The instrument returned a voice to him, soft-spoken and polite, fully as mechanical in its origins as the instrument itself, yet rich with humorous astute inflection.
“Seventy-six hours, Master. That’s a new correction: this region is so clean we’ve gained another four hours since I made the last estimate. I apologize for my previous inexactitude.”
Inexactitude! Lando thought. The Core-blessed thing talks prettier than I do, and I’m supposed to be the con artiste around here!
The Millennium Falcon’s velocity, many times greater than that of light, was limited only by the density of the interstellar medium she traversed. Ordinary space is mostly emptiness, yet there are almost always a few stray molecules of gas, sometimes in surprisingly complex chemical organization, per cubic kilometer. Any modern starship’s magnetogravitic shielding kept it from burning to an incandescent cinder and smoothed the way through what amounted to a galaxy-wide cluttering of hyperthin atmosphere. But the resistance of the gas was still appreciable through a reduction in the ship’s theoretical top speed.
The particular area the Falcon was then passing through seemed to be an exception. Bereft of the usual molecular drag, the Falcon was outdoing even her own legendary performance.
The captain pondered that, then addressed the intercom again. “Better back her off a few megaknots. I need more time than that before this confounded dingus comes off my arm. And you’ve still got a dent or two yourself that needs ironing out. And Vuffi Raa?”
“Yes, Master?” was the cheerful reply. Lando could hear the clack-clack-clack of keyboard buttons being punched as per his instructions. The vessel slowed, but that could not be felt through her inertial dampers.
“Don’t call me master!”
That had been very nearly reflexive. He’d long since given up wondering what the robot’s motivation was for the small but chronic disobedience. Actually, Lando was concerned about his little mechanical friend, and not just because Vuffi Raa was such a terrific pilot droid. Or at least not entirely. These sporadic violent attacks they’d been suffering lately were getting to be a serious matter where they had only been minor nuisances before, and knowing why they were happening, to Lando’s great surprise, hadn’t helped a bit.
The gambler sneered down at his foot where another, tinier set of coils pulsed healing energies into his flesh. Somehow, that was the final insult—that and the black eye. It was one thing to attempt to murder an enemy. That was what a vendetta was all about, after all. But to do him in by millimeters, an abrasion here, a contusion there? Fiendish, Lando was forced to admit—if it wasn’t simple ineptitude. Somehow the enemy realized that a man otherwise willing and capable of bare-handedly confronting a ravening predator his own size, sometimes panics at the sound of a stinging insect barnstorming around his ears.
Well, the gambler told himself, that’s why we’re on this so-called errand of mercy. I’m going to put a twelve-gee stop to all of this juvenile assassination nonsense, one way or the other, once and for all.
Sure, it was a risky proposition; the stakes were as high as they could be. But above and beyond every other consideration, Lando Calrissian—he told himself again—was a sport who’d wager anything and everything on the turn of a single card-chip.
That’s how he’d gotten into the mess in the first place.
It seemed that, some time before, a talented but essentially prospectless young conscientious-objector-of-fortune had won himself a starship—actually a converted smuggling freighter—in a game of seventy-eight-card sabacc. A little while later he had, quite unintentionally, acquired a pretty peculiar robot in much the same fashion. Together, the two machines and their man had set out upon a series of adventures, some more profitable than others. In the process, they had made a number of enemies, one of them a self-proclaimed sorcerer who had plotted to Rule The Galaxy, and had tripped over Lando on his way to the top. Twice.
The fellow had resented that, blamed Lando for his own bumbling and bad luck, and the vendetta had begun. Until now, it had been an unrequited, entirely one-sided relationship. All Lando wanted was to be left alone. He’d tried explaining, via various media, that he didn’t care who ran the universe—he’d break whatever rules it suited him to disobey in any case, whoever was in charge—and that the sorcerer was perfectly welcome to all the power and glory he could grab. Alas, these blandishments, reasonable as they sounded to the gambler, had fallen upon inoperative auditory organs.
