Star Wars: Death Star

by Michael Reaves

  The Steel Talon was the ninth ship upon which he’d served; on the last four of them his duty had been that of a gunnery chief. An Imperial-class Star Destroyer, the Talon was the backbone of the fleet. Tenn hoped to be transferred, one day, to one of the four new Super-class Star Destroyers that were currently being built. Those were monsters indeed, eight or ten times the size of the Imperial-class ships, which were themselves over a kilometer and a half in length. The SSDs looked like nothing so much as pie-shaped wedges sliced out of an asteroid and covered with armament. Perhaps if he called in the right favors at the right time, he might wrangle an assignment on the next one scheduled to roll ponderously out of the Kuat Drive Yards. He still had a few good years left in him, and who better to run the big battery on one of those monster ships than him? He had his request in, and maybe, if Hoberd got his promotion, he’d put in a good word for Tenn before he left. As long as Hoberd was running the battery, though, that wasn’t likely to happen. He didn’t want to lose the best CPO in the sector, so he said.

  Well, thought Tenn, it’s nice to be appreciated. Still, he knew, deep down, that he wouldn’t be satisfied until he could say he’d run the biggest and the best.

  Shift change was coming, and officers and crew filled the halls on their way to their duty stations. Even though it would only be a drill, Tenn was looking forward to hearing the generators whine as the capacitors loaded, followed by the heavy vibrations and scorched-air smell as the ion cannons and lasers spoke, spewing hard energy across empty space to destroy the practice targets. To be able to reach out a hundred klicks or more and smash a ship to atomic dust was real power. And nobody was better at it than he was.

  Tenn got to the array five minutes early, as always. Fifty meters in diameter, the unit was quiet as shift change neared. He saw Chief Droot and nodded at him. “Chief. How’re we doin’?”

  “Shipshape, Gee.” The big Chagrian, one of the few aliens to rise to any kind of rank in the Imperial Navy, glanced around. “You know there’s a surprise drill at eleven thirty hours?”

  “Yeah.”

  “We cleared the decks, got the caps charged, ready to blaze.”

  Tenn grinned. “Thanks, Droot. I owe you one.”

  “Nah, I’m still two down—you had the station shining like a mirror on that last inspection. I got a smile out of the admiral himself that time.”

  Tenn nodded. Everybody kept track of who owed who what on a ship, and you didn’t let a fellow chief catch flak if you could help out. Even if it wasn’t your watch, it was your station, and what made one look bad made them all look bad. And vice versa, of course.

  “Station’s yours,” Droot said. “I’m gonna go get some supper. I hear the mess hall has some berbersian crab on the menu.”

  “More likely doctored soypro,” Tenn said.

  Droot shrugged. “Yeah, well, it’s the navy, not the Yuhuz Four Star.” He left, ducking to make sure his horns cleared the hatch.

  The morning shift crew was already in place—CPO Tenn Graneet wanted his people onstation fifteen minutes early, and if you weren’t, you’d be sorry. Once, and you got your rump chewed like a starved reek was gnawing on it. Twice, and you were looking for another job.

  “Good morning, people,” Tenn said.

  “Morning, Chief,” came the echo from the crew.

  “Polish your buttons, boys,” the chief said. “I don’t want anything sticking just in case we have to shoot something today.”

  Most of the crew smiled. They all knew about the drill. They were all ready. None of them wanted to be the being who disappointed Master Chief Petty Officer Graneet. No, sir …

  MEDICAL FRIGATE MEDSTAR FOUR, POLAR ORBIT, PLANET DESPAYRE

  “Captain Dr. Kornell Divini?”

  Uli nodded. “Yeah.”

  “Medical Technician Class Two Vurly, sir,” the man said. Human, as Uli was, or at least close enough that he couldn’t tell otherwise, and Uli was something of an expert on humanoid anatomy.

  “This way, sir.”

  The meditech led him down featureless gray corridors, deeper into the ship, to an office complex. Uli marked the route half consciously, knowing he could find his way around pretty quickly if need be. He had a good sense of direction, though it wasn’t anything he could claim credit for—he’d been born that way.

