Star Wars: Death Star

by Michael Reaves

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. I had a patient who works for someone who was in a high-level meeting. It was announced right after Vader arrived on the station with you.”

  She shook her head. “This is terrible news.”

  “All the news is terrible,” Uli said. “It has been since this war began.”

  She looked up at him. “If there’s ever going to be good news for any of us again, Uli, it has to start with us. We have to create it, not wait to read about it the next morning.”

  The door slid up. Uli looked up in annoyance and said, “I thought I told you to—” He stopped. It wasn’t the tech.

  It was Vader.

  He entered, his cloak spreading like black ink against the eggshell white of the exam room’s floor. “Doctor. I trust your patient is well?”

  The words came out before Uli was aware of them. “Yes—no thanks to you.”

  Leia laughed.

  Vader regarded him. “You are insubordinate, Doctor. But I have no time to show you the error of your thoughts.” He gestured to Leia. “Come with me, Your Highness.”

  For a moment, Uli and the Princess locked gazes. Her eyes were brown, he noticed.

  Barriss’s eyes had been blue, he remembered.

  If he’d had a weapon, he might have used it on Vader in that brief instant of time, to allow her a chance to escape. But he was a doctor, not a fighter. It was not his path.

  “Good luck,” he said to her.

  She nodded. “And to you.”

  Vader ushered her through the door ahead of him with a gesture that was almost courtly. The panel dropped, and they were gone.

  COMMAND CENTER, DEATH STAR

  Motti entered the control room to report to Tarkin. “We’ve entered the Alderaan system.”

  It had been a quick trip, and all systems had performed flawlessly. The station was as fast as any ship in the Imperial Navy, and faster than most. The jump to lightspeed had been smooth, the hyperspace lanes had been cleared by Imperial order, and it seemed that it had taken no time at all to reach the Alderaan system. The superlaser was charged to full capacity and ready to fire.

  Tarkin nodded. He seemed about to speak when Vader entered, along with a couple of guards and the fetching Princess Leia Organa. Gorgeous woman, Motti thought. He wouldn’t mind getting to know her better. Alas, she wasn’t going to be with them much longer. A waste.

  She was hustled up to Tarkin. It seemed obvious that Vader’s tortures had had little or no effect, because her spirit was unbroken. “Governor Tarkin,” she said. “I should have expected to find you holding Vader’s leash. I recognized your foul stench when I was brought on board.”

  Motti suppressed a laugh. My, but she was a spitfire. A real shame she had to die.

  Tarkin favored her with a smirk. “Charming to the last.” He reached out and touched her chin. “You don’t know how hard I found it signing the order to terminate your life.”

  She jerked her head back. “I’m surprised you had the courage to take the responsibility yourself.”

  Motti held his smile in check, but not without effort. She might be about to die, but she wasn’t going to cringe in fear. You had to respect that in an enemy, even a woman. Maybe especially a woman.

  “Princess Leia, before your execution, I would like you to be the guest at a ceremony that will make this battle station operational.” Tarkin took a few steps, raised his hands to take in the vastness of the station, and turned to regard her again. “No star system will dare oppose the Emperor now.”

  She sneered at him. “The more your tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.”

  Tarkin walked back to her, pointing a finger for emphasis. “Not after we demonstrate the power of this station. In a way, you have determined the choice of the planet that will be destroyed first.” He loomed over her, face-to-face. “Since you are reluctant to provide us with the location of the Rebel base, I have chosen to test this station’s destructive power on your home planet of Alderaan.”

  That wiped the smirk from her face.

  She said, “No! Alderaan is peaceful. We have no weapons! You can’t possibly—”

  “You would prefer another target?” Tarkin asked. “A military target? Then name the system!”

  Motti watched as Tarkin crowded the Princess, giving her no space, no chance to regain her balance, either figuratively or literally. He leaned over her, nose-to-nose, backing her up. She was stopped by Vader standing behind her.

