Death Star (13 page)

Thus it had been reasoned early on that, while the hull was being laid, individual sectors would be built and sealed. This allowed plenty of storage space, at least at first, for supplies, as well as habitats for workers to stay close to the task. Hundreds of thousands of laborers needed someplace convenient to live—shuttling them back and forth for any distance after every shift was neither cost- nor time-effective.

The hull-plate extruders were only a few hundred kilometers away, hung at a fixed orbital point where the gravitational forces of the prison planet and the raw-material asteroids being towed to the gigantic masticators all balanced. The process was simple enough. An asteroid sufficiently high in nickel-iron content was hauled from the outlying belt to the masticators and fed into a maw; the whirling durasteel teeth chewed the asteroid to tiny bits and mixed them with alloy ores mined and brought up from Despayre, including quadanium. The resulting gravel had water added and was put under high pressure to form a slurry, then fed into pipelines that led to the smelters. These were essentially huge melting pots that refined the mix, burning off impurities. The resulting scarified ore was conveyed to extruders that pressed out the hull plate, rather like food paste from a squeezed tube. There was still a lot of slag left over, but this was just gathered together, pointed at the local star, and given a hard push. Months later, these slag-rafts would fall into the sun and be burned up.

Teela had been on projects before that used deep-space masticators and extruders, of course, such as skyhooks and wheelworlds. She’d never seen as large or as many as there were here, however. The amount of plate being produced was beyond any amount ever used in one place before.

Sector N-One was shaped like a large crescent slice of juicemelon, cut in half midway. It was thirty-one kilometers wide at the base, which would be the equator when the station was finished, narrowing almost to a point only a few dozen meters wide at the other end, and just over ninety-four klicks long. Most of the sectors would be identical in this hemisphere, save for a select few and including, of course, those through which the superlaser would be constructed.

It was hard to visualize the scope of the whole orb.
Big
didn’t begin to do it justice. The habitable crust alone was two kilometers thick, and included in it the surface city sprawls, armory, hangar bays, command center, technical areas, and living quarters. Below that would be the hyper-drive, reactor core, and secondary power sources—none of which, fortunately, concerned her.

What concerned her at the moment was an old and somewhat cranky Wookiee who was giving her a hard time.

Teela’s command of the Wookiee language was rudimentary. The problem with speaking Shyriiwook wasn’t so much the vocabulary as the pronunciation; a human’s vocal apparatus just couldn’t handle the grunts, groans, and howls necessary to be understood. Like most people who’d ever been around serious construction projects, Teela was used to dealing with the tall and furry bipeds—they seemed to gravitate to such sites, even when they weren’t being enslaved and forced to labor on them. Fortunately, on the big projects most Wookiees understood Basic, even if they couldn’t wrap their tongues around it any more than humans could deal with Wookiee-speak. Given all that, Teela usually managed to communicate well enough with them.

Usually.

The chief on this shift in this subsector was a grizzled old Wook named Hahrynyar, who probably would have joined
up voluntarily if he hadn’t been grabbed and enslaved. His coat was gray from muzzle to ankle, he was stubborn and intractable, and he had the annoying habit of forgetting how to understand Basic whenever Teela made an indisputable point. Which was what was happening now.

“Haaarrn,”
the Wookiee said.
“Aarn whynn roowarrn.”

“I understand that it’s on the plans. What I’m saying is I don’t want you to build it. It doesn’t make any sense to put a heat exhaust port there. The main exhaust port is already done, and if there is a need for additional ones—which I don’t believe there is, at all—there are better places to put them than right next to the main one. We don’t need it in this sector, and certainly not
there.”
She pointed at the holo schematic of the polar trench.

“Harnkk whoom?”

“On
my
authority, that’s whose.”

“Arrk-arn ksh sawrron.”

Teela chuckled. She’d understood that well enough. “Yes, yes, I’ll put it in writing.”

These old metal benders and rivet pounders always thought they knew better than the architect when it came down to the actual construction. Sometimes they did, which was fine. But no matter what, they’d stick to the approved plan like a preprogrammed droid with permabond on its wheels to make sure they didn’t get scalded by the sector work boss.

She couldn’t blame the Wook for wanting it in writing. Early in her career Teela had taken verbal orders from a designer. No big deal, just some interior frame spec on a resiplex he thought was silly, so he’d told her to use a different grade of durasteel and, when she’d seemed uncertain, had assured her it was plenty strong enough to handle the job and a lot cheaper, so what was the problem? She’d shrugged and done what he’d asked. When the inspectors came around and refused to approve the building, the designer had been very quick to point out that his assistant
must have made that decision all on her own, because the plans—and he—had
specifically
called for 9095-T8511 grade on that scaffold frame, and if his assistant had used 9093-T7511? Well, it didn’t matter that the alloy and heat-treat could easily take the load if the plans called for the higher grade, now, did it?

He had hung her out to twist in the breeze. Later, when Teela had stormed into the designer’s office to give him a piece of her mind, he had laughed at her. She needed to learn how to play in the real galaxy, he’d told her. If you got caught, you passed the blame along. What she should have done, he’d said, was laid it onto the obviously blind and stupid construction crew chief who had selected the wrong alloy. He could read a plan, couldn’t he?

Teela couldn’t prove anything and she wasn’t stupid. After that, she made certain to get any deviations from the plans appended to the work order in writing. So she knew exactly what the old Wookiee was thinking.

“Don’t worry about it now,” she said. “You have to get the heat exchangers into the barracks before you’d start on piddly stuff like ports, anyhow.”

“Arrrrnn rowwlnnn.”
Well, yes, Hahrynyar allowed, that was the way a smart builder would do things.

