Star Wars: The Adventures of Lando Calrissia (40 page)

Reclaiming his leg, Vuffi Raa spared a split-second of attention for the gambler while he helped it connect itself. “You’re a hard being to rescue, Master. You don’t wait for help. I’ll ask you how you got loose from Rokur Gepta later, if we live. Meanwhile, hadn’t you better man the quad-guns?”

“
You
suggesting an aggressive act? I think you’re right.” Lando was gone before he’d finished the last sentence. Sliding into the gun chair, he flipped switches and pushed buttons, grabbed the handles of the ungainly weapon, and rested restless digits on the triggers.

A fighter made a pass at the larger ship as she lifted, her thrusters glowing blue-white.

Lando made life hell for him.

The
Falcon
soared into the multicolored sky, two of the fighters harrying her like angry hornets. They were fast, maneuverable, and
good
. Too good: Lando hadn’t any easy dodge available there, as he had at the fissured asteroid. Nor was he experiencing much success smoking his tormentors. But his
steady, accurate, occasionally inspired shooting kept them from having very much luck, either.

Another frantic pass, another exchange of energy-bolts, to little effect except in generating adrenaline on both sides.

Oseon 5792 dwindled rapidly beneath them.

Then somebody manhandling a fighter made a mistake, zigging when he should have zagged. Aboard the
Falcon
, crosshairs rested firmly on his midsection, waiting for exactly such an error. They were still on him as Lando mashed both triggers, tracking all the while, following through.

The fighter burst into a tumbling ball of sparks and greasy smoke.

Vuffi Raa rolled the
Falcon
, skidded, bringing Lando’s guns to bear again. He poured her fury into the remaining fighter as it swerved to avoid the fate of its companion.

Freighters weren’t supposed to be able to do that!

The unnaturally agile saucer suddenly performed a maneuver that, in another place and time, would be called a Luftberry circle, placing her smack on the fighter’s back again. Her quad-guns pounded.

The enemy wriggled off the hook once more, but this one made an error, too: he got sore. Veering in a wide, angry, predictable loop, he came back to have his vengeance. Instead, he got four parallel pulsed beams of raw fusion-reactor output straight in the helmet visor.

And exploded, showering space with incandescent atoms.

Beneath them, there was a sudden streak of light.

Something left the asteroid
faaassst
!, headed for interstellar space. At very nearly the same instant, the surviving three fighters, having reconnected themselves with their battleship engine, bored directly for Bohhuah Mutdah’s miniature world, fanatically intent on taking their victim with them—and unaware that (whoever it was) he was gone. Detaching themselves at the last second, they slung the giant, throbbing power plant at Oseon 5792.

One of them had a mechanical failure. His cable wouldn’t release. He was pulled down with the engine into hell.

The other two sheered off frantically.

Vuffi Raa raced tentacle tips over the
Falcon
’s keyboards. The resulting acceleration could be felt by her captain even through her powerful inertial dampers. His gun seat slewed around violently, slamming itself and its occupant hard against
the stops as the guns swung wildly. The asteroid dwindled to a pinprick—

—and blossomed into a glowing cloud, consuming one of the fighters who thought he’d gotten away, tumbling the other. Even the Flamewind paled momentarily as the ravening fireball expanded, growing brighter, brighter.

Then, from the inside out, it began to dim.

Lando took a deep breath—discovered he’d already taken one he didn’t remember—and let it out.

“
Brace yourself, Master
!” screamed the intercom beside his ear.

BLANG! ZOONG! GRAT!

It was like being inside a titanium drum being beaten by a tribe of savages. Debris showered past the
Falcon
, mostly ricocheting off her shields, some pieces actually getting through at a reduced and harmless velocity.

The freighter shook and danced, then steadied.

Lando released a second breath he didn’t recall taking, unstrapped himself from the quad-gun chair, rubbed a couple of sore places on his back, and shambled forward to the cockpit.

Deep in interstellar space, far from the Oseon and getting farther by the nanosecond, a brand-new one-seat fighter, bruised and battered by the Flamewind and the destruction of a world, took its badly shaken pilot home.

