Galaxies Apart

Thirty Eight

Duty. Toranne had lived her life by that watchword. Fourteen years before, she had been plucked from obscurity, a bright but otherwise nondescript ten-year-old girl in one of Alderaan's lesser cities. They had come for her one morning while she was at lessons. Her mother and father must have been so proud to think that their only daughter had been selected for a special training programme to serve none other than the Emperor himself.

Strange. Her memories were fuzzy, undoubtedly, but they hadn't seemed proud. Her mother had hugged her fiercely and for such a long time that Toranne had wondered if she was ever planning on letting go. As her shuttle rocketed into orbit and away from them, she remembered her father's paleness, the redness around his eyes.

They had died ten months later. Speeder accident. Her new masters allowed her to go back and attend to the funeral, where she encountered aunts and cousins and extended family. All were struck by how much little Toranne had already changed. A solitary tear during the memorial service seemed her only concession to an outward display of emotion. She refused several offers to come back to the extended family, stay with relatives. Stay? Stay and give up her position? Turn her back on her duty?

Never.

It was all made clear to her as the months and years passed. Emperor Palpatine had personally initiated a galactic search for a servant in tune with the Force. Not a Jedi, not a Sith; not exactly. Lord Vader was his emissary in that regard – he needed no other. No, what Palpatine sought was someone who could be in constant contact with him without the need for bothersome technology. A field agent who could be relied upon above all others to carry out his orders with utmost speed and efficiency.

And out of that search, she alone had been deemed worthy. She alone would hold the honour of being named Emperor's Hand.

At the ceremony of initiation, she had felt proud fit to burst. Palpatine had become more than a sponsor, more than a mentor to her. She worshipped him completely and would have gladly laid down her life to serve him.

Five years almost to the day after that glorious ceremony, that day arrived.

She was working at a comms station when she felt the telltale brush of his mind against hers. He was always with her, of course, but normally his presence inside her was ethereal, insubstantial. Not now. He filled her suddenly, so quickly and completely that she staggered slightly against the console.

The time has come, Toranne. Wipe them out.

Now? At this time? With the Death Star holding a close orbit above a city-planet like Coruscant? This embryonic response formed reflexively in her brain-

Heads turned around her as she cried out. The pain drove her to her knees. The connection she had been so very proud of was now being used to transmit agonies to her, a long distance version of his infamous lightning strobed through with visions of her own grisly fate if she dared to question his orders again.

And then-

He was gone. Completely gone. She gasped involuntarily, as if suddenly plunged into engine coolant. A part of his soul had been lodged deep within her mind for as long as she could remember. It had grown into a part of her, a secret mental place she could return to and draw resolve from; a bottomless well of strength.

She felt alone. Small, helpless, and alone without him. Where had he gone? Had he done this as a punishment? Would he come back? She wanted to scream, to run to a viewscreen and try to hail him, to fall to her knees and beg-

"Are you ill?" the Lieutenant working alongside her asked.

She stood up, unsteadily. "I should report to Medical," she managed, and walked away before he could press the issue further.

As the doors slid shut behind her and she found herself on one of the immense connecting promenades the Death Star possessed, Toranne was dizzy with despair. She had to get him back. Had to please him. How to please him?

Yes. Yes…

No-one gave her a second glance as she moved through the decks toward the Death Star's central elevator hub. Why would they? As personal assistant to Grand Moff Tarkin (the late Grand Moff Tarkin, she reminded herself with a savage smile) she commanded power and respect throughout the crew.

She would do her duty. Palpatine had ordered that the long-dormant self-destruct sequence be activated. He had not specified the delay time, however.

She reached the room whose location she had been required to memorise. It was a power substation relay access room, one of hundreds scattered across the axis of the great behemoth. Unlike its brothers, however, this station had an extra surprise.

A twist of a hand and a hidden panel popped open, revealing a simple keypad that even if discovered would not have raised suspicions. Her fingers flew across the keys, entering the 30-digit number that activated buried code within the computer systems of the Death Star. Within moments a power surge would begin that the central reactor core would fail to report and its safety systems fail to notice.

Half an hour from now, the Death Star would be nothing more than a shockwave of debris.

By then, her personal shuttle would be well out of range. She had no doubts that the Emperor would survive the destruction rained down on Coruscant by the Death Star's demise. Eventually, she would rejoin her Master at his side and he would see fit to restore their connection. She knew it to be true. It was only fitting.

