Death Star (27 page)

V
il Dance was flying like a man possessed by an unfettered spirit, as well as he had ever piloted a TIE fighter, really sharp, he knew it—and it still wasn’t good enough. No matter how he jinked or stalled or dipped, the attacker was right there behind him! He couldn’t shake him—the other ship was like some impossible shadow, mimicking his every move.

Vil did a power stall, but the bogey stayed right behind him as if he were welded to Vil’s TIE. He rolled, went vertical—and the tail was still there. He hadn’t fired a shot—yet.

“All right,” he muttered through clenched teeth. “Let’s burn some g’s, my friend.” He shoved the TIE into an almost ninety-degree break to starboard, nearly blacking out from the overpowering tug of gravity as he pulled at least four g’s. And the mysterious black fighter not only matched him, but made it look easy. Vil could almost hear his nemesis behind him yawning. If he could shake him loose long enough to turn, at least he might manage a last-ditch maneuver that pilots called a WBD: We Both Die. He’d take the son of a raitch with him.

But it was too late for that. Abruptly his pursuer’s ion cannons flared. White light filled the cockpit, and as it blinded Vil, he heard:

“Your ship has been destroyed.” The flight simulator’s
voice wasn’t supposed to have any inflection, but Vil was sure he heard a smug
gotcha!
tone to it.

“Sim off,” Vil said. He was disgusted with himself. The holoprojection winked out, and he leaned back in the control formchair and sighed.

He’d thought—hoped—that the martial arts stuff he’d been studying would make a difference. After a couple of months’ worth of classes, he’d felt as if he had been honed just a little sharper. And it was true, he’d realized when looking at the readouts; the timers had verified his reaction time. He
was
faster.

But not fast enough to ace the simulator.

Ever since the newbie Kendo had died, over a month ago, Vil felt he’d been off his game. It wasn’t anything dramatic—he could still outfly anyone else on the battle station, hands down. But he still felt less than optimum.

It hadn’t been
his
fault. The kid had been reckless. He’d wound up chewing vacuum for it, and there was nothing Vil could have done.

But he’d been one of Alpha Squadron, and as such, Vil felt responsible. He’d never had a death in his squad before. He felt that he should do something more than the obligatory memorial service, the expressions of grief to the family via holo. But he had no idea what.

It would have been one thing if Nond Kendo had died in the heat of battle. But to go out on so foolish a thing as a training exercise … it was so
pointless
.

There were times, in fact, when the whole thing seemed pretty pointless to Vil. And these thoughts, these feelings, disturbed him—almost as much as the kid’s death did.

He’d signed up to be a fighter pilot for the Empire; had pictured himself rocketing through the cosmos, gunning down evildoers in the name of everything right in the galaxy. But so far, the only deaths he’d seen were those of a group of motley escaped convicts who’d stolen a shuttle, and a kid too cocky to live.

It wasn’t exactly how he’d visualized it.

“Time of fight?” he asked.

The computer said, “Two minutes, fourteen seconds.”

Vil’s eyebrows went up at that. It hadn’t seemed that long during the fight. That was a personal best against the sim of Colonel Vindoo Barvel, the only man who’d held his own for even a few breaths against Darth Vader. Vil wondered how he would fare against a sim of Vader. Not that he’d ever find out; he’d like to meet the fool crazy enough to ask the man in black to be scanned and holoed while he pretended to pilot a TIE. Like it as not, Vader would take the man’s head off with that fancy laser sword of his.

Anyway, he’d held his own two seconds longer than he’d ever managed before. Maybe this hand-to-hand stuff Stihl was teaching had some merit, after all. He felt a little better.

“Where do I rank overall?”

“Of current-duty Imperial pilots, you are currently ranked nineteenth in this simulation.”

Hmm
. “Out of how many?”

“Two hundred and thirty-four thousand, six hundred and twelve.”

Okay, so that wasn’t
too
bad. Only eighteen pilots ahead of him, out of nearly a quarter million? Certainly nothing to be ashamed of …

Vil sighed. He leaned back in the formfit. “Set it up again,” he said.

“Beginning simulation in ten seconds. Nine … eight … seven … six …”

Vil took a deep breath, and gripped the controls.

Atour had been laboring over a data retrieval problem for nearly an hour when he realized that somebody was standing
behind his chair. He frowned and turned, ready to chastise whoever it was for intruding into his office sanctuary.

But the words died unspoken. Standing behind him, close enough to touch, was a droid, one of the new librarian models. He hadn’t had a chance to see one before now, other than in holocatalogs and sales material. It looked something like a standard bipedal protocol droid, save its color was a metallic blue instead of gold, complete with a bluish glow to its photoreceptors. The head was a bit larger also, reflecting its increased memory capacity. “Yes?”

“Good midday, sir. I have been ordered to report to you for assignment.”

What was that accent? High Coruscanti, it sounded like. Very posh and clipped. He’d never heard a droid affect an accent before, and the upper-crust sensibility it conveyed made Atour hide a smile.

“In what capacity?”

“Sir, I am a librarian. I am here to assist you in whichever way you deem felicitous.”

Felicitous
. Not a word that one usually heard from the vocabulator of a droid. Or anybody else, for that matter. Sometimes Atour thought he was the last classically educated man in the galaxy.

“Sent by whom?”

“Sector Admiral Poteet, sir.”

“I see. And your name?”

“I am model P-RC-three.”

“No, no, not your model number. Your name.”

“I have no name, sir.” The polished tone sounded somehow disapproving. “I am a droid.”

“Who programmed you?”

“My primary programming was installed by Lord Alferon Choots Bemming, the owner and chief operating officer of Bibliotron Systems.”

Ah
. “On Imperial Center.”

“Yes, sir.” Again the subtle subtext, which managed this time to imply,
Where else?

