Showdown At Centerpoint

by Roger MacBride Allen

  any day of the week." "How far have you gotten?" asked Anakin as he looked

  over the gleaming silver control panel. It looked just the way he had left

  it, after pushing one button too many a few days before. The technician's

  name was Antone, and he was a thin, wiry-looking fellow, dark-skinned with

  shoulder-length, shiny black hair that hung straight down on either side of

  his face. He didn't answer at first, but instead gave Anakin a strange look,

  a look Anakin had seen before. It was the look Anakin got from grownups who

  had heard he was weirdly good with machines, but didn't quite believe it

  yet. Antone glanced at Jaina and Jacen, and got an encouraging nod from both

  of them. "I assure you, young Master Anakin is remarkably talented,"

  Thrccpio volunteered. Antone seemed unwilling to take the droid's word, but

  Ebrihim and Marcha and Q9 were there too, and somehow the presence of the

  Drall seemed to convince Technician Antone to take things seriously and

  cooperate. "I'd say we're stuck," he said, "except that might be saying too

  much. It makes it sound like we'd been making progress and then stopped. But

  we never got anywhere in the first place." "Not at all?Anakin asked. "Not at

  all. The system won't respond to any commands we give it." "Sure it will,"

  said Anakin. He sat down at the control panel and pushed his hand down onto

  a flat, featureless spot on the console. He pulled his hand away, and the

  surface of the console started to shift and rise up, forming itself into a

  joysticklike shape-but one perfectly shaped to Anakin's hand. Anakin touched

  the joystick, just touched it, and a hollow wireframe five-by-five-by-five

  of cubes appeared in the air over the control panel. Anakin let go of the

  joystick. It remained in place for a moment, then melted back down into the

  console as the cube display vanished. "How did you do that?'1 Antone

  demanded. He scooted Anakin out of the chair and pressed his own hand down

  on exactly the same place on the panel. Nothing happened. Nothing at all.

  Antone gave Anakin another strange look, and then comprehension dawned in

  his face. "Burning stars," he said. "Burning stars. It must have imprinted

  itself on your personal characteristics the first time you used it." "Huh?"

  Anakin said. "What do you mean?" demanded Jacen, "It imprinted on him,

  somehow. It locked in on his fingerprints, or his DNA, or his brain waves,

  or something, and locked them into its memory. It'll only work for him."

  Anakin's eyes lit up with a wild gleam. "Only for me?" he asked. "It's all

  mine?" "There must be a way to let other users use it," Jacen objected.

  "Yeah, probably," said Antone, "but we don't have time to look for them. We

  have to work with what we've got." "Wait a moment," Ebrihim objected. "Are

  you saying what 1 think you're saying?" Antone nodded solemnly. "Your little

  friend here is the only person who is going to be able to operate this

  control panel. And from what I've seen, and what you've told me, even if he

  can make it work, I'm not sure he really understands what it does." "I

  believe," said Threepio, "that you have just offered an excellent

  summing-up." Gaeriel Captison watched Admiral Ossilege pace the floor of the

  flag deck, and could not help but feel sympathy for the man. They were, for

  the moment, alone on the flag deck, and that fact spoke volumes. He had told

  everyone to go off and do his bidding, and now they were gone. Later,

  perhaps, this place would be chaos, with aides rushing in and out, mountains

  of message forms covering every flat surface, klaxons blaring and orders

  bellowing out from the overhead speakers. But now it was quiet, empty, a

  lonely place. And Ossilege must be an especially lonely man right now. There

  would be decisions yet to make, orders to give, but now, for the most part,

  his job was over. He had deployed his forces, issued his instructions, laid

  his plans. Now all he could do was wait. "It isn't easy, is it?" she asked.

