Star Wars: The Adventures of Lando Calrissia (60 page)

“How many would you say we are, old friend?”

“Perhaps as many as a million. The rest have followed another of the human’s suggestions: they are concealing themselves in the walls of the StarCave.”

A mental shrug. “Well, they may be right, and that may save us from extinction better than doing battle with these monsters. This idea of individual dissent that Lehesu forced
upon us may have its uses. Different opinions produce different modes of survival, one or more of which may succeed.”

The fleet grew as they approached it.

“I do not know,” Fey said. “I believe I would prefer to be playing
sabacc
just now. The notion of being killed—”

“Is faintly refreshing,” finished the older of the two Elders. “Lehesu is right: it is better than sitting around becoming stagnant.”

“Everyone to his own preferences,” Fey answered wryly.

Aboard the
Reluctant
, a gunner’s mate finally tore his eyes away from the scope. “A million of ’em! Core save us, there’s a million of ’em out there!”

His supervisor hurried over, looked down from the catwalk into the mate’s instruments while the mate looked up in fear and wonder at him. “You’re wrong, son, the computer’s making a new estimate. Make that
two
million.”

Sen chuckled to himself as he hopped out of the artificial skin he’d just generated, leaving it behind to confound the enemy. Their sensors would now be registering three million Oswaft, and even if they fathomed the trick, they wouldn’t know which outline to shoot at.

One chance in three of getting killed, instead of unity. You could learn things from
sabacc
. He hopped another hundred meters, paused, and made it one chance in four. Every step his people took this way increased their apparent numbers arithmetically. The real test would come when they reached the fleet and began swimming in its midst.

“Are you ready, old friend?” asked Fey at his side.

“No. Let’s go.”

Their first leap took them within firing distance of the
Reluctant
. Before she could bring their guns to bear, they were gone. Sen angled his next jump to place him between that vessel and the next in the metallic swarm. He hopped, created a ghost of himself, and hopped again, this time to a safe place where he could watch.

Reluctant
belied her name and
fired
! The powerfully huge bolt, a recent Imperial development, sliced through the false Oswaft, scoring a deep and crippling hit on her sister vessel, who had fired only slightly behind the other ship. This bolt was a near miss, but it caught an escort fighter and vaporized him instantly. The Oswaft outline dissolved and was gone.

Sen jumped again, creating another threatening image of himself. It had much the same effect as the first: the enemy counted on a target to absorb the lethal force of his guns before they struck a sister vessel. They were wrong, and discovering it too slowly. A million Oswaft followed Sen and Fey, repeating the same actions. Space was lit with thousands of fierce, futile bolts. Men died by the hundreds until the trick was finally puzzled out.

By then it was too late. Shouting at the top of his voice, Sen crumpled a pair of fighters, then concentrated his energies on a cruiser. Lando was right: her shields were too dense to have any effect. He stopped shouting at everything but the gnatlike fighters, and hopped and hopped, making sure each time to place himself between two capital ships.

For their part, as they saw the destruction of their own numbers by their own guns, the navy slowed even more, trying to aim its fire so as not to endanger the fleet. This was useless: either there was nothing to shoot at, or the bolt would knife through the observed enemy, blasting a cruiser or a dreadnaught instead.

In fifteen minutes, the fleet was reduced by 11 percent. Then the shooting stopped.

By that time, Shanga’s diminished squadron had made two more runs against the
Falcon
, losing another fighter. With Vuffi Raa at the controls, the freighter had gradually drawn them nearer where the fleet was busily destroying itself. Fire leaped here and there, lighting up the eternal night. Navy fighters blew up, showering their mother vessels with debris, spreading damage further. The Oswaft darted in and out, their numbers very slightly diminished, too, as the sentients grew tired or careless.

Aboard the
Falcon
, Lando bore down on the quadgun once again, turning a small spacecraft into drifting junk.

“Say, that wasn’t one of our bandits! That was a navy fighter. Where the Core are we, Vuffi Raa?”

