He hadn't been supposed to awaken until arrival at his destination. The premature activation was a survival mechanism, but it had cost him something. He could remember nothing of his origins; had only the vaguest impression that the race who had created him looked something like him.
In all the time since, through hundreds of owners, hundreds of systems, planets, cultures, he'd never grown so fond of a human being.
He couldn't exactly say why Lando Calrissian affected him so, but affection was the truth. They laughed together; Vuffi Raa's separating tentacles (once the robot had disclosed this capability) had become the basis for a number of Lando's rare but elaborate practical jokes. They prospered together, and in financial extremes, Lando had divided his small fortunes between buying food for himself and whatever small electronic items the robot's maintenance required.
They were friends.
And now, Vuffi Raa was helpless to aid his master.
Outside, a braid of raspberry red, lemon yellow, and orange orange twisted through the heavens, across a constellation locals called the Silly Rabbit.
No sentient sighted being could have cared less than Vuffi Raa.
Rokur Gepta floated in an utter blackness not half so dark as the secret contemplations of his soul.
Deep underground, where the final traces of the minuscule natural gravity of the asteroid were canceled, he hung suspended in the center of an artificial cavern, momentarily free of all sensation, free of the annoyances attendant upon suffering the incompetence of his underlings, free of the steady, grinding presence of the warmth and bustle of life.
His plans were well in motion. The Wennis was some distance away, its crew performing drill after endless drill, not so much to sharpen their abilities - they were, after all, only the best of a hopeless lot - as to keep them out of the kind of trouble that uncontrolled individuality never fails to generate.
Gepta smugly affirmed to himself that chance favors the prepared mind: a happy turn of fate had placed his enemy, Lando Calrissian, in the custody of Oseon officialdom. Since that officialdom was a government, and he was who he was, Calrissian was already three-quarters of the way into his hands.
They would be cruel hands, once they received their prey.
And deservedly so. Who had kept the sorcerer from obtaining and using the Mindharp of Sharu, an instrument of total mental control over others? Lando Calrissian. Who now owned the ancient enigmatic robot that seemed the Key to yet another sheaf of tantalizing unanswered questions-and limitless power? Lando Calrissian. Who had evaded trap after trap, including that prepared for him on Dilonexa XXIII and the device planted aboard that cursed wreck, the Millennium Falcon?
Lando Calrissian.
How he hated that name! How he would make its owner squirm and writhe until he learned the secret of his weird luck, or the other, hidden powers for which he was a front! How he would crush the life-slowly, very slowly-out of Lando Calrissian's frail body, after first destroying most of the mind (but not enough so that its owner couldn't appreciate the final moments).
Gepta thought back to an earlier, a happier time, to his first the ancient Sorcerers of Tund. How years as an adept among he had deceived the doddering fools, even while stealing their esoteric and sequestered learnings. As intended, they had mistaken him for a young apprentice and had been unable to penetrate his disguise. Already, he had been, even those thousands of years ago, far older than the most ancient of the sorcerers, and they knew how to stretch a life span!
Ah, yes. The galaxy still believed that somewhere the hidden planet Tund was home to the mysterious Order. Only Gepta knew it was a sterile ball. Not so much as a tiny fingerbone was left. The thought - the memory of what he had done on that final day - filled him with delight and satisfaction.
Someday he'd do it to the entire universe!
Meanwhile, that universe wasn't big enough for Rokur Gepta and Lando Calrissian. As Lando Calrissian was going to discover very soon.
Slowly, with elaborate precision, the sorcerer everted his body-turned inside-out on the axis of his digestive system as a form of meditative relaxation - and resumed a true appearance only slightly less disgusting than the one he had given a few seconds before. No human being had ever seen him thus, none ever would - and live to relate the horror of it. He relaxed his numberless alien appendages, stretched them, and relaxed, then spun about himself the appearance of the gray-swathed presumably humanoid sorcerer the world knew.
