Star Wars - Black Fleet Crisis - Shield Of Lies

by Michael P. Kube-Mcdowell

  Lando said. "As though once we'd put our weapons away, we were no

  longer suspect. 'Terribly sorry, forgot our keycode, had to blow up

  the entryway'-- 'Oh, that's all right, come in and make yourself

  comfortable--'" "I've been asking myself from the beginning what kind

  of intelligence we were facing," Lobot said. "It's the most

  interesting question before us--" "I'm still going with 'Where's my

  next meal coming from?"" Lando said. "And Artoo would probably vote

  for 'Who put him in charge, anyway?"" Lobot patiently waited out the

  interruption, then went on. "I have projected how this ship would

  behave if you, or I, or Artoo, or Threepio were its master. Its real

  behavior does not match any of these models."

  "Pardon me, sir, but why should it?" asked Threepio, who had been

  listening attentively. "This vessel was not built by humans, or

  droids. We are not its masters. Its behavior can only be properly

  evaluated in the appropriate cultural context."

  "I disagree, Threepio. The conditions of the test dictate the form of

  the answers," said Lobot. "If that were not so, th e millions of

  species in this galaxy would have so little in common that there would

  be no need for your services."

  "He's got a point, Threepio," said Lando. "No matter where I've gone,

  or who I've been dealing with, the one thing that holds the deal

  together is that everyone's looking out for their own end. I call it

  enlightened self-interest, and it's the motor that powers the

  universe."

  "The conditions of the test are sentience and survival," said Lobot.

  "The form of the answer is to identify and neutralize threats. This

  ship has failed the test.

  trolled by sentient beings. It is a work of great ingenuity, but it is

  not intelligent."

  "I see," said Threepio. "Master Lando, should I discontinue my efforts

  to contact the masters of this vessel?"

  "Just hang on, Threepio," said Lando. "I'm still not sold on this.

  Lobot, a ship of this size and complexity, successfully evading capture

  for more than a hundred years--there must be something or somebody in

  charge."

  "Something, yes. But not something sentient. I believe we were

  deceived by the apparent complexity into invoking a god hypothesis."

  "A god hypothesis?"

  Lobot nodded. "When we spoke of the masters of this vessel, we assumed

  there was a consciousness observing us and controlling events in our

  environment," he said. "We even turned to these masters to save us,

  respectfully offering entreaties and hoping for their intervention on

  our behalf.

  "But there's no indication the ship is aware of us, beyond its local

  awareness of our effects on it. Its responses have the character of

  autonomic functions. I now believe the vagabond is an automaton of

  great sophistication, employing rule-based responses incorporated into

  its fundamental structure."

  "What rule could it have been following when it tried to suck me out

  into space?"

  "You were using a blaster, and caused a breach which did not heal,"

  said Lobot. "You could have triggered a rule specifying that fires be

  extinguished by exposure to vacuum."

  Lando's cheeks wrinkled as he weighed Lobot's argument.

  "So you want us to start pushing buttons at random, is that it?"

  "We know it responds to touch. We were probably wrong to conclude that

  it responds negatively."

  Lando continued to vacillate. "Still quiet outside, Artoo?"

  Artoo chirped a single beep, recognizable as "Yes."

  Looking back at Lobot, Lando shrugged and gestured with an open hand.

  "After you."

  Nodding, Lobot unlocked and removed his gauntlets one at a time,

  clipping them to tool stays on the contact suit. Then he jetted to the

  nearest part of the enclosing wall, reached out both hands, and pressed

  the palms lightly against the surface. When nothing happened, he

  started sliding to his left. The wall of the chamber began to rise

  under his hands, as though it were shaping itself to an invisible

  mold.

  "My goodness gracious!" Threepio suddenly cried out, "Artoo, do you

  see?"

  Lobot retreated hastily to the middle of the chamber, but the

  transformation continued. Broad disks appeared and grew into squat

  cylinders. Ridges defined long arcs across the display, shadowing the

  rippled patterns spilling down the curves of a hemisphere. Color

  appeared but did not overwhelm--there were swirls of a pale blue and

  spikes of a soft yellow, and none respected the boundaries of the

  geometries they overlaid.

  Lando's eyes twinkled with delight. "I 'never thought you were the

  artistic type, Lobot."

  Returning to the wall, Lobot touched the drumlike surface of one of the

  cylinders. The chamber was suddenly filled with music, a haunting duet

  of intertwined melodies that rose and fell like swells in a gentle

  sea.

  "I'm not letting you have all the fun," Lando said with a grin, peeling

  the makeshift glove off his right hand and jetting to the opposite

  wall.

