Death Star (14 page)

“Think about it. A block of the underground goes up in flames. The suppressors, which passed inspection less than two months ago, suddenly don’t work. The fire crews get here late, and the next morning a man who sets fires for a living is found dead of ‘natural causes’ in his cube. Plus all those deliveries that didn’t get made? It doesn’t take a construction engineer to put it together.”

Memah stared at him. “Kark,” she said.

“Yeah. Somebody is collecting a fat insurance voucher. What d’you want to bet that construction’s gonna crank up on a new row of shiny new businesses that are gonna be owned by some uplevel bosses who just happen to be bureaucrats responsible for the firefighters and automatic suppressors?”

“And we can’t do anything about it,” she said.

“Not if the fix was in. You had it covered?” He nodded at the ashes. “Insured?”

“No. I never saw the need, what with the suppressors and all.”

Rodo nodded. She was grateful for the lack of rebuke in his face and voice. “What are you gonna do?”

Memah shook her head. “No idea.”

There were others wandering through the ruins, humans and aliens, looking at what had been their shops, the repositories of their hopes and dreams. And gawkers, fire-control droids still checking hot spots, local police … the strangely silent crowd, moving in and out of the smoky mist like revenants, made it all seem quite surreal.

A man in black coveralls approached them. His gaze took in the pile of smoldering cinders, and he shook his head. “Sorry for your loss, Memah Roothes.”

Again, she understood the words, but they meant nothing. “Do I know you?”

“No. I’m Neet Alamant, a recruiter for Civilian Adjunct to the Imperial Navy.”

“Yeah—so?”

“I have an offer you might find interesting.”

Memah gave a bark of bitter laughter. “Unless you’re looking for plant fertilizer”—she gestured at the ruins—“I don’t have a lot for sale right about now.”

“I understand. Perhaps we might speak of this later? Here is my contact information. Please comm me when you have a free moment.”

He handed her an info button, flashed a patently false smile, and walked across the street toward several people standing in front of what had been a bakery.

Memah stared at the button on her palm. A free moment? Sure, no problem. She’d have plenty of those upcoming. She’d be sitting in her room on the dole with nothing to do, remembering the good old days when she ran a pub.

She looked at Rodo. He shrugged.

Memah looked back at the ruin of her cantina. What was she going to do now?

Uli passed his hands under the UV sterilizer, then wiped them on a clean towel. The orderly droid floated the patient out and toward post-op. They were caught up, no more patients scheduled for surgery or follow-ups until rounds that evening. A break at long last.

“You should come see this, Doc,” Zam Stenza, one of the orderlies, said.

Curious, Uli followed the orderly through the staging area and down a half-finished passage that was more catwalk
than corridor. His boots thumped upon the cheap expanded metal grate that was the temporary floor of the corridor, and the sound echoed hollowly along the hallway. This section was supposed to be finished, but it looked only half done; less, in places. There was enough air, but there were construction droids crawling like metal spiders on the inside of the hull, welding studs and connectors and adding insulation. Uli saw unsealed gaps in the interior walls.
Sure hope they don’t pop a seam somewhere
, he thought nervously. He was fairly certain that carrying on shirtsleeve activity in such a precarious environment was contravening several safety regs, and he was equally sure that it would do no good whatsoever to point this out.

Stenza stopped to look through the window at a lower walkway. Uli moved closer to see what was so interesting.

A group of pedestrians was moving along the wide passage. It consisted of guards, high-ranked officers, and one man in black who towered over them all.

“Who’s that?” Uli asked, feeling like he should know.

“Darth Vader,” Zam said. “He’s here on an inspection tour.”

Uli stared at the tall, black-cloaked figure. He knew about Vader, of course. He’d seen vids of the man—if that was what he really still was under the suit, which looked like it contained some kind of cyclic respiratory system, and probably bionic prosthetics as well, judging by his gait. The stiffness was subtle, but there if you knew where to look.

“Inspection tour?”

“Yes,” said C-4ME-O, who had come up behind them. “This project is of prime concern to the Emperor.”

“And just how do you know this, Fourmio? Tight with the Emperor, are you?”

“No, but I was put into service on Coruscant before it became Imperial Center. I’ve never had a mindwipe, so I
have my memories of that time. Droids do sometimes talk to one another, you know. Word gets around.”

Uli nodded. Yes, that was true enough. There was a lot of truth in the old saw that said,
If you want to know what goes on, ask the droids
. They see, they hear, and they don’t forget. He had known some droids who were every bit as clever and talkative as any natural-borns or clones he’d been around. There’d been that protocol droid back at Rimsoo Seven on Drongar—what had it been called?—who’d been self-aware enough to play sabacc and gloat over the winnings. It had had a sarcastic circuit a klick wide.

Uli watched the procession pass. “Walked right past us, didn’t they?”

“The word is that Lord Vader is not fond of medics,” C-4ME-O said. “Apparently he has had some unpleasant experiences in that area.”

Uli nodded. He could see why. The only reason he could imagine that someone would be stuffed into a lung-suit with a respirator breathing for him would be because his own breathing passages had been terribly damaged and, for some reason, new lobes and trachea could not be cloned and implanted. That would be a strange malady in this day and age, but not impossible. Some kind of autoimmune problem, perhaps. There were those rare people, one in a billion, who would reject their own matched genetic tissue implants—even skin grafts. Had to be something like that, Uli mused—nobody would voluntarily walk around looking like Vader otherwise.

“Supposedly he can kill a man just by looking at him,” Stenza said. He dropped his voice to a whisper. “I heard a rumor that he was once a Jedi.”

