Showdown At Centerpoint Read online

  to weigh the danger to her against the consequences if she had some bit of

  data without knowing about it-something that could save dozens, or hundreds,

  or millions of lives. If I had her here., and I could do a proper

  debriefing, I'm sure she could tell us all sorts of useful things." "But you

  don't have her here," Luke said. "No, I don't," Kalencia agreed. "Even with

  a standard comlink I could get somewhere. But this business of waiting hours

  and hours for an answer, and then waiting hours and hours for her to hear

  the next question-it makes it impossible to get anywhere. If I had a comlink

  we could scramble so there was at least some chance of keeping it

  private-then we could get somewhere." "That's a lot of ifs," Luke said.

  "Let's leave them all out. What are the odds on your being able to get

  anything more out of Tendra as things stand?" Kalenda sighed and shook her

  head. "Just about zero," she said. "But the stakes are so high." "So high

  you had to try," Luke said. "I understand. But if it can't be done, it can't

  be done." Kalenda smiled humorlessly. "That doesn't sound like a Jedi

  attitude," she said. "Even Jedi know their limits," said Luke. Kalenda

  nodded reluctantly. "Very well," she said. "There are a large number of

  warships parked in orbit of Sacorria. That's al! we're going to get out of

  Source T." "Al! right then," Lando said. "Let's leave it there. We're coming

  up on Centerpoint Station. Figuring it out ought to be enough to keep us

  busy right there." Kalenda looked toward Lando again, and this time her

  glance seemed to meet his. "Thai's an understatement, if ever I heard one,"

  she said. It didn't take Belindi Kalenda long to confirm that idea.

  Centerpoint was so absurdly big, so complex, and so unlike anything in her

  experience, that it was all but impossible to know where to start. Over the

  next day or so the Bakuran fleet moved in on Centerpoint, advancing very

  slowly. If Ossilcge was merely pretending to be cautious, he was doing a

  good job of it. He moved his ships in carefully, pausing repeatedly in his

  approach to scan every bit of the station to the limits of the Bakuran

  detection systems. Not that Kalenda could blame him for caution. Not when

  Centerpoint could have swallowed the Intruder whole through the smallest of

  its sally ports. But even from the closest range Ossilege was willing to

  risk, the scan results weren't good enough to satisfy Kalenda. She sat at a

  scan station in the intruder's intelligence section, sifting through the

  endless, inconclusive images of Centerpoint. It seemed as if the place was

  deserted, but go try to prove a negative. The enemy could have hidden a

  whole fleet of Star Destroyer-type warships in there, and a whole army of

  stormtroopers. If the ships were properly powered down to standby, and if

  the enemy was using the right sort of shielding, there would be no way to

  detect them. What made it even more worrisome was that the enemy had shown

  almost no large ships so far. They had to be hidden somewhere. That was part

  of why Kalenda had wanted better numbers from Source T. If she had gotten

  good, hard data from Source T about the types of ships she had seen at

  Sacorria, she would have some idea of what might be lying in wait inside

  Centerpoint. For that matter, Centerpoint might not even need ships to

  defend itself. She had spotted fifty or sixty points on the exterior of the

  station that might be weapons ports. The station was an incredible amalgam

  of familiar and alien, modern and ancient. There was no way to know how long

  a given object had been there, or who had built it, or if it still operated.

  She ran the images across her scan screen, one after the other. Armored

  portals and hemispherical blisters, long cylindrical objects on what looked

  like aiming platforms, attached to complicated plumbing and wiring. Some of

  them might be massive covered-over turbolascr sites. And those Phalanxes of

  dark circular openings. Some could be missile batteries. And some might be

  refueling stations or docking faeilities for refreshment bars. There was no

  way to tell. They would have to send in a team. The Lady Luck launched

  itself out of the Intruder's landing bay, and lifted off into the blackness

  of the sky and toward Centerpoint. "Why do I always get handed these jobs?"

  Lando asked no one in particular as he guided his ship toward the station.

  "Maybe it has something to do with the way you volunteered," replied Gaeriel

  Captison from the seat behind the copilot's station. Lando didn't feel too

  happy about having her along, but she had insisted. The ex-Prime Minister of

  Bakura had been granted full rights to speak for her government by the

  present Prime Minister, and she had been determined to join the scouting

  party, so that the Bakuran government was properly represented. Much to

  Lando's regret, Threepio was also along for the ride, in case any

  translation was needed. "I had to volunteer," Lando growled. "Once Luke

  volunteered, I knew he was going to need his wing-man." Luke had launched

  first, in his X-wing. He was flying about two kilometers ahead of Lando,

  just close enough for easy visual tracking. Kalenda, in the copilot's seat

  of the Lady Luck, gave Lando an odd look. Of course, all of her looks were

  pretty odd, so maybe it didn't mean much of anything. Or maybe she was

  wondering why a man who had worked so hard to establish a reputation as a

  devil-may-care adventurer, the sort who only looked out for himself, was

  sticking his neck out. Again. "Somehow, I think a Jedi Master would be able

  to take care of himself," she said, "Maybe," Lando said. "And maybe not.

