商业托福阅读：星球大战第八章(6)
Gauges began to whine in protest, and by ones and twos every instrument on the control console sequentially went berserk. Try as he might, Solo couldn’t keep the surface of the gargantuan station from looming steadily larger, larger—until it became the heavens.Luke stared wildly at secondary installations as big as mountains, dish antennae larger than all of Mos Eisley. "Why are we still moving toward it?" "Too late," Kenobi whispered softly. A glance at Solo confirmed his concern.
"We’re caught in a tractor beam—strongest on I ever saw. It’s dragging us in," the pilot muttered.
"You mean, there’s nothing you can do?" Luke asked, feeling unbelievably helpless.
Solo studied the overloaded sensor readouts and shook his head. "Not against this kind of power. I’m on full power myself, kid, and it’s not shifting out of course a fraction of a degree. It’s no use. I’m going to have to shut down or we’ll melt our engines. But they’re not going to suck me up like so much dust without a fight!" He started to vacate the pilot’s chair, but was restrained by an aged yet powerful hand on his shoulder. An expression of concern was on the old man’s face—and yet, a suggestion of something somewhat less funereal.
"If it’s a fight you cannot win—well, my boy, there are always alternatives to fighting…" The true size of the battle station became apparent as the freighter was pulled closer and closer. Running around the station’s equator was an artificial cluster of metal mountains, docking ports stretching beckoning fingers nearly two kilometers above the surface.
Now only a miniscule speck against the gray bulk of the station, the Millennium Falcon was sucked toward one of those steel pseudopods and finally swallowed by it.
A lake of metal closed off the entryway, and the freighter vanished as if it had never existed.
Vader stared at the motley array of stars displayed on the conference-room map while Tarkin and Admiral Motti conferred nearby. Interestingly, the first use of the most powerful destructive machine ever constructed had seemingly had no influence at all on that map, which in itself represented only a tiny fraction of this section of one modest-sized galaxy.
It would take a microbreakdown of a portion of this map to reveal a slight reduction in spatial mass, caused by the disappearance of Alderaan. Alderaan, with its many cities, farms, factories, and towns—and traitors, Vader reminded himself.
Despite his advances and intricate technological methods of annihilation, the actions of mankind remained unnoticeable to an uncaring, unimaginably vast universe.
If Vader’s grandest plans ever came to pass, all that would change.
He was well aware that despite all their intelligence and drive, the vastness and wonder were lost on the two men who continued to chatter monkeylike behind him.
Tarkin and Motti were talented and ambitious, but they saw things only on the scale of human pettiness. It was a pity, Vader thought, that they did not possess the scope to match their abilities.
Still, neither man was a Dark Lord. As such, little more could be expected of them. These two were useful now, and dangerous, but someday they, like Alderaan, would have to be swept aside. For now he could not afford to ignore them. And while he would have preferred the company of equals, he had to admit reluctantly that at this point, he had no equals.
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