But for all the use Q9 was being, he might as well be one of the children.
The children.
Suddenly it registered with Q9 that the children were no longer with the group. For a full tenth of a millisecond, he toyed with the idea of sounding the alarm, but then rejected the idea. Master Solo had made it clear that nothing was very clear at all. There might be some reason for the children to be missing. Perhaps their parents had instructed them to find something out. Perhaps their hosts would take it ill if they found out the children had been wandering off where they should not have been.
No. After all, he had installed all that sophisticated detection and sensing equipment. It was time that he put it to use.
Q9-X2 slowed to a halt and allowed the tour group to get ahead of him. He turned around and headed off in the opposite direction, extruding sensor probes as he went. He already had powered up his molecular backtrack sniffer, his residual heat trend directionalizer, and was starting to absorb data from them, when it dawned on him to look down.
Footprints. Footprints in the grimy floor of the excavated tunnel. It was with a sense of mild frustration that he pulled the sensors back into their recesses. What point in having the best equipment available if there was never any need to use it?
He headed off down the tunnel.
* * * Anakin was moving faster now, running full tilt down the gloomy passages of the lower level. If anything, it was a bit danker, a bit darker, than it had been above. Jacen tried to peer into the dim tunnel. Whoever had installed the lights down here had been working on a tight budget, that was for sure. It was dark. But that didn't seem to bother Anakin.
He was moving straight ahead, still staring at the tunnel floor. Jaina and Jacen were hard-pressed to keep up.
Suddenly Anakin stopped dead in his tracks, and the twins nearly bowled him over before they could stop. As best either of the twins could see, he was standing in front of a stretch of corridor that looked exactly like every other stretch they had seen. But that did not seem to bother Anakin. He was literally hopping with excitement. "Here!" he muttered under his breath. "Here! Here! I need to His voice faded out, and he stopped moving. Then he squatted down on the floor of the tunnel, stuck his right index finger out, and pointed it at the tunnel floor. "There," he whispered. "And it goes up Holding his finger about ten centimeters away from the floor, he moved his hand toward the wall, and then, slowly, up it.
"He's tracing something," Jaina said in a whisper. "Following it back."
"Yeah, but what's he tracing?" Jacen whispered back.
"And what's he tracing it to?"
By now, Anakin was pointing to a spot on the wall a good fifteen centimeters beyond his reach. He jumped up and tried to reach it, but he could not. He turned toward the twins, and it seemed to Jacen at least that he was only just at that moment aware of them at all. "Up!" he said.
"I need to go up. Let me up on your shoulders."
Jaina knelt down next to her brother and he scrambled up on her shoulders. She stood up carefully, Anakin swaying back and forth just a little bit as she overbalanced a trifle.
"Forward!" he said. "More, more. Stop. Good. Now go left-no, right. No, no, not so far. Back back-stop!
Good, good. Hold it.".
"Jacen, what's he doing?" Jaina asked. "I can't see.
"He's got his hand flat out against the wall," Jacen said.
"He's pushing against the wall, real hard. Oh, wow!"
There was a slight shower of pebbles and dust. "Great, I just got a face full of gravel," Jaina spluttered. "What hapened?"
It's a panel," Jacen said. "Like a keypad panel, but way different. It's a five-by-five grid of little green buttons.
A little door popped open in the tunnel wall, and there was this little panel behind it. It lit up kind of all purple and green as soon as the little door swung open."
"It lit up?" Jaina asked. "You mean there's still a live power supply down there?".
"I guess. Probably that was what Anakin was tracing."
"Now what is he doing?" Jaina demanded. "Anakin, hurry up, whatever you're doing. You're getting heavy."
"Just a sec," Anakin said. "Almost got it."
"I think he's trying to figure out what button to push," Jacen said. "This is getting weird."
Anakin stared hard at the purple keypad, whispering to himself and pointing at the green buttons. "Okay," he said at last. "Here goes." He started pushing buttons, one after the other. Every time he pressed a button, another green light would wink out.
"Here goes what?" Jaina demanded. "Jacen, what is he doing?"
"The thing he does best," Jacen said. "He's pushing buttons."
"Done," said Anakin. "Let me down."
Jaina complied eagerly. "But now what?" she asked.
"What happens now?"
And then, with the dull rumble of heavy machinery, a ten-meter-wide section of the tunnel wall in front of them slid out of the way, dropping down into the floor. There was a clattering of pebbles, and a feeble cloud of dampish dust shook loose from the wall.
Behind the false wall was a huge, seamless panel of faultless, gleaming silver. Suddenly a seam line appeared in the silver wall, and a huge section of it swung back, like the door of a huge bank vault swinging open. The children hurried to one side to get out of its way.
