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," Kalencia 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 al! we're going to get out of
Source T." "Al! 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. "Thai'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 Ossilcge 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 turbolascr sites. And those Phalanxes of
dark circular openings. Some could be missile batteries. And some might be
refueling stations or docking faeilities 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
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 wing-man." 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. Whal 1 meant was that Captain Calrissian and
Master Skywalkcr 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 Ccnterpoint. 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. Thai 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 caking up t- Luke sighed. Another nuisance. With normal communications
stili utterly jammed throughout the Corel-lian 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, hut 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, "Arloo, 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 1 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. Kalcnda 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?"
CHAPTER FOUR
Child's Play Anakin 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 rcmarkahly 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 cjuite
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 chile 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 hi; built-in recording systems. But even a droid
had tc recharge once in a while, and besides. Q9-X2 did no want to spend all
day. every day preventing this mos peculiar child from pushing the wrong
button anc melting the planet. If nothing else, the constant strair would be
too much for his judgment circuits. At least ii might be, and that came to
much the same thing. Perhaps not the most straightforward thought process,
jusl there, but it was enough of an argument to get him t break from
Anakin-watching once in a while, and tha1 was more than good enough. Anakin
punched a code into the access panel, and ; low chime sounded. Past
experience had taught Qc that this sound was not a good sign. It seemed to
be J sort of warning bell. "That will do, Anakin," said Q9. Anakin looked
around in surprise, as if he hadn' known Q9 was there. "Q9!" Anakin shouted.
"Oh!" If the droid had been programmed to do so, lit would have let out a
sigh. Q9 had been with him foi hours now, so it seemed unlikely the child
could bt surprised by his arrival. On the other manipulator Anakin hadn't
shown much sign of acting talent. Ql. had heard of the phenomenon known as
absentmind edness, but he hadn't had any reason to believe i really existed
until he met Anakin. "I think it would blt; best if you stopped examining
that machine unti 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 idee what it does?" "N-n-no," Anakin admitted, quite