Shanga threw his head back and laughed. “I am not your subordinate, magician, nor is the least senior of my men. We felt like going and we went. Here we are, closer to the ThonBoka than we would have been, the better rested for having done something constructive to get ourselves there. Is it this that you find objectionable?”
Beneath the bridge of the Wennis lay the captain's battle quarters, which, like his command chair, had also been preempted by the sorcerer. A duplicate of the command chair was placed in the center of the room before a large viewscreen, which presently showed the depths of interstellar space, as translated by the ship's computers from the hyperdrive hash of what was really to be seen. The light was gray and even, matching the sorcerer's clothing and, somehow, his voice.
“You are a military man, Admiral, I oughtn't to need to explain these matters to you, of all people.”
The military man grinned and shook his head. “I was a military man. Now I am a mercenary in my own employ, fighting, because it suits me to do so, for the honor of a civilization that no longer exists. I recognize no authority and I desire no authority. My men follow me because it suits them.”
He grew tired of standing. The discussion was altogether too much like being called to the school supervisor's office, and it rankled. Shanga looked around, discovered a lounger beside the door to the corridor, tossed his helmet onto another chair, and reclined, stretching his customarily ship-cramped legs and relaxing.
Shanga groped around inside his spacesuit until he found tobacco in a shirt pocket. He withdrew the cigar, put it in his mouth, and lit it with a hundredth-power discharge of his blaster. Gepta's guards hadn't taken his weapon this time. He hadn't let them. Three of them had broken arms and a fourth, who'd gone on insisting, was dead. That was the real reason for the conference.
“Let's put our card-chips in the table-field, Gepta,” Shanga said through a cloud of blue smoke. “You're up to something - the way you've redecorated this cruiser is evidence enough bf that - and it amounts to more than simple revenge against one lousy gambler. And you need us. I've got twenty-three flyers in a battered assortment of fighters gathered from the scrap heaps of a dozen cultures, and yet any one of them is a match for any three of yours.”
The sorcerer gripped the arms of his chair, convulsively fending off the impulse to have the man disintegrated where he sat. There was too much light in the room for his comfort, and increasingly too much smoke. Yet he had always prided himself on an ability, a willingness, to withstand temporary deprivation and discomfort for the sake of future gains. “Oh, and how is it that you reach this conclusion?” he asked evenly. After all, the crew of the Wennis was the best the Navy had to offer.
Shanga blinked, considering his words. “It's how you throw away good people. Your whole culture places no value on the individual. Funny, because that's all there is: no 'group,' no 'Navy,' no 'Empire,' only individuals, who do all the thinking, all the work, that gets done. Waste that, and it'll come back to haunt you, Gepta. People aren't plug-in modules you can use up. That's why my guys are a match for any five of yours. They know they're irreplaceable, and... Look: you've got a drive tech who's pretty good, but doesn't have the right family or connections, or espouses the wrong beliefs. Disregard his unique competence, pack him off to the life-orchards or the spice mines, and all that leaves you are the socially acceptable incompetents. Starts to show, after a while; the machinery grinds down.”
A tiny portion of the gray-robed sorcerer that was neither illusion nor altogether human shuddered. And controlled himself. Klyn Shanga's time would come later. In the meantime, in order to prevent morale-destroying rumors from spreading through the crew, he would order that “complications” set in among the lesser casualties of Shanga's intransigence. They'd be given space burial with full honors; he needed to shut down the ship's drives briefly, anyway.
“We shall agree,” he said to the fighter pilot with forced amiability, “to disagree; it is not necessary that we hold the same philosophy in order to cooperate.”
“No,” Shanga nodded, “it isn't. What's important is that I have my squadron, you have this ship and passage through the fleet. Together, we both know Calrissian, have confronted him in the past. He'll become your prisoner - or worse. We'll have Vuffi Raa, the Butcher of Renatasia, to haul back in force shackles for public trial and execution!”
Knowing full well that a very different fate awaited the squadron commander - not dissimilar to that which he planned for the gambler - Gepta nevertheless replied, “Yes, of course. Then you will be free to rebuild your civilization.” A hint of cordiality very nearly made it into his tone.
