and the eastern console operator, both given a ghostly outline by the dim, blank backlight of the viewscreen.
The strange cacophony in the constrained space of the hallway was not what Tarkin expected. He could hear snatches of words from Cass, who was talking quickly into his commlink. From the end of the corridor, past the open doors into the darkened conference room, came the sound of grinding metal, and jumbled radio tones that made the implant behind Tarkin's left ear give off little chirps and squawks of protest as he threaded through the members of his staff.
Though the corridor looked like a confused jigsaw of barely illuminated forms in the minimal emergency lighting, it was obvious to Tarkin that their deathtrooper escort – which was stationed outside the entrance to the Overbridge complex – were trying to force the high security blast door to reach them.
Another warble of scrambled communications pierced the semi darkness, and as Tarkin approached the source, he saw that there was a gap in the blast doors leading out into the hallway. The deathtrooper escort had made a valiant effort of prying the doors open, but they had only managed to produce a foot of clearance at the most; forced to fight harder and harder against the security door's hydraulic pressure with every inch gained. Under other circumstances, Tarkin would have considered that accomplishment evidence of unacceptable insufficiency in the door's design.
As he reached the front of the cluster, Tarkin's communication implant ceased its sounds of protest, and started descrambling the Deathtroopers' communication in to decipherable – if harsh and robotic – galactic basic.
"Situation Untenable" one of the troopers was saying to Motti and the surviving crewman from the overbridge. "Retreat suggested."
"That is that plan, yes," Tarkin said as he came to a stop, although he couldn't bring himself to use the deathtrooper's words. To call it a retreat was distasteful.
"This blast door is obstructing evacuation," the deathtrooper reported. "Manual release required."
For obvious security reasons, the manual override for the blast door was behind a hatch on the interior side's wall. Tarkin gestured to it impatiently, and their accompanying station trooper was quick to pop the panel open and pull the lever within.
There was a faint, whining hiss as pressure was relieved on the quartet of durasteel panels. With some exertion from those among them who were still able-bodied, the blast door opening was widened to the point that Romodi could be escorted through without trouble, and they filed out into the corridor. From there, they started following the shortest path to the nearest bank of turbo lifts.
The quiet of the hallway made the mere rustling of their uniforms obtrusive – to say nothing of their footfalls, or Cass's intermittent hails into his commlink - and Tarkin found the near silence to be rather eerie. The absence of the faint rolling bass that a living ship produced was to be expected, but the lack of any voices from nearby crew seemed wholly strange. When combined with the oppressive darkness of the space, it made Tarkin think of an ancient tomb. It was as if the whole station had died in the attack, and they were the sole survivors left to skirt the silent remains of the dead as they made their escape.
Tarkin thought that he was closer to the truth than he had any right to be. If a short tumble to the back of the overbridge had left two of its occupants dead, the Death Star's long corridors would have become lethal falls of several hundred meters when the station's gravity had been in flux. As absurd as it was, Tarkin had to believe that an appreciable fraction of the station's crew had been killed or seriously injured falling down hallways, of all things. Indeed, their complement of deathtroopers seemed to have diminished from eight to five, with no sign of the missing men.
"First, we will need to procure protective gear, after which we will be proceeding to the hangar level," Tarkin announced to the group at large. "Any functional shuttle should make a suitable escape vehicle."
That was easy to say, but reality was rarely so forgiving. Tarkin hadn't exactly been in a position to measure the cant of the floor when the station's gravity had been at its most disrupted, but for several seconds the drop had been almost straight towards the station's core, which at the overbridge's more forgiving higher latitude had been a sharp angle along the floor. The station's equatorial hangar bays would have all been re-oriented by almost 90 degrees so that gravity pulled straight toward the back of the hangar.