  Sure enough, it was the Medical Admin section he found himself in. Ships’ medical suites all looked alike; the same pale off-white walls, wide corridors, and color-coded luminescent floor stripes that led you to various departments. There were a dozen or so people working: secretaries, mostly, some biologicals, some droids. The hands-on medical stuff would be done elsewhere down the hall, he knew.

  “Commander Hotise, Dr. Kornell Divini.”

  Hotise was a short, rotund man, probably seventy or so, with white hair and a cropped beard. He wore office grays, and the clothes were cut well enough that they had to be tailored. He was checking off a list on a flatscreen. He looked up, nodded at the tech. “Thanks, Vurly.”

  The tech nodded, said “Sir,” and left.

  “Welcome to MedStar Four, Doctor,” Hotise said. “Glad to have you aboard.”

  Uli nodded. “Thank you, sir,” he said. His apparent lack of enthusiasm must have showed. The old man cocked an eyebrow that had more hair than a leafcrawler.

  “Not happy with this assignment, son?”

  That earned Uli’s new commander an incredulous look. “Not happy? I did my first tour in a Rimsoo unit on a swamp world where your lungs could fill with spores in five minutes if you weren’t wearing a filter mask. I patched up maybe a thousand clones, and I was supposed to be rotated back to my homeworld and discharged a civilian at the end of it. That was … five? six? hitches ago. I lost track.”

  Hotise nodded. “Imslow,” he said.

  “That’s right.” IMSLO stood for “Imperial Military Stop Loss Order.” Too many skilled people who’d been drafted had had enough of the military after the Clone Wars, and when their compulsory service ended, wanted nothing more than to go home. With the action against the Rebels heating up, the Empire couldn’t allow that. Doctors, in particular, were in short supply; hence, IMSLO. A retroactive order mandating that, no matter when you’d been conscripted, once you were in, you were in for as long as they wanted you—or until you got killed. Either way, it was kiss your planned life good-bye.

  Imperial Military Stop Loss Order. An alternative translation, scrawled no doubt on a ’fresher wall somewhere by a clever graffitist, had caught on over the last few years: “I’m Milking Scragged; Life’s Over.” The memory brought a faint, grim smile to Uli’s lips.

  “Sorry, son,” his CO said. “It’s not my policy.”

  “But you are career navy.”

  The older man nodded. “We each have our chosen path.”

  “Not exactly true, is it? If I was on my chosen path, probably you and I would never have met.”

  Hotise shrugged. “What can I say? I don’t run things back in civilization—I just do what I’m told. We were short a surgeon. I requisitioned a replacement. You’re him. You weren’t here, you’d be someplace else where the Empire deemed you necessary.

  “It ain’t Imperial Center General or Big Zoo, but it’s quiet here. Not like a Rimsoo tent out in the tall grass. Nobody is shooting at us. Most of what we see is the occasional industrial accident or normal wear and tear. You could do better, Captain, but you could also do a lot worse. War is ugly, but that’s how it is.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You can drop that part. We’re pretty informal around here. I’ll have a droid show you to your quarters, and you can take the tour and settle in.” Hotise looked at Uli’s orders. “Says here you’re originally from Tatooine, Dr. Divini.”

  “Uli.”

  Hotise squinted at him. “Beg pardon, son?”

  “People call me Uli. It’s a Tusken word—means—”

  An alarm blared, cutting him off. Uli didn’t need a translation: Incoming!


  A secretary droid rolled up on a single wheel. Its gyroscope squeaked a little right at the edge of Uli’s hearing as the spinning wheel kept the droid upright and stable. It stopped in front of Hotise. “Sir, Ambulance Ship Nine is on the way to Dock B with twelve workers injured by an oxygen tank explosion at the construction site.”

  Uli noticed that the droid’s vocabulator had, for whatever reason, a kind of musical lilt that he found pleasant. It was as though the droid were a character from a light opera, about to burst into song at any moment.

  “It should be arriving in six-point-five minutes,” the droid continued. “Field medics list primary damage due to compressive injuries, shrapnel wounds, and vacuum ruptures. Four critical, two of those in shock; three moderate; five minor. Species breakdown is six Wookiees, three humans, one Cerean, one Ugnaught, one Gungan.”

