Showdown at Centerpoint (39 page)

“Well, that’s pretty simple too. When Admiral Ackbar does his precision hyperspace jump, he’ll land right on top of them, and they’ll never know what hit them. And our ships don’t want to be sitting in the shooting gallery.”

“When does he show up?”

Lando checked the ship’s navicomputer and the chronometer. “Uh-oh,” he said. “Right here. And right now.”

The piece of empty space in front of them was suddenly ablaze with the flaring light of starships coming in out of hyperspace, ships that were streaks of blazing white, flashing into existence and screaming past the
Lady Luck
to either side, over her, under her, so close that they could almost hear the nonexistent winds of space rushing past them as the ships roared by. It was an incredible sight, a beautiful sight—and a terrifying one. Lando clenched his teeth and wrapped his hands around the flight stick. He held on for dear life, forcing himself by sheer strength of will not to try to dodge the oncoming ships, for fear of flying smack into one he did not see.

And then they were past, and then they were gone. And then Lando slowed the
Lady
to a reasonable speed, and breathed.

And then the war was over, for Lando, and for Tendra.

*   *   *

Gaeriel Captison was starting to feel the pain. Not in her legs, of course, but everywhere else. Admiral Ossilege sat beside her, barely conscious himself, bleeding badly. Gaeriel thought she could smell something
burning behind her. Not that such things mattered anymore, of course.

In spite of everything, somehow Ossilege had managed to open up the control panel set into the side of his chair, the ship’s self-destruct. He had flicked up all of the safeties and pushed down all of the buttons. All but the last. He was waiting, still waiting, still watching his tactical displays. They were barely working, but they would not have to work well at all to show him what he needed to see.

“There!” he said. “There! Ships coming in! They’re here.”

“It’s time, then,” said Gaeriel. “You’re a good man, Admiral Ossilege. You did your duty. You held them. You stopped them. Well done.”

“Thank you, ma’am. I was—I was proud to serve with you.”

“And I with you,” she said. “But now it’s time to go.” She thought of her daughter, Malinza, left all alone in the universe. She would be cared for, of that Gaeriel had no fear. Perhaps—perhaps the universe would compensate for all the sorrow of her young life, and bring her nothing but good as she grew older. It was a comforting thought, Gaeriel decided. A good thought to go out on.

“I can’t—I can’t move my arm,” said Ossilege. “I can’t push the button.”

“Here,” said Gaeriel. She looked up and saw at least three Triad ships were near. She smiled and reached over. “Here,” she said again. “Let me.”

*   *   *

The explosion lit the sky, tore a hole across the Triad fleet. For a few glorious seconds a new light blazed up, a pillar of fire brighter than all the stars in the sky.

“Oh, sweet stars in the sky,” said Tendra. “That was the
Intruder
. They’re gone. They’re all gone. It’s over.”

Lando looked down at the ship chronometer again,
then to Centerpoint Station, and then toward the distant dot of light that was Drall.

“No it isn’t,” he said. “But in one minute and twenty seconds, it will be. Maybe for a lot of people.”

*   *   *

“Antone!” Jaina shouted. “Now! Now! We have to do it now!”

Technician Antone came rushing back in, his eyes bulging out of his head. “I can’t,” he said, and held up the datapad. “It’s still running. The last part of the problem is still running. It won’t be done for another five minutes at least. Twelve million people. Twelve million people.” Antone sat down on the floor and covered his head with his hands.

“We’re doomed!” Threepio moaned. “If they control the starbuster, our enemies will destroy us all.”

Jacen Solo stood riveted to the spot, his eyes as wide as they could be. Everyone in the chamber was rooted to the spot. Twelve million people. They had one chance to make this work, and it would fail because they couldn’t give the right numbers to a seven-year-old kid.

“Wait a second,” he said to himself. “Who needs numbers?” He turned toward his brother, still seated at the console. “Anakin,” he said. “It felt too heavy, right? Can you fix it? Can you close your eyes and
feel
it? Make it feel right, make it go right?”

“What are you saying?” Ebrihim asked. “You want him to
guess
?”

