Star Wars - The Adventures of Lando Calrissian Trilogy

by L. Neil Smith

  Gepta was gone. There was no sign of him. Nor was there any sign of the means by which he'd entered. One instrument on Whett's helmet panel flickered fitfully in response to radiation leakage. Something hot was going on inside the shielded compartment, but he couldn't tell what. Whatever it was, it was unfamiliar.

  He jetted up smoothly to the rear of the compartment and inspected it closely. As he had guessed, there was no airlock, no door of any kind. He rounded the corner and inspected a side, then another and another and another. No sign. He applied sophisticated instruments, highly developed skills. It was a solid box of metal, approximately ten meters on a side, featureless, except...

  But that was ridiculous. Precisely in the center of the aft-most surface was a service petcock, opening on a pipeway no more than four centimeters in diameter. He didn't dare lift the cover, but he hung there in free-fall for a dangerously long while pondering, running through a catalog in his head of species and their capabilities.

  The Sorcerers of Tund. No investigator - spy or anthropologist - had ever gotten a crack at those mysterious old prunes. He'd regretted Gepta's decision to pick him up in transit, he'd wanted to see Tund, be the first. His employer would have liked that, too. The Sorcerers of Tund were reputed to have some mighty powers - if you believed in that nonsense - but he couldn't recall any legends about dematerialization or the ability to squeeze through tiny apertures.

  Magic? Perhaps there was something, after all, to the idea that...

  But that was ridiculous.

  XV

  ABOARD THE WENNIS, Rokur Gepta prepared himself for battle.

  There were mental exercises peculiar to Tund, disciplines on ancient ancestry; weapons to inspect, both personal and aboard the cruiser; personnel to instruct and threaten. Communications had begun flowing from the fleet. Gepta occupied the bridge, watching, listening, replying. A steady traffic of messengers rushed back and forth between the sorcerer and a hundred points within the ship.

  “No,” Gepta hissed at the monitor before him, “you will not deviate from your designated position, my dear Captain, even to pursue escaping vessels - especially not to defend yourself, is my meaning clear, sir? You are a ship of the line. You are expected to perform your duty as specified, never to question orders, to consider yourself and your command expendable in the service of society.

  “We have now spoken for two minutes too long on this subject. Out.”

  He waved a hand; the disappointed features of the captain of the Intractable faded from the screen. It was the third such conversation he'd conducted within the hour, and he was growing weary of it. Only the thought of what lay aft in its armored compartment, the lovely green death, enabled him to remain calm.

  “General Order!”

  An electronically equipped secretary hurried to his side, a recording device clutched fearfully in hand. “While it should not be necessary,” Gepta dictated, “to instruct officers of the line in their duties, some question has arisen as to the advisability of their writing their own orders upon no other discretion than the wish to preserve their ship or their personal interpretation of their purposes in being here.

  “To resolve these uncertainties, and as an example for future individualists, the commanding officers of the Intractable, the Upright, and the Vainglorious are hereby stripped of rank, along with their seconds in command. Said command will revert to the third officer in succession, and the six abovementioned personnel will be placed unprotected in an airlock, which shall be evacuated into empty space.

  “By the authority of Rokur Gepta, Sorcerer of Tund. Did you get all of that, young man?”

  The stenographer, his face grown white, nodded dazedly. “Y-Yes, sir.”

  “Good. Send it out and make sure it's understood that the order is to be carried out immediately. Now run along.”

  Beneath his headdress windings, Gepta smiled. Aside from his two sessions in the armored compartment aft, this was the best he'd felt all day.

  Vuffi Raa sat in the left-hand seat of the control room of the Millennium Falcon, setting up problems on the navigational console and cross-playing them through his master's game computer. He had to admit, Lando had been right. His scheme wouldn't win a war, and it might cost a great many lives on both sides, but it would wear the fleet down and encourage Gepta's political opponents to step in and end the blockade.

  Had he been capable of shaking his head ironically, he would have done so.

