Showdown At Centerpoint

by Roger MacBride Allen

  hour or two to do the job. Had Chewbacca left the work on O9 for Anakin as a

  way of letting Anakin make amends for what he had done? Or was Anakin's

  instinctive, near-mystical ability with machines so great that he could do

  things Chewbacca. with his centuries of experience, could not? Chewbaeea had

  only worked on Q9 for a few minutes at a time, when he was taking a break

  from his work on the propulsion systems. Ah. well. Life was full of minor

  mysteries that would never quite be solved, and Ebrihim's command of the

  Wookiee language was not good enough to question Chewbacca on such a subtle

  point. Not that it was ever wise to question the Wookiee toe-closely. "I am

  grateful lo both of you-all of you-for repairing me," said Q9. "But what is

  ihis about turning the repulsor on? That seems a most foolhardy act. Whose

  idea was it?" "My idea," Anakin said, looking down at the deck of the lounge

  compartment. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to cause so much trouble." "I am

  relieved to hear it. I would be even more relieved to learn that you had

  caused no trouble at all. I gather this was not the case?" "Oh, Anakin

  managed lo do just a bit of damage," Ebrihim said breezily, "but we will

  discuss that later. Right now I would suggest that you run a full set of

  diagnostics on yourself. It might well be that you find that several

  corrective adjustments need to be made." Q9 activated his repulsor pads and

  floated up into the air to his normal hover height. "I shall do so," he

  replied. "But I would suggest that someone else around here might want to

  run some diagnostics and make some adjustments." With that, he floated

  silently out of the compartment, "What did he mean by that?" Anakin asked.

  "I think he was suggesting that little boys should try and learn from their

  mistakes." "That's not what he said," Anakin objected. "No, my version was

  more polite. But the advice remains good." Anakin looked from Chewbacca to

  Ebrihim, "You mean I should think more before I work on a machine?" Anakin

  asked. "That is precisely what 1 mean," Ebrihim said. "Precisely. Nov. run

  along and play-with your toys, not with machinery." He watched the lad hurry

  off to find his brother and sister. "Of course." he said to Chewbacea. "the

  problem is that Anakin sees toys and machines as one and the same thing."'

  Chewbacea nodded grimly as he put away his tools. "In any event," said

  Ebrihim, "it is good to have Q9 up and about again. Thank you for your help.

  And I think it is about time I relieved my aunt. My watch is about to

  start." Chewbacca gave a yip and a hoot of polite dismissal and Hbrihim

  turned and left the lounge. The two Drall had been taking turns on watch in

  the Falcon"?, cockpit. The sensor displays there might well give them some

  sort of warning if trouble showed up. By having the Drall take the watch.

  Chewbacea had time lo keep up his work on his repairs to the Falcon.

  Wookiees in general, and Chewbacca in particular, were not given to bursts

  of optimism, but Chewbacca had made it sound as if he was close, very close,

  lo getting at least some propulsion restored. Even if all they could do was

  fly high enough to get out of this enormous trap of a cylinder and back up

  to the surface that would be at least some help. Ebrihim entered the cockpit

  and saw his aunt silting at the pilot's station. She was using a pile of old

  clothes under her somewhat ample rump to boost her up high enough to see all

  the instruments. She looked around as he entered. "Greetings, nephew. Q9

  floated in a moment or two ago and made several insulting remarks. It is

  good to see that he is operational again." "It is indeed, dearest aunt. Is

  there anything to report?" She shook her head. "No, there is not. and for

  that let us be profoundly grateful-" She stopped speaking and looked at the

  overhead detector display. She stared at it. slock-still, for all of five

  seconds. She shook her head. "It would appear I spoke too soon," she said

  and then slapped down the red-alert siren. It started hooting loudly, loudly

  enough for the children outside the ship to hear it and come running. "Aunt!

  What is it?" Ebrihim asked. "1 should think that would be obvious," she

  said, sludying the display. "It's a ship, ol course, coming in right on top

  of us. But 1 am not so much interested in what it is. I would much rather

  know who it is."

  CHAPTER NINE

  If and When It's amazing how much you can find when you know where to look,"

  said Lando, studying the data that was flowing past, screenful after

  screenful. "And it doesn't hurt to have someone as good at data searches as

  Arloo. And, ah, well, even Threepio's language skills have been helpful."

  Threepio turned his head rather briskly. "Helpful? I would say they have

  been essential. You wouldn't have been able to translate a tenth of that

  information without me." "Don't push it," Lando said. "Yes, you were a great

  help, all right? There, I said it. But I was about to say that without

  Administrator Sonsen, we wouldn't have gotten anywhere at all." Jenica

  Sonsen smiled broadly and gave Lando a jab in the ribs that was probably

  just a trifle harder than she had intended it to be. "Easy, all of you," she

  said. "All I did was show you the log files." But the log files had told

  them a lot-and led them in a lot of profitable directions. It was all down

  there, very clear. Looking from here, it was easy to spot signs of something

  going wrong. Station systems no one had even known about started coming to

  life. Power fluctuations. Spikes and drops in various forms of radiation,

  some of them significant enough to require the tempo- rary evacuation of

  part of the station. The station re-pointing its spin axis, gradually

  reaiming its poles in new directions. "The change in spin orientation. How

  did you people explain that away?" asked Lando. "Centerpoint has always been

  self-correcting," Jenica said. "The barycenter point isn't absolutely

  stable. The station has always moved itself around a little to stay properly

  oriented and positioned. It wasn't like it hadn't ever happened before."

