Star Wars: Death Star

by Michael Reaves

  Motti picked up a trio of denseplast workout balls, each the size of his fist. Anywhere else on the station they would weigh about a kilo each; in the HG room they were three apiece. Juggling them caused his muscles to quickly burn. His shoulders, arms, hands, back—all were protesting the effort as he tossed and caught the balls. He could manage the three most basic patterns: the cascade, which was the easiest; the reverse-cascade, a bit harder; and the shower, in which the balls all circled in the same direction. If he dropped one it was usually during the shower pattern, and the first thing he had learned when juggling in the HG room was to move his feet out of the way quickly if he dropped a ball. Three kilos moving three times faster than normal could easily break bones or crush toes.

  Today, despite the burning in his muscles, he was a machine, moving perfectly, and the balls stayed aloft, moving in sync without any flaw. He was aware that a couple of other senior officers were watching him from one corner of the room, and he smiled to himself. Being fit was important. If you were physically stronger than the men around you, it made them look upon you with the most basic level of respect: Cross me, and I can break you in half. He was not, nor would he ever be, some fat and out-of-shape form-chair officer who’d wheeze and run out of breath if he had to climb a flight of steps.

  He began to juggle the three heavy balls faster, shortening the arcs, bringing his elbows in closer to his body, tightening the pattern. The balls, which had been flying over his head, settled lower, and persistence of vision made them almost look as if they were a wheel rotating on an axle in front of him. Soon he would be able to add another one to the circle and juggle four. It might seem a trivial thing, but it wasn’t. It was a metaphor for how to live one’s life. A man could do almost anything he wished, if he wanted it enough.

  THE HARD HEART CANTINA, DEATH STAR

  Sergeant Stihl didn’t spend much time in pubs or cantinas. Now and again he’d go, mostly to show he was a regular trooper who didn’t mind having a couple of brews with the other men, but not all that often. An evening spent in a cantina would be one in which he could have been working on his fighting art or reading some epistemological treatise. Also, mind-altering substances did bad things for your motor skills, and it was hard to overcome the inertia of a few ales or some brain-fogging chem once you were done. Much easier then to sit on a soft chair and watch the entertainment holos than to go work out, which was definitely not the road to mastery.

  One of the troopers in his unit had gotten engaged, however, and the shift had an excuse to celebrate, so Nova had gone along, since the man was also a student of his.

  It was a nice enough joint. Clean, well ventilated, the crowd noisy but not over the top. Obviously the place to be off-hours in this sector, as it was standing room only. And the ale was cold.

  He noticed a security guy watching things, and after a few minutes of surreptitiously watching him watch the crowd, Nova had marked him as a player. He stood head and shoulders over most of the crowd, but he wasn’t dependent just on his heft—that was obvious. The man was a fighter. Nova didn’t know which art he favored or what kind of combat moves he had, but there was definitely something there. After so many years of dancing the dance, you could tell, just by the way a man stood or leaned against a wall. It was subtle—there was an attention to balance and stances, a way of shifting weight that, if you knew what to look for, was easy to see. This guy could take care of himself and anybody else in here who might want to give him trouble as well.

  Except for Sergeant Stihl, of course.

  He smiled into his ale. It was only his second in two hours, and there was still three-quarters of the purple liquid left. He’d already burned up the alcohol from the first mug, and he had no intention of continuing to drink enough to dull his wits. His days of getting hammered in public were long past—what was the point in having skills in a martial art if you were too fuzz-headed to use them when the need arose? He’d once seen a Bunduki player, a guy who had won top-level matches, get soused at a cantina in a dirtside dive. The player had gotten into a tiff with a local, and because he was drunk had gotten his butt thumped pretty good—despite his skill. Nova wasn’t going to find himself in that position, not if he could help it. And he didn’t go to cantinas to fight—that was just plain stupid. You never knew who had a vibroblade tucked away in a back pocket, or a couple of friends who would jump in unexpectedly to help out when you squared off.

