Star Wars_ Death Star - Michael Reaves [8]
Nothing.
3
IMPERIAL PRISONER TRANSPORT SHIP GLTB-3181, IN SUBORBITAL TRAJECTORY FOR PROCESSING STATION NINE, DEATH STAR
Teela Kaarz sat in her assigned seat, staring at the blank hull next to her. The shuttle had no viewports in the passenger area, so there wasn’t much to see, save other prisoners. There were maybe three hundred such—males and females of perhaps a dozen different humanoid species, packed into the transport in tight rows. The smell of various body odors was sour and potent. She saw no other Mirialans such as herself. She knew there were some from her home-world down on the hellacious world of Despayre—at least, there were if they were still alive. The prison planet was rife with danger—wild animals, poison plants, violent storms, and extremes of heat and cold due to an erratic orbit. Not a place to which anybody of her species, or most others, would voluntarily go, unless they had a most serious death wish.
Teela didn’t harbor a death wish, but it mattered little now what she wished. Her right to wish, along with just about every other right, had been taken from her. She was no longer a galactic citizen. As of a standard year ago, she was a criminal and a prisoner.
Her “crime” had been simply to back the wrong political candidate in a planetwide election on her world. The Emperor had decided that the man running for office was a traitor, as were his most influential supporters. He had thus ordered a score of well-to-do Mirialans to be rounded up, given a speedy “trial,” and convicted of treason. Given the public outrage over this travesty of justice, it had been deemed politically inexpedient to execute them then and there, and so Teela and her compatriots had been shipped off to die on a world many light-years away—a world so dangerous and inhospitable that it almost seemed to have been designed for the sole purpose of being a prison planet.
It had been quite a shock to be among those so chosen. In the span of a single planetary rotation, she had gone from being an influential and well-to-do professional to a criminal, and had existed in the latter state for a standard year. She had been lucky—and astonished—to have survived that long. She had been an architect, specializing in encapsulated arcology design—not a profession that prepared one for survival on a world where every other animal slinking around considered you prey, or every other plant had thorns from which a tiny scratch could cause agonizing pain before its poison killed you.
Before her fall from grace she had been near the top of her game, a much-sought-after professional who had designed the Ralthhok Encapsulization on Corellia and the Blackstar wheelworld in the Sagar system. She had been fêted and lionized, a guest of monarchs and Senators, heads of industry and starfleet admirals. She had thought nothing of taking an atmo-skimmer halfway around Mirial to dine with friends on different continents for each meal.
Now just having a dinner that didn’t bite back was a luxury.
She had been lucky, but her survival hadn’t been entirely due to luck. Her father had been fond of the outdoors, and as a young girl she had gone camping with him frequently. He had taught her woodcraft, and while the plants and animals on the prison world Despayre were different from those on Mirial—to say the least—the principles of dealing with them were the same. If it had teeth and claws, it was best to avoid it. If it had thorns or serrated edges, it was not a good idea to stray too close. One kept one’s awareness firmly in the here and now and did not indulge in the luxury of daydreams and reverie unless one was safely barricaded behind makeshift walls constructed of cast-off battleplate or jury-rigged fields. And it was a good idea not to