Star Wars_ The Black Fleet Crisis 03_ Tyrant's Test - Michael P. Kube-McDowell [155]
They were all there—Lando asleep in the bunk, Lobot stretched out on the floor of the systems compartment, Threepio strapped into the right-hand seat, and Artoo contentedly plugged into both the data port and the power port at the interface board.
Eckels was in the pilot’s seat, bending forward over the ship’s small data displays with a frown while keying the datapad on his lap fluidly by touch alone.
“I believe I have an answer for you now,” Eckels said without looking away from his work. “Shall we wake the others?”
“No,” said Luke. “They’ve done their part—let them rest. Let’s compare notes first. If we find we have questions for them, we can take care of that later.”
“I was able to get the benefit of Lobot’s thoughts while he showed me around,” said Eckels. “He has an admirably disciplined mind.”
“People have been underestimating him for as long as I’ve known him,” Luke said. “So what do you have?”
Eckels sat back in his seat and pointed to the data display. “Lobot was right,” he said. “The moons are the key.”
“The moons they saw in the orrery.”
“Yes,” said Eckels. “With the assistance of Colonel Pakkpekatt, we’ve analyzed the recordings Artoo-Detoo made the first time the expedition reached the auditorium and viewed the diorama. The orbits depicted for the moons turn out to be unstable.”
“Check me if I’ve missed something, Doctor, but Maltha Obex has no moons.”
Eckels nodded. “But Qella did. Unremarkable moons—nothing to inspire a grand mythology. At least not until one of them fell from the sky.”
“The ice age is the result of a moonstrike,” Luke said, his expression gravely thoughtful.
“Yes, it would appear so,” said Eckels. “The smaller moon was a capture moon, with an irregular orbit. Working backward from Artoo’s recordings, we found that the gravity of the larger moon disturbed the capture moon into a decaying orbit—a hundred years, in round numbers, before the fall.”
“And the Qella saw it happening. They knew what lay ahead for them,” Luke said. “And they used the warning, and the time they had left, to build this vessel.”
“The ultimate and supreme achievement of their species,” said Eckels. “Judging from what I saw, they did not have the means to destroy or repulse a moon—even the small moon of Maltha Obex dwarfed this vessel and its power. Nor did they have the means to evacuate a populous planet—the culture depicted in these serographs numbered hundreds of millions, if not more.”
“It would have taken thousands of vessels this size,” Luke said. “An impossible task in the time they had.”
“But they could build one, and send it away before the end came,” Eckels said. “When the expedition looked at the orrery, they saw this system as it was when the vagabond had last seen it—before the moonstrike, the destruction of the Qella, and the death of their planet under a blanket of ice.”
Eckels gazed out the front of the cockpit at the faces of the gallery. “Your friend Lando was wrong,” he went on. “What’s here is very real. This ship isn’t a collection of objects—it’s a collection of ideas. We may never know why, but the Qella valued these ideas more than their lives. And that which we value is that which gives meaning to our lives. What a grand gift they have given us—what a gloriously defiant futility.”
“Futility?” Luke asked. “What about those things in the interior? Lobot keeps wanting to call them Qella. You said that they looked like the Qella. And now the ship has brought them home.”
Frowning, Eckels looked down at his datapad. “But there are only a few thousand of them, on a vessel that could have held many more.” Eckels shook his head. “No, it cannot be. This is not an ark, or even a lifeboat. Those bodies are the controllers and protectors of this vessel, not its treasure. The real treasure of this vessel is in ideas and memories—a thousand years of history, a thousand years of art, this splendid biomechanical science.