Death Star (31 page)

“All right,” she said. “Just keep me in the circuit.”

“Of course.”

After he left her office, Teela looked over the schedule again. Her portion of the construction was on time and on budget, true enough, but she wasn’t the only architect on the project, and as it sometimes happened, the good suffered for the faults of the bad. She expected a call from her boss anytime now, telling her she was going to have to cut costs or speed up—or both. It wasn’t fair or right, but if you could carry your load, then you were often asked to help somebody else carry theirs.

“Teela Kaarz?”

Teela looked up. Her receptionist droid stood in the doorway of her office.

“Yes?”

“Senior Project Manager Stinex sends his regards and asks that you come by his office at your convenience.”

Teela nodded. Well, there it was, just like she expected. “Inform the senior PM I’ll be by in an hour, if that’s okay with him.” There was no help for it. That was how things worked.

She noticed the droid was still there. “What?”

“You have a call incoming from a Lieutenant Villian Dance.”

Teela grinned. “Put that through. And close the door on your way out.”

Despite her resolve, the dashing TIE pilot had charmed her. He was funny, clever, and not bad-looking. Given her job and trustee status, it wasn’t as though she had much time for recreation, and a man who made her laugh was worth something.

Her viewscreen blossomed with the image of Vil Dance. He tossed her a jaunty salute, two fingers off his brow. “Good shift, Lady Teela?”

She smiled. “Not too bad so far, Lieutenant. I hope your own is going well.”

“It just improved a thousand percent.”

Smooth, she thought. As smooth as the surface of a neutron star. “To what do I owe the honor of this call?”

“Ah, well, as it happens, I know somebody who knows somebody who is a friend of the cook in the new Melahnese restaurant that just opened on the Rec Deck food court. You fancy fodu in green fire sauce?”

“One of my favorites.”

“I thought maybe you’d like spicy food. I can get us a table, swing shift. My treat.”

“How can a lieutenant afford such exotic cuisine? I hear it’s very expensive to eat there.”

He gave her a disarming shrug. “Not a lot to burn credits on out here,” he said. “And since at any moment I might be leaving on a mission from which I won’t return, I figure
might as well spend the money on something—someone—worthwhile.”

She laughed. “How long are you going to milk that particular routine?”

“I can see I’ll have to try something else, since you are a coldhearted fem unaffected by the prospect of my possible demise. So—dinner?”

She could see her conscience in her mind’s eye, shaking its head.
You’ll be sorry …

Space it
, she told her inner self. “Well, I do have to eat,” she said aloud. “What time?”

He flashed her that gigawatt smile. “Nineteen hundred?”

“I’ll meet you there.”

“Just made my day, Teela.”

“We do what we can to keep the troops happy.”

After they disconnected, she leaned back in her chair, feeling somewhat bemused with herself.

Nothing would come of any liaison between them, not in the long term. He was a pilot and—despite his ironic bravado—likely to get blown out of the vacuum sooner or later. And she was a prisoner who might get some consideration after the station was built, but there were no guarantees there, either.

Still, there was a war going on, and you had to take your joys where you could find them. When built, this battle station would be weapon-proof, and she might be allowed to stay on assignment after the basic design was finished—perhaps even after this thing was ready to roll out and over any resistance in its way. There would still be changes, both in design and construction, taking place. The fact that she was working for the enemy still troubled her occasionally, but she’d rationalized it away, for the most part. And anyway, a job and a place to sleep weren’t the only considerations in a woman’s life. It was better, in the present circumstances,
to take it one day at a time and enjoy each as best she could.

And Lieutenant Vil Dance sounded like he knew how to make life enjoyable.

This new deal he had in mind, if he pulled it off, would leave Ratua sitting very pretty indeed. It was technically illegal—which was moot because, given his situation, everything he did was technically illegal—but in this case, nobody would come to any harm. The Empire was pouring credits into this project like water onto a forest fire; a few buckets here and there wouldn’t be missed, and what was beneath their notice would fix things so he wouldn’t have to work for a while.

He was feeling pretty good, all in all, as he walked confidently down the gently curving corridor toward the recreation area. He mulled over his plans on his way to see Memah Roothes, the most beautiful and interesting female he had run across in, well … forever. The cantina was just ahead, up the corridor a hundred meters or so, when the bouncer, Rodo, emerged. Ratua started to call out and wave, but then, half a step behind Rodo, a second man exited the cantina. It took him a second to place the second fellow, the context and surroundings being utterly different from where Ratua had last encountered him. When he did, a chill washed over him like a splash of liquid nitrogen.

It was Sergeant Nova Stihl, the same man for whom he’d sometimes participated in martial arts demonstrations back in Slashtown.

Without missing a step Ratua turned into the next doorway, a shop featuring femwear, resisting the urge to kick in the afterburner. He pretended to peruse the racks of selections
and gaze at the holomannequins. As he did, he could feel fear roiling in his belly like one of the dianoga rumored to infest downlevels. Stihl was a decent man, but there was no doubt where his loyalties lay, and it wasn’t with escaped prisoners.

A droid rolled up, gyroscopically balanced on a single wheel. “How may I assist you, sir?”

Calm down!
“I need, uh, something, ah, festive for a female friend.”

“Species?”

“Twi’lek.”

“Skin tone?”

“Um, teal.”

“How festive, sir?”

“Oh, you know. Very.”

“Right this way. We have a selection of Twi’lek wear in the correct color coordinates. Something in hisp-silk, perhaps? Sleep gowns? Microgarments?”

