21

Han Solo Beamed to be drowning in a syrup of nightmares. He could not escape the drugged and painful interrogation, as the hardened and porcelain-beautiful face of Admiral Daala stared at him and pummeled him with questions.

“Just put him over here,” a woman’s trilling voice said. Not Daala.

His body was being dragged like luggage across a floor.

“We have been ordered to stand guard,” said a fuzzed voice filtered through a stormtrooper helmet.

“Stand guard, then, but do it outside my lab. I want to talk to him in peace.” The woman’s voice again.

“For your own protection—” the stormtrooper began. Han felt himself dropped to the floor. His limbs didn’t seem to remember how to bend.

“Protection? What is he going to do—he doesn’t seem to have the energy to sneeze. If you left any unscrambled memories in his head, I want to pick at them without any interference.”

Han felt himself hauled upright again, his arms wrapped behind him. Cold, smooth stone pressed against his back. “Yes, yes,” the woman’s voice said, “chain him to the column. I’m sure I’ll be safe. I promise to stay out of reach of his fangs.”

He heard the marching boots of stormtroopers leaving the room. His mind became active long before his body figured out how to respond. He remembered parts of the interrogation, but not all of it. What had he told Admiral Daala? His heart began pounding harder. Had he divulged any crucial secrets? Did he even know any crucial secrets?

He was fairly certain he had told her the basic events about the fall of the Empire and the rise of the New Republic—but that caused no harm, and it might even lead to benefits. If Daala knew she had no chance, perhaps she would surrender. And if banthas had wings …

His eyes finally opened grudgingly, letting light slam inside. He flinched away from returning vision, but eventually his eyes focused. He found himself in a spacious room, some kind of laboratory or analysis center, not his detention cell on the Gorgon. He heard singing and the sound of flutes.

Han turned his head to see a willowy alien woman standing in front of a device that seemed to be a combination musical keyboard and data-entry pad. He had heard her voice arguing with the stormtrooper. She hummed a complex string of notes as her fingers played on the musical keys; in front of her a rotating blueprint of a three-dimensional triangular shape took form, like a shard of glass capped with a tetrahedron and some sort of energy pod dangling from the lower point. With each tone the woman processed, additional lines appeared on the complicated diagram.

Han worked his tongue around in his mouth and tried to talk. He meant to say, “Who are you?” but his lips and vocal cords would not cooperate. The sounds came out more like “Whaaaaa yuuuurrrr?”

Startled, the female alien fluttered her slender hands around the 3-D geometrical image. Then she pranced over to where Han lay. She wore a badge on her smock, imprinted with her likeness and glittering holograms of the kind used for cipher-locks.

She was an attractive humanoid, tall and slender, with a bluish tint to her skin. Her gossamer hair seemed like strands of pearlescent feathers. When she spoke, her voice was high and reedy. Her eyes were wide and deep blue, carrying an expression of perpetual astonishment.

“I’ve been waiting for you to wake up!” she said. “I have so many questions to ask you. Is it true that you actually set foot on the first Death Star, and you got a look at the second one while it was under construction? Tell me what it was like. Anything you can remember. Every detail would be like a treasure trove to me.”

The babbled questions came at him too quickly to assimilate. What did the Death Star have to do with anything? That was ten years ago!

Instead, Han focused his gaze past her. Pastel gases glowed on the other side of the broad window, swirling around the insatiable mouths of the black holes. He counted all four Star Destroyers in orbital formation high above. That meant he must be somewhere in the little cluster of planetoids in the center of the gravitational island.

And he was alone. Neither Kyp nor Chewbacca had ended up here with him. He hoped they had at least survived Daala’s vicious interrogation. He worked his mouth, trying to form words again. “Who are you?”

The alien woman touched her badge with one of her long-fingered hands. “My name is Qwi Xux. And I know that you are Han Solo. I’ve read a hardcopy of the debriefing you gave Admiral Daala.”

Debriefing? Did she mean the interrogation, the torture chair that made his entire body spasm?

Qwi Xux’s entire demeanor seemed superficial and distracted, as if she were paying only a small amount of attention to details while she kept her mind preoccupied with something else. “Now then, please tell me about the Death Star. I’m very eager to hear what you remember. You’re the first person I can talk to who was actually there.”

