Death Star Read Free

recovery vessel to pick up the pieces.”
    “Copy, ST-One-One,” said Captain Exeter. “Good job.”
    “Thank you, sir. Let’s return to base, Alpha Squad.”
    Vil smiled as he waited for his team to form up again. This was the best job in the galaxy, being a fighter pilot. He couldn’t imagine a better one. He was young, not even twenty-five yet, and already a legend among his peers—and among the ladies as well. Life was good.
    As they started for the Destroyer, Vil saw in the distance the frame of the gigantic battle station that was being built in planetary orbit. They were a hundred kilometers away from the structure, and it was still skeletal, its interior construction only just begun, but even so, it looked impossibly huge at this distance. It was to be the size of a small moon when it was finished, dwarfing the largest Star Destroyer.
    Incredible to think about. And if he kept racking up missions like the one just completed, there was a very good chance that he would be assigned as unit commander on board the new station.
    He led his squad back to the equatorial launching bay. Looking at the awe-inspiring base, he felt a surge of pride in the Empire, and a feeling of gratitude at being a part of the Tarkin Doctrine’s glorious mission. There was no official appellation or designation, other than
battle station
, that he knew of for the Grand Moff’s vision, but there was a name for it that everybody he knew, officers and enlisted alike, used.
    They called it the Death Star.

2

LQ FLAGSHIP
HAVELON
, IN GEOSYNCHRONOUS ORBIT ABOVE PLANET DESPAYRE
    W ilhuff Tarkin—now Grand Moff Tarkin, with that exalted promotion being due to this very project—stood before the deck-to-ceiling transparisteel viewport on the observation deck, looked out at his creation, and found it good.
    He was building a world.
    True, as worlds went, what was taking form three hundred kilometers from his flagship would not be quite as imposing as Imperial Center, say, or Alderaan. But when finished, it would be larger than two of the satellites of his own planet Eriadu, and it would be home to well over a million beings.
    More to the point, it would hold countless worlds under its—
his
—thrall.
    It had been nearly three decades since Raith Sienar had first made Tarkin privy to the concept of the “battle station planetoid,” and it had taken almost a decade to get the idea through the snarls of red tape and bring the Geonosians on board to improve and implement the designs. The project had been known by various code names—such as
the Great Weapon
—and the original plans had been much improved by the Geonosian leader Poggle the Lesser. But it had taken years for the concept to be stewarded through the tortuous maze of government bureaucracy before constructionwas finally ordered to begin. There were still flaws in the original plans, but many of them had been addressed during the building of the proof-of-concept prototype in the Maw Installation, and others were being corrected as they were uncovered. The greatest minds in the galaxy had been recruited or drafted to lend their expertise to the building of this ultimate weapon. The brilliant Dr. Ohran Keldor, the mad weapons master Umak Leth, the young but nevertheless laser-sharp Omwati prodigy Qwi Xux, the Twi’lek administrator Tol Sivron—they, and many, many others of like stripe, had been investigated and approved by Tarkin himself. All were as good as the Empire could provide, willing or unwilling.
    In addition, he had conscripted a veritable army of enslaved Wookiees, plus tens of thousands of convicts from the steaming jungles of the prison planet Despayre, and a plethora of construction droids, the latter the largest such collection of automata ever assembled. All of them, organic and artificial, now worked around the chrono, with but one goal in mind: the culmination of his vision.
    The project code-named Death Star.
    Tarkin pursed his lips slightly. There was a taint