Abyss (6 page)

“Let’s leave repairs for later,” Luke said. He pulled a light, combatrated vac suit from the locker and tossed it to Ben, then took another for himself. “I want to have a look around first.”

Ben caught the suit with no outward sign of anxiety, but the sudden ripple in his Force aura was hard to miss. He was afraid of the strange presence monitoring them from the station center, and Luke wished he understood why. The snaky feel of its Force touch certainly suggested the “tentacle” that had touched his son at Shelter. But what, exactly, had the thing
done
that continued to haunt Ben more than a decade later?

“Ben, it’ll be okay.” Luke opened his vac suit and began to push his feet into the legs. “If you’re remembering something else about your time at Shelter, it would be better to share—”

“Dad, I’m not trying to avoid anything out there,” Ben said. “But we’ve already been attacked once, and the
Shadow
took some bad hits. It’s just sound tactics to get things ready in case we need to leave in a hurry.”

It was hard to know whether Ben was unaware of how his fear was controlling him, or just allowing it to interfere with his judgment, but it really didn’t matter. The time was fast approaching when the young man had to face his demons or surrender to them, and—as much as Luke wished it otherwise—the choice was one that no father could make for his son.

Continuing to don his vac suit, Luke peered out the viewport and scowled at the fleet of abandoned vessels. “Take a look outside, then tell me again about sound tactics.”

Ben frowned and studied the equipment-strewn hangar outside, then slowly flushed with embarrassment.

“Yeah … I see,” he said, opening his vac suit. “We aren’t going to have time finish our repairs.”

“Probably not,” Luke agreed. “A Jedi needs to be observant, and being observant means—”

“Thinking about what you see,” Ben finished, quoting one of Kam Solusar’s favorite sayings. “I should have asked myself why everyone was leaving their tools lying around. It could be that something has been drawing—or taking—the ship crews away, and it doesn’t look like anyone makes it back here to finish their repairs.”

“Which means?”

Ben peered out the viewport for a long time, obviously searching for some missed detail that would explain what was luring the crews away from their vessels—and why no one was returning. Finally, he turned back to Luke, shaking his head.

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “All that occurs to me is that we shouldn’t make the same mistake everyone else did.”

Luke smiled broadly. “Congratulations—that’s
exactly
what it means.”

Ben looked more puzzled than before.

“The trouble with
sound tactics
is that they make you predictable,” Luke explained. “Jedi shouldn’t be predictable.”

Ben’s eyes finally lit in understanding. “Got it,” he said. “From now on, we eat when
I’m
hungry.”

Luke laughed, glad to see that Ben was relaxed enough to joke. “I don’t think we have the supplies for that.” He pulled their helmets from the suit locker. “Space yachts don’t come with that much cargo capacity.”

They sealed their suits and exited through the air lock into about a quarter standard gravity. Luke immediately began to feel a bit dizzy. Like Centerpoint Station, this habitat lacked true artificial gravity. Instead it created an imperfect imitation by rotating on its axis—a
method that wreaked havoc on the delicate inner ear of many bipedal species.

Once the
Shadow’
s outer hatch had closed, Luke secured the hidden lock inside its framework by triggering a latch that could only be accessed with the Force. Meanwhile, Ben gathered some equipment from nearby ships, and they proceeded to camouflage the
Shadow
together. Ben tossed some hand tools onto an engine mount, and Luke leaned a torch kit against a landing strut. Finally, they used the Force to stir up a cloud of dust that would eventually drift back onto the
Shadow
, leaving it covered in the same gray blanket as the surrounding vessels.

They weaved their way through the tangled mass of ships and into the primary air lock at the back of the berthing deck. Like the hangar itself, the chamber was equipped with motion-sensitive lights that remained fully functional. So when Ben secured the hangar hatch behind them, the two Skywalkers patiently waited for an automatic valve to open and equalize pressure with the station interior.

They were still waiting two minutes later when the motion-sensitive lights switched off.

Ben’s voice came over the helmet speakers. “Great—maybe we
should
have started on the repairs.” His tone was joking, but with a nervous edge. “And waited until they sent someone to fetch us.”

