by Troy Denning
“What sort of debris?” his father demanded. “Ice? Rock? Iron-nickel?”
Ben thumbed the SELECT bubble active and slid it over to one of the designators: OBJECT B8. An instant later a density analysis offered a 71 percent probability that OBJECT B8 was a medium transport of unknown make and model.
But Ben did not immediately relay the information to his father. As the Shadow’s nose returned to its original plane, an enormous, gray-white dome was slowly coming into view. Dropping down from above and upside down relative to the ship, the dome hung at the base of a large, spinning cylinder ringed by a dozen small, attached tubes. Floating between the cylinder and the Shadow were nearly twenty dark flecks with the smooth lines and sharp corners suggestive of spacecraft, all drifting aimlessly and as cold as asteroids.
“Ben, you’re worrying me,” his father admonished. “How bad is it?”
“Uh, I don’t really know yet.” As Ben spoke, the Shadow’s lamp beams continued to slide up the spinning cylinder, to where it joined a gray metal sphere that looked to be about the size of one of Bespin’s smaller floating cities. “But maybe you should come back to the flight deck as soon as things are secure back there.”
“Yeah,” Luke said. “I was just thinking the same thing.”
As the lamp beams continued to reveal more of the station—at least that’s what Ben assumed he was looking at—he began to grow even more confused and worried. With a second, dome-capped cylinder rising out of the sphere directly opposite the first, the thing reminded him of a station he had helped infiltrate during the recent civil war. It didn’t seem possible that two such structures could exist in the galaxy by mere coincidence, or that he would have happened on this one by mere chance even if the two were related. He had the uneasy feeling that the Force was at play here—or, to be more precise, that the Force was putting him in play.
Now that they were actually in visual range of their target, Ben brought the full suite of sensors back online and began to investigate. To both his relief and puzzlement, all of the contacts appeared to be derelict vessels. They ranged widely in size, from small space yachts like the Shadow to an antiquated Tibanna tanker with a capacity in excess of a hundred million liters. Ben did a quick mental calculation of the total tonnage of the abandoned ships and shuddered. If these were captured spoils, there were some very impressive pirates hiding around here somewhere.
Starting to envision sensor masks and ambushes, Ben slid the Shadow into the cover of an old TGM Marauder. The ship looked as deserted as its sensor profile suggested, tumbling slowly with cold engines, open air locks, and no energy emanations whatsoever. But there was no apparent combat damage, or anything else, to suggest it had been taken by pirates.
Ben turned the sensors on the station itself and found it marginally less derelict. Its power core was active, but barely. A few warm areas suggested that at least some of its atmospheric seals remained intact. Approaching closer, he could see that three of the dark tubes attached to the upper cylinder had come loose at one end and were in danger of being launched away by centrifugal force. Whoever lived here—if anyone did—they were not much on maintenance.
The clack-clack of boots-in-a-hurry echoed through the open hatchway at the rear of the flight deck, then suddenly stopped. Ben activated the canopy’s mirror panel and found his father standing behind the copilot’s chair, jaw hanging slack as he stared at the slowly spinning station ahead.
“Remind you of anything?” Ben asked.
Luke’s gaze remained fixed on the space station. “What do you think?” he asked. “It could be a miniature centerpoint Station.”
Centerpoint had been an ancient space station located in the stable zone between the Corellian worlds of Talus and Tralus. Its origins remained cloaked in mystery, but the station had once been the most powerful weapon in the galaxy, capable of destroying entire star systems from hundreds of light-years away. One of the few positive things to come of the recent civil war, in Ben’s opinion, had been the facility’s destruction. He was far from happy to discover another version hidden here, deep inside the Maw.
“I was afraid you’d say that,” Ben said with a sigh. “What do we do now? Lob a baradium missile at it?”
Luke’s voice grew disapproving. “Do we have a baradium missile?”