Perhaps fightercraft, secured in their hanging berths, would be largely undamaged, but that would require each member of Tarkins staff to fly in their own ship. One of Tarkin's hands was non-functional, Romodi was severely injured, and Tarkin couldn't vouch for anyone's piloting experience other than his own. Effectively, they were constrained to the use of a shuttle, which presented its own problems. Lambda class shuttles – such as his personal ship that Bast had alluded to earlier – and Sentinel class landers possessed docking clamps on their landing gears, but these clamps were rated to keep the ships in place when artificial gravity failed, or against sudden wrenching forces like a ship collision. They were most certainly not rated for anchoring the ships in place when gravity had just tilted ninety degrees, and they were suddenly clinging to what was effectively a highly polished wall.
All things considered, such a simple request – a functional evacuation ship that could fit the whole of their party – was looking like a rather tall order.
They reached a security station at the junction of the corridor leading to the overbridge and two others – finding only a set of lockers and an unpowered security terminal that Tarkin was reasonably sure had not been abandoned by choice. There was no sign of the station's rostered crew, but he expected that they had both been thrown down the left connecting corridor when the reactor had been destroyed. As they travelled, Tarkin expected that they would eventually find points such as closed blast doors in high traffic corridors where multiple crew members – all likely dead from their falls – had collectively come to rest.
A deathtrooper opened one of the wall lockers and started pulling out some basic vacuum kits; sealing gloves to fit over their sleeve cuffs, couplers to cover the point where their dress pants fed into their boots, and thick quick deploy collars that would encase their heads in plastiform bubbles if a sudden drop in air pressure was detected. Not only was the equipment military in style, but it was obtrusively so; rugged and tactile – which was to say, a physical protector against the vacuum of space, rather than a projected atmospheric shield.
Inelegant it may be, but in their current state of uncertainty, the equipment was essential to insuring the officers' safety. Perhaps, once their current crisis was resolved, it would be time to review the standard uniform for the navy's upper echelons. When the risk of decompression was as heightened as it was on the relatively exposed bridge of a Star Destroyer, essential vacuum survival gear should not be an entire fumble in an emergency locker away.
When every unsuited member of their entourage had finished attaching the vacuum kits to their uniforms – the single accompanying station trooper substituting his open face helmet in the process – they proceeded down the left corridor, which led deeper in from the station's surface, toward a primary lift shaft.
The bank of turbolifts at the corridor's end was – like everywhere else they had passed through – dark, deserted, and eerily quiet. Here, however the silence was augmented by a dull, ambient sound that could only be described as vacuous; the faint rolling bass that accompanied a large enclosed space and the idle movement of the air within it.
Like so many of the station's lifts, this set ran adjacent to an over-large cylindrical freight shaft, and Tarkin was acutely aware that the only thing separating them from that cavernous space and multiple kilometre fall was a simple rail. Almost certainly, every person who had been waiting for one of these lifts had been flung 'across' the chasm and hit the far wall, likely surviving the moderate fall, only for gravity to right itself and leave them falling down the shaft to their deaths. That sequence of events would have occurred at every landing all the way up the length of the shaft, leaving a pile of literally hundreds of bodies at its base.
The entirety of this thought passed through Tarkin's mind in a few short seconds, but he was still having trouble grasping the extent of the devastation. The Death Star's reactor had been destroyed, or at least cracked open by the rebel attack; that much he could understand readily. That there would be some large amount of physical damage to the station as a result was also easily grasped. But that a ten second shift in gravity had killed off a large portion of the station's crew that otherwise should have survived the attack… that was more difficult to wrap his head around.
What was easier to fathom was, again, their own proximity to that shaft. Should the reserve power falter or the station's artificial gravity fail again, they too would be whisked out into the open space, and after that their deaths.
With that in mind, "Quickly," was the only warning he had for the others as they walked out onto the landing.
They passed the several standard sized lifts and approached the double-wide service lift at the end of the row. That was the only one that would accommodate their entire group, and regardless was the only one connected to the reserve power grid. It also traversed a longer distance than the personnel lifts; going below the lower extremity of the freight shaft and allowing them to exit into a service corridor alongside the station hangars proper.
