Death Star (41 page)

Uli turned and saw an interrogation tech standing down the hall. “Are you the medic on duty?”

“I’m Dr. Divini, yes.”

“I have a patient for you. This way, quickly.”

Uli followed the tech back up to the prison level. Vader was gone, along with the interrogation droid, but their work was evident. The Princess lay on the cell’s platform in no small amount of distress.

Uli passed his hand over the cell’s reader and said, “EM kit!”

The reader recognized his ID. A slot in the wall opened, and a drawer containing a full emergency medical kit extruded. He grabbed a handheld diagnoster from it and moved to the supine woman. He pressed the sensor against her bare shoulder and watched as the readout’s infocrawl began.

Her eyelids fluttered, then opened. She gave him a faint
smile. “Pardon me if I don’t get up, Doctor. I’m feeling a bit tired.”

He gave her an automatic smile back. “Sorry,” he said. “I’ll do what I can to help you.”

“First time I’ve heard that in a while.”

“Just relax and I’ll take care of things.”

“I’ve heard that one before, too.”

Despite the gravity of the situation, Uli grinned. He had to admire the woman. Pumped full of chem and suffering from electrical shocks and who knew what else, and she was still able to joke. If she was an example of the Rebels’ mettle, the Empire wasn’t going to win this war anytime soon.

Generally, the atmosphere in the place was, at the least, festive. Today, however, the mood was subdued. Ratua sat at the bar watching Memah make drinks, and neither of them was happy. She went through the motions, but he knew her mind was not on her task. They had recently witnessed the death of a planet, an act committed by the huge weapon upon which they lived. Whatever one’s politics, it had been a sobering, nightmarish sight. What kind of monster could order such an atrocity, could cause the destruction of an entire world?

A world that, had Ratua not managed to escape, would have taken him with it, along with the millions of other lives cut short in panic and agony.

They weren’t the only ones who had seen it, and for something of this magnitude, word spread quickly. It was true that the Death Star had been built with the capability to commit such heinous acts, but he’d been given to understand, along with most of the station’s population, that it was never actually going to have to use such destructive power. What
had the man in charge—Tarkin, he remembered—said on one of the public comcasts? “Fear would keep the systems in line.” Ratua could understand that—it made a skewed kind of sense. But to actually use the station’s ability; to annihilate an inhabited world, even one populated by the hardest hard cases in the galaxy, not even as a demonstration, but purely to test …

That was something no sane man could grasp.

The war had just taken a very ugly turn, and Ratua feared it might get worse before it got better.

Commander Atour Riten, who was not given to much in the way of socializing, sat alone at a table, drinking a potent liquor distilled from some kind of tropical tuber on Ithor. It had quite a kick, and while he usually enjoyed the fiery taste, that wasn’t the reason he was drinking it now.

How had it come to pass that the Empire was destroying entire worlds? Atour was an intelligent and sensible man; he might be apolitical, but he wasn’t naïve. He was aware of the purpose for which this battle station had been built. The Death Star was a doomsday device, a weapon of such unimaginable horror that its very existence would, supposedly, prevent any insurrection, anywhere. Even the concept of war would become a thing of the past. And even if such ultimate power had to be demonstrated, there were plenty of uninhabited worlds floating out there; blow one of them to flinders and the message is delivered, loud and clear:
Your world could be next
.

He had been naïve, he realized. He’d let himself believe that there was a limit to inhumanity—that there could be such a thing as a weapon too powerful to use. But such was obviously not the case. There were, it appeared, no depths to which sentient beings could not sink. Build a blaster that could destroy a planet, and some bigger fool would build one that could extinguish a star. It would go on and on, insanity without end, because there’s always a bigger blaster.

How could a being with any conscience remain politically neutral after such an event?

He took another swig from his glass. It was certainly enough to drive any sane being to drink.

Teela and Vil sat at a table, drinks before them, but neither bothered to pick up their glasses. They didn’t speak.

She watched Vil stare moodily into his glass. He was a pilot, he was trained for war, he risked his life in fights—but even so, the destruction of Despayre had shaken him. Badly.

Teela was beyond shaken. She was appalled. Horrified. She could have been on that world—she
had
been on that world, and if not for an ability the Empire had decided it needed, she would have still been down there when Despayre was shattered.

She’d had nothing to do with the weapons aspect of building the station. She designed and built housing and recreation and living space. And she’d had no real choice, had she? After all, she was still a prisoner.

Right?

Her inner self could have a fine old time saying
I told you so
along about now, she knew. Instead, it was uncharacteristically silent.

U
li sat at the bar next to a humanoid with unbelievably bright green eyes, and thought about cantinas he had frequented during his time in the military. Some had been fun, some merely places to get lit; some had been dens of comrades-in-thrall—doctors, nurses, techs, all dragooned and forced to serve in a war that they all detested. The beings who had to patch up the wounded or cover the dead they couldn’t save were generally less enthusiastic over the glory of war than most. After a thousand young people pass under your knife, torn and battered by the effects of blasters or shrapnel, it got old, and it made you weary to your depths. War was as stupid and antisurvivalist an action as a species could undertake, and if Uli could suddenly be made some kind of god, as his first act he would erase the knowledge and memory and ability to make war from the universe.

Now the Empire had a planet buster—and here he was, on the blasted thing. How much worse could things get?

“Hey, Doc.”

Uli looked to his left and saw a sergeant arrive at the bar. It took a couple of seconds to place the man—he was a patient. The guy with the bad dreams and the midi-chlorians.

“Sergeant Stihl. How are you sleeping?”

“Truth is, hardly at all. Recently got worse. A lot worse.” He sat on the stool.

