Star Wars: Death Star

by Michael Reaves

  He nodded. “I’ll be back before the evening crush,” he said. He headed for the mouth of the alley, and she went back inside.

  Rodo’s worry aside, a missed delivery was probably nothing to be concerned about, Memah told herself. There was, after all, a war on, and little glitches were to be expected, even if the war never actually came close to this planet, save for a few incidences of sabotage. And what Rebel with half a brain was going to come down to the Southern Underground to blow something up—here, where there was a good chance somebody would waylay him and steal everything he had on him, including his bomb? Unless you knew your way around these parts, it was risky being a tourist without a couple of armed guards. Plus, there weren’t any targets down here that would make much of a headline in the holocasts—who cared about the slums below the streets anyhow?

  She thought then of those Eyes who’d been in the other night. Yeah, okay, that had been unusual, but whatever their reasons, it wasn’t as if there was anything covert going on …

  Was it?

  Memah snorted. Probably some computer had burped somewhere and lost a couple of routing files. As long as it was a onetime glitch, she could live with that. After all, where local government was concerned, it wasn’t as if she had a lot of choice these days.

  NCO CANTINA, ISD STEEL TALON

  The NCO cantina was half full, the air blowers working hard to get rid of the smoke and body odors, and almost succeeding. MCPO Tenn Graneet sat across the four-person table from Olzal Erne, the second-watch chief from the starboard array. Both humans had their elbows on the table, right hands clasped in arm-wrestling position. Their left hands were linked on the tabletop.

  Erne was bigger—twelve, maybe fifteen kilos heavier—ten years younger, and he liked to pump iron, so he had the muscles of a weight lifter. To look at them, it should be no contest—Erne clearly had the advantage.

  “You about ready, old man?” Erne said.

  “Just a second.” Tenn freed his left hand, grabbed his frosted mug, and took a long swallow of ferment. He put the mug down, grinned, and relinked with Erne’s left hand. “Good when you are, Olzal.”

  A dozen members of both gunnery crews and a couple of deck polishers stood around the table, watching as both men settled in, the muscles on their arms beginning to bunch slightly. Other than that, the clasped hands could have been molded in durasteel.

  “Five on Chief Erne, thirty seconds max,” one of Erne’s gunners said.

  “I got that,” somebody on Tenn’s crew said.

  “Ten on CPO Graneet,” one of the proton railers, also of Tenn’s crew, chimed in.

  “Time on that?” a woman asked.

  “As long as it takes.”

  “I’ll take that bet.”

  “Hey, Numbers, how much does our side win?” Tenn asked.

  Numbers was a Givin, a species of beings who were, on the whole, obsessed with mathematics. Only a few dozen Givins had been conscripted, but their ability to survive for short periods, unsuited, in hard vacuum, even more than their aptitude for juggling integers, had resulted in more favored treatment than most other nonhumanoids got from the Empire.

  Numbers had an uncanny ability to do all manner of arithmetic in his head, almost as fast as a droid. Now was no exception. Tenn had no sooner posed the question than the gaunt creature replied, “Eighty-five credits among us. Twenty in your pocket.”

  “Counting your money, Tenn? You gotta beat me first, don’t you?”

  “Oh, that.” With a quick snap of his wrist and flexion of his chest and shoulders, Tenn slammed Erne’s hand to the tabletop. It took maybe an entire second.

  He let go of the other man’s hand to a smattering of applause and cheers. Erne looked stunned. He rubbed his biceps. “Milking son of a tairn!” he said. “How the kark did you do that?”

  Tenn grinned. “Clean living, Chief.”

  The truth was otherwise, but only he knew it. Back in a dustup during the final days of the Clone Wars, when he’d been an assistant gunner on his first assignment, some idiot of a loader had switched leads on a heavy capacitor and then forgotten to set the safeties. As soon as the discharger opened it, the cap had blown and showered the gun crew with shrapnel, a piece of which had severed the tendon connecting Tenn’s right pectoral muscle to his arm.

  It had been lucky for the loader that he’d been killed instantly; otherwise, those of the crew who weren’t already maimed or dead would have made it a point to see him die slowly.