“
Something
,” Luke corrected. He raised an arm, and the lights reactivated. In contrast with the hangar illumination, which had been tinted heavily toward the blue end of the spectrum, the light in the air lock had a distinctly green cast to it. “Or maybe we should just equalize pressure ourselves.”

Luke reached over to the side of the chamber and pushed down on a lever, which he assumed to be the handle of a manual standby pump. A sharp
clunk
shook the entire air lock; then the ceiling slid aside and left them staring up into a cavernous darkness above.

Ben’s hand dropped to the lightsaber hanging on his belt. “What’s that?”

“The door, I think.”

Luke extended his awareness through the opening. When he did not sense any danger, he Force-leapt up into the darkness and landed
adjacent to the hole. Almost instantly dim green light began to pour from a nearby wall, illuminating a short length of squat, wide corridor. Ben arrived a moment later, still standing on the air lock floor as it rose into the hole through which Luke had just jumped.

“Do you get the feeling someone’s making this easy for us?” Ben asked.

“Either that, or the equipment is just that reliable,” Luke said. “I don’t know which worries me more.”

“The equipment, definitely,” Ben said over the suit comm. “This place has the same external design as Centerpoint Station, remember? That
can’t
be coincidence.”

“Probably not,” Luke admitted. “But this station can’t be as dangerous. It’s sitting between two black holes, and it would be pretty hard to target anything from in here. We can’t even get navigation readings.”

“Yeah,
we
can’t,” Ben agreed. “But
we’re
not the ones who built it.”

Luke frowned at the thought that another weapon similar to Centerpoint Station might exist in the galaxy. Fortunately, this one was much smaller, which meant it probably did not share the same function. At least, that was what he
hoped
it meant.

Luke checked his external readouts and was not surprised to discover he and Ben remained in a hard vacuum. He motioned Ben to the other side of the corridor. “And on that cheery note …”

They started toward the interior of the station, studying their environs as they walked. No more than two meters high but three times as wide, the corridor appeared to have been designed to move a lot of traffic quickly—an impression reinforced by two metal bands running along the floor, which might have been a guide ribbon for some sort of robotic hovercart. The walls and ceiling were made of a translucent composite that did not quite conceal the network of fibers, tubes, and ducts running behind them.

After the Skywalkers had traveled ten meters, the wall behind them fell dark, and a pale green glow began to pour from the next section. As Luke and Ben continued deeper into the station, they began to come across detritus of all kinds—vac suit helmets, an ammonia
breather’s air tank, blaster rifles, flechette launchers, and half a dozen single-wheeled carts with round bellies and gel-padded kneeling benches. Each time a new section of wall illuminated, the light grew more anemic, and soon the hue was more yellow than green.

“This place is starting to dark me out,” Ben said, stopping beside a half-inflated vac suit. “Why can’t they just pick a color?”

“Good question,” Luke said. He was not happy to see Ben reacting to his feelings instead of focusing on the problem. “Maybe the colors are supposed to tell you where you are. You have a guess?”

“Yeah, maybe.” Ben used his boot toe to flip the vac suit onto its back and shone his wristlamp into the helmet’s faceplate, revealing a visage so shriveled and gray it might have been Ho’Din or human. “The lights could be a warning system, you know? Like blue means safe, green means danger, yellow means big trouble.”

Luke felt only a faint tingle of danger himself, but that didn’t mean Ben’s theory was wrong—especially considering the body they had just found. He activated the status display inside his faceplate and found all radiation levels well within the normal range.

“Ben, are you sensing something that worries you?”

“You mean aside from that strange presence in the central sphere?” Ben asked.

“Right.”

“And besides the fact that we’re poking around a ghost station with no way to contact anyone?”

“Yes, aside from that.”

“And that somebody really old, powerful, and mysterious obviously went to a lot of trouble to keep this place hidden from the likes of us?”

“And that, too.”

Ben shrugged and shook his helmet. “Then no, I’m all systems ready.” He stepped over the body and continued up the corridor. “Let’s keep moving.”

