Showdown at Centerpoint (13 page)

Luke brought the X-wing into a hover over the center of the lock and swung the fighter around to cover the
Lady Luck
as she came in. The
Lady
moved forward slowly, easing her way into the interior. The airlock chamber was cavernously huge and profoundly dark. The
Lady Luck
’s landing lights came on and swiveled about, throwing a shifting spot of brightness on the interior wall of the lock, but Luke was not able to make much of what the spot revealed. The huge exterior airlock door lumbered shut, sealing them inside. Now they were trapped, if they wanted to think of it that way.

Then the lock’s own interior lights bloomed into life, coming up slowly enough that Luke’s eyes were not dazzled. The interior of the lock was a half cylinder on its side, with the flat wall of the half cylinder forming the deck.

The deck was littered with debris, odds and ends of all sorts. Bits of clothing, broken pieces of luggage, freight containers, abandoned machinery, even a small spacecraft with all its access ports open and its nose assembly removed. Obviously it had been cannibalized for parts.

“-ooks like -ome folks got out of here in a -urry,” Lando said.

“Looks like,” Luke said. What, exactly, had they been in such a hurry to get away from? And had they made a run for it last week, or a hundred years before? He didn’t feel easy in his mind. “Listen, Lando, normally I’d say land the ship with the passengers first and let the fighter fly cover. But with that airlock door shut, there doesn’t seem much point to it. I’ll land first. Maybe if it’s a trap, they’ll spring it on me first and then—”

“Then what?”

“I don’t know,” Luke said. “But don’t land until you’re sure it’s safe.”

“If I wait
that
long, we’re -oing to be sittin- here in hover mode for a long time,” Lando replied.

There didn’t seem to be any good answer for that, so Luke didn’t try to offer one. “I’m headed down,” he said. Luke eased back on the repulsors and brought the X-wing slowly down onto the deck.

He made a nice smooth landing and was getting ready to undo his canopy and get out when Artoo beeped furiously at him. “What? Oh!” Artoo was right—the airlock chamber hadn’t been pressurized. That could be a problem. Luke hadn’t worn a sealable flight suit, and he was not entirely clear on whether there were pressure suits for all aboard the
Lady Luck
. But what was the point of bringing them in here if they couldn’t get out of their ships?

Luke looked around the airlock chamber again and noticed that the debris was all inside a fairly well-prescribed perimeter. Why had everyone crowded together like that in the midst of what seemed to have been a panicked departure? A burst of light suddenly flared to life in the center of the airlock chamber’s roof. Four streaks of light split off from the center and slid down to the four corners of the chamber. The streaks faded to darkness, and then the light burst came to life again, before splitting up and sliding down
to the corners, and then the pattern repeated. It was as clear a signal as the airlock door opening and shutting.
Go down, go down, go down
.

Now Luke understood. “Lando,” he said, “bring her down. They’re using a force bubble pressurization system in here. I don’t think they want to activate the force field until you’ve landed.” By using a force field system, they could avoid constantly pressurizing and depressurizing the chamber—no small issue in a chamber this size.

“But then we’d both be trapped insi—the force field,” Lando objected.

“What’s the difference? We’re already trapped inside the airlock.”

“There’s a difference between being in a cage with a bantha and climbing into the bantha’s gullet,” Lando muttered. “But all right, here we come.”

The
Lady Luck
eased down on her repulsors and set down ten meters in front of Luke’s X-wing.

The moment she landed, there was a shimmering in the space over their heads. After a moment it settled down into a thin blue hazy blur that surrounded the two ships, forming a hemisphere over them. A tunnel formed of the same blue haze came into being just behind the
Lady Luck
. Peering down it, Luke could see that it led to a more conventional-sized inner airlock hatch.

“Leading us there every step of the way,” Luke muttered to himself. He heard a far-off, high-pitched hissing noise, and the body of the X-wing creaked and groaned once or twice as it adjusted to the change in pressure. The hissing dropped in pitch down to a low roar of noise, and the incoming air was whipping up some of the smaller bits of debris and throwing them around, until the inside of the force field bubble was swirling with bits of paper and dust and torn-up packing material. The X-wing rocked back on its shock absorbers as the rush of air pushed at it.