Han wondered if the interrogation drugs were still muddling his brain, or if there really was a reason why someone should want him to talk about the defunct Death Star. And why should he tell this Imperial scientist anything anyway? Had he divulged anything important to Daala? What if she took her four Star Destroyers and attacked Coruscant?

“I’ve already been interrogated.” He was pleased to hear his words come out clearly enough to be understood this time.

In one bluish hand Qwi held up a short printout. “I want your real impressions about it,” she continued. “What did it sound like? What did it feel like when you walked down the corridors? Tell me everything you can remember.” She wrung her hands in barely restrained excitement.

“No.”

His response apparently shocked Qwi enough that she took a step backward and let out a startled musical squawk. “You have to! I’m one of the top scientists here.” Her mouth hung partly open in confusion. She began to pace around the pillar where he had been bound, forcing Han to turn his head. The effort nearly made him pass out.

“What good does it do to withhold information?” Qwi asked. “Information is for everyone. We build on the knowledge we have, add to it, and leave a greater legacy for our successors.”

Qwi struck him as being impossibly naive. Han wondered how long she had been sheltered in the middle of the black hole cluster. “Does that mean you share your information with anyone who asks?” he said.

Qwi bobbed her head. “That’s the way Maw Installation works. It is the foundation of all our research.”

Han barely managed a grin of triumph. “All right, then tell me where my friends are. I came in here with a young man and a Wookiee. Share that information with me, and I’ll see what I can remember about the Death Star.”

Qwi’s uneasy reaction told him that she had never before considered anything but clear-cut cases. “I don’t know if I can tell you that,” she said. “You don’t have a need to know.”

Han managed a shrug. “Then I see how much your own code of ethics means to you.”

Qwi glanced toward the door, as if contemplating whether to summon the stormtroopers after all. “It is in my charter here as a researcher that I have access to all the data I need. Why won’t you answer my few simple questions?”

“Why won’t you answer mine? I never signed your charter. I’m under no obligation to you.”

Han waited, fixing his eyes on her as she fidgeted. Finally, Qwi pulled out her datapad and hummed as she keyed in a request.

She looked at him with wide deep-blue eyes that blinked rapidly. Her hair seemed like a glittering waterfall of fine down spilling to her shoulders. When she whistled again, the datapad gave a response.

“Your Wookiee companion has been assigned to a labor detail in the engine-maintenance sector. The physicist formerly in charge of concept development and implementation always swore by Wookiee laborers. He had about a hundred of them taken from Kashyyyk and brought to the Installation when it was formed. We don’t have many left. It’s hard and dangerous work there, you know.”

Han shifted his position, still finding it difficult to move. He had heard rumors that Wookiee slaves had been put to work during the actual construction of the first Death Star. But Qwi spoke of these things with simple frankness.

“What about my other friend?” Han asked.

“Someone named Kyp Durron—is that him? He is still aboard the Gorgon in the detention area, high security. I don’t see much of a report from his debriefing, so apparently he didn’t have much to tell them.”

Han frowned, trying to assess the information, but Qwi became animated again. “All right, I’ve shared the information you wanted. Now tell me about the Death Star!” She stepped closer to him but remained well out of reach.

Han rolled his eyes but saw no reason not to. The Death Star had been destroyed long ago, and the plans were safely locked inside the protected data core of the former Imperial Information Center.

Han told Qwi about the corridors, the noises. He knew the most about the hangar bay, the detention area, and the garbage masher, but she didn’t seem much interested in those details.

“But did you see the core? The propulsion systems?”

“Sorry. I was just running interference while someone else knocked out the tractor-beam generators.” Han pursed his lips. “Why are you so interested in all this anyway?”

She blinked her eyes. “Because I designed most of the Death Star!”

Before she could notice Han’s shocked response, she trotted over to the near wall and worked a few controls that turned a section of the metal plating transparent. Suddenly a dizzying panorama replaced his narrow view of the bright gases. He could see the other clustered rocks that made up Maw Installation.

“In fact, we’ve still got the prototype Death Star right here at the Installation.”

