Reaching a decision, he gestured with a gray-gloved hand. Feeble light began to glow within the monstrous cavern, swelling until it filled the place. Small black hairy things within the walls squeaked a protest, rustled in their niches, then settled back into troubled somnolence.
He would make up this discomfort to his pets, Gepta thought, and if the audience turned out to be less than advertised, so would the emissary make restitution, most slowly.
A faint electronic chirp from a panel in the left arm of his basaltic throne alerted him of visitors. He firmed up his visual appearance; no sense alarming the messenger unduly at the outset. The time for intimidation, confusion, and betrayal would come later. It always did.
From a passageway far to the right, across a kilometer or more of cavern floor, a small procession wended its way, composed of minions in uniform, their marks of rank and organization stripped away to preserve the fiction that they were civilians. In truth, they were the same sort of gift the Wennis had been, and served their original master by serving Rokur Gepta.
The honor guard consisted of a half-dozen heavily armed and smartly groomed beings, every fiber bristling at attention as they marched. In their midst was a giant, a large, heavyset man in a battered spacesuit, carrying his helmet under one arm. The group wound carefully among the cavern floor’s many stalagmites, following a hidden pattern that, if strayed from, would precipitate their immediate and total destruction.
Gepta waited on his throne, three meters above the floor.
As the column reached its base, Gepta’s soldiers snapped to a halt. The visitor technically stood at attention, too, but he was the sort of being who, when the time came, would look as if he were lounging indolently in his own coffin. He was utterly relaxed, utterly alert. He was utterly unafraid of anything, most especially death.
If Rokur Gepta feared anything himself, it was men such as this.
“Sir!” the leader of the guardsmen said, “we present Klyn Shanga, Fleet Admiral of the Renatasian Confederation, sir!”
Gepta would accept no title or honorific. Such were for lesser beings. He tolerated being called “sir” because his underlings, of military background, seemed to grow increasingly uncomfortable and uninformative unless they could insert it at least once in every sentence they addressed to him.
Gepta nodded minutely, looking down on the craggy giant. “Admiral, welcome to the planet Tund,” he hissed. “Few have seen it, save my minions, and even fewer have lived to say they’ve seen it.”
Shanga grinned broadly from a face that was one scar overlaid upon another until nothing of the original flesh remained. Yet an ordinary human being would have found the effect somehow pleasing. Klyn Shanga was everybody’s adventurous uncle, the one who’d been everywhere, done everything, and had it done back to him.
He ignored the threat: “That ‘Admiral’ is something in the nature of a joke, Sorcerer. In your terms I’m more of a squadron leader, and it’s not much of a squadron. Core—for that matter, it’s not much of a Confederation, either! But we have our points, as my letters of introduction demonstrated, I’m sure. You know about the Renatasia?”
Gepta nodded once again. Upon receiving the communication in question, he’d consulted references and had a conference with his kennel of government spies. What was to be learned was skimpy; there had been a highly energetic cover-up. Yet the essential facts were clear.
“It was a system and a culture colonized long before the current political status quo was achieved. It developed independently, unknown to the rest of the galaxy, and at a somewhat slower pace technologically. It was discovered, subverted, exploited, and obliterated by certain commercial interests acting in concert with the Navy. You, your squadron, and your Confederation are some of the rare survivors. Are these the fundamental elements of the story, Admiral Shanga?” The sibilance of Gepta’s whisper echoed in the cavern.
Shanga’s turn to nod. “That’s it. About a third of the population lived, reduced further by starvation and disease.” He leaned against a stalagmite, casually swinging his helmet by a strap around his finger. “Get rid of the flunkies and we’ll talk a deal, how about it?”
Gepta savagely repressed a wave of rage and nausea that swept through him at the man’s impudence. Time, he told himself, there would be time to deal with him appropriately later. He gestured and the men, with uncertainty on their faces, brought themselves back to attention, turned in place, and marched back the way they’d come. It took them a long while, so indirect and lengthy was the route. All the while, Shanga leaned against his stony outcrop with a grin across his battered face.
