Star Wars - Lando Calrissian and the StarCave of ThonBoka

by L. Neil Smith

  “Do you want this end-wrench, Vuffi, or the adjustable spanner?”

  The robot glanced back at his master, squatting on the deck plates with one leg thrust under the bench for leverage and security, much like the cigar. Lando leaned on a tool chest, assisting. They’d lifted a repair port and the robot peered now into a complex maze of working and semiworking parts.

  “Adjustable, Master. This is a section I rigged after we beefed up the shields in the Oseon. All we had in stock were replacements from the Ringneldia, and everything in that system is standardized around the diameter of some native bean or other.”

  It wasn’t just the sudden pullback of the murderous fleet that bothered Vuffi Raa, although it had left thousands of dead Oswaft in its wake. While genuinely ignorant, or at least amnesiac, about his own origins, he could infer certain facts about his makers and their culture, and the trouble was, several of the facts in question were contradictory. And current events were bringing him swiftly to a personal crisis involving those contradictions. It was not a situation that any intelligence—even that of a Class Two droid—finds comfortable.

  He detached one of his sinuous manipulators, directing it remotely to thread its way into the starboard reactant-impeller units, deep in the bowels of the Millennium Falcon. Nothing was actually wrong with the system, but had it been a hair more sluggish, they would have been fried by the Courteous instead of cheating their way through hyperspace. It didn’t pay to tolerate the slightest malfunction, not when they were the only spaceship the ThonBoka had to put up against the fleet. Those devices not only fed the engines, which was fairly important in itself, but the deflector shields as well. Vuffi Raa and Lando needed every fractional advantage if they weren’t going to sell their lives cheaply.

  “For example,” the gambler continued, craning his neck to see what the robot was doing beneath the floor, “there’ll be one group which will loudly—and correctly—proclaim that this undeclared war against the Oswaft constitutes genocide, although they wouldn’t hesitate if they’d thought of it first themselves. Then there’ll be a gang of middle-of-the-roaders who could do it better or cheaper. Finally, there’ll be the ones who regard the action as too gentle and indecisive. They’ll want the fleet to sit back and toss in a few planet-wreckers, and they’re probably the ones we owe for this hiatus.”

  A little cynical, Vuffi Raa thought before replying. “But Master, there aren’t any planets here to wreck, thank the Core.”

  “Thank three little blue suns out there that went kablooie for that. You’re right, although planet-wreckers could make things pretty uncomfortable for our friends the Oswaft—not to mention our tender selves. And besides, in interstellar power politics, it’s gestures and appearances that count, not actual results. I’ve long suspected that’s why civilizations rise and fall. Especially fall. Try adjusting that vernier, will you? I thought I heard the field blades wobble a little when you nudged it before.” He unstuck his cigar again and took a puff.

  Another tentacle clicked at Vuffi Raa’s “shoulder” and drifted away to check the readings on the control panels forward. It was possible, the droid thought, that the problem was simply an instrument failure, and it would be stupid to repair something that was already in perfect working order.

  Each of the robot’s five tentacles, usually tapering smoothly to a rounded tip, could also blossom at the end into a small five-fingered hand. In the center of each rested a miniature replica of the large red eye atop his body; he would see what his tentacles saw. This, and the ability to send his limbs off on various errands, caused him to wonder about his creators.

  They were hardly stupid; still, there were counter-indications. Here he was, preparing his master’s ship for a battle in which he, himself, dare not participate directly. Early in life, he had experimented: attempting combat, in contravention of his deepest-laid programming, had sent him into a coma that lasted nearly a month. He was extremely clever; he could run and hide; physically he was very tough; he could ally himself with individuals like Lando, quite capable of the defensive violence necessary to protect themselves and their mechanical partner, Vuffi Raa. But he, himself, simply could not harm another thinking being, whether organically evolved or artificially constructed.

  It just didn’t make sense. Vuffi Raa took a certain pride in the fact that he was a highly valuable machine, more so, strictly speaking, than the starship he was servicing. Simply as a market consideration, he had a duty to protect his life; anyone attempting to take it demonstrated, by that very act, that they were less valuable, at least in any moral sense that made sense.

