Chapter 12 : Despayre
Darth Vader wanted to be done with the Death Star, wash his hands of it forever, and leave it with its doting master, Wilhuff Tarkin. Its purpose was distasteful enough, but the events that had been necessary for its completion had left him disgusted, most of all with himself for his part in them. Now that it was finally operational, he would have been more than happy to command Devastator to a sector far away from the enormous space station.
Unfortunately, for the third time in as many weeks, Admiral Motti was on the comlink from his own Star Destroyer, with yet another urgent message concerning the Death Star.Vader thought seriously about turning the call over to a subordinate officer, letting Motti stew a bit, but he knew that would only delay the inevitable.
Seated in his private quarters on board Devastator, he activated the com. "What is it now , Admiral ?"
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They had been born at almost the same time, the Death Star and himself.Not his literal birth,of course, but his rebirth as Darth Vader.When he first saw the enormous frame hanging in space, he had been but 23, the trauma of Mustafar barely scabbed over in his mind.So many things he had taken for granted then, that he was the Chosen One, that he had the power to make things the way he wanted them to be, that Palpatine would rule the Empire with wisdom.He had not yet discovered that he was not as strong as he thought, and that Palpatine was not his mentor, but a manipulator who enjoyed the game even above the outcome.
Now he was 41, and the illusions and optimism of his youth were long gone from him. Not that he wanted to see with 23 year old eyes again; it was much better to see things as they truly were, even if the reality was harsh.There were just so many things he would have done differently, if he had only known then what he knew now. The things he had dreamed of, he had not accomplished. The things he had accomplished did not bring him peace.
He supposed he had conquered his greatest fear, though.He had known by the pain and terror that gripped his heart that he couldn't live without her, and so it had begun.The life changing event, the Galaxy changing event, all had been driven because he had been afraid to lose her.Miserably, he found he could live without her, had been forced to live without her, and here he'd been, almost twenty years, alone, untouched, unloved. In a way, it was almost the life the Jedi had outlined for him. But he no longer feared being alone, because now it was the only way he knew.
His other accomplishments were as nothing to him. Ironically, Palpatine was the one that had said it best, that he longed for a life of significance, a life of conscience. The destruction of the Jedi, his support of the Emperor, all had seemed to be the right thing to do once, but now he was not so sure.Service to Palpatine had not delivered the future he thought it would. There must be something more, something more to life than being a soldier in the Empire. He wanted the Force to speak to him, to show him the way, so that he might at least once take that action that was beyond doubt.
And then there was the great absence in his life, his failure to raise his son. He had promised him he would return, but the years had slipped by, and he'd only set eyes upon him the one time.Now Luke was eighteen, a man grown. He hoped Owen had been a good father to him, that Owen had known the things a father should teach a son, since he himself had not been sure how it should be done.Someday, they would still meet, and he would explain to Luke what had kept him away.
Just as his life had gaping holes, the Death Star was in the same state.Twenty years they had been working on this technological marvel. The credits that had been spent on its construction could have rebuilt a thousand worlds stunted by poverty, could have educated trillions of younglings. Fed the Galaxy, forever.Instead it was mired in one object, a weapon of incomparable power designed not for defense, but to strike terror in the hearts of Imperial citizens.
He understood the reasoning behind its creation, in fact he'd heard the Tarkin Doctrine directly from the lips of its originator, the now Grand Moff Tarkin, who had long held the Emperor's favor. Rule through the fear of force, rather than force itself, Tarkin had said early in his career, and the Emperor had nodded in agreement.
In theory, Vader could stand behind the concept. Every time he paused silently in an entry before a meeting, waiting to sit until he felt the level of unease among the Imperial officers rise, he was using the Tarkin Doctrine. A little intimidation never hurt anyone, and when it was enough to deflect conflict, it was quite valuable. The problem with the Tarkin Doctrine in practice was that the level of threat necessary to keep the Rebellion from growing had continue to rise until the Death Star was no longer grand excess. Fleets of Star Destroyers and legions of stormtroopers were simply not enough to quell the Rebellion, and it was now necessary to threaten the citizens of the Empire with the destruction of entire worlds in order to maintain their cooperation.
That,he thought, shaking his head in disapproval, is a failure of leadership. Palpatine and Tarkin were two of a kind, really. They both understood power, needed it like he needed his ventilator, but neither of them understood leadership.Fear could be useful, but you could push a man too far, and then he might come lashing back at you, even if his effort was futile.That was where the Galaxy stood now, with its back against the wall, and nothing left to do but come right back at its Imperial rulers. The Rebellion was only the natural response to the oppression of Palpatine's New Order. He had seen it coming, not in a farseeing way, but in a common sense way, tried to warn Palpatine of it long ago, but the Emperor had dismissed him with that all-knowing expression that came so easily to him.