As Qwi spoke, a gigantic wire-frame sphere as large as any of the asteroids rose behind the shortened horizon of the nearest planetoid like a deadly sunrise. The prototype looked like a giant armillary sphere, circular rings connected at the poles and spread out for support. Nested in the framework and superstructure hung the enormous reactor core and the planet-destroying superlaser.

“This is just the functional part,” Qwi said, staring out the window with admiration in her eyes. “The core, the superlaser, and the reactor, without a hyperdrive propulsion system. We didn’t see any need to add the structural support and all the housing decks for troops and administrators.”

Han found his voice again. “Does it work?”

Qwi smiled at him, her eyes sparkling. “Oh yes, it works beautifully!”

Kyp Durron felt like an animal trapped in a cage. He stared at the dull confining walls of the detention cell. Illumination came through slitted grills in the ceiling, too bright and too reddish to be comfortable on his eyes. He sat on his bunk, stared at the wall, and tried not to think.

Leftover pain still throbbed through his body. The interrogator droid had been vicious in finding the pain stimuli in his body, damping endorphins so the slightest scratch seemed like agony. The sharp hypodermic needles felt like spears as they plunged into his flesh; the will-breaking drugs flowed like lava through his veins.

He had begged his memories to divulge some detail the interrogators would find useful, if only to stop the questioning—but Kyp Durron was nobody, a hapless prisoner who had spent most of his life on Kessel. He didn’t know anything to tell the Imperial monsters. In the end they had found him worthless.

Kyp stared at the self-making meal the door dispenser had given to him. By opening the lid of the pack, he spontaneously heated the textured protein main course and chilled the synthetic fruit dessert; after a short time the utensils themselves began to break down and could be eaten as snacks. But Kyp could find no spark of hunger inside him.

His thoughts drifted again to Han Solo’s predicament. Unlike Kyp, Han knew a great deal about the New Republic and had many secrets to divulge. Han’s interrogation would have been far more thorough than his own. And Admiral Daala’s ministrations had been worse than anything Kyp had experienced during his years in the Imperial Correction Facility. At least down in the spice mines he knew how to avoid calling attention to himself.

Since the age of eight, Kyp had lived on Kessel, coping with the rules, the torturous work, the miserable conditions under the old Imperial rule or under the chain of usurpers and slave lords such as Moruth Doole. His parents were dead, his brother Zeth conscripted away to the stormtrooper academy, but Kyp had learned how to lie low, to survive, to endure.

Not until Han Solo’s arrival, though, had he considered escape. Han showed that a small, determined group could break free of a prisoner’s shackles. That they had stumbled into an even worse situation inside the Maw seemed irrelevant.

Piloting the stolen shuttle, Kyp had used his fledgling powers to steer them safely through the black hole cluster. In the years since the withered Vima-Da-Boda had taught him the fundamentals of her Jedi skills, Kyp had made little use of his own affinity for the Force.

He remembered Vima-Da-Boda’s face as shrunken and leprous; and she had a habit of huddling in corners, of pulling shadows around herself as if to hide from immense prying eyes. The fallen Jedi had a guilty conscience that suffocated her like a blanket, but she had taken the time to teach Kyp a few things before the Imperials whisked her away. “You have great potential,” she had told him in one of her last brief lessons.

Kyp had paid little attention to that, until now.

He stared fixedly at his untouched meal. Perhaps if he concentrated, focused his abilities on manipulating something, moving a tiny object, he could turn that skill into an escape.

Escape! The word rang through his heart, conjuring images of hope. He was not certain how he did what he did. Sensing the best route through darkened spice tunnels seemed perfectly natural to him. When flying the shuttle through the fiery gas clouds, he had listened to the mysterious whispering voice directing him. Kyp turned and altered course, spinning and whirling whenever it seemed right.

But now that he needed to make use of the Force, he didn’t know where to begin.

He fixed his gaze on the flimsy foil covering of the instant meal, trying to bend it. He pushed with his mind, picturing the thin metal twisting and crumpling into a ball—but nothing happened. Kyp wondered how much of Vima-Da-Boda’s ramblings had been simple superstition and craziness.

