Chapter 52

Waypoint

"It's a short hop back to Rudrig, fire up the navicomputer," Ahsoka ordered her Padawan.

Nat asked, "We're not going straight to Wayland?"

"Not without knowing what we're getting into. Hondo is a cheat, a thief, and a liar. Either we're walking into a trap, or he's telling the truth, and we're walking into the unknown. This Waylander... he had a sword that can block a lightsaber, the reflexes to get past my defenses, and the Force sense to know just where to hit and when. I'm not walking into any trap or unknown situation with him in the middle of it without being ready for it."

Trusting her apprentice to handle the controls, Ahsoka used the console to start skimming through data files relating to lost colonies.


An Imperial Star Destroyer sailed through the starlit skies of the galaxy. The name emblazoned in fresh paint on the hull was Executor. The crew, made up of a mix of clones and enlisted officers, operated at peak efficiency. The most intelligent, driven, and ingenious men had enlisted, and the clones had spent their entire short lives drilling and practicing the work they did daily.

But the core of the ship, the driving force behind every decision, was a man in a mask with no military rank. His men respected him, although his black mask and wheezing mechanical breath only added to the fear that drove that respect.

The fate of poor Lieutenant Gottlor added even more. The Lieutenant was a skilled navigator, and a skilled leader. But his attitude when speaking to Lord Vader about a minor mistake that had caused damage to the engine intakes when the ship had come out of hyperspace too close to a hydrogen cloud was his undoing. An attitude with a superior officer would, in most cases, only prove fatal to an officer's next promotion. Vader didn't raise his voice. He didn't yell. As his glassy eyes stared down the defiant Lieutenant, Vader merely gestured towards him, and Gottlor's neck snapped like a brittle twig.

The ship ran far more efficiently after that. Whether Lord Vader was on the bridge or in the atmospheric chamber that served as his quarters, everyone on board worked as hard as they could to ensure that there were no more mistakes that would lead to a conversation with Vader.

In his quarters, Darth Vader read the most recent reports.

After all of this, after the fires of the Clone Wars waned, after the Jedi Order was no more and he was no longer a Jedi or a General, here he was. Sitting on a newly rechristened Imperial-class Star Destroyer, reading reports. It was larger and more powerful than the Venator-class that he had served on before, and the hangar bays were in the belly of the ship, rather than the spine. But little else had changed.

His mechanical hand twitched, nearly scrolling further down on the page than he intended. Whether the device was still having trouble calibrating itself to his nerve impulses, or whether his annoyance at being stuck doing a tour of duty was causing the twitch, it didn't matter. He had a duty to do, and that duty couldn't be done if his own body wouldn't cooperate.

Turning his attention away from the report, he focused on the offending arm. While he could not connect to it through the Force in the same way he could with an organic object, he could sense the ebb and flow of power currents in the machine. And through the Force, he could feel what was working properly, and what wasn't.

The device was so much more complicated than the engines he was used to repairing and building. Its servos were so much more complicated than the simple servos used in a protocol droid. Its sensors and neural translation matrixes were constantly learning and growing in ways that put most fully fledged droid brains to shame.

The cost to create and maintain the body of Darth Vader was enough to feed and house a large family on the surface levels of Coruscant.

The tremor passed, and Vader returned to his report.

Before he finished reading the next line, a warning light went off. Vader stood up and marched to the nearby transmission pad. He kneeled, and above him the holographic image of the Emperor formed.

"What is your bidding, my Master?" he asked.

"Rise, Lord Vader. You have seen the latest reports from the facility at Mount Tantiss?" The Emperor's voice, much like his visage, seemed to be run through with wrinkles and cracks. But such superficial details were no matter to one who was as strong in the Force as Emperor Palpatine.

Vader stood and looked up at the image of his Master. "I have seen that the reports have stopped suddenly. My analysts say that the communications satellites are still in place, so it is most likely not a communication failure. The two native races of the world are not friendly, and they fear the worst."

"It was not an alien uprising that caused this. I am afraid that it was a miscalculation on my part. Over the last month, I have been preparing for a galaxy without Jedi. Using blood samples, I was growing and mentally programming several Jedi clones to help protect and guard the facility there. I fear that I may have released one of them too soon. Perhaps the clone even felt the death of the original Jedi through the Force. Either way, it has gone rogue. It is unstable, and it needs to be... put down."

"The Executor can leave immediately."

"No," the Emperor said, "you will not go to Wayland immediately. This project was an attempt to see if cloned Jedi could be grown and programming on a whim. I now know that it is a failure. The experts at Arkanian Micro assured me that any clone grown too fast would be mentally unstable. I thought that a well-indoctrinated Force sensitive mind would prove to be the exception. I was wrong. However, there is another way."

Vader waited, knowing that the Emperor was, above all else, a politician. If there was anything in this galaxy that the Emperor wielded with as much authority as the Force, it was speech.

"Your predecessor, Count Dooku, delivered to me a gift some time ago. A Jedi, in stasis. Using slow growth techniques similar to those of the Kaminoans, Arkanian Micro spent the last ten years perfecting the clone. It will seek only to do my bidding and to protect my storehouse. In this I can give it a balance between its need to do my bidding, and its remaining Jedi instincts. The Jedi were always protectors, and I will give it something to protect. It has one purpose, and one purpose only. I have set it loose upon the galaxy. It will deal with the rogue clone, and secure the facility for our later use. Fear not, Lord Vader. I would never replace you with a mere clone."

"Of course, my Master." Vader bowed his head respectfully. "What is your bidding for me, then?"

"You will go to Kashyyk. The Wookies have shown considerable resistance to the New Order, and I have some intelligence that suggests that some of your former compatriots may be hiding in the forests there with them. Do what you must to restore peace to the galaxy. The lives of the Wookies or their wroshyr trees are of no concern in the grand scheme of things."

"I will do what I must."

"If my clone should fail me, then I will ask you to go to Wayland. After all, you helped destroy the original. The malfunctioning clone should be no trouble for you."

The holographic image of the Emperor disappeared, and Vader turned around. He marched stiffly to the chair inside his hyperbaric chamber and opened a com channel to the bridge.

The Captain appeared in the viewscreen, somewhat out of breath. He must have run across the bridge to respond to the com as quickly as possible. "Yes, my Lord!" he said.

"Set a course for Kashyyk immediately, maximum speed."

Vader cut the communication off halfway through the Captain's response. He didn't really care what the man had to say, he only cared what the man did. And Vader didn't need Force-enhanced sense to feel the thrum of the engines powering up, and the slight shift in gravity that even the inertial compensators couldn't hide as the vessel reoriented itself for the jump to hyperspace.

As he returned to his reports, he noticed that his hand was no longer twitching. A part of him wondered who the Jedi clone was. The Emperor had said that it was a Jedi that Vader had helped kill.

Since Vader had helped to destroy the entire Jedi order, that didn't narrow the possibilities down by very much.


Author's note: I have to admit, I was humming the Imperial March, followed by the Emperor's theme as I wrote this. Just a side effect of being a musician, I suppose.