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

by L. Neil Smith

  He splashed water on his thin, elongated face, his neck and bony chest, ran a laser over his stubble, and remembered. He'd been younger then, of course, and his appearance considerably different. Afterward, he'd had four centimeters of bonemer grafted into each tibia, fibula, and femur to increase his height, proportionate amounts added to his arms as well, and an extra vertebra interleaved in his spine. It was painful, and it had taken several months just to accustom himself to the new leverages, the new bodily rhythms the surgery imposed.

  He was still learning, and, in the meantime, gave an unnaturally awkward and gangling impression. This he welcomed, as it added to his disguise. He'd also lost some forty kilograms - amazing how much that alone had rendered him unrecognizable. The hair had whitened of its own accord, as whose wouldn't in the knowledge that something of the order of a billion individuals wanted to see him painfully dead, and were willing to do something positive about it. He'd left the hair alone, changing only its style. It, too, served his purpose, which amounted simply to staying alive in a murderous business. He'd already outlived the average life-expectancy in his profession by over thirty years.

  The tap water shut itself off. He dried himself vigorously with the only towel he'd be permitted on the voyage, picked up the soiled shipsuit from where he'd dropped it, and crossed the cabin to the tiny partitioned alcove where his travel bag hung unfolded. Depositing the old clothes on the closet floor, he got out another set, dressed himself carefully and comfortably, then made another withdrawal from his bag, went to the unfolded bunk with a small electronic device clutched almost desperately in his knobbly fingers.

  He lay down, placed the mechanism beside him, drew a small cable from it, and fastened the eye-mask on its free end over his face. His hand hovered over a large green button on the side of the black plastic case.

  Then he paused in thought once more.

  The Renatasia had been a lovely system. He recalled it vividly: eight plump planets and a cheerful medium-size yellow star set a surprising number of parsecs outside the then-current margins of the billion-system Empire.

  Apparently they'd been human-colonized in some dim spacefaring prehistory, although no records of the event survived, either there or in “civilized” reaches. For the Administration a million systems, of course, were not enough. A billion wouldn't be. Thus Renatasia must be brought under its kindly influence.

  Renatasia III and IV were the jewels in their cozy and conveniently isolated diadem. From space they appeared warm, lush, green and inhabited by a people who used steel, titanium, and simple organoplastics, were capable of wringing useful amounts of energy from the core of the atom, and who had not only reached but profitably colonized every one of the remaining six bodies in their system, from freeze-dried outermost, to charcoal flambéed innermost - albeit under domes and in burrows, rather than through the total climatic transformation that even the Empire often found too expensive to pursue.

  They had not quite reinvented faster-than-light spacedrives, although they were fiddling with its theoretical underpinnings. Nor had they yet made the basic discoveries that would inevitably lead them to such mechanisms as deflector shields, tractor-pressor beams, disruptors, and disintegrators - a fact for which the Centrality navy was later to be rather embarrassedly grateful. For they could also fight, it developed, like the very devil. They'd been doing it for millennia.

  Mathilde was the capital city of a nation-state of the same name, located on the second largest continent of Renatasia III. Reception of the system's crude, flat, electronic sound-and-picture transmissions revealed that her citizens spoke a much-corrupted version of the commonest language of the galaxy - this was to serve as justification for the intervention that came later - and were the most prosperous and technologically advanced people in the system, their offworld colonies the most numerous and successful.

  The nation-state of Mathilde, along with others like it, was located in the north temperate zone, and divided its activities about equally between agriculture and manufacturing. Just like every other polity in the system, it had forgotten its long-past origins elsewhere in the galaxy. Mathildean writers and scholars speculated about what future explorers would discover among the stars, and whether there was intelligent life in outer space.

  A severely damaged civilian star-freighter had first happened upon the Renatasia System by accident. Once it had limped back to port for repairs, her captain had dutifully reported the system's existence to the government. No contact had been made by the freighter, which made things very much easier for the intelligence operative assigned the task of establishing official communications. The Ottdefa Osuno Whett.

  His academic credentials had always been the perfect cover for a Centrality spy. Where can an anthropologist not go and poke his long, thin nose into the most intimate and personal details of a culture?

  Before leaving, his superiors had equipped him, more or less against his better judgment, with an assistant, a rather odd little droid of obviously alien manufacture who said his name was Vuffi Raa and that, owing to a mishap of some sort involving a deep-space pirate attack while he was being shipped in a packing crate, he was unable to remember his place of origin or the species who had built him. Whett was scientist enough - and a genuine anthropologist - to be frustrated by the lack of information. Centrality Intelligence was even less helpful. They simply told him to stop asking stupid questions and get on with his assignment. He got on.

  Vuffi Raa did prove to be useful in many ways. He was a superb personal valet, had a capacious memory, an astute intelligence with an easy grasp for every cultural nuance. He was utterly obedient, except that Whett couldn't get the little droid to call him master.

  Actually, that turned out all to the good. Before landing their small, unarmed entry vessel on the front lawn of the Mathildean chief executive's official residence, among bands and fanfares and uncounted cocked and loaded weapons, Vuffi Raa had been instructed to disguise himself as an organic being with sophisticated plastics simulating skin.

