At the Source
Tendra Risant sat in the pilot’s station of the Gentleman Caller, and wondered if it was going to be all right, wondered how it could be all right. She had done her part, however little that might be. In purely objective terms, all was well. She had used the radionics transmitter to tell Lando of the fleet hidden in the Sacorrian system. His friends had gotten the news, and it might well prove vital to them. She knew Lando was alive, and well, and that he was glad she was in-system.
But none of that could change the fact that she was stuck out here, and no one could get to her. She looked through the forward viewport at the bright star of Corell, dead ahead. Unless that interdiction field went down, it was going to take her months to cross the distance from here to there. It was worth it, she knew that. She had more than likely saved lives, many lives—perhaps even Lando’s life.
But the thought of more months alone on this ship was more than she could bear.
But the people Lando was with, the Bakurans, had asked her to send them more information. There was not much she could tell them that she had not said already—but she would tell them what she could. She switched on the radionics transmitter and set to work.
The Bakuran light cruiser Intruder fired her main forward turbolaser battery three times, and three times Pocket Patrol Boats exploded. “Very well,” said Admiral Hortel Ossilege. “You may hold your fire. Bring the turbolasers to their stowed position and power them down. Make sure our friends can detect what you are doing. We have shown we can hurt them at will. Now we extend an invitation to leave. Let us see if our friends out there understand that we plan to play rough if they stay.”
A reasonable tactic, Luke Skywalker thought, feeling none too happy about it. A show of overwhelming force might convince the surviving defenders to withdraw. After all, the odds of a handful of fighters defeating the Intruder and her sister ships, Sentinel and Defender, and all their fighters were almost zero.
On the other hand, the Rebels had faced such odds more than once in the war against the Empire, and had emerged victorious. Good training, strong motivation, good equipment, good intelligence—and plain good luck—could even up the odds quite a bit. There was no such thing as certainty in war.
Luke Skywalker stood next to Admiral Ossilege on the bridge of the Intruder. As always when he agreed with the man, he did not feel comfortable doing so. Luke glanced at Lando Calrissian, standing on the other side of Ossilege, and the look on his face told Luke that Lando shared his concerns. The tactics were sound, even conservative. The enemy forces consisted of little more than twenty or so PPBs. There was nothing much to be gained in wiping out such a small force. If Ossilege could convince them to withdraw without exposing his own forces to needless casualties, that would be all to the good.
Very sensible and cautious. Except that Ossilege was not a cautious commander. If it seemed he was trying something careful, Luke had a hunch that it was merely a cover for something madly audacious to follow. Ossilege had shown a tendency to dare too much rather than too little. When he played a conservative game, the odds were fair that what appeared to be caution was just an elaborate preparation for a very large gamble indeed. Or had losing the Watchkeeper to the Selonian planetary repulsor cost him his nerve? Ossilege was a small, wiry-looking man, who favored dress-white uniforms that set off his collection of medals and ribbons. He was a dried-up, self-important little man who seemed to have little patience for anyone or anything. He looked to be a comic-opera caricature of an admiral—but Luke had never met as hard-edged, as cold-blooded, a military commander. No one found it relaxing to spend time in the presence of Admiral Ossilege.
Of course, with the massive, overwhelming bulk of Centerpoint Station dominating the sky outside the viewports, Luke would have felt a little edgy even if the Watchkeeper hadn’t been destroyed.
“There they go,” Lando announced, pointing toward a cloud of tiny dots lifting away from one of the docking bays of Centerpoint. The defending fighters were withdrawing. “Decided they couldn’t do any good against us, I guess.”
“Or perhaps they decided we would be unable to do Centerpoint any harm,” said Ossilege. “A wise tactician retreats from an indefensible position in order to preserve his forces. But a wise tactician will likewise avoid expending his forces needlessly in the defense of the impregnable.”
“What are you saying?” asked Luke.
