Death Star (26 page)

Rodo shrugged. “Sure. Wouldn’t you?”

Nova grinned. “Oh, yeah.”

Rodo’s grin matched his own. “Next ale is on me.”

“I think I’m done drinking.”

“Yeah, that’s why I offered.” He paused, then added, “There’s a guy teaches teräs käsi classes downlevels.”

“That would be me.”

“Maybe I might drop by?”

“I’d like that. You’re welcome anytime.”

Rodo bent and, with what looked like almost no effort, lifted the still-confused man to his feet. “What say we call it a night and head home, hey, friend?”

The man nodded. “Yeah. I’m very tired. What happened?”

“You tripped.”

“Oh, wow.”

Nova Stihl waited until Rodo had the drunk firmly in hand before he sat again. He noticed that the other troopers at the tables were looking at him with a certain amount of … something … in their faces. Wonder? Amazement? Respect? Fear?

All of the above, probably.

“Next round is on me,” Nova said. “To celebrate the union of Sergeant Dillwit here and his poor unlucky betrothed.”

The men laughed, and that was the end of that.

Memah Roothes was preparing a drink made up of ten different-colored layers of liquid, and it required some precision to keep the fluids from bleeding into one another. She had the first seven poured into a cylindrical crystal as long and as big around as Rodo’s forearm. The last three layers were the hardest, but as long as she kept a steady hand, she’d manage. It was a pain in the glutes manipulating the various densities, but the concoction, which would serve four, went for fifty credits, so it was worth the five minutes
it took. When it was finished, Memah sat back and looked at it. Perfect.

Rodo appeared at the end of the bar as the server droid collected the drink, called, for some reason Roothes had never understood, “A Walk in the Phelopean Forest,” and wheeled away with it. “Nice work,” he said.

“Thanks. You, too. I noticed you didn’t kick the sergeant out?”

“Nah. Pure self-defense. I’d have done the same.”

“Went down pretty fast.”

“Yeah. Guy is really good—system-class fighter, easy. Didn’t expect to find somebody like that out here in the middle of nowhere.”

“Why not? It’s a warship, right?”

“Yes, but the really good ones are either out in the killing fields
using
the stuff or back in civilization teaching it to recruits. First one is okay, second is a waste. Here, it’s just unusual.”

Memah shook her head. “Males. Always with the violence. You want to go a couple of rounds with this guy, don’t you?”

Rodo grinned. “I wouldn’t mind. You want to stay sharp, you got to hone yourself against the best you can find. Just friendly competition. Nobody gets hurt—well, not hurt too bad.”

Memah shook her head again.

Rodo drifted away.

Even though she was busy, she caught a glimpse of Green-Eyes sitting over in the corner, sipping an ale. Now, there was an interesting male. A Zelosian, he’d said; not a species she’d ever run into before. She’d warped the HoloNet a little looking for general data on his kind, and found surprisingly little. They seemed to be a strange genetic mixture of plant and animal, unable to crossbreed with any other humanoids—not that she was overly concerned
about that, as she saw no urgent need for younglings in her future.

She found him oddly compelling. Yes, he had an easy smile and a relaxed manner, plus he wasn’t hard to look at, but it was more than that. There was a kind of … resonance, if that was the right word. As though they had known each other for a long time, even though they had only met recently.

He pretended to be a moderately successful contractor, but whatever he was, that wasn’t it. She’d had Rodo do a little checking on him as well, and as far as this station was concerned, no such person as Celot Ratua Dil existed. Which meant he was a rogue of some kind, working the angles, and her heart had sunk when she’d learned that.

She shook her head as she filled half a dozen mugs with black Mon Calamari seaweed mash and she pondered, not for the first time, the question: Why couldn’t she find a decent, hardworking, ordinary kind of male who wanted to grow old together? Why was she always attracted to the bad boys, the ones without two honest credits to rub together, the ones with no real prospects?

Memah sighed as she prepared another drink. Ah, well … if it wasn’t for kissing bad boys, she’d never get any kissing done at all. Not that she’d gotten a lot of even that lately.

She put the drinks up. “Order up!” she said.

The server droid rolled up to collect the tray.

Well, she was going to be stuck here for another year-and-some before her contract ran out. Maybe Green-Eyes could help the time go easier.

C
PO Tenn Graneet had been assured that the mock-up of the battery control room for the superlaser was an exact replica of the as-yet-unfinished one, down to the last rivet. Every function that was to be found in the soon-to-be-working ultimate weapon was replicated in the simulator. The gunnery team would spend long hours training at the mock-up’s consoles, programming the complicated firing procedure into their brains, so that when the actual control room became operational, switching to the real thing would be as easy as falling off a bantha.

Which was a good thing, because the superlaser battery wasn’t a simple installation. It was, in fact, far more complex than any gun control in any ship in the Imperial Navy that Tenn had ever encountered. There were banks of lighted switches color-coded for each of the eight tributary sub-beams; monitors double-stacked around the wall that showed every function of the hypermatter reactor and generator; sensor readings from the heart of the reactor to the field amplifiers, the inducer, the beam shaft … taken all together, it made a heavy destroyer’s biggest gun look like a child’s toy. Each component had to be precisely tuned and focused. If the primary beam focusing magnet was off a nanometer, the tributary beams would not coalesce, and there was a good chance of imbalance explosions in the beam shaft if the tributaries weren’t pulsed in at
exactly
the
proper time and in the proper sequence. The techs and engineers tended to wave that possibility off as too small to worry about. One chance in a hundred million, they said. Tenn wasn’t swallowing that. When it came to something this potentially deadly, no odds were long enough. It was true that there were automatic fail-safes, but Tenn—and any chief worth his salt—trusted them just about as far as he could stroll in hard vac. Some of those engineers lived in skyhooks so far up past the clouds that they’d forgotten what the ground looked like. If a gun’s designer wasn’t willing to stand next to it when it was being tested, well, Tenn saw no reason to be there, either.