Ben dropped his gaze. “Sorry. Uncle Han said it was always smart to keep one—”
“Your uncle isn’t a Jedi,” Luke interrupted. “I wish you’d remember that.”
“Sure,” Ben said. “But maybe this one time we should think about the way he would handle this. If this place was built by the same beings that designed centerpoint Station, the smartest thing we can do is get rid of it.”
“And maybe we will—after we unjam our vector plates and replenish our hydraulics.” Luke slipped into the copilot’s seat behind Ben. “In the meantime, try to avoid hitting anything. I’ll see if I can find a safe place to dock this bird.”
AS HANGAR BAYS WENT, THIS ONE LOOKED LIKE A DECADES-OLD DISASTER zone. The main doors were jammed about halfway open, leaving the entire facility exposed to the dark vacuum of space. The decks were slowly revolving around the Shadow as the station rotated on its axis, and they were crammed with starcraft from a dozen different eras and classes, all facing the open exit for a quick departure. Hand tools lay scattered across hull tops, tank dollies were propped against landing struts, charging carts rested beneath retracted access panels. A film of pale dust covered everything, so thick on the older craft that it was sometimes difficult to determine the hull color. None of the vessels showed attack damage, but all those tools suggested they had needed some manner of repair, and many crews had not even bothered to raise the boarding ramp before abandoning their work.
As his son struggled to accommodate the station’s rate of rotation, Luke extended his Force awareness toward the middle of the facility. On the journey in, he had sensed a concentration of life energy in the central sphere, a hazy cloud too large and diluted to be a single being, with no discernible focuses to suggest individual presences. It was still there, an area of heaviness and warmth in the faint fog of Force energy that permeated this part of the Maw. Luke could tell by the way it began to writhe up inside him that it had not only been monitoring their arrival, it had been awaiting them.
Ben swung the Shadow around to face the hangar exit, then put down—somewhat heavily—between an old TheedSpeed Galaxy Runner and a swoop-sized needle ship with a hatch about the size of a human hand. They completed the shutdown routine quickly, clicked out of their crash webbing, and went aft. Instead of following Luke to the suit locker, however, Ben stopped at the engineering station and began to call up system reports.
“Let’s leave repairs for later,” Luke said. He pulled a light, combat-rated vac suit from the locker and tossed it to Ben, then took another for himself. “I want to have a look around first.”
Ben caught the suit with no outward sign of anxiety, but the sudden ripple in his Force aura was hard to miss. He was afraid of the strange presence monitoring them from the station center, and Luke wished he understood why. The snaky feel of its Force touch certainly suggested the “tentacle” that had touched his son at Shelter. But what, exactly, had the thing done that continued to haunt Ben more than a decade later?
“Ben, it’ll be okay.” Luke opened his vac suit and began to push his feet into the legs. “If you’re remembering something else about your time at Shelter, it would be better to share—”
“Dad, I’m not trying to avoid anything out there,” Ben said. “But we’ve already been attacked once, and the Shadow took some bad hits. It’s just sound tactics to get things ready in case we need to leave in a hurry.”
It was hard to know whether Ben was unaware of how his fear was controlling him, or just allowing it to interfere with his judgment, but it really didn’t matter. The time was fast approaching when the young man had to face his demons or surrender to them, and—as much as Luke wished it otherwise—the
choice was one that no father could make for his son.
Continuing to don his vac suit, Luke peered out the viewport and scowled at the fleet of abandoned vessels. “Take a look outside, then tell me again about sound tactics.”
Ben frowned and studied the equipment-strewn hangar outside, then slowly flushed with embarrassment.
“Yeah … I see,” he said, opening his vac suit. “We aren’t going to have time finish our repairs.”
“Probably not,” Luke agreed. “A Jedi needs to be observant, and being observant means—”
“Thinking about what you see,” Ben finished, quoting one of Kam Solusar’s favorite sayings. “I should have asked myself why everyone was leaving their tools lying around. It could be that something has been drawing—or taking—the ship crews away, and it doesn’t look like anyone makes it back here to finish their repairs.”
