The game being played in the cruiser Reliable’s MessRec area included Lando, two cooks, and a pair of low-ranking gunners. Lando wore his most tattered clothing, pressed with razor creases, for the occasion.
What made sabacc really interesting—and destroyed the nerves of most amateurs who tried to play it—was that each card was an electronic chip, capable of changing face and value at random any moment until the card-chip was lying flat on a gaming table or upon the electronic mat Lando had provided. Thus a winning hand, held too long, could change spontaneously to garbage, or, more rarely, a mess of meaningless numbers could become a palladium mine.
Lando found the game relaxing and a welcome change from the exigencies of interstellar freight-hauling. He’d always enjoyed it, no matter the stakes, possibly because he found it quite difficult to lose. Even honestly.
The older of the two cooks took the hand and the deal shifted to him accordingly. He’d won perhaps half what the previous winner had and was looking inordinately pleased with himself. Lando inwardly shook his head, remembering times when the ransom for a princess or the price of a starship had rested before him on a table in the most exclusive and luxurious settings imaginable. It was difficult to keep the right perspective, to remember from moment to moment that the real stakes here were the highest he’d ever played for: the survival of an entire race, and whatever he might demand in fabricated precious stones indistinguishable from nature’s best.
With pitiable awkwardness, the cook dealt Lando a pair of card-chips from the bottom of the deck, attempting to cheat the others in the process as well. Not only wasn’t he good at it, he wasn’t any good at it. Lando received a Master of Staves, worth fourteen points, and a Nine of Flasks: a natural two-card twenty-three. The gambler held them back, hoping one or the other would metamorphose into something worthless. He wasn’t after the pay of those miserable sailors, but information.
“Well,” he said casually, “I’ve almost sold my quota here on the Reliable. You swabbies have any suggestions where I might find greener pastures?”
His connections, compliments of the Respectable’s sector chief, had about run dry, and he needed not only the name of the next ship closer to the mouth of the ThonBoka, but of someone aboard in a position to do him some good. As bets were placed and extra cards were passed around; Lando asked for one, giving up the Commander. He received an Ace of Coins just as the Nine in his hand transformed itself into an Eight—another pestiferous twenty-three!
All right, then: “Sabacc!” The gambler said for the first time that afternoon. You lose some, you win some; you gotta take the good with the bad. He raked in a few millicredits and promptly engineered a loss again. It was simpler to do when he had control of the cards.
“You might try the Courteous,” the younger of the two cooks suggested, pushing his white hat back from his sweaty forehead. He smelled of onions and had a missing tooth. “Those boys been on the line longer’n anybody here. I got a cousin-in-law over there who says—OW!”
“Oh he does, does he?” observed Lando, watching the older cook kick the younger under the table. “Accident-prone or just sensitive to pain?”
“You gotta keep your flapping lip buttoned, Merle,” the older cook said, “There’s sucha thing as security.”
“Aww, Clive, Lando’s all right. Usta be a rating hisself, didn’t you, Lando? He just wants to sell stuff over on the Courteous, like he done here, ain’t that right, Lando? an’ seein’ as it’s the closest ship in, he might be able to get a look at what the fuss is—OW!”
The older cook looked apologetic. “No offense, Mr. Calrissian.”
Lando grinned as he watched the younger cook rub a tender shin. “None taken.”
It was a cheerful tune the young gambler was whistling as he shinnied down the ladder into the airlock of the Millennium Falcon. “Honey, I’m home!”
“Are you referring to me, Master?” Vuffi Raa asked, maneuvering his tentacles over the hatchway coaming. He took Lando’s helmet, helped his master raise the circular overhead hatch and screw it into place.
“Did you take care of that little job I asked you about?” the gambler inquired. They passed along the corridor to the cockpit. Lando stopped to inspect his quad-guns. The fleet security force’s seals were still in place; the weapons were theoretically inoperable. Vuffi Raa had cheated around them the first hour they’d been installed.
