Star Wars_ Death Star - Michael Reaves [74]
There weren’t many of those readers left, and they were growing rarer all the time—this Atour knew from experience. But there were some who still knew how to actually turn a page—and for those who were willing to do so, the rewards could be great indeed.
Of course, Atour was no Luddite antiquarian who grumbled and inveighed against the modern world. On the contrary, he’d been praised by experts as a slicer of excellent quality. And it had served him well more than once to have knowledge he wasn’t supposed to. One didn’t normally think of the data storage and information retrieval business as being particularly cutthroat, but it must be remembered that, in Palpatine’s Empire, every business was cutthroat. And if one was the head librarian and archivist, such files were accessible, even without high-level clearance. He hadn’t spent a lifetime among the stacks without learning a trick or two.
Thus it was that Riten found himself looking at a set of plans for this battle station, aka the Death Star. He was no engineer to understand all the schematics, and the documents were fat with technical jargon, but anyone with even a smattering of a general education could see the wonder of the place. It was a monster in size, and in intent, as well as in killing ability—or it would be once they assembled all of the weaponry and got it operational.
Fascinating material …
For more than a few years Atour Riten had, when he discovered such interesting and potentially useful files, copied them and logged them into a personal folder that was virtually impossible to slice. In addition to the best military wards and pyrowalls, the folder was also protected by a random number generated by a quantum computer, said number being forty-seven digits long. Moreover, the program would shift each digit one value lower or higher every six standard hours, and only somebody with the code to access the program running it could keep track of this shift—one had to know the date and hour the program generated the number in order to follow the sequence. It was a slow and unwieldy process, hardly suitable for files that needed to be accessed with any frequency, but workable for him.
Once the files were copied, he needed a safe place to keep them. For some time, ever since he had run the military base’s library there, he had sent the files to Danuta, a planet of no great import or value save for its mildly strategic location. It was easy enough to piggyback the coded information onto an Imperial message comm or even a holocomm—another trick he had learned in his years of accessing military secrets.
Someday, if he lived long enough, Atour intended to write a history of the times that had begun with the Clone Wars and run through the current conflict between the Empire and the Rebel Alliance. Of course he had to wait and see who won before he could get to that part, but he was always on the lookout for research material. The plans for this battle station, upon which the war-in-progress might well hinge, certainly seemed worthy of a place in that research. He’d have to write the account under a pseudonym, of course. No matter which side won, they would want to have words with the author of such a tome, which would hold both sides up to a bright light that would flatter neither. Likely the information would be suppressed, but that didn’t matter. There would always be copies of it floating around, and beings who wished to know its contents. Knowledge was like that—once it was ushered into the light, putting it back into the shadows was difficult, if not impossible.
Atour leaned back in his formchair, which offered a silent adjustment to his contours. Had to give the Empire its due—when they wanted to, they could provide first-class environments. His office was testimony to that.
He gestured at the computer’s cam, moving his fingers in a pattern