  He looked out through the segmented viewport forward, where he saw Lehesu hanging peacefully - at least to all appearances. He keyed the corn. “I have completed the modeling exercise, friend Lehesu. I believe we have a good chance. Will you not join the others with their preparations?”

  The giant creature swam closer to the Falcon and peered in at his little robot friend. “No, Vuffi Raa. I am aware of what I must do, and I am ready. I was curious as to the projections you are undertaking. Will the fleet truly destroy itself if Lando's plan works?”

  The droid raised a tentacle to indicate certainty since he couldn't nod. “Yes, as unbelievable as it may seem. You are an amazing people, my friend, and that's what makes it possible. The Falcon is as ready as she'll ever be, although I-”

  “You are troubled, Vuffi Raa?” Lehesu could interpret tones of voice even with a mechanical being. “Please speak to me about it; perhaps that will help.” Glancing mentally at the timepiece he carried in his circuitry, the robot gave his equivalent of a shrug. “It is like this, Lehesu...” He told the Oswaft of the conflicts he felt in his programming and that he was beginning to disapprove of those who had imposed it on him. It didn't seem right that he should be compelled to stand by idly - at least what he considered to be idly - while the Navy exterminated a gentle, admirable people.

  “I see,” the alien replied at last. “You know, we are in much the same position. I do not know whether I can take a life in my own defense, either. We are not a fighting people, as you so rightly have observed. Perhaps it is time for us to abandon life to make room for a more successful product of evolution.”

  The robot, not knowing what to say, said nothing.

  “Then again, Vuffi Raa, we should go away only if we cannot change. If we can, we are a successful species, are we not?”

  Momentarily, Vuffi Raa wished he could smoke a cigar like his master. It seemed to help the human think, and it lent a certain dignity to whatever answer he might give the Oswaft. “I do not know, my friend. It seems wrong somehow that the success of a race be measured by its ability to do violence. There are other things in the universe.”

  The Oswaft was no more capable of nodding than the robot.

  “Still, one must consider that none of these things are any good to one if one is dead.”

  Vuffi Raa chuckled. “You have a point, there, Lehesu, you have a point.”

  “We are going to be too late!” the Other complained. “I know it!”

  “Peace, my old friend,” the One replied. “That is not yet a foregone conclusion. There are no foregone conclusions anymore. And even so, it is an experiment. It would not be valid, did we interfere. Any result is a desired result, am I not correct in this?”

  They bored through the endless night at a velocity that seemed a crawl to them, although a good many physicists would have been interested to know such a velocity was possible. Behind them stretched an endless line, the Rest who had come to witness the results of the One's experiment.

  “However,” the Other replied, hesitating in his thought if not in his headlong flight, “I have had a disturbing new thought which-”

  “That was the purpose of the experiment, was it not?”

  “Yes, yes. But I do not believe you are going to be particularly happy with it. You see, it has occurred to me that, despite the unconventional methods by which you created our experimental subject, and despite the obvious anatomical differences...” Here, the Other made a gesture emphasizing the smooth, rounded shape of their kind.

  “Yes? Please
continue.”

  “Do not be impatient; this is difficult. I have come to believe we have certain responsibilities toward this entity - specifically that you do - beyond simple scientific inquiry.”

  There was a long pause as another several parsecs whisked behind them. Nor did the One reply at all. For once his friend had pursued a line of reasoning where he could not easily follow.

  “You are its parent.”

  “What?”

  “You brought it into existence. You sent it out into the universe. We – you - cannot blandly let it be destroyed. Such would be reprehensible.”

  Again the One failed to respond. The light-years rushed by as he plunged himself deep into thought, pondering not only the question of his responsibility, but the more disturbing thought that he had overlooked the issue entirely. Their experimental subject was a thinking being, not to be trifled with as if it were an inanimate object. Apparently complacency had cost him more than progress and the flavor of life, it had interferred badly with his ethical sensibilities.

