Star Wars - Correlian trilogy 3 - Showdown at Centerpoint

by Allen McBride

  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 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 ehute. 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 Chewbacea 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 rcpulsor 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 Us 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 Trains. 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 Ehrihim, 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 lop 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 trie concealed topside entrance. The Duchess's hoverear 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. 09 could see all the rest of the party from here- Jacen and Jaina carrying some sort of gear out of the Millennium Fal
con; 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, Mareha, 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 Highly 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." Jaccn set down the crate he was lugging out of the Fa/con, 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 elue 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 Drail 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, Ebrihini'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 chil-dren do-and that in spite of having once been children themselves." "Somehow, that docs not surprise me. I suppose our own young ones can be some trouble, but I must say I have no recollection at all of your misbehaving as badly as Anakin does." "Don't talk like I'm not here!" Anakin shouted indignantly. These Drall grown-ups were worse than regular human grown-ups for pushing kids around. "I was just thinking about stuff." "What kind of stuff?" Jaina asked. All of them ganging up on him, even the other kids. "Just stuff." Anakin said, frowning fiercely. "Well, Anakin, there is certainly nothing wrong with thinking," said Aunt Marcha. "I'm sure the universe would be a better place if we all indulged in the practice a bit more. If you could do your thinking without the banging, that would be a great help. All right?" "All right," Anakin said, still feeling kind of grouchy. But he knew he was lucky they had stopped asking questions when they had. Because of all that Jedi stuff, he would have had to tell the truth if they asked more, or his brother and sister would catch him fibbing, and then he'd be in even more trouble. Sometimes Jacen and Jaina acted just like grown-ups. If he had told them he had been thinking about that control panel Q9 had told him to stop fooling with, they all would have yelled at him. He knew he could get it to do something. Something big, and important. What, exactly, he wasn't sure. But something. He could feel that. It was like the control panel was calling to him, asking him to hurry back and set the machinery free, let it go out and do the work it was supposed to do. But it didn't matter. They hadn't asked him about it. So he could think about it all he liked. "Come, dearest aunt," said Ebrihim to the Duchess. "It is late. Everyone else is asleep. We have made great progress, but we can do no more with our researches tonight." The two Drall were sitting in the hovercar. reviewing their notes for the day. And Ebrihim was right. They could go no further for the moment. "Whatever progress we have made is only the barest start toward understanding this place," the Duchess replied. "We have some idea of how the alien keypads are laid out, and what- some of the button markings and color coding seem to mean. But going from there to operating this place, and shutting it down safely-a machine that has been operating for at least tens of thousands of years and perhaps much longer? We have no idea how the system draws its power. Suppose we do learn how to turn it off. Where does the power go once it is not coming here? If it is some sort of geologic energy tap, as I suspect, we might set off massive seismic disturbances. I think it most probable that this chamber is but one part of a much larger system. I suspect this is merely the nozzle, if you will, for a propulsion system woven into the very being of this world. We are dealing with a device that can move a planet. A device of that power could also destroy a planet, if it was not used properly. I do not see any way of learning all we need to know in any reasonable period of time." Ebrihim smiled faintly and let out a short bark of a laugh. "Unless, of course, we simply instruct Anakin to find the main control panel and then set him loose on it." Marcha's eyes widened in horror. "Do not say such a thing, nephew. Not even in jest. Jokes like that have a way of coming true." Anakin's eyes snapped open so suddenly it startled him. He was, quite abruptly, wide awake and staring up at the under hull of the Millennium Falcon. He sat up quietly and looked around. Jacen and Jaina were still sound asleep. Chewbacca was a deep enough sleeper that Anakin didn't even worry about him. Ebrihim and Aunt Marcha were in the hoverear. Anakin turned and looked in that direction. All the c
