Showdown at Centerpoint (15 page)

Sonsen shrugged, a bit theatrically. “I can tell you that one set is called the South Conical Mountains, and the other is called the North Conicals. I’ll let you figure out which is which. People try to climb them once in a while, but even in the near zero-gee zone at the spin axis, it isn’t easy. Anything else of vital interest you need to know? Like the names of the boats in the bottom of the lake bed?”

“No,” said Lando, his mind clearly somewhere else. “I think that’s all I need to know.”

“Great,” said Sonsen. “Sometime I’ll have to spend five minutes learning everything important about
your
homeworld.”

“Hmmm? What? No, no. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it that way. I mean, I think I know enough to understand what’s going on.”

“After five minutes? No offense, but our ITA people have been trying for
just
a bit longer, and we haven’t worked it out yet.”

“ITA?” Luke asked.

“I believe in this context, the reference is to Intelligence
and Technical Assessment,” Threepio said in a helpful tone of voice.

“I’m sure you’ve got good people,” Lando said, “and I didn’t mean to sound rude or condescending. It’s just a question of viewpoint. You’ve been seeing this thing from the inside out your whole life. I happen to be in a position to see it from the outside and—”

Just at that moment, Artoo let off a low, unsettled-sounding whistle. His view lens swiveled up to take in an overhead view, and then he turned to Threepio and let off a series of beeps and whistles that were too fast for Luke to follow.

“Very well, Artoo, I will inquire, though it is very rude of you to interrupt.” Threepio turned toward Jenica Sonsen. “Pardon the intrusion, Administrator Sonsen, but my counterpart wishes to know, rather urgently, if the two previous Glowpoint flare events started suddenly, or if there was a gradual increase in the light source’s brightness.”

It was plain that Sonsen was less and less sure of this crowd of visitors with every moment that passed. “Interesting droids you’ve got,” she said to no one in particular. “As best we’re able to tell, the brightness came up gradually, over the course of about half an hour. We don’t know for sure because no one who was in here to see it got out alive—and of course all the recording instruments were destroyed as well”

Artoo rocked back and forth on his roller legs and whistled urgently, his head whirling back and forth.

“Oh, dear!” Threepio said. “I quite agree. We must depart at once.”

“What?” Lando asked. “Why? What’s going on?”

Threepio turned stiffly toward Luke and stared at him in surprise. “You have not noticed? Oh! Of course. My apologies. Your eyes compensate so automatically that you are unaware of the change. An interesting demonstration of the difference in our perceptions.”

Lando glared at the protocol droid. “Threepio,” he said in an artificially, calm voice, “if the next words from you are not an explanation of the problem, I am going to power you down right now and permanently disable your speech center. What is the problem?”

Threepio seemed about to protest, then thought better of it. “It is, quite simply, Captain Calrissian, that the visible light output from the Glowpoint has increased six percent in the last five minutes.”

*   *   *

“Anakin!” Jacen could
feel
his little brother nearby, and he knew perfectly well that Anakin could sense Jacen’s presence. But all the knowing back and forth in the world, all the ability to zero in on each other’s location, did not do much good in the current situation. For Jacen could also sense that Anakin was scared and feeling guilty, feeling sorry for what he had done.

It was a wonderful paradox, in a sense. If there was ever a kid in the history of the galaxy who
deserved
to be in trouble, it was Anakin Solo, now, today. After all, they had been trying to keep this place hidden. Anakin couldn’t have made it more visible if he had tried.

But the sheer magnitude of what he had done made it all but impossible to hold him responsible. Anakin couldn’t possibly have understood what he was doing, or he never would have done it. He was just a little boy who liked to play with machines. Jacen thought back to a few incidents in his own life when his parents had let him off easier than they might have. Nothing this big, of course, but the point was the same. Jacen had always thought those had been times he had gotten off easy, gotten lucky. Now he was not so sure. Maybe it hadn’t been him being lucky, but his parents being understanding.

