Showdown at Centerpoint (9 page)

A
nakin Solo stared at the featureless silver wall for a full minute, and then thumped twice, hard, at one particular spot on it. Sure enough, an access door popped open, revealing another purple-and-green control keypad with a five-by-five grid of keys. Anakin frowned at the keypad, as if trying to decide his next move.

The experimental droid Q9-X2 watched Anakin carefully—which was really the only prudent way to watch him, when one thought about it. Q9 found Anakin’s skill with machinery, his seemingly instinctive ability to make devices work, even when he had no idea what the devices were, to be remarkably disconcerting. It seemed to have something to do with this Force business that was so important to this group of humans. The theory seemed to be that Anakin’s talent in the Force had somehow given him the ability to see inside machines, to manipulate them from the outside, down to the microscopic level. Not that Anakin was infallible, by any means. He made mistakes—and sometimes he quite deliberately made machines do things that no one else would want them to do. But one could learn a lot about an unknown device by watching Anakin figure it out.

Thus, the droid had two purposes in watching the child—first was at least to attempt to prevent him from
doing
too
much damage as he wandered from one piece of machinery to the other.

His other duty was simply to record what the child did when he started fiddling with the hardware he found.

It was a full-time job—a more than full-time job, really. Q9-X2 drew most of the duty, thanks to his built-in recording systems. But even a droid had to recharge once in a while, and besides, Q9-X2 did not
want
to spend all day every day preventing this most peculiar child from pushing the wrong button and melting the planet. If nothing else, the constant strain would be too much for his judgment circuits. At least it
might
be, and that came to much the same thing. Perhaps not the most straightforward thought process, just there, but it was enough of an argument to get him a break from Anakin-watching once in a while, and that was more than good enough.

Anakin punched a code into the access panel, and a low chime sounded. Past experience had taught Q9 that this sound was not a good sign. It seemed to be a sort of warning bell.

“That will do, Anakin,” said Q9.

Anakin looked around in surprise, as if he hadn’t known Q9 was there. “Q9!” Anakin shouted. “Oh!”

If the droid had been programmed to do so, he would have let out a sigh. Q9 had been with him for hours now, so it seemed unlikely the child could be surprised by his arrival. On the other manipulator, Anakin hadn’t shown much sign of acting talent. Q9 had
heard
of the phenomenon known as absentmindedness, but he hadn’t had any reason to believe it really existed until he met Anakin. “I think it would be best if you stopped examining that machine until Chewbacca or one of the others can take a look at it.”

“But I’ve almost got it working!” Anakin protested.

“Do you know what it does? Do you have any
idea
what it does?”

“N-n-no,” Anakin admitted, quite reluctantly.

“Do you remember what happened the last time you heard that chime and you kept going?”

“A trapdoor opened,” Anakin said, suddenly finding reasons to look everywhere but at Q9.

“Yes. A trapdoor opened. Under me. And I fell into a waste disposal chute. If I had not managed to jump my repulsors to high power in time and bounce back up, what would I be right now?”

“Mashed down to a ten-centimeter cube. Unless the machine had melted you down by now.”

“Quite right. But Chewbacca only found that out afterward, didn’t he?”

“I helped him,” Anakin protested.

“Yes, you did. And we need you around to help him more. So what would we do if the trapdoor was under you this time?”

Anakin’s eyes grew wide with alarm. “Oh,” he said. “Maybe I’d better stop and let Chewie look.”

“Maybe you’d better,” agreed Q9. “Come on, let’s go find the others.”

Anakin nodded. “Okay,” he said, and turned back the way they had come.

Q9 followed after on his repulsors, relieved that Anakin had decided to be cooperative—this time. Q9-X2 had been designed with the capacity to learn new behaviors by trial and error, but he had never expected to use that capacity to learn practical child psychology. The skills required to handle Anakin with even marginal success were taking up an inordinate portion of system resources. Q9 decided he was going to have to perform a partial memory wipe on himself, and free up some capacity, when this was over.

If it ever
was
over. As they came out of the side passage and into the central chamber, Q9 reflected that this situation was starting to look rather permanent.

