VI. The Passengers

He is here.

It was his second shipboard assault of the day, and even the Dark Lord was tired.

Exhaustion, in its way, was a safety function of the life support. His blasted lungs were delicate structures, and sustained exertion had damaged them before. But the Force would carry him even when the broken machine of his body would not, and it was not for such simple concerns that he hesitated now.

From the beginning, the Rebels' desperate assault bore all the hallmarks of his old master. Daring assaults against superior forces with little chance of success, as he had once said, were "his speciality." Obi-Wan was never reckless—not tactically—but paradoxically, the Jedi Master's caution and resilience made him especially suited to the feats of near-lunatic courage in which they had once indulged together.

At first, he had his doubts as to whether Obi-Wan had taken a direct hand in the attack. He had not shown himself in the attack on Scarif, not even when he might have been useful. The Rebels on the surface would not have been so easily fenced in and wiped out, he thought, with Kenobi leading them. And yet, there was something about the attack, and about the slight tremors in the Force aboard the Profundity, that reminded him of his old master. He took an awful chance jumping to Tatooine—but here was the Rebel ship, as he must have known it would be.

And somewhere on that vessel, at long last, his old master was aboard. There could be no denying it, now.

It was his pleasure, usually, to board first, ahead of his troopers. He relished the terror of the desperate soldiers as he cut through them alone. But Vader did not dare underestimate the cunning of his old master, and he did not dare walk into a trap. As the boarding shuttle latched to the airlock and its cutting torches went to work, he directed the first wave of stormtroopers to the front. If his boarding tactics were known to Kenobi, the stormtroopers would take the brunt of any trap, and he would follow behind to settle their score once and for all.

The torches hissed as they pierced first the outer airlock and then the inner. Stormtroopers poured into the breach. A chorus of blaster fire erupted from the stark white halls of the Rebel ship. And still he waited, reaching out with the Force. As he predicted—as Kenobi must have known—coming back to this world of bittersweet memory dulled his perceptions, made him less astute through the Force than he ought to have been. But Kenobi's presence was here, very close by. The closest they had ever come since...

Vader stretched out his feelings, hunting, seeking—but his hatred, boiling in him now, made any fine sensing impossible. He thought, in some deep place, of his homeworld, of his old life, of all the thousand ways he had learned to hate them. At the center of them all was Obi-Wan's betrayal, and there the hatred was too much for even him to harness as a weapon. Through the Force, he cast his terrible gaze over the ship, but it brought him no greater focus. He found that in his anger he could not sense Kenobi's presence at all—only broadcast his own. He should have known Kenobi would go into hiding here. The closer Kenobi came to his old homestead, the more muddled Vader's perceptions became, and the weaker his grip on the Dark Side.

As his anger grew, the Rebels felt it in the corridors of the little ship, and it shook them. Their aim faltered as they trembled. Slowly, the tide of the assault turned and the stormtroopers forced their way into the ship.

The Rebels died screaming, not at the hands of Vader's greatness, but to the clumsy shooting of the lowly foot soldiers. That, too, was a frustration and a slight. Vader fought to control his anger, harnessing it, ready to bring it to bear, and stepped at last into the breach.

There was no trap waiting for him. Only the remains of a terrible firefight as two squads, boxed into a narrow hallway, had each gone down destroying the other. He looked down at the bodies as he passed, checking the blast points, searching for signs that Obi-Wan's lightsaber had bounced the bolts back into them. But it was clear at once—this was only an ordinary firefight, and a sloppy one at that.

The tremor in the Force, that slightest of signatures, was still around him. But he could not place it; and the more it frustrated him, the more fixated on it he became.

The sweep of the ship, for what it was worth, was routine. But Kenobi was nowhere to be found; fatigued as he was, limited in his powers and confused by emotions too long buried, Vader was so bent on the futile search that it was easier to conduct interrogations by hand. He had long enjoyed the effect it had on his men, and on the enemy, to crush their throats with the Force; now, unwilling to split his focus, he absently seized the surviving captain by the neck and hoisted him with the strength of his armoured skeleton alone.

"Where is your commander?" he said evenly, coldly. "Where is he hiding from me?"

"I am the commander," he croaked. "I am the captain of this consular ship."

"Where is Kenobi?"

"I don't know," croaked the captain. "No one on board by that name."

"You cannot deceive me," said Vader; but even as he said it, he knew the captain was telling the truth. Had Vader been wrong? Had his powers diminished that much? Kenobi had to be here. He had been sure he felt his master's presence, here, on board—but now, at last, he was beginning to doubt it.

