“But I’ve almost got it working!” Anakin protested.
“Do you know what it does? Do you have any idea what it does?”
“N-n-no,” Anakin admitted, quite reluctantly.
“Do you remember what happened the last time you heard that chime and you kept going?”
“A trapdoor opened,” Anakin said, suddenly finding reasons to look everywhere but at Q9.
“Yes. A trapdoor opened. Under me. And I fell into a waste disposal chute. If I had not managed to jump my repulsors to high power in time and bounce back up, what would I be right now?”
“Mashed down to a ten-centimeter cube. Unless the machine had melted you down by now.”
“Quite right. But Chewbacca only found that out afterward, didn’t he?”
“I helped him,” Anakin protested.
“Yes, you did. And we need you around to help him more. So what would we do if the trapdoor was under you this time?”
Anakin’s eyes grew wide with alarm. “Oh,” he said. “Maybe I’d better stop and let Chewie look.”
“Maybe you’d better,” agreed Q9. “Come on, let’s go find the others.”
Anakin nodded. “Okay,” he said, and turned back the way they had come.
Q9 followed after on his repulsors, relieved that Anakin had decided to be cooperative—this time. Q9-X2 had been designed with the capacity to learn new behaviors by trial and error, but he had never expected to use that capacity to learn practical child psychology. The skills required to handle Anakin with even marginal success were taking up an inordinate portion of system resources. Q9 decided he was going to have to perform a partial memory wipe on himself, and free up some capacity, when this was over.
If it ever was over. As they came out of the side passage and into the central chamber, Q9 reflected that this situation was starting to look rather permanent.
They were a motley crew, all of them holed up in this huge and alien place. Anakin and Q9 paused at the exit from the side passage and looked around.
Seen from this vantage point, the repulsor chamber seemed too large and obvious for a hiding place, but, from the surface, Q9 knew just how difficult it would be for outsiders to find this place. It was shielded from every detection system that Q9 knew about—with the exception of Anakin Solo. He had found this chamber—and its identical twin on Corellia—with no trouble whatsoever.
And there were good reasons for hiding the chamber. It contained the planetary repulsor that had propelled Drall into its current orbit, unknown millennia ago. Likewise with Corellia and, no doubt, with the other inhabited worlds of the Corellia system—Selonia and the Double Worlds, Talus and Tralus. Each of them had a hidden chamber like this one. Each of them had a planetary repulsor like this one. And each of them had been transported into the Corellian system long, long ago, by some long-forgotten race for some long-forgotten reason.
But now the hunt for the repulsors was on. The party in the repulsor chamber had been cut off from outside contact for some time, but the last information they had was that the rebel forces on at least some and probably all of the inhabited worlds were actively searching for the repulsors. The reason was not entirely clear. While the repulsors would make powerful and effective weapons, they were not war-winners, not by any means. According to Ebrihim, a planetary repulsor could be used to knock out a ship in orbit—but it would be hard to aim and unwieldy to use. There would be the element of surprise, but only the first time the repulsor was used. There were other, simpler, cheaper, more reliable ways of shooting down enemy spacecraft, and many of them were available to the rebel groups. So why were they expending precious time and effort in the middle of a war in order to find weapons of marginal utility?
Q9 gave it up. He had come to that point in the analysis two hundred thirty-nine times before, and it didn’t seem likely that an answer that did not spring to mind any of those times would do so on the two hundred fortieth attempt.
Instead, he admired the strange and massive forms that made up the main planetary repulsor chamber. The chamber itself was a huge vertical cone, just under a kilometer from top to bottom, the walls of which appeared to be gleaming, perfect metallic silver. At the base of the conical chamber were six smaller cones of the same silver material, each just over one hundred meters tall. They were spaced evenly around a circle centered on the axis of the pyramid. In the exact center of the chamber’s base was a seventh, larger cone, twice as tall as the others, but with the same slender proportions. Passages to side chambers were spaced around the circumference of the chamber, and vertical shafts in the floor of the chamber led to a series of lower levels they hadn’t even started to explore.
