Star Wars_ Death Star - Michael Reaves [78]
Memah shook her head again.
Rodo drifted away.
Even though she was busy, she caught a glimpse of Green-Eyes sitting over in the corner, sipping an ale. Now, there was an interesting male. A Zelosian, he’d said; not a species she’d ever run into before. She’d warped the HoloNet a little looking for general data on his kind, and found surprisingly little. They seemed to be a strange genetic mixture of plant and animal, unable to crossbreed with any other humanoids—not that she was overly concerned about that, as she saw no urgent need for younglings in her future.
She found him oddly compelling. Yes, he had an easy smile and a relaxed manner, plus he wasn’t hard to look at, but it was more than that. There was a kind of … resonance, if that was the right word. As though they had known each other for a long time, even though they had only met recently.
He pretended to be a moderately successful contractor, but whatever he was, that wasn’t it. She’d had Rodo do a little checking on him as well, and as far as this station was concerned, no such person as Celot Ratua Dil existed. Which meant he was a rogue of some kind, working the angles, and her heart had sunk when she’d learned that.
She shook her head as she filled half a dozen mugs with black Mon Calamari seaweed mash and she pondered, not for the first time, the question: Why couldn’t she find a decent, hardworking, ordinary kind of male who wanted to grow old together? Why was she always attracted to the bad boys, the ones without two honest credits to rub together, the ones with no real prospects?
Memah sighed as she prepared another drink. Ah, well … if it wasn’t for kissing bad boys, she’d never get any kissing done at all. Not that she’d gotten a lot of even that lately.
She put the drinks up. “Order up!” she said.
The server droid rolled up to collect the tray.
Well, she was going to be stuck here for another year-and-some before her contract ran out. Maybe Green-Eyes could help the time go easier.
36
SUPERLASER SIMULATOR, THETA SECTOR, DEATH STAR
CPO Tenn Graneet had been assured that the mock-up of the battery control room for the superlaser was an exact replica of the as-yet-unfinished one, down to the last rivet. Every function that was to be found in the soon-to-be-working ultimate weapon was replicated in the simulator. The gunnery team would spend long hours training at the mock-up’s consoles, programming the complicated firing procedure into their brains, so that when the actual control room became operational, switching to the real thing would be as easy as falling off a bantha.
Which was a good thing, because the superlaser battery wasn’t a simple installation. It was, in fact, far more complex than any gun control in any ship in the Imperial Navy that Tenn had ever encountered. There were banks of lighted switches color-coded for each of the eight tributary sub-beams; monitors double-stacked around the wall that showed every function of the hypermatter reactor and generator; sensor readings from the heart of the reactor to the field amplifiers, the inducer, the beam shaft … taken all together, it made a heavy destroyer’s biggest gun look like a child’s toy. Each component had to be precisely tuned and focused. If the primary beam focusing magnet was off a nanometer, the tributary beams would not coalesce, and there was a good chance of imbalance explosions in the beam shaft if the tributaries weren’t pulsed in at exactly the proper time and in the proper sequence. The techs and engineers tended to wave that possibility off as too small to worry about. One chance in a hundred million, they said. Tenn wasn’t swallowing that. When it came to something this potentially deadly, no odds were long enough. It was true that there were automatic fail-safes, but Tenn—and any chief worth his salt—trusted them just about as far as he could stroll in hard vac. Some of those engineers lived in skyhooks so far up past the clouds that they’d forgotten what the ground looked