“What have you got against Lando Calrissian, anyway, Gepta?”
The sorcerer’s gaze jerked upward across the chamber to assure that no one else was present to witness the gibe. Then he settled back in his throne and stared coldly at the fighter pilot before him, struggling to maintain an even tone.
“It is sufficient that he has offended me—primarily with his impudence, Klyn Shanga, a fact you would do well to bear in mind. We have agreed upon the history of your woebegone system; tell me, what is your interest in a vagabond gambler. What has he to do with—”
In an instant, Shanga’s façade of relaxation dropped away. He stood rigidly beside the stalagmite, his body trembling with anger. Rather a long time passed before he was able to reply.
“Calrissian doesn’t figure in it. He has a partner—”
“The robot? Surely, Admiral—”
“Robot!” Shanga shot back hotly. “In the Renatasia it wasn’t a robot, but a five-limbed organic sapient! I saw it then—nobody could avoid it! It was treated to parades and banquets, in the media every minute! It was an emissary from a long-lost galactic civilization that … that … that ultimately destroyed us! It was a spy, Gepta! It infiltrated us, observed our weaknesses, planned our downfall with ruthless precision! Robot? Oh yes, I saw it again after the battle of Oseon, disguised as a harmless droid, but I wasn’t fooled, not for a nano! Robot? What would a robot have to gain from—”
Gepta raised an interrupting hand. He knew perfectly well why a droid might help destroy a system. Programmed to obey, it wouldn’t have a choice, and properly disguised with an organic-appearing plastic coating, it would be a perfect spy. The sorcerer, however, wasn’t about to argue with the man and possibly lose an ally. Shanga would have his uses—and his ultimate disposition.
“Very well, Admiral, we each of us have personal reasons for wishing a conclusion to this hunt, and your offer of assistance is welcome. But your communication hinted at more; there was a claim that you know where the Millennium Falcon may be found?”
“And trapped!” the warrior added with a snap in his voice. “Imagine the sweetness of it: trapped between us and the Navy!” He began laughing, the edge in his voice growing increasingly hysterical until he leaned heavily against the stone column, wiping his eyes and coughing. When he could speak again, it was only one word: “StarCave!”
Rokur Gepta kept his peace, offering no reply. The term was meaningless to him, but given an hour of privacy and access to his sources of information it would not remain so. Finally he replied. “StarCave, you say.”
The fighter pilot nodded. “Yes, we have our spies, too, Gepta—we have to. After all, they’re the ones who—but never mind that. The navy’s keeping a heavy blockade there. We don’t know why. There are rumors, but most of them are so silly that we think they’re an Intelligence cover. Whatever the reason, we also know that Calrissian’s planning to run the blockade, in fact may be there as we speak. We have things you need: information, a rebuilt fighter squadron. You have something we need: passage through the blockade. With Calrissian bottled up there, we can …”
There was a very prolonged silence during which each of the figures savored his personal revenge. Gepta was secretly surprised that the military could mount a major action of that type without his knowing of it. On the other hand, he hadn’t known about the Renatasian affair until year
s after it had happened. He was equally surprised at the depth—and enthusiasm—of Shanga’s intelligence sources. After it was over, if he, the sorcerer, could incorporate … But that was for later. This was now, and the culmination of a very long, very annoying episode in the gray magician’s otherwise unopposed rise to total power.
“Very well, Admiral Shanga, let us make an agreement between us. We shall go to this, this StarCave and see what may be seen. The refitting of the Wennis is nearly complete, and I will hurry the work. Your squadron will rendezvous with her at a place convenient to us both. I shall take us through the blockade, and you shall assist with the destruction of the Millennium Falcon and her owners. And afterward …”
Shanga stood, his right hand flexing where his blaster would have been hanging had it not been taken from him by Gepta’s security people. He felt incomplete without it. There was a worn diagonal area across the lower half of his pressure suit, from high behind the left hip where the heavy belt ordinarily settled itself, to the middle of his right thigh where the weapon would have been strapped down.