From the control room, the robot replied. “
Entering the zone of conflict between the Oswaft and the fleet. I’ll try to keep us clear of any large ships, since we—There! Got another one!—since we can’t maneuver like the spacepeople
.”

A cluster of fighters swooped past the
Falcon
, ignoring her while blasting toward a cruiser that was breaking up. Three Oswaft, concentrating all their power, had done that when one
of her shields was down momentarily, due to a collision with a fighter.

Suddenly, Shanga’s men were back, diving on the
Falcon
by turns, drawing her fire, getting in shots of their own. There was only one of Lando, and his arms were getting weary from their constant work at the quadguns. The
Falcon
looped and soared, outmaneuvering the fighters again and again. Weapons flared, men died.

Without warning, all action ceased among the fleet. The blast and brilliance of shooting stopped as if someone had turned a switch. Every fighter was recalled.

At the center of things now, Lando and Vuffi Raa and Lehesu watched as a broad corridor was cleared among the ships. Shields up, they were immune to the Oswaft, and, as long as they didn’t fire on the vacuum-breathers, they suffered no more losses.

“
Something on the scope, Master
.”

“Keep me advised.”

Through the space cleared by the fleet, an older-model cruiser became visible, surface-coated dead black, bristling with an array of unfamiliar equipment. On its underside were emblazoned the arms of Rokur Gepta himself. On its sides were added the ship’s name:

“
—by edict! You are commanded to cease fire and to surrender to the nearest Imperial vessel immediately
.”

Apparently, Vuffi Raa had found the navy’s frequency—or they had found the
Falcon
’s and had patched it through the intercom. As he listened, Lando saw one of his auxiliary target screens go momentarily blank, then fill with the dark and terrifyingly familiar image.

“
This in the name and at the order of Rokur Gepta, Sorcerer of Tund
.”

And then: “
Private to Captain Lando Calrissian of the
Millennium Falcon.” The wizard leaned conspiratorially into the pickup. “
You have put up a valiant and brilliantly conceived fight, sir, but one which you shall inevitably lose, if only because I am willing to throw half the resources of civilization at you, should it prove necessary. I could bury you with dead bodies, and fill this entire nebula with the wrecks of ships, and I will
.

“
However, I offer you an opportunity to minimize unnecessary bloodshed, to settle things personally and at close hand between ourselves, once and for all. Nor have I need for the resources of half an empire to persuade you. At this very moment the power is mine to exterminate every sentient being in this nebula, every flyspeck of life, every hope that life again will ever flourish here
.

“
Behold and bear witness
!”

He raised a hand, as if in a magician’s gesture. Outside, from one of the ungainly projections on the hull of the
Wennis
, there was a faint, fast squirt of brilliant life. Instantly it streaked toward a cluster of gigantic Oswaft who, since ceasing to fight, had been watching and listening. Sen and Fey were among them.

As the light point reached them, they began glowing a pale, sickly green and disappeared without a trace before their dying screams had faded. Whatever the weapon was, it could discriminate between real organic beings and the phony outlines Lando had taught them to create. Those remained like ghosts, hollow and insubstantial.

“
That, my dear Captain Calrissian, was a demonstration employing one times ten to the minus seventeenth of the power available to me. The object was an electromagnetic torpedo, scarcely larger than a filterable virus and programmed to self-destruct after it had done its work. Had it not been so, this area around us would contain no life by now, nor, within a week, would the entire nebula
.

“
I offer you, however, an alternative. Should you triumph, the entire fleet shall go away. Should I win, I shall release a thousand tons of this destructive agent in the ThonBoka
.

“
As for ourselves personally, we shall fight a duel to the death
.”

“W
E HAVE ONE
advantage, Master.”

Vuffi Raa had just returned from the
Wennis
, where, at Gepta’s command, he had gone as Lando’s second to receive the terms for the duel. Frost was turning into water on the little robot’s chromium-plated body and dripping off onto the floor of the tiny airlock below the topside hatch.

“That’s absolutely peachy, old go-between. Any little boost would be welcome, just now.” He looked out through a viewport. On one side the
Falcon
was englobed by the Navy, perhaps five hundred enormous capital ships.

