Galaxies Apart

Forty One

They said that for a soldier, war was nine-tenths waiting around bored, and one-tenth sheer terror. Crix Madine had seen enough action in his career to know that to be fairly accurate. He had never expected to be waiting around on the bridge of the Alderaan while a sizeable portion of the Imperial Navy hung in space, so close he could practically read the ID numbers on their hulls if he so desired.

It was so damned quiet. Everyone was in a state of high alert, yes, but without new orders coming in nothing was changing. It was almost as if no-one dared speak, lest their voice break the soap bubble fragility of the reality they had somehow found themselves in. Peace talks? With the Empire?

And yet, why was it so odd? Capturing the Alderaan had been a massive victory, yes, but had the Alliance really expected every single ship in the Imperial Fleet to graciously swan into superlaser range in an orderly queue? Surely the more likely outcome were negotiations to avoid that happening-

"Hey," a hand dropped on his shoulder.

He glanced up, ashamed that his much-vaunted commando reflexes had apparently been on temporary leave. Identifying who it was reassured him somewhat.

"Hello Winter."

He and the former Alliance agent had once been on opposite sides of the covert fence; he'd attended many meetings where senior officials had all but torn their hair out over the identity of Targeter, the spy with the perfect memory. Since his defection he had made a point of sharing his experiences with her, to pool resources to better help the Alliance.

He knew that was only partially true, of course. Winter was, not to put too fine a point on it, a complete stunner. Had she been a galactic authority on the finer points of growing topacacia blooms he would, in all likeliness, still have found some excuse to get speaking to her when duty permitted.

"How's it looking?"

He repeated his earlier feelings to her, including his puzzlement at the unease with which he viewed the current initiative for peaceful negotiations. She grunted.

"It's because," she said quietly, not looking at him but rather out to space, "we haven't spilled enough blood yet."

He opened his mouth to contradict that rather unpleasant sentiment…and then closed it again. She was right. The Alliance had suffered greatly at the hands of the Empire. Yavin IV had been the pinnacle of that suffering, but it had not stopped there. Entire cells had been wiped out mercilessly. Alliance ships had been hunted relentlessly across space. Its leaders and founding members had found themselves with enormous bounties placed upon their heads of such value that every single unsavoury character with a starship probably had their picture fix-o-taped to the cockpit window by now.

They had hungered for revenge. And yet thus far all that bloodlust had been spent on was the Ssi-ruuk, not the Empire. It was a sobering thought; Madine knew all too well how comforting it was to consider oneself to have the moral high ground in war. It was why he'd switched sides, after all. But more and more he was being reminded that in the business of taking lives to promote political ideals, no matter how laudable those ideals were, the bottom line was the same: you were taking lives.

So apparently in addition to being a beauty and having an eidetic memory, Winter was also a pretty passable psychologist. Madine felt himself sink down a little further into his own personal awe-space of this woman.

"Are the Rogues still by the Death Star?"

He nodded. "They're to wait for Ackbar to emerge. And…I think the official line was to serve as a reminder of our presence."

She snorted, evidently nervous about something. "Some reminder. Twelve X-Wings against a Death Star? That must be causing the Imps no end of worry."

"X-Wings and Y-wings almost brought that old hulk down once before."

She glanced at him. "You've spoken to Wedge," she guessed, smiling slightly.

He knew that smile. With a sinking heart, her nervousness regarding Rogue Squadron's current whereabouts became depressingly explainable. "You know him?" he asked, for the look of the thing.

There was that smile again. He doubted she was even aware of it. "A little, yes."

He drummed his fingers on the command console and bit the inside of his cheek. Damning statistic though it was, despite its founder member being a woman, the Rebel Alliance's rather threadbare military seemed to suffer from a distinct lack of them. Particularly gorgeous ex-spies with whom he had plenty in common and whom he thought to be – until recently – available. Ludicrously, these seemed in especially short supply.

"Can I ask you something?"

"Mmf," he assented, still thoughtfully processing his cheek.

