Showdown at Centerpoint (23 page)

The chief gunner left the thought unfinished, but Ossilege understood. He sighed. If that assault boat had stayed there long enough for the
Intruder
to set up the shot, then this war might be over right now.

*   *   *

“Boy, you get out of touch for five minutes and everything changes,” said Lando as the
Lady Luck
flew clear of the mammoth Centerpoint airlock. “Where’s the
Intruder
?”

“What’s the
Intruder
?” Jenica asked.

“Biggish sort of thing. A ship. A Bakuran light cruiser. It should not be hard to miss, but I can’t spot it.”

“Have you looked in the last place you had it?” she asked.

Lando smiled. “I did, just now, and it wasn’t there. But I bet I find it in the last place I look.”

“So where is it?”

“At a guess, something has happened, and Admiral
Ossilege has charged off as bravely as possible to do something about it, whether it needs doing or not.”

“I’m not sure I appreciate your tone, Lando,” said Gaeriel.

“I’m not sure I appreciate the way Ossilege takes chances,” said Lando. “But the question is, what do we do now?”

“I’m not sure,” Gaeriel said. “Life is going to be a lot easier if and when we get communications back.” She thought a moment. “Can we get a laser comlink with either of the two destroyers?”

“Not easily,” Lando said. “It’d probably be easier and faster just to fly over to the closest ship, dock, open the hatch, and ask what’s going on.”

“Then let’s do that,” Gaeriel said. “We can decide what to do when we know more.”

“A very sensible attitude, that,” said Lando. “We’re on our way.”

*   *   *

Jaina let out a sad sigh. Things were very bad. The prisoners sat, sad and forlorn—and rather crowded—in the mobile stockade, unable to do anything but watch as the Human League troopers and technicians unpacked their gear, obviously getting ready to settle in for a long stay.

The mobile stockade was really nothing more than a force field generator designed to stay outside the force field itself, so that those held in the field could not get at the generating machinery. The force field was transparent, however, and those inside could
see
the generator, plain as day, straight in front of them.

This did not sit well with Anakin, to put it mildly. The idea that he could
see
but could not
touch
the device that was holding them prisoner seemed to upset him far more than the fact that he was a prisoner.

The other two children tried to keep him as distracted
as possible, but it was not easy. On the bright side, struggling to keep Anakin cheered up distracted them from their own worries. The two Drall, Ebrihim and Marcha, seemed to have decided that being locked up gave them a chance to catch up on a decade or so of family gossip—and they clearly had an enormous family. They sat there, for hour after hour, discussing the doings of this cousin, the money problems of that uncle, the scandalous failure to divorce of that great-aunt twice-removed and her fifth husband.

Chewbacca paced back and forth, from one side of the hemispherical force field containment to the other. He was forced to watch the Human League techs poking around the
Millennium Falcon,
wandering around on the upper hull, opening the access panels, and studying the interiors. Once or twice, a League tech would open a panel and laugh out loud at what he saw. It was difficult to restrain Chewbacca at those moments. He would pound his fists on the force field and roar his frustration, but doing so gained him nothing more than slightly singed fur on his hands and upper arms.

Perhaps only the two Drall were calm and settled enough to deal with the situation rationally when Thrackan Sal-Solo marched over from the assault boat. Jaina certainly wasn’t in any mood to be reasonable. A Human League tech was by his side, carrying a holographic recorder.

“Good afternoon to all of you,” said Thrackan in that voice that was so close to her father’s, and yet so far away. Cousin Thrackan—strange and unpleasant to think of him that way, Jaina told herself, but that was what he was.

“Hello,” said Jaina, and Jacen muttered a hello as well. Anakin took one look at his father’s cousin and burst into tears—and Jaina couldn’t blame him. It was upsetting just to look at—at Thrackan. He looked so
much
like their father—just a little darker, a little heavier, the hair a different shade. The beard helped
make him seem at least a
little
different from Dad, but somehow that only made the similarities more upsetting. It was like looking at—at a dark side version of her father, the way
he
could have been, if anger and resentment and suspicion had taken hold of him.