  Nova was to wonder, later, if there really was anything to the metaphysical theory that thinking such thoughts gave them a higher probability of actually occurring. Maybe if he’d been thinking about doing his laundry or herding workers into the mess hall, the guy walking past wouldn’t have stumbled at that moment. Maybe. Or maybe it had something to do with Blink.

  Blink was his private name for a knack he had for anticipating things, particularly movements of opponents. Many times, during a fight, he would know somehow, before the movement began, that the other guy was going to throw an elbow or a kick. Of course, being able to anticipate your rival’s next move was the essence of good fighting, but Blink went beyond that. Not even years of practice could tell you, for example, if an antagonist was about to activate a hidden portable confounder, a sensory scrambling device that could momentarily throw you off-balance. Or if another fighter was coming around the corner as backup to the first. But these things, and others, had happened to Nova. And he’d known. Somehow.

  Whatever the reason, he saw the man, who was carrying a platter of mugs filled with ale he had collected at the bar, catch his boot on a stool leg, and because the stool was locked down, the leg didn’t move. The guy started to fall, directly toward Nova who, without thinking, stood, reached out with his left hand, and tapped the falling man on the shoulder, deflecting him to the side so that instead of dropping the platter of mugs into Nova’s lap, the man fell past him half a meter to the right.

  The mugs flew, showering fizzy ale in gouts every which way. The platter hit the floor well ahead of their former owner, who managed to break his fall with his hands. Then, big, drunk, and really irritated, he shoved away from the floor, came up, and spun to face Nova.

  “You okay, friend?” Nova asked.

  “No, I’m not milking okay! What did you trip me for?”

  Nova shook his head. “I didn’t. You caught your foot on the stool right there.”

  “You calling me a liar?”

  “Just telling you what I saw.”

  “You tripped me, then you shoved me!”

  “Nope. I just kept you from landing on top of me. Sorry. It was a reflex.”

  The man balled his hands into fists. His face, already red, got more so. Nova sighed. He knew the signs. Any second now …

  The man stepped in and threw a hard, straight, right-lead punch at Nova’s face. Nova turned his head, brought his left hand up to deflect the fist a bit, and with the open palm of his right hand smacked the attacker on the left temple, staggering him. Before the guy could do more than blink, Nova switched hand positions and thumped the heel of his left hand into the man’s right temple. The man fell again, not unconscious, but not far from it.

  “You about done, Sergeant?” came a soft voice from behind him.

  Nova had felt, rather than seen, the big security man come up from his right side.

  “I think so.” Nova turned to find the bouncer looming before him.

  “Teräs käsi,” the bouncer said. It was not a question.

  “Yep.”

  The big man nodded. “Highline, mirror-tools. Nice. I’m Rodo.”

  “Nova Stihl.”

  A couple of heartbeats passed.

  “You were a little slow getting here,” Nova said.

  “Not really. I saw you come in. I didn’t think you’d need any help.” Rodo looked down at the dazed man.

  “And you wanted to see.”

  Rodo shrugged. “Sure. Wouldn’t you?”

  Nova grinned. “Oh, yeah.”

  Rodo’s grin matched
his own. “Next ale is on me.”

  “I think I’m done drinking.”

  “Yeah, that’s why I offered.” He paused, then added, “There’s a guy teaches teräs käsi classes downlevels.”

  “That would be me.”

  “Maybe I might drop by?”

  “I’d like that. You’re welcome anytime.”

  Rodo bent and, with what looked like almost no effort, lifted the still-confused man to his feet. “What say we call it a night and head home, hey, friend?”

  The man nodded. “Yeah. I’m very tired. What happened?”

  “You tripped.”

  “Oh, wow.”

  Nova Stihl waited until Rodo had the drunk firmly in hand before he sat again. He noticed that the other troopers at the tables were looking at him with a certain amount of … something … in their faces. Wonder? Amazement? Respect? Fear?

  All of the above, probably.

  “Next round is on me,” Nova said. “To celebrate the union of Sergeant Dillwit here and his poor unlucky betrothed.”

  The men laughed, and that was the end of that.

