Death Star (24 page)

“Show me.”

A hologrammic projection, life-sized, appeared over the patient, floating in the pale bluish glow of the OT’s UV sterility lamps.

Uli looked. “I still don’t—oh, there it is. What the frip is it doing there?”

It was a rhetorical question, but the droid answered it anyhow. “Cross-checking against my datafiles indicates an anatomical abnormality, Doctor.”

“Brilliant.” Uli shook his head. Fates save him from
literal-minded droids. But there was no time to be annoyed at the MD-S3. The appendix was swollen to what looked like four times normal size, though its unusual location made it hard to see even though he now knew where it was. His mind ran through various choices. He’d have to open the man up a bit more, or get an endoscopic arm in to snip and glue … yeah, that would be the best way. Least invasive.

“Extrude a number six endoscope with an SS clamp and seal off that appendix.”

“Yes, Doctor.”

Another thin appendage snaked from the droid’s housing. This one bore a two-tined fork. The upper one was a self-cleaning cam lens, while the lower tine, five centimeters longer, held an open surgical-steel clamp. The droid deftly inserted the arm into the patient. The holo appeared over the man, showing the fork’s progress.

Unerringly, the droid positioned the clamp at the base of the inflamed appendix and then snapped it shut. A second arm, an endosnipper, slid in and, with an actinic flash of laser light, removed the appendix. A vacuum attachment sucked out any possible contaminants. The droid removed the surgical arms and tissue.

Uli breathed easier. “Do a scan of the appendix for any pathogens and order antigen motes effective for anything you find.”

“Yes, Doctor.”

“Send me a copy of the lab work and prescriptions.”

“Yes, Doctor.”

“Okay. Close him up and have an orderly take him to the ward.”

“Yes, Doctor.”

Uli turned away from the patient. Before such things as axial scans and precision surgical droids, they might have lost this patient, digging around looking for a lost appendix that was about to pop. But the major would survive,
and likely go on to slaughter hundreds or maybe thousands more people before the war ended.

The irony of it all wasn’t hard to see.

“So whaddya think, Chief?” Mekkar Doan slapped the main control console.

Tenn Graneet grinned at his fellow petty officer. “Oh, it’s a first-class craft, right enough.”

The two men were standing in a small nexus chamber overlooking the eight radiating particle accelerator tubes designed to feed the superlaser beam. The walls were covered with readout meters, fluctuating bar graph monitors, banks of controls, and other equipment. Much of it was beyond CPO Tenn Graneet’s knowledge, but that was all right. He didn’t need to know everything about
how
it worked. He just had to be able to work it.

Chief Doan laughed. “You think you can shoot it, once everything’s hooked up?”

Tenn gave him a fake astonished look. “
You
shot it, didn’t you? When I can’t hit anything you can, I’ll retire.”

“You read the specs?”

Tenn nodded. “Yeah. It could be a planet cracker, if it works like it’s supposed to.”

“Engineers say it will.”

“Engineers.” Tenn put a considerable amount of sarcasm in the word.

“Yeah, I hear that. But they’re pulling out all the stops on this baby.” He rubbed his hand on the control console. “Any problem they had, they threw enough money at it to bury it to the rails. We’ll have the power, no worries there.”

“And if somebody didn’t forget to dog a bolt tight, maybe it won’t blow us all to the other side of the Rim.”

“Hey, I’m telling you, word is the worst piece of gear on it is still triple redundant.”

“I had a nephew who was a deck monkey on the
Battle Lance
,” Tenn said.

Doan’s smile faded. “Yeah. I knew a couple of guys shipped on her. It was a freak accident.”

“Maybe. A backfire could overload the HM reactor and turn this station into radioactive dust, too.”

Doan shook his head. “Never happen. They got the Emperor himself looking over their shoulders on this one. They won’t frip it up.”

Tenn shrugged. There was little point in worrying about equipment failure. If the thing worked, it would prove the Death Star to be, as Tarkin had put it in one of his many inspirational addresses to the station’s population, “The ultimate power in the galaxy.” If it didn’t work—well, the hypermatter reactor was capable of generating an energy burst equivalent to the total weekly output of several main-sequence stars; if anything went wonky, it wasn’t likely he’d be around long enough to notice. Nor would anyone else.

“Yeah, well,” he replied, “if they can build it so it holds together, I’ll shoot it.”

“Let me show you how it works. You and your team will be practicing on the simulator until the real thing here’s online.”

As Doan explained the intricacies of the sequencing relays, Tenn found it somewhat difficult to concentrate on what the other man was saying. He wasn’t sure why. After all, he’d dreamed of this moment for months: the day he’d finally stand in the control chamber of the superlaser and be officially given command of it. Even though construction wasn’t finished yet, you couldn’t tell it from in here. He listened to the susurration of the klystron tubes and thermistor couplers, smelled the astringent scent of insulation lube, felt the breath of conditioned air adjusted to a
constant twenty degrees, and wondered why he was not content.

There was only one reason that seemed remotely feasible.

The
Battle Lance
.

His nephew, Hora Graneet, had been a navy spacer on the
Imperial
-class Star Destroyer Mark II class vessel, which had been selected for a shakedown cruise testing one of the improved prototype hypermatter reactors. Tenn didn’t know the specifics of what had happened, and didn’t have anything close to the math needed to understand it anyway. He knew that hypermatter existed only in hyperspace, that it was composed of tachyonic particles, and that charged tachyons, when constrained by the lower dimensions of realspace, produced near-limitless energy. How this “null-point energy” had become unstable he didn’t know. He only knew it had been powerful enough to turn an ISD-II and its crew of thirty-seven thousand people into floating wisps of ionized gas in a microsecond.

