Star Wars: The Adventures of Lando Calrissia (38 page)

“But tell me more about these raiders,” Mutdah continued. “Who were they? What did they want?”

“Sir, they made no demands, they simply—I have no idea, sir.”

“Captain? Surely you must—”

Lando shrugged. “I’ve been trying to figure it out myself for days. There might be some connection with a pirate ship I fought off between Dilonexa and the Oseon. Then again, it might just be another sore loser.”

Mutdah contemplated Lando’s reply for a rather longer time than Lando could see any reason for, muttered, “Possibly …,” more to himself than anyone else, then “… and possibly not.”

Finally he shook his massive head and turned very slightly to face Lando again. “I might explain that Officer Fybot has never been particularly happy in his line of work. He was, I ascertained when my intelligence sources informed me of this scheme, conscripted to pay tribute owed by treaty by his system to the central galactic government.

“A gentle being, our Waywa; at heart he nurtures no ambition greater than to become a gourmet chef. I suspect that you and I would find his culinary efforts quite resistible. Nonetheless, he possesses no small talent, in the view of his fellow avians, and fondly wishes to resume his education where he was forced to abandon it upon being drafted into service.

“Have I stated your case correctly, Waywa?”

The bird-being reached up, gave his helmet a quarter turn, detached it from its shoulder ring and tucked it under an arm. He wrinkled up the few mobile portions of his face in a grimace Lando had learned to recognize as representing happiness.

“Oh yes, quite correctly, sir!”

The trillionaire addressed Lando again. “In return for his cooperation,
I have personally assured Waywa that he will no longer be required to suffer involuntary servitude at the behest of the government. I fully intend to make good upon that promise, keep my part of the bargain.”

Abruptly, Mutdah raised a tiny pistol from where he’d concealed it in the deep folds of his corpulent body, drilled Waywa Fybot cleanly through the abdomen. The beam of energy pierced both suit and bird. A surprised expression froze on Fybot’s face as his inert form wafted away slowly from the center of the room.

That made
four
corpses in the library. Things are getting pretty messy around here, the gambler thought.

“The anatomy,” Bohhuah Mutdah said incongruously, “is somewhat differently arranged than one might anticipate. That was, believe it or not, a clean shot through the creature’s heart.”

His fat hand, which supposedly hadn’t been used for years, adroitly tucked the pistol into the waistband of its owner’s shorts, then hovered there, ready to draw and use the gun again in a fraction of a second.

Lando had noticed that the fat man’s reflexes were incredible.

Now he noticed something else: a glow of cruel satisfaction that suffused the trillionaire’s decadent face. The man
liked
killing.

He looked at Lando appraisingly. “The question now, my dear Captain Calrissian, is what I ought to do with you. As you are aware, I have eliminated—have caused to be eliminated—two duly sworn officers of the law. They will doubtless be missed. I have illicitly purchased a substantial amount of a highly illegal substance. I have suborned an agent of the government. In short, nothing I couldn’t easily pay to have taken care of.”

The obese figure pointed toward the table once again. “There is a box of excellent cigars in the top drawer of the end table. Would you kindly remove two of them, light them with the lighter you will also discover there, give one of them to me, and enjoy the other yourself?”

The fat hand stayed near the gun.

Lando followed the instructions—with the exception of lighting the cigars. He handed one to Mutdah, offered to light it for him.

“Oh, come now, Captain. I suppose you are afraid of being
poisoned or something silly like that. Here: If you don’t mind, I’ll puff on both cigars while you apply the flame—
no
, don’t let the flame touch them. That’s right, just hold it there until the ends begin to glow. That’s the way to enjoy a fine cigar. Please choose either one you wish.”

Lando was a gambler, a professional manipulator of cards. He knew how to “force” a draw, determine which card another person took while appearing to encourage a free choice. Mutdah wasn’t doing it to him.

He took a cigar. It was very, very good.

“Well,” he said after a couple of satisfying draws. He’d missed the cigars he’d accidentally crushed aboard the
Falcon
, and the crude cigarettes he’d rolled from their tobacco had been no substitute. “I don’t suppose you can just let me go my own way. Believe me, I don’t care
what
substances you find enjoyable, and these two”—he waved a hand broadly to indicate the room in which the remains of Vobah and Fybot were floating somewhere—“were no friends of mine.”

