main course and chilled the synthetic fruit dessert; after a short time the
utensils themselves began to break down and could be eaten as snacks. But
Kyp could find no spark of hunger inside him.
His thoughts drifted again to Han Solo's predicament. Unlike Kyp, Han knew a
great deal about the New Republic and had many secrets to divulge. Han's
interrogation would have been far more thorough than his own. And Admiral
Daala's ministrations had been worse than anything Kyp had experienced
during his years in the Imperial Correction Facility. At least down in the
spice mines he knew how to avoid calling attention to himself.
Since the age of eight, Kyp had lived on Kessel, coping with the rules, the
torturous work, the miserable conditions under the old Imperial rule or
under the chain of usurpers and slave lords such as Moruth Doole. His
parents were dead, his brother Zeth conscripted away to the stormtrooper
academy, but Kyp had learned how to lie low, to survive, to endure.
Not until Han Solo's arrival, though, had he considered escape. Han showed
that a small, determined group could break free of a prisoner's shackles.
That they had stumbled into an even worse situation inside the Maw seemed
irrelevant.
Piloting the stolen shuttle, Kyp had used his fledgling powers to steer them
safely through the black hole cluster. In the years since the withered
Vima-Da-Boda had taught him the fundamentals of her Jedi skills, Kyp had
made little use of his own affinity for the Force.
He remembered Vima-Da-Boda's face as shrunken and leprous; and she had a
habit of huddling in corners, of pulling shadows around herself as if to
hide from immense prying eyes. The fallen Jedi had a guilty conscience that
suffocated her like a blanket, but she had taken the time to teach Kyp a few
things before the Imperials whisked her away. "You have great potential,"
she had told him in one of her last brief lessons.
Kyp had paid little attention to that, until now.
He stared fixedly at his untouched meal. Perhaps if he concentrated, focused
his abilities on manipulating something, moving a tiny object, he could turn
that skill into an escape.
Escape! The word rang through his heart, conjuring images of hope. He was
not certain how he did what he did. Sensing the best route through darkened
spice tunnels seemed perfectly natural to him. When flying the shuttle
through the fiery gas clouds, he had listened to the mysterious whispering
voice directing him. Kyp turned and altered course, spinning and whirling
whenever it seemed right.
But now that he needed to make use of the Force, he didn't know where to
begin.
He fixed his gaze on the flimsy foil covering of the instant meal, trying to
bend it. He pushed with his mind, picturing the thin metal twisting and
crumpling into a ball--but nothing happened. Kyp wondered how much of
Vima-Da-Boda's ramblings had been simple superstition and craziness.
His parents had no special sort of powers. On the Deyer colony of the Anoat
system, they had both been outspoken local politicians. Upon hearing of a
growing rebellion against the Emperor's rigid policies, they decided to work
from within, speaking out against Palpatine to make him more moderate rather
than overthrow him entirely. They resoundingly protested the destruction of
Alderaan--but their efforts had only gotten the two of them and their sons
Zeth and Kyp arrested.
Kyp remembered that night of terror, when the stormtroopers had melted down
the door of the family dwelling even though it was unlocked. The armed
soldiers marched into the living quarters, kicked over the fragile
fiber-grown furniture. The stormtrooper captain read an arrest order through
the filtered speaker in his helmet, accusing Kyp's parents of treason; then
the stormtroopers drew their blasters and stunned the two astonished adults.
Kyp's older brother Zeth had tried to protect them, so the troopers stunned
him as well.
Kyp, with tears streaming down his face, could only stare in disbelief at
the three crumpled forms as the stormtroopers linked stun-cuffs around his
wrists. He still couldn't imagine how they had considered him a threat,
since he had been only eight years old at the time.
Kyp and his parents were taken to Kessel, while fourteen-year-old Zeth was
hauled off as a brainwashed recruit to the Imperial military academy in
Carida. They had never heard from Zeth again.
After little more than a year Kessel went into enormous internal upheavals,
with prison revolts, the Imperials overthrown, slave lords taking over.
Kyp's parents had died during the commotion, executed for being on the wrong
side at the wrong moment. Kyp himself had survived by hiding, becoming
silent and invisible. He had rotted in the darkness of the tunnels for eight
years, and now he had escaped.
Only to be captured again.
Somehow, it seemed, the Imperials were always there to wreck his
aspirations. On Deyer the stormtroopers had stolen him away from his home;
on Kessel they had thrown him into the spice mines. Now that he and Han had
finally escaped, the stormtroopers had clamped around him again.