“Anakin! It’s all right! Nobody’s mad at you.” Well, Chewbacca wasn’t exactly
thrilled
with him, and Aunt Marcha wasn’t all that pleased with him for getting her
hovercar vaporized or getting her head cut open. If and when they ever got Q9-X2 working again, he was not likely to express his gratitude for what Anakin had done. But no one was
mad
. Not exactly. “Come on out.” Jacen knew perfectly well it was no good chasing Anakin or going in after him. He would just run away, hide again. Jacen would have to get him to come out on his own.

“I wanna stay here!” Anakin called out.

That was, strangely enough, a good first step. Jacen knew his brother well enough to know he was asking to be talked out of what he had just said. “Come on, Anakin,” Jacen said. “You can’t stay there forever.”

“Can so!”

“But it’s getting dark.” For reasons best known to the beings who had built this place, the steady, perfect illumination the chamber had produced from out of nowhere when it was cone-shaped wasn’t there anymore now that it was open to the sky. And night was coming on. “What about food?” Jacen went on. “Aren’t you hungry?”

“Well, maybe a little.”

“Maybe a lot,” Jacen said. “Tell you what. Why don’t you come get something to eat, and then if you want to go back to hiding, you can.” The suggestion made no sense at all, of course, but that was all right. It gave Anakin a way to save face, a way to back down.

There was a long silence—and that was a good sign too. Anakin was thinking about it. Jacen waited for a minute, and then gave it another try. “Anakin? Come on back to the camp—to the ship—and have some food.” He couldn’t really invite him to the camp. There wasn’t much of a camp left. Everything that hadn’t been inside the
Falcon
had been burned to a crisp.

“Can I really come back and hide later if I want to?” Anakin asked.

“All you want,” Jacen promised, knowing how easy
it would be to keep that promise. After all, Anakin hadn’t needed permission to run away and hide the first time. He wouldn’t need it the next time, either, assuming they didn’t put a round-the-clock guard on him or lock him up and weld the hatch shut. And Jacen wouldn’t put it past Anakin to manage an escape even with a guard and a locked door.

“Well, all right. Wait a second.” After a moment Anakin appeared at the entrance to the corridor. He paused there and looked toward his big brother.

“It’s all right, Anakin, really.” Of course, there was very little that
was
all right, but Anakin knew what Jacen meant. Anakin came forward, slowly at first, then suddenly he was running as fast as he could. He threw his arms around Jacen and Jacen hugged him back.

“I’m sorry, Jacen. I didn’t mean to do anything bad. Honest.”

“I know, I know. But what you mean to do really doesn’t count so much, sometimes. It’s what happens that matters.” Jacen could almost hear his father telling him the same thing. Suddenly he found himself thinking not of what his father or mother would do—but
about
them. They were probably in trouble too, out there, somewhere. The last any of them knew about their parents was that they had remained behind, trapped in Corona House, when Chewbacca had gotten the three children, Q9, and Ebrihim out. Were they still there? Or had Dad’s cousin Thrackan locked them up someplace else? Or had they gotten away, somehow? Jacen suddenly felt a wave of guilt pass over him. Why hadn’t he worried about them more, thought about them more?

“I miss Mom and Dad,” Anakin announced, with his face mashed up against Jacen’s shoulder, his voice a little muffled and a little snuffly.

Jacen was surprised to hear his brother say that just then. It would seem Anakin’s mind worked a bit more
like Jacen’s than Jacen had thought. “So do I,” Jacen said. “So do I. Come on. Let’s go back to the others.”

*   *   *

The two boys walked hand in hand toward the center of the massive chamber. Anakin slowly settled down enough to take an interest in his surroundings. He looked up toward where the top of the conical chamber had been, toward where the sky was now.

“Boy,” he said. “Things have really changed.”

“Yeah,” agreed Jacen. “They sure have.” He looked up himself and was astonished all over again by the sight.

The sky was getting dark, and so was the interior of the chamber, but the silvery surface did a good job of reflecting what light there was. It was probably just about sunset, but there was no real way to know. All they could see was a perfectly circular patch of dark sky, exactly overhead, right at the zenith, with the gleaming shadows of the seven silver cones stabbing into the edge of that perfect circle of night. Jacen could see stars starting to peek through, here and there.