It was a huge, artificial, gleaming, impersonal alien place—and a ramshackle, improvised, crude, homey-looking campsite was sitting right in the middle of it, right by the base of the central cone. No doubt to human or Drallish—or even Wookiee—eyes, the camp looked incongruous enough. To the droid’s eyes, it looked absurd.
The Millennium Falcon was there—and it had been a very close job flying it into the concealed topside entrance. The Duchess’s hovercar was parked alongside it. A line with washing on it was strung between the Falcon’s topside parabolic antenna and a spike antenna on the roof of the hovercar. Chewbacca was trying to use as little power as possible, to reduce the chance of detection. Even the Falcon’s clothes drier was off for the duration. Folding chairs and tables were set up to one side of the two vehicles, and the children, tired of the close confines of the Falcon, had moved their sleeping pads outside and under the ship. As always, the children had arranged their beds so they could all sleep together—the twins’ beds close together, with Anakin just a bit farther off.
Q9 could see all the rest of the party from here—Jacen and Jaina carrying some sort of gear out of the Millennium Falcon; Chewbacca the Wookiee, sitting at his camp chair, fiddling with some recalcitrant bit of hardware or other; and the two Drall, Ebrihim and his aunt, Marcha, the Duchess of Mastigophorous, at the other end of the table, hunched over their own work.
The two Drall, like all of their species, were rather short by human standards, Ebrihim being just about Jacen’s height. They were short-limbed and thick-bodied—downright plump, in fact—and covered with thick brown fur. As Q9 had learned, to human eyes they tended to look like stuffed toy animals. Some humans found them hard to take seriously—but failing to take Drall seriously was always a huge mistake. They were sober, serious, levelheaded beings in general. Even if Ebrihim was found to be a bit flighty by Drallish standards, his aunt was one of the most commonsensical beings Q9 had ever met.
No doubt Anakin’s latest somewhat unnerving discovery would give them something else to work on, give them another piece to the puzzle they were struggling to put together. They intended to develop a useful understanding of the repulsor’s control system. All in all, Q9 felt, the two Drall had the hardest job of anyone in the camp.
The hardest job besides waiting, of course. And they were all doing that.
“Come on, Q9,” said Anakin. “Quit dawdling.”
Another bit of child psychology to note down—no matter how slow they might be when one was waiting for them, no caregiver had ever moved fast enough when it was the child doing the waiting. “Coming, Anakin.”
* * *
Jacen set down the crate he was lugging out of the Falcon, looked up, and saw Q9 and Anakin heading back to camp. “Finally,” he said. “I thought they’d never get back. Now we can eat.”
“Darn. We can? Maybe we can get them to stay away a little longer.” Jaina set down her own crate and waved to Anakin. Her little brother waved back.
“Come on, the survival rations aren’t that bad.”
“They aren’t that good, either. Especially the nine millionth time in a row. I think they call them survival rations because no one knows if you’ll survive eating them.”
“Ha ha. Very funny. I think you’ve told me that joke nine million times—and it wasn’t so good
the first time.”
“Sorry,” Jaina said, sitting down on her crate. “Not much new inspiration here.”
“I know, I know,” Jacen said. “Things here don’t change much.” He could have gone and checked the Millennium Falcon’s chronometer, but without that and Chewbacca’s rigid insistence that they all eat and sleep at normal intervals, there was no clue at all to how much time had passed. The light in the chamber was unchangeably bright, coming from some diffuse and undefinable source in the upper reaches of the cavern. There was no sound at all from the massive cavern, except the sound of their own moving around and talking. But every sound anyone made produced a series of faint, distant echoes, whispering down from the top of the chamber for long seconds afterward. And the echoes of every sound mingled with all the others, Anakin’s laughter blending with Chewbacca’s growl or the whir of a machine, or the bang of a camp chair bumping into a table merging with the low, serious voices of the two Drall in conversation with each other.
