Star Wars_ Death Star - Michael Reaves [59]
No matter where you went, people were the same. There were honest ones, dishonest ones, generous, greedy, all across the spectrum, and if you were paying attention you could tell which were which and use them to your benefit. If he had learned nothing else living on a prison planet, he had learned to pay attention.
By creating a false identi-tab he became Teh Roxxor, an inspector employed by a civilian contractor who built storage bins for recycling stations, which gave him a reason to be in such places. Not that it seemed necessary; the one time a guard had seen him going boldly into one of his storage spaces, Ratua had just smiled and nodded at him, and the guy had waved back and gone on about his business.
Unbelievable. Give him a year like this, he’d be running this battle station …
27
REC ROOM 17-A, LEVEL 36, DEATH STAR
Lieutenant Vil Dance looked around the interior of the rec room. It was of basic design—tall ceiling, mirrors along one wall, an expanse of padded floor—and otherwise empty save for seven or eight people, all of them humans but one, a tall Rodian with a vibroblade scar across his face. Didn’t see a lot of them in the military—didn’t see many aliens at all, given how generally xenophobic the Empire was—but Vil had heard that some of them were pretty good bounty hunters. Given that, he could understand why the Rodian might be here. It helped explain the face scar as well.
Vil checked his chrono. Class was supposed to start in five minutes.
Most of the others looked to be in pretty good shape, which wasn’t unexpected. Not a lot of do-little types would bother to stir their backsides to come and try something that required any physical effort. He knew plenty of pilots who, outside of the required calisthenics, got most of their exercise from walking to the cooler to get another bottle of ale. Vil kept in pretty fair shape on his own; he wasn’t here so much for the workout, or even the knowledge, as he was for the possibility that he might gain a tiny edge as a pilot. At the Academy, somebody had done some research and found that people who studied this kind of thing had slightly better scores in the flight simulators due to decreased reaction time. He’d never really had a chance to try it before. He was, he knew, already an excellent pilot, but every little bit he could add to that was worth checking into.
The door slid open. A man in gray workout skins walked into the room. He had a rolling, muscular gait and a big smile, and appeared to be in his early thirties. He wasn’t particularly big or impressively muscled, but something about the way he moved, the economy of his motion, said to Vil that this guy knew his stuff.
“I’m Sergeant Nova Stihl,” he said, “and I’d guess that almost everybody here outranks me. But let’s get this straight from the start—I don’t care if you’re a gasser or an admiral, this is my class. What we are talking about is teräs käsi, a martial art designed for close work. Hands, feet, elbows, knives, sticks. I expect I know more about this stuff than any of you, so what I say goes. You can’t live with that, walk now. Unless, of course, somebody can demonstrate they are better than I am, in which case, I’ll take lessons from you.” He paused. “So do we have any fighters here?”
Vil felt he could handle himself reasonably well when the furniture started flying, but there was no way he was going to step up to that kind of comment. It wasn’t the sort of invitation anyone in his right mind would extend unless he was reasonably confident of what the end result would be.
He looked around. A couple of the men looked to be ground-pounders, thick with enough muscle to be dangerous. There was one guy, a little smaller than most, who had a feral gleam in his eyes. Vil’s impression was that he wouldn’t want to have the guy behind him in a dark corridor. And there was the Rodian, but he didn’t know enough about Rodians to judge that one.