“Rebuild Renatasia? There's nothing left to rebuild! We've become your stinking suburbs! Everything we have, everything we do is a pale, threadbare, plastic imitation of whatever was in fashion ten years ago in the capital! All we have left to aspire to is ... justice!”
Inwardly, Gepta chuckled. How right the admiral was; how much more right he would be. The sorcerer watched Shanga for a moment, sitting in his presence without permission, smoking, and enjoyed the unintended irony. Then he pressed a button on one arm of his throne.
“You know Vuffi Raa, Admiral Shanga, and we both have reason to know Lando Calrissian.” The name stuck unpleasantly in Gepta's throat; the two words were not the terms on which he was used to thinking of the man, but Shanga would not appreciate or understand the sorcerer's private system of references. “Now let us hear from one who claims to know something about what else awaits us in the ThonBoka, shall we?”
The squadron leader shrugged, looking suddenly old and tired. He needed to get back to his men. He needed-
A door slid aside, and a tall, gangly human being entered, a man with bushy white hair and a permanently sour expression pulled down over his long undertaker's features.
“Fleet Admiral Klyn Shanga of Renatasia,” the sorcerer intoned formally, “Please meet the Ottdefa Osuno Whett, Associate Professor of Comparative Sapient Studies at the University-”
“College boys, now!” the fighter pilot snorted, his energy renewed by contempt. “What's he got to contribute to this palaver, anyway?”
“Rather a good deal, my dear - Admiral, was it?” There was a note of polite disbelief in the man's voice as he examined Shanga's clothing, found a place to seat himself, looking first to Gepta for approval, and sat. “I am the galaxy's foremost expert - by virtue of the fact that I am the only expert, heh heh - on the Oswaft, the intelligent space-evolved life of the ThonBoka.”
“Some expert! According to our friend the magician, here, nobody knew about those creepy-crawlies until a few months ago, nobody. How much could you have learned in-”
Whett looked a bit disturbed, as if Shanga's disrespect for Gepta, or at least its punishment, might be contagious. “Sir, I am an anthropologist, the very same who unraveled the impenetrable mysteries of the Sharu of Rafa. I have lived among and studied the asteroid miners of the Oseon, I-”
“The way I heard it, Mister Associate Professor, the Sharu sort of unraveled themselves!” He blew a puff of smoke from his relit cigar and laughed, particularly to see that mention of the Sharu made even Rokur Gepta appear momentarily uncomfortable. Now there was a race of sorcerers!
“My title, Admiral, is Ottdefa, an honor conferred by my home system, and I would thank you t-”
“Forget it, friend, I got carried away.” Shanga looked back to Gepta. He was one of the few men in the known galaxy who could look directly into the sorcerer's face without wincing. “Okay, I'll bite: what's this all about?”
Without a word, Gepta nodded at the Ottdefa, who began again.
“The Oswaft are a most unusual people. I began observing them with an electronic telescope, at the behest of Lord Gepta, until it became apparent that they were aware of the instrument's emanations. Then, in a specially fitted meteoroid, I traversed much of their region, making observations with less intrusive devices. They evolved in space out of the clutter of organic molecule
s to be found there, and reached the pinnacle of intelligence, protected by the nebula that all but encloses them, and unaware that anyone else existed.
“They have a natural ability to enter hyperspace and travel through it. They communicate by modulating radio-frequency waves with their brains. Theirs is a complex, highly sophisticated language, and it is just about all the culture they possess. They have no need of clothing or shelter, and what little food they require drifts past them on a sort of breeze. Hence, they make few artifacts, most of them sculptures or bodily decorations.”
Shanga shook his head. “I don't get it. It's stupid enough that the navy is bothering with them. From everything you say, they're no threat to anybody; they don't want anything anybody has. But what's the point of our boning up on-”
“Because, my dear Shanga,” the sorcerer hissed, “they are allies to our enemies! We shall either win them over and force them to betray Calrissian, or they, too, shall be destroyed!”
