The medical bay seals behind the last droid.
The Exactor's secondary bay, the one that does not get used for crew, the one whose access protocols I locked to my voice and my voice alone the morning we left Murkhana orbit. The droids pushed out into the corridor. The maintenance overrides set. Forty minutes on the cycle counter before the next scheduled droid sweep, and the ships officer corp has been told there is to be no override of the lock in that window for any reason short of a hull breach.
I am alone.
The bacta rises around what is left of me. Warm. Lifting me off the support rack. Same as always. The temperature differential settles. The pain in the necrotic patches dulls a half-step under the bacta's chemistry.
The respirator is off.
I breathe through what is left of my own throat: wet, labored, each inhalation a reminder that the lungs were in no condition to work this hard without assistance. The silence around me is the silence of my suit's absence. The mechanical rhythm that lives in every room I am in is gone. What replaces it is the sound of my own ruined breathing, audible only to me, audible only here.
This session is not rest.
My suit lies on the rack across the bay. Mine without me in it. The pieces in their cradles: chest plate, gorget, shoulder couplings, prosthetics laid out as the droids left them.
I extend the Force into it.
Anakin's mechanical intuition wakes. Slow at first, then absolute. Decades of his hands on engines, on droids, on starfighters, on the prosthetic at his right wrist that he kept fine-tuning until he was good enough to upgrade the work himself. Knowledge that arrives without effort because the body that learned it is still partly the body I am operating.
The Force moves through the circuitry like fingers tracing veins.
I find the kill switch rerouting first.
Still holding. The signal path I redirected weeks ago in this same medbay still reads as fully functional to any external scan. Drawn through the auxiliary diagnostic loop. Terminated at a feedback node that loops back into itself. The kill command swallowed before it can reach the priming relays. Palpatine's medical droids will run a complete diagnostic during the maintenance session waiting on the planet below. They will find the kill switch armed, paired, and ready to fire on his command.
It will not fire.
The hyperwave beacon next. The spoofing relay still transmits the cover signal: telemetry mimicked to the byte, location-pings appropriately delayed for orbital lag, the buffer populated with the exact data Palpatine's office would expect from a kill-switch-leashed apprentice operating in Imperial space. The beacon reads nominal. Has read nominal since the sabotage.
Both chains broken. Palpatine still blind.
I work circuit by circuit. Methodical. The same precision Anakin used the first time he field-stripped a J-7 actuator at thirteen: every relay traced, every contact verified, the Force moving through the connections with the discipline of a man defusing ordnance.
Because that is what this is.
Every second the kill switch reads as active is a second Palpatine believes he holds a leash that does not exist. The droids on Coruscant must find what they expect to find. Nothing better than last time, nothing improved, the system exactly as it was. An apparent improvement would raise questions.
Nominal is the goal.
I adjust the auxiliary timing on the relay one micro-cycle slower. Closer to the drift the relay would show after weeks of operation. Verify. Adjust the buffer noise floor on the beacon to match what the previous cycle showed. Verify.
Satisfied.
I begin to withdraw the Force from the armor.
Then —
A presence outside the door.
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I feel her before she can knock.
The Force carries her presence through the durasteel. Rivoche, the texture of her attention I have been learning for weeks. Alert. Purposeful. She has something to deliver, and she has chosen to deliver it now, which means it is timely.
Underneath the purpose: curiosity.
Bright. Contained. The thing she is professionally suppressing but cannot fully hide from someone reading the Force. The sealed medical bay. The droids pushed out. Me alone inside. She wants to know what is behind the door, and she knows better than to ask, and the knowing-better is doing most of the work of keeping the curiosity in.
She has earned the answer eventually.
Not now.
I reach.
This is not the manipulation of the garden, the volume turned up on existing desire. It is not what I did to Tansen with a cold Force-grip, or to Olee with drowning pressure in the lessons. It is direct. A presence entering her mind without violence, without demand. A voice that is not a voice settling into the space behind conscious thought.
Halt.
She stops mid-step.
Her curiosity spikes. Not fear. A hand jerking back from a door that opened on its own. The discomfort of another mind touching hers without warning, the recoil of a private interior that has just discovered it is not private. Her professional composure reasserts itself fast, faster than I expected, faster than most adults manage the first time. But the recoil was there.
I send calm alongside the next sending. A deliberate choice. I am managing her reaction the way I manage almost nothing else aboard this ship.
You will need to be accustomed to this. What are you interrupting me for?
A beat. She steadies. Then her voice, carefully level, through the door.
"My lord. We're twelve minutes out from Coruscant. Sublight on the approach." A breath. "The captain is asking whether you want the bridge for it, or whether he should run standard protocols and meet you at the shuttle bay when you're ready."
