Slave Ship (star wars) Read online

  "What little genius that I have," Kuat of Kuat said at last," is inherited from my father and from all my ancestors before him."

  Fenald gave a slight smile; he had heard similar words before." The Technician is too modest."

  "Better that than too vainglorious." Overweening pride would, he knew, be the eventual downfall of his enemies. There had been a certain Falleen prince, with ambitions and ego nearly equal to that of Emperor Palpatine, whose fiery arc across the stars had ended in a fatal crash." But as I was saying-there is more to that hereditary genius than the mere design and crafting of warships. If that were all I had to do," mused Kuat of Kuat," then life would be an unending pleasure. But life for me, as it was for my progenitors, is not so simple."

  "Sir?"

  "Even under the old Republic, there had been political intrigues with which to contend." Kuat rubbed behind the felinx's pointed ears as he gazed out the curved bank of viewscreens." And rival engineering firms that wished to supplant Kuat Drive Yards' position as the preeminent military contractor in the galaxy. It's always been that way." He nodded slowly." But now, under the rule of Emperor Palpatine, the stakes involved in these intricate, unending games has reached a zenith of deadly seriousness. Our every move, on this board that spans the inhabited worlds, could have fatal consequences-not just for one man, but for even the mightiest corporations. I have little regard for my own fate, but the thought of the Emperor grasping all of Kuat Drive Yards in his fist, as has been done with so many other worlds and entities in the galaxy. . ." He fell silent for a moment as that thought evoked the renewal of a cold vow inside him.

  That will never happen, swore Kuat of Kuat." I would rather see Kuat Drive Yards, my heritage and the work of generations of Kuats before me, utterly destroyed and in ruins before letting it fall into the control of the Empire." He glanced over at his security head." That's not an empty promise, either."

  "As I am well aware, Technician." Fenald gave a single nod of acknowledgment." I have personally supervised the necessary arrangements, to ensure another outcome. If that time should ever come, there will be no Kuat Drive Yards for the Emperor to take hold of."

  There was a certain bleak comfort in Fenald's statement. What can be built up, thought Kuat, can be leveled. The same engineering and design skills that went into the construction of the Empire's warships had been turned to the means of annihilating the docks in which they were built. A vision came to Kuat of Kuat, not of the series-programmed, high-thermal explosions that would render all of Kuat Drive Yards into smoldering scrap, but the aftermath, when the twisted durasteel, the remnants of the cranes and immense grappling rigs, would be as cold as the stray atoms in the vacuum surrounding them. The KDY life-support systems, which kept the vacuum and the power-supply reactors' hard radiation at bay, would be shattered as well; no living creatures would be left among the rubble. The apocalypse would come upon them, the workers and servants of Kuat Drive Yards and their hereditary lord as well, in swift fury; they would all die at their stations, the lowliest machinist at a turret lathe's controls, Kuat himself reduced to an ashen corpse behind the torn-apart grid of the view-screens that had looked out upon his domain. That would then be his monument, and the memorial to his ancestors, those who had also borne the title of Kuat of Kuat. Living observers on the nearest worlds would turn their gaze to the nighttime skies and see the shadow of the wreckage passing in front of the stars, writing a black glyph toward the horizon, an emblem of past glories that would need no translation to an alien tongue.

  "I thank you for your faithful service," said Kuat of Kuat." It means a great deal to me."

  "If it eases the Technician's mind, then it's worth it." The Kuat Drive Yards security head stood with his hands clasped behind his back. The glow of true belief, as inherited as his superior's title, was evident in his eyes." But the time of its use will never come; that is what I believe. Our enemies conspire in vain; Kuat Drive Yards will yet endure."

  "Your confidence is also appreciated." Kuat wished he could be as sure. For there was more than just the Emperor and his endless machinations to worry about. The Rebellion had complicated everything, as though the gameboard had been transformed from two dimensions to three. Kuat Drive Yards owed no allegiance to anything but itself, harbored no great ideals other than its own survival and independence, a state within whatever larger state prevailed beyond the corporation. If that other, encompassing state were the old Republic, the Empire that had overthrown it, or whatever vision of universal freedom that the Rebel Alliance wished to bring about-that meant nothing to Kuat of Kuat. Eventually, one side or the other would win out; if it was Emperor Palpatine, or Leia Organa and Luke Skywalker and the forces for which they had become both symbols and leaders, all that Kuat wished to make sure of was that Kuat Drive Yards was on a friendly-or at least neutral-basis with the victors. Whoever won, there would be a need afterward for cruisers and destroyers, and all the other fearsome equipage of interplanetary warfare.

