Star Wars: The Adventures of Lando Calrissia (39 page)

* * *

Surprise attack
!

Wrestling the
Falcon
with one hand, Lando desperately tried to fire the cockpit guns with the other as the weird ragtaggle fighter-squadron bore down on him. It was a nightmare: they were too well shielded for his inconsequential guns to trouble, yet he couldn’t operate the quad-guns without leaving the bridge.

Vuffi Raa, insane and helpless, couldn’t assist him.

He fired again. He might as well have been shooting streams of pink lemonade as the pale, ineffectual fire that was all he could manage. The enemy fleet bore down on him, bore down, bore down …

Lando finished throwing up, coughed, choked, cleared his throat.

“Obviously,” Gepta hissed cheerfully, “you survived the peril that you just reexperienced. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be here now—it’s only logical. It is a logic which enables us to live with our unpleasant memories, is it not? An integrative, healing contextualization which we all require to survive.”

“Sure,” the gambler gasped. “Sure, you rotten—anything you say!”

“Ahh! Resistance at last! As I was saying, however, the art of torture-by-chagrin lies in
denying
the mind that integration, that perspective. As you relive the minor horrors of your life, you don’t recall that you survived, eventually triumphed. You see, even at moments of extreme peril, there are defenses, distractions, digressions which dilute the passions. What is more, my method does not allow its subject to experience anything
but
the fear. You can think of nothing else. The experience goes on and on, in circles, until the ego and the will are utterly crushed.

“Resistance,” the lecturer trudged on relentlessly, “only adds the
brissance
, the, how shall I express it, the
snap
! which makes the quashing of the human personality possible. Get angry by all means, Captain. Insult me. Not only will it speed the process—without rendering your eventual agony any shorter in duration, I assure you—but I relish it, as you shall see to your dismay!”

Lando’s breath was sour, the taste in his mouth bitter, but he managed a reply. “I’m betting that you’re bluffing, Gepta. I’m betting that you’re lying about that part. It would be like you. I think I’ll continue hating your guts for a while, just as a matter
of form. I think I’ll imagine them pulled out through your navel and roasted over a slow—”

Lando’s world was a forest of giant legs.

All around him, grown-ups on their private hurried errands jostled him, threatening to knock him down and trample him. There wasn’t anything he could do. He was only three years old.

And he had lost his mommy.

The frightening alien city streets were crowded for the holidays, wet and dirty, dark with early evening. The lighted windows of the giant stores along the sidewalk didn’t help. He stumbled in the slush and nearly fell, sagged instead against the wall below a window filled with toys, and fought back the tears rolling down his terrified little face.

“Mommy!” Where was she? Why didn’t she come and get him? She’d left him at one of the windows—he’d wanted to watch the animated display—when he’d promised he wouldn’t move. He was tired of the inside of the store; everything was up too high; there were too many people; and it hadn’t been an interesting department anyway, where the lady had given mommy too much money back.

“Mommy?”

“
Your mommy isn’t here, Lando. You’re all alone, and always will be
.”

“Who’s that talking?”

“
I’m your fear, little Lando, I’m your terror. I’m an eternity of anguish and I’m going to
get
you
!”

“Mommy!”

Somehow the voice sounded familiar. Somehow he knew the voice hated him and wanted to hurt him. He didn’t know what those big words were, terror, eternity, anguish, but they didn’t sound very nice. He wanted his mommy.

But he was lost forever in the forest of legs.

“Ahhh,
that
was a deep and fundamentally traumatic one, wasn’t it, little Lando? I could barely stand it myself.”

Gasping, Lando shook the tears from his eyes, tried to catch his breath. It felt like he’d been crying for a thousand years. He remembered the incident very well. It had lasted, in reality, all of ten minutes, but somehow, he had never quite trusted the universe afterward.

“What do you mean
you
could barely stand it?” shouted
Lando, then: “
You
! You were the voice! What are you doing to me?”

“Only beginning, my dear boy, only beginning. We’ve been at this, what? Half an hour? It will go on for days, Captain Calrissian, with any luck for weeks! I may attempt to prolong it for—But I see that you are puzzled, Lando.”

Gepta had resumed pacing. Lando moved, tried to stretch, and discovered that he’d hurt himself. Where the force cuffs held him, where the marble table bore against his back, he was in pure, unadulterated physical agony.

It felt good by comparison.

