Star Wars: The Adventures of Lando Calrissia (25 page)

There were seventy-eight of these, in five suits: Sabres, Staves, Flasks, and Coins, plus the special suit of face cards with negative values. The object was to build a two- or three-card hand adding up to twenty-three, no more. What made it especially difficult was that the cards were “smart”—each was, in fact, a sophisticated electronic chip capable of changing randomly
to another value, while the card it replaced changed to something else. This made for a fast-paced, nerve-wracking game combining elements of skill and fortune.

Lando thought of it as relaxing.

He held up a card, watched it blur and shift and refocus, from Commander of Staves to Three of Coins. In the surface field of a gaming table, the cards would retain their identities. This was necessary for scoring: imagine tossing down a perfect twenty-three, only to have it transmute itself into a losing hand.

Another card, the Seven of Sabres. It stayed its old familiar self for rather a longish time, finally changed into Endurance, one of the negative cards. Lando shuffled it back into the deck.

The Oseon, he thought: I should know a great deal more about it and its people. Principally, what the traffic will bear. He turned from the cards to a datalink, punched a few buttons. There it was: oh, yes! While it might be remarkable for its rich inhabitants, it was downright famous for its seasonally spectacular scenery.

Oseon was the home of the Flamewind.

Many stellar systems have asteroid belts, where whole planets have come unglued or never quite managed to coalesce. Circular zones occupied by rocks rather than worlds, their constituents could range in size from sand grains to objects hundreds—even thousands—of kilometers in extent. Some few systems had more than one such belt.

The Oseon had nothing else.

In the Oseon there were no planets at all in the proper sense of the word. Not even the Core knew what disaster had taken place there, perhaps billions of years before the advent of humankind. Maybe a rogue star had passed too close, its gravity well disrupting the planet-forming process. Maybe some unique element in the makeup of the system had caused the planets to blow themselves up.

Perhaps there had been an ancient, alien war.

Whatever the cause, the Oseon sun was now surrounded by seven broad bands of floating debris, billions upon billions of subplanetary bodies. The largest of these worldlets, Oseon 6845, was an artificially honeycombed mountain seven hundred kilometers in diameter, filled with luxury hotels, nightspots, and palatial residences. Other rocks in other belts had been converted into estates for the rich and superrich. There was plenty of room.

All of this, while quite extraordinary, was not in itself sufficient to turn the place into a five-star tourist attraction. But once a year (by what reckoning Lando forgot even as he read it), the Oseon System’s sun flared in a peculiar manner (giving rise to the theory about a unique element blowing up the planets). As the flares tore streamers of excited vapor from the nearest of the asteroids, the entire system fluoresced, pulsed, resonated, generating enormous bands of shifting color, fairy brilliance, millions of kilometers long and wide, like the spokes of an enormous wheel. Colors ranged across the humanly visible spectrum, exceeding it broadly at both ends.

There was, very possibly, nothing else quite so impressively beautiful in the known universe as the Flamewind of Oseon.

Lando did a rapid calculation: yes, if his luck ran well for long enough, he and Vuffi Raa would be there at the right time. Perhaps that had been intended by Lob Doluff as an incentive of sorts. How nice: a kind of bonus they could both—

KABLOMMMMM
!

The
Millennium Falcon
pitched end over end with sudden violence.

Through the ports, stars whirled crazily about them in a meaningless pattern. Alarms went off, filling the cabin with an ear-splitting wail. Smoke began seeping into the room as random bits and pieces—Lando’s cards, his cigars, an old pair of socks—clung in odd, unpredictable places, responding to the primitive artificial gravity imposed on the ship by its wild head-over-heels spin.

“Vuffi Raa!”

Grasping the nearest bolted-down furniture, Lando shouted at the intercom. “What in the name of the Eternal was that?”

There was no response.

Pulling himself hand over hand against the nonsensically vectored drag, Lando made slow, unsteady progress to the bridge. Klaxons beat upon his head, their noise a tangible thing. The final turn of corridor was like crawling up a vertical sewer pipe, each rung of the emergency ladder coming with greater difficulty as he climbed above the ship’s new center of gravity.

