The meter-high entity turned to its master. “I believe you'll be able to make out the nebula now, Master. See, that blurry spot ahead?”
Lando strained his eyes, then gave up and punched the electronic telescope into activation. Yes, there it was: the ThonBoka, as its inhabitants called it. It was a sack-shaped cloud of dust and gas, enterable only from one direction, rich with preorganic molecules even up to and including amino acids. Inside that haven, life had evolved without benefit of star or planet, life adapted to living in open empty space. Some of that life had eventually acquired intelligence and called itself the Oswaft. But at the moment, they were under siege.
“What about the blockade, can you locate that?” Lando strapped himself into the right-hand seat, ran a practiced eye over various gauges and screens, relaxed, and plucked a cigar out of the open safe beneath the main control panel.
“Yes, Master, I'm overlaying those data now.”
Vuffi Raa's tentacles flicked over the panel with a life of their own. He was a Class Two droid, with a level of intelligence and emotional reaction comparable to those of human beings. He had a good many other talents, as well. To Lando's occasional disgust, however, the robot was deeply programmed never to harm organic or mechanical sapience, and was thus an automatic pacifist. There had been times when that had been inconvenient! On the main viewscreen, showing the sack-like ThonBoka nebula, a hundred tiny yellow dots sprang to life.
Lando whistled. “That's quite a fleet for bottling up one undefended dust cloud. What do they think this is, the Clone Wars?”
He leaned forward to light his cigar, but was stopped by the offer of a glowing tentacle tip. Yes, Vuffi Raa had a lot of useful talents.
“That isn't even half of them, Master. Although I can't understand why, some of the fleet out there have modified their defense shielding into camouflage to conceal themselves. I also believe they've mined the mouth of the nebula.”
Puffing on his cigar, Lando forced calm. “And we're going to run that blockade. Oh, well, it's been a short life but a brief one. Can you do anything about shield camouflage for us?”
The robot wiped the screen display. “I'm afraid not, Master, it's very sophisticated technology.”
“Which means that everybody in the universe is using it except civilians. Well, then, what's our plan?”
There was a startled pause that might have been filled with a blinking red eye had Vuffi Raa been capable of such a thing.
“I thought you had the plan, Master.”
Lando sighed resignedly. “I was afraid you'd say that. To tell the truth, I had a plan, but it seems pretty insubstantial, here and now. I shall repair to my free-fall cogitorium once more and reconsider. I'll get back to you as soon as possible. Don't hold your breath, it may very well be a century or three.”
He unstrapped himself from his chair, took a final disgusted look through the sectioned canopy, and removed himself from the control area with his cigar. Around the long, heavily padded corridor, out into the cluttered lounge, off with the artificial gravity, and back to the geometric center of the room, where he sat and smoked and tried to think.
It wasn't one of his better days for that.
“Master?” The voice coming over the intercom was agitated. It startled the gambler out of a dream in which, no matter what sabacc hand he held, His cards kept changing to garbage, while a faceless gray opponent held a newly invented one, the Final Trump, which was an automatic twenty-three.
“Zzzzzz-what?”
Lando blinked, discovered that he was covered with sweat. His velvoid semiformals were soaked through, and he smelled like a bantha someone had ridden half to death. He stretched, trying to remove kinks from his muscles that shouldn't have been there in zero gee.
“Vuffi Raa, how many times have I told you never to call me-”
“Master” the robot interrupted, sounding both worried and eager at the same time, “it's been nearly three hours. Have you come up with a plan?”
“Uh, not exactly,” the gambler replied, shaking his head in an unsuccessful attempt to clear it. “I'm working on it. I said I'd call you when-”
“Well, I think we'd better talk it over now, if you don't mind You see, there's a picket cruiser sitting not more than a hundred kilometers off our starboard bow. I didn't see them, so well camouflaged were they, and they've fired two warning shots already. Master, they say they'll cut us in half with the next shot unless we stand by to receive boarders.”