  “I grow tired of asking this,” Tarkin told her, “so it’ll be the last time. Where is the Rebel base?”

  Motti watched as she looked at the viewer. Alderaan was centered there, a beautiful green, white, and blue world, quite unaware of its impending danger.

  “Dantooine,” she said. Her voice was soft. Defeated. “They’re on Dantooine.” She lowered her gaze.

  Tarkin looked up, pleased. “There, you see, Lord Vader, she can be reasonable.” He looked at Motti. “Continue with the operation. You may fire when ready.”

  Leia looked up in shock. “What?”

  Tarkin turned back to face her. “You’re far too trusting. Dantooine is too remote to make an effective demonstration. But don’t worry—we will deal with your Rebel friends soon enough.”

  “No!” She struggled, but Vader held her fast.

  Motti smiled as he prepared to give the order. Tarkin was right. Fear was the key …

  SUPERLASER FIRE CONTROL, DEATH STAR

  Tenn heard the order crackle over the speaker. He couldn’t believe it, but there it was:

  “Commence primary ignition.”

  He hesitated a second. Could it be some bizarre kind of test? To see if he had what it took?

  No, that was foolish. He had already killed the prison planet, hadn’t he? They couldn’t have any doubts about his loyalty, both to the Empire and to Governor Tarkin.

  But in a way that made it worse—because it meant the order was real. He was about to destroy yet another world—and it wasn’t a virulent jungle planet swarming with criminals this time.

  This time it was a world all too similar to his own homeworld.

  He was aware of his CO watching him. He reached up, grabbed the lever. All systems were green.

  His crew once again performed their functions flawlessly, adjusting switches, checking readouts, balancing harmonics. All too soon, everything was in readiness. All systems were go.

  Tenn felt sweat dripping down his neck, under that blasted helmet. He looked at the timer: 00:58:57.

  He pulled the lever.

  It would take a second or so for the tributary beams to coalesce. He wanted to look away from the monitor, but he couldn’t.

  The superlaser beam lanced from the focusing point above the dish.

  The image of Alderaan on the screen was struck by the green ray.

  It took no more than an instant. Tenn knew that the beam’s total destructive power was much bigger than matter-energy conversions limited to realspace. At full charge, the hypermatter reactor provided a superluminal “boost” that caused much of the planet’s mass to be shifted immediately into hyperspace. As a result, Alderaan exploded into a fiery ball of eye-smiting light almost instantaneously, and a planar ring of energy reflux—the “shadow” of a hyperspatial ripple—spread rapidly outward.

  The timer read: 00:59:10.

  So little time. So much damage. It was incredible.

  If, somehow, the Rebel Alliance were to win this war—not that Tenn Graneet could see how that would be possible, given what he had just witnessed, what he had just done—then surely this act would condemn his ashes to the deepest pit they could find after he was executed.

  It was his job, and if he hadn’t performed it, someone else would have, but his belly roiled with the enormity of what pulling that lever had caused.

  Billions of lives snuffed out. Just like that.

  There was no sense of triumph in it, none. He had not destroyed a Rebel bas
e or a military target. Instead, a planet full of unarmed civilians had been … extinguished.

  And he had done it.

  It made him feel sick.

  G-12 BARRACKS, SECTOR N-SEVEN, DEATH STAR

  Nova was taking a sonic shower to relax before trying once again to sleep when he felt a roar in his head—soundless, but nevertheless so loud that it knocked him completely unconscious.

  When he awoke, he was lying on the floor of the shower plate, the hum of the sonics still vibrating his body. His nose was bleeding, and his muscles tremored and shook as if he’d been hit by a stunner on maximum. He could barely stand.

  Something had just happened. Something terrible.

  60

  MAIN CONFERENCE ROOM, COMMAND CENTER, DEATH STAR

  The Imperial officer strode into the room, his boots echoing on the polished deck. Tarkin sat at the opposite end of the conference table, and Vader had taken a position near the wall to the left of the door. No one else was there save a pair of guards on the sides of the doorway.

