The Other interrupted. “Events move of their own accord! What shall come to pass is unpredictable! It is Chaos, I tell you, Chaos!”
“And there ought to be a law? Remember, comrade, that it is this state of unpredictability which nearly every race endures for all of its life-span. It is in this state that we began, and we are unusual in surviving it. We very nearly died of boredom; would that have been more desirable?”
“Don't lecture me!” the Other replied with uncharacteristic sharpness. “I know as well as you do of the dangers that confronted us. I was the first to consent to your plan. Do not begrudge me the right to complain of some of its consequences; it assists me in adjusting to the inevitable.”
Laughter crackled through the distorted space around them. “Nothing is inevitable anymore, dear comrade, nothing! That is the entire point of the experiment!”
“Well, I hope your experiment will produce a cure for smugness, then. I personally shall take great pleasure in restraining you while it is forcibly administered!”
Once again laughter sundered the twisted ether as the One, the disgruntled Other, and the Rest, in various states of mind, plunged onward.
“Nonsense!” Rokur Gepta hissed from the corner of his apartments below the control deck. “He is mine to deal with, and I tell you he shall be sectioned alive before the entire crew - yours included, Admiral Shanga - as an example!”
It was the first time the fighter commander had ever seen the sorcerer pace nervously. The time was growing near for the resolution of a number of crises, and the Renatasian had a suspicion that Gepta, too, feared he would be robbed of his victory by a trigger-happy fleet Commodore. Carrying disrespect to new heights because he felt the effect was necessary, Shanga flopped into the sorcerer's huge chair.
“Gepta, you old charlatan, you know better than that, and if you don't, I'll tell you now. Keep Bern Nuladeg in the brig, if you wish, until we get to the ThonBoka. He could use the rest, and it'll keep him out of trouble. Not to mention saving your well-concealed face. But execute him, and I'm through with you. I'll take my squadron and-”
“You'll do what you are told!” Gepta made a threatening magical gesture.
Shanga laughed. “Save your parlor tricks, old man! We stopped doing what we were told when your precious Navy destroyed anything we had to lose by disobeying. Twenty-three loose cannon, Gepta, and they're all pointed at you unless you-”
“Silence! I have no further need for you, Klyn Shanga. You have foolishly told me where Lando Calrissian might be found. We will soon be there, and he is trapped by the fleet, cannot get away from the justice I shall mete out. You serve no purpose. You are dispensable!”
Shanga obtained another cigar from inside his suit, lit it, and spat out a flake of tobacco onto the carpeted floor.
“Yeah? Well, I spent a little time with your pet professor today. You'll recall you instructed him to be free and easy with information bearing on combat operations in the nebula? What he had to say about the stuff relayed this morning from the fleet was very interesting. Very interesting, indeed.”
Gepta, his back turned to the squadron commander, spoke to the wall. “And what was that?”
“Ask your own people if you don't believe me. We're up against it, Gepta. There are something like a billion Oswaft in that sack, every one of them as dangerous as a fighter ship. Something about folks like us being electrochemical in nature, our nervous systems, anyway. Well, the Oswaft are what your boy is calling 'organoelectronic.' I don't know exactly everything that implies, but they can think and act and maneuver a lot faster than we can. What's more, a flock of them destroyed the Courteous. Nobody knows how.”
Gepta whirled on Shanga. “What has this to do with disposition of your group, Admiral?” The way the sorcerer pronounced his title may have been the most sarcastic thing that Shanga had ever heard. With difficulty he shrugged off the implied threat, returned to calculated insult.
“So you think you're going to get anywhere with the clumsy children you've got manning this ship? I told you, Gepta, they're amateurs, and they're so scared at balling things up, they'll ball them up anyway! I think what Bern Nuladeg tried this morning ought to demonstrate pretty well how frightened we are, of you, or of anything else. You need us, you pretentious idiot, and you're going to lose this operation without us. You may have already. Have you heard from the fleet?”
There was a long, long silence while Rokur Gepta gained control of himself. No one, not for perhaps twenty thousand years, had spoken to him in such a manner and lived - or even died a quick and merciful death. In fact some of them had lasted, under one instrument of both torture and regeneration or another, for centuries. Klyn Shanga might be one such, after this was over.
Very well, then, the sorcerer reasoned, it should not matter what immediate disposition he made of Shanga or his underlings. They would serve their purpose in the coming conflict, and any who survived...
But he had one more source of information to consult. He strode rapidly to the chair that Shanga occupied, ignored the man, and pressed a button. “Send me the Ottdefa Osuno Whett immediately.”
Not three minutes later, the compartment door whisked aside, and the anthropologist stepped in. The tall, emaciated professor took in what was to be seen, sensed conflict momentarily postponed, and vowed to himself to get out of the way as soon as he could manage it.
“You have been following the information from the fleet?” the sorcerer asked without preliminaries.
“Of course, sir, I-”
“What do they tell you of the capabilities of the Oswaft?”
Shanga grinned, but kept his silence.
“Well, sir, it is a confirmation of my earlier studies. In a cellular sense, these beings seem to exist on a sort of solid-state level, something like primitive electronics. This accounts for their communications abilities and-”
“How is this known? Is it merely surmise, or are there data?”
The anthropologist's astonishment grew every time Gepta snapped at him. Along with his fear. “Sir, a number of vessels did a full-range scan at the moment the creatures were destroyed. Most of them were vaporized when the Courteous went up. In fact, it's possible that not one of them was injured by fire from the fleet. They simply miscalculated the destructive radius of an exploding cruiser. The Courteous did open fire, but there wasn't any time t-”
The sorcerer raised a hand and the scientist halted. “By what means did the Oswaft destroy the cruiser Courteous Ottdefa? And how vulnerable do you suppose they are to the Navy's weapons?”