Luke watched his exterior gauges as the roaring subsided.
At least as far as his instruments were concerned, it was perfectly normal air at perfectly normal pressure. Of course, it
could
contain some deadly nerve gas the X-wing’s detectors couldn’t sense, but if whoever was running the show here had wanted to kill them, they could have done the job about a dozen times already.

Never mind. Time to get on with it. Luke popped the canopy of the X-wing and let it swing up out of the way. He pulled his flight helmet off and stashed it, then climbed up out of the pilot’s compartment. He slid down the side of the fuselage and dropped lightly to the ground. Relatively light gravity here, he noticed. Of course, they were fairly close to the spin axis here. The apparent force of gravity would be a lot stronger close to the equator line of the sphere.

The hatches of the
Lady Luck
swung open, the egress ramp came down, and Lando, Gaeriel, and Kalenda walked down it, closely followed by a rather agitated-looking Threepio.

“I don’t like this place,” the protocol droid announced. “Not one little bit. I’m sure we are all in the most terrible danger here.”

“Yeah, whatever,” Lando muttered. “Besides, what was the last place you
did
like?”

Threepio hesitated a moment and cocked his head to one side. “A most interesting question,” he said. “I can’t recall one, offhand. I shall have to consult my onboard archives.”

“Do it later, Threepio,” said Luke. “We might need you for other things.”

“Certainly, Master Luke.”

Gaeriel and Kalenda looked around the airlock chamber, and it was easy to tell the diplomat from the intelligence officer. Kalenda knelt down to examine some of the broken-up debris and snatched at a few of the bits of paper that were fluttering, no doubt in hopes of reading some important clue. Gaeriel made sure Threepio, the protocol and translation droid, was
close, and directed her attention to the force field tunnel and the hatch that would lead them to their host.

Luke heard a beeping and a blooping from the topside of his X-wing. “Don’t worry, Artoo, I haven’t forgotten you.” Back at a base, the normal thing was to use a winch to get Artoo in and out of his socket in the stern of the X-wing. In the field, it was possible for Artoo to get himself out, but the process was not very graceful, and had ended with Artoo toppling over and landing with a crash on more than one occasion.

But when the pilot of the X-wing was a Jedi Master, such awkwardness was not necessary. Luke reached out with his ability in the Force and lifted Artoo gently into the air.

“Do be careful, Master Luke,” said Threepio. “It makes me nervous just to see you do that.”

Artoo let out a long, low moan that echoed his agreement with Threepio. “Relax, both of you,” said Luke. “I could do this standing on my head.” Artoo moaned again. “Sorry,” said Luke. “It’s not nice to tease.” Luke moved Artoo clear of the X-wing and was just about to start bringing him down to the deck when the hatch at the end of the force field tunnel began to lumber open. Everyone stopped what they were doing and turned to look.

Luke felt his hand move toward his lightsaber, but then he pulled it away. No. All he knew for sure was that he had touched the mind of a human who seemed to bear them no ill will. Whoever was about to come through that door had not summoned them all here to engage in single combat. They would be dead many times over by now, if that was her intent. He saw Lando and Kalenda make the same reflex reach for their own sidearms, and then pull their hands back.

The doors rumbled open, and a tall, thin, nervous-looking, pale-skinned woman came in. She hesitated at the entrance for a moment, and then shrugged and walked toward them at a brisk clip that seemed to say
less about her eagerness to get to the end of the tunnel and more about her rather agitated state.

Luke watched her as she came closer. She was an attractive-looking woman with a long, thin face, thick black curly hair that reached to her shoulders, and prominent, expressive eyebrows. She looked worried as she came toward them, her eyes moving from one member of the party to the next. But then the worried look faded away to be replaced by one of pure bafflement as she looked upward.

“How are you doing that?” she asked. “And why?”

“Huh?” Luke asked, and looked up himself. “Oh!” He had nearly forgotten that Artoo was still hanging in midair. If he had lost any more concentration, Artoo would have crashed to the deck. Distracted by the sight of their hostess’s arrival, it would seem that Artoo had forgotten it himself. Luke willed Artoo to move down and landed him gently on the deck. “It’s sort of a long story,” he said.

“I’ll bet,” the young woman said, giving Luke a long, hard, quizzical look. “Well, anyway. I’m Jenica Sonsen, C-point COO Ad-Op.”

