Memah still couldn’t get her mind around it. This wasn’t just a building reduced to ashes. This was her life.
Rodo came to stand next to her, his face grim. “Varlo Brim was discovered dead in his cube this morning.”
She frowned. “Who?”
“An arsonist, a professional. I know someone who works for the medical examiner. ‘Heart failure’ was entered on Varlo’s certificate—before his body ever arrived at the morgue. Word from above was that there was to be no detailed examination of the corpse.”
She turned away from what had been her reason to get up every day and blinked at him. The ash-laden air made her eyes watery. It seemed important that she understand what Rodo was trying to tell her, but, though he was speaking in Basic, the words didn’t seem to make sense. “Which means … what?”
“Think about it. A block of the underground goes up in flames. The suppressors, which passed inspection less than two months ago, suddenly don’t work. The fire crews get here late, and the next morning a man who sets fires for a living is found dead of ‘natural causes’ in his cube. Plus all those deliveries that didn’t get made? It doesn’t take a construction engineer to put it together.”
Memah stared at him. “Kark,” she said.
“Yeah. Somebody is collecting a fat insurance voucher. What d’you want to bet that construction’s gonna crank up on a new row of shiny new businesses that are gonna be owned by some uplevel bosses who just happen to be bureaucrats responsible for the firefighters and automatic suppressors?”
“And we can’t do anything about it,” she said.
“Not if the fix was in. You had it covered?” He nodded at the ashes. “Insured?”
“No. I never saw the need, what with the suppressors and all.”
Rodo nodded. She was grateful for the lack of rebuke in his face and voice. “What are you gonna do?”
Memah shook her head. “No idea.”
There were others wandering through the ruins, humans and aliens, looking at what had been their shops, the repositories of their hopes and dreams. And gawkers, fire-control droids still checking hot spots, local police … the strangely silent crowd, moving in and out of the smoky mist like revenants, made it all seem quite surreal.
A man in black coveralls approached them. His gaze took in the pile of smoldering cinders, and he shook his head. “Sorry for your loss, Memah Roothes.”
Again, she understood the words, but they meant nothing. “Do I know you?”
“No. I’m Neet Alamant, a recruiter for Civilian Adjunct to the Imperial Navy.”
“Yeah—so?”
“I have an offer you might find interesting.”
Memah gave a bark of bitter laughter. “Unless you’re looking for plant fertilizer”—she gestured at the ruins—“I don’t have a lot for sale right about now.”
“I understand. Perhaps we might speak of this later? Here is my contact information. Please comm me when you have a free moment.”
He handed her an info button, flashed a patently false smile, and walked across the street toward several people standing in front of what had been a bakery.
Memah stared at the button on her palm. A free moment? Sure, no problem. She’d have plenty of those upcoming. She’d be sitting in her room on the dole with nothing to do, remembering the good old days when she ran a pub.
She looked at Rodo. He shrugged.
Memah looked back at the ruin of her cantina. What was she going to do now?
MEDCENTER, SECTOR N-ONE, DEATH STAR
Uli passed his hands under the UV sterilizer, then wiped them on a clean towel. The orderly droid floated the patient out and toward post-op. They were caught up, no more patients scheduled for surgery or follow-ups until rounds that evening. A break at long last.
“You should come see this, Doc,” Zam Stenza, one of the orderlies, said.
Curious, Uli followed the orderly through the staging area and down a half-finished passage that was more catwalk than corridor. His boots thumped upon the cheap expanded metal grate that was the temporary floor of the corridor, and the sound echoed hollowly along the hallway. This section was supposed to be finished, but it looked only half done; less, in places. There was enough air, but there were construction droids crawling like metal spiders on the inside of the hull, welding studs and connectors and adding insulation. Uli saw unsealed gaps in the interior walls. Sure hope they don’t pop a seam somewhere, he thought nervously. He was fairly certain that carrying on shirtsleeve activity in such a precarious environment was contravening several safety regs, and he was equally sure that it would do no good whatsoever to point this out.
