The Jedi Academy Trilogy_ Jedi Search Part 20

Absolutely pure glitterstim!"

Lando nodded noncommittally. Luke, playing his part, fished around for more information. "So how does this affect your safety record? Did this creature prey on any of the miners?"

"Yes, it killed several, including the s.h.i.+ft boss and my a.s.sistant- -the ones I told you about. How many bodies have you found so far?" Doole asked the guard.

"Three fresh ones and two old ones, and we think it killed a bunch more. There's a big Wookiee and some other prisoners still unaccounted for."

Doole scowled at the guard, but quickly regained his false smile.

Luke felt cold upon hearing the news. Of course, there was no way of knowing whether the Wookiee in question was Chewbacca--the Empire had taken a great many slaves from the Wookiee homeworld of Kashyyyk, and many survivors could well have been s.h.i.+pped off to Kessel. Luke met Lando's gaze, and the other man shook his head ever so slightly. "Very interesting," Lando said.

"Come on, there's more to see," Doole said as he strode back to the floating cars. "I hope all this is impressing you."

"Certainly is," Lando said. "You have an amazing operation here, Moruth."

Luke remained silent. All day long he had been straining his senses, searching for some echo of Han or Chewbacca, but he had found nothing. Plenty of others wallowed in pain and misery here, but Luke found no hint of the ones he sought.

Han Solo might never have reached Kessel, and he was certainly no longer there. At least not alive.

The admiral's quarters on an Imperial-cla.s.s Star Destroyer were s.p.a.cious and functional, and they had been Daala's only home for more than a decade.

Year after year she operated in a vacuum, alone as always, following Tarkin's parting instructions with no further input from the Grand Moff. The great distortion of the Maw itself blacked out all external holonet transmissions. Her fleet had been isolated, and the crew on her four Star Destroyers had fallen into a routine, but Daala did not relax her grip. She was afraid to wonder about events outside in the galaxy, confident at least that she could count on the Empire with its unbending rules, sometimes cruel but always clear-cut.

But now, in her turmoil, she was glad her quarters were sealed and locked, quiet and empty, so no one could see her like this. It would ruin her image entirely. Everything had been cut-and-dried before the interrogation of the new prisoners. ...

Daala punched up the recording and watched it again, though she had already replayed the sequence a dozen times. She could mouth the words as the prisoner spoke them, but this tiny image could not convey the impact she had felt when watching him firsthand.

The man, Han Solo, sat strapped in a nightmarish, convoluted chair with steel tubes and wires and piping tangled around him. The gadgetry looked sharp and ominous--most of it served no purpose other than to increase the prisoner's terror, and in that it proved effective.

On the recording, Daala stood by Commander Kratas, the captain of her flags.h.i.+p, the Gorgon. She could smell the prisoner's fear, but his demeanor was full of bl.u.s.ter and sarcasm. He would crack easily.

"Tell us where you come from," Daala said. "Is the Rebel Alliance crushed yet? What has happened in the Empire?"

"Go kiss a Hutt!" Solo snapped.

Daala stared woodenly at him for a moment, then shrugged, nodding to Kratas. The commander punched a control pad, and one of the metal bars across the restraining chair hummed.

The muscles in Solo's left thigh began to spasm, jittering. His leg bounced up and down. The spasms grew worse. He had a puzzled, confused look on his face, as if he couldn't understand why his own body was suddenly behaving so strangely. The involuntary seizure clenched the muscles under his skin.

Daala smiled.

Kratas adjusted one of the controls, and Solo flinched as the muscles along the left side of his rib cage also began spasming, tightening his body, but the chair would not let him move. Solo fought back an outcry.

The seizures were not so painful as they were maddening. Daala had found that a most effective interrogation technique was simply to induce an unrelenting facial tick that made the eyes blink over and over and over again for hours without end.

"Tell us about the Empire," she said again.