  It answered his touch with a great rectangle pierced by two long

  channels and filled with finer detail than the sculpture it faced.

  Lando did not know the meaning of the pattern, but he could see the

  scar his blaster had left in it--a circular bite out of the upper edge

  of the rectan gle, obliterating twenty or more of the myriad smaller

  cells within it.

  The damage did not dampen Lando's enjoyment for long. The two men flew

  about the chamber like nimble, persistent insects until they had tested

  its entire surface.

  There was something marvelous about the way a simple touch of the hand

  brought the empty chamber to life.

  But the most splendid discovery of all-in Lando's eyes, at least--was

  the doorway that opened for him at one end of the chamber, and its

  twin, which Lobot manifested at the other.

  Lando did not know where either might lead them, but he much preferred

  an uncertain choice to no choice at all.

  In the captain's wardroom aboard Glorious, two pieces of metal rested

  on a table beside a contact suit gauntlet. The longer of them was

  badly twisted. The ends of both were scorched with matching burns.

  Colonel Pakkpekatt held the shorter of the two lightly between two

  fingers, turning it over for examination.

  "You're certain?" he asked.

  "Yes, Colonel," said Taisden. "This is the frame of a Hired Hand

  CarryAll, a common self-stabilizing equipment sled."

  "Ownership?"

  "The registry code indicates it is the property of a Hierko Nochet, a

  Babbet adventure guide and onetime acquaintance of Lando Calrissian.

  We believe that the general acquired this and certain other property

  from Nochet in a sabacc tournament two years ago."

  "Have you had it analyzed for biological identifiers?"

  "It was' swept immediately after retrieval," said Technical Agent

  Pleck. "There are trace markers consistent with human handling, but I

  cannot confirm that either Calrissian or the cyborg is the source." />
  "Why not?"

  "Sir, it's, uh, a bit awkward--we have no bioprofile of the general to

  compare it to."

  Pakkpekatt bared his teeth. "A flag officer of the Fleet? To say

  nothing of his history before joining the Rebellion, and since leaving

  it. How is this possible?"

  "I don't know, sir. We have found records that indicate his bioprofile

  was recorded at least three times, but the profiles themselves have

  disappeared. And the clerk of records on Cloud City refuses even to

  answer our inquiries, citing something he called the Founder's

  Contract."

  Shaking his head, Pakkpekatt said, "Under his uniform, General

  Calrissian remains a smuggler and a scoundrel. Was anything else found

  in the sweep, Pleck?"

  The agent frowned. "Yes, Colonel--though I don't know what

  significance to assign to it."

  "Tell me what you can."

  "Yes, sir. We recovered a relatively large amount of an unidentified

  biological material from the facing of the sled this area, here," the

  agent said, pointing. "The quantity is on the order of two million

  cells--I should say cell fragments, because most were mechanically

  damaged."

  "Mechanically? As if these pieces had been used as weapons?"

  "No, sir. The distribution was too uniform. More like--well, sir,

  more like you'd sat down and sanded the outside of the frame with a

  roughskin rat. I'm sorry, sir, I know that's rather unscientific."

  "You said the cells were unidentified."

  "Yes, sir. And they may stay unidentified. The leading theory is that

  they may be artificial cells, a mechanism rather than an organism. The

  genetic sequences are much too short and seem to have little extra

  material.

  With your permission, we'd like to use one of Glorious's hyperspace

  probes to send a sample back to the Exobi-ology Institute on

  Coruscant."

  Pakkpekatt bared his teeth. "See to it, Lieutenant," he growled. "It

  should have been done when you first thought of it."

  The agent hurriedly left the room under the heat of Pakkpekatt's glare,

  and the colonel turned his attention back to Taisden. "Was anything

  else recovered from the location where these were found?"

  "No, sir. Nothing else. Stendaff is still on station, sweeping the

  area, but it looks clean down to decimeter resolutions."

  akkpekatt picked up the short section of sled frame. "A most curious

  kind of flotsam, Agent Taisden.

  Difficult to construct a scenario to account for it."

  "Yes, sir."

  "Are all of our people off Marauder now?"

  "Yes, sir. The section came over with me, and Captain Garch had

  quarters assigned to them on X Deck."

  "Then I suppose I have delayed as long as I can, hoping that these

  foolish orders would be withdrawn," said Pakkpekatt. "Advise Captain

  Hannser that I am releasing Marauder from this command effective

  immediately.

  He is to return his ship at best possible speed to Krenhner Sector

  Station and report to the commodore there."