One of the two Deathtroopers moving ahead of the main group as a sort of forward escort called the elevator, and Tarkin had to spend over a minute agonizing over the compromising nature of their position while they waited for the lift to arrive. With every second that past, he became surer that it would be that moment that the gravity gave out again, and they were all plucked off the landing.
Then the turbolift doors opened, and – with what Tarkin observed to be no small amount of urgency – they crammed themselves inside. As the doors closed and Motti keyed for the hangar level, Tarkin let out a breath he'd been unintentionally holding. His stomach dropped as the turbolift began to descend, the sensation especially unwelcome while he was so wary of the stability of the Death Star's gravity.
Even with its larger size, the service lift struggled to accommodate them all. Tarkin had to hold his bound arm across his chest to avoid it being pinned between Yularen and a Deathtrooper. At his other shoulder, Cass was still ceaselessly repeating his hail into a commlink, an unfortunate coincidence of positioning arranging them so that he was almost talking right into Tarkin's ear.
Tarkin furrowed his brow, and was only moments away from telling Cass to abandon the clearly fruitless pursuit, when the commlink gave a little squall of feedback, followed by something that Tarkin couldn't make out.
He waited for Cass to resolve the message, knowing that to enquire before the other had something to report would only serve as a delay. Indeed, Cass didn't respond for several seconds, still surprised by his sudden success.
"This is Communications Chief Cass. Identify yourself."
The response was again indistinct to Tarkin's ears, but what he could identify was a very distinctive bass tone to the speaker on the other end of the line. No sooner had his suspicion began, than was it confirmed.
"Governor Tarkin," Cass said as the turbolift stopped. "I have a line of communication with Lord Vader."
"Give it to me," Tarkin ordered without hesitation, lifting his good hand to a place where – he felt fairly sure – Cass would be able to reach without having to test his aptitude for contortion.
With only some awkward shuffling and worming of limbs, Cass was able to deposit the cylinder onto Tarkin's open palm. Before his fingers could close over it, however, the lift doors opened and the device was plucked straight back off by a sudden gust of escaping air.
He lost track of the commlink in the ensuing chaos, as they were all pulled a step toward the open door, the officers' emergency collars deploying their inflatable helmets to protect them from the sudden depressurization.
Tarkin cursed as he stumbled, then righted himself. The world around him had become muted, the soundscape now dominated by his own breathing and the faint hiss as he was fed oxygen from the helmet's reservoir. It would seem they had finally stumbled across that which he feared; the Death Star's hull had indeed been cracked open by the reactor explosion, and they had found one of the many decks that had been compromised.
How many more of the station's crew – those who hadn't been claimed by the inversion of gravity – had found their work and action stations vented to space before blast doors could close? What force had contrived to ensure that all sections of the station they passed through were inert and dead; equivalents to ghost towns.
Looking around, Tarkin saw that they were in a utilidor connecting two hangars. The deathtroopers were checking their helmet seals, and the members of his staff appeared disoriented, likewise checking that their own emergency gear was secure. The expandable domes protecting them from vacuum had an unavoidable sense of fragility that was almost impossible to ignore and demanded constant checks. Romodi was sprawled across the deck, so lacking in equilibrium that even the moderate tug of their turbolift decompressing had been too much for him.
With no quick way to delegate the task now that they were prevented from talking by the vacuum, Tarkin grasped Hurst by the arm and helped him to his feet, then gestured repeatedly at Yularen until he understood, and took custody of his concussed peer.
That done, Tarkin checked around the hallway until he found where the commlink had come to a rest, finding it in, alarmingly, a dip in the floor. He retrieved it before that abnormality could distract him, keeping the channel open so as to preserve the connection that had been established. Until they could reach a pressurized area and remove their helmets, however, the commlink was effectively useless.
Then he turned his eyes on the hallway around them, trying to understand how what should have been a level floor could have such a depression in it as the commlink had come to rest in. He almost couldn't believe what lay before him.