They continued up the corridor for another two hundred paces, passing a series of intersections and huge chambers filled with equipment so alien and mysterious that Luke could not even guess at its function. There were huge barrels made of the same material as the
walls, surrounded by glowing coils of what appeared to be fiber-optic cable. In another chamber, they saw a silver sphere the size of the
Millennium Falcon
hovering over a disk of dark metal. The next cavernous room held a warren of containment-field cubes, each one holding a hammock, a couple of basins, and a large, wedge-skulled skeleton still draped in a thin yellow robe.

Reluctant to cross a still-shimmering barrier field that had probably sealed the entrance for centuries—if not millennia—father and son lingered outside the chamber for a time. They could not help debating whether the prisoners had belonged to the species that had created the station, were some enemy species the creators were fighting, or had been a crew from one of the vessels abandoned in the hangar, left here to die by a long-forgotten band of pirates. After discussing the likelihood of each possibility for several minutes, they finally realized they would never know and continued on their way.

Twenty meters later, they came to another detention center. The remains inside
these
cells were exoskeleton parts. Judging by the size of the thoraxes and abdomens, the inhabitants had been a little smaller than humans. Their chitinous skulls were large and heart-shaped, with openings for huge multifaceted eyes. Scattered around each cell were at least half a dozen small limb tubes and no more than four larger ones, suggesting insectoids with two powerful legs and four long arms.

Ben’s voice came over Luke’s helmet speaker. “Hey, those look like—”

“Killiks,” Luke agreed. “Unu
did
claim they were involved in the building of the Maw and Centerpoint Station.”

“As
slaves
, it looks like,” Ben replied. “Dad, what
is
this place?”

“I don’t know.” Luke admitted. He shook his helmet and started up the corridor again. “But I intend to find out.”

A few steps later, the next section of lighting activated and they found themselves facing the curved bulkhead of the station’s central sphere. Their way forward was blocked by a translucent membrane bulging out toward them. Luke touched his gloved fingertips to it, then pressed lightly and felt it yield.

“That’s air pressure,” Ben observed. “It must be an emergency bulkhead seal.”

“Probably,” Luke agreed.

Luke activated his wristlamp and shone it through the center of the membrane. The view beyond was blurry, but he could see enough to find himself struggling to reorient his sense of direction. They seemed to be looking down into a dome-shaped chamber, with themselves and the membrane located near the top and a bit off to one side. A shoulder-high rail ran down the curving wall to the dome’s circular floor, which had a ring of hatches running along its outer edge. Some of the hatches seemed to be open, but it was impossible to see more than that.

Luke reached out with the Force again and felt the Presence somewhere beyond the chamber. It was clear and strong and as large as a cloud, concentrated in the darkness ahead. But it was floating everywhere around them, too, above and below and behind. He felt it snaking up inside him, a growing hunger that longed only for his touch.

A shudder of danger sense raced up his back. Luke deactivated his wristlamp and stepped away from the membrane.

“You feel it, too?” Ben asked.

Luke nodded. “And it feels
us.
”

“Yeah.” Ben looked away, then activated his headlamp and shone it up an intersecting corridor. “So which way to an air lock?”

Luke was concentrating too hard to smile, but he was glad to hear his son sounding so determined. It didn’t mean Ben was ready to face every demon from his past, but it did suggest he understood the necessity.

When Luke didn’t respond right away, Ben swung his helmet lamp back around and said, “Right. Trust the Force.”

“Always a good idea,” Luke said, “but I had something else in mind.”

He turned his hand vertical and began to push his fingertips against the membrane.

“You think it’s a Killik pressure seal?” Ben asked.

“Something like that.” Luke continued to push, stretching the membrane so far that it swallowed his arm to the elbow. “We know they were here, so it seems likely they would have adapted their own construction techniques from this technology.”

By now Luke had pushed in his arm to the shoulder. He stepped forward, inserting his whole flank. The membrane continued to stretch. A lamp panel activated, flooding the room with white light, but his view of the chamber grew even blurrier. With nothing beneath him except a steep, curving wall, it felt like stepping off a cliff into a fog bank. He grabbed one of the rails he had seen earlier and brought his other foot across.