  Separating a third tentacle from his body, Vuffi Raa dispatched it to check the readiness of the ship’s weapons systems, particularly the quad-guns of which Lando was so fond. The Millennium Falcon had always fairly bristled with armament, yet, with only two crew-beings to man her, and one of them a pacifist at that, they’d always meant to tie the weapons together cybernetically somehow. In this brief interlude between confrontations with the fleet, they’d scarcely more than begun the task.

  His inhibitions could be stretched, Vuffi Raa had discovered. Knowing full well, for example, that the preparations furthered violent activity, he could nevertheless perform them. Moreover, he could fly the Falcon for Lando, maneuvering properly to assure his destruction of the enemy.

  How very peculiar, thought the robot. Who made me this way, and what did they intend by it?

  “What in the name of the Edge, the Core, and everything in between are they waiting for out there?”

  Lando fidgeted at the table as Vuffi Raa watched him disassemble and clean his tiny five-shot stingbeam as a final, albeit somewhat silly, preparation for the coming battle. They were in the passenger lounge. The deckplate gravity was set at full normal, and that, thought the robot, was a bad sign. His master liked free-fall best for thinking.

  “For somebody else to get here,” a tinny, electronically relayed voice answered. It was Lehesu, visible in a monitor screen the robot had installed. In reality, the great being hovered outside in the void not far from the Falcon. Given his size, and Lando’s environmental requirements, this was the closest the three could come to normal face-to-face conversation.

  “What?”

  Lando stopped what he was doing with a jolt, one hand poised on the cleaning brush, elbow in the air, shoulders suddenly hunched as if someone had punched him in the stomach. He rose. Slowly he turned, step by step he approached the monitor until his nose nearly rested on the screen. At his side, the half-cleaned weapon dripped solvent on the deck plates.

  “Who—” he demanded of the manta creature, “—and how the deuce do you know?” Some sort of fire flickered in the gambler’s eyes, but even Vuffi Raa, long acquainted with the man’s moods, couldn’t guess what it signified now.

  “Why, Lando, somebody named Wennis,” Lehesu answered in a tone of injured innocence. He’d come a long way, learning to interpret human vocal inflections and the images of facial expressions he received directly in his brain from the ship’s transmitter. He was disturbed now because his friend looked and sounded angry with him.

  “As to how I know: it’s practically the only thing they’re talking about out there, can’t you hear them? Something’s going to happen when Wennis gets here, something big. Somebody else named Scuttlebutt has it that—”

  “Oh my aching field density equalizers!” As the robot watched, his master’s expression changed, like the face on a sabacc card, from puzzled to exasperated to delighted. The gambler crossed the room again in two strides, threw himself into a recliner, dug around in his shipsuit pockets and extracted a cigar.

  “No, Lehesu, I can’t hear them, remember? And even if I could—well, Vuffi Raa can ‘hear’ radio signals, but the military uses codes that are intended to preclude eavesdropping.”

  He lit the cigar, heedless of the flammable fluid all over his hands.

  “Dear me!” cried the Oswaft in real distress, “have I been doing something
unethical? I shall cease immed—”

  Lando sat up abruptly, pointing his cigar at the monitor like a weapon. “You’ll do nothing of the sort—you can’t do anything unethical to those goons, it’s philosophically impossible! Here I’ve been getting ready to die bravely, and now, casually, you’ve given us all a chance to survive! By gadfrey, Vuffi Raa, old corkscrew, let’s break out a bottle of—OWWWWCH!”

  Lando’s hands glowed a flickering blue as he leaped up from the recliner and began running around the room. Without hesitation, Vuffi Raa thrust out a tentacle and tripped him; he flopped on the deck, yelling, while the robot tossed a jacket that had been hanging on the back of the lounger over the gambler’s hands, and wrapped it tight. The fire was out.

  “What’s the matter over there?” the monitor demanded. “Are you all right?”

