Showdown at Centerpoint (11 page)

The shaking of the ground seemed to ease off, even as the echoing roar faded away. But Chewbacca 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 Ebrihim came crawling out, half carrying, half dragging his aunt Marcha. 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 Marcha 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 Q9, 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.

To 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 repulsors 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 setting.

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 were 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 all of them stayed stubbornly off-line.

Suddenly the entire ship was bathed 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 power 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, each burst riding up to the top of the now-open cone and forcing it open wider and wider and wider. Chewbacca 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 than 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 frightened
—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.”

Chewbacca 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 small child’s head as he let out a worried growl.

“Anakin’s still all 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, Chewbacca 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. Chewbacca 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, Chewie 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.

T
hrackan Sal-Solo, self-proclaimed Diktat of the Corellian Sector, leader of the Human League, stared at the bottle in front of him and gave serious thought to the idea of getting himself good and drunk. There seemed precious little else he could do, besides wait.

Thrackan had never been much good at waiting—which was ironic, for he had spent much of his adult life waiting. Waiting for a superior to resign or retire or be arrested, waiting for a plot to mature, waiting for the time to be right, waiting for the long-awaited offer of the succession from Dupas Thomree, Diktat of Corellia—waiting until the day Thomree died, and that fool Gallamby had taken his place instead. Waiting for the Empire to wake up and understand the danger represented by the damnable Rebels, waiting for the Emperor to strike back from the hammer blows the Rebellion gave the Empire, waiting for Thrawn’s conterstrike to succeed.