Rokur Gepta laughed bitterly. The best deception is the one that first deceives the deceiver. Blood stained the voluminous gray robes he wore, and agony pulsed through his ruined eye—another debt he owed Lando Calrissian. Yet Rokur Gepta was a being who took precautions, too. For example, his private fighter, one of the tiniest craft capable of interstellar flight ever constructed. It had saved his life in the Rafa System; now it guaranteed his continued existence once again.

In a universe that was all illusion, deception was a double-edged sword. As Bohhuah Mutdah, he had nearly sunk into that flaccid degenerate’s depression, so thoroughly had he absorbed the role. Only an all-consuming passion for vengeance had helped him to maintain his true identity. Similarly, when attacked by Calrissian, the disguise that he had worn for centuries had nearly been his undoing.

He endured the pain a while longer as a lesson to himself. There was no truth, no objective reality. Yet it would serve him, as a master of deception, to keep his illusions sorted out
better. He would meditate upon this lesson while waiting at the Tund System for the scheduled arrival of the
Wennis
, due to rendezvous with him after the passing of the Flamewind. He’d left her and her crew on Oseon 6845 and flown the fighter to 5792 to assume the role of Bohhuah Mutdah.

A pulse of raw anger nearly overwhelmed him, and he concentrated on the pain again to maintain self-control. He’d lost his pet on 5792—another debt he owed the vagabond gambler, one which he would pay with interest when the opportunity presented itself again. Correction: when he
made
the opportunity.

Well, enough was enough. He set his tiny ship on automatic, let the gray-swathed form he usually assumed fade. At long last he occupied the pilot’s seat in his true appearance.

The tinklewood rod dropped to the floor of the small cabin, the bloodsmears along its length vanishing before it hit. Gepta’s pain, fully as illusory as his common worldly manifestation, vanished even more quickly.

Then another rearrangement, another shift of shapes and colors. Once again the charcoal-cloaked, mysteriously masked entity appeared, clean of bloodstains, free of pain.

He cut out the autopilot, took the grips of the fighter’s controls, and punched in the overdrive.

The ship became a fading streak against a starry sky and was gone.

“There it is, Master!” an excited Vuffi Raa called.

Lando peered into the transparent canopy of the
Falcon
’s cockpit. The radar and proximity indicators were still nonfunctional and would remain so as long as the Flamewind raked the Oseon. He longed for an old-time primitive optical telescope. The electronic magnifier aboard the
Falcon
was worse than useless here.

“You’ve got a sharp eye, little friend. But keep the shields up—we don’t know whether he’s really helpless or just faking.” Lando took another puff on the crudely rolled cigarette. Someday he’d get the chance to buy some more cigars.

The
Falcon
swayed and dipped, matching the velocity of the tumbling fighter. Not only had the droid insisted on rescuing its occupant—if said occupant had survived the beating his craft had received—but Lando had agreed in the hope that it might answer a few nagging questions.

Exactly
whom
had he offended sufficiently to merit the fantastic
vendetta that—he hoped—was drawing to a close this very minute? He’d certainly never won enough money from any single individual to make it understandable.

The streamers of the Flamewind and the starry background began whirling crazily as Vuffi Raa rolled the ship to match the motion of the disabled fighter. Lando took a final drag, groaned, and cranked himself out of the seat, staggering a little at the disorienting sight. The
Falcon
’s artificial gravity and inertia compensators were functioning perfectly, but his sight was fooling his middle ear. He squinted.

“I’ll get topside. Hold her steady, will you?”

“Be assured, Master—and be careful. I’ll join you as quickly as I can.”

“Right.”

On the way to the upper hatch, Lando reclaimed his helmet. He hadn’t had time to take off his pressure suit, which was just as well. He placed the bubble on his head, gave it the slight push downward and the fractional turn that locked it into place, and checked the telltales on his arm to make sure he had a perfect seal.

One more stop. He seized a meter-long breaker bar from a socket-wrench set in the engine area. He’d lost his stingbeams on 5792, kept no other small arms aboard the
Falcon
. Hefting the length of titanium, he swung it experimentally. Not as good as steel would have been, too light, but it would do to crack a helmet faceplate or a skull.