They were a motley crew, all of them holed up in
this huge and alien place. Anakin and Q9 paused at the exit from the side passage and looked around.

Seen from this vantage point, the repulsor chamber seemed too large and obvious for a hiding place, but, from the surface, Q9 knew just how difficult it would be for outsiders to find this place. It was shielded from every detection system that Q9 knew about—with the exception of Anakin Solo.
He
had found this chamber—and its identical twin on Corellia—with no trouble whatsoever.

And there were good reasons for hiding the chamber. It contained the planetary repulsor that had propelled Drall into its current orbit, unknown millennia ago. Likewise with Corellia and, no doubt, with the other inhabited worlds of the Corellia system—Selonia and the Double Worlds, Talus and Tralus. Each of them had a hidden chamber like this one. Each of them had a planetary repulsor like this one. And each of them had been transported into the Corellian system long, long ago, by some long-forgotten race for some long-forgotten reason.

But now the hunt for the repulsors was on. The party in the repulsor chamber had been cut off from outside contact for some time, but the last information they had was that the rebel forces on at least some and probably all of the inhabited worlds were actively searching for the repulsors. The reason was not entirely clear. While the repulsors would make powerful and effective weapons, they were not war-winners, not by any means. According to Ebrihim, a planetary repulsor could be used to knock out a ship in orbit—but it would be hard to aim and unwieldy to use. There would be the element of surprise, but only the first time the repulsor was used. There were other, simpler, cheaper, more reliable ways of shooting down enemy spacecraft, and many of them were available to the rebel groups. So why were they expending precious time and effort in the middle of a war in order to find weapons of marginal utility?

Q9 gave it up. He had come to that point in the analysis two hundred thirty-nine times before, and it didn’t seem likely that an answer that did not spring to mind any of those times would do so on the two hundred fortieth attempt.

Instead, he admired the strange and massive forms that made up the main planetary repulsor chamber. The chamber itself was a huge vertical cone, just under a kilometer from top to bottom, the walls of which appeared to be gleaming, perfect metallic silver. At the base of the conical chamber were six smaller cones of the same silver material, each just over one hundred meters tall. They were spaced evenly around a circle centered on the axis of the pyramid. In the exact center of the chamber’s base was a seventh, larger cone, twice as tall as the others, but with the same slender proportions. Passages to side chambers were spaced around the circumference of the chamber, and vertical shafts in the floor of the chamber led to a series of lower levels they hadn’t even started to explore.

It was a huge, artificial, gleaming, impersonal alien place—and a ramshackle, improvised, crude, homey-looking campsite was sitting right in the middle of it, right by the base of the central cone. No doubt to human or Drallish—or even Wookiee—eyes, the camp looked incongruous enough. To the droid’s eyes, it looked absurd.

The
Millennium Falcon
was there—and it had been a very close job flying it into the concealed topside entrance. The Duchess’s hovercar was parked alongside it. A line with washing on it was strung between the
Falcon
’s topside parabolic antenna and a spike antenna on the roof of the hovercar. Chewbacca was trying to use as little power as possible, to reduce the chance of detection. Even the
Falcon
’s clothes drier was off for the duration. Folding chairs and tables were set up to one side of the two vehicles, and the children, tired of the close confines of the
Falcon,
had moved their
sleeping pads outside and under the ship. As always, the children had arranged their beds so they could all sleep together—the twins’ beds close together, with Anakin just a bit farther off.

Q9 could see all the rest of the party from here—Jacen and Jaina carrying some sort of gear out of the
Millennium Falcon;
Chewbacca the Wookiee, sitting at his camp chair, fiddling with some recalcitrant bit of hardware or other; and the two Drall, Ebrihim and his aunt, Marcha, the Duchess of Mastigophorous, at the other end of the table, hunched over their own work.