They walked on, toward the
Falcon,
moving a bit more carefully as they picked their way through the heaps of burnt-up belongings. Everything that had been outside the ship was reduced to melted puddles and to ashes. Jacen and Anakin paused again to get a look at the
Falcon
. “The ship’s broken again,” Anakin said. It was not a question.

“Uh-huh. It looks like all the propulsion systems blew out before Chewbacca could get the shields up.”

Anakin nodded slowly. “That isn’t good,” he said.

Jacen looked straight up, at the top of the cylinder, something like a kilometer or two over their heads. Unless Chewbacca could get the ship running, or unless someone could figure a way to walk straight up the
side of the smooth, slick, sheer, impenetrable walls, they were stuck down here. “It sure isn’t,” Jacen agreed. “Come on,” he said. He almost told Anakin they were all waiting for him, but then it occurred to him that would not exactly encourage his brother to step lively. “Let’s go in.”

*   *   *

The Duchess Marcha of Mastigophorous sat in the lounge of the
Millennium Falcon,
feeling downright gloomy. The company was not enlivening. Her nephew, Ebrihim, was playing a dispirited game of sabacc with Jaina. The fact that Jaina had lost several hands showed just how low her spirits were. Q9, or what was left of him, was propped up against the far bulkhead of the compartment. He reminded Marcha all too closely of a mummified corpse no one had gotten around to burying.

She herself had a pounding headache, though she knew that she could count herself lucky to have no more serious complaints than that. It was a miracle that none of them had been killed. Well, maybe Q9
had
been killed. At least Chewbacca had not been able to revive him.

Of course, it might not matter that much who was alive and who was dead right now. They were trapped here, and most of their rations had been outside the
Falcon,
either stored on the hovercar or else in storage crates that had been stacked outside the spacecraft to make room. The
Falcon
’s emergency stores would last for a while, but not forever. Marcha’s best guess, which she had not shared with anyone, was that they had perhaps enough water for six days and enough food for ten.

And they might well be lucky if they were alive long enough to worry about such things. She agreed with Chewbacca that it was all but certain that the repulsor’s
violent awakening had wiped out the Drallists, and good riddance, but there was bound to be
someone
who had been far enough away to survive the disturbance and had noticed it.

She saw two possibilities. Perhaps Drall scientists would notice the seismic convulsions, or the electrical disturbances or whatever, and come take a look. However, that seemed a
trifle
improbable, as there was, after all, a war on, most public institutions had been shut down, and there were massive travel restrictions in effect. Unpleasant as it might be to concede the point, it seemed far more likely that a military group of some sort, equipped to detect repulsion activity, would have seen a burst of repulsor power bright enough to blow out their detector screens and come to investigate.

It seemed most unlikely that it would be anyone pleasant who arrived under those circumstances. And leaving behind the trifling problem of the sort of thing most of the military groups in the system were likely to do to captured enemy civilians, there was the question of what they could do with the planetary repulsor, once it was in their possession. Lots of unsavory people had been looking for the things for a long time. Marcha did not know what they hoped to do with the repulsor, but she doubted it would be anything good. All she knew was that the enemy regarded the repulsors as vitally, urgently important. It was not beyond the realm of possibility that by handing this one over to the enemy, Anakin had lost the entire war, single-handed.

But these opinions, too, she kept to herself. Things were bad enough already, and there was no sense making them worse right now, when they would no doubt deteriorate on their own in due course.

Their one hope seemed to be that Chewbacca could get the
Falcon
’s propulsion systems working again. The Wookiee was working on the problem now, rooting around in all the access panels, knee-deep in cables and burned-out parts. She could hear him from here,
banging and thudding about. He was doing his best, no doubt, but Marcha had strong doubts that he would succeed. It seemed likely that what had knocked them out was the initial massive burst of repulsor power so strong that it had managed to jump across open circuits. In all likelihood, a similar electromagnetic pulse had blown out Q9.

No, the situation was not good. Not one little bit good. And it seemed unlikely to do anything but get worse.

She heard the sound of footsteps coming up the
Falcon
’s entry ramp and looked up in time to see Jacen and Anakin come into the lounge. Ebrihim and Jaina looked up as well. It would seem that Chewbacca heard them also, as he appeared in the door and stood there a moment or two after the two boys came in.