The tunnel was full of looming shadows and weirdly lit figures that appeared in and vanished from the beams of the handlights. The tunnel was cold and dank, with a clammy feel to the air.
Ebrihim had worried that the children might be afraid in the dark forbidding tunnels, but he soon realized that he had underestimated them once again. They were clearly used to dealing with odd circumstances.
There was another bit of good news that quickly became apparent—the Drallists were unlikely to find this particular piece of tunnel anytime soon. An underground subsidence, many years before, had collapsed the main tunnel back toward the main entrance. In all probability, it wasn’t the only such cave-in. Maybe their backs would be safe.
On the other hand, Ebrihim reflected, the Drallists could drill a vertical hole just as well as anyone else. It would be best not to let their guard down.
Ebrihim tried to stay out of the way while people got organized. There seemed to be enough going on without his adding to the party. Chewbacca was checking the winch gear to make sure they could get back out, Aunt Marcha had wandered ahead down the tunnel, and Q9 was hovering about, generally getting in the way. Meantime, the two older children were doing what they could to get Anakin on the job, encouraging him to reach out with his ability in the Force and see if he could find anything like the whatever-it-was he had detected in the Corellian tunnels.
“I can sort of feel it,” Anakin said, a bit doubtfully. He reached out his hand and seemed to be trying to catch something floating in the air. “Not as strong as it was the other place. Not sharp. Just sort of floating there. Like it got broke. Maybe when the roof fell ir back there, something gone torn up.”
“Try, Anakin,” said Jacen. “Try.”
Anakin shrugged helplessly. “I am trying,” he said “But it’s just not strong enough.”
“Excuse me,” said Q9. “Perhaps I can be of help. Your Grace, you believe that the entrance to this chamber will be in exactly the same position relative to the entrance as the one on Corellia?”
“That is correct.”
“Then I can use my inertial tracking data to lead us to the proper coordinates. My best estimate is that we still have some way to go, and are probably not in the right cross-corridor. However, I should be able to get us within thirty meters of the correct point.”
Anakin nodded eagerly. “Get me that close, and I can find it!”
“Then allow me to lead the way,” Q9 said, the pride in his voice plainly apparent.
The droid set the rest of the group a fairly brisk pace, especially considering that none of the others had the benefit of repulsor skirts and had to contend with the increasingly uneven floors and the mud slides. How long had these tunnels been here, anyway? Ebrihim wondered.
The two Drall had the hardest time keeping up with the others. The children could climb over anything, and Chewbacca could walk faster than anyone else in the group could run. But the Drall had evolved from exclusively ground-dwelling animals, not brachiators like the humans and the Wookiee. Their short legs and arms, and their limited climbing ability, made negotiating the various obstacles far more difficult for them.
Q9 was getting farther ahead with every moment, the beams of his floodlights zipping along down the tunnel. Three times he stopped abruptly at cross-corridors and dove down the left side passages. Twice he came back. The third time, it would seem, he found the path he was looking for. Ebrihim and Marcha puffed along as best they could, trying to keep up. They made the left turn and came around the corner just in time to see the Wookiee and the children making a right down the next corridor. The two Drall redoubled their efforts, but they were just barely able to keep Q9 from getting still farther ahead.
The children, however, were actually closing the distance between them and Q9 as Anakin grew more eager in the chase and the other two children urged him on.
“Keep trying, Anakin!” Jaina shouted as her brother paused for a moment, looking a little lost. Anakin nodded, then pointed at something invisible under the floor.
“Can you feel it now?” Jacen called to his brother as he climbed over a pile of collapsed rock. “Can you?”
“Yeah!” Anakin said. “Starting to! It’s there in the floor, just like in the other place. Q9! Stop! You’re going too far.”
The droid stopped and turned—and managed to blind everyone for a moment as his forward-view floodlight swept across their eyes. “Q9! Shut that thing off!” Ebrihim shouted, feeling irritable. He didn’t like being left behind.