  It occurred to Whett that perhaps the droid would then resemble his original manufacturers. It was a galaxy-wide assumption that droids tended to be designed in the image of their makers. However, he shelved the speculation; they had other problems at present.

  The robot would pose as the leader of the diplomatic expedition, an envoy from a starry federation Way Out There, ready to welcome the Renatasians into the fold. That was Whett's habitual deception at work. He assumed the role of humble assistant and secretary. This kept him neatly out of a spotlight he felt it would eventually be safer to avoid, knowing standard policy toward unclaimed but occupied territory.

  The Ottdefa Osuno Whett, lying in his tiny cabin aboard the decommissioned cruiser Wennis, en route to the ThonBoka, paused momentarily in his musings and finally pushed the button on the electronic box beside him on the cot. A tide of relaxation funneled into his brain through the bony wave guides of his eye sockets. It was followed by another and another and another, each successively smaller, yet still soothing. To run the device continuously would put him into deep sleep, a condition he must avoid in the event the sorcerer should call on him again. But the waves of rest were almost as good.

  He pushed the button again. More memories came to him, unbidden.

  After the initial, inevitable awkwardness of first contact, the Mathildeans, along with everybody in the rest of the system, took Vuffi Raa to their hearts. He addressed international conclaves. He presided over formal banquets. He was photographed with scantily clad media personalities. He was compelled to turn down offers involving the endorsement of consumer products. Even so, small replicas of the five-limbed droid began showing up in stores almost from the beginning, and several sizable fortunes were made for their enterprising creators.

  All the while, a short, plump, dark-haired Ottdefa Osuno Whett made observations and unobtrusive recordings. Estimates were made and updated concerning the strength of the Renatasian economy, the effectiveness of
the system's defenses. It was accepted as a given that invasion would unite the deeply divided civilization. Whett would have preferred to play upon those divisions, in effect to let the system conquer itself, but the Navy was beneath such subtleties. Some effort was made by the authorities to limit the pair's access to high security installations, but they didn't take account of a spy technology centuries ahead of Renatasia's.

  As he lay in his cot aboard the Wennis, Whett's mind was upon another day, another place. His hand hovered over the button of the electronic relaxer, just as it had hovered, in the small cabin of their landing vehicle, over a button on the communicator panel. Pushing the button would transmit all the data he had collected and trigger the invasion by the Navy.

  “Well, robot, the great moment has arrived! This will alter the history of Renatasia forever!”

  “It will bring history to an end in this system, sir, not alter it.”

  Whett was sitting in the passenger's seat. Their machine was stored near the hotel in which they were living, and the excuse had frequently been offered that Vuffi Raa required certain nutrients and gases in order to subsist in the (to him) foreign atmosphere of Renatasia III. There had been some thought of holding the craft and examining it - the military mind is the same the universe over - but it had been vetoed by a Mathildean chief executive very much aware of the visitor's popularity.

  “Cold feet, from a droid? Why haven't you said anything about this before?” Whett was annoyed. The creature was spoiling his moment of supreme triumph. Still, there was no specific way he could fault the machine; it spoke the objective truth, was in fact incapable of speaking anything else. History would end for Renatasian civilization within a few days of his pressing the button.

  “I am a droid, sir, constructed to obey. Your remark seemed inferentially to require a reply, that is all.” The robot sat in the pilot's chair, its limbs at rest, its eye glowing dully in the dim light of the concrete parking garage.

  “I suggest that you address me as master, robot.”

  “I'm sorry, sir, I am not programmed to respond in that area.”

  Savagely, Whett jammed his thumb down on the button. A small amber light glowed to life on the panel; no other sign appeared. The deed was done, could not be called back.

  Vuffi Raa's eye dimmed almost to extinction, as if the power to transmit the treacherous information was being drained from his supply.

  The next few days were bedlam, exactly as Whett had expected. The Navy appeared at the fringes of the system, close enough to be fully detectable by Renatasian defense sensors. They even let the local military lob a few primitive thermonuclear weapons at them to demonstrate the utter futility of, resistance. The fleet's shields glowed briefly, restoring energy consumed by the voyage out, and that was that. Almost.

  Unfortunately for the Navy, and high-technology aggressors everywhere in space and time, invasions cannot be conducted with continent-destroying weapons or from behind shields. Not unless you're willing to obliterate the enemy, and not at all if you're interested in taking what the enemy has: raw materials, agricultural products, certain manufactured goods, and the potential labor of her citizens.

  While the fleet sat tight and safe in orbit above the eight planets of Renatasia, 93 percent of the first wave of troopers were savagely massacred by the locals, using chemical bullet projectors, crude high-powered lasers, poison gases, clubs, meat cleavers, and fists.

  Eighty-seven percent of the second wave died similarly, even though they'd been forewarned, 71 percent of the third, and so on, The Navy was winning a glorious, disastrously expensive victory. Troopships carrying replacements began showing up at hourly intervals.

  Osuno Whett and Vuffi Raa had gone into hiding briefly after they had summoned the fleet. Nevertheless, they were hunted and hounded across the face of the planet. The relentless natives gleefully cut them off again and again from rescue by their uniformed compatriots.

