A cluster of fighters swooped past the Falcon, ignoring her while blasting toward a cruiser that was breaking up. Three Oswaft, concentrating all their power, had done that when one of her shields was down momentarily, due to a collision with a fighter.
Suddenly, Shanga's men were back, diving on the Falcon by turns, drawing her fire, getting in shots of their own. There was only one of Lando, and his arms were getting weary from their constant work at the quad-guns. The Falcon looped and soared, outmaneuvering the fighters again and again. Weapons flared, men died.
Without warning, all action ceased among the fleet. The blast and brilliance of shooting stopped as if someone had turned a switch.
Every fighter was recalled.
At the center of things now, Lando and Vuffi Raa and Lehesu watched as a broad corridor was cleared among the ships. Shields up, they were immune to the Oswaft, and, as long as they didn't fire on the vacuum-breathers, they suffered no more losses.
“Something on the scope, Master.”
“Keep me advised.”
Through the space cleared by the fleet, an older-model cruiser became visible, surface-coated dead black, bristling with an array of unfamiliar equipment. On its underside were emblazoned the arms of Rokur Gepta himself. On its sides were added the ship's name:
WENNIS
“- by edict! You are commanded to cease fire and to surrender to the nearest Imperial vessel immediately.” Apparently, Vuffi Raa had found the navy's frequency - or they had found the Falcon's and had patched it through the intercom. As he listened, Lando saw one of his auxiliary target screens go momentarily blank, then fill with the dark and terrifyingly familiar image.
“This in the name and at the order of Rokur Gepta, Sorcerer of Tund.” And then: “Private to Captain Lando Calrissian of the Millennium Falcon.” The wizard leaned conspiratorially into the pickup. “You have put up a valiant and brilliantly conceived fight, sir, but one which you shall inevitably lose, if only because I am willing to throw half the resources of civilization at you, should it prove necessary. I could bury you with dead bodies, and fill this entire nebula with the wrecks of ships, and I will.
“However I offer you an opportunity to minimize unnecessary bloodshed, to settle things personally and at close hand between ourselves, once and for all. Nor have I need for the resources of half an empire to persuade you. At this very moment the power is mine to exterminate every sentient being in this nebula, every flyspeck of life, every hope that life again will ever-flourish here.
“Behold and bear witness!”
He raised a hand, as if in a magician's gesture. Outside, from one of the ungainly projections on the hull of the Wennis, there was a faint, fast squirt of brilliant life. Instantly it streaked toward a cluster of gigantic Oswaft who, since ceasing to fight, had been watching and listening. Sen and Fey were among them.
As the light point reached them, they began glowing a pale, sickly green and disappeared without a trace before their dying screams had faded. Whatever the weapon was, it could discriminate between real organic beings and the phony outlines Lando had taught them to create.
Those remained like ghosts, hollow and insubstantial.
“That, my dear Captain Calrissian, was a demonstration employing one times ten to the minus seventeenth of the power available to me. The object was an electromagnetic torpedo, scarcely larger than a filterable virus and programmed to self-destruct after it had done its work. Had it not been so, this area around us would contain no life by now, nor, within a week, would the entire nebula.
“I offer you, however an alternative. Should you triumph, the entire fleet shall go away. Should I win, I shall release a thousand tons of this destructive agent in the ThonBoka.
“As for ourselves personally, we shall fight a duel to the death.”
XV
“WE HAVE ONE advantage, Master.”
Vuffi Raa had just returned from the Wennis, where, at Gepta's command, he had gone as Lando's second to receive the terms for the duel. Frost was turning into water on the little robot's chromium-plated body and dripping off onto the floor of the tiny airlock below the topside hatch.
“That's absolutely peachy, old go-between. Any little boost would be welcome, just now.” He looked out through a viewport. On one side the Falcon was englobed by the Navy, perhaps five hundred enormous capital ships.
From another port, he could see they were hemmed in by Klyn Shanga's squadron, what was left of it, in formation once again about the pinnace. The tractor field was off, and would have been invisible in any case, but the arrangement gave them an instant choice between two modes of movement.