  “I will be, once I learn not to play with fire,” Lando answered as he sat up. He winced as Vuffi Raa unwrapped the jacket. His hands were tender, but not badly burned. The droid was gone a moment, returned with a sprayer of plaskin and coated Lando’s hands until they were shiny with it.

  The gambler flexed his fingers with satisfaction. “Pretty close, old fire extinguisher. I’d have had to pick a new profession if it weren’t for your quick thinking. And if it weren’t for this stuff—” With freshly dried digits, he examined the first-aid spray, then his brow furrowed in thought. He helped Vuffi Raa tidy up the gun-cleaning mess while explaining to the Oswaft what had happened, but his voice had an absent quality the robot recognized as the sign of an idea under incubation.

  Finally, stubbornly, he relit the cigar he’d flung across the room, sat back in the recliner, and was silent for a solid hour. Vuffi Raa played a few hands of radio sabacc with Lehesu, and let the gambler think. He was fresh out of ideas himself, and, like his master, had been resigned to dying at as high a cost to their assailants as possible.

  An odd thing, violence, he pondered, watching the computer change a Commander of Sabres in his “hand” to an Ace of Flasks. He’d inflicted violence on Lando in order to save him from a nasty burn, and hadn’t felt a qualm down in his programming. Yet, had some third person tried to harm Lando, the robot would have been helpless to remove the threat. Definitely a glitch there.

  It bothered him.

  “The Wennis is a ship, Lehesu, like the Falcon here,” Lando said an hour later over a steaming plate from the food-fixer.

  “So Vuffi Raa tells me. It’s a difficult concept to grasp.”

  “Well, grasp this: it’s the personal yacht of Rokur Gepta, Sorcerer of Tund. We’ve run into that fellow twice before, and not nicely either time. Now that I know he’s involved, this whole blockade makes sense. The truce’ll be over when he gets here.”

  The gambler suppressed a shudder, remembering previous confrontations. Once, in the Oseon, the sorcerer had used a device to stimulate every unpleasant memory Lando had, then recycle them, over and over, until he nearly went mad. It had been interference from Klyn Shanga, intent on destroying Vuffi Raa, that had accidentally saved him. They’d rescued Shanga from the wreck of his small fighter afterward and turned him over to the authorities in another system. He wondered where the man was now.

  “Well, in any case, I think I’ve got an idea. You know, in order to win a war it isn’t necessary to defeat your enemy, just make the fight so expensive he’ll give up and go away.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” the Oswaft answered, “but what you say makes sense.”

  “Sure. As I explained to Vuffi Raa, this blockade’s bound to have some opposition. It’s already expensive, we merely have to make it more so.”

  “How can we do that? We have no weapons, and the fleet, with its shields up, is no longer vulnerable to our voices, as was the Courteous. It has occurred to me that it was a good thing I was in a weakened condition when I met you, otherwise I might have destroyed you in the same manner.”

  The gambler waved a negligent hand at the monitor. “There was only one of you, whereas I’m told there were a thousand Oswaft in the party that met the Courteous. Never mind that, we’re going to let the fleet destroy itself.”

  “How?” Both Vuffi Raa and Lehesu spoke this time.

  “I have some questions to ask you first: it’s really true you can understand interfleet communications?”

  “Yes, Lando, so could any of my people, given a few moments’ thought.”

  “Hmmm … All right, what about this synthesizing business. Can you make any substance I ask you to?”

  “As long as it’s relatively simple and there are raw materials to hand, as it were.”

  “And the nebula: your elders tell me that there isn’t any food there for you, that it was all ‘grazed’ out, long ago. Yet there are raw materials …”

  “Yes, Lando, where is all of this leading?”

  “Out of a mess. One more thing: how long do you have to rest between hyperjumps, and how accurately can you predict where you’ll break out?”

  “Lando,” the Oswaft said in exasperation, “I think I see where you’re going with this. You want us to make bombs or something and plant them on the fleet’s vessels. In the first place, from what Vuffi Raa has told me of weaponry, bombs aren’t all that simple. In the second—”

  “No, no. Nothing to do with bombs at all, and besides, those ships’ll be coming in here shielded to a fare-thee-well. And in the second, I said we’ll let them destroy themselves, didn’t I? I have a plan to make the war expensive, that’s all.”

