"You're the techn.o.brain," his sister replied wearily. "Where would that be?"

Zak considered. "The airlock. We didn't see any holograms until we left the airlock. Let's go."

They hurried in the direction of the s.p.a.ce dock and its airlock.

Now and then they heard the rancor roar down some distant street. Each time, they froze in their tracks and waited until its ground-shaking footsteps faded away.

Tash had been silent. Zak looked over at her. She was muttering something under her breath.

"... one of us must die... one of us must die..." she breathed.

"Tash!" Zak yelled. He shook her shoulders. "Quit it! What does that mean?"

Tash blinked and her eyes focused on him. "Wh-What?"

"You said it again. 'One of us must die.' What does that mean?"

His sister shook her head. "I'm sorry, Zak. I don't know. I don't even know I'm doing it. It must be important, but I just don't know."

"All right, just forget it. Look, here's the airlock."

They had arrived at a heavy steel portal set in the ma.s.sive dome.

Beyond the door was a room that led to another door. And that door led to the s.p.a.ce dock.

"We'll just wait in the airlock for now, until we can figure out what to do. The holograms won't work there," said Zak.

"Okay," Tash said, reaching to press the switch that activated the automatic door.

Zak was distracted by a movement in the other direction. Four spidery limbs crawled into his line of sight. This time he whipped his head around and caught full sight of the brain creature. Its long arms and legs clung to the side of the s.p.a.ce dome as its enormous head bobbed back and forth, red eyes burning bright. Two flailing tentacles flapped out of its open mouth. It looked bigger.

"Tash, wait!" Zak warned.

Too late. The door opened. For a fraction of a second, Zak and Tash were able to look out the door-a door that opened into the icy-cold vacuum of s.p.a.ce. Then Tash was sucked out into the void.

CHAPTER 14.

Zak just barely managed to grab Tash's arm before she was pulled into deep s.p.a.ce. Air from inside the dome began rushing out into empty s.p.a.ce, dragging Tash and Zak along with it. Zak held Tash with one hand and clung to the edge of the doorway with the other. He had seen deep s.p.a.ce and stars before, of course, but always from the safety of a starship viewport. Now he was looking at the eternal night with his naked eye. He didn't like it.

"Pull me back!" Tash gasped over the rushing wind.

"I can't!" he said, gritting his teeth. "Pull yourself!" Tash tried to use Zak's arm as a rope to pull herself back into Fun World. But the escaping air dragged at her face and clothes.

"I can't!" she yelled.

"You have to!" Zak demanded. He had already lost his parents and friends. His uncle was away, and now even Deevee was gone. He could not lose his only sister, the only family he had left. "Try!"

Tash gritted her teeth. Hand over hand, she pulled herself to safety. Centimeter by centimeter, she fought the wind that sucked her into s.p.a.ce, until she was back inside the dome. Zak slapped the Close switch. The minute the heavy door slid back into place, the powerful suction force stopped, and Tash collapsed to the ground.

For a moment the two Arrandas lay next to each other, gasping for breath.

"Wh-What is this place?" Tash nearly sobbed. "It's like a giant death trap."

"I don't know," Zak panted. "Everything's wrong here. I don't know why this is happening."

"I do."

Standing before them was Uncle Hoole! Both Arrandas got to their feet and threw their arms around him with relief. Hoole returned their hugs awkwardly. The stern expression never left his face.

"Uncle Hoole, we've got to get out of here," Zak explained in one hurried breath. "The holograms are alive and they're killing people. They killed Lando, a gambler we met, and Deevee's missing. And The Nightmare Machine creature is lurking about, I don't know what it is, but we've got to-"

"Remain calm," Hoole said steadily. "I have already discovered the cause of the occurrences. I a.s.sure you, everything is under control. Now follow me."

Zak and Tash were so relieved to see their uncle, so calm and in control, that they followed him willingly. This time when Zak spied a movement out of the corner of his eye, he ignored it. Whatever the creature from The Nightmare Machine was, Hoole would deal with it.

But the Shi'ido led them straight to the administration building at the heart of Hologram Fun World.

"Wait!" Zak almost shouted. "We can't go back there!"

Hoole didn't even pause. "The answers to your questions are within."

Tash and Zak looked at one another. They had no choice but to follow their uncle.

Like the rest of Fun World, the administration building seemed deserted. The silence made Zak even more nervous. Alone, the three rode a turbolift to the top of the building and entered Danna Fajji's office.

The baron administrator sat at his desk with his hands folded neatly in his lap.

"Welcome, welcome," Fajji said. "I understand you've had quite a day here at Hologram Fun World."

"Quite a day!" Tash snapped. "Your holograms killed our friend!

They almost killed us!"

Fajji chuckled. "Oh, no, no, no. I a.s.sure you no one has been killed. At least, not yet."

With startling quickness, the smile fell away from Fajji's face.

Then Fajji's face itself fell away.

