Showdown at Centerpoint (28 page)

“And if Mom did give in to him because of us, a lot of other people would get hurt,” said Jaina.

“And killed,” added Jacen.

“Precisely. The second, more likely possibility is that your mother would refuse his demands. She would do so fully knowing the consequences, and it would break her heart. But she would refuse him, all the same. Sooner or later, your cousin Thrackan would either become so angry and frustrated that he would take it all out on you—or else he would threaten to torture you, or actually do so, in order to get what he wanted out of your mother.”

“Torture?” Jaina said. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

“Would he really?” Jacen asked.

“I think it quite possible. Even likely.”

Q9 looked from his master to the children, and back again. There was something unstated here, something he nearly said himself, before thinking better of it. No one was saying that it would be better for the children to have a clean, quick death in a crash rather than be the unwilling pawns in a cruel game. A cruel game where many others would suffer, a game that could only end with the pawns being destroyed at the exact moment it suited their master. How noble, how brave of them all to say nothing at all about it. How odd that he, Q9, was having such peculiar and emotional reactions to everything. Just that moment a new and terrifying
thought crossed his mind. “Half a moment,” he said. “What about me?”

Ebrihim looked toward Q9 and chuckled to himself. “Oh, you’ll go with them, of course. What else could you do? What, exactly, do you expect Thrackan Sal-Solo would do to you if he woke up in the morning to find the chidren gone and you here?”

Q9 thought that one through, and did not care one little bit for the conclusions he reached. “I might have known,” he said. “It’s clear now that it’s
all
been a plot against me.”

“It seems to me there are other beings worse off than you in all this,” Ebrihim said. “But never mind that. Go, and go now. The longer you delay, the greater the dangers will be.”

“But we don’t know what’s wrong with the ship, and we don’t know how to fix it,” Jaina protested.

Ebrihim held up his hand with the comlink in it. “We have this comlink in here, and you children can use Q9’s built-in comlink to communicate with us until you re-establish the link to the
Falcon
’s comm system. I’ll have the comlink. Chewbacca can tell me what to do, and I’ll tell you. We’ll walk you through it. You can do it.”

Chewbacca nodded his agreement, and made an encouraging little burbling snarl.

“It’s nice for you to say,” said Jaina to Ebrihim, “but that doesn’t mean you’re right.”

“I’m sure you can do it. Now you must go,” said Ebrihim. “The guards could awaken at any moment. We have no choice in the matter. Go!”

The three children looked at each other for a moment, and then, moving as one, they turned and headed for the ship, leaving so suddenly and quietly that Q9 was taken by surprise. He hovered, motionless for a moment, before he swiveled his view dome about and realized they were gone.

He raised himself up on his repulsors and took off after them.

*   *   *

Admiral Ossilege himself met the
Lady Luck
when she landed on the hangar deck of the
Intruder
. He waited, resplendent in his customary dress-white uniform, and watched as the
Lady
’s hatch swung open. “Greetings to you all,” he said as Lando, Gaeriel, and Kalenda disembarked, Threepio following behind. “I trust your information is as interesting as you promise. I find it most ironic that the moment we are at long last able to speak over the comlinks, we must worry about being overheard.”

“I think you’ll agree that it’s all worth hearing—and that it’s worth being sure we keep it to ourselves,” Lando said. “Let’s get to someplace where we can talk.”

“Of course,” said the admiral. “We shall go to my private quarters. He glared at Threepio. “
That
can stay aboard your ship, I think,” he said to Lando.”

“Well, really, how inconsiderate—” Threepio began, but Ossilege frowned fiercely enough to silence him.

“The rest of you, come this way.” Lando glanced toward Kalenda, but she just shook her head. No doubt the same thought had crossed her mind. The admiral spent so much of his time on the bridge, it had never occurred to either of them that he even
had
quarters.

But he did have them, and he led the group to them in short order. Lando had always prided himself on a sense of design, a knack for knowing what looked right. It was instantly plain to his practiced eye that Ossilege’s stateroom suite was a jarring display of opposites—the opulent up against the spartan, the huge and magnificent against the small and thrifty.

The room itself was spectacular—the cream-colored walls and deep blue carpets, the sheer size of it, twice the size of any other stateroom on the ship. A huge circular viewport, two meters across, took up most of one bulkhead, and out of it Lando could see a breathtaking view of Drall framed against the night sky. The
indirect lighting was warm and even, coming from every side so that it was impossible to cast a shadow in the room.

The personal appointments to the room, on the other hand, were barely there at all. A camp cot sat in one corner, with a fold-up night table by its side. The cot was made up with sharp-edged precision, the pillow plumped up and set precisely in the centerline of the bed, exactly over the point where the covers and sheet were perfectly folded back. Somehow, the perfection of it all told Lando that Hortel Ossilege made his own bed in the morning, despite any number of valet droids and human servants. He was not the sort of person who would trust anyone else to make his bed properly. There was an alarm clock, a portable comm unit, and a reading light on the night table, and a single, largish book as well. Whether the volume was a novel of some sort, a weighty historical tome, a Bakuran religious text, or the Bakuran Navy regulation book, Lando could not tell.

There were absolutely no other personal items at all in the room. Whatever else he did own was presumably hidden away behind the closet doors. In the far corner near the door was a spartan, utilitarian desk with a small, neat stack of work waiting for the admiral on one side, and a much larger, but equally neat stack of work already done on the other. There were a few writing instruments lined up neatly to one side of the desk, a desk lamp, a datapad, and another comm set. Nothing else. The desk was positioned so that when the admiral sat behind it, as he did now, the splendid viewport was behind him. That was the sum total of furnishings in the room. Indeed, there were no other chairs in the room beside the one behind the desk, but even as Lando was noticing this, a gunmetal-gray service droid trundled into the room, carrying three folding chairs on its back. It set the chairs in front of the desk with surprising speed and efficiency, and then was gone.