  Let's just say that I owe him one," "Who in the galaxy doesn't?" Gaeriel

  asked. "Actually, Lady Captison," said Kalenda, "you're the one I most wish

  weren't here." "Thanks for that compliment," Lando muttered. Kalenda winced.

  "Sorry, that came out wrong. Whal 1 meant was that Captain Calrissian and

  Master Skywalkcr have military training. They're more likely to be ready

  for-for whatever we find. Not really the job for an ex-Prime Minister."

  "There are other skills in the universe besides knowing how to shoot and fly

  and fight without getting killed," Gaeriel said. "If we get lucky, there

  might be someone reasonable on that station. Someone we can negotiate with.

  If so, having a trained negotiator with plenipotentiary powers on hand might

  be a good thing." "We're going to have to get really lucky for that to

  happen," Lando said. "So far we haven't found many people who are

  particularly reasonable in this star system." Luke Skywalker felt good. He

  was back at the controls of his X-wing, alone, except for R2-D2 riding in

  his socket in the aft of the fighter. Maybe Mon Mothma wanted to push him

  into a position of leadership. Maybe circumstances were pushing him that

  way-or maybe the whole universe was pushing him that way. But right now, at

  this very moment, it was just Luke, his droid, and his X-wing. Nearly all

  pilots loved the solitude, the distance, of flying, and Luke was no

  exception there. Flying was, in and of itself, a pleasure, an escape from

  his worries and cares and duties. Not that the escape would last for
long.

  There was, as always, a job to do. Luke looked toward the massive station.

  Indeed, they were now close enough that he would have been hard-pressed not

  to look at it. It all but filled the X-wing's viewports. Luke could scarcely

  believe his eyes. He had seen all the reports. He knew how big Centerpoint

  was, or at least he had read the numbers-but somehow, numbers did not

  express the hugeness of the object hanging in the sky, Centerpoint Station

  consisted of a huge sphere, a hundred kilometers across, with a massive

  cylinder stuck to each pole of the sphere. The station was roughly three

  hundred kilometers from end to end, and rotated slowly around the axis

  defined by the two polar cylinders. To judge by looking at the entire

  exterior surface, it had been built almost at random over the millennia.

  Boxy things the size of large buildings, pipes and cables and tubes of all

  sizes running in all directions, parabolic antennae and strange patterns of

  conical shapes sprouted everywhere. Luke spotted what seemed to be the

  remains of a spacecraft that had crashed into the exterior hull and then

  been welded in place and made into living quarters of some sort. At least it

  looked that way. It seemed like a rather ad hoc way to add living space-and

  adding living space seemed more than a bit redundant for something the size

  of Ccnterpoint. And yet none of that spoke of the real size of the thing. It

  was, after all, the size of a small moon-by some standards, maybe even the

  size of a largish one. Luke had been on worlds smaller than this station.

  This station was large enough to be a world, large enough to contain all the

  myriad complexities, all the variety, all the mystery of a world. Large

  enough that it would take a long time indeed to get from one end of it to

  the other. Large enough that you could live your whole life there without

  seeing all of it. Thai was Luke's definition of a world a place too large

  for one person to experience in a lifetime. Luke had been to countless

  worlds, and yet he knew he had never seen all there was to see on any of

  them. People tended to label a world, and leave it at that, as if it could

  be all one thing. But that was wrong. Another part of Luke's definition was

  that a world couldn't be all one thing. It was easy to say Coruscant was a

  city world, or that Mon Calamari was a water world, or that Kashyyyk was a

  jungle world, and leave it at that. But there could be infinite variety in

  the forms of a city, or an ocean, or a jungle-and it was rare for a world

  really to be all one thing. The meadow world would have a mountain or two;

  the volcano world would have its impact craters; the bird planet would have

  insects. And Centerpoint Station was big, so big it was difficult to judge

  the scale of the place. Space provided few visual cues available on the

  ground to tell the eye how big things were. Apart from the questions of

  size, the idea of a spinning space station was disconcerting. Spinning was

  something that planets did, and they did it slowly. Centerpoint Station was

  spinning at a slow and stately rate, but you could see it moving. The

  techniques for producing artificial gravity on a station or ship without

  spinning the object on its axis had been old at the founding of the Old

  Republic. Luke had never seen such a thing as a spinning space station. It

  seemed, somehow, not part of the natural order of things. An absurd thought,

  of course. What was natural about starships and space stations? But there

  was something else, something more fundamental than size or spin, bothering

  Luke about the station. The station was old. Old by any human standard, old

  by the standard of virtually any sentient being. So old that no one knew how

  long ago it had been built, or who had built it, or why. And yet, it was not

  truly old at all. Not compared to the ages of planets, or stars, or the

  galaxy. Even ten million years was not so much as an eye blink to the four-

  or five- or six-billion-year-old planets and stars and moons that filled the

  universe. But if what seemed ancient to humans was all but newly minted in

  the eyes of the universe, then surely all the endless generations of

  remembered galactic history were nothing more than an eye blink of time. The

  birth, the rise, the fall of the Old Republic, the emergence and collapse of

  the Empire, the dawn of the New Republic, all shrank down into a single

  brief moment, compared to the immensity of time on a truly galactic scale.