Lando shook his head, and went on running down the longform checklist, getting his best spacesuit up and ready for the coming conflict.
“Yes, Master. You'll recall he was the one responsible for your winning me in the first place? Well, it was he, who, well, supplied me to the Ottdefa Osuno Whett. He knows me rather well-and still believes that he can program me to betray you.”
The gambler looked up, set the pair of vacuum gauntlets he'd been working on aside, and lit a cigar. Possibly his last.
“How very interesting. And can he?”
“Not at all. What's even better is that he still believes me to be bound by my earlier programming. He thinks I cannot fight.
Lando grinned. “You know, I'm not sure I understand that myself. But of course that's why he offered to let you help me out in this duel, to make up for his powers of magic, so he said.”
The robot raised an affirmative tentacle. “What now remains is for us to plan what we will do once we're out there. Have you an idea?”
Lando drew a deep puff, let it out slowly, savoring it. “I do, indeed, old Saturday-night special. The terms are one personal weapon apiece?”
“Not precisely, Master. You are allowed one weapon, I am allowed none. He didn't specify what he would use. I didn't ask. It seems we have no choice in this matter.”
“No, but tell me, does he know about the way you let your tentacles do their own thinking?”
The gleam in Vuffi Raa's faceted eye grew brighter. “No, Master, I don't believe he does.”
“Swell. Then here's what we'll do - and don't call me master.”
Rokur Gepta stood in an airlock of the Wennis, watching the Millennium Falcon through the bull's-eye in the hatch. He could see her captain and his droid climbing out of their own airlock as he himself suited up. The suit was a deep non-reflective gray, about the color of the walls of the ThonBoka. He turned to the officer beside him, the nominal captain of the cruiser.
“You are certain that you understand my instructions?”
“Yes, sir,” the unhappy-looking man replied. “I am to exterminate all life in the nebula, regardless of the outcome of the duel.” He gulped at speaking what he felt to be a dishonorable and unmilitary decision, and remained rigidly at attention as the sorcerer donned his helmet.
“Precisely, Captain, and if you are entertaining any ideas of countermanding that order in the event of my demise, please remember that the continued existence of your family depends on its being carried out. That was the purpose of sending the courier to your home system a few minutes ago. Their lives are in your hands.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Very well, then, stand aside so that I may exhaust the lock - unless you care to join me in the airless void?”
Klyn Shanga watched the accursed Vuffi Raa, Butcher of Renatasia, climb out of the airlock of the Millennium Falcon. The little monster was still wearing that spacesuit he'd affected in the Oseon that made him appear to be a robot. Shanga began flipping switches; turbines whined as power levels increased. One trembling hand remained on the button of his weapon system. Steady, old soldier, he told himself, only a few more minutes.
Suddenly, a fighter across the formation from him slid forward, gaining speed as it approached the Falcon. Shanga opened his mouth to scream “Bern, no!” when a man-thick power beam from the Wennis str
uck fighter number Twenty-three, blowing it to bits.
“Sorry, Admiral Shanga,” a voice said over the intership. “Orders from the Sorcerer of Tund. There is to be no interference.”
And no revenge, no justice, Shanga realized, unless he could figure out something quickly. Ten years of his life, of the lives of all his men, down the drain, unless - Movement near the Wennis caught his eye. Rokur Gepta jetted from the airlock, crossed half the space between the cruiser and the freighter, and came to a skillful hovering stop. He folded his spacesuited arms and hung, awaiting his adversaries.
Across the void that had become an arena, Lando Calrissian followed his example in a bright yellow spacesuit, rocketing to meet the sorcerer, stopping several dozen meters away. Vuffi Raa was right behind him.
Something on the order of a billion pairs of eyes - or equivalent sensory equipment - watched as the sorcerer inclined his head in a small, grudging bow. Without further warning, his right hand lashed out, and a beam of energy struck the place where Lando had been. He tumbled, spun, and recovered, something small and glittering in his own hand, but didn't return fire.