“Which means?”
Ben peered out the viewport for a long time, obviously searching for some missed detail that would explain what was luring the crews away from their vessels—and why no one was returning. Finally, he turned back to Luke, shaking his head.
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “All that occurs to me is that we shouldn’t make the same mistake everyone else did.”
Luke smiled broadly. “Congratulations—that’s exactly what it means.”
Ben looked more puzzled than before.
“The trouble with sound tactics is that they make you predictable,” Luke explained. “Jedi shouldn’t be predictable.”
Ben’s eyes finally lit in understanding. “Got it,” he said. “From now on, we eat when I’m hungry.”
Luke laughed, glad to see that Ben was relaxed enough to joke. “I don’t think we have the supplies for that.” He pulled their helmets from the suit locker. “Space yachts don’t come with that much cargo capacity.”
They sealed their suits and exited through the air lock into about a quarter standard gravity. Luke immediately began to feel a bit dizzy. Like Centerpoint Station, this habitat lacked true artificial gravity. Instead it created an imperfect imitation by rotating on its axis—a method that wreaked havoc on the delicate inner ear of many bipedal species.
Once the Shadow’s outer hatch had closed, Luke secured the hidden lock inside its framework by triggering a latch that could only be accessed with the Force. Meanwhile, Ben gathered some equipment from nearby ships, and they proceeded to camouflage the Shadow together. Ben tossed some hand tools onto an engine mount, and Luke leaned a torch kit against a landing strut. Finally, they used the Force to stir up a cloud of dust that would eventually drift back onto the Shadow, leaving it covered in the same gray blanket as the surrounding vessels.
They weaved their way through the tangled mass of ships and into the primary air lock at the back of the berthing deck. Like the hangar itself, the chamber was equipped with motion-sensitive lights that remained fully functional. So when Ben secured the hangar hatch behind them, the two Skywalkers patiently waited for an automatic valve to open and equalize pressure with the station interior.
They were still waiting two minutes later when the motion-sensitive lights switched off.
Ben’s voice came over the helmet speakers. “Great—maybe we should have started on the repairs.” His tone was joking, but with a nervous edge. “And waited until they sent someone to fetch us.”
“Something,” Luke corrected. He raised an arm, and the lights reactivated. In contrast with the hangar illumination, which had been tinted heavily toward the blue end of the spectrum, the light in the air lock had a distinctly green cast to it. “Or maybe we should just equalize pressure ourselves.”
Luke reached over to the side of the chamber and pushed down on a lever, which he assumed to be the handle of a manual standby pump. A sharp clunk shook the entire air lock; then the ceiling slid aside and left them staring up into a cavernous darkness above.
Ben’s hand dropped to the lightsaber hanging on his belt. “What’s that?”
“The door, I think.”
Luke extended his awareness through the opening. When he did not sense any danger, he Force-leapt up into the darkness and landed adjacent to the hole. Almost instantly dim green light began to pour from a nearby wall, illuminating a short length of squat, wide corridor. Ben arrived a moment later, still standing on the air lock floor as it rose into the hole through which Luke had just jumped.
“Do you get the feeling someone’s making this easy for us?” Ben asked.
“Either that, or the equipment is just that reliable,” Luke said. “I don’t know which worries me more.”
“The equipment, definitely,” Ben said over the suit comm. “This place has the same external design as Centerpoint Station, remember? That can’t be coincidence.”
“Probably not,” Luke admitted. “But this station can’t be as dangerous. It’s sitting between two black holes, and it would be pretty hard to target anything from in here. We can’t even get navigation readings.”
“Yeah, we can’t,” Ben agreed. “But we’re not the ones who built it.”
Luke frowned at the thought that another weapon similar to Centerpoint Station might exist in the galaxy. Fortunately, this one was much smaller, which meant it probably did not share the same function. At least, that was what he hoped it meant.
