Star Wars_ Death Star - Michael Reaves [104]
His Master would be pleased with both events.
48
SUPERLASER FIRE CONTROL, THETA SECTOR, DEATH STAR
They hadn’t lied. The differences between the simulator and the real thing were negligible. There were more worn spots and scratches in the simulator, put there over months of drills, but the equipment was identical.
Despite all the training, Tenn was still a little nervous. This was the real thing; from here, they could generate a pulse of pure destruction that was stronger than anything ever fired before. Amazing, and not a little intimidating. Not that he expected to ever fire the weapon at full power, certainly not to destroy an entire planet. The whole idea, as he understood it, was that the threat would be more than enough. They’d probably disintegrate an uninhabited moon or two, just to prove they meant business, but the actual targets would be military—Rebel bases, fleets, and the like. For such as those, the superlaser would be a ridiculous amount of overkill, akin to frying a green flea with a turbo-laser.
“You’ve been hands-on in the simulator, you’ve seen the reads, so I’m not breaking any big news here,” his CO said, breaking Tenn’s reverie. “This is a monster gun, but it’s not a repeater. You miss the first shot, you won’t get another one on your shift.”
Tenn nodded. He’d asked about power storage first day on the simulator, and the engineers had fallen all over themselves backing away from that one. But once he’d seen the numbers—they had to keep those honest, even in sims—he’d figured it out pretty quick. The capacitors could hold enough juice to light up a planet, true enough, but once they discharged, they weren’t going to be filling back up real quick. Once you shot the thing, you might as well turn off the lights and go take a long nap, because it wasn’t going to be back up to full power for the better part of a day. True, you could still pump out some pretty nasty low-power beams—and the definition of low here was still bigger than what a Star Destroyer could manage, even letting all the hardware spit at once—but it would be a duster instead of a buster. You could scorch a city or two, boil away a large lake or perhaps even a small sea, but that was about it.
And if you were the guy pulling the trigger and you missed, well, you’d be looking for a new job starting ten seconds after you said, Oops …
Tenn said, “My crew doesn’t miss, Cap. You find a target and if we can see it, we will hit it, my personal guarantee.”
The CO laughed. “You shooters are all alike.”
“Check the records, Cap, check the records. They don’t pay me to miss.”
The CO’s face went serious. “I know that, Chief. But we don’t get to pick the targets. It might get ugly.”
Tenn shrugged. “I’m not a politician or a Moff, sir. I do my job, let them do theirs.”
The CO slapped him on the shoulder. “Good man!” He sounded relieved.
“So, we going to get operational here?”
“Pretty quick, son. Let your crew get familiar with the knobs. It’s all supposed to be the same, but we won’t be shooting blanks. I don’t want anybody to get the jeeblies when it comes time to crank it up for real.”
“I hear that, Cap. My crew won’t let you down.”
“I know they won’t, Chief. That’s why they get the first shot. You retire and have the great-grandkids at your feet, you can tell them that—how you shot the first round from the biggest cannon ever made.”
“Something to look forward to,” Tenn said. “That is, soon as I get a wife and get started on the kids who’ll get that great-grandkid ball rolling.”
Both men laughed.
THE HARD HEART CANTINA, DECK 69, DEATH STAR
“I still find that a pretty bizarre coincidence,” Memah said. “That out of all the cantinas in all the galaxy, the one guard who would know you on sight happens to walk into mine.”
“Stranger things have happened,” Ratua said. “I knew a farmer on a legume co-op on Duro, one of fifty workers there. He was drafted into the navy. So he went through a year of basic training, shipped out, wound up being sent halfway across the galaxy to patrol in the middle of nowhere.