Star Wars: The Adventures of Lando Calrissia (61 page)

Something on the order of a billion pairs of eyes—or equivalent sensory equipment—watched as the sorcerer inclined his head in a small, grudging bow. Without further warning, his right hand lashed out, and a beam of energy struck the place where Lando—

—had been. He tumbled, spun, and recovered, something small and glittering in his own hand, but didn’t return fire. Soaring, he made a complicated figure in the vacuum as Gepta fired twice more, missing both times. While the sorcerer was thus distracted, Vuffi Raa circled warily, working his way behind the gray-clad figure. Two more shots, then Gepta realized that he was being deceived. He whirled, just as the robot’s tentacles separated from his pentagonal body, spreading, encircling the sorcerer’s position, and moving in.

Almost hysterically, Gepta tried to burn the tentacles, but they wriggled and squirmed as they came toward him, each
limb no longer where it had been when the aim was taken. Closer they came, closer.

Lando
fired
! striking Gepta squarely in the back. Incredibly, the stingbeam’s energy passed through the sorcerer harmlessly, nearly striking Vuffi Raa’s body, which was backing, slowly, clumsily away from the fight while it directed the tentacles to the attack.

Gepta whirled again, getting off three shots at the gambler. The last one hit him in the foot. There was a puff of steam and a hissing audible only to Lando, then the suit sealed, its medical processes already shutting off the pain. He had no idea how badly he’d been hurt, but he knew that he could still fight. He fired a second of his five shots, again taking the sorcerer in the center of the torso. Again the beam sliced through without apparent damage.

Then a tentacle grasped Gepta around the neck.

The gray-suited figure struggled, trying to unwrap the chromium-plated limb, but it hung on grimly. From his vantage point in the squadron, Klyn Shanga watched, then was suddenly struck blind by a thought:

Vuffi Raa, so-called Butcher of Renatasia, really
was
a robot
!

Nothing else could explain the independent limbs. But if that was true, then what of their mission of revenge? What of the only purpose they had had for living, since the death of their civilization. What of—

Abruptly, there was a surge of motion as the tenuous hold of tractors at a hundredth power was broken and the pinnace moved forward of its own accord, leaving the fighters behind. No one aboard the vessels of the fleet seemed to notice, so much of their attention was riveted on the duel.

But Shanga did.

“What’s going on, there? Who’s in the pinnace?”

“
It is I, the
Ottdefa
Osuno Whett
,” came the electronic reply. “
I’m going to end this farce, destroy the robot and the gambler—and perhaps Rokur Gepta, in the bargain! None of them are fit to—
”

Another blinding flash of recognition. It was the voice that did it, separated now from the assumed appearance. Whett was the Butcher’s aide! Whett was the Butcher’s assistant! Whett was—

—the Butcher himself! It
had
to be! No other explanation was possible.

Heeling his fighter over, Klyn Shanga thumbed his weapons at the pinnace. The larger vessel’s shields were up, however, shields designed to protect an admiral’s tender person during ship-to-ship and ship-to-planet transfers. Shanga’s fire coruscated off the invisible barrier.

“This is Zero Leader!” he shouted on the squadron’s frequency. “Get that pinnace—the man we seek is aboard! I’ll explain later, if we live!” Desperately, he punched buttons on the remote console that had controlled the pinnace on the trip out. He couldn’t prevent Whett from driving it, nor drop its shields, but he could keep it out of hyperdrive and lock the tractor field.

He did the latter. The squadron snapped into formation. Opening his small ship’s engines all the way, he screamed at his men to do the same. Slowly, inexorably, the assemblage of ships achieved headway.

Abruptly, someone aboard the
Wennis
noticed the motion.

“
Zero leader, this is the
Wennis!
Halt immediately, or we’ll blast you out of the nebula
!” The warning was repeated. Gathering speed now, Shanga steered his squadron and their captive—who was desperately and ineffectually attempting to reverse things from the pinnace—toward the decommissioned cruiser. Faster and faster, skirting the space where the battle between Gepta and Lando and Vuffi Raa still raged, they zeroed in on the larger vessel.

