Darksaber

by Kevin J. Anderson

  Artoo trundled across the polished floor. The assassin droids trained their implanted blasters on the two newcomers, targeting systems tracking the large motions. A battery of observation cams studied them with cold objectivity from near the juncture of wall and ceiling.

  "This place gives me the chills ... rather, it would give me the chills, if I had the physical capability to have them," Threepio said. "As it is, my circuits are merely ... uneasy--but if you could do anything to assist me, Artoo ...?"

  The astromech droid was already accessing a terminal, requesting further details. Artoo's input jack locked into the main drive and spun around. Threepio paced about in stiff discomfort. The assassin droids stared at them.

  The slicer droids paid no attention whatsoever.

  "Would you like me to tell you a story to pass the time, Artoo?" Threepio said.

  Artoo blatted an emphatic No.

  "Well, really!" Threepio bent over one of the keypads and detected something most surprising. He reached down with his gold-plated fingertips and held up a small tuft of grayish fur. "Oh dear, I wonder how this got here?" he said. "This room is supposed to be kept meticulously clean."

  He examined the floor and inspected the wall.

  His optical sensors were drawn to a small ventilation intake for the huge intake fans that circulated supercooled air to the deep levels of the Information Center . The cover plate stood ajar, but it was far too small for any intelligent creature to have come through. Could the Imperial Information Center be inhabited by some sort of large rodent?

  Artoo shrilled in alarm, and Threepio strutted over to a screen where the astromech droid had begun replaying archival video records from the security monitoring cameras. Threepio saw from the date on the images that the footage had been taken while Durga's entourage met with the Chief of State in the reception halls far above. Because no security breach had been recorded down here in the Imperial Information Center , though, no one had bothered to do more than a cursory scan on them.

  Artoo manipulated the images, enhancing and enlarging them, massaging out shadows by playing virtual light into the images.

  "Why, I recognize those!" Threepio said.

  Just at the edge of the frame, motion gave away three of the furry, multiarmed Taurill scampering out of the ventilation ducts and up to the unmanned computer consoles.

  "Whatever are they doing?" Threepio said. "How could they possibly have gotten down here? We rounded them all up, didn't we?"

  Artoo chittered, then froze another image that showed the Taurill deliberately punching commands into a keypad.

  "This is most suspicious," Threepio said.

  The droids watched as the three Taurill completed their command strings and copied a file into a data cylinder, which they secreted in their own fur; then they dashed back to the ventilation shafts.

  "It would appear that they've copied something from our records. What could they possibly want?"

  Threepio said. At Artoo's warbled reply, he added, "Of course I'd like you to find out! Why else would I have brought you along, you silly whistling trash can?"

  Artoo replayed the images slowly, noting the Taurill command strings, then input them himself. The passworded files scrolled onto the screen, immediately recognizable. In fact, Artoo had once carried the complex blueprints inside himself.

  Threepio wailed, "We must warn Mistress Leia immediately!" He ran toward the turbolift doors, shrilling an alarm. Artoo rolled after him. The assassin droids snapped to attention and trained their weapons on them.

  "Summon Chief of State Organa Solo!" Threepio said. "This is an emergency. The fate of the entire galaxy is at stake."

  The assassin droids were not impressed, and Threepio increased the volume in his vocal circuits. "Don't you understand? The plans to the Death Star have been stolen!"

  HOTH ASTEROID BELT

  CHAPTER 13

  When Durga the Hutt returned to the asteroid belt in triumph, Bevel Lemelisk was summoned to the bottom-most deck of the Orko SkyMine ship, where Durga sat in the observation blister to stare out at the stars.

  Lemelisk entered the chamber accompanied by two Gamorrean guards, who shoved him into Durga's presence with a grunt, then stomped off to other duties.

  Durga lay on inflated cushions. A music synthesizer warbled odd, discordant notes in a grating yet hypnotic background melody. Pink and blue smoke wafted like jagged fingers back and forth as the air exchangers alternated on either side of the room. The smoke had an acrid incense smell, a mild narcotic that affected Hutts but did nothing more than burn Lemelisk's human nostrils.

  Durga's deep laugh boomed out.

