Showdown at Centerpoint (34 page)

“That’s the bad news, and it’s bad.” The image of Lando paused for a moment, and then broke into a broad smile. “The
good
news is very good indeed. Don’t ask me how, because we haven’t had time to sort
it all out yet, but the children have escaped from Thrackan—and they did it aboard the
Millennium Falcon
. They flew the ship. And before you can turn blue, Han, the
Falcon
doesn’t have so much as a scratch on her. But the punch line is—they captured Thrackan. Han, you should have seen it. The kids flew a classic inside loop and put two disabling shots right into Thrackan’s stern. The Bakurans have taken Thrackan prisoner. Anyway, I know you won’t believe it, but the kids did it all—”

“I don’t believe it,” Han said.

“Sssh!” said Leia.

“—and they are all safe and sound aboard the
Intruder
. Chewbacca and two Drall who got mixed up in all this are being picked up from the repulsor right now. They’re okay too, as best we can tell.

“But the real reason I sent this message is to ask you to come here. Gaeriel Captison has called a council of war for eighteen hours from now. We need you all there. Madame Captison wants a Selonian representative as well. Please arrange that if you possibly can. Also, to be blunt about it, the odds are good we’re going to need every scrap of firepower we can get before the end of this. We need all of you, we need the
Jade’s Fire,
and we need Luke’s X-wing. Send a return message as soon as possible, reporting your intentions. But whatever you do, please hurry. We are almost out of time.”

L
eia Organa Solo, Chief of State of the New Republic, ran full-tilt down the access ramp of the
mm Jade’s Fire,
onto the hangar deck of the
Intruder,
and nearly knocked over two of the honor guard as she rushed forward to her children, flinging her arms around the twins. Anakin escaped her first swooping hug simply because he was hopping too fast and too high with excitement to be an easy target. But Han Solo was hard on the heels of his wife, and he scooped Anakin clear up off the ground. Luke joined the happy little knot of chaos, hugging the children, greeting them, tousling Jacen’s hair, tickling Jaina, lifting Anakin out of Han’s arms to hold him in his own. Threepio tottered around, offering his own greetings—and generally getting in the way.

“Anakin! Jacen! Jaina!” said Leia. “Oh, let me look at you all.” But then she threw her arms around all three of them, and held them so tight it didn’t seem likely she could see much of anything at all.

Lando Calrissian joined the tangle of welcome, throwing his arm around Han, shouting a friendly insult in his ear, pounding him on the back, giving Leia a kiss, teasing the children. The other new arrivals, Mara
Jade and the Selonian representative, Dracmus, followed.

Admiral Ossilege allowed himself a thin, wintry smile as he watched the proceedings. “Not the most dignified of entrances, eh, Madame Prime Minister? I would have expected more poise from the Chief of State.”

Gaeriel probably could have managed some commonplace comment about ceremony giving way to family, or that there were other considerations besides dignity in the universe, but somehow she couldn’t bring herself to do it. She thought of her own little daughter, Malinza, back home on Bakura. She looked to Luke Skywalker, lifting his niece up onto his shoulders, and thought of how good he was with children, and of all the things that might have been, but never could be now. But still, the admiral seemed to be expecting some kind of reply. So she decided to speak, and somehow, the truth slipped out. “I think it’s beautiful,” she said.

Admiral Hortel Ossilege turned toward her and regarded her with frank surprise. “Indeed?” he said. “Clearly, then, standards of beauty vary greatly. Mine do not include noisy and unruly children.”

“Then I pity you,” said Gaeriel, quite surprised with herself for being so blunt. “I know of nothing else that brings more beauty into
my
life.”

Gaeriel Captison stepped forward, leaving a stunned Admiral Ossilege in her wake. She moved toward the newcomers and offered them a simple, graceful bow. “Madame Chief of State,” she said. “Captain Solo. I bid you welcome to the
Intruder,
and wish you much joy of this wonderful reunion.” And with that, she knelt down in her very official ministerial robes and gave each of the children a kiss.

Let the old sourpuss chew on
that
for a while,
she told herself. Gaeriel had had something of a wild streak in her youth. It was good to know it had not completely abandoned her.

*   *   *

“The situation is, in one sense, complicated and, in another, quite simple,” said Belindi Kalenda, addressing the council of war gathered on the flag deck of the
Intruder. And a motley crew this council is,
she told herself. To her immediate left was Ossilege in his perfect dress-white uniform and his chestful of medals, Gaeriel Captison in her ministerial robes, Lando Calrissian with a rather swell-looking purple cape thrown over one shoulder of his burgundy blouse, and Han Solo in a rather rumpled light brown shirt, with a utility vest worn over it. That vest had obviously seen a lot of use over the years. Then came Solo’s wife, Leia Organa Solo, the Chief of State, in a plain blue shirt and dark slacks borrowed from Mara Jade. All of the Chief of State’s own clothes had of course been lost, destroyed, or abandoned along the way in the last few weeks.

Next to Leia was her brother, Luke Skywalker, in his neatly pressed and insignia-free flight suit. Behind him, against the wall, his two droids, R2-D2 and C-3PO, stood by in case they were called on. Both of the two Drall, Ebrihim and Marcha, wore nothing but plain brown fur—though both seemed to have gotten bits of their fur cooked off in the last two days. Then came the Wookiee Chewbacca, who seemed either moody or thoughtful—she didn’t have much luck reading Wookiee expression. Jenica Sonsen had managed to find herself wedged in next to Chewbacca on one side and a nervous-looking Selonian named Dracmus on the other. Sonsen did not look too thrilled about her seating position. By her expression, she expected the Wookiee and the Selonian to start arguing over light meat or dark at any second.

