Death Star (46 page)

Obi-Wan Kenobi was
gone
.

How could this be?

For the first time that he could remember, the dark side had no answer. And a great surge of unfamiliar emotion suddenly washed over him.

Darth Vader, the Dark Lord of the Sith’s apprentice, one of the two most powerful beings in the galaxy, was afraid.

T
arkin watched the recording of Vader fighting the old man in a lightsaber duel, fascinated. Obi-Wan Kenobi had survived all these years. Who would have believed it?

That he was still able to make a fight of it against Darth Vader was even more impressive. The man looked old enough to be Vader’s father, and then some. Amazing.

The sound was not the best quality, but Tarkin could hear some of the exchanges between the two fighters. One statement from Kenobi in particular struck him, something about becoming more powerful than his ex-student could possibly imagine if Vader struck him down.

How droll. Had Kenobi expected Vader to flee in superstitious terror by telling him such a thing?

The thought had barely crossed Tarkin’s mind, however, when moments later Vader did indeed strike the old man down, and the former Jedi simply … 
disappeared
, leaving nothing behind but his robes and cloak.

Tarkin stared at the image, his jaw dropping in disbelief. This was impossible—there had to be some trick at work. Nobody could survive decapitation by a lightsaber!

“Lord Vader is on his way in,” came a voice from the intercom.

Tarkin nodded. He switched off the recording and changed to an external view of the starfield, which he stood
regarding. After a moment, Vader entered the room and came to stand next to him.

“Are they away?” Tarkin asked.

“They have just made the jump into hyperspace.”

“You’re sure the homing beacon is secure aboard their ship? I’m taking an awful risk, Vader. This had better work.”

It was indeed a risk, letting the Princess and her band of rogues “escape.” If it didn’t work, they would not only lose a high-level prisoner and a couple of Rebel spies—they would lose the Death Star plans as well. And even though Tarkin tended to agree with Motti that having the plans wouldn’t really do the Alliance any good now that the battle station was operational, he wasn’t interested in taking any risks with the ultimate weapon. But if the escapees fled to the main Rebel fortress, as Vader was certain they would, the war would be over sooner than expected.

Much sooner.

The plans, after all, would hardly survive the destruction of whatever planet they came to rest upon.

The Death Star was at last operational, and there was no place in the galaxy where a beat-up Corellian freighter could run that they could not follow.

Making good on his promise that he could retrieve classified information and use it was proving to be somewhat harder than Atour Riten had anticipated. While he had certain codes that would allow him to access restricted files, the nuts-and-bolts operation of a vessel as large as this one was not a simple matter. There were so many subsystems, so many backups and redundant programs, that winnowing out the precise details was time consuming in the extreme.

Were it not for P-RC3, he would never have been able to manage it.

“What do we have so far?” he asked the droid. “And please skip the part where you warn me how dangerous it is.”

P-RC3 said, “I have accessed the shuttle-craft codes. The vessel most likely to be of use is the E-Two-Tee Medical Shuttle, a small, fast ambulance craft. It is unarmed and clearly marked as a noncombat medical transport, and under normal circumstances neither the Rebel Alliance nor the Empire will fire on it. It also has limited hyperdrive capability. It generally carries a crew of six, with facilities to transport and maintain twice that many human-sized patients.”

“Good, good, that gives us plenty of room. What about the tractor beam?”

“Recent misuse of tractor beam controls has resulted in increased security. However, surreptitious programming using an ouroboros routine will, with a proper activation signal, result in a temporary overload to the beam projector’s circuit breaker in the sector from which the ship would, in theory, be departing. This will keep that particular projector offline for approximately thirty seconds before the automatic reset. A return to full power will require fifteen seconds more. A pilot of sufficient skill should be able to accelerate far enough during that time to be out of range; however, if he ventures into the path of any of the other sectors’ beams, they could capture the ship.”

“Excellent.”

“I have not, however, been able to bypass bay door controls for egress. Those systems are not yet linked to the main computer.”

“That’s no good,” Atour said. “If we can’t get the shuttle launched, the rest doesn’t matter.”

“So it would seem.”

Atour considered the problem. “What is the procedure for standard emergency medical transport launch?”

“The onboard crew sends a copy of its orders to Bay Door Control and requests permission to depart. The flight plan is checked via comlink to Flight Control and, if valid, the officer in charge gives the order to his technicians. A force field sufficient to retain atmosphere but permeable enough to allow vessels to penetrate is produced. The vessel exits, the doors are closed and sealed, the field is shut off.”

Atour nodded. “So the only reasonable solution here is to have the doors opened by the BDC crew.”

“Yes.”

“Hmm. Can you produce a bogus flight plan and order for transmission?”

“I can, but I cannot insert that plan into the Flight Control systems, which are independent of the main computer. They will have no record of them.”

“But you can jam or redirect communications if you have the op-chan frequencies?”

“Certainly, sir. Even you could do that.”

Atour gave him a look. “So if the door crew sends a signal to the Flight Control crew and instead of getting to them it goes somewhere else, then whoever gets that call could verify the orders?”

“In theory,” the droid said.

