Part 7 (2/2)
Anakin - he still thought of himself as Anakin - heard the engine of an arriving stars.h.i.+p travel over his position. He had no idea how much time had pa.s.sed before he heard a clone trooper's voice call out, ”Your majesty, this way.”
Then he heard Palpatine's voice, ”There he is. He's still alive.”
Anakin's blackened torso went completely limp as he finally allowed darkness to sweep over him.
Anakin awoke on an operating table, surrounded by droids. The recently appointed Emperor Palpatine had brought him to a surgical reconstruction center on Coruscant, and the droids were busily attaching robotic limbs to his quivering torso, which was strapped to the table by strong metal belts. The droids were working fast to maintain the precious midi-chlorians that existed in Anakin's blood and tissue. To prevent the midi-chlorians from becoming thinned by intrusive chemicals, the droids were working without anesthetics.
Anakin felt everything.
He felt each cold metal blade that sliced into his hideously scarred flesh to allow more tools to probe and stabilize his damaged internal organs. He squirmed as shattered bones were replaced by plastoid, and cringed as lasers grafted the new limbs into place. At some point, he overheard a surgical droid explaining to Palpatine that he would require a special helmet and backpack to cycle air in and out of his damaged lungs.
Despite this damage, throughout the entire procedure, he never stopped screaming.
Finally stabilized, Anakin lay quietly on the table to which he was still secured. He was clad in a gleaming black life-support suit with a lighted control function panel set across his chest. He watched as a robot mechanism above his head slowly lowered a black mask with oval vision receptors and a triangular respiratory vent over his face, while another mechanism placed a helmet over his skull. The helmet and mask locked onto each other as they simultaneously bolted to the armored ring that wrapped around his neck. Fully encased within the pressurized suit, he heard a labored, mechanical rasp, then realized it was the sound of his own breathing.
The table tilted, raising Anakin's restrained body to a standing position. From the shadows of the operating room, the hooded Emperor stepped forward and said, ”Lord Vader. Can you hear me?”
Vader? That's right. . . I'm Darth Vader. Anakin is gone.
Vader exhaled, then said, ”Yes, Master.” The mask's vocabulator had transformed his voice into a commanding baritone. He still felt weak, so it was with some difficulty that he slowly turned his head, adjusting his vision through the helmet to better see the Emperor. The Emperor's face was gnarled and twisted, deformed by the Sith lightning that had been briefly deflected by Mace Windu during their battle.
”Where is Padme?” Vader said in his new voice. After everything that had happened, he was still concerned for her, still loved her, still wanted to save her life. ”Is she safe? Is she all right?”
In his most sympathetic tone, Palpatine said, ”It seems, in your anger, you killed her.”
”I? I couldn't have,” Vader said with disbelief. 7 loved her! I did everything I could to save - his mind's voice sounded strange to him, weaker than the synthesized roll of thunder that emitted from his mask. He recalled choking Padme on Mustafar, watching her body crumple and fall on the landing pad.
I didn 't mean to...
Vader snarled, ”She was alive. I felt it!”
Palpatine took a cautious step backward as Vader moaned with grief and rage. Around the laboratory, equipment and droids began to rapture and burst as Vader lashed out in all directions with his Force powers. There was a loud snap of metal as he tore his left arm free from the table, then his right. He lurched forward on alloy legs that were fitted into c.u.mbersome boots until he stood at the edge of the surgical floor. And somehow, through all his anger, he suddenly sensed at least one truth: Padme was dead, along with their unborn child.
”No!” he bellowed so loud and long that his cry echoed off the walls. Behind his mask, he squeezed his eyes shut in an effort to hold back the tears that he was physically unable to wipe away.
But no tears came. He didn't know whether the surgical droids had altered or removed his tear ducts, and he was beyond caring. All he knew for certain was that Padme was gone from him forever... and that there were more than a few Jedi still waiting to be killed.
Devoid of love for anyone, and unable to feel the touch of anything through his gloved, cybernetic fingers, Darth Vader was finally ready to fully embrace the dark side.
And so he did.
CHAPTER 13.
Darth Vader's earliest missions involved tracking down the Jedi who had survived the purge. He investigated every reported sighting, traveled to many remote worlds to hunt his quarry, and killed every Jedi he found. No reports led to Obi-Wan or Yoda, but Vader remained ever vigilant.
With every pa.s.sing day, Vader distanced himself from the Jedi he had been. Where Anakin Skywalker had been influenced by traumatic circ.u.mstances, Vader shaped himself by inflicting pain on others. Unfortunately, because of his artificial arms, he was unable to conjure Sith Lightning or be invulnerable to it. He would always be weaker than the Emperor.