Just to make things really complicated, Vuffi Raa had already had enemies of his own. Although the robot hadn’t known it. His previous master, while spectacularly untalented at games of chance, had been a highly effective government employee in the spy business. This fellow, ostensibly an itinerant anthropologist, had used the little robot, forced him to help undermine a previously undiscovered system-wide civilization in a manner that had resulted in the brutal military extermination of two-thirds of its citizens. The remaining third, understandably perturbed, had sworn eternal hatred for the droid, and had enthusiastically begun to do something about it.
Subsequent attempts at negotiation, as in Lando’s case, had been nearly lethally futile. Some people just won’t listen.
Well, life is like that, Lando thought as he hovered in what had been designed as the passenger lounge of the Millennium Falcon. It served as their living room; just then, it was the gambler’s private thinking-parlor, and the thoughts he was thinking were reasonably ironic. He took another puff on his cigar.
The trouble with two partners having separate sets of mortal enemies is that said enemies don’t always make distinctions. Particularly when using fragmentation grenades. Poor Vuffi Raa had gotten badly dented by an assassin in the employ of the sorcerer at their last port of call. The idiot had confessed before expiring; with the nervousness of a beginner, he’d thrown the pin instead of the grenade. The robot’s injuries would work themselves out after a while. He had excellent self-repair mechanisms.
In another incident, Lando had been pushed over a rail into a vat of vitamin paste he had considered acquiring for that very trip, somehow fracturing both arm and toe and picking up a shiner. What really hurt was that he’d simply ruined his second-best velvoid semiformal captain’s uniform. He was certain Vuffi Raa’s enemies were responsible. It felt like their style. Clumsy.
Nor was the Millennium Falcon considered immune. In fact, she’d rather taken the brunt of things, with bombs planted inside her (two of which had actually gone off) and having felt the fury of several small space battles in recent months. A fighter pilot had deliberately rammed her, crumpling her boarding ramp. She’d strained her engines getting them in and out of various places in a hurry. Her battery of quad-guns, under Lando’s capable direction, had staved off the occasional pirate vessel, who probably hadn’t anything at all to do with vendettas. Surprised at the ferocity with which her captain had taken it all out on their hides, defeated pirates were giving the battered old freighter quite a reputation.
Pirates they could handle. The Falcon was a good deal faster than she looked, terrifyingly well armed; he and the robot were pretty hot pilots, but Vuffi Raa had taught Lando everything he knew in this regard. Lando told himself again that the business at the StarCave would pay off all other debts, as well. He was thoroughly fed up, loaded for whatever furry omnivorous quadruped the fates cared to place in his path.
Tugging gently at the vacuum ashtray hose, Lando drifted to the ceiling of the lounge, gave a little shove against the overhead, which propelled him near the floor. He switched on the gravity and walked both forward and starboard around the Falcon’s curving inner corridor, to the cockpit, which was set in a tubelike construction projecting from the front of the ship.
In the left-hand pilot’s seat, an equally weird construction perched, a five-limbed chromium-plated starfish with a single glowing red eye set atop its pentagonal torso. Its tentacles were at rest just then, having reduced the Falcon’s speed as Lando had requested.
The me
ter-high entity turned to its master. “I believe you’ll be able to make out the nebula now, Master. See, that blurry spot ahead?”
Lando strained his eyes, then gave up and punched the electronic telescope into activation. Yes, there it was: the ThonBoka, as its inhabitants called it. It was a sack-shaped cloud of dust and gas, enterable only from one direction, rich with preorganic molecules even up to and including amino acids. Inside that haven, life had evolved without benefit of star or planet, life adapted to living in open empty space. Some of that life had eventually acquired intelligence and called itself the Oswaft. But at the moment, they were under seige.
“What about the blockade, can you locate that?” Lando strapped himself into the right-hand seat, ran a practiced eye over various gauges and screens, relaxed, and plucked a cigar out of the open safe beneath the main control panel.
“Yes, Master, I’m overlaying those data now.”