  At last: “I am afraid you are right, my old friend. Congratulate me, I am a father. And by all means, let us hurry, lest we be too late!”

  “It's simple, really,” Lando explained for the fifth time with as little hope of success as he'd enjoyed the first four. “You jump into the middle of a pair of ships, do the little trick we've discussed, and jump out. The Navy'll do the rest.”

  The gambler floated in the lotus position in the center of the Cave of the Elders, Sen and Fey on either side of him. Each of the gigantic beings was at least five hundred times larger than he was. He felt like a virus having polite tea with a pair of bacteria.

  “But Captainlandocalrissiansir, it is disgusting!” Fey complained. “It is demeaning, beneath the dignity of any-”

  “How do you feel about losing your transparency?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Lando drew on the cigar he'd gotten Vuffi Raa to build a holder for in his suit helmet. There was a slight bulge now in the faceplate, and the air filters had needed overhauling, but at long last he could sit and think properly in hard vacuum.

  “Isn't death demeaning, beneath your dignity, disgusting?”

  There was the distinct sensation that the younger of the two Elders had blinked with surprise. “Why, I had never thought of it that way before.”

  Sen had remained silent through this argument. Now he spoke up.

  “Tell me, Lando, could you perform the physiological equivalent of this act? To excrete bodily wastes in order to-”

  “You bet your biffy I could! Look: all that this requires is that you concentrate a certain mix of heavy metals in your systems, hop to the right coordinates, let your pores do their work, and hop out, leaving a sensor-detectable Oswaft-shaped outline behind for the boys in gray to shoot at. Play your cards right and, human reaction-time being what it is, they'll shoot each other, instead.”

  Sen and Fey thought about that. For rather too long a time, Lando thought.

  “Listen, you two, you didn't hesitate to offer me all kinds of precious jewels, and you manufacture them in the same-”

  “It's not the same at all!” Fey wailed. “Don't you understand that it's different when one-”

  “Not from my cultural standpoint. On the other hand, Navy humans I know see a big ethical difference between killing animals for food and killing vegetables - although I've met a photosynthetic sentient or two who might give them an argument. Let's leave it that cultures often have blindnesses about themselves where other cultures see more clearly. Can you do this thing?”

  The soft twinkling of precious stones gleamed through the transparent Elders. “Those of us who can will rendezvous with you at your signal.”

  The gambler shrugged. “Guess I can't ask for more than that, can I?”

  He sensed that Sen was smiling. “No, I suppose you cannot, unless one wishes to emulate the enemy we are about to fight.”

  As his fighter squadron passed through the mouth of the ThonBoka, Klyn Shanga was fighting a nagging thought. Like a tune that circles through your consciousness all day (whether you like the tune or not - and, more often than not, you don't), he was wondering about the Ottdefa Osuno Whett. Why did that son-of-a-mynock seem so familiar? Where had he seen him before?

  “Seventeen, square up a little on the mark. You're lagging, and it's putting a strain on the pinnace.”

  “Roger Zero Leader. Executing.” He gave a quick glance at the other computer-generated indicators on his boards and settled back in his acceleration couch again. Where had he met the tall, skinny, white-haired anthropologist before, and why did he have trouble thinking of him as an academic. What should he be? A flunky of some kind. Whett was born to be a subordinate.

  But why? He came to the conclusion that it wasn't Whett's appearance he remembered so vividly. The voice, then? A high, whiny, nagging voice it was, full of a high opinion of himself that didn't seem to fit the vague memory Shanga had.

  It was like the false memories one experiences in dreams: you wake up suddenly (and often with relief) knowing that the thing you remembered never happened at all. But Whett was real.

  “Twenty-three to Zero Leader over.”

  “Go ahead, Bern.”

  “Sure. How come we're not maintaining comm silence on this run? I thought we were gonna surprise the little-”

  “They know we're coming, and there's only one direction we can come from.”