A gleaming light poured out into the tunnel as the vault door opened, and the children had to shield their eyes for a moment before they could see clearly.
Inside the door was a long corridor, made of the same silver stuff as the vault door. The corridor seemed to be open at the other end, but they could not make out clearly what was there. There did not seem to be any sort of place for the light to come from, but it came just the same. The three children stared down that corridor for a long moment.
They knew what to do next, but there was a universe of courage between knowing and doing.
"What is it, Anakin?" Jaina asked her little brother.
He shrugged. "Don't know. I just felt it there, and I followed it. Don't know what it is."
"Well," said Jacen with far more confidence than he felt, "we'll never find out here. Come on.
The three children took each other by the hand, with Anakin in the middle, and stepped up onto the gleaming corridor.
The corridor was a good hundred meters long, and they moved down it at a slow, careful pace. At last they reached its other end, and stood looking down at-at something that Jacen had never seen before. He had never even seen anything like it before.
The floor went past the end of the corridor, and ended in a view platform about five meters across. The platform hung out in empty space, with no guardrails or any other sort of protection around the edge.
And it was the sort of platform you wished did have guardrails. It stood at the apex of an impossibly deep artificial cavern, made of the same silver-colored material, a half kilometer deep at least. The cavern was in the shape of a sharply angled cone, with the platform at the point, and the base of the cone on the floor of the cavern, far below.
Jacen let go of his brother's hand, got down on his hands and knees, and crept out toward the edge of the platform.
He stuck his head out over the edge, and swallowed hard.
The first thing he noticed was that there seemed to be no support of any kind for the platform they were on, other than the bit of walkway that stuck out of the tunnel they had come down.
Far below, he could make out other conical shapes, much smaller than the cavern itself, yet still extremely large. There were seven of the cones, with six in a circle around the central seventh. All of them seemed to have the same heightto-width proportions as the cavern itself.
"What in the name of space have you children gotten yourselves into now?" a querulous droid voice demanded.
Jacen's reflexes tried to jump him out of his skin, nearly sending him right off the platform. He had to shut his eyes for a second when he thought about how he could have gone right of
f the edge. He found he had the shakes, and he had to lie still for a moment before he settled down. "Hello, Q9," he said. "Thanks for almost scaring me to death," he said, scooting back in toward the center of the platform before sitting himself up and getting to his feet.
"Were those thanks sincere, or was that more of this sarcasm business?" Q9 asked.
"Oh, sarcasm," Jacen said. "Very definitely sarcasm.
Did you come looking for us? Are the others looking, too, or just you?"
"Yes, I came looking for you," he said. "And no, none of the others are looking for you. At least they weren't when I left them."
"Good," said Jacen. "Jaina, Anakin, we've got to get out of here."
"But we just got here," protested Anakin.
"I know, I know. I want to explore it, too. But the longer we're missing, the more likely they'll come looking for us-and find this place. Do you want that General What'shisname-"
"Yarar," Q9 interjected.
"Right, Yarar. He's no nice guy, no matter how hard he smiles. Do you want his people finding this-this whatever it is? It's got to be what they're looking for. And it's got to be very big and important."
Anakin thought for a moment and then shook his head violently no. "Uh-uh," he said. "No. Can't let that general guy in here."
"Then we have to leave," Jacen said. "Can you make the vault door and the panel hide themselves again?"
"Sure," said Anakin. "That's automatic when we go back out."
"How do you know that?" Jaina demanded.
Anakin looked at her in blank surprise. "I know, that's all. I feel it.".
"But-" Jaina began.
Jacen cut her off. "Later, Jaina. Later. Listen, both of you-and Q9, too. We don't say anything about this to anyone, okay? Not just yet. There might be spy eyes or snoopers in the hovercar or back at the villa. We wait until all of us can get together someplace safe and talk it over.
Then we decide. Okay?"
Jaina nodded her agreement, and Anakin a bit more slowly. The three children turned toward the droid. "Oh, I quite agree," he said. "However, I do think it would be best if you allowed me to take as complete a scan as I can before we depart. We might well want a record of this place for future reference."
"Okay," Jaina said, "do it, but do it quick. Jacen's right. We have to get out of here. Come on, Anakin."
Anakin obediently took his big sister's left hand in his right, and offered his own left hand to his big brother. The three children hurried back down the silver corridor, Q9 hanging back for a few moments as he floated above the view platform and got as good a scan as he could. He could not get much closer to the edge than the human children had dared, for his repulsors were low-powered models that would not work more than a few meters above a surface.
If he had floated out over the platform edge, he would have dropped like a stone.
The three children waited for him at the entrance to the silver corridor, and at last he came zipping back down along it at high speed.
