Fascist, Thus Inefficient
“As you can see, my young apprentice, your friends have failed,” the Emperor said, triumph in his tone. “Now, witness the firepower of this fully armed and operational battle station!”
Luke looked at him in shock.
“Fire at will, Commander!” the Emperor said.
Fourteen months previously…
“Shipment IL-214-73 arriving,” a petty officer reported.
“Thank goodness,” muttered one of the technicians. “After the delays we’ve been having, we need to get those Khyber crystals into the third main focusing array. It’s been on the critical path for a week.”
He brought up the display, frowning. “All right, I think we can make up a bit of time if we just get them straight to cutting and installation.”
“Don’t we need to run them through the testing process first?” a more junior technician asked. “That’s on the list.”
“I know it’s on the list,” the senior tech replied. “But the list was written when they didn’t expect there’d be rebel attacks hitting our supply lines.”
He waved at the screen. “The testing process means heating each individual crystal up to eighteen hundred, even though we know Khyber can all handle temperatures of up to forty-seven-fifty. The cutting process doesn’t rely on heat tolerance either. Any crystalline flaws will come out in cutting, and we can just junk them. It means cutting takes a bit longer, but by going straight to cutting we can save at several hours on the overall process. And you know how much time we’ve lost already.”
The junior tech looked worried, then shook his head.
“All right,” he replied. “I guess so.”
“You need to learn how things are done in practice,” the senior tech said. “No big deal.”
Eleven months previously...
“I’m quite sure Rothana Heavy Engineering’s XJ-15 hypermatter feed systems will meet your needs better than the alternatives,” the Rothana representative said, as Admiral Jerjerrod examined the datasheet.
He wasn’t so sure. The newer units had better specifications, certainly, but they weren’t proven, and they were also somewhat more expensive.
“I don’t think that’s necessarily the case,” he said, out loud. “While I appreciate Rothana’s position, the Sienar alternative has similar flow rates and more proven applications.”
The Rothana representative nodded, sagely.
“I understand entirely,” he said. “However, I must point out that Rothana has some important additional information to present.”
He held out a credit chip, which Jerjerrod took and inspected.
“Owing to the XJ-15’s protracted development, we are willing to provide our test units at cost,” the representative went on. “That is in addition to having a higher production rate than our competitors and a less committed production output.”
Jerjerrod hesitated, then pocketed the credit chip.
“That all seems in order,” he said. “The XJ-15 it is.”
“Marvellous,” the representative declared.
Nine months previously...
“I’ve examined the records that exist from the first Death Star,” a senior technician said. “The amount of strain that was placed on the flash suppression systems was minimal to nonexistent. Even with the full firing that destroyed Alderaan, surviving records indicate that the flash suppressors had no more than a five percent load placed on them – an amount that can be handled by untreated durasteel.”
The other men and women in the meeting looked at the data on the screen behind their colleague.
“You’re suggesting we forego the duratemp treatment on the flash protection systems?” one of the women asked, cautiously. “I can see the advantages, but the downsides seem significant. I’d even say potentially destructive.”
“It is my position that the cost of including the duratemp treatment is unacceptable,” the tech replied. “It takes time and effort, including supervisory attention which cuts into the available man-hours on the project. We only have so much experienced manpower.”
That drew winces, though none of the humans in the room drew attention to the fact that they were spending a lot of that time in interminable meetings.
“In the following presentation, I’ll discuss my proposal and how it could shave as much as one week off the final completion timetable,” the senior tech continued, flicking to the next screen of his presentation. “This model shows how the flash suppression systems are built around the main weapon…”
Six months previously…
“There simply isn’t an option,” the head of personnel replied. “Our existing system is not providing enough technicians and operators.”
“This was quite sufficient for the first Death Star,” Jerjerrod protested.
“The first Death Star was a project that took decades,” the manager replied, shrugging. “It didn’t come up at first, sir – for that I apologize – but if we are going to redress the problem, we need to act now. There is no alternative.”
