Star Wars - The Adventures of Lando Calrissian Trilogy

by L. Neil Smith

XVIII

  WITH A VICIOUS tentacle-slash at the bulkhead behind him, the robot launched himself across the room, straight at the astounded fighter pilot. The pilot leaped up just as four chrome-plated manipulators seized him in their mechanical embrace, joined by a belated fifth.

  The pilot heaved his forearms up and outward in a hold-breaking maneuver, fended off a tentacle with a forearm block that would have snapped radius and ulna of a human antagonist, delivered a powerful turning backfist blow to Vuffi Raa's pentagonal torso.

  The little robot flew back the way he'd come, smashed into the wall, and was on the way back into combat again before Lando could so much as blink.

  “Master!” the droid shouted, once again wrapping his limbs about those of the pilot. “Use your medikit!”

  Fumbling at the belly of his suit, Lando grabbed the kit's injector, a flat thick coin of an object with a red side and a green side laminated over silvery plating. As Vuffi Raa held the fighter pilot momentarily, Lando slapped the injector on his neck. There was a hisssss, the pilot slumped, and Vuffi Raa released him.

  The robot seemed to slink into a corner, his red eye growing dimmer, his tentacles spreading and curling until the little fellow was a simple metallic sphere. The light pulsed feebly once, and went out.

  “Vuffi Raa!” the gambler exclaimed, shaken with surprise and grief. He hurried to the robot's side, without the faintest idea what to do for his friend. A tiny hint of eye-glow still could be made out.

  Lando stood as anger began to fill him. He walked over to the pilot. The sedation hadn't rendered him unconscious. He lay, breathing deeply, his eyes swimming in and out of focus, in and out of burning lunatic hatred for the helpless droid across the room.

  Lando turned him over roughly, tore the somewhat antiquated blaster from the man's military holster, flipped him on his back again. Poking around in the small cramped chamber, he found some scraps, odds and ends from maintenance projects, among them a two-meter length of heavy wire. Holding it against the shield-saturated upper hull, he burned it in half with the blaster on its lowest setting, and, without waiting for the fused ends to cool, returned to the recumbent pilot, twisting one piece around his suited wrists, the other around his ankles.

  Then, uncaring about what physiological damage he might be doing the soldier, he twisted the knurled edge of the injector until a small arrow was opposite the engraved legend stim, and clapped it firmly to the man's face.

  The device made its subtle noise. The fellow flushed, groaned, but his eyes grew clearer immediately. Lando pressed the still-warm muzzle of the blaster against the man's left kneecap.

  “All right, Ace: tell me your story and make it short. By all means don't cooperate. I'd love an excuse to use you up, one joint at a time!” The knuckle of his index finger tightened on the trigger, and the pilot saw it.

  “I'm Klyn Shanga,” the trussed-up figure said with a sigh. “I'll tell you anything you want to know, as long as you promise to use that blaster on me afterward. One clean, effective shot for an old soldier, what do you say?”

  Taken aback, Lando let the muzzle drop to the floor. “I say I'll let you know after I hear what you have to say. 'Klyn Shanga': what kind of name is that?” He squatted on the deck beside Shanga, one eye on Vuffi Raa. The robot didn't stir.

  Shanga shook his head and sighed again, trying to accept defeat. He'd had a good deal of practice. “It's the name of a dead man, friend, the name of a dead man. Who in the Name are you, and what are you doing fighting men like yourself with that fiend over there?”

  “I'm Captain Lando Calrissian of the Millennium Falcon,” Lando replied evenly, “and that 'fiend' is my pilot-droid and friend, friend. His name is Vuffi Raa and he never hurt the tiniest insectoid in his life. He's programmed against it.”

  The pilot blinked. “A droid? Is that what it told you? Explains the fancy chrome - I almost didn't recognize it. But I did! You don't forget the devil that destroys your civilization!”

  Lando scratched his head. “Be sensible, man. How could one little droid... and anyway, what I've told you is true. He is a droid, I've seen him partially disassembled. Let me tell you, if he's been permanently harmed - do you know why he's curled up like that and deactivated? Well, it's because he was forced to attack and restrain a sentient being, I'd guess, to defend himself and me.”