“I beg your pardon, Master Ebrihim,” said the droid, and doused his forward-view flood. “Have you found it, Master Anakin?”
“Yeah! There!” the boy said, pointing at a blank spot on the muddy wall. “Someone lift me up and—ooof!” Anakin got the wind knocked out of him as Chewbacca scooped him up in his arms, but he scarcely even noticed as he squirmed with excitement. “There! There!” he called out, pointing to where he wanted to go. He pushed on a section of wall, but nothing happened. “All this junk on it,” he muttered to himself, and clawed away a patch of the caked-on mud until he had cleared an area about fifteen centimeters square. The wall underneath still seemed pretty blank to Ebrihim, but Anakin pressed on it again, harder this time, and a section of wall popped away, as if it were trying to open, but it got stuck with less than a finger’s breadth of space clear. Anakin put his fingers around the open edge, but couldn’t get it to go any farther. Finally Chewbacca simply tucked Anakin under one arm and pulled the little door open himself. Even he had to strain a bit to get it to move, but then it popped clear and came open smoothly as clots of mud and dirt rattled to the floor.
A thin layer of mud hid the interior, and Anakin eagerly scraped it off. He revealed a five-by-five grid of green buttons that flickered to life, with a purple light backlighting the buttons. Anakin frowned at the buttons and muttered to himself, “Might not be working too well. Just have to try.” He punched a combination into the buttons and waited a few seconds for something to happen. Nothing did. He balled up his fist and punched the top of the keypad. The green light buttons came on more brightly, and stayed on. Anakin tried the combination again—and this time something very definitely happened.
There was a clunk and a thud and a deep, unnerving sort of rattle, and then suddenly the muddy overlayer of the wall in front of them shuddered and fell off in a heap, spattering everyone with mud and dirt. The stone wall under the mud dropped down onto the floor.
In the Corellian tunnels, the panel behind the false wall had been a gleaming silver. The panel here was tarnished and splotched. But the panel worked properly, even if it did show signs of age. A line appeared in the panel, then began to form into a seam. Suddenly there was an enormous door in the wall, and it swung open, forcing everyone to scuttle out of its way. The big door bulldozed the heaps of mud out of the way as if they weren’t even there.
Behind the door was a long corridor of silverstuff, all of it perfect and untarnished, exactly like the one on Corellia.
Light from the corridor flooded the muddy corridor, and everyone shut off their handlamps. Q9 powered down his overhead light and retracted both of his lights back into his body.
Chewbacca set Anakin down and stepped up into the silver corridor, moving slowly and cautiously, the twins and the other adults and the droid behind him. The Wookiee had to lower his head in order to fit in the corridor, which meant he had to move even more slowly. But Anakin was in motion as soon as the Wookiee put him down. He raced down the corridor ahead of everyone else.
“Oh, boy,” Jaina said to her brother. “If he falls off the edge, Mom and Dad will kill us.” The twins hurried after their brother, even though there was no hope of catching him before he got to the end.
The corridor ended in open space, with the platform they were standing on jutting out into nothingness, forming a rounded view ledge roughly five meters on a side. There were no guardrails. Chewbacca was unconcerned by the sheer drop. He went right over to the edge and l
ooked down. The others stayed bunched up, close to the center of the platform.
The cavern was an exact duplicate of the one hidden away on Corellia. It was a sharply angled cone about a half-kilometer tall, all the surfaces made of the same silvery metal—if it was a metal.
The children and Q9 had been forced to leave the huge chamber on Corellia almost the moment they found it, for fear of leading the Human League to it. There had been no chance to examine it closely or explore it. This time, there was the chance—but no one quite knew how to proceed. The obvious thing to do was to get to the base of the chamber, but short of jumping over the edge, there seemed to be no way to accomplish it. Ebrihim was on the verge of asking if they could do something with the winch when events overtook him. The viewing platform started moving, sidling up the side of the cone toward its apex. It was enough to startle even Chewbacca, who leapt back toward the center of the platform as he spun about to see what had happened.
