Free Death Star by Michael Reaves Page B

free of his bondage, he was going to yet another post—this time on the behemoth called the Death Star.
    Generally he tried not to think about Drongar—even after all this time, reminiscing led to certain memories that were too painful. But he couldn’t help but remember a phrase that the scrappy little Sullustan reporter Den Dhur had often used:
I’ve got a bad feeling about this
.
    Right
, Uli thought.
SLASHTOWN PRISON COLONY, DESPAYRE
    Ratua first heard the rumor from Balahteez, the Pho Ph’eahian spice smuggler. Balahteez had, over the years, developed numerous contacts, and, perhaps not surprisingly, many of them had ended up here. As a result, he always seemed to have good sources of information. The price you had to pay to hear that information was to listen to his sad story of unjust treatment by the heartless Empire.
    Spice smuggling by itself usually wasn’t enough to rate a trip to the prison planet for a life sentence, but Balahteez had been involved in an unfortunate accident while being pursued by an Imperial patrol near the Zharan moon Gall. Realizing that his ship would soon be overtaken by the navy gunboat chasing him, Balahteez had jettisoned his illegal cargo. The drug, packed securely in a block of carbonite the size of a luggage trunk, had hurtled down Gall’sgravity well and punched a large hole into the outer hull of a barracks housing a large unit of TIE fighter mechanics. The hole was big enough that thirty of the hapless mechanics had been blown through it and into vacuum by the explosive decompression, and a dozen more had run out of air before the emergency and repair droids could reseal the compartment. Not to mention the other fifty or so who had died immediately from the impact; the carbonite block had been traveling at about two kilometers a second and had left a crater thirty meters in diameter.
    It had been an accident, pure and simple, and the odds against the block striking one structure in a few thousand square kilometers of utter emptiness were so large that calculating them would have caused a throbbing headache in a Givin. Needless to say, the Empire hadn’t seen it like that.
    Ratua had heard the story enough times that he knew it almost word for word: the smuggler had been tried, convicted, and put on a ship to Despayre, all in less than a standard week’s time. Ratua had heard it said that Pho Ph’eahians were great raconteurs, entertaining enough to keep their audience spellbound. And the Pho’s story had been interesting—the first five or six times Ratua had heard it. But he’d lost count of how many times it had been told to him by now. And the Pho couldn’t be hurried along: Ratua had to sit and smile and pretend to be interested, offering sympathy in the right places, nodding, clucking his tongue and shaking his head in amazement, or the smuggler would get miffed and wouldn’t reveal what he had recently learned. It was rather like performing a well-rehearsed play: if Ratua did his part correctly, he’d be rewarded; flub his lines, and he’d be left joyless.
    “Truly, truly, you have been mistreated,” he said. “So unfair.”
    Balahteez nodded. “I have, indeed I have.”
    “Sad. There is no justice.” Ratua judged that they were at the point where he could now ask, “So, any news?”
    “As it happens, my leafy friend, yes. I have it on dependable authority that the EngSat Complex and Dybersyne Engineering Systems have begun production on the largest focusing magnet ever built—the gauss equivalent of a small iron moon’s field, so they say.”
    “Well, that’s, uh … interesting,” Ratua said. “Probably the most exciting thing this year at the Interstellar Conference of Dull and Boring Science Twits.”
    “My apologies for any inadvertent rudeness, my young sprout, but you know naught about which you jest.” Balahteez glanced up at the ceiling but was clearly intending that his gaze pierce the roof and extend into space.
    “Yon