He came out into the dingy tunnel and floated back down it a few meters, to make sure he would be well clear of the vault door clo'ing.
Jacen stepped up to the purple keypad. "What do I do, Anakin?" he askcd.
"Push the center one in, and hold it for three grimnals."
"What the heck is a grimnal?"
"I don't know," Anakin said, "but that's how long you hold it in."
Jacen sighed and shook his head. Maybe someone out there had a other. If so, he wanted to meet the guy. He stabbed his finger down onto the center button of the five-by-five grid. All the buttons instantly lit up green again. He held the button down until the vault down began to swing shut, and then let it go and stepped back a pace or two.
The vault door swung to and latched itself shut. The section of tunnel wall slid back up out of the floor with a rumbling thud, and the cover over the keypad panel swung itself shut. The silver corridor and the huge conical chamber were as well hidden as they had ever been.
"Now all we have to do is get back there before they notice we're gone," Jacen said.
"Wait a second!" Jaina objected. "Q9-how did you find us?"
"Isn't it obvious?" he asked.
"If it was obvious, I wouldn't ask. Tell me."
"Your footprints," he said. "I simply did the obviou thing and followed your footprints."
"Oh, great," Jaina said, looking down. "Yarar's guys will follow them straight here and they'll know right where to look."
"Maybe not," said Jacen. "All of you go back down the tunnel a bit. I want to try something." The others obediently got out of the way, and Jacen turned his attention to the much-trampled dust of the corridor. Uncle Luke could have smoothed it all down without even breaking a sweat.
He reached out with the Force and willed the dust to smooth itself out in front of the vault entrance. Nothing happened for a moment, but then the dust began to stir just a bit-and then, quite suddenly, all the footprints vanished, the dirt floor of the tunnel smoothing itself out.
Now that he had the hang of it, Jacen jogged back a bit farther and tried it on another section of tunnel, with equally satisfactory results. His sister saw what he was doing and joined in. Working with the sort of unspoken coordination that was part of being twins, they took turns smoothing out the tunnel floors behind them as they retraced their steps.
The three children and the droid had made it back up to the upper level, and were well on their way back to where they had snuck away from the grown-ups when their mother came hurtling around a corner and spotted them. "There you are," she said, the relief in her voice obvious. "I could sense you with the Force, but I couldn't find you. Where have you been?"
"Oh, we just sort of wandered off with Anakin," Jacen said, hoping that he was managing to sound casual. "Q9 found us and brought us back."
Leia looked to the droid. "Good work, Q9. I'm glad we have you along. Now let's go find the others before our host decides to turn the dig site upside down looking for you. Come on."
Jacen and Jaina exchanged a knowing look as their mother turned away on them and headed back the way she had come. Good. They had gotten away with it.
At least for the moment.
Leia turned and gestured impatiently. "Come on," she said. "Can't keep them waiting."
Jacen thought of the huge and hidden machines that had clearly been waiting for a very long time indeed, and smiled.
He had a feeling they wouldn't have to wait very much longer.
Coming, Mother," he said, and hurried along to catch up.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN In Trans II uke stuck his head into Lando's cabin and caught him staring at the holocom unit again. "Haven't you worked up the nerve yet?" he asked.
Lando turned in his seat and gave Luke a reproachful look. "It's not that easy, you know, just calling a woman out of the blue."
"But you do that sort of thing all the time," Luke said, coming into the cabin and sitting down on the bed. "You certainly managed to do all right charming Karia Ver Seryan."
"Yeah. I charmed her so much I nearly got killed. But that was different. That was in person. I was there, in front of her. I knew I was welcome, and I could see by the way she stood, the way she held her head, a million little things, that she was receptive. An uninvited holocom call is much more of an intrusion. I don't know anything about this Tendra Risant woman. What am I going to say to her?"
"You might start with hello and see how it goes from there," Luke suggested.
"Big advice from Luke Skywalker, noted ladies' man," Lando said.
"Okay, maybe I'm not a galaxy-class smooth-talker. I don't claim to be. But you do. Make that call." Luke stood up and slapped his friend on the shoulder. "Now." He turned and left the room.
"Easy for you to say," Lando muttered. But Luke had a point. If he was going to do it, he might as well do it now. For about the hundredth time, he started punching in Tendra's call code. But this time, for the first time, he actually got all the way through the call code and
sat still long enough for the connection to go through.
The holocom came to life, and the face of a young woman appeared in it. She was fair-skinned, with high cheekbones and a slender, expressive face. "Hello?" she said.
"Yes, hello," Lando said, his heart pounding so hard the holocom's microphone should have picked it up. "My name is Lando Calrissian. I'm trying to reach Tendra Risant?"
Star Wars - Ambush At Corellia Page 26