Before her fall from grace she had been near the top of her game, a much-sought-after professional who had designed the Ralthhok Encapsulization on Corellia and the Blackstar wheelworld in the Sagar system. She had been fêted and lionized, a guest of monarchs and Senators, heads of industry and starfleet admirals. She had thought nothing of taking an atmo-skimmer halfway around Mirial to dine with friends on different continents for each meal.
Now just having a dinner that didn’t bite back was a luxury.
She had been lucky, but her survival hadn’t been entirely due to luck. Her father had been fond of the outdoors, and as a young girl she had gone camping with him frequently. He had taught her woodcraft, and while the plants and animals on the prison world Despayre were different from those on Mirial—to say the least—the principles of dealing with them were the same. If it had teeth and claws, it was best to avoid it. If it had thorns or serrated edges, it was not a good idea to stray too close. One kept one’s awareness firmly in the here and now and did not indulge in the luxury of daydreams and reverie unless one was safely barricaded behind makeshift walls constructed of cast-off battleplate or jury-rigged fields. And it was a good idea not to let one’s guard drop even then, because there were predators inside the compounds as well as out; predators with two legs instead of four or six, but nonetheless deadly.
One year. And until this morning, there had been no reason for her to believe she would ever leave Despayre, however much time she might have left to live. But when Imperial Guards landed outside the makeshift shantytown the prisoners had named Dungeontown, the rumor had quickly spread. There was a project in orbit, the word was, and they needed more labor.
“I hear they got twen’y t’ousand Wookiee slaves workin’ this t’ing,” the man sitting to her right said. He was talking to the prisoner on his right, and not Teela, but as close as he was, she’d have to be deaf to miss the conversation. The prisoner to her right was a Bakuran; coarse, and convicted of multiple crimes, according to the bragging he’d been doing to their mutual seatmate: robbery, gun-running, assault, murder. He smelled like slime mold.
“That right?” The prisoner seated one away from Teela was a Brigian, a tall, purple-skinned humanoid whom Teela had seen in Dungeontown a few times. The only Brigian in their town, she had heard. He was soft-spoken when he answered the Bakuran, but she’d also heard that he had been an assassin good enough with his hands that he seldom needed a weapon. There was a story that he had once killed a virevol—a kind of wolf-sized, saber-toothed rat found only on Despayre—with nothing more than a stick. And then cooked and eaten it.
Thieves and murderers. Pleasant company for a woman who had, until she had been arrested for a poor political stance, never gotten so much as a skytraffic ticket. Not that she had made that knowledge public. The more dangerous criminals in Dungeontown thought you were, the greater the chance they would leave you be. When anybody asked her what her crime had been, Teela always just smiled. That tended to make the questioner think twice about whatever his intentions might be toward her.
“Yar,” the Bakuran said. “Half a million droids, plus a load o’ construction bots—extruders, shapers, benders, like that, too. Big sucker they be buildin’, whatever t’ kark it is.”
The purple humanoid shrugged. “Die on the planet, die in space. No matter.”
The transport slowed, then stopped. After a moment there was a clank! that vibrated through the ship.
“Sounds like a ramp just locked on,” the Brigian said. “Looks like wherever we’re going, we’re there.”
The Bakuran turned to look at Teela, giving her a long up-and-down leer, then a toothy grin. “Wouldn’t mind a bunkmate, if space b’ tight,” he said. “You’ll do.”
“Last ‘bunkmate’ I had accidentally died in his sleep one night,” Teela said. She smiled.
The Bakuran blinked. “Yar?”
She didn’t say anything further. She just kept smiling.
The Bakuran’s grin faded.
A guard appeared. “Everybody up and single-file,” he said.
The Brigian was closest to the aisle, the Bakuran behind him, and Teela behind the Bakuran. He kept glancing back at her, quick and nervous looks, as they filed out of the ship and into the sinuous tube of the pressurized ramp.