  The officer came to attention.

  Tarkin looked at the man. “Yes?”

  “Our scout ships have reached Dantooine. They found the remains of a Rebel base, but they estimate that it has been deserted for some time. They are now conducting an extensive search of the surrounding system.”

  Vader felt a small surge of triumph, even though the news was bad. He had expected this.

  As the officer turned and marched away, Tarkin came to his feet, simmering with rage. “She lied! She lied to us!”

  Vader was amused at Tarkin’s outrage. Now who was too naïve and trusting? Aloud, he said, “I told you she would never consciously betray the Rebellion.”

  Tarkin took a few steps toward him. Vader could sense that the governor’s anger had gotten the better of him. “Terminate her! Immediately!”

  Unseen under his helmet, Vader’s tight features formed a painful grin. He understood Tarkin’s anger—after all, he himself was a master of anger—but Princess Leia Organa might better serve them alive. He would consider the matter. Tarkin could not order, only suggest various courses and actions to him, and he was not averse to going along with those suggestions most of the time, since they didn’t really matter. But Darth Vader bowed to no one’s wishes save those of his Master, the Dark Lord of the Sith. Should his Master’s wishes and Tarkin’s collide, Tarkin would be swept away with the rest of history’s dust without a second’s hesitation.

  Nova hadn’t really been surprised to be assigned as one of the guards for the conference room on the Command Level. It wasn’t his normal duty, but he was a senior sergeant, and when one of the men normally at the post developed a sudden illness Nova had been tapped as a temporary replacement. He was the kind of guard they liked, adept with either weapons or his bare hands.

  Mostly the room was empty the entire shift, and there was little to do but think; however, toward the end of the shift, Governor Tarkin and Darth Vader had arrived. Nova could not help but overhear, of course, as the two had a discussion that ranged across several topics—mostly concerned with the next target for the Death Star. It seemed that the Rebels’ main fortress had been located, and they were awaiting reports from the scouts before spacing there to destroy that planet as well.

  Nova was still reeling from the results of the most recent test. He had passed out in his sonic shower at precisely the instant that the superlaser had shattered the peaceful world of Alderaan, and he was certain this was no coincidence. The doctor’s diagnosis about midi-chlorians had to be connected. He’d done research on it with the station archivist’s help, and had come to the reluctant conclusion that he was somehow receptive to the pervasive energy field the Jedi had called the Force. A Force-sensitive was the term. It explained why he sometimes could anticipate the moves of his opponents, the skill he called Blink.

  He wasn’t sure what to do about this—he wasn’t even sure that anything could be done. It had evidently been with him to a certain degree for his whole life; it wasn’t just going to go away. Since he seemed to be stuck with it and the visions it brought, maybe there was something he could do with it besides just dodge incoming fists.

  The door opened and a senior officer marched in, as stiff as if he had a durasteel rod for a spine.

  The man gave his report, and Nova kept his face stolid as he listened. So the girl that the doctor had spoken of in the cantina had given Tarkin and Vader a false lead. Brave, but not very smart, since Tarkin was now irritated enough to tell Vader to execute her.

  Once upon a time, Nova would have shrugged that bit of news away. It wasn’t his business how the higher-ups behaved; he just followed his orders and did his job, a good and loyal soldier. But if blowing up Despayre had been terrible, killing Alderaan was several orders of magnitude more horrifying. Billions of innocents had died there, not hardened and convicted criminals—billions of civilians of all ages—and how could you in good conscience serve somebody who thought that was the way to wage war?

  It had rocked him to his core, maybe more because of the whole Force thing. But he hadn’t been the only one. Sure, there were always some kill-’em-all types who said they must have deserved it, else it wouldn’t have been done; but there were a lot of people on this battle station who couldn’t accept these actions as things even to be contemplated in a sane and rational universe. It wasn’t supposed to have gone this far. From everything he’d heard it was to be merely the threat of mundicide. Blowing up a planet—killing everything that lived on it—just to make a point?