Atour had, of course, heard of Lord Alferon, the amateur inventor and heir to the Bemming Shipping fortune. The family owned one of the largest private libraries of hard-copy books in the galaxy, more than seven million volumes, some ranging back to the Golden Age. Lord Alferon was supposedly so rich that he could buy a planet, cover it knee-deep in precious jewels and metals, and then use the rumored doomsday weapon on this battle station to blow it all to atoms without putting a noticeable dent in his exchequer. He was also something of a tinkerer, and owned a droid-design company where he spent much of his personal time. Atour thought wistfully of the rich man’s library. There were people who would kill to work there, and he was foremost among them. Seven million books. He sighed. It made one’s heart ache.

“All right, then. Henceforth, you will answer to the name ‘Persee.’ Unless you have some objection?”

“No objection, sir.” Was the droid’s tone slightly icier? Well, if so, that was just too bad.

“Good,” Atour said. “Now come here and make yourself useful. There is a bottleneck in this access system, here—” He pointed at the holoscreen. “—and I want it eliminated. Find a way.”

“Very good, sir. Will that be all for now?”

“That’s enough, I imagine. How long do you estimate it will take?”

The droid stepped forward and touched several controls on the holoconsole, then watched as a crawl of words and numbers scrolled up so fast that no human could possibly read them. After a few seconds it touched a second control. The alphanumerics stopped, and the droid stood there silently.

Atour counted slowly to five. “You were going to give
me an estimate of the time necessary to clear the bottleneck.”

“Unnecessary, sir. The problem has been cleared.”

Atour blinked. “Really?”

“Of course, sir. Will there be anything else?”

Atour smiled. A competent assistant! How wonderful! Better a single droid that knew what it was doing than any number of fumbling organic beings. “No, I think that will do for now. Thank you, Persee. I appreciate it.”

“It is my function, sir. Would you care for some tea while you determine my next chore? I have checked the kitchen stores, and can offer you a choice of Manellan Jasper, Kosh, Bluefruit Kintle …”

Now Atour Riten laughed aloud. Perhaps this post wouldn’t be so onerous after all.

A
dmiral Motti was pleased that Admiral Helaw had done such a good job with the
Undauntable
. She was an old ship, on the line for a decade before any other in this quadrant, and despite that, she gleamed like a shiny new credit coin. All systems were in order, and Helaw, who was going to retire as soon as this project was finished, was old school, a man who had earned his flag rank on the front lines of a dozen major battles. When the guns started working, you wanted a man like him watching your back—he’d take the beam in his own chest before he allowed it to hit you from behind.

As the two men walked down the corridor to the docking bay where Motti’s lighter waited, their talk was easy and informal. They went way back—Helaw had been a captain on the
Ion Storm
when Motti had gotten his promotion to first lieutenant. That Motti had eventually done a desk tour on Imperial Center and made contacts that allowed him to rise past his old commander spoke to his ambition and intelligence in such matters. Helaw had never enjoyed politics, even though Motti had tried to interest him. The older man just didn’t care—all he wanted to do was take his ship out and smoke the enemy, and he was as good at it as any man in the navy. Assigning him a desk would have been a waste, Motti knew, even though he
would have been a formidable Moff, had he wanted to go down that road. Better by far than Tarkin, whose political skills were superior to Motti’s own, but whose grasp of working strategy and tactics was much inferior to Helaw’s.

“So you think this big tank of a station Wilhuff is building is coming along all right?”

“It is. And now that I’m aboard, it will do so even faster.”

Helaw laughed. “Never a lack of self-confidence in you. Zi.”

Motti smiled in return. “You know what they say: Sometimes wrong, but never in doubt.”

“I still think it’s putting too many spawns in one bin.”

“Come on, Jaim, you’ve seen the specs, even though you weren’t supposed to. The station is a fortress. It has more guns than a fleet, and a weapon that will crack open worlds like they were ripe wuli nuts. Nothing the Rebels can throw at it will slow it down by as much as a meter. Nothing
we
have will give it pause. Whatever else he might be, Wilhuff’s ideas about this are solid. The Rebels won’t be able to run fast enough, and if we can blow a planet out from under them, where can they hide?”

“Maybe.”

They were almost to the deck. Motti turned to look at his old commander. “ ‘Maybe?’ ”

“Did I ever tell you ’bout Lieutenant Pojo?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Thirty-five, forty years back, Kan Pojo was the range officer and small-arms instructor on the training ship
Overt
. He was fleet champion with any arms you could carry—carbine, sniper rifle, sidearm. He could use a blast pistol to pick flies off a wall at ten paces. I never saw a man who could shoot as well as he did. It was uncanny.”

“Uh-huh.” Motti resisted the urge to yawn. He admired and respected Jaim Helaw as he did few men, but the old trooper did take his time spinning a yarn.

“We ran into a bit of trouble in the Vergesso—pirates had taken over a moon. We were sent down to teach them the error of their ways.”

Motti nodded. “And?”

“Pojo wanted to get into the fray. It was a lot of close-quarters stuff: the only city on the moon was domed—we’re talking a maze of alleys and narrow streets. Nobody could use big guns, because anything larger than a blaster rifle might rupture the dome. So the CO thought, Why not?

“I was doing a tour as a naval adjunct, a second loot, and Pojo was assigned to our squad. So we drop, access the dome, and start hunting pirates. They were a ratty bunch, maybe a hundred, hundred and twenty of ’em, but spread out.

“Our squad came across a group of ’em, about twenty-five men, and we all commenced to have a shootout. Pojo was knocking them down, left, right, and center, like targets on the range. Only thing I’ve ever seen to compare it to is that old holo of Phow Ji taking out the mercenaries. Ever seen it?”

Motti nodded. What soldier hadn’t?