Embarrassment mottled the midshipman’s face.
“Nothing to say for yourself, Ensign?”
“Nothing at this time, sir.”
“I thought not.”
Tarkin swung to a female officer standing at the opposite end of the row. “Chief, Ensign Baz is relieved of duty. See to it that he is escorted to the crew berth and confined to quarters for the remainder of the voyage. I will decide his fate once we reach Coruscant.”
The petty officer saluted. “Yes, sir.”
“Also, alert Commander Cassel that the vehicle pool has become a rendezvous area for spice users. Tell him to perform a flash inspection of all barracks and personal lockers. I expect him to confiscate all inebriants and other illicit substances.”
“Sir,” she said.
Dismissed, the rest of the crew scattered with haste, and Tarkin blew out his breath in irritation. The conversation with Mas Amedda had left him on edge, and he was taking his frustration out on his crew. He understood and fully supported the idea of a chain of command, but he took it personally when power plays interfered with his duties. He trusted Cassel to attend to Sentinel’s responsibilities in his absence, but he wasn’t comfortable with being summoned away at such a critical time, much less without full explanation. If the purpose of the visit was to discuss the recent attack, then perhaps he should have delayed filing the report. If not about the attack, what matter could be so vital that it couldn’t wait until after the looming shipments were safely escorted to Geonosis?
What was done was done, however, and he was determined to present the best possible face to the Emperor.
Leaving the main compartment, he walked forward through two hatches to the ship’s command cabin, which he had designed to be more spacious than those found on similar ships, as it was here that he spent most of his travel time. Immediately he found himself relaxing, and let out his breath in slow reprieve. If exasperated by Coruscant’s demands, he should at least be able to find some solace in the ship.
At just under 150 meters in length, the corvette fit neatly between the old Judicial cruisers and Corellian Engineering’s new-generation frigates. Heavily armed with turbolasers, ion cannons, and proton torpedo tubes, and featuring a Class One hyperdrive that made it the fastest ship in the Imperial Navy, the Carrion Spike had been designed specifically for him — and to meet many of his personal specifications — by Sienar Fleet Systems. Based on a prototype stealth corvette that had been introduced during the Clone Wars at the Battle of Christophsis to counter Separatist Admiral Trench’s blockade of the planet, the triangular-shaped ship was unique in having cloak technology. Powered by rare stygium crystals, the stealth system rendered the ship essentially invisible to ordinary scanners.
Hearing Tarkin enter, the captain — a slim, dark-complected man who had served under Tarkin during the war — swiveled in his acceleration chair.
“Sir, do you wish to assume the controls?”
Tarkin nodded and replaced him in the command chair, running his hands over the instruments as he settled in. The Carrion Spike’s ion turbine sublight arrays, countermeasures suite, and navicomputer were also state-of-the-art, the latter allowing the ship to make the jump from Sentinel Base to Coruscant without exiting hyperspace to retrieve routing data from relay stations or primitive hyperwave beacons.
Gazing into the nebulous swirl of hyperspace, he decided that, yes, he could take comfort in having such a ship. In many respects the Carrion Spike was a sign of just how far he had come, and where he now stood in the Imperial hegemony.
And what Eriadu wouldn’t have given for such a vessel in the decades leading up to the Clone Wars! At that point the sector’s problems were pirates lured by sudden wealth, privateers hired by Eriadu’s competitors in the lommite trade, and resistance factions protesting the unjust practices of shipping conglomerates operating with impunity in the free trade zones. Eriadu would eventually triumph with the defenses it had at its disposal; but a ship like the Carrion Spike might have granted the Seswenna the edge it needed to vanquish its enemies with greater efficiency and added flourish.
In the absence of a Republic military, and as punishment for refusing to provide the Core Worlds with profitable deals, Judicials — the Republic’s non-Jedi law enforcers — were often withheld from intervening in disputes, leaving the Seswenna little choice but to create its own armed forces. A loosely knit group that came to be known as the Outland Regions Security Force, the sector’s response to pirates and privateers had to make do with second-rate ships built on Eriadu or at Sluis Van, and with laser and ion cannons purchased from arms merchants who for a century had been ignoring the Republic’s ban on the sale of weaponry to member worlds.
Not six standard months after passing his ultimate test on the Carrion Plateau, sixteen-year-old Wilhuff was sent up the well to begin his training in space combat, his tutelage supervised by an entirely new cast of characters, some of them Tarkins, but others from worlds as distant as Bothawui and Ryloth. Jova had neither a taste nor the tolerance for space, but would sometimes sedate himself with anti-nausea drugs and accompany his grand-nephew, less to offer hands-on instruction in astrogation, combat maneuvering, and weapons training than to make sure that Wilhuff was applying in zero-g the lessons he had learned on the plateau.
“More than fifty Tarkins have lost their lives to marauders,” his uncle told him, “and the number of Eriaduans who’ve been killed is beyond estimation.”
To drive home the point, their first stop was a colony world of Eriadu that had a suffered a recent attack by pirates. Wilhuff had had ample time to grow accustomed to the sight, scent, and taste of blood, but he had never seen so much human blood spilled in one place. The mining colony had been attacked without warning, thoroughly plundered, and burned to the ground. Those settlers who hadn’t died of laser wounds or been incinerated in the fires had been mercilessly butchered and left to be picked over by scavengers or consumed by insects. It was clear to Wilhuff that many of them had been tortured. Hundreds of settlers had been abducted and perhaps already sold into slavery.
Wilhuff was sickened, physically and spiritually, in a way he had never experienced on the Carrion, and the disgust he felt gave rise to despair and a hunger for revenge.
“This is the way of things among the lawless,” Jova said as they moved grimly through the destruction, not so much to defuse Wilhuff’s outrage as to anchor the massacre in a moral context. “Pirates, privateers, or activists, they’re no different from the vermin and predators we dealt with on the Carrion. They need to be educated, and acquainted with our notion of law and order. So you treat them just like the ones we hunted or forced into submission, striking fast and in full commitment. You make use of asteroid fields, nebulae, star flares, whatever you find, to intensify the havoc. You keep them off balance with unexpected maneuvers, and you let your starfighters function like vibro-lances in the hands of our Rodians. You establish supremacy like we showed you, by concentrating all the force at your command on one point, hammering away like you would with a vibroblade, through armor like you would through scales or cartilage or bone, and you show no quarter. You stay on your quarry until you’ve found the soft spot that brings death, and you put the fear into the rest by gutting your victim, ripping out his liver, and devouring it.”
As he was expected to, Wilhuff took his uncle’s instructions to heart, by demonstrating in space the mettle he had shown on the Carrion.