A broad beam of power struck the pinnace squarely on the bow. Her shields held, and the energy, sluicing off the deflectors, missed the lightly shielded fighters as well. As they came within a few hundred meters of the
Wennis
, Shanga abruptly cast off the tractor field and flipped his craft around. Years of reflex allowed his men to follow the motion like a school of fish.

The pinnace struck the
Wennis
—her own shields negligently still powered down to allow the sorcerer to debark—and penetrated her hull. There was a brief instant in which nothing else happened, a suspension of time as inertia was overcome, as systems attempted to control the damage and failed.

Then a titanic explosion as the cruiser belched flaming gases everywhere, consuming herself, the pinnace, and everyone aboard both vessels. Even two of the fleeing fighters were tumbled badly.

Farther away, Rokur Gepta, Vuffi Raa, and Lando were distracted
by the explosion. Gepta stared insanely. Lando recovered first, took aim, and—

—was struck by a piece of flying debris. His shot went wild, hitting the sorcerer in the ankle. In shock, Lando recovered and watched as the form of Rokur Gepta withered and faded. He jetted up beside the magician in time to see a heavy military blaster swing around, fire, swing a little farther, and fire again. Vuffi Raa’s tentacle floated emptily with nothing left to hold onto. The third shot, cast by an unconscious and dematerializing hand, caught the robot’s torso, a hundred meters away, dead in the center.

The metal glowed momentarily. When the incandescence dimmed, so had the single red eye in the body’s center. It was flat, glassy, and black.

Lando pawed through Rokur Gepta’s empty spacesuit. Down in the leg was a small bundle of ugly, slimy tissue, resembling a half-cooked snail, an escargot with a dozen skinny, hairy black legs. It was one of the most disgusting things the gambler had ever seen, but he’d seen it before.

It was a Croke, from a small, nasty system he’d once visited. The species was intelligent and unvaryingly vicious, and they were all masters of camouflage and illusion.

This one wasn’t quite dead. The suit had protected it, and it was nearly impervious to hard vacuum. Lando ripped the suit away, took the stunned and putrid creature that had been Rokur Gepta, and
squeezed
. When he was through, his suit gloves were covered with greasy slime, but no Sorcerer of Tund would ever rule the galaxy.

As if Gepta’s death were a signal, the fleet began to open up on the Oswaft within range. In the space of a moment, hundreds died … until the fleet had other things to think about; Klyn Shanga’s squadron was shooting back, giving the vacuum-breathing sapients covering fire so they could retreat. One fighter exploded, then another, but they were saving Oswaft lives.

“
CEASE FIRE IMMEDIATELY OR BE DESTROYED
!”

The voice came over everybody’s communicators simultaneously, at every frequency. Lando looked up from his little friend’s scorched torso—he’d gathered in the tentacles, as well, but they would not attach themselves and lay in his arms like so many dead pieces of jointed metal—to see a figure that dwarfed the departed Elders, even the largest dreadnaughts in the fleet.

It was a starship, but it was at least fifty kilometers in diameter, a smooth, featureless, highly polished ovoid of silvery metal. Another, identical monster followed close behind it. Far to the rear, Lando watched as others, countless others, penetrated the supposedly impenetrable wall of the ThonBoka as if it were so much fog. Hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands.

Some fool aboard the
Recalcitrant
opened fire with the new meter-thick destructor beam, deep green and hungry. A red beam from the leading foreign ship met the green one squarely, forced it back a meter at a time until it reached the navy cruiser. A pause, then the
Recalcitrant
became a cloud of incandescent gas.

“
CEASE FIRE OR BE DESTROYED! THERE WILL BE NO OTHER WARNING
!”

Racked with grief, Lando watched as more and more of the titanic ovoids appeared in the nebula. There was no way to estimate their number. The gambler thought they might fill up the StarCave, twelve light-years across as it might be.

Then a sensation brushed past him. Somehow he knew that only he could hear the tightly beamed message that issued from his helmet phones.

“
You are Captain Calrissian, are you not? You have fought valiantly, and not in vain. You grieve for your little friend. I grieve, too, for he was my only son
.”

“
S
ABACC
!”
SAID THE
One. “By the Center of Everything, Lando, I knew we would learn new and valuable things if only we dared to.”