At the entrance to a huge and cold assembly area, Teela saw there were thousands of other prisoners entering through scores of ramps connected to other transports. She could smell the perspiration and fear from the prisoners, mixed with the stale, metallic tang of recycled air. Guards stationed at scanners monitored each incoming line. As each prisoner passed through a scanner, there sounded a musical tone.
Reading their implants, she guessed. Most of the notes were the same, but now and again a different tone would sound, a full step lower, and the prisoners connected to them would be separated from the others and directed away from the main body toward a stairway to a lower level. Maybe one in fifty, she figured.
Who were they? she wondered. Rejects? Culls? People bound for a one-way trip out the nearest air lock?
When Teela passed the scanner’s arch, the tone emitted was the lower one. She felt her heart race faster, her breath catch, as the guard brusquely ordered her to step out of the line.
Whatever that sound meant for those it selected, she was apparently about to find out.
4
THE SOFT HEART CANTINA, SOUTHERN UNDERGROUND, GRID 19, IMPERIAL CITY, CORUSCANT SECTOR, CORE WORLDS
“Should I break their skulls?” Rodo asked.
Memah Roothes said, “No. Just throw ’em out.”
“You’re sure? I don’t mind.”
“Much as I admire a man who enjoys his work, I’m asking you to try to curb your enthusiasm.”
“You’re the boss.”
From behind the bar, where she occasionally took a turn mixing drinks, the owner of the Soft Heart Cantina watched as Rodo, the pub’s peacekeeper, went to attend to the off-duty and getting-progressively-louder customers. That there were two Imperial stormtroopers soused and gearing themselves up for a fight didn’t worry her. Rodo—if he had another name, nobody she knew had ever heard it—was one of the biggest humans she had ever seen. Born and raised on Ragith III, a descendant of human colonists who had been genetically bred and selected for generations to adapt to the one-and-a-half standard-g environment, Rodo, at over two meters and 110 kilos, was not a man you wanted to have mad at you. Somebody once parked a landspeeder in his spot on the street outside the cantina. Rodo had considered this an insult, and he had been direct in dealing with it.
Seeing a vehicle picked up and turned over without help makes an impression—people didn’t park in Rodo’s spot anymore. He was also extremely fast and very, very good at some weird kind of martial art, which he could use to tie a drunk and belligerent patron into a knot faster than you could call the Imperial cools to come and haul the problem away.
Rodo’s presence was why things tended to stay pretty quiet in the cantina, even on a payday like tonight. When somebody got too loud or combative, usually Rodo’s arrival at the table was enough to solve the problem.
Usually, but not always …
Memah turned to finish a drink order. She saw—out of the corner of her eye—a human male, a spacer by his garments, gazing dreamily at her, chin supported by one hand as he leaned over his drink. She gave no acknowledgment of his admiration. A Rutian Twi’lek from Ryloth, with teal skin that seemed to glow under the fullspec lights, she was used to such looks. Her skin, in both color and tone, was one of her best features, which she tended to showcase by wearing short and sleeveless dresses.
She knew that, to most humanoid races, she was startlingly beautiful; even her lekku, the two large, fleshy tendrils that hung about her shoulders instead of human hair, seemed to have an erotic attraction for humans. And she was fit enough, due to a daily swimming and zero-g workout regimen, although it always seemed to her that she could stand to lose a kilo from her hips.
> Memah had managed this place for two years, and owned it for two more, before the galaxy had gone crazy. Of course, war was good for business in a cantina. Beings about to ship off to battle in the middle of nowhere on some backrocket planet knew they wouldn’t be relaxing in a place like hers the few times they weren’t blasting Rebels or droids. This tended to promote a certain to-vac-with-tomorrow attitude, which translated into considerable profits for her.
The Heart was crowded, and it took Rodo a minute to work his way to the would-be fighters, who were at a two-seat table near the east wall. One of them was on his feet and the other rising when the big bouncer arrived. He was a head taller and nearly as wide as both of them put together. He eclipsed the light, and both men looked up to see what was casting such a gigantic shadow.
