wandering factories taking useless rubble and fabricating scores of valuable
industrial components. Right! Tarkin had been with her during the immense
pressure of her original training. She knew what the man was capable of.
And the new Sun Crusher was--"What?" Han had said, raising his voice so that
it hurt her fragile ears. "What in all the galaxy could the Sun Crusher be
used for other than to completely wipe out all life in systems the Imperials
don't like? You don't even have a bogus excuse like rubble mining. The Sun
Crusher has one purpose only: to bring death to countless innocent people.
Nothing more."
But Qwi could not possibly have the responsibility for lives on her hands.
That wasn't part of her job. She just drew up blueprints, toyed with
designs, solved equations. It exhilarated her to discover something
previously considered impossible.
On the other hand, she was perfectly aware of what she was doing ... though
feigned naiveté provided such a nice excuse, such a perfect shield against
her own conscience.
In the Maw databanks Qwi had discovered the complete "debriefing" of Han
Solo--protected by a password she had easily broken--full video instead of
just a transcription. Sivron and Daala had indeed kept much of it from
her--but why?
As Qwi watched the entire torture session, she could not believe her eyes.
She had never suspected the information had been taken from him in that
manner! The words on paper seemed so cool and cooperative.
But on a deeper, professional level she was outraged at Admiral Daala.
Access to data was supposedly open to all Maw scientists. She had never been
denied a single information request in twelve years inside the black hole
cluster! But this was even worse. She hadn't just been denied access to the
full report--she had been deceived into thinking Han's debriefing held no
more data.
But information is meant to be shared! Qwi thought. How can I do my work if
I don't have the pertinent data?
Qwi had little trouble breaking through the various passwords. Apparently,
no one had expected her to bother looking. She read the full report with
sickened astonishment: the destruction of Alderaan, the attack on Yavin 4,
the ambush of the Rebel fleet over Endor, the huge hospital ship and
personnel carriers blown into micrometeoroids by the second Death Star's
superlaser.
"What did you think they were going to be used for?" Han had said. Qwi
closed her eyes to the thought.
Focus on the problem. It had been a mantra of her childhood. Be distracted
by nothing else. Solving the problem was the only important thing. Solving
the problem meant survival itself. ...
As a child she remembered spending two years in the sterile, silent
environment of the orbital education sphere above her homeworld of Omwat.
Qwi had been ten standard years old, the same age as her other nine
companions, each selected from different Omwati honeycomb settlements.
From orbit the orange and green continents looked surreal, blurred by clouds
and dimpled with canyons, blemished by upthrust mountains--nothing like the
clean maps she had seen before.
But beside Qwi's educational sphere orbited Moff Tarkin's personal Star
Destroyer. It had been a mere Victory class ship, but powerful enough to
rain death and ruin down on Omwat if the students should fail.
For two years life for Qwi had been an endless succession of training,
testing, training, testing, with no other purpose than to cram the total
knowledge of engineering disciplines into pliable young Omwati minds--or to
burst their brains in the process. Tarkin's research had shown that Omwati
children were capable of amazing mental feats, if pushed properly and
sufficiently. Most of the young minds would collapse under the pressure, but
some emerged like precious jewels, brilliant and creative. Moff Tarkin had
wanted to test that possibility.
The gaunt, steel-hard man had stood in his dress uniform during important
examinations, staring at the surviving Omwati children as they wrestled with
problems that had stymied the Empire's best designers. Qwi remembered how
alarmed they had been when one of her classmates, a young male named Pillik,
suddenly fell to the floor in some kind of seizure, grasping his head and
screaming. He managed to climb to his knees, weeping, before the guards
grabbed him. He still grasped for his examination paper as they hauled him
away, yelling that he wanted to finish his work.
In silence Qwi and her three surviving classmates went to the window of the
educational sphere so they could watch as turbolasers from the Victory-class
Star Destroyer obliterated Pillik's honeycomb settlement in punishment for
his failure.
Qwi could not be distracted by consequences. If her concentration faltered,
everyone would die. She had to lock away all caring. Problems were pure, and
safe, to be solved for their own sake. She could not allow herself to think
beyond the abstract challenge at hand.
In the end Qwi had been the only one of her group who made it through the
training. She received no instruction in biological sciences, saving her
memory space for more physics, mathematics, and engineering. Tarkin had
whisked her off to the new Maw Installation and placed her under the
tutelage of the great engineer Bevel Lemelisk. Qwi had been in the Maw ever
since.
