Star Wars_ Death Star - Michael Reaves [37]
The hull-plate extruders were only a few hundred kilometers away, hung at a fixed orbital point where the gravitational forces of the prison planet and the raw-material asteroids being towed to the gigantic masticators all balanced. The process was simple enough. An asteroid sufficiently high in nickel-iron content was hauled from the outlying belt to the masticators and fed into a maw; the whirling durasteel teeth chewed the asteroid to tiny bits and mixed them with alloy ores mined and brought up from Despayre, including quadanium. The resulting gravel had water added and was put under high pressure to form a slurry, then fed into pipelines that led to the smelters. These were essentially huge melting pots that refined the mix, burning off impurities. The resulting scarified ore was conveyed to extruders that pressed out the hull plate, rather like food paste from a squeezed tube. There was still a lot of slag left over, but this was just gathered together, pointed at the local star, and given a hard push. Months later, these slag-rafts would fall into the sun and be burned up.
Teela had been on projects before that used deep-space masticators and extruders, of course, such as skyhooks and wheelworlds. She’d never seen as large or as many as there were here, however. The amount of plate being produced was beyond any amount ever used in one place before.
Sector N-One was shaped like a large crescent slice of juicemelon, cut in half midway. It was thirty-one kilometers wide at the base, which would be the equator when the station was finished, narrowing almost to a point only a few dozen meters wide at the other end, and just over ninety-four klicks long. Most of the sectors would be identical in this hemisphere, save for a select few and including, of course, those through which the superlaser would be constructed.
It was hard to visualize the scope of the whole orb. Big didn’t begin to do it justice. The habitable crust alone was two kilometers thick, and included in it the surface city sprawls, armory, hangar bays, command center, technical areas, and living quarters. Below that would be the hyper-drive, reactor core, and secondary power sources—none of which, fortunately, concerned her.
What concerned her at the moment was an old and somewhat cranky Wookiee who was giving her a hard time.
Teela’s command of the Wookiee language was rudimentary. The problem with speaking Shyriiwook wasn’t so much the vocabulary as the pronunciation; a human’s vocal apparatus just couldn’t handle the grunts, groans, and howls necessary to be understood. Like most people who’d ever been around serious construction projects, Teela was used to dealing with the tall and furry bipeds—they seemed to gravitate to such sites, even when they weren’t being enslaved and forced to labor on them. Fortunately, on the big projects most Wookiees understood Basic, even if they couldn’t wrap their tongues around it any more than humans could deal with Wookiee-speak. Given all that, Teela usually managed to communicate well enough with them.
Usually.
The chief on this shift in this subsector was a grizzled old Wook named Hahrynyar, who probably would have joined up voluntarily if he hadn’t been grabbed and enslaved. His coat was gray from muzzle to ankle, he was stubborn and intractable, and he had the annoying habit of forgetting how to understand Basic whenever Teela made an indisputable point. Which was what was happening now.
“Haaarrn,” the Wookiee said. “Aarn whynn roowarrn.”
“I understand that it’s on the plans. What I’m saying is I don’t want you to build it. It doesn’t make any sense to put a heat exhaust port there. The main exhaust port is already done, and if there is a need for additional ones—which I don’t believe there is, at all—there are better places to put them than right next to the main one. We don’t need it in this sector, and certainly not there.” She pointed at the holo schematic of the polar trench.
“Harnkk whoom?”
“On my authority, that