Finally, all boards were green. Drives and shields were ready as the Navy voice in the comm reached zero.
Lando hoped his invention was ready, too.
“Millennium Falcon,” the communicator warned a final, unnecessary time - giving the gambler and the droid an extra few seconds - ”you're a dead-”
“Now!” Lando and Vuffi Raa screamed at the same time.
The voice chopped off. The after shields blossomed into an invisible protective canopy while the ultra-light-speed generators began to throb - just as the leading wave front of the first meter-thick destructor beam from the cruiser struck the Falcon squarely in the center of her stern.
Her shields held... and held... and suddenly the Millennium Falcon burst into an enormous blinding cloud of rapidly dispersing gases; a rain of metallic particles glittered, occupying the space where she had been.
VI
THE ONE ADDRESSED the Other: “At long last, it is nearly time.”
Like Lehesu of the Oswaft, he swam comfortably in emptiness absently contemplating the surrounding stars. Unlike Lehesu, he knew everything about them, had been to visit many of them himself. Nor was that the only way that he was not like the ThonBoka vacuum-breather.
Even Lando Calrissian, accustomed to many strange and wonderful sights, would have had trouble recognizing the entity as a living being.
“Yes,” the Other replied, although his companion's statement had been rhetorical. “All things are now as they have been planned. I shall gather the Rest, and they shall accompany us.”
He took action to accomplish just that. Such were the distances involved that, even at communications speeds exponential to that of light, it would require several days to achieve the desired transfer of information.
“Indeed,” the One agreed. “That, too, is as it has been planned. It is very strange, my friend, this 'not-knowing,' stranger than I had anticipated. Quite an uncomfortable feeling, really. It has been so long since...” He let what served him for a voice trail off, contemplating a gulf of time the mere thought of which might have driven a lesser being to gibbering disconnection.
The Other indicated silent sympathy. He, too, had experienced the discomfort of uncertainty, and, despite his almost unimaginable life-span, and the relatively recent character of the events, for far too long. Uncertainty was like that. However, that had been the very purpose of the plan. Over the countless eons of their existence, the One, the Other, and the Rest had become, in a manner of speaking, too perfect, too well-informed. It had become all too easy to anticipate events simply from long experience with reality, excellent sources of information, and well-practiced logic.
Ironically, it was in that manner that the One had originally foreseen racial stagnation and eventual death did these comfortable circumstances continue. He had advised all concerned that an element of the unknown be reintroduced. They, of course, had seen the sense of it and agreed (with a cordiality that was itself symptomatic; a more vital, lusty people would have included a number of individuals who were contrary just for the sake of contrariness.) Their first experiment in guesswork, partial knowledge, and risk was maturing now, a process some thousands of years in the making.
“Do you suppose...” the Other began, unconsciously reviving a long-unused turn of phrase as he let the unproductive thought trickle away. At that point speculation was futile. He knew as well as the One what consequences, in all their manifest likelihoods, were possible, from a vast unprecedented enrichment of their ancient, already lavishly complex culture, to its uttermost destruction. These were not beings to whom such gambling came easily or naturally - which was yet another reason why it had become necessary. “Do you suppose... ?”
The One replied, “I do not know - How truly unsubstantial a sensation! For the first time in eons we shall learn New Things, regardless of the outcome. These we shall have to integrate with the old, producing syntheses unlocked for - I feel this emotion must be very much as our ancestors experienced when scarcely anything was known, and everything remained yet to be learned. It is little wonder they were half mad and came close, times without number, to destroying themselves.”
After a long period of silence, the Other said, “I have learned a New Thing already.” In the tone of his voice there was an odd, semiforgotten, yet somehow familiar difference.
But excitement tinged the voice of the One: “Please tell me - what is it? I, too, must learn this New Thing, and we must pass it on to-”
“I have learned that the prospect of learning New Things makes you unreasonably loquacious. I am not certain - there it is again, that 'not knowing' - that this is altogether good.”
“I believe,” the One replied rather stiffly, “that you have reinvented humor. And I am not certain whether that is good.”
