Free Showdown at Centerpoint by Roger MacBride Allen Page A

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 lateto 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?”

CHAPTER FOUR

Child’s Play
    A
nakin Solo stared at the featureless silver wall for a full minute, and then thumped twice, hard, at one particular spot on it. Sure enough, an access door popped open, revealing another purple-and-green control keypad with a five-by-five grid of keys. Anakin frowned at the keypad, as if trying to decide his next move.
    The experimental droid Q9-X2 watched Anakin carefully—which was really the only prudent way to watch him, when one thought about it. Q9 found Anakin’s skill with machinery, his seemingly instinctive ability to make devices work, even when he had no idea what the devices were, to be remarkably disconcerting. It seemed to have something to do with this Force business that was so important to this group of humans. The theory seemed to be that Anakin’s talent in the Force had somehow given him the ability to see inside machines, to manipulate them from the outside, down to the microscopic level. Not that Anakin was infallible, by any means. He made mistakes—and sometimes he quite