Star Wars_ Death Star - Michael Reaves [85]
“Me,” she finished. “Do you think that wise? I should be getting back to my duties at the Maw.”
“They will keep. I need you here more than they do there.”
Daala nodded. “Well. I suppose that if it is my duty, what else is to be done?”
She smiled. He returned it.
“I’ll start immediately,” she said.
Tarkin cleared his throat. “Perhaps not immediately. I seem to recall there were some other matters we intended to discuss.”
“In the privacy of your quarters?”
He smiled again. “Just so.”
THE HARD HEART CANTINA, DECK 69, DEATH STAR
Teela Kaarz wasn’t much of a drinker. Sure, she’d have a little wine with dinner, a social drink now and then, but she was too happy a drunk, too willing to go along with whatever anybody wanted just for the fun of it, and that had gotten her in trouble more than a couple of times. Better to stay sober than to have to deal with the regrets later—she had enough of those as it was.
But here she was, in this cantina, listening to a young woman on the small stage playing a stringed instrument, something classical and quiet, barely audible over the sounds of people drinking, laughing, and talking. She was here because she had won a bet—one of the other architects had doubted her ability to redesign a dining hall to a specification change suddenly required because somebody had mistranslated a measurement system. Whereas the specs said the room’s floor was to be nine hundred square meters, whoever had written the blueprint had somehow used the Trogan meter instead of the Imperial standard meter, and the difference could not be made to fit in the available space, since there was a 25 percent variation in the measures.
Back when she had been in school, such an error would have been unthinkable, but the relationship of academe to real construction was that of night to day. It happened all the time. Just last week an automated supply ship had plowed into a warehouse on Despayre, destroying the ship entirely and half the building it hit, because somebody had set the autopilot’s deceleration speed to centimeters per second instead of meters. If you impact at a hundred times the velocity you’re supposed to, it makes something of a difference.
Vishnare, the architect who had proposed the bet, lifted his cup in salute, as did the other five people from her workgroup, and she raised her own cup in acknowledgment.
A noisy group entered the cantina just then, drowning out whatever toast Vishnare had to offer, along with the music. Teela looked at the new arrivals: half a dozen human males all dressed in pilots’ informals.
She sipped a tiny bit of her drink and put the cup down. The pilots were loud, full of themselves, oozing overconfidence and arrogance. She had dated a former military pilot once who’d left the service and taken a job flying commercial transports on her homeworld, but he hadn’t left the attitude behind. Look at me, it said, I’m so much better than everybody else. I can fly!
That relationship hadn’t lasted long. Being secure in what you did was a good thing, but being obnoxious about it? Not so much.
The pilots took a table, and a droid went over to take their orders.
Teela surreptitiously glanced at her chrono. She had to stay for a while more just to be polite, but since she wasn’t much for small talk, mostly she’d just sit there and smile and nurse her drink until she could make an excuse and take off. She had some journals she wanted to read, and crowded, noisy rooms had never been her favorite spaces. She needed to go to the refresher, though, and while she preferred to do that in her own cube, when you had to go, you had to go.
She smiled, stood, and worked her way toward the ’fresher.
She was on her way back to her table when a large fellow wearing storage workers’ greens decided he would give her an opportunity to enjoy his company. The man lurched to his feet and blocked