Greg, Cord, Bova, Niven, and Commander Sol are sitting at a shiny black round table in a moody conference room not far from the Super Laser Gunnery Station.
"You are probably wondering why I call all of you here today," Greg says to his comrades. "One of you... is the murderer."
Commander Sol sighs. "Enough horseplay. You said you have a scheme to fix the Super Laser."
"I do. To recap, the problem we have is that the computer interfacing between us and the Super Laser is activating alarms that freeze the firing sequence. Then we have to manually close the relays to drain the capacitors into the laser amplifiers, which shoots the laser. Thus screwing up the targeting and we miss the core of the planet we want to explode. Questions?"
Cord raises his hand. "What is an oscillator?"
"It creates the laser beam that gets amplified into the super laser beam."
"Copy that." Cord gives a thumbs up.
"Why are you blaming the computer for the alarms?" Commander Sol asks. "Other things are causing the problems."
"The computer follows strict parameters and can't determine if a variation is a real problem or not. No imagination, I guess."
"Like mid level management," says Bova. "And the gravy temperature in the mess deck."
"Yes. Correct on both."
"Gravy?" Commander Sol looks concerned. "This analysis is based on the temperature of gravy?"
"A little bit," Greg says. "An interaction with a food service droid showed me how our computers react to things out of tolerance. The Super Laser's parts are so large their electrical values are incredibly inconsistent. The output of the generators and storage capacity of the capacitors vary every day, and if one goes one way and the others go the other way, they are way out of tolerance and trigger an alarm."
"I have an observation that might back up this theory," Niven says. "When the Death Star is near a star, and half of the Laser's dish is in light and the other half is in shade, the static temperatures of the amplifiers behind the dish vary by a hundred degrees. That could cause the warm amplifiers to be out of calibration with the cold ones."
"Exactly. I didn't think about the effect from sunlight."
"It sounds reasonable. How do we fix it before we get replaced?" Sol asks. "And when somebody is replaced around here, it's by somebody still alive."
Greg looks at his notes. "In the short term, let's make it look like the Super Laser is working as designed until we figure out the best permanent solution. For now, we should always manually close the relays to fire. That means using the targeting computer to predict when we want to shoot, count back in time to know when to charge the capacitors, and hopefully, it will all line up. "
"Why count back?"
"You don't want to charge the capacitors too early," says Niven. "If we wait too long to shoot they could drain too much energy from the reactor, and the rest of the Death Star could lose power."
"That would piss somebody off," Cord says.
"It sounds like a lot of power to manage without safeguards." Commander Sol leans back. "I want the alarm system to be able to protect the Death Star in case we screw something up."
"I'll try to re-patch the alarm circuits to work independently," says Niven. "We could determine if we need to shut down."
"Let's get back to the Gunnery Station and give it a shake." Greg stands up. "After lunch of course. I hear there's a cool cafe at the very bottom of the Death Star that has gourmet meat pies. It's on me."
They leave the conference room as a group of high ranking officers are approaching to enter.
"Is the room free?" an officer with a bowl hair cut asks. "We have it booked for 11:30."
"We're finished." Commander Sol smiles. "Just a little operations discussion. We're the Super Laser Gunners."
"Ah!" The officers smile and nod, looking impressed. The team tries to look smug but there are not good at that kind of thing. "We hope to find a live target for you soon. I hear you are operational."
Huge nervous smiles. "Oh, yes. Ready to fire."
"Good!" Bowl Cut turns to his cronies. "Let's get seated before Tarkin and Vader arrive. I want to discuss the rebels briefly." The others nod and they march into the room.
"I'd like to get out of here before Tarkin and Vader arrive," Cord says. "I don't want them to know I exist."
"Good idea." Sol walks away and yells over his shoulder. "Troops fall out!"
