Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order 09_ Edge of Victory 02_ Rebirth - J. Gregory Keyes [104]
He stood next to where the ship the warriors had come on was connected to the infidel space station by an oqa membrane, speaking through the gnullith-villip hybrid in his throat. He disliked having to command through the thing, for it distorted his voice somewhat, lessening its effectiveness.
The new leader of the warriors, Qau Lah, threw a withering glare his way. “The infidels opened their station to space. We were forced to obtain ooglith cloakers, as you know, since you wear one yourself. We will find them.” He lifted his chin and bared his teeth. “Besides, it is the Yuuzhan Vong who does not accept challenge from a worthy opponent who disgraces his people.”
Nom Anor narrowed his eyes, then chopped his hand in a gesture of command. “Go. Find them.”
As they turned, he lifted the infidel blaster he had secreted in his sash. It made him feel vaguely sick to handle it, but he had learned to do all sorts of distasteful things lately.
He shot Qau Lah in the back of the head from a meter away, then the warrior next to him. The third managed to raise his amphistaff before the blaster burned a hole through his face.
That was three. Cursing to himself, Nom Anor started off to find the rest of the warriors who had seen him with the Jedi, to make certain none of them would carry report of what they had seen back to Qurang Lah.
FORTY-TWO
“What happened back there, exactly?” Leia asked.
“Hand me that,” Han said, gesturing toward his tools.
The Falcon had made five quick jumps with no sign of pursuit. Now they were headed for the Maw, but Han wasn’t waiting for the facilities there to begin his repairs. The second he thought they were safe, he’d begun tending to his baby.
Leia handed him the demagnetizer.
“Not that,” Han said. “That.” He pointed just as vaguely. “The thingie.”
“Which thingie?”
“The hydrospanner.”
She handed it to him, rolling her eyes. “I’m not gonna sprout fur, you know,” she said. “I’m not going that far.”
“I don’t know,” Han replied dubiously. “I knew this woman once, real pretty. Hit fifty and grew a mustache.”
“Han. The Sunulok?”
“Ask your son. He’s the one with the education.”
Jacen turned from his own work on the power core. “I’m pretty sure I get it,” he said.
His mother looked up at him. “Do tell.”
“The cargo tanker was full of liquid hydrogen, right?”
“That far I got.”
“Dad dumped it all over the Sunulok, and we fired into it. That didn’t do anything, except the Sunulok produced voids to swallow our shots. They started swallowing hydrogen as well.”
“And choked on it? What?”
“The voids are like quantum black holes. You reach the event horizon—which in this case is more or less microscopic—and gravity becomes nearly infinite. Which means acceleration does, too. When a concussion missile hits one, for instance, the matter in it is instantly compressed into neutrons and then, blip, singularity. Just like a black hole. And like black holes, if you dump in too much matter at once, it has to queue up to get in. It starts compressing outside the event horizon, so on the way in it undergoes fusion.”
“And the black holes swallow most of the energy,” Leia said.
“Exactly. The light we saw was only a fraction of the energy being produced, the part that escaped. Most of it went into the singularity. We know from experience that disappearing energy taxes the dovin basals, right? In a few seconds the Sunulok’s voids swallowed dozens of hydrogen fusion explosions. It shut them down.”
“Looks like all of your education wasn’t a waste,” Han remarked.
“Wow,” Leia said. “That could be a good countermea-sure against those voids.”
“Not really,” Han said. “It would only work if the hydrogen density was like it was—it was still semiliquid. In another few seconds, it would have dispersed enough that it wouldn’t have done anything. If the Sunulok had been moving, they would have whipped through it in a second. No, we had the perfect setup, and