Ebrihim turned around at the same moment as the others, and everyone was rooted to the spot by a terrifying sight. Anakin had found another concealed keypad, this one set into the surface of the platform. He was kneeling over it, punching in commands. As they watched, the platform surface under the keypad extruded itself upward to form a control station about a meter off the ground. The keypad canted itself down a bit to be easier to reach. Anakin got to his feet and punched in a rapid series of commands. The platform stopped, then moved sideways. It seemed as if it were still attached to the wall of the chamber, but how he could not tell. The two simply flowed into each other.
Just below their present position, and off to one side, they could see the opening of the corridor they had come down. They heard a low solid boom coming from the corridor, and Ebrihim realized that the outer door to the tunnel system had just closed itself.
Then the silver walls of the cone puckered in around the corridor opening, irising in to seal it off, until it shrank away and vanished altogether. Almost immediately, the platform started moving again, sliding smoothly and perfectly and impossibly up the side of the conical chamber.
“Anakin!” Aunt Marcha shouted. “What on Drall are you doing! Stop this platform at once!”
But Anakin did not reply, or even seem to be aware of her existence. He was completely focused on the keypad in front of him. Ebrihim made a move toward him, to try to stop him, but Jacen held up a warning hand.
“Don’t!” he cried. “Whatever he’s doing, he’s doing it, and doing it right. If you try and interrupt him, and he gets confused and pushes the wrong button …”
Ebrihim saw Jacen’s point. What if he accidentally pushed a button that made the platform vanish altogether? Up and up they went, the far sides of the cone coming closer and closer, more and more of the view downward getting cut off—though not even Chewbacca was too eager to look down any more.
They were approaching the apex of the cone. “We are going to be mashed flat in a moment,” Q9 announced in a calm, conversational tone. The platform moved closer, and closer, and closer to the apex—and then, perhaps twenty meters short of the top, it stopped.
And something happened to the top of the cone. It shimmered, and its surface rippled and wiggled, until it settled down to a regular series of upward pulses. They could hear the sound of something big and hard smashing into rock, over and over again.
“It’s like it was pushing,” Jaina said. “As if it was trying to get—”
And with a sudden, final, thunderous roar, the pulsating point of the cone rammed upward, and broke free, slamming tons of rock and soil out of the way. Suddenly they could see the night sky.
Loose rock and debris fell down into the chamber, but a strange flicker of—of power; there was no clearer way to describe it—swept past the platform they stood on, and grabbed at the debris, and threw it back upwards, out of the hole, up into the night.
All was quite abruptly quiet and still. Where the apex of the cone had been, there was now a perfect cylinder, about thirty meters across.
Anakin pushed another button, and the platform moved upward again, growing wider as it rose until the sides of the platform merged with the sides of the cylinder, and the platform moved straight up, toward the night.
When it reached the surface, it stopped. They were standing in the dark on a silver disk thirty meters across on the surface of Drall, looking up at a cold night sky pocked with stars, Talus and Tralus visible near the horizon. Ebrihim could see the hovercar, about a kilometer or so away, visible by an interior light.
“Anakin,” the Duchess asked, in a sort of half-strangled attempt at a casual tone of voice, “can you make it go back down? Can you make it go up and down whenever you like?”
“Sure!” said Anakin. “All I have to do is—”
“No!” Marcha cried, before Anakin could reach for the controls. “Not now. Not just yet. But I think we need to stay here, inside the chamber, set up camp. We need to study this place, but we need to remain concealed as well. If we go in and out of it, we are sure to be spotted, and we can’t risk that. We need to study this place, master it, and keep the wrong sort of people from getting near it.”
“What is this place?” Ebrihim asked. “What does it do? Who built it, and when, and why?”
“I can answer some of those questions, nephew, and I expect you could do the same, if you gave it a bit of thought. You saw how it shoved those rocks back up as they fell. That confirmed what I suspected. This place is a repulsor, a planet-sized repulsor, powerful enough to move the whole world of Drall. It did move the world of Drall, once, long ago.”