Bohhuah Mutdah slowly exhaled smoke. “I’d be a great deal more inclined to take that seriously, my boy, if I hadn’t seen the expression on your face when they were killed. I suspect that you pretend to be a blasé Core-may-care, live-and-let-live sort of rogue, Captain. But you are a moralist at heart, and I would always have to be looking over my shoulder for you.”

He waggled his massive, bloated shoulders. “As you can see, I would find that quite a burdensome task.”

Lando’s chest began to tighten. He hadn’t any illusions about what was about to happen, not since he’d seen Waywa Fybot burned down, but here it was, unmistakably. Soon
five
corpses would drift on the air currents in the chamber, and the next few seconds would determine whether it was slim and uniformed or gross and nearly naked.

“So I guess we can’t make a deal, then?” Lando asked rhetorically. The second pistol hadn’t been his only cautious preparation, but he was damned if he could see what good his others would do now.

“I’m afraid not,” Bohhuah Mutdah answered sadly. “And for more than one reason. In the second drawer of the end table, you will find a pair of manacles.” He drew the gun, leveled it at the gambler. “I wish you to put them on. If you do not, then I will slowly roast you with this weapon, rather than kill you outright. The first shot will pierce your lower spine so
that you will be helpless to resist the subsequent agony. Get the manacles and put them on, please.”

Lando thought about it, looked at the muzzle of the pistol, looked into Mutdah’s unwavering beady eyes, and got the manacles. They were force shackles, a pair of cuff bands connected by an adjustable miniature tractor beam. First class and very expensive. That figured.

“That’s right,” the trillionaire said encouragingly. “Now put them on.”

Shrugging to himself, the gambler snapped the bands around his wrists. He wasn’t altogether resigned; Mutdah had something in mind. After all, he hadn’t handcuffed Bassi Vobah or her partner.

“Thank you very much, Captain. Now place the shackle beam in this loop of monofilament. Yes. You see, I mentioned that there was more than one reason why I cannot let you go? You recall that?”

An exasperated expression on his face, Lando asked, “Why do jerks like you always have to go into this thespian routine? If you’re going to kill me, do it with the gun instead of boredom, there’s a good fellow.”

A flush spread itself across the vastness of Bohhuah Mutdah’s face. With a gargantuan effort, he forced himself erect, pointed the weapon at Lando.

“The first reason I have explained. My enemies are hounding me and would see my power and fortune redistributed. Parenthetically, I must tell you that I do not care a whit about any of that. The continuation of the Bohhuah Mutdah ‘empire’ is of considerably less than no interest to me at all. I am constitutionally incapable of feeling any concern about it.

“The real reason, Captain, is that I don’t
want
to let you go.”

The obese trillionaire’s body began to blur, its colors swirling together, its outline dissolving. It was replaced by the somewhat smaller form of an individual swathed in gray from top to toe. Only his insanely hungry eyes showed through the wrappings of his headpiece.

“For I am Rokur Gepta, and I’m going to torture you until you
beg
for death!”

“
S
ABACC
!”

Lando Calrissian slapped down the cards in triumph—a triumph that turned to embarrassed agony when he saw he’d hesitated too long between shouting out his victory and sealing it in the stasis field of the gaming table.

In the brief interval between the acts, his perfect twenty-three had transmuted itself into a losing hand.

The seventeen-year-old would-be professional gambler writhed inwardly. He’d practically begged for a chance to join the game in the back room of the local saloon. He’d lied to his family, ducked out on school, broken or severely bent several ordinances about minors and environments such as the one he found himself in now.

He wished that he was home in bed. He wished that he was home
under
his bed. He wished he’d never seen a deck of card-chips in his life, never practiced with them, never imagined himself a dashing rogue and scoundrel.

It was all a dream, a foolish, idiotic dream.

“All is illusion, Captain Calrissian!”