"The Empire is in the garbage masher!" Solo said. Daala could see the whites of his eyes as Solo tried to look down at his rebellious leg muscles. "The Emperor is dead. He died in the explosion of the second Death Star."

Daala and Kratas both snapped their heads up. "Second Death Star?

Tell me about it."

"No," Solo said.

"Yes," Daala said.

Kratas adjusted another b.u.t.ton. The bars in the labyrinthine chair hummed, and Solo's right hand began twitching, his fingers scrabbling against the smooth metal, jittering and shaking. Solo tried to look everywhere at once.

"The second Death Star?" Daala asked again.

"It was still under construction when we set off a chain reaction in its core. Darth Vader and the Emperor were on board." Solo resisted, but he seemed to delight in telling the news.

"And what happened to the first Death Star?" Daala said.

Solo grinned. "The Alliance blew it up, too."

Daala was skeptical enough that she didn't believe him entirely. A prisoner would say anything, especially a defiant one like this. But in her gut she feared it might be true--because it explained other things, such as the years of silence.

"And what about Grand Moff Tarkin?"

"He's in a billion atoms scattered across the Yavin system. He burned with his Death Star. He paid for the lives of all the people on Alderaan, a planet he destroyed."

"Alderaan is destroyed?" Daala raised her eyebrows.

Kratas increased the power vibrating through the chair. Tiny pearls of sweat appeared on his own forehead. Daala knew what the commander was thinking: during all these years of isolation they had been a.s.suming the Emperor would maintain his iron grip, that the fleet of all-powerful Star Destroyers and the secret Death Star would cement Imperial rule across the galaxy. The Old Republic had lasted a thousand generations. And the Empire ... could it have fallen in just a few decades?

"How long since the explosion of the second Death Star?"

"Seven years."

"What has happened since?" Daala finally sat down. "Tell me everything."

But Solo seemed to gain inner strength and clammed up. He glared with his dark, angry eyes. Daala sighed. It was like a rehea.r.s.ed show they had to perform. Kratas adjusted the controls until Solo's entire body was a writhing, spasming ma.s.s of twitching muscles, as if a storm were happening inside his body.

Gradually, the prisoner spilled the entire story of the other battles, the civil war, Grand Admiral Thrawn, the resurrected Emperor, the truce at Bakura, the terrible conflicts in which the waning Empire had been defeated again and again --until finally she had Kratas release him. The loud humming of the chair suddenly stopped, and Han Solo slumped into exhausted bliss at being freed from the onslaught of his own muscles.

Daala motioned outside the door of the holding cell, summoning a glossy black interrogation droid that floated in with hypodermic needles glistening like spears in the dim reddish light. Solo tried to cringe back, and Daala could see the fear in his eyes.

"There," Daala said. "Now the interrogator droid will confirm everything you told us." She got up and left.

Later she had found out that Solo was indeed telling the truth in everything he said. Alone in her quarters, Admiral Daala switched off the recording. Her head pounded with a gnawing, throbbing ache like dull fingernails sc.r.a.ping the inside of her skull.

One of the Maw Installation scientists, learning that the new prisoner had actually been on board the completed Death Star, demanded to speak with him. Daala would send the scientist this interrogation report- -after she edited it, of course. Sometimes it was impossible to keep these prima donna scientists happy. They had such a narrow view of things.

Right now Daala had greater worries. She had to decide what to do with this new information.

In her quarters Daala stood between two full-length curved mirrors that projected a reflection of her body, head to toe. Her olive-gray uniform showed no wrinkle, only crisp creases and near-invisible seams.

Through a strict regimen of exercises and drills, she had not added a fraction to her weight during her long a.s.signment; her appearance, though older and harder now, still pleased her.

Daala wore her bright admiral's insignia proudly over her left breast: a row of six scarlet rectangles set above a row of blue rectangles. To her knowledge she was the only woman ever to wear such a rank in the Imperial Navy. It had been a special promotion, given directly by Grand Moff Tarkin himself, and it was possible the Emperor did not even know of it. He certainly did not know about the Maw Installation.