“What?” Ebrihim said. “It shoved some rocks out of the way. How could it move a planet?”
“Easily,” she said. “You saw a giant swat at a gnat. Does that mean the giant is not able to do more? I knew from the first moment that I saw the images from the Corellian chamber that it had to be a repulsor. The configuration of forms is identical to the earlier Drallish repulsors, albeit scaled up tremendously.”
“But I don’t get it,” Jacen objected. “What do you mean, the repulsors moved the planet? Move it from where?”
“Another star system. Scientists have argued for generations about the theory that the Corellia planetary system could not have formed naturally, that someone must have moved all these planets here from elsewhere. Well, here, at last, is the proof. We are standing on the roof of the device that propelled this world from—from wherever it came from, who knows how long ago? We know there is an identical device on Corellia. There must also be identical installations on Selonia and Talus and Tralus. All the worlds were brought here, so long ago it was forgotten when we began our civilization, at the dawn of the New Republic. As to who, and why, I have no idea.” She shook her head thoughtfully. “And we Drall thought we knew our past.”
“But why has everyone been searching like crazy for these things?” Jacen said. “It’s interesting and important, but why would guys like the Drallists and the Human League be looking for ancient machines? They don’t care about that kind of stuff.”
“No,” agreed the Duchess, “but they do care about weapons. A repulsor this size could do any amount of damage. A repulsor that can move a planet can also move a spacecraft—or smash it to pieces. It is a massively powerful defensive weapon. With a planetary repulsor operational, a planet could hold off any conceivable attack.”
“That’s all very well, Aunt Marcha,” Ebrihim said tartly, “but there is no threat of such attack—or wasn’t before the current troubles. Besides, all the planets had perfectly good defenses beforehand. I can’t believe there’s all this fuss over a defensive weapon. The planetary repulsors would be nice to have as weapons, but not so vital or urgent that they would be worth all the trouble that’s been taken to dig them up.”
“You may well be right, nephew, but we must argue that point at a later time. Right now I suggest that we leave Q9 here to watch this entrance while the rest of us go to the hovercar and warm up before we get back to work on the
repulsor.”
“But what do you plan to do with it, besides keeping the bad guys from getting it?” Anakin asked.
The Duchess of Mastigophorous shook her head, a worried look on her face. “If I knew, my dear, I would tell you.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Arriving Signals
Thirty seconds to projected edge of interdiction field,” the tactics officer reported, her voice echoing through every compartment of the Intruder. The moment had come, and they were exactly as ready as they were ever going to be. The crews of all four ships were strapped in and ready for what was bound to be a rough ride. “Twenty-five seconds.”
Luke looked down on the bridge from the glassed-in confines of the flag deck that looked down on the bridge proper. Luke and all his companions were there, strapped into their seats and ready for action. Belindi Kalenda, Lando, Gaeriel, Artoo, and Threepio. And Ossilege, of course, along with his staff officers.
The bridge down below was a fairly standard arrangement, borrowing as much from Imperial ship design as anything else. There was a central raised walkway, with the various control stations in sunken trenchlike operations centers that lined the perimeter of the bridge.
Luke glanced over at Lando and grinned. “Let’s see if we can make it all the way in this time,” he said.
Lando smiled back. “Absolutely,” he said. “I don’t like getting doors slammed in my face.”
“Twenty seconds.”
“I don’t know why they bothered with the countdown clock,” Lando said. “That’s just a best-guess estimate of the edge of the field. It’s bound to be off.”
“It never hurts to give the crew something to focus on,” said Admiral Ossilege. “And it makes it a great deal easier to coordinate between the four ships.”
“Fifteen seconds.”
“I quite agree with Captain Calrissian,” Threepio volunteered. “I’ve always found this sort of thing terrifically disturbing.”
Assault at Selonia Page 23