Star Wars: Death Star

by Michael Reaves

  Had to be something big. You could have a headful of hard vac and still suss that out.

  The air lock doors opened. Vil lit his engines and was gone.

  14

  RECEIVING DECK SEVEN, HAVELON

  Tarkin frowned as he waited on the receiving deck for Vader to arrive. It was certainly true that the Emperor could send whomever he liked, whenever he liked, to check on the station’s progress. Tarkin had no reason to be anything but grateful to the Emperor—how many Grand Moffs were there, after all? Who had elevated him to that puissant position and given him command of the most important military project in galactic history?

  All that was true. And he was grateful—to Palpatine. But one feels differently toward the one holding the leash than toward the one on the leash.

  There was something about Vader that set his teeth on edge. It wasn’t just the prosthetic suit with its mask and breather, nor the fact that he couldn’t see the eyes behind those polarized lenses. Vader had power, both personal and as the Emperor’s tool, and Tarkin’s sense of him was that he cared about as much for a human life standing next to him as he did about a mistfly in the far-off swamps of Neimoidia. Standing next to Vader was like standing next to a giant thermal grenade—it might just go off at any moment.

  And the man in black had a temper, no doubt about that. Thus far, he had not unleashed it in Tarkin’s direction, but Tarkin had seen it loosed on others, and those who thought to give Vader grief quickly realized that it was a fatal mistake.

  No matter how much people decried the Force as being a superstition that hadn’t saved the Jedi from annihilation, it was real enough to enable Vader to stop a man’s heart or keep the breath from his lungs simply by willing it. Not to mention knocking blaster bolts from the air with that lightsaber of his. True, nothing would be able to withstand the force of this battle station’s armament, once it was operational. But it wouldn’t be fully operational for another few months, and anybody who was both strong enough and foolish enough to slay Vader would have to deal with the Emperor’s wrath—and he made Vader seem like an Iridonian hugglepup.

  The shuttle hatch opened. With most military VIPs, there would be an honor guard of elite stormtroopers or even Imperial Red Guards emerging first. Not so with Vader. He strode through the hatch and down the ramp alone, his cape billowing behind him in the wind of his own passage, fearless, not the least bit worried about any possible danger. He was arrogant, but then he had reason to be.

  Tarkin waited, his admirals shifting nervously behind him. Some of them couldn’t stand the very idea of a man like Vader, who existed outside the chain of command and was able to come and go as he pleased, not truly subject to military orders. Well, it was what it was, and there was no help for it.

  Vader approached to stand before Tarkin. He always seemed larger and taller than Tarkin remembered, a dark presence, a force, as it were, of nature. “Grand Moff Tarkin,” he said, offering not even the slightest nod of a military bow. Vader bent the knee to no one, save the Emperor, Tarkin knew.

  “Lord Vader.” There was no point in offering small talk or pleasantries; Vader had no use for them. “Shall we begin the tour?” Tarkin asked, extending one hand in a gesture that encompassed the entirety of the station.

  “Proceed.”

  “This way. We’ll take my lighter.”

  Vader could sense the hostility of some of the men behind Tarkin, but that was of no importance. Hostile words or actions he could and would deal with, but thoughts of the weak-minded were no threat. Tarkin, oily and smooth as always, was a man who knew where his best interests lay, and as long as his own plans matched those of the Emperor, he was a useful tool. Which was good, because Vader would not hesitate to use that tool.

  The Rebels were turning out to be more troublesome than many had expected. The Emperor had known it would be thus, of course; the resistance had not been a surprise to him. The Emperor was completely in concert with the dark side of the Force. He was the most powerful Sith who had ever existed.

  As would Vader be, someday.

  But that was in the future. Now he had more mundane duties. There were problems with the construction of this station. When Vader left, those problems would be corrected. He would return as necessary to correct more troubles as they appeared, and he would also return at times when things were proceeding smoothly, just to remind Tarkin and his senior officers that the Emperor’s eye was always watching them.

  Always.