  "The Rebellion. . ." Kuat of Kuat mused aloud once more, voicing the deep currents of his thoughts." Even if the Rebel Alliance is able to establish a new Republic-one with greater justice and harmony among the galaxy's sentient creatures than had prevailed before-certain aspects of human and nonhuman nature still would not change."

  "Such is wisdom, Technician."

  He and his head of security had discussed these things in the past. Mere greed and all the cascading layers of misunderstanding would be enough to dictate the presence of some kind of order-keeping force. And that meant armaments, and the ability to deliver their firepower across vast distances. The much-vaunted Death Star hadn't been a Kuat Drive Yards project

  Kuat of Kuat himself had forbade the organization even making a bid on any of its subsystems-but the reasoning behind it had been understandable.

  "Not just wisdom," said Kuat." But cunning." He repeated one of the lessons he had received from his own father, the Kuat of Kuat before him:" Force and terror accomplish what reason and understanding cannot."

  The Kuat family had been in that business a long time, supplying the instruments of force and terror. His reluctance to get involved with any aspect of the Death Star's construction hadn't been based on a moral objection, but purely practical. Kuat Drive Yards' wealth and power came from building warships, and the Death Star, if it had succeeded in the Imperial admirals' purposes, would have wiped out much of the need for such expensive-and profitable-craft. A stupid creature fouls its own nest; only a suicidal one helps destroy it. With relief, and a measure of vindication, Kuat of Kuat had heard of the Death Star's own destruction at the Battle of Yavin. For the Empire to begin constructing an even bigger Death Star only meant that the admirals hadn't learned their lesson. Speed was not so important as maneuverability; the Death Star's hyperspace capabilities had not been enough to outweigh other elements of military force, such as numerical superiority. No Death Star could be made so powerful and impervious to attack as to outweigh the loss of those factors.

  The security head displayed a thin, knowing smile." Cunning prevails, Technician, where wisdom is powerless."

  "Exactly so." That age-old principle was what kept him from placing the services of Kuat Drive Yards at the Rebel Alliance's disposal. True cunning required cold blood, beyond anything that ran in the veins of any of the galaxy's reptilian species. Kuat had seen ample evidence of that ruthlessness in the Emperor-but what of the Rebels? He had gone over the reports provided by Kuat Drive Yards' own intelligence teams, the compilations of details, facts, rumors, myths, anything that could be found out about the Alliance's leaders, particularly this Luke Skywalker that both the Emperor and his top lieutenant Lord Vader seemed so obsessed with. But Kuat had yet to be able to make a determination about their innermost nature. All that idealism dismayed him; it was precisely that which had brought down the old Republic and allowed Palpatine to come to power. And now, with this talk of Luke Skywalker being a Jedi Knight-what could be more foolish? Kuat's ancest
ors had seen all that bright parade of honor and dedication, of belief in things greater than that which could be grasped by mortal hands, gradually fade away while the Emperor's power had grown, an eclipse swallowing whole the suns it put into shadow. The mysterious Force that had shaped the Jedi beliefs did not seem able to prevail against those such as Vader, who could turn it to darker use, use that consumed one's spirit even while one's grasp upon the galaxy's fate tightened. Better to trust in machines, Kuat mused, and in the powers that can be seen and felt and measured. That simple cunning had ensured the survival of Kuat Drive Yards. So far. . .

  "And yet," murmured Kuat of Kuat." And yet, I would believe. If I could."

  "Technician?"

  He was aware of the other man peering at him, trying to decipher the meaning of the barely audible words." Pay me no heed." The felinx shifted in the cradle of Kuat's arms, its lustrous green eyes shut, its wordless dreams of satiated appetite and endless

  warmth safe for the time being. That was all that mattered, to this small creature at least. It's got things soft, Kuat thought ruefully. If he had only his own desires, his own hopes and fears, to consider, then making the necessary decisions would be considerably easier. But with all of Kuat Drive Yards weighing upon his shoulders, with its fate weighing upon his shoulders, the lives of so many depending upon the moves he made in this game, the alliances he forged between himself and unproven allies, the annihilating hatred of enemies whose powers, revealed or in the shadows, spanned the galaxy. . .

