Flat out Imperial – consider yourselves warned.
The true substance of our innermost being can not be realized under normal conditions. Only under extreme pressure, we find whether we are meant to be diamonds or dust.
Scuttlebutt calls her the ISD 'Death or Glory'. Technically speaking, it ought to be the SSD 'Death or Glory' by now, but as the ship is brand-new and the title hereditary, going back to the very first time the Dark Lord has set his booted feet on the deck of a battleship and declared it his flagship, scuttlebutt may take a bit to catch up.
Anyway, it fits. There are only two ways off the ship: a substantial promotion, most likely your own command – or a body bag. I still suspect that my transfer to the Executor was Commander Torrel getting back at me for turning him down.
Still, in a ship the size of a small city – by anyone's standards but Coruscant's – I didn't expect anyone but the bridge crew and a few select frontline troops to come into closer contact with his lordship.
So cue my icy, icy surprise when, not two month into my new assignment, someone swept into the lab in the middle of my shift, literally swept, with a presence like a tidal wave surging past, and when I turned I found two meters of black armor breathing down on me.
I snapped to attention by sheer reflex, but when a deep rumble demanded to know, "What are you doing, Lieutenant?" I found my mind fatally blank.
The plasma flux analyzer I'd been working on chose this moment to announce fresh results, I thought 'Damned analyzer, now's really lousy timing!', but somewhere around analyzer my brain rebooted, and I was able to give a satisfying account of my current task.
His lordship listened for a minute, snapped off a surprisingly astute question for someone who does not spent his days steeped in plasma physics, and then swept past with a curt "Carry on."
He toured the lab for maybe fifteen minutes, stretching towards eternity for each of the hapless officers that caught his attention, and then vanished again as quickly and mysteriously as he had appeared.
Everyone breathed a collective breathe of relief, but when I tentatively asked the officer on duty if there was any particular reason for this unexpected inspection, he shrugged and said, utterly unapologetic for having let me walk right into that one, "Lord Vader likes to weed out anyone who cannot function under pressure, before they wind up in a really serious situation."
'And take somebody with them, with their mistakes,' is implied in his tone. I'm fine with that principle, I really am, but when the Dark Lord weeds you out, you stay out.
As in, get off the ship. And not by promotion, either.
Oo oo oo oo oo oO
Function under pressure means to snap off the proper salute at the lieutenant commander who was a lieutenant when you last saw him, mere hours ago.
Though in that particular case, I didn't mind much. Firs is easy to treat with respect, unlike his predecessor, Sioms, who was a dyed-in-the-wool opportunist – and, thanks to a swiped security vid, continues to serve the department as an object lesson about how you don't talk back to his lordship if you value your life, but you don't butter up to him, either.
Sioms tried to dazzle the Dark Lord with an impressive-sounding but mostly nonsensical tirade about his work. His lordship listened for a moment, cut in with a sharp "Do not lie to me!" and when Sioms tried to salvage the situation with a drippy piece of sycophantism, he was brushed aside impatiently.
Function under pressure means to keep on your toes, no matter your rank or current occupation, as his lordship brooks no failure, by anyone.
No station aboard is safe from his ominous presence, he haunts the entire ship from bridge to keel, from stern to stem, and you can never be sure where he'll turn up next. The entire crew has grown as accustomed to the possibility of sudden death with little to no forewarning as the TIE-pilots are – and as aware of the fact that proper preparations and constant vigilance can at least ameliorate the risk.
Despite the personal implications, I cannot find this inappropriate for a frontline ship.
Oo oo oo oo oo oO
Function under pressure. An excellent mantra to keep your wits together when you find yourself unexpectedly tangled around a Sithlord's armored legs.
One moment I was checking my gear, flattening myself against the storage compartment subconsciously to clear the way for his lordship sweeping towards the cockpit after a few last orders to the troopers in the back. The next moment, the ship jumps towards hyperspace but not into it, pushing thousands of gees without proper synchronization, and while the inertia dampeners catch enough to ensure that (a) the ship holds together, and (b) its occupants aren't instantly turned into red paste, everyone still gets smashed into the rear wall.