Ossilege gestured toward Centerpoint. “We are dismissing the enemy fighters because they are so small in comparison to us. But, proportionately, we are far smaller in comparison to Centerpoint. It is, somehow, the source of power that can impose an interdiction field over an entire planetary system. What other powers might it have?”
“No way to know,” said Lando. “I figure the one thing we can count on is being surprised. And I doubt that many of the surprises are going to be pleasant.”
Just at that moment, a service droid wheeled up from behind them and came around to stop in front of Lando. “And here’s a surprise now,” Lando muttered. “Yes, what is it?” he asked the droid.
“Begging your pardon, sir, but Lieutenant Kalenda wishes to see both you and Master Skywalker, sir. A new message from Source T has come in.”
Lando looked worriedly at Luke. “That ought to make me happy,” he said. “But I have the feeling she’s not calling in just to chat.” He turned toward the service droid. “Lead the way.”
* * *
Source T was Tendra Risant. Lando and Luke had met Tendra on her home world of Sacorria, one of the so-called “Outlier” worlds of the Corellian Sector. The local authorities had kicked Lando and Luke off Sacorria almost immediately after meeting Tendra.
As they followed the droid down to the cruiser’s com section, it crossed Lando’s mind, not for the first time, that Tendra would be vastly amused to learn that Bakuran military intelligence had given her a name as ridiculously pompous as Source T.
Lando had met Tendra while searching the galaxy for a rich wife. Tendra was certainly well off enough to qualify as rich, and it was certainly within the realm of possibility that she would make a good wife for Lando—if they could get together in the same place at the same time long enough to get to know each other.
But even if they had not had the time to fall madly, passionately in love with each other, the two of them had very definitely made a connection with each other, established a solid bond, something that they could build on, someday, if the universe gave them that chance.
As best he could piece together, Tendra had somehow managed to spot some sort of military buildup in the Sacorrian system. Connecting the buildup to the interdiction field, she had decided she had to get word to Lando. Toward that end, it would seem she had gotten her hands on a spaceship, bribed her way off Sacorria, and crashed it into the Corellian interdiction field.
None of that would have done anyone much good, but for one other fact—Lando had given her a radionics communications set. The radionics set did not use any of the standard comlink frequencies, but instead sent and received messages on a modulated carrier wave in the radio band of the electromagnetic spectrum. The radionics signals were completely immune to the system-wide jamming, and were likewise completely undetectable to anyone using comlink equipment. The downside was that like all other forms of electomagnetic radiation—infrared, visual light, ultraviolet, gamma ray, X ray, and so on—radio band radiation traveled at the speed of light. Tendra’s messages to Lando, and his replies, therefore likewise crawled along at the speed of light, and were highly susceptible to interference.
She was still aboard her ship, the Gentleman Caller, at the outskirts of the Corellian system, ambling gradually in toward the inner system at speeds that were distinctly sublight. It took long hours for her messages to reach him—but it could well take long, weary months before her ship could cross the same distance.
Unless, of course, they could bring down the interdiction field. And that was what they were here to do.
They arrived at the com section. He and Luke waited as the service droid extended a data probe and plugged into the security port by the com section door. Lando’s original radionics set was still aboard his ship, the Lady Luck, but the Intruder’s tech staff had had no trouble at all putting together their own radionics set from the plans and spec sheets the Lady Luck also carried, and had actually managed to make their transmitter more powerful, and their receiver more sensitive.
But it wasn’t radionics Lando had on his mind. He was concerned with Tendra.
As if the situation with Tendra wasn’t complicated enough, there was the small matter of the actual information she was broadcasting to Lando. It was enough to give the intelligence staff fits.
The security system beeped its clearance code, and the hatch to the com section slid open. Lando looked inside before entering and let out a small sigh. There she was, as if the mere thought of anxious intelligence officers was enough to summon one. Lieutenant Belindi Kalenda, of New Republic Intelligence, was waiting for them, and she did not look happy.
“Didn’t anyone ever tell your lady friend how to count?” she demanded the moment the hatch slid shut. Kalenda had never been much for small talk, and she was just about at the end of her tether now.