She does not ask what I am doing in here.
She is not going to.
She is going to keep what just happened inside her own head and wait. She is holding it on her own. In the corridor. After ten seconds. Faster than I expected.
Standard protocols. I will come to the shuttle when I am ready.
Another pause.
Wait outside.
"Yes, my lord."
I withdraw from her mind.
The Force releases the connection cleanly. Her presence settles outside the door, the curiosity still there, the discomfort folding in with everything else she carries. She will sit with it. She will not name it tonight. She will not ask me about it tomorrow. Sometime in the year ahead she will, and by then she will have decided what she wants to know.
I return to the armor.
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The bacta begins to drain.
The level drops by the centimeter: the warm amber retreating down past my shoulders, my chest, my abdomen. The cold air of the medbay touches what the bacta uncovers. The damaged skin reacts before I can suppress the reaction.
The shivering starts.
I do not fight it. The body does what the body does. There is no point in fighting the temperature differential on tissue this compromised.
The bacta is gone. I stand on the platform inside the empty tank.
I look down.
Six weeks without a proper maintenance cycle.
The necrotic patches I knew about are larger now. My right shoulder, where the prosthetic socket meets what is left of my deltoid. My lower spine, where my chest plate's posterior brace presses against tissue that lost its blood supply during the original reconstruction. The synthskin grafts I had Palpatine's droids lay down before Corellia have lost their slow battle against the underlying decay. The edges have lifted. The pressure sores beneath where my chest plate sits are deeper than they were before Corellia. The interface where my left forearm prosthetic meets my residual limb has gone black at the margin.
The smell.
Faint. Specific. The sweet-wrong scent of tissue that has stopped being tissue and started being something else.
I look at all of it.
Resignation rises first. Then anger. Not the hot anger that feeds the leviathan. The older one. The one that has been part of every moment in this body for so long it is the air I breathe. It surfaces only when I am made to look at it directly. The leviathan does not rise for it as it does for the hot anger. It stirs deeper. Slower.
The essence transfer is years away.
The research has not begun.
The body underneath the power is still rotting and will keep rotting, and there is nothing to be done about it except the maintenance cycle waiting on Coruscant and the certainty that Palpatine's droids will see every patch, every lifted margin, every centimeter of failed graft, and will report all of it to the man who already knew.
Let them see.
The decay is part of the performance. The broken weapon that still functions. Palpatine finds it useful to see the damage. It reminds him what he controls.
What he believes he controls.
I exit the tank.
The droids return through the bay's secondary door, mine, not his. The layering begins.
Compression sheath first. Black, elasticated, drawn tight against the necrotic patches to hold the synthskin in place under my suit's pressure cycles. The temperature stasis layer over that: the thin under-armor that runs the cold-loop my helmet feeds into when ambient temperature climbs. Plastex. Mylar. Each layer closing another centimeter of outside world away from what is left of me.
The prosthetics socket in.
The neural spike at the base of my spine seats first. The half-second lag before my fingers respond. The lag I had thought the reconstruction eliminated. It is back. Has been back for weeks. I have had to relearn what I learned the first year inside this suit: issuing motor commands a fraction of a second before I want them executed. The phantom sensation of limbs that end at metal instead of flesh.
My chest plate locks down.
The central control panel activates. Blue light. Red light. The diagnostic sequence cycles through the system check. Every reading nominal. Every relay paired. The kill switch armed and functional. The hyperwave beacon transmitting. Everything reading exactly as it read this morning, exactly as it read last week, exactly as it will read when Palpatine's droids run their version of the same cycle in the maintenance chamber below.
My helmet descends.
The needles seat at the base of my skull, my temples, the points along my cervical column where the system interfaces with what is left of my nervous system. My HUD flickers and steadies.
My respirator takes the first breath.
In-hiss. Out-rasp.
The silence is dead.
I stride out of the medical bay.
Rivoche falls in behind me without a word. Three paces back. Her face composed. The curiosity contained. Her presence in the Force calm. She has put the mind-touch where she will put many things in the years ahead, somewhere she can hold it and not let it distract her from the work in front of her.
The corridor lights pass over my chest plate.
The viewport at the corridor's end shows Coruscant.
The throneworld grows in the frame. The crown of fire. The city-planet that never sleeps. Palpatine's palace visible even from here: the tower rising above the haze, the dark needle that has been the orientation point of every Coruscant approach since I came back wearing this suit.
The maintenance droids waiting.
The debrief waiting.
Everything waiting.
In-hiss. Out-rasp.
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The Imperial Palace medical facilities.