Summoning a power of which the universe was equally ignorant, he drifted slowly, deliberately, toward the floor of the cavern. There was work to do, and he must be about it.
And yes... he must feed his pet.
Klyn Shanga concealed his grief. Year after year, it never got any easier to bear. Now, Colonel Kenow, his old and valued companion, was dead. Dead and gone. Forevermore.
They had fought in the battle of the Rood together as boys. It had been an insignificant sideshow in a vastly greater war, but to them, it had been a lifepath-altering cusp. They had survived, toughened by the ghastly experience, transformed from callow farmboys into soldiers.
And friends.
And now, Colonel Kenow was dead.
The worst of it was that it had been a senseless, purposeless death spurred by an impetuosity Shanga wouldn't have believed possible in a man of Kenow's age and battle experience. The stringent rich-man's laws of the Oseon had forced the veteran to abandon the weapon he was used to in favor of a crude length of pipe. Then he had been shot down by a stranger only tangentially involved with the enemy they sought, an accidental, not altogether innocent bystander. If only Kenow had listened...
Lightning flared, shaking the entire fabric of the odd assembly of fighters. Keeping station off the asteroid was growing more difficult by the minute. He could scarcely see across the few hundred meters that separated him from the farthest ship in his tiny fleet, thanks to the colored vapor that smoked and roiled around them. The radiation-counter needles climbed inexorably, despite the fact that they were in the shadow of a billion tons of iron-based rock. How much longer they could keep it up...
Well, in the end, it wouldn't matter. The giant engine still pulsed reliably, the cables connecting it to the fighters were sound.
They'd had to rebalance to make up for Kenow's missing ship, but that had been simple, really. If they could just hold on long enough to do their work, it wouldn't make a bit of difference whether they survived the fury of the Flamewind, whether their skin flaked off and they lost their hair and vomited up the last drop of their lives.
Those lives would have been well accounted for, the loss well worth it.
Shanga, like the rest of his companions, bided his time, hid his grief. The sleet of energy around them was making even line-bound communication impossible. The cables acted like a huge antenna, gathering up a howling cacophony that ground on the nerves, eroded morale and resolve. It was as if all the dead the universe had ever seen gathered in an unholy chorus once a year in the Oseon.
And now there was a new voice, that of Colonel Kenow, Klyn Shanga's old friend.
Well, soon there would be other voices, Shanga’s among them.
Lob Doluff wasn't any happier than anyone else that carnival season. He regarded the whole Flamewind fooforaw as an enormous, unnecessary pain in the neck. He had never liked it, never understood why anybody else did.
Lob Doluff was color-blind.
He was also worried half to death. Dressed as he was in lightweight indoor clothing, his head uncovered, his plump arms bare to the chill of the special section of his garden, standing in the middle of half a hectare of snow, his hands were sweating.
The Administrator Senior's visual disability did not affect his appreciation for flowering plants although his reasons for collecting them may have been a bit different from those others who might have. He loved their perfume and their persistence.
To him a weed that cracked a ferroconcrete walkway was something of a miracle, and here, where tiny, a
lmost microscopic flowers poked their small, courageous heads up through snow and ice, there was something especially miraculous.
It did little to cheer him now, however. He was in a bind.
Unlike his subordinate, Bassi Vobah, he was one of there who served the few, while making an unusually honest effort to serve the many. He was quite as wealthy as anyone in the Oseon, and yet a sense of civic duty, personal pride, drove him to sit in the Administrator Senior's office and attempt to govern the essentially ungovernable millions upon millions of falling worldlets that comprised the system.
He kept the peace. He maintained minimal social services. He acted as a buffer between the Oseon's inhabitants and a galaxy that often clamored for their attention, either in response to their great wealth, their enormous fame - or their criminal reputation.
At all of this he was very good, and his independent wealth allowed him a certain latitude denied the average civil servant. He might not quite be able to tell his superiors to take a flaming jump into the Core, but he had thought about it more than once and made the recommendation to many of their representatives.
