Now Lando was demanding more room, expanding the shields against the asteroid's substance. He turned the knob again; something groaned like a living – or dying - thing aft of the cockpit, but the panel lights still showed everything intact.
Half a dozen fighters shot by the lip of the crevasse, seeking, searching, probing. One of them fired an experimental shot. It penetrated and rebounded half a dozen times within the walls before it faded.
Another group of fighters swooped past.
And another.
They were circling the asteroid, searching the long canyon, hundreds of kilometers in extent, for the hidden freighter that had burned at least two of their number out of the polychrome skies of the Oseon. Their flybys were becoming more frequent as they narrowed the search.
Lando turned the knob a little more, a little more. A brilliant beam of energy cascaded across the forward shields.
By accident or design, the enemy had found its prey.
The power needle jumped. Lando slammed the knob to the right as far as it would go. There was a deafening exploding sound. Multicolored light showered in on Lando and the robot as the asteroid burst under the stresses of the shields and the Flamewind swept around them again.
Secondary explosions punctuated the space around them: one, three, five - Lando lost count as the hurtling rock fragments smashed and scattered the fighter squadron - seven, eight. Perhaps more, he wasn't sure. No one turned to fight. He diverted a little power to the inertial dampers, cut the shields back to normal, fired up the drives and kicked in the deadreckoner.
They were on their way again. He turned up the gravity in the lounge. Even he could hear the thump and a curse from Bassi Vobah. He grinned and shook his head.
The improved shields seemed to help considerably. Vuffi Raa retained his reason, Bassi Vobah was as emotional as she ever was. Waywa Fybot dozed in his rack, recovering from his injuries with the aid of an electronic bone-knitter from the Falcon's medical bag of tricks. He ought to be completely well in a few more hours, just in time to arrest the trillionaire addict.
Swell.
Lando, for the most part, stayed up in the cockpit. He was tired of having police for company, preferred the company of Vuffi Raa. The little robot scurried around, tidying up and doing minor repairs. He reported that the hull was perfectly sound, despite the torture inflicted on it, and, in a spare hour, checked the mountings of the shield generator for stress crystallization.
There wasn't any.
Now that he had time to think about it again, Lando realized that his life had become very complicated. He'd had many of the same thoughts in jail back on Oseon 6845, but things had been simpler, even as recently as then. He was a simple man, he told himself, a relatively honest gambler who usually only cheated to avoid winning too conspicuously. Yet someone - several someones, it would appear - kept trying pretty hard to kill him. First with a bomb. Then with another bomb. Then, just to show a little versatility, with a big piece of titanium pipe. Finally, most recently, with a cleverly jimmied spacesuit. He didn't even count the pirate attack or the two encounters with the fighter squadron, although the latter seemed at least tangentially connected. He simply didn't know where it all fit in.
Everybody has enemies, especially a gambler who makes a habit of winning. But the vendetta was ridiculous. For the hundredth time, he reviewed his life over the past few years, trying to discover some person he'd known and hurt badly enough to merit such attention. He was a skillful and fortunate man with the cards, and, despite his failings as a merchant captain, he was becoming a pretty good ship-handler, as well. If he did say so himself.
Vuffi Raa said so, himself.
Unfortunately, when closely examined, his proficiency was a talent of no practical value. All it seemed to do was get him into trouble. He belonged on a luxury interstellar liner as a passenger, educating other passengers about the follies of trying to fill an inside straight. The soldier-of-fortune routine was beginning to pall.
Well, if by some slim chance he got out of this mess, he'd see about rearranging his life. He had come to love the Falcon, but it was a dangerous affair, one that threatened to get him killed at just about any moment. Vuffi Raa was quite another matter, a good friend and partner, an astute adviser. But this captain business...