  "Lemelisk, you're here!"

  From another chair General Sulamar stood and straightened his uniform, brushing his knuckles across the jingling placards of medals on his chest.

  "We've been waiting for you, Lemelisk," he said. Durga turned to glare at the Imperial.

  "You wait on my pleasure, General," the Hutt said. "We will start when I wish to start."

  "Yes, Lord Durga," Sulamar said, bowing quickly and stepping back. His face became the color of soggy white cheese, and he glared at Lemelisk as if the engineer had done something wrong.

  Lemelisk focused his attention on Durga, who was the most important enemystally at the moment. "Tell me, Lord Durga, did you get the Death Star plans?" Lemelisk felt his heart rise to his throat, and he unconsciously rubbed at the rough stubble on his cheeks and chin, scratched the shocks of white hair on his head. He had worked hard on those plans, spending so much of his life first laboring with Qwi Xux inside Maw Installation to develop the concept and the prototype, then spending months with the resources of the Empire to build the first enormous battle station.

  Durga's enormous mouth bent upward like twisted rubber. With a small hand he inserted a data cylinder into a player nestled among the cushions at his side. The projector glowed, sending beams through the pink and blue smoke. A wire-frame diagram of Lemelisk's first-order blueprints appeared, rotating a three-dimensional sphere that showed layers within layers of deck plans, computer centers, defensive installations, energy storage areas--and the planet-destroying superlaser that ran through its axis.

  General Sulamar rubbed his hands together, his face young and boyish again. His grin made him look like a narrow-faced rodent. "Excellent,” Sulamar said. "Work must begin at once."

  Durga scowled at him. "General Sulamar, I am in charge of this project."

  "Of course, Lord Durga," Sulamar said-- but his eyes remained fixed hungrily on the Death Star plans.

  Bevel Lemelisk decided to use the awed moment to his advantage. "Lord Durga, if I might ask a question? Exactly what is the Imperial general's purpose here among us?"

  Sulamar straightened his shoulders like a spined puffer bird and turned to Durga. "I bring Imperial prestige to your project. I will use my connections to obtain some of the items you need, the security codes you must possess. And when you begin your Hutt reign of terror across the galaxy"--he grinned--"think of how much more effective you will be if you're accompanied by the famed and feared General Sulamar, the Scourge of Celdaru, the man who successfully carried out the Massacre of Mendicat without losing a single stormtrooper. I held a hundred worlds in my fist--and I squeezed. The entire galaxy learned to tremble at my name."

  Lemelisk shrugged. He didn't want to press the issue, but he had never heard of Sulamar before. Of course, he had been isolated in Maw Installation for a long time. ... He looked again at the glowing outline of the Death Star. Though he saw only the outer layer of the projection, he knew the depth and intricacies of those plans. His heart pounded, and excitement brought a flush to his skin again. At last, a new project that he could sink his teeth into.

  He smiled and marveled at the design, remembering the first time he had showed it off.

  "Magnificent," the Emperor had said, cowled in his black hood as he stared at the Death Star plans that Grand Moff Tarkin and Bevel Lemelisk presented to him.


  "Yes, a technological terror," Tarkin said. Lean and cruel-looking, Tarkin stood at attention beside his Emperor, nodding down at the image.

  Lemelisk and his naive but brilliant co-worker Qwi Xux had designed a battle station that placed fearsome power in a single commander's hands. Tarkin had been delighted with the concept and the plans and the prototype, and so he had brought Lemelisk out of Maw Installation to present the idea to the Emperor personally.

  "Explain it to me," the Emperor said, extending his hands into the glowing simulation. The lines bent and buckled, curling around Palpatine's clawed fingers. Lemelisk had never seen a hologram react that way before, as if the image itself were trying to cringe from the Emperor's touch.

  Lemelisk rubbed the perspiration from his palms on to his shirt as he spoke quickly, nervous in Palpatine's presence but even more excited to talk about his brainchild. "This battle station will be the size of a small moon a hundred kilometers in diameter," he said, "housing a single weapon of mass destruction. It will tax our construction skills to the limit, but I will be the chief engineer, and I'm certain I can complete the task personally."