Both the floors and walls of the corridor were warped, alternatively bulging and sinking beyond the clean straight dimensions of their construction. The recessed wall lights were shattered, glass fragments scattered up and down the corridor's length. It was almost more surprising that the durasteel framing hadn't shorn off entirely. At the passageway's end, a blast door had only partly closed, its plates prevented from sliding home by the distortion of the frame and tracks. That would explain the hallway's depressurization, as beyond the door would be one of the Death Star's innumerable hangars, the atmospheric containment shield – which should have been running on a dedicated redundant power supply - having also been compromised by the warping forces that had twisted the corridor so out of shape.
Romodi had to be helped over every irregularity, his footing far too unsure to navigate a floor that rolled up and down like the surface of a planet. For Tarkin, it was almost like something out of a dreamscape, or perhaps a surrealist art holovid. Once they had emerged into the hangar, however, the corridor was forgotten entirely.
This hangar in particular was empty, the shuttle it should have held having departed earlier that day to return General Tagge to his fleet. Even if the space had contained a functional and ready shuttle, it wouldn't have been enough to distract from their first view of what lay outside the bay's surface exit.
It was as if the station was haloed by an aurora, although this aurora was not waves of light, but comprised out of countless glowing particles that formed an iridescent cloud of vibrant blue. The Death Star's reactor core had been destroyed, and its hull split open. So too then had the reactor fuel reserves spilled forth, girdling the station's husk with a brilliant shroud of escaped hypermatter.
It was beautiful in a way that briefly made Tarkin forget about the disaster that had produced it. There was a gnawing thought, though, that eventually overcame his awe. Hypermatter – like antimatter – annihilated with normal matter, and millions upon millions of particles now wreathed the Death Star like blood spilled from a corpse. Escaping had just become infinitely more difficult. Perhaps, even, impossible.
Tarkin realized that they had all stopped to admire the view – that was to say, his staff; the deathtrooper escort were standing to attention, their training overruling the wonder that the rest of them had been unable to resist.
Chagrined, and hoping to brush over his own inattentiveness, Tarkin made a show of turning around to face the rest of his staff, breaking their collective fixation on the hangar mouth. His mouth set in a line of harsh disapproval, Tarkin motioned toward the opposing utilidor.
His subordinates began to move again, most of them appearing some degree of sheepish under their emergency helmets. Except for Romodi, of course, who was still feeling the worst of his concussion. Motti and Sturgist also looked somewhat dazed, or perhaps lost in their own thoughts. Tarkin stood and watched for a moment, making sure to drive his irritation home as he made eye contact with each man in turn, and then also resumed walking.
They crossed the hangar, then travelled the length of the next connecting corridor. Here, they were further away from the warped section of the structure, but the floor here was – like those of the hangar and other utilidor before it – was a roiling sea of swells and dips that made walking an exercise in frustration, and Romodi's concussion an even greater liability. Toward the entrance to the next hangar, the structural distortions began to smooth out, but it left Tarkin extremely worried crossing the threshold. This hangar contained his personal shuttle, and even if it would have otherwise managed to stay anchored through the disaster, he couldn't imagine it maintaining landing gear lock on a floor that was seizing and warping beneath it.
Tarkin stopped only for a moment as they entered the hangar, hoping against all reason that he could find something redeemable in the disaster in front of him, and then kept going. Now, however, he felt a hollowness in his gut. Perhaps it was desolation.
His shuttle was still there, and the docking clamps, it seemed, had held. It was the landing gears themselves that had failed, shearing away just above the foot under the sudden strain of the shifting gravity and heaving floor. Hence, the floor in the centre of the hangar still hosted the jagged-topped stumps of the landing gears, while the rest of the ship was at the very back of the hangar. Its three stabilizer fins were bent and twisted out of shape, while the main body and – more importantly - the cones of the sublight engines were dented and buckled. The ship would not be taking off any time soon.
