Showdown at Centerpoint (36 page)

Han watched as the
Lady Luck
flew out of the hangar doors and toward him. Suddenly Han felt good. They were flying into danger, into battle, but what of that? He had done it before. He was behind the controls of his own ship, in space, surrounded by friends. What was to feel bad about? He saw the
Lady Luck
do a double barrel roll just as Luke’s X-wing launched. Han laughed out loud. He wasn’t the only one feeling good. He keyed on the com system. “
Falcon
to
Lady Luck
. Lando, you old pirate, the idea is to fly in a straight line just at the moment. I think you just wobbled off course a bit.”

“Aw, can’t a guy have a little fun now and then?”

“Relax, both of you,” said Luke as he pulled into position off Lando’s starboard wing. “We’re going to get a chance to do all the fancy flying we want today.”

The
Jade’s Fire
launched, and Mara came on the line. “I don’t know about the rest of you,” she said, “but I’d be just as happy if this stayed nice and simple.”

Chewbacca cut off the ship-to-ship link, hooted loudly, and bared his fangs.

Han laughed. “All right,” he said, “so she’s a spoilsport.
Any spoilsport who can fly the way she does can be my wingman any day of the week.”

*   *   *

“How far have you gotten?” asked Anakin as he looked over the gleaming silver control panel. It looked just the way he had left it, after pushing one button too many a few days before.

The technician’s name was Antone, and he was a thin, wiry-looking fellow, dark-skinned with shoulder-length, shiny black hair that hung straight down on either side of his face. He didn’t answer at first, but instead gave Anakin a strange look, a look Anakin had seen before. It was the look Anakin got from grownups who had heard he was weirdly good with machines, but didn’t quite believe it yet. Antone glanced at Jaina and Jacen, and got an encouraging nod from both of them. “I assure you, young Master Anakin is remarkably talented,” Threepio volunteered.

Antone seemed unwilling to take the droid’s word, but Ebrihim and Marcha and Q9 were there too, and somehow the presence of the Drall seemed to convince Technician Antone to take things seriously and cooperate. “I’d say we’re stuck,” he said, “except that might be saying too much. It makes it sound like we’d been making progress and then stopped. But we never got anywhere in the first place.”

“Not at
all
?” Anakin asked.

“Not at all. The system won’t respond to any commands we give it.”

“Sure it will,” said Anakin. He sat down at the control panel and pushed his hand down onto a flat, featureless spot on the console. He pulled his hand away, and the surface of the console started to shift and rise up, forming itself into a joysticklike shape—but one perfectly shaped to Anakin’s hand. Anakin touched the joystick, just touched it, and a hollow wireframe five-by-five-by-five of cubes appeared in the air over the
control panel. Anakin let go of the joystick. It remained in place for a moment, then melted back down into the console as the cube display vanished.

“How did you do that?” Antone demanded. He scooted Anakin out of the chair and pressed his own hand down on exactly the same place on the panel. Nothing happened. Nothing at all. Antone gave Anakin another strange look, and then comprehension dawned in his face. “Burning stars,” he said. “Burning stars. It must have imprinted itself on your personal characteristics the first time you used it.”

“Huh?” Anakin said.

“What do you mean?” demanded Jacen.

“It imprinted on him, somehow. It locked in on his fingerprints, or his DNA, or his brain waves, or something, and locked them into its memory. It’ll only work for him.”

Anakin’s eyes lit up with a wild gleam. “Only for me?” he asked. “It’s all
mine
?”

“There must be a way to let other users use it,” Jacen objected.

“Yeah, probably,” said Antone, “but we don’t have time to look for them. We have to work with what we’ve got.”

“Wait a moment,” Ebrihim objected. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

Antone nodded solemnly. “Your little friend here is the only person who is going to be able to operate this control panel. And from what I’ve seen, and what you’ve told me, even if he can make it
work,
I’m not sure he really understands what it
does.
”

“I believe,” said Threepio, “that you have just offered an
excellent
summing-up.”