Jerjerrod rubbed his temples, thinking about the problem.
The fully functional Death Star was going to need hundreds of thousands of qualified technicians and operators, familiar with the systems of the vast battle station, and so many of the men who knew much about the Death Star at the moment were busy building it.
There hadn’t been many left after the destruction of the first battle station, because most of them had been working on it at the time.
“All right,” he said. “So your proposal is…?”
“We keep the same number of trainers for now, but abbreviate the course,” the manager answered. “Two months – at most. Then we have the new graduates train the next batch for two months, and so on. Exponential growth. At twenty students per instructor and a hundred instructors to start with, we’ll end up with eight hundred thousand in six months.”
That was extremely tempting… they wouldn’t be anything like the equal of what they should be, but they could learn on the job.
“All right,” Jerjerrod said. “Approved – see to it.”
One month previously…
“Next item on the checklist?” Commander Jaskier asked.
“Step one hundred and seven,” Technician Mils replied. “Self test.”
She pressed the self-test button, and the computer system clicked and flickered as it ran through the diagnostics.
Data results and readouts went up on the screen, and Jaskier and all the others in the control station watched the results.
None of them had any comment to make about the numbers. The checklist said to run the self test, so that was what they were doing.
“Step one hundred and eight,” Mils went on. “Sign off on results.”
She did that, as well, and Jaskier nodded.
“Good,” he said. “And I believe we’ve finished that half an hour ahead of schedule! Good work, everyone.”
Now.
The firing commands flashed out through the Death Star’s systems, triggering a cascade of further commands, and the whole massive battle station’s main superlaser woke for the first time.
Fifty XJ-15 hypermatter flow regulators controlled the flow of energy from the power core into the power collectors, and the energy being channelled into the system surged rapidly – rising to one hundred and eighteen percent of nominal, above what would have been anticipated, and greater than the one hundred and two percent that the older, more proven Sienar systems would have generated.
Thousands of high powered beams were generated, controlled and focused through an enormous array of Khyber crystals… a small but measurable fraction of which were cheap industrially grown diamonds instead, added to the shipments by subcontractors eager to stretch out their production from the strip-mined planet of Ilum without running so late on their deliveries that financial penalties were imposed.
None of the technicians who were in a position to spot the problem at this stage were actually capable of doing so. Their necessarily abbreviated training had mostly been on what buttons to push, and nobody had the deeper knowledge of the systems to recognize that the system was in an anomalous state.
Then some of the diamonds shattered under the load, allowing the beams free to damage adjacent systems, and in moments the whole of the energy drawn from the hypermatter core was unleashed.
The flash suppression systems were wholly, and fatally, inadequate.
“Watch yourself, Wedge!” Lando called, his head on a swivel, and banked the Falcon around so his ventral turret gunner could clear off one of the TIEs attacking Red Leader. “We’ve got to-”
Then there was a sudden blinding flash, and Lando did a double-take.
The Death Star’s protective shield was instantly, and dramatically, visible – because the entire inside of it was full of plasma and flame, lighting it up as clearly as Ackbar’s briefing had done back before the operation was launched in the first place. Then something blew up on the surface of the forest moon as the plasma followed the funnel of the shield, and the explosive force was no longer contained but began to drift out into space.
“...the kriff?” Lando asked, eventually. “What just happened?”
“Ow,” Darth Vader said, indistinctly, reaching up to feel his helmet, which had been crushed in by an impact with the ceiling.
The Emperor’s throne room seemed to mostly be intact, though there was an Emperor-shaped hole in the window nearest his throne, and Luke had his hands out to either side as he stood on the wall.
“Father, are you all right?” the younger Skywalker asked.
“What happened?” Vader replied. “I remember the Emperor ordering that the Death Star should fire…”
“I don’t know, it exploded just after he said that,” Luke answered. “It turns out that overconfidence was his weakness… do you have any idea where the nearest spaceship is? Keeping the atmosphere in is tiring me out a bit.”