ar's lights were out. the windows darkened, and the hatch was shut. That left Q9. The droid spent most nights in standby mode, partially powered down, plugged into a portable charging stand between trie hoverear and the Falcon, with his back to the larger craft. Anakin also knew that the bulk of the Falcon would block nearly al! of the droid's sensors. So long as he kept the ship between himself and Q9, he ought to be able to sneak away without any problems. Moving as silently as he could, he pushed back his blanket and rolled over so he was on his hands and knees. He crawled out from under the Falcon, and.into the endless bright light of the repulsor chamber. Anakin blinked once or twice as he got to his feet. Strange to be sneaking around in light as bright as day. But there was no time to worry about that kind of stuff. Someone might wake up any second and notice he was gone. Padding along in his bare feet, clad only in his underwear, Anakin moved straight out for the perimeter of the huge chamber, glancing over his shoulder now and then to make sure that he was keeping the Falcon between himself and Q9. He reached the perimeter and trotted unhesitatingly into the closest tunnel entrance. The passage he wanted was almost on the other side of the chamber from here, but that did not worry him. The others might get lost in the side passages, but not Anakin. He could feel which way was the right way. He moved unerringly through the complicated maze of passages, taking every turning and passage with absolute confidence. He eould feel the panel getting closer. Closer. And there it was, just as he had left it, the initial keypad open and waiting. He stared at it for a minute, then reached out his hand and held it, palm down, over the pad. He closed his eyes, reached out, and fell the interior of the pad, tracing the eireuits, the logic paths, the potentials and safeties that were inside the machine. It had been asleep for so long, so very long, waiting for someone to wake it up. And now. Now was the time. He knew, knew with absolute certainty, how to make it work. No Q9-X2 here to tease him, or make him worry about trapdoors and stuff. He knew. He was sure. Anakin Solo reached out and pressed the center button of the five-by-five grid. The green button turned purple. Good. He paused for a moment, and then, stretching his fingers as far as they would go. he pressed all four of the corner buttons at once. They turned orange, not purple. He frowned. That wasn't quite what he had expected, but never mind. Move on. Starting at the top and moving counterclockwise, he pressed the center button of each outer row in turn. These did indeed turn purple. That made him feel a bit better. The keypad made the chiming noise again, but this time it wasn't just once. It kept going, over and over and over. Anakin closed his eyes once more and held his palm over the keypad. Yes. Yes. That was it. Starting from the bottom right, and moving clockwise, he pressed each of the corner buttons in turn. Each turned from orange to a reassuring purple as he pressed it. He paused, only for a moment, just before he pushed in the last one. Was this such a good idea? He was going to get in trouble for this, he knew that much. But would it be so much trouble that it wouldn't be worth it? No. He had to do it. There was no turning back now. He pushed in the last orange button. It turned purple, and suddenly the chiming noise was louder and higher-pitched. There was a low-pitch hum from behind Anakin, and he turned around. A section of the floor was sliding away. For a moment he wondered if he had been wrong about trapdoors. But then a whole complicated console rose slowly up out of the floor, a strange-looking control panel, all in the same silver stuff as the chamber itself, in front of a stranger-looking little seat that looked as if it were intended for a being that bent in different places from a human. Hopping with excitement, all doubts forgotten, Anakin sat down in the odd little chair and did not even notice that it was adapting itself to his body, reforming itself, lifting him up and moving him forward so he would be able to reach the controls more comfortably. He stared at the instruments for a full minute, then extended his arms and spread his fingers out as far as they would go. He shut his eyes and reached out into the intricately, beautifully complicated universe of switches and paths and controls and linkages behind the knobs and levers and dials that covered the control panel. Power ratings, capacitance stowage, vernier control, targeting subsystems, safety overrides, shielding constraints, thrust balancing. What they all were, what they all meant, how they all worked, and worked together-all of it flowed into him, as if the ancient machines were speaking to him, telling him their story. He knew it all. He knew it all now. Anakin put his hands on the control panel and felt it all flow through him. Wake it up. He had to wake it up. The whole system had slept for so long. It wanted to come awake, to revive itself, to do its proper work. He moved as if he were asleep, in a dream, moving to what his ability in the Force told him he could do, not to do what needed doing, or what he ought to do. He knew, somehow, the compulsion, the desire to make the system come on, was within himself, that the machinery was nothing more than machinery. But it fell as if it were the machine whispering to him, not his own in- stincts and abilities urging him on. Pull that long lever to start the initiator process activator. Twist that dial to bring the geogravitic energy transfer system on-line. Tap in that command sequence at the standard five-by-flve keypad to clear the safeties. Somewhere, deep below him, the ground shuddered slightly, and a low, powerful hum began to build. The chiming noise grew more and more intense, becoming louder and louder, the chiming coming faster and faster. A flat spot on the control panel twisted and shimmered and then started to swell upward, to form itself into a handle like a spacecraft's joystick. Anakin reached