“Yes,” said the Admiral, “and afterward: what?”
The sorcerer smiled, an expression that manifested itself only in the sarcastic tone of his voice. Inside the dark gray windings about his hidden face, it was a far from pleasant expression.
“Afterward, my dear Admiral Shanga, we two shall go our separate ways, you to rebuild Renatasian civilization to glorious, dizzying new heights, while I, on the other hand—”
“Mynock muffins!” Shanga raised his gauntleted hand in a mocking salute. Then, without further ceremony, he turned on his space-booted heel and began the trek across the damp cavern floor to the elevator.
He itched to have his blaster once again—an itch he felt between his shoulder blades as he turned his back on the perfidious sorcerer—to get in his small fighter and rejoin the squadron hovering at the edge of the barren Tund System. The dead planet was giving him the creeps.
For his part, Gepta watched the figure of the Renatasian soldier diminish in the twilit distance, kneaded his gray-gloved hands together, once more stifling rage that bordered on gibbering insanity. To be walked out on by a mere underling! And especially one who possessed the gall to consider himself an equal partner in the sorcerer’s affairs!
It was almost more than the ancient magician could bear. Almost.
There are rituals, however, formulae for calming both the mind and body under such nerve-shredding circumstances, venerable practices of the long-dead Sorcerers of Tund.
Rokur Gepta applied them all with a will.
• IV •
LANDO SAT IN the copilot’s seat, smoking a cigar and thinking. The navy cruiser wasn’t naked-eye visible and he had no desire to crank up the telescope. He’d seen a cruiser before.
They’d been given ten minutes to make up their minds: prepare for boarders or be obliterated. Lando was using every second of those minutes, trying to produce a third alternative. He wasn’t having much luck. He’d known from the beginning that a moment like this was going to arrive, sooner or later—although he hadn’t imagined it arriving quite so soon. The plans he’d sketched out in the leisure and safety at their last port of call seemed fragile and silly now, however detailed and astute they had appeared at the time.
The trouble, of course, arose from the fact that Lehesu hadn’t gone straight home. Fortune or coincidence hadn’t had very much to do with his rescue. Lando and Vuffi Raa had stumbled across the same “desert” that had threatened to kill the young Oswaft. What it meant for them and the Falcon was a sudden drop to below light-speed while Vuffi Raa recalibrated the engines. In the empty sector, the engines had met almost no resistance and they threatened to race wildly until they tore themselves and their operators apart, atom by atom.
Thus they had been poking along on their reaction drive when they’d encountered a five-hundred-meter monster soaring out of nowhere. At first they’d taken Lehesu for a weird ship from an unknown culture. They’d been half right, but then Lehesu had mistaken the Falcon for a being something like himself. It had taken much longer to straighten out that misunderstanding than to puzzle out the vacuum-breather’s plight and do something about it.
Vuffi Raa had, as usual, been at the controls, as Lando kept a suspicious eye on Lehesu and a nervous thumb on the trigger from the quad-gun blister.
“Master, I have communications on a very unconventional frequency.”
“What’s being said?” Lando shifted the stump of his cigar to the other side of his mouth, hunched over the receiver of the quad-gun even farther, and strained to see the weird object floating half a klick away. It was transparent, and didn’t show up very well on the detectors, as if it were made of plastic instead of metal. There was no sign of shielding, and he’d seen much bigger ships. Nevertheless, its casual proximity raised the fine hair on the back of his neck and gave him the impulse to jam the triggers down and keep them down until it was reduced to harmless vapor.
“I’ve got the Falcon’s computers working on it—they’re not very well suited to translation, I’m afraid—and I’m also plugged into things myself. It would appear—wait! We’re starting to receive a visual array. Repeating that first greeting seems to have done the … yes … yes … Master! It’s sending us a picture of ourselves!”
Great, Lando thought, here we are, parsecs from any known civilization, and we’ve stumbled across an itinerant portrait photographer. Usually they brought a pony or a young bantha with them, but … He let the sarcastic thoughts dribble away. They weren’t doing any good. He trusted Vuffi Raa to handle things in general, but hated to put his life in anybody’s hands but his own.