Lando grunted. His mouth tasted like a mynock cave.
“That's the Navy for you, no consideration at all.”
III
CONCEALED BEYOND THE reach of civilization lay a place called Tund, a name of legendary repute, one seldom spoken above a whisper.
That whispered word named a planet, a system, or a cluster of stars - no one was quite certain which - rumored for ten thousand years to be the home of powerful and subtle mages. Fear was associated with the name, the sort of fear that inhibits mentioning, even thinking about, the thing it represents, so as not to invoke its omniscient, omnipotent, and malevolent attention. Almost no one knew the even more hideous truth.
The planet Tund was sterile, devoid of native life, its surface roasted to a fine, gray, powdered ash where evergreen forests, tropical jungles, and continent-broad prairies had once stretched for countless kilometers. It was a world destroyed by magic.
Or by belief in magic.
At night the planet's face glowed softly, not merely with the pale blue fire of decaying atoms, but with a ghostly greenish residue of energies as yet unknown to the rest of galactic civilization. Where it flickered balefully, nothing lived, or ever would again. It had been partially to preserve the secret of such power that Rokur Gepta, last of the fabled Sorcerers of Tund, had utterly obliterated every living thing upon the planet, from submicroscopic wigglers to full-flowering sentience. His was a terrible, cosmically unfeeling precaution.
The rest had been sheer malice.
Here and there an oasis of sorts had been permitted its closely regulated probational existence, areas reseeded from which, some billions of years hence, when the evil emerald fires had at long last died , life might resume its pitiably hum bled march. Massive force-fields were essential to press the flickering death away from those few havens.
In one such oasis crouched the cruiser Wennis, a decommissioned, obsolete, and thoroughly effective instrument of pitiless warfare, being refitted to her master's precise specifications. Her crew was an odd but deliberate mixture of the cream of the galaxy's technical and military elite and its dregs, often represented in the same individual.
Her weaponry and defenses ran the gamut from continent-destroying hell projectors to small teams of unarmed combat experts. She had been a gift of prudence from the highest and consequently most vulnerable of sources in the galaxy. The Wennis would not be recognizable when Rokur Gepta was through with her.
The sorcerer had that way with ships, and planets, and people. The only value anything possessed for him was its utility relative to his inexorable rise to power. Wealth meant nothing more to him than that, nor the companionship of his fellow beings, even - owing to the most peculiar and repulsive of physical circumstances - that of females.
He was empty, as devoid of life and warmth as his handiwork, the planet Tund itself. Such an emptiness requires endless volumes of power to fill it even momentarily.
Someday he, too, would bestow gifts of decommissioned battle cruisers-although he would exercise considerably more care to see that they were employed strictly in his interests. And even that lofty seat of power was only a feeble beginning. The million-system civilization ruled from it, after all, was only a small wedge of the galaxy.
And the galaxy itself only a small part of...
Deep within the twisted caverns of the murdered planet Tund, where Rokur Gepta had once personally searched out and exterminated every one of his ancient mentors - the original sorcerers, who had lovingly instructed him
in the ways of power that had been their ultimate undoing - the treacherous former pupil sat, immersed in thought. He brooded in a blackness utterly unbroken by the glimmer of so much as a single passing photon. That was the way he preferred it; he had other means of observing reality.
Even in the full light of a healthy planet's daytime surface, another individual would be less fortunate: Rokur Gepta was simply impossible to come to terms with visually. He was a blur, a vagueness more psychological than perceptual in character, perhaps because his color was that of terror.
On the very rare occasions he was spoken of by others, descriptions varied: he was a malignant dwarf, a being of average though preternaturally imposing stature; a frightening giant of a figure over two meters tall, perhaps three. All accounts agreed that he was perpetually swathed in cloaks and windings of the same hue as his lifeless domain, an ashy gray from the tips of his (presumed) toes to the top of his (apparent) head.