“Yeah, well, you’ve still got to learn the difference between luck and skill. That’s eighteen trillion I’m ahead of you already,
counting that last hand, and I don’t even know yet what we’re using for currency!”

The gambler took a deep drag on his cigar and watched as the One gathered in the seventy-eight-card deck with a sweep of a jointed metallic tentacle. His eye glowed a deep scarlet with delight and anticipation as he dealt them out again, two to Lando, two more to Klyn Shanga, two to the extensor manifesting itself as the Other.

“Too bad,” he continued. “This game is a whole lot faster and more interesting five-handed. If only Vuffi Raa …”

“Each of us,” observed the Other, “sets his own course through the universe and must follow it where it takes us. This is called integrity, and to deviate—”

“Come on, you five-legged clowns, cut the pop philosophy and play cards! You know how long it’s been since I sat down at a real table and—”

Lando grinned. “And tried filling inside straights all night long, Admiral? At that, it beats dodging bullets and destructor beams. I’m glad you decided to be on our side, and I’m especially glad you’re a better fighter pilot than you are a
sabacc
player.”

“I’m only warming up. Give me a chance, and I’ll have your hide the easy way: payable in cash!”

Laughter around the table. It was good to have the lounge full of visitors, the gambler thought; a real passenger lounge for a change. But some folks seemed to be missing from his life, missing from places they’d carved for themselves only recently. Or relatively recently.

“Heard from Lehesu yet?” he asked, watching a Commander of Flasks change itself into a Three of Staves. He knew it was an electronic trick, but it never failed to give him goosebumps. Shanga was frowning, a sure sign he had a good hand, Lando had learned quickly. He kept his betting light.

The fighter pilot shook his head, still frowning. “One of the boys said something about seeing a middle-sized Oswaft zooming off during the battle. Said something about a courier he wanted to catch up with. Is it true the spacepeople want to make him High Supreme Galootie or something?”

A mechanical chuckle issued from the extensor representing the One. “It would seem they have decided that leadership—or at least wisdom—do not necessarily correlate positively with age. This is gratifying to me, as I am the youngest of my people
 … that is, I was before Vuffi Raa … er, I believe I shall take another card, gentle-beings.”

Outside, far away across the StarCave, the actual repositories of the intelligence of the One, the Other, and the Rest lay, as it were, at anchor. They were gigantic fifty-kilometer starships, intergalactically self-propelled droids of ancient origin.

Shanga changed the subject. “I never quite got who it was who built you folks originally—that is, if you don’t mind me asking a religious question.”

“Not at all,” the One replied. “They were a race of individuals who looked rather like these extensors. There are some among us who recall them, although I do not, except through cybernetically handed-down memories. They were not spacefarers; the idea simply didn’t appeal to them. They were wiped out in a radiation storm when a nearby star went supernova. Only a few intelligent machines were left, and they were my ancestors. We did explore the stars, at least in our arm. There is a high incidence of unstable stars there, so that organic life is rare.”

“Yes,” the Other concurred, “it was his idea to seek out organic life to liven up our own culture, and here we are.”

Lando shook his head. He wished his little robot friend were there to see this hand; it was a lulu. “Yes, but first you sent out an explorer whose memories were suppressed and who could not act violently. That way he’d generate fresh impressions and not get your civilization into trouble with others unless it was absolutely necessary.”

“Correct,” the One said. “And while the suppression worked, the conditioning did not. Self-preservation is a powerful motive, even though in the end—
sabacc
!”

“Beginner’s luck!” the professional gambler howled, wondering how much he’d lost this time. He heard footsteps behind him, turned and looked down the curving corridor toward the engine area. A figure stood there, covered with grease, a spanner in one of its hands. Its five-sided carapace was still scorched.

“I got the deflectors readjusted, Master,” Vuffi Raa said. “Admiral Shanga’s men are good shots, but that weakness won’t show up again now!”

“Fine. Now will you please stop being dutiful and join the game? And don’t call me master in front of your old man, here, it’s embarrassing.”

* * *

Hours later, two days after the battle and departure of the fleet, Lando was dozing in his pilot’s chair in the cockpit. Vuffi Raa was out somewhere, visiting his kinfolk.

“
Captainmasterlandocalrissiansir, I have returned
.” the ship-to-ship said.