  The Emperor's reptilian eyes bored into him. Lemelisk turned back to the projected plans and brushed his hands over the surface layers.

  "The Death Star will have planetary shielding, surface-to-air turbo-lasers, three-hundred-sixty-degree sensor capability, powerful multi-directional tractor beams, and heavy ion cannons."

  "Impressive," the Emperor said in a frigid voice, "but only if our enemies fall right in our laps! How is this thing supposed to move?"

  "Ah!" Lemelisk held up a finger and pointed along the equator. "The Death Star is equipped with enormous engines for propulsion in normal space as well as hyperspace. This station can go anywhere we wish." His eyes lit up, and he lowered his voice to a childlike whisper. "The superlaser is powerful enough to crack entire worlds. One blast can turn a planet into a cloud of rubble."

  Grand Moff Tarkin bowed and cleared his throat.

  "The Death Star will be a self-contained garrison whose only purpose is to enforce your New Order. It is exactly the doomsday weapon you asked me to create, my Emperor.”

  "It will be crewed by close to a million officers, support personnel, and stormtroopers. It may be enormously expensive to build," Tarkin continued, "but this single Death Star alone will be worth a thousand Star Destroyers. The mere threat of this battle station will make any populace quiver in terror, for they can have no defenses against it. None."

  The Emperor leaned forward to stare at the plans again. Bevel Lemelisk had never actually seen someone gloat before ... but Emperor Palpatine did.

  And so did Durga the Hutt and General Sulamar.

  Sulamar held a personal data slate and punched up a summary, which he studied intently.

  "Lord Durga," he said, "I'm pleased to announce that the second pair of Automated Mineral Exploiters, models Gamma and Delta, are now functional and reprogrammed"-he shot a wicked glare at Bevel Lemelisk--"we removed the fatal flaws suffered by the original pair. The processors have begun exploiting the asteroid field and are smelting materials at this moment."

  Durga nodded his large head, blinking froglike eyes. Around him small windows mounted at regular intervals around the observation blister showed streaming lights from chunks in the asteroid field as they wandered about their pell-mell courses, flashing as they rotated irregular surfaces, reflecting Hoth's distant sunlight.

  "We can afford no further delays," Durga said, jabbing a stubby finger at Bevel Lemelisk. He yanked the data cylinder from the reader, and the glowing plans faded into the curling narcotic smoke. "You, Lemelisk, get to your redesign work--and take care that you don't make foolish mistakes as you did with the Mineral Exploiters." The Hutt chuckled with a chilling deadly mirth. "I'd hate to have to execute you if you disappoint me."

  Lemelisk shuddered out of all proportion to the threat. He took the data cylinder from the Hutt's slimy hand and held the files close to his chest. "Yes, Lord Durga."

  He bowed and scuttled backward out of Durga's private chambers. He rushed to his own quarters already grinning, eager to begin work.

  CHAPTER 14

  Bevel Lemelisk demanded absolute silence as he worked. He had sealed his quarters, hoping the Gamorrean guards wouldn't bumble in or pound on his door without realizing they had the wrong cabin number.

  He settled into a wobbly metal seat; he had knocked it over in anger when he had been unable to complete his three-dimensional crystal puzzle. Getting the right solution meant a great deal to Bevel Lemelisk, and he disliked failure immensely ... though it was much better to fail in private than when other people were watching.

  Realizing that he hadn't eaten in nearly a day, Lemelisk had fixed himself a fast, high-protein meal and set the steaming plate of bright orange gruel beside him at the workbench. He didn't particularly like the stuff, but eating was little more than the necessary refueling of his mental machine.

  As he inserted the data cylinder into his terminal and began to work, though, he forgot about the meal entirely.

  The image shimmered in front of him, a giant spherical battle station, detailed deck after deck, component after component. Only Lemelisk knew its true complexity.

  He began to strip away the outer layers of the holo blueprint, removing extraneous levels, streamlining the construction, and tailoring it to the Hutts' needs. By eliminating the unnecessary Imperial padding, the superstructures, the personnel quarters, Lemelisk could create a weapon with far more energy devoted to sheer destruction.