Soaring, he made a complicated figure in the vacuum as Gepta fired twice more, missing both times. While the sorcerer was thus distracted, Vuffi Raa circled warily, working his way behind the gray-clad figure. Two more shots, then Gepta realized that he was being deceived. He whirled, just as the robot's tentacles separated from his pentagonal body, spreading, encircling the sorcerer's position, and moving in.
Almost hysterically, Gepta tried to burn the tentacles, but they wriggled and squirmed as they came toward him, each limb no longer where it had been when the aim was taken.
Closer they came, closer.
Lando fired, striking Gepta squarely in the back. Incredibly, the stingbeam's energy passed through the sorcerer harmlessly, nearly striking Vuffi Raa's body, which was backing, slowly, clumsily away from the fight while it directed the tentacles to the attack.
Gepta whirled again, getting off three shots at the gambler. The last one hit him in the foot. There was a puff of steam and a hissing audible only to Lando, then the suit sealed, its medical processes already shutting off the pain. He had no idea how badly he'd been hurt, but he knew that he could still fight.
He fired a second of his five shots, again taking the sorcerer in the center of the torso. Again the beam sliced through without apparent damage.
Then a tentacle grasped Gepta around the neck.
The gray-suited figure struggled, trying to unwrap the chromium-plated limb, but it hung on grimly. From his vantage point in the squadron, Klyn Shanga watched, then was suddenly struck blind by a thought: Vuffi Raa, so-called Butcher of Renatasia, really was a robot!
Nothing else could explain the independent limbs. But if that was true, then what of their mission of revenge? What of the only purpose they had had for living, since the death of their civilization. What of - Abruptly, there was a surge of motion as the tenuous hold of tractors at a hundredth power was broken and the pinnace moved forward of its own accord, leaving the fighters behind. No one aboard the vessels of the fleet seemed to notice, so much of their attention was riveted on the duel.
But Shanga did.
“What's going on, there? Who's in the pinnace?”
“It is I, the Ottdefa Osuno Whett,” came the electronic reply.
“I'm going to end this farce, destroy the robot and the gambler - and perhaps Rokur Gepta, in the bargain! None of them are fit to-” Another blinding flash of recognition. It was the voice that did it, separated now from the assumed appearance. Whett was the Butcher's aide! Whett was the Butcher's assistant! Whett was - the Butcher himself! It had to be! No other explanation was possible.
Heeling his fighter over, Klyn Shanga thumbed his weapons at the pinnace. The larger vessel's shields were up, however, shields designed to protect an admiral's tender person during ship-to-ship and ship-to-planet transfers. Shanga's fire coruscated off the invisible barrier.
“This is Zero Leader!” he shouted on the squadron's frequency. “Get that pinnace - the man we seek is aboard! I'll explain later, if we live!” Desperately, he punched buttons on the remote console that had controlled the pinnace on the trip out. He couldn't prevent Whett from driving it, nor drop its shields, but he could keep it out of hyperdrive and lock the tractor field.
He did the latter. The squadron snapped into to formation.
Opening his small ship's engines all the way, he screamed at his men to do the same. Slowly, inexorably, the assemblage of ships achieved headway.
Abruptly, someone aboard the Wennis noticed the motion.
“Zero leader this is the Wennis! Halt immediately, or we'll blast you out of the nebula!” The warning was repeated. Gathering speed now, Shanga steered his squadron and their captive - who was desperately and ineffectually attempting to reverse things from the pinnace - toward the decommissioned cruiser. Faster and faster, skirting the space where the battle between Gepta and Lando and Vuffi Raa still raged, they zeroed in on the larger vessel.
A broad beam of power struck the pinnace squarely on the bow. Her shields held, and the energy, sluicing off the deflectors, missed the lightly shielded fighters as well. As they came within a few hundred meters of the Wennis, Shanga abruptly cast off the tractor field and flipped his craft around. Years of reflex allowed his men to follow the motion like a school of fish.
The pinnace struck the Wennis - her own shields negligently still powered down to allow the sorcerer to debark - and penetrated her hull.
There was a brief instant in which nothing else happened, a suspension of time as inertia was overcome, as systems attempted to control the damage and failed. Then a titanic explosion as the cruiser belched flaming gases everywhere, consuming herself, the pinnace, and everyone aboard both vessels. Even two of the fleeing fighters were tumbled badly.
