The rest of the bridge crew paid close attention to their consoles, cringing at the pilot's plight, but unwilling to interfere with his presumed destiny. They had seen a captain stripped of dignity and all but killed in that very place. They held out little hope for a mere lieutenant.
The scout gulped visibly, wishing he was back inside the claustrophobic confines of his craft. He was the best pilot aboard the Wennis, possibly one of the best in the service.
That was not going to do him any good with the sorcerer.
Nor had he been educated to say or do the diplomatic thing when confronted with malevolent and arbitrary authority, at least of such potency. He felt he would have been better served had such a skill been part of his otherwise exhaustive military survival training-seldom had the need arisen for making a fire with flint and steel or using a signal mirror to summon help.
“The Courteous, sir,” he answered finally, “part of the blockade line at the ThonBoka. In fact, sir, at the time, she was the closest vessel to the nebula. I listened to the traffic, sir, as I had been about to report aboard the flagship on your orders, and was awaiting docking clearance. This Em Falcon, an ugly old tub of a tramp freighter, was supposed to rendezvous with Courteous for purposes of trade. She'd been through the whole fleet that way, peddling tobacco and other civilian stuff like a vendor droid at a ballgame. Instead, she attempted to evade the cruiser and made high speed for the mouth of the nebula. That's when Courteous caught her. I never saw a beam like that before, sir. Must be something new.”
Gepta leaned forward even farther, towering from his pedestaled chair over the young officer. “And the Millennium Falcon? What of her?”
The pilot gulped again, appreciating well the fate of innocent bearers of bad tidings. “Vaporized, sir. She took the full force on her after shields and overloaded. It was visible all over the fleet. Sir.”
“So...” The sorcerer considered these data, the scout virtually forgotten as the young man stood before him, trembling at attention, his helmet under his arm. A runnel of sweat slowly crept down the side of the pilot's neck into the metal pressure collar of his suit.
The gray-swathed sorcerer glanced up again a moment later, almost absently. “Are you still here, Lieutenant? I suggest you report back to your section immediately.”
The room fairly creaked with sudden relaxation. An astonished and highly relieved young courier saluted his commander gratefully and departed the bridge amid the silent cheers of the cruiser's conspicuously disinterested crew members.
Looking forward to a good meal and something tall and cool to drink in the pilot's lounge below, the lieutenant passed through the bulkhead doors with a new spring in his step. The panels whispered closed behind him as he stepped into the companionway.
A large security trooper, one of Gepta's personal bodyguards, came up behind him, laid a hand the size of a telecom directory on the young man's shoulder. The lieutenant nearly jumped out of his spacesuit.
“Thought you'd bought the farm there, didn't you, son?”
The older man's face crinkled in a grin that was difficult to interpret. “Say, I'm just going off duty, and seeing as how I was aboard the first time we ran into that garbage scow the Falcon, and seeing as how I'm just as pleased she's a cloud of radioactive dust, what do you say we both go below for some liquid celebration?”
The lieutenant looked up uncertainly into the trooper's face. The clamp-like grip on his shoulder gave him little choice. He nodded without enthusiasm, and the two dwindled and disappeared down the corridor.
A short time later, Rokur Gepta stirred from futile contemplation, held up a gloved hand, and snapped his fingers. From somewhere aft and overhead there came a rustle of dry, hairy wings as one of his pets lurched out of its darkened, foul-smelling niche, flapped across the room trailing an indeterminate number of scrawny, many-jointed legs. It came to rest, perching blindly on Gepta's outstretched wrist, salivating in anticipation just as the bodyguard entered the bridge with a small, shallow tray. With his free hand, Gepta accepted a pair of plastic tongs, reached for something on the tray, and held it up before his pet. The creature had nothing resembling a face, simply a gummy puckered opening toward the front of its body, set between the wings. The cavity distended greedily at the touch of the offered morsel.
There was a moment of enjoyment, some sucking, digestive noises.... It belched.
VII
LEHESU CAME AS close to nervous pacing as any Oswaft could.