  The outline diagram of the main superlaser core glowed in front of him with bright lines indicating main support girders: the purity of his superlaser design, unmasked by the external shell. That was much better.

  He squinted and leaned close to the projection, remembering how excited he had been to see the original construction actually taking place. ... Grand Moff Tarkin had arrived at the Death Star construction site in a nondescript Lambda-class cargo shuttle. He and Lemelisk sat in the passenger seats and discussed important matters as Tarkin's alien slave, a Calamarian named Ackbar, piloted them toward the huge mass of girders and construction machinery larger than any space station ever conceived.

  Lemelisk couldn't understand why Tarkin spent so much time with the salmon-colored alien, whose fishy smell and large round eyes made Lemelisk queasy. Tarkin had crushed the world of the Mon Calamari and forced the strange creatures to serve his will. Now he made Ackbar his personal aide as another means of whipping him, tormenting him with the duties he resented so much.

  Completely broken, Ackbar meekly followed Tarkin's every order. He guided the Lambda-class shuttle with wooden talent, chauffeuring them with as little enthusiasm as possible. Lemelisk noted that, though the alien reacted little, Ackbar seemed to hang on every word Tarkin said, as if storing information for whatever possible use a slave might make of it.

  The Death Star construction hung in orbit around the penal world of Despayre in the Horuz system. The Outer Rim territories were Tarkin's personal stomping grounds--and he stomped as often and as hard as possible. The world below was a deep green, fissured with blue and brown rivers and shallow seas. Despayre looked far too calm to be a hellish prison planet, but Lemelisk knew the prehistoric jungles there writhed with vicious insects and predators, poisonous plants, and carnivorous crustaceans. The convicts huddled within the walls of their fortresses, hoping never to be exiled to the wilds.

  The penal colony provided a ready pool of willing labor to build the Death Star. The volunteer lists carried five times as many names as the site could possibly support, and thus the workers in the space facility were expendable--but unfortunately they were also uneducated and surly, completely untrained for the type of sophisticated labor the project required.

  Lemelisk directed the routine operations from his comfortable remote station. As chief engineer, he watched the progress reports to make sure all the components fit together properly. He didn't
like to venture out into the hazardous construction area, however--he wasn't a hands-on manager.

  Now, though, as Ackbar piloted the Lambda shuttle directly into the forest of girders, Lemelisk looked around, seeing bright flashes of laser welders and the glowing ends of newly smelted durasteel plates that emerged from processing plants. Curls of black smoke and the glow of waste heat spread into open space. Steam glittered in a shower of diamond-ice crystals.

  When the Death Star was complete, the world of Despayre would be shrouded in an upper-orbital blanket of industrial debris as a side effect of the work. Unfortunately for the convicts, the debris would make passage to the penal colony virtually impossible.

  Despayre would then be off limits, and the prisoners would have to fend for themselves ... until supplies ran out and the ferocious jungles came in.

  "You're making good progress," Tarkin said, looking out the port.

  Lemelisk cracked his knuckles. "Awe inspiring, isn't it?" He had seen the plans so often, knew the details so intimately--but the actual construction still took his breath away, making him feel that all his years of exile in Maw Installation had paid off. The small Death Star prototype had been amazing as well, but that was merely a proof-of-concept model. It functioned, but it wasn't the real thing.

  "I will send my report to the Emperor,” Tarkin said. "Keep up the good work, Engineer Lemelisk."

  The Lambda shuttle proceeded through the gridwork of the Death Star and out the other side, then began a slow orbit of the external construction.

  The focusing eye for the superlaser gaped at them like a large meteorite crater. In the piloting chair Ackbar remained silent. The alien didn't seem terribly thrilled at the magnificence of this new weapon.

  Lemelisk smiled as the shuttle turned around and returned to the base. Everything was going so well. He felt better than he had in years, watching his dreams come to life.

  Lemelisk presented the modified design to Durga the Hutt, while General Sulamar brusquely inspected every step of the process, looking over the engineer's shoulder. Lemelisk spoke as the general pressed in, squinting and scowling. He longed for an opportunity to "accidentally" jab the general in the stomach with his elbow.