  "You send them out to do your bidding, and off they go, following your

  instructions, living or dying, winning or losing, because of what you

  ordered." "No," he said, "it isn't easy. Everyone else knows what to do,

  because I have told them. But who tells me?" For Ossilege, that was a

  remarkable bit of introspection, bordering on self-pity. He himself seemed

  to realize that had given too much away, for he stopped his pacing and sat

  down in the admiral's chair. A chime sounded, and a deep, melodic robotic

  voice spoke from the overhead speaker. "All outbound craft launched and

  clear," it said. "Intruder getting under way in thirty seconds. All hands to

  assigned battle stations." Ossilege sat motionless throughout the

  announcement, not moving or speaking. Gaeriel could not tell if he was

  listening to it intently or not even aware that the voice had spoken. The

  chime sounded again, there was a change in the vibrations of the ship, and

  the flag deck instruments started reporting forward movement. They were on

  their way. "Tell me," Ossilege said at last, speaking after such a long

  silence that Gaeriel jumped ten centimeters in the air. "The plan. Do you

  think it will work?" The irony was almost too obvious. After endless weeks

  of being trapped aboard the Gentleman Caller, wishing above all else to move

  faster, get to where she was going sooner, Tendra Risant now had not the

  slightest desire for her ship to go anywhere at all. The Gent floated

  quietly in the darkness of space, in a stable free orbit of Corell-an orbit

  that put her squarely between the Triad fleet and the two Bakuran

  destroyers. She had not the slightest doubt that both sides were tracking

  her, watching her go by. Probably both of them recognized her ship for what

  she was-a civilian non-combatant, accidentally caught between the two

  fleets. As long as she floated, unpowered, through space, she represented no

  particular danger. But she also had no doubt at all that both sides would

  fire immediately if they felt in the slightest way threatened by the

  Gentleman Caller. And the Gentleman Caller was surrounded. There was no

  direction at all she could find that wouldn't take her close to the path of

  one ship or another. She did not dare maneuver, for fear of one side or the

  other deciding she was a booby trap, a bomb or a weapon disguised as a

  civilian ship. All she could do was sit here, and pray to whatever gods she

  could think of that no one decided she was getting in the way. No one knew

  exactly what was going to happen next, Tendra least of all. But whatever did

  happen, she was going to have a ring-side seat for it. It has been said, by

  more than a few observers, who have put it more than a few different ways,

  that warfare consists of long stretches of boredom, interspersed with short,

  sharp bursts of chaos and terror. Lando had been through battles enough in

  his day to realize the truth of that description. Or, to put it another way,

  it was a long, long flight from Drall to Centerpoint. Long enough that Luke,

  aboard the X-wing, returned to the Intruder twice for brief rest periods as

  they traveled. Luke, Jedi Master that he was, certainly could have toughed

  it out, but Luke was not a fool. A
nd only fools deliberately went into

  combat worn and unrested. The others-Han and his crew, Mara, and Lando

  -could all get up and stretch, set the autopilot, and sneak off for a nap.

  Not Luke. They could have used a very brief jump through hy-perspace to

  shorten the trip substantially, but there were reasons they did not want the

  Triad fleet thinking too much about hyperspace. And they also wanted the

  Triads to have their attention focused on the Intruder, the three trading

  ships, and the Intruder's fighter escort. The more they looked there, the

  less they would look in other directions. Lando punched up his own detector

  system and tried to get an idea of how the Triad fleet was reacting. So far,

  they didn't seem to be in the least bit distracted by the Intruder, The

  whole fleet was still moving in toward Centerpoint at a slow, steady pace of

  its own. Nothing substantially different from the last time he checked, or

  the time before that. Soon, though. Soon. They were getting close enough to

  start picking targets, planning their attack- Wait a second. Lando frowned

  at his display. Had that been there before, or had he just missed it? A tiny

  ship, civilian by the looks of what the detectors could tell him, right

  smack in between Centerpoint and the Triad fleet. And wait another second.

  Where could that ship have come from? Lando sent a signal querying the

  Intruder's position board database for the last few days. He went back to

  the time just before the interdiction field went down, and played it forward

  from there. The tiny ship winked into existence before the Triad ships. But

  how could anybody get here before the Triad, unless- Lando sat bolt upright.

  Unless they were closer than the Triad ships, coming from much closer in.

  From inside the interdiction field, for example. Lando finally had the sense

  to try it the easy way. He sent the standard ship-ID query signal. Fifteen

  seconds later he had his answer back. Twenty seconds after that he had

  changed course and accelerated to his top sub-light speed in order to

  intercept. It was a full minute later before he realized he should have

  asked permission, a realization he came to mostly because his com board

  started lighting up. He punched the transmit button. "Lady Luck to

  Intruder," he said. "I've, ah, just spotted something. I'm just heading over

  to investigate it. I'll be back with the fleet in good time for the main

  event." "Intruder to Lady Luck," replied a rather fussy-sounding voice. "The

  object you are on intercept for is an identified and uninvolved civilian

  spacecraft. No need to investigate." "Well, I'm going to anyway," Lando

  said. "She might not be as uninvolved as you think." Or at least, he

  thought, she's not going to be uninvolved for long. To Ebrihim's eye, the

  control room of Drall's planetary repulsor looked as if a bomb had hit it.

  It was knee deep in crumpled bits of paper and discarded food containers.

  Little knots of technicians were huddled in every corner of the room,

  arguing over readings, debating what various arrangements of purple and

  orange and green cubes and bars of light might mean. Handwritten labels were

  stuck over about half the controls on the console. As the other half of the

  controls seemed to appear and disappear and change shape and size almost at

  whim, it was a trifle more difficult to label them. Jaina and Jacen were

  asleep on cots in the next room over. Ebrihim and Marcha were still on the

  go, in the thick of it, helping the techs order their readings, sketching

  out the various transmutations of the control panel. Q9 usually seemed to

  have two or three remote sensors out as he traced this signal or that

  through the interior of the control system and took power readings, and he

  and Threepio had found any number of things to bicker about. But all the

  rest of them could work as hard and as much as they wanted. Anakin was still

  in the center of it all, still going strong, working the controls as he was

  asked, shifting the system' from one mode to another, helping the grown-ups

  understand what all the buttons meant. He had that wild-eyed look in his

  eyes that human children sometimes seemed to get when they had been up too

  long or had been too stimulated for too long. Sooner or later it would all

  be too much for him, and the poor child would simply keel over from

  exhaustion. Ordinarily, it would already be time, and past time, to get the

  child to bed, but under the circumstances they had to get as much out of him

  as possible before- "Newses! I have good ncwses!" an excited voice shouted.