  “Kinda like that first raid we made south of Mathilde, after the Betrayal, right?” Nuladeg chuckled at the blood-soaked memory. It was the only thing they could do. The reminiscence wasn't that pleasant, although they'd killed a thousand enemies that morning, caught them on the ground before they got set up for defense. He remembered the shock he'd felt at the invasion, after all the friendly welcoming they'd done for Vuffi Raa and now why did that make him think of Whett again?

  “Zero Leader to Twenty-three. Bern, have you seen Gepta's pet anthropologist, Osuno Whett?”

  “Can't say as I have. How come?” Shanga could see the other fighter's craft on the opposite side of the formation, its cockpit full of cigar smoke. He wondered how the little man breathed in that atmosphere.

  “I don't know, Bern, but there's something nagging me, and it seems to be important.”

  “Stop chewing on it, then, boss. Sleep it over. It'll come to you if it's important. Core, you could use a little shut-eye, anyways. Sit yourself back, and I'll take the con for a while.”

  “Thanks a lot, Bern, I appreciate it.”

  “Just so you don't make a habit of it.

  “Roger, Twenty-three, and out.”

  The Ottdefa Osuno Whett looked over some highly peculiar data as he sat in the cramped confines of his hiding place. Outside, the stars appeared motionless through the ports. It was an illusion.

  According to the almost microscopic spy devices he'd planted on Gepta with only partial success, the wizard had indeed entered that armored compartment aft of the Wennis through a tube scarcely larger than a child's wrist diameter. And somewhere within that tube, according to these readouts, Gepta had ceased to exist, for the dust-mote-sized recorders had drifted in the tube and remained there, recording nothing, until the sorcerer again became himself Whatever that was.

  Whett shifted uncomfortably on his couch, not daring to show a light that might be seen from the outside, not believing the readouts, their displays stopped down to near invisibility.

  He'd known others in his field - anthropology, not spying - who'd eventually come to believe in the primitive magic they studied, otherwise serious scholars who thought that dancing, after all, at least when performed a certain way by a certain people, could bring rain. Good minds gone to rot from nothing more than overexposure, some malignant form of osmosis. He'd always resisted that, regarded it as a failure both of scientific detachment and personal integrity. Now, he wasn't sure.

  All right, the Sorcerers of Tund were supposed to have been capable of all k
inds of magic. No one had ever claimed that they were even human; that was a general assumption, and, like all general assumptions, was probably mistaken. Nonetheless...

  What species was naturally capable of the thing his instruments had witnessed? Gepta had returned through the tube, the electronic motes adhering to him again as he, what - materialized? And what was that weird, unknown radiation that, despite armor he now realized was not one but two meters thick, incredibly still leaked out when Gepta had been inside the compartment for a few minutes?

  And most of all, what, in the Name of the Core, was Rokur Gepta?

  XVI

  “MASTER, WE'VE GOT company!”

  “All right Vuffi Raa, I'm coming!”

  Lando jumped up from his seat in the lounge where he'd been programming tactics for the Oswaft. Out of over a billion of the creatures, less than a thousand had agreed to play his game of sabacc, live or die. He ran around the corridor to the cockpit and flung himself into the right-hand seat.

  “Where are they?”

  The robot indicated a tightly strung series of blips on the long-range sensors. “Fighters, Master, the same kind we fought in the Oseon. I make it twenty - no, twenty-five. I don't know what that big thing in the middle is.”

  The gambler nodded. “I wonder if it isn't the same group. They don't look like a tactical fighter wing, and they're using the same formation they did before. Last time it was a battleship engine.” He began throwing switches, bringing the Falcon's defensive armament to full readiness.

  “Oh my,” Vuffi Raa said in a subdued voice, “the Renatasians. Sometimes I think it would be better just to surrender myself to them. If only they knew the truth.”

  “Cut it out, sprocket-head! They know the truth, it's just too hard to let go of a scapegoat once you've got him by the chin whiskers. Let's surprise those mynock-smoochers by going out to meet them, what say?”