Never having seen let alone served alongside a Jedi, he was fascinated from the start. His theoretical grasp of the Force was as keen as that of most of his academy peers, but he was less interested in furthering his understanding of metaphysics than in observing the aloof Jedi in action. How adept were they at tactics and strategy? How quick were they to wield their lightsabers when their commands fell on deaf ears? How far were they willing to go to uphold the authority of the Republic? As a self-considered expert in the use of the vibro-lance, Tarkin was equally captivated by their lightsaber skills. Watching them train during the journey to Halcyon, he saw that each had an individual fighting style, and that the technniques for attacks and parries seemed unrelated to the color of the energy blades.
At Halcyon the Jedi divided the Judicials into four teams, assigning one to accompany them to the fortress and inserting the others on the far side of a ridge of low mountains to block possible escape routes. While Tarkin saw a certain logic in the plan, he couldn’t quite purge himself of a suspicion that the Jedi merely wanted to rid themselves of responsibility for law enforcement personnel they clearly thought of as inferiors.
What the Jedi hadn’t taken into account was the fact that Halcyon’s usurpers were a tech-savvy group who had had ample time to prepare for an assault on the bastion. No sooner were the Judicial teams inserted into the densely forested foothills than the planet’s global positioning satellites were disabled and surface-to-air communications scrambled. In short order, Tarkin’s team lost touch with the two cruisers that had brought them to Halcyon, their Jedi commanders, and the other Judicial teams. The prudent response would have been to hunker down while the Jedi attended to business at the fortress and wait for extraction. But the team’s commander — a by-the-numbers human with twenty years of Judicial service whose piloting and martial skills had earned him Tarkin’s reluctant respect — had other ideas. Convinced that the Jedi, too, had fallen prey to a trap, he got it in his head to strike out overland, traverse the ridge, and open a second front on reaching the fortress. This struck Tarkin as pure arrogance — no different from what he had seen in some of the Jedi he had come to know — but he also realized that the commander likely couldn’t abide being stranded in a trackless wilderness with a group of raw trainees.
Tarkin was immediately aware of the potential for disaster. The commander’s datapad contained regional maps, but Tarkin knew from long experience that maps weren’t the territory, and that triple-canopy forests could be confounding places to negotiate. At the same time, he realized that the opportunity for finally proving his worth couldn’t have been more made to order if he had designed it himself. Mission briefings had acquainted him with the local topography, and he was reasonably certain he could follow his nose almost directly to the bastion. But he decided to keep that to himself.
For three days of foul weather, mudslides, and sudden tree falls, the commander had them stumbling through thick forest and bogs, occasionally circling back on themselves, and growing increasingly lost. When on the fourth day their blister-pack rations ran out and exhaustion began to set in, all semblance of team integrity vanished. These scions of wealthy Core families who thought nothing of journeying across the stars had forgotten or perhaps never known what it meant to stand or sleep beneath them, far from artifical light or sentient contact, in an isolated wilderness on a far-flung world. The frequent, intense downpours disspirited them; the hostile-sounding but innocuous calls of unseen beasts unnerved them; the overhead roar of swarming insects left them huddling in their confining shelters. They grew to fear their own shadows, and Tarkin found his strength in their distress.
The chance to show just what he was made of came on the pebbled shore of a wide, clear, swift-flowing river. Off and on for some hours, the team had been moving parallel to the river, and Tarkin had been studying the current, making parallax observations of objects on the bottom and observing the shadows cast by Halcyon’s bashful suns. Hours earlier, downstream of a waterfall, they had passed a stretch they would have been able to ford without incident, but Tarkin had held his tongue. Now, while the commander and some of the team members stood arguing about how deep the water might be, Tarkin simply waded directly into the current and trudged to the middle of the river, where wavelets lapped at his shoulders. Then, cupping his hands to his mouth, he yelled back to the team: “It’s this deep!”
After that, the commander kept him by his side, and eventually surrendered point to him. Navigating by the rise and set of Halcyon’s twin suns, and sometimes in the sparing illumination of the planet’s array of tiny moons, Tarkin led them on a tortuous forest course that took them through the hills and into more open forest on the far side. Along the way he showed them how to use their blasters to kill game without burning gaping holes in the most edible parts. For fun, he felled a large rodent with a hand-fashioned wooden lance and entertained the team by dressing and cooking it over a fire he conjured with a sparkstone from a pile of kindling. He got his fellow plebes used to sleeping on the ground, under the stars, amid a cacophony of sounds and songs.
At a time when the Clone Wars were still a decade off, it became clear to his commander and peers that Wilhuff Tarkin had already tasted blood.
When they had walked for three more days and Tarkin estimated that they were within five kilometers of the usurper’s fortress, he fell back to allow the commander to lead them in. The Jedi were astounded. They had only just put an end to the insurrection — somehow without losing a single eminent hostage — and they had all but given up on finding any members of the Judicial team alive. Search parties had been dispatched, but none had managed to pick up the team’s trail. Relieved to be back on firm ground, the cadets were at first reserved about revealing the details of their ordeal, but in due course the stories began to be told, and in the end Tarkin was credited with having saved their lives.
For those Judicials who knew little of the galaxy beyond the Core, it came as a shock that a world like Eriadu could produce not only essential goods, but also natural champions. A clique of congenial cadets began to form around Tarkin, as much to bask in the reflected glow of his sudden popularity as to be taught by him, or even to be the butt of his jokes. In him they found someone who could be as hard on himself as he could be on others, even when those others happened to be superiors who shirked their responsibilities or made what to him were bad decisions. They had already witnessed how well he could fight, scale mountains, pilot a gunboat, and succeed on a sports field, and — as crises like the one at Halcyon grew more common — they grew to realize that he had a mind for tactics, as well; more important, that Tarkin was a born leader, an inspiration for others to overcome their fears and to surpass their own expectations.
Not all were enamored of him. Where to some he was meticulous, coolheaded, and fearless, to others he was calculating, ruthless, and fanatical. But no matter to which camp his peers subscribed, the stories that emerged about Tarkin in the waning days of the Judicial Department were legendary — and they only grew with the telling. Few then knew the details of his unusual upbringing, for he had a habit of speaking only when he had something important to add, but he had no need to brag, since the tales that spread went beyond anything he could have confirmed or fabricated. That he had bested a Wookiee in hand-to-hand combat; that he had piloted a starfighter through an asteroid field without once consulting his instruments; that he had single-handedly defended his homeworld against a pirate queen; that he had made a solo voyage through the Unknown Regions …