  Taisden nodded. "I'll see to it immediately, sir."

  Left alone in the wardroom, Colonel Pakkpekatt slowly cupped his right

  hand and began to smack it against the table, driving his friction pads

  against the retracted points of his nails. The pain proved unequal to

  the anger he was wrestling, so he methodically increased both the force

  and frequency of the blows.

  There was an eerie deliberateness to his self-abuse, and his face

  remained expressionless throughout. He did not stop until the pads

  were swollen and pulpy-soft, and the pain shooting up through his arm

  and deep into his chest had bled off the restless need that impatience

  and frustration had bred in his pedrokk gland--the fighter's heart.

  By that time Marauder was ready to depart, and Pakkpekatt waited until

  he had watched it go, jumping toward Krenhner the moment it cleared

  convoy radius.

  Then he turned to his recording log and began at last to dictate a

  report he did not want to make for a supervising committee he no longer

  could say he respected.

  Four little ships, groping through the dark for a few short days. That

  is all your lives are worth to them. I n ever would have thought I

  would see such dishonor. I never thought I would feel such shame.

  Over the next several hours, Artoo added twenty chambers to his map of

  the vagabond, numbering each in turn as the team visited it. To help

  them remember where they had been, he also recorded for each a fish-eye

  holo of what Lando had dubbed "the pop-ups."

  So far, they had discovered two basic patterns for the pop-ups. Eight

  of the chambers were like the first--one side of the chamber would

  reveal a large figure that might have been a sigil, a sculpture, or

  symbolic writing.

  The opposite face would reveal a finely detailed geometric design that

  Lando and Lobot both were convinced was the map of a temple or small

  city. Somewhere in every map room was a key that triggered Qella

  music, though every "song" was different from the others.

  Apart from the music, the pop-ups in the map rooms appeared to be

  static. They remained on display as long as the team lingered; when

  the team moved on to another chamber and the connecting portal closed,

  the pop-ups collapsed and vanished as quickly as they had appeared.

  Next in sequence after every map room came one or more of what Lobot

  dubbed "gadget rooms." In them the team found a variety of mostly

  mysterious pop-ups that might move, change color, hum, or change shape

  when touched. But with a very few exceptions, the gad gets had no

  decipherable function, and none caused any detectable change in the

  status of the ship.

  "I still think these could be control rooms," Lando said as they

  prepared to leave chamber 20. "We just don't know what we're

  controlling. We could be driving the custodian crazy, lowering the

  heat in the 'freshers and changing the channel on his CosmiComm

  service."

  One welcome discovery was that when they entered a chamber by

  conventional means--through the por-tals-the chamber provided its own

  illumination. Power had become critical enough for Artoo that, back in

  chamber 11, Lando had coupled him to Threepio for an energy

  transfusion. The protocol droid, carried everywhere by Lobot or Artoo,

  was consuming very little power directly.

  "Yes, by all means. You should take it all," he said, looking down at

  his chest as Lando snapped the transfer cable into the recharge

  coupling. "I'm nothing but a burden to you. I don't know why you ever

  brought me on this mission, Master Lando. I'm completely useless to

  you. Give all my power to Artoo and go on without me.

  Leave me here in the dark."

  With a will, Lando resisted the temptation to take the droid at his

  word.

  Chamber 21 was another map room, the ninth. The sigil resembled a

  feathered embracing a cluster of fist-size spheres. The map was an

  irregular pentagon, with one side twice as long as the others and the

  same shape echoed in the ope
n area at the very center. Neither Lobot

  nor Lando could find a music key, but their attempts seemed to trigger

  something quite different, and startling.

  At first, there was just a pale pink glow slowly pulsing in a structure

  near the long outer wall. Then, suddenly, that part of the map erupted

  in a gout of fire that leaped a full meter up from the wall.

  The team fell back in surprise. "They've found us!"

  Threepio cried. "Artoo, save yourself!"

  "It's a holo--a recording," Lobot said.

  "No, it's real," Lando said. "Look at your suit sen-sors--wait, Artoo,

  don't!" He lunged toward the droid, who was busily unlimbering the

  nozzle of his fire extinguisher.

  By the time the struggle was over, the entire map had been replaced by

  a five-sided black scar, and the chamber was half choked by a

  white-soot smoke.

  Lando herded them back into chamber 20, where they waited the two

  minutes they had learned it took for a room to reset. When they

  reentered 2], the black scar was gone, and with it the smoke. With

  their backs practically pressed 'against the sigil, they then watched a

  replay.

  The initial blast came from the same structure, after the same pulsing