“Well, then that problem is solved. You’ll just have it set up so that that call comes here.”

The droid turned to regard him.

“Oh, don’t look at me like that—I won’t be here. You will take the call and verify it.”

“That would be illegal, sir. I cannot knowingly violate Imperial law.”

“But if I am on that shuttle and you don’t confirm the order, then I’ll be arrested, and possibly even executed.”

“In that case, my primary programming, which is to protect you from harm, would allow such illegal activity.”

Atour slapped P-RC3 on the back. “Good man. I knew I could count on you.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Set it up, Persee. I have a feeling we won’t have a lot of time. Once this station comes out of hyperspace, things will get very active around here.”

“Right away, sir.”

“I’m going to pay a visit to the local cantina now. Let me know when you get everything done.”

Vader was still attempting to come to terms with the disappearance of Obi-Wan. His moment of triumph as he’d cut the old man down had been short-lived. How ironic that he’d been constantly telling nonbelievers like Tarkin not to underestimate the power of the Force, and now he’d witnessed an event that made him realize he was guilty of just such heresy himself.

His Master had never spoken of Jedi just vanishing into nothingness. This bespoke a power that Vader had not yet seen, even in the dark side. But surely it must exist there. Perhaps it had something to do with the darksome hints that his Master had dropped, from time to time, about Darth Plagueis, the Sith Lord who had been Darth Sidious’s Master. Plagueis had been, according to the Emperor, obsessed with the preservation of the immaterial ego after the physical death of the body. Vader determined to ask his Master about it as soon as this distracting foolishness with the Rebels was—

The intercom beeped. Tarkin answered it. “Yes?”

“We are approaching the planet Yavin,” a tech said.

“The Rebel base is on a moon on the far side. We are preparing to orbit the planet.”

Tarkin smiled as he disconnected and looked at Vader. “Well, Lord Vader, it seems you were correct. We are almost in position to break the back of the Alliance. I am sure the Emperor will be pleased.”

“If the station performs as it is supposed to,” Vader said. He believed that it would, but Tarkin seemed a bit too smug and sure of himself. It served him to keep the man slightly on the defensive.

“Oh, it will,” Tarkin said. “I guarantee it will.”

M
emah had closed the cantina again, this time ostensibly to repair a malfunctioning cooler unit.

Ratua came back to the bar, waving a small electronic device. “Sniffer says we’re still clean. No listening devices have been brought in since we got here.”

“That’s good,” Rodo said, “because if we weren’t involved in a conspiracy that would get us all shot before, we sure are now.”

Memah looked around at the others: Riten, the instigator; Dance, the TIE pilot; Kaarz, the architect; Stihl, the guard; Divini, the doctor; Rodo, Ratua, and herself. Eight of them, against the might of the Empire.
Not very good odds
, Memah thought. One misstep and they were all dead.

“Any questions?” Riten asked.

“It seems too easy,” Rodo said.

“Not really,” Nova said. “The station is designed to withstand massive attack from without, but nobody worries too much about security within. The place is full of stormtroopers, guards, army and navy personnel, even a few bounty hunters thrown in. Plus, the only ways in or out are well protected. And if you do manage to get out, there are enough guns to turn you into subatomic particles, and twenty-four tractor beam batteries to hold you still while they do it.”

There was a small jolt. Everyone reacted uneasily. “What now?” Uli asked.

“Just came out of hyperspace,” Vil observed. “Wherever we were going, we’re probably there.”

“The Yavin system,” Riten said. “Three planets, the only one of which concerns us being Yavin Prime. A gas giant with a number of habitable moons.”

“And why is this important?” Ratua asked.

“Remember the Rebel freighter that ‘escaped’? The one with the doc’s girlfriend on it?” Nova asked.

Uli shook his head. “Not my girlfriend, alas. Although she made Atour’s point about not being part of the problem well enough to convince me to join this raggedy crew.”

“Yeah, well, the scut in the guard shack is that the ship was bugged and let go so we could follow it. Tarkin thinks there’s a Rebel base here somewhere.”

“Bad for them if it’s so,” Rodo said.

“But perhaps not for us,” Riten said. “If the navy is busy fighting off Rebel attack ships, it might make it easier for us to escape.”

Nova said, “Nothing the Rebels have can get close enough to scratch the finish on the Death Star—anything bigger than a fighter’ll get blown apart a thousand klicks out.”

“Still, during a battle, ambulance ships sometimes get dispatched without causing undue concern.”

Rodo shook his head. “I hope you and your droid got all this right,” he said to the archivist. “Otherwise even an ambulance won’t do us much good.”

Teela said, “So what do we do now?”

“Go on back to your routine, keep your heads down, and don’t cause any fuss. Set your personal comlink to the library’s data channel—that’s five-five-seven-point-nine. As soon as everything is in place, I’ll call, and with any luck, that call will be very soon.

“You’ll have thirty minutes to make it to the transport. If everything goes well, we’ll be in deep space a couple of minutes after that—and free.”

“
If
everything goes well,” Vil said. His voice was dry.

Two black-clad security guards were waiting, flanking P-RC3, when Atour arrived.

Atour felt his insides freeze. “What’s going on here?”