As he pondered his own failing, at the frayed edge of his famous good humour, one of the squad leaders approached him, having completed the sweep of the ship's systems.

"The Death Star plans are not in the main computer," he reported.

The plans. Yes. That was what they had sent him to retrieve. What he had failed to contain. There was no more time for personal vendettas—only for the will of the Emperor.

"Where are those transmissions you intercepted?" Vader demanded, changing tack. "What have you done with those plans?"

The interrogation was as short as it was fruitless. The Force betrayed him in his search; even his mechanical grip betrayed him. Crushing his throat with the Force, Vader might have skirted the line between the Rebel's life and death with a delicate hand for hours, coaxing valuable information out of him. But the mechanical servos of his hand lacked such precision; they were clumsy tools for crushing and destroying, and they did their job too well. As the captain twitched feebly in his grip, resisting his will, he felt the hand tighten as if far away from it, felt the bones in his valuable prisoner's neck crumple and cave under his metal fingers. The secrets of Captain Raymus Antilles died with him; and Vader was left imprisoned in an exhausted suit, holding a useless body, finding no guidance in the Force as his focus gave way to anger and he jerked his armoured head left and right, seeking the Jedi who was simply not there. With disgust he threw away the body.

"Commander," he ordered, boiling over, "tear this ship apart until you've found those plans. And bring me the passengers. I want them alive!"

The troopers were moving by the time he said it. He knew now there was no Jedi to be found aboard the ship. That familiar ripple of consciousness was suddenly gone. Perhaps he had imagined it. Perhaps it was the planet's influence, or those blasted twin suns, weakening his grip on the Dark Side. But at least the plans could still be found.

He stepped over another body. Dead. Dead. Dead. He yearned for a survivor to terrify. Their reaction to him was empowering; always it was the same. To the Rebels, who had heard only rumours of him, he was a shadow, a ghost story, an invincible black spectre of the Dark Side. He revelled in the power. It made him feel whole again. But beneath the armour, beneath the burnt necrotic skin, he felt keenly his weakness. He had reached Scarif too late; he had failed aboard the Profundity; he was failing now aboard the Tantive IV. Until those plans, the Emperor's plans, were in his hands, nothing he had done today would be considered a success.

Dead. Dead. So few of them aboard, but they had fought to the bitter end. The casualties did not matter—he could always get more stormtroopers—but the courage and coordination of their last stand troubled him. Vader had overseen a thousand such massacres, perhaps. Sometimes, they were even ready for him; the Rebels were well-trained now, and their counterattacks were fierce. But always, when you slaughtered enough of their friends, the order broke down.

There was something different about the way these men fought together, perfectly coordinated and with unscathed courage, even to the last man.

The old masters—before Kenobi—had ways of swaying the odds. Yoda's presence on the battlefield, it was said, could make ten troops fight like a hundred. But the art of battle meditation was lost, now: to his knowledge, Kenobi had never mastered it. But the old man was full of tricks. Even surrounded by the dead, Vader was uneasy.

When word came over the comms that they had managed to take one—one—prisoner alive, he had a difficult time measuring his steps. He thirsted for her terror; he craved it. He slowed his pace consciously as he came down to the main hallway, savouring the shock he knew his entrance would cause…

"Darth Vader," she snapped, almost before he entered the hallway. "Only you could be so bold."

He waited, a moment too long, for his ventilator to fill his lungs to reply, and she continued to hiss and spit at him in front of his own men. Even Commander Jir, dumbstruck at his side, could do nothing to interrupt the young woman's tirade.

It was the last of his patience. He pressed the Senator calmly, keeping his voice even, narrowing the focus of his anger to her, probing for her emotions, determined to provoke her to fear even if he had to use the Force to do it. But this tiny woman, half his size, unseasoned in war, somehow shrugged off his will. It was impossible and he could not explain it. Her resilience was like nothing he had ever encountered. But his failure to intimidate her was the last frustration he could accept from this miserable day. He would have killed her on the spot, if he'd had the plans in hand, or even another prisoner to interrogate. But there was nothing to be done now.

"I don't know what you're talking about," she scolded him—and kept going. He could take no more.

"You are part of the Rebel Alliance and a traitor," he barked. "Take her away!"

The plans were gone. The survivors were dead. The stormtroopers had witnessed a slip of a girl give him a dressing down and walk away unharmed. And Kenobi was nowhere to be found after all.

"Holding her is dangerous…" Commander Jir advised, nipping at his heels without a moment's pause. After only a few moments with Senator Organa's uppity daughter, the men had already begun to second-guess his command. His command.

Vader gritted his blackened teeth. This insufferable day was far from over.