Showdown at Centerpoint (8 page)

But even if Kalenda played a cagey game, she didn’t play a dishonest one. “It’s never easy,” she said, “figuring the balance. I knew the risk was there, but I had 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,” Kalenda 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 all we’re going to get out of Source T.”

“All 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. “That’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 Ossilege 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 turbolaser sites. And those Phalanxes of dark circular openings. Some could be missile batteries. And some might be refueling stations or docking facilities 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 wingman.” 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. What I meant was that Captain Calrissian and Master Skywalker 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 Centerpoint.

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.
That
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- —eaking up t—”

Luke sighed. Another nuisance. With normal communications still utterly jammed throughout the Corellian 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, but 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. “Artoo, 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 I 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. Kalenda 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?”