Death Star (34 page)

“S
ergeant Stihl, we have intruders! There’s a breakout on Level Five, Detention Block AA-Twenty-three. Take a squad and get over there!”

Nova stared at the lieutenant in disbelief. Intruders? A breakout? How was that possible?

“Sergeant!”

No time to wonder about it now. “Copy, sir, on our way! Bretton, Zack, Dash, Alix, Kai, with me! Mahl, Cy, Dex, Nate, on point! Move out, people!”

The squad hustled out of the barracks and into the hall, the sound of their armor rattling as they moved. The corridors were strangely deserted, which Nova chalked up to luck. Fewer people meant fewer civilian casualties.

“Who are we after, Sarge?” That from Dash.

Nova didn’t know. Who were they after?

Well, kark it, he’d know them if he saw them.

“Just shoot who I tell you to,” he told the trooper. Then he raised his voice to include the rest of the squad: “Double-time it, people!”

They ran through the gray-and-black halls, following the four guards on point, their sidearms held up, fingers outside the trigger guards, as per regulations. The ceilings and floors were covered with blaster-proof absorbital, so if somebody accidentally cooked off a round it wouldn’t do
any damage. If you carried your weapon pointed at the floor, however, there was a good chance in a crowd that you’d shoot somebody’s foot off, and the walls and vent grates weren’t all that sturdy, either.

The corridor branched ahead. As they approached, Nova was desperately trying to remember which one led to D-Unit when a blaster bolt sizzled through a cross corridor ahead. The four guards on point skidded to a stop, then moved ahead slowly toward the intersection to peer around it.

Nova suddenly realized this was all familiar. It was as if he had been here before, seen the events that were now unfolding. He knew, without knowing how, that in the next few seconds a squad of stormtroopers was going to—

“Aaahhhh!”
Somebody beyond the bend in the corridor screamed, and a moment later half a dozen troopers barreled around the corner of the hallway intersection, heading toward Nova and his men.

They were being chased by a single man with a blaster, yelling like a berserker as he ran. The man—Nova saw that he was dressed like a down-on-his-luck spacer—stopped, realizing that there were suddenly overwhelming odds in front of him. Then he turned and ran back the other way, putting on a burst of speed as he disappeared around the corner.

“After him! Go!” Nova led the pursuit, followed by his squad and the others. Once around the bend, he saw that the fleeing spacer had been joined by a Wookiee, and both of them were now shooting back at their pursuers as they fled. A blaster bolt took the man next to Nova. He tried to line up on the runners, but was jostled by somebody from behind; his bolt scorched the plating just behind the two escapees. The human zapped another round at them.

Time slowed down. The bolt crawled toward them, impossibly slow. But as slowly as it was moving, Nova found he was moving even slower … the deadly energy
burst was going to hit him, and there was nothing he could do to stop it.

The blaster bolt slammed into him, penetrating the chest plate easily. It pierced his chest, burned out his heart, and he fell, dying—

Nova jerked up in bed, his pulse racing, as one of his cubemates hollered, “Hey, Stihl! Wake the frip up, you’re yelling in your sleep again! Some of us are trying to get some milking rest here!”

“Sorry,” Nova gasped. He slowed his breathing, using calming techniques he’d learned over the years. He felt his pulse rate drop, felt himself grow calmer.

But not calm enough. Nova laid back down, staring at the ceiling. So much for the sleeping meds helping things.

Tarkin looked at the data running up the screen, pleased. The station was nearly operational—at least enough so that they could begin basic maneuvers. The superlaser was only partially functional, true, but it was hot enough to test, and he had some ideas about how to do that.

All in all, things were going very well indeed.

There had been a few glitches. Daala had not been able to find those responsible for the destruction of the
Undauntable
. She had returned to the Maw, but would be back again, soon. Tarkin looked forward to her next visit.

An intelligence report had just come to his attention. There had been some kind of break-in and theft at an out-of-the-way military base on Danuta. While normally this would have been of little interest to Tarkin, the investigating agents had heard some intel—no more than rumor, really—that one of the files stolen was a set of plans for this battle station. Tarkin frowned. On the face of it, that
seemed unlikely—how would the plans have gotten to that backrocket planet in the first place?

Then again, military secrets were notoriously hard to keep, and a file could be transmitted across the entire galaxy, given enough power in the generating signal. Some low-level functionary might have, at some point, come across the plans and decided to copy a set. There could be many reasons for doing so—knowledge was power. How much would the plans be worth to the Rebel Alliance? A fortune, certainly; well worth the small risk of being found out.

And if there was even a remote chance that such a thing had come to pass, if those plans had fallen into the clutches of the Rebels, that could be bad. The station, when fully operational, would be invulnerable from without, of course, but a saboteur who knew exactly where to do the most damage from within could be a real threat.

This needed to be addressed, and Tarkin knew who was best suited for the task. It was galling to have to ask the man for help, but the station’s safety was paramount.

He moved to the holoplate and activated it. It was a priority-one communication, and the connection was made almost immediately.

The shimmering image of Darth Vader appeared before Tarkin, life-sized, as if he were standing in the same room.

“Grand Moff Tarkin. Why have you called?”

“I understand there is a remote possibility that a set of plans for this battle station may have been stolen by Alliance agents.”

“Yes.”

Tarkin clamped his teeth tight enough to make his jaw mucles ache. “You knew this?”

“I have my own agents.”