  When the medic had reconnected the tendon in Tenn’s upper body, he hadn’t liked the old attachment, which had gotten pretty banged up by the piece of hot metal. So he’d done an organic-screw embed and reattached the ligament a little lower. It looked fine, and eventually the screw was reabsorbed, leaving nothing more than a tiny bone nub. The result of this creative endeavor had been about a 25 or 30 percent improvement on the leverage in his right arm. With a little training, Tenn’s right pectoral was effectively almost half again as strong as his left. It didn’t look it, it wasn’t any larger, but the result was nonetheless impressive. It had won him a lot of bar bets on arm-wrestling contests over the years.

  Numbers slid a little stack of credits under Tenn’s mug. “Your cut, Chief.”

  “My elderly mother thanks you kindly, son.” He looked at Erne. “So, I buy the next round?”

  “Works for me,” the bigger man said.

  “No dishonor in being beaten by the best.”

  The chief grinned. “Give me a couple of days to heal up, we can have a rematch.”

  “Always happy to take a fellow navy man’s money.”

  After the watchers had gone back to their own brews, Erne said, “So what’s the scut on the new battle station?”

  “The Death Star?” Tenn lowered his voice to a conspiratorial level. “I hear that anybody who can hit a resiplex wall from a meter away can have a berth if he wants it. But if you can really shoot, they’ll let you run the big guns—including one that’ll make our biggest weapons look like pocket slugthrowers.”

  “No kidding?”

  “Guys like us, we got no problem,” Tenn continued. “All we have to do is ask.”

  “You gonna go for it?”

  “Now you’re kidding. I’m a lifer; why wouldn’t I? When this thing is finished, nothing anybody anywhere can field against it will even scratch the finish. Running a gun that will pop Star Destroyers like soap bubbles, maybe even knock a moon out of orbit—what kind of gunner would pass that up?” He grinned. “Bigger is better.”

  “I hear security will be tight. No leaves once you sign on until after the station becomes operational.”

  “And this is different from what we’re now doing how? Besides, look at the size of it. It’s gonna be like living on a moon—or in one. Thousands of decks. You can scan it and plug it so that everything a man could want will be somewhere in that sucker. Who needs shore leave when all you have to do is punch up the turbolift?”

  Erne allowed as how Tenn’s evaluation of the Death Star’s prurient possibilities made much sense. Both men drank more of their ales.

  “I’ve already told my exec I’m ready to sign on,” Tenn said. “Soon as they get a gun working, enough air to breathe, and enough gravity to tell which way’s up, I’m there.”

  “Speaking of everything a man could want …,” Erne said. He nodded at the door.

  Tenn turned. Ah. A pair of civilian workers from Supply—young, good-looking fems—stood there, having come, no doubt, to check out a place where real men drank.

  “I like the blond,” Erne said.

  “Fine by me,” Tenn said. “Hair’s all the same color in the dark.”

  Erne stood. “Good evening, ladies. Might my father and I buy you both drinks?”

  The two young women smiled. Tenn gave them his best grin in return, feeling the contentedness that only liquor and competitive victory could bring. A good job, the respect of people you worked with, and a nice-looking female sitting next to him,
in a cantina full of excellent Ortolan blue ferment. How much better could life get?

  13

  PILOTS’ PUB, REC DECK, ISD STEEL TALON

  Vil Dance had a stack of tenth-credit coins balanced on his upturned elbow, up to a dozen now. Around him, other pilots were making bets on whether he’d make it.

  So far, so good …

  He took another sip of his ale. The game was simple: You pointed your elbow like a gun sight and aimed in front of you, forearm held at a ninety-degree angle and parallel to the floor. With your open palm next to your ear and facing the ceiling, you snapped your hand down and tried to catch the coins balanced on your elbow before they fell. Anybody could do one. Most could do three or even four. Once you got past ten it was harder. Vil’s personal best was eighteen, so a dozen wasn’t that hard. It was a hand–eye coordination test, and if you were a pilot, you’d better have that in a goodly amount. The trick was to snap your cupped hand down fast enough so that you got to the coins while they were still stacked together. After a few centimeters’ free fall in normal gravity, they started to break from the stack, and once that happened you couldn’t pull it off. The movement had to be fast, but it also had to be smooth. The slightest off-angle jerk would torque the stack enough to separate the coins. You could manage most of them if that happened, but you’d miss some, guaranteed.