Vuffi Raa’s tentacles flicked over the panel with a life of their own. He was a Class Two droid, with a level of intelligence and emotional reaction comparable to those of human beings. He had a good many other talents, as well. To Lando’s occasional disgust, however, the robot was deeply programmed never to harm organic or mechanical sapience, and was thus an automatic pacifist. There had been times when that had been inconvenient.
On the main viewscreen, showing the sacklike ThonBoka nebula, a hundred tiny yellow dots sprang to life.
Lando whistled. “That’s quite a fleet for bottling up one undefended dust cloud. What do they think this is, the Clone Wars?” He leaned forward to light his cigar, but was stopped by the offer of a glowing tentacle tip. Yes, Vuffi Raa had a lot of useful talents.
“That isn’t even half of them, Master. Although I can’t understand why, some of the fleet out there have modified their defense shielding into camouflage to conceal themselves. I also believe they’ve mined the mouth of the nebula.”
Puffing on his cigar, Lando forced calm. “And we’re going to run that blockade. Oh, well, it’s been a short life but a brief one. Can you do anything about shield camouflage for us?”
The robot wiped the screen display. “I’m afraid not, Master, it’s very sophisticated technology.”
“Which means that everybody in the universe is using it except civilians. Well, then, what’s our plan?”
There was a startled pause that might have been filled with a blinking red eye had Vuffi Raa been capable of such a thing. “I thought you had the plan, Master.”
Lando sighed resignedly. “I was afraid you’d say that. To tell the truth, I had a plan, but it seems pretty insubstantial, here and now. I shall repair to my free-fall cogitorium once more and reconsider. I’ll get back to you as soon as possible. Don’t hold your breath, it may very well be a century or three.”
He unstrapped himself from his chair, took a final disgusted look through the sectioned canopy, and removed himself from the control area with his cigar. Around the long, heavily padded corridor, out into the cluttered lounge, off with the artificial gravity, and back to the geometric center of the room, where he sat and smoked and tried to think.
It wasn’t one of his better days for that.
“Master?” The voice coming over the intercom was agitated. It startled the gambler out of a dream in which, no matter what sabacc hand he held, his cards kept changing to garbage, while a faceless gray opponent held a newly invented one, the Final Trump, which was an automatic twenty-three.
“Zzzzzz—what?”
Lando blinked, discovered that he was covered with sweat. His velvoid semiformals were soaked through, and he smelled like a bantha someone had ridden half to death. He stretched, trying to remove kinks from his muscles that shouldn’t have been there in zero gee.
“Vuffi Raa, how many times have I told you never to call me—”
“Master,” the robot interrupted, sounding both worried and eager at the same time, “its been nearly three hours. Have you come up with a plan?”
“Uh, not exactly,” the gambler replied, shaking his head in an unsuccessful attempt to clear it. “I’m working on it. I said I’d call you when—”
“Well, I think we’d better talk it over now, if you don’t mind. You see, there’s a picket cruiser sitting not more than a hundred kilometers off our starboard bow. I didn’t see them, so well camouflaged were they, and they’ve fired two warning shots already. Master, they say they’ll cut us in half with the next shot unless we stand by to receive boarders.”
Lando grunted. His mouth tasted like a mynock cave. “That’s the Navy for you, no consideration at all.”
• III •
CONCEALED BEYOND THE reach of civilization lay a place called Tund, a name of legendary repute, one seldom spoken above a whisper. That whispered word named a planet, a system, or a cluster of stars—no one was quite certain which—rumored for ten thousand years to be the home of powerful and subtle mages. Fear was associated with the name, the sort of fear that inhibits mentioning, even thinking about, the thing it represents, so as not to invoke its omniscient, omnipotent, and malevolent attention. Almost no one knew the even more hideous truth.
The planet Tund was sterile, devoid of native life, its surface roasted to a fine, gray, powdered ash where evergreen forests, tropical jungles, and continent-broad prairies had once stretched for countless kilometers. It was a world destroyed by magic.
Or by belief in magic.