Whenever the camp was busy and active, there was a constant whisper of background echoes reverberating down from above, just enough to make the chamber seem less foreboding and empty. But five or ten seconds after they stopped moving or talking, the chamber would fall silent again, and the stillness would seem to shout louder than any noise how strange this place was, how old its flawless gleaming silver walls, how alien and powerful its capabilities.
Night—or what they pretended was night—was the hardest. With the silver walls still gleaming in the unchanging light, they would go to bed—the children to their sleeping pads in the shadow of the Falcon, Chewbacca to his usual shipboard bunk, the two Drall to foldout beds in Aunt Marcha’s hovercar, and Q9 plugged into a charge stand. Then, all would be so quiet that the slightest noise seemed to echo forever. A cough, a whisper, Ebrihim’s muttering snore—or Anakin crying in his sleep—seemed to carry up to heaven and come down again and again.
It was not the best way to live, Jacen reflected. But in a sense, it was not a way of life at all. It was a way of waiting. All of them, even Anakin, seemed to know things could not last this way forever—or even for very long. There was a war being fought out there, and sooner or later, one side or the other would find this place, and after that—
After that, no one even pretended to know what would happen.
* * *
“Sit up properly, Anakin,” said the Duchess Marcha, “and stop banging your foot against the table leg. The noise is bad enough, but the echoes will drive me to distraction.” She shook her head and looked toward her nephew, Ebrihim. “Honestly, nephew, I do not understand these human children. What does Anakin gain by slouching over and making such irritating noises?”
“I have not dealt with them long enough to obtain a clear answer, dearest aunt. However, I might add that it would seem that even human parents do not understand the purpose behind much of what human children do—and that in spite of having once been children themselves.”
“Somehow, that does not surprise me. I suppose our own young ones can be some trouble, but I must say I have no recollection at all of your misbehaving as badly as Anakin does.”
“Don’t talk like I’m not here!” Anakin shouted indignantly. These Drall grown-ups were worse than regular human grown-ups for pushing kids around. “I was just thinking about stuff.”
“What kind of stuff?” Jaina asked.
All of them ganging up on him, even the other kids. “Just stuff,” Anakin said, frowning fiercely.
“Well, Anakin, there is certainly nothing wrong with thinking,” said Aunt Marcha. “I’m sure the universe would be a better place if we all indulged in the practice a bit more. If you could do your thinking without the banging, that would be a great help. All right?”
“All right,” Anakin said, still feeling kind of grouchy. But he knew he was lucky they had stopped asking questions when they had. Because of all that Jedi stuff, he would have had to tell the truth if they asked more, or his brother and sister would catch him fibbing, and then he’d be in even more trouble. Sometimes Jacen and Jaina acted just like grown-ups.
If he had told them he had been thinking about that control panel Q9 had told him to stop fooling with, they all would have yelled at him. He knew he could get it to do something. Something big, and important. What, exactly, he wasn’t sure. But something. He could feel that. It was like the control panel was calling to him, asking him to hurry back and set the machinery free, let it go out and do the work it was supposed to do.
But it didn’t matter. They hadn’t asked him about it.
So he could think about it all he liked.
* * *
“Come, dearest aunt,” said Ebrihim to the Duchess. “It is late. Everyone else is asleep. We have made great progress, but we can do no more with our researches tonight.” The two Drall were sitting in the hovercar, reviewing their notes for the day. And Ebrihim was right. They could go no further for the moment.
“Whatever progress we have made is only the barest start toward understanding this place,” the Duchess replied. “We have some idea of how the alien keypads are laid out, and what some of the button markings and color coding seem to mean. But going from there to operating this place, and shutting it down safely—a machine that has been operating for at least tens of thousands of years and perhaps much longer? We have no idea how the system draws its power. Suppose we do learn how to turn it off. Where does the power go once it is not coming here? If it is some sort of geologic energy tap, as I suspect, we might set off massive seismic disturbances. I think it most probable that this chamber is but one part of a much larger system. I suspect this is merely the nozzle, if you will, for a propulsion system woven into the very being of this world. We are dealing with a device that can move a planet. A device of that power could also destroy a planet, if it was not used properly. I do not see any way of learning all we need to know in any reasonable period of time.”