The three visitors sat down facing the desk, and Ossilege stared at them expectantly. “Tell me,” he said, “all about Centerpoint.”

Lieutenant Kalenda cleared her throat and spoke, a bit nervously. “The long and the short of it is that Centerpoint is the starbuster. It is the device used to make stars go nova.”

“I see,” said Ossilege, in about the same tone of voice he would have taken if Kalenda had just told him the evening dinner menu.

“And we also are pretty sure that the planetary repulsors are the way to shut Centerpoint down.”

“Indeed?” he asked in the same calm tone. “Most interesting. Perhaps,” he said, “you could provide me with a few details.”

T
he alarm buzzer squawked wildly in the tiny sleeping cabin of the
Gentleman Caller
. Tendra Risant leapt up out of bed, her heart pounding. She scrambled to her feet, getting herself entangled in the sheets and nearly falling flat on her face before she got herself sorted out and headed for the control room.

She didn’t recognize the alarm. What in the burning suns had broken down this time? She reached the control room and checked all the displays, but saw nothing but a green board.

Then she woke up the rest of the way and remembered. She had installed this alarm herself. The one that went off when the
Gentleman Caller
’s navicomputer detected the interdiction field going down.

The interdiction field going down! Suddenly her mind was racing. One part of her was suddenly afraid. The field coming down could mean any number of things, many of them not good. But all that was beyond her control. Later she could let her imagination run wild, let herself speculate about what it all meant. Right now the field coming down meant exactly one thing. She could get moving at last. She scrambled into the pilot’s seat and set to work.

Tendra had had very little practice with navicomputers before boarding the
Gentleman Caller,
but she certainly had plenty of time to practice with the one on
the ship since then. Working as fast as she could, she set up the problem, getting a fix on her present location and a precise grid reference on her intended target point, letting the navicomputer massage the numbers and come up with the proper values for the jump in and out of hyperspace that would get her there.

She knew where she was well enough—she had had plenty of time to practice finding that out too—but the question of where to go she had never quite decided. It had seemed simpler to keep the navicomputer updated with all the potential destinations, so that she could decide at the last minute if there was a change in the situation. Except, now, it was time to make a decision, and she was far from decided.

But she had to move fast. Whoever controlled the interdiction field might well be able to bring it back up again at any time. She dithered for a moment longer, and then made up her mind. Centerpoint. She would go to Centerpoint. The last she had heard from Lando, it had seemed he was heading that way. She suspected that meant very little when dealing with Lando, or in time of war, let alone both, but she had to choose someplace. She punched in the proper settings and flipped the navicomputer over to automatic operation. The display came on, showing a thirty-second countdown clock. The clock started moving, and the seconds melted away.

For half a moment Tendra considered the idea of getting set to jump to hyperspace on manual if the automatics failed. That was the way the heroes always did it in the holovids, after all. But no. The holovid heroes were always seasoned pilots of the spaceways, or else they were the most naturally gifted pilots the galaxy had ever seen. Besides, they were always backed up by that most powerful of allies—cooperative scriptwriters. Life didn’t work that way. She couldn’t count on it all turning out right by the last scene.

Besides, this was exactly the second time she had ever flown a hyperspace jump. If something went wrong with the automatics, and they decided to shut down rather than proceed, it would be prudent of her to take their word for it. Better to sit out here for another month or two, going half mad with boredom, rather than have the hyperspace motors blow up under her or kick her out into the far side of the galaxy.

She checked the countdown clock. Fifteen seconds. It had been a hell of a long ride so far, and even if this worked, and she got into the Corellian system, even if her navicomputer was dead-on and she arrived right at Centerpoint’s main docking collar, there were no guarantees that this ride was over quite yet.

Ten seconds. And what about Lando? Was he all right? Was he anywhere remotely near Centerpoint? Would she even be able to find him? It was the middle of a war, after all. Things were not likely to be all that well organized.

Five seconds. What was she doing here, anyway? Why had she climbed into an overpriced secondhand starship to go chasing after some smooth-talking ladies’ man she had met exactly once? She had always thought of herself as a levelheaded sort of person. Right now the evidence was strictly to the contrary.

Three seconds. This was crazy. She was about to jump into a war zone. She ought to abort the jump to light speed, reverse course, and head back home to Sacorria, where it was safe.

Two seconds. No. Too late for that. If she did, she would spend the rest of her life wondering what if.

One second. Instead, she was about to find out.

Zero. The cockpit viewport exploded into life as the sky filled with starlines, and the
Gentleman Caller
made the big jump to light speed.

Suddenly Tendra Risant didn’t have the time to worry about anything at all.

*   *   *

Ossilege stood up from behind his desk, turned, and paced the room thoughtfully. He paused in front of the viewport, and now gave a long, hard look at the planet Drall.

He had no interest when it was just a lovely sight,
thought Lando.
Now that it has great military significance, though—now he wants to take a look at it
.

“So if I understand you correctly,” he said, turning to face the others, “the planetary repulsors are of far greater significance than we thought. If we possessed one in time to deflect the hyperspace tractor-repulsor shot from Centerpoint—then that would save all the good people of Bovo Yagen—and perhaps, just incidentally, win us the war. Do I have that about right?”