“What’s the problem now, Lieutenant Kalenda?” Lando asked wearily.
“The same as always. Numbers, that’s the problem,” Kalenda said. She was a somewhat odd-looking young woman. Her wide-spaced eyes were glassy, almost milky, and a bit off-kilter. She was almost, but not quite, cross-eyed. She was a bit darker-skinned than Lando, and her black hair was done up in a complicated sort of braid piled on top of her head. The scuttlebutt was that she had at least some small skill in the Force, or at least that her intuition was good, and her hunches tended to play out, that she seemed to see more than most people. In any event, she had an odd way of seeming to look past your shoulder at something behind you, even when she was glaring right at you—as she was right now. “Numbers. We still have no idea how many ships are waiting out there at Sacorria.”
“We wouldn’t know there were any ships at all there, if not for Lady Tendra,” Lando said sharply. “Maybe your NRI operatives on Sacorria know more about ship spotting, but did any of them have the initiative to get into the Corellian system and let us know about them?”
Kalenda looked woodenly at Lando. “I never told you there were NRI agents on Sacorria,” she said warily.
“And I never told you I used to be a smuggler, but you know it just the same,” Lando snapped. “Don’t treat me like a fool. If you didn’t have agents there, someone wasn’t doing their job.”
“Let’s try and get back on track here,” Luke said, attempting to smooth things over a bit. “What’s wrong with Lady Tendra’s message?”
“We have sent three follow-up queries asking her to give further details of the types, sizes, and numbers of ships she saw. Her latest message seems longer and more detailed, but once you weed out all the qualifiers and caveats, we still have nothing but the vaguest sorts of estimates.”
“She can’t tell you what she doesn’t know,” Lando said, wondering how many times he would have to tell that to Kalenda before she would believe it. Or when he would stop being frustrated by the intelligence group reading messages intended for him—and reading them first.
“But we have to know more than we do!” Kalenda said. “Whose ships are those? How many are there, and how well armed are they? Who commands them, and what are their intentions? You’ll have to transmit again, and ask for more information.”
“I won’t,” Lando said sharply. “I don’t care what your psych teams say about her responding best to me. She told you all she can, and I’m not going to help you harass her anymore.”
“But we need more—”
“The trouble is, she doesn’t have any more,” he snapped. “You have all the details you’re going to get. Did you expect Tendra to be able to tell you the fleet commander’s middle name by looking at ships in orbit through macrobinoculars? She’s given us a warning, and a very useful one. She’s given you all the information she can, and there are limits on how far we can press her.”
“And there are also limits to how many messages you can ask her to send,” Luke put in. “Every time she sends us one, the odds of her being detected go up.”
Kalenda looked at Luke sharply. “Detected? How? By whom?”
“Think about it,” Lando said. “You’re the intelligence officer. The way she’s broadcasting is secret, but it’s not hidden in any way. She’s broadcasting in clear, without any coding or encryption. Anyone who had the right sort of gear for scanning radio-band frequencies could lock in on her radionics transmission in a heartbeat. You did it easily enough. Then they’d not only know that we know about the ships tucked away in orbit of Sacorria, they’d be able to triangulate back and zero in on her location, the same way we did.”
“What difference would that make?” Kalenda asked.
“Plenty, if we’re talking about the people who control the interdiction field. They’d want to silence her. Say they switched the field off for thirty seconds. With good targeting and good planning, that would be enough time for a ship to drop into hyperspace, pop out next to the Gentleman Caller, blow Tendra out of the sky, and then return to base before the field went back up.”
“But she broadcasted constantly for days without anything happening to her,” Kalenda objected.
“She didn’t have any choice. She had to transmit until I responded. Now she doesn’t have to take that chance. Your radionics broadcasts are much more powerful than hers, and they’re closer to anyone listening in the inner system. If the opposition spots your transmissions, they’ll know to look for her.”