  The sleeping felinx stirred in Kuat's arms, as though sensing some wordless measure of his troubles. He stroked its head, soothing the creature back into the unworried sector of its slumbers. I'll take care of you, Kuat promised it. One way or another. Win or lose.

  Beside him, Fenald turned away for a moment. The security head pressed his fingertips to his ear, listening intently to the buried whisper of his cochlear implant.

  "The report has been decrypted and analyzed, Technician." Fenald dropped his hand from the side of his jaw." Perimeter intelligence stations have confirmation from their sources, with a reliability factor in the high nineties percentile range."

  "Very good." Kuat of Kuat had expected as much. He had issued continuing orders that he wasn't to be bothered with rumors and baseless speculation. At this point, only cold, hard facts-the accurate reporting of the moves made by the other players in the game-would help him formulate his own strategies and gambits." And the details?"

  "The ship known as Slave I, registered to the bounty hunter Boba Fett, was found drifting in orbit above the planet Tatooine-"

  "Found by whom?" That was the important part. Kuat was aware that there had recently been a large Imperial Fleet in orbit above the atmosphere of Tatooine; it had apparently been lying in wait for an expected rescue operation from the Rebel Alliance. The Imperial Fleet was no longer in the sector-if it had been, Kuat's own bombing raid on Tatooine's Dune Sea would have had to have been aborted. There was still a possibility, though, that the Imperial Navy might have left a few reconnaissance ships behind.

  "Slave I was found by a routine security patrol of the Rebel Alliance." The Kuat Drive Yards security head's memory was enhanced by a loop-recall data-organizing module, controlled by the barely noticeable tensing of his facial muscles." For some time now, the Empire has ceded control of that sector to the Alliance, inasmuch as it has little apparent strategic value. That may change, of course, when we deliver the new additions to the Imperial Fleet."

  That was Kuat's own analysis of the situation. Tatooine was at the edge of the galaxy, far from the important and highly developed sectors that formed the core of the Empire. Palpatine could write off the entire zone and it would result in little real loss, either economically or militarily. At least in the short run-but leaving the sector in the hands of the Alliance would certainly give Palpatine's foes a development and staging area for the rest of their campaign against the Empire. Sooner or later, Imperial ships and troops would have to sweep through the sector and reestablish control; the Empire couldn't tolerate this festering-and rapidly expanding-wound in its side.

  More than that, Kuat knew, would dictate the eventual offensive, the deadly tools for which were even now being constructed in the Kuat Drive Yards docks. There was also the Emperor's own personality, if that term could be applied to something that had been so utterly consumed by unchecked egomania and the dark powers that he commanded. In some ways, it could be argued-and Kuat had certainly done so, in late-night conversations with his security head-that Emperor Palpatine, as such, had already ceased to exist. Kuat had heard the stories of Palpatine's dedication to what he termed the dark side of the Force; whether such a mysterious energy field, underlying the very fabric of the universe, actually existed or not was of no concern to an engineer and scientist such as himself. But to the self-schooled psychologist that Kuat was, and the political intriguer that he had been forced to become, it mattered a great deal. The Force might only exist in the minds of the Emperor and a few other die-hard believers in the old religion, such as Darth Vader; that made it real enough to demand Kuat's attention. He had had a few face-to-face encounters with the Emperor and the Dark Lord of the Sith, representing his inherited corporation in the business negotiations upon which Kuat Drive Yards depended. At the last such meeting, Kuat of Kuat had received the unsettling impression that the physical body of the Emperor, that hooded and wrinkled form, was no more than a shell, hollowed from the inside by the Force in which Palpatine had placed so much of his own psychic energy. The small eyes buried in their sockets of crepelike tissue had seemed to Kuat like holes poked through a mask worn by a no-longer human entity, something from which all life had been drained, leaving only ravenous hunger and the desire for control over those creatures that still breathed and moved of their own volition. Something still called itself Emperor Palpatine, and spoke with the same wily, mocking tongue-but the words were those of an entity not only dead but embodying Death itself, a Force that consumed the energies of Life as its food.

