Death Star (11 page)

“Yes, and even here it is
free
from any Imperial tap.”

The droid did not respond to that. Memah shook her head in disgust; a human mannerism she’d picked up. It was pointless to argue with a droid; might as well argue with the ferment dispensers under the bar. “All right. When may I expect the shipment?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Well, I guess I’ll just have to make do somehow, won’t I?”

That question was evidently also beyond the droid’s comprehension. Sighing, Memah waved it away.

Rodo, who had been in the front repairing a broken hinge caused by the impact of a combative patron, came back to the delivery portal. “Problem?”

“Yes. Today’s delivery—there isn’t one.”

“Hmm …”

Memah turned to look at him. “Do I detect some kind of meaning in that monosyllable?”

“It’s probably nothing,” Rodo replied. “But I saw the food staples airtruck fan past Kenloo’s Market this morning without stopping. They get their deliveries same days we do.”

The market was two buildings down, on the other side of a vacant shop that had once housed exotic offworld pets. Some kind of exobiotic plague had run through the animal stock seven months back, and half of them had died. The Empire had quarantined the place, had the remaining creatures put down, and that was the end of that. The building had sat empty ever since.

She pulled herself back to Rodo’s comment. “What are you getting at?”

The big man shrugged. “Just seems odd that two businesses right next to each other, with service from different delivery companies, would both get bypassed on the same day.”

“A coincidence,” she said.

“When I was with the Strikebirds, we had a saying: Coincidence can get you killed.” Rodo yawned and stretched his arms over his head, displaying muscles that would make a Whiphid look scrawny. “Maybe I’ll check around,” he said, “see if Chunte’s and Ligabow’s are also having delivery problems.”

“And if they are?”

He shrugged. “Then it means something.”

She couldn’t help the exasperated tone that crept into her voice. “Like
what
?”

Rodo shrugged again. “Dunno. Could be a lot of things. Maybe just problems with dispatcher programs. Maybe the start of somebody trying to depress real estate values so he can buy up the block. Hard to say. Could be nothing at all.”

Memah nodded slowly, not quite sure what to make of Rodo’s sudden and studied casualness. “Yeah, well, we’re going to have to dust off some of the reserve stock to get through tonight’s crowd. And even then, it’ll be iffy.”

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.

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?

V
il 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.