Showdown at Centerpoint (10 page)

“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.

He pushed in the last orange button. It turned purple, and suddenly the chiming noise was louder and
higher-pitched. There was a low-pitch hum from behind Anakin, and he turned around.

A section of the floor was sliding away. For a moment he wondered if he had been wrong about trapdoors. But then a whole complicated console rose slowly up out of the floor, a strange-looking control panel, all in the same silver stuff as the chamber itself, in front of a stranger-looking little seat that looked as if it were intended for a being that bent in different places from a human.

Hopping with excitement, all doubts forgotten, Anakin sat down in the odd little chair and did not even notice that it was adapting itself to his body, reforming itself, lifting him up and moving him forward so he would be able to reach the controls more comfortably. He stared at the instruments for a full minute, then extended his arms and spread his fingers out as far as they would go. He shut his eyes and reached out into the intricately, beautifully complicated universe of switches and paths and controls and linkages behind the knobs and levers and dials that covered the control panel. Power ratings, capacitance stowage, vernier control, targeting subsystems, safety overrides, shielding constraints, thrust balancing. What they all were, what they all meant, how they all worked, and worked together—all of it flowed into him, as if the ancient machines were speaking to him, telling him their story.

He knew it all. He knew it all now.

Anakin put his hands on the control panel and felt it all flow through him. Wake it up. He had to wake it up. The whole system had slept for so long. It
wanted
to come awake, to revive itself, to do its proper work. He moved as if
he
were asleep, in a dream, moving to what his ability in the Force told him he could do, not to do what needed doing, or what he ought to do. He knew, somehow, the compulsion, the desire to make the system come on, was within himself, that the machinery was nothing more than machinery. But it
felt
as if it were the machine whispering to him, not his own instincts
and abilities urging him on. Pull that long lever to start the initiator process activator. Twist that dial to bring the geogravitic energy transfer system on-line. Tap in that command sequence at the standard five-by-five keypad to clear the safeties. Somewhere, deep below him, the ground shuddered slightly, and a low, powerful hum began to build. The chiming noise grew more and more intense, becoming louder and louder, the chiming coming faster and faster.

A flat spot on the control panel twisted and shimmered and then started to swell upward, to form itself into a handle like a spacecraft’s joystick. Anakin reached out to it with his left hand, barely aware of what he was doing, not noticing that the handle was forming itself, reshaping itself, to fit itself to his hand. A graphic display appeared in the air over the handle, a hollow wireframe cube, made up of a grid of smaller cubes five high, five across, and five deep. All the smaller cubes were transparent, but, as Anakin watched, one cube, in the far lower left corner, turned green.

Slowly, carefully, he pulled back on the joystick. The solitary green cube turned purple, and suddenly the three transparent cubes it touched turned green. The corner cube turned orange, the second layer turned green, and a new layer of cubes turned purple. The colors spread out until the entire five-by-five-by-five grid shifted through green to purple to bright, glowing orange. The ground trembled again, and the hum of power grew deeper, and, somehow, more emphatic, more solid, the sound of massive energies waiting to be unleashed.

Anakin let go of the joystick. At the moment he did, the chiming stopped. The control chamber was suddenly silent as the power hum dropped away into lower and lower frequencies, until it was so deep a tone it was below the threshold of hearing.

The joystick melted away, flattened itself back down into the control panel. And there, in the blank space at
the center of the panel, a new button created itself, flowing up out of the panel surface, shaping itself into a disk about six centimeters across and a centimeter high. As he watched, the button shifted its color, changed from silver to green, green to purple, purple to orange, plain orange to a throbbing, pulsating orange, pulsing from the color of molten iron to the dull near red of a dusky sunset.

The chamber was silent. Anakin stared in open-mouthed fascination at the final button, his eyes wide, the light of the throbbing orange button throwing weird and shifting colors onto his clothes, his face, his eyes.

The button. The button was there. It called to him, or else his own compulsion, his compulsion to make machines
work,
to make machines
do,
called from deep inside himself.

He did not know. He did not care.

He reached out his left hand. He held it poised over the button for a moment.

And then he pushed it down.

*   *   *

Lightning flared out from the apex of the central cone in the great chamber, lancing out toward each of the lower cones, slamming into them with sparks and fire. Thunder, deafeningly loud, the sound of the earth cracking open and splitting itself apart, roared out through the great chamber. Blinding light exploded out from the lightning strike to reflect off every silver surface, flooding the chamber with brilliance.

The lesser cones answered back, sending their own thunderbolts back to strike at the top of the center cone, blasting it into incandescence. Then, as suddenly as it had been there, the lightning was gone, and the cones were as they had been, unaffected by the massive power that had played around them. The sound of the thunder echoed through the chamber, reverberating
back and forth like the angry war cry of some long-forgotten god.

The chamber shuddered and shook with the thunder. Chewbacca, aboard the
Falcon,
was thrown from his bunk as the ship bounced and lurched along with the chamber. He was halfway to the ship’s control room before he came fully awake and realized the ship was on the ground.

Not just on the ground, but
under
it, in a sealed chamber, with no hope of escape.

Shields. The
Falcon
’s shields would provide at least some protection. He had to get everyone aboard, and
fast
. He turned and headed for the open access ramp.

The twins had gotten out from under the ship. They were on their feet and struggling to stay that way as the ground bucked and heaved under their feet. Chewbacca shouted for them to get aboard, but the echoes of the thunder were so loud that even his voice did not carry. He waved his arms, gesturing for them to get aboard. Jacen saw him and nodded vigorously. He grabbed his sister’s arm and pulled her toward the ramp. The simple effort of trying to move at all was enough to knock them both off their feet. But they kept on moving, crawling toward the access ramp.