Death Star (32 page)

Right on schedule the droid’s photoreceptors lit. “Will there be anything else, sir?” Persee asked.

“No, I think that will do it for now. Systems check.”

The droid replied, with no discernible delay, “My circuits, modules, and mechanics are all operating at optimum, sir.”

“Well, good,” Atour said. He made an airy gesture of dismissal. “Toodle off, then.”

After the droid left, Atour felt better. There was no way he could do many of the things he was accustomed to doing with a blabbermouth droid looking over his shoulder and transmitting it all to the local security computer. The chances of anybody ever grilling Persee until it blew a circuit were very slim, but still, chance favored the better-prepared life-form.

He had a group of new junior librarians coming in for orientation later in the day, and tons of things to do before they showed up. His personal files were proof against any of them stumbling across anything secret by accident or intent. He assumed as a matter of course that one or more of them had to be some kind of Imperial spy. That was usually the case in any organization, and even if it weren’t, it was better to make that assumption and be wrong than to not make it and be thrown into prison for underestimating the powers-that-were. A man didn’t get to be his age and status by being completely foolhardy, even though he had certainly stepped over the line a time or ten. In his lifelong war against authority, he had won more battles than he had lost, even if they didn’t know it.

Much to do, he reminded himself, and little time in which to do it. Best get moving.

D
aala stepped from the shower, a waft of hot water vapor following her out. Tarkin smiled as she dried herself with a fluffy black towel made of virgin cotton from the Suliana fields and slipped into a matching robe. She stood under the air jets and dried her short hair, then came into the bedchamber and sat on the foot of the bed.

“Feel better?” Tarkin asked.

“Much. So much nicer to have hot water than the sonics.”

“Yes. Rank has its privileges. You have news for me?”

“I do. You won’t like it.”

He sat up and looked at her.

She went to the desk, opened a drawer, and removed an info disk. She dialed his computer terminal to life.

“You have my access codes?” Now he slid out of the bed, the silk of his sleepwear causing static electricity as it moved across the sheets. His gown crackled and clung to his body, but he ignored it as he walked to where she stood.

She smiled at him. “Of course.”

“Did I give them to you?”

“You don’t remember? Well, if you didn’t, I know you meant to.”

Tarkin wasn’t sure if he should be angered or aroused by this evidence of Daala’s boldness. Before he could decide, a hologram blinked on. It showed rows of sealed cargo containers,
the white everplast boxes stacked three-deep, with corridors between them to allow access. They looked like standard two-point-five-meter units, but it was hard to say just by looking.

“Security cam,” she said. “Aft cargo hold on the
Undauntable
.”

“A security cam that was not destroyed in the explosion?”

“Oh, it was blown up with the rest of the ship. But it was rigged to feed a signal to a receiver. I obtained the recording.”

“How?”

“A moment. Watch.”

There was a date/time stamp in the lower right-hand corner of the image, the seconds flashing by …

A figure moved into view. Tarkin frowned. It was still hard to judge size without some kind of scale.

As if reading his thoughts, Daala moved her hand over a sensor, and a grid overlaid the image. The figure was slightly less than two meters tall. That still didn’t tell him much. With the cloak and hood concealing it, it could have been any of a hundred species.

The mysterious being walked along the row of containers. It reached one in the middle of the cam’s field and tapped the keypad on the door with one gloved finger.

“Why didn’t we have bioscanners going as well?” Tarkin asked, annoyed. “We’d have data on species, sex, age—”

“Shh,” she said. “We were lucky to have gotten this much. Now watch.”

The door rolled up and the figure entered the container.

Thirty seconds passed. The figure emerged, closed the door behind him—or her—and moved out of cam view.

Daala waved the recording off. She looked at him, waiting.

Tarkin was nobody’s fool. “The explosive device was in
the cargo container and ready to go. All the agent had to do was trigger it.”

“Yes. He didn’t bring anything with him, so it had to be in place already.”

“And?”

She turned to the console’s controls. Another image appeared, this one a routing manifest.

“The rigged container’s ID number is not visible in the recording, but the number of the one eight down is, so it was a simple matter to figure out the one we want.”

True
, Tarkin thought. Loading droids were not known for creativity. They stacked cargo containers by the numbers.

“You can see that this container came from the cargo vessel
Omega Gaila
, itself from the ammunition stores at the Regional Naval Supply Area near Gall. The container carried high explosives, so that’s what a scan would show—if anybody bothered to do one.”

She waited again.

Tarkin thought about it. “The RNSA at Gall is a high-security facility. Extremely tight. Nobody on or off the base without top clearance, even the cargo handlers.”

“Yes.”

He frowned. Shook his head. “Not possible.”

“Yet somebody got into a container and rigged it with a bomb powerful enough to blast a Star Destroyer apart. And they weren’t shooting in the dark, hoping to hit something, because it took somebody on the other end to arm the device.”

“So they knew where it was bound,” he finished for her. “No way to have agents at every possible destination. Once it got to our storage facility, it could have gone to any of several ships.”

“Or to this station,” she said. “It was the luck of the draw that
Undauntable
needed ammo before we did.”

