Free Showdown at Centerpoint by Roger MacBride Allen

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 hocway 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 aStation 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