Now, in his special secret chamber aft of the Wennis' drives, Rokur Gepta contemplated the temporary contents of a force-bubble stronger than the full battle-shielding of the cruiser. Perched upon its pylon, it contained a secret, an entire race, the Sorcerers of Tund, had died to protect.
At greater strength now, its ghostly flicker filled the room with evil dancing shadows, all of them Gepta's. He felt at peace. It was the only light he really liked. It reminded him of home. The home he had remodeled with its assistance.
Inside the bubble tiny forms seethed and sizzled at the border of visibility, like dust motes in a sunbeam. They were densest at the bottom of the bubble, yet many thousands more sparkled in the space above the bottom. They were lively, active, hungry.
Gepta chuckled to himself. In a manner of thinking, they, too, were his pets. He had harnessed the most dangerous forces in the universe and kept them there in a cage. He made and unmade them at his pleasure. And he had work for them to do.
Again. There was enough... substance... there to eliminate the life in an entire globular cluster.
The ThonBoka, all its inhabitants, Lando Calrissian, Vuffi Raa, Klyn Shanga - yes, and perhaps this arm of the navy, which was, after all, another obstacle to his desire for power - all of them would feel the agony of first contact with this, the most unusual of all his pets.
And then they would feel nothing.
He shut off the switches. Where there had been activity before within the bubble, all movement stopped. The green glow died abruptly. The motes stopped dancing. It was drawing near the time that Gepta had arranged to have the drives shut down again, so that he could steer his small auxiliary through the zone of murderous radiation, back to the main hull of the Wennis.
The force-bubble grew smaller until it, too, disappeared, leaving the smooth, mirror-surface top of the pylon, a simple pedestal of polished metal. Gepta smiled to himself, pocketed the one small object he had removed from the pedestal as the force-field deactivated, and began cycling the airlock.
How beautiful to contemplate an entire galaxy of worlds glowing sweetly thus, to imagine the whole universe clean and sterile, linear and predictable.
The One said to the Other, “I observe that you have brought the Rest.”
They were arrayed before him, rank on rank, less for the sake of discipline (a concept utterly alien to those beings) or even orderliness, than for the simple reason that all of them wanted to see and hear what was going to happen next. Uncountable numbers of them bristled with unfamiliar tenseness.
They were not altogether certain it was an improvement over their normal state.
“Yes,” confirmed the Other, like his companion, like all his companions, glittering in the cold diamond starlight, “and I believe that they wish for you to address them now, explain-”
“But they know as well as you or I,” the One protested, rude interruptions and strained emotions coming now with greater frequency, even at so vast a remove from their grand experiment. “They're all perfectly familiar with-”
“Yes,” his friend said, but gently, “and yet they wish it as a kind of ceremony, marking the passage of one epoch and the initiation of another, unknown, somehow frightening one. I wish it, too, if you do not mind greatly.”
The One hesitated, even though he had already assented within himself. After all, if those he cared for felt the need...and perhaps it would help calm him, as well. What sort of result would issue when this project was mature, however, worried him.
Already circumstances were nearly unbearable.
“My friends, as we all know, some while ago, a rather long time, even for we who are perhaps the most longevous race in the galaxy, at my suggestion we caused a being to come into existence among us who was, well, somewhat different, imbuing him with certain minor physical advantages, and a burning desire to know about the universe.”
There was a murmuring of remembrance, a stir of suppressed excitement. Change was coming hard and fast to the One, the Other, and the Rest.
“This being was peaceful, unaggressive even by our standards, for we had shaped him in this way for several reasons that made sense to us and still do. Nonetheless, he has become embroiled in one violent incident after another, brutal, sanguine clashes with primitive cultures. Lives have been lost.
“Yet he has learned much, and the time has arrived for us to learn it from him.”
The rumbling of comment from the Rest grew louder. The One gave them time to contemplate, then said at last, “We go now to gather him in. We do not even know whether he will be happy to see us, to learn that his searches, at least for the time being, are over with. Let us greet him in dignity and love, understand the trials he has been through, and treasure what he has to give us, for it is rich.