It was so clearly a lost cause that, aside from Tarkin's brief, hopeful indecision, they didn't even stop to check the wreckage. Instead they crossed the hangar to the opposing service corridor, which would connect them to yet another hangar.
Observing how even here there were slight rises and falls to the level of the floor, it made that sense of desolation in him grow even stronger. It fed off of and back into a rising surety that there would be no way for them to escape the station's husk. If his shuttle – as carefully maintained as it was – had failed to stay secure… could there be a single suitable, operable escape ship left on the entire Death Station?
The next hangar had contained two more shuttles, both of which had failed and been crippled in a similar fashion to his own. All that remained was an impressive display of destruction at one end of the hangar, and the ever-impressive view of the hypermatter cloud at the other.
There, they stopped. Tarkin stared out into the iridescent cloud, contemplating the reality of their situation that was quickly becoming apparent. They would keep looking, because they had to. To do otherwise would be accepting the most bitter incarnation of an already devastating defeat. Eventually, they would reach a pressurized space, at which point he would be able to tell Darth Vader to jump to hyperspace without them. Help would arrive within a day after that – assuming the Empire was quick to mobilize – which would mean twenty-four standard hours of staying alive on a station on a crippled reserve power system. That was a long time in which the gravity could fail again, or the air recyclers could stop functioning, or the husk could come apart and fall into the gas giant's atmosphere. Stars, the Rebellion could launch a second attack to finish the destruction. If they survived long enough to be rescued, Romodi would have gone almost a day with an untreated concussion.
A vibration ran through the floor and up his legs. It was faint, and had no accompanying sound, but it was a reminder that they needed to keep moving. Tarkin turned to his staff, seeing their likewise disheartened faces, and gestured that they should keep moving.
They were almost perfectly between the two hangars, passing in front of the access door to another service turbolift, when Tarkin was first able to resolve the details in the small section of hangar that could be seen through the far blast door. He couldn't be sure yet, but the bright white material and what looked like diagonal edges were distinctly reminiscent of a shuttle or lander, rather than the walls of a hangar. Had they despaired too soon?
It seemed the others had been given the same impression. Without a single gesture exchanged, or even a conscious decision on Tarkin's part, they were moving at a brisk walk, and then a jog. He glanced behind, and saw Yularen, the surviving overbridge trooper, and Romodi bringing up the rear, the latter's feet only skimming the floor as he was whisked forth by the other two.
Relief washed over him as they reached the end of the utilidor, and there was no doubt left. Awaiting them in the hangar, still rooted securely to the deck hull, was a Sentinel-class landing craft. Its unsightly visage – that of an elongated and more rounded derivative of the more elegant Lambda-class shuttles that officers of their status were accustomed to – was nonetheless the most beautiful ship Tarkin had ever seen.
The forward entry ramp was down, inviting them in, and they wasted no time in covering the distance to its base and proceeding up into the lander. One of the deathtroopers took up a post by the exit controls, keying for flight ready once the last of their entourage – Cass and the rear guard deathtrooper – had entered the ship.
The ramp sealed, and Tarkin could hear the hiss of flowing air over his helmet as the hold pressurized. They waited until the flow stopped, and then collectively began to strip off their helmets and pressure seals.
The very moment he removed his helmet, Tarkin had to rankle his nose at the stale, sour odour of sweat that was sealed into the padding of the hold's seats. It was nothing he couldn't tolerate, and nor was it anything he hadn't experienced before in his time serving the Empire. Tarkin had never known a Sentinel lander to smell of anything else, and most Lambda shuttles carried a similar – if less pungent – musk.
Only those shuttles reserved for those of Tarkin's peerage – having never carried full loads of troopers sweating under the weight of their field kits - were free of the curse. Indeed, the private shuttles of high ranking officials often carried the smell of their occupants' preferred colognes. Tarkin's private shuttle, for instance, was imbued with the faintest impression of lavender – almost imperceptible, owing to Tarkin's preference for subtlety in his perfuming and personal grooming. Vanity to the point of obtrusiveness was almost as unbecoming as poor hygiene.