Kyp's anger focused into a projectile, and he tried again to use his ability
on the meal tray. He pushed, and a drop of sweat fell into his eyes,
blurring his vision. Had the tray moved, jerked a little? He saw a small
dent in the textured protein patty that formed the main course. Had he done
that?
Perhaps anger was the key to focusing his latent energies.
He wished Vima-Da-Boda had spent more time instructing him down in the
mines. He concentrated on the walls, on his narrow surroundings. He had to
find some way of escaping Han had already proved that it could be done.
Kyp vowed that if he did manage to get away, he would find someone to teach
him how to use these mysterious powers. He never wanted to be left so
helpless again.
Looking at the delicate, birdlike Qwi Xux, Han somehow could not imagine her
as the developer of the Death Star. But she worked willingly in the Maw
Installation, and she had admitted her role in a matter-of-fact way.
"What's a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?" he finally said.
"This is what I do. This is what I'm best at." Qwi nodded her head absently,
as if considering her answer. "Here I have a chance to grapple with the
greatest mysteries of the cosmos, to solve problems that others have claimed
are unsolvable. To see my wild ideas take shape. It's very thrilling."
Han still could not understand. "But how did this happen to you? Why are you
here?"
"Oh, that!" Qwi said, as if suddenly understanding the question. "My home
planet was Omwat, in the Outer Rim. Moff Tarkin took ten young Omwati
children from various cities. He placed us in intense forced-education
camps, trying to mold us into great designers and problem solvers. I was the
best. I was the only one who made it through all the training. I was his
prize, and he sent me here as a reward.
"At first I worked with Bevel Lemelisk to bring the Death Star to fruition.
create newer and better concepts."
"Okay," Han said, "so I'll ask you again, why do you do this stuff?"
Qwi looked at him as if he had suddenly grown stupid. "It's the most
interesting thing I can imagine. I have my pick of the challenges, and I'm
usually successful. What more could I want?"
Han knew he wasn't getting through. "How can you enjoy working on things
like this? It's horrible!"
Qwi took another step backward, looking baffled and hurt. "What do you mean
by that? It's fascinating work, if you think about it. One of our concepts
was to modify existing molecular furnace devices into autonomous "World
Devastators" that could strip raw materials from a planet's surface, feed it
into huge automated onboard factories, and produce useful machines. We're
quite proud of that idea. We transmitted the proposal off to Tarkin shortly
after he took Bevel with him." Her voice trailed off. "I wonder what ever
happened to that idea."
Han blinked in astonishment. The terrifying fleet of World Devastators had
attacked Admiral Ackbar's home planet, laying waste part of the beautiful
water world before the juggernauts were destroyed. "The World Devastators
have already been built," Han mumbled, "and put to very efficient use."
Qwi's face lit up. "Oh, that's wonderful!"
"No, it isn't!" he shouted into her face. She sprang back. "Don't you know
what your inventions are used for? Do you have any idea?"
Qwi backed off, straightening up again defensively. "Yes, of course. The
Death Star was to be used to break up dead planets to allow direct mining of
the heavy metals trapped in the core. The World Devastators would be
autonomous factories combing asteroids or sterile worlds to produce a wide
range of items without polluting inhabited planets."
Han snorted and rolled his eyes. "If you believe that, you'll believe
anything. Listen to their names! Death Star, World Devastator--that doesn't
sound like something for peacetime economic development, does it?"
Qwi scowled and turned her back on it. "Oh, what difference does it make?"
"The Death Star's first target was the planet Alderaan--my wife's home
world! It murdered billions of innocent people. The World Devastators were
turned loose on the inhabited world of Calamari. Hundreds of thousands of
people died. Those efficient factories of yours manufactured TIE fighters
and other weapons of destruction, nothing else."
"I don't believe you." Her voice did not sound confident.
"I was there! I flew through the rubble of Alderaan, I saw the devastation
on Calamari. Didn't you read about it in my interrogation report? Admiral
Daala pressed me over and over again for those details."
Qwi crossed her slender bluish arms over her chest. "No, that wasn't in your
debriefing summary, which you so melodramatically call an "interrogation.""
"Then you didn't get the whole report," Han said.
"Nonsense. I'm entitled to all data." She stared at her feet. "Besides, I
only develop the concepts. I make them work. If someone on the outside
abuses my inventions, I can't be held responsible. That's beyond the scope
of what I do."
Han made a noncommittal sound, simmering with anger. Her words sounded
rehearsed, like something that had been drilled into her. She didn't even
seem to think about what she was saying.