  Memah Roothes was preparing a drink made up of ten different-colored layers of liquid, and it required some precision to keep the fluids from bleeding into one another. She had the first seven poured into a cylindrical crystal as long and as big around as Rodo’s forearm. The last three layers were the hardest, but as long as she kept a steady hand, she’d manage. It was a pain in the glutes manipulating the various densities, but the concoction, which would serve four, went for fifty credits, so it was worth the five minutes it took. When it was finished, Memah sat back and looked at it. Perfect.

  Rodo appeared at the end of the bar as the server droid collected the drink, called, for some reason Roothes had never understood, “A Walk in the Phelopean Forest,” and wheeled away with it. “Nice work,” he said.

  “Thanks. You, too. I noticed you didn’t kick the sergeant out?”

  “Nah. Pure self-defense. I’d have done the same.”

  “Went down pretty fast.”

  “Yeah. Guy is really good—system-class fighter, easy. Didn’t expect to find somebody like that out here in the middle of nowhere.”

  “Why not? It’s a warship, right?”

  “Yes, but the really good ones are either out in the killing fields using the stuff or back in civilization teaching it to recruits. First one is okay, second is a waste. Here, it’s just unusual.”

  Memah shook her head. “Males. Always with the violence. You want to go a couple of rounds with this guy, don’t you?”

  Rodo grinned. “I wouldn’t mind. You want to stay sharp, you got to hone yourself against the best you can find. Just friendly competition. Nobody gets hurt—well, not hurt too bad.”

  Memah shook her head again.

  Rodo drifted away.

  Even though she was busy, she caught a glimpse of Green-Eyes sitting over in the corner, sipping an ale. Now, there was an interesting male. A Zelosian, he’d said; not a species she’d ever run into before. She’d warped the HoloNet a little looking for general data on his kind, and found surprisingly little. They seemed to be a strange genetic mixture of plant and animal, unable to crossbreed with any other humanoids—not that she was overly concerned about that, as she saw no urgent need for younglings in her future.

  She found him oddly compelling. Yes, he had an easy smile and a relaxed manner, plus he wasn’t hard to look at, but it was more than that. There was a kind of … resonance, if that was the right word. As though they had known each other for a long time, even though they had only met recently.

  He pretended to be a moderately successful contractor, but whatever he was, that wasn’t it. She’d had Rodo do a little checking on him as well, and as far as this station was concerned, no such person as Celot Ratua Dil existed. Which meant he was a rogue of some kind, working the angles, and her heart had sunk when she’d learned that.

  She shook her head as she filled half a dozen mugs with black Mon Calamari seaweed mash and she pondered, not for the first time, the question: Why couldn’t she find a decent, hardworking, ordinary kind of male who wanted to grow old together? Why was she always attracted to the bad boys, the ones without two honest credits to rub together, the ones with no real prospects?

  Memah sighed as she prepared another drink. Ah, well … if it wasn’t for kissing bad boys, she’d never get any kissing done at all. Not that she’d gotten a lot of even that lately.

  She put the drinks up. “Order up!” she said.

  The server droid rolled up to collect the tray.

  Well, she was going to be stuck here for another year-and-some before her contract ran out. Maybe Green-Eyes could help the time go easier.

  36

  SUPERLASER SIMULATOR, THETA SECTOR, DEATH STAR

  CPO Tenn Graneet had been assured that the mock-up of the battery control room for the superlaser was an exact replica of the as-yet-unfinished one, down to the last rivet. Every function that was to be found in the soon-to-be-working ultimate weapon was replicated in the simulator. The gunnery team would spend long hours training at the mock-up’s consoles, programming the complicated firing procedure into their brains, so that when the actual control room became operational, switching to the real thing would be as easy as falling off a bantha.

