Showdown at Centerpoint (20 page)

“Anakin turned the repulsor on, and there was some sort of power surge,” said Ebrihim. “We were afraid we had lost you altogether—but Anakin and Chewbacca got you working again.”

Ebrihim found himself wondering if Q9 had actually needed any substantial repair at all. It hadn’t taken
Anakin more than an hour or two to do the job. Had Chewbacca left the work on Q9 for Anakin as a way of letting Anakin make amends for what he had done? Or was Anakin’s instinctive, near-mystical ability with machines so great that he could do things Chewbacca, with his centuries of experience, could not? Chewbacca had only worked on Q9 for a few minutes at a time, when he was taking a break from his work on the propulsion systems. Ah, well. Life was full of minor mysteries that would never quite be solved, and Ebrihim’s command of the Wookiee language was not good enough to question Chewbacca on such a subtle point. Not that it was ever wise to question the Wookiee
too
closely.

“I am grateful to both of you—all of you—for repairing me,” said Q9. “But what is this about turning the repulsor on? That seems a most foolhardy act. Whose idea was it?”

“My idea,” Anakin said, looking down at the deck of the lounge compartment. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to cause so much trouble.”

“I am relieved to hear it. I would be even more relieved to learn that you had caused no trouble at all. I gather this was not the case?”

“Oh, Anakin managed to do just a bit of damage,” Ebrihim said breezily, “but we will discuss that later. Right now I would suggest that you run a full set of diagnostics on yourself. It might well be that you find that several corrective adjustments need to be made.”

Q9 activated his repulsor pads and floated up into the air to his normal hover height. “I shall do so,” he replied. “But I would suggest that someone else around here might want to run some diagnostics and make some adjustments.” With that, he floated silently out of the compartment.

“What did he mean by that?” Anakin asked.

“I think he was suggesting that little boys should try and learn from their mistakes.”

“That’s not what he said,” Anakin objected.

“No, my version was more polite. But the advice remains good.”

Anakin looked from Chewbacca to Ebrihim. “You mean I should think more before I work on a machine?” Anakin asked.

“That is
precisely
what I mean,” Ebrihim said. “Precisely. Now run along and play—with your toys, not with machinery.” He watched the lad hurry off to find his brother and sister. “Of course,” he said to Chewbacca, “the problem is that Anakin sees toys and machines as one and the same thing.”

Chewbacca nodded grimly as he put away his tools.

“In any event,” said Ebrihim, “it is good to have Q9 up and about again. Thank you for your help. And I think it is about time I relieved my aunt. My watch is about to start.”

Chewbacca gave a yip and a hoot of polite dismissal and Ebrihim turned and left the lounge.

The two Drall had been taking turns on watch in the
Falcon
’s cockpit. The sensor displays there might well give them some sort of warning if trouble showed up.

By having the Drall take the watch, Chewbacca had time to keep up his work on his repairs to the
Falcon
. Wookiees in general, and Chewbacca in particular, were not given to bursts of optimism, but Chewbacca had made it sound as if he was close, very close, to getting at least
some
propulsion restored. Even if all they could do was fly high enough to get out of this enormous trap of a cylinder and back up to the surface that would be at least some help.

Ebrihim entered the cockpit and saw his aunt sitting at the pilot’s station. She was using a pile of old clothes under her somewhat ample rump to boost her up high enough to see all the instruments. She looked around as he entered. “Greetings, nephew. Q9 floated in a moment or two ago and made several insulting remarks. It is good to see that he is operational again.”

“It is indeed, dearest aunt. Is there anything to report?”

She shook her head. “No, there is not, and for that let us be profoundly grateful—” She stopped speaking and looked at the overhead detector display. She stared at it, stock-still, for all of five seconds. She shook her head. “It would appear I spoke too soon,” she said and then slapped down the red-alert siren. It started hooting loudly, loudly enough for the children outside the ship to hear it and come running.

“Aunt! What is it?” Ebrihim asked.

“I should think that would be obvious,” she said, studying the display. “It’s a ship, of course, coming in right on top of us. But I am not so much interested in
what
it is. I would much rather know
who
it is.”

I
t’s amazing how much you can find when you know where to look,” said Lando, studying the data that was flowing past, screenful after screenful. “And it doesn’t hurt to have someone as good at data searches as Artoo. And, ah, well, even Threepio’s language skills have been helpful.”

Threepio turned his head rather briskly. “Helpful? I would say they have been essential. You wouldn’t have been able to translate a tenth of that information without me.”

“Don’t push it,” Lando said. “Yes, you were a great help, all right? There, I said it. But I was
about
to say that without Administrator Sonsen, we wouldn’t have gotten anywhere at all.”

Jenica Sonsen smiled broadly and gave Lando a jab in the ribs that was probably just a trifle harder than she had intended it to be. “Easy, all of you,” she said. “All I did was show you the log files.”

But the log files had told them a lot—and led them in a lot of profitable directions. It was all down there, very clear.

Looking from here, it was easy to spot signs of something going wrong. Station systems no one had even known about started coming to life. Power fluctuations. Spikes and drops in various forms of radiation, some of them significant enough to require the temporary
evacuation of part of the station. The station re-pointing its spin axis, gradually reaiming its poles in new directions.

“The change in spin orientation. How did you people explain
that
away?” asked Lando.

“Centerpoint has always been self-correcting,” Jenica said. “The barycenter point isn’t absolutely stable. The station has always moved itself around a little to stay properly oriented and positioned. It wasn’t like it hadn’t ever happened before.”