  Uli frowned. That was an interesting mix—six Wookiees? Working for the Empire? That didn’t seem right.

  “So much for quiet,” he said. “Which way to Emergency Receiving?”

  “You don’t have to jump right in yet,” Hotise said.

  Uli shrugged. “Might as well. It’s what I do.”

  Hotise nodded. “Fourmio will show you.” He nodded at the droid. “Leave your gear here; I’ll have it taken to your quarters.”

  The droid said, “This way, Dr. Divini,” in a pleasing tenor. Its wheel squeaked as it rolled down the hall. Uli followed.

  6

  SLASHTOWN PRISON COLONY, GRID 4354, SECTOR 547, QUADRANT 3, PLANET DESPAYRE

  As a Zelosian, Celot Ratua Dil could, if pressed, live on sunlight and water—at least for a while. He didn’t know his species’ origin, but he did know that his people all had green eyes and green blood. While nobody outside the species had ever been curious enough to do full genetic scans, the theory that there had been some unique melding of animal and plant in the dawn of Zelosian history was accepted as fact on his homeworld. Sunlight and a little water, and he could go a month, two months, without eating a bite, though he’d rather not. He’d rather eat a nice meal of bahmat steak and feelo eggs, and, as long as he was rathering, he’d much rather be home on Zelos than on a prison world full of nasty criminals.

  Unfortunately, that wasn’t how it was.

  He looked around the inside of the rude hut in which he lived, a ramshackle collection of local wood and cast-off Imperial packing crates lashed together with vines, wire, and bits of twine. Not much, but it was home. He rolled off the pad he used for a bed, essentially a blanket over some evergreen boughs. Fresh and layered right, it was pretty comfortable. The branches were getting dry, though; it had been a couple of standard weeks since he’d changed them. He’d have to do that soon; not only were dry branches uncomfortable, but scorpion slugs would quickly infest them, and one sting from a slug’s tail could cause members of just about any humanoid species agony for weeks—if they were lucky.

  For the thousandth time Ratua mentally railed against the bad luck that had sent him here. Yes, he was a thief, though not much of one. And yes, he’d been a smuggler, though he’d never made any real credits at it. He was a pretty good scrounger, which helped him survive here. And he was not above taking advantage of a poor trader in a spirited transaction now and again. But being scooped up in a Trigalis port pub that just happened to have a pirate gang in it, and being lumped in as one of their crew? That was wrong. All he had done was stop in for a mug of ferment. The fact that he had been doing a little haggling with one of the pirates over some meelweekian silk that had “fallen” from a commercial hovervan earlier didn’t mean he was a member of the crew.

  The judges, unfortunately, had not been convinced. Ratua had offered to undergo a truth-scan, but somebody would have to pay for that, as he didn’t have the coin, and the judges weren’t willing to spend taxpayers’ credits when he was so obviously guilty of something, even if it wasn’t this particular crime on this particular world. And so he’d been tossed in with a crowd of hard-bitten types, all of them wedged into a cargo hold not big enough for half their number, and summarily tossed off the planet.

  Being on a prison planet with some seriously bad criminals was not a walk in a quiet park. Even without the exiled thieves, murderers, extortionists, and so on, Despayre wouldn’t be anyone’s first choice to build a winter home. The land was mostly jungle, consisting of one large continent and one considerably larger ocean. The rampant growth was nourished by a gravity level of less than three-quarters a standard g, and by seasonal gales that roared in from the distant ocean, fueled by tidal forces due to the erratic orbit.

  The jungle flora and fauna had responded to the environmental challenge of the gales by producing large, close-knit growth that stabbed roots deep into the ground. In some places the entwined rain forest was totally impenetrable. The animal life had adapted as well, by becoming, for the most part, sinuous and serpentine, the better to forage through the tightly interwoven vines and boles. There were poisonous crustaceans, as well as a few flying creatures such as small winged lizards and manta-like things, the latter with an interesting life cycle that began in the ocean and ended in the jungle.

  And everything—everything—seemed to be the most vicious, savage, and generally unpleasant representative of its species possible. It wasn’t so much an interdependent ecological system as it was all-out biological war, with each of Despayre’s myriad indigenous species seemingly hardwired to attack and destroy all others. Everything that moved, it seemed, had fangs that dripped venom, and everything rooted to the ground had poisonous thorns, barbs, burrs …

  And on top of all that, there were the prisoners.

