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The chime sounded again and Vader looked up, shaking his stare from the lightsaber's glow and activating the comm switch at his side, deactivating Kenobi's sword at the same time.
Moff Tarkin's voice came harshly over the comm, "Lord Vader, are you there."
"Yes."
"We have exited hyperspace and are approaching the Yavin system, a sensor sweep is in progress to determine the Rebels' exact location, please come to the control center."
"As you wish."
Time passed.
The Rebels' base was located and the Death Star began its ponderous orbit toward the moon where the base was so cleverly hidden inside the temple of some ancient civilization.
Tarkin felt confident that the Rebels would either flee entirely or launch a small fleet of capital ships to try and take out the super-laser before it could strike.
Vader's intuition told him otherwise, and sent him inexplicably from the control center toward the lower levels of the Death Star.
It was there that a lieutenant encountered him and told him of the single-man Y and X-Wings barreling toward the space station, easing their way through its magnetic field and heading for a long trench.
Vader did not know the full details of the battle station, but he had no doubt the Rebels had discovered or believed they had discovered a flaw in the design that could be exploited. He had said as much to the Emperor when the construction had begun and again at its conclusion, but when the Emperor's mind was made up, no being in the galaxy could change it.
Vader led the Death Star's two TIE squadrons into space and met the enemy. The Dark Lord had not engaged in this type of dogfighting space combat in years, except in his private simulator on Coruscant, but he led the charge, eliminating 17 ships as the Rebels now found their assault limited by both the attacking Imperial vessels and the massive amount of fire coming from the Death Star's defenses.
Vader and his wingmates zoomed down the trench time and again, now fully aware that the Rebels' objective was to fire a missile into a miniscule exhaust port. One pilot nearly made it before Vader picked off his starboard engine.
He and his wingmates chased the three last X-Wings. One pulled out with damage, the second met death at Vader's hands.
The third ...
Reaching out to the third pilot through the Force set Vader's pulse racing. Here was an opponent, here was a being drawing on the Force itself to make himself a better pilot.
The X-Wing dodged and danced, and Vader tracked it relentlessly. His heart pounded at the chase, so long since any opponent had been any more the slightest of challenges to the Lord of the Sith.
Without even realizing it, Vader spoke aloud.
"The Force is strong in this one."
Idle chatter was not something Vader engaged in, he spoke only when necessary, preferring to allow his actions express his intent. His mind suddenly connected the pilot ahead of him with the boy whose rage he had felt after striking down Kenobi onboard the Death Star. Might they be one and the same?
The X-Wing lurched as one of Vader's lasers pierced its astromech, and again Vader spoke aloud, the thrill of the hunt overwhelming him.
"I have you now."
He centered his targeting-sights on the X-Wing and slowly squeezed the laser triggers.
A flicker of motion and a feeling of death distracted Vader's concentration. To his right, one of his TIE escorts exploded in a ball of flame.
"What?" Vader demanded.
The other TIE pilot broke radio silence with a terse "Look out!". The two elite TIE pilots hand-picked to fly wing duties to Darth Vader knew their place was to follow orders, never interfere and speak only if absolutely necessary. Neither pilot has spoken as much as a syllable since they had launched out of the Death Star hangars.
A check down to his sensors indicated another ship angling down toward the trench, mostly-obscured from view by the blazing Yavin sun. The ship fired again and grazed Vader's remaining wingmate, who panicked, jerking his ship laterally in the narrowing trench and clipping Vader's own wings, sending him into a uncontrolled vertical spin out of the trench.
Time passed.
Vader righted his ship after only two moments of spinning, but angled his TIE away from the Death Star, feeling the tension from the battle station mounting to a fever pitch.
Despite his distance from the Death Star, Vader's craft was still rocked by the shock wave when it exploded, and the light was enough to sting his tired eyes, even incased within the dark helmet.
A normal TIE pilot, alone in his single-man fighter and in the middle of nowhere, would have died there, either running out of air, dying of thirst or hunger or simply drifting, unable to contact help without the use of long-range communications.
Darth Vader was no normal pilot ... and this was no normal TIE.
After running a diagnostics check to ensure all systems were functioning within their normal parameters, Vader used the navigation computer to find the closest Imperial base, and activated the TIE's hyperdrive.