“Go, then. Somebody has mislaid my shipment of triaxial fiber-optic cable and I’ve got to run it down. Get the exchangers unpacked and a crew started installing them, and we’ll get back to the philosophy of exhaust ports later, okay?”

The old Wookiee nodded and headed off. Teela watched him lumber away for a second, then turned her attention to the next problem. Never a dull moment, the day was never long enough, and they sure didn’t pay her enough …

She had to smile at that. The pay might not be much, but it was better than living in a pesthole down on a planet full of murdering scum. Even cantankerous old Hahrynyar couldn’t argue with that.

Tenn Graneet stuck his head into the CO’s office. “You wanted to see me, Cap?”

His commanding officer looked up from his flimsiwork. “Come in, Tenn.”

Tenn ducked slightly to pass through the hatch. Captain Hoberd’s office looked, as usual, like the local A-grav had somehow suffered a massive flux in just this room; data-chips were piled haphazardly on the floor, the two holopics on opposite walls—one was an image of Hoberd’s graduating class, the other of his wife, Linesee, and their two kids; Tenn could never remember their names—hung constantly askew, and Hoberd’s Silver Valor medal was dangling from the upper hinge of a wall cabinet. Every time Tenn entered the CO’s office, the medal was dangling from a different location—on one or the other of the family pics, from the small alumabronze sculpture on his desk, even swinging slightly in the breeze directly beneath the air vent … he couldn’t recall ever seeing it in the same place twice. Droot and some of the others reported the same experience. No one ever saw him move it, and no one knew why he did. It was just a quirk of the captain’s. Those unfamiliar with his war record might think he had a disrespectful attitude, but nothing could be further from the truth—at least, not in Tenn’s opinion.

“What’s up?” He couldn’t read anything from the man’s face, which wasn’t unusual; Hoberd, it was said, could out-stare a Weequay. Normally this didn’t bother Tenn, but today, for some reason, he began to feel a little uneasy. The energy in the room was subtly different. He didn’t go in for woo-woo concepts like that, but sometimes he couldn’t deny it.

“Sit down, Tenn.” Hoberd’s expression didn’t change. Tenn looked at the chairs, both of which were filled with
various objects, and perched on the edge of the less cluttered one. “I’ve got some bad news, I’m afraid.”

Uh-oh
, Tenn thought. Had to have been that last inspection; he couldn’t think of any other possibility. What had gone wrong? An improper calibration? Not up to spit-’n’-polish standards? What was it?

The CO let him sweat for a moment, then grinned. “Bad news for me, anyway—I’m losing my best noncom.”

“Sir?”

“Pack your bags, Chief. You’re for the Death Star. They’re giving you the big gun.”

At first the words didn’t make sense to Tenn. Then the meaning broke through, like a sun through clouds, and he grinned.

“No poodoo, Cap?”

Hoberd held up a small datachip. “Orders just came down.” He tossed the chip, and Tenn caught it in midair. He was aware that he was grinning like a kid. “Thanks, Cap!”

Hoberd frowned slightly. “You sure you want to do this?”

“You’re kidding, right?”

The CO shook his head regretfully. “How am I going to replace you?”

Tenn blinked. “What, you aren’t coming?”

“Not me. My tour is over soon, and I’m mustering out. One of my in-laws runs a good-sized industrial operation—I have a job waiting.”

“Oh,
that
sounds exciting. Making widgets? Moving sewage? C’mon, Cap. You and me, pulling trigger on the biggest—”

“Job pays three times as well and the only thing dangerous about it might be having the wife find out where I’m hiding the girlfriend.”

They both laughed. Then Hoberd continued, “No guns’re operational yet. There are only a few sectors even pressurized,
but you’re the best shooter in the fleet and they’re lucky to have you. They want you over there as soon as possible to begin orientation.”

Tenn felt like his head would split in half if his grin got any bigger. The CO was right: who better to pull the firing lever on the superlaser? This was the biggest, most powerful weapon ever built.
Ever
. This was as good as it got. He could bask in the warm glow of that for quite a while.

“Well, what’re you waiting for? Go on! Next time I see you your ugly mug had better be hidden behind one of those snazzy black visors they wear over there.”

CPO Tenn Graneet walked out of Captain Hoberd’s office feeling as though something had gone wrong with the corridor’s gravity, because he was definitely walking on air. Just wait until Droot and Velvalee heard the news. The best shot in the galaxy paired with the biggest gun … Tenn slapped his hands together, rubbing them with enthusiasm. He couldn’t wait to get his hands on those controls.

M
emah stood on the walk in front of what had been her cantina, stunned beyond words. The Soft Heart was no more than ashes and cinders, still warm, soot and smoke twirling up toward the exhaust fans in a dirty breeze.

And it wasn’t just her place. The whole block had burned. The fire-suppression sprayers had unaccountably malfunctioned, according to the unofficial reports, at least, and the droid fire crews had been sent to the wrong location, so that by the time they arrived and began their efforts to control the blaze, it had been too late by far. They were lucky to have kept it from spreading to the whole sector, they said.

Memah still couldn’t get her mind around it. This wasn’t just a building reduced to ashes. This was her
life
.

Rodo came to stand next to her, his face grim. “Varlo Brim was discovered dead in his cube this morning.”

She frowned. “Who?”

“An arsonist, a professional. I know someone who works for the medical examiner. ‘Heart failure’ was entered on Varlo’s certificate—
before
his body ever arrived at the morgue. Word from above was that there was to be no detailed examination of the corpse.”

She turned away from what had been her reason to get
up every day and blinked at him. The ash-laden air made her eyes watery. It seemed important that she understand what Rodo was trying to tell her, but, though he was speaking in Basic, the words didn’t seem to make sense. “Which means … what?”