  The guards, safe in their floating patrol barges, were there to make sure nobody escaped; short of that, the prisoners could do pretty much whatever they wanted to one another, and not a night went by without somebody being thumped, sometimes hard enough that they died. It was the law of the jungle in here, just as it was out there, and the big predators ruled. They took what they wanted, and if you objected, you got squashed. Ratua tried to keep a low profile—if they didn’t notice you, they weren’t as likely to take you out just for the sport of it. He kept his mouth shut and his head down, and concentrated on survival.

  He washed his face, using fairly clean water in a stasis field generator dome, then headed outside. Sergeant Nova Stihl, one of the more easygoing of the guards, taught a self-defense class nearby every morning. Mostly the students were other guards, but there were some prisoners, and Ratua enjoyed watching other people sweat. Plus, it was a gathering in which biz could be conducted. Swap a little of this for a little of that, get by a little better. Ratua had a pretty good biz going bartering goods and services, and that helped buy off the predators who did spot him now and then. Say, fellow being, which would you rather do? Stomp me into green mush, or get a new battery for your music player?

  Among criminals, as among most people, greed was pretty dependable.

  Ratua arrived shortly at the cleared spot where the self-defense players gathered. There were eighteen or twenty of them, plus about that many prisoners and guards watching. He circulated, hoping to find somebody with a couple of spare sunfruits he could score for breakfast.

  Sergeant Stihl was talking about what to do if somebody attacked you with a knife as Ratua worked his way around the gathering.

  “Anybody know the first thing you do if somebody comes at you with a blade?” Stihl asked.

  “Run like a fleetabeesta,” somebody said.

  To the general laughter, Stihl replied, “You took this class before?” More laughter. “Monn has it exactly right,” the sergeant continued. “You make tracks away, fast as you can. Bare-limbed against a knife, you get cut, no ifs, no buts. And unless you scum of the galaxy have been industrious since last time I looked, you don’t have much of a medcenter anywhere around these parts. You could get cut bad, bleed out, or get infected and leave the party by the slow and painful exit, hey?”

  There was a murmur of agreement. Eve
rybody knew that. Lose a body part here, it was gone for good if you weren’t a natural regenerator. The state of local medicine was rudimentary: a few docs and other healers, but not a lot of equipment or meds. Of course, the closest bacta tank was a mere three hundred or so klicks away; unfortunately, the direction was vertical rather than horizontal, and most of the prisoners had few illusions about their chances of being hoisted up to the orbiting facility if they were in harm’s way.

  “But if you don’t have a weapon and you can’t run, then you need another option. And it has to be one that doesn’t depend on great skill because it won’t work unless you have that, and even then, maybe not.” Sergeant Stihl looked around. “Hey, Ratua, lemme borrow you for a minute.”

  Ratua smiled. He’d done this before.

  “Lot of self-defense teachers, they say you have to trap and control the knife arm,” Stihl continued. “That, not to put too fine a point on it, is pure mopak. If you aren’t faster than the guy with the knife, that gets you gutted, no matter how much you know.”

  Ratua strolled into the ragged circle made by the watchers. Stihl tossed him the practice knife, a forearm-length dagger made out of softflex. Stiff enough to work like a real knife, but with enough give that if you hit somebody with it, it would bend without doing damage. The point and edges were coated with a harmless red dye that left a temporary mark on whatever they touched.

  “I’m twelve years deep in teräs käsi,” Stihl said. “I was the First Naval Fleet’s Unarmed Middleweight Champion two years, runner-up for two more. Bare hand-to-hand, I expect I can take anybody my size on this planet apart, doesn’t matter which species. Blade-to-blade, I can duel to a draw. Bare against a knife? I’ll get cut. Show ’em, Ratua.”

  Ratua smiled and stepped in as if he was in no hurry. He made a lazy thrust with the knife. Stihl went into a crouching move to grab his arm, only—

  Ratua did his trick.

  As the sergeant reached for his wrist, Ratua pulled his hand back, and while it looked like no big deal to him, he knew the watchers would see his hand blur.