“And it will change everything.”
IX
TUMBLING PONDEROUSLY BOW over stern, and with the slightest of rolls to starboard, the Millennium Falcon slowed microscopically, her attitude burners sputtering at irregular intervals in the eternal darkness. Her roll corrected, her pitch losing its momentum, she stabilized and came to a full stop. There was a fitful, uncertain fluttering of red at her ports, scattered here and there around her battered hull, then the strong, clear crimson of emergency lighting.
From small jets at the rear, streams of milky liquid struck her aft hull plates, boiling off noiselessly in thick, gaseous clouds that mingled with the trailing smoke. A still-molten stub of structural metal projecting to the precise edge of her shield radius cooled and dimmed. The smoke ceased pouring; the interior lights and running markers came on full.
From a pressure valve in the circular hatch atop the Falcon's hull a mast extruded, silvery, slender, obviously being paid out by hand in jerky increments. It stopped with a springy quiver when two meters of it were visible. Lehesu, floating nearby, heard a familiar voice:
“Hello there, old flatfish! Lost the main antenna in all the excitement back there! That is you, isn't it, Lehesu? Glad to be here. If Vuffi Raa had hesitated by a picosecond, you'd be talking to our radioactive ghosts!”
From a rather different culture - one, for example, whose conception of death did not encompass fancies of an ectoplasmic afterlife - Lehesu failed to comprehend at least two-thirds of the greeting.
Nevertheless, he understood that his friends had safely arrived in the ThonBoka, and was overjoyed.
“Landocaptainmaster!” the vacuum-breather exclaimed, unconsciously addressing the human occupant of the starship as an Oswaft Elder, “Yes it is I!” He swam closer to the spacecraft until he could peer into its control room through the canopy. Inside sat Lando Calrissian, con man and sometime gambler (or gambler and sometime con man), and his mechanical would-be servant, Vuffi Raa. Full-time robot.
The two were still busily turning knobs and pushing buttons, attempting to restore the Millennium Falcon to some semblance of operational normality. The captain's seat harness lay unfastened, floating in the temporarily gravity-free air about his acceleration couch. So it had been he,
most probably, who had erected the antenna, aft and upstairs. The young Oswaft was pleased to have deducted the data, insignificant as they might be. It meant he was beginning to have a feel for what had been a totally alien environment and civilization.
“Greetings and salutations, friend Lehesu,” the droid echoed. “Not one of my better entrances, I'm afraid. And we both apologize for the delay in reaching you.” He looked to Lando, who was nodding, although whether in assent to the apology or as a comment on the robot's flying skills was moot.
“We were within hailing distance,” Vuffi Raa continued, “of the StarCave, several days ago, but it was necessary to work our way through the blockading fleet by means of deception.”
There was the slightest hint of distaste in the robot's voice, Lando thought. It annoyed him; deception was supposed to be one of his major stocks-in-trade, and Vuffi Raa understood that as well as anyone. Besides, how else were they supposed to have gotten through. the fleet? He lit a cigar and gazed out through the wedge-sectioned port at the Oswaft floating gently ahead of the motionless Falcon. Blockade or not, it was good to be out of circulation, beyond the reach of what passed for civilization - and of hired assassins - however temporarily.
Knowing the navy, he had a pessimistic notion just how safe they were within the nebula and for how long. But he had a plan for that, too, and encouraged by his relatively easy victory over the fleet thus far, he intended to relax.
“I do not understand,” Lehesu protested in response to something Vuffi Raa had said when Lando wasn't listening. “I believed that I had seen you and the Falcon utterly destroyed. Of course, at the time, I didn't know it was you, but...”
Satisfaction suffused the droid's tone, “It was my master's idea, really. During the time I described to you, while he was spying upon the enemy under the guise of selling things and gambling, I fitted out a cylinder of powdered metallic shavings mixed with various volatiles, and attached it to the stern of the Falcon. This we left unshielded, so that the cruiser's rays, upon striking it, would convey the illusion that...”
Star Wars - The Adventures of Lando Calrissian Trilogy Page 38