Her coppery hair flowed over her shoulders, rippled down her back to below her hips. More than a decade ago Daala had arrived at Maw Installation with her hair cropped short and bristly, part of the humiliation the Imperial military academy inflicted upon female candidates.

After being sealed inside the Maw, though, Daala was placed in charge by direct order from Tarkin. Asinine regulations-for-the-sake-of-regulations meant nothing to her anymore. She refused to cut her hair, as a gesture of her own independence: rank had its privileges. She felt Tarkin would have approved. But Tarkin was dead now.

Turning, she dimmed the lights, then activated the door. Outside, two bodyguards snapped to attention and continued staring ahead. Despite Maw Installation's isolation, Daala insisted on peak performance, regular drills, war-gaming sessions. She had been trained in the Imperial military mold; though the system had done its best to squash her ambitions, Daala followed its tenets.

Beneath their armor the two guards were well built and attractive; but Daala had not taken a lover since Grand Moff Tarkin. After him fantasizing had been enough.

"Escort me to the shuttle bay," she said, stepping into the corridor. "I'm going down to the Installation." She strode off, hearing the bodyguards march behind her, weapons ready. "Inform the duty commander that I have a meeting with Tol Sivron." One of the bodyguards muttered into his helmet comlink.

She strode down the corridors, pondering the complexity of her s.h.i.+p, the troops, the support personnel. In the Imperial fleet a single Star Destroyer housed thirty-seven thousand crew and ninety-seven hundred troops, but because of the secrecy of the Maw Installation, Tarkin had a.s.signed her only a skeleton crew--people without families, without connections to the outside, some recruited from worlds devastated by the early battles of the Empire.

Even under rigid discipline, though, her crew had been trapped here for eleven years with no furloughs, no R and R other than the meager amus.e.m.e.nt facilities available on board. Her troops had grown weary of the entertainment libraries--restless, bored, and angry at being placed on standby alert for so long without word from the outside. They were well armed and itching to go out and do something--as was Daala herself.

At her fingertips Daala had the might of sixty turbolaser batteries, sixty ion cannons, and ten tractor-beam projectors, one of which had just been used to capture the battered Imperial shuttle. Inside the hangar bays the Gorgon alone carried six TIE fighter squadrons, two gamma-cla.s.s a.s.sault shuttles, twenty AT-ST walkers, and thirty AT-ST scout walkers.

Three more identical s.h.i.+ps, the Manticore, the Basilisk, and the Hydra, orbited Maw Installation, also under Daala's command. Years ago Moff Tarkin had taken Daala herself to the Kuat Drive Yards to watch her four Star Destroyers under construction.

Tarkin and Daala had flown a small inspection shuttle around the enormous superstructures being a.s.sembled in orbit. The two remained silent for the most part, staring at the enormity of the project. Around them in s.p.a.ce the tiny lights of workers, transport vessels, rubble smelters, and girder extruders made a hive of activity.

Tarkin had placed a hand on her shoulders, squeezing with a grip made of steel cords. "Daala," he said, "I am giving you enough power to turn any planet to slag."

Now, aboard the Star Destroyer Gorgon, Admiral Daala entered a personnel lift that took her and her bodyguards from the command quarters below the bridge tower to one of the hangar bays. She did not announce her arrival when the doors slid open. Daala was pleased to see her troops bustling about the TIE fighters, the shuttles, and service vehicles.

After so many years of boredom, her personnel kept every system functioning perfectly.

Only months after the completion of Maw Installation, Daala had noticed a malaise creeping through the personnel. Part of it was because of her, she was sure; commanded by the only female flag officer, a.s.signed to baby-sit a bunch of scientists in the most protected spot in the galaxy, the troops had grown lax. But a few graphic executions and continual threats kept Daala's crew constantly on edge, honing their skills and making it inconceivable for them to s.h.i.+rk their duties.

