Star Wars: The Adventures of Lando Calrissia (29 page)

But that scarcely made up for the trouble Calrissian was causing, and if possible, she’d see him fried for that. The other complication was his fault, indirectly, as well. She’d argued with her superior, Lob Doluff, about it, but pressure was being put on him, and the pressure worked its way down onto her shoulders. Calrissian would pay for that, as well.

Flamewind had begun, and she was going to miss it.

Vuffi Raa paced the curved companionways of the
Millennium Falcon
. He was a most unhappy machine. Below, the hatchway to service corridor 17-W was closed, clamped with an impound seal, and it had been all he could do to persuade the authorities not to stencil a seizure notice on his body—or take him away and lock him up in some warehouse.

Maintaining a modest silence about his manifold additional capabilities, he’d convinced them that, as a pilot, navigator, and repairbot, he was essentially part of the ship. As a consequence, they had affixed to his torso a restraining bolt—a bit of electronic mischief that was supposed to inflict enormous pain on his nervous system should he attempt to leave the
Falcon
.

It had taken him all of thirty seconds to disable it, once the
police had departed. Nonetheless, prudence dictated that he stay there unless he could think of something useful to do for himself and his master.

Outside, huge sheets of polychrome gas filled the sky, punctuated every few minutes by terrifying displays of lightning. Flamewind was barely underway and yet, for most observers, the phenomenon was overwhelming.

Vuffi Raa didn’t even notice it.

He supposed that Lando had offered at least a hundred times to set him legally free. For some reason it bothered the gambler deeply to own another sapient being, even a mechanical one. Vuffi Raa had always turned him down, preferring to stay with his adventurous master. Now he wondered—very briefly—whether it mightn’t have been a better idea to accept. As a manumitted droid, he would have been at liberty to deal with the situation.

Although what, specifically, he would have done remained a mystery.

As an article of property, he was told nothing by the authorities about Lando’s fate or that of himself and the
Falcon
. However, from long, long experience with human culture, the robot could make a fairly accurate guess. Somehow all of that must be prevented, some bargain struck that would at least leave them even, leave them in the condition in which they’d arrived.

Vuffi Raa had very little experience making deals.

Outside, the sky writhed with the seven colors of the spectrum—and with every possible mixture in between. For Vuffi Raa, there were more than a hundred basic colors, from lowest infrared to highest ultraviolet, and the permutations and combinations possible had to be expressed in exponentials.

Yet the spectacle was lost on him, and not from any lack of aesthetic sensitivity.

He
liked
Lando Calrissian. The little droid had a deceptive appearance; he always looked brand-new, and his mere meter of height made people think diminutive thoughts about him. In reality, he had a powerful mind and a lifetime that stretched back centuries, even further than he could remember.

Apparently, that was the result of a pirate attack on a freighter in whose hold he’d occupied a commercial shipping crate. It was his first clear memory, the jarring, shouting, screaming. The groaning of the fabric of the victimized ship. He hadn’t been supposed to awaken until arrival at his destination.
The premature activation was a survival mechanism, but it had cost him something. He could remember nothing of his origins; had only the vaguest impression that the race who had created him looked something like him.

In all the time since, through hundreds of owners, hundreds of systems, planets, cultures, he’d never grown so fond of a human being. He couldn’t exactly say why Lando Calrissian affected him so, but affection was the truth. They laughed together; Vuffi Raa’s separating tentacles (once the robot had disclosed this capability) had become the basis for a number of Lando’s rare but elaborate practical jokes. They prospered together, and in financial extremes, Lando had divided his small fortunes between buying food for himself and whatever small electronic items the robot’s maintenance required.

They were friends.

And now, Vuffi Raa was helpless to aid his master.

Outside, a braid of raspberry red, lemon yellow, and orange orange twisted through the heavens, across a constellation locals called the Silly Rabbit.

No sentient sighted being could have cared less than Vuffi Raa.

Rokur Gepta floated in an utter blackness not half so dark as the secret contemplations of his soul.

