Part 29 (1/2)

”Gee,” said Anakin. ”I sure hope we don't let them Marcha, d.u.c.h.ess of Mastigophorous, rode up the strange silver disk elevator to the surface, Anakin at the controls, as usual. Down below her, the Millennium Falcon was concealed, and Chewbacca was working Ebrihim and Q9 and the twins hard, setting up a snug little underground camp in the huge, hidden repulsor chamber. They would be able to hide out there for quite some time, and be able to study the repulsor in detail.

With a little luck, they would find a way to keep anyone else from using it.

But all that was for later. Right now Marcha simply wanted to get up out from underground and stand under the bold night sky of Drall.

The disk elevator rushed smoothly upward and inward, to the apex of the huge chamber. The point of the cone opened itself as the edges of the disk merged with the edges of the chamber, and they were moving up a smooth, perfect cylinder, rising out of the ground mt0 a brilliant night, the sky awash with stars.

And more than stars. There, off to the east, Corellia and Selonia were two fat points of light near the horizon. And to the west, floating a bit higher in the sky, the Double Worlds of Talus and alus, with Centerpoint Station so tiny a fleck of light Marcha was not sure if she saw it, or simply imagined that she did.

”They're out there somewhere, aren't they?” Anakin asked, taking Marcha by the paw and leaning into her a bit.

”Yes, dear, they are,” she said, wrapping her free arm around him.

”Your parents are out there, I am sure of it, working and fighting and struggling to set things right.” Anakin nodded thoughtfully. ”They always do,” he said. ”Is that why we have to stay here? So we can help them by figuring out this repulsor thing?”

”Yes, dear,” said Aunt Marcha. ”That's it exactly.”

down.

Somewhere out on the edges of the Thanta Zilbra system, Wedge Antilles brought his Enhanced X-wing in for a landing on the flight deck of the Naritus, and wished to the devil he had an enemy he could shoot at.

Instead, they were evacuating people from a whole star system, just because the paranoids at NRI had heard some crazy rumor. The story was that someone had blown up one star, and was threatening to blow up Thanta Zilbra next, and then some other star-and it seemed to Wedge that the rumor mill had named practically every star in the Galaxy as being the next on the list.

It all sounded absurd on the face of it. How the devil would anyone go about blowing up a star? Zero hour was less than twelve hours away now, and there had been no sign of anything happening. And what about the rumors that the Chief of State was caught up in the middle of it, in serious danger? Wedge hope that part of it was wrong.

He knew how much the New Republic needed Chief of State Organa Soland he knew how much leia meant to Wedge's friends Han and Luke.

But the scuttleb.u.t.t about leia was a rumor, nothing more. Some of the fliers in his squadron had heard that the whole exploding-star story was a fake, though none of them could name any source beyond the usual friend of a friend of a buddy who knew someone who heard something in the staff canteen. Wedge ignored it all.

Rumors were not his department. His job was to follow orders, and at the moment that meant flying evacuation support missiona few in his X-wing, and but most pa.s.senger runs in a small runabout. He also had to ride herd on Rogue Squadron, and keeping that bunch of loose cannons under control was no easy task.

They were keeping him busy on this one, but that was to be expected when the fleet mission was to evacuate every single sentient being from the entire Thanta Zilbra system-including those who did not want to go.

Those were headaches enough without wasting time worrying if orders made sense. At least he was flying fighters again. For a while there, it had seemed as if he had been drawing every duty but the one he was best at.

Not that running courier jobs and running emergency spares to transports was the most exciting kind of flying.

But at least it was nearly over. The fleet was supposed to jump into hypers.p.a.ce no later than one hour before zero hour. Another s.h.i.+ft and a half, and it would all be over-and more than likely they'd have to move everyone off the transports back to their homes, with apologies all around for the inconvenience. Of course, a fair number of the people of Thanta zilbra had saved them the trouble. Unable to believe there was any danger, they had simply refused to go. A fair number of the New Republic representatives trying to convince them were not all that convinced themselves, and that didn't help matters.

But enough of all that, just for the moment. He needed to unwind, at least a little bit, before he went back out. He popped his canopy and pulled himself out of the fighter. He waited for the ground crew to bring in the egress ladder, then climbed down out of his s.h.i.+p.

He went to the pilot's ready room, stripped out of his flight suit, treated himself to a very brief but very needed shower, and got into a fresh set of coveralls.

Thus refreshed, and feeling a bit restless, he decided to wander over toward the operations center to see what had gone wrong while he was out on patrol sorting out the last foul-up.

The Naritus was the flags.h.i.+p for the three wars.h.i.+ps and eight large transports involved in this mission, and the ops center was the nerve center for the whole operation. It was from ops that s.h.i.+ps were dispatched and recalled, from ops that the word came to try this solution instead of that, or just to give up and go on to the next problem. It was from here that the fleet officers placed their comlink calls to the leaders of this mining outpost or the captain of that in-system freighter, urging them, cajoling them, pleading with them to get out now, before it was too late, before disaster struck. It was from here that the mission commanders tried to smooth things over aboard the overcrowded transports. There had already been fights and one or two near riOts.

Tempers were running hot.

Wedge arrived at the ops-center hatch, punched his access code into the keypad, and the hatch slid open. He stepped inside-and instantly noticed something was wrong. Ops was calm. Quiet. Usually it was a madhouse, people tearing around, trying to manage the flow of s.h.i.+ps and refugees and information.

But something had happened. And he realized it was not calm that had brought the room to silence, but horror. Everyone in the room, without exception, was staring at one or another of the monitor displays.

No one was bellowing orders into headsets, or punching commands into control panels, or flipping back and forth through a dozen com frequencies to hear from all the partic.i.p.ants in a given crisis. None of them were doing anything but sta'ing. Wedge looked from one face to another and saw the same expression.

Dumb shock, disbelief, astonishment, terror.