  This was his last tour, Nova decided; he wasn’t going to stay in a military that would commit such atrocities. And if there was anything he could do to help prevent it from happening again, he ought to seriously consider it.

  Killing civilian populations on a planetary scale was evil beyond comprehension. Nova could fight a room full of men straight-up, face-to-face, and if he had to kill half of them to survive, he’d do it. But he hadn’t signed on to slaughter children asleep in their beds.

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES, DECK 106, DEATH STAR

  Atour Riten considered himself a man of the galaxy; he had traveled far and wide and seen much. He had toured the spice mines of Kessel, explored the ruins of Dantooine, and witnessed the death of stars in the Bi-Borran Cluster. Even though most of his working days had been within the walls of libraries and archives, he had also breathed the outside air of scores of worlds in the course of his years. And he had remained apolitical for all those years, going his own way, avoiding commitments to things he didn’t think he could influence yea or nay.

  But not anymore. Not after Alderaan.

  The destruction of Despayre had been bad enough, as much for what it had portended as for the act itself. But Alderaan had been a peaceful world; its government had sympathized with the Rebels, true enough, but the Empire’s reaction had been overkill in the most horrifyingly literal sense imaginable. The immensity of it overwhelmed him each time his imagination started down that killing road: mothers, babies, grandfathers, pets … all wiped out in a heartbeat.

  He could not help but be reminded of the Mrlssi saying: Evil compounds exponentially. It was true. Such horrors inevitably fed upon themselves, mushrooming into the unthinkable in very short order. Atour could not stand to see this happen again. He was old, he had lived a long and full life, and he decided now that whatever days he had left, he would dedicate to defeating an Empire capable of such abominations.

  “Persee, initiate a search for weak points in this battle station—those that might be most vulnerable to internal sabotage.”

  “That would be unwise, sir. Such a scan would almost certainly be detected, and Imperial intelligence operatives would undoubtedly wish to engage in conversation with the initiator of such a search. It would not be a pleasant conversation.”

  “Then I suggest you do it cautiously.”

  “Sir, I feel compelled to point out again that the risk of such a venture would be great.”

&nb
sp; “And I appreciate your concern,” Atour said. He leaned back in his formfit chair and steepled his fingers. “Do it anyway.”

  The droid acknowledged this order and shuffled away to implement it. Atour sighed. He realized that P-RC3 was going to suffer a traumatic memory loss in the near future. That would be a shame—he’d actually become rather fond of the droid—but given the gravity of what the Empire had done and must be made to pay for, the price of a droid’s memory—and one old man’s life, come to think of it—was small enough.

  CONFERENCE ROOM, COMMAND CENTER, DEATH STAR

  The intercom cheeped, and Tarkin activated it. “Yes?”

  The voice from the comm said, “We’ve captured a freighter entering the remains of the Alderaan system. Its markings match those of a ship that blasted its way out of Mos Eisley.”

  Tarkin frowned. Mos Eisley was on Tatooine, where the stolen battle station plans had, according to Vader, landed. Coincidence? Not likely. He looked at Vader, who said, “They must be trying to return the stolen plans to the Princess. She may yet be of some use to us.”

  Tarkin considered that. Yes. While his anger at her deception had not abated, there were more important things at stake here than one prisoner’s life or death. Vader was right. She might be useful as a decoy.

  “Best you go and personally deal with this, Lord Vader.”

  DOCKING BAY 2037, DEATH STAR

  Vader stalked into the bay as a lieutenant and several stormtroopers exited the captured freighter. The lieutenant said, “There’s no one on board, sir. According to the log, the crew abandoned ship right after takeoff. It must be a decoy, sir; several of the escape pods have been jettisoned.”

  Vader nodded. “Did you find any droids?”

  “No, sir. If there were any on board, they must also have been jettisoned.”