“Not guess,” said Jaina. “Feel. Reach out to it, Anakin. Let go of your conscious feelings. Reach out with the Force.”

Anakin looked at his brother and his sister, and swallowed hard, and then he shut his eyes. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah.”

Eyes still closed, he held out his hands for controls that weren’t there, controls that took form under his
hands even as he reached for them. Glowing grids of orange and purple and green appeared and flared up and vanished around his head, but Anakin did not see them.

Deep beneath their feet, a deep, determined vibration began to build. They heard the crash of thunder from the repulsor, and the sound of power being gathered, of unimaginable force being channeled and focused and held in ready.

The joysticklike control materialized, slithering up perfectly into Anakin’s grasp. He pushed the control stick slowly forward, and a cube of perfect blazing orange appeared before his still-closed eyes. He made tiny, imperceptible adjustments with the controls, and the orange cube flickered once and grew brighter. He held the stick forward for a long, long moment—

And then he pulled it down, as hard as he could.

The chamber shuddered with power, and a stream of lightning blazed down the corridor and out into the chamber.

*   *   *

They could not see it in the control chamber, except for Anakin, who saw everything perfectly from behind closed eyes. But those on the surface and those in space could see it. They could see the repulsor thunder and roar with repressed power, power that seethed and pulsed and flickered in its eagerness to be set free. They saw the power in that repulsor that built up and up and up.

And they saw it leap out of the repulsor chamber, tear across space, land square on the south end of Centerpoint, just as practically every countdown clock in space reached zero, just at the moment Centerpoint was to fire. The South Pole lit up with the energy that was supposed to stream out invisible, unseen, undetected, into hyperspace, was supposed to reach out across space and murder a star.

But the repulsor beam broke up the opening into hyperspace, defocused the beam, detuned it enough that some small part of its energy was converted into visible light. The South Pole of Centerpoint began to glow, began to throb and pulse with its own power. The glow spread, expanding outward, stretching itself out into a magnificent bubble of light, harmless light, that lit the skies of all the Corellian worlds, gleaming, shining, blooming, growing—and then guttering down to nothing.

Lando Calrissian watched it all from the North end of Centerpoint, and started breathing again. He hadn’t even realized he had stopped.

“Now,” he said to Tendra. “Now, it’s over.”

I
don’t even know why you were so eager to have my fleet come here,” said Admiral Ackbar in his gravelly voice. He turned and regarded Luke Skywalker through his goggly eyes. They were on Drall, as Ackbar had been curious to inspect the repulsor. “There was hardly any work left for my ships to do—thanks to Admiral Ossilege and Gaeriel Captison.”

“Thanks to them, yes, sir,” said Luke. Luke thought of Gaeriel, thought of her daughter, Malinza. Luke had promised Malinza he would take care of her mother. How was that debt to be paid? He thought of Ossilege, of the difficult, impossible man who also had a knack for
doing
the difficult, the impossible. “I will mourn them both for a long time to come. But we have won. Thanks to them, and many others. And in large part thanks to those three children, over there.”

Anakin and Jacen and Jaina were racing around, climbing around the hummocks of dirt that the repulsor had forced up when it had shoved its way out of the ground. They were being chased by a laughing Jenica Sonsen and a Belindi Kalenda who was too busy making ferocious faces to laugh. They were playing in the shadow of the repulsor. Once hidden underground, the top of the cylinder now rose a hundred meters up out of the ground.

Han and Leia laughed out loud as their children
turned the tables and started chasing Sonsen and Kalenda. Mara watched the fun, smiling quietly, and even Chewbacca was enjoying the show. Not far off, Ebrihim and the Duchess Marcha were lounging on the ground, intent in conversation. Judging by their eager, focused expressions, they were either talking over some complicated matter of state or, more likely, dissecting some particularly juicy bit of family gossip.

It was probably the latter but Luke hoped it was the former. The Duchess would need the practice. Leia had told Luke of her plan to appoint Marcha the new Governor-General of the Sector.

Dracmus sat by the two Drall, apparently so enthralled with their conversation that she had fallen sound asleep.

