Death Star (20 page)

Ratua wasn’t quite to the point where he swaggered about as if he owned the place, but he did move now with a certain confidence that belied his true status, and which, no doubt, made him even more invisible to the cools. He strolled into the public cafeterias, selected food and drink,
and ate unmolested. No ID was necessary for that; food was free. He’d even slipped into a supply depot and, using his speedy mode, had “borrowed” fresh clothes—a basic freight handler’s coveralls.

The first few days he had been on the station, he’d found a few empty trash chutes that didn’t seem to be used, where a clever being could rig a couple of crosspiece supports and camp out of sight. Of course, you had to be careful that somebody didn’t open the chute and dump trash onto your impromptu bivouac, but that had only happened once. Still, it had been sufficiently discomfiting to send him looking for more congenial hiding places—that, and the suspicion gleaned from sounds and smells that there were things living on the garbage levels. Big things.

After that, he found all manner of storage spaces that were empty or nearly so, and for a being with his skills, slipping into these when nobody was around was child’s play. He could sleep there without much worry at all.

Food, shelter, clothes—he had all the basics. And after he had gotten the lay of the place, some artful scavenging had provided basic items for barter.

“Ho, trooper. You know anybody who might have use for a D-nine battery pack in pretty good condition? As it happens, I have one and find myself a little short of coin until payday. Worth ten c’s, easy, but I can let you have it for seven …”

Within a week he had a pretty good stash of trade goods hidden in a recycling station storage bin, enough credits to buy small items he couldn’t get for free or “borrow,” and a line to a couple of quartermasters who were making a little extra in the gray and black markets.

No matter where you went, people were the same. There were honest ones, dishonest ones, generous, greedy, all across the spectrum, and if you were paying attention you could tell which were which and use them to your benefit.
If he had learned nothing else living on a prison planet, he had learned to pay attention.

By creating a false identi-tab he became Teh Roxxor, an inspector employed by a civilian contractor who built storage bins for recycling stations, which gave him a reason to be in such places. Not that it seemed necessary; the one time a guard had seen him going boldly into one of his storage spaces, Ratua had just smiled and nodded at him, and the guy had waved back and gone on about his business.

Unbelievable. Give him a year like this, he’d be running this battle station …

L
ieutenant Vil Dance looked around the interior of the rec room. It was of basic design—tall ceiling, mirrors along one wall, an expanse of padded floor—and otherwise empty save for seven or eight people, all of them humans but one, a tall Rodian with a vibroblade scar across his face. Didn’t see a lot of them in the military—didn’t see many aliens at all, given how generally xenophobic the Empire was—but Vil had heard that some of them were pretty good bounty hunters. Given that, he could understand why the Rodian might be here. It helped explain the face scar as well.

Vil checked his chrono. Class was supposed to start in five minutes.

Most of the others looked to be in pretty good shape, which wasn’t unexpected. Not a lot of do-little types would bother to stir their backsides to come and try something that required any physical effort. He knew plenty of pilots who, outside of the required calisthenics, got most of their exercise from walking to the cooler to get another bottle of ale. Vil kept in pretty fair shape on his own; he wasn’t here so much for the workout, or even the knowledge, as he was for the possibility that he might gain a tiny edge as a pilot. At the Academy, somebody had done some research and found that people who studied this kind of thing had slightly better scores in the flight simulators due to decreased
reaction time. He’d never really had a chance to try it before. He was, he knew, already an excellent pilot, but every little bit he could add to that was worth checking into.

The door slid open. A man in gray workout skins walked into the room. He had a rolling, muscular gait and a big smile, and appeared to be in his early thirties. He wasn’t particularly big or impressively muscled, but something about the way he moved, the economy of his motion, said to Vil that this guy knew his stuff.

“I’m Sergeant Nova Stihl,” he said, “and I’d guess that almost everybody here outranks me. But let’s get this straight from the start—I don’t care if you’re a gasser or an admiral, this is
my
class. What we are talking about is teräs käsi, a martial art designed for close work. Hands, feet, elbows, knives, sticks. I expect I know more about this stuff than any of you, so what I say goes. You can’t live with that, walk now. Unless, of course, somebody can demonstrate they are better than I am, in which case, I’ll take lessons from you.” He paused. “So do we have any fighters here?”

Vil felt he could handle himself reasonably well when the furniture started flying, but there was no way he was going to step up to that kind of comment. It wasn’t the sort of invitation anyone in his right mind would extend unless he was reasonably confident of what the end result would be.

He looked around. A couple of the men looked to be ground-pounders, thick with enough muscle to be dangerous. There was one guy, a little smaller than most, who had a feral gleam in his eyes. Vil’s impression was that he wouldn’t want to have the guy behind him in a dark corridor. And there was the Rodian, but he didn’t know enough about Rodians to judge that one.

One of the men he’d pegged as ground-pounders said, “I c’n handle m’self okay.”

Stihl gave him a welcoming grin. The ground-pounder
was taller, heavier, and he did look like a man you wouldn’t want mad at you. Vil had the feeling, however, that that wasn’t going to make a whole lot of difference to Sergeant Stihl.

“Okay,” the instructor said. “Come and show me something. Knock me down and I’ll buy your drinks for the next month.”

The ground-pounder grinned at that. “Comin’ right up, Sarge!”

Vil thought,
This’ll be interest
—and before his mind could finish the thought, it was over. The big ground-pounder stepped in, swung a punch that would have dented quadanium plate, and a second later was lying flat on his face.

