Star Wars_ Death Star - Michael Reaves [63]
Perhaps she would not have gone so far, so quickly, without his aid, but without any doubt a woman of her skill and talent would not be held back. He would not have been attracted to any woman less capable. If a man could not have an equal as a mate, at least it was good to find one who could run with him.
He looked around his quarters. Was it a bit dusty in here? He’d have the cleaning droids come in and put it in sparkling order straightaway. Daala was coming, after all. Things must be perfect or he would know the reason why.
He smiled. They called him old behind his back, but he had fire left in him. He was sure his subordinates would be surprised if they knew just how hot that fire burned.
29
CIVILIAN LIVING QUARTERS, DELTA SECTOR CONSTRUCTION SITE, DEATH STAR
Teela had come to the conclusion that her boss liked throwing problems at her, just to see her initial reaction. This one was easier than some, harder than others, and overall another chore she could have as well done without.
Stinex looked at her expectantly. “What do you think?”
“I think you must get some kind of perverse pleasure out of bedeviling me.”
He laughed. “The older one gets, the harder it is to find fun things to do. Your solution?”
“Tee-my. Either that, or you-buh.”
Stinex laughed again, louder. Tee-my came from TMAI, which was the acronym for Throw Money At It; you-buh was from UABH—Use A Bigger Hammer. Both were terms that builders and mechanics liked to toss around. A whole lot of problems could be solved if one but had enough credits to buy whatever was needed to fix them. And brute force had its place, too. Neither was workable here and she knew it, but she did like making the Old Man laugh.
“Seriously,” he said.
Teela stood and walked to the holo of the sleep-space proposal. Closed, it looked like nothing so much as a coffin, and she knew that she wasn’t the only one on whom it would leave such an impression. She gestured, and a line of glowing stats and dimensions appeared.
“Come on, boss,” she said. “You know the stats as well as I do. If we try to stuff five hundred civilians who haven’t had the training or the acclimation to phobespace dimensions into things like this, the minders will have them coming out their ears. We overload the med section, the civilians don’t do the work … there is no upside.”
He nodded. “Yet we have to figure out a way, and since I am in charge, I’m making it your task.”
Teela muttered a particularly vile curse word.
The difficulty was that they had X amount of space within which to house Y numbers of living beings. It was well known by builders throughout galactic space that many species would, without sufficient living space, become claustrophobic, often violently so. Humans were particularly susceptible to this, which was a problem, as something like 95 percent of the Death Star’s projected crew were human or genetically very similar. There were ways of training human troops—combinations of hypnosis, drugs, and periods of acclimation—to offset this so that the problem would not be epidemic among the military contingent, but the civilians generally had no such training. Put folks into a sleep space the size of a coffin, and a great number of them would quickly develop psychological problems. Some nonhuman species, such as Gamorreans and Trandoshans, could not be made to enter such places voluntarily no matter what.
You didn’t want someone welding a critical joint at a crucial juncture of an air-supply line to be half crazed from sleep deprivation because her fear of tight places had kept her awake for several cycles.
You’d think that on a station this large, the last problem they’d have would be living space. And yet some idiot who’d created the initial plans years before had thought that a chamber measuring a meter by a meter by two was sufficient room for somebody human-sized if all she or he was going to be doing