Star Wars_ Death Star - Michael Reaves [5]
They called it the Death Star.
2
LQ FLAGSHIP HAVELON, IN GEOSYNCHRONOUS ORBIT ABOVE PLANET DESPAYRE
Wilhuff Tarkin—now Grand Moff Tarkin, with that exalted promotion being due to this very project—stood before the deck-to-ceiling transparisteel viewport on the observation deck, looked out at his creation, and found it good.
He was building a world.
True, as worlds went, what was taking form three hundred kilometers from his flagship would not be quite as imposing as Imperial Center, say, or Alderaan. But when finished, it would be larger than two of the satellites of his own planet Eriadu, and it would be home to well over a million beings.
More to the point, it would hold countless worlds under its—his—thrall.
It had been nearly three decades since Raith Sienar had first made Tarkin privy to the concept of the “battle station planetoid,” and it had taken almost a decade to get the idea through the snarls of red tape and bring the Geonosians on board to improve and implement the designs. The project had been known by various code names—such as the Great Weapon—and the original plans had been much improved by the Geonosian leader Poggle the Lesser. But it had taken years for the concept to be stewarded through the tortuous maze of government bureaucracy before construction was finally ordered to begin. There were still flaws in the original plans, but many of them had been addressed during the building of the proof-of-concept prototype in the Maw Installation, and others were being corrected as they were uncovered. The greatest minds in the galaxy had been recruited or drafted to lend their expertise to the building of this ultimate weapon. The brilliant Dr. Ohran Keldor, the mad weapons master Umak Leth, the young but nevertheless laser-sharp Omwati prodigy Qwi Xux, the Twi’lek administrator Tol Sivron—they, and many, many others of like stripe, had been investigated and approved by Tarkin himself. All were as good as the Empire could provide, willing or unwilling.
In addition, he had conscripted a veritable army of enslaved Wookiees, plus tens of thousands of convicts from the steaming jungles of the prison planet Despayre, and a plethora of construction droids, the latter the largest such collection of automata ever assembled. All of them, organic and artificial, now worked around the chrono, with but one goal in mind: the culmination of his vision.
The project code-named Death Star.
Tarkin pursed his lips slightly. There was a taint of melodrama to the name that he didn’t care for, but no matter. The words, along with the reality of the battle station itself, would amply convey its terrifying purpose.
The Horuz system had been scavenged for raw material; asteroids and comets were being harvested from both the inner and outer belts and broken into components of oxygen, hydrogen, iron, nickel, and other elements; enormous bulk transports, ore haulers, tankers, and cargo craft had been gutted and reconfigured as orbiting laboratories, factories, and housing, all filled with workers producing fiber optics, electronics, and thousands of other technological instruments and construction materials. After nearly two decades of frustration, of false starts, union disputes, administrative procedure, and political maneuvering, the construction of the Empire’s doomsday device was at last irrevocably under way.
Certainly there had been problems. Tarkin had been surprised and annoyed to find that Raith Sienar’s original designs—the very same ones he himself had presented to Palpatine, and which the Emperor had rejected more than ten years earlier—had been the basis for the plans Palpatine had finally given him to implement. Well, perhaps it wasn’t so surprising, given the vagaries