So? Don’t tell me you’re
scared,
Graneet. You knew the risks. This is a war, declared or not. Wars have casualties
.

No. It wasn’t that. It wasn’t even so much that Hora had been a favorite nephew, or that the younger Graneet had admired his uncle so much that he’d enlisted, which made Tenn feel a considerable amount of responsibility for his death. It was the thought of that much power, and the possibility of it becoming uncontrollable. Again Tenn surprised himself. He’d never been overly concerned about fallible technology before. His was not to reason why; he was the trigger man. And he was being handed the biggest gun in the galaxy—with the safety off.

But was he capable of wielding such power wisely?

Was anyone?

D
aala came down the ramp looking every centimeter the Imperial admiral. She didn’t just walk, she
swept
, and it was a joy to watch her stride. Strong, smart, ambitious, dedicated, funny,
and
beautiful—what more could a man possibly want in a partner?

Well, a bit more proximity would be good. But they were both creatures of duty, and Tarkin knew that wasn’t apt to change anytime soon; certainly not until the battle station was finished and unlimbered. Perhaps not even then. He knew that Daala looked upon him with much favor, but the relationship had always been secondary to her career. He understood that. More; he admired it. He wouldn’t want a woman who thought any less of herself. That was the ultimate paradox, of course.

“Grand Moff Tarkin. So good to see you again, sir.”

Tarkin held his smile in check. One had to be proper about such things out in plain sight. “Admiral Daala. The pleasure is mine. I trust your trip was uneventful?”

“Yes, sir. Nothing untoward whatsoever.”

“Excellent. Allow me to show you to your quarters. Your suite, as it happens, is right next to mine.”

He saw a flicker of anticipation cross her face—hardly enough to notice unless one was standing right in front of her. In a very quiet voice, without moving her lips, she said, “How convenient, Wilhuff.”

He couldn’t keep from smiling, despite his best efforts. “This way, Admiral.” He extended one hand to show her the direction.

She gave him a military nod, and they moved off past the honor guard. As they walked, she stared about the hangar, impressed. “I knew it would be huge, but the reality of it hadn’t quite come home.”

“Save your awe for when it’s finished and operational. Which will be quite soon now.”

“The Rebel Alliance won’t know what hit them.”

“Oh, they’ll know, my dear. Everyone will know. That’s the point.”

She had cut her hair shorter than when last they had been together. It was flattering on her, but then, he’d never seen her with a hairstyle that wasn’t flattering. There weren’t really any regulations about how female admirals should dress or groom themselves—Daala was the only one, after all, and who would dare to tell her?

She had risen on merit alone, but certainly her ascent to the command ranks had caused some speculation about her relationship with Tarkin and how that might have smoothed the way. Nobody speculated about it in earshot of him, of course. Not anymore, because those foolish few who’d done so had had their ashes scattered to the four solar winds. Tarkin had not reached the unique rank he held by allowing his enemies any quarter whatsoever. Yes, Daala had been his protégée, and yes, he had opened doors for her a bit sooner than she might have managed on her own, but she had made flag command without his help. There were plenty of male admirals unfit to polish her boots.

They soon reached the door to her quarters. “Shall we go inside and discuss this further?” he murmured to her.

“By all means, Grand Moff Tarkin.”

Before the door had slid completely shut behind them, she was in his arms.

The library aboard the battle station wasn’t the biggest Atour had ever seen by any means. He had done his apprenticeship in the Baobab Archives on Manda, although these days he didn’t deem it exactly prudent to highlight that fact on his résumé. And from there he had gone on to be the archivist of such repositories as the Dorismus Athenaeum on Corellia and the Holorepository on the wheelworld Arkam 13. The latter was known for having the largest collection of lore on the Old Republic outside the Temple.

It wasn’t the most exciting of lives, that of an archivist, but it was one that suited him well. He had not, as many supposed, always been introspective and scholarly; as a young man he’d fought for the Janissariad in the Balduran Civil War. The experience had left a foul taste in his mouth for any and all forms of centralized government. Disgusted with politics, Atour Riten had retreated, in soul if not body, into the misty past. It was a decision he’d never regretted.

The Death Star Library—as his mind insisted on naming it—was supposed to eschew the use of holobooks, tapes, and ’crons and rely instead on phononic lattice storage. This would allow storage of a huge amount of information in a very small space. Part of Atour’s brief in this new job was to supervise the droids scanning information from other media into lattice form. Even on something the size of the Death Star, space was at a premium—at least for such things as data storage.

Though he’d seen bigger and better, the amount of data accrued was impressive nonetheless. The files were extensive, the retrieval systems were thick with memory to speed up downloads, and the broadcast-to-reader circuitry was top-notch. It was a pity that most people didn’t actually go to libraries anymore, not when they could sit in the comfort of their own quarters and access files electronically.

Want to read the new hot interstellar caper novel, or the latest issue of
Beings
holozine? Input the name, touch a control, and
zip
—it’s in your datapad. Need to study the history of winged intelligent species? No more difficult than inputting search parameters, then scanning the bibliographic references and choosing a place to begin.

There were, of course, old-fashioned beings who would still actually trundle down to where the files were. On some worlds the most ancient libraries kept books—actual bound volumes of printed matter—lined up neatly on shelves, and readers would walk the aisles, take a volume down, sniff the musty-dusty odor of it, and then carry it to a table to leisurely peruse.

There weren’t many of those readers left, and they were growing rarer all the time—this Atour knew from experience. But there were some who still knew how to actually turn a page—and for those who were willing to do so, the rewards could be great indeed.