Tarkin placed his emergency helmet and sealing gloves down on a seat, Romodi crumpling into the seat beside it as he did so. His adjutant's eyes fluttered closed, and no sooner had he done so than he was set upon by both Cass and Sturgist, the two shaking his arms and patting the side of his face.
"You can't go to sleep, sir," Sturgist said, glancing at Tarkin as if expecting him to euthanize Romodi if the man did so.
"Stars, I'm so tired," the Adjutant rasped, making a feeble attempt at waving them off. "Just let me sleep. Don't you remember your aid training?"
"Do you, Hurst?" Tarkin asked, examining the man more closely. He reached over and lifted one eyelid. Even though the bright lights of the hold were shining on it, the pupil did not shrink. "Able to hold a conversation…but your eyes are dilated and you need assistance walking. I'm sorry, Hurst, but no sleep until you've seen a medic."
"Sithspit," was Romodi's only response.
Tarkin looked at the other two. "Do not let him sleep. Am I understood?"
"Yes sir," both men replied.
He gave them a stern nod, and then walked back over the closed ramp, stopping just outside the doorway to the cockpit. Inside, he could hear the warbling of a deathtrooper's scrambled communications, but his implant was only managing to translate small snippets. Instead, he silenced it with a light tap to a module behind his left ear, and then produced Cass's commlink. He pressed the send signal, waited for the chirp to confirm the outgoing feed had reached the far end of the connection, and spoke.
"Lord Vader, this is Tarkin. Are you still there?"
The small cylinder was silent for so long that Tarkin feared the connection had been broken, or that the Sith's fighter was out of range.
Then the other's voice came back, his modulated baritone as distinctive as his characteristically concise response.
"I am."
Tarkin allowed himself a moment to feel relieved before responding. "My apologies for the delay. Parts of the station have been depressurized, and we found ourselves inconvenienced by one such area." He paused for a moment, but continued, knowing that otherwise it would only be an unnecessary silence as he awaited input that Vader usually refrained from providing "We've procured a functioning escape ship; a landing craft, and we should be ready to launch shortly."
"There is a suitable path out of the debris field, for now," Vader replied. "I will guide you through. Be quick."
"Of course," Tarkin said, and lowered the commlink. Only now could he dare to hope that they would escape that Death Star to continue the fight against the Rebellion – but no, hope could come later. Right now, he couldn't afford to waste time with dreams of retaliation.
Entering the cockpit and unmuting his translation implant, he found Yularen sitting in one of the astrogator seats at the cockpit's rear, and – oddly – Bast positioned at the pilot controls. The general was shooing away one of their deathtrooper escorts, who was suggesting that it would be safer if one of the escort squad piloted them out instead. To call the exchange curt would be a disservice, considering the method of communication employed by the alumni of the deathtrooper academy was already quite clipped to begin with.
Tarkin and Yularen shared a look of trepidation. He had never heard or seen anything to suggest Bast was an especially skilled pilot, and thought that – if he were – at the very least some small amount of hearsay would have heralded the fact. Barring the possibility that he was deluded as to his own skill, Bast must be at least competent… but would that be sufficient to follow an ace pilot like Darth Vader through the hypermatter cloud?
He considered it a moment longer, then signalled to the deathtrooper to let Bast be and seated himself in the co-pilot's chair.
The trooper hesitated a few seconds more before he resigned his pursuit and took the astrogator seat directly behind Bast. The matter closed, Tarkin keyed the lander's communication's panel to Vader's open frequency and shut the commlink off.
The three of them slipped headsets over their ears – the Deathtrooper presumably synchronizing his own helmet communicator to listen in on the channel – and Tarkin tested the connection as Bast went through the final steps of priming the shuttle for takeoff.