Lando shook his head. The back room of the sleazy hometown saloon had vanished, and with it the embarrassed memory of humiliation and mistake. Actually, he’d gone on to win that game, taking home more money than he’d ever had together in one place before. Why hadn’t he remembered that?

Replacing the saloon in his field of vision was a broad rich lawn, trees at the horizon, Flamewind spouting, roiling, and coruscating overhead. That was where he’d seen all those people on the approach to Oseon 5792. Where had they gone?

“The sights you see at this very moment are no more real,
no more substantial than the memories you have just experienced so vividly, my boy!
That
is the fundamental truth the universe has to teach us, and like nearly everybody else, you have not managed to learn it until the uttermost end of your life!”

The hiss in that voice was unpleasantly familiar. Lando twisted his head around—he was tied up!—but couldn’t find the source. The range of his vision was limited by the upended picnic table, a cold, synthetic marble of some kind, to which he had been bound. All he could see was the garden before him.

And the Flamewind.

The soft sound of slippered feet on grass. A shadow passed around the table—from the angle, Lando guessed it had been propped up on a bench—and turned to confront him.

“Rokur Gepta!”

The voice was filtered through a smile behind the turban windings. “And you thought I was dead, a victim of the uprising on Rafa IV. No, Captain, I have been quite thoroughly alive for a vastly longer time than you could guess. I am hard to kill and highly reluctant to let strangers terminate my existence.”

Lando bit back a witty reply. In the first place, this was not the time for it, not when he was staked down and helpless. The tractor cuffs were anchored to the table, the beam of force between them lying in close and inseparable contact with the marble surface above his head. Likewise, another pair of manacles had been added to his spacesuited ankles. He and Gepta had moved from the bubblecavern in the asteroid’s free-fall center to the surface, beneath the domes.

And he couldn’t remember a moment of it.

“No remarks?” the sorcerer taunted. “I see that you have at least learned
some
discretion. This is not a moment for repartee, but a time for contemplation. You are about to experience an agony so excruciating, so unprecedented in the history of intelligent life, that being one of its first experimental subjects is a privilege and a signal honor.

“You have had a sample of it:
torture by chagrin
.”

The sorcerer waved a leather-gloved hand.

A jail cell on Rafa IV at dawn. The open-fronted chamber looked out on a graveled yard. The noise was deafening: they
were waking up the prisoners for a day of murderous labor in the life-orchards.

The guards beat on the bars. Lando had awoken with a start; now the fear of what was about to happen filled his being to the core. He backed into the cell, trying to escape the noise, his unsteady breathing slowly turning into a whimper.

BLAAASSSST
!

The fire hose caught him unprepared. It clashed him against the wall, the icy water sluicing over him, blinding him, forcing itself into his mouth and nose. He fell to his knees, his head battered against the wall. He ducked it, trying to breathe, trying to stay alive against the killing force of—

“But, you protest, it wasn’t like that at all?”

Gepta paced back and forth in front of Lando, relishing the gambler’s agony. Despite the sweat on every centimeter of his skin, Lando was freezing, simply from the memory.

But Gepta was right: it hadn’t been like that at all.

“It—it only lasted a few moments,” Lando stuttered. Perhaps it was a surrender of some kind; he hated to give the madman any satisfaction at all. But he had to understand what was happening here.

“I wasn’t nearly that frightened. I’d already worked out a way to escape. And it only lasted a few seconds—not the
hours
I just …” He tapered off, unable to continue because of his shaking. Shaking merely at the remembrance of something that hadn’t bothered him all that much when it was actually happening.

“You’re a brave man, Captain Calrissian. You don’t like to think of it that way. What do you call it, ‘creative cowardice’? You regard yourself a pragmatist, one not given to heroics.”

The sorcerer had paused, stood now nearly motionless before the gambler. In the background, the Flamewind whorled around the demented sky, casting many-colored shadows. Lando shook his head to get the sweat out of his eyes, tried his bonds. As he’d expected, they were there to stay.

“And yet,” Gepta continued, “what is bravery but the capacity to
reject
our fears, ignore and suppress them, then go on to do whatever it is we are afraid to do. What you are experiencing now, dear Captain, is the fear you
refused
to experience the first time. Now you have no choice!”