*   *   *

Gaeriel Captison watched Admiral Ossilege pace the floor of the flag deck, and could not help but feel sympathy for the man. They were, for the moment, alone
on the flag deck, and that fact spoke volumes. He had told everyone to go off and do his bidding, and now they were gone. Later, perhaps, this place would be chaos, with aides rushing in and out, mountains of message forms covering every flat surface, klaxons blaring and orders bellowing out from the overhead speakers. But now it was quiet, empty, a lonely place.

And Ossilege must be an especially lonely man right now. There would be decisions yet to make, orders to give, but now, for the most part, his job was over. He had deployed his forces, issued his instructions, laid his plans. Now all he could do was wait.

“It isn’t easy, is it?” she asked. “You send them out to do your bidding, and off they go, following your instructions, living or dying, winning or losing, because of what you ordered.”

“No,” he said, “it isn’t easy. Everyone else knows what to do, because I have told them. But who tells me?”

For Ossilege, that was a remarkable bit of introspection, bordering on self-pity. He himself seemed to realize that had given too much away, for he stopped his pacing and sat down in the admiral’s chair.

A chime sounded, and a deep, melodic robotic voice spoke from the overhead speaker. “All outbound craft launched and clear,” it said. “
Intruder
getting under way in thirty seconds. All hands to assigned battle stations.”

Ossilege sat motionless throughout the announcement, not moving or speaking. Gaeriel could not tell if he was listening to it intently or not even aware that the voice had spoken. The chime sounded again, there was a change in the vibrations of the ship, and the flag deck instruments started reporting forward movement. They were on their way.

“Tell me,” Ossilege said at last, speaking after such a long silence that Gaeriel jumped ten centimeters in the air. “The plan. Do you think it will work?”

*   *   *

The irony was almost too obvious. After endless weeks of being trapped aboard the
Gentleman Caller,
wishing above all else to move faster, get to where she was going sooner, Tendra Risant now had not the slightest desire for her ship to go anywhere at all. The
Gent
floated quietly in the darkness of space, in a stable free orbit of Corell—an orbit that put her squarely between the Triad fleet and the two Bakuran destroyers. She had not the slightest doubt that both sides were tracking her, watching her go by. Probably both of them recognized her ship for what she was—a civilian non-combatant, accidentally caught between the two fleets. As long as she floated, unpowered, through space, she represented no particular danger. But she also had no doubt at all that both sides would fire immediately if they felt in the slightest way threatened by the
Gentleman Caller
.

And the
Gentleman Caller
was surrounded. There was no direction at all she could find that wouldn’t take her close to the path of one ship or another. She did not dare maneuver, for fear of one side or the other deciding she was a booby trap, a bomb or a weapon disguised as a civilian ship.

All she could do was sit here, and pray to whatever gods she could think of that no one decided she was getting in the way.

No one knew exactly what was going to happen next, Tendra least of all. But whatever did happen, she was going to have a ring-side seat for it.

*   *   *

It has been said, by more than a few observers, who have put it more than a few different ways, that warfare consists of long stretches of boredom, interspersed with short, sharp bursts of chaos and terror. Lando had been through battles enough in his day to realize the truth of that description. Or, to put it another way, it
was a long, long flight from Drall to Centerpoint. Long enough that Luke, aboard the X-wing, returned to the
Intruder
twice for brief rest periods as they traveled. Luke, Jedi Master that he was, certainly could have toughed it out, but Luke was not a fool. And only fools deliberately went into combat worn and unrested. The others—Han and his crew, Mara, and Lando—could all get up and stretch, set the autopilot, and sneak off for a nap. Not Luke.

They could have used a very brief jump through hyperspace to shorten the trip substantially, but there were reasons they did not want the Triad fleet thinking too much about hyperspace. And they also wanted the Triads to have their attention focused on the
Intruder,
the three trading ships, and the
Intruder
’s fighter escort. The more they looked there, the less they would look in other directions.

