* While a great many good or at least non-evil people die at the same time, it's still great to see everyone in the command center going crazy when the torpedoes hit--save for Tarkin, who basically freezes and dies thinking, "It's not happening, it's not happen--" BOOM.
* A decent Imperial pilot remembers flying in training, with low-powered lasers so that no one was killed, and how during one demonstration Darth Vader decided to join them. He takes out about half a dozen of his opponents like it's nothing, then goes head-to-head with the best of the trainers, a veteran that made the decent pilot feel like a child who could barely walk trying to keep up with a marathon runner. Despite the other pilot's skills, Vader matches every move, shoots ''him'' down, and is later found to have done all this ''with his targeting and navigation computers disabled before launch,'' which the decent pilot believed was flatly impossible. The pilot remarks, [[JawDrop "Everyone watching this had to manually close their mouths."]]
* Dr. Divini, the resident surgeon, is evaluating Leia's condition after her interrogation, when they're interrupted by Darth Vader, who inquires as to how she's faring. On reflex, the good Doctor replies that she's fine... no thanks to ''him''. That's right, a mere ''surgeon'' had the balls to talk back to the ''Dark Lord of the Sith''. In the torture chamber he had just used.
** Even better, Vader lets it slide.
* Alone, Rodo and Stihl are both devastatingly effective martial artists. Seeing them team up to fight a wave of stormtroopers is as awesome as it is sad (given how their staying behind results in a HoldTheLine fate).
* When Teela senses Vader probing her thoughts, she builds the image of a mental wall to shut him out, leaving Vader momentarily speechless.
* Ratua not only escapes from a prison planet but spends several weeks or months walking around in plain sight on the Death Star under an assumed name while spending his nights living in a makeshift garbage hideout.
* Riten establishes his assertive, BadassBureaucrat nature quickly by reprogramming his new droid assistant to be loyal to him and not the Empire and then accessing a copy of the Death Star plans to hang on to for any number of future uses.
* As the climax of the book hits, ''Teela'' of all people, realizing the attacking Rebels might have discovered the superfluous exhaust port, has an initial response of "We have to tell someone!" She backed a political candidate the Empire didn't like and was sent to [[PenalColony Despayre]] for it, but since starting work she's been surrounded by her fellow contractors and thinks of their safety. This happens during the Battle of Yavin as she and most of the other viewpoint characters are scrambling to enact their escape plan, and when she protests to Riten that people will die, he says, ''good''. The stakes are too high, they live on the ''Death Star''! After all his earlier [[NeutralNoLonger neutrality]], Riten has fully realized what a singular moral position they're all in is.