  15

  LOWER LEVEL TROOP BARRACKS, SECTOR N-ONE, DEATH STAR

  The N-One sector, a huge area equal to one twenty-fourth of a hemisphere, had been partly pressurized and heated, so at least Teela didn’t have to wear a vac suit to work anymore. Thank the stars for that; she was sick to death of ending each day fatigued by the effort of manipulating the stiff joints and servos, the limited vision, and the inability to scratch—to name only a few problems. She’d worn vac suits before on jobs, and those experiences hadn’t been pleasant, but this was by far the worst, because the Empire, no doubt in a cost-saving effort, had mandated the use of outmoded constant-volume suits instead of the newer, elastic one-piece designs.

  The suits had been necessary for a time, however. On a project this size there was no way to complete the entire hull, pressurize it all, and then start building the interior—the amount of air necessary would be tremendous. Once the vessel was functional, then the multitude of converters installed in every sector could easily handle the task, but until those were online, air would have to be sucked from a planetary atmosphere and hauled up out of the gravity well by cargo ship—either that, or build a huge conversion plant in space and truck water to that, which would be even harder. A tanker full of water was more unwieldy than one full of air bottles, and without proper heat it just turned into blocks of ice when you unloaded it, which in turn resulted in problems with increased volume. The sheer magnitude of the project wouldn’t allow a full exterior hull construction first.

  Thus it had been reasoned early on that, while the hull was being laid, individual sectors would be built and sealed. This allowed plenty of storage space, at least at first, for supplies, as well as habitats for workers to stay close to the task. Hundreds of thousands of laborers needed someplace convenient to live—shuttling them back and forth for any distance after every shift was neither cost- nor time-effective.

  The hull-plate extruders were only a few hundred kilometers away, hung at a fixed orbital point where the gravitational forces of the prison planet and the raw-material asteroids being towed to the gigantic masticators all balanced. The process was simple enough. An asteroid sufficiently high in nickel-iron content was hauled from the outlying belt to the masticators and fed into a maw; the whirling durasteel teeth chewed the asteroid to tiny bits and mixed them with alloy ores mined and brought up from Despayre, including quadanium. The resulting gravel had water added and was put under high pressure to form a slurry, then fed into pipelines that led to the smelters. These were essentially huge melting pots that refined the mix, burning off impurities. The resulting scarified ore was conveyed to extruders that pressed out the hull plate, rather like food paste from a squeezed tube. There was still a lot of slag left over, but this was just gathered together, pointed at the local star, and given a hard push. Months later, these slag-rafts would fall into the sun and be burned up.

  Teela had been on projects before that used deep-space masticators and extruders, of course, such as skyhooks and wheelworlds. She’d never seen as large or as many as there were here, however. The amount of plate being produced was beyond any amount ever used in one place before.

  Sector N-One was shaped like a large crescent slice of juicemelon, cut in half midway. It was thirty-one kilometers wide at the base, which would be the equator when the station was finished, narrowing almost to a point only a few dozen meters wide at the other end, and just over ninety-four klicks long. Most of the sectors would be identical in this hemisphere, save for a select few a
nd including, of course, those through which the superlaser would be constructed.

  It was hard to visualize the scope of the whole orb. Big didn’t begin to do it justice. The habitable crust alone was two kilometers thick, and included in it the surface city sprawls, armory, hangar bays, command center, technical areas, and living quarters. Below that would be the hyper-drive, reactor core, and secondary power sources—none of which, fortunately, concerned her.

  What concerned her at the moment was an old and somewhat cranky Wookiee who was giving her a hard time.

  Teela’s command of the Wookiee language was rudimentary. The problem with speaking Shyriiwook wasn’t so much the vocabulary as the pronunciation; a human’s vocal apparatus just couldn’t handle the grunts, groans, and howls necessary to be understood. Like most people who’d ever been around serious construction projects, Teela was used to dealing with the tall and furry bipeds—they seemed to gravitate to such sites, even when they weren’t being enslaved and forced to labor on them. Fortunately, on the big projects most Wookiees understood Basic, even if they couldn’t wrap their tongues around it any more than humans could deal with Wookiee-speak. Given all that, Teela usually managed to communicate well enough with them.