Klyn Shanga raced through endless night to join his makeshift squadron. Considering his three careers - soldier for his nation-state, farmer upon military retirement, soldier again for a hastily united and inevitably defeated Renatasian System - this last, the seeking of ultimate vengeance, was quite the strangest.
Shanga leaned back in his patched and shabby acceleration couch, carefully placing his feet between control pedals, stretching his long legs and arching his back to relieve an aching stiffness born more, on this occasion, of emotional tension than of lengthy travel. He was well practiced at that, having logged an incredible number of intersystem parsecs in his unlikely machine.
His blaster, its grips polished smooth by use, its muzzle bright with holster-wear and pitted by many more firings than it had been designed for, once again clung comfortingly to his thigh. It was not that having the weapon made him a whole man; like most professional soldiers, he was revolted by killing and avoided it whenever he could.
Besides, he could do more damage to an opponent with his left elbow than most individuals could with an entire arsenal. But, like the battered, ancient ship he flew, it was an accustomed extension of his body, a companion and friend.
He had very few others left.
Somewhere ahead, hovering at the deep-frozen margin of the Tund System, his tiny fleet awaited the news he carried. They had towed themselves originally into this sector of the galaxy - a long, long way from home - by means of a scrapped and resurrected Centrality battleship engine that had been left among the ruins of their civilization by the departing marauders. To this they had attached, by cable, craft bought, stolen, and traded from a hundred cultures. Ultimately, the engine had become a weapon of despair, a fusion-powered battering ram.
Even so, they had failed to accomplish their purpose for it, the destruction of Vuffi Raa. Now, deprived of an independent method of ultra-lightspeed travel, they had to rely upon an uncertain ally. One who, without question, would betray them in the end.
Alone in the cramped cockpit of his fighter, Shanga reviewed the words he would employ to persuade his men that he had made the best of a bad bargain - those few who had survived the voyage to the Tund System and their first bloody encounter with the enemy at the Oseon. More had joined them afterward, dribbling out in the filthy holds of ancient freighters, hitching rides aboard the interstellar garbage scows.
Ironically, it was Rokur Gepta who, more than anybody else, represented the malign spirit that had destroyed the Renatasia.
Somehow, too, it was fitting that they plotted together to use the navy as a sort of backstop against which they could crush their common foes. That same Navy had been the direct agent of his home system's destruction. At the beginning of his vindictive adventure, Klyn Shanga had been fatalistically resigned to throwing away his life and the lives of his threadbare command in order to avenge their titanic losses. Now he realized with increasing clarity and weariness that there was more - much more - to live for. The capture and slow termination of the five-legged infiltrator would only begin the process. Somehow they must make their mark upon the Navy, upon the Centrality itself, upon everyone responsible in any way for the murder of a civilization.
H
opelessness breeds desperate measures. A partnership with the Sorcerer of Tund necessarily included a risk that the pitiable remains of Renatasian manhood might be used to some surpassingly evil purpose, to fulfill some objective even more hideous than the obliteration of a system-wide culture. If anyone was capable of engineering such a cataclysm, it was Rokur Gepta.
There was a Renatasian animal that planted itself by the waterside and, in the process of giving birth, provided fodder for a predacious toothy swimmer. Gepta was very much like that toothy swimmer, circling expectantly. Shanga, with his tiny fleet (call it, rather, a “school”) felt very much like that hapless littoral creature who must die herself-sacrificing, as well, a certain percentage of her young - in order to give whatever microscopic meaning to life that it was capable of possessing.
On the other hand, only sapient beings were foolish enough to imagine that the universe was anything but a sadistic battlefield where brutality was the natural order and agonized screaming provided the background music. Not even a man as bitterly demoralized as Klyn Shanga believed there was any meaning to death.
Perhaps he should never have retired from the military, he thought with a deeply-felt sigh uncharacteristic of the role he presently played or the place he found himself now. All those years on his farm, amid fresh, growing things under a kindly sky, had made him far too philosophical to be a good soldier ever again. But he was all his world had left, so he would have to do.