Problems had to be solved for their own sake. If she allowed herself to be
distracted by feelings, terrible things would happen. She remembered images
of burning Omwati cities winking like faraway campfires from orbit, the
laser-ignited wildfires that swept across the savannas of her world--but she
had too many calculations to finish, too many designs to modify.
Qwi had salved her conscience by laying the responsibility on others. But
the truth was, she created devices that had directly caused the deaths of
entire civilizations, the destruction of whole worlds. With the Sun Crusher
she could wipe out solar systems with the push of a button.
Qwi Xux had a lot of thinking to do, but she didn't know how to go about
this kind of pondering. This was an entirely new and different type of
problem to solve.
Chewbacca stood like a statue, refusing to move and daring the keeper to use
his power-lash again.
The keeper did.
Chewbacca roared at the pain lancing across his skin; his nerves writhed in
the aftermath of the charge. He raised his hairy arms, seething with the
desire to rip the fat, placid man's limbs from his spherical torso.
Fourteen stormtroopers leveled their blasters at him.
"Are you going back to work, Wookiee, or do I have to nudge the power
setting up a couple more notches?" The keeper tapped the handle of the
power-lash against his palm, gazing at Chewbacca with a bland expression.
His complexion was dusty-looking and bloodless, as if no hint of life had
ever passed beneath the skin.
"Any other time I might have enjoyed the challenge of breaking you, Wookiee.
I've been here fourteen standard years wit
h an entire crew of Wookiee
slaves. We lost a few during the process, but I cracked them all, and now
they follow orders and do their work. But Admiral Daala insists that
everything be in top-notch condition for mobilization by tomorrow."
He flicked the sizzling green tip of the lash in the air in front of
Chewbacca's face, singeing some of the fur. Chewbacca peeled back his black
lips and growled.
"I don't have time to play games right now," the keeper said. "If I have to
waste any more time disciplining you, I'm going to dump you out into space.
Do you understand?"
Chewbacca considered roaring in his face, but the keeper looked serious. At
the very least Chewbacca had to survive long enough to find out what had
happened to Han. A long time ago Han had rescued Chewbacca from other
enslavers, and he still owed the man a life debt. He gave a low grunt of
acquiescence.
"Good, now get back to that assault shuttle!"
Chewbacca wore gray work coveralls with pockets to hold engine diagnostic
tools and hydrospanners. None of the tools could be used as a weapon;
Chewbacca had already checked that much out.
The gamma-class assault shuttle took up a good portion of the Gorgon's lower
hangar bay. Chewbacca had a small databoard listing the configurations for
the tractor-beam projector and the deflector-shield generators. He had
worked on other ships before, and he knew the Falcon inside out thanks to
the many on-the-spot repairs he and Han had been forced to make. With the
specs on the databoard he could easily service decades-old Imperial
technology.
On the rear of the assault shuttle Chewbacca checked the exhaust nozzles of
the thrust reactors and grudgingly tested the blaster-cannon mountings. In
the front of the vessel a convenient boarding hatch allowed access for the
command crew, but Chewbacca opted for the more rigorous method of popping
open and climbing through one of the foldaway launch doors used to disgorge
zero-G stormtroopers during a space assault.
Inside, he had access to the engineering level, where he tinkered with the
power modulators and the life-support systems. He restrained his urge to rip
out circuits and damage the equipment--the keeper would execute him
immediately, and such a minor sabotage would accomplish nothing. Even subtle
damage was likely to be discovered in the initial checkout procedure.
The assault shuttle's spartan passenger section held only benches for its
complement of spacetroopers, as well as power-coupled storage compartments
for their bulky zero-G armor.
Up front Chewbacca powered up and checked out the command console, did a
test run of the twin-tandem flight computers ... and thought about uprooting
the chairs on which the five members of the command crew would sit.
Outside in the Gorgon's hangar bay the fat keeper shouted and lashed at the
air. Chewbacca felt a surge of anger upon hearing cries of agony from the
other cowed Wookiee slaves. He knew nothing about his fellow captives; he
had been held in a separate cell, and they were not allowed to speak to each
other.
Chewbacca wondered how long it had been since these exhausted slaves had
touched the branches of their home trees.
"Get working!" the keeper yelled. "We have a lot that needs to be done
today! Three hundred ships on the Gorgon alone!" And Chewbacca knew the
three other star destroyers had an equal number of TIE fighters, blastboats,
and assault shuttles.
Chewbacca clenched his fist around an upraised storage lid, bending it
noticeably. He wanted to know why Admiral Daala insisted on such desperate
speed.