Farther away, Rokur Gepta, Vuffi Raa, and Lando were distracted by the explosion. Gepta stared insanely. Lando recovered first, took aim, and was struck by a piece of flying debris. His shot went wild, hitting the sorcerer in the ankle. In shock, Lando recovered and watched as the form of Rokur Gepta withered and faded. He jetted up beside the magician in time to see a heavy military blaster swing around, fire, swing a little farther, and fire again.
Vuffi Raa's tentacle floated emptily with nothing left to hold onto. The third shot, cast by an unconscious and dematerializing hand, caught the robot's torso, a hundred meters away, dead in the center.
The metal glowed momentarily. When the incandescence dimmed, so had the single red eye in the body's center. It was flat, glassy, and black.
Lando pawed through Rokur Gepta's empty spacesuit.
Down in the leg was a small bundle of ugly, slimy tissue, resembling a half-cooked snail, an escargot with a dozen skinny, hairy black legs. It was one of the most disgusting things the gambler had ever seen, but he'd seen it before.
It was a Croke, from a small, nasty system he'd once visited. The species was intelligent and unvaryingly vicious, and they were all masters of camouflage and illusion. This one wasn't quite dead. The suit had protected it, and it was nearly impervious to hard vacuum. Lando ripped the suit away, took the stunned and putrid creature that had been Rokur Gepta, and squeezed.
When he was through, his suit gloves were covered with greasy slime, but no Sorcerer of Tund would ever rule the galaxy.
As if Gepta's death were a signal, the fleet began to open up on the Oswaft within range. In the space of a moment, hundreds died...until the fleet had other things to think about; Klyn Shanga's squadron was shooting back, giving the vacuum-breathing sapients covering fire so they could retreat. One fighter exploded, then another, but they were saving Oswaft lives.
“CEASE FIRE IMMEDIATELY OR BE DESTROYED!”
The voice came over everybody's communicators simultaneously, at every frequency. Lando looked up from his little friend's scorched torso - he'd gathered in the tentacles, as well, but they would not attach themselve
s and lay in his arms like so many dead pieces of jointed metal - to see a figure that dwarfed the departed Elders, even the largest dreadnaughts in the fleet.
It was a starship, but it was at least fifty kilometers in diameter, a smooth, featureless, highly polished ovoid of silvery metal. Another, identical monster followed close behind it. Far to the rear, Lando watched as others, countless others, penetrated the supposedly impenetrable wall of the ThonBoka as if it were so much fog.
Hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands.
Some fool aboard the Recalcitrant opened fire with the new meter-thick destructor beam, deep green and hungry. A red beam from the leading foreign ship met the green one squarely, forced it back a meter at a time until it reached the navy cruiser. A pause, then the Recalcitrant became a cloud of incandescent gas.
“CEASE FIRE OR BE DESTROYED! THERE WILL BE NO OTHER WARNING!”
Racked with grief, Lando watched as more and more of the titanic ovoids appeared in the nebula. There was no way to estimate their number. The gambler thought they might fill up the StarCave, twelve light-years across as it might be.
Then a sensation brushed past him. Somehow he knew that only he could hear the tightly beamed message that issued from his helmet phones.
“You are Captain Calrissian, are you not? You have fought valiantly, and not in vain. You grieve for your little friend. I grieve, too, for he was my only son.
XV
“SABACC!” SAID THE One. “By the Center of Everything, Lando, I knew we would learn new and valuable things if only we dared to.”
“Yeah, well, you've still got to learn the difference between luck and skill. That's eighteen trillion I'm ahead of you already, counting that last hand, and I don't even know yet what we're using for currency!”
The gambler took a deep drag on his cigar and watched as the One gathered in the seventy-eight-card deck with a sweep of a jointed metallic tentacle. His eye glowed a deep scarlet with delight and anticipation as he dealt them out again, two to Lando, two more to Klyn Shanga, two to the extensor manifesting itself as the Other.
Star Wars - The Adventures of Lando Calrissian 03 - The StarCave of ThonBoka Page 15
