"It comes to something when you have to learn news this big from the Empire." The large red-faced human sitting on the other side of the briefing room table shook his head in exaggerated astonishment. "Though if I'm honest, I didn't believe it 'til I got here."
Harvan grimaced in sympathy. It was all to easy to imagine the disbelief of someone learning for the first time that – in effect – the Alliance would be placing Darth Vader on trial. "Do you have an impression of how widespread this information is within the Imperial forces?"
Lieutenant Linaen, late of the Imperial Navy and long-time member of Alliance Intelligence, took a deep draw on the pipe he had insisted on being given before the debriefing commenced. With consummate skill, he exhaled a perfect smoke-ring. "As far as I can tell, no one has a blind clue what anyone else is doing. Half the governors are trying to convince people the Death Star never blew up. The other half each have a different idea how they should take over where the Emperor left off. The fleet admirals aren't much better. My captain was trying to deal with half a dozen contradicting orders when I got out. Right now, the only thing in a worse state than the chain of command is the intelligence network."
Harvan's fingers danced across his pad while Linaen spoke. Even after only half an hour's exposure, he was getting used to the way the big man talked around subjects, slowly spiralling in on his points.
"It's truly impressive how quickly they've started stabbing each other in the back. Seems like every intel-chief is trying to pin the blame for the Endor leak on every other intel-chief and they don't care who gets caught in the cross-fire. There's enough rumourmongering and plain old lying going on that you couldn't trust them to tell you the date, let alone what happened to Vader after the Death Star blew. Rumours have been flying for weeks but like I said, nothing you could trust."
Linaen puffed at his pipe and leant back until his chair creaked in protest. "From what I heard, the first solid info they got about it was from a free-trader who gets tapped by Ch'riis'yl system security bureau from time to time. That's what the packet beamed to the Tyranic said anyway. They verified it against a partial data-dump taken from a captured blockade runner over Ventrax."
"The Caldera?" Harvan asked, guessing from what he knew of recent Alliance losses.
"Not a clue. Packet didn't say. Anyway, this is all supposed to be top priority data and not for general consumption but with things the way they are, the usual bully-boys aren't doing too good a job at keeping everyone staring at their feet. My experience is that the news is spreading pretty fast among the commissioned ranks. Non-comms are probably still mostly in the dark, at least they were the last few places I got a chance to look at. Stormtroopers probably don't know much about it but then they don't really go in for paying attention to stuff beyond the end of their blasters. I wish I could give you a view into more than a single star destroyer and a couple of way-stations but it was that or getting out while the getting was good, so I hope you don't mind I chose the option that keeps my skin on."
"Not at all." Harvan smiled. "It's good to have you back with us."
"Well I don't know about that. I'm just glad to be out of that damned uniform at last. Never, ever got used to this bloody boots." Linaen made a show of rubbing at his lower leg. "Anyway, I think the thing you need to know is that the Empire, however it's going to fall apart, knows full well where Vader is now, even if they're not necessarily sure what's happened to him in the meantime. What they'll do with that . . ." He held up his enormous hands. "Your guess is as good as mine right now. I heard one rumour that a bunch of the Emperor's special-ops teams went dark the second he bit vacuum but whether they'd want to try springing Vader, I don't know. Most of the Royal Guard must have been on that thing when it blew anyway, right?"
Frowning, Harvan thought back to a similar rumour mentioned in an interview with a defecting stormtrooper commander that Trin Camberlain had shown him a couple of days before. That the moment the Emperor died, whole sections of the Imperial military no one had ever really noticed before had suddenly evaporated, leaving holes in everything from deep cover surveillance to military stores. There was still no concrete evidence to back it up, but the idea alone was worrying enough.
"What was the reaction to the news that Vader was still alive?" he asked, trying not to breath as Linaen blew another smoke ring.
"Honestly? Most of the people I had contact with day-to-day would have been happy if he'd been blown to atomic dust alongside his boss. There was a lot of talk about the governors and Moffs hoping like blazes he was gone so they could make a claim for the throne. You know people assumed he'd take over if the Emperor died, right? Which scared the ever loving hell out of anyone who thought about it for more than five seconds." Linaen let the pipe rest for a moment and arranged his face in an expression of bland indifference. "But the Empire's officers obey their orders to the letter," he said in the clipped tones of an Imperial Academy graduate, "so we would of course all buckle down and let ourselves be throttled one by one if it came to that. Or we would have," he completed, dropping the act again, "if everything hadn't gone wrong so fast. You have any idea how much manpower and material was tied up in that battle-station? It pretty much bankrupted the Empire the first time around, can you imagine how badly this has hit them? Well, I suppose you can, that's your job, right? Frankly, the Empire has bigger things to worry about now than Vader. From what I overheard, the rumour is that no one wants to be the one to lift a finger to help him. No one owes him any loyalty. It will make a lot of power grabs easier if he just . . . goes away."
"None of them, the higher ranking Imperials I mean – none of them are worried that allowing the Alliance to try Vader, or at least arrange his trial would give us legitimacy?"
"If they're worried about that, it hasn't filtered down to the level I was working at. It doesn't match up to any impression of what the higher ups were doing that I got. I know there was some murmuring about it being impossible to dismiss the Alliance any more . . . nothing as definite as talking about Vader making the difference though. The Emperor still eclipses him on that score!" Chuckling, Linaen tapped his pipe against his hand. "I wish I could have read their minds for you, Mr Sahtou, but I never got the chance to try. For all I know, they might be planning a daring rescue mission right now but if so, nothing I saw suggested the Tyranic will be part of it. We were ordered to try and carry on pretty much as normal, which got a lot harder very quickly. It's amazing what people can achieve when they stop thinking the Empire's unstoppable."
Harvan gave a cough of laughter. "Very true. Now, would you mind talking about some of the political shifts we've heard rumours about? Perhaps you can give us a little better idea exactly who is coming out on top amongst all the in fighting . . ."