His parents had no special sort of powers. On the Deyer colony of the Anoat system, they had both been outspoken local politicians. Upon hearing of a growing rebellion against the Emperor’s rigid policies, they decided to work from within, speaking out against Palpatine to make him more moderate rather than overthrow him entirely. They resoundingly protested the destruction of Alderaan—but their efforts had only gotten the two of them and their sons Zeth and Kyp arrested.

Kyp remembered that night of terror, when the stormtroopers had melted down the door of the family dwelling even though it was unlocked. The armed soldiers marched into the living quarters, kicked over the fragile fiber-grown furniture. The stormtrooper captain read an arrest order through the filtered speaker in his helmet, accusing Kyp’s parents of treason; then the stormtroopers drew their blasters and stunned the two astonished adults. Kyp’s older brother Zeth had tried to protect them, so the troopers stunned him as well.

Kyp, with tears streaming down his face, could only stare in disbelief at the three crumpled forms as the stormtroopers linked stun-cuffs around his wrists. He still couldn’t imagine how they had considered him a threat, since he had been only eight years old at the time.

Kyp and his parents were taken to Kessel, while fourteen-year-old Zeth was hauled off as a brainwashed recruit to the Imperial military academy in Carida. They had never heard from Zeth again.

After little more than a year Kessel went into enormous internal upheavals, with prison revolts, the Imperials overthrown, slave lords taking over. Kyp’s parents had died during the commotion, executed for being on the wrong side at the wrong moment. Kyp himself had survived by hiding, becoming silent and invisible. He had rotted in the darkness of the tunnels for eight years, and now he had escaped.

Only to be captured again.

Somehow, it seemed, the Imperials were always there to wreck his aspirations. On Deyer the stormtroopers had stolen him away from his home; on Kessel they had thrown him into the spice mines. Now that he and Han had finally escaped, the stormtroopers had clamped around him again.

Kyp’s anger focused into a projectile, and he tried again to use his ability on the meal tray. He pushed, and a drop of sweat fell into his eyes, blurring his vision. Had the tray moved, jerked a little? He saw a small dent in the textured protein patty that formed the main course. Had he done that?

Perhaps anger was the key to focusing his latent energies.

He wished Vima-Da-Boda had spent more time instructing him down in the mines. He concentrated on the walls, on his narrow surroundings. He had to find some way of escaping—Han had already proved that it could be done.

Kyp vowed that if he did manage to get away, he would find someone to teach him how to use these mysterious powers. He never wanted to be left so helpless again.

Looking at the delicate, birdlike Qwi Xux, Han somehow could not imagine her as the developer of the Death Star. But she worked willingly in the Maw Installation, and she had admitted her role in a matter-of-fact way. “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?” he finally said.

“This is what I do. This is what I’m best at.” Qwi nodded her head absently, as if considering her answer. “Here I have a chance to grapple with the greatest mysteries of the cosmos, to solve problems that others have claimed are unsolvable. To see my wild ideas take shape. It’s very thrilling.”

Han still could not understand. “But how did this happen to you? Why are you here?”

“Oh, that!” Qwi said, as if suddenly understanding the question. “My home planet was Omwat, in the Outer Rim. Moff Tarkin took ten young Omwati children from various cities. He placed us in intense forced-education camps, trying to mold us into great designers and problem solvers. I was the best. I was the only one who made it through all the training. I was his prize, and he sent me here as a reward.

“At first I worked with Bevel Lemelisk to bring the Death Star to fruition. When we had the blueprints completed, Tarkin took Bevel away, leaving me to create newer and better concepts.”

“Okay,” Han said, “so I’ll ask you again, why do you do this stuff?”

Qwi looked at him as if he had suddenly grown stupid. “It’s the most interesting thing I can imagine. I have my pick of the challenges, and I’m usually successful. What more could I want?”

Han knew he wasn’t getting through. “How can you enjoy working on things like this? It’s horrible!”

Qwi took another step backward, looking baffled and hurt. “What do you mean by that? It’s fascinating work, if you think about it. One of our concepts was to modify existing molecular furnace devices into autonomous ‘World Devastators’ that could strip raw materials from a planet’s surface, feed it into huge automated onboard factories, and produce useful machines. We’re quite proud of that idea. We transmitted the proposal off to Tarkin shortly after he took Bevel with him.” Her voice trailed off. “I wonder what ever happened to that idea.”