Once in the cockpit, he climbed exhaustedly into his seat
and strapped himself in, trying without much success to catch his breath.

Rendered virtually invisible by their speed, Vuffi Raa’s tentacles were flying over the controls. It must be some emergency, thought Lando, if even the multitalented robot was too busy now to talk. To the continued tune of shrilling alarms, Lando began assisting him, newly acquired knowledge coming sure and true to his fingertips. First, they stabilized the ship’s insane changes of attitude. Up became up once again, down, down.

Next, they located the source of the explosion. It was in the bottommost level of the
Falcon
, seemingly just under the belly skin. They triggered cannisters of firefoam, then jettisoned the resultant mess into open space. Temperature indicators relaxed, a few red lights winked to green. The alarms shut off; a deafening silence reigned.

Finally, Vuffi Raa laid the proper course back in, and they were on their way to the Oseon once again, although at something less than normal interstellar cruising speed.

“How bad is the damage?” Lando was already unstrapping himself. He wiped a shaking hand over his dampened forehead.

Vuffi Raa looked over the control panel, several sections of which were still ablaze with red and yellow lights. “It would appear, Master, to be superficial. The difficulty began when I shifted into faster-than-light drive. We shall have to inspect it close up, however. I don’t trust the remote sensors.”

“Very well,” the gambler answered, “let’s get below. I’ll put on a pressure suit and—”

“Master, it is standard procedure in such instances for one crew member to remain at the controls, while the other—”

“All right, then,” Lando said, a trifle irritated, “
you
stay here. I’ll suit up and—”

“Master, I can operate perfectly well in a hard vacuum without a suit. Explosive decompression doesn’t bother me. And I know how to weld. Do you?”

The little droid, of course, showed no expression, but Lando felt as if there were a pair of human arms somewhere inside its shiny chassis, folded across an imaginary chest, beneath an unbearably smug grimace.

“Have it your own way, then! I’ll
still
suit up. It seems a sensible safety precaution, just in case you open the wrong
door somewhere. Keep me informed, will you—
and don’t call me Master
!”

Vuffi Raa unstrapped himself from the copilot’s seat, rose, and strode to the back of the control area. “I’ll do better than keep you informed, Master. Observe that monitor nearest your left elbow.”

Swiveling his neck, Lando was suddenly seeing himself, quite plainly if somewhat distortedly, as if by a wide-angle lens held too close to its subject. The colors seemed a bit off, and the gambler realized he was seeing a translation of infrared and ultraviolet information in addition to the usual spectrum.

“I get it: I see what you see. You know, this could come in very handy: like, say, the next time I’m in a game, and—”

“But Master, that would be unethical!”

“Wouldn’t it just? All right, we’ll talk about it later. Meanwhile, let’s get to work on the damage.”

They both shuffled out of the cockpit, headed toward separate destinations.

Ten minutes later, Lando was again seated in his pilot’s recliner, watching the monitor through the transparent faceplate of a spacesuit helmet. He thought about opening the visor to smoke a cigar, remembered the magic words “explosive decompression,” and desisted. After all, they didn’t know yet how badly hurt the
Falcon
was. A footfall, no matter how light, in the wrong place might blow a hull panel, which—

On the screen, Vuffi Raa had made it to the site of the explosion. His viewpoint approached a heavily damaged piece of machinery.

“Why, that’s just one of the hydraulic jacks for the boarding ramp,” Lando exclaimed, almost indignantly. “There’s nothing flammable or explosive in that section—and what does it have to do at all with the ultra-lightspeed drive?”

The camera angle tilted downward. A tentacle reached for something wedged between two heavy springs. The object had to be sawed and twisted out of its place, then the tentacle lifted it nearer the robot’s eye.

“What the devil is
that
?” Lando asked the intercom.

The thing looked like a spring itself, a section of thick-gauge wire coiled and then twisted around into an evasively familiar shape, rather like a doughnut, but with an extra turn, pretzel-wise.