  Usually.

  The chief on this shift in this subsector was a grizzled old Wook named Hahrynyar, who probably would have joined up voluntarily if he hadn’t been grabbed and enslaved. His coat was gray from muzzle to ankle, he was stubborn and intractable, and he had the annoying habit of forgetting how to understand Basic whenever Teela made an indisputable point. Which was what was happening now.

  “Haaarrn,” the Wookiee said. “Aarn whynn roowarrn.”

  “I understand that it’s on the plans. What I’m saying is I don’t want you to build it. It doesn’t make any sense to put a heat exhaust port there. The main exhaust port is already done, and if there is a need for additional ones—which I don’t believe there is, at all—there are better places to put them than right next to the main one. We don’t need it in this sector, and certainly not there.” She pointed at the holo schematic of the polar trench.

  “Harnkk whoom?”

  “On my authority, that’s whose.”

  “Arrk-arn ksh sawrron.”

  Teela chuckled. She’d understood that well enough. “Yes, yes, I’ll put it in writing.”

  These old metal benders and rivet pounders always thought they knew better than the architect when it came down to the actual construction. Sometimes they did, which was fine. But no matter what, they’d stick to the approved plan like a preprogrammed droid with permabond on its wheels to make sure they didn’t get scalded by the sector work boss.

  She couldn’t blame the Wook for wanting it in writing. Early in her career Teela had taken verbal orders from a designer. No big deal, just some interior frame spec on a resiplex he thought was silly, so he’d told her to use a different grade of durasteel and, when she’d seemed uncertain, had assured her it was plenty strong enough to handle the job and a lot cheaper, so what was the problem? She’d shrugged and done what he’d asked. When the inspectors came around and refused to approve the building, the designer had been very quick to point out that his assistant must have made that decision all on her own, because the plans—and he—had specifically called for 9095-T8511 grade on that scaffold frame, and if his assistant had used 9093-T7511? Well, it didn’t matter that the alloy and heat-treat could easily take the load if the plans called for the higher grade, now, did it?

  He had hung her out to twist in the breeze. Later, when Teela had stormed into the designer’s office to give him a piece of her mind, he had laughed at her. She needed to learn how to play in the real galaxy, he’d told her. If you got caught, you passed the blame along. What she should have done, he’d said, was laid it onto the obviously blind and stupid construction crew chief who had selected the wrong alloy. He could read a plan, couldn’t he?

  Teela couldn’t prove anything and she wasn’t stupid. After that, she made certain to get any deviations from the plans appended to the work order in writing. So she knew exactly what the old Wookiee was thinking.

  “Don’t worry about it now,” she said. “You have to get the heat exchangers into the barracks before you’d start on piddly stuff like ports, anyhow.”

  “Arrrrnn rowwlnnn.” Well, yes, Hahrynyar allowed, that was the way a smart builder would do things.

  “Go, then. Somebody has mislaid my shipment of triaxial fiber-optic cable and I’ve got to run it down. Get the exchangers unpacked and a crew started installing them, and we’ll get back to the philosophy of exhaust ports later, okay?”

  The old Wookiee nodded and headed off. Teela watched him lumber away for a second, then turned her attention to the next problem. Never a dull moment, the day was never long enough, and they sure didn’t pay her enough …

  She had to smile at that. The pay might not be much, but it was better than living in a pesthole down on a planet full of murdering scum. Even cantankerous old Hahrynyar couldn’t argue with that.

  GUNNERY COMMAND, ISD STEEL TALON

  Tenn Graneet stuck his head into the CO’s office. “You wanted to see me, Cap?”

  His commanding officer looked up from his flimsiwork. “Come in, Tenn.”

