Star Wars_ Death Star - Michael Reaves [9]
One year. And until this morning, there had been no reason for her to believe she would ever leave Despayre, however much time she might have left to live. But when Imperial Guards landed outside the makeshift shantytown the prisoners had named Dungeontown, the rumor had quickly spread. There was a project in orbit, the word was, and they needed more labor.
“I hear they got twen’y t’ousand Wookiee slaves workin’ this t’ing,” the man sitting to her right said. He was talking to the prisoner on his right, and not Teela, but as close as he was, she’d have to be deaf to miss the conversation. The prisoner to her right was a Bakuran; coarse, and convicted of multiple crimes, according to the bragging he’d been doing to their mutual seatmate: robbery, gun-running, assault, murder. He smelled like slime mold.
“That right?” The prisoner seated one away from Teela was a Brigian, a tall, purple-skinned humanoid whom Teela had seen in Dungeontown a few times. The only Brigian in their town, she had heard. He was soft-spoken when he answered the Bakuran, but she’d also heard that he had been an assassin good enough with his hands that he seldom needed a weapon. There was a story that he had once killed a virevol—a kind of wolf-sized, saber-toothed rat found only on Despayre—with nothing more than a stick. And then cooked and eaten it.
Thieves and murderers. Pleasant company for a woman who had, until she had been arrested for a poor political stance, never gotten so much as a skytraffic ticket. Not that she had made that knowledge public. The more dangerous criminals in Dungeontown thought you were, the greater the chance they would leave you be. When anybody asked her what her crime had been, Teela always just smiled. That tended to make the questioner think twice about whatever his intentions might be toward her.
“Yar,” the Bakuran said. “Half a million droids, plus a load o’ construction bots—extruders, shapers, benders, like that, too. Big sucker they be buildin’, whatever t’ kark it is.”
The purple humanoid shrugged. “Die on the planet, die in space. No matter.”
The transport slowed, then stopped. After a moment there was a clank! that vibrated through the ship.
“Sounds like a ramp just locked on,” the Brigian said. “Looks like wherever we’re going, we’re there.”
The Bakuran turned to look at Teela, giving her a long up-and-down leer, then a toothy grin. “Wouldn’t mind a bunkmate, if space b’ tight,” he said. “You’ll do.”
“Last ‘bunkmate’ I had accidentally died in his sleep one night,” Teela said. She smiled.
The Bakuran blinked. “Yar?”
She didn’t say anything further. She just kept smiling.
The Bakuran’s grin faded.
A guard appeared. “Everybody up and single-file,” he said.
The Brigian was closest to the aisle, the Bakuran behind him, and Teela behind the Bakuran. He kept glancing back at her, quick and nervous looks, as they filed out of the ship and into the sinuous tube of the pressurized ramp.
At the entrance to a huge and cold assembly area, Teela saw there were thousands of other prisoners entering through scores of ramps connected to other transports. She could smell the perspiration and fear from the prisoners, mixed with the stale, metallic tang of recycled air. Guards stationed at scanners monitored each incoming line. As each prisoner passed through a scanner, there sounded a musical tone.
Reading their implants, she guessed. Most of the notes were the same, but now and again a different tone would sound, a full step lower, and the prisoners connected to them would be separated from the others and directed away from the main body toward a stairway to a lower level. Maybe one in fifty, she figured.
Who were they? she wondered. Rejects? Culls? People bound for a one-way trip out the nearest air lock?
When Teela passed the scanner’s arch, the tone emitted was the lower one. She felt her heart race faster, her breath catch, as the guard