Star Wars_ The Jedi Academy Trilogy 01_ Jedi Search - Kevin J. Anderson [97]
Only months after the completion of Maw Installation, Daala had noticed a malaise creeping through the personnel. Part of it was because of her, she was sure; commanded by the only female flag officer, assigned to baby-sit a bunch of scientists in the most protected spot in the galaxy, the troops had grown lax. But a few graphic executions and continual threats kept Daala’s crew constantly on edge, honing their skills and making it inconceivable for them to shirk their duties.
That tactic had been one of Tarkin’s prime lessons. Command through the fear of force rather than force itself. Daala had 180,000 people at her disposal, not counting the weapons designers in Maw Installation itself. She did not want to waste them.
She glanced up and down the hangar, her molten-metal hair trailing behind her. Inside an electromagnetic cage that shielded the entire vessel, technicians scoured the battered Imperial shuttle Endor that had been brought in by the new captives. Endor—what kind of name was that? She had never heard the term before. The technicians would be checking for service markings, locator beacons, and course-log files.
For a moment Daala considered taking the battered shuttle itself down to Tol Sivron, the chief scientist of Maw Installation; the effect would probably shock him into paying attention to her for once. But that would be a childish gesture. She let the technicians continue their work and chose instead the Imperial shuttle Edict.
“I can pilot this myself,” she said to her bodyguards. “Leave me.” On the flight down she wanted time alone. She knew what Sivron would say on hearing the news, but this time she would not let him get away with it.
The bodyguards dropped back and to the side as Daala stepped up the ramp into the shuttle. She moved with quick, habitual movements, powering up the engines, running through the automated checklist. She mounted the headset nodes to her temple and to her ear, listening to her course vector as she raised the Edict from its pad and arrowed it out through the magnetic shields that closed off the hangar bay from the vacuum of space.
Surrounding her was the colorful, deadly shell of gases swirling into the endless gullets of black holes. Below hung Maw Installation itself, a cluster of planetoids crammed at the exact center of the gravitational island. The surfaces of the barren rocks touched in some places, grinding together. Immense bridges and bands held the asteroids in place. Access tubes and transit rails connected the cluster of drifting rocks.
Under Grand Moff Tarkin’s direction Imperial constructors had ferried the rocks across space and through the obstacle course into the Maw. The insides of the asteroids were hollowed out into habitation chambers, laboratory areas, prototype assembly bays, and meeting halls.
If we present the citizens with a weapon so powerful, so immense as to defy all conceivable attack against it, a weapon invulnerable and invincible in battle, that shall become the symbol for the Empire. Daala had read a draft of the communiqué Tarkin had sent to the Emperor, urging the creation of superweapons. We may need only a handful of these weapons to subjugate thousands of worlds, each containing millions upon millions of beings. Such a weapon must have force great enough to dispatch an entire system, and the fear it shall inspire will be great enough for you to rule the galaxy unchallenged.
After getting permission for his scheme, Tarkin had used his new authority as Grand Moff to put together this supersecret think-tank installation, where he could isolate the most brilliant scientists and theoreticians, giving them orders to develop new weapons for the Emperor. Since Tarkin took credit for