She would pay him back for all he had done for her.

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Watching Site Zero come to life was like having been swallowed by some huge beast that was slowly but surely slumbering into life around you. Power flowed through circuits that had not been active in who knew how many years. As more and more systems reactivated, the harmonics they had begun to detect hours previously had built into a constant low roar of vibration that made talking, made thinking difficult.

That wasn't what was bothering Mara Jade.

She had volunteered to go back to the Millennium Falcon to assist in retrieving further power couplings Kyp had announced would be needed for him to attempt to generate a time portal from the Control Room. Not entirely to her surprise, Solo had managed to insist without saying much that she be accompanied on the trip back to his ship.

It was the choice of volunteer for her companion that had surprised her.

"How are you holding up?"

She gritted her teeth and glared at the man walking beside her. He showed no signs of acknowledging her attention, though it would have taken someone with hide as thick as a bantha not to have felt the heat of her gaze.

"Wanting to know whether you can turn your back on me, Skywalker?"

Now he did glance over. There was no annoyance in his face, she noted (to her annoyance), merely a hint of bemusement. "Do you look for the ulterior motive behind everything anyone says, or am I a special case?"

"Call it a good habit."

They were an hour from the Falcon, at leisurely walking pace. Skywalker had begun the journey at what was practically a jog and had quickly ascertained that Mara simply wasn't up to the pace yet. She was still recovering from the after-effects of Palpatine's puppeteering act. He had slowed down to a comfortable pace without saying a word. She had deliberately pushed that pace back up to uncomfortable levels. Another hour of this and she might just be tempted to prove them all right and hijack the damn ship.

YOU WILL KILL DARTH VADER.

Her breathing intensified and her heartbeat fluttered. She tried hard to maintain her military-precision step and keep her attention level even as the words echoed in her mind. She glanced at Skywalker. If he asked her was she OK…she wouldn't be responsible for her actions.

"Where are you from?"

She blinked. "What?"

"Just wondering what planet you're from," he clarified. "I heard somewhere it's called smalltalk. Thought I'd give it a try." He kept his eyes straight ahead.

She bit her cheek and scowled, wanting to tell him where to put his questions, but the reflexive flare of anger died a little. She found herself thinking of Yoda, that tiny green presence she'd been so quick to dismiss in comparison with her Master. The same presence who had guided her through the darkest time her soul had ever experienced.

"I don't know," she finally admitted.

He absorbed this in silence. "My uncle told me I was born on Tatooine," he said, conversationally, though somehow she sensed that this was not something he'd spoken of to anyone.

"You don't believe him?"

"No."

"So why not go ask him?"

She felt the flicker in his Force sense, the ripple of sadness, and for a brief instant the image of fire and bones flashed through her mind. Site Zero's powering up was amplifying her once-dormant Force powers. It was useful for the pain meditation, but she found herself unprepared for feeling someone else's emotions. Especially when she had worked so hard to repress her own…

"He's dead. The Empire murdered him looking for me."

"The Alliance have done their fair share of killing in the pursuit of freedom," she shot back, without even really knowing why.

"You really won't be happy until I bite on one of those barbs, will you?"

Her mouth shut neatly on her reply, mainly because she knew as well as he did that he was entirely correct, blast him.

"What about your parents?" she said instead, as much to change the subject as out of any sense of half-hearted curiosity.

"My uncle would never speak of my mother," he replied quietly. "Only that she died shortly after I was born. My aunt…" he trailed off for a moment, gathering himself a little, "…my aunt told me once that she wasn't from Tatooine; she was from a planet far distant. She said she was beautiful, almost like a princess. My uncle gave her a look and she stopped talking. I never got anything else out of her."

Your uncle sounds like a control freak, she wanted to say, but kept silent. Like those who bottled up their pasts often did, once Skywalker had opened the floodgates more and more was spilling forth. Fine. She could feign interest with the best of them – she had been to enough Imperial functions to have become an expert by now.

"Vader killed my father."

Abruptly there was no need to feign anything.

YOU WILL KILL DARTH VADER.

Luke must have sensed the command this time. "Are you-?"

"Yes!" she snapped back, in a harsher tone than was really warranted. Her anger was directed more at herself – dammit, she had to regain some measure of control and quickly. Had the Emperor's withdrawal from her really affected her so deeply?