With a sinking heart, Klyn Shanga inspected the remnants of his command. One lost at Oseon 6845. Two lost in the first engagement with that tramp freighter. And now, between the Flamewind and that exploding asteroid, a mere five fighters left. It was possible that more had survived, were even now trying to find their way back to the squadron through storm and radiation. Some of them might even live past this adventure because they'd lost touch with their comrades.
Five tiny fighting craft, no two alike, except in general size, range, and firepower. They drew on the battle-cruiser engine, restoring their own power even as it pulled them through the nightmarish void.
Well, each of the men had known from the beginning what he faced: a cruel and cunning enemy; a being that took delight in human misery; a creature willing to sacrifice whole cultures, entire planets to satisfy whatever unknowably evil objectives it set for itself.
And each had understood, when he had assembled them in his home system from the ragtags of a dozen armies, how little chance there was of surviving the quest. To them, it had been worth it. Five out of twenty-four.
It still was.
Bohhuah Mutdah lounged in a gel-filled recliner, watching a performance of surpassing obscenity. On the lawn before him, all manner of sentient beings mingled, progressing through every permutation of activity possible to them. He had hired them - over three hundred of them - for that express purpose. They were following his detailed instructions. He found it boring.
Bohhuah Mutdah found very nearly everything boring.
There was little he cared to participate in directly, owing either to security considerations - even now he was surrounded by an unobtrusive force field to protect him from potential assassins among his employees - or to his physical condition. He had seen too much of life, had too much of life. Still he clung to it, although he didn't know why.
To say that Bohhuah Mutdah was obese would be to engage in understatement. He had begun, a hundred years ago, with a large frame, a little over two meters tall, broad-shouldered, long-legged. That had been only the beginning, an armature on which he molded a grotesque parody of heroic sculpture. He was heroically obese, monumentally obese, cosmically...
On a genuine planet, with a real gravitic pull, he would have weighed three hundred kilos, perhaps three-fifty. He hadn't entered such a field for a quarter of a century. He was bigger around the waist than two large men could reach and working on three. His own arms looked stubby, his legs like cones turned over on the ends into absurdly tiny baby feet. His face was a bushel basket full of suet, dotted with impossibly tiny features: a pair of raisin eyes, a pair of pinprick nostrils, a miniature blossom of a mouth.
He hadn't used his own hands for any purpose for five years. He could afford to use the hands of others. He had no real notion of what he was worth. No truly rich man does. He'd heard it said he was the wealthiest human in the known galaxy. He wasn't sure about that, either, and didn't care.
He didn't care about anything at all - except, perhaps, lesai.
Maybe it was the drug that kept him going, maintained the mild interest he experienced in remaining alive. Everything else, the world, the entire universe, resembled a bleak gray plain to him. The Flamewind, lashing and snarling above his heavily shielded dome, seemed colorless to him, although the hirelings on the lawn paused long enough, now and again, to look up in awe at the display.
It wasn't being rich that had done this to him. As long as he could remember, since he was a child in rather ordinary circumstances, he'd puzzled over the phrase “will to live” and wondered what drove others to the bizarre extremes they sometimes reached while struggling merely to remain in existence. Mutdah's wealth had been the cas
ual result of a decade's desultory application of his incredible intelligence, directing his modest substance toward a path of inevitable, automatic growth.
Nor did that intelligence provide him with an answer to his real problem. He knew submorons, many of them working for him, whose capacity to enjoy life was infinite compared to his. He simply lived on, whether he cared to or not, like a machine - no, even the machines who worked for him appeared to relish the mockery of life they possessed with greater fervor and satisfaction than their master.
It was a puzzle. Luckily, he didn't care enough about solving it to let it worry him unduly. He watched the sky, he watched his performers. He watched reflections of it all in the fist-sized Rafa life-crystal he wore upon a yard of silken cord about his neck, wondering why he'd bothered to obtain the thing in the first place.
That philosopher, whoever he had been, had been right: the greatest mystery of life was life itself. And the question that best stated it was: why bother?
A tear rolled down Bohhuah Mutdah's pillow of cheek, but he was far too numb to notice it.