out to it with his left hand, barely aware of what he was doing, not noticing that the handle was lorming itself, reshaping itself, to fit itself to his hand. A graphic display appeared in the air over the handle. a hollow wireframe cube, made up of a grid of smaller cubes five high, five across, and five deep. All the smaller cubes were transparent, but, as Anakin watched, one cube, in the far lower left corner, turned green. Slowly, carefully, he pulled back on the joystick. The solitary green cube turned purple, and suddenly the three transparent cubes it touched turned green. The corner cube turned orange, the second layer turned green, and a new layer of cubes turned purple. The colors spread out until the entire five-by-five-by-five grid shifted through green to purple to bright, glowing orange. The ground trembled again, and the hum of power grew deeper, and. somehow, more emphatic, more solid, the sound of massive energies waiting to be unleashed. Anakin let go of the joystick. At the moment he did, the chiming slopped. The control chamber was suddenly silent as the power hum dropped away into lower and lower frequencies, until it was so deep a tone it was below the threshold of hearing. The joystick melted away, flattened itself back down into the control panel. And there, in the blank space at the center of the panel, a new button created itself, flowing up out of the panel surface, shaping itself into a disk about six centimeters across and a centimeter high. As he watched, the button shifted its color, changed from silver to green, green to purple, purple to orange, plain orange to a throbbing, pulsating orange, pulsing from the color of molten iron to the ciull near red of a dusky sunset. The chamber was silent. Anakin stared in open-mouthed fascination at the final button, his eyes wide, the light of the throbbing orange button throwing weird and shifting colors onto his clothes, his face, his eyes. The button. The button was there. It called to him, or else his own compulsion, his compulsion to make machines work, to make machines do, called from deep inside himself. He did not know. He did not care. He reached out his left hand. He held it poised over the button for a moment. And then he pushed it down. Lightning flared out from the apex of the central cone in the great chamber, lancing out toward each of the lower cones, slamming into them with sparks and fire. Thunder, deafeningly loud, the sound of the earth eracking open and splitting itself apart, roared out through the great chamber. Blinding light exploded out from the lightning strike to reflect off every silver surface, flooding the chamber with brilliance. The lesser cones answered back, sending their own thunderbolts hack to strike at the top of the center cone, blasting it into incandescence. Then, as suddenly as it had been there, the lightning was gone,
and the cones were as they had been, unaffected by the massive power that had played around them. The sound of the thunder echoed through the chamber, reverber- ating back and forth like the angry war cry of some long-forgotten god. The chamber shuddered and shook with the thunder. Chewbacca, aboard the Falcon, was thrown from his bunk as the ship' bounced and lurched along with the chamber. He was halfway to the ship's control room before he eame fully awake and realized the ship was on the ground. Not just on the ground, but under it, in a sealed chamber, with no hope of escape. Shields. The Falcon's shields would provide at least some protection. He had to get everyone aboard, and fast. He turned and headed for the open access ramp. The twins had gotten out from under the ship. They were on their feet and struggling to stay that way as the ground bucked and heaved under their feet. Chewbacca shouted for them to get aboard, but the echoes of the thunder were so loud that even his voice did not carry. He waved his arms, gesturing for them to get aboard. Jacen saw him and nodded vigorously. He grabbed his sister's arm and pulled her toward th e ramp. The simple effort of trying to move at all was enough to knock them both off their feet. But they kept on moving, crawling toward the access ramp. The shaking of the around seemed to ease off, even as the echoing roar faded away. But Chewhacca had no illusions that things would stay quiet for long. He rushed down the ramp even as the twins were crawling up it. The others. He had to get to the others. Moving as if he were on the deck of a storm-tossed ship in the sea, he made his way to the far side of the ship. The hovercar had toppled over on its side. As he moved toward it the side hatch popped open and Kbrihim came crawling out, half carrying, half dragging his aunt Mareha. She seemed to have a bad cut on the left side of her head. She looked half-stunned. Somehow, without even knowing how he did it, Chewbacca crossed the distance to the hovercar. He reached out and lifted Mareha away from Ebrihim's side, then tucked her under one arm and lifted Ebrihim down to the ground with the other. He shouted at Ebrihim to get aboard the Falcon, and pointed toward the ship. Either Ebrihim could understand what Chewbacca was saying or else he understood the gesture. He nodded and started toward the ship. The ground had all but stopped moving, and Ebrihim was to walk more or less without being knocked over. Chewbacca looked toward the ship himself and saw Qy, down and inert, slumped over next to his charging stand. Still carrying Marcha, he moved to the charging stand and examined the situation. The droid looked completely dead and motionless. Chewbacca