Star Wars_ Death Star - Michael Reaves [18]
Ratua nodded and moved out of the circle. These occasional little demonstrations were another reason he managed to stay alive. Predators preferred helpless victims, and while Ratua wasn’t a fighter—the sight of blood, even if it wasn’t green, made him ill—there were a lot slower folks to prey upon. Why risk your neck if you didn’t have to?
Stihl would go on to talk about position and preemptive strikes and such, but Ratua had heard it all before. He was more interested in finding a sunfruit, and after his moment in the spotlight, that would probably be easier. Everybody loved a star.
Most days, Sergeant Nova Stihl felt as if he was part of the solution and not part of the problem. Being a guard on a prison planet was, at best, not a particularly glamorous duty. In fact, even at its best, you could carbon-freeze it and it would still stink to high orbit. He’d much rather be out in the thick of things, fighting Rebels on a real field of battle, using his hard-earned skills where they’d matter the most. But somebody had to be here, and he was philosophical enough to shrug off the fact that he’d been one of those so assigned. He’d learned a long time ago to make the best of the situation. That was all you could do if you were a trooper in the Imperial Army.
He remembered a quote from the Mrlssi philosopher Jhaveek: “I know myself to be only as I appear to myself.” It was a deceptively complex concept, couched in simple words. Nova smiled slightly as he thought of the probable reaction his fellow soldiers would have if they knew that the holos hidden beneath his bunk were not racy images of Twi’lek dancing girls, but rather dissertations on various schools of metaphysical thought detailed by the galaxy’s finest philosophers. Not that he had anything against Twi’lek dancing girls. But his studies, over the last few years of his post here, had kept him sane—of that he was convinced.
Most of the prisoners were indeed the dregs of the galaxy—bad beings who had broken major laws and who deserved to be put away for life, if not jettisoned from the back of a Star Destroyer along with the rest of the garbage. A few had been collected and shipped here by bad luck or accident, though he knew that most of those weren’t exactly pillars of society, either. Ratua was a good example of this, although Nova owed him big-time for getting him the holos with only an eyebrow raised in reaction. But the vegetable man was an exception. If you checked the data on the majority, you’d probably find that most of them had gotten away with some full-out evil hurt aimed at the rest of whatever world they came from, so you didn’t feel too bad about them being here. There weren’t too many of the truly innocent who wound up on Despayre, though he knew of a few; political prisoners, most of them. Backed the wrong candidate, spoke up at the wrong time, didn’t toe the party line. Nova felt some sympathy for those, though given how the galaxy was these days, probably more sympathy than they deserved. If you’re dumb enough to stand in front of a riot trooper and make an obscene gesture at him, you ought not to be surprised if he shoots you. Troopers were people, they had feelings, and on a bad day dancing in front of one and calling him names could be a very bad idea.
It was the same thing with politics. Anybody with more than vestigial sensory organs could tell which way the Imperial wind was blowing, and there was a war on, even though it hadn’t been officially named as such. Free speech sometimes had to be tempered for the good of society, and what would have been a spirited discussion back when the Republic was in full flower was often now considered treason. That bothered him some. Maybe not as much as it should’ve, but some.
Nova sighed. Despite his fascination with the conundrums posed by some of the galaxy’s foremost scholars, he didn’t consider himself a particularly deep thinker—he just did what