“It’s a Möbius coil of some kind, Master,” Vuffi Raa answered at last. “They’re used as tuners and—my word, it’s an
antenna
. Master, someone placed a device here to detect the shift into ultralightspeed. You see, there’s a hyperware generated by the—”

“Yes, yes,” Lando interrupted impatiently. “But what’s the point of all that?”

“There would be a considerable point, Master, if the antenna was connected to a controller that, in turn, was connected to a bomb.”

The gambler pondered that. “You mean, someone just walked up and attached it back on Dilonexa, while we were refueling, and when we buttoned up for takeoff, we effectively brought it inside the ship ourselves?”

“Something like that, Master.”

“A bomb. Do you suppose they found out about the wintenberry jelly?”

D
EEP SPACE
.

The officially decommissioned Imperial Cruiser
Wennis
bored through the blackness like a thing alive, a hungry thing, a thing with the need to kill. It had been built for that, nearly three-quarters of a century ago. Now it was an obsolete machine, displaced by more efficient killers.

Still, it served its purpose.

On the bridge, a uniformed crew quietly attended to their duties. They were a mixed lot, officially—again,
officially
—civilians. Many were the worst of the worst, the scum and misfits of a million-system civilization. Others were the best that could be had, the cream of the elite.

Like the
Wennis
, this, too, served a purpose.

All were military personnel, now indefinitely detached to serve aboard the decommissioned cruiser. In this, they served their Emperor (although not without an occasional—extremely discreet—grumble) and hoped for early promotion and other rewards.

In practicality, all served an entity who, although somewhat less elevated than His Imperial Majesty, was nevertheless quite as frighteningly impressive. This figure stalked the bridge as well, draped from crown to heel in the heavy dark swathings people had come to associate with the mysterious and sinister Sorcerers of Tund.

Rokur Gepta, all features save his burning eyes concealed behind the final windings of his turbanlike headgear, barely suppressed a scream.

“
Do you have the temerity to tell me you have failed again
?”

The officer he addressed was not happy with his present assignment. In the first place, his uniform had been stripped of all rank and unit markings. It made him feel naked. In the second place, he could not understand why a battle-ready cruiser and its full crew were pursuing a single tiny tramp freighter.

The officer gulped. “I only mean to say, sir, that the device our agent planted seems to have gone off prematurely. It was supposed to explode, on your orders, just before atmospheric entry at their next port of call.”

“
So you have failed twice
! You idiot, they’re en route to the Oseon—there will
be
no atmospheric entry! I have had enough of this!”

The sorcerer made a gesture with his gloved fist. The officer groaned, sweat sprang out on his forehead, and he sank to his knees.

“You see how much more effective it is than mere pain, don’t you? Everyone has memories, little items from their past best left buried: humiliations, embarrassments, mistakes … sometimes fatal ones. All the ways we have failed those we have loved, the ways they have failed us!”

Gepta made another gesture.

“No, you can think of nothing else! The ignobility races round and round your mind, amplified, feeding on itself!”

The officer’s face went gray, he swayed on his knees, his back bowed, his clenched fists began dripping blood where the fingernails cut into the palms. A little froth appeared at one
corner of his mouth, followed by more blood as he gnashed at his lips and tongue. Finally, he lost all control, collapsed in a heap and lay there, twitching, moaning.

Gepta released him.

A pair of orderlies appeared, dragged the broken man from the bridge. Oddly enough, he was far from destroyed. Gepta had noticed, in the past, a certain increase in efficiency, perhaps even slightly enhanced intelligence after one of these crises. So why not make a good tool better? The tool was not in any position to complain of the stresses involved. Did it hurt a knife to grind it to razor sharpness? Who cared?

Slightly invigorated himself, the sorcerer turned, strode back to the control chair he usually occupied on the bridge. He was not captain on the
Wennis
, but he liked to stay on top of things.

He sat. Beside the chair was a pair of cages, each perhaps half a meter cubed. In the first, he kept his pet.

It was scarcely visible in its bed of gray-green muck, simply three stalky black legs thrusting upward crookedly, curving inward with a certain hungry, greedy energy perhaps only Gepta could see and sympathize with. The legs were sparsely hairy.