  He hunched over the monitor, conspiratorially. Vuffi Raa leaned toward him, consumed by curiosity. Lando was clearly enjoying this part, and the robot wasn’t sure that made him happy.

  “Now here’s what we’ll do …”

  • XIV •

  “GENTLEMEN, MAN YOUR fighters!”

  Klyn Shanga gazed across the cavernous cluttered hangar deck inside the Wennis as his squadron climbed into their tiny spacecraft. Even good old Bern was there, snaking up the ladder into his cockpit. He’d served his sentence in durance vile. Gepta had, surprisingly enough, been as good as his word about that.

  It worried Shanga. He wondered what the old trickster had up his long gray sleeve. Keeping promises wasn’t an expected part of the magicians’ repertoire, and the fighter commander felt it boded evil.

  The noise was deafening as impellers whined, refueling lines were tucked away, commands snouted here and there. There was a constant steady rumble of eager machinery. In a few moments the hangar crew would clear the deck, all inner doors would be sealed, and the huge belly doors of the cruiser would cycle open, giving the Renatasians access to open space.

  * * *

  “This is the confrontation we’ve been waiting a decade for,” Shanga had told his men, all twenty-three of them, lined up at a ragged, ill-disciplined attention in their shabby, mismatched uniforms. They represented a dozen old-style nation-states, most of which no longer existed. They flew craft purchased, borrowed, leased, and stolen from as many systems, the ships equally threadbare. In common the flyers shared only a thirst for revenge.

  “The Butcher awaits us out there,” Shanga had said, pointing vaguely toward the hangar doors overhead. Artificial gravity in the hangar had been reoriented to allow easier servicing and launching of the squadron. “He’s laughing at us, you know. His very existence, ten years after his crimes, is a mockery of justice. Well, we will silence that laughter, bring justice back to the universe!”

  There was no cheering. Some of the warship’s crew members working on the Renatasian squadron had looked up momentarily, impressed more at Shanga’s vehemence than at any eloquence he might have possessed. To individuals in a hierarchy such as they served, strong feelings openly expressed were a threat to survival, the highest virtues moderation, compromise, a deaf ear and a blind eye to injustice.

  There was nodding among the twenty-three at Shanga’s words, acceptance, a grim agreement, a pact. They looked at their commander and at one another, realizing that it might be for
the last time.

  “And afterward?” Bern Nuladeg lounged against the outstretched wing of one fighter at the end of the line of men, chewing an unlit cigar. “What’ll we do then?”

  “Afterward, we’ll …” Shanga tapered off. He hadn’t planned for there to be any afterward. There were a billion or more Oswaft out there, of uncertain capability, allied with the unspeakable Vuffi Raa. The chances any Renatasian would survive the next few hours were slight. Moreover, their safety afterward, in Gepta’s hands, was questionable. The sorcerer would be completely unpredictable once he’d won his victory. There’d be nothing to come back to, not in a fleet commanded from the Wennis.

  Shanga shook his head as if to clear it of useless speculations. “Afterward you’re on your own. Rendezvous with whatever ship will pick you up. Get home the best way you can—if you want to go home. For the time being, my friends, we live only for justice, only for revenge.”

  There was muttering, but it was in resigned agreement with what their commander had said. If there was any future, let it come on its own terms, its very arrival a surprise.

  They boarded their fighting vessels.

  Shanga strapped himself into his pilot’s couch, made sure the canopy seals were good, that all mobile service implements had been properly detached and the access ports dogged down. He watched the hangarmen file out through various oval doorways in an unpanicky haste as the big red lights came on to signal the beginning of the cycling process. In effect, the hanger now became a huge airlock; he knew from long experience that, despite the best efforts to filter and scrub the salvaged air, the rest of the ship, from control deck through officer’s country down to the scuppers, would smell of aerospace volatiles for several hours.