How to Take an Empire

Chapter Sixty-Eight: Sidious' Interlude

He should have had Ahsoka Tano killed back when she'd been in his grasp.

Before him was the image of the former Jedi from the broadcast that even his best communications officers had been unable to stop. They had been able to trace the broadcast. But if Tano had been clever enough to hide in the shadows and build a rebellion, she'd been clever enough to know a broadcast of that magnitude could be traced. She would be gone by the time he could send anyone to get his hands on her. He sent someone to the location anyway.

The large doors to his throne room, formerly the Jedi's own High Council chambers, opened. Even now, nine years since the demise of the Jedi, he could sense the echoes of pain, fear, and suffering as his millennia-old enemies were cut down by his command with the help of one they'd called their own, their graveyard being the new foundation and beginning of his Sith Empire.

Lord Vader made his way into the room, faltering ever slightly at the image of Tano lit up off to the side. He recovered quickly enough and kneeled before Sidious' throne. Sidious decided not to acknowledge him immediately, ever conscious of the rising tension in his apprentice at the site of his own former apprentice from when he was a Jedi. Ever conscious of his apprentice trying and failing to control the turbulent mix of dark emotions growing within him.

Finally, Sidious said, "Rise, Lord Vader."

Vader rose to his feet, his gaze immediately going to the holo of the togruta woman beside him.

"The apprentice lives," Vader finally said with all the fury Sidious expected of him.

"So it seems," Sidious replied. "At the head of a Rebellion and with an army to add insult to injury."

"The Alderaan Royal family was involved," Vader stated. "At least, that is what she alluded to in her declaration of war."

"Yes," Sidious replied, tapping his fingers on the arm of his throne.

Anger burned in him at the audacity of the girl's words—the promise of not just war but to bring it right to the seat of his power.

Sidious had once appraised Tano as a potential threat to gaining Skywalker as his apprentice when Skywalker had first been assigned to teach her. Ultimately he'd determined that Skywalker's attachment to the brat would hold little sway over his future apprentice coming to the dark side. He'd refocused his efforts on continuing to encourage seeds of distrust and miscommunication between the boy and those he was loyal to—the Order, Obi-wan Kenobi, and his dear wife. He'd given the girl no more thought or concern.

The girl had even been an unexpected boon to Sidious when, without his interference or manipulation, her fellow Jedi framed her for the crime of bombing the Jedi Temple. All he'd had to do was watch the Jedi Order and the Senate flounder as they made hasty decisions resulting from the fear produced out the chaos of the war. A wrongful conviction and an execution, especially if Skywalker had been unable to stop it, would have done more to sow the seeds of distrust between the Order and Skywalker than Sidious could have ever manufactured. But even the near-miss of such a tragedy had done enough. Then, as a result of Skywalker's hastiness and rage, he'd caused the Council to separate him from the girl, something he'd lamented over to Sidious many times. It was both tragically pathetic and fortunate how the Council practically pushed the boy into his grasp by unwittingly making him feel so isolated.

By the time Sidious told the boy the Jedi had to be eradicated, he hadn't even had to do much convincing. Eliminating the Jedi was a personal vendetta that just so happened to be the apparent key to gaining strength in the dark side to save his wife from her inevitable death. He'd asked of the boy nothing that he hadn't already wanted to do over the years. And if that had not cemented his hold on the boy, if he had been mildly concerned that Skywalker's former apprentice had escaped, that she had any lingering influence over him, she'd rectified the problem herself with the near-fatal strike she'd given him.