Kalenda’s face was expressionless. Had she known all this, and elected to risk Tendra’s life on the chance of getting more information? Or had it not occurred to her? That seemed unlikely enough in an officer as sharp as Kalenda seemed to be—though the last few days had been hard on all of them. Lando half expected her to offer excuses, to lie and say she hadn’t thought it through.
But even if Kalenda played a cagey game, she didn’t play a dishonest one. “It’s never easy,” she said, “figuring the balance. I knew the risk was there, but I had to weigh the danger to her against the consequences if she had some bit of data without knowing about it—something that could save dozens, or hundreds, or millions of lives. If I had her here, and I could do a proper debriefing, I’m sure she could tell us all sorts of useful things.”
“But you don’t have her here,” Luke said.
“No, I don’t,” Kalenda agreed. “Even with a standard comlink I could get somewhere. But this business of waiting hours and hours for an answer, and then waiting hours and hours for her to hear the next question—it makes it impossible to get anywhere. If I had a comlink we could scramble so there was at least some chance of keeping it private—then we could get somewhere.”
“That’s a lot of ifs,” Luke said. “Let’s leave them all out. What are the odds on your being able to get anything more out of Tendra as things stand?”
Kalenda sighed and shook her head. “Just about zero,” she said. “But the stakes are so high.”
“So high you had to try,” Luke said. “I understand. But if it can’t be done, it can’t be done.”
Kalenda smiled humorlessly. “That doesn’t sound like a Jedi attitude,” she said.
“Even Jedi know their limits,” said Luke.
Kalenda nodded reluctantly. “Very well,” she said. “There are a large number of warships parked in orbit of Sacorria. That’s all we’re going to get out of Source T.”
“All right then,” Lando said. “Let’s leave it there. We’re coming up on Centerpoint Station. Figuring it out ought to be enough to keep us busy right there.”
Kalenda looked toward Lando again, and this time her glance seemed to meet his. “That’s an understatement, if ever I heard one,” she said.
* * *
It didn’t take Belindi Kalenda long to confirm that idea. Centerpoint was so absurdly big, so complex, and so unlike anything in her experience, that it was all but impossible to know where to start. Over the next day or so the Bakuran fleet moved in on Centerpoint, advancing very slowly. If Ossilege was merely pretending to be cautious, he was doing a good job of it. He moved his ships in carefully, pausing repeatedly in his approach to scan every bit of the station to the limits of the Bakuran detection systems. Not that Kalenda could blame him for caution. Not when Centerpoint could have swallowed the Intruder whole through the smallest of its sally ports.
But even from the closest range Ossilege was willing to risk, the scan results weren’t good enough to satisfy Kalenda. She sat at a scan station in the Intruder’s intelligence section, sifting through the endless, inconclusive images of Centerpoint.
It seemed as if the place was deserted, but go try to prove a negative. The enemy could have hidden a whole fleet of Star Destroyer-type warships in there, and a whole army of stormtroopers. If the ships were properly powered down to standby, and if the enemy was using the right sort of shielding, there would be no way to detect them.
What made it even more worrisome was that the enemy had shown almost no large ships so far. They had to be hidden somewhere. That was part of why Kalenda had wanted better numbers from Source T. If she had gotten good, hard data from Source T about the types of ships she had seen at Sacorria, she would have some idea of what might be lying in wait inside Centerpoint. For that matter, Centerpoint might not even need ships to defend itself. She had spotted fifty or sixty points on the exterior of the station that might be weapons ports. The station was an incredible amalgam of familiar and alien, modern and ancient. There was no way to know how long a given object had been there, or who had built it, or if it still operated.
She ran the images across her scan screen, one after the other. Armored portals and hemispherical blisters, long cylindrical objects on what looked like aiming platforms, attached to complicated plumbing and wiring. Some of them might be massive covered-over turbolaser sites. And those Phalanxes of dark circular openings. Some could be missile batteries. And some might be refueling stations or docking facilities for refreshment bars. There was no way to tell.