Few people were aware of what had become of Anakin Skywalker, but it was not long before nearly everyone in the Galactic Empire had heard some rumor or stray fact about Palpatine's new servant. One month after Palpatine became Emperor, a story circulated that Vader had tracked down a nest of fifty Jedi traitors and killed every one of them by himself. Eyewitnesses described him as a wraithlike being who seemed to possess Jedi powers and wielded a lightsaber, but he was definitely not a Jedi. After all, the Jedi may have attempted to overthrow the Republic, but they had never been known to strangle their opponents.
Some suspected Darth Vader was a droid engineered to carry out the Emperor's will. Others suggested that he might have once been a professional gladiator or bounty hunter. There was even speculation that he might be a well-known public figure who had a.s.sumed the name ”Darth Vader” and wore his face-concealing helmet to hide his true ident.i.ty.
Vader himself did nothing to reveal his personal history. As far as he was concerned, the only thing people had to know about him was that he answered only to the Emperor.
As the Emperor's lieutenant, Vader carried out his Master's directives with lethal precision. Besides hunting Jedi, he supervised the expansion of the Imperial Navy and enforced every new law - many of which promoted the hatred of nonhumans - to bring greater power to the Empire. Those who opposed or disappointed Vader wound up dead or enslaved, and even Palpatine' s most ardent supporters regarded the masked, shadowy cyborg with dread. In a short time, his very name became synonymous with terror.
The Emperor reorganized the Galactic Senate as the Imperial Senate, so he could continue to monitor and manipulate the representatives of the worlds he now controlled. Vader accompanied the Emperor to the more important Senate functions, which were often attended by Senator Bail Organa of Alderaan, among others. During the Clone Wars, Anakin Skywalker had, for a time, shared Senator Amidala's regard for Organa as a rare, honorable politician, but to Darth Vader, the man was as insignificant as a common insect. Like most people, Organa directed his gaze elsewhere when Vader was present.
After allocating the more mundane responsibilities of government to paranoid administrators, the Emperor made fewer public appearances, which allowed him to devote more of his time to studying the dark side of the Force in his palace on Coruscant. In time, Vader's looming form became the ultimate icon of Imperial authority. But the Emperor never let Vader forget who was in charge. Over time, they had many variations of the same conversation, which usually began with the Emperor's taunting question: ”Are you afraid of death, Lord Vader?”
”No, Master.”
”Then why do you go on living?”
”To learn to become more powerful, Master.”
”Do you seek such power so you might try to strike me down?”
”You are my path to power, Master. I need you.”
”Yes, my apprentice. Remember your place, and that you have much to learn.”
Vader eventually created his own private retreat, Bast Castle, on the storm-scoured planet Vjun, where Count Dooku had once taken refuge during the Clone Wars. On Vjun, Vader conducted his own studies of the dark side. He had no doubt that the Emperor knew what he wanted more than anything: the power to kill his Master. But because Palpatine was so incredibly powerful, and despite several attempts, Vader learned that he had no reason to believe he could ever defeat the elder Sith Lord.
As the years pa.s.sed, the Empire expanded by conquering more worlds. While cloned soldiers were still utilized for the Imperial Navy, humans also began serving as enlisted officers or were conscripted into duty as technicians, pilots, and stormtroopers.
Although Anakin Sky walker had never had any personal exchanges with the bounty hunter Jango Fett, Darth Vader did become familiar with Fett's cloned ”son,” Boba Fett, who had inherited his father's armor, weapons, and stars.h.i.+p. As Boba Fett gained a well-deserved reputation as the best bounty hunter in the galaxy, it was inevitable that Vader would occasionally retain him for clandestine a.s.signments.
Vader also supervised secret operations on numerous worlds. To enlist deadly Noghri warriors to his cause, he came to the aid of their planet after he had covertly poisoned it with life-inhibiting toxins. When an Imperial research station accidentally released a lethal bioagent on the planet Falleen, Vader commanded his soldiers to fire turbolasers at the contaminated world, killing over two hundred thousand Falleen natives.
Of all the operations that Darth Vader oversaw, the most important was the construction of the Death Star, a moon-sized battle station that, when finished, would be equipped with a superlaser capable of destroying entire planets. Conceived by one of the Empire's highest-ranking officers, Grand Moff Wilhuff Tarkin, and originally designed on Geonosis, the Death Star promised to be the Empire's ultimate weapon. As part of Tarkin's doctrine of Rule by Fear, the battle station would strike such terror throughout the galaxy that no world would dare defy or disobey an Imperial command.
As Palpatine had foreseen, the Empire did have its enemies. One particular underground movement - the Alliance to Restore the Republic, more commonly known as the Rebel Alliance - proved to be the most irritating. Although Imperial officials were certain that the Rebels had established a secret base, the base's location remained unknown.
Nineteen years after the end of the Clone Wars and the birth of the Empire, the Rebel Alliance attacked an Imperial convoy in the Toprawa system in the Outer Rim. Darth Vader immediately realized that it had been a diversionary tactic, and that the Rebels' real goal was to infiltrate an Imperial research station on Toprawa.
The Rebels had stolen the plans for the Death Star.
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