On the other side of Dracmus the Selonian was Mara Jade, looking cool and elegant in a well-tailored but otherwise quite ordinary ship’s coverall.

And, Kalenda reminded herself, she was there too, of course. The last few days and hours had been so chaotic that it would have been easy enough to forget
her own existence. “To cover the simple side of it first,” she went on, “the enemy is closing in on Centerpoint. They need to keep us from interfering with the next starbuster burst—which, of course, we must interfere with, no matter what the cost. Considering the number of lives at stake if we fail, I do not think anyone will disagree with me when I suggest that the destruction of our entire force would indeed be a low enough price for victory.

“And we must face the fact that we run such a risk. We have three major combatant ships carrying a total of thirty-two flight-worthy fighters. The enemy has at least eighty larger spacecraft. If all of them carried a full complement of fighters—though I very much doubt they do—the number of fighters on their side would be well up in the hundreds.”

The numbers were daunting enough to cause a flurry of whispers and mutters around the table.

Kalenda waited for the murmuring to settle down, and then continued. “We do have a few advantages I can tell you about. We have managed some fairly good long-range scans of the enemy fleet. We’ve gotten some good imagery of some ships. Most are not that large or that well armed. I can tell you that many of those ships are old, some predating the Imperial period. I doubt that any of them are of post-war construction. They are probably both dated and in relatively poor repair. Parts for many of those ships are going to be hard to come by. They are all but certainly relying on nonstandard and jury-rigged repairs. I would also expect the qualities of their crews to be below average. Their pool of potential recruits could not have been the best. Probably most are flying with a minimum of previous training and experience. However, don’t count too much on that.
Some
of those crews are probably going to be as good as ours. We just don’t know which ones.”

“In short,” said Admiral Ossilege, “we have better ships, but the numbers are most definitely against us.
However, we do have a plan for dealing with the situation. We will come to that a bit later.” He looked over and nodded at Kalenda. “Continue,” he said.

“The complicated side of the situation is that we almost, but not quite, control two of the repulsors. To the best of our knowledge, none of the various front groups—I don’t think ‘rebel groups’ quite suits the case anymore—none of the various front groups controls one at this time. I believe that was a major miscalculation on the part of the Triad. They assumed that locating and activating a repulsor would take much less time than it did.”

“Unless they got the estimates exactly right,” said Mara Jade, “and the Triad’s people are sitting on the Talusian and Tralusian and Corellian repulsors, just waiting for the signals to push the button.”

“Exactly right,” said Kalenda. “Obviously, the Double World Talus and Tralus repulsors are the most worrisome ones. If the enemy controls those, he has the ability to crush our ships down to rubble in any millisecond he chooses.”

“But we don’t
think
they have that capability,” Ossilege said. “Their fleet is moving in with a great deal of caution. Their behavior is consistent with fears that we control one or more repulsors, while they control none. In my considered opinion, it is
not
consistent with their controlling any of the repulsors. It is not even consistent with a bluff. If the enemy had the Talus or Tralus repulsors operational, this battle would be over already.”

“That caution might also explain why they haven’t reactivated the interdiction field,” said Mara. “They might want to be sure they have a way out of here.”

“That’s possible,” said Jenica Sonsen, “but we don’t think that’s why it’s still down. We’ve run some numbers on how Centerpoint must operate, what it can do, that sort of thing. The short form is that we don’t think they
can
reactivate it while Centerpoint is at this stage of powering itself up for a starbuster shot. Too much
power being diverted, too many systems busy. You can turn on an interdiction field while the system is in standby. You can turn one off at any time. You can leave it on while the system is powering up. But you can’t initiate an interdiction field while the Glowpoint is charging. At least we think that’s the case.”

“It damned well better be the case,” said Ossilege. “Our plans with Source A depend on it.”

“Excuse please,” said Dracmus. “What or who is a Source A?”

“We’ll come to that a bit later,” Ossilege said, a slight smile on his lips.

“What about Centerpoint itself?” Han asked. “Is there any weak spot that we know about? Someplace where we might pile in a lot of firepower and get lucky? Blow the place up?”

“No, sorry,” said Sonsen. “It doesn’t work that way. Don’t forget that the Glowpoint is a containment vessel for an extremely powerful reaction. It’s very strong, and it’s very good at absorbing and dispersing energy, and well insulated. The figures we worked up show that the energy levels in there at the moment are the equivalent of setting off a proton torpedo at least once a second, and Centerpoint has been putting up with that for days on end. And the rest of the structure is very strong, and very old, and so well sealed and shielded that we’ve never been able to map most of the interior. I’m told the
Sentinel
has landed search parties that are doing their best to find the control system and shut the system down, but that control system has kept itself pretty well hidden for at least a thousand generations. I doubt they’ll find it in just a day or two of looking.”

“So the repulsors are our only hope,” said Luke. “But then why worry about the Triad fleet at all? Why confront it? Why not just withdraw, get our ships out of harm’s way, and concentrate all our effort into activating the repulsors?”

“Because the repulsors are not the only game in
town,” said Ossilege. “That
is
an eighty-ship fleet out there, after all. They could dominate this star system indefinitely, if they chose to do so, and we left them alone. Or suppose, for example, they got to the repulsors on Drall and Selonia and grabbed them from us before we were ready to use them?”

“Let’s talk about the repulsors for a minute,” said Luke. “Where are we with them? How about the Selonian repulsor? Dracmus?”

The Selonian shook her head mournfully. “There is no changing. I have been checking with our people just before this fine meeting. The Sacorrian Selonians, the Triad Selonians of the nameless Den, are weakening. They see the force of our arguments. But they are not with us yet.”

“Is there any realistic chance of their being persuaded before the next starbuster shot?” Ossilege asked.