"Shouldn't you be sitting in the big chair?" she asked, jerking her head back and to the side to indicate Ackbar's command seat.

He winced. He'd been hoping no one would press him on that. "Aren't you the highest-ranking officer here, with the Admiral gone?"

"Technically…" he admitted, grimacing. "But…Winter, I'm the leader of a commando squad. It was nice for the Alliance to give me a high rank when I jumped ship, but my training is in staying undetected, in stealth and subtlety. Last time I looked, those weren't top of the list of desirable qualities for someone commanding a Death Star."

She said nothing, just kept looking at him. He'd been captured twice by the enemy back in his Imperial days and tortured for information. Absurdly, Winter's accusatory look was making him feel more uncomfortable.

"He'll be back soon," he said, more than a trifle defensively. "It's not like Thrawn took the trouble to invite him over there just to start a fight, is it?"

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The corpse of the stormtrooper hit the deck inches from where Ben lay. He had scrambled to the edge of the conference table as soon as he could. Fortunately, with typical Imperial grandiosity the Death Star had been outfitted with furnishings in keeping with its militaristic theme; he was crouching under what was surely one of the very few conference tables in the galaxy that was thoroughly blaster-proof.

The Alliance guards by the door had been amongst the swiftest to react. Realising they were potentially outnumbered by many hundreds of thousands to one, they had sealed the entrance doors to the lounge with well-placed shots, trapping everyone inside. Both sides had exchanged point-blank fire in the early stages of the skirmish; from his admittedly limited vantage point, Ben had been sure that at least a third of each side's number had been cut down in those chaotic early exchanges.

One of them had been his father.

He had dragged Vader's body in from the firing line. There was a smoking hole in the armour around the lower torso. That infamous breathing rhythm was falteringly weak and ponderous. Ben had shoved him forcefully as far underneath the table's overhang as he could manage. The Rebels occupied the opposite side. The conference room had afforded no other means of cover.

He could hear stormtrooper reinforcements outside trying to get through the sealed doors.

"Give it up, Admiral!" Thrawn, who had clearly survived, was calling from further down the Imperial side of the divide. "This is futile! Don't throw your life away!"

Ackbar made no reply. Ben had no idea if this was because he was a smoking corpse or because he had nothing to say.

"Ben…" Vader managed.

"Don't try to talk," Ben chided him. "Keep your strength. It'll be over soon and I'll get you to the medbay."

Vader was shaking his head, saying no. "Help me get…this mask off," he said.

Ben grabbed him by the loose ends of his cape and thrust his face close to that terrifying mask. "You listen to me," he hissed, "you're not dying in the crossfire of some random firefight. So you lie there and shut up and wait for me to get help. Understand?"

The stormtrooper's body had fallen awkwardly. His blaster rifle had tumbled end-over-end and was now around five feet or so from where Ben crouched.

Something made him look to his left. He stared into yellow eyes and a face contorted in hatred and contempt.

And then, Palpatine made a dive for the blaster rifle.

Ben sprang into motion a quarter-second behind him. In that brief eye contact he had made, he had read Palpatine's intentions as clearly as if they both had still been connected to the Force. Both of them knew the location to Site Zero. Logic dictated Thrawn would need only one to guide him. Given the political value to be wrested from executing the Emperor, Thrawn would most likely seek to make a deal with Ben.

Unless, of course, Ben was already dead.

Palpatine reached the rifle first. He swung it around with a cry of triumph…but too late. Ben was already upon him, using the force of his dive to cannon into the older man, deflecting his aim hopelessly high and wide. Ben concentrated his efforts on getting Palpatine's hands off the trigger.

He half-expected the fight to be a formality, given the age difference, but it was far from that. Palpatine fought like an uncaged beast. There was no form to it, no structure; he pulled, he punched, kicked, bit, twisted with all of his might, knowing full well he was fighting for his very existence with every ounce of strength he could extract from himself.