Qwi Xux did not like to be muscled around by stormtroopers. In her years at
the Maw Installation, she had learned to ignore the rigid troopers marching
around the corridors in white armor, in endless robotic training and
formations that made no sense at all. Did they all have faulty memories, or
what? Once she learned something, she didn't need to keep drilling,
drilling, drilling. Qwi paid little attention to them anymore--until a squad
marched into her laboratory and insisted that she follow them.
Only moments earlier Qwi had shut down her illicit database searches, and
she had disengaged the privacy lock on her lab's entryway. She had no reason
to think the stormtroopers suspected anything, but she still felt
unreasoning terror.
The troopers folded around her in a protective bubble as they marched her
along the tiled corridors. "Where are you taking me?" Qwi finally managed to
ask.
"Admiral Daala wishes to see you," the captain said through the filtered
speaker on his helmet.
"Oh. Why?"
"She'll have to tell you that herself."
Qwi swallowed a cold lump in her throat and put a haughty tone in her voice.
"Why couldn't she come to me herself?"
"Because Admiral Daala is a busy person."
"I'm a busy person, too."
"She is our commanding officer. You aren't."
Qwi asked no further questions but followed in silence as they took her
across an access tube to another asteroid in the main conglomeration, then
aboard a small shuttle in the landing bay.
When they arrived aboard the Star Destroyer Gorgon, Qwi could not keep
herself from staring in wide-eyed fascination. Though the enormous ships had
hung in the sky above Maw Installation for as long as she could remember,
Qwi rarely had an opportunity to board them. Her stormtrooper escorts took
her directly to the Gorgon's bridge.
The trapezoidal command tower rose high above the arrowhead-shaped main
body, giving a panoramic view overlooking the vast landscape of the ship.
Qwi stood and stared out the front viewport toward the cobbled-together
collection of rocks that made up Maw Installation. For a moment she
remembered watching from the orbiting educational sphere as Moff Tarkin
obliterated Omwati cities far below. ...
Command crew bustled about their stations, intent on their work as if in the
middle of an important drill. In the corridors stormtroopers marched by at a
brisk pace. Overlapping intercom messages peppered the air. Qwi wondered how
the troops could be so busy after a decade of doing nothing.
Admiral Daala stood by her command console, staring at the deadly swirling
gases that blocked her from the outside. Qwi saw her trim, perfect figure
masked by an aurora of chestnut hair that flowed like a living blanket down
her back. When Daala turned to face her, some of the hair remained where it
hung, wrapping around her waist while other strands arced behind her.
"You wanted to see me?" Qwi asked. Her reedy voice quavered despite her
efforts to control her nervousness.
Daala looked at her for a moment, and Qwi had the impression of being placed
under a magnifying lens in preparation for dissection. Then Daala suddenly
seemed to recognize her. "Ah! You are Qwi Xux, in charge of the Sun Crusher
project?"
"Yes, Admiral." She paused a moment, then blurted, "Have I done something
wrong?"
"I don't know. Have you?" Daala an
swered, then turned back to the broad
window, staring out at her other ships. "I can't get any straight
information out of Tol Sivron, so I'll tell you directly. If you have any
further work to do on your Sun Crusher, finish it now. We are mobilizing the
fleet."
Daala misinterpreted Qwi's shocked silence. "Don't worry--I'll authorize
whatever assistance you need, but everything must be done within a day.
You've had two years longer than Grand Moff Tarkin gave you. It is time to
put the Sun Crusher to use."
Qwi took a deep breath, trying to keep her thoughts from spinning. "But why
now? Why such a rush?"
Daala whirled back at her, wearing a sour expression. "We have received new
information. The Empire lies wounded and vulnerable on the outside, and we
can't just sit here and wait. We have four Star Destroyers, a full fleet the
Rebellion knows nothing about. Since the Death Star prototype is not capable
of hyperspace travel, it is useless to us in this operation--but we will
have the Sun Crusher. Your beautiful Sun Crusher." The lights of the fiery
gases outside glimmered in Daala's eyes. "With it we can destroy the New
Republic, system by system."
All of Han's warnings echoed as loud as screams in Qwi's head. He had been
right about everything.
Daala dismissed her, and Qwi stumbled as the stormtroopers escorted her back
toward the waiting shuttle. Qwi would have to make her decision sooner than
she had expected.
In her own quarters images of planets scrolled in front of Leia's eyes.
Jedi Search Page 32