Star Wars - The Adventures of Lando Calrissian 03 - The StarCave of ThonBoka

by L. Neil Smith

  Thrashing frantically back and forth, he peered into the vessel's darkened ports, learning nothing. Gently, he nudged the spaceship, unintentionally adding an additional vector to her tumbling motion.

  “Lando! Vuffi Raa! Are you in there?”

  He thought a moment, then, despite everything he bad struggled to understand about his new companions, added: “Falcon, my little friend, please talk to me! This is Lehesu the Oswaft! Are Vuffi Raa and Lando still alive?”

  VIII

  THE REFITTED CRUISER Wennis was a trowel-shaped wedge of metal bristling with instrument and weapons emplacements arranged to overlap yet not interfere with one another's fields of effectiveness. At an unusual - and unusually heavily shielded - point on her after surface, between the great blinding arrays of drive tubes and deflectors, was a small chamber with windowless walls two meters thick. It could be entered only by a small auxiliary craft, available to the vessel's master alone, and then only when he had ordered the drives temporarily shut down. To navigate the small craft while the cruiser's massive engines were in operation would be instantaneous suicide.

  Two hundred centimeters is a great deal of wall, especially when it is composed of the latest, state-of-the-art battlewagon armor. Yet the armoring of the special chamber was not intended to protect its contents from the ravening drive radiations of the Wennis. It was to protect the Wennis from what lay in the chamber. Even so, it was a futile effort, intended more to comfort the one entity who knew what the arrangement was all about, to provide some sense, however illusory, of security.

  Inside the chamber, Rokur Gepta stood before a chest-high metal pylon capped with a transparent bubble the size of a man's head. Gepta knew the chamber and controls by memory. No light burned within it. He ran a gray-gloved hand along the surface of the pylon, watching with unseeing eyes as his fingers pressed inset keys. Inside the bubble, he had begun to create an infinitesimal speck of the most dangerous single substance the universe had ever known. A sickly green light began to seep from the bubble, filling the darkened chamber with malignant luminosity.

  The trouble with a man like Klyn Shanga, the sorcerer thought, wasn't that he was not afraid to die. It had taken Gepta an unprecedentedly long while to figure that out, so tortuous and alien was the line of reasoning involved. Rokur knew many individuals who were not fearful of death, in fact they seemed to welcome the idea, embrace the opportunity. They were eager to die, for their beliefs, for the government or the numerous causes that opposed it, even for Gepta himself. Such men were easy to control and extremely useful. Down deep somewhere they hated and feared life and were anxious to be relieved of the burden of living in a manner that would not disturb their other, contradictory beliefs.

  It was clear Klyn Shanga enjoyed being alive, which was what made things confusing. Rokur Gepta was not used to being confused, and it infuriated him. How was it that someone who loved life could be unafraid to die? The first conclusion the sorcerer had reached - not much help in understanding the perverse phenomenon, but of high pragmatic significance - was that the original expedition to Renatasia hadn't done a thorough enough job. They had done only two-thirds of it, and it badly wanted finishing.

  Gepta promised himself to assign that matter the highest of priorities once the current operation was over and he could think about other things. If Shanga was representative of Renatasia's people, that system could turn out to be a much greater danger to his plans - and to the government - than even the essentially harmless vacuum-breathers of the ThonBoka.

  He gazed into the ghastly glow before him, savoring its destructive potential. One cubic millimeter of the substance, established in a self-sustaining manner, would leap from point to point on a planet's surface, eradicating anything that lived, devouring any organic substrate on which future life depended. It was the ultimate disinfectant, the ultimate sterilizer. There was something wonderfully clean and neat about this substance and the very concept of it.

  It cleared up confusion. Life was confusion, and intelligent life the most contradictory and confusing of all, realized Gepta.

  Klyn Shanga wanted to live, yet was unafraid to die. Such a man could not be controlled, and, when he had something that the sorcerer wanted, he became... impossible! It had not been two hours since he interviewed the man, shortly after the Wennis met his ragtag squadron in deep space. The craft of Shanga's squadron were not interstellar vessels, and they were to have waited for Gepta at the edge of his home system. But so eager had they been for the ThonBoka (or desirous of leaving Tund) that they had departed early, confident the cruiser would overtake them before they ran into trouble.

  “It was insubordination!” the livid Gepta hissed, looking down at Admiral Shanga. Their confrontation was not being held on the bridge because of the possibility that things would be said that would harm discipline.

  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 molecules 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 O
ne 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.”