Star Wars_ The Jedi Academy Trilogy 01_ Jedi Search - Kevin J. Anderson [108]
“In fact, we’ve still got the prototype Death Star right here at the Installation.”
As Qwi spoke, a gigantic wire-frame sphere as large as any of the asteroids rose behind the shortened horizon of the nearest planetoid like a deadly sunrise. The prototype looked like a giant armillary sphere, circular rings connected at the poles and spread out for support. Nested in the framework and superstructure hung the enormous reactor core and the planet-destroying superlaser.
“This is just the functional part,” Qwi said, staring out the window with admiration in her eyes. “The core, the superlaser, and the reactor, without a hyperdrive propulsion system. We didn’t see any need to add the structural support and all the housing decks for troops and administrators.”
Han found his voice again. “Does it work?”
Qwi smiled at him, her eyes sparkling. “Oh yes, it works beautifully!”
Kyp Durron felt like an animal trapped in a cage. He stared at the dull confining walls of the detention cell. Illumination came through slitted grills in the ceiling, too bright and too reddish to be comfortable on his eyes. He sat on his bunk, stared at the wall, and tried not to think.
Leftover pain still throbbed through his body. The interrogator droid had been vicious in finding the pain stimuli in his body, damping endorphins so the slightest scratch seemed like agony. The sharp hypodermic needles felt like spears as they plunged into his flesh; the will-breaking drugs flowed like lava through his veins.
He had begged his memories to divulge some detail the interrogators would find useful, if only to stop the questioning—but Kyp Durron was nobody, a hapless prisoner who had spent most of his life on Kessel. He didn’t know anything to tell the Imperial monsters. In the end they had found him worthless.
Kyp stared at the self-making meal the door dispenser had given to him. By opening the lid of the pack, he spontaneously heated the textured protein main course and chilled the synthetic fruit dessert; after a short time the utensils themselves began to break down and could be eaten as snacks. But Kyp could find no spark of hunger inside him.
His thoughts drifted again to Han Solo’s predicament. Unlike Kyp, Han knew a great deal about the New Republic and had many secrets to divulge. Han’s interrogation would have been far more thorough than his own. And Admiral Daala’s ministrations had been worse than anything Kyp had experienced during his years in the Imperial Correction Facility. At least down in the spice mines he knew how to avoid calling attention to himself.
Since the age of eight, Kyp had lived on Kessel, coping with the rules, the torturous work, the miserable conditions under the old Imperial rule or under the chain of usurpers and slave lords such as Moruth Doole. His parents were dead, his brother Zeth conscripted away to the stormtrooper academy, but Kyp had learned how to lie low, to survive, to endure.
Not until Han Solo’s arrival, though, had he considered escape. Han showed that a small, determined group could break free of a prisoner’s shackles. That they had stumbled into an even worse situation inside the Maw seemed irrelevant.
Piloting the stolen shuttle, Kyp had used his fledgling powers to steer them safely through the black hole cluster. In the years since the withered Vima-Da-Boda had taught him the fundamentals of her Jedi skills, Kyp had made little use of his own affinity for the Force.
He remembered Vima-Da-Boda’s face as shrunken and leprous; and she had a habit of huddling in corners, of pulling shadows around herself as if to hide from immense prying eyes. The fallen Jedi had a guilty conscience that suffocated her like a blanket, but she had taken the time to teach Kyp a few things before the Imperials whisked her away. “You have great potential,” she had told him in one of her last brief lessons.
Kyp had paid little attention to that, until now.
He stared fixedly