Ben, however, had been trained in unarmed combat during his days at the Jedi Academy. After his initial shock at the ferocity of Palpatine's fightback, he allowed himself to take a breath even as they rolled across the killing floor, the blaster rifle sandwiched in their grip. The old man's lack of strength was his weakness, of course. Ben simply had to get a firm enough grip on-

- and with perfect train-of-thought-losing timing and perfect aim to match, Palpatine brought his knee up.

Ben made a strangled noise in the back of his throat. His previously iron grip around the blaster rifle relaxed by a substantial margin. He could only watch as Palpatine ripped the weapon from his hands, his teeth gritted with effort and his eyes afire with triumph, and turned the rifle's barrel until it was placed directly against Ben's forehead.

"Welcome to the future," Palpatine hissed, and pulled the trigger.

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"Use it…sir," the guardsman wheezed. His eyes closed and his head slumped forward. Warm blood, flowing freely from the stomach wound the guard had caught, coated the hand-held communications device he was trying to pass to Ackbar, who took it from fingers suddenly unresisting and lifeless.

"Ackbar to Alderaan," he barked into the device, as his surviving guards shoved him to cover. Blaster fire reverberated around him, incredibly loud in the confined conference room. Stormtroopers and Rebels were falling wherever he looked. Thrawn was screaming something about not throwing his life away.

No response came back. For a moment he feared the worst; that the Imperials outside the room had maintained enough presence of mind to realise what was happening and jam communications.

No. "Alderaan here," Madine's voice came back a heartbeat and an eternity later. Clearly the sounds of blaster fire were transmitting loudly down the open channel, because Madine's voice changed in pitch right after. "Admiral, what's happening?!"

"We're under attack," Ackbar stated the obvious. "Listen to me: you must stop the Death Star from leaving this system! If it escapes, you must follow – everything depends on it, do you under-"

Static. The Empire had caught up, it seemed.

With the sound of metal warping under the strain of being pounded by a heavy repeating blaster, the stormtrooper reinforcements broke through the conference room doors. Ackbar's surviving guards changed their targets and poured blaster fire through the opening, succeeding in driving back the initial charge.

He watched with detached fascination as a small white object came hurtling through the opening, rolling into the conference room before bouncing high onto the charred remains of the great table in the centre. It looked like-

"Sonic grenade!" someone shouted. Who, he never knew.

There was a noise-

He had, in his capacity as an Imperial slave, once attended a weapons demonstration with his master. He had learned quietly from the sidelines during all such events, picking up knowledge he swore he would use later against the Empire. That day he had seen the effect of sonic grenades on captive Wookiees; the high-intensity soundwaves overloaded their victims auditory systems, forcing the brain to shut down temporarily all senses in order to prevent permanent damage; the result was to introduce a complete imbalance in the equilibrium of those affected by the blast radius.

All of this he had learned. And so, when his vision blurred and shrank, his hearing muffled and he found he could do nothing save collapse to the ground, at one level he knew exactly what was happening to him.

White blurs appeared above him, red streaks emanating from them into the prone guards lying to his left and right. Had his sense of smell been working, the scent of charred flesh would have signalled the end of the valiant resistance of his men.

White blurs coalesced over him. He thought he heard, faintly, as if through the waters of the Mon Calamarian ocean he had not seen in far too long, someone shouting, a man. He sounded angry.

He'd seen so much anger in his life. Too much. It was to be his final thought.

Ackbar's world went red, and then black, and he saw and heard no more.

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"NO!" Thrawn thundered, too late. He actually managed to stand, bracing himself against the edge of the conference table. Ackbar was dead.

"No," Palpatine breathed. The sonic grenade had gone off just as he had pulled the trigger, the blast wave knocking him off his feet and sending the bolt harmlessly to the ceiling. Ben stood above him, swaying a little from the after-effects, but the rifle held securely in his hand.

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"No…" the word escaped Madine's lips even as he felt his heart sink and his stomach twist. For a second, a fatal second, he felt paralysed as to what to do next. It was Winter who jarred him into action; her hand gripped his shoulder and her fingers dug into his flesh, a silent message to focus.

