Star Wars_ Darksaber - Kevin J. Anderson [44]
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.