In a hidden place, Rokur Gepta thought upon the art of deception. How ironic it was, and yet how fitting, that the surest way to lie to others is to lie to oneself first. If you can convince the single soul who knows the falsehood for what it is, then everyone else is an easy mark.
Salesmen had known this simple wisdom for ten thousand years, but Rokur Gepta had never known a salesman. Politicians knew it, too, but politicians were Gepta's natural prey, and while the spider knows the ways of the fly in many respects, she never asks him what he thinks of the weather.
Gepta, isolated by necessity now, from his cruiser, from his underlings, even from his beloved pet - they'd better be taking proper care of it, or they themselves would face a greater appetite! - did not regret the rigors which fulfillment of his plans required. Long centuries before an infant Bohhuah Mutdah moaned that life meant nothing, Gepta was consumed by an overwhelming lust for all the things life meant to him: power; hunger filled power; humiliation of enemies; power.
He let himself be warmed, in his stifling concealment, by memories of triumphs past, by extrapolation to future victories. He saw himself astride the universe, whipping it on to exhaustion in his service. In a linear progression, he would make vassals of emperors, servants of gods. Nothing was beyond the scope of his ambition, nothing.
And his certain destruction of Lando Calrissian would be but a microscopic footnote, a token of good luck, a single four-leaf clover in an infinite field. It was an exercise in determination to Rokur Gepta, an example of taking minute pains to assure that everything, absolutely everything, was right.
The subject of a microscopic footnote to the future history of intergalactic space was pleased.
He rolled another cigarette and lit it while Vuffi Raa checked references against the Oseon ephemeris. Exactly as the gambler had anticipated, they'd wound up, at the end of the program, in a flock of asteroids which were well cataloged and identifiable.
And not too very far away from Oseon 5792.
A gambler's life had taught him to take satisfaction from success without being cocky or becoming careless. Well outside the range of the best-known ship-detection systems, and despite the fact that the Flamewind howling outside had blinded any such devices, he ordered Bassi Vobah and her feathered colleague into hiding. Examining the blueprints of the Falcon, it had occurred to him that there was space below the corridor decking that might be perfect for installing hidden lockers. Smuggling was merely an interest with him; it might someday rise high enough among his priorities to become a hobby. In the meantime, he had not as yet taken time or gone to the expense of building the lockers. He might never get around to it.
As a consequence, the two police officers were extremely uncomfortable just then, zipped into their spacesuits and stuffed beneath the decking. They clung to stanchions, cursing Lando and their jobs, wishing they had become clerk typists or shoe salespersons.
Which suited their chauffeur right down to the ground.
“Fifty-seven ninety-two coming up, Master. I believe it's that big blob over there on the right.”
“That's starboard, old binnacle; don't let's disillusion the tourists. Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of - You've got the package ready?”
The little robot turned from the controls, reached behind himself adroitly, and took a vacuum-wrapped parcel from the jumpseat. “I inspected it and analyzed it as you requested, although I don't quite understand why that was necessary. It's genuine lesai, all right, in its most potent form, enough for six months' use by even the most habituated addict, and worth more the-”
“Fine, fine. The reason why I wanted you to check it is that I didn't want to be caught delivering a shipment of phony goods. The recipients would likely find a way to reprimand me. Terminally. Also, I didn't want to be exposed to the stuff myself. I don't know how addictive it is, but it's potent applied to the skin.”
Lando checked the lightweight vacuum suit he was wearing, made sure his stingbeam was handy in an outside pocket. The part of the mission that had always worried him was coming up. His gambler's wisdom told him it was a bad bet: when the owner of a big, well-defended estate found out he'd brought the law, there were bound to be some recriminations.
The Falcon drifted closer to Oseon 5792.
At approximately a hundred kilometers farther than Lando would have expected under the current “weather conditions,” they were hailed by a cruising ship. It was small, like the fighters Lando had fought off, but brand-new and nearly as heavily armed as his own. Radio being out of the question, it was using a modulated laser to communicate. Unfortunately, Lando didn't have a de-modulator.