“Why yes, Master, I have. Can you tell me now why you wanted such an odd thing done?” Strapping himself into place, the robot received clearance from the Respectable and detached the Falcon from her belly.
Lando glanced suspiciously around the cabin. “You tell me: can I let you in on it without informing the boys in gray up there?”
The little droid sounded a bit scandalized. “Master, I removed a total of twenty-three listening devices from this vessel, put there by at least three separate agencies in the last seventy-one hours. We’re completely clean. What I’d like to know is why you wanted—”
“Simple. I want you to raise the Courteous, confirm we’re on our way, and set a course for her. Then I want you to be ready to punch everything we’ve got into the drives, and everything else into the aft shield-generators, as soon as we pass by her and light out for the ThonBoka. Got that?” He reached under the control panel, extracted a cigar of a quality much higher than the ones he had been selling. Vuffi Raa lit it for him with a tentacle tip.
“Aye, aye, Master. But that device you had me construct while you were aboard the Respectable: it projects at least a meter beyond the after shields, and it’s—”
“Courteous, this is Millennium Falcon if you’re reading. As per previous permission, we’re on our way over. I’ve got a hundred gallons of beebleberry ice cream I’ve been saving especially for you. Over.”
“But Master, we don’t have any—”
“Em Falcon, this is Courteous. We haven’t had any kind of ice cream aboard for weeks. You’re highly welcome, and we hear you have an interest in statistics.”
Lando laughed at the universal gambler’s code. “Permutations and combinations of the number seventy-eight, Courteous—fives are wild. Watch for us at your airlock any minute now. Out.”
The Falcon soared under reaction drive across the distance between the two warships, Lando worrying every moment that his idea and the device he’d had Vuffi Raa construct would actually work. It was the most terrible risk he’d ever taken, with no time to experiment, and technologies were not exactly his bailiwick. If it failed, then they’d be little metal splinters scattered from there to the Rafa System.
“Millennium Falcon, you’re off the beacon! Where’d you learn to fly that overstuffed horseshoe, you confounded feather merchant, some charm school somewhere?”
Critical moments ticked by, during which the Falcon refrained from replying to the innuendo—and precious kilometers toward her goal racked themselves up on the boards.
“Em Falcon, now hear this! Correct course immediately! Our guns are bearing on you, do you copy?”
Gritting his teeth and clamping nervous hands securely over the arms of his chair, Lando sat motionless, watching the dials. A trickle of sweat ran down the side of his neck into his collar, but he said nothing.
Once more: “Millennium Eff, you’ve got five seconds from the mark, and then you’ll be nothing but incandescent atoms! Mark: five, four, three …”
“Okay, Vuffi, this is it! As soon as the drives are hot, punch everything she’s got!”
“Very well, Master.”
The robot’s tentacles were a confusing blur over the ship’s control console as he diverted power to the after shields until the gauges screamed at the incipient overload. Lights began twinkling cheeringly across the section of the panels labeled FTL; the powerful interstellar drives awoke from several days’ unwilling somnolence. Finally, all boards were green. Drives and shields were ready as the Navy voice in the com reached zero.
Lando hoped his invention was ready, too.
<
br /> “Millennium Falcon,” the communicator warned a final, unnecessary time—giving the gambler and the droid an extra few seconds—“you’re a dead—”
“Now!” Lando and Vuffi Raa screamed at the same time.
The voice chopped off. The after shields blossomed into an invisible protective canopy while the ultralight-speed genera tors began to throb—just as the leading wave front of the first meter-thick destructor beam from the cruiser struck the Falcon squarely in the center of her stern.
Her shields held … and held … and—
Suddenly the Millennium Falcon burst into an enormous blinding cloud of rapidly dispersing gases; a rain of metallic particles glittered, occupying the space where she had been.
• VI •
THE ONE ADDRESSED the Other: “At long last, it is nearly time.”