  It wasn’t as though the honor of the squad or anything was riding on him, but Vil did have a reputation to keep up. His times on the pilot reaction drills were always in the top two or three, and that’s what this was, essentially. A test of reflexes. There were other species, like the Falleen, for example, who could catch twenty or more with no problem whatsoever. But few humans could manage even ten, other than acrobats, martial arts masters … and pilots.

  “C’mon, Dance. You’re slower than a ronto in eight g’s.” That was Benjo.

  “Yeah, while we’re young,” Raal added. “Well, some of us, anyway …”

  Vil grinned, snapped his hand down, and grabbed the dozen tenths, no problem. “Easy money,” he said.

  There was a moment of surprised silence among the squad, then:

  “Five says he can’t do fourteen.”

  “I’ll take that bet.”

  “Ten says he can.”

  “Odds?”

  “Odds? What, do I look like a Toydarian bookie? Even!”

  While the pilots argued, Vil collected two more coins from a stack on the table. Fourteen, eh? Still four less than his top number, though he didn’t see any real point in mentioning that right—

  The scramble horn blared, a series of short, insistent hoots. The pilots dropped the chatter, along with whatever else they were holding except for their credits, which they stuffed into pockets as they ran toward the exit. Vil set his mug down on the table and followed. There had been only one swallow of ale left; it would haven taken all of two seconds to finish it, but when the horn howled, you stopped whatever you were doing right that instant and hauled butt for your station. First, it was the right thing to do; everybody knew that. Second, you never knew when an Imperial holocam might be watching you, and if you got caught dragging your feet during a call to station, instead of being a crack TIE pilot, you might find yourself transferred to a few months of “droid duty” scrubbing out garbage bins and latrine holding tanks.

  And third, Vil liked flying even more than he liked drinking.

  “Gotta be a drill,” somebody said. “Not likely another prison break after that last batch we cooked.”

  Vil didn’t speak to that. Somewhat to his surprise, he’d had a couple of uncomfortable nights after that experience. Yes, they had been criminal scum, and it was his job to stop said scum, and they had been shooting at him, but even so it hadn’t been a real contest. The Lambda hadn’t had a chance. He’d blown that ship out of vac and watched the remnants of the crew whirl through the coldness, freezing in clouds of their own bodily fluids. One tended to think about it as shooting blips, like in the holo sims, not people, but seeing the carnage that had resulted from his weapons had … Well, let’s be honest here, Vil told himself, since it’s all just between me. The truth was … he’d had a few dreams.

  No, not dreams. Dreams were innocuous fragments of this and that, things like not having studied for a test or flying without a craft or being naked in public. These hadn’t been dreams.

  These had been nightmares.

  Thankfully, he’d forgotten the details almost immediately after waking up, save for one night. That had stayed with him. One of the flash-frozen corpses, drifting through the void about ten meters away from the cockpit of his fighter. Its head and body had been ravaged by shrapnel to such an extent that Vil couldn’t tell if it had been male or female. He’d watched, fascinated, as the lacerated body rotated slowly, bringing its face into view. He’d noticed that, by some miracle of chance, the eyes had been untouched by the sleetstorm of metal …

  And then the eyes opened.

  Vil suppressed a shudder. That had been the worst. He told himself that it wasn’t unusual, that it was part of the job. That he’d get used to it.

  It helped. A little.

  As Vil approached the hangar, he saw the assistant to the command officer on deck waving the pilots in.

  “Move like you’ve got a purpose, people! A pregnant Pa’lowick could run faster! Let’s go!”

  “ADO,” Vil said as he approached. “What’s flyin’?”

  “You and your squad, among nine others,” the ADO said. He kept waving at the still-approaching pilots, down now to only a handful. “VIP escort for the Imperial-class Destroyer Devastator.”