  At long last they joined a force, a remnant of the third wave, which helped them get aboard a shuttle and into the safety of a Centrality battlewagon. But not before the ugly, merciless extermination of two-thirds of the Renatasian population was an evil, personally experienced nightmare they would live with - and sleep with - for the rest of their lives.

  Whett, in his cabin on the Wennis, pushed the button again. Waves of relaxation, but regrettably not of forgetfulness, swept through his tense and tortured body as tears coursed down his face. It was a rare moment: generally he merely hated and feared the remaining Renatasians, having for the most part burnt out his circuitry for shame. He had fled their persistent presence for a long, long time.

  Nor had he been unhappy when, at long last, his superiors had ordered him to “lose” the robot - both an unwelcome reminder and a dead giveaway to pursuers - to Lando Calrissian in a rigged sabacc game. That had been in the Oseon, and things had not turned out well for either the hopes of his superiors or for those of Rokur Gepta, who had personally supervised that particular operation.

  Now, alone with his real pursuers, his memories, Whett realized that it was more than revenge he needed to accomplish in the ThonBoka. He had to see that robot destroyed. It was a dangerous link, in more ways than one, to an even more dangerous past. And he had to see an end, as well, to Captain Lando Calrissian, who could connect his new appearance, adopted before the game, with the robot.

  Very well, then: Gepta sought to destroy Calrissian; Shanga sought to destroy Vuffi Raa (because he didn't know the real mastermind was a “harmless” academic he had seen nearly every day); that academic must now seek to destroy them both, gambler and droid.

  Still he wondered, after all this time: where had that accursed robot come from, anyway?

  XIII

  THAT ACCURSED ROBOT scratched his head.

  “Politics, saved our lives, Master? I'm not altogether sure I understand.”

  In reality, the gesture was more a matter of flicking a delicate tentacle tip around the bezel that retained the faceted red lens of his eye, mounted on the upper surface of his headless pentacular “torso.” But its meaning was clear; he had picked it up from long association with human beings. As usual, certain aspects of that association puzzled him.

  “Well, I'm only guessing, mind you, but a massive operation such as that Edge-blasted blockade out there, especially when it's being carried out in secret, presents a lot of opportunities to people envious of the boys on top.” Lando pried up his cigar from where he'd secured it to the edge of the bench top, drew deeply on it, expelled the smoke, and squashed it firmly once again, sideways, into the wad of chewing gum that, in the absence of gravity, held it where it wouldn't float away.

  “Do you want this end-wrench, Vuffi, or the adjustable spanner?”

  The robot glanced back at his master, squatting on the deck plates with one leg thrust under the bench for leverage and security, much like the cigar. Lando leaned on a tool chest, assisting. They'd lifted a repair port and the robot peered now into a complex maze of working and semiworking parts.

  “Adjustable, Master. This is a section I rigged after we beefed up the shields in the Oseon. All we had in stock were replacements from the Ringneldia, and everything in that system is standardized around the diameter of some native bean or other.”

  It wasn't just the sudden pullback of the murderous fleet that bothered Vuffi Raa, although it had left thousands of dead Oswaft in its wake. While genuinely ignorant, or at least amnesiac, about his own origins, he could infer certain facts about his makers and their culture, and the trouble was, several of the facts in question were contradictory. And current events were bringing him swiftly to a personal crisis involving those contradictions. It was not a situation that any intelligence - even that of a Class Two droid - finds comfortable.

  He detached one of his sinuous manipulators, directing it remotely to thread its way into the starboard reactant-impeller units, deep in the bowels of the Millennium Falcon. Nothing was actually wrong with the system, but had i
t been a hair more sluggish, they would have been fried by the Courteous instead of cheating their way through hyperspace. It didn't pay to tolerate the slightest malfunction, not when they were the only spaceship the ThonBoka had to put up against the fleet.

  Those devices not only fed the engines, which was fairly important in itself, but the deflector shields as well. Vuffi Raa and Lando needed every fractional advantage if they weren't going to sell their lives cheaply.

  “For example,” the gambler continued, craning his neck to see what the robot was doing beneath the floor, “there'll be one group which will loudly - and correctly - proclaim that this undeclared war against the Oswaft constitutes genocide, although they wouldn't hesitate if they'd thought of it first themselves. Then there'll be a gang of middle-of-the-roaders who could do it better or cheaper. Finally, there'll be the ones who regard the action as too gentle and indecisive. They'll want the fleet to sit back and toss in a few planet-wreckers, and they're probably the ones we owe for this hiatus.”

  A little cynical, Vuffi Raa thought before replying. “But Master, there aren't any planets here to wreck, thank the Core.”

  “Thank three little blue suns out there that went kablooie for that. You're right, although planet-wreckers could make things pretty uncomfortable for our friends the Oswaft - not to mention our tender selves. And besides, in interstellar power politics, it's gestures and appearances that count, not actual results. I've long suspected that's why civilizations rise and fall. Especially fall. Try adjusting that vernier, will you? I thought I heard the field blades wobble a little when you nudged it before.” He unstuck his cigar again and took a puff.