Memah grinned again. There was no way she could hear what Rodo was saying to them. The place was noisy with conversation and laughter, the clink of glasses toasting, the scrape of chair legs on the hard floor. She had two more tenders working the bar, both busily mixing drinks and drawing down the taps. It wasn’t a quiet environment. But she knew essentially what the big man was telling the two troopers. They had disturbed the spirit of the Heart, and they would have to leave—now.
If they were wise, they’d smile and nod and hustle themselves to the door. If they were stupid, they’d argue with Rodo. If they were really stupid, one or both would decide that how they behaved wasn’t any of the peacekeeper’s business, and they’d be happy to demonstrate their Imperial combat training to him, thank-you-very-milking-much!
Rodo’s response was always based on their attitude. Play nice, and they could come back tomorrow and start fresh, with no hard feelings. It went on a sliding scale from there. In this case, the two must have decided that the enforcer wasn’t as tough as he looked, and worth at least a few choice words, probably concerning his parents or siblings and his immoral relationships with them.
Before either trooper could do or say anything else, Rodo grabbed each one by the shirtfront, moving incredibly fast for such a big man, and, in an amazing display of raw strength, lifted both clear of the floor and banged their heads together. If they weren’t unconscious after that, they were certainly stunned enough to cease hostilities. Holding them thus, Rodo walked toward the door, as if doing so was no more effort than carrying two large steins of ale.
It didn’t take him long to achieve the exit—everybody between him and the door moved with great alacrity, clearing a broad and empty path. The room went almost quiet as the door hissed open and Rodo tossed the two into the street.
When the door hissed shut, the noise level returned to normal, and Memah went back to her drink order. Nobody was hurt, and so there was no need to worry about the authorities. And if the troops were foolish enough to come back with others like them, seeking to exploit their Imperial status … well, there wasn’t an overabundance of support downlevels for such officiousness.
Memah sighed. When she’d first started in this line of work, waitressing in a dive deep in Gnarlytown called Villynay’s, most of the Imperial troops had still been clones, and every one of them had been uniformly polite and easygoing. It was true that, after a bit too much ferment, they could get a tad boisterous, but they’d never been a problem, and had also never been at all hesitant in helping to street anyone who was. She’d heard that they’d all been programmed, somehow, to only show hostility toward the enemy. Whatever the reason, the clones had been a pleasure to serve.
Well, that was then and this was now. Maybe she was looking at the past through rose-colored droptacs, but it seemed to her that a lot had changed. Now a night when Rodo didn’t have to eject a few obstreperous drunks was a night to remember.
As she put together a Bantha Blaster, stirring in the ingredients, Memah noticed another pair of customers. They weren’t causing any ruckus; if anything, they were too quiet. Humans, a male and a female, they were, like much of the crowd this time of the evening. Both were dressed in nondescript black coveralls. They nursed mugs of membrosia and sat facing each other at a two-seat table in the corner, from which they seemed, without being obvious about it, to be watching the room.
And even though she never caught them staring directly her way, Memah got the distinct feeling that they were particularly interested in her.
Rodo arrived back at the bar like a heavy-gravity crawler docking. He scanned the room, looking for more trouble. None seemed to be in the offing at the moment.
Memah finished the Blaster and put it on the bar. “Ell-Nine, order up!”
The new server droid, a trash-can-sized one on wheels whose model she never could remember, rolled to the bar. “Got it, boss,” it chirped. It grabbed the tray with extendible arms, anchored it to the magnetic plate atop its “head,” and took off to deliver the drinks.
Memah drifted down to the other end of the bar. “Rodo, you see the two in black in the corner?”
Rodo didn’t look at the pair, nor directly at her. “Yep.”
“Know who they are?”
“Not who. Haven’t seen ’em in here before. Got a good idea what, though.”
There was a long pause that Memah finally broke. “You want to finish that thought and educate me here?”
He cracked a small smile. Rodo liked her, though he’d never made a move on her, and she knew he never would. “Imperial Intelligence ops.”