When hesitated before he began again: “Sir, as difficult as it may be to believe, it appears that simple microwaves were the method, but at incredible power levels. This is consistent with their ability to hyper-travel, since it, too, is an energy-intensive phenomenon. There is also the fact to consider that the Courteous was unshielded - I believe the circumstances are referred to as 'garrison discipline'? Shielded, I believe a ship would be quite safe. To answer your second question, there is no reason to believe that the Oswaft would be any more impervious to disintegrator beams, tractor-pressor beams, disruptors, and the like, than any other living thing.”
The sorcerer stood deep in thought, one hand where his chin should have been under his wrappings. Shanga sat, apparently relaxed and smoking his cigar, while Whett stood nearly at attention.
“One final question, Ottdefa: how many Oswaft are there?”
“Sir, there is no direct way of knowing. Estimates range from several hundred million to a few billion.”
Shanga laughed. “Since when do the words 'few' and 'billion' belong in the same sentence. Gepta, they could whittle down the fleet by sheer attrition, and-”
“Silence,” the sorcerer said with unusual gentleness, “I must think. Ottdefa, I will speak with you later, thank you for your report.” The door whooshed open and closed behind the grateful anthropologist.
Then Gepta addressed Shanga. “Admiral, you are no friend of mine
, and, after this operation, will never again be an ally. But you have spoken the truth to me, and I am compelled to recognize it. Very well, we shall do as you have suggested. Your man - what was his name? - will remain confined until we reach the nebula, whereupon he will revert to your command. I trust you and your squadron will serve me as you have implicitly promised.”
The fighter pilot rose wearily and stubbed out his cigar. Rearranging his newly recovered blaster on his leg more comfortably, he walked toward the door, turned back to the sorcerer at the last moment.
“I haven't any reason to want to send you flowers, either, old man, but we've got a common enemy. We'll stick with you until that's taken care of. Talk to you later.” He stepped through the door and was gone.
Scarcely noticing the man had left this time, Rokur Gepta paced awhile more, then, with a more determined stride than before, turned to his chair. He seated himself and activated several cameras. He pushed a button. “For immediate recording and beamcast to the fleet,” he directed unseen technicians: “Upon my own unanswerable authority, I order you to cease all combat operations upon receipt of this transmission and to return to your positions on the original blockade perimeter.
“Evasion or failure, on the part of any officer, at any level, to comply swiftly with this direct order will be punishable by summary revocation of all rank and privileges, judiciary and ceremonial impoverishment and sale into bondage of all family members within five degrees of consanguinity, and for the perpetrator himself, slow mutilation and death upon public display.
“I, Rokur Gepta, Sorcerer of Tund, command it.”
The camera lights went out.
Gepta sat back in his chair, feeling much better. This would buy them all some time, and resolve part of the conflict between Klyn Shanga and himself. Odd, he hadn't had a real adversary to stand up to him for thousands of years. No one dared oppose his ruthless exercise of power. Everywhere he went, people in their masses, and as individuals, feared, hated, and served him.
Except for Lando Calrissian.
And now, possibly even worse than the itinerant gambler - because the affront seemed deliberately calculated - there was Klyn Shanga.
The most peculiar aspect of it was that, somehow, it felt good.
XII
THE OTTDEFA OSUNO Whett reflected.
Shuddering in the relative security of his assigned quarters in officer's country, he considered himself extremely lucky just to be alive that morning. He'd seen others broken, figuratively and literally, at the malignant whim of Rokur Gepta, individuals guilty of nothing more than reporting a purely mechanical failure or bringing him information he didn't want to assimilate. To be trapped in the middle of a dispute between the evil sorcerer and his reluctant - and no doubt soon-to-be former - partner, that barbarian Shanga...
He crossed the cramped living-sleeping space allotted him, noting that he'd forgotten to fold the cot into the wall in his earlier haste to answer Gepta's summons. So - he was still accustomed to depending on a servant after all this time. It was a weakness to make note of and correct.
The gray military wallcoat of the compartment still oppressed him, despite the decorations - ceremonial masks, garish shields, primitive hand-powered weapons - he'd hung up here and there. He'd have to see what else he carried in his luggage down below in the storage hold. It would brighten the place up and strengthen the official “cover” that allowed him to travel thus encumbered in the first place.
Entering the tiny head, he sloughed off the casual civilian shipsuit he'd been wearing, now soaked through with perspiration and smelling foul. He wasn't on the schedule for a shower at this time of day, and hadn't had time for it when the fixtures had been operational.
Thank the Core for the mixture of intelligent species whose differences in personal habits and physical characteristics made individual quarters (at least at his level of rank) a necessity rather than a luxury even aboard this spartan vessel. At that, it could be worse: he could be quartered with the noncoms or conscriptees. It wouldn't have been unprecedented; his long career had seen him assume many stranger poses. Now all he desired was a refreshing wash, which he attended to at the small sink (set into the shower stall along with the toilet) with its trickle of lukewarm recycled water. An ironic expression greeted him in the mirror above the sink.
Well, he had survived, as he had always survived. All it had required was layer upon layer of carefully prepared deception. It was the sole art to which he could truly lay claim, the only way he could expect to get out of this mess with his skin intact.
That accursed robot: it had been responsible for all his troubles in recent years. Gepta and Shanga were headed toward the ThonBoka nebula - from Tund, on the outskirts of one side of civilization, to the StarCave, on the fringes of the other side - for nothing more than revenge. Perhaps he, himself, the soi-disant Ottdefa Osuno Whett, would be enjoying a little vengeance, too, when the Wennis finally arrived at its destination.
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 fiddl
ing 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.
Star Wars - The Adventures of Lando Calrissian Trilogy Page 41