Uli nodded. The mysterious Force was fairly amazing when manifested by an expert in its use. Uli had seen it demonstrated by a woman who had been part of the team on Drongar. She had been a Mirialan, a Jedi healer named
Barriss Offee. Only a Padawan when he’d met her; later she had become a Jedi Knight. He’d learned a lot from conversations with her, both about the ways of the Jedi and, in broader terms, about life. She’d been strong in the Force, he’d been told. Not that it had been enough to save her. Barriss had died on Felucia, so he had heard, when the clones had turned on their Jedi masters.

The news had hit him far worse than he’d expected. He’d told himself many times, in the nearly two decades since his first posting on that fetid swamp world, that what he’d felt for Barriss had been nothing more than youthful infatuation. It might be true, but he could still see her face in his mind, hear her voice, feel the power that had lived inside her. Even after all these years.

Maybe he hadn’t loved her. Maybe he’d been too young to know what love was, back then. But when he had heard of her death …

So many people he had cared deeply for were dead because of that karking war. Probably some of the Jedi had escaped death, but the official posture was that they had all been enemies of the people and executed accordingly. And all research into the psionic abilities of the former peacekeepers of the galaxy had been summarily halted. To venture into that area was worth the death penalty these days. Lot of that going around, too. Step wrong and it was prison if you were lucky, and death if you trod too hard on the wrong toes. Given all this, it was amazing that Vader would tolerate even the rumor of him being a Jedi.

He sighed. Well, it wasn’t his business. He was a surgeon. Genetics, esoteric mind-over-matter control, connections with the infinite … those weren’t his concerns. He just went where he was told, cut where he was ordered to cut, and hoped that his forced servitude would end someday, preferably with him still in one piece. Initially he’d thought that the only good thing about being assigned to a battle station the size and power of this one was not having
to worry about being blown up. That was before the first influx of wounded workers from the bombed section had come under his knife. Nothing was safe, not even this monstrous Death Star.

Uli turned away. There should be time to grab a bite at the commissary, and a few hours’ sleep, before his next shift. Unless there was more sabotage, of course.

He wished he could remember the name of that droid back on Drongar. He knew it was going to bug him all day.

T
he man dressed in black with the respirator helmet felt to Teela like something out of a long-forgotten nightmare. She could almost sense evil radiating from him in pulsing waves; just being near him made her queasy, set her stomach roiling.

And for all that, she was not even his focus, merely one of the retinue of architects and builders standing in the background as Grand Moff Tarkin arrived with the tour to show off this part of the station. She had not spoken to Vader, nor he to her, but still she felt the way she imagined an insect under a magnifying lens might feel if it looked up and saw a giant eye staring down at it. Vader had his back to her, and yet she could
feel
his attention as a kind of dark pressure, as if a cold hand had been laid on her shoulder.

It made her want to walk away. No, it made her want to
run
away, to get as far from here as she could, as quickly as she could. She’d never felt such a heavy sense of foreboding. The opposite side of the battle station wouldn’t be far enough to run. But to attempt such a thing would be a bad career move for anybody, and more so for a criminal paroled as a trustee.

Tarkin was droning on about something to do with firepower, pointing at turbolaser emplacements, and Vader seemed to be listening. But Teela
knew
, somehow, that his focus was not on the Moff’s speech. He was probing the
minds of those around them, examining them, and finding them … lacking something.

Abruptly she became aware that his full attention had arrived at her. Of a moment, she felt as if she had been stripped naked, both her mind and body, and that Vader, like the imagined scientist examining the insect pinned under his lens, beheld her in all her being—the good, the bad, the flaws, the strengths … everything that made her who she was.

Instinctively, she threw up a mental wall, a shield to prevent the intrusion, as though slamming a blast door shut. She did it by envisioning just that: a heavy durasteel portal closing, the shaft locks sliding into their collars, the perimeter flange sealing. She’d always had a vivid imagination—a big reason why she was successful in her chosen field—and she could see, in her mind’s eye, every seam and seal, every weld and rivet on the hatch, could hear the solid, echoing
boom!
it made as it shut, could even feel the vibration. Just before it closed, she thought she felt a small hint of something from Vader’s thoughts: surprise.

And … curiosity.

But—that was
impossible
. How could she feel someone else’s thoughts?

It had to have been her imagination, Teela thought. But a moment later the tall figure turned and looked directly at her. The lenses in the black helmet hid his eyes, but there was no doubt—he had marked her.

It wasn’t just her imagination.

Teela held her gaze as steady as she could, and kept her mental wall in place.

A moment passed. It seemed like a long time, but it couldn’t have been more than a few heartbeats. Vader seemed to nod slightly, then turned back to look at whatever it was that Tarkin was prattling on about.

The removal of his attention was like a glass shell shattering about her. Teela nearly collapsed. She gasped, loud
enough to cause several of her colleagues to glance at her. She felt shaken to her core.

What had just happened?

Ratua considered his options, or at least what he thought they might be, and found them less satisfactory every time he recounted them. Only one held any appeal at all, and that one not so much.

As he saw things, he could either spend the rest of his life on this tropical pesthole of a world, until one day somebody or something killed him …

Or he could leave.

That is, he could try. The stats were as simple as they were depressing: nobody lived to a ripe old age on the prison planet and shuffled off peacefully in their sleep. Nobody. Either some horrible local disease took them, or somebody wanted their boots, or something with fangs and poison-tipped claws looking for a meal got too close, and that was just how it was. Despayre was a hard place, and sooner or later you were grub food, even if you were as fast as Ratua was.