Luke checked his external readouts and was not surprised to discover he and Ben remained in a hard vacuum. He motioned Ben to the other side of the corridor. “And on that cheery note …”
They started toward the interior of the station, studying their environs as they walked. No more than two meters high but three times as wide, the corridor appeared to have been designed to move a lot of traffic quickly—an impression reinforced by two metal bands running along the floor, which might have been a guide ribbon for some sort of robotic hovercart. The walls and ceiling were made of a translucent composite that did not quite conceal the network of fibers, tubes, and ducts running behind them.
After the Skywalkers had traveled ten meters, the wall behind them fell dark, and a pale green glow began to pour from the next section. As Luke and Ben continued deeper into the station, they began to come across detritus of all kinds—vac suit helmets, an ammonia breather’s air tank, blaster rifles, flechette launchers, and half a dozen single-wheeled carts with round bellies and gel-padded kneeling benches. Each time a new section of wall illuminated, the light grew more anemic, and soon the hue was more yellow than green.
“This place is starting to dark me out,” Ben said, stopping beside a half-inflated vac suit. “Why can’t they just pick a color?”
“Good question,” Luke said. He was not happy to see Ben reacting to his feelings instead of focusing on the problem. “Maybe the colors are supposed to tell you where you are. You have a guess?”
“Yeah, maybe.” Ben used his boot toe to flip the vac suit onto its back and shone his wristlamp into the helmet’s faceplate, revealing a visage so shriveled and gray it might have been Ho’Din or human. “The lights could be a warning system, you know? Like blue means safe, green means danger, yellow means big trouble.”
Luke felt only a faint tingle of danger himself, but that didn’t mean Ben’s theory was wrong—especially considering the body they had just found. He activated the status display inside his faceplate and found all radiation levels well within the normal range.
“Ben, are you sensing something that worries you?”
“You mean aside from that strange presence in the central sphere?” Ben asked.
“Right.”
“And besides the fact that we’re poking around a ghost station with no way to contact anyone?”
“Yes, aside from that.”
“And that somebody really old, powerful, and mysterious obviously went to a lot of trouble to keep this place hidden from the likes of us?”
“And that, too.”
Ben shrugged and shook his helmet. “Then no, I’m all systems ready.” He stepped over the body and continued up th
e corridor. “Let’s keep moving.”
They continued up the corridor for another two hundred paces, passing a series of intersections and huge chambers filled with equipment so alien and mysterious that Luke could not even guess at its function. There were huge barrels made of the same material as the walls, surrounded by glowing coils of what appeared to be fiber-optic cable. In another chamber, they saw a silver sphere the size of the Millennium Falcon hovering over a disk of dark metal. The next cavernous room held a warren of containment-field cubes, each one holding a hammock, a couple of basins, and a large, wedge-skulled skeleton still draped in a thin yellow robe.
Reluctant to cross a still-shimmering barrier field that had probably sealed the entrance for centuries—if not millennia—father and son lingered outside the chamber for a time. They could not help debating whether the prisoners had belonged to the species that had created the station, were some enemy species the creators were fighting, or had been a crew from one of the vessels abandoned in the hangar, left here to die by a long-forgotten band of pirates. After discussing the likelihood of each possibility for several minutes, they finally realized they would never know and continued on their way.
Twenty meters later, they came to another detention center. The remains inside these cells were exoskeleton parts. Judging by the size of the thoraxes and abdomens, the inhabitants had been a little smaller than humans. Their chitinous skulls were large and heart-shaped, with openings for huge multifaceted eyes. Scattered around each cell were at least half a dozen small limb tubes and no more than four larger ones, suggesting insectoids with two powerful legs and four long arms.
Ben’s voice came over Luke’s helmet speaker. “Hey, those look like—”
“Killiks,” Luke agreed. “Unu did claim they were involved in the building of the Maw and Centerpoint Station.”
“As slaves, it looks like,” Ben replied. “Dad, what is this place?”