Ratua followed the droid to the back of the shop. There were no other customers or staff about that he could see. There was a window at the shop’s front, and all he wanted was to be sure his back was to it. He paid scant attention to the droid as it held something filmy and nearly transparent up for his inspection. “Yes, yes, that’s nice. What else do you have?”

His mind whirled. He hadn’t expected to see anybody he knew here. None of his fellow prisoners were likely to be wandering the station on their own, and what were the chances one of the few guards he had known personally on the prison world would be transferred here?

Apparently much greater than he had expected.

When you thought about it, it made sense. They’d need guards on the station, because a place as big as this was becoming would definitely have crime popping up, even if it was no more than deckhands getting drunk and disorderly. And that wouldn’t be the only problem. Put a million people
into an enclosed space, even one as huge as the Death Star, and there were going to be a fair number of bad eggs. Military discipline wasn’t the easiest thing to live under, plus there were all those civilian contractors. Yeah, they’d definitely need detention centers and guards, and who better than guys who had hands-on experience on a planet full of real criminals?

Okay, so it was reasonable. But that wasn’t the problem, was it? If Stihl saw him, he was cooked, no two ways about it. And that was definitely going to put a bend in his ability to court Memah. He couldn’t risk going into the cantina if, as he suspected, Rodo and Stihl had become pals. It certainly wasn’t surprising—given their joint love of hand-to-hand violence, it was inevitable that they’d either be bosom buddies or mortal enemies. Regardless, his potential romance was over before—

Hold on, hold on, wait a second
. He had told Memah who he was. For maybe the second time in his life, he had offered the truth. She knew he was an escapee, and—so far, at least—had done nothing. He could just tell her about this. They could work out something …

“How about this item?”

He looked at the droid. It held up a piece of crimson silk that he could easily hide in his hand, with two fingers left over. The mental image of Memah wearing nothing but this filled his thoughts, momentarily banishing that of Sergeant Stihl. Oh,
my
.

“I’ll take that. And that other thing, too.”

“Very good, sir. Debit code?”

“How about hard currency?”

“That will be fine, sir. Shall I gift-wrap these for you?”

“Uh, yes. That would be good.”

Ratua walked out of the store carrying the packages, in a considerably more sober mood than he’d been in a few minutes before. He had a few nice gifts for Memah, though they might be a bit premature, given the nature of their relationship.
He would hold on to them for a while and hope to see her in one, someday soon.

And when he thought about it, maybe Stihl wasn’t so much a threat after all. The man was in the military, so his work schedule had to be somewhere in the ship’s computer. Those files could be accessed by somebody with sufficient expertise—and with enough credits, such expertise could be purchased by a careful person. If you knew when and where someone was going to be a large portion of the time, you could avoid accidentally running into him.

He felt himself relax a little. Things weren’t so bad. Once again, luck had been on his side. He was almost coming to believe that he led a charmed life.

“H
old still, Persee.”

“I am motionless, sir,” the droid said.

Atour Riten frowned. If that was true, then his hands must be shaking a bit. Was he really that old?

“Almost done here,” he said. “A bit more patience …”

“I have infinite patience, sir, being a droid. However, I am constrained to point out that your current actions would seem to be in violation of the Imperial Legal Code, Section Fourteen, Subsection Nine, Part C-dash-one, which forbids tampering with autonomous droid function without official permission.”

“So it would seem. But I have permission.” He inserted the photonic cable and turned it until it locked into place.

“I show no record of such permission, sir.”

“Hand-delivered this morning,” Atour said. “My-eyes-only, very hush-hush.”

“Really, sir? This is most unusual. I feel I must verify—”

The droid’s last comment was interrupted when Atour touched the transfer button on his datastick, and the program contained therein began to download into Persee’s memory. The droid sagged slightly, and its photoreceptors dimmed.

The personality substrate would remain the same; Atour did not want to disturb the droid’s abilities, good help being so hard to come by. There were only two items that
would be substantially changed. First, Persee’s spyware, which required it to monitor its work environment and to report on any activities that might be remotely illegal according to Imperial statutes, would shortly be disabled. Second, its basic loyalty module, set up to put the good of the Empire at the top of its function pyramid as defined by its Imperial programmer, was being altered to shift this loyalty to Atour personally.

Persee was, in a few more seconds, going to become Atour Riten’s servant first and foremost, and anything it saw or heard its master do from now on, it would keep to itself. Any tampering with its memory chip in an attempt to bypass the new programming would result in a total memory wipe, right down to the primary nodes. What would be left wouldn’t be able to walk, talk, or do much of anything else. After all, an assistant who might consciously or unconsciously betray him to Imperial agencies, either covert or overt, wasn’t of much use.

Atour had been able to access some wonderful material over his years of filing and cataloging. This droid-altering program had been one of his best finds. Hook it up, pop it in, and
zip!
Just like that, you had a new best friend who would do anything to keep you from harm. Anyone who queried Persee would get reasonable assurances that Commander Atour Riten was a prince of a fellow, as honest as the galaxy was wide, and this would hold true no matter how insistent the questioner. If it went past a certain point, Persee would suffer a firmware breakdown and, whatever anyone might suspect, there would be nothing to find indicating sedition.

The memory of the transfer itself would also be erased from Persee’s mind. The droid wouldn’t have a clue that any tampering had been done, or that it was any different when it walked out of the office than when it had walked in.

There was a
ping!
as the download ended. Atour unlocked
and then removed the cable; the entire process had taken only a couple of seconds. He counted to ten.