  Shanga slumped back on the deck, laid his head down, and groaned. “I don't know what the Name is going on here! Partially disassembled? Programmed against aggression? You don't happen to have a cigarette, do you?”

  Lando smiled grimly. “I was about to ask you the same thing, Klyn Shanga.”

  “Klyn Shanga?” said a small voice from across the room. “Is that what you're called? Master, I believe I can clear up some of this confusion, now.”

  “Vuffi Raa!” Lando shouted joyfully. The pilot stiffened.

  “You don't know me, creature, but I know you! Remember the Renatasia System?”

  The robot uncurled himself, stepped slowly and gracefully toward the two men, and lowered his torso to the floor, letting his tentacles relax. It was one of the few times Lando had ever seen the robot rest.

  It was one of the few times he had ever needed to.

  “Yes, Klyn Shanga, I remember it very well. And with more shame and regret than I can ever express. Master, the Renatasia is a prehistoric colony. No one knows how long ago human beings settled there. Long before the Republic, certainly. Long before any historian is willing to admit there was spaceflight. But it exists, and was totally isolated from the rest of civilization, not aware of it, any more than we were aware of them.”

  “You will recall,” the droid explained, “that my former master, the fellow you won me from in the Rafa, was an anthropologist and government spy. Well, I was with him for many years, a condition of mutual discomfort and dissatisfaction, I assure you.

  “An independent trader, much like yourself, Master, had stumbled across the Renatasia, and my master was designated to check out his findings, reported because there is a standing reward for such discoveries.

  “Forgive me, Freeman Shanga - oh, it's Colonel, is it? - well, forgive me, sir, but the Renatasia was a backward place in the technological sense. My master surmised that, sometime after the original colonization, it had been cut off from whatever system the settlers had come from, and, over the next dozen generations, had slid back into barbarism - perhaps even further. As it turned out, they had climbed back high enough to have commercial interplanetary travel within their own system, but had not discovered faster-than-light modalities.

  “It was this which was their undoing. The government had classified them as socially retarded and suitable for forcible redevelopments variety of wholesale 'therapy' that is a thin euphemism for ruthless exploitation. The Renatasia System, unable to defend itself, was to be used. To be used up, if desirable.

  “But first it had to be surveyed, analyzed, inspected for hidden strengths. My master believed that the best deception was the truth - suitably edited. He ordered me to cover my metallic surface with a latoprene coating of an organic appearance, had me make suitable clothing to fit over my admittedly rather unconventional shape, and accompanied me to the surface of Renatasia III in an open, highly conspicuous landing. We announced ourselves to the local government - the system was divided at the time into separate nation-states that often fought vicious wars with one another - as representatives, envoys, from a galaxy-wide civilization.

  “Renatasia, after a suitable interval, was going to be invited to join. There were parades, Master, and celebrations. We traveled widely in the system, the honored guests of a people who hoped that this fresh contact with a higher civilization would put an end to war and poverty among them. We went to banquets, we made speeches. And always, always, I was the Chief Delegate. My master played the role of secretary and assistant.

  “We were there for seven hundred standard days, during which we helped them organize a single system-wide government, organized the
ir defense force under a unitary command, then greatly reduced its size. We gave them new technology - trivialities that would aid them not at all when our true purposes were revealed.

  “The Imperial Fleet arrived on the seven hundred first day.”

  “In the beginning, the rejoicing was only redoubled - until the fleet began collecting slave levies, demanding taxes, closing schools and forcing the Renatasians to teach their children the major galactic tongues to the exclusion of their own. Whole cities, whole nations resisted. Whole cities, whole nations were leveled.

  “Two thirds of the population were exterminated in the bungled pacification operations that followed. Stunned and embarrassed, the government left the Renatasia System. The entire matter was covered up and what was termed an 'incident' was forgotten as quickly as possible.”

  “We didn't forget!” Klyn Shanga cried from his supine position on the deck of the Millennium Falcon. “We had nothing left but our dreams of retribution! And now we have failed!”

