Abyss (5 page)

“Blast,” Ben said. He expanded his Force awareness again, but felt
only the same meld-like presence he had sensed earlier—and it was too diffuse to be much of a navigation beacon. “We’re back to flying blind. I can’t feel anything useful now.”

“That’s not really a problem,” Luke pointed out. “There’s only one place in here where anything can have a permanent habitat.”

Ben nodded. “Right.”

Stable Zone One wasn’t actually very stable. Even the slightest perturbation would start a mass on a long, slow fall into one of the adjacent gravity wells. Therefore, anything
permanently
located inside the zone could only be at the precise center, because that was the only place where the forces were in absolute equilibrium.

Ben brought the navigation sensors back up. This time, the screen showed nothing but a small fan of light at the bottom, rapidly fading to darkness as the signals were obscured by cold gas and dust. He activated the
Shadow’
s forward flood lamps and continued onward. The beams tunneled ahead for perhaps a kilometer before vanishing into the black fog of dust and gas. Ben decelerated even further, then adjusted headings until all external forces affecting the
Shadow’
s travel vector were exactly zero, and set a waypoint. Theoretically, at least, they were now on course for the heart of the stable zone.

When Ben shifted his attention forward again, he saw a blue fleck of debris floating in the light beam ahead. He instantly fired the maneuvering thrusters to decelerate more, but in space, even a relative creep was a velocity of hundreds of kilometers an hour, and they covered half the distance to the object before the
Shadow
responded.

Instead of the stony boulder or ice ball that Ben had expected, the object turned out to be a young Duros. Ben could tell that he was a Duros because he wasn’t wearing a pressure helmet, and his blue, noseless face and big red eyes were clearly visible above the collar of a standard Jedi-issue flight suit. Hanging on his shoulder was what, at that distance, appeared to be a portable missile launcher.

“Dad?” Ben asked. “Are you seeing this?”

“Duros, no helmet?”

“Right.”

Luke nodded. “Then yes, I—”

The Duros was silhouetted by a white flash, and the silver halo of an oncoming missile began to swell in front of the
Shadow’
s cockpit. Ben shoved the yoke forward and hit the thrusters, but even a Jedi’s reflexes weren’t that quick. A metallic bang echoed through the hull, and damage alarms began to shriek and blink. In almost the same instant, the Duros and the missile launcher floated past mere meters above the cockpit, and the muffled thud of an impact sounded from far back in the stern.

“Definitely no hallucination,” Luke commented.

“Dad, that looked like—”

“Qwallo Mode, I know,” Luke replied. Mode was a young Jedi Knight who had disappeared on a standard courier run about a year earlier. When an exhaustive search had failed to find any trace of him, the Masters had finally concluded that he had perished. “He’s a long way from the Tapani sector.”

“Assuming that
was
Qwallo.” Ben extended his Force awareness behind them, but did not sense any hint of the Jedi’s presence. “Should I make another sweep to see if we can recover him?”

Luke thought for a moment, then shook his head. “Even if he’s still alive, let’s not give him another shot at the
Shadow
. Before we start taking those kinds of chances, we need to figure out what’s going on here.”

“Yeah,” Ben agreed. “Like how come he didn’t need a helmet.”

“And how he got here in the first place—and why he’s shooting at us.” Luke clicked out of his crash webbing, then added, “I’ll handle the damage. If you see anyone else floating around with a missile launcher and no pressure suit, don’t ask questions, just—”

“Open fire.” Ben deployed the blaster cannons, then checked the damage display and saw that they were bleeding both air and hyperdrive coolant. To make matters worse, the yoke was sticking, and that could mean a lot of things—none of them good. “Got it. We’ve taken enough damage.”

Ben switched his threat array to the primary display. At the top of the screen, the gray form of a mass shadow was clarifying out of the darkness. A yellow number-bar was adding tons to the mass estimate
faster than the eye could follow, but he was alarmed to see that it was already into the high five digits and climbing toward six. There was no indication yet of the object’s overall shape or energy output, but the tonnage alone suggested something
at least
as large as an assault carrier.

Unsure whether it was better to slow down to prevent a collision or accelerate to avoid being an easy target, Ben started to weave and bob. There was just a vague hint of danger tickling the base of his skull, but that only meant nothing had set its sights on the
Shadow
yet.

On the third bob downward, the yoke jammed forward and wouldn’t come back. Ben cursed and tried to muscle it, but he was fighting the hydraulic system, and if he fought it too hard, he would break a control cable. He hit the emergency pressure release, dumping the control system’s entire reservoir into space, and then checked his threat array again.

The mass ahead was no longer a shadow. A silvery, elongated oval had taken shape in the middle of the display, the number-bar in its core now climbing past seven million tons. The oval was slowly drifting toward the bottom of the screen and shedding alphanumeric designators, indicating the presence of a debris field
and
the danger of an impending collision with the object itself. Ben hit the maneuvering thrusters
hard
, and the
Shadow
decelerated.

He heard a toolbox clang into the main cabin’s rear bulkhead, and his father’s alarmed voice came over the intercom speaker. “What did you hit?”

“Nothing yet.” Ben pulled back on the yoke, using his own strength to force the vector plates down. “The control yoke’s power assist is gone, and we’ve reached a debris field.”

“What sort of debris?” his father demanded. “Ice? Rock? Iron-nickel?”

Ben thumbed the
SELECT
bubble active and slid it over to one of the designators:
OBJECT B
8. An instant later a density analysis offered a 71 percent probability that O
BJECT B
8 was a medium transport of unknown make and model.