Vil didn’t have a clue what the sergeant had done to cause it. He’d just made some kind of fast sidestep and what looked like a wave of his hands, and
bam!
the attacker hit the floor hard enough that Vil could feel it vibrate.

Ouch …

There was a surprised murmur from the others that indicated they didn’t know what Stihl had done, either.
Bet the next class is a
lot
bigger once this gets around
, Vil thought.

“Anybody else want to give it a shot?”

Much shuffling of feet, inspection of fingernails, and sudden interest in the ceiling. Nobody did, apparently.

“Good.” Stihl reached one hand down and helped the ground-pounder to his feet. “Then let’s get started.”

Because there weren’t enough medical doctors or droids to go around, Uli found himself, somewhat to his annoyance, doing routine physical exams on new arrivals to the station. Using a surgeon for such work was rather like using a protocol droid to run a water converter—the task would
be accomplished, speedily and efficiently, but it would definitely not be the most effective use of the droid’s time and skill.

He gave the diagnoster printout of the just-finished scan a look-over while his latest patient got dressed. The man was human, originally from Corellia, but he’d been eking out a grim existence on Despayre for the last four months. Nowhere on his dossier did it list the reason he’d been banished to that pesthole. Why should it? No point in wasting pixels on a man who, for all intents and purposes, was dead.

The stats were unsurprising: elevated urinary nitrogen, compromised immune system, vitamin and mineral deficiencies, incipient scurvy … borderline malnutrition, in short. The man was lean as a Givin, with no excess fat at all to soften sinew and musculature. He’d been able to survive, but, if he hadn’t been scooped up in one of the regular sweeps for more workers, he wouldn’t have lasted much longer. Now his problems were over, for the short run at least. No more subsisting on boiled knobblypears and roasted ratbats; the mass-produced rations that were the workers’ diet might not be particularly tasty, but they would be nutritious enough to keep him alive and laboring for the Empire.

Until he was, most likely, worked to death.

After the Corellian had been led out by a med droid, Uli rubbed his eyes and asked, “Who’s up next?”

C-4ME-O said, “Memah Roothes, female, Rutian Twi’lek, Ryloth, arrived onstation nine days past from Imperial Center.”

“Coruscant,” Uli corrected the droid. “I always hated that name change.” He glanced at the wall chrono. Nearly eleven forty-five hours; he’d been on his feet since twenty-three hundred.

“Memah Roothes is a civilian contractor whose designation
is RSW-Six, subgrade two, Miscellaneous Entertainment and Services.”

“Which means what?”

“She was hired to run a cantina in this sector.”

Uli couldn’t help but feel slightly peeved at the droid. “Why didn’t you just say that in the first place?”

“I did, Captain Dr. Divini. If you had studied your
Imperial Designation Manual
, you could hardly have reached any other conclusion.”

“I don’t need a droid telling me to read the manual, thank you very much.”

C-4ME-O made a snorting sound.

“What was that?”

“Condensation on my vocabulator. It needed to be cleared.”

Uli grinned and shook his head. “Give me the chart.”

In the exam room, the Twi’lek female sat on the table in a disposable wrap, dangling her bare feet over the edge. Her skin tone was teal, and at first glance, she certainly looked healthy enough. “Memah Roothes, I’m Dr. Divini.”

“Doctor.” A cool and noncommittal acknowledgment.

He looked at the flatscreen. “Says here that you’re originally from Ryloth, by way of Coruscant.”

“By way of a lot of places.”

“No major illnesses or injury on the record.”

“Nope. I had cavern fever as a child—I’m from the Darkside—but that was common enough. Most of the younglings caught that sooner or later. Other than that, nothing to speak of.”

Uli nodded. It had been a long time since his medical rotations and he’d never seen that many Twi’leks even then, though he had cut open a few since. Her chart indicated pretty standard stuff. He’d test her reflexes, listen to her heart, and then let the diagnoster check the rest, including a broadscan for any possible pan-species communicable
diseases; not that it mattered much, since she’d already been here for a week and a half. Everything by the numbers; any third-year medical student could do it. He turned to the instrument table and fitted an auscultator to his ears, then turned back to her, saying, “Well, let’s have a listen to your heart. Would you mind—”

He stopped as she slid off the table, shucked her wrap, and tossed it onto the table, all in a single, smooth motion. Then she faced him.

Uli wore his professional expression. “I was going to say, Would you mind taking a deep breath?”

She shrugged. “You would have gotten around to asking eventually.”

Uli wasn’t sure in what context her remark was meant, and not in a big hurry to find out. Roothes was definitely an attractive female, no two ways about it; still, he was a doctor. He’d seen more than a few beings of various sexes naked before. It was all part of the job.

He poked and listened and examined, didn’t find anything remarkable, and noted such on the flatscreen chart. She was a well-nourished, well-developed sthenic Twi’lek female who looked a bit younger than her stated age and was within normal limits for a being of her species, at least according to the old-fashioned physical exam.

“Step in front of the diagnoster, please.”

She did so. The machine hummed as it sensed her presence on the exam pad. A bright light flashed, and in an instant she was weighed and measured, her various bodily systems—digestive, respiratory, nervous, circulatory, and musculoskeletal—scanned. The machine ran a battery of more than a hundred tests in a heartbeat, both generic and species-specific, and sent the results to his flatscreen. They testified that Memah Roothes was normal, healthy, and disease-free. No surprises.

“You can get dressed,” he told her.

She looked at him. “So I pass?”

“Yes. Everything checks out fine.”

“Two hours of my life I’ll never get back,” she muttered as she began to re-dress.

Uli left the room, suppressing a smile. He knew just how she felt.