[Black Fleet Crisis] - 02(28)

Next in sequence after every map room came one or more of what Lobot dubbed “gadget rooms.” In them the team found a variety of mostly mysterious pop-ups that might move, change color, hum, or change shape when touched. But with a very few exceptions, the gad gets had no decipherable function, and none caused any detectable change in the status of the ship.

“I still think these could be control rooms,” Lando said as they prepared to leave chamber 20. “We just don’t know what we’re controlling. We could be driving the custodian crazy, lowering the heat in the ‘freshers and changing the channel on his CosmiComm service.”

One welcome discovery was that when they entered a

chamber

by conventional means—through the portals-the chamber provided

its

own illumination. Power had become critical enough for Artoo that, back in chamber 11, Lando had coupled him to Threepio for an energy transfusion. The protocol droid, carried everywhere by Lobot or Artoo, was consuming very little power directly.

“Yes, by all means. You should take it all,” he said, looking down at his chest as Lando snapped the transfer cable into the recharge coupling. “I’m nothing but a burden to you. I don’t know why you ever brought me on this mission, Master Lando. I’m completely useless to you. Give all my power to Artoo and go on without me.

Leave me here in the dark.”

With a will, Lando resisted the temptation to take the droid at his word.

Chamber 21 was another map room, the ninth. The sigil resembled a feathered embracing a cluster of fist-size spheres. The map was an irregular pentagon, with one side twice as long as the others and the same shape echoed in the open area at the very center. Neither Lobot nor Lando could find a music key, but their attempts seemed to trigger something quite different, and startling.

At first, there was just a pale pink glow slowly pulsing in a structure near the long outer wall. Then, suddenly, that part of the map erupted in a gout of fire that leaped a full meter up from the wall.

The team fell back in surprise. “They’ve found us!”

Threepio cried. “Artoo, save yourself!”

“It’s a holo—a recording,” Lobot said.

“No, it’s real,” Lando said. “Look at your suit sensors—wait, Artoo, don’t!” He lunged toward the droid, who was busily unlimbering the nozzle of his fire extinguisher.

By the time the struggle was over, the entire map had been replaced by a five-sided black scar, and the chamber was half choked by a white-soot smoke.

Lando herded them back into chamber 20, where they waited the two minutes they had learned it took for a room to reset. When they reentered 2], the black scar was gone, and with it the smoke. With their backs practically pressed ‘against the sigil, they then watched a replay.

The initial blast came from the same structure, after the same pulsing glow. As the pillar of fire rose, the shock rippled out through the rest of the city, destroying the neat symmetry. The fire quickly fell back but spread into a firestorm that raced across the shattered city and consumed it. In a matter of seconds the wall was scorched black as before, the map destroyed.

“Artoo, please run an analysis on the atmosphere in here,” Lando said.

Threepio reported the results. “Oxygen five percent—oxygen eight percent—oxygen eleven percentre would you make up your mind?” the droid asked, clanging Artoo on the dome with his working arm.

“It’s not him, Threepio,” said Lobot. “The ship is restoring the chamber to its status before the fire, for the next demonstration.” He looked to Lando. “These are history lessons. Something terrible happened to the Qella city that was under this sign.”

“Maybe this is our first clue about what happened to them,” Lando said.

“But there’s something else going on, too. Artoo, what’s the oxygen component now?”

The answer, relayed through Threepio, was fifteen percent.

“Son of a- - Lobot, Threepio, you stay here. Artoo, come with me.

There’s something we have to check.”

“Where are you going?”

“Back to chamber one, express lane. Sit tight—it won’t be so long.

We won’t be sight-seeing this time.”

The patrol frigate Bloodprice bore the colors of the Prakith navy and the crest of Governor Foga Brill. Both were more prominent than the sigil of the Imperial Moff for Sector 5, which was consigned to the armor panel above the frigate’s chin turrets.

The displays mirrored the allegiances felt by Captain Ors Dogot and his crew of nearly four hundred. The officers owed their commissions and their postings to Brill, not to Grand Moff Gann. It was Brill who collected the commission fees and the annual posting assessments.