“What?” Luke asked.

Sonsen sighed. “Sorry. Force of habit. Centerpoint Chief Operations Officer, Administration and Operations. Basically, I run the place, these days. The C-point CE declared a bug-out right after the first major flare incident, and the whole Exec Sec evaced along with practically all the C-point civpop. I wish
I
could get out of here, but I was OOD when the bug was called, so regs said I was stay-behind.”

Luke was about to ask her what
that
meant when Threepio stepped forward. “Perhaps I might be of help, Master Skywalker,” said the droid. “She is using many terms that are similar to the bureaucratic argot of Coruscant. I believe that what Administrative Officer Sonsen means is that Centerpoint’s Chief Executive ordered a full evacuation after the first flare disaster, and the entire Executive Secretariat left along
with most of the civilian populace. Although she wished to leave with everyone else, Administrative Officer Sonsen happened to be the Officer On Duty at the moment when the evacuation was declared, and under those circumstances, she was automatically designated the officer to stay behind and serve as a caretaker.”

“She didn’t say anything about a disaster,” Lando said suspiciously.

“I beg your pardon,” Threepio said, “but she did refer to a ‘major incident.’ That is a common bureaucratic euphemism for a major catastrophe.”

“Hold it,” Sonsen said, “the tin box got it all correct, but I
am
right here. You could ask
me
what I meant.”

“Only if you promise to speak Basic like everyone else,” Lando said. Luke had to smile. Lando never had had much use for bureaucratic double-talk.

For a moment it looked as if Sonsen were about to bite Lando’s head off, but then backed down. “Maybe you’ve got a point. But I have to know what you’re
doing
here. Your ships blew out of nowhere and then those fighters bugged out too.”

“Were they your fighters?” Kalenda asked. “And what government do you represent?”

“The fighters you were shooting at? They weren’t Fed-Dub.”

“Fed-Dub?”

“Sorry. The Federation of the Double Worlds.’

Kalenda nodded and looked to Luke, her gaze seemingly somewhere over his left shoulder. “The Federation is the duly elected government of Talus and Tralus.”

“You people still haven’t told me who you are and what you’re doing here,” Sonsen said.

“Our apologies,” Gaeriel said, speaking for the first time, “I am Gaeriel Captison, plenipotentiary of the planet Bakura. This is Captain Lando Calrissian, Jedi Master Luke Skywalker, and Lieutenant Belindi Kalenda, all of the planet Coruscant. We represent the
New Republic and the planet Bakura.” She went on in a tone of voice that suggested she was expecting argument, but wasn’t going to put up with it. “We are,” she said, “taking possession of Centerpoint Station in the name of the New Republic.”

“Well,
good,
” said Sonsen. “It’s about time
somebody
did. Come this way and I’ll show you where everything is.” She turned around abruptly and starting walking down the tunnel toward the inner hatch.

Gaeriel looked at Luke, clearly taken aback. “She’s not what we expected,” she said.

“Most things aren’t, around Luke,” Lando said. “But if she’s going to hand over the keys to us, I think we’d better not let her get too far ahead.”

*   *   *

The four humans and two droids found Sonsen waiting for them on the other side of the inner hatch. “There you all are,” she said. “Shall we start the tour?” Her tone was utterly matter-of-fact, as if handing over space stations to more or less allied forces was all part of the daily routine. “I can’t show you all of the station, of course, unless you all want to die of old age before we’re half done, but I can show you the basics. This way.” She ushered them all into a waiting turbovator car on the opposite side of the lock chamber. They followed her in. Luke entered the car after everyone else, feeling quite bewildered. The turbovator car was huge and scruffy-looking. All the walls were covered with dings and scratches, as if the car had seen a lot of heavy use moving cargo. There was a meter-wide porthole in the back wall of the car, likewise a bit dinged-up, and another like it in the ceiling. However, there seemed to be nothing but blackness to see.

“Hang on just a second,” she said. “We have to move the car through an airlock. Fressure difference. And, ah—well, something happened to the air where we’re going.” She worked the controls, and the car
lurched forward a few meters. They heard a hatch seal behind them. There was the whir of air pumps and then, through the viewport, they saw another hatch open before them.