"Lord Vader," he said. "We're completing final engine start, almost ready to follow you out. Is the way clear?"
After a brief delay, Vader's bass voice returned through his headset. "For now. You must be quick if you wish to follow. The debris field is not stable, and the path will not be open for long."
"Acknowledged," Tarkin replied, and Bast followed right after.
"Engine is primed. Repulsorlifts are ready. Stand by for take-off."
It should have been a smooth affair, but then again, the Death Star should have been invincible.
The moment Bast shifted his flight stick the lander lurched and tilted to the right, a piercing shriek emanating through its durasteel structure. Tarkin grit his teeth as the dorsal stabilizer scraped along the hangar wall, then clenched his good hand around the end of his chair's arm rest as the shuttle juddered, then began to gimbal around the fore starboard corner of shuttle body, the screech of warping metal running through its frame the whole while.
"Put it back down," Yularen demanded, voice coloured with panic.
"I can do it," Bast retorted, face contorted in a snarl as he wrestled the controls. "If we can just… wrench… free…"
The shuttle lurched again, and again, until Bast gave a final heave on the flight stick, and the obstruction – a torqued landing gear, Tarkin was sure – gave its last squeal of protest and was shorn off completely.
Their craft spun away, its flank scraping along the hangar before righting and clearing the opening.
"Bast, pull it back," Tarkin hissed, certain he was about to tear the armrest from its mounting brackets.
"Right, right, right," Bast said back, his face so set with concentration that Tarkin wasn't sure if he was responding to the words, or just the sound of his voice. The general wrenched at the controls again, spinning the lander in a full circle before managing to bring it to rest. They were floating close to the Death Star, still nestled within the relative shelter of the equatorial trench. In front of them, the cloud of ejected hypermatter waited, ominous in its vibrant brilliance. The blue radiance of each particle was a dazzling spot of light that blotted out the space behind it, and each one would react with the normal matter of their sentinel in a strong and instantaneous burst of energy.
Bast – apparently unperturbed by their fiasco of a launch or their proximity to imminent death – pointed through the viewport at another ship hugging close to the bottom wall of the trench. It had the distinctive markings of a TIE fighter, but the unique shape of Vader's 'Advanced X1' prototype.
Tarkin nodded, and was about to suggest that Bast relinquish the pilot's seat before following the fighter out of the hypermatter field, when the deathtrooper seated behind Tarkin stood up and did just that.
The trooper lifted Bast out of the pilot's seat and pushing him toward the hatchway into the shuttle's hold. Bast, for his part, let out a grunt of surprise, but didn't resist, dropping into the newly vacated astrogator chair.
"Launch successful," Tarkin reported into his headset. "We're ready for extraction through the debris field."
"An interesting choice of launch procedure," was Vader's only comment on the fiasco. "Follow my lead exactly."
Without hesitation, and comparatively masterful handling compared to the meatgrinder they had just been subjected to, the trooper increased the shuttle's throttle and began drawing closer to Vader's TIE fighter. When they were close enough that Tarkin found his hand wrapping around his armrest once more, the fighter too began to move, keeping ahead of them by only slightly more than the length of the Sentinel lander itself.
Vader didn't provide any warning before beginning a sharp turn into the debris field, and even as Tarkin took a firm hold on his armrest that this time he would not be so quick to relinquish, he had to be impressed at how closely their new pilot matched the manoeuvres of their guide. After another three tight turns with particles of hypermatter streaming by at an unnerving proximity to the cockpit viewport, Tarkin had to admit that even if his arm hadn't been injured, he didn't think he could have pulled off the precision tail – in no small part due to the absolutely alien environment of the hypermatter field.