Not EmPal SuRecon. That is the public-facing complex. This is the maintenance chamber from after Mustafar, from before Corellia, the chamber where the sabotage window opened during the routine cycle six weeks ago.
This is the third.
Pressurized atmosphere. The mechanical claw overhead, ready to lift and rotate my suit through the access stages. The observation window across the chamber where the operating surgeon would stand if a being capable of operating in this chamber existed.
Palpatine is already there.
Of course he is already there.
He stands at the window in the black-on-black robes, the post-Order-66 cut, not the Senate pageantry. The cowl up. The hands inside the sleeves. The chamber light catches the lower portion of the face and leaves the rest in shadow.
His presence in the Force is what it always is.
The black hole he has always been, the hungry emptiness, unchanged. His attention sits in the chamber at the constant level it always sits, neither pressing in to read me nor backing off to grant me space. I have learned to read that constant pressure as what enjoyment looks like in his signature.
The droids begin.
The chest plate comes off first. Then the shoulder couplings. Then the prosthetics. The layering reverses in the order I put it on this morning on the Exactor.
The debridement begins when the compression sheath comes off.
The sander.
The first pass across the right shoulder takes the dead synthskin away in a sheet that the catch-tray below collects. The second pass goes into the necrotic flesh beneath. The pain arrives as the sensation it always is. Fire across nerves that should have stopped firing months ago but still fire because my suit's neural feedback loop forces them to.
I feed it to the leviathan.
The motion is automatic. Months of practice. The pain enters the channel, the channel routes it to the reservoir behind my chest plate, the dark side drinks it as easily as breathing. The leviathan stirs at the bottom of the reservoir, content with the meal, patient.
Through the glass, Palpatine watches.
"How are you, my apprentice. You have been away a long time."
The voice carries through the chamber's audio relay. The same voice he uses when he is making a senator feel important before he kills the senator's bill on the Senate floor.
"Master."
"Six weeks. Longer than the schedule we discussed."
"Corellia required more on-ground time than we estimated."
"Indeed. We will speak of Corellia."
The sander moves. Another pass. Another sheet of dead tissue into the tray.
He begins methodically.
Not the hologram-call version from three weeks ago. This is the in-person version. Deeper. The Force is pressing against my awareness with each question; checking the answer before the answer fully finishes assembling itself, checking my body for tells, checking my suit's reactor output for the kind of fluctuation that would tell him whether an answer is costing me anything.
"How did you read Bel Iblis, my apprentice."
"The Bloodstripe first. The fact that he wore it to a meeting he had not been told the agenda of. He brought his most authoritative artifact to a room where authority was the question. He was telling me he was a person to be negotiated with, not a person to be ordered."
A pause. The sander shifts to the lower spine. Then there is the next pass.
"Continue."
"His daughters. He brought no defense for them in the meeting — meaning he had decided before he walked in that their safety was something he was willing to negotiate for. Not their security generally. Their safety in the room. I read what he had decided and offered him the terms he had already decided to accept."
"And the dual governorship, my apprentice."
"Aldrete. Young. Combat capability, the wrong instinct for what war is." A breath. The sound of my own ruined breathing in the chamber. "He needs educating in what governance is. And is not. By a teacher who can do it without becoming his ally."
A breath.
"Bel Iblis is the teacher. The structure forces him to spend the next decade teaching Aldrete and never consolidating influence over him. Forces Aldrete to spend the same decade testing Bel Iblis and never earning his approval."
Another breath.
"They cannot become a faction. They will not."
The sander shifts down my back. This pass goes deeper than the second. Into the tissue beneath the synthskin in long, deliberate strokes. The catch-tray collects what comes off in red-black sheets. The smell of cauterized flesh fills the chamber. I feed it to the leviathan with the rest.
"And if one of them dies."
"I appoint a replacement. The structure outlives the man."
"Mm."
He turns from the window for a moment and speaks to one of the droids attending him. Instructions I do not catch through the audio relay. Then he returns.
"Walk me through the physical document choice."
"The houses needed an artifact. A signature on a flimsi is heavier than a signature on a holo, in their tradition. The Hermi quill closed the conversation in a way nothing else could have. Their grandchildren will tell their grandchildren about the day Garm Bel Iblis signed his name in Hermi ink at the head of a Corellian delegation."
"And what will their grandchildren remember about you."
A breath. Longer than the debridement requires.
"That there was a man at the head of the room with a broken voice. That he listened, and the choice was theirs."
Not what he asked. He asked what they will remember about me. I gave him what they will remember about the room. He registers the gap, and he lets it stand.
Palpatine smiles. I cannot see it through the cowl. The Force shows me anyway.
