Prompt 14(b) - Death Star

[peppermint_shamrock]

Title: A Mad Venture
Prompt: Death Star
Author: peppermint_shamrock
Rating: G
Characters: Original Character
Pairing: None
Star Wars Media Property: OT, post ANH
Word count: 200
Warnings/Spoilers: None
Summary: An architect is asked to design the second Death Star.
Author Notes: N/A
Beta: None, it's just me

Read on AO3

 

The architect stared down at his orders in disbelief.

Decades of planning, designing, and construction had gone into the creation of the Death Star. As had an almost unimaginable amount of money. All of that, all of the years of labor and resources, had been rendered pointless, a complete waste with its destruction only a very short time after its completion and debut.

A very expensive lesson for the Empire.

Or, he’d thought it had been. Now, they were asking him to rebuild it, even larger than before, with the flaws of the first corrected, in a timeline that was not even a quarter of its predecessor’s.

It was a mad venture. A task not merely impossible, but so ludicrous as to be laughable.

At least, it would be laughable if he could say as much. Unfortunately, giving his honest assessment of the demands was something he had to avoid if he wanted to preserve the continued function of his windpipe.

Which he did, which meant he had to make this impossibility work, one way or another. Money was apparently no object, but even though the Empire was willing to throw endless amounts of it around, money couldn’t buy time.