“Make that child stop crying,” Thrackan said, as if Jaina could make Anakin quiet with a wave of her hand.

“I can’t,” she said. “He might calm down in a minute, but he’s scared of you.”

“There’s no reason to be scared of me,” said Thrackan. “Not yet.”
That
was less than comforting.

Jaina knelt down and gave her little brother a hug. “It’ll be all right, Anakin, honest,” she whispered to him, hoping that she was telling the truth.

“Why are you here?” Jacen asked, glaring at Thrackan. “What do you want?”

“Not much at all, not much at all,” Thrackan said. “I merely need some pictures of all of us together.”

Chewbacca roared, growled, and bared his teeth, then gestured for Thrackan to come into the stockade containment.

Thrackan smiled. “I don’t speak your barbaric language, Wookiee, but I understood
that
. No, thank you. I can get quite close enough to you for my purposes from
outside
the force field.”

“Why do you want holos of us?” Aunt Marcha demanded.

Thrackan smiled. “I should think that would be obvious, even to a member of your species. I am in the process of turning off the jamming of communications. When the jamming is off, I will broadcast the holos to demonstrate that you are my prisoners. While I doubt anyone will much care what happens to a pair of rotund Drall or a psychotic Wookiee, I would expect that the children’s parents will be inspired to more reasonable behavior if they knew I had their children—and a planetary repulsor.”

Marcha, Duchess of Mastigophorous, drew herself
up to her full height and glared at their jailkeeper. “You are on the verge of a most serious error,” she said. “For your own safety, I urge you to reconsider this act.”

Thrackan laughed out loud. “You are scarcely in a position to make threats, Drall. Save your breath.”

“Very well. May the consequences be on your head alone. Honor required me to say what I did. But a wise being can tell a warning from a threat.”

For the briefest of moments, the bland smile flickered off Thrackan’s face, but then it was back, as calm and meaningless as ever. “I need say no more to any of you on this subject,” he said. “Now I want the three children on this side of the stockade, closest to me, and you three aliens on the far side.”

“Why—” Ebrihim began.

“Because I wish it!” Thrackan snapped. “Because if you do not obey, I can manipulate the force field to make the stockade half the size it is. Because I can shoot you all dead if I so choose.” Thrackan paused, and smiled. “Because I can and will harm the children if you do not,” he said. “Now go to the other side.”

The two Drall and the Wookiee exchanged looks with each other. It was clear they had no real choice. They moved to the opposite side of the stockade.

Anakin had more or less settled down by this time, and Jaina urged him to his feet. There was always one sure way to distract Anakin, and that was to have him watch someone use a machine. And of course there might be other benefits to watching the procedure. “Look, Anakin,” she said. “Watch what the man does.”

Anakin nodded and wiped his nose. The three children stood as close as they could to the edge of the field and watched intently as the technician knelt down by the stockade’s force field generator. He pulled a very old-fashioned metal key out of his pocket, shoved it into a slot on the generator, and turned it a quarter turn to the left. Then he changed several of the settings
on the device. A new force field, a vertical wall running across the middle of the stockade field, and separating the adults from the children, came into being. He turned the key back a quarter turn to the right and pulled it back out. “Ah, Diktat, sir, it might also be wise to intensify the fields somewhat, so that they are more plainly visible on the holographic recording.”

“Will it make the prisoners themselves harder to see?”

“Very slightly, sir, but they will be quite recognizable, and the sight of the force field will make a very clear visual statement that they are prisoners. It will make your words stronger.”

“Very well,” Thrackan said. “Make the adjustment.”

The technician turned a dial, and the force field turned a trifle darker.

“Very good,” said Thrackan. “Very good indeed. “Now, then. Take your holo recorder and shoot,” he said. “Get a nice long sequence of each face in turn, and then a wide shot of all of us together. I don’t want there to be any chance of someone not being sure I have the children, or of someone thinking that it’s been faked in some way.”

