Star Wars_ The Jedi Academy Trilogy 01_ Jedi Search - Kevin J. Anderson [96]
Daala wore her bright admiral’s insignia proudly over her left breast: a row of six scarlet rectangles set above a row of blue rectangles. To her knowledge she was the only woman ever to wear such a rank in the Imperial Navy. It had been a special promotion, given directly by Grand Moff Tarkin himself, and it was possible the Emperor did not even know of it. He certainly did not know about the Maw Installation.
Her coppery hair flowed over her shoulders, rippled down her back to below her hips. More than a decade ago Daala had arrived at Maw Installation with her hair cropped short and bristly, part of the humiliation the Imperial military academy inflicted upon female candidates.
After being sealed inside the Maw, though, Daala was placed in charge by direct order from Tarkin. Asinine regulations-for-the-sake-of-regulations meant nothing to her anymore. She refused to cut her hair, as a gesture of her own independence: rank had its privileges. She felt Tarkin would have approved. But Tarkin was dead now.
Turning, she dimmed the lights, then activated the door. Outside, two bodyguards snapped to attention and continued staring ahead. Despite Maw Installation’s isolation, Daala insisted on peak performance, regular drills, war-gaming sessions. She had been trained in the Imperial military mold; though the system had done its best to squash her ambitions, Daala followed its tenets.
Beneath their armor the two guards were well built and attractive; but Daala had not taken a lover since Grand Moff Tarkin. After him fantasizing had been enough.
“Escort me to the shuttle bay,” she said, stepping into the corridor. “I’m going down to the Installation.” She strode off, hearing the bodyguards march behind her, weapons ready. “Inform the duty commander that I have a meeting with Tol Sivron.” One of the bodyguards muttered into his helmet comlink.
She strode down the corridors, pondering the complexity of her ship, the troops, the support personnel. In the Imperial fleet a single Star Destroyer housed thirty-seven thousand crew and ninety-seven hundred troops, but because of the secrecy of the Maw Installation, Tarkin had assigned her only a skeleton crew—people without families, without connections to the outside, some recruited from worlds devastated by the early battles of the Empire.
Even under rigid discipline, though, her crew had been trapped here for eleven years with no furloughs, no R and R other than the meager amusement facilities available on board. Her troops had grown weary of the entertainment libraries—restless, bored, and angry at being placed on standby alert for so long without word from the outside. They were well armed and itching to go out and do something—as was Daala herself.
At her fingertips Daala had the might of sixty turbolaser batteries, sixty ion cannons, and ten tractor-beam projectors, one of which had just been used to capture the battered Imperial shuttle. Inside the hangar bays the Gorgon alone carried six TIE fighter squadrons, two gamma-class assault shuttles, twenty AT-AT walkers, and thirty AT-ST scout walkers.
Three more identical ships, the Manticore, the Basilisk, and the Hydra, orbited Maw Installation, also under Daala’s command. Years ago Moff Tarkin had taken Daala herself to the Kuat Drive Yards to watch her four Star Destroyers under construction.
Tarkin and Daala had flown a small inspection shuttle around the enormous superstructures being assembled in orbit. The two remained silent for the most part, staring at the enormity of the project. Around them in space the tiny lights of workers, transport vessels, rubble smelters, and girder extruders made a hive of activity.
Tarkin had placed a hand on her shoulders, squeezing with a grip made of steel cords. “Daala,” he said, “I am giving you enough power to turn any planet to slag.”
Now, aboard the Star Destroyer Gorgon, Admiral Daala entered a personnel lift that