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Doxin sat by an interlaboratory communication station and cheered as he saw one of the Rebel corvettes crumble, disintegrating into a cloud of pulverized metal plate and escaping fuel and coolant gases.

“It worked!” Doxin said. “The MCPS worked!” He tapped the receiving jack in his ear, listened, and frowned with his enormous lips. When Doxin wrinkled the brow on his bald head, the ridges rippled all the way up to his crown like rugged-terrain treads.

“Unfortunately, we won’t get a second shot, Director. The MCPS seems to have malfunctioned,” Doxin said. “But I do believe the original success against an actual target has proved the system worthy of additional development.”

“Indeed,” Tol Sivron agreed, looking admiringly at the expanding cloud of debris from the corvette. “We must have a follow-up meeting.”

“The system is presently off-line,” Doxin said.

The second Rebel corvette came in with all weapons blazing, and the asteroid housing the offices and labs of the high-energy concepts incinerated under the barrage.

“It appears to be unquestionably out of commission,” Sivron said.

Doxin was deeply disappointed. “Now we’ll never conduct a post-shot analysis,” he said with a sigh. “It’s going to be hard to compile a full report without actual data.”

A loud whump reverberated through the facility. Tol Sivron peered out into the hall as his division leaders crowded to get a view. White-and-gray smoke curled down the corridors, clogging the ventilation systems.

The screens on the computer monitors inside the conference room went blank. As Sivron stood up to demand an explanation, the lights in all the offices winked out, replaced by a pale-green glow of emergency systems.

The stormtrooper captain rushed up with a clatter of boots on the tiled floor.

“Captain, what’s going on?” Tol Sivron said. “Report.”

“We have just successfully destroyed the main computer core, sir,” he said.

“You did what?” Sivron asked.

The captain continued in his staccato voice. “We need your personal codes to access the backup files, Director. We will irradiate them to erase the classified information.”

“Is that in the emergency procedures?” Tol Sivron looked from right to left for an answer from his division leaders. He picked up the hardcopy of the Emergency Procedures manual. “Captain, which page did you find that on?”

“Sir, we cannot allow our vital data to fall into Rebel hands. The computer backups must be destroyed before the invaders take possession of this facility.”

“I’m not sure we addressed that contingency when we wrote the manual,” Golanda said with a shrug, flipping pages as well.

“Perhaps we’ll have to put that in an addendum?” Yemm suggested.

Standing, Wermyn shuffled through the papers with his one meaty hand. “Director, I see here in Section 5.4, ‘In the Event of Rebel Invasion,’ Paragraph (C). If such an invasion appears likely to succeed in gaining possession of the Installation, I am to lead my team in a mission to the power-reactor asteroid and destroy the cooling towers so that the system will go supercritical and wipe out both this base and the invaders as well.”

“Good, good!” Tol Sivron said, finding the right page and verifying the words for himself. “Get to it.”

Wermyn stood up. His swarthy greenish-purple skin flushed darker. “All these procedures have been approved, Director, but I don’t quite follow our next step. How is my team going to get to safety? In fact, how are any of us going to get to safety once I’ve set up the chain reaction?”

A stormtrooper’s voice cut through the alarm chatter on the intercom. “Rebel troops have entered the base! Rebel troops have entered the—” The words ended in a squawk of dead static.

“Sound the evacuation order,” Sivron said, beleaguered. He stared out the sweeping viewing window with his close-set, beady eyes. Rebel battleships pummeled the Installation. Then a glinting metal framework rose into view, an armillary sphere the size of a small moon.

“Just go and take care of the reactors, Wermyn,” Tol Sivron said. “We’ll fall back and evacuate to the Death Star prototype.