In this super dense minefield, there was no sense of depth or distance that he could discern. A close hypermatter particle was distinguished from a far one only by how bright it was. More than that, if – from their perspective as they traversed the cloud – those two particles overlapped, there was no sense of parallax; it only appeared as a single, even brighter particle that hence appeared to be dangerously close. If the deathtrooper ever gave into the natural urge to juke away from this trick of forced perspective, then they would be deviating from Vader's carefully blazed trail to safety and almost certainly end up ploughing right into multiple other particles, sparking off an annihilation reaction and killing them instantly.
So, even though it repeatedly and frequently looked as if they were about to dive right into a dense thicket of hypermatter particles, they stuck to the path Vader laid out for them. Tarkin could trust that the Sith's force senses would be a worthy guide, but it couldn't keep him from flinching each time death appeared certain, or banish the niggling worry that their deathtrooper pilot would make a mistake.
Tight turn followed corkscrew twist followed tight turn, many of them so sharp that they overcame the lander's inertial compensators and pressed Tarkin back into his seat. He had lost all sense of scale regarding the size of the cloud, and had no clue as to their position relative to the Death Star or open space. The only thing left to focus on was the silhouette of Vader's fighter against the brilliant backdrop of the debris field.
And then, there was an opening ahead showing nothing but the speckled black of open space. A few seconds more more and they were clear of the hypermatter cloud, the moment demarked by the subtle hum of the lander's wings folding down into the flight position. They followed Vader straight up and away until they had put some distance between them and the deadly cloud, and then turned. The shuttle entered an elevated orbit around the station to perform the calculations for a hyperspace jump and Tarkin was able to get his first good look at the Death Star as the station came into view. It was somewhat obscured by the iridescent glow of the spilled fuel, but nowhere near enough to conceal the extent of the damage.
It was a shocking sight. Large swathes of plating had been blown off – or more likely vaporized. A huge chunk of the station in the southern hemisphere had been destroyed – likely, it had been the section of station directly opposite to the point where the rebel torpedoes had struck the station's core, and had hence suffered the brunt of the ensuing explosion. Looking into it, he could see that not just the Death Star's reactor, but multiple layers of the station that had encircled it, had been hollowed out by the explosion, leaving the rest of the station essentially a thick, warped husk.
If the Death Star was ever operable again, it would be a miracle. But then again, that there was anything left at all seemed a miracle in and of itself. Had Tarkin given the order to fire on the rebel base, the Death Star would have been primed to fire at the moment the torpedoes impacted the reactor. Several dozen ignitions of the reactor would have stored enough energy to destroy a planet in the superlaser's massive capacitors. They would have been like a balloon fit to burst, and the attack would have left the whole station as a cloud of hot dust.
He was still contemplating that, and still absorbing the vista of durasteel grey and hypermatter aqua when the hyperdrive engaged. Any hint of the glowing cloud was blotted out as the myriad pinprick lights of the galaxy flared to starlines and then faded to the mottled blue of hyperspace.
Tarkin breathed a relieved sigh, and again he noticed a stale whiff of sweat creeping in from the hold. He would have grimaced, if not for the overriding sense that they had escaped
Of course, there had been a time in Tarkin's career that had consisted almost entirely of long flights in sweat-sour troop transports, and while the scent could never be called pleasurable, it had been so familiar and ubiquitous as to go unnoticed. Was he so long divorced from that lifestyle that the smell of a landing craft was now something that had to be tolerated?
Tarkin took a deep breath – finding that, yes, the rancour of aged sweat was still distasteful, but by no means unbearable – and then fixed Bast and Yularen with a tight smile.
"Call it unpleasant if you will," he said. "But I call it the greatest scent in the Empire; that of action."
And that it was. It was unassuming, unpleasant, and made one's tongue feel dirty if its taste was allowed to collect there, but it was the smell of troopers in action and boots on the ground. It was the smell that had both saved the Republic and built the Empire, and – if Tarkin had his way - it was the smell that would soon escort the Rebellion to a brutal and unceremonious end.
He settled back into his flight chair and began to think. There would be plans to make and fleets to mobilize, but first they would need to trim the fat from their own numbers… and Tarkin knew exactly where to start.