Unfortunately, he was unable to indulge himself on this occasion.
Pressure - greater pressure than he had known existed - was being placed on him to betray many of the things he stood for. If he complied, it was distinctly possible that no one would ever learn of it. But he, Lob Doluff, would know, and it would remove a great deal of the satisfaction from his life.
At the other end of the proposition, he stood to lose his position, his wealth, his reputation, even his life if he insisted on pushing things to their extreme. In addition, many, many others would suffer. It was ugly, and he hadn't thought such things could happen in a civilized universe.
Now he knew different.
He turned from his absent contemplation of the snowflowers of a hundred systems, walked through an invisible air curtain into a semitropical wedge of the dome, strode to a tree stump, and flipped the top upward. Reaching in, he seized a communicator and brought it to his lips.
“This is the Administrator Senior,” he said after asking for the correct extension number. “Have Captain Calrissian brought to my office in an hour.”
His hands were sweating again. He'd never sent a man to certain death before.
VIII
IT was Two and a half meters tall, had an orange beak and scaly three-toed feet, was covered with bright yellow feathers, spoke in an annoying high-pitched effeminate voice despite its repulsively obvious masculinity, and answered to the name Waywa Fybot.
It was also an undercover narcotics agent.
Lando hadn't learned any of this yet as a pair of robots, spray-painted the same color as Bassi Vobah's uniform, dragged him from his comfortable cell to confront the Administrator Senior.
“The charge is carrying a deadly weapon, Captain Calrissian, and the customary sentence, upon conviction, is death by exposure.”
Lob Doluff paced back and forth before the floor-to-ceiling window in his office. Outside, the Flamewind filled the sky with racing garishness, but most of it was obscured by the dozens of hanging plants that turned the window into a vertical carpet of shaggy greenery.
Other plants were scattered about in pots, in long narrow planters, in aquaria, even drifted in the air on lacy pale wings. A gentle frond brushed Lando's cheek as a flying plant passed over his head.
Lob Doluff didn't have a desk. He didn't need one. Tucked away in an alcove was a datalink with its screen and Keyboard; a pair of secretaries awaited his summons in an anteroom.
What he had were several comfortable chairs, none of which had been offered to Lando, and the enormous bird-thing that none of the mobile plant life would even approach. And Bassi Vobah herself, looking prim and starched and heavily armed.
Lando reached downward to thrust his hands in his pants pockets, discovered once again he hadn't any, and folded his arms across his chest. He looked from Bassi to the Administrator Senior, spent a moment on the weird creature in the corner, then back to the humans.
“I take it, then, that you're not charging me with murder.”
Bassi Vobah nodded. “That would be irrelevant. In the first place, there's ample evidence that you killed him in self-defense. In the second place, we have no record of him having entered the Oseon by legal channels and therefore, at least in legal terms, he doesn't - never did - exist.”
Lando shook his head. “Nice government you have here. Why is carrying a weapon a capital offense, and what have I got to do to get out of it? I take it that I wouldn't be here if you weren't going to offer me some nasty alternative to being shoved out an airlock.”
The gambler had been in, this position before, on more than one occasion. Odd, how government people needed extra governmental people to manage their dirty work on occasion. The things that he'd been asked to do, however, could scarcely be classified under civil service job descriptions.
Bassi Vobah had stiffened at Lando's reply, and only steely nerves and training had kept her hand away from the gigantic military blaster hanging at her hip.
Lob Doluff, however, seemed relieved. He nodded toward the nonhuman observer, introduced the creature to Lando.
Waywa Fybot flapped his short arms as if in greeting, ruffled his feathers, and settled back into silence.
“In one sense, Captain, you are mistaken. You have been arrested and are soon to be tried and duly convicted of the offense.” The Administrator Senior made a gesture. The robots on each side of Lando stepped back. Lando was signaled to a chair facing those in which Lob Doluff was seated and Bassi Vobah stood behind at a sort of parade rest.