The giant ray-like creature drifted in the relative emptiness of space at what he regarded a prudent distance from the warship - guarded mouth of the ThonBoka.
Watching the watchers.
As always, his estimate of what was prudent differed somewhat from that of his co-sapients. None of them could be persuaded to venture within light-years of the spot from which the periodic activities of their new enemies could be observed, if not entirely understood.
Restless, Lehesu concentrated a moment, got his bearings in some manner no one but another Oswaft would be able to fathom, and hopped, without thinking much more about it, a few hundred thousand kilometers, as if the intervening distance didn't exist. It was a gesture of frustration. He had been brought up to believe such fidgeting was infantile, undignified, not to mention impolite when in the company of others. But at the moment he couldn't help himself. He was impatient, an emotion he shared in common with other species, but which would be beyond the comprehension of most Oswaft. Still he waited.
He wasn't at all certain when Lando, Vuffi Raa, and the Falcon would arrive. He had difficulty yet, realizing that the freighter was not a real person. The existence of, and his friendship with, the chromium-plated robot made this realization even more difficult to achieve. That they would not fail to come to his aid he never doubted for an instant, despite the genteel jeering of family and friends.
They had not believed the least of his tales about the Open Sea until the evidence had thundered up to the ThonBoka mouth, heavily gunned and, for some reason, angrily disposed toward the vacuum-breathing race.
This, of course, was somehow the adventuring Lehesu's fault.
Concerning Lando Calrissian... The Oswaft's brief sojourn into human territory still hadn't educated him about cats; however there were certain aspects of that animal's psychology he might have identified with. Hadn't the gambler and his friends saved his life?
Twice?
They were obligated, now.
Anxiety shifted Lehesu again, this time a quarter of a light-year, to one side of the nebula mouth, before he fully noticed it. He could “see” better from the vantage anyway. Metallic motes lost against a starry backdrop, the elements of the fleet themselves were invisible at this distance. But the aggregate was noisy. A welter of communication darted from ship to ship in a complex net of energies the operators of which fondly imagined was private. Lehesu had learned Lando's language in a matter of hours. It did not occur to him that the stirrings and mixings of ideas that constituted top-secret military codes were anything other than amusing games to those who employed them. He puzzled them out in idle moments, much faster than he'd overcome the initial difficulty presented by communicating with the gambler and the robot.
Had those in command of the fleet, those who had ordered its destructive presence outside the ThonBoka, become aware of that minor Oswaft capability, they would have redoubled their efforts to exterminate the space people. In this instance, ignorance was mutual; Lehesu hadn't a notion of the threat he and his people represented to those who cherished power for its own sake.
A small, thin cloudlet of interstellar plankton drifted by, home on the complex tide of gravity and photon pressure, tiny pseudo-animals and quasi-plants that formed the basis of the Oswaft diet, indeed for the diet of all the thousands of space-evolved species living in the shelter of the StarCave. Lehesu nibbled at them in a desultory fashion. To the small extent he was aware of them, he realized they didn't taste particularly good. There was a reason for that:
they were slowly dying.
The bottom rung of the ThonBoka food ladder was being ruthlessly and deliberately sawed out from under the rest of the nebula's ecology.
Every now and again the vessels of the picket fleet outside would blossom into glowing visibility as, in concert, they unleashed titanic energies, saturating the space around themselves with destructive particles and waves. It was at these moments that Lehesu (who had found it necessary to explain to his people something he didn't altogether understand himself. that these were not living organisms that besieged them, but artifacts containing living organisms) could see that the blockading fleet formed a carefully calculated pattern through whose fields of fire not one molecule of pre-organic substance could sift unassaulted.
What did come through was spoiled and tasted terrible.
If that were not enough, the ships sprayed a kind of poisonzymes designed to smash the complex natural molecular arrangements of deep space, reduce them to constituent atoms, and destroy their nutritive value. The Oswaft and their environment were being coldly and systematically starved to death by an implacable enemy they did not know, hadn't picked, had owed no animosity.
Until now.
“Yellow Niner, this is Hosrel XI Perimeter Control, we have a bandit at coordinates three-five-oh-two-three. Do you copy? Over.”