Deep underground, where the final traces of the minuscule natural gravity of the asteroid were canceled, he hung suspended in the center of an artificial cavern, momentarily free of all sensation, free of the annoyances attendant upon suffering the incompetence of his underlings, free of the steady, grinding presence of the warmth and bustle of life.

His plans were well in motion. The
Wennis
was some distance away, its crew performing drill after endless drill, not so much to sharpen their abilities—they were, after all, only the best of a hopeless lot—as to keep them out of the kind of trouble that uncontrolled individuality never fails to generate. Gepta smugly affirmed to himself that chance favors the prepared mind: a happy turn of fate had placed his enemy, Lando Calrissian, in the custody of Oseon officialdom. Since that officialdom was a government, and he was who he was, Calrissian was already three-quarters of the way into his hands.

They would be cruel hands, once they received their prey.

And deservedly so. Who had kept the sorcerer from obtaining and using the Mindharp of Sharu, an instrument of total
mental control over others? Lando Calrissian. Who now owned the ancient enigmatic robot that seemed the key to yet another sheaf of tantalizing unanswered questions—and limitless power? Lando Calrissian. Who had evaded trap after trap, including that prepared for him on Dilonexa XXIII and the device planted aboard that cursed wreck, the
Millennium Falcon
! Lando Calrissian.

How he hated that name! How he would make its owner squirm and writhe until he learned the secret of his weird luck, or the other, hidden powers for which he was a front! How he would crush the life—slowly, very slowly—out of Lando Calrissian’s frail body, after first destroying most of the mind (but not enough so that its owner couldn’t appreciate the final moments).

Gepta thought back to an earlier, a happier time, to his first years as an adept among the ancient Sorcerers of Tund. How he had deceived the doddering fools, even while stealing their esoteric and sequestered learnings. As intended, they had mistaken him for a young apprentice and had been unable to penetrate his disguise. Already, he had been, even those thousands of years ago, far older than the most ancient of the sorcerers, and
they
knew how to stretch a life span!

Ah, yes. The galaxy still believed that somewhere the hidden planet Tund was home to the mysterious Order. Only Gepta knew it was a sterile ball. Not so much as a tiny fingerbone was left. The thought—the memory of what he had done on that final day—filled him with delight and satisfaction.

Someday he’d do it to the entire universe!

Meanwhile, that universe wasn’t big enough for Rokur Gepta and Lando Calrissian. As Lando Calrissian was going to discover very soon.

Slowly, with elaborate precision, the sorcerer everted his body—turned inside-out on the axis of his digestive system as a form of meditative relaxation—and resumed a true appearance only slightly less disgusting than the one he had given a few seconds before. No human being had ever seen him thus, none ever would—and live to relate the horror of it. He relaxed his numberless alien appendages, stretched them, and relaxed, then spun about himself the appearance of the gray-swathed presumably humanoid sorcerer the world knew.

Summoning a power of which the universe was equally ignorant,
he drifted slowly, deliberately, toward the floor of the cavern. There was work to do, and he must be about it.

And yes … he must feed his pet.

Klyn Shanga concealed his grief. Year after year, it never got any easier to bear. Now, Colonel Kenow, his old and valued companion, was dead. Dead and gone. Forevermore.

They had fought in the battle of the Rood together as boys. It had been an insignificant sideshow in a vastly greater war, but to them, it had been a lifepath-altering cusp. They had survived, toughened by the ghastly experience, transformed from callow farmboys into soldiers.

And friends.

And now, Colonel Kenow was dead.