They would have to send in a team.
* * *
The Lady Luck launched itself out of the Intruder’s landing bay, and lifted off into the blackness of the sky and toward Centerpoint. “Why do I always get handed these jobs?” Lando asked no one in particular as he guided his ship toward the station.
“Maybe it has something to do with the way you volunteered,” replied Gaeriel Captison from the seat behind the copilot’s station. Lando didn’t feel too happy about having her along, but she had insisted. The ex-Prime Minister of Bakura had been granted full rights to speak for her government by the present Prime Minister, and she had been determined to join the scouting party, so that the Bakuran government was properly represented. Much to Lando’s regret, Threepio was also along for the ride, in case any translation was needed.
“I had to volunteer,” Lando growled. “Once Luke volunteered, I knew he was going to need his wingman.” Luke had launched first, in his X-wing. He was flying about two kilometers ahead of Lando, just close enough for easy visual tracking.
Kalenda, in the copilot’s seat of the Lady Luck, gave Lando an odd look. Of course, all of her looks were pretty odd, so maybe it didn’t mean much of anything. Or maybe she was wondering why a man who had worked so hard to establish a reputation as a devil-may-care adventurer, the sort who only looked out for himself, was sticking his neck out. Again. “Somehow, I think a Jedi Master would be able to take care of himself,” she said.
“Maybe,” Lando said. “And maybe not. Let’s just say that I owe him one.”
“Who in the galaxy doesn’t?” Gaeriel asked.
“Actually, Lady Captison,” said Kalenda, “you’re the one I most wish weren’t here.”
“Thanks for that compliment,” Lando muttered.
Kalenda winced. “Sorry, that came out wrong. What I meant was that Captain Calrissian and Master Skywalker have military training. They’re more likely to be ready for—for whatever we find. Not really the job for an ex-Prime Minister.”
“There are other skills in the universe besides knowing how to shoot and fly and fight without getting killed,” Gaeriel said. “If we get lucky, there might be someone reasonable on that station. Someone we can negotiate with. If so, having a trained negotiator with plenipotentiary powers on hand might be a good thing.”
“We’re going to have to get really lucky for that to happen,” Lando said. “So far we haven’t found many people who are particularly reasonable in this star system.”
Luke Skywalker felt good. He was back at the controls of his X-wing, alone, except for R2-D2 riding in his socket in the aft of the fighter. Maybe Mon Mothma wanted to push him into a position of leadership. Maybe circumstances were pushing him that way—or maybe the whole universe was pushing him that way. But right now, at this very moment, it was just Luke, his droid, and his X-wing. Nearly all pilots loved the solitude, the distance, of flying, and Luke was no exception there. Flying was, in and of itself, a pleasure, an escape from his worries and cares and duties.
Not that the escape would last for long. There was, as always, a job to do.
Luke looked toward the massive station. Indeed, they were now close enough that he would have been hard-pressed not to look at it. It all but filled the X-wing’s viewports.
Luke could scarcely believe his eyes. He had seen all the reports. He knew how big Centerpoint was, or at least he had read the numbers—but somehow, numbers did not express the hugeness of the object hanging in the sky.
Centerpoint Station consisted of a huge sphere, a hundred kilometers across, with a massive cylinder stuck to each pole of the sphere. The station was roughly three hundred kilometers from end to end, and rotated slowly around the axis defined by the two polar cylinders. To judge by looking at the entire exterior surface, it had been built almost at random over the millennia.
Boxy things the size of large buildings, pipes and cables and tubes of all sizes running in all directions, parabolic antennae and strange patterns of conical shapes sprouted everywhere. Luke spotted what seemed to be the remains of a spacecraft that had crashed into the exterior hull and then been welded in place and made into living quarters of some sort. At least it looked that way. It seemed like a rather ad hoc way to add living space—and adding living space seemed more than a bit redundant for something the size of Centerpoint.
