Showdown at Centerpoint by Roger MacBride Allen Page A

came to Anakin as a result, then, he knew, his own life would be forfeit, and rightly so.
    It took him but a moment to think it all through. But thought was nothing without action. He rushed for the cockpit and activated the
Falcon
’s shields at full strength. The sound faded away somewhat as the shields engaged. Chewbacca tried to activate the ship’s repulsors to raise her up off the heaving deck of thechamber, but they would not engage. He checked the propulsion readouts. Every propulsion system was offline. He had no idea why. But there was no time to worry about that now. He needed to get the ship up off the deck before it was bounced apart. Even without the propulsion systems, there was a way to do that. Chewbacca worked the shield controls, shifting power away from the upper shields to the lower ones, extending the lower shields as far as they would go, and softening them, so they formed a gradual thickening membrane rather than a hard edge—if only the trick would work. The
Falcon
hesitated a moment, and then rose up off her landing jacks to rest on a cushion of softened lower-side shields. The bouncing and bucking and heaving of the deck was still there to be felt, but the shields smoothed it down and gave the ship a chance to ride it out. He set the shields to self-compensate and maintain their setting.
    He could at least hope the shields would protect them against what was happening, but he would not be able to do more than hope until he knew what was going on. All he knew for sure was that it seemed to be happening above them all. He looked up, just as another spectacular cycle of lightning bursts flashed back and forth between the tops of the cones, and then another, and another. The cycle was clearly growing faster, and more powerful. There was no way of knowing what sorts of energy and radiation those bolts were putting out. Chewbacca could do little more than hope that the
Falcon
’s shields would protect those inside against it all.
    The lightning transfers grew faster and faster, more and more powerful, until all the cone-tops were a constant blaze of light, joined together by spikes of fire.
    Then, it seemed, the cone-tops drew the fire in, absorbing the energy that flowed around them. The roaring thunder of the lightning faded away as the cone-tops flared and flickered with energy, light of every color sparking and shimmering on their surfaces.
    Just when Chewbacca thought the display had reached its climax, he realized the scintillating colors were flowing
down
the cones, toward the bottom of the chamber—toward the
Millennium Falcon
. Chewbacca tried frantically to activate one of the propulsion systems, any of the propulsion systems—but all of them stayed stubbornly off-line.
    Suddenly the entire ship was bathed in lightning, a firestorm of sparks and flares that coursed around the shields, sparking and flaring everywhere. Every circuit breaker and safety cutoff in the ship tripped at once, and Chewbacca made no effort to reset any of them. He had no desire to have any active circuits running with that much power flowing around the ship.
    As suddenly as it had flowed over the ship, the wave of power swept past it. Chewie craned his neck around to watch the energy wave moving, just in time to see it incinerate the hovercar, detonate Q9’s charging stand, and set everything else left outside ablaze.
    The blaze of energy swept on, swooping up the sides of the chamber’s conical interior wall, rushing up toward the apex of the chamber, a ring of seething power that grew brighter, more powerful, more energetic as it moved higher up the cone.
    The ring of fire merged into a single point of raging power at the apex of the cone and exploded outward in a torrent of light that streamed forth in all directions, blindingly bright. The walls of the cone seemed to shudder, shake, expand as the power burst rippled through them.
    Another stream of scintillating power coursed down the big central cone and the