Star Wars - Correlian trilogy 3 - Showdown at Centerpoint

by Allen McBride

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Evasive Maneuvers Han Solo paced the ground, back and forth, back and forth, the gravel crunching underfoot. He almost tripped over Artoo once or twice, until he managed to shoo the droid out of the way. "Go over this one more time," he said, turning to Dracmus. The Selonian had joined Han, Leia, Luke, and Mara for dinner on the grounds of the villa. By all rights, they should have been lounging about the table, relaxing in the gentle breezes of perfect twilight, after a first-rate dinner. But Han just couldn't do it. It seemed utterly criminal just to be hanging around, lolling in the lap of luxury, while the whole star system was falling to pieces. Everyone kept telling him that there was nothing they could do but wait, but Han had had enough of waiting about five minutes after Luke had told them about Centerpoint. "I know I need to understand the situation," said Han, "but I also know I'm completely lost. So please. Explain to me why it's in our best interest to just sit here and wait Explain to me what it accomplishes." "Yes," said Luke. "Please do. I'd like to hear this." "Very wellness," said Dracmus, "let me be trying it again. You have to start with knowing the idea that the three things that matter most to Selonians are honor, consensus, and the Den. All else cornes behind those three. Everything, and far behind." "All right, that much I get," said Han. "But what's that got to do with why having the Triad Selonians on repulsor duty was such a big deal?" "Merely everything, that's all," said Dracmus. "The Triad Selonians on Sacorria descend from despised offshoot of a bloodline discredited long ago. I will not be going into the whole history, but suffice to be saying that the ancestors of the Triad Selonians disputed a just settlement in a matter of vitalness, centuries ago. Some of them tried to lie and cheat their way into a position of advantage over other members of their own Den. As a consequence, the Den was split up into two groups-the victims of the fraud and the nasty perpetrators. The perpetrators were kicked off Corellia by my ancestors, the ancestors of the Hunchuzuc, and also removed from Selonia by the Overden. So bad was the scandal that the victims formed a new Den under a new name, because the old name was utterly dishonored. Even now I must not speak it. It is obscenity, only to be used when time is right for splendidly rotten insult. This name-losing had never happened to any other Den ever before, and it has never happened again since." "It doesn't seem quite fair to blame people for what their ancestors did," said Luke. "Is muchly more fair for Selonians than humans, I am believing. Remember that the Den is all. The Den lives on while the individuals die. Also recall that the new individuals arc virtual clones of the old ones. You humans tend to think of a Den as collection of individuals. But we are not like humans. In many ways, we are more like highly intelligent social insects. We are individuals, but the individual is completely in service of the Den. Well, nearly complete. We are something closer than your families, but not quite as close as the cells in the body." "That's going a bit far, isn't it?" asked Mara. "And it still doesn't seem fair to kick everyone out for the sins of the ancestors," said Luke. "Leia and I would be in very big trouble if humans did that." Dracmus bowed very slightly to Mara, an almost imperceptible movement. "Maybe analogy is too far. Maybe yes and maybe no. But, Master Skywalker, when you bleed, do you worry how blood cells that go out of you feel about leaving? If some of your blood cells are diseased, do you think about what is fair to cells that are still healthy when you treat the illness-or do you get your blood changed completely, just to be on the safe side, just to make sure illness cannot come back?" Han resisted the urge to start pacing again. "It's the story of my life with you, Dracmus, but we've wandered off the point again." "Thought we were talking about how humans different from us," Dracmus said. Han paused a moment, resisting the temptation to lose his temper again. He collected himself and then spoke. "I've got a feeling we're not going to get anywhere until we're all agreed on this, so okay. I'll tell you my reaction, and then maybe we can move on. I grew up with Selonians, and I never knew any of this. I admit it's embarrassing, but-" "Be not muchly embarrassed, Honored Solo," Dracmus said in a soothing voice. "Don't be forgetting the Selonians you met were trained-and bred-for sole purpose of dealing with humans. Is our job to make you feel comfy with us." "I know, I know. And they did a good job. I grew up thinking that Selonians were just funny-looking humans with a few quaint customs left over from the old days. But just to round this out, I should have found out how it worked, even if your people didn't want me to know. Back in my smuggling days, I made a career out of knowing what the other side's worldview was like-and yet I grew up knowing nothing about the people next door. It makes me wonder about the rest of my life, growing up on Corellia. How much else did I not see?" "Probably quite a bit," said Leia. "None of us ever really sees our own culture all that well." Han roiled his eyes. "Gee, there's an original thought. But even all this is off the point. What I was going to say was that it was embarrassing to find out how little I knew about you, .but that right now I don't care about being embarrassed. Treat me like a complete idiot, but make me understand what's going on. If I've got this straight, now that Kleyvits has admitted to being in the pay of the Triad, and admitted to smuggling some of them back onto the planet, that changes everything, right?" "Right," said Dracmus. "Excellent!" "Great. I'm glad. But how?" "Begging pardon?" "How. How does Kleyvits confessing change everything?" "Because it means my Hunchuzuc were tricked. We gave in under false pretenses. The