Lando punched up his own detector system and tried to get an idea of how the Triad fleet was reacting. So far, they didn’t seem to be in the least bit distracted by the
Intruder
. The whole fleet was still moving in toward Centerpoint at a slow, steady pace of its own. Nothing substantially different from the last time he checked, or the time before that. Soon, though. Soon. They were getting close enough to start picking targets, planning their attack—

Wait a second. Lando frowned at his display. Had that been there before, or had he just missed it? A tiny ship, civilian by the looks of what the detectors could tell him, right smack in between Centerpoint and the Triad fleet.

And wait another second. Where could that ship have come from? Lando sent a signal querying the
Intruder
’s position board database for the last few days. He went back to the time just before the interdiction field went down, and played it forward from there. The tiny ship winked into existence
before
the Triad ships. But how could anybody get here before the Triad, unless—

Lando sat bolt upright. Unless they were closer than the Triad ships, coming from much closer in. From inside the interdiction field, for example.

Lando finally had the sense to try it the easy way. He sent the standard ship-ID query signal. Fifteen seconds later he had his answer back. Twenty seconds after
that
he had changed course and accelerated to his top sub-light speed in order to intercept. It was a full minute later before he realized he should have asked permission, a realization he came to mostly because his com board started lighting up. He punched the transmit button. “
Lady Luck
to
Intruder
” he said. “I’ve, ah, just spotted something. I’m just heading over to investigate it. I’ll be back with the fleet in good time for the main event.”

“
Intruder
to
Lady Luck,”
replied a rather fussy-sounding voice. “The object you are on intercept for is an identified and uninvolved civilian spacecraft. No need to investigate.”

“Well, I’m going to anyway,” Lando said. “She might not be as uninvolved as you think.”
Or at least,
he thought,
she’s not going to be uninvolved for long
.

*   *   *

To Ebrihim’s eye, the control room of Drall’s planetary repulsor looked as if a bomb had hit it. It was knee deep in crumpled bits of paper and discarded food containers. Little knots of technicians were huddled in every corner of the room, arguing over readings, debating what various arrangements of purple and orange and green cubes and bars of light might mean. Handwritten labels were stuck over about half the controls on the console. As the other half of the controls seemed to appear and disappear and change shape and size almost at whim, it was a trifle more difficult to label them.

Jaina and Jacen were asleep on cots in the next room over. Ebrihim and Marcha were still on the go,
in the thick of it, helping the techs order their readings, sketching out the various transmutations of the control panel. Q9 usually seemed to have two or three remote sensors out as he traced this signal or that through the interior of the control system and took power readings, and he and Threepio had found any number of things to bicker about.

But all the rest of them could work as hard and as much as they wanted. Anakin was still in the center of it all, still going strong, working the controls as he was asked, shifting the system from one mode to another, helping the grown-ups understand what all the buttons meant. He had that wild-eyed look in his eyes that human children sometimes seemed to get when they had been up too long or had been too stimulated for too long. Sooner or later it would all be too much for him, and the poor child would simply keel over from exhaustion. Ordinarily, it would already be time, and past time, to get the child to bed, but under the circumstances they had to get as much out of him as possible before—

“Newses! I have good newses!” an excited voice shouted. Everyone stopped what they were doing and looked up as Dracmus rushed into the room. “The Sacorrian Selonians! What a splendid idea this bribing was! Must congratulate honored Jade on fine suggestion!”

“They’ve agreed to cooperate?” Ebrihim asked eagerly.

“No, Honored Ebrihim!” said Dracmus in the same gleeful voice. “They refuse! They delay! Maybe later they come around, but not yet.”

“Then why are you so happy?” Marcha demanded.

“Because bribe suggestion gives
them
idea.” She held up a datapad and waved it in the air. “They still not willing to help with
their
repulsor—but they willing to sell instruction manual!”

“Lemme see that,” Antone said, and grabbed at the datapad. He turned it on and paged through it, grinning
more and more widely as he did so. He nodded enthusiastically. “This is it,” he said. “With what Anakin has shown us, and what this tells us about the notation—I think—I’m not sure but at least I
think,
we can run this place.”