“I understand. Pills didn’t help?”

“Not really.”

“Sorry.”

“Me, too. I—” He stopped and looked past Uli at the green-eyed fellow on Uli’s right. “Celot Ratua Dil?”

Has to be a Zelosian, with those eyes, Uli thought. One of the rare chlorophyllians in the galaxy. And he and the sarge obviously knew each other.

The plant man turned and stared, and Uli saw panic well briefly in those eyes. But then they resumed their slightly cynical outlook. “Well, blast,” he said. “You changed your shift, didn’t you, Stihl? I should’ve checked.” He shook his head, shrugged, and grinned. “Oh, well.”

“What are you doing here?” the sergeant asked. No sound of hostility that Uli could tell; nevertheless, he was starting to feel acutely uncomfortable sitting between them.

“Having a drink,” Celot Ratua Dil said. “Wishing I were back on my homeworld. Things weren’t so bad there, in retrospect. I could have had a pretty good life at home, but, no, I wanted to travel and see the galaxy. Stupid choice.”

The tender drifted over, and Uli noticed that her right hand was under the bar, out of sight. He was feeling very uncomfortable now.

The tender, a Twi’lek, looked familiar, too. Where had he seen her? Ah, yes … just picture her naked. Another patient.

“Dr. Divini, nice to see you again.” She looked at the fellow to Uli’s right. “Everything okay here?”

The green-eyed man said, “Oh, yeah. Just renewing an old acquaintance. Been awhile.”

Stihl looked at the tender. “Memah. You know this guy?”

She nodded. “I do.”

Stihl looked at the Zelosian again. Uli felt a current of
something uneasy passing back and forth, and he leaned back a bit to get out of the flow.

Stihl said, “How did—”

“I decided to leave,” Celot Ratua Dil said.

Stihl didn’t say anything for a moment. Then he looked at the Twi’lek woman behind the bar. “You wouldn’t have your hand on a stunner under there, would you, Memah?”

“I might.”

Stihl nodded, as if to himself. He looked at the Zelosian, then back at the Twi’lek. His eyebrows arched. “So that’s how it is?”

“That’s how it is. And I do know who he is and where he came from.”

There was a pregnant silence.

Uli said, “Pardon me for butting into what’s probably not my business, but since I’m sitting in the middle of this conversation and we’re all of a sudden talking about stunners, somebody want to tell me what’s going on?”

The other three looked at one another.

The Zelosian said, “Sorry, Doctor, ah … Divini, is it? It’s fairly straightforward. Before he was transferred here, Sergeant Stihl was a guard on Despayre—you know, that planet this station just blew to space dust? And I was, for a time, a resident there.”

“He’s an escaped prisoner,” Stihl said. His voice was still quiet and calm, but it carried clearly to them. He looked at his hands, which were, Uli noticed, quite callused. He looked back at the Zelosian. “You were sentenced there for life.”

“You mean ‘death,’ don’t you, Sarge? Because when the powers-that-be on this station let go with that death ray, anybody who was on Despayre got cooked to ashes, and those ashes got blown all over the galaxy, if I recall recent history.”

Stihl nodded. “Yeah.”

“So now what?” the Twi’lek asked.

“Yeah,” Celot Ratua Dil added. “You can’t exactly send me back, can you, Sarge?”

Uli watched Stihl’s face. He would probably be a good card player, because he wasn’t giving anything away. “No,” he finally said. “I guess I can’t.” He looked at Memah. “You really think he’s worth pulling that stunner for?”

“I really do.”

Another five seconds passed. Then: “How about a mug of Alarevi ale?” Stihl said. “And give the doc and Radish Boy here another of whatever they’re drinking, on me.”

Memah nodded and removed her hand from under the bar. She and her boyfriend seemed a bit relieved. Not that much, but then Uli would wager his eventual possible IMSLO discharge that nobody was spiking any sine waves tonight. Shock tended to have that effect on people.

He was aware that a potentially nasty situation had just been avoided, and it might be wise to let it lie, but he was curious. He said, “As I recall, Sergeant, aren’t you some kind of martial artist?”

“I am.”

“If the lady had pulled a stunner, couldn’t you have defended yourself against it?”

“Probably. But she wasn’t the problem.”

“Oh?”

“Want to show him?” he said, looking over Uli’s shoulder at the Zelosian.

“Sure. Where’s your glass, Doc?”

Uli turned away from the sergeant and looked at the bar. His half-drunk glass of beer was …

Where was it?

He looked up at the Zelosian. There was a blur of motion—

His glass was back in front of him. The beer sloshed a bit but otherwise gave no indication that it hadn’t been in front of him the whole time.

Stihl laughed softly. “Ratua’s fast.”

“I get that,” Uli said. “So—if Memah had pulled her stunner, while you were dealing with her, Ratua could’ve clonked you one. If you’d gone after him first, she’d have stunned you.”

“Not a high-percentage situation for me,” Stihl said.

Uli blinked at him. “So just like that, you’re okay with this? You’re going to let it go?”

Stihl nodded as Memah drew a mug full of dark ale for him. “Why not? Not like he’s going anywhere, and he’s right—I can’t send him back to a place that doesn’t exist anymore.” He took the ale, smiled, and sipped at it. “Ah. Thanks.” He looked back at Uli again. “And compared with what the Empire just did, how much harm could a smuggler do? You want to turn him in?”

“Not particularly.”

“Well, there you are, then.”

The other drinks arrived, and the tender had poured one for herself.

Uli held up his glass. “To the end of the war,” he said.

The others raised their glasses and echoed his words.