  "That lo one side,'" said Lando, "the main thing is that I've now pretty

  much confirmed what I suspected the second I saw those conical forms in the

  poles of Hollowtown. That form of six small cones around a larger one is the

  exact geometry you need for a particular kind of old-style repulsor.

  Actually, if you get down and take a look on the microscopic level, you'll

  see exactly the same pattern, repeated over and over and over again, on the

  surface of modern repuisor systems. Crudely put, we don't make one big

  repuisor element like that anymore, because the bigger the repuisor, the

  heavier the object has to be for the repulsor to work efficiently." Lando

  brought up a wireframe diagram of Centerpoint and pointed to the image of

  the repulsors. "These are pretty big, but on the other hand, planets are

  pretty big too." "But all the inhabited planets have their own repulsors,"

  Kalenda objected. "What did the builders of Corellia need this place for?"

  "Because this isn't just a repuisor," he said. "This is a hyperspacc'

  repuisor. This station was designed to open up a-a gate, a
tunnel-through

  hyperspacc. grab a planet, and pull it back this way. It acts as more of a

  tractor beam than a repuisor, really, but that's the idea." "How?" Luke

  asked. "How does it work?" Lando shrugged. "I don't know. But as

  Administrator Sonsen has pointed out a time or two, knowing how it works

  isn't always that important. It's knowing that it the station to report al!

  the events, but the automatic logging reports I've found indicate there was

  more of the same. Then there was a different sort of power flow shifts from

  the automatic recording instruments that have kept up right until the

  present moment-and they start at exactly the time the jamming and the

  interdiction field come on. Then we get the second Glowpoint flare, and,

  shortly thereafter, the second induced supernova." "But how could it be we

  didn't feel any of that, or see anything?" Jenica asked. "You're talking

  about a hugely powerful pulse of energy being shot off from this station. No

  one saw anything. There wasn't any huge vibration or any burst of heat."

  "This station is putting out a hugely powerful interdiction field and a

  powerful jamming field right now. Can you feel either of those?" "The

  pointing," Kalenda said. "What does the re-pointing show?" Lando brought up

  a holographic projector, and threw up an image of the stars near to

  Corellia. "The red spot at the center of the display is our position. This

  is the pointing of Centerpoint's South Pole relative to the starfield before

  things started happening." A blue line streaked out from the center of the

  display and pointed toward nothing at all. "This is the pointing after the

  first shift in spin orientation." A line of red lanced out and stabbed

  straight through the heart of a star. "That is TD-10036-EM-1271," Lando

  said. "The first star to go nova." Lando punched in another command, and a

  shaft of gold streaked out and touched another star. "Thanta Zilbra," Lando

  said. "The second star on the list. A population in the tens of thousands.

  My guess is most of them are dead. I know logistics, and I don't see how

  they possibly could have gotten everyone out in time. And this," he said,

  "is where we're pointed now." A line of violet fire flashed out, and hit

  another star, square and true. "That is the third star on the hit list we

  got in the initial warning message. Bovo Yagen. I looked it up. One source

  says one planet with eight million. Another says two planets with a total

  estimated system population of twelve million on the planets, and who knows

  how many stations and habitats and mining camps and so on. Centerpoint is

  the starbuster, and it is getting set to blast that star and those planets

  and all those people down to cinders and dust." "When?" Kalenda asked. Lando

  hit another control button and a countdown clock appeared. "Artoo ran the

  problem. We have to backtrack a little to account for how long the pulse

  will take to travel through hyperspace, and how long it will take for the

  chain reaction to take hold inside the star and build up to an explosion.

  Centerpoint is going to have to send a tractor-repulsor hyperspace burst in

  exactly one hundred twenty-three hours, ten minutes, and thirteen seconds

  from now in order to keep to the schedule in the original warning message.

  Twelve hours and twelve minutes after that, the chain reaction induced by

  the energy pulse will bloom out of the star's core, and up it will go."

  "Burning stars. Centerpoint-my home-is a weapon," Jenica said, her voice

  full of shock. "And whoever controls it is going to have the power to

  control the Corellian Sector-and maybe the whole galaxy," Gaeriel said. "Do

  what we say, or we blow up your star." "Wait a second," Luke said. "There's

  a piece that doesn't fit. If Centerpoint is the starbuster, then it's the

  prize, the most important place in the Corellian system. Why the fuss over

  the planetary repulsors? Why didn't the plotters worry about Centerpoint?"

