- "What's [Vader] doing down there?"
"Dying…like everything else we touch." - ―Tauntaza and an officer
Tauntaza's fortress, also known as Tauntaza's facility or the death machine, was a mobile fortress constructed on the planet Gabredor III by Governor Tauntaza of the Galactic Empire. The fortress was able to absorb organic life energy from planets and convert it into power. Although Tauntaza had affiliated herself with the Crimson Dawn criminal organization, she had been following instructions from Emperor Palpatine in constructing the fortress,[3] which involved a cost in the order of billions of credits.[2]
Tauntaza escaped to her fortress and activated it, beginning to drain the life from the planet and causing a severe sandstorm.[1] The droid ZED-6-7 determined that the entire planet would be reduced to a desert in forty-eight hours. Vader ordered Admiral Firmus Piett aboard his flagship, the Executor, to fire on the fortress, but its shields, powered by the energy it was draining from the planet, were strong enough to resist the blast. Vader approached the facility and utilized an astromech droid carrying his lightsaber to infiltrate the underside of the fortress, disabling the extractor and carving an entrance. Tauntaza's crew recommended she evacuate, but the governor instead connected her suit of armor to the facility's energy tanks in order to use the power against Vader. Although Vader was able to destroy the facility, Tauntaza escaped, and Vader learned she had been following orders from the Emperor.[3]
The Alliance to Restore the Republic would later recover Tauntaza's fortress, with a group under the command of a general moving it to an uninhabited planet in the Outer Rim in order to repair it and use it for their own purposes. However, Vader, who had since joined Administrator Sly Moore's Schism Imperial, a group of Imperials dissatisfied with the Emperor that included Tauntaza, reclaimed the facility alongside the former governor and his own cyborg M.A.R. Corps. Vader and Tauntaza ordered the machine's crew to activate it, killing the rebels in the vicinity, before declaring that they would continue repairing the facility.[2]
Appearances[]
- Darth Vader (2020) 25 (First appearance)
- Darth Vader (2020) 26 (Mentioned only; in the opening crawl)
- Darth Vader (2020) 27 (First identified as Tauntaza's fortress)
- Darth Vader (2020) 28 (In flashback(s))
- Darth Vader (2020) 29 (Appears in hologram)
- Darth Vader (2020) 43
- Darth Vader (2020) 44 (Mentioned only)
- Darth Vader (2020) 45 (Mentioned only)
- Darth Vader (2020) 47 (Indirect mention only)