He wore a turban-like headdress whose final lengths were wound around the place his face should be, obscuring all his features save the eyes, twin pools of whirling, insatiable, merciless voracity.
Understandably, the sorcerer had enemies, although he had outlived - often by design - the small minority of them with the capacity to do him harm. He had outlived many others as well, simply by surviving centuries of time. His long life was in grave and constant danger, however, from those few who still survived and the continually fresh crop of victims who wished him ill.
And that was, what produced his present quandary.
Word had been conveyed, through several layers of underlings, of an emissary, a messenger whose credentials offered a potentially profitable alliance. Should he trust the individual sufficiently to hear him out, as per request, in total privacy?
The sorcerer pondered. The risk of a personal audience was great, especially as the representative came from a principal powerful enough to preclude extensive security measures, which could be interpreted as an affront. There were limits to the precautions that could be taken, but none to the cleverness of assassins. He ought to know; he had employed enough of them himself.
Reaching a decision, he gestured with a gray-gloved hand. Feeble light began to glow within the monstrous cavern, swelling until it filled the place. Small black hairy things within the walls squeaked a protest, rustled in their niches, then settled back into troubled somnolence.
He would make up this discomfort to his pets, Gepta thought, and if the audience turned out to be less than advertised, so would the emissary make restitution, most slowly.
A faint electronic chirp from a panel in the left arm of his basaltic throne alerted him of visitors. He firmed up his visual appearance; no sense alarming the messenger unduly at the outset. The time for intimidation, confusion, and betrayal would come later. It always did.
From a passageway far to the right, across a kilometer or more of cavern floor, a small procession wended its way, composed of minions in uniform, their marks of rank and organization stripped away to preserve the fiction that they were civilians. In truth, they were the same sort of gift the Wennis had been, and served their original master by serving Rokur Gepta.
The honor guard consisted of a half-dozen heavily armed and smartly groomed beings, every fiber bristling at attention as they marched. In their midst was a giant, a large, heavyset man in a battered spacesuit, carrying his helmet under one arm.
The group wound carefully among the cavern floor's many stalagmites, following a hidden pattern that, if strayed from, would precipitate their immediate and total destruction.
Gepta waited on his throne, three meters above the floor. As the column reached its base, Gepta's soldiers snapped to a halt. The visitor technically stood at attention, too, but he was the sort of being who, when the time came, would look as if he were lounging indolently in his own coffin. He was utterly relaxed, utterly alert. He was utterly unafraid of anything, most especially death. If Rokur Gepta feared anything himself, it was men such as this.
“Sir!” the leader of the guardsmen said, “we present Klyn Shanga, Fleet Admiral of the Renatasian Confederation, sir!”
Gepta would accept no title or honorific. Such were for lesser beings. He tolerated being called “sir” because his underlings, of military background, seemed to grow increasingly uncomfortable and uninformative unless they could insert it at least once in every sentence they addressed to him.
Gepta nodded minutely, looking down on the craggy giant.
“Admiral, welcome to the planet Tund,” he hissed. “Few have seen it, save my minions, and even fewer have lived to say they've seen it.”
Shanga grinned broadly from a face that was one scar overlaid upon another until nothing of the original flesh remained. Yet an ordinary human being would have found the effect somehow pleasing. Klyn Shanga was everybody's adventurous uncle, the one who'd been everywhere, done everything, and had it done back to him.
He ignored the threat: “That 'Admiral' is something in the nature of a joke, Sorcerer. In your terms I'm more of a squadron leader, and it's not much of a squadron. Core - for that matter, it's not much of a Confederation, either! But we have our points, as my letters of introduction demonstrated, I'm sure. You know about the Renatasia?”
Gepta nodded once again. Upon receiving the communication in question, he'd consulted references and had a conference with his kennel of government spies. What was to be learned was skimpy; there had been a highly energetic cover-up. Yet the essential facts were clear.