Hard.
Everyone but the Dark Lord – and myself, seeing how I hit him within the first two meters of the way back. My ribs and one shoulder hurt like hell from the impact, but contrary to an irrational expectation, the physical contact doesn't feel any different from an ordinary armored trooper. Somehow, I anticipated something like a Holden coupling, so searingly cold you can lose a hand when you touch it.
With lightspeed putting an irrevocable end to acceleration without the hyperdrive, gravity quickly wins out against inertia. The Dark Lord stops whatever he was doing to keep in place, reaches down and pulls me off his feet.
"Follow me," he snaps, before brushing the cockpit doors aside and storming in.
First thing I make out beyond the swirling cape is the pilot, dead, with half of his head missing.
Second is the instrument panel burning brightly. I stare in mesmerized astonishment for a moment, unused to the sight of open flames which the fire suppression system should have smothered immediately. Then the heavy cape comes down on them, suffocating the flames just as effectively.
"Secure this man," comes the next order, and I turn to find the copilot slumped in his seat but still in one piece.
"Yes, milord." As a science officer I do not habitually carry restraints in my pockets, but the troops in the back should have some. I whirl and run back into the main cabin.
Function under pressure, I repeat to myself, function under pressure!
The pile of limp bodies at the back wall looks smaller than I would have expected from the number of people involved, and I can only hope that the compression is merely an optical effect. The top layer wears white armor, fortunate for me, a dozen men that were already leaning against the back wall, got crashed into by everybody else and then slumped across the rest when gravity regained the floor. They're buried to the hips, but I find some restraints in an accessible belt pouch, hurry back into the cockpit and slap them on the unconscious copilot.
His lordship has both hands buried in a jagged, still sizzling hole in the instrument panel, furiously salvaging controls. Most admirals – not to mention moffs and other more political ranks – I wouldn't want to see within ten steps of an emergency repair, but Lord Vader seems to know what he is doing.
Scuttlebutt has it that his lordship can turn a bucket of random spare parts into something capable of atmospheric re-entry – and then steer it down. There are compilations of optical scanner data pulled from the sensors of his personal TIE-squadron that get passed around like something a lot more illicit, and make anyone who knows piloting go, "Holy shit!"
But still, the idea of the Supreme Commander of the Imperial Forces actually getting his hands dirty with repairs seemed so odd that I dismissed it as irrelevant. Damn, am I glad to be wrong!
"Can you pilot?" said Commander growls, without looking up.
"I passed the obligatory courses at the Academy, milord." I'm Navy, after all.
And yet, … I swallow heavily, but Agur's bloated sun is approaching rapidly and in a few minutes I'll be dead anyway, so I continue, "My instructors advised me not to try and make a career out of it."
"It will do." An unidentifiable mess of molten circuitry is pulled from the ruined console, and I can see the black gloves torn and partly burned, glinting metal moving underneath.
"There are eleven survivors in the back," the mechanic growl goes on, before I can do more than blink at the sight. "You have three minutes to move as many as possible into the cockpit."
"Yes, milord."
Eleven. Out of twenty-five troops plus a dozen officers, most of them SciCorps like me. Most of them friends of mine. And I thought, finding out whether Agur Seven was perpetrating tax fraud on a truly astronomical scale or delivering large amounts of ores to the Rebellion – or any combination of the two – was going to be a boring mission, my greatest worry the fact that I had inexplicably wound up on the same shuttle as a just as bored Sithlord.
Function under pressure. I fumble with the first helmet, relieved to find it attached by the same principles as the standard space suit I'm used to. No use to check for a pulse here, the uncovered head slumps back loosely, neck snapped inside the armor. I push the corpse aside as far as possible, fingers frantically moving towards the next body.