He stood up, began walking. "Comms, tell Rogue Squadron to haul themselves out of there, now! Tactical, keep track of every single damn ship out there and get me threat projections! Keep an eye out for any ship that tries to run and get me a hyperspace vector for projected destination point!"

He had reached Ackbar's seat. "Chamber Master, commence primary ignition."

"Target?"

Madine pointed to the Death Star, his arm shaking with fury. "Take a guess," he said.

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"Sir?"

The querulous query from the extremely nervous technician was the only sound in a conference room which momentarily seemed to be occupied by statues. Thrawn was standing over the body of Ackbar, Ben over the cowering shape of Palpatine. For an instant all seemed afraid to break the pause after the uninterrupted terror and chaos of the previous few minutes.

"Yes?" Thrawn answered the question.

"The Alderaan has targeted us, sir," the technician gulped. "Full power. Estimated time before firing less than ninety seconds. We can't match that speed, sir."

Amazingly, it almost looked like Thrawn was struck dumb by the revelation. No-one had ever seen him lost for a course for action. That had been his greatest strength as a leader and a strategist; he simply refused to be beaten. But for a heartbeat, he simply stood there amidst the corpses of the fallen, stunned at the ferocity of the combat that had whirled up around them.

The moment passed, and he was Thrawn again.

"Fire up the engines and prepare to enter an exit vector to the navicomputer," he told the technician, who raced off to obey. "Restrain him," he told the reinforcement stormtroopers, indicating Palpatine. They dragged the once-Emperor to his feet and held him securely by the arms.

Thrawn walked to Ben and stood nose-to-nose with him, staring deep into his eyes. Ben had been probed by some of the finest Jedi and Sith the galaxy had to offer and had shielded his inner thoughts; it had been his greatest skill. He suddenly found himself thankful he had never encountered Thrawn in that time.

"You will take us to the installation you described?" Thrawn asked him.

Ben nodded. "One condition."

Thrawn wasted no time. "Name it."

Ben licked his lips. "You will restore the Force to my father and me."

Thrawn mulled it over for the briefest of moments. He nodded. Ben saw the light of hope kindle in Palpatine's eyes behind him. "I have a condition also."

"Name it," Ben said evenly.

Thrawn walked to the table and acquired a blaster rifle from one of the fallen stormtroopers. He placed it into Ben Skywalker's hands and subjected him to another one of those soul-searching looks, before stepping aside, so that nothing stood between Ben and Palpatine.

"Finish it," Thrawn instructed him. "You, now. Finish it."

The brief light of hope in the old man's eyes died to be replaced with anger, confusion, fear. He mustered himself to form that hateful face into one final expression of contemptuous amusement. "You're weak," he told Ben. "Weak, just like your fath-"

Blam.

He slumped in the grip of the stormtroopers holding him. A neat hole shone through the centre of his forehead. As they released his body, his nerveless corpse collapsed to the deck, the eyes of every officer in the room following its every movement.

"Set your course for the Corellian system," Ben said quietly. "Adjust it by point three five and alert me when we're twenty light-years out. We'll make the final adjustment then."

Thrawn gestured to Pellaeon. "Captain…?"

Pellaeon, efficient as ever, nodded. "Aye, Admiral," he assured his superior, and left the room to carry out the orders.

Ben had discarded the rifle and was crouching by his father. Vader was very weak. The pauses between breaths were lengthening with each laboured exhalation. He was fading fast, and Ben knew it.

Thrawn's shadow fell over him. Ben glanced upward. "He's dying," he said simply. "He needs the Force to heal."

Thrawn turned to the stormtroopers fitted with ysalamiri. "Lieutenant, you're on personal assignment to me until stated otherwise," he advised him. "Stay within ten feet of me at all times. Do you understand?"

"Aye, sir."