The baron administrator's skin crawled across his frame, and in two blinks of an eye he had changed shape.

Tash and Zak were looking at another Shi'ido.

"Gog!" Zak cried. But the presence of the evil scientist was not nearly as terrifying as what happened next. Gog turned to Uncle Hoole and nodded satisfactorily. "Excellent work, Dr. Hoole."

Hoole shrugged. "It was quite simple. They are trusting."

"You can't be working with him!" Tash insisted in a panic. "He's your enemy."

"He's your enemy," Hoole replied. "Gog and I have been working together since the beginning of Project Starscream."

Zak shook his head. "It can't be true!"

"It is," Gog said. "And now we'll prove it. Hoole, destroy these two interlopers."

A blaster appeared in Uncle Hoole's hand. He put it right between Zak's eyes.

CHAPTER 15.

Zak felt the cold metal of the blaster press against his forehead and braced himself for the shot.

Hoole did not fire right away. He waited, prolonging the moment of terror with an evil laugh. A quiver of terror ran through Zak like a groundquake, and he hugged himself to keep still.

His hand brushed against something hard in the pocket of his tunic.

He felt the square shape of the sabacc card shuffler and pulled it out.

"Enough torment, Hoole," Gog said. "End this once and for all."

Hoole nodded and began to squeeze the trigger. But before he did, Zak shoved the sabacc shuffler in Hoole's face and squeezed. The sabacc cards rattled and flew out of the shuffler chute. A deck full of hard plastic wafers slapped Hoole in the face. The Shi'ido grunted and reeled backward, waving his free hand before him to clear his sight.

"Run!" Zak yelled.

Tash was already ahead of him, racing for the turbo-lift. Zak slipped into the lift just as the doors closed.

"Everything's gone crazy! Everything!" he shouted at the walls.

Tash's only answer was a violent shudder and a whisper: "One of us must die."

The lift doors opened and they ran for the exit. As they reached it, they heard another turbolift open, and a blaster shot burned a hole in the wall to their left. Hoole was chasing them.

They were running through a horror-filled amus.e.m.e.nt park, being chased by their own uncle, who was working for the galaxy's most evil scientist. Zak realized that Tash might be right-they might not get out of Fun World alive.

A blaster bolt pa.s.sed so close to Zak, he heard it burn the air around his ear.

"In here!" he panted, and ducked into the nearest doorway.

He stumbled forward and found himself floating in deep s.p.a.ce.

This time, however, it was not the lifeless cold of real s.p.a.ce. Zak was standing in the cavernous Star Chamber, which he and Tash had visited on their first day in Hologram Fun World. Stars and planets whirled past his head.

"Zak? You okay?" Tash said weakly. He saw her in the light of a pa.s.sing sun, nine planets spinning around it.

"I feel like you sound," he answered.

"I'm miserable," she replied. "This is worse than anything, Zak. I thought it hurt when Mom and Dad died, but this..." she choked on the rest of her words. "And I failed. I could have saved you from those machines. I could have used the lightsaber. But I blew it. I want to be a Jedi so badly, but I was always afraid to fail..."

"You didn't blow it, Tash," Zak said. "I think you saved us by dropping the lightsaber. It didn't matter that you were afraid."

Something about his own words p.r.i.c.ked Zak's memory, but before he could follow the thought, a new solar system came rushing through the void at them.

"Zak!" Tash started. "Do you know what system that is?"

"You're the one who does all the studying."

"It's Alderaan!"

She was right. He recognized the planets of the Alderaan system-including the hologram of their own blue-green planet. The system swept toward them and then slowed down, hovering a few meters away.

Zak swallowed. "I never thought I'd see home again, even in a hologram."

Then a single sphere appeared in the darkness. It was silver, and cold, and as it approached, they saw the thousands of laser towers on its surface. The approaching globe was pocked by one single indentation, like an eye, that slowly rotated toward the planet Alderaan.

It was the Death Star.

"No!" Zak and Tash yelled together.

The Death Star's eye began to glow as the ma.s.sive battle station powered up its superlaser. There was a blinding flash. A powerful energy beam streaked through the holographic darkness and punctured Alderaan. A second later, nothing remained of the planet but a cloud of debris spreading out through s.p.a.ce.

Tash and Zak's despair turned to fear when the Death Star rotated to face them.

"I've got a bad feeling about this," Zak warned, backpedaling away.

"Where's the door?"

Tash scanned the room, but saw only the whirling planets of the galaxy. "I don't see it."

"Here!" a voice called out.

Tash and Zak recognized the sound immediately. "Deevee!"

"Over here!" the droid called again.

They ran toward the sound, dodging in and out of a dozen star systems, running from one end of the galaxy to the other, outrunning even the holographic Death Star.

Deevee stood in a square of light framed by the doorway, holding out one beckoning hand. Sprinting past him, they burst out of the galaxy and back into Fun World.