  Which was a good thing, because the superlaser battery wasn’t a simple installation. It was, in fact, far more complex than any gun control in any ship in the Imperial Navy that Tenn had ever encountered. There were banks of lighted switches color-coded for each of the eight tributary sub-beams; monitors double-stacked around the wall that showed every function of the hypermatter reactor and generator; sensor readings from the heart of the reactor to the field amplifiers, the inducer, the beam shaft … taken all together, it made a heavy destroyer’s biggest gun look like a child’s toy. Each component had to be precisely tuned and focused. If the primary beam focusing magnet was off a nanometer, the tributary beams would not coalesce, and there was a good chance of imbalance explosions in the beam shaft if the tributaries weren’t pulsed in at exactly the proper time and in the proper sequence. The techs and engineers tended to wave that possibility off as too small to worry about. One chance in a hundred million, they said. Tenn wasn’t swallowing that. When it came to something this potentially deadly, no odds were long enough. It was true that there were automatic fail-safes, but Tenn—and any chief worth his salt—trusted them just about as far as he could stroll in hard vac. Some of those engineers lived in skyhooks so far up past the clouds that they’d forgotten what the ground looked like. If a gun’s designer wasn’t willing to stand next to it when it was being tested, well, Tenn saw no reason to be there, either.

  Triggering a monster like this wasn’t like pressing the firing stud on a blaster. At optimum it would take fifteen or twenty seconds from the given command to fire until the main beam was ready to be unleashed, and they hadn’t gotten close to that yet. Half the time during firing simulations they couldn’t balance the phase harmonics enough to shoot the primary beam at all. And even if the magnetic ring was precisely stabilized, all it would take was one of the tributaries warbling so much as a microhertz out of phase, and the others would desynchronize as well. The result would be a feedback explosion along the beam shaft and back to the main reactor that would turn the battle station into an incandescent plasma cloud in less than a single heartbeat, and the Empire thanks your family very much for your sacrifice.

  That wasn’t going to happen on his watch, Tenn vowed. By the time the actual battery was operational, Tenn expected his crew to be running the program smooth as lube on polished densecris plate. But they weren’t there yet. Not even within a parsec of close.

  Fortunately, they had plenty of time to practice. The crew, half of whom Tenn had swiped from his old unit with help from his new commander, were sharp enough, but it took twelve people working the battery to properly light the big gun and make it go bang, and every one of them had to nail his
or her part dead-on. There was no margin for error. So far, in the first dozen run-throughs, they had been able to fire the primary beam five times within a minute of the order. Once they’d taken two minutes, and four times they hadn’t been able to focus the tributaries properly at all, resulting in complete failures to fire. One time the computer had registered a late minor beam-warble that would have resulted in an automatic shutdown of the primary power feed to avoid damage, which meant it would have taken an hour to get back up for ignition sequencing. And wouldn’t that be a delightful job, recalibrating everything with the land batteries of a Rebel base spewing hard energy at you?

  In addition to the real problems, there had been a simulated major run malfunction with multiple beam-warbles and disharmonic phasing. The computer, in theory, could have shut that one down in time, but Tenn thought that report was optimistic. In a real situation, with a fully powered weapon, that one would more than likely have turned a whole lot of beings, equipment, and everything else into sizzling ions racing toward the edges of the galaxy.

  “All right, boys, let’s see if we can get it right this time. I want everything by the numbers and clean. Throw the wrong switch, you are on kitchen patrol for a week. Too slow on the phase-balance, better get some nose plugs, because you will be scrubbing the trash compactors until they sparkle. Drop a reading on the inducers, and you’ll find yourself shoveling out the animal pens until you smell like the south end of a northbound reek. Are we clear?”

  “Yes, Chief!” came the chorus of replies.

  “Say again, I didn’t hear you!”

  “Yes, Chief!”

  He smiled under the blast helmet, then grimaced as a rivulet of sweat ran into one eye. The milking headgear would be less than useless if the gun backfired, but it would make a dandy torture device for interrogating real spies. True, it was navy policy that gunners wear them, but whoever’d designed these black buckets hadn’t had to leave one on for a whole shift. They just made the job harder by restricting peripheral vision and essentially guaranteeing that you spent most of your shift clonking your head on pipes, struts, bulkheads, and the like. They were also hot and stuffy. Tenn was pretty sure some boot-head had designed them for looks and not function. When nobody was around, he let the men take the helmets off and breathe a bit, but given the nature of this sim battery, some by-the-book officer was always dropping by to gawk.