Uniformed corpse, armored corpse, groaning body. I drag Commander Firs free from the pile and finally get some reaction from a half-buried trooper, who grabs my hand with a hard grip when I try to remove his helmet.
"Get yourself out of the pile, then move the injured into the cockpit. Move it, trooper!" I shout at the dazed man and he obeys.
I have four walking wounded, all of them armored troopers, and five other survivors before my time runs out, one trooper that drowned face-down in his helmet after a head-injury, and little Ensign Guati, hands worn to bloody claws, crushed and suffocated at the very bottom of the pile.
I don't usually see the point of advanced interrogations beyond the fact-finding, which is more elegantly achieved by truth serums in my opinion, but looking at the girl's discolored face …. When Lord Vader goes to take the traitorous copilot apart, I want to be right behind him, holding his cape.
"Time's up, Lieutenant," the Dark Lord snaps as I shove the pair of troops dragging the last survivor into the already very cramped cockpit.
The hatch cycles shut and my ears pop with the sudden increase of air pressure, making me realize that the main cabin must have been losing atmosphere. Function under pressure – I stifle a near-hysterical urge to laugh.
His lordship nods towards the now vacant copilot chair, and I strap myself in, astonished beyond words by the fact that the ship seems to obey – ever so slightly – to the controls under his hands.
We are no longer heading straight into the sun. That's marvelous, but the elation only holds until I tear my eyes away from the viewscreen and take a closer look at the displays before me, desperately trying to recall the configuration of a Lambda's instrument panel. The black helmet turns fractionally towards me, but before his lordship can say anything, the elusive memory flares up brilliantly in my mind, and I busy myself with identifying what we still have and what we need.
There are more red lights than green in front of me and more dead displays than lights. Hyperdrive is gone – well, duh! – as are communications and most of the sensors. Armaments are down to the stern guns – which are completely useless without operational sensors – and the ominous lack of input from pretty much anything located in the wings or near the hinges tells me that inertia did bad things to the outlying parts of the ship during our extreme acceleration. That includes shields and the maneuvering thrusters, and the Emergency Disengage is red-lighted, too, presumably for the same reasons.
I spare a moment to pat the panel before me, mouthing 'Good girl, hold together for just a little longer', to ward off the catastrophic structural failure that only phenomenally good luck – and Cygnus's diligent construction work – has kept off, so far.
But luck and diligence can only go so far, I'm pretty sure a tractor beam trying to lock onto the crippled ship would tear it to pieces. Not to speak of air drag upon attempted re-entry on anything with more than the slightest wisps of atmosphere.
Function under pressure. On the plus side, the repulsors seems to be working fine, for what good they'll do us without functioning landing gear and, more importantly, the ability to fold the wings back into docking mode. The main engines are firmly red-lined but still operational, too. I take a closer look at the fluctuating output of the ion engines when I catch a movement of the Dark Lord's hands from the corner of my eye, perfectly in tandem with the fluctuation.
Stars! His lordship is compensating for the defunct maneuvering thrusters by varying the output between the two parts of the twin engine. I catch my jaw off the floor, swallow my awe and take a closer look. I'm rather certain that the controls, in the original configuration, did not allow for that sort of manipulation. Somewhere in his repairs, the Dark Lord must have bypassed the auto-regulation unit that balances the two engines, normally.
"You will give me maximum thrust reversal, on my command," the Sithlord cuts through my musings.
"Yes, milord." The read-outs are red, though, so I report dutifully, "Thrust reversers show System Test Failure."
"They will work," his lordship decrees, and who am I – or the engine – to disagree.
Agur Five's largest moon looms up suddenly, and with another twitch of uneven engine thrust, Lord Vader steers the crippled ship into a degenerating orbit around the dusty ball of rock.
"Reverse in three. Two. One. Now!"