Ebrihim smiled faintly and let out a short bark of a laugh. “Unless, of course, we simply instruct Anakin to find the main control panel and then set him loose on it.”
Marcha’s eyes widened in horror. “Do not say such a thing, nephew. Not even in jest. Jokes like that have a way of coming true.”
* * *
Anakin’s eyes snapped open so suddenly it startled him. He was, quite abruptly, wide awake and staring up at the under hull of the Millennium Falcon. He sat up quietly and looked around. Jacen and Jaina were still sound asleep. Chewbacca was a deep enough sleeper that Anakin didn’t even worry about him. Ebrihim and Aunt Marcha were in the hovercar. Anakin turned and looked in that direction. All the car’s lights were out, the windows darkened, and the hatch was shut.
That left Q9. The droid spent most nights in standby mode, partially powered down, plugged into a portable charging stand between the hovercar and the Falcon, with his back to the larger craft. Anakin also knew that the bulk of the Falcon would block nearly all of the droid’s sensors. So long as he kept the ship between himself and Q9, he ought to be able to sneak away without any problems.
Moving as silently as he could, he pushed back his blanket and rolled over so he was on his hands and knees. He crawled out from under the Falcon, and into the endless bright light of the repulsor chamber.
Anakin blinked once or twice as he got to his feet. Strange to be sneaking around in light as bright as day. But there was no time to worry about that kind of stuff. Someone might wake up any second and notice he was gone.
Padding along in his bare feet, clad only in his underwear, Anakin moved straight out for the perimeter of the huge chamber, glancing over his shoulder now and then to make sure that he was keeping the Falcon between himself and Q9.
He reached the perimeter and trotted unhesitatingly into the closest tunnel entrance. The passage he wanted was almost on the other side of the chamber from here, but that did not worry him. The others might get lost in the side passages, but not Anakin. He could feel which way was the right way.
> He moved unerringly through the complicated maze of passages, taking every turning and passage with absolute confidence. He could feel the panel getting closer. Closer.
And there it was, just as he had left it, the initial keypad open and waiting. He stared at it for a minute, then reached out his hand and held it, palm down, over the pad. He closed his eyes, reached out, and felt the interior of the pad, tracing the circuits, the logic paths, the potentials and safeties that were inside the machine. It had been asleep for so long, so very long, waiting for someone to wake it up.
And now. Now was the time. He knew, knew with absolute certainty, how to make it work. No Q9-X2 here to tease him, or make him worry about trapdoors and stuff. He knew. He was sure.
Anakin Solo reached out and pressed the center button of the five-by-five grid. The green button turned purple. Good. He paused for a moment, and then, stretching his fingers as far as they would go, he pressed all four of the corner buttons at once. They turned orange, not purple. He frowned. That wasn’t quite what he had expected, but never mind. Move on. Starting at the top and moving counterclockwise, he pressed the center button of each outer row in turn. These did indeed turn purple. That made him feel a bit better. The keypad made the chiming noise again, but this time it wasn’t just once. It kept going, over and over and over.
Anakin closed his eyes once more and held his palm over the keypad. Yes. Yes. That was it. Starting from the bottom right, and moving clockwise, he pressed each of the corner buttons in turn. Each turned from orange to a reassuring purple as he pressed it. He paused, only for a moment, just before he pushed in the last one. Was this such a good idea? He was going to get in trouble for this, he knew that much. But would it be so much trouble that it wouldn’t be worth it?
No. He had to do it. There was no turning back now.
Star Wars: The Corellian Trilogy III: Showdown at Centerpoint Page 7