Qwi flitted back to her 3-D display panel, tapping on the musical keys and
humming to sharpen the long, angular image she had been constructing when
Han opened his eyes. "Would you like to see what I'm working on now?" Qwi
asked, studiously avoiding any mention of the previous discussion.
"Sure," Han said, afraid that when she no longer needed to talk to him, Qwi
would send him back to his detention cell.
She gestured to the image of the small craft. Four-sided and elongated, it
looked like the long shard of a firefacet gem. From the diagram he could see
a pilot's compartment with space enough for six people. Small lasers studded
strategic areas; the bottom of the long point carried a strange toroidal
transmitting dish.
"Right now we're working on enhancing the armor," Qwi said. "Though the
craft is not much larger than a single-man fighter, we need it to be
completely impervious to attack. By introducing quantum-crystalline armor,
where only a few layers of atoms are stacked as densely as physics permits,
laminated on top of another thin film just as tough but phase shifted, we
can be confident that nothing will harm it. Not so much as a dent."
Han nodded to the laser emplacements; he couldn't see well from his vantage
chained against a support pillar. "Then why add the weaponry if the ship is
indestructible?" He had visions of a fleet of these things replacing the TIE
fighters; a small force of indestructible assault craft could fly into any
New Republic fleet and carve the ships up at their leisure.
"This craft is highly maneuverable, and small enough not to be noticed on a
system-wide scan, but they still might encounter some resistance. Remember,
the Death Star was the size of a small moon. This accomplishes through
finesse what the Death Star brought about through brute force."
With a cold fear inside Han did not want to know the answer to his next
question. How could she compare this small ship to the Death Star? But he
couldn't stop himself from asking, "And what is it? What does it do?"
Qwi looked at the image with awe, pride, and fear. "Well, we haven't
actually tested it yet, but the first full-scale model is basically
completed. We call this concept the Sun Crusher, tiny but immensely
powerful. One small, impervious craft launches a modulated resonance
projectile into a star, which triggers a chain reaction in the core,
igniting a supernova even in low-mass stars. Straightforward and simple."
In his horror, Han could think of nothing to say. The Death Star destroyed
planets, but the Sun Crusher could destroy whole solar systems.
Luke and Lando stood with Moruth Doole high inside one of Kessel's
atmosphere stacks. They held the rusted guard railing at the edge of a
catwalk, staring down the dizzying drop. Leaning into the stack, they
breathed the manufactured air boiling into the sky; it reminded Luke of the
great air shaft in Cloud City.
Doole shouted into the roaring background noise. "According to one old
Imperial study, there's only enough raw material in Kessel's crust to keep
the atmosphere in equilibrium for a century or two at our present rate of
consumption." He shrugged, hunching his bumpy shoulders in a sort of
seizure. "A few years ago the output was higher so that the slaves could
walk around and breathe the air--but what's the point in allowing that?"
Lando nodded sagely, as if still interested, while Luke said nothing. Doole
had been their tour guide for an entire day, talking more than even the
long-winded senators on Coruscant. Doole wanted Lando's half million credits
and went about extolling Kessel's virtues like a representative from the
planetary chamber of commerce.
Wherever Doole took them, Luke strained his Jedi senses, reaching out to
find some sign of Han or Chewbacca. But Luke could feel no tickle in the
Force, no ripple of his friends' presence. Perhaps they were truly dead
after all.
Lando continued his conversation with Doole, shouting into the rushing wind
that rose through the stack. "A lot can change around here by the time the
air runs out. What matters is what you accomplish during your own lifetime."
Doole's hissing laugh was swallowed by background noise. He reached up to
lay a hand on Lando's shoulder. "We think alike, Mr. Tymmo. Who cares what
happens after we're space dust? I'd rather squeeze Kessel dry while I've got
it in my fist."
"You seem to have such an enormous operation. Why are you still running it
solo?" Lando asked.
Doole flinched at the term "solo," and Luke knew Lando had chosen his word
carefully; both of them caught the Rybet's reaction. "What do you mean?"
Doole asked.
"Well, when the Imperial confiscation of spice ended, I would have thought
you'd open all your markets, get a thousand representatives to spread the
product. Jabba the Hutt is dead. Why didn't you link up with the unified
smugglers under Talon Karrde and Mara Jade? That must have hurt your
profits."
Doole pointed one gummy-ended finger at Lando. "Our profits are growing
enormously, now that we get all the glitterstim, rather than just what we
can steal from under Imperial noses. And after being so long under the yoke
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