Klyn Shanga flew onward through the star-strewn darkness, reviewing the words he would employ to persuade his men. He wished fervently they were of some use persuading himself.
Rokur Gepta, traveling aboard the refitted cruiser Wennis, was receiving an alarming report from one of his advance escorts. The flyer had returned in a one-seat fighter approximating the size and combat capabilities of Klyn Shanga's, but which was equipped - and this was rare, even for the navy - to exceed the speed of light. The little ship was half engine, virtually unarmed, and a tight fit, even for a slender youth. Piloting such a vehicle for more than a few minutes brought new meaning to the word “discomfort.”
It and its occupant had been to the ThonBoka and back again already while the lumbering Wennis, considered a very sprightly vessel for its class, was still many days journey from the nebula.
Gepta had such a fighter for his personal use. It had saved his life at least twice. He came as close to feeling fond of it as he came to feeling fond of anything - aside from the grim denizens from the darker recesses of his cavern on Tund. Fondness was not an emotion ordinarily to be discovered within the similarly stygian depths of Rokur Gepta's soul, although whether it had never lived within him, or had been ruthlessly exterminated early in his life, was a question that perhaps even the sorcerer was not prepared to answer.
Thus it was with something of a shock, in the brief instant before he regained control of himself, that Gepta experienced an unfamiliar, transient, and microscopic pang of personal regret as he learned of the destruction of the Millennium Falcon and her crew by the blockade cruiser. While the sorcerer wasn't watching Lando Calrissian hid somehow risen unbidden from the s of petty annoyance to that of worthy opponent and honored enemy.
“I saw it myself, sir!” the breathless scout gasped as moisture from the surrounding air condensed upon his space-cold armor and trickled off into a little pool on the deck plates.
Like those of all his comrades attached to the mysterious Wennis, his gray uniform was unadorned by signs of rank or unit in order to preserve certain political fictions which his masters cherished. That no creature wiser than a sponge was taken in by such an exercise constituted no good reason not to pursue it.
Likewise, the slowly warming pressure suit he wore over his uniform, having just a few moments before leaped out of his cramped, ultrafast spacecraft into the cavernous hangar deck of the supposedly civilian cruiser, was without markings. Most of the personnel aboard the Wennis, being professional soldiers, resented the shallow deception, but, with understandable circumspection, seldom got around to mentioning it aloud.
While in command of the Wennis, Rokur Gepta did not affect the basaltic throne and the splendid isolation he preferred on Tund. He occupied the captain's acceleration chair (although there was an officer on board who claimed the title) and supervised his underlings on the bridge as they manipulated the controls at his bidding. He pitilessly examined the incoming scout, wondering whether, after all the time, all the effort, someone else had casually robbed him of victory over his prey.
“What ship, again?” the sorcerer hissed, briefly contemplating punishing its captain and crew. “Which ship destroyed the Millennium Falcon, and by what means?” The sorcerer hunched over like a scavenger bird, peering through the windings of his headdress, his eyes a pair of glowing, pulsating coals.
The rest of the bridge crew paid close attention to their consoles, cringing at the pilot's plight, but unwilling to interfere with his presumed destiny. They had seen a captain stripped of dignity and all but killed in that very place. They held out little hope for a mere lieutenant.
The scout gulped visibly, wishing he was back inside the claustrophobic confines of his craft. He was the best pilot aboard the Wennis, possibly one of the best in the service.
That was not going to do him any good with the sorcerer.
Nor had he been educated to say or do the diplomatic thing when confronted with malevolent and arbitrary authority, at least of such potency. He felt he would have been better served had such a skill been part of his otherwise exhaustive military survival training-seldom had the need arisen for making a fire with flint and steel or using a signal mirror to summon help.