She frowned, surprised. What would a couple of Eyes be doing in her place? She ran a workingbeing’s bar, and there wasn’t much likelihood of any high-level skulduggery or spying being done here. This was the Southern Underground, after all; most underdwellers couldn’t even spell espionage, much less engage in it.
“You sure?”
“Pretty much. They got the look. You want, I can poke around some, check ’em out.”
She shook her head. “No. Don’t stir up trouble we don’t need. Just keep an eye on them.”
Rodo settled back. “That’s what you pay me for, Boss Lady.”
5
OFFICERS’ BARRACKS, ISD STEEL TALON, HORUZ SYSTEM
Master Chief Petty Officer Tenn Graneet rolled out of his sleep rack and put his bare feet onto the cold metal deck. That woke him up fast enough. Really ought to get a rug to put down there. He’d been meaning to do it since he’d been assigned to the ship, eight weeks ago, but other things kept taking priority, and neither S’ran Droot nor Velvalee, the other CPOs who shared the cabin, seemed bothered by it. Of course Droot’s feet were more like hooves, and Velvalee was used to temperatures a lot colder—the blasted floor might feel warm to his feet, for all Tenn knew. Those two were on graveyard shift this week, so they’d be heading back to the cabin about the time he got to his post.
Tenn mentally shrugged. Someday he’d get around to it. Maybe cozy up to that Alderaan woman who did knitting when off duty, get her to make him enough of a synthwool carpet to cover the deck—it wouldn’t take all that much. He always could sweet-talk a fem into doing all kinds of things for him.
He padded down the hall to the refresher, took a quick sonic shower, splashed depil on his stubble, and wiped it clean. Then, wrapped in a towel, he went back to don the uniform of the day.
Tenn Graneet was past fifty, but he was in very good shape for a man his age. He had a few unrevised scars from various battles when his station had been hit by enemy fire, or from when something had gone wrong and blown up, and a couple from cantina rumbles when he’d been slow to get out of the way of a broken bottle or vibroblade. Still, he was lean and muscular, and he could keep up with grunts half his age, though not as easily as he used to. The days when he could party all night and then work a full shift the next day were past, true, but on the obstacle course even the newbies knew enough to not get in front of him unless they wanted to get run over. It was a point of pride that, even after more than thirty years in the navy, nobody in Tenn Graneet’s gunnery crew could outdrink, outfight, or outwomanize him.
He picked out his oldest uniform clothes, the
light gray faded to the color of ash, and slipped into them. They were going to get dirty and smelly anyway today, so no point in messing up new ones. Word from uplevels was there was going to be another surprise battle drill around midshift. The Port Heavy Blaster Station CO, Captain Nast Hoberd, was a drinking buddy with Lieutenant Colonel Luah, who was the admiral’s assistant, and as a result the PHBS always got the heads-up when a drill or inspection was about to be sprung. The captain wanted his unit to look good, and since they always knew in advance when it counted, they always did look good. White-glove a surface in any of the six turbolaser turrets or two heavy ion cannon turrets, and there wouldn’t be a speck of dirt. You could eat off the floor in Fire Control on inspection days. Light the battle alarms, and the port battery was the first to report battle-ready. Every time.
Rumor was that Hoberd was up for major, and his unit’s pretty-much-spotless performance during every drill and inspection didn’t hurt his chances any. Not that the blaster crew had any slouches on it. You didn’t get to shoot the big guns unless you had plenty of practice shooting the little ones, and anybody who couldn’t pull his weight, Tenn got rid of fast enough to leave friction burns. He had his own reputation to keep up. CPO Tenn Graneet was the best gunnery chief in this being’s navy. If somebody gave them a target and it could possibly be hit, his crew would hit it, sure as there were little green beings living on Crystan V.
Dressed, Tenn looked at himself in the mirror. A face that was every centimeter the grizzled old navy chief looked back at him. He grunted. He’d joined the Imperial Navy before it was the Imperial Navy, and he expected to die at his post. That was fine by him. A lifetime of military service wasn’t a bad life at all, as far as he was concerned. He left his quarters and headed into the hall.
Star Wars: Death Star Page 3