The worst of it was that it had been a senseless, purposeless death spurred by an impetuosity Shanga wouldn’t have believed possible in a man of Kenow’s age and battle experience. The stringent rich-man’s laws of the Oseon had forced the veteran to abandon the weapon he was used to in favor of a crude length of pipe. Then he had been shot down by a stranger only tangentially involved with the enemy they sought, an accidental, not altogether innocent bystander. If only Kenow had listened …

Lightning flared, shaking the entire fabric of the odd assembly of fighters. Keeping station off the asteroid was growing more difficult by the minute. He could scarcely see across the few hundred meters that separated him from the farthest ship in his tiny fleet, thanks to the colored vapor that smoked and roiled around them. The radiation-counter needles climbed inexorably, despite the fact that they were in the shadow of a billion tons of iron-based rock. How much longer they could keep it up …

Well, in the end, it wouldn’t matter. The giant engine still pulsed reliably, the cables connecting it to the fighters were sound. They’d had to rebalance to make up for Kenow’s missing ship, but that had been simple, really. If they could just hold on long enough to do their work, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference whether they survived the fury of the Flamewind, whether their skin flaked off and they lost their hair and vomited up the last drop of their lives. Those lives would have been well accounted for, the loss well worth it.

Shanga, like the rest of his companions, bided his time, hid his grief. The sleet of energy around them was making even
line-bound communication impossible. The cables acted like a huge antenna, gathering up a howling cacophony that ground on the nerves, eroded morale and resolve. It was as if all the dead the universe had ever seen gathered in an unholy chorus once a year in the Oseon.

And now there was a new voice, that of Colonel Kenow, Klyn Shanga’s old friend.

Well, soon there would be other voices, Shanga thought. His among them.

Lob Doluff wasn’t any happier than anyone else that carnival season. He regarded the whole Flamewind fooforaw as an enormous, unnecessary pain in the neck. He had never liked it, never understood why anybody else did.

Lob Doluff was color-blind.

He was also worried—half to death. Dressed as he was in lightweight indoor clothing, his head uncovered, his plump arms bare to the chill of the special section of his garden, standing in the middle of half a hectare of snow, his hands were sweating.

The Administrator Senior’s visual disability did not affect his appreciation for flowering plants although his reasons for collecting them may have been a bit different from those others might have. He loved their perfume and their persistence. To him a weed that cracked a ferroconcrete walkway was something of a miracle, and here, where tiny, almost microscopic flowers poked their small, courageous heads up through snow and ice, there was something especially miraculous.

It did little to cheer him now, however. He was in a bind.

Unlike his subordinate, Bassi Vobah, he was one of the
few
who served the few, while making an unusually honest effort to serve the many. He was quite as wealthy as anyone in the Oseon, and yet a sense of civic duty, personal pride, drove him to sit in the Administrator Senior’s office and attempt to govern the essentially ungovernable millions upon millions of falling worldlets that comprised the system. He kept the peace. He maintained minimal social services. He acted as a buffer between the Oseon’s inhabitants and a galaxy that often clamored for their attention, either in response to their great wealth, their enormous fame—or their criminal reputation.

At all of this he was very good, and his independent wealth allowed him a certain latitude denied the average civil servant. He might not
quite
be able to tell his superiors to take a flaming
jump into the Core, but he had
thought
about it more than once and made the recommendation to many of their representatives.

Unfortunately, he was unable to indulge himself on this occasion. Pressure—greater pressure than he had known existed—was being placed on him to betray many of the things he stood for. If he complied, it was distinctly possible that no one would ever learn of it. But he, Lob Doluff, would know, and it would remove a great deal of the satisfaction from his life.

At the other end of the proposition, he stood to lose his position, his wealth, his reputation, even his life if he insisted on pushing things to their extreme. In addition, many, many others would suffer. It was ugly, and he hadn’t thought such things could happen in a civilized universe.

Now he knew different.

He turned from his absent contemplation of the snow-flowers of a hundred systems, walked through an invisible air curtain into a semitropical wedge of the dome, strode to a tree stump, and flipped the top upward. Reaching in, he seized a communicator and brought it to his lips.

“This is the Administrator Senior,” he said after asking for the correct extension number. “Have Captain Calrissian brought to my office in an hour.”

His hands were sweating again. He’d never sent a man to certain death before.

I
T WAS TWO
and a half meters tall, had an orange beak and scaly three-toed feet, was covered with bright yellow feathers, spoke in an annoying high-pitched effeminate voice despite its
repulsively obvious masculinity, and answered to the name of Waywa Fybot.