  Tenn ducked slightly to pass through the hatch. Captain Hoberd’s office looked, as usual, like the local A-grav had somehow suffered a massive flux in just this room; data-chips were piled haphazardly on the floor, the two holopics on opposite walls—one was an image of Hoberd’s graduating class, the other of his wife, Linesee, and their two kids; Tenn could never remember their names—hung constantly askew, and Hoberd’s Silver Valor medal was dangling from the upper hinge of a wall cabinet. Every time Tenn entered the CO’s office, the medal was dangling from a different location—on one or the other of the family pics, from the small alumabronze sculpture on his desk, even swinging slightly in the breeze directly beneath the air vent … he couldn’t recall ever seeing it in the same place twice. Droot and some of the others reported the same experience. No one ever saw him move it, and no one knew why he did. It was just a quirk of the captain’s. Those unfamiliar with his war record might think he had a disrespectful attitude, but nothing could be further from the truth—at least, not in Tenn’s opinion.

  “What’s up?” He couldn’t read anything from the man’s face, which wasn’t unusual; Hoberd, it was said, could out-stare a Weequay. Normally this didn’t bother Tenn, but today, for some reason, he began to feel a little uneasy. The energy in the room was subtly different. He didn’t go in for woo-woo concepts like that, but sometimes he couldn’t deny it.

  “Sit down, Tenn.” Hoberd’s expression didn’t change. Tenn looked at the chairs, both of which were filled with various objects, and perched on the edge of the less cluttered one. “I’ve got some bad news, I’m afraid.”

  Uh-oh, Tenn thought. Had to have been that last inspection; he couldn’t think of any other possibility. What had gone wrong? An improper calibration? Not up to spit-’n’-polish standards? What was it?

  The CO let him sweat for a moment, then grinned. “Bad news for me, anyway—I’m losing my best noncom.”

  “Sir?”

  “Pack your bags, Chief. You’re for the Death Star. They’re giving you the big gun.”

  At first the words didn’t make sense to Tenn. Then the meaning broke through, like a sun through clouds, and he grinned.

  “No poodoo, Cap?”

  Hoberd held up a small datachip. “Orders just came down.” He tossed the chip, and Tenn caught it in midair. He was aware that he was grinning like a kid. “Thanks, Cap!”

  Hoberd frowned slightly. “You sure you want to do this?”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  The CO shook his head regretfully. “How am I going to replace you?”

  Tenn blinked. “What, you aren’t coming?”

  “Not me. My tour is over soon, and I’m mustering out. One of my in-laws runs a good-sized indus
trial operation—I have a job waiting.”

  “Oh, that sounds exciting. Making widgets? Moving sewage? C’mon, Cap. You and me, pulling trigger on the biggest—”

  “Job pays three times as well and the only thing dangerous about it might be having the wife find out where I’m hiding the girlfriend.”

  They both laughed. Then Hoberd continued, “No guns’re operational yet. There are only a few sectors even pressurized, but you’re the best shooter in the fleet and they’re lucky to have you. They want you over there as soon as possible to begin orientation.”

  Tenn felt like his head would split in half if his grin got any bigger. The CO was right: who better to pull the firing lever on the superlaser? This was the biggest, most powerful weapon ever built. Ever. This was as good as it got. He could bask in the warm glow of that for quite a while.

  “Well, what’re you waiting for? Go on! Next time I see you your ugly mug had better be hidden behind one of those snazzy black visors they wear over there.”

  CPO Tenn Graneet walked out of Captain Hoberd’s office feeling as though something had gone wrong with the corridor’s gravity, because he was definitely walking on air. Just wait until Droot and Velvalee heard the news. The best shot in the galaxy paired with the biggest gun … Tenn slapped his hands together, rubbing them with enthusiasm. He couldn’t wait to get his hands on those controls.

  16

  THE SOFT HEART CANTINA, SOUTHERN UNDERGROUND, GRID 19, IMPERIAL CITY

  Memah stood on the walk in front of what had been her cantina, stunned beyond words. The Soft Heart was no more than ashes and cinders, still warm, soot and smoke twirling up toward the exhaust fans in a dirty breeze.

  And it wasn’t just her place. The whole block had burned. The fire-suppression sprayers had unaccountably malfunctioned, according to the unofficial reports, at least, and the droid fire crews had been sent to the wrong location, so that by the time they arrived and began their efforts to control the blaze, it had been too late by far. They were lucky to have kept it from spreading to the whole sector, they said.