Stenza stopped to look through the window at a lower walkway. Uli moved closer to see what was so interesting.
A group of pedestrians was moving along the wide passage. It consisted of guards, high-ranked officers, and one man in black who towered over them all.
“Who’s that?” Uli asked, feeling like he should know.
“Darth Vader,” Zam said. “He’s here on an inspection tour.”
Uli stared at the tall, black-cloaked figure. He knew about Vader, of course. He’d seen vids of the man—if that was what he really still was under the suit, which looked like it contained some kind of cyclic respiratory system, and probably bionic prosthetics as well, judging by his gait. The stiffness was subtle, but there if you knew where to look.
“Inspection tour?”
“Yes,” said C-4ME-O, who had come up behind them. “This project is of prime concern to the Emperor.”
“And just how do you know this, Fourmio? Tight with the Emperor, are you?”
“No, but I was put into service on Coruscant before it became Imperial Center. I’ve never had a mindwipe, so I have my memories of that time. Droids do sometimes talk to one another, you know. Word gets around.”
Uli nodded. Yes, that was true enough. There was a lot of truth in the old saw that said, If you want to know what goes on, ask the droids. They see, they hear, and they don’t forget. He had known some droids who were every bit as clever and talkative as any natural-borns or clones he’d been around. There’d been that protocol droid back at Rimsoo Seven on Drongar—what had it been called?—who’d been self-aware enough to play sabacc and gloat over the winnings. It had had a sarcastic circuit a klick wide.
Uli watched the procession pass. “Walked right past us, didn’t they?”
“The word is that Lord Vader is not fond of medics,” C-4ME-O said. “Apparently he has had some unpleasant experiences in that area.”
Uli nodded. He could see why. The only reason he could imagine that someone would be stuffed into a lung-suit with a respirator breathing for him would be because his own breathing passages had been terribly damaged and, for some reason, new lobes and trachea could not be cloned and implanted. That would be a strange malady in this day and age, but not impossible. Some kind of autoimmune problem, perhaps. There were those rare people, one in a billion, who would reject their own matched genetic tissue implants—even skin grafts. Had to be something like that, Uli mused—nobody would voluntarily walk around looking like Vader otherwise.
“Supposedly he can kill a man just by looking at him,” Stenza said. He dropped his voice to a whisper. “I heard a rumor that he was once a Jedi.”
Uli nodded. The mysterious Force was fairly amazing when manifested by an expert in its use. Uli had seen it demonstrated by a woman who had been part of the team on Drongar. She had been a Mirialan, a Jedi healer named Barriss Offee. Only a Padawan when he’d met her; later she had become a Jedi Knight. He’d learned a lot from conversations with her, both about the ways of the Jedi and, in broader terms, about life. She’d been strong in the Force, he’d been told. Not that it had been enough to save her. Barriss had died on Felucia, so he had heard, when the clones had turned on their Jedi masters.
The news had hit him far worse than he’d expected. He’d told himself many times, in the nearly two decades since his first posting on that
fetid swamp world, that what he’d felt for Barriss had been nothing more than youthful infatuation. It might be true, but he could still see her face in his mind, hear her voice, feel the power that had lived inside her. Even after all these years.
Maybe he hadn’t loved her. Maybe he’d been too young to know what love was, back then. But when he had heard of her death …
So many people he had cared deeply for were dead because of that karking war. Probably some of the Jedi had escaped death, but the official posture was that they had all been enemies of the people and executed accordingly. And all research into the psionic abilities of the former peacekeepers of the galaxy had been summarily halted. To venture into that area was worth the death penalty these days. Lot of that going around, too. Step wrong and it was prison if you were lucky, and death if you trod too hard on the wrong toes. Given all this, it was amazing that Vader would tolerate even the rumor of him being a Jedi.
