Star Wars_ Death Star - Michael Reaves [81]
It would have been one thing if Nond Kendo had died in the heat of battle. But to go out on so foolish a thing as a training exercise … it was so pointless.
There were times, in fact, when the whole thing seemed pretty pointless to Vil. And these thoughts, these feelings, disturbed him—almost as much as the kid’s death did.
He’d signed up to be a fighter pilot for the Empire; had pictured himself rocketing through the cosmos, gunning down evildoers in the name of everything right in the galaxy. But so far, the only deaths he’d seen were those of a group of motley escaped convicts who’d stolen a shuttle, and a kid too cocky to live.
It wasn’t exactly how he’d visualized it.
“Time of fight?” he asked.
The computer said, “Two minutes, fourteen seconds.”
Vil’s eyebrows went up at that. It hadn’t seemed that long during the fight. That was a personal best against the sim of Colonel Vindoo Barvel, the only man who’d held his own for even a few breaths against Darth Vader. Vil wondered how he would fare against a sim of Vader. Not that he’d ever find out; he’d like to meet the fool crazy enough to ask the man in black to be scanned and holoed while he pretended to pilot a TIE. Like it as not, Vader would take the man’s head off with that fancy laser sword of his.
Anyway, he’d held his own two seconds longer than he’d ever managed before. Maybe this hand-to-hand stuff Stihl was teaching had some merit, after all. He felt a little better.
“Where do I rank overall?”
“Of current-duty Imperial pilots, you are currently ranked nineteenth in this simulation.”
Hmm. “Out of how many?”
“Two hundred and thirty-four thousand, six hundred and twelve.”
Okay, so that wasn’t too bad. Only eighteen pilots ahead of him, out of nearly a quarter million? Certainly nothing to be ashamed of …
Vil sighed. He leaned back in the formfit. “Set it up again,” he said.
“Beginning simulation in ten seconds. Nine … eight … seven … six …”
Vil took a deep breath, and gripped the controls.
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES, DECK 106, DEATH STAR
Atour had been laboring over a data retrieval problem for nearly an hour when he realized that somebody was standing behind his chair. He frowned and turned, ready to chastise whoever it was for intruding into his office sanctuary.
But the words died unspoken. Standing behind him, close enough to touch, was a droid, one of the new librarian models. He hadn’t had a chance to see one before now, other than in holocatalogs and sales material. It looked something like a standard bipedal protocol droid, save its color was a metallic blue instead of gold, complete with a bluish glow to its photoreceptors. The head was a bit larger also, reflecting its increased memory capacity. “Yes?”
“Good midday, sir. I have been ordered to report to you for assignment.”
What was that accent? High Coruscanti, it sounded like. Very posh and clipped. He’d never heard a droid affect an accent before, and the upper-crust sensibility it conveyed made Atour hide a smile.
“In what capacity?”
“Sir, I am a librarian. I am here to assist you in whichever way you deem felicitous.”
Felicitous. Not a word that one usually heard from the vocabulator of a droid. Or anybody else, for that matter. Sometimes Atour thought he was the last classically educated man in the galaxy.
“Sent by whom?”
“Sector Admiral Poteet, sir.”
“I see. And your name?”
“I am model P-RC-three.”
“No, no, not your model number. Your name.”
“I have no name, sir.” The polished tone sounded somehow disapproving. “I am a droid.”
“Who programmed you?”
“My primary programming was installed by Lord Alferon Choots Bemming, the owner and chief operating officer of Bibliotron Systems.”
Ah. “On Imperial Center.”
“Yes, sir.” Again the subtle subtext, which managed this time to imply, Where else?
Atour had, of course, heard of Lord Alferon, the amateur inventor and heir to the Bemming Shipping fortune. The family owned one of the largest private libraries of hard-copy books in the galaxy, more than seven million volumes, some ranging back to the Golden