Death Star (25 page)

Of course, Atour was no Luddite antiquarian who grumbled and inveighed against the modern world. On the contrary, he’d been praised by experts as a slicer of excellent quality. And it had served him well more than once to have knowledge he wasn’t supposed to. One didn’t normally think of the data storage and information retrieval business as being particularly cutthroat, but it must be remembered that, in Palpatine’s Empire, every business was cutthroat. And if one was the head librarian and archivist, such files were accessible, even without high-level clearance. He hadn’t spent a lifetime among the stacks without learning a trick or two.

Thus it was that Riten found himself looking at a set of plans for this battle station, aka the Death Star. He was no engineer to understand all the schematics, and the documents were fat with technical jargon, but anyone with even a smattering of a general education could see the wonder of the place. It was a monster in size, and in intent, as well as
in killing ability—or it would be once they assembled all of the weaponry and got it operational.

Fascinating material …

For more than a few years Atour Riten had, when he discovered such interesting and potentially useful files, copied them and logged them into a personal folder that was virtually impossible to slice. In addition to the best military wards and pyrowalls, the folder was also protected by a random number generated by a quantum computer, said number being forty-seven digits long. Moreover, the program would shift each digit one value lower or higher every six standard hours, and only somebody with the code to access the program running it could keep track of this shift—one had to know the date and hour the program generated the number in order to follow the sequence. It was a slow and unwieldy process, hardly suitable for files that needed to be accessed with any frequency, but workable for him.

Once the files were copied, he needed a safe place to keep them. For some time, ever since he had run the military base’s library there, he had sent the files to Danuta, a planet of no great import or value save for its mildly strategic location. It was easy enough to piggyback the coded information onto an Imperial message comm or even a holocomm—another trick he had learned in his years of accessing military secrets.

Someday, if he lived long enough, Atour intended to write a history of the times that had begun with the Clone Wars and run through the current conflict between the Empire and the Rebel Alliance. Of course he had to wait and see who won before he could get to that part, but he was always on the lookout for research material. The plans for this battle station, upon which the war-in-progress might well hinge, certainly seemed worthy of a place in that research. He’d have to write the account under a pseudonym, of course. No matter which side won, they would want to
have words with the author of such a tome, which would hold both sides up to a bright light that would flatter neither. Likely the information would be suppressed, but that didn’t matter. There would always be copies of it floating around, and beings who wished to know its contents. Knowledge was like that—once it was ushered into the light, putting it back into the shadows was difficult, if not impossible.

Atour leaned back in his formchair, which offered a silent adjustment to his contours. Had to give the Empire its due—when they wanted to, they could provide first-class environments. His office was testimony to that.

He gestured at the computer’s cam, moving his fingers in a pattern that said
Wipe all records of this access
. The holo blinked once, and it was done. Now he needed to find a comsig leaving the station, and link and route his stolen files to it. Communications were restricted at this base, of course, but if you went high enough up the chain of command, there was always someone who was allowed to talk to someone else. And since any officer foolish enough to risk his career by stealing a ride on a superior officer’s communications probably wouldn’t have been assigned here in the first place, the techs most likely didn’t bother to look too closely at the messages they were generating. And even if they did, they wouldn’t see Atour’s addition if they didn’t know exactly where and how to look.

The chink in the armor of powerful beings was that they believed power made them smarter, as well as blaster-proof. It had been Atour Riten’s experience that neither of these things was true.

He wove a complicated two-handed pattern at the computer cam, which began scanning comm frequencies, looking for a ride. Eventually, it would find one. There was no hurry.

Meanwhile, it was time for lunch.

M
otti prided himself on keeping fit. Stripped to a speed-strap and drenched in his own sweat, he was working out in the executive officers’ heavy-gravity room, which he’d set at a three-g pull. Just standing in such a field was an effort. Every movement required three times the energy it normally did. Even jumping was risky—land at a bad angle and you could break an ankle. Trip and fall and the impact could fatally crack your skull.

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.

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.”