She'd always been able to sense him, squatting somewhere in the back of her mind, a touchstone of power should she ever need to draw upon it. At times she had done so; but Mara disliked reliance on anything or anyone save herself, and each time his strength had assisted her she had forsworn with all of her will not to have to resort to doing so again.

What was the point, after all, of being the sole person trusted with the responsibility of being Emperor's Hand if you could not even trust yourself to see through the challenges of the role?

All of this she had told herself, and been content with…and yet since Yoda had instructed her on how to remove…no, how to rip him from her mind, she had felt a loneliness the like of which she had not encountered, or ever expected to encounter.

Luke was still staring her way. She steadied herself, shot him the best sharp frown she could muster and brought matters back to the issue at hand. "Vader?"

He nodded. "My father was a Jedi Knight. Vader betrayed him and murdered him."

She smiled grimly. "Vader makes a habit of that."

"He's involved with the Empire's civil war, isn't he?"

She was impressed, despite herself. "Yes. He's turned against the Emperor," she said, feeling guilty for revealing the fact and then chastising herself for such silliness. It hardly mattered what she confessed at this stage.

Luke took a breath; she sensed his nervousness at the question he was about a frame a fraction before it came. "He's gone from you. You can't hear him anymore."

She didn't answer.

"It must be…strange," he settled for the word awkwardly.

Something within snapped. She stopped, turned to him, her face flushing with blood and anger and frustration, hands clenched to fists so tight her fingernails were close to drawing blood from her palms.

"Strange?" she choked. "Being his Hand…it was my life, Skywalker. My entire life, for as long back as matters worth a damn. I had privilege. I had a place. I commanded respect from the highest ranking members of the Imperial Navy. All of that is gone. And…" she fought back tears as the truth of her tortured emotions finally unravelled, even to herself, "…I don't have anyone to blame for it. Anyone but him. The man I worshipped used me as casually as he'd use an empty glass to hold his wine and then tried to smash me to pieces when I fought back."

"So help us," Luke countered.

"I'm not trying to stop you."

"You're not trying, period. We could use someone like you, Mara. No-one knows if Ja…if Kyp can really pull off this portal like he says he can. And even if he can, how in the worlds are we meant to change history back? How are we going to get onto that Death Star to find the proton inhibitor? I honestly don't know. But what I do know is that getting onto a Death Star would be a hell of a lot easier if we had help from an Emperor's Hand…"

She had avoided thinking about it, she realised, but his words hit home. Was she really prepared to turn her back on her previous existence to the extent of actively helping Skywalker and Solo undo the last five years of Imperial success?

Yes.

Her old life was over. Like it or not, this uncharted territory she was ploughing into now would form the basis of whatever life she would choose to make for herself. And blast it, she would choose. She would choose to help put the galaxy right again, to set her once-precious Emperor on a path that would eventually lead to his demise.

She knew it to be true. It was only fitting.

She would pay him back for all he had done to her.

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Toranne stumbled to her knees. "H-how…?" she managed to gasp.

"I call it Delta Source," Thrawn informed her conversationally. "My own innovation, as irony would have it. Since proven to be very useful for knowing worthwhile nuggets of Palace gossip – one item of which, as chance would have it, were the names and current assignments of all of the Emperor's Hands."

They had surrounded her at the first intersection leading away from the relay access room. A squadron of stormtroopers. She had opened fire and managed to take one down, but had been cut down by the overwhelming response. A blaster bolt had gone into her abdomen. It was fatal.

A roving walker droid projecting a holo had emerged from the ranks of the stormtroopers. Admiral Thrawn's face held not one single trace of pity as his holographic eyes watched the life ebb from her lithe body.

"Other Hands…" she gasped, coughing up blood, finding herself unable to even support herself on all fours, "there are no other Hands…! I am the Emperor's Hand! The only!"

"A useful lie. You may continue to believe it if you wish. My thanks for revealing the location of the overload circuit."

"You will all…die," she croaked, before beating everyone to it.

Technicians arrived on the scene, forcing their way through the stormtroopers. Their lead saluted the holo smartly. "You have work to do, Captain," Thrawn reminded him.

"Yes, sir. Chain reaction shouldn't be a problem to stop now we know the location of the starting point."