"Theater, Lord Vader. Good theater."
"Yes, master."
The debridement continues. The sander moves to the central chest panel, the place where the kill switch he believes he holds is housed. The necrotic margin around the panel is wide. The sander takes its time.
Olee comes up.
He arrives at her sideways, as he always does, through a question about my auxiliary.
"And the Padawan. What has she become."
"A project."
"In progress."
"In progress."
"Useful."
"Useful. Not yet complete."
The slavery-rage cover I gave him at the reconstruction holds as it has held since. He accepts the framing. Moves past.
The phrik. The starfighter. He arrives at the Cassius subject matter as casually as he arrived at the Bloodstripe matter. I volunteer the details he would have probed for; the dreadnought program, the personal-commission framing, the Aldrete house and its political weight. The same pattern as the hologram call. Give him what he would have asked for, and make him feel he has not had to ask.
He takes the offering with the same warm interest as before.
"You are developing a pattern, Lord Vader. You collect people."
The words land with their full weight.
Not an accusation. Not, in the strict sense, a question either. The observation of a man who has been watching a pattern build for months and has decided to acknowledge that he sees it. The acknowledgment is the move.
The Force pulses through him as he says it, the pulse I have learned to read as Palpatine's signature when he is enjoying himself.
"Yes, master."
Through the glass, his attention sharpens. I read the pleasure he takes in the debridement as clearly as I read his interest in my answer.
"Walk me through your thinking on that, my apprentice."
"Loyal instruments are more efficient than coerced ones. The cost of acquiring loyalty in the right people is lower than the cost of maintaining coercion in the wrong ones. The products compound differently."
"They do indeed."
He moves slightly at the window. I cannot see what the movement is.
"I am pleased, Skywalker. You are growing into the office."
The sander shifts to the new synthskin application. Sheets of artificial flesh apply across the cleaned tissue. Each graft contracts as it sets, the bonding burning as it always burns. The pain channels to the leviathan. The leviathan drinks. The reservoir's level rises in increments I can feel underneath my chest plate that is currently across the chamber on the rack.
Throughout, the diagnostic cycle runs on the armor.
I track it through the Force. The kill switch reads as functional. The beacon transmits nominal. Palpatine's droids run their checks; the readings come back as they always come back. Palpatine does not comment on the diagnostics. He would not, so long as the results are exactly what he expects.
The session winds toward its close.
New prosthetic calibrations. Neural interface verifications. The full maintenance cycle completing its work in the order Palpatine's specifications require it to complete it in.
He steps back from the observation window.
The warmth in his voice shifts. Not colder. More deliberate. The tone of a man who has been moving toward a conclusion since the conversation began and is now ready to deliver it.
"You have done well, Lord Vader. Corellia reflects a maturity I had hoped to see but did not expect so soon."
There is a pause. My respirator fills it.
In-hiss. Out-rasp.
"We will discuss the appropriate recognition of your achievement. Celebrations, perhaps. Something public. The Empire should see what its second-in-command has accomplished."
Another pause. Not mine this time. His.
"There is also the matter of the shipyards."
He does not raise his voice. He does not sharpen it. He sets the sentence down lightly, the way a man sets down a tool he intends to pick back up later, when the situation suits it.
"A commitment of that scale, on a world the ink is not yet dry on. Made without a word to me." A pause that nearly felt like its own small eternity. The Force around him does not move at all, which is worse than if it had. "We will speak about that, my friend. Properly. You really should bring these decisions to me first. It distresses me to have to be anything other than pleased with you."
He turns from the window. His robes whisper against the corridor floor beyond.
"Rest. You will want your strength for when we next speak."
The corridor door closes behind him.
I hang in the maintenance clamps. The chest plate not yet seated. The new synthskin still setting under the cooling lamps. The leviathan coiled in the reservoir, fed well by the session, patient.
The celebration is coming.
The gift is coming.
But Palpatine is also displeased, and the lightning is coming.
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The droids complete the reassembly.
My chest plate seats. My shoulder couplings re-pair. My prosthetics socket. My compression sheath, my temperature stasis layer, the plastex, the mylar: every layer back where it was this morning on the Exactor, every reading in the central panel exactly where it has read for weeks.
My helmet descends.
The needles seat at the base of my skull, my temples, my cervical column.
In-hiss. Out-rasp.
My HUD flickers and steadies. The diagnostic results sit at the bottom of my field of view in the white text my HUD always renders them in.
Everything nominal.
Everything exactly as it should be.
The chains Palpatine thinks he holds are still broken. He does not know and can not know.
Not yet.
In-hiss. Out-rasp.