Star Wars_ Young Jedi Knights 05_ Darkest Knight - Kevin J. Anderson [20]
Their engines boomed like distant thunder through the upper atmosphere.
The pilots followed their leader, swooping down, cracking the whip in the sky.
The Y-wings formed convoluted figure eights, flying so close to each other that their hulls were almost kissing. But the new guidance systems and engines did not fail them.
The refurbished Y-wings performed flawlessly, and Jaina felt a warm satisfaction inside. She held her breath, amazed.
If Qorl and the Second Imperium could see this demonstration, she mused, they might think twice before attempting to tackle the New Republic.
From one of the connecting structures that linked the perimeter platform to the central levels of the fabrication facility, a door dilated open.
An excessively tall, spindly droid appeared, its legs like thin support pipes, its long arms coppery. The droid had a squarish head with rounded corners and optical sensors mounted on all sides. It strutted out, moving with spidery grace as it balanced round footpads on the deck.
"Greetings, honored guests," the tall droid said, weaving on its leg hinges as it walked.
"I am the Tour Droid, happy to serve you this morning. I have received instructions to give you the complete tour of our facilities-in fact, the expanded VIP tour. I will speak Basic, unless you prefer to converse in Wookiee, Sullustan, Bothan, or another native language."
Jaina shook her head. "Basic will do fine, thanks."
The Tour Droid turned a pirouette on one long rodlike leg, and Jaina guessed that the droid had been constructed so tall in order to comfortably accommodate speaking with Wookiees.
The droid strode ahead with a mantislike gait. "You've already seen our air show for this morning," it said. "Now for the good stuff."
Since Jaina loved learning about the way things fimctioned, every workstation inside the fabrication facility intrigued her. Interesting smells of lubricants, cryogens, and electrical solder surrounded her. The air was filled with buzzing, humming sounds against a background of white noise from thousands of complicated manufacturing labs.
Jaina looked to the ceiling high above their heads and saw embedded glowpanels that suffused the corridors with a constant white light. At regular intervals, where hallways intersected, they passed trapdoor hatches that provided access to the underside of the factory and emergency evacuation routes down into the lower forest levels.
The Tour Droid led the group into a room full of transparent cylinders that stretched from floor to ceiling, pillars filled with a bubbling fluid and sparkling diamondlike matrices.
"Here you see our crystal-growing tanks," the droid said, raising the volume of its speaker patch to drown out the gurgling noises and whir of air-recirculation fans. "In these carefully modulated tanks we send electrical impulses in specific currents through the nutrient fluid to distribute crystalline molecules in solution. This encourages them to grow into a precise matrix with facet angles and electronic pathways mapped for our galaxy-renowned computer cores. A building is only as strong as its foundation, and these crystalline cores form the critical foundation of our computer architecture."
Jacen rubbed his fingers against a curved tank, tracing the paths of tiny bubbles as they rose toward the ceiling. "This is neat," he said.
"Please don't touch the cylinders," the Tour Droid said. "Faint electrostatic discharges from your body could disturb the crystallization processes inside."
Jacen'pulled his hand away and looked sheepishly at his sister. She didn't bother to chide him for it, though, since she had wanted to do the same thing herself.
The next room was exceedingly cold, with puffs of white steam curling around the door fi-ame. The air smelled of scoured metal and frost.
Inside, robotic arms moved about, sloshing thin metallic wafers through baths of liquid oxygen, pools of ultracold fluid