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By Root 608 0

Realizing that his ship would soon be overtaken by the navy gunboat chasing him, Balahteez had jettisoned his illegal cargo. The drug, packed securely in a block of carbonite the size of a luggage trunk, had hurtled down Gall’s gravity well and punched a large hole into the outer hull of a barracks housing a large unit of TIE fighter mechanics. The hole was big enough that thirty of the hapless mechanics had been blown through it and into vacuum by the explosive decompression, and a dozen more had run out of air before the emergency and repair droids could reseal the compartment. Not to mention the other fifty or so who had died immediately from the impact; the carbonite block had been traveling at about two kilometers a second and had left a crater thirty meters in diameter.

It had been an accident, pure and simple, and the odds against the block striking one structure in a few thousand square kilometers of utter emptiness were so large that calculating them would have caused a throbbing headache in a Givin. Needless to say, the Empire hadn’t seen it like that.

Ratua had heard the story enough times that he knew it almost word for word: the smuggler had been tried, convicted, and put on a ship to Despayre, all in less than a standard week’s time. Ratua had heard it said that Pho Ph’eahians were great raconteurs, entertaining enough to keep their audience spellbound. And the Pho’s story had been interesting—the first five or six times Ratua had heard it. But he’d lost count of how many times it had been told to him by now. And the Pho couldn’t be hurried along: Ratua had to sit and smile and pretend to be interested, offering sympathy in the right places, nodding, clucking his tongue and shaking his head in amazement, or the smuggler would get miffed and wouldn’t reveal what he had recently learned. It was rather like performing a well-rehearsed play: if Ratua did his part correctly, he’d be rewarded; flub his lines, and he’d be left joyless.

“Truly, truly, you have been mistreated,” he said. “So unfair.”

Balahteez nodded. “I have, indeed I have.”

“Sad. There is no justice.” Ratua judged that they were at the point where he could now ask, “So, any news?”

“As it happens, my leafy friend, yes. I have it on dependable authority that the EngSat Complex and Dybersyne Engineering Systems have begun production on the largest focusing magnet ever built—the gauss equivalent of a small iron moon’s field, so they say.”

“Well, that’s, uh … interesting,” Ratua said. “Probably the most exciting thing this year at the Interstellar Conference of Dull and Boring Science Twits.”

“My apologies for any inadvertent rudeness, my young sprout, but you know naught about which you jest.” Balahteez glanced up at the ceiling but was clearly intending that his gaze pierce the roof and extend into space.

“Yon construction, upon which so many of our fellows have been conscripted to menial labor, along with thousands and thousands of slaves, droids, and private contractors, not to mention army, navy, and Imperial engineers, is the destination for this colossal apparatus.”

“Yeah—so?”

“Well, let me enlighten you. Beams of coherent particles, such as electrons, positrons, and the like, as well as amplified photon emissions, are often focused with large magnetic rings. Let us postulate that one could, in this fashion, generate a weaponized beam with enough force to blow a large asteroid apart with a single blast.”

“Is there such a thing?”

“In theory, yes, though it requires a power source so large as to be impractical to perambulate, even on a Star Destroyer. But,” Balahteez continued, raising one phalange in emphasis, “aboard something the size of, say, a moon, one could easily install and house such a mechanism.”

“You’re saying the battle station they’re building up there is going to be that large?”

“Oh, my, yes. Easily. But this is not the point. The magnetic ring being built by Dybersyne is much, much larger than would be needed to focus such a beam, even a beam of such astonishing power.”

Ratua frowned. “You’ve lost me.”

The smuggler