pulled at the cable connecting the droid to the charger, but the connection seemed to have gotten jammed somehow. Chewbacca yanked harder, and the cable snapped. He scooped the droid up in his free hand and headed for the Falcon. At that moment the lightning struck again, blasting out from the central cone toward the six smaller cones that surrounded it. Chewbacca looked up involuntarily to see the dazzling bright display, but then realized his mistake and looked away before he could be blinded by the light. The light he could look away from, but the sound, the overwhelming sound-there was nothing he could do to shut that out. He hurried toward the ship as the lesser cones answered back to the master, sending their own bolts of fire back toward the central cone. The noise redoubled, louder than ever, and the ground bucked harder, nearly knocking Chewbacca over. The Falcon was bouncing on its landing jacks, riding their shock absorbers. Chewbacca staggered around to the far side of the ship and got to the entry ramp. He had to time his rush up the ramp between the buckings and surgings of the silver surface of the ground. Judging the moment to be right, he rushed aboard ship. He hit the switch to raise the ramp, then got to the lounge. He set the Duchess Marcha and Q9-X2 down on the deck as gently as he could. Ebrihim had already produced a first-aid kit from somewhere, and knelt down next to his aunt. The two Drall, the droid, the twins-Chewbacca suddenly realized that Anakin wasn't there. He had half assumed the youngest child would be with the twins. He turned and headed toward the door. "Anakin's safe!" Jacen shouted over the thundering din, clearly reading Chewbacca's thoughts from his action. "He's in some sheltered side tunnel. I can feel him in the Force. He's not hurt, and he's feeling more scared we'll be mad at him than scared he'll get hurt. I think he set this off." Chewbacca just stood there and stared at Jacen for a moment, unsure what to do. He had sworn to protect the children above all else. If Anakin were indeed safe, then he could button up the ship and wait this thing out. But if-if-Anakin were in danger, then what could he do? Search all the endless side corridors for him during this massive disturbance? But if he did that, he would be exposing the ship, and those aboard her, to greater danger. He would have to get the shields raised and lowered so he could go in and out-and no one besides him knew the ship well enough to keep the shields up. "lo keep the others safe, he would have to stay here. Very well. It was not certain, it was not perfect, but it was the best judgment, the best decision he could make under the circumstances. If he had judged wrong, and harm came to Anakin as a result, then, he knew, his own life would be forfeit, and rightly so. It took him but a moment to think it all through. But thought was nothing without action. He rushed for the cockpit and activated the Falcon's, shields at full strength. The sound faded away somewhat as the shields engaged. Chewbacca tried to activate the ship's rcpulsors to raise her up off the heaving deck of the chamber, but they would not engage. He checked the propulsion readouts. Every propulsion system was offline. He had no idea why. But there was no time to worry about that now. He needed to get the ship up off the deck before it was bounced apart. Even without the propulsion systems, there was a way to do that. Chewbacca worked the shield controls, shifting power away from the upper shields to the lower ones, extending the lower shields as far as they would go, and softening them, so they formed a gradual thickening membrane rather than a hard edge-if only the trick would work. The Falcon hesitated a moment, and then rose up off her landing jacks to rest on a cushion of softened lower-side shields. The bouncing and bucking and heaving of the deck was still there to be felt, but the shields smoothed it down and gave the ship a chance to ride it out. He set the shields to self-compensate and maintain their betting. He could at least hope the shields would protect them against what was happening, but he would not be able to do more than hope until he knew what was going on. All he knew for sure was that it seemed to be happening above them all. He looked up, just as another spectacular cycle of lightning bursts flashed back and forth between the tops of the cones, and then another, and another. The cycle was clearly growing faster, and more powerful. There was no way of knowing what sorts of energy and radiation those bolts were putting out. Chewbacca could do little more than hope that the Falcon's shields would protect those inside against it all. The lightning transfers grew faster and faster, more and more powerful, until all the cone-tops were a constant blaze of light, joined together by spikes of fire. Then, it seemed, the cone-tops drew the fire in, absorbing the energy that flowed around them. The roaring thunder of the lightning faded away as the cone-tops flared and flickered with energy, light of every color sparking and shimmering on their surfaces. Just when Chewbacca thought the display had reached its climax, he realized the scintillating colors W'cre flowing down the cones, toward the bottom of the chamber-toward the Millennium Falcon. Chewbacca tried frantically to activate one of the propulsion systems, any of the propulsion systems-but ail of them stayed stubbornly off-line. Suddenly the entire ship was balhed in lightning, a firestorm of sparks and flares that coursed around the shields, sparking and flaring everywhere. Every circuit breaker and safety cutoff in the ship tripped at once, and Chewbacca made no effort to reset any of them. He had no desire to have any active circuits running with that much power flowing around the ship. As suddenly as it had flowed over the ship, the wave of power swept past it. Chewie craned his neck around to watch the energy wave moving, just in time to see it incinerate the hovercar, detonate Q9's charging stand, and set everything else left outside ablaze. The blaze of energy swept on, swooping up the sides of the chamber's conical interior wall, rushing up toward the apex of the chamber, a ring of seething pow