Like Lehesu of the Oswaft, he swam comfortably in emptiness absently contemplating the surrounding stars. Unlike Lehesu, he knew everything about them, had been to visit many of them himself. Nor was that the only way that he was not like the ThonBoka vacuum-breather. Even Lando Calrissian, accustomed to many strange and wonderful sights, would have had trouble recognizing the entity as a living being.
“Yes,” the Other replied, although his companion’s statement had been rhetorical. “All things are now as they have been planned. I shall gather the Rest, and they shall accompany us.”
He took action to accomplish just that. Such were the distances involved that, even at communications speeds exponential to that of light, it would require several days to achieve the desired transfer of information.
“Indeed,” the One agreed. “That, too, is as it has been planned. It is very strange, my friend, this ‘not-knowing,’ stranger than I had anticipated. Quite an uncomfortable feeling, really. It has been so long since …” He let what served him for a voice trail off, contemplating a gulf of time the mere thought of which might have driven a lesser being to gibbering disconnection.
The Other indicated silent sympathy. He, too, had experienced the discomfort of uncertainty, and, despite his almost unimaginable life-span, and the relatively recent character of the events, for far too long. Uncertainty was like that. However, that had been the very purpose of the plan. Over the countless eons of their existence, the One, the Other, and the Rest had become, in a manner of speaking, too perfect, too well-informed. It had become all too easy to anticipate events simply from long experience with reality, excellent sources of information, and well-practiced logic.
Ironically, it was in that manner that the One had originally foreseen racial stagnation and eventual death did these comfortable circumstances continue. He had advised all concerned that an element of the unknown be reintroduced. They, of course, had seen the sense of it and agreed (with a cordiality that was itself symptomatic; a more vital, lusty people would have included a number of individuals who were contrary just for the sake of contrariness.) Their first experiment in guesswork, partial knowledge, and risk was maturing now, a process some thousands of years in the making.
“Do you suppose …” the Other began, unconsciously reviving a long-unused turn of phrase as he let the unproductive thought trickle away. At that point speculation was futile. He knew as well as the One what consequences, in all their manifest likelihoods, were possible, from a vast unprecedented enrichment of their ancient, already lavishly complex culture, to its uttermost destruction. These were not beings to whom such gambling came easily or naturally—which was yet another reason why it had become necessary. “Do you suppose …?”
The One replied, “I do not know—How truly unsubstantial a sensation! For the first time in eons we shall learn New Things, regardless of the outcome. These we shall have to integrate with the old, producing syntheses unlooked for. I feel … this emotion must be very much as our ancestors experienced when scarcely anything was known, and everything remained yet to be learned. It is little wonder they were half mad and came close, times without number, to destroying themselves.”
After a long period of silence, the Other said, “I have learned a New Thing already.” In the tone of his voice there was an odd, semiforgotten, yet somehow familiar difference.
But excitement tinged the voice of the One: “Please tell me—what is it? I, too, must learn this New Thing, and we must pass it on to—”
“I have learned that the prospect of learning New Things makes you unreasonably loquacious. I am not certain—there it is again, that ‘not knowing’—that this is altogether good.”
“I believe,” the One replied rather stiffly, “that you have reinvented humor. And I am not certain whether that is good.”
Klyn Shanga raced through endless night to join his makeshift squadron. Considering his three careers—soldier for his nation-state, farmer upon military retirement, soldier again for a hastily united and inevitably defeated Renatasian System—this last, the seeking of ultimate vengeance, was quite the strangest.
Shanga leaned back in his patched and shabby acceleration couch, carefully placing his feet between control pedals, stretching his long legs and arching his back to relieve an aching stiffness born more, on this occasion, of emotional tension than of lengthy travel. He was well practiced at that, having logged an incredible number of intersystem parsecs in his unlikely machine.