“As I said, the punishment as prescribed by law is exposure to the heat, cold, and vacuum of interplanetary space. There is, however, no provision for the precise method to be employed, and I am moved, my boy, to suggest a means by which the law may be obeyed and yet spare you from the unpleasantness such an experience ordinarily brings.”
“I get it. You're going to shoot me before you stuff me out the airlock. By the way, Administrator Senior, have you ever seen somebody after they were spaced?” (Lando hadn't either, but he had a good imagination and hoped that Doluff did as well.) “Pretty messy.”
He made a face, eyes bulging out, tongue lolling at the corner of his mouth.
Lob Doluff grimaced painfully, gulped, and placed a protective hand on his large stomach. “That's exactly what we're trying to prevent, my boy. To my knowledge, there has never been a normal execution in the Oseon, and I have no desire to be the first.”
“Nor I,” Lando agreed, “I suppose this is where our avian friend comes in, isn't it?” He indicated Waywa Fybot, taking up a great deal of room in the corner.
Fybot stepped forward. “Tell me, Captain,” the creature squeaked ridiculously, especially considering its size “have you ever heard the name Bohhuah Mutdah?”
“Sounds like somebody bawling for his mommy.” Lando was sick of being the eternal patsy. He knew by then that they needed him, and had become determined to make things as difficult as he could for them.
The humor of the response - what little there was of it - was lost on everybody present. Lando even detected a little shudder from Lob Doluff. The Administrator Senior shut his eyes, wiped sweaty palms on the creases of his trousers.
The big bird took another step forward, towering over Lando.
“Bohhuah Mutdah is a retired industrialist, a trillionaire. His holdings in the Oseon are the largest in the system by a single individual, and it is possible that he is the wealthiest person in the civilized galaxy.
“He is also thoroughly addicted to lesai.”
Lesai. Lando shut the bird-being out of his mind for a moment, summoning up what he knew of the rare and extremely illegal drug.
The product of a mold that grew only on the backs of a single species of lizard in the Zebitrope System, lesai had many desirable qualities. In the first place, it eliminated the necessity for sleep, thus effectively lengthening th
e human life span by a third. Unlike other stimulants which consumed something vital in the human brain, lesai provided that something vital itself, meaning it could be taken indefinitely.
Yet, it was not without its cost. It turned the user into an emotionless, amoral calculating machine. In the end, family and friends, the lives of thousands or millions of other individuals - at least so the authorities claimed - counted as nothing, compared to whatever goals the addicted mind had set itself. One had to be careful; those in power often lied about things like the effect of drugs, and even Lando, who was strongly predisposed against any mind-altering substances, took what the government said with a very large grain of salt.
Nonetheless, some of this made sense. He could understand how lesai and the richest individual in the known universe might be associated. There wasn't any particular trick to becoming rich - as long as one devoted his whole life to it to the exclusion of everything else. Lando wasn't capable of it; to him, money was a means to an end.
It became meaningless when it was an end in itself.
But not everybody felt that way. Perhaps Bohhuah Mutdah was a person like that.
“Okay,” he interrupted the avian creature, “so we have a fabulously wealthy lesai addict, and you're a drug cop. What's the matter, didn't he pay his protection money on time?”
Waywa Fybot stood up even straighter than before' his feathers fluffed straight outward as if in shock. “Captain Calrissian, you forget yourself! I, after all, am a-”
“An agent of a government fully as corrupt as any government that ever existed. Don't kid me, wompa-breath. Vice laws are always written to be selectively enforced, to serve other purposes. What have you people got against this Mutdah character, is it simply that you don't like the size of his bank account?”
The bird-creature blinked, began to tremble with rage. It opened its beak to reply, shut it again, opened it again, and subsided into the corner, speechless. Lando grinned at the Administrator Senior and his Peacekeeper, spread a hand that was half a shrug.
Star Wars - The Adventures of Lando Calrissian 02 - Lando Calrissian and the Flamewind of Oseon Page 6