The two Drall, like all of their species, were rather short by human standards, Ebrihim being just about Jacen’s height. They were short-limbed and thick-bodied—downright plump, in fact—and covered with thick brown fur. As Q9 had learned, to human eyes they tended to look like stuffed toy animals. Some humans found them hard to take seriously—but failing to take Drall seriously was always a huge mistake. They were sober, serious, levelheaded beings in general. Even if Ebrihim was found to be a bit flighty by Drallish standards, his aunt was one of the most commonsensical beings Q9 had ever met.

No doubt Anakin’s latest somewhat unnerving discovery would give them something else to work on, give them another piece to the puzzle they were struggling to put together. They intended to develop a useful understanding of the repulsor’s control system. All in all, Q9 felt, the two Drall had the hardest job of anyone in the camp.

The hardest job besides waiting, of course. And they were
all
doing that.

“Come on, Q9,” said Anakin. “Quit
dawdling.
”

Another bit of child psychology to note down—no matter how slow they might be when one was waiting for them, no caregiver had ever moved fast enough when it was the child doing the waiting. “Coming, Anakin.”

*   *   *

Jacen set down the crate he was lugging out of the
Falcon,
looked up, and saw Q9 and Anakin heading back to camp. “Finally,” he said. “I thought they’d never get back. Now we can eat.”

“Darn. We can? Maybe we can get them to stay away a little longer.” Jaina set down her own crate and waved to Anakin. Her little brother waved back.

“Come on, the survival rations aren’t that bad.”

“They aren’t that good, either. Especially the nine millionth time in a row. I think they call them survival rations because no one knows if you’ll survive eating them.”

“Ha ha. Very funny. I think you’ve told me that
joke
nine million times—and it wasn’t so good the first time.”

“Sorry,” Jaina said, sitting down on her crate. “Not much new inspiration here.”

“I know, I know,” Jacen said. “Things here don’t change much.” He could have gone and checked the
Millennium Falcon
’s chronometer, but without that and Chewbacca’s rigid insistence that they all eat and sleep at normal intervals, there was no clue at all to how much time had passed. The light in the chamber was unchangeably bright, coming from some diffuse and undefinable source in the upper reaches of the cavern. There was no sound at all from the massive cavern, except the sound of their own moving around and talking. But every sound anyone made produced a series of faint, distant echoes, whispering down from the top of the chamber for long seconds afterward. And the echoes of every sound mingled with all the others, Anakin’s laughter blending with Chewbacca’s growl or the whir of a machine, or the bang of a camp chair bumping into a table merging with the low, serious voices of the two Drall in conversation with each other.

Whenever the camp was busy and active, there was a constant whisper of background echoes reverberating down from above, just enough to make the chamber
seem less foreboding and empty. But five or ten seconds after they stopped moving or talking, the chamber would fall silent again, and the stillness would seem to shout louder than any noise how strange this place was, how old its flawless gleaming silver walls, how alien and powerful its capabilities.

Night—or what they pretended was night—was the hardest. With the silver walls still gleaming in the unchanging light, they would go to bed—the children to their sleeping pads in the shadow of the
Falcon,
Chewbacca to his usual shipboard bunk, the two Drall to foldout beds in Aunt Marcha’s hovercar, and Q9 plugged into a charge stand. Then, all would be so quiet that the slightest noise seemed to echo forever. A cough, a whisper, Ebrihim’s muttering snore—or Anakin crying in his sleep—seemed to carry up to heaven and come down again and again.

It was not the best way to live, Jacen reflected. But in a sense, it was not a way of life at all. It was a way of waiting. All of them, even Anakin, seemed to know things could not last this way forever—or even for very long. There was a war being fought out there, and sooner or later, one side or the other would find this place, and after that—

After that, no one even pretended to know what would happen.

*   *   *

“Sit up properly, Anakin,” said the Duchess Marcha, “and stop banging your foot against the table leg. The noise is bad enough, but the echoes will drive me to distraction.” She shook her head and looked toward her nephew, Ebrihim. “Honestly, nephew, I do not understand these human children. What does Anakin gain by slouching over and making such irritating noises?”

“I have not dealt with them long enough to obtain a clear answer, dearest aunt. However, I might add that
it would seem that even human parents do not understand the purpose behind much of what human children do—and that in spite of having once been children themselves.”