  Vuffi Raa propped himself a little higher, began untwisting the wires around Klyn Shanga's wrists. “You gathered warcraft. I didn't recognize you for what you were. There were fighters from at least twenty civilizations in your squadron, and that booster engine was from a scrapped dreadnaught.”

  “Yes! It took us a decade to put the operation together, cost us everything we had! And in the end, it came to nothing!” He turned his face to the floor; his shoulders shook briefly.

  Lando untied the soldier's ankles, helped him to his feet. “I trust, old man, that you understand: Vuffi Raa is many things, but he is only a droid. He has no choice but to do exactly what he is ordered to do. Did you ever see him personally harm anyone?”

  Shanga turned to face the gambler. “No, no I didn't. What has that got to do with it?”

  “A very great deal. You saw how he reacted, simply to passively restraining you?”

  The warrior set his mouth grimly. “So what? You can kill a man by ordering it done. You don't have to bloody your own hands. Yet you'll be just as guilty!”

  Lando took a firmer grip on Shanga's blaster. “Then I suppose that means you won't give your word not to-”

  “You're bloody well right it doesn't!” roared Klyn Shanga.

  “Very well.” Lando, holding the weapon on the man, reached up and reprogrammed the airlock hatch. “Come along, Vuffi Raa.”

  Stepping through the bulkhead door, the gambler spoke again. “We'll bring you a cot and some food. I intend to drop you off at the nearest system, and you won't be harmed. I hope to convince you on the way, sometime in the next few days, that this vendetta is irrational. Vuffi Raa is a thoroughly good being, and would have died rather than destroy your culture, but he is also a robot who, even in the vilest of hands, must obey. I'm trying to do something constructive about that, too.”

  “You are?” a dazed Vuffi Raa asked from the corridor outside. “What, Master?”

  “Don't call me Master!”

  He shut the door, programmed it to restrain the fighter pilot, and shoved the blaster into a slash pocket on the outside of his suit.

  “Let's get forward, old thing, we need to decide where next to head for.”

  “That would depend, Master, on whether we are freight haulers or gamblers, wouldn't it?”

  “Indeed it would, except that, at the moment, we are gentlebeings of leisure. We have a hundred seventy-three-odd thousand credits I won on Oseon 6845, after all.”

  Halfway to the cockpit, the droid turned and looked at Lando. “I hate to say this, Master, but from past experience that won't last very long.”

  Lando stopped in midstride, a scowl on his face. He wanted desperately to shuck out of his increasingly uncomfortable spacesuit, get a shower, and lie down for a couple of eons.

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence. But we also have twenty million credits I sort of accidentally brought along with me from Bohhuah Mutdah's place. He won't be needing it anymore!”

  They continued along to the control deck, where Vuffi Raa began the procedure necessary to setting a course. Lando was glumly rolling another cigarette with crushed cigar tobacco and highly unsuitable paper.

  “Twenty million credits, and I don't have any decent smokes!”

  The robot paused. “Master, may I ask you a question?”

  “As long as you don't call me master when you do it.”

  “I'll try. Lando, Klyn Shanga's people, the Renatasians - I feel responsible for them. Their civilization has been all but obliterated. If they recover at all, it will be centuries before they're finished.”

  Lando nodded solemnly. “That's true. On the other hand, everybody has to start again, fresh every day, from wherever they are.”

  “Well, Mas - I mean, Lando, we have your winnings from the Oseon. Wouldn't the Renatasians recover a good deal more quickly if they had some help? After all, we're gamblers and adventurers. Being rich would only get in our way. I think we ought to give Klyn Shanga the twenty million.”

  Lando looked at Vuffi Raa, it his cigarette, and leaned back in his acceleration couch. It was a long time before he spoke.

  “Vuffi Raa, you're a decent, humane droid at heart. And, when you get right down to it, I'm not too bad a sort myself. Compared to the rest of the universe, we're the good guys. But as far as the twenty million is concerned, my little mechanical friend, forget it.

  “I'm going to enjoy being rich.”