His attention shifted to a second trooper. "Have the stasis fields on the other ysalamiri reactivated. Bring Lord Vader to the medbay. Keep him out of range of any ysalamiri."

Thrawn, the ever-present Rukh, and the stormtrooper he'd ordered to follow him began to step back to the far end of the conference room.

"Wait," Ben said suddenly, something important occurring to him. He pointed to where Palpatine lay. "You have to keep another ysalamiri around his body."

Again, Thrawn did not waste time with questions; he simply nodded to another trooper and the man undid his nutrient backpack and placed it beside the corpse.

Ben placed his hands around his father's body and dragged him to his feet. He supported him as best he could and moved him away. As they moved, passing a certain point of distance from Palpatine's corpse and from Thrawn's stormtrooper, Ben Skywalker inhaled sharply – the universe around him seemed to colour, to bloom, as if it were expanding inward and outward simultaneously, growing into a dimension full of vibrancy and life that until that moment he had forgotten even existed.

The Force was again with him.

He reached out with it, felt his father's pain, his injuries. And to his relief, he felt his father's Force presence, falteringly weak at first, but already growing stronger. Vader's head moved. He was regaining consciousness.

"Thank you," Ben told Thrawn, as he helped his father to find his feet and support himself. He saw Thrawn give the briefest of nods in return, before turning to leave, presumably for the bridge.

"Wait," Ben called. Thrawn turned. Ben indicated Palpatine's body and managed to give a grim smile. "Our dear departed Emperor has one final role to play."

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Rogue Squadron made sport of the odds. They considered an even match unfair, on the basis that they were the Rogues; anyone else…well, wasn't. Being outmatched three-to-one was more their style.

Being outmatched three thousand to one, though…

"Watch it, Rogue Eight!" Wedge hollered, desperately throwing his X-Wing into another series of near-suicidal banks and dives. "You've got…" he glanced at his instruments, and blinked sweat from his eyes, "…lots on your tail," he finished.

"You take the three hundred on the left!" Jansen's voice came over the comm. Wedge would have found time to find the gallows humour in the statement if he wasn't too busy hauling tail in a one-eighty manoeuvre that bought him another ten seconds of continued existence. There were, at a rough estimate, about thirty TIEs on his six…and his seven, and eight…and possibly his nine, ten and eleven too.

He was dead. He knew it. He would die as somehow he'd known he always would; above the nightmarish surface of this blasted all to hell artificial moon, perishing in a glorious, brief fireball of superheated plasma just like Biggs and Porkins and the rest had done at Yavin.

He came out of the spin and levelled out – and felt the breath leave his lungs in a deflated whee. Coming straight at him were…well, he lost count. Somewhere north of fifteen TIE Interceptors. They'd be in range in seconds and he'd never be able to avoid the volley of laserfire they'd pepper the air with.

So it was with some surprise that he watched them scatter in all directions, as if they were a flock of birds suddenly frightened by some huge predator in their midst.

"The Alderaan is about to fire!" Dack fairly screamed in his headset. "We're right in the line of impact!"

"Rogues, scatter!" he commanded, though they'd already be doing just that. Every single small ship, every Star Destroyer for that matter, within a million mile radius would be hellbent on putting as much space between themselves and the Death Star as possible-

"Wedge!" it was Madine's voice. "Get clear!"

"Right with you," Wedge assured him. He was turning the ship toward Coruscant and heading straight for the rest of the Imperial fleet stationed there – they would have other priorities right now than destroying one X-Wing.

Behind him now, the Death Star moved. For a vessel the size of a small moon, its sublight engines were amazingly powerful. Wedge keyed his navicomputer out of a vague sense of morbid curiosity, and found that his suspicions were correct.

"Looks like they're leaving," he observed. With the one ship capable of taking the Alderaan down in a straight shootout gone, Coruscant would be there for the taking.

"Wedge," it was Madine again. "We won't get them before they go to hyperspace. Ackbar got one last communication out before they turned on him in there. He told us to stop the Death Star leaving, or track it if it did leave. Can you pull a hyperspace vector for its likely destination?"