Triggering a monster like this wasn’t like pressing the firing stud on a blaster. At optimum it would take fifteen or twenty seconds from the given command to fire until the main beam was ready to be unleashed, and they hadn’t gotten close to that yet. Half the time during firing simulations they couldn’t balance the phase harmonics enough to shoot the primary beam at all. And even if the magnetic ring was precisely stabilized, all it would take was one of the tributaries warbling so much as a microhertz out of phase, and the others would desynchronize as well. The result would be a feedback explosion along the beam shaft and back to the main reactor that would turn the battle station into an incandescent plasma cloud in less than a single heartbeat, and the Empire thanks your family very much for your sacrifice.

That wasn’t going to happen on his watch, Tenn vowed. By the time the actual battery was operational, Tenn expected his crew to be running the program smooth as lube on polished densecris plate. But they weren’t there yet. Not even within a parsec of close.

Fortunately, they had plenty of time to practice. The crew, half of whom Tenn had swiped from his old unit with help from his new commander, were sharp enough, but it took twelve people working the battery to properly light
the big gun and make it go bang, and every one of them had to nail his or her part dead-on. There was no margin for error. So far, in the first dozen run-throughs, they had been able to fire the primary beam five times within a minute of the order. Once they’d taken two minutes, and four times they hadn’t been able to focus the tributaries properly at all, resulting in complete failures to fire. One time the computer had registered a late minor beam-warble that would have resulted in an automatic shutdown of the primary power feed to avoid damage, which meant it would have taken an hour to get back up for ignition sequencing. And wouldn’t
that
be a delightful job, recalibrating everything with the land batteries of a Rebel base spewing hard energy at you?

In addition to the real problems, there had been a simulated major run malfunction with multiple beam-warbles and disharmonic phasing. The computer, in theory, could have shut that one down in time, but Tenn thought that report was optimistic. In a real situation, with a fully powered weapon, that one would more than likely have turned a whole lot of beings, equipment, and everything else into sizzling ions racing toward the edges of the galaxy.

“All right, boys, let’s see if we can get it right this time. I want everything by the numbers and clean. Throw the wrong switch, you are on kitchen patrol for a week. Too slow on the phase-balance, better get some nose plugs, because you
will
be scrubbing the trash compactors until they sparkle. Drop a reading on the inducers, and you’ll find yourself shoveling out the animal pens until you smell like the south end of a northbound reek. Are we clear?”

“Yes, Chief!” came the chorus of replies.

“Say again, I didn’t hear you!”

“Yes, Chief!”

He smiled under the blast helmet, then grimaced as a rivulet of sweat ran into one eye. The milking headgear would be less than useless if the gun backfired, but it would
make a dandy torture device for interrogating real spies. True, it was navy policy that gunners wear them, but whoever’d designed these black buckets hadn’t had to leave one on for a whole shift. They just made the job harder by restricting peripheral vision and essentially guaranteeing that you spent most of your shift clonking your head on pipes, struts, bulkheads, and the like. They were also hot and stuffy. Tenn was pretty sure some boot-head had designed them for looks and not function. When nobody was around, he let the men take the helmets off and breathe a bit, but given the nature of this sim battery, some by-the-book officer was always dropping by to gawk.

“We have an order to commence primary ignition,” he said. “Commence … 
now
!”

He tapped the timer control and watched the seconds flick past as the chorus of reports began:

“Hypermatter reactor level one hundred percent. Feeds on tributaries one through eight are clean …”

“Primary power amplifier is online …”

“Firing field amplifier is green …”

“We are go on induction hyperphase generator feed …”

“Tributary beam shaft fields in alignment …”

“Targeting field generator is lit …”

“Primary beam focusing magnet at full gauss …”

Tenn watched the timer. So far, so good. But then:

“We have a hold on tributary five. Repeat, we have
orange
on T-five! Disharmonic in the subrouter.”

“Fix it, mister!” Tenn said. He looked back at the timer. Twenty-four seconds … “Get it straight right milking
now
!”

The sweating T-5 tech tapped buttons, moved sliders, pivoted shift levers. “Reharmonizing … the warble is flattening out—in five, four, three, two … T-five is clean, we are
go
on T-five!”

Tenn scanned his board. The last orange light blinked off, and they were green straight across. He thumbed the
safety button on the shifter above his head and pulled it down.

“Successful primary ignition achieved,” the computer said.

There was a cheer from the crew, and Tenn smiled. “Thirty-eight seconds. That’s a new record, even with the glitch, but we can do better.” He took off his helmet. “Restart it. If we break thirty seconds before swing or third shift does, I’m buying the beer.”

They cheered, and fell to work with a will. Once again, he smiled. Nothing seemed to motivate a crew like the lure of free beer.