The black helmet had no way to change expression, of course, but Tarkin could hear the amusement in the Dark Lord’s voice. “I see,” he said, his tone carefully neutral.
Now was not the time to be at odds with the Emperor’s lackey.

“I will find out if it is true, and if so, I will deal with it.” The black helmet inclined questioningly. “That is why you called me, isn’t it?”

Tarkin nodded. Vader might be many things, but fainthearted he was not. Once he began a task, he seldom swerved from finishing it. Odds were that the story was no more than a baseless rumor, but if not, no one was better equipped to determine the facts and eliminate the problem than Darth Vader. A useful, if dangerous, tool—no matter how Tarkin might feel about him personally.

“Keep me advised,” he said.

“Of course.” The image of Vader vanished.

Vader broke the comm connection with Tarkin. How had the man found out about the stolen plans so quickly? There must be a leak somewhere. There were always leaks. The only way to prevent them was to keep everything to yourself, and that was not always possible.

Vader, of course, knew much more about the situation than he had told Tarkin. It was true: a set of plans had been stolen from a military base, and those plans were, indeed, now in Rebel hands. They had been smuggled to Dark-knell, and then to Toprawa. There a band of Rebels had seized an Imperial communications tower and transmitted the plans to a blockade-runner orbiting the planet.

The blockade-runner, he had learned, was the
Tantive IV
.

Princess Leia Organa’s vessel.

Bail Organa and his daughter had been among those in the reconstituted Imperial Senate who had cast their lot with the Rebels. The proof was not there yet, but Vader
knew. He did not even need the Force to assure him of this. He knew it.

Doubtless her ship was on its way to deliver those plans to some secret Rebel base. Vader had to find and capture the craft before it arrived at its destination. Even though he would have preferred to follow the vessel to its destination and destroy the base, the destruction of another nest of Rebels was not as important as safeguarding his Master’s prized battle station.

Thus the
Devastator
was bound for Tatooine, where his agents had predicted the
Tantive IV
was headed. A secret base there made little sense, as the planet was mostly desert and of little military or commercial value. The world was far enough out of the main lanes so that the Rebels might have had a base there once, but that possibility had already been checked thoroughly by Imperial operatives, who had reported that no such place now existed.

It made little sense. The planet was all sand and dunes, sparsely populated by colonists, both humans and other species, and the indigenous Tuskens. Vader knew just how inhospitable the place was. After all, he had spent his early years there—

No. Anakin Skywalker had been raised in the hot, dry wasteland, but who he was now had been forged on a world that made Tatooine look like Hoth. He had been annealed in the molten rivers of Mustafar. Mustafar was his birthworld, not Tatooine.

In any event, why the Princess was going there was unimportant. Perhaps she was just taking a roundabout route to throw off possible pursuit. What was important was that she had the plans for the Death Star, and that in itself was sufficient reason to detain her. The Empire would recover the plans and in so doing rid itself of her meddlesome actions at the same time.

His Master would be pleased with both events.

T
hey hadn’t lied. The differences between the simulator and the real thing were negligible. There were more worn spots and scratches in the simulator, put there over months of drills, but the equipment was identical.

Despite all the training, Tenn was still a little nervous. This was the real thing; from here, they could generate a pulse of pure destruction that was stronger than anything ever fired before. Amazing, and not a little intimidating. Not that he expected to ever fire the weapon at full power, certainly not to destroy an entire planet. The whole idea, as he understood it, was that the threat would be more than enough. They’d probably disintegrate an uninhabited moon or two, just to prove they meant business, but the actual targets would be military—Rebel bases, fleets, and the like. For such as those, the superlaser would be a ridiculous amount of overkill, akin to frying a green flea with a turbo-laser.

“You’ve been hands-on in the simulator, you’ve seen the reads, so I’m not breaking any big news here,” his CO said, breaking Tenn’s reverie. “This is a monster gun, but it’s not a repeater. You miss the first shot, you won’t get another one on your shift.”

Tenn nodded. He’d asked about power storage first day on the simulator, and the engineers had fallen all over themselves backing away from that one. But once he’d
seen the numbers—they had to keep those honest, even in sims—he’d figured it out pretty quick. The capacitors could hold enough juice to light up a planet, true enough, but once they discharged, they weren’t going to be filling back up real quick. Once you shot the thing, you might as well turn off the lights and go take a long nap, because it wasn’t going to be back up to full power for the better part of a day. True, you could still pump out some pretty nasty low-power beams—and the definition of
low
here was still bigger than what a Star Destroyer could manage, even letting all the hardware spit at once—but it would be a duster instead of a buster. You could scorch a city or two, boil away a large lake or perhaps even a small sea, but that was about it.

And if you were the guy pulling the trigger and you missed, well, you’d be looking for a new job starting ten seconds after you said,
Oops …

Tenn said, “My crew doesn’t miss, Cap. You find a target and if we can see it, we will hit it, my personal guarantee.”

The CO laughed. “You shooters are all alike.”

“Check the records, Cap, check the records. They don’t pay me to miss.”

The CO’s face went serious. “I know that, Chief. But we don’t get to pick the targets. It might get ugly.”

Tenn shrugged. “I’m not a politician or a Moff, sir. I do my job, let them do theirs.”

The CO slapped him on the shoulder. “Good man!” He sounded relieved.

“So, we going to get operational here?”

“Pretty quick, son. Let your crew get familiar with the knobs. It’s all supposed to be the same, but we won’t be shooting blanks. I don’t want anybody to get the jeeblies when it comes time to crank it up for real.”

“I hear that, Cap. My crew won’t let you down.”