  "-uke ou the- "I'm here, Lando, but your signal is breaking up badly." "-our

  signa caking up t- Luke sighed. Another nuisance. With normal communications

  stili utterly jammed throughout the Corel-lian system, the Bakurans had done

  their best to improvise a laser com system that sent voice signals over

  low-power laser beams. It did not work well, hut it did work. Maybe they

  would have done better to use a version of Lando's radionics system, but it

  was too late to think of that now, "Arloo, see if you can clean that up a

  little." Artoo booped and bleeped, and Luke nodded. "Okay, Lando, try it

  again. How do you read me?" "Much better, -anks, but 1 won't mind when we

  can go ba- to regular com systems." "You and me both." "Well, I'm not

  holding my breath. But never mind that now. Kalcnda spotted something. Look

  at the base of the closest cylinder, -ight where it joins the sphere.

  There's a -inking light -ere. See it?" Luke peered through the viewscreen

  and nodded. "I see it. Hold on a second while I get a magnified view." Luke

  activated the targeting computer and used it to get a lock on the blinking

  light, then slaved his long-range holocam to the targeting system. An image

  popped into being on the fighter's main viewscreen. There was the blinking

  light-next to a large outer airlock door that was opening and shutting, over

  and over again. "If that's not an invitation to come on in, I don't know

  what is," Luke said. "We all agree with that back -is end," Lando's voice

  replied. "Even Golden Boy understood what it meant, and he's incoherent in

  over six million forms of communication." Luke grinned at that. There had

  never been a great deal of love lost between C-3PO and Lando, and the last

  few weeks had not done much to endear the droid to the human, "Glad it's

  unanimous," Luke said. "The question is, do we accept the invitation?"

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Child's Play Anakin Solo stared at the featureless silver wall for a full

  minute, and then thumped twice, hard, at one particular spot on it. Sure

  enough, an access door popped open, revealing another purple-and-green

  control keypad with a five-by-five grid of keys. Anakin frowned at the

  keypad, as if trying to decide his next move. The experimental droid Q9-X2

  watched Anakin carefully-which was really the only prudent way to watch him,

  when one thought about it. Q9 found Anakin's skill with machinery, his

  seemingly instinctive ability to make devices work, even when he had no idea

  what the devices were, to be rcmarkahly disconcerting. It seemed to have

  something to do with this Force business that was so important to this group

  of humans. The theory seemed to be that Anakin's talent in the Force had

/>   somehow given him the ability to see inside machines, to manipulate them

  from the outside, down to the microscopic level. Not that Anakin was

  infallible, by any means. He made mistakes-and sometimes he cjuite

  deliberately made machines do things that no one else would want them to do.

  But one could learn a lot about an unknown device by watching Anakin figure

  it out. Thus, the droid had two purposes in watching the child-first was at

  least to attempt to prevent him from doing too much damage as he wandered

  from one piece of machinery to the other. His other duty was simply to

  record what the chile did when he started fiddling with the hardware he

  found. It was a full-time job-a more than full-time job really. Q9-X2 drew

  most of the duty, thanks to hi; built-in recording systems. But even a droid

  had tc recharge once in a while, and besides. Q9-X2 did no want to spend all

  day. every day preventing this mos peculiar child from pushing the wrong

  button anc melting the planet. If nothing else, the constant strair would be

  too much for his judgment circuits. At least ii might be, and that came to

  much the same thing. Perhaps not the most straightforward thought process,

  jusl there, but it was enough of an argument to get him t break from

  Anakin-watching once in a while, and tha1 was more than good enough. Anakin

  punched a code into the access panel, and ; low chime sounded. Past

  experience had taught Qc that this sound was not a good sign. It seemed to

  be J sort of warning bell. "That will do, Anakin," said Q9. Anakin looked

  around in surprise, as if he hadn' known Q9 was there. "Q9!" Anakin shouted.

  "Oh!" If the droid had been programmed to do so, lit would have let out a

  sigh. Q9 had been with him foi hours now, so it seemed unlikely the child

  could bt surprised by his arrival. On the other manipulator Anakin hadn't

  shown much sign of acting talent. Ql. had heard of the phenomenon known as

  absentmind edness, but he hadn't had any reason to believe i really existed

  until he met Anakin. "I think it would blt; best if you stopped examining

  that machine unti Chewbacca or one of the others can take a look at it.'

  "But I've almost got it working!" Anakin protested "Do you know what it

  does? Do you have any idee what it does?" "N-n-no," Anakin admitted, quite