“That to one side,” said Lando, “the main thing is that I’ve now pretty much confirmed what I suspected the second I saw those conical forms in the poles of Hollowtown. That form of six small cones around a larger one is the exact geometry you need for a particular kind of old-style repulsor. Actually, if you get down and take a look on the microscopic level, you’ll see exactly the same pattern, repeated over and over and over again, on the surface of modern repulsor systems. Crudely put, we don’t make one big repulsor element like that anymore, because the bigger the repulsor, the heavier the object has to be for the repulsor to work efficiently.” Lando brought up a wireframe diagram of Centerpoint and pointed to the image of the repulsors. “These are pretty big, but on the other hand, planets are pretty big too.”

“But all the inhabited planets have their own repulsors,” Kalenda objected. “What did the builders of Corellia need this place for?”

“Because this isn’t just a repulsor,” he said. “This is a
hyperspace
repulsor. This station was designed to open up a—a gate, a tunnel—through hyperspace, grab a planet, and pull it back this way. It acts as more of a tractor beam than a repulsor, really, but that’s the idea.”

“How?” Luke asked. “How does it work?”

Lando shrugged. “I don’t know. But as Administrator Sonsen has pointed out a time or two, knowing how it works isn’t always that important. It’s knowing that it
does
work. My guess is it serves as a ‘lens’ that can amplify and direct a massive burst of repulsor energy through hyperspace. I think it must tap into the gravitic potential of Talus and Tralus, but I don’t know for sure.”

“But why would they use a space station as a super tractor beam?” Jenica asked.

Lando shook his head. “That’s not the question. The question is—why did your people use the hyperspace tractor-repulsor as a space station? The architects of this star system built Centerpoint, used it, finished with it, and left it alone. Then your ancestors—or at least somebody’s ancestors—decided it would be a nice place to live. The structure you called Hollowtown was never intended as a place to live. It was a containment facility for the massive energies the tractor-repulsor put out as it was charging up.”

“Charging up? Wait a second. Are you saying that Hollowtown is just a power storage battery?”

“Pretty much,” Lando said.

“But people lived there!”

“Maybe so, but that’s not what it was designed for.”

“So why did the Glowpoint stay on all the time?” Jenica demanded. “It’s been functioning, and putting out a very steady level of light and heat for thousands of years. There has to be a reason for it.
We
thought it was to provide Hollowtown with sunlight, but I guess we were wrong. I mean, if you’re right.”

Lando frowned. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s like some stoves and ovens on planets where they burn hydrogen or methane for cooking. You always leave a little tiny flame burning, so that you can reignite the main system easily when you want to do some cooking.”

“You’re saying that the Glowpoint that provided us with light and heat was a
pilot light
?”

“Maybe. But maybe the builders
did
leave it on when they were done, and it provided light and heat to Hollowtown. Maybe they
did
intend for the charging containment to be converted to living space. After all,
they
had no reason to turn the hyperspace tractor repulsor on again. They were finished building the Corellian star system.”

“We’re getting a little off-point here,” Kalenda said. “Can you show us why you think Centerpoint is the starbuster?”

“Well, first off, either you take my word for it, or I can show you the math to demonstrate that the form and level of power needed to pull a planet in through a hyperspace link can be converted into the power needed to induce a compression wave in a star’s core. If the tractor-repulsor energy is directed at the core of a star, and concentrated in a burst, the burst will be sufficiently powerful to touch off a nova explosion.”

“We’ll take your word for it,” Jenica said hurriedly. “Math was never my strong point. What’s the rest of it?”

“It would take a generation or two just to trace out circuits and systems we’ve found, but all you’ve got is me and a couple of droids, and no time. Even so, I do think I’ve got the broad outlines of the thing worked out. This is the pattern I can put together by sifting through the records here, and matching them up with events off the station. First off, Centerpoint Station suddenly reorients its spin axis drastically. Then there were a lot of reports of ‘unexplained power surges’ and ‘unscheduled energy pulses’ and ‘transient events’ and ‘unplanned radiation releases’ reported in the station log, along with a lot of other nice bureaucratic phrases that mean no one knew what was going on.

“I think all the transient events and so on were just Centerpoint getting ready to fire up the Glowpoint. But, in any event, the first Glowpoint flare happens, lots of people die, there’s chaos and panic and the evacuation. Then, shortly thereafter, the first induced supernova happens. Then civil war breaks out. Just after the first supernova, Centerpoint shifts its spin axis
again
. It’s also a more drastic shift than anything Centerpoint had ever done before. No one was here on
the station to report all the events, but the automatic logging reports I’ve found indicate there was more of the same. Then there was a different sort of power flow shifts from the automatic recording instruments that have kept up right until the present moment—and they start at
exactly
the time the jamming and the interdiction field come on. Then we get the second Glowpoint flare, and, shortly thereafter, the second induced supernova.”

“But how could it be we didn’t feel any of that, or see anything?” Jenica asked. “You’re talking about a hugely powerful pulse of energy being shot off from this station. No one saw anything. There wasn’t any huge vibration or any burst of heat.”

“This station is putting out a hugely powerful interdiction field and a powerful jamming field right now. Can you feel either of those?”

“The pointing,” Kalenda said. “What does the re-pointing show?”

Lando brought up a holographic projector, and threw up an image of the stars near to Corellia. “The red spot at the center of the display is our position. This is the pointing of Centerpoint’s South Pole relative to the starfield before things started happening.” A blue line streaked out from the center of the display and pointed toward nothing at all. “This is the pointing after the first shift in spin orientation.” A line of red lanced out and stabbed straight through the heart of a star. “That is TD-10036-EM-1271,” Lando said. “The first star to go nova.” Lando punched in another command, and a shaft of gold streaked out and touched another star.