Amedda adopted a haughty look. “And deprive us of such verbal sport? Next time, perhaps.”
Tarkin remained at his desk after Amedda ended the transmission and the hologram vanished. Then he signaled for the protocol droid.
“I’m going to need that uniform as soon as possible,” he told the RA-7 as it entered.
The droid nodded. “Certainly, sir. I’ll instruct the fabricator to begin at once.”
Tarkin summoned the uniformed 3-D image of himself from the holotable and regarded it, thinking back to Eriadu and recalling Jova’s comment once more.
“It’ll look even better with blood on it.”
A boy's life
CYNOSURE OF THE Greater Seswenna sector of the Outer Rim, Eriadu could trace its history to the earliest era of the Republic. At that time, the galaxy’s dark age had ended, the Sith had been defeated and driven into hiding, and a true republic had emerged from the ashes. With a member of House Valorum presiding as Supreme Chancellor, a pan-galactic Senate had been created, and the military had been disbanded. Revitalized, the populations of the Core Worlds, ravenous for new resources and not above exploiting every opportunity to enhance the quality of their lives, were eager to expand their reach.
The planet was transformed from just another Outer Rim wilderness to a civilized world worth considering for inclusion in the Republic by adventurous pioneers who had been granted permission by Coruscant to procure and settle new territories, either by cutting deals with indigenous populations or simply by overrunning them, and finally to establish trading colonies capable of furnishing the Core with much-needed resources. It was a scenario played out in many remote regions, and in Eriadu’s case the resource happened to be lommite ore — essential to the production of transparisteel — rich deposits of which had been discovered on worlds throughout the Greater Seswenna. Lacking funds to mine, process, and ship the crude, Eriadu’s settlers had been forced to secure high-interest loans from the InterGalactic Banking Clan, but in an era when hyperspace travel between the Seswenna and the Core required astrogating by hyperwave beacons — with numerous reversions to realspace necessary to ensure safe passage — shipments of ore were frequently delayed or lost due to one catastrophe or another. As debts mounted, Eriadu risked becoming a client world of Muun bankers until entrepreneurs from the Core world Corulag had intervened, rescuing the planet from servitude. It was likewise through Corulag’s influence with the Republic Senate that the fledgling Hydian Way had been routed through Eriadu space and the planet placed on the galactic map.
Corulag’s motives, however, were not altogether altruistic; the Core entrepreneurs forced Eriadu to increase the lommite supply and had demanded the bulk of the mining profits. Amplified operations led to rampant growth and an influx of impoverished workers from neighboring worlds. Eriadu’s once lush mountains were soon stripped of cover, a pall of pollution hung over the major cities, and the standard of living plummeted. Still, there was prosperity for a few; quick credits to be made in ore processing, local and deep-space transport, and usury.
For the Tarkins, wealth came by providing security.
Their climb to the top had been hard won. Among Eriadu’s earliest pioneers, the ancestral Tarkins had had to function as their own police force and defenders, countering attacks first by the ferocious predators that thrived in Eriadu’s forests and mountains, then by off-world rogues and scoundrels who preyed on the exposed populations of the struggling settlements. Under Tarkin leadership local militias evolved slowly into a sector military. As a result, and despite his celebrated ancestors having had their start as hunters, freelance pilots, and mining contractors, Tarkin thought of himself as the product of a military upbringing, in which discipline, respect, and obedience were held in the highest regard. Avowed technocrats as well, the family held a view that it was technology — more than Corulag — that had rescued Eriadu from savagery and had allowed Eriaduans to forge a civilization from a murderous wasteland. Technology in the form of colossal machines, swift starships, and potent weapons had helped convert the hunted into the hunters, and it would be technology that would one day usher the planet into the elite of the modern galaxy.
While Tarkin had been raised with all the advantages that came with wealth, it was a curious kind of privilege. In mansions that strived to emulate the architectural fashions of the Core but were little more than gaudy imitations of the originals, the Tarkins and others like them did their best to mimic the customs of the affluent, without ever succeeding. Their hardscrabble roots were far too apparent, and life on Eriadu seemed barbaric compared with life on cosmopolitan Coruscant. Tarkin understood this at an early age, particularly when dignitaries from the Core visited and made his parents feel smaller than he knew them to be; less evolved for living on a wild world whose outlands were racked by seismic quakes, whose rough cities lacked weather control and opera houses, and whose residents were still battling pirates and rapacious nature for supremacy. And yet he felt no need to search outside his own family for childhood heroes, since it was his ancestors who had fought back the wilderness, survived the odds, and brought order and progress to the Seswenna.
Even in relaxed and safe surroundings, then, Tarkin was not the entitled child one might have imagined judging by his tailored clothes or rambling home. As proud as his parents were of their achievements, they were also well aware of their low social standing among people who mattered. They never missed an opportunity to remind their son that life was inequitable, and that only those with an appetite for personal glory could succeed. One needed to be willing to crush underfoot anything or anyone. Discipline and order were the keys, and law was the only unanswerable response to chaos.
At every opportunity Tarkin’s parents would emphasize what it meant to live in deprivation. Their sermons were designed to drill into their son the fact that everything they owned was the product of having overcome adversity. Worse, affluence could vanish in an instant; without constant vigilance and the drive to succeed, everything one had could be wrested away by someone stronger, more disciplined, more committed to personal glory.
“How do you imagine we came to the point where we have so much,” his father might say over dinner, “while so many outside the gates of this elegant home have to struggle to survive? Or do you imagine that we have always resided in such luxury, that Eriadu was accommodating from the start?”
Early on, young Wilhuff would only stare down at his plate of food in silence or mutter that he had no answers to his father’s questions. Then, during one supper, his father — tall and straight-backed, with deep forehead creases that curved down past his eyes like parentheses — ordered the family’s servant to remove Wilhuff’s meal before he’d had a chance to take so much as a bite from it.
“You see how easy it is to go from having everything to having nothing?” his father asked.
“How would you fare if we now banished you to the city streets?” his mother added. Nearly as tall as her husband, she dressed in expensive clothes for every meal and affected elaborate hairstyles that were sometimes hours in the making. “Would you do what you needed to do to survive? Could you bring yourself to wield a club, a knife, a blaster, if weapons were what it took to keep you from starving?”
In an effort to calculate the expected response, Wilhuff glanced between the two of them and puffed out his chest. “I would do whatever I had to do.”
His father only grinned in disdain. “A brave one, are you? Well, you’ll have that bravery put to the test when you’re taken to the Carrion.”
The Carrion.
There it was again: that strange word he had heard so often growing up. But just then he asked: “What is the Carrion?”
His father seemed pleased that his son had finally wondered aloud. “A place that teaches you the meaning of survival.”