  Everyone stopped what they were doing and looked up as Dracmus rushed into

  the room. "The Sacorrian Selonians! What a splendid idea this bribing was!

  Must congratulate honored Jade on fine suggestion!" "They've agreed to

  cooperate?" Ebrihim asked eagerly. "No, Honored Ebrihim!" said Dracmus in

  the same gleeful voice. "They refuse! They delay! Maybe later they come

  around, but not yet." "Then why are you so happy?" Marcha demanded. "Because

  bribe suggestion gives them idea." She held up a datapad and waved it in the

  air. "They still not willing to help with their repulsor-but they willing to

  sell instruction manual!" "Lemme see that," Antone said, and grabbed at the

  datapad. He turned it on and paged through it, grin- ning more and more

  widely as he did so. He nodded enthusiastically. "This is it," he said.

  "With what Anakin has shown us, and what this tells us about the notation-I

  think-I'm not sure but at least I think, we can run this place." "You mean,"

  said Ebrihim, "you think that Anakin can run this place for-" He stopped in

  midsentence. "Oh, dear," said Threepio. "He's done it again. It often

  happens when he stays up too late." Anakin was still sitting in the control

  panel's chair, but his head was resting on the panel itself, and he was

  sound asleep. Ebrihim nodded in wonder. Human children. Bizarre creatures.

  Anakin had been wide awake and busily working not thirty seconds before.

  "Ah, well," Ebrihim said. "The rest of us can keep working, but I suppose a

  child has to get a good night's sleep if he's expected to save two or three

  star systems in the morning." "Lando?" she asked. He was the first human

  being she had seen in a month. "Tendra." And suddenly they were in each

  other's arms, holding each other tight. "Oh, Lando. Lando. You shouldn't

  have come. You shouldn't have. There are ships on all sides of us, and

  sooner or later the shooting is going to start and-" "Hey, hey," said Lando.

  "Shh. Take it easy," he said. "Take it easy. My ship is plenty fast enough

  to get us out of here. We'll be all'right." "But it's too dangerous!" she

  insisted. "It was too risky." "Come on," Lando said, stroking her chin and

  giving her a big, warm smile. "I had to think of my image. How could I

  possibly turn down the chance to rescue the damsel in distress?"

  Tendra Risant was asleep when it happened. The first she knew that there was

  anything going on was when a large booming noise echoed through the hull of

  the Gentleman Caller. To say she found it a startling way to wake up would

  be a massive understatement. She nearly jumped out of her skin. She sat up

  in bed,
listening fearfully. What was it? Had a meteor crashed into the

  ship? Had something in the engine room blown up? Then she heard the whirring

  noise of doors sliding open and air pumps working. The airlock! Someone had

  docked with the Gentleman Callerl She scrambled out of bed and pulled her

  robe on. Who was it? What did they want? A weapon. She needed a weapon. Was

  there even a blaster on board the ship? She stepped out into the

  corridor-and froze in her tracks. There he was, right in front of her,

  grinning from ear to ear. "I tried to call ahead," he said, "but there

  wasn't any answer." The hours crawled past. The Triad ships moved toward

  Centerpoint, the Sentinel and the Defender kept up their guard over

  Centerpoint, and the Intruder's little fleet of armed trading ships and

  fighters moved in toward the Triad ships. Ossilege watched it all on his

  status boards, hour after weary hour, alone on the flag deck. No one needed

  to come here. Not until the battle began. Time was the enemy now, and time

  was the ally. They had to thread this needle carefully, oh, so carefully.

  Too soon, and they would give the game away, and all of Source A's efforts

  would be in vain. Too late, and the other side would jump first, attack the

  Bakuran ships and be done with it. And then there was the whole vexed

  question of the rcpulsor. Would they have it, or wouldn't they? Would it

  work, or wouldn't it? Were Calrissian's figures for the timing of

  Centerpoint's next shot even accurate? They had checked over the figures a

  dozen times, and they seemed correct. But what of the error no one saw, the

  bad assumption that everyone agreed to without even realizing it? They were

  the sort of questions that had plagued military commanders from the

  beginning of time, and they were likely to keep on doing so for quite some

  time to come. Time. That was the question. What was the proper time? There

  was no way of knowing for sure. No way of reading intentions off a display

  grid, no way of judging enemy morale and fighting prowess from a remote

  infrared image. The ships moved closer to each other. Closer. Closer. At

  last Admiral Hortel Ossilege stood up, walked over to the main display grid,

  and inspected it carefully, studying each ship, each status report in turn.

  Satisfied, or at least as satisfied as he was going to get, he returned to