er that grew brighter, more powerful, more energetic as it moved higher up the cone. The ring of fire merged into a single point of raging power at the apex of the cone and exploded outward in a torrent of light that streamed forth in all directions, blindingly bright. The walls of the cone seemed to shudder, shake, expand as the power burst rippled through them. Another stream of scintillating power coursed down the big central cone and the six lesser ones, down over the base of the chamber, blanketing the Falcon in bolts of blazing glory as it swept past the ship, out and up and in toward the point of the conical chamber, racing toward the pinnacle, blasting out its energy, making the very walls of the cone shimmer and shake with its power. And again. And again. And again. Until the power burst did not meet in a point, but instead reached the top of an open cone, and exploded as a ring of light-with the blue skies of daylight visible above. Chewbacca, still stunned and amazed, began to realize what was happening. The conical chamber of the planetary repulsor was transforming itself, opening itself out, opening out its apex point to give itself a clear shot at the sky. Another power burst swept over the ship. Another. Another, another, another, eaeh burst riding up to the top of the now-open cone and forcing it open wider and wider and wider. Chewbaeea checked the shield displays and saw that, for a miracle, they were holding. That was, no doubt, less a testimony to the strength of the shields t han it was to the characteristics of the energy sweeping past the ship. The power bursts were flowing over the shields, not attempting to penetrate them. But Chewbacca was past worrying about such things. Whether or not they survived, or were burnt to a cinder, was out of his hands, of anyone's hands. This titanic machine would do whatever Anakin had ordered it to do, and nothing could stand in its way. Chewbacca thought of the endless megatons of rock and stone and dirt the chamber had to be slamming out of the way, the massive shock waves that had to be reverberating throughout the whole vicinity. There had been a whole series of underground tunnels leading to the hidden entrance to this place. Surely all of them had collapsed, along with the Drallist building that sat atop them. The Drallists had been searching for the planetary repulsor. By now, beyond doubt, the planetary repulsor had found them, destroyed them as they had attempted to destroy the New Republic's government. Chewbacca found a rough justice in that thought, and smiled to himself. Jacen came into the cockpit and slipped into the pilot's seat, his father's seat, straining to see what was happening. The boy seemed very small, and very fright- ened-and yet controlled, adult, serious. There was no time now to feel the terror of the moment. That could come later. That was what nightmares were for. The boy looked up and saw what was happening, saw the job that the roiling, seething energies were doing. "It's opening/' Jacen said, his voice full of wonder. "And it's getting higher." Chewbaeea looked up. He hadn't noticed that, but Jacen was right. The walls of the cone were getting taller, even as they spread wider. Perhaps that was to insure the stone and earth it shoved out of the way did not tumble down into the cavern. Perhaps it was for some other reason altogether. Who could know what the makers of this stupendous device had intended? Chewbacca turned toward Jacen and pointed toward the outside of the ship, then held his hand out, palm down, at the height of a smali child's head as he let out a worried growl. "Anakin's still a!l right," said Jacen. "I can feel him. He's out there"Jacen pointed toward one specific point in the perimeter of the chamber wall-"and he's scared-maybe even more scared than we are-I mean more scared than Jaina and me-but he's all right." In the midst of his own fear, Chewbaeea managed to find a little bit of a laugh. A clever recovery on Jacen's part. The child knew that Wookiees did not like admitting to fear, and had found a way to avoid offending a Wookiee who was downright terrified. Any rational being would be terrified by all this. Chewbaeea pointed to the back of the Falcon and made another interrogatory-sounding noise, "They're all okay back there," said Jacen. "Aunt Marcha woke up, and I think she'll be okay. Except Q9. He's still dead-or off, or shorted out, or whatever. He's not moving, anyway," Chewbacca nodded. They were lucky any of them were alive. If Q9 could be repaired, Chcwie would attend to it later. If not-well, one casualty seemed a very low price indeed for riding out this storm. Another pulse of energy swept over the Falcon, a bit rougher ride than the last one. The ship bounced once or twice and spun about a few degrees to starboard. Chewbacca growled thoughtfully. A reminder, that was. A reminder that they were nowhere near close enough to the end of this to talk about living through it.