Even now, as the Rebellion gained strength and momentum, Palpatine hardly seemed concerned. Maybe Tarkin had swayed the Emperor's mind, convinced him that the Death Star would solve the Rebel issue, as Tarkin so fervently believed. To that end they had sent him to hurry construction, to finish this thing that its designers had been unable to complete in nearly twenty years. This thing that he did not believe in, that represented the wrong solution to the problem. But he went because he always went,to make Palpatine's wishes into realities.If he had distinguished himself among all the Emperor's seconds, if he had carved out a niche for himself in this Empire, it was that he could be counted on to make things happen. It was comfortable in his niche, a spot where he could hide from Palpatine, be left alone to accomplish things as he saw fit. And in the comfort of the niche, he could forget that he himself was ruled by Palpatine's version of the Tarkin Doctrine , by his own fear of the Emperor's power.
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The planet was called Despayre, and even the fanciful spelling of its name could not disguise what its inhabitants felt.On first arrival at the Imperial prison world, convicts might have felt elation when they discovered how loose security was in the penitentiary, and how easily they could escape into the wild jungles of the planet. Soon they were back, though, the numerous predators native to the planet forcing them to return to the relative safety of the prison compound. That's when it set in, the despair, when they realized that their fondest wish was no longer to escape, but to be let back in to their own cell.
While the prisoners saw the situation as a nightmare, Wilhuff Tarkin saw paradise. An isolated Outer Rim world, populated by a captive group unable to communicate with the rest of the Galaxy, a group to whom hard labor in space would seem a welcome relief to their current situation; to Tarkin, it had seemed almost too good to be true. Stealthily he had moved the final stages of construction of his beloved Death Star from the safety of the secret Maw Installation to the planet Despayre.
The convicts had not proved quite as desireable a work force as Tarkin had hoped, however. While they had fought over the opportunity to come off planet to work on the gigantic space station, their eagerness did not translate into productivity.Prison disputes carried from the surface spilled out in orbit, while other convicts worked slowly to delay their return to the prison below.Some prisoners carried out acts of sabotage, not to prolong their work, but for the joy of chaos. Too far into the process to move the Death Star to another labor source, a way had to be found to push the prisoners harder, to exact more effort from them, to get the station finished.
They had brought Vader in as the solution, expected him to wring his own standards of performance from the miserable group of prisoners, and get the Death Star completed. He had about turned around and left when he first assessed the situation. He knew from his own experiences, and from his time at Palpatine's side, that first you had to know what was important to a man to know how to motivate him, to drive him on. These men had precious little to live for; he didn't see much he could use as motivation.
By working on the Death Star they had already left the squalor of the prison behind ; he could not offer them any more reward than that. That left only the fear of punishment, the threat of being sent back to the prison, or worse, death. An endless exchange of workers constantly needing training was not productive either, so the Imperial foremen had taken to tolerating a certain amount of misbehavior just to keep the work flow going.
To start, he simply established standards. He outlined expectations for the workers and stopped the Imperial foremen from taunting the prisoners. He made the chief engineer of the Death Star, Bevil Lemelisk, come out of his remote office and down to the actual construction site. A structured workplace, and his overseeing presence, were enough to make immediate improvements.
The calm was short-lived, however. On board Devastator, stationed safely away from the debris field surrounding Despayre, he received reports that the work crews were in revolt. By the time he arrived in the shuttle from Devastator, the stormtroopers stationed on the Death Star had restored order, but the prisoner work crews were still hurling insults at their foremen. Determined to get to the root of the problem, he interviewed the prisoners, only to find the uproar had started when an Imperial lieutenant had casually mentioned that Despayre would be the first test site when the Death Star became functional. He had been unaware of this detail, and silently cursed Tarkin for omitting this information.
With no hope left for themselves, the prisoners were refusing to work, despite the presence of the stormtroopers. Needing to keep the project on track, he reluctantly turned to an ancient technique, one probably used in every corporation in the Galaxy, although perhaps not at the same level. He assembled the prisoners, felt of their minds, and determined who among them were the leaders. Those men, as well as the loud mouthed Imperial officer, were executed on his order.
Disoriented without their leaders, the remaining prisoners had returned to work, offering no resistance to their Imperial supervisors.Their lassitude was transitory, however, and within a week, they had put down their tools, and refused to do anything more.Once again, he found himself with little choice but to use the threat of death to push them forward.
It was not so effective this time. A new leader had emerged among the convicts, and with stormtrooper blasters pointed at his chest,he had shouted,"We may be prisoners, but we are not slaves ! We will not build the weapon that will kill our brothers down below."
He had stared with admiration at the defiant prisoners. From where did these men who had nothing pull such inner strength ? How did they decide that they would be pushed no further, even if the consequence was death ? He found he could not punish them for their rebellion. He ordered the stormtroopers to lock them in their cells, while he returned to Devastator to analyze the situation.
He was still on board Devastator when the call came in from Tarkin. Bevil Lemelisk, unhappy that he had not taken more drastic action, had complained to Tarkin that the prisoners had ceased working on the Death Star, that it would never be completed at this rate. Tarkin's solution had been to order the execution of every prison laborer, and to start over with new workers. Slaves, Wookiee slaves were the answer to the construction problem, Tarkin now believed, and he wanted Vader to stay on to supervise their adjustment.
