Abyss Read Online Free PDF

the gas grew so dense that the
Shadow
began to buck and shudder in its turbulence. Ben held on tight to the yoke … 
and
to the dark presence he was clasping in the Force.
    His father’s voice sounded behind him. “Uh, Ben?”
    “It’s okay, Dad,” Ben said. “I’ve got an approach lane.”
    “A
what
?” Luke sounded genuinely surprised. “I hope you realize the hull temperature is almost into the red.”
    “
Dad
!” Ben snapped. “Will you please let me concentrate?”
    Luke fell silent for a moment, then exhaled loudly. “Ben, the gas here is too dense for these velocities. We’re practically flying through an atmo—”
    “
Your
idea,” Ben interrupted. The black oval swelled to the size of a fist. “Trust me!”
    “Ben,
trust me
doesn’t work for Jedi the way it does for your uncle Han. We don’t have his luck.”
    “Maybe that would change if we trusted it more often,” Ben retorted.
    The black oval continued to expand until it was the size of a hatch. Ben fought the turbulence and somehow kept the
Shadow’
s nose pointed toward it, then the ship was inside the darkness, flying smooth and surrounded by a dim cone of orange radiance. Startled by the abrupt transition and struggling to adjust to the sudden change of light, Ben feared for an instant that the dark presence had led him off-course—perhaps even out of the accretion disks altogether.
    Then the cone of orange began to simultaneously compress and fade, becoming a dark tunnel, and a far worse possibility occurred to him.
    “Say, Dad, would we know if we were flying down a black hole?”
    “Probably not,” Luke said. “The time–space distortion would make the journey last forever, at least relative to Coruscant-standard time. Why do you ask?”
    “Oh, no reason,” Ben said, deciding not to alarm his father any more than necessary. If he
had
flown them past an event horizon, it was too late to do anything about it now. “Just curious.”
    Luke laughed, then said, “Relax, Ben. We’re not flying down a black hole—but will you
please
slow down? If you keep this up, you really
are
going to melt the hull.”
    Ben glanced at his display and frowned. The hull temperature had climbed into the critical zone, which made no sense at all. The surrounding darkness and the lack of turbulence meant they were no longer being blasted by heat from the accretion disk. The hull ought to be cooling rapidly, and if it wasn’t …
    Ben jerked the throttles back and was pitched against his crash webbing as friction instantly began to slow the
Shadow
. The area surrounding them wasn’t dark because it was
empty
—it was dark because it was filled with cold matter. They had entered Stable Zone One, where gas, dust, and who-knew-what-else was floating in limbo between the two black holes. Worried that they weren’t decelerating fast enough, he used the maneuvering thrusters to slow the ship down even further … then realized that during the excitement, he had lost contact with the dark presence he had been using as a reluctant guide.
    “Blast,” Ben said. He expanded his Force awareness again, but feltonly the same meld-like presence he had sensed earlier—and it was too diffuse to be much of a navigation beacon. “We’re back to flying blind. I can’t feel anything useful now.”
    “That’s not really a problem,” Luke pointed out. “There’s only one place in here where anything can have a permanent habitat.”
    Ben nodded. “Right.”
    Stable Zone One wasn’t actually very stable. Even the slightest perturbation would start a mass on a long, slow fall into one of the adjacent gravity wells. Therefore, anything
permanently
located inside the zone could only be at the precise center, because that was the only place where the forces were in absolute equilibrium.
    Ben brought the navigation sensors back up. This time, the screen showed nothing but a small fan of light at the bottom, rapidly fading to darkness as the signals were