That tactic had been one of Tarkin's prime lessons. Command through the fear of force rather than force itself. Daala had 180,000 people at her disposal, not counting the weapons designers in Maw Installation itself. She did not want to waste them.

She glanced up and down the hangar, her molten-metal hair trailing behind her. Inside an electromagnetic cage that s.h.i.+elded the entire vessel, technicians scoured the battered Imperial shuttle Endor that had been brought in by the new captives. Endor-what kind of name was that? She had never heard the term before. The technicians would be checking for service markings, locator beacons, and course-log files.

For a moment Daala considered taking the battered shuttle itself down to Tol Sivron, the chief scientist of Maw Installation; the effect would probably shock him into paying attention to her for once. But that would be a childish gesture. She let the technicians continue their work and chose instead the Imperial shuttle Edict.

"I can pilot this myself," she said to her bodyguards. "Leave me."

On the flight down she wanted time alone. She knew what Sivron would say on hearing the news, but this time she would not let him get away with it.

The bodyguards dropped back and to the side as Daala stepped up the ramp into the shuttle. She moved with quick, habitual movements, powering up the engines, running through the automated checklist. She mounted the headset nodes to her temple and to her ear, listening to her course vector as she raised the Edict from its pad and arrowed it out through the magnetic s.h.i.+elds that closed off the hangar bay from the vacuum of s.p.a.ce.

Surrounding her was the colorful, deadly sh.e.l.l of gases swirling into the endless gullets of black holes. Below hung Maw Installation itself, a cl.u.s.ter of planetoids crammed at the exact center of the gravitational island. The surfaces of the barren rocks touched in some places, grinding together. Immense bridges and bands held the asteroids in place. Access tubes and transit rails connected the cl.u.s.ter of drifting rocks.

Under Grand Moff Tarkin's direction Imperial constructors had ferried the rocks across s.p.a.ce and through the obstacle course into the Maw. The insides of the asteroids were hollowed out into habitation chambers, laboratory areas, prototype a.s.sembly bays, and meeting halls.

If we present the citizens with a weapon so powerful, so immense as to defy all conceivable attack against it, a weapon invulnerable and invincible in battle, that shall become the symbol for the Empire. Daala had read a draft of the communique Tarkin had sent to the Emperor, urging the creation of superweapons. We may need only a handful of these weapons to subjugate thousands of worlds, each containing millions upon millions of beings. Such a weapon must have force great enough to dispatch an entire system, and the fear it shall inspire will be great enough for you to rule the galaxy unchallenged.

After getting permission for his scheme, Tarkin had used his new authority as Grand Moff to put together this super-secret think-tank installation, where he could isolate the most brilliant scientists and theoreticians, giving them orders to develop new weapons for the Emperor.

Since Tarkin took credit for everything without citing his sources, the Emperor himself did not know of the installation's existence.

The workers and architects who built the place had boarded a return s.h.i.+p, thinking their job finished, but Daala had reprogrammed their navicomputers herself with an incorrect course out of the Maw. Instead of flying to their freedom, they had plunged straight into the mouth of a black hole. No loose ends.

The secret of Maw Installation had been protected. After Tol Sivron and his teams proved the initial concept of the Death Star, Grand Moff Tarkin had taken one of the Installation's top scientists, Bevel Lemelisk, to the Outer Rim to oversee actual construction of the first production-model Death Star.

Tarkin's last words to the Maw scientists had been a challenge: "Good. Now create an even more powerful weapon. Surpa.s.sing the Death Star may seem inconceivable, but we must maintain our superiority, we must maintain a sense of fear among the citizens of the Empire. The Death Star is terrible. Think of something worse. That is your reason for existence."

Tarkin gave them nine years to develop his next-generation ultimate weapon. And now, since Tarkin was dead and no one else knew Maw Installation even existed--Daala could make her owndecisions, plan her own course of action.