  "Three reasons," Lando replied. "The first is that they didn't try to get it

  because they already had it-or at least had found a way to control it. I

  figure there is some well-shielded, well-hidden control room on this

  station. Someplace we wouldn't find it if we looked for a hundred years.

  Probably there isn't anyone in it, any- way. All of it automated, set to

  work off timers and remote control. Second reason might be plain old

  misdirection. If you get everyone worried about the repul-sors, no one's

  going to have time to go looking for the starbuster. And the third reason-

  "Has been staring us right in the face," Kalenda said. "I think I just

  figured it out. I haven't really worked with repulsor field theory since

  school, but part of what makes repulsors work is that they can interfere and

  resonate with each other, right? And you can use that interference between

  two or more repulsor cells to provide steering and control. Power to a small

  side repulsor cell can deflect the beam from the main repulsor." Lando

  nodded. "Exactly. The planetary repulsors can jam Centerpoint's hyperspace

  tractor-repulsor beam. They are the only repulsors strong enough to do it.

  "But it goes deeper than that. The planetary repulsors can work as

  amplifiers, not just as jammers. In practice it would be the devil to

  manage, but, in theory, you could tune all the planetary repulsors into a

  single network slaved to Centerpoint. That would provide Centerpoint with

  even more power and range than it has now. Right now, Centerpoint gets its

  power by tapping a little bit of the gravitic potential of Talus and Tralus.

  Suppose it could tap into Selonia, and Corellia, and Dratl? For that matter,

  I haven't quite worked out the geometry of it yet, but with all five planets

  and Centerpoint in the network, you could probably tap into the star

  Corell's gravitic potential. If I'd designed this system back whenever it

  was designed, I'd make sure that was possible. Just imagine Centerpoint with

  that much power. It would be able to strike at any point in the galaxy. The

  masters of Centerpoint could grab any planet they wanted and pull it into

  this system-or drop into a star, if they wanted. Centerpoint could blow up

  any star its masters chose. It could set up an interdiction field or

  communications jamming over the whole galaxy-or any part of it its masters

  ugrave; wanted to isolate. It could probably do a lot of other things we

  haven't even thought of yet." "A lot of things that didn't make sense are

  starting to make more sense than I'd like," said Luke. "But using the

  repulsors for jamming. How would that work?" "That's a lot simpler," Lando

  said . "If any of the planetary repulsors fired a properly tuned beam at

  Centerpoint, it would disrupt the aim and the tuning of the tractor-repulsor

  beam;" "Could the planetary beams actually move Centerpoint itself?" Luke

  asked. "Not enought to make any difference," said Lando. "Centerpoint's more

  powerful than any of the plancta-ries. If the planetaries pushed Centerpoint

  off its present position, Centerpoint could just push it back. But any one

  of the planetaries can shut Centerpoint down by sending out a jamming

  signal." "AH right," Kalenda said. "Now we know all this. W
hat do we do

  about it?" Lando turned his hands palms-up in a gesture of helplessness.

  "Not much. We don't know it's being controlled, or from where, or how. We've

  got a rough idea of what the system is, but we're nowhere near understanding

  how to operate the system." "There must be some cable we can cut, some

  control system we can smash," Jenica said. "I bet there is-but I don't know

  where it is. And we won't find out unless we search every deck and shell and

  compartment on this station. And even if we found the control system, I'm

  not so sure we could smash it. Remember this system is robust enough that

  it's been up and running since before the Old Republic." "Then we could blow

  up the whole station," Gaeriel said. "With what?" Kalenda asked. "We have

  one light cruiser and two destroyers. None of them are carrying any bomb

  powerful enough to destroy something three hundred kilometers from end to

  end. Maybe, if you gave the Bakuran engineers enough time, they might be

  able to rig fixed-point detonators powerful enough to wreck the interior

  pretty thoroughly. With enough time. But not with only one hundred

  twenty-odd hours to do it." "Well, there's one thing we can do," Luke said.

  "Get the word out. Tell our people what we've found out. If we can find Han

  and Leia and Chewbacca, if we can find our allies on the worlds here, and

  let them know what we know, that's a start. If they can get to a planetary

  repulsor in time, and if they can figure out how to run it, and if they can

  jam that hyperspace tractor-repulsor beam, then maybe we can save some

  lives." Lando shook his head. "That's a lot of ifs, Luke," he said, the

  doubt heavy in his voice. "I know," said Luke. He looked up at the countdown

  clock, the clock that showed how long Bovo Yagen had to live. The seconds

  were melting away. "And it's going to take all the ifs we have to beat that

  when up there." The ship dove down into the repulsor chamber, moving fast

  and aggressively, but not so fast that Ebrihim wasn't able to see the

  insignia painted on the underside of its fuselage as he looked up at it. A

  stylized human skull with a knife in its teeth. "Human League!" he cried

  out. "Can we get the shields up?" "No!" Aunt Marcha shouted. "The children

  are still outside. We have to wait for them to get aboard." Ebrihim hopped