Star Wars_ Death Star - Michael Reaves [123]
“You there!” a man’s voice called loudly.
Uli turned and saw an interrogation tech standing down the hall. “Are you the medic on duty?”
“I’m Dr. Divini, yes.”
“I have a patient for you. This way, quickly.”
Uli followed the tech back up to the prison level. Vader was gone, along with the interrogation droid, but their work was evident. The Princess lay on the cell’s platform in no small amount of distress.
Uli passed his hand over the cell’s reader and said, “EM kit!”
The reader recognized his ID. A slot in the wall opened, and a drawer containing a full emergency medical kit extruded. He grabbed a handheld diagnoster from it and moved to the supine woman. He pressed the sensor against her bare shoulder and watched as the readout’s infocrawl began.
Her eyelids fluttered, then opened. She gave him a faint smile. “Pardon me if I don’t get up, Doctor. I’m feeling a bit tired.”
He gave her an automatic smile back. “Sorry,” he said. “I’ll do what I can to help you.”
“First time I’ve heard that in a while.”
“Just relax and I’ll take care of things.”
“I’ve heard that one before, too.”
Despite the gravity of the situation, Uli grinned. He had to admire the woman. Pumped full of chem and suffering from electrical shocks and who knew what else, and she was still able to joke. If she was an example of the Rebels’ mettle, the Empire wasn’t going to win this war anytime soon.
THE HARD HEART CANTINA, DEATH STAR
Generally, the atmosphere in the place was, at the least, festive. Today, however, the mood was subdued. Ratua sat at the bar watching Memah make drinks, and neither of them was happy. She went through the motions, but he knew her mind was not on her task. They had recently witnessed the death of a planet, an act committed by the huge weapon upon which they lived. Whatever one’s politics, it had been a sobering, nightmarish sight. What kind of monster could order such an atrocity, could cause the destruction of an entire world?
A world that, had Ratua not managed to escape, would have taken him with it, along with the millions of other lives cut short in panic and agony.
They weren’t the only ones who had seen it, and for something of this magnitude, word spread quickly. It was true that the Death Star had been built with the capability to commit such heinous acts, but he’d been given to understand, along with most of the station’s population, that it was never actually going to have to use such destructive power. What had the man in charge—Tarkin, he remembered—said on one of the public comcasts? “Fear would keep the systems in line.” Ratua could understand that—it made a skewed kind of sense. But to actually use the station’s ability; to annihilate an inhabited world, even one populated by the hardest hard cases in the galaxy, not even as a demonstration, but purely to test …
That was something no sane man could grasp.
The war had just taken a very ugly turn, and Ratua feared it might get worse before it got better.
Commander Atour Riten, who was not given to much in the way of socializing, sat alone at a table, drinking a potent liquor distilled from some kind of tropical tuber on Ithor. It had quite a kick, and while he usually enjoyed the fiery taste, that wasn’t the reason he was drinking it now.
How had it come to pass that the Empire was destroying entire worlds? Atour was an intelligent and sensible man; he might be apolitical, but he wasn’t naïve. He was aware of the purpose for which this battle station had been built. The Death Star was a doomsday device, a weapon of such unimaginable horror that its very existence would, supposedly, prevent any insurrection, anywhere. Even the concept of war would become a thing of the past. And even if such ultimate power had to be demonstrated, there were plenty of uninhabited worlds floating out there; blow one of them to flinders and the message is delivered, loud and clear: Your world could be next.
He had been naïve, he realized.