  Vil blinked. “We got a rainbow-jacket admiral? A Moff?”

  “Not exactly. The guy running this ship is more of a monotone,” said the ADO. Noting Vil’s blank look, he added, “All black.”

  Vil got it then. “Darth Vader.”

  “Friend of yours?”

  Vil laughed. They were side by side on the stairs, almost to the flight deck. Vil said, “Never met the man—or whatever he is. Saw him fly once. TIE school, out of Imperial City Naval Base. Against Barvel.”

  There was no need to specify that he was talking about Colonel Vindoo “The Shooter” Barvel, one of the most decorated TIE pilots ever. During the Clone Wars, Barvel had taken out more than thirty confirmed enemy craft in ship-to-ship combat, twice that many more probables, and nobody knew how many he hadn’t even bothered to report. Vil knew he himself was a good pilot, a hot-hand even in training, but Barvel, who had been cycled out of combat by jittery brass to make sure the Empire had a live hero to parade around as a recruiter, was the best. Even though he was only a captain at the time, he’d been put in charge of the pilot school at ICNB. Barvel could power-dive the wings off any other craft and hit a target the size of a pleeky on the way down at top speed, port or starboard cannon, you pick which gun. In training missions he’d flown with the man, Vil had felt like a small child who could barely walk trying to keep up with a champion distance runner.

  During maneuvers for the about-to-graduate pilots, Darth Vader had shown up. He didn’t have any military rank per se, but he was the Emperor’s wrist-hawk and everybody knew it. If it came from Vader’s augmented voxbox, it might as well have come from Palpatine’s lips, and you argued with it at your peril, no matter how high your rank.

  Vader had watched for a time, then asked for a TIE fighter. He had climbed in, taken off, and joined the mock battle. Within seconds, his electronic guns had painted half a dozen ships, and it had come down to Vader versus Barvel. Vil, whose ship had been hit in a three-on-one early in the pretend fight, had been in a holding pattern waiting for the engagement to finish, and he’d watched it all.

  Vader hadn’t exactly flown circles around Barvel, but every time The Shooter jigged or jinked, Vader was half a second ahead of him. Barvel was doing things Vil didn’t think were possible in a TIE, and Vader not only matched him, move for move, he just plain outflew him. It was—no other word for it—
astounding. Vil quickly realized that Vader could have taken the flight school commander out at any time—he was only playing with him.

  That had been as spooky in its own way as Vil’s nightmare. He’d never seen a human pilot move like that. Damned few alien ones either, for that matter.

  After a few passes, and with what had seemed a slow, offhand, lazy series of rolls and loops, Vader came around, nailed Barvel with his training beams, and it was “Game over.” All the pilots hanging there in space had to reach up and shut their mouths manually.

  The ADO looked down the hallway, but no more pilots were inbound. He turned and pointed. “Better get to your ship, Dance.” A short pause, then: “Vader’s good, huh?”

  “Better than good. If it was him against me, I’d just overload my engine and blow myself up—that way I’d get to pick my own moment to die.”

  What Vil hadn’t mentioned, mostly because he still didn’t believe it himself, was that the mechanic who’d serviced Vader’s borrowed TIE fighter afterward had come out of the bay shaking his head. The nav and targeting comps had been turned off, he’d said. Cockpit recorder showed that Vader had done that before he’d left the dock. So if the mechanic was to be believed, not only had Vader beaten the best pilot in the navy as easily as if Barvel had been a crop duster on some backrocket world, he had done so on manual.

  Which was simply impossible.

  “Go,” the ADO said. “Hit vac—you don’t want to be late to the party.”

  “No, sir.” Not that Vader needs the escort, Vil thought. Nobody here could get in his way.

  Vil hurried onto the deck, his mechanic waving him to his TIE. “Been takin’ a nap, rocketjock? Get in!”

  As Vil clamped down his helmet and checked his readings, he had a moment to ponder the purpose of the escort. Darth Vader, commanding a big Destroyer. Wonder what he’s doing here?