A muffled
clank
! reverberated gently through the entire ship. Almost as quickly, the robot’s voice crackled in his earphones. “
We’re locked on, Master. I’ll just stabilize our attitude and be right with you
.”

Lando didn’t feel the maneuver. When things were working right (and he couldn’t see out a window), he wasn’t supposed to. In any case, he was busy turning a large metal wheel set in the hatch over his head. The seal was supposed to be tight with the escape aperture of the fighter; his suit was only a precaution. But he had closed an airtight door behind him when he entered this area of the ship.

Lando was a man who took precautions.

The wheel hit its stop, the door slumped downward a couple of centimeters, and Lando swung it aside. Pocked and abraded metal greeted him, a circle of it, set in a broader area that matched it in long, hard wear. The circle had an inset ring at its edge. Lando dug a gloved pair of fingers under it, pulled
hard, and a strip of sealant followed it down through the
Falcon
’s hatch.

The circle popped out—slightly higher pressure inside the fighter. Lando tossed the emergency access plate down to the chamber floor, stuck a cautious wrench handle through the port, followed it with his head and shoulders. A booted foot hung on either side of his head. The boots were connected to a pair of legs that rose to a body slumped in an acceleration chair and strapped in. The body didn’t move.

Straining a little, Lando stretched up and hit the harness quick-release. Tugging gently on the figure’s ankles, he got the body started down through the hatch, having to drop his breaker bar to the floor to make room and gain an extra hand. The shoulders jammed momentarily, then slid through.

Lando was glad he’d adjusted the gravity in the room to one-tenth normal. The guy would have squashed him on the way down the hatch ladder. He was huge.

With the rescued pilot lying unconscious on the floor, Lando heaved the hatch back into place, turned the wheel until a green light winked from a small panel beside it, and dropped back to the floor. He read what he could of the pilot’s suit telltales. Appearances could be deceptive; the pilot looked human, but it could be ammonia he was breathing inside his suit.

That wasn’t the case. As he detached his own helmet and began on that of the disabled fighter pilot, he heard another clank as Vuffi Raa cast off the ruined craft. Inside the helmet was an aged rugged face, elaborately scarred, and covered with a grizzled week-old beard. Even in repose the face looked tough and wise and experienced.

An eyelid fluttered.

Lando recovered the wrench handle, just in case, then had a second thought. This fellow looked strong enough to take the handle away from the gambler and shove it right up his—

A hiss sounded across the chamber. Vuffi Raa stepped through the door just as the pilot began to stir. The tough old man shook his gray head slightly, looked up groggily at Lando, blinked, and looked around the room.

His gaze stopped at the droid, froze there. A look of passionate hatred suffused the pilot’s face, and his body tensed for combat.

“
You
!” the pilot screamed, “Destroyer of my world! Kill me now, or you shall surely escape death no more!”

W
ITH A VICIOUS
tentacle-slash at the bulkhead behind him, the robot launched himself across the room, straight at the astounded fighter pilot. The pilot leaped up just as four chrome-plated manipulators seized him in their mechanical embrace, joined by a belated fifth.

The pilot heaved his forearms up and outward in a hold-breaking maneuver, fended off a tentacle with a forearm block that would have snapped radius and ulna of a human antagonist, delivered a powerful turning backfist blow to Vuffi Raa’s pentagonal torso.

The little robot flew back the way he’d come, smashed into the wall, and was on the way back into combat again before Lando could so much as blink.

“Master!” the droid shouted, once again wrapping his limbs about those of the pilot. “Use your medikit!”

Fumbling at the belly of his suit, Lando grabbed the kit’s injector, a flat thick coin of an object with a red side and a green side laminated over silvery plating. As Vuffi Raa held the fighter pilot momentarily, Lando slapped the injector on his neck.

There was a
hisssss
, the pilot slumped, and Vuffi Raa released him.

The robot seemed to slink into a corner, his red eye growing dimmer, his tentacles spreading and curling until the little fellow was a simple metallic sphere. The light pulsed feebly once, and went out.

“Vuffi Raa!” the gambler exclaimed, shaken with surprise and grief. He hurried to the robot’s side, without the faintest idea what to do for his friend. A tiny hint of eye-glow still could be made out. Lando stood as anger began to fill him.