Star Wars_ Death Star - Michael Reaves [56]
So yes, this battle station was huge. He had known it, intellectually, but the reality of being able to see it with references that gave one an idea of its size was something else entirely. There were only a dozen or so sections of it finished enough for normal habitation, but even those portions were exceedingly large.
Atour mentally shrugged. It didn’t matter how big the thing was, only that the library inside it was worthwhile. And this one certainly was, if what he had been told was true. It wasn’t as large and encompassing as, say, Imperial Center Main, but it was much more complete than many planetary libraries—or at least it would be when he got done with it.
“Big suckah, idn’t it?” The man sitting next to him was some kind of construction worker, a contractor who specialized in magnetic containment vessels, a subject that had come perilously close, during the course of the flight up, to breaking Atour’s belief that nothing was boring, provided the person speaking of it understood it properly. Flux, gauss, m-particle and graviton shifts? Even with his not-inconsiderable general knowledge, those technical details were but mildly interesting, at best.
Still, Atour Riten believed firmly that there was no excuse for discourtesy, and so he nodded. “Indeed.” Unfortunately, this was taken as encouragement by his seatmate to launch into an enthusiastic description of the power requirements, in megajoules, that it took to run such a huge station.
Atour let him babble on while he waited for the docking procedure to begin and considered the vagaries of fate that had led him here, so late in life. That the library was a potentially good one had been an unexpected bonus, because he had not been posted here as any sort of reward. He’d been shunted off into this world-forsaken assignment as a way of getting rid of him, at least in a manner of speaking.
It had been, in a sense, his own fault: Atour Riten was, admittedly, not always circumspect when it came to controversial subjects—politics, government, personal relationships—and there were a fair number of people who hated to suffer his opinions as a result. Fortunately for him, those with enough power to have him killed with a snap of their fingers seldom had pristine pasts. Archivists, as a rule, knew how to dig into data banks and find just about anything, including bodies thought safely long buried. And old and smart archivists knew how to rig dead-man switches so that if they themselves suddenly died, no matter how natural it might seem, the locations of those bodies—many, many bodies—would come to light. Sometimes they literally were bodies; mostly they were bits of damaging, often illegal, information that would cause much consternation in high levels of government should they pop up on the daily holonews.
There were a whole lot of people who did not want that to happen, and some of them were passing smart, smart enough to at least realize that promoting Atour Riten to commander and shuffling him off into the middle of nowhere to run a military library and archive was a lot safer than deleting him. And so it had come to pass.
Truth to tell, he wasn’t that unhappy about the solution they’d found. His glory days of revamping and innovation were behind him. Weeks where he could stay awake and alert for three or four sleep cycles and burn in a work-fever were long past. He could still put together a top-rack system as well as anyone—false modesty aside, better than most—but these years it took longer than once it had. He was much nearer the end of his road than the beginning. And all in all, he had few regrets.
He sighed softly. Long had he been a thorn in the foot of whoever was in power. This latest shift didn’t really matter all that much: Republic, Empire, it was six to one, half a dozen to the other.