He sighed. Well, it wasn’t his business. He was a surgeon. Genetics, esoteric mind-over-matter control, connections with the infinite … those weren’t his concerns. He just went where he was told, cut where he was ordered to cut, and hoped that his forced servitude would end someday, preferably with him still in one piece. Initially he’d thought that the only good thing about being assigned to a battle station the size and power of this one was not having to worry about being blown up. That was before the first influx of wounded workers from the bombed section had come under his knife. Nothing was safe, not even this monstrous Death Star.
Uli turned away. There should be time to grab a bite at the commissary, and a few hours’ sleep, before his next shift. Unless there was more sabotage, of course.
He wished he could remember the name of that droid back on Drongar. He knew it was going to bug him all day.
17
CONSTRUCTION SITE BETA-NINE, DEATH STAR
The man dressed in black with the respirator helmet felt to Teela like something out of a long-forgotten nightmare. She could almost sense evil radiating from him in pulsing waves; just being near him made her queasy, set her stomach roiling.
And for all that, she was not even his focus, merely one of the retinue of architects and builders standing in the background as Grand Moff Tarkin arrived with the tour to show off this part of the station. She had not spoken to Vader, nor he to her, but still she felt the way she imagined an insect under a magnifying lens might feel if it looked up and saw a giant eye staring down at it. Vader had his back to her, and yet she could feel his attention as a kind of dark pressure, as if a cold hand had been laid on her shoulder.
It made her want to walk away. No, it made her want to run away, to get as far from here as she could, as quickly as she could. She’d never felt such a heavy sense of foreboding. The opposite side of the battle station wouldn’t be far enough to run. But to attempt such a thing would be a bad career move for anybody, and more so for a criminal paroled as a trustee.
Tarkin was droning on about something to do with firepower, pointing at turbolaser emplacements, and Vader seemed to be listening. But Teela knew, somehow, that his focus was not on the Moff’s speech. He was probing the minds of those around them, examining them, and finding them … lacking something.
Abruptly she became aware that his full attention had arrived at her. Of a moment, she felt as if she had been stripped naked, both her mind and body, and that Vader, like the imagined scientist examining the insect pinned under his lens, beheld her in all her being—the good, the bad, the flaws, the strengths … everything that made her who she was.
Instinctively, she threw up a mental wall, a shield to prevent the intrusion, as though slamming a blast door shut. She did it by envisioning just that: a heavy durasteel portal closing, the shaft locks sliding into their collars, the perimeter flange sealing. She’d always had a vivid imagination—a big reason why she was successful in her chosen field—and she could see, in her mind’s eye, every seam and seal, every weld and rivet on the hatch, could hear the solid, echoing boom! it made as it shut, could even feel the vibration. Just before it closed, she thought she felt a small hint of something from Vader’s thoughts: surprise.
And … curiosity.
But—that was impossible. How could she feel someone else’s thoughts?
It had to have been her imagination, Teela thought. But a moment later the tall figure turned and looked directly at her. The lenses in the black helmet hid his eyes, but there was no doubt—he had marked her.
It wasn’t just her imagination.
Teela held her gaze as steady as she could, and kept her mental wall in place.
A moment passed. It seemed like a long time, but it couldn’t have been more than a few heartbeats. Vader seemed to nod slightly, then turned back to look at whatever it was that Tarkin was prattling on about.
The removal of his attention was like a glass shell shattering about her. Teela nearly collapsed. She gasped, loud enough to cause several of her colleagues to glance at her. She felt shaken to her core.
What had just happened?
SLASHTOWN PRISON COLONY, DESPAYRE
Ratua considered his options, or at least what he thought they might be, and found them less satisfactory every time he recounted them. Only one held any appeal at all, and that one not so much.
As he saw things, he could either spend the rest of his life on this tropical pesthole of a world, until one day somebody or something killed him …
Or he could leave.
That is, he could try. The stats were as simple as they were depressing: nobody lived to a ripe old age on the prison planet and shuffled off peacefully in their sleep. Nobody. Either some horrible local disease took them, or somebody wanted their boots, or something with fangs and poison-tipped claws looking for a meal got too close, and that was just how it was. Despayre was a hard place, and sooner or later you were grub food, even if you were as fast as Ratua was.