His blaster, its grips polished smooth by use, its muzzle bright with holster-wear and pitted by many more firings than it had been designed for, once again clung comfortingly to his thigh. It was not that having the weapon made him a whole man; like most professional soldiers, he was revolted by killing and avoided it whenever he could. Besides, he could do more damage to an opponent with his left elbow than most individuals could with an entire arsenal. But, like the battered, ancient ship he flew, it was an accustomed extension of his body, a companion and friend.
He had very few others left.
Somewhere ahead, hovering at the deep-frozen margin of the Tund System, his tiny fleet awaited the news he carried. They had towed themselves originally into this sector of the galaxy—a long, long way from home—by means of a scrapped and resurrected Centrality battleship engine that had been left among the ruins of their civilization by the departing marauders. To this they had attached, by cable, craft bought, stolen, and traded from a hundred cultures. Ultimately, the engine had become a weapon of despair, a fusion-powered battering ram. Even so, they had failed to accomplish their purpose for it, the destruction of Vuffi Raa.
Now, deprived of an independent method of ultra-lightspeed travel, they had to rely upon an uncertain ally. One who, without question, would betray them in the end.
Alone in the cramped cockpit of his fighter, Shanga reviewed the words he would employ to persuade his men that he had made the best of a bad bargain—those few who had survived the voyage to the Tund System and their first bloody encounter with the enemy at the Oseon. More had joined them afterward, dribbling out in the filthy holds of ancient freighters, hitching rides aboard the interstellar garbage scows.
Ironically, it was Rokur Gepta who, more than anybody else, represented the malign spirit that had destroyed the Renatasia. Somehow, too, it was fitting that they plotted together to use the navy as a sort of backstop against which they could crush their common foes. That same Navy had been the direct agent of his home system’s destruction. At the beginning of his vindictive adventure, Klyn Shanga had been fatalistically resigned to throwing away his life and the lives of his threadbare command in order to avenge their titanic losses. Now he realized with increasing clarity and weariness that there was more—much more—to live for. The capture and slow termination of the five-legged infiltrator would only begin the process. Somehow they must make their mark upon the Navy, upon the Centrality itself, upon everyone responsible in any way for the murder of a civilization.
Hopelessness breeds desperate measures. A partnership with the Sorcerer of Tund necessarily included a risk that the pitiable remains of Renatasian manhood might be used to some surpassingly evil
purpose, to fulfill some objective even more hideous than the obliteration of a system-wide culture. If anyone was capable of engineering such a cataclysm, it was Rokur Gepta.
There was a Renatasian animal that planted itself by the waterside and, in the process of giving birth, provided fodder for a predacious toothy swimmer. Gepta was very much like that toothy swimmer, circling expectantly. Shanga, with his tiny fleet (call it, rather, a “school”) felt very much like that hapless littoral creature who must die herself—sacrificing, as well, a certain percentage of her young—in order to give whatever microscopic meaning to life that it was capable of possessing.
On the other hand, only sapient beings were foolish enough to imagine that the universe was anything but a sadistic battlefield where brutality was the natural order and agonized screaming provided the background music. Not even a man as bitterly demoralized as Klyn Shanga believed there was any meaning to death.
Perhaps he should never have retired from the military, he thought with a deeply felt sigh uncharacteristic of the role he presently played or the place he found himself now. All those years on his farm, amid fresh, growing things under a kindly sky, had made him far too philosophical to be a good soldier ever again. But he was all his world had left, so he would have to do.
Klyn Shanga flew onward through the star-strewn darkness, reviewing the words he would employ to persuade his men. He wished fervently they were of some use persuading himself.
Rokur Gepta, traveling aboard the refitted cruiser Wennis, was receiving an alarming report from one of his advance escorts. The flyer had returned in a one-seat fighter approximating the size and combat capabilities of Klyn Shanga’s, but which was equipped—and this was rare, even for the navy—to exceed the speed of light. The little ship was half engine, virtually unarmed, and a tight fit, even for a slender youth. Piloting such a vehicle for more than a few minutes brought new meaning to the word “discomfort.”
Star Wars - Lando Calrissian and the StarCave of ThonBoka Page 5