Death Star Read Free Page A

of melodrama to the name that he didn’t care for, but no matter. The words, along with the reality of the battle station itself, would amply convey its terrifying purpose.
    The Horuz system had been scavenged for raw material; asteroids and comets were being harvested from both the inner and outer belts and broken into components of oxygen, hydrogen, iron, nickel, and other elements; enormous bulk transports, ore haulers, tankers, and cargo craft had been gutted and reconfigured as orbiting laboratories, factories, and housing, all filled with workers producing fiber optics, electronics, and thousands of other technological instruments and construction materials. After nearly two decades of frustration, of false starts, union disputes, administrative procedure, and political maneuvering, the constructionof the Empire’s doomsday device was at last irrevocably under way.
    Certainly there had been problems. Tarkin had been surprised and annoyed to find that Raith Sienar’s original designs—the very same ones he himself had presented to Palpatine, and which the Emperor had rejected more than ten years earlier—had been the basis for the plans Palpatine had finally given him to implement. Well, perhaps it wasn’t so surprising, given the vagaries of war and politics. Nothing that went into the Empire’s vaults was ever completely lost, although sometimes things were mislaid. And concepts rejected when they came from someone else often looked better when rethought as one’s own. Even the Emperor, it seemed, was not immune to that particular hubris.
    After a prototype design had been built and refined in the heart of the swarm of black holes known as the Maw cluster, Tarkin and Bevel Lemelisk, the head of design, had had the Death Star project moved several times to avoid possible Rebel sabotage attempts, ultimately relocating it to the Horuz system for added security. Of course, on a project this huge, there was little hope that it could be kept secret forever—but knowing that it existed, even knowing where it was being built, was not the same as being able to do anything about it. Admiral Daala, commanding four
Imperial
-class Star Destroyers and countless smaller attack craft, kept constant vigilance from her station within the Maw; any unauthorized ships that entered the region would not leave to carry tales elsewhere.
    Tarkin stared at the incomplete spheroid, floating serenely in the void, eerily backlit by the solar glow reflected from Despayre. It wasn’t even a complete skeleton yet. When done, however, the battle station would be 160 kilometers in diameter. There would be twenty-four zones, twelve in each hemisphere. Every zone, called a sprawl, would have its own food replicators, hangar bays, hydroponics, detention blocks, medical centers, armories, command centers,and every other facility needed to provide service for any mission deemed necessary. In an emergency, auxiliary command centers located in each sprawl provided full weapons and maneuverability control, for a redundancy depth of twice a dozen. When fully operational, the battle station would be the most powerful force in the galaxy, by far.
    And it was Tarkin’s to command.
    As the commander of such a vessel, he would, perforce, be the most powerful man in the galaxy. The thought had certainly occurred to him that not even the Emperor could stand before him, did he choose to challenge Palpatine’s rule. Then again, Tarkin knew the Emperor. If their positions were reversed, he knew that there was no possible way he would sanction anyone having such power—not without some kind of fail-safe. Was a destruct device already built into the station somewhere, with the red button safely installed in Palpatine’s chambers? Was some equivalent of Order 66 known only to certain onboard officers and troops? Or was it something even more devious? Tarkin was certain the Emperor had some kind of insurance against any theoretical rebellion. Not that the Grand