“So it’s being run by somebody higher than a cargo handler.
At the very least, there had to be somebody from Routing involved, and enough of a conspiracy to be able to place or contact an agent already here. We are talking about a Rebel spy in the Imperial Navy with more than a little reach.”

“Just so.”

“We can probably determine who loaded the container, and who routed it.”

“Which is good, but also doesn’t stop something similar from happening again if the next shipment comes from a different source.”

“Correct. We need to find whoever is running the agents here,” he said.

“I concur.”

He looked at her. “How do you plan to do this?”

“I’m assuming that the agent did not choose suicide. We have the day and time the device was activated. He or she would have had to arrive before that time, and depart before the explosion.
Undauntable’
s operational logs were backed up on the station’s computer, the last entry coming just before the ship’s destruction. It might take some time, but we can access those and narrow down the possibilities.”

“Good,” Tarkin said. “Do so immediately.”

She smiled and adjusted the lapels of her robe. “Immediately?”

He did not return her smile. “Yes. There are times for dalliance, and times for action. I want a report by zero five hundred hours.”

Daala nodded and began to dress, quickly.

U
li looked at his commander incredulously. Since Hotise had arrived and set up shop on the station, they hadn’t seen each other that much, and Uli wasn’t happy to be seeing him now.

“What?” Hotise said. “You seem to think that I personally run this war, Doctor. Believe me, if I did, it’d be run a sight better. As it is, there are things that are simply in short supply. Medical doctors, not to mention psychiatrists, are hard to come by, even here with the big green light. It won’t kill you to step into the breach now and then. You did rotations in both disciplines during your residency.”

“Of course I did. I’m not complaining about the work. But I’m a surgeon, not an internal meds doctor. My skills are rusty outside my specialty.”

“Well, you have state-of-the-art robotics backing you up, as well as the top-of-the-line diagnosters in the galaxy. A first-year medical student or a competent droid could run those and hit the mark ninety-five percent of the time.”

“You’re making my point for me, Doctor.” Uli held his hands up. “These are for cutting, not tapping knees and treating headaches. It’s not the best use of my talents.”

Hotise shrugged. “Making best use of talent has never been the military’s mission, son. They change about as fast as a space slug molts. If they want to have a doctor digging
trenches in the field of battle, they will have him do just that—because they can.

“If routine physicals get in the way of your surgery, then let them slide. But as long as you aren’t slicing and gluing, we don’t have enough help for you to sit around waiting for another body to open up.” He leaned forward, putting his hands on Uli’s cluttered desk. He looked, Uli thought, about twenty years older than he had months before, when he’d assigned Uli his duties. Uli could also smell a faint whiff of alcohol on his breath.

“Eventually,” Hotise continued, “we’ll be fully staffed, but until then, we have to spread ourselves around.”

“And if the spread is too thin for the good of the patients?”

Hotise straightened. “Suck it up, Dr. Divini. There is a war on, after all.”

Uli sighed and nodded. He hadn’t really expected anything else. And tired or not, drunk or not, the man was right. A surgeon lying on a couch could just as easily be treating routine lumps and bumps.

Didn’t mean he had to like it, though.

“You have patients to see,” Hotise said. “So I’ll get out of your hair. Have a nice shift.”

The older man exited the office, and Uli glared at Hotise’s back as he left.

“I’m unfamiliar with all the nuances of human behavior,” C-4ME-O said, “but I think it’s safe to say that you didn’t come out the best in that exchange.”

“You’re the second wise-mouth droid I’ve met. If I never meet another one, my life would not suffer a bit.”

“Here’s the next patient’s chart, Doctor.”

“Go find something useful to do before I decide you need to be reprogrammed as a latrine cleaner. We can do that in the military, you know. Take a medical droid and put him to that use.”

“Idle threats do not become you, Dr. Divini.”

Uli smiled despite himself and looked at the chart. It described the complaint of one Sergeant Nova Stihl, a guard, who was having …

Bad dreams?

Great. Wonderful. He knew less about psychological maladies than he did Rodian influenza.

In the exam room, the patient sat on the table wearing a disposable flimsi gown. Offhand, he looked fit and muscular; on the face of it he didn’t appear to be beset with any major psychosis. His affect was calm.

“Sergeant Stihl. I’m Dr. Divini. What seems to be the problem?”

The man gave him a little shrug and looked embarrassed. “Trouble sleeping.”

“I see. Says here you’ve been having nightmares?”

“Yeah. I hate to waste your time on piddly stuff, Doc, but I’m starting to doze off at work. Maybe you can give me a pill or something?”

“No problem there, we have all kinds of sleeping meds. But we should probably try to figure out the cause before we try curing it.”

Stihl shrugged again. “You’re the doctor.”

“How long has it been going on?”

“Hard to say. I used to have a bad night once in a while at my last posting, but they’ve gotten worse since I was transferred up here. More frequent.”

“Uh-huh. Any stress at your job?”

Stihl laughed. “I’m a guard. I deal with sodders locked in detention who don’t want to be there, most of whom did something illegal to get there. Stress goes with the territory.”

“Been doing it awhile?”