How to Take an Empire

Chapter Fifty-Nine: Améla

It would certainly be easy to pass off this insurgency as the workings of some isolated group, but Vader had been married to one of Naboo's former queens. There was almost nothing that happened on Naboo of this magnitude that their queen didn't know about. He fought his way through a path to the palace, not killing every insurgent he came across, but probably killing more than necessary in his ire and definitely injuring more. To his credit, he wasn't going out of his way to help the Imperial ground forces that they were trying to subdue.

Once he was in the palace, it didn't take him long to fight through the chaos to where the Naboo Royal Guard and the queen's handmaidens had holed themselves up in the throne room. He assumed they used a diversion to keep most of the action away from there for the time being because he met no resistance from either side of the fight. The only opposition he was met with was massive, wooden, barricaded doors, which he easily blasted through with Force.

The blasters of the handmaidens were already raised, but before they could shoot, a wave of Vader's hand had the weapons flying from their grasps.

"This need not end in violence," Vader said.

Unsurprisingly, Naboo's teenage queen wasn't buying that.

"Your master and the Empire you've both built have left us with little choice in the matter," she replied in the practiced monotone that the queens of Naboo favored.

"Do not force me to kill you."

Because Force knew killing their queen was something the Naboo would never forgive him for, no matter what plan he and Ahsoka had in place to rid them of the Emperor forever.

"Then you will be forced," the Queen declared defiantly.

Vader gripped his lightsaber, his temper beginning to get the better of him. So much so that if there was a better option, he couldn't think of it. So, he paused. He had a while before the violence made its way to this part of the palace, if it did. And as talented as he knew Naboo's Royal Guard and the handmaidens to be, they were no threat to him.

He shed some of the thick layers of the dark side from around him, imploring the Force for an option that didn't necessitate more death than he'd already wrought on the Naboo in their foolhardy attempt. The goal was to make sure the Emperor got off-planet. The feat would have been easy if he'd been able to go with the Emperor himself, but the Naboo insurgency made that impossible for him. Thus, the only way to absolutely ensure the Emperor's survival was for the queen to call off the forces that would no doubt be in pursuit of him.

Without the dark side fogging his mental faculties, the solution became apparent.

"Allow me to have a one on one discussion with your queen," Vader said as the palace shook with an explosion.

The captain of her guard immediately began to protest that, but the queen held up her hand to silence him. As the Queen set her hand back in her lap, she made a nearly imperceptible gesture. A gesture that Vader would have missed if he hadn't been familiar with the ways that Padmé and her handmaidens communicated with each other when they switched places. The gesture gave away that the one dressed as the queen was a decoy.

He should have known.

He observed the handmaidens, looking for the one that would respond. One with dark brown eyes and dark blond hair pulled into an elegant braided knot at the back of her head caught Vader's attention, standing just in the decoy's line of sight. She frowned only slightly, breaking the practiced passive mask of the handmaidens before again schooling her features.

Vader pointed to her and said, "Believe me, Your Highness. If I'd wanted to kill you, all of you would have been dead not long after I'd walked into the room. You'd do well to send away your entourage, or I'll ensure our one-on-one discussion myself."