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 sav
ed 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 shouted 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 doors in unpanicky haste as the big red lights came on to ways in an 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.
It was a good smell, he thought to himself, an agreeable one to die with in your lungs if you couldn't arrange for soft grass and evergreen boughs.
He flipped switches and the whining of his engines raised in pitch, the cockpit vibration skipped a beat and settled in a newer discordance with the other machine noises. Adrenaline was rushing into his bloodstream. By the Core, he was a warrior. Say what you like about that, you simpering peace-dogs, he was born and bred to fight!
The hangar doors above him ponderously ground aside.
“Five and Eighteen out!” a voice said in his helmet. Two fighters filled the hangar with exhaust mist as they lifted and roared out into space. The vapor cleared quickly. “Fourteen and Nine out!”
“Six and Seventeen!”
In pairs his men took to the void, as eager for a fight as he was.
His onboard computer held a three-dimensional map of the ThonBoka with probable locations for the Millennium Falcon marked therein. It was known that there were three small blue-white stars, and some artificial structure, much larger than the freighter, at their center.
That would be the prime area for the search. The “destroy” part would follow immediately.
“Two and Twenty-one!” another voice shouted, then Shanga himself felt a severe jolt and the blood stress of acceleration as the hangar catapult-pressor latched onto his command ship and flung it into sp
ace among his men. Others continued to pour from the Wennis in the same manner, in an order tactically determined by the motley mixture of ship types and models available to them. “Nineteen and Four!”
They assumed a complicated formation, hovering until all of the squadron was free of the hangar bay. In the center of the group lay Pinnace Number Five, the very auxiliary Bern Nuladeg had been apprehended trying to steal. Her after section glowed and pulsed with pent-up energy. They were still a relatively long way from the nebula, at least where the small fighters' capabilities were concerned. Even once they got there, it was six light-years to the center - approximately twenty-five times their own maximum flying range.
The pinnace, capable of faster-than-light travel, had been fitted with a tractor field. Unmanned, controlled remotely by Klyn Shanga, it would tow them into the heat of battle, returning parsimoniously on its own to the Wennis. He and his best computer doctor had checked the lend-lease auxiliary carefully from bow to stern for ugly practical jokes and delayed-action booby traps. He just couldn't bring himself to trust Rokur Gepta's generosity.
That worthy had been unavailable at debarkation time, apparently gone off to meditate or something. Just as well: his orders to release the Renatasian squadron had been there in his place. To the Edge with the sorcerer, Shanga thought. With any luck at all, they'd never see each other again.
He tapped the keyboard, checking the positions of his tiny fleet clustered about the pinnace. “This is Zero Leader,” he announced. “Eleven, tighten up a little on Twelve - that's it. Twenty-two, you're idling a little ragged, aren't you? What's your toroid temperature?”
The fusion-powered fighters would conserve reaction mass, relying on the cruiser's auxiliary to do the work, but they must keep their systems up for instant combat readiness. Belt and suspenders, Shanga thought, belt and suspenders. The old saw was wrong about old, bold pilots, but this was the only way it could be done.
“Nominal,” Twenty-two replied. He was a young kid from a continent half a world away from Mathilde, Shanga's nation-state. There'd been a time when he'd been supposed to hate that accent. “I think the trouble's in the telemetry, sir.”
Star Wars - The Adventures of Lando Calrissian 03 - The StarCave of ThonBoka Page 12