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It rested on a disk of something like durasteel, six meters in diameter and a meter thick. Rising from that was a central pole with something like a broad sensor antenna stretching out from it. The antenna was curved like a dish; given the way it was situated, Han was certain it was meant to rotate. Piled up against the back of the dish, strapped to it by metal cabling, were the numerous barrel-like objects he had seen, each large enough to hold a full-grown bantha. The whole structure towered some fifteen meters into the air.

Leia looked at him. He shrugged. “You got me.”

“I—hey!” Leia's deactivated lightsaber suddenly stretched out toward the apparatus, as if leaping toward it, and she staggered in that direction.

So did Han. It was as though his weapons and backpack were suddenly caught in a tractor beam, dragging him along.

Then the pull ceased. Resisting it, Han and Leia were abruptly stumbling in the other direction.

Leia straightened. “Magnetic pulse. Why don't we, um—”

“Move back a ways, yeah.”

They did so, observing the apparatus from what they felt was a safer distance: thirty meters.

Han was unsurprised when a bogey emerged from the base of the apparatus. “Call for you, sweetie,” he said.

Leia shot him a half-amused look and approached the bogey.

“Ask it what the gizmo is for and if there are any good bars or clubs around here.”

“Your sense of humor is returning—ah.” She offered a little gasp as her hand came in contact with the bogey. Again her hair whipped up into an electrocuted nimbus.

“Draw in,” she said. “Push out. Deactivate. Next. Next. Next. Acceleration. Interaction.” Clearly pained, Leia kept up the contact.

“Leia—”

“Not now, Han. I can see the sequence. They're everywhere, it's huge. Evaluations almost complete, then terminus.” Finally, she staggered back. This time she did fall, sprawling on the mulchy cavern floor, eyes open but glazed.

“Leia!” Han knelt over her, torn between making sure she was unhurt and keeping a wary eye out for centipedes. He decided to rely on his ears for the latter danger and bent over his wife.

She was panting, the meter on her breath mask indicating the increased demands on its processing, but her vision was clearing. She sat up almost as abruptly as she had fallen. “We've got to go.”

“Where?”

“The surface.”

“I knew that already.” A cold suspicion formed in Han's gut. “Why?”

“This cavern is going to blow up, and then another few, and then the rest all at once, and that's the end for Kessel.”

As they ran, she explained. “That antenna-thing is an electromagnet. A super-electromagnet. When it starts spinning, it will yank the machinery off the walls and drag it all to itself.”

“Not a chance. Across all those kilometers?”

“Han, the makers of this place might also have built Centerpoint Station. Remember how powerful it was?” Centerpoint's gravitic tractor could, in theory, move planets and suns; could collapse and destroy whole solar systems. Han didn't miss its presence in the universe.

“Point taken. Super-destructive.”

“No, that's only the start.” They charged through the fungi toward the nearest wall, almost heedless of the dangers. Leia had her lightsaber in hand, and twice had to cleave red-and-yellow centipedes as they struck at her. Once they raced by a fungus with a crimson spider atop; they were ten meters past before the adrenaline hit Han and gave him a burst of speed, but the spider did not follow.

“Those barrels are explosives,” Leia continued. “I didn't get a sense of how they functioned, whether they're protonic or nuclear or something we don't even understand, but when all the machinery is encrusted onto the antenna, they blow up and incinerate it all … and collapse the cavern.”

“Making getting out of here an especially good idea.” They reached the cavern wall and the banks of machinery they had already passed on the way in, and ran toward the entrance, still kilometers away. “How long before it happens?”

“I don't know. Minutes?” Leia put on a burst of speed.

From long experience,