Luke heard a high-pitched voice raised in protest behind him, answered by a rapid, high-pitched twittering that sounded far from complimentary. He turned around to see Artoo and Q9 at it again, bickering over some fine point of droid design or other. Threepio was standing between them, trying to calm them both down. Luke had a feeling Threepio would meet with his usual degree of success.

“You know,” he said, “it’s the beings on this plain, the humans and the Selonian and the Drall and the Wookiee and the droids right here.
They’re
the ones who won this war. Not the ships or the guns or the hardware.”

“You’re right, of course,” said Admiral Ackbar. “But no one wins a war. There are just different degrees of losing. The damage done on these worlds is shocking. Shocking. It will take them many years to rebuild it all, to sort out all the loose ends.”

Luke nodded. But at least some of the loose ends were being tidied up already. Admiral Ackbar brought news of the arrest of one Pharnis Gleasry, a self-styled agent of the Human League, part of the spy ring that had sliced its way into far too many government files
back on Coruscant. It had taken very little to get Gleasry singing like a bird. The whole Human League spy ring back in Coruscant had been scooped up and thrown in jail where they belonged.

There was, of course, the question of what to do about the next star on the starbuster list. The short-term solution was to de-imprint the repulsor controls so they could be used by someone over seven, be ready with the
right
targeting numbers, and simply fire this repulsor—or the one on Selonia—as needed. Once it was too little, and too late, the Sacorrian Selonians had indeed caved in altogether. The long-term solution was to get the shutdown codes from the Triad. As the Triad was in an understandably cooperative mood—what with the New Republic occupation troops already on the way—that didn’t seem likely to be too much of a problem. Someone had started the completely false rumor that the New Republic Navy was going to re-aim Centerpoint straight at Sacorria’s sun, and leave it that way through all the starbuster pulses until they got the shutdown code. The rumor might well encourage cooperation.

And then there was the whole question of studying Centerpoint, and the repulsors on the other three worlds. Who had built the Corellian system, and when, and why, and what had happened to them? Well, some ends were looser than others. Those mysteries might easily take centuries to be solved—if they ever were.

There was one other loose end that Luke took a personal interest in. But he had a feeling that it would get sorted out without undue delay.

“You know,” said Admiral Ackbar, “you said it was the people here who won this war. I can’t help noticing two rather prominent names that seem to be missing. They were on the transport with us. Where in the world have they gone to?”

Luke smiled. He knew exactly where they were, but he had a feeling they were not much in the mood for
company. “I wouldn’t worry too much, Admiral. They’re both the sort who are pretty good at taking care of themselves.”

*   *   *

“Lando?” asked Tendra as they wandered about on the churned-up land that the rise of the repulsor had produced. It was not the loveliest of landscapes, but it did have the advantage of providing a good deal of privacy behind every hummock and furrow of ground.

“Yes?” Lando asked. “What is it?” Tendra had found herself on top of a higher than usual clump of loose rock. Lando offered his hand, and she took it, used it to steady herself as she slipped and slithered down into the next little furrow of ground. He did not let go of her hand once she was on level ground, and she did not let go of his.

“Remember how I told you that a Sacorrian woman is not allowed to marry without her father’s consent, no matter how old she is?”

Lando felt a little flutter in his chest, a flutter of fear, and excitement, and interest, all mixed up together. “Yes,” he said, managing to keep his voice steady. “What about it?”

“Well,” she said, “there’s just one thing. We don’t have to do anything about it
immediately,
but there’s something more I want to tell you about that law. An interesting legal technicality. It’s been well established by many precedents that a Sacorrian woman is not bound by that law—
if
she is outside the Sacorrian system. If she were on, oh, Drall for example.”

“Is that so?” Lando asked, quickly regaining his old equilibrium. The idea needed time, and thought—but he definitely liked it at first glance. He smiled, and looked at her lovely face. “Is that a certifiable fact?” he asked.

“It is,” she said, smiling right back at him.

“Then why don’t we get back to the
Lady Luck
and discuss the whole matter over dinner?” he asked.
“I’ve
always found legal technicalities to be downright fascinating.”