Overden made us be thinking that the Overden ran the repulsor, and had smashed the Bakuran destroyer all by themselves. All was fraud," she said, her voice growing genuinely angry. "The Overden achieved a consensus favorable to themselves by trickery and deception, and by involving themselves with a dishonored and nameless Den. This is depth of crime. Even worse, the nameless Den was linked to Triad, and Triad linked to Sal-Solo, who kidnaps his own, steals children." "Guilt by association," Han said. "How advanced and sophisticated." Mara looked up at Han. "Think it through. In a group society run by consensus, guilt by association makes some sense." "Anyway," said Dracmus, "Overden in bad. No way could it be worse for them. You saw how Kleyvits caved in once the truth came out. That will be happening every time Hunchuzuc demands the truth of Overden Selonian. Overden will be losing so much face you'll be able to be seeing the back of their heads from the front. Hunchuzuc will take over. Take over consensus, take over much property-take over possession of the repulsor." "But the Sacorrian Selonians are still the ones running the repulsor," Luke objected. "Yes! And so we must wait. I know that human way-at least one human way-to deal with such problem would be to give the Sacorrian Selonians one chance to give up. If they didn't, in you go with all guns blazing nicely. But maybe everyone gets killed. You seize the repulsor, but have no idea where on switch is." Dracmus shook her head. "This is not Selonian way. We will talk with Sacorrian scums, nasty though job will be. We arc talking with them, right now. And we will talk to them. And talk to them. Finally, pressure--peer pressure on Sacorrians to give up--will be too much, and they will give up. And do more than giving up. They will cooperate with Hunchuzuc, tell us how to run machinery, as part of their penance for being on the losing side. This is how it will be. We just have to sit back and wait." "Sounds terrific," said Han. "So what's the catch?1' "The catch is all takes time. Everything I tell of will happen. Is inevitable. The trouble is like in old Selonian saying. The agreed-to we do at once. The inevitable can take a little while.' " "How big a little while?" asked Luke. Dracmus shook her head. "An hour. A day. A month. A year." Luke frowned. "An hour we have. Maybe even a day. But not much longer. Centerpoint Station is going to fire at Bovo Yagen in just over eighty-four hours. Unless we fire a planetary repulsor beam at Center- point at just the right moment, a whole solar system dies." "And a whole Sector starts to panic and wonder who's next, and a whole galaxy starts to wonder what the point is of a New Republic that can't protect them," said Leia. "And I hate to say it," said Han, "but they'd be absolutely right to start wondering." "Should I reset the breaker now?" Jacen asked. "Not yet. Just a sec," said Anakin, a bit absently. "One more o
f them to stick in." He was lying on his stomach, propped up on one elbow, leaning over the open underfloor access panel. He stared down into the morass of wires and cables and circuit boards for a minute or two, then reached in and pulled another of the fist-sized power-shunt transpacitors. It took a good solid yank to pull the thing out of its socket. He held it up and stared at it for a moment, almost as if he c ould see through it, into it. "Boy, did this get all melty inside." He set it to one side. "Jaina, gimme the one from the hyperdrive." Jaina handed him the last of the transpacitors they had gotten by cannibalizing the Falcon's faster-than-light drive. Anakin plugged it into the socket, then reconnected the power shunt board to the main sub-light engine circuit. "All right," he said to Jacen. "Push the reset." Jacen was sitting by the next access panel over, where the circuit breaker board was. He held his breath and threw the switch back to the on position. There was the slightest of pauses, and then the green status light came on. Jacen breathed a sigh of relief, then turned to Q9. "It worked, Chcwbacca. We ought to have repulsors and sublight engines now." Chewbacca's voice-an anxious yelp and a growl- answered, sounding as if it came from a little bit out of the comlink mike's normal range. There was something more than a bit incongruous about a Wookiee voice coming from Q9's speaker. "Chewbacca says to hurry," Ebrihim said, quite needlessly. "Okay, okay, we're hurrying,'1 Jacen said, getting to his feet. He closed the panel over the breaker box while Anakin closed up the one over the circuit board. "We're on our way to the cockpit now." The muffled sound of a comlink being fumbled about came from Q9's speaker, and then a hoot from Chewbacca and Ebrihim's slightly exasperated voice. "Give it back," he said, apparently to the Wookiee. "I'll tell them." There was a slight pause, and then Ebrihim's voice again, a bit louder and clearer. "Get moving as fast as you can," he said. The sun will be rising soon, and I'm sure our friend will be getting up as well." "All right, all right," muttered Jacen. "Nag, nag, nag, all the time. Come on, Q9, let's go." "I still don't see why you couldn't have taken the time to go get another comlink out of stores," said Q9, speaking in his own voice. "I don't enjoy being used as an intercom." Jacen smiled as he headed for the cockpit. "It saved us the five minutes of finding one and getting it tuned and matched to the one Chewbacca's using. Believe me, we needed the five minutes. Don't worry. We'll switch over to the ship's main com system in a minute." Jacen paused at the entrance to the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon. He had been in the cockpit many times before, of course-but this was different, very different. No one was keeping an eye on him this time, or making sure he didn't press any buttons, or shooing him away. No. This time, he was here to fly the ship. Fly her. The very idea terrified him. "Want to have a contest to see which one of us is more scared?" Jaina asked. Jacen turned around and smiled. His twin sister and