A Certain Point of View

Chapter 4: A Presence

The hulking Devastator roared silently through hyperspace with an eerie serenity. Only onboard, in the pressurized hallways of manufactured durasteel, could the desperate rumble and whine of the behemoth's engines be felt. On the bridge, although the ship surged through space faster than light itself, Captain Wermis could not stop looking over his shoulder. The repulsorlift doors were still and silent—for now—but any moment, now, they would yawn open to reveal a dark visitor. The captain had only a few moments in charge of his own bridge, and resolved to use them.

Taking a moment to steady his quaking voice, he cleared his throat and motioned to one of the engineers.

"Sir?" the Imperial officer responded.

"Recall the supply access turbolift on Deck Two and have it standing by," he said. "Send a crew down to prepare an escape pod. Get it done by the time we come out of hyperspace."

"As you command."

It was refreshing to hear those words again, even now with his fate rushing up to meet him. Although he was the Devastator's commander of record, there was no question who was in full control of the ship. The monstrous Sith Lord who had ordered this jump was taking an incalculable risk, targeting an obscure Outer Rim world almost at random. And when that risk inevitably failed, Wermis had no intent of being the nearest scapegoat for that failure.

"Captain?"

Wermis snapped out of his thoughts and turned to the engineer. "Go on."

"We're coming up on the Tatoo system. Shall I bring us out of hyperspace?"

That would bring him running.

"Negative," said Wermis with feigned confidence. "Take us all the way in to Tatooine. Right into outer grav. Pull out as late as you can. We wouldn't want to spoil the surprise."

The engineer nodded. "With due respect, sir...there are three dozen inhabitable systems in the Arkanis Sector. The Rebel ship could have made a short-haul jump to any one of them on this lane."

"One world's as good as another, then," said Wermis.

"If we guessed wrong," said the engineer, "they'll have all the time they need to calculate a second jump before we get another chance."

The turbolift hissed and Wermis's heart sank as the door slammed open.

"Let's hope we guessed right," he whispered. Behind him, the terrible breathing. The long shadow.

"Bring us out," he ordered, and turned to face his inexorable fate.

The Star Destroyer burst from another place into the dark expanse of common space, shuddering as it hit the trace gravity of the binary stars and fought to steady its incalculable mass. Seeming at first a thousand miles away across only twenty feet of durasteel floor, the Dark Lord of the Sith came towards him, mood nearly unreadable. But Wermis had grown so accustomed to that regulated breathing that he could tell it was off-pace—faster than usual. Was he angry? Was he eager? Or was his terrible armour simply preparing him for the fight to come?

The black armour was dusty and smelt faintly of ozone. He'd been fighting already.

"T-Tatooine, my lord," Wermis stammered. "As you commanded."

As if the captain had said nothing, Darth Vader strode past him to the observation port of the bridge and looked out on the stars. Wermis looked, too, searching the blackness for some glimmering speck, some spark of hope that would save him from fatally absorbing the Dark Lord's failure. But the space before them was too impossibly vast to be sure.

They stood in silence a long moment. Wermis was nearly in tears. His thoughts drifted to the service turbolift, to the escape pod, to the bleak and desolate Tatooine surface. He wondered if he might make it, if he bolted. But he knew he would not.

"Lord Vader," called the engineer, as if the captain had never existed. "Scanners pick up a passenger transport taking evasive action. Corvette class."

"That's it," said Vader. "Engage pursuit. Target their main reactor with forward batteries, and direct the assault commander to prepare a boarding party."

Wermis breathed a sigh of relief as the tension in his chest collapsed. But it was perhaps too audible a sign, as the Dark Lord hesitated before repairing to the Assault Deck.

"Your fears have betrayed you," said Vader. "See that in the future they do not betray me." He strode off the bridge at that, and was already gone when word came up from Deck Two that the crew sent to prepare his escape pod had been found littering the hallway, strangled by an unseen hand.

As Wermis received the news with cold horror, the turbolift behind him leapt to full speed, carrying its brooding passenger nearly the full height of the ship to the hangar below. The change in pressure, in gravity, brought a searing pain to the places where the armour scratched at his raw flesh—and that pain brought him focus.

The Emperor had demanded absolute containment of the situation. That much had already failed, and it was only through the Force, or luck, or maybe even both, that he had caught them immediately upon their escape from Scarif. The ship had jumped to hyperspace almost instantly, far too fast to have made instant calculations for a vessel its size. So the ship had been prepared for a jump to Tatooine from the beginning, even before the battle had been joined. That intrigued him and concerned him.

There could have been no way of knowing the little ship's destination, but for a familiar twinge he felt rippling through the Force. Even as his body betrayed him, as his anger powered the abilities he despised and weakened the ones he desired most, his insight had become incalculably powerful: if he had not reached across worlds, not exactly, he had felt an energy, a peculiar strong tremor that led him the only way it could have.

Who but his old master would lure him to the world he so despised? Who even knew of the forsaken, Hutt-controlled rock? Only Obi-Wan, now, knew of Anakin Sywalker's beginnings. Only he would think to hide on the one planet where a storm of old emotions—even love—interfered with the purity of Vader's grip on the Dark Side. Only Obi-Wan would have lured him to the place where he was weakest to end their conflict at last. With an eagerness he dared not admit, even to himself, Vader prepared himself to meet his destiny, and to finish what he had begun.