He was in his shack, alone and brooding. The pitiful interior was illuminated by a glow stick, which gave barely enough light to show the backless chair, the large cable spool that served as his table, with his cracked plate and two mismatched and chipped mugs, and the crab spider as big as his hand nestled in one of the upper corners near the roof. Night had fallen, and the predators that liked the dark were out hunting. Some were prisoners, some animals, and none of them was apt to wish you well. And yet for the path Ratua needed to be upon, he would have to venture out in the night. Moreover, he was going to have to do it real soon, because the only chance he had of getting off this rock was the tiniest of loopholes that could close at any moment. The effort would cost him everything he owned—which wasn’t much, and that was part of the problem—and if he failed, yet still somehow survived, he would be starting over again from point zero, with nothing save the clothes he was wearing.
Ratua sighed, staring at the makeshift wall of his hut. Was the life here worse than the risk of trying to leave it? Nothing ventured, nothing gained, but also nothing lost …
A tap on the door interrupted his meditation. He grabbed his capacitor, walked two steps to the entrance, and peered out through the peephole. The capacitor, salvaged from a broken gel-cam’s battery pack, wasn’t much of a weapon. It required contact with an attacker, which was closer than Ratua wanted to be against somebody with a knife, say, but it was better than nothing. The device, once triggered, built up an electrical charge within a couple of seconds. The amperage was low, but there was still enough voltage to knock a full-sized human onto his backside—assuming you could touch bare skin with the contact points. His quickness made it a somewhat better weapon than it might be in the hands of someone with normal reactions, but it was good for only a single zap before it had to be recharged, which would be far too slow in a fight if you couldn’t stall the attack long enough to let the juice build back up.
As good a scrounger as he was, he had never been able to score a blaster. Not that he’d tried all that much. Carrying a firearm wasn’t the best way to keep
under the radar. Still, there were times, like now, when he regretted not having scrounged harder.
He glanced through the tiny fish-eye lens in the door, salvaged from the same cam as the capacitor, and relaxed. It was Brun, the cargo crew boss on the night shift. The one he’d been expecting.
Ratua opened the door, checked to make sure nobody was behind Brun, and quickly shut and barred the door behind the man.
Brun was human, kind of; he looked like nothing so much as a normal-sized male who’d been sat upon by something large and heavy. His trunk was shaped like a canister, and his head was almost wider than it was tall. He was from some planet that Ratua had never heard of before they’d met. Brun had been on the prison world for years, and had worked his way up to a position of some trust in that he was allowed inside the compound to help in the loading and unloading of cargo supplies for the dirtside guard posts.
The only way off the world was by ship, and the guard supply craft were the most likely conveyances. There had been organized breaks in which whole ships had been commandeered, but that was, in Ratua’s considered opinion, stupid past the point of suicidal. The Empire had all kinds of firepower up there, and they weren’t shy about using it if they knew a transport had gone rogue. That had happened six months or so ago, and there hadn’t been any survivors of that attempted escape.
If you couldn’t sneak past, you weren’t going to get very far. And in a stand-up with Imperial warships, you were going to lose.
Brun was not a man for pleasantries. “Krovvy me th’ bit-ska, floob. M’hitch revs inna cyke.”
Whatever world Brun was from was either too far out on the Rim for a decent education program, or its indigent population really didn’t care about being understood all that much. After months of conversation, Ratua had picked up enough of Brun’s patois to understand the gist of his statement, which was something along the lines of Tell me your idea, friend. My shift starts in an hour. The term floob was considerably less benign than “friend,” but Ratua was willing to overlook that. He pointed at one of the two chairs. As Brun sat, the wood creaking under his weight, Ratua went to his stashbox and came out with a bottle of wine. It wasn’t a great wine, but it was from off-world and not a local vintage, so it was better by far than what was available to most prisoners. Ratua had been saving it for a special occasion, and this was about as special as it was going to get.
Star Wars: Death Star Page 10