Slaves. The prisoners had refused to become slaves. They had volunteered to work on the Death Star, so even though their options had been death in the prison below, or death for refusing to work, technically, they had chosen their own path. He had used that reasoning to comfort himself, to avoid the ugliness of which he had become part. With the Wookiees, there would be no such shield from the truth.
As a small boy, he had dreamt of freeing the slaves of Tatooine. He had never forgotten the feeling of being a thing, of being someone else's property, of not being in control of his own life. Instead of freeing the slaves, he was now to become the enforcer of slavery. Of all the things he had done for the Empire, for Palpatine, this one would require him to turn himself inside out, to become the very thing he had sworn to destroy, more than any other, save for one.
He remembered this feeling. He had felt exactly like this the night before Mustafar, on the steps of the Jedi Temple.He had known that what he was about to do was wrong, but he had valued her life above all others.He had silenced the small voice in his head, ignored the warning in his gut. In the weeks after, he went over and over the arguments, solidifying his defense of his own actions.The Jedi were a threat to the Senate, to the Republic, to Palpatine.It became second nature to repeat the reasons why his choice had been right.
But time, like water through a canyon, had worn away defenses that had once been as solid as rock. Now, sometimes, in the dark, in the silence of the hyperbaric chamber, without his armor and his mask, sometimes he heard the small voice. They had been his comrades,his teachers, his brothers and sisters. And the younglings, the younglings... who so desperately had wanted his protection.
He could not change what he had done; he could not bring them back.
The Jedi had spent so much time teaching him to listen to the Force, but they never taught him to listen to himself. Follow the Force, follow the Code, they said,but never follow your heart.Or your gut. Or that almost silent voice inside that is not the will of the Force, but the will of your own conscience. To look inward is the way of the Sith. Without knowing how to listen to himself, it had been too easy to follow the voice of others, of the Council, of Palpatine.
Those prisoners knew. They had no Force to guide them, no Code to follow, no Council directing them, and still they knew the point past which they would not let themselves be pushed any further. How was it that a man learned to do this ? Maybe, not by quieting the mind, which let in the Force, but by listening with the heart to the soft whisper of the conscience.
Tarkin and the Wookiees would be arriving soon.He already knew that he would do what needed to be done. He would take these beings that had been stolen from their home world, ripped from their families, and feed them to the monster that was Tarkin's dream. The former slave would indeed become the slavemaster.
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Never in a million years would he have guessed Motti's newest message. The first call from Motti had been surprising enough. Governor Tarkin and Bevil Lemelisk, enroute from Eriadu to Despayre to perform the first tests of the Death Star, had been attacked by Rebels, and forced to abandon their ship in an escape pod. Only Admiral Motti's tendency to keep his nose close to Tarkin's backside had saved the Governor and the Death Star engineer from a long, uncomfortable ride in the claustrophobia inducing escape pod. Motti's Star Destroyer had intervened to rescue the pair, and delivered them safely to the Death Star.
The second call was not unexpected; it was not even necessary. Even though Tarkin and Lemelisk had been injured in the Rebel attack, they could not wait until they were recovered to test the space station. They had stood in the control room of the Death Star, bandaged and bacta'd, to watch the maiden test of the ferocious superlaser. The planet Despayre, and all its inhabitants, were obliterated in an enormous explosion. They had to move the Death Star back from the shock wave of debris, but that had not dimmed the glow in Tarkin's heart. On board Devastator, he had fought back nausea and headache as the Force delivered the news of the planet's destruction well in advance of Motti's signal.
When Motti delivered the third message,however, he made him repeat it. He sat in utter disbelief, trying to make sense of it all. Not only had the Rebels attacked Tarkin's shuttle, but in two separate occurances they had stolen sets of plans to the Death Star. Complete plans. Complete technical readouts on this thing that had been secret for 20 years. How could information this important be lost at precisely the most crucial moment ?
A breach of this magnitude reeked of Palpatine's influence. The pattern was all too familiar. By allowing the plans to fall into Rebel hands, the balance of power was tipped, fueling the flames of the Galactic Civil War. Palpatine would once again be in his favorite seat, presiding over the conflict, seeing how far he could push the thin edge of control, ever confident in his ability to swing events in whichever direction he desired.
All his efforts, all his actions in which he had yet again ignored his conscience so that the Death Star could be completed, had only been to aid Palpatine's amusement. When would he learn? When would he stand in defiance, and refuse to be pushed any further?
There was no time to think about that now, though. Now he had to get Devastator to the Toprawa system, where according to Motti's report, Rebels had taken over the relay station, from which they could transmit the Death Star plans. He would pursue the Rebels across the Galaxy, if necessary, and retrieve the stolen plans. Then, maybe then, he could finally be done with the Death Star.