But Ben did not immediately relay the information to his father. As
the
Shadow’
s nose returned to its original plane, an enormous, gray-white dome was slowly coming into view. Dropping down from above and upside down relative to the ship, the dome hung at the base of a large, spinning cylinder ringed by a dozen small, attached tubes. Floating between the cylinder and the
Shadow
were nearly twenty dark flecks with the smooth lines and sharp corners suggestive of spacecraft, all drifting aimlessly and as cold as asteroids.

“Ben, you’re worrying me,” his father admonished. “How bad is it?”

“Uh, I don’t really know yet.” As Ben spoke, the
Shadow’
s lamp beams continued to slide up the spinning cylinder, to where it joined a gray metal sphere that looked to be about the size of one of Bespin’s smaller floating cities. “But maybe you should come back to the flight deck as soon as things are secure back there.”

“Yeah,” Luke said. “I was just thinking the same thing.”

As the lamp beams continued to reveal more of the station—at least that’s what Ben
assumed
he was looking at—he began to grow even more confused and worried. With a second, dome-capped cylinder rising out of the sphere directly opposite the first, the thing reminded him of a station he had helped infiltrate during the recent civil war. It didn’t seem possible that two such structures could exist in the galaxy by mere coincidence, or that he would have happened on this one by mere chance even if the two
were
related. He had the uneasy feeling that the Force was at play here—or, to be more precise, that the Force was putting
him
in play.

Now that they were actually in visual range of their target, Ben brought the full suite of sensors back online and began to investigate. To both his relief and puzzlement, all of the contacts appeared to be derelict vessels. They ranged widely in size, from small space yachts like the
Shadow
to an antiquated Tibanna tanker with a capacity in excess of a hundred million liters. Ben did a quick mental calculation of the total tonnage of the abandoned ships and shuddered. If these were captured spoils, there were some very impressive pirates hiding around here somewhere.

Starting to envision sensor masks and ambushes, Ben slid the
Shadow
into the cover of an old TGM Marauder. The ship looked as
deserted as its sensor profile suggested, tumbling slowly with cold engines, open air locks, and no energy emanations whatsoever. But there was no apparent combat damage, or anything else, to suggest it had been taken by pirates.

Ben turned the sensors on the station itself and found it marginally less derelict. Its power core was active, but barely. A few warm areas suggested that at least some of its atmospheric seals remained intact. Approaching closer, he could see that three of the dark tubes attached to the upper cylinder had come loose at one end and were in danger of being launched away by centrifugal force. Whoever lived here—if anyone did—they were not much on maintenance.

The
clack-clack
of boots-in-a-hurry echoed through the open hatchway at the rear of the flight deck, then suddenly stopped. Ben activated the canopy’s mirror panel and found his father standing behind the copilot’s chair, jaw hanging slack as he stared at the slowly spinning station ahead.

“Remind you of anything?” Ben asked.

Luke’s gaze remained fixed on the space station. “What do
you
think?” he asked. “It could be a miniature Centerpoint Station.”

Centerpoint had been an ancient space station located in the stable zone between the Corellian worlds of Talus and Tralus. Its origins remained cloaked in mystery, but the station had once been the most powerful weapon in the galaxy, capable of destroying entire star systems from hundreds of light-years away. One of the few positive things to come of the recent civil war, in Ben’s opinion, had been the facility’s destruction. He was far from happy to discover another version hidden here, deep inside the Maw.

“I was afraid you’d say that,” Ben said with a sigh. “What do we do now? Lob a baradium missile at it?”

Luke’s voice grew disapproving. “Do we
have
a baradium missile?”

Ben dropped his gaze. “Sorry. Uncle Han said it was always smart to keep one—”

“Your uncle isn’t a Jedi,” Luke interrupted. “I wish you’d remember that.”

“Sure,” Ben said. “But maybe this one time we should think about the way he would handle this. If this place was built by the same beings
that designed Centerpoint Station, the smartest thing we can do is get rid of it.”

“And maybe we will—
after
we unjam our vector plates and replenish our hydraulics.” Luke slipped into the copilot’s seat behind Ben. “In the meantime, try to avoid hitting anything. I’ll see if I can find a safe place to dock this bird.”

As hangar bays went, this one looked like a decades-old disaster zone. The main doors were jammed about halfway open, leaving the entire facility exposed to the dark vacuum of space. The decks were slowly revolving around the
Shadow
as the station rotated on its axis, and they were crammed with starcraft from a dozen different eras and classes, all facing the open exit for a quick departure. Hand tools lay scattered across hull tops, tank dollies were propped against landing struts, charging carts rested beneath retracted access panels. A film of pale dust covered everything, so thick on the older craft that it was sometimes difficult to determine the hull color. None of the vessels showed attack damage, but all those tools suggested they had needed some manner of repair, and many crews had not even bothered to raise the boarding ramp before abandoning their work.

As his son struggled to accommodate the station’s rate of rotation, Luke extended his Force awareness toward the middle of the facility. On the journey in, he had sensed a concentration of life energy in the
central sphere, a hazy cloud too large and diluted to be a single being, with no discernible focuses to suggest individual presences. It was still there, an area of heaviness and warmth in the faint fog of Force energy that permeated this part of the Maw. Luke could tell by the way it began to writhe up inside him that it had not only been monitoring their arrival, it had been
awaiting
them.

Ben swung the
Shadow
around to face the hangar exit, then put down—somewhat heavily—between an old TheedSpeed Galaxy Runner and a swoop-sized needle ship with a hatch about the size of a human hand. They completed the shutdown routine quickly, clicked out of their crash webbing, and went aft. Instead of following Luke to the suit locker, however, Ben stopped at the engineering station and began to call up system reports.