"No problem," Wedge replied. His navicomp got to work decoding exactly that even as the Death Star's sublight engines got enough speed up to charge the hyperspace generators. "Got it!" he cried in triumph. A moment later, the Death Star exhibited that telltale flash of pseudomotion before vanishing into hyperspace. He turned the X-Wing around, as did the rest of Rogue Squadron. "I'm transmitting it to you now."

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The tactical officer aboard the Alderaan blinked. His readout…it almost looked like before it had disappeared into hyperspace, the Death Star had actually launched a proton torpedo at them. A single, lone, proton torpedo.

He debated whether to bring it to General Madine's attention. But what could he say? Their shields were already up. He doubted the power dip from absorbing the impact of one miserable proton torpedo against their enormous, nigh-on impenetrable shield would show up even on the most low-level power consumption charts.

He said nothing.

He would come to re-examine that decision at least once a day for the rest of his life.

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It did look like a proton torpedo. As it streaked across space, closing the distance between itself and the Alderaan, a tiny blip against that immense sphere, anyone could have been forgiven for thinking that was what it was.

In reality, however, it was rather more than that. For a start, no explosives were contained within its casing. Instead, a single ysalamiri resided within. Simplistic, sessile creatures, it was securely fastened to its personal life-support system, the artificial nutrient branch that Thrawn had helped to develop. It was quite blissfully unaware that it was hurtling through space at an extremely respectable percentage of lightspeed.

The other occupant of the hollow casing was likewise unperturbed by their high-speed, one-way journey. But then, the man formerly known as Darth Sidious and Emperor Palpatine of the Galactic Empire wasn't overly perturbed about very much at the moment, given that he was dead.

A time-delayed relay activated. A tiny explosive affixed to the nutrient branch bleeped, and an equally tiny explosion signalled the end of the ysalamiri's life. Sad, certainly, but galactically speaking not a huge event.

Except that with its death, the Force-empty bubble it had been generating surrounding the hollow torpedo shell ceased to exist.

The Force rushed to fill this vacuum, and almost one hundred years of Dark Side energies…almost a century of hate and anger and fear, of betrayal and murder and deceit…all of these sins hit the corpse inside, all at once, without the immensely powerful mind which once channelled these dark impulses into an energy source there to act as a safety valve.

The torpedo exploded, not with a minor flare of proton detonation as the unfortunate tactical officer had anticipated, but with the power of the greatest Sith Lord in millennia behind it.

It went through the Alderaan's shield as if it wasn't there.

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Wedge saw it. He saw the Alderaan spin on its axis, saw its energy shield fluctuate and splutter.

"What the hell…" he breathed. He had been expecting he and the rest of his Squadron to make good on their head-start they had on their multitude of Imperial pursuers and quickly dock with the Alderaan.

The immense structure righted itself, ponderously.

"Rogue Leader to Alderaan," he hailed them. "What in the Force just happened to you?"

"Not sure," the response came after a few moments, from a dazed-sounding Madine. "Something hit us…"

There was a pause. Someone was talking on the other end. Judging by the tone, it wasn't good news. "Rogue Leader," Madine's voice came back, "that blast knocked out our engines. Weapons are still online, but we're not going anywhere."

"Understood," Wedge acknowledged. It could have been worse.

"We can handle the Imperials here. I want you and Rogue Squadron to pursue the Death Star. By the time we're mobile again, we could have lost their trail."

"Copy that," Wedge heard himself saying. He even heard himself give the order to the rest of his Squadron, punch in the co-ordinates to the navicomputer on his X-Wing.

A pitiful little band of X-Wings against a Death Star. Worked out so well the first time. He pushed the thought out his head with a physical effort.

"Good luck," Madine told him.

"Stay alive, Wedge," Winter's voice echoed a second later.

He didn't - couldn't - reply. He pulled the hyperspace lever and was gone, his Squadron following a half-second later.