The technician lifted his holographic recorder to his face and set to work, recording the image of each unsmiling face in turn, then taking a wide shot of Thrackan with all the prisoners. At last he was done. “That should do it, Diktat Sal-Solo,” the tech said.

“Very good,” said Thrackan. “Let’s go get the transmitter set up and get ready to send that out.”

“What about setting the force field back, sir?”

Thrackan looked at the stockade for a moment. “Leave it,” he said. “It might be wise to keep the children separate from the aliens. It might make it harder for them to scheme together.” With that, he turned and walked away, the technician following behind.

Jaina watched as the two of them walked away. “Did you see enough of what the tech did?” she asked Jacen.

“Not really,” he said. “I don’t think I could manipulate the controls with the Force, anyway. I don’t have that kind of fine control. And besides, the tech had that key.”

“Anakin, what about you?”

“I could do
something
if I could
get
at it,” he said. “Change some stuff. But you need that key to turn a field on or off, or cut all power.
You
saw him. Have to have that
key
to turn it off.”

“No hope there, then,” Jaina said.

“Hush, child,” said the Duchess Marcha from the other side of the vertical force field wall. “There is always hope—particularly against an opponent who believes everything can be won with bullying.”

Jaina went over to the vertical wall, the other children trailing after. “Has he really made a mistake, Aunt Marcha?” she asked, wanting comfort and reassurance as much as information.

“Oh, yes,” she said, “very much so, child.”

Chewbacca laughed gently, a small growly noise, and then let out a yip and a hoot. The Wookiee looked around to make sure no Human League trooper was close enough to watch. Then he moved up as close as he could to the vertical wall and opened the palm of his hand.

He had a pocket comlink.

Jaina looked up at Chewbacca with a wild grin. “I should have known,” she said. “With all that long fur, you could hide practically
anything
on your body. And besides, who’s going to frisk a Wookiee?” Chewbacca chuckled again at that question.

“But what good does that do us?” Jacen asked. “That thing doesn’t have any range at all. Not more than a few kilometers.”

“You’re forgetting someone who is quite nearby,” Ebrihim said. “Someone who has built-in communications equipment.” Ebrihim smiled to himself. “Someone who is probably getting most tired of waiting.”

*   *   *

Q9-X2 was most definitely tired of waiting—in itself a remarkable accomplishment in a droid. Any other droid would have simply turned itself off after setting an implanted timed wake-up command in its standby circuits. Not Q9. He was afraid of missing something. Not that there could be much to miss when stuffed upside down into one of the
Falcon
’s hidden smuggling compartments. Q9 found that he was more bothered by being confined than by being inverted. It would have been more pleasant to have been right-side up, but time had been exceedingly short, and this had been the first place they had found where he could fit at all, in any orientation.

Ebrihim’s instructions had been simple enough, and did not require Q9 to stay turned on.
Wait at least fourteen hours. Do not emerge until it is safe to do so. At that time, examine the ship and the situation as best you can. Determine the best method for coming to our aid, and carry out that method
. Rather on the vague side, but the intent was straightforward. The execution would be tricky, as most of Q9’s sensors had to be extended out of his body before he could use them, which meant they were less than helpful while he was upside down in a tight-fitting storage bin.

He
could
have stayed powered down, but he was simply too agitated for that. Q9 had run some diagnostics and analyzed his on-board service log. He knew exactly how close he had come to being destroyed by Anakin’s activation of the repulsor. Droids were rarely reminded of their own mortality in quite that way. Now, shortly thereafter, Q9 had ample time to consider the notion of his own destruction. It had nearly happened in the recent past, and the odds seemed fairly high that it would happen in the near future. Under the circumstances, deliberately shutting oneself off seemed the height of folly. Suppose one component had failed, or was on the verge of failing, and his diagnostics had missed it? Suppose he loaded a timed
wake-up event, went into standby, and then the wake-up command was never implemented? In short, he had no desire to turn himself off when he was not confident he could turn himself back on again.

Clearly, it was an absurd state of affairs, but there it was. Q9 was afraid to go to sleep.

He settled in to wait some more.