The young rating at the sensor screen had been bored until then. She had been bored for thirty-four solid weeks, and the constant drills, the frontier-duty pay, the promise of a chance at a commission, hadn't helped. Not a bit. But she was no longer bored.
If the bogey was a drill, it was something new. At that top-secret navy base on the freeze-dried edge of an already unspectacular system, anything new, however potentially threatening to life, limb, or the continued wearing of a uniform, was highly welcome.
“Perimeter Control,” the interceptor pilot replied with a studied drawling casualness that belied the fact that he was a year younger than the sensor operator, “we copy. This is Yellow Nine Leader Are you requesting a six-sixty-six? Over?”
The operator leafed quickly through her procedures manual. It was so hard remembering... yes, there it was: six-sixty-six, scramble and visual checkout of an unidentified target. Scrambling, in effect, was already taken care of. Hosrel XI Command kept at least one full interceptor squadron spaceborne on the perimeter all the time, and Yellow Niner was it, at the moment. She hadn't any idea what was being defended at the Core-forsaken base. Probably the navy was developing something unimportant, but they were giving security all the ruffles and flourishes.
“Yellow Niner, that's affirmative. Give me your ETVC. Over.”
“My what? Oh yeah: we ought to be eyeballing your bogey in about, oh, call it seven minutes, give or take. Got it on the scope repeater now. Looks kinda like it's made of plastic, doesn't it? Over.” Both the interceptor pilot and the sensor operator had been briefed, fairly recently, on new developments in camouflaging shields. But neither could discuss it in the clear over an open communications band.
Security is a sword that cuts both ways, and most often wounds the hand that wields it.
“Yes, yes it does, Yellow Niner. I have your ETVC at six minutes, now. Is that about right? Over.”
“Yeah, yeah. Yellow Nine Squadron, this is Yellow Nine Leader. As far as I know, this is no drill, repeat, no drill. Unlock your arming switches and keep the thumb you aren't sitting on near the button. No mistakes, now, or we'll all be plucking crystals in the life-orchards. Out to you, and over to PC”
PC, thought the Operator, that sounded sort of nice and heroically terse. She said nothing, but simply watched a dozen hard, sharp, shiny blips converge on the single fuzzy, almost invisible one. She had already sent nervous fingers flying over an alphanumeric pad, alerting her superiors to the situation, and other eyes were monitoring other scopes, now, within the subterranean bowels of the installation. She fastened her military collar and straightened a crease. Almost, she hoped, the target would be a genuine pirate attack or rebel uprising.
Promotions came fast in times of--
“Perimeter Control, this is Yellow Nine Leader. Where the Core is this thing? We oughta be right on top of it, unless you're - by the Great Lens, there it is! It's huge and clear as glass! We're making our first pass, using prerecorded hailing signals... oh yeah; over”
The strange vessel failed to respond, at least on frequencies the interceptors were permitted to receive. Instead, it simply disappeared as the squadron crowded it, leaving the fighters to mill around an empty spot like moths around a light that is suddenly turned out.
It reappeared to one side, a few thousand meters away, just as Yellow Nine Seven passed beneath its transparent wing, which twitched involuntarily as Lehesu struggled to regain his balance. Suddenly Yellow Nine Seven cork-screwed away, a smoking, flaming ball of crumpled metal, its pilot screaming something into his helmet mike about his deflector shields having failed to function properly. The voice bit off suddenly.
Eleven pilots whipped their ships around savagely. Eleven thumbs mashed down upon their firing studs. Twenty-two eyes widened as eight destructive beams - three had not been maintenanced correctly - converged on empty space. One interceptor, Yellow Nine Four, was caught in the crossfire. He'd failed to make a turn, due to faulty attitude-control, and vanished in a flash of energy and atomized debris.
Lehesu stepped off half a light-year, astounded at the hostile reaction he'd encountered, not at all like his first contact with the Millennium Falcon. And his people thought he was crazy.
With the Oswaft equivalent of a shrug, he turned his face toward yet another star whose spectrum showed traces of artificial, highly ordered radiation, and prepared himself for a longer jump this time.
