Star Wars: The Cestus Deception by Steven Barnes

Author:Steven Barnes
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub, mobi
Tags: Kenobi, Obi-Wan (Fictitious character), Star Wars fiction, Space Opera, General, Science fiction, Adventure, Life on other planets, Fiction
ISBN: 9780345458971
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Published: 2004-06-01T07:00:00+00:00

"Disappeared?" Obi-Wan managed to conceal the pleasure in his voice. "How is that possible?"

"The entire planet is honeycombed with tunnels. Many of them are unmapped. We can only assume that someone, for their own purposes, shunted the car off its route into one of these secondary pathways."

"And as yet you have received no communication?"

"None," she said.

Obi-Wan studied the entire map, his face set sternly. "May I assume that the other cars traveling along the map have sensors to avoid collision?"

"My engineer can answer that question," Duris said.

The engineer was a small, graying human who looked as if the current stress might cost him his few remaining sprigs of hair. "Yes, the sensors are excellent."

"Tell me," Obi-Wan asked Duris, "what is known of the situation at this time?"

"A group of Five Family executives were kidnapped."

"This Desert Wind group we've heard of?"

"We do not know," she replied. "We've heard little from them in the past year, and considered their threat broken. Frankly, it doesn't seem like their style."

Obi-Wan closed his eyes and counted to five, and then opened them again, retaining his most serious expression. "Can you holomap the entire system?"

The engineer nodded. "Well, of course, but why?"

"In order to do something like this, to make the car disappear, they have to have removed it from the grid. The individual magcars should react to the absence of a moving object, slowing and speeding themselves in compensation. The degree of disruption will increase the closer we get to the point of departure."

"But they have clearly affected our computers. They left no trace-"

"They left no direct data trace. But can the phantom car influence proximity sensors on other system vehicles?"

"Well...," the engineer's mouth suddenly widened as he grasped Obi-Wan's implication. "No. The safety system is off the main grid, a backup system to prevent a single mistake in central command from causing a systemwide catastrophe."

"Good," Obi-Wan said, as the complete system sprang to life in a floating web of glowing silver threads. "Now I want you to filter for proximity feedback from the cars themselves, showing their actual positions and their projected positions according to schedule."

The engineer blanched. "But ... we are not on Coruscant, sir. We have no computer fast enough to find the original point of departure-"

Obi-Wan raised his hand. "I am not searching for a thing. I need to sense something that is not there. Where computers falter, the Force may prevail. Please. Give me the images."

The engineer gawped at Obi-Wan. Then Duris nodded her head and waved her primary hands, and he performed as requested. Soon every image on the grid was doubled. "Make the projected images red, and the actual ones blue," Obi-Wan said, his voice dropping low.

Duris remembered stories of these mystic warriors, and fought to repress a tremor of almost supernatural awe. She nodded to the engineer, and a series of ghostly overlay images began to form. Impossibly complex, all of it, because as each car accelerated or decelerated to compensate for the missing car, they began

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