“Well, send them back a picture of themselves, for Core’s sake! Pretend we’re a pair of tourists taking each other’s snapshots. It beats shooting it out.”
“Yes, Master, I had already arrived at that conclusion, and am transmitting a slow-scan with the proper characteristics. I can put it on one of your gunnery screens if you think it’s worth the risk.”
“Go ahead. I can do better with the naked eye anyway, given our range and this thing’s weird composition.”
On a display to his left, the outline of the Falcon, as seen by the alien object, faded away to be replaced with an enhanced representation of the object itself. Vuffi Raa’s vision was better than Lando’s. He was making out or inferring a good deal more detail. The thing remarkably resembled some marine creatures Lando had seen in his travels although it was too large by at least an order of magnitude. It was also somewhat like a bird—
The picture jerked, the viewpoint changed, the object curled and uncurled its “wings.”
“Master, this picture’s coming from them! Master, I don’t think this is a spaceship! I think it’s a—”
At this point, Lehesu began his little video drama, showing himself starving to death and dying, then changing things to show himself feeding and prospering. By the time he was finished, Lando and Vuffi Raa had a much better idea of what they had encountered in that odd, empty region of interstellar space.
Lando knew that it was theoretically possible for organisms to evolve in free space. Chemical compounds formed spontaneously there, many of them very sophisticated and much like those that had preceded life in the oceans of millions of worlds. There were even substances which scientists argued were ultrasimple life, somewhere below the level of viruses on a scale of organization.
What bothered Lando was that they’d encountered Lehesu in a region utterly devoid of the chemical soup that was supposed to give rise to life. It didn’t make sense. One didn’t expect to find human beings in places where there was no light, no heat, no oxygen, no—then he remembered where he was, the same lifeless, empty stretch of nothingness the odd creature was navigating, and liked the situation even less than before.
“Master, I think it’s asking for help!”
“Tell it we gave at the office!”
“Master, those symbols! They’re atomi
c nuclei! It’s telling us what it needs. That settles it: those aren’t fuel compounds, they’re food. It’s a living creature, and it’s been starving to death!”
Lando thought about it. “What does it want, Vuffi Raa? We’re not very likely to have anything this alien can eat, are we?”
“Simple organic compounds, amino acids. Master, the contents of the ship’s recyclers are almost made for its requirements. Could we?…”
“Oh, very well, go ahead. We could always use a friend who breathes vacuum and can cross interstellar space by sheer force of personality. Let him have what he—”
The Falcon gave a small lurch as Vuffi Raa vented the recyclers. The creature reacted immediately, swooping and soaring ecstatically through the haze of muck they’d released into the void. Lando nearly went crazy trying to keep the energy weapons trained on it, then gave up. The thing wasn’t going to harm them; it ate garbage and had been starving to death. They’d made a friend, and friends don’t point guns at one another.
He switched off the gunnery circuits, unstrapped himself from the swiveling chair, and lumbered forward to join Vuffi Raa in the cockpit.
They’d remained in that one spot for several days, learning Lehesu’s language while Vuffi Raa adjusted the engines. At one point it had become necessary for the gambler to suit up and step outside so that the giant Oswaft could be made to understand that the Falcon was a thing containing people of a different size and shape than the Oswaft had been capable of imagining. For all his size and the idiotic fix he’d gotten himself into out there, the alien was not stupid. Artifacts were not entirely unknown to his culture, and, as soon as he’d grasped the concept of a spaceship, he’d come up with an idea of his own.
Which meant that Vuffi Raa had to go to work again. In the end, the robot had cobbled up a huge tank out of metal and sheet plastic and filled it with recycler contents. Now Lehesu could travel without running out of nutriment. It had taken both man and droid to maneuver the tank into position beneath the enormous space-going creature. He grasped it in several dozen of his tentacles, gently stroking his new friends with a couple of others as his voice filtered through Lando’s suit-helmet radio.
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