And yet none of that spoke of the real size of the thing. It was, after all, the size of a small moon—by some standards, maybe even the size of a largish one. Luke had been on worlds smaller than this station. This station was large enough to be a world, large enough to contain all the myriad complexities, all the variety, all the mystery of a world. Large enough that it would take a long time indeed to get from one end of it to the other. Large enough that you could live your whole life there without seeing all of it. That was Luke’s definition of a world: a place too large for one person to experience in a lifetime.
Luke had been to countless worlds, and yet he knew he had never seen all there was to see on any of them. People tended to label a world, and leave it at that, as if it could be all one thing. But that was wrong. Another part of Luke’s definition was that a world couldn’t be all one thing.
It was easy to say Coruscant was a city world, or that Mon Calamari was a water world, or that Kashyyyk was a jungle world, and leave it at that. But there could be infinite variety in the forms of a city, or an ocean, or a jungle—and it was rare for a world really to be all one thing. The meadow world would have a mountain or two; the volcano world would have its impact craters; the bird planet would have insects.
And Centerpoint Station was big, so big it was difficult to judge the scale of the place. Space provided few visual cues available on the ground to tell the eye how big things were.
Apart from the questions of size, the idea of a spinning space station was disconcerting. Spinning was something that planets did, and they did it slowly. Centerpoint Station was spinning at a slow and stately rate, but you could see it moving.
The techniques for producing artificial gravity on a Station or ship without spinning the object on its axis had been old at the founding of the Old Republic. Luke had never seen such a thing as a spinning space station. It seemed, somehow, not part of the natural order of things.
An absurd thought, of course. What was natural about starships and space stations?
But there was something else, something more fundamental than size or spin, bothering Luke about the station. The station was old. Old by any human standard, old by the standard of virtually any sentient being. So old that no one knew how long ago it had been built, or who had built it, or why.
And yet, it was not truly old at all. Not compared to the ages of planets, or stars, or the galaxy. Even ten million years was not so much as an eye blink to the four- or five- or six-billion-year-old planets and stars and moons that filled the universe.
But if what seemed ancient to humans was all but newly minted in the eyes of the universe, then surely all the endless generations of remembered galactic history were nothing more than an eye blink of time. The birth, the rise, the fall of the Old Republic, the emergence and collapse of the Empire, the dawn of the New Republic, all shrank down into a single brief moment, compared to the immensity of time on a truly galactic scale.
“-uke — -ou the—”
“I’m here, Lando, but your signal is breaking up badly.”
“-our signa- —eaking up t—”
Luke sighed. Another nuisance. With normal communications still utterly jammed throughout the Corellian system, the Bakurans had done their best to improvise a laser com system that sent voice signals over low-power laser beams. It did not work well, but it did work. Maybe they would have done better to use a version of Lando’s radionics system, but it was too late to think of that now. “Artoo, see if you can clean that up a little.”
Artoo booped and bleeped, and Luke nodded. “Okay, Lando, try it again. How do you read me?”
“Much better, —anks, but I won’t mind when we can go ba— to regular com systems.”
“You and me both.”
“Well, I’m not holding my breath. But never mind that now. Kalenda spotted something. Look at the base of the closest cylinder, -ight where it joins the sphere. There’s a —inking light -ere. See it?”
Luke peered through the viewscreen and nodded. “I see it. Hold on a second while I get a magnified view.” Luke activated the targeting computer and used it to get a lock on the blinking light, then slaved his long-range holocam to the targeting system. An image popped into being on the fighter’s main viewscreen. There was the blinking light—next to a large outer airlock door that was opening and shutting, over and over again. “If that’s not an invitation to come on in, I don’t know what is,” Luke said.
“We all agree with that back —is end,” Lando’s voice replied. “Even Golden Boy understood what it meant, and he’s incoherent in over six million forms of communication.”
Luke grinned at that. There had never been a great deal of love lost between C-3PO and Lando, and the last few weeks had not done much to endear the droid to the human. “Glad it’s unanimous,” Luke said. “The question is, do we accept the invitation?”