Finally reaching the small gravity field of the central administrative asteroid, Daala secured the shuttle Edict in the docking bay. She stood beside her shuttle, breathing deeply of the dusty, exhaust-laden air and already wis.h.i.+ng she could be back on the gleaming and sterile decks of the Gorgon. She would deal with Tol Sivron quickly, then return.

A contingent of stormtroopers a.s.signed to ground duty bustled to a.s.sist her. "Follow me," she said. A show of force would smother any protests from the scientist administrator.

She did not announce her arrival but strode directly through the anterooms, startling the various clerks and administrative a.s.sistants.

The stormtroopers stood at attention. The clerks stared at them, then slowly took their seats again and refrained from making any outbursts.

"Tol Sivron, I need to speak with you," Daala said, entering his office. "I have some important news."

The scientist administrator's office was cluttered, but with all the wrong things. More a bureaucrat than a scientist, Tol Sivron required the theoreticians and designers to build concept models and tiny prototypes of their ideas, which Sivron left on shelves, on furniture, in alcoves. Daala guessed that Sivron played with them as toys during dull moments.

Around the office lay piles of proposals, design studies, regular progress reports, charts of optimized parameters that the scientist administrator required in hardcopy. His clerks studied these reports, then wrote their own reports summarizing them and referencing still further doc.u.ments. Daala didn't believe the administrator read any of them.

"Tol Sivron swiveled his chair to look at her with a bored expression. "News? We haven't had any news in a decade."

Sivron was a Twi'lek, pasty-faced and hairless, with two whip-like head-tails that dangled from his skull. The tentacles fell over his shoulders like two skinless blood-eels sucking the back of his cranium.

Sivron's close-set pig-like eyes and mouthful of jagged teeth heightened Daala's disgust. Twi'leks were generally a disreputable lot, slinking around with smugglers and acting as henchmen for crime lords like Jabba the Hutt. Though Daala rarely questioned Grand Moff Tarkin's decisions, she didn't understand how Tol Sivron had obtained his position here.

"Well, we have news today. We captured three prisoners who blundered into the Maw in a stolen Imperial shuttle. We have put them all through deep questioning, and I see no reason to doubt the veracity of this information, as unpleasant as it may seem."

"So what is this unpleasant information?"

Daala kept her face absolutely rigid. "The Emperor is dead, the Rebels have won. A few warlords tried to put the Empire back together, but they merely caused years of civil war. A new Republic is now the primary government in the galaxy."

Sivron sat up in shock. In a nervous gesture his head-tails coiled behind his neck. "But how could that happen? With our Death Star design-- "

"Grand Moff Tarkin built one Death Star, but the Rebels managed to steal the plans, and somehow they discovered a flaw, a thermal-exhaust port that allowed one small fighter access to the reactor core. The Rebels destroyed the Death Star and killed Tarkin."

"I'll a.s.sign a team to look over the plans so we can correct this flaw!" Sivron said, a matter of pride to him. "At once!"

"How is that going to help anything now?" Daala snapped. "Tarkin had Bevel Lemelisk with him on the outside. After the first Death Star was destroyed, the Emperor himself asked Lemelisk to design a larger model, this time eliminating the known flaw. The second Death Star was still under construction when the Rebels destroyed it."

Sivron scowled, as if trying to figure out how he could solve a problem already several years old. As the years stretched out with no word from outside, Sivron had sent self-destructing drones through the fiery walls of the Maw, carrying coded transmission bursts, updates for Tarkin. Daala had strict orders not to leave Maw Installation, and so they waited. And waited.

Daala's primary mistake had been overestimating the abilities of her mentor, Tarkin. She had graduated from the Imperial military academy on Carida, one of the toughest training grounds for military service in the Empire. She had excelled in every curriculum, defeated many warriors in single combat, used her strategic skills to wipe out entire armies in war games.