The four guys spend twenty minutes riding elevators to the bottom of the Death Star. After walking through various hallways they find a wide room with a low ceiling, green walls, and non-matching furniture called the Grass Valley Cafe. They sit down on two opposing couches with a coffee table between them and look at the menu handwritten on the wall. It lists three different meat pies, some veggie snacks, and fancy coffee.
"I never heard of meat in a pie," Cord says. "What does that taste like?"
"It tastes like meat stew in a pie crust," replies Niven. "It's good. Allow me, gents." He walks over to a serving machine in the wall next to the coffee bar and selects four nerf meat pies, then orders four coffees from the droid barista. He returns and hands out the pies.
"Thanks, mate." Greg takes a bite. "I'm hungry after that walk. Why do space ships have so many big hallways? You figure it would be cheaper to connect the rooms together and make the ship smaller." Coffee arrives and he takes a sip. "Wow. That went to my head."
"No, I think we just went into hyperspace," Bova says. "You can barely feel it but I think we are going somewhere."
"Maybe it's a port call." Greg looks around and walks to the oldest man in the cafe. They chat for half a minute and he returns. "These guys work in supply and acquisitions. He says there is no port scheduled, but his roommate recently fulfilled an expedited star chart request from the navigation department. For Alderaan."
"Oh, sweet!" Cord is overjoyed. "Some of my friends on Dantooine were from Alderaan. They said it had clean air, mountains, rivers, lakes, and trees. And pretty girls."
"You sold me." Bova nods. "How do we get down there if it's not a port call?"
"You lie and say you need something in particular." Greg ponders. "What can we come up with they have?"
"Girls."
"It's not going to work." Niven shakes his head. "This is the Death Star, not a Star Destroyer. Port calls aren't our thing."
"At least it will be a nice view." Cord finishes his pie. "I might have another."
After lunch, the team trudge to the Gunnery Station, woozy from a heavy meal but also wired from strong coffee. They man their stations and spend a few minutes going over the current firing procedure to figure out how to make a new one.
"What have we decided?" asks Sol from the corner of the room.
Niven taps his teeth. "I think we only need a few adjustments in our procedure. We just add closing the relays on the fire command, and bypass alarms along the way."
"What are those?" Greg points to three silver T-shaped levers in the control console.
"These are the analog override controls for the Super Laser," Bova says. "The first one sets the output voltage for the thermal generators, the second is the duration of the beam, the third sets the final output power of the combined beam."
Greg moves one lever up and down. "When are we suppose to use them?"
Bova shrugs. "I was told to never use them."
"Intriguing." Greg grabs his helmet. "Let's do some simulated firing tests and move the levers around. And we'll start with the recorded values from our last failure." He puts on his helmet. "How do we reload the saved parameters?"
"I got it." Niven scrolls through his tiny display screen and loads a file into the simulator application. "Got it. Let's shoot."
The team does a handful of simulated shoots while playing with the levers and other switches. Alarms whine intermittently through the tests, but during one scenario they remain silent.
"Whoa!" Sol holds up his hands. "No alarms! What did you do?" Greg looks down at his hand on lever number three.
"Right before we closed the relays, I moved the laser's total output power from one hundred to zero percent."
"Then I shot the laser." Niven checks the displays around him. "No alarm. With the power lever set to zero, the wide ranging variables in the components became inconsequential."
"The computer stopped caring." Greg removes his helmet. "It's as if I asked a catering droid for gravy, and he says he needs to heat it to the proper temperature, and then I cancel the order. He would stop caring about the temperature."
"Then we just take the gravy by closing the breakers," says Bova. "I think I finally understand something."
"You just need it explained to you as gravy." Cord chuckles. "Me too."
"How confident are you guys that it will work on a live shoot?" asks Sol. The four look at each other.
"I say ninety percent," says Niven.
"Ninety five," says Greg.
"No clue," from Cord.
"Ditto," from Bova. "We can try it at the mess hall tonight with the gravy."
Greg looks to Niven. "That's not a bad idea. Dinner is on me."