From another port, he could see they were hemmed in by Klyn Shanga’s squadron, what was left of it, in formation once again about the pinnace. The tractor field was off, and would have been invisible in any case, but the arrangement gave them an instant choice between two modes of movement.

Lando shook his head, and went on running down the long-form checklist, getting his best spacesuit up and ready for the coming conflict.

“Yes, Master. You’ll recall he was the one responsible for your winning me in the first place? Well, it was he, who, well, supplied me to the
Ottdefa
Osuno Whett. He knows me rather well—and still believes that he can program me to betray you.”

The gambler looked up, set the pair of vacuum gauntlets he’d been working on aside, and lit a cigar. Possibly his last. “How very interesting. And can he?”

“Not at all. What’s even better is that he still believes me to be bound by my earlier programming. He thinks I cannot fight.”

Lando grinned. “You know, I’m not sure I understand that,
myself. But of course that’s why he offered to let you help me out in this duel, to make up for his powers of magic, so he said.”

The robot raised an affirmative tentacle. “What now remains is for us to plan what we will do once we’re out there. Have you an idea?”

Lando drew a deep puff, let it out slowly, savoring it. “I do, indeed, old Saturday-night spatial. The terms are one personal weapon apiece?”

“Not precisely, Master. You are allowed one weapon, I am allowed none. He didn’t specify what he would use. I didn’t ask. It seems we have no choice in this matter.”

“No, but tell me, does he know about the way you let your tentacles do their own thinking?”

The gleam in Vuffi Raa’s faceted eye grew brighter. “No, Master, I don’t believe he does.”

“Swell. Then here’s what we’ll do—and don’t call me master.”

Rokur Gepta stood in an airlock of the
Wennis
, watching the
Millennium Falcon
through the bull’s-eye in the hatch. He could see her captain and his droid climbing out of their own airlock as he himself suited up. The suit was a deep nonreflective gray, about the color of the walls of the ThonBoka. He turned to the officer beside him, the nominal captain of the cruiser.

“You are certain that you understand my instructions?”

“Yes, sir,” the unhappy-looking man replied. “I am to exterminate all life in the nebula, regardless of the outcome of the duel.” He gulped at speaking what he felt to be a dishonorable and unmilitary decision, and remained rigidly at attention as the sorcerer donned his helmet.

“Precisely, Captain, and if you are entertaining any ideas of countermanding that order in the event of my demise, please remember that the continued existence of your family depends on its being carried out. That was the purpose of sending the courier to your home system a few minutes ago. Their lives are in your hands.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Very well, then, stand aside so that I may exhaust the lock—unless you care to join me in the airless void?”

* * *

Klyn Shanga watched the accursed Vuffi Raa, Butcher of Renatasia, climb out of the airlock of the
Millennium Falcon
. The little monster was still wearing that spacesuit he’d affected in the Oseon that made him appear to be a robot. Shanga began flipping switches; turbines whined as power levels increased. One trembling hand remained on the button of his weapon system. Steady, old soldier, he told himself, only a few more minutes.

Suddenly, a fighter across the formation from him slid forward, gaining speed as it approached the
Falcon
. Shanga opened his mouth to scream “Bern, no!” when a man-thick power beam from the
Wennis
struck fighter number Twenty-three, blowing it to bits.

“
Sorry, Admiral Shanga
,” a voice said over the intership. “
Orders from the Sorcerer of Tund. There is to be no interference
.”

And no revenge, no justice, Shanga realized, unless he could figure out something quickly. Ten years of his life, of the lives of all his men, down the drain, unless—

Movement near the
Wennis
caught his eye. Rokur Gepta jetted from the airlock, crossed half the space between the cruiser and the freighter, and came to a skillful hovering stop. He folded his spacesuited arms and hung, awaiting his adversaries. Across the void that had become an arena, Lando Calrissian followed his example in a bright yellow spacesuit, rocketing to meet the sorcerer, stopping several dozen meters away. Vuffi Raa was right behind him.