Unaware that a densely cloaked scout vessel was right behind him.
The next system had been much the same, except...
They'd been forewarned, somehow, of this bizarre unidentified craft that had managed to destroy three (Yellow Nine Nine had missed the mouth of its Launch/Reentry tunnel and splashed itself all over a Mountainside of frozen nitrogen; little squiggles of liquid helium danced with glee at the sight) first-rate fighter-interceptors. The new group also ignored his frantic, placative signaling and suffered forty-three casualties, some of them on the ground, due to an unfortunate change of shift going on between two double-strength squadrons.
Lehesu had given up and gone home.
Eventually the fleet had made its appearance. The ordeal was a little more bearable for Lehesu than for the others. He was the only Oswaft in a hundred generations who had come close to dying by starvation once before. As some human philosopher in a different time and place would observe, that which fails to kill us strengthens us.
Lehesu knew his limits; he could tell that the pogrom was going to take rather a longer time than either side realized. To his less adventurous comrades, it was already agony, already an unprecedented emergency. They felt, for the first time in their long, long lives, a relatively mild discomfort, and were afraid. Some actually spoke of attempts to negotiate, to establish upon what terms the enemy would let them live, not knowing that their utter destruction was the only success the fleet's mission profile recognized. Lehesu wished his people would get angry, instead.
Thus, he waited.
It was some hours after the last of the energetic nutrient destroying displays that something unusual happened. Lehesu felt a tight, powerful beam of communications energy coming from the blockaded nebula entrance. While he knew the language, he didn't know the culture; the gulf between planetbound species and free-fall dwellers was so enormous that any understanding was a gigantic tribute to the Oswaft's intellectual capabilities. Whatever they were saying out there, it was frantic, and not at all friendly.
It happened again! Judging from the manner in which this second burst was all bunched up into the higher frequencies, something was headed away from the fleet and toward the ThonBoka, fast. Lehesu maneuvered that way, both by straightforwar
d distance-covering flight to keep an “eye” on the incoming signals, and by nonlinear distance-avoiding hops.
Whatever was coming, it ought to have some kind of reception committee.
Suddenly an impossibly solid bar of unbearably bright light lashed out, connecting the two points in space with each other. There was a brilliant flash, a scattering of reflections, then nothingness. A sparkling hint of metallic debris and smoke lingered at the very edge of Lehesu's sensory capabilities. The galactic drift carried traces of scorched titanium and plastic into the ThonBoka.
A long, quiet moment followed. Then, without warning, something materialized not far from Lehesu, out of the wherever-it-is that starships go when they're traveling faster than the speed of light.
It was an absurdly shaped object, like something resembling a coral-encrusted horseshoe magnet a tenth the Oswaft's size and possessing none of his fluid grace. The thing was tumbling slowly, end over end, while enormous volumes of dense white smoke billowed from its blast-blackened rear surface.
Naturally, Lehesu recognized her at once.
“Lando! Vuffi Raa! Can you hear me in there? Are you all right?”
The vacuum-breather swam closer, carefully avoiding the foul-smelling effluents issuing from the curved rear edge of the freighter. Nothing indicated that life had ever inhabited the strangely shaped craft. The glow-spots he now knew to be windows lay dark and foreboding along her surfaces as she continued to somersault gently before the space-going sentient, the random motion itself a grim presentiment that nothing rational lived at the controls.
“Vuffi Raa! Lando! Speak to me!” the Oswaft beamed on every frequency he knew. “This is Lehesu!”
Nothing replied.
Much more figuratively than literally, Lehesu cast a backward glance at the fleet besieging his home. He didn't know how he could accomplish it, but he swore, in that moment of grief, a terrible revenge against those who were responsible for the tragedy. To gain and lose new friends, good friends - in some respects the only friends he'd ever had - in what seemed to the extremely long-lived creature like the mere space of minutes... It was almost more than a being could bear.
Star Wars - The Adventures of Lando Calrissian 03 - The StarCave of ThonBoka Page 6