“It was a system and a culture colonized long before the current political status quo was achieved. It developed independently, unknown to the rest of the galaxy, and at a somewhat slower pace technologically. It was discovered, subverted, exploited, and obliterated by certain commercial interests acting in concert with the Navy. You, your squadron, and your Confederation are some of the rare survivors. Are these the fundamental elements of the story, Admiral Shanga?” The sibilance of Gepta's whisper echoed in the cavern.
Shanga's turn to nod. “That's it. About a third of the population lived, reduced further by starvation and disease.” He leaned against a stalagmite, casually swinging his helmet by a strap around his finger. “Get rid of the flunkies and we'll talk a deal, how about it?”
Gepta savagely repressed a wave of rage and nausea that swept through him at the man's impudence. Time, he told himself, there would be time to deal with him appropriately later.
He gestured and the men, with uncertainty on their faces, brought themselves back to attention, turned in place, and marched back the way they'd come. It took them a long while, so indirect and lengthy was the route. All the while, Shanga leaned against his stony outcrop with a grin across his battered face.
“What have you got against Lando Calrissian, anyway, Gepta?”
The sorcerer's gaze jerked upward across the chamber to assure that no one else was present to witness the gibe. Then he settled back in his throne and stared coldly at the fighter pilot before him, struggling to maintain an even tone.
“It is sufficient that he has offended me - primarily with his impudence, Klyn Shanga, a fact you would do well to bear in mind. We have agreed upon the history of your woebegone system; tell me, what is your interest in a vagabond gambler. What has he to do with-”
In an instant, Shanga's facade of relaxation dropped away. He stood rigidly beside the stalagmite, his body trembling with anger. Rather a long time passed before he was able to reply.
“Calrissian doesn't figure in it. He has a partner.”
“The robot? Surely, Admiral-”
“Robot!” Shanga shot back hotly. “In the Renatasia it wasn't a robot, but a five-limbed organic sapient! I saw it then - nobody could avoid it! It was treated to parades and banquets, in the media every minute! It was an emissary from a long-lost galactic civilization that... that... that ultimately destroyed us! It was a spy, Gepta! It infiltrated us, observed our weaknesses, planned our downfall with ruthless precision! Robot? Oh yes, I
saw it again after the battle of Oseon, disguised as a harmless droid, but I wasn't fooled, not for a nanosecond! Robot? What would a robot have to gain from-”
Gepta raised an interrupting hand. He knew perfectly well why a droid might help destroy a system. Programmed to obey, it wouldn't have a choice, and properly disguised with an organic-appearing plastic coating, it would be a perfect spy.
The sorcerer, however, wasn't about to argue with the man and possibly lose an ally. Shanga would have his uses - and his ultimate disposition.
“Very well, Admiral, we each of us have personal reasons for wishing a conclusion to this hunt, and your offer of assistance is welcome. But your communication hinted at more; there was a claim that you know where the Millennium Falcon may be found?”
“And trapped!” the warrior added with a snap in his voice. “Imagine the sweetness of it: trapped between us and the Navy!” He began laughing, the edge in his voice growing increasingly hysterical until he leaned heavily against the stone column, wiping his eyes and coughing. When he could speak again, it was only one word:
“StarCave!”
Rokur Gepta kept his peace, offering no reply. The term was meaningless to him, but given an hour of privacy and access to his sources of information it would not remain so. Finally he replied.
“StarCave, you say.”
The fighter pilot nodded. “Yes, we have our spies, too, Gepta - we have to. After all, they're the ones who - but never mind that. The navy's keeping a heavy blockade there. We don't know why. There are rumors, but most of them are so silly that we think they're an Intelligence cover. Whatever the reason, we also know that Calrissian's planning to run the blockade, in fact may be there as we speak. We have things you need: information, a rebuilt fighter squadron. You have something we need: passage through the blockade. With Calrissian bottled up there, we can...”
Star Wars - The Adventures of Lando Calrissian Trilogy Page 33