I push the lever up and white-hot ion streams blaze across the cockpit viewscreen. That's not what is supposed to happen, according to the manual, so the reversers took some damage, too, but besides scouring the hull, the streams do cause a rapid loss of speed. Gravity reaches out for us and we begin to fall.
"Undo reverse!"
I pull the lever back. Alternating forward and reverse thrust gets us down to a few hundred meters above a vast dusty plain, falling towards it at a moderate angle.
"Repulsors!" comes the sharp order and I slam my hand down on the respective switch before realizing that the repulsors of a shuttle have an effective range of some dozens of meters, not hundreds.
I'm not entirely clear about what happened next.
We skip, like a flat stone across water, for at least a hundred kilometers across the dusty plain, skim a rock spur and hurtle, head over heels, for at least as long before our momentum is fully spent. Torn metal screams as the wings are shorn off, and somewhere in between a piece of rock hurtles towards me, seen coming for a split-second before it crashes through the viewscreen, but by some miracle it never hits me in the face.
When the dust has settled, the viewscreens are completely opaque, leaving us blind to the outer world. Gravity is very light, provided only by the celestial body we have crashed onto, and the atmosphere is thinner than it should be. Some groaning body has ended up tangled around my feet.
I forcefully unclench my fingers from the yoke at the third try and finally have the time to wonder why I'm not breathing hard vacuum. The Dark Lord has one hand splayed out in a strained looking gesture, and some inner voice tells me that this is all that keeps the atmosphere inside the cockpit from dissipating. I wonder absentmindedly why he would bother. His suit protects him and he might even get to keep the troopers, their armor is not rated space-proof but will withstand the vacuum for a couple of minutes.
Trying to disengage the crash webbing, some half-forgotten emergency procedure has me ask, softly as not to break his lordship's concentration, "Status everyone?"
"TK-984, status acceptable."
"TK-3756, status unchanged."
Ominous silence.
"TK-6680 does not respond," the second voice reports after a moment.
"Check his life signs, but make sure to reseal the helmet afterwards, if he's still alive," I call over my shoulder, fighting with the last stubborn strap.
A muffled "Yessir!" and the litany continues.
I'm barely through with the headcount – everyone inside the cockpit is still alive – when his lordship declares, "The blastshields will hold now, but life support has failed. So, Sleep!"
Oo oo oo oo oo oO
Everything else I know about this day is just hearsay. Lord Vader pushed everyone aboard, except himself, into an unconsciousness so deep that the bit of oxygen trapped within the cockpit was enough to keep eleven people alive until rescue arrived.
For that someone came up with the idea – some say it was the Captain, some say it was his lordship shoving the thought into the Captain's mind, some say it was someone else entirely – to send one of the Titan dropships to the moon, piloted by two members of Black Squadron. They performed the minor miracle of landing the huge transport atop the remains of the shuttle in such a way that the floor hatch meant for deploying the AT-ATs swallowed the wreck whole, without crushing anything as yet uncrushed.
I came to in the infirmary, with the dubious – and ever spreading – reputation of having flown copilot to Lord Vader in what Firs calls, "the most terrifying piece of flying I've ever seen!"
It's not true. All I did was supply a second pair of arms to reach for those controls too seriously damaged on the pilot's side to repair, but still viable on the copilot's side. The "most terrifying piece of flying" was done by someone else. Maybe I can convince people of that fact someday – preferably before someone expects a repeat performance.
What will stay with me for the rest of my life, though, is the realization that hit me a few days after the fact: if only half of what I've heard about his lordship's suit and powers is true, he could have jumped ship any time he wanted to, while the rest of us hurtled to our deaths. It would have cost him nothing but a little time adrift in space, contemplating the stars before the Executor arrived to pick him up. To wrestle the damaged ship into a controlled crash-landing was – for him – the far more risky option.
Yet, I don't think the alternative ever occurred to him.
A/N: Plenty of technobabble, I know. I just felt like it. Physics should work, though – within the rather loose definition of physics as seen in the SW universe – if not, please point out the error.