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The workers and architects who built the place had boarded a return ship, thinking their job finished, but Daala had reprogrammed their navicomputers herself with an incorrect course out of the Maw. Instead of flying to their freedom, they had plunged straight into the mouth of a black hole. No loose ends.

The secret of Maw Installation had been protected. After Tol Sivron and his teams proved the initial concept of the Death Star, Grand Moff Tarkin had taken one of the Installation’s top scientists, Bevel Lemelisk, to the Outer Rim to oversee actual construction of the first production-model Death Star.

Tarkin’s last words to the Maw scientists had been a challenge: “Good. Now create an even more powerful weapon. Surpassing the Death Star may seem inconceivable, but we must maintain our superiority, we must maintain a sense of fear among the citizens of the Empire. The Death Star is terrible. Think of something worse. That is your reason for existence.”

Tarkin gave them nine years to develop his next-generation ultimate weapon. And now, since Tarkin was dead and no one else knew Maw Installation even existed—Daala could make her own decisions, plan her own course of action.

Finally reaching the small gravity field of the central administrative asteroid, Daala secured the shuttle Edict in the docking bay. She stood beside her shuttle, breathing deeply of the dusty, exhaust-laden air and already wishing she could be back on the gleaming and sterile decks of the Gorgon. She would deal with Tol Sivron quickly, then return.

A contingent of stormtroopers assigned to ground duty bustled to assist her. “Follow me,” she said. A show of force would smother any protests from the scientist administrator.

She did not announce her arrival but strode directly through the anterooms, startling the various clerks and administrative assistants. The stormtroopers stood at attention. The clerks stared at them, then slowly took their seats again and refrained from making any outbursts.

“Tol Sivron, I need to speak with you,” Daala said, entering his office. “I have some important news.”

The scientist administrator’s office was cluttered, but with all the wrong things. More a bureaucrat than a scientist, Tol Sivron required the theoreticians and designers to build concept models and tiny prototypes of their ideas, which Sivron left on shelves, on furniture, in alcoves. Daala guessed that Sivron played with them as toys during dull moments.

Around the office lay piles of proposals, design studies, regular progress reports, charts of optimized parameters that the scientist administrator required in hardcopy. His clerks studied these reports, then wrote their own reports summarizing them and referencing still further documents. Daala didn’t believe the administrator read any of them.

Tol Sivron swiveled his chair to look at her with a bored expression. “News? We haven’t had any news in a decade.”

Sivron was a Twi’lek, pasty-faced and hairless, with two whiplike head-tails that dangled from his skull. The tentacles fell over his shoulders like two skinless blood-eels sucking the back of his cranium. Sivron’s close-set piglike eyes and mouthful of jagged teeth heightened Daala’s disgust. Twi’leks were generally a disreputable lot, slinking around with smugglers and acting as henchmen for crime lords like Jabba the Hutt. Though Daala rarely questioned Grand Moff Tarkin’s decisions, she didn’t understand how Tol Sivron had obtained his position here.

“Well, we have news today. We captured three prisoners who blundered into the Maw in a stolen Imperial shuttle. We have put them all through deep questioning, and I see no reason to doubt the veracity of this information, as unpleasant as it may seem.”

“So what is this unpleasant information?”

Daala kept her face absolutely rigid. “The Emperor is dead, the Rebels have won. A few warlords tried to put the Empire back together, but they merely caused years of civil war. A new Republic is