Han blinked in astonishment. The terrifying fleet of World Devastators had attacked Admiral Ackbar’s home planet, laying waste part of the beautiful water world before the juggernauts were destroyed. “The World Devastators have already been built,” Han mumbled, “and put to very efficient use.”

Qwi’s face lit up. “Oh, that’s wonderful!”

“No, it isn’t!” he shouted into her face. She sprang back. “Don’t you know what your inventions are used for? Do you have any idea?”

Qwi backed off, straightening up again defensively. “Yes, of course. The Death Star was to be used to break up dead planets to allow direct mining of the heavy metals trapped in the core. The World Devastators would be autonomous factories combing asteroids or sterile worlds to produce a wide range of items without polluting inhabited planets.”

Han snorted and rolled his eyes. “If you believe that, you’ll believe anything. Listen to their names! Death Star, World Devastator—that doesn’t sound like something for peacetime economic development, does it?”

Qwi scowled and turned her back on it. “Oh, what difference does it make?”

“The Death Star’s first target was the planet Alderaan—my wife’s home world! It murdered billions of innocent people. The World Devastators were turned loose on the inhabited world of Calamari. Hundreds of thousands of people died. Those efficient factories of yours manufactured TIE fighters and other weapons of destruction, nothing else.”

“I don’t believe you.” Her voice did not sound confident.

“I was there! I flew through the rubble of Alderaan, I saw the devastation on Calamari. Didn’t you read about it in my interrogation report? Admiral Daala pressed me over and over again for those details.”

Qwi crossed her slender bluish arms over her chest. “No, that wasn’t in your debriefing summary, which you so melodramatically call an ‘interrogation.’ ”

“Then you didn’t get the whole report,” Han said.

“Nonsense. I’m entitled to all data.” She stared at her feet. “Besides, I only develop the concepts. I make them work. If someone on the outside abuses my inventions, I can’t be held responsible. That’s beyond the scope of what I do.”

Han made a noncommittal sound, simmering with anger. Her words sounded rehearsed, like something that had been drilled into her. She didn’t even seem to think about what she was saying.

Qwi flitted back to her 3-D display panel, tapping on the musical keys and humming to sharpen the long, angular image she had been constructing when Han opened his eyes. “Would you like to see what I’m working on now?” Qwi asked, studiously avoiding any mention of the previous discussion.

“Sure,” Han said, afraid that when she no longer needed to talk to him, Qwi would send him back to his detention cell.

She gestured to the image of the small craft. Four-sided and elongated, it looked like the long shard of a firefacet gem. From the diagram he could see a pilot’s compartment with space enough for six people. Small lasers studded strategic areas; the bottom of the long point carried a strange toroidal transmitting dish.

“Right now we’re working on enhancing the armor,” Qwi said. “Though the craft is not much larger than a single-man fighter, we need it to be completely impervious to attack. By introducing quantum-crystalline armor, where only a few layers of atoms are stacked as densely as physics permits, laminated on top of another thin film just as tough but phase shifted, we can be confident that nothing will harm it. Not so much as a dent.”

Han nodded to the laser emplacements; he couldn’t see well from his vantage chained against a support pillar.

“Then why add the weaponry if the ship is indestructible?” He had visions of a fleet of these things replacing the TIE fighters; a small force of indestructible assault craft could fly into any New Republic fleet and carve the ships up at their leisure.

“This craft is highly maneuverable, and small enough not to be noticed on a systemwide scan, but they still might encounter some resistance. Remember, the Death Star was the size of a small moon. This accomplishes through finesse what the Death Star brought about through brute force.”

With a cold fear inside Han did not want to know the answer to his next question. How could she compare this small ship to the Death Star? But he couldn’t stop himself from asking, “And what is it? What does it do?”

Qwi looked at the image with awe, pride, and fear. “Well, we haven’t actually tested it yet, but the first full-scale model is basically completed. We call this concept the Sun Crusher, tiny but immensely powerful. One small, impervious craft launches a modulated resonance projectile into a star, which triggers a chain reaction in the core, igniting a supernova even in low-mass stars. Straightforward and simple.”

In his horror, Han could think of nothing to say. The Death Star destroyed planets, but the Sun Crusher could destroy whole solar systems.