“They say we're supposed to stop here,” Vuffi Raa supplied. “They say they'll fry us out of the firmament if we don't heave to for boarding. Good heavens, Master, they're listing the weaponry they carry! If they're only lying about ninety-five percent of it, we're done for.”
“That's all right, old electrodiplomat. How do we tell them that we're stopping for inspection?” Lando had a password, but - with all the other details in his mind the past few days - it hadn't occurred to him that there might be a problem using it.
“I can tell them, Master.” The robot leaned forward, directed his big red-faceted eye toward the security ship, and blat! a beam of scarlet coherency leaped through the canopy.
“Tell them the secret word is 'dubesor' - I understand that's a native insult on Antipose XII.” Lando took a final, not altogether relaxed, drag on his cigarette and put it out. Vuffi Raa's laser beam winked out almost at the same moment, and he turned to his master.
“They say we're late. I told them, who wouldn't be, considering the Flamewind and everything, and gave them a little edited version of our trouble with the fighters - presumed to be pirates. Did I act correctly, Master?”
“First sabacc, and now bluffing your way past the bouncers. I'm not sure whether to be proud of you or worried. I think I'm a bad influence. What did they say?”
“That we're expected and should set down on the small field opposite the surface mansion complex - but not to try any dirty tricks. They gave me another list of engines of destruction they can employ with pinpoint accuracy against a ground target.”
“That guy must have been a drummer for an arms company.
All right, let's set her down. You do it, won't you? I'm a little too nervous to risk it, considering my amateur status as a pilot.”
“Very well, Master.”
I wonder what the folks on Antipose XII are doing tonight, Lando thought, whooping it up in the local saloon and calling each other dubesor?
It beat hell out of what he was about to do.
XIV
OSEON 5792 was not particularly large as asteroids in the Oseon go. It was perhaps fifteen kilometers across its widest span, a flattened disk-shaped accretion of many smaller bodies or a peculiar fragment from a shattered planet. To Lando it rather resembled an island, floating on
a sea of impossible blue - that being the color the Flamewind was concentrating on at the moment.
Yet it was an island with two personalities. The top side, as the gambler thought of it - perhaps because it was the first view that he had of it - was a mythological garden, dotted with small lakes, spread with rolling lawns, and punctuated here and there by groves of trees, all held down by high transparent domes and artificial gravity. As the Falcon approached, Lando could make out clumps of beings on the grass before a huge old-fashioned palace, doing something. He couldn't make out quite what it was.
The underside of 5792 was an impressive miniature spaceport, cluttered parking grounds to an enormous motley fleet of spacecraft, almost as if it were a hobbyist's collection, rather than a working landing field. The port was ringed, at the asteroid's edge, with heavy armament; Lando began taking the security picket's boasts more seriously. These folks believed in firepower and had the hardware to back up their belief.
Vuffi Raa settled the Falcon in a berth designated for him with a pulsing beacon. As the freighter's landing legs came into gentle contact with the surface, and the robot began slapping power-down switches, Lando slapped his safety-belt release.
“I'm going to finish suiting up. You understand what you're supposed to do?”
He pulled on a lightweight space glove, gave his stingbeam another check. It shouldn't look too obvious. No point making things easy for the opposition.
“Yes, Master, I'm to conceal myself in the main control-cable conduit between here and the engine area. I'll tap into the lines there and keep the Falcon ticking over for an instant getaway.” The little droid paused as if reluctant to continue. “I'm to stay here, no matter what, and blast off for deep space if you're not back within eight hours. Why do you ask me to repeat these things like a child? You know I have a perfect memory.”
“Yeah? Well, I'd feel a lot better about that if you remembered not to call me master. Besides, you've been known to improvise.”
Star Wars - The Adventures of Lando Calrissian Trilogy Page 27