“The Courteous, sir,” he answered finally, “part of the blockade line at the ThonBoka. In fact, sir, at the time, she was the closest vessel to the nebula. I listened to the traffic, sir, as I had been about to report aboard the flagship on your orders, and was awaiting docking clearance. This Em Falcon, an ugly old tub of a tramp freighter, was supposed to rendezvous with Courteous for purposes of trade. She'd been through the whole fleet that way, peddling tobacco and other civilian stuff like a vendor droid at a ballgame. Instead, she attempted to evade the cruiser and made high speed for the mouth of the nebula. That's when Courteous caught her. I never saw a beam like that before, sir. Must be something new.”
Gepta leaned forward even farther, towering from his pedestaled chair over the young officer. “And the Millennium Falcon? What of her?”
The pilot gulped again, appreciating well the fate of innocent bearers of bad tidings. “Vaporized, sir. She took the full force on her after shields and overloaded. It was visible all over the fleet. Sir.”
“So...” The sorcerer considered these data, the scout virtually forgotten as the young man stood before him, trembling at attention, his helmet under his arm. A runnel of sweat slowly crept down the side of the pilot's neck into the metal pressure collar of his suit.
The gray-swathed sorcerer glanced up again a moment later, almost absently. “Are you still here, Lieutenant? I suggest you report back to your section immediately.”
The room fairly creaked with sudden relaxation. An astonished and highly relieved young courier saluted his commander gratefully and departed the bridge amid the silent cheers of the cruiser's conspicuously disinterested crew members.
Looking forward to a good meal and something tall and cool to drink in the pilot's lounge below, the lieutenant passed through the bulkhead doors with a new spring in his step. The panels whispered closed behind him as he stepped into the companionway.
A large security trooper, one of Gepta's personal bodyguards, came up behind him, laid a hand the size of a telecom directory on the young man's shoulder. The lieutenant nearly jumped out of his spacesuit.
“Thought you'd bought the farm there, didn't you, son?”
The older man's face crinkled in a grin that was difficult to interpret. “Say, I'm just going off duty, and seeing as how I was aboard the first time we ran into
that garbage scow the Falcon, and seeing as how I'm just as pleased she's a cloud of radioactive dust, what do you say we both go below for some liquid celebration?”
The lieutenant looked up uncertainly into the trooper's face. The clamp-like grip on his shoulder gave him little choice. He nodded without enthusiasm, and the two dwindled and disappeared down the corridor.
A short time later, Rokur Gepta stirred from futile contemplation, held up a gloved hand, and snapped his fingers. From somewhere aft and overhead there came a rustle of dry, hairy wings as one of his pets lurched out of its darkened, foul-smelling niche, flapped across the room trailing an indeterminate number of scrawny, many-jointed legs. It came to rest, perching blindly on Gepta's outstretched wrist, salivating in anticipation just as the bodyguard entered the bridge with a small, shallow tray. With his free hand, Gepta accepted a pair of plastic tongs, reached for something on the tray, and held it up before his pet. The creature had nothing resembling a face, simply a gummy puckered opening toward the front of its body, set between the wings. The cavity distended greedily at the touch of the offered morsel.
There was a moment of enjoyment, some sucking, digestive noises.... It belched.
VII
LEHESU CAME AS close to nervous pacing as any Oswaft could.
The giant ray-like creature drifted in the relative emptiness of space at what he regarded a prudent distance from the warship - guarded mouth of the ThonBoka.
Watching the watchers.
As always, his estimate of what was prudent differed somewhat from that of his co-sapients. None of them could be persuaded to venture within light-years of the spot from which the periodic activities of their new enemies could be observed, if not entirely understood.
Restless, Lehesu concentrated a moment, got his bearings in some manner no one but another Oswaft would be able to fathom, and hopped, without thinking much more about it, a few hundred thousand kilometers, as if the intervening distance didn't exist. It was a gesture of frustration. He had been brought up to believe such fidgeting was infantile, undignified, not to mention impolite when in the company of others. But at the moment he couldn't help himself. He was impatient, an emotion he shared in common with other species, but which would be beyond the comprehension of most Oswaft. Still he waited.
Star Wars - The Adventures of Lando Calrissian Trilogy Page 36