At night the planet’s face glowed softly, not merely with the pale blue fire of decaying atoms, but with a ghostly greenish residue of energies as yet unknown to the rest of galactic civilization. Where it flickered balefully, nothing lived, or ever would again. It had been partially to preserve the secret of such power that Rokur Gepta, last of the fabled Sorcerers of Tund, had utterly obliterated every living thing upon the planet, from submicroscopic wigglers to full-flowering sentience. His was a terrible, cosmically unfeeling precaution.
The rest had been sheer malice.
Here and there an oasis of sorts had been permitted its closely regulated probational existence, areas reseeded from which, some billions of years hence, when the evil emerald fires had at long last died, life might resume its pitiably humbled march. Massive force-fields were essential to press the flickering death away from those few havens.
In one such crouched the cruiser Wennis, a decommissioned, obsolete, and thoroughly effective instrument of pitiless warfare, being refitted to her master’s precise specifications. Her crew was an odd but deliberate mixture of the cream of the galaxy’s technical and military elite and its dregs, often represented in the same individual. Her weaponry and defenses ran the gamut from continent-destroying hell projectors to small teams of unarmed combat experts. She had been a gift of prudence from the highest and consequently most vulnerable of sources in the galaxy.
The Wennis would not be recognizable when Rokur Gepta was through with her.
The sorcerer had that way with ships, and planets, and people. The only value anything possessed for him was its utility relative to his inexorable rise to power. Wealth meant nothing more to him than that, nor the companionship of his fellow beings, even—owing to the most peculiar and repulsive of physical circumstances—that of females. He was empty, as devoid of life and warmth as his handiwork, the planet Tund itself. Such an emptiness requires endless volumes of power to fill it even momentarily.
Someday he, too, would bestow gifts of decommissioned battle cruisers—although he would exercise considerably more care to see that they were employed strictly in his interests. And even that lofty seat of power was only a feeble beginning. The million-system civilization ruled from it, after all, was only a small wedge of the galaxy.
And the galaxy itself only a small part of …
Deep within the twisted caverns of the murdered planet Tund, where Rokur Gepta had once personally searched out and exterminated every one of his ancient mentors—the original sorcerers, who had lovingly instructed him in the ways of power that had bee
n their ultimate undoing—the treacherous former pupil sat, immersed in thought. He brooded in a blackness utterly unbroken by the glimmer of so much as a single passing photon. That was the way he preferred it; he had other means of observing reality.
Even in the full light of a healthy planet’s daytime surface, another individual would be less fortunate: Rokur Gepta was simply impossible to come to terms with visually. He was a blur, a vagueness more psychological than perceptual in character, perhaps because his color was that of terror.
On the very rare occasions he was spoken of by others, descriptions varied: he was a malignant dwarf; a being of average though preternaturally imposing stature; a frightening giant of a figure over two meters tall, perhaps three. All accounts agreed that he was perpetually swathed in cloaks and windings of the same hue as his lifeless domain, an ashy gray from the tips of his (presumed) toes to the top of his (apparent) head. He wore a turbanlike headdress whose final lengths were wound around the place his face should be, obscuring all his features save the eyes, twin pools of whirling, insatiable, merciless voracity.
Understandably, the sorcerer had enemies, although he had outlived—often by design—the small minority of them with the capacity to do him harm. He had outlived many others as well, simply by surviving centuries of time. His long life was in grave and constant danger, however, from those few who still survived and the continually fresh crop of victims who wished him ill. And that was what produced his present quandary.
Word had been conveyed, through several layers of underlings, of an emissary, a messenger whose credentials offered a potentially profitable alliance. Should he trust the individual sufficiently to hear him out, as per request, in total privacy?
The sorcerer pondered. The risk of a personal audience was great, especially as the representative came from a principal powerful enough to preclude extensive security measures, which could be interpreted as an affront. There were limits to the precautions that could be taken, but none to the cleverness of assassins. He ought to know; he had employed enough of them himself.
Star Wars - Lando Calrissian and the StarCave of ThonBoka Page 2