"See to it, Captain. I shall give serious consideration to demotion for you in the event your optimism is unfounded. Thrawn out."

Standing beside the Admiral on the bridge of the Chimaera, Pellaeon ran that last sentence through his mind again to check he had heard correctly as the holo of the speechless head technician winked out of existence.

"I have every confidence in him, Captain," as ever, Thrawn plucked the thoughts from his mind. "Merely a little humour on my part."

Pellaeon wisely kept his opinion to himself. "If you say so, Admiral."

"Battle report, Captain?"

Pellaeon returned his attention to the tactical readouts. Incredibly, given the situation less than an hour ago, hostilities between Imperial forces had ceased completely.

"Situation is secure, Admiral. Ships in holding patterns only. No combat."

"Excellent. Open a channel. Entire Imperial Network. Priority override code."

He was rapidly learning how to absorb the unexpected and simply roll with it. Pellaeon suspected that this was going to be a skill that would develop rapidly when working with Admiral Thrawn.

"Channel open."

A soft beep sounded throughout the bridge. The crew – Pellaeon included – fought the urge to hold their breath, knowing full well that anyone locked into the holonetwork had just witnessed their broadcast, their communication, overridden by a holo of Admiral Thrawn.

Right now, that meant thousands of inhabited worlds, untold trillions of sentient beings. The Empire could initiate this code, yes, but holonet users could terminate it at the flick of a switch and go back to their original communication – meaning that Thrawn figured he had something important enough to say that he was betting they wouldn't.

"My name is Thrawn," the man with the glittering eyes began, "and I assume you've heard of the Empire with whom I swear my allegiance. I assume over the last two decades you've grown to think you know what the Empire means. Oppression. Intimidation. Enslavement. The subjugation of so-called alien races in favour of humans."

Pellaeon burned a little at the words; burned at their harshness, but mostly at their accuracy.

"Well," Thrawn smiled, and indicated himself, "what you know is about to change. This galaxy needs to be strong. We face threats we can't even begin to imagine. And I will not permit us to be swept aside. It is clear from history, our recent history, that there are some who think that collective strength comes from being able to perform tricks with floating rocks and glorified vibroblades. That era is past."

He pressed a button. Pellaeon glanced down at the holonet feed. His blood chilled at what the display had changed to; a holo of Thrawn's Noghri commandos surrounding Vader and Palpatine. The Noghri demonstrated for the benefit of the holo that the former Emperor was being very firmly held in place. Palpatine, for his part, screamed soundless outrages at his captors. Pellaeon found himself wishing the Noghri would retaliate, but the inscrutable aliens kept their icy calmness.

The feed went back to Thrawn.

"In two hours from now," he said, history dripping from his words, "Senator Palpatine, self-proclaimed Emperor of the Galactic Empire, will be executed for his leading role in the series of atrocities perpetrated over the duration of his rule in the name of order. The execution will be carried on this frequency. It will mark the end of an era."

He took a breath. Pellaeon could sense that even Thrawn was aware of the implications of what he was saying.

"Palpatine's willing accomplice in his crimes, Darth Vader, will also be executed."

Pellaeon fingers curled around his console. Vader had been on their side in this conflict. Clearly Thrawn did not anticipate him fading quietly into the background now the battle was won. He could only imagine the Dark Lord's reaction to hearing the news he had been betrayed; those ysalamiri Thrawn placed such faith in had better not fail…

There was no doubting Thrawn possessed steel, but this was nothing short of breathtaking. Between them, Palpatine and Vader had cast a pall of fear over greater than half an entire galaxy. To order their execution-

"No longer will Jedi, or Sith, rule over those they deem inferior. We will have strength. We will have courage. But we will not have barbarism. The New Empire will be born today, an Empire to last a thousand generations. I encourage you to gather and bear witness. Thrawn out."

The transmission cut. Silence reigned over the Chimaera's bridge in the aftermath of Thrawn's words. Pellaeon saw the Admiral's mouth open as if to speak, but at that moment the first clap sounded from the starboard crew pit, and quickly escalated into such applause that it was all Thrawn could do to sit there and wait for it to end.

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"ETA to Coruscant, Lieutenant?" Admiral Ackbar inquired.

"Two hours, Admiral."

Ackbar gave a Mon Calamari version of a mirthless smile. "Let's hope we're not late for the party," he said softly.