  THE ADVENTURES OF

  LANDO CALRISSIAN

  #3

  Lando Calrissian

  and the

  StarCave of ThonBoka

  by

  L. Neil Smith

  This one for E Paul Wilson, Healer and friend, and for James P Hogan, who makes seven.

  I

  LEHESU SWAM THE endless Open Sea.

  He was large for a young adult, although there were Elders of his species twice his size and mass. An alien observer in a different place and time would have pointed out his resemblance to an enormous manta ray-broad and streamlined, powerfully winged, and somehow pleasingly sinister. His sleek dorsal surface was domed high with muscle.

  Others would have been reminded of the Portuguese man-o'-war, seeing the tentacular ribbons hanging from his ventral side, marveling at the perfect glassy transparency of his body with its hints and flashes of inner color.

  Yet, naturally enough, such comparisons would have been misleading. Lehesu had been born among the people who call themselves the Oswaft. He was, unlike ray or jellyfish, penetratingly intelligent. Unlike most others of his kind, he was also aggressively curious.

  He dwelt in a place the Oswaft called the ThonBoka, which, in, Lehesu's language, brought to mind visions of a cozy harbor on the margins of astronomy’s ocean. It was a haven of peace and plenty, a refuge.

  There were those among the Oswaft, principally family and friends, who had warned him smugly that he would regret adventuring beyond the safe retreat of the ThonBoka into the dark perils of the Open Sea. Few of them actually dared speculate precisely what those perils might consist of, what he might find, what might find him - except a quick, unpleasant death. For all their intelligence, the Oswaft were not remarkably imaginative, particularly when it came to the topic of death. They were a long-lived people and patiently, even fatally, conservative in their outlook.

  Others hadn't even cared enough to scold him. Lehesu, himself, was a nuisance and a danger, whose very presence was somehow inappropriate to the warm sanctum of the ThonBoka, a hint of the darker ugliness that lurked beyond its confines. To their credit, it would have been completely uncharacteristic of them to expel him, just as it would never have occurred to any one of them, regardless of personal opinion, to attempt to stop Lehesu from sacrificing himself to his incomprehensible exploratory itch.

  At that moment, he was beginning to wish he had listened to someone. The Open Sea was slowly starving him to death.

  He flapped his great manta wings reflexively to achieve calm. It was an awe-inspiri
ng, majestic gesture - had there been anyone to see it - among his kind, the equivalent of breathing slowly and deliberately.

  And for Lehesu, it was every bit as effective: it didn't help in the slightest. If anything, it only reminded him that he had a plight to worry about.

  He was not really frightened. For all their conservatism, fear came slowly to the Oswaft, panic not at all. It was just that curiosity was not a common characteristic among them, either.

  They had their ancient, venerable, time-tested, firmly established, customary, and honored traditions. Such redundancy was necessary, Lehesu thought, to convey the suffocating stuffiness of it all. Yes, there were ways of accepting innovation, After all, his people weren't savages. It happened gradually, over several dozen generations. The culture of the Oswaft was far from stagnant. It was simply, excruciatingly, boring.

  Lehesu, on the other fin, was a genius of curiosity - or a totally demented mutation. The conclusion depended on whom you sought for an opinion, Lehesu or any other individual of his species. In his thirst to know what unlooked-for wonders lay beyond the cloying safety of the ThonBoka, he was utterly alone. He could not so much as begin to explain the burning need that drove him into the Open Sea - not to anyone his own age, certainly not to any of the Elders, no, not even to the younger ones.

  Well, perhaps one day he would have young of his own. And if curiosity were something that could be passed on, they would understand and share his thirst. He chuckled to himself - how he would ever find a mate who could tolerate him might constitute something of a problem.

  Then again, it might not. It was highly unlikely he would survive traversing what amounted to a desert. Every fiber in his great and graceful body ached with hunger. He had been cruising for what seemed an eternity without encountering a molecule of nutriment, and it was far too late to go back. He lifted his enormous wings once more, unable to ignore their rapidly failing strength.

  Lehesu had never seen or even heard of a cat, but he would have understood what killed it, how, and why. Still, he couldn't really bring himself to regret what he had done. Curiosity may have killed him already, but it was vastly better than dying from boredom.