  Kuat remembered something else from his last encounter with the Emperor: a deep sense of being offended, not so much as a living creature but as a businessman, the guiding intelligence of one of the galaxy's largest and most powerful corporations. Where are the customers going to come from? The problem with Palpatine's vision of the future, an Empire where his word and his will were the only ones that mattered, was that it was just not a commercially viable environment. What would be the point of Kuat Drive Yards, or any other of the galaxy's great manufacturing concerns, designing and creating products to be sold on one planet or a thousand, if there was no one on those worlds to buy them? More than anyone, Kuat of Kuat was aware of the destructive capability of the warships that his firm was constructing for the Imperial Navy. For the Emperor to succeed in his ambitions, his mania for universal control-and for him to turn back the threat of the Rebel Alliance-all that would mean the destruction of any number of inoffensive and otherwise prosperous worlds. Potential clients, mused Kuat-if not directly for his corporation's products, then for other companies with whom he had already done business. The Emperor had already shown his disregard for maintaining the galaxy's customer base, by sanctioning the late Governor Tarkin's destruction of the planet Alderaan with the massive firepower of the original Death Star. That had personally rankled Kuat; there had been an outstanding contract with the local government on Alderaan for a utility fleet of perimeter observation scouts and orbital customs stations, all to be furnished at a considerable profit by Kuat Drive Yards. The units had just been about ready to leave the KDY construction docks and head off in a delivery flotilla to Alderaan when the word of their destination being reduced to a few charred ashes drifting in navigable space had reached Kuat of Kuat. A near-total write-down for the corporation, salvageable only in part by breaking up the undelivered vessels and recycling some of their components into the next order for Imperial battle cruisers. For a while, he had considered presenting a bill to
Emperor Palpatine, for the losses sustained by Kuat Drive Yards, but had at last decided not to push the issue. Better to leave the red ink on the books, Kuat had figured, than make an enemy out of one's biggest remaining customer. Even with Prince Xizor gone, things were still dangerous enough at Palpatine's court, with all the various levels of intrigue constantly going on, without handing another weapon to the corporation's enemies.

  "So the Rebel Alliance has Boba Fett's ship." Kuat brought himself back to the situation at hand. The deeper concerns over which he mulled would have to wait a while longer for their final resolution." And it has been confirmed that this is in fact Slave 7?"

  It was a good question. Boba Fett's personal history was studded with occasions in which the bounty hunter had passed off a ringer vehicle as his distinctive ship. For someone whose skills consisted largely of handing out other creatures' deaths, Fett had an unusual talent for faking his own demise. Or perhaps that talent was to be expected-Kuat wasn't sure which. Life and death were the same for a bounty hunter; it was all merchandise, with different values attached, depending upon the marketplace. Boba Fett or any of his colleagues-they were all just as happy to deliver a corpse as well as a living hostage, if the same payoff could be gotten for it. With that kind of attitude, it was no wonder that one's own death became just a matter of strategy and negotiation.

  The head of security gave a single nod." Our sources in the Alliance have concluded that there is no deception involved-as least as far as the identity of the intercepted ship is concerned. The subcode numbers on the engines' shield regulator devices have been read out-" He tapped the side of his head, where the cochlear implants were hidden." Those were in the message that was received just now. I forwarded them to our records department; the numbers match up with the original construction manifest for Slave I."

  "That settles the issue, then." Kuat of Kuat had personally supervised the design and assembly of Boba Fett's ship; there had been some custom features that still distinguished Slave I as a state-of-the-art job. An ID profile, the signal that was transmitted from one ship to another with the critical name and affiliation data, could be faked-not easily, but with enough determination and technical expertise, it could be done. Unbeknownst to the Empire or any other Kuat Drive Yards customer, every ship that left the construction docks had a trapdoor access routine hardwired into its onboard computers, for just that purpose. For Boba Fett to have overridden Slave I's regulator subcodes, though, would have meant risking a catastrophic core meltdown; there wouldn't be a ship left floating around to be misidentified. Ergo, this ship was Fett's and no other." Did our sources have any other information about the ship? The contents, perhaps?"