“You see, the art of torture-by-chagrin requires that its practitioner experience what the subject experiences. He must guide the mind of the subject into always deeper, always more terrifying waters. He must suffer the experiences himself, in order to assure the quality, the depth, the texture of it.

“And in your case, Captain, and in mine, to make sure it is suitable as revenge!

“Yes, I have a way of living in your head, and yes, I am willing to suffer every bit of pain you suffer, so that I will know that I am torturing you enough!”

Overhead, the Flamewind sheeted the sky with a demented rainbow. Interplanetary lightning crackled across ionized paths. A hurricane of color whirled around the asteroid.

Gepta whispered, “The next little nostalgic digression will concern your business failures, Captain. But before we begin, I wish to tell you that they are not altogether the product of a malicious universe or your incompetence.”

Gepta had been pacing back and forth a couple of meters in front of the tilted table where Lando was restrained. Now, for the first time, the sorcerer stepped forward until his eyes burned into those of the gambler.

“
I hounded you
!”

Lando shook his head, too groggy from pain of several kinds to comprehend fully what Rokur Gepta was telling him.

“I dogged your footsteps! Everywhere you went, I saw to it that the prices were a little higher, the rates you could resell at were a little lower! I warned the authorities anonymously that you were a smuggler, increasing the number of fees you had to pay, raising the amount in bribes! I devoured you by attrition—and then arranged for you to be invited to the Oseon!”

“What?” It didn’t make sense. Hadn’t the government wanted to destroy Bohhuah Mutdah? Hadn’t—

“I anticipate the questions you are asking yourself, Captain. I and I alone arranged for that decadent leviathan to be harrassed by the government, then had him killed and took his place. All so I would be here when you arrived. I saw to it that more money was placed in your hands than you have ever had before—tens of millions!—money you will now never have the chance to spend.”

Here, Gepta reached behind the table, took the thick sheaf of bills, and placed it on the ground at Lando’s feet.

“Enjoy it, Captain Lando Calrissian, in the limited way that you are able. Enjoy it as you shall enjoy the memories of every sickening, humiliating, painful event in your life—including this one! I shall enjoy it all with you, purify it, help you to concentrate upon it to the exclusion of all else.

“And we shall see, as I have never had the opportunity to determine before, whether an individual can die of shame …”

He lifted a hand; Lando could feel something like drowsiness steal over him, just as he had in each instant before. He fought it, wrenching himself in the restraints, but his mind kept getting fuzzier, his eyes refused to focus on anything but his own terrifying inner realities. He fought it—

But he was losing.

M
AGENTA CURTAINS SHIMMERED
against a stationary tapestry of pale stars as lightning exploded above Bohhuah Mutdah’s crystalline dome.

And exploded again.

Startled, Rokur Gepta whirled in mid-gesture as a flash bleached his surroundings for a third time in as many seconds.
Somewhere, far away, there was a roar of matching thunder—which should have been impossible—and a breeze began sifting toward its distant source. The broad lawn rippled like the pelt of an angry predator.

The wind was fully as impossible as the thunder. Yet it rose from an initial flutter to gale force in a twinkling, whipping at the sorcerer’s gray cloak, hurling dust and loose papers along with it.

Lando squinted. The dead trillionaire’s lofty architecture had been breached somewhere near the edge of the worldlet. The artificial pull of gravity this side of the asteroid was indolently kinder than at the spaceport, and consequently insufficient to maintain the present atmospheric pressure without help. That help was departing rapidly. The hurricane would roar until things equalized.

He hoped he’d be able to breathe by then.

Battered by the powerful current, Gepta lurched against its strength, trying to reach Lando. The gambler realized this was his only chance—and that perhaps the preparations he had made, however elaborate, might be worthwhile, after all.

Beneath his spacesuit, under the sleeves of his shipclothes, he was wearing his own set of tinklewood splints. In fact, it had been this idea that later served as inspiration when Waywa Fybot broke his legs.

In Lando’s case the intention was to
prevent
injury. There were half a dozen twenty-centimeter rods, half a centimeter in diameter, running parallel to each of his forearms, tucked through small fabric loops in three neat circumferential rows, near the elbow, wrist, and in between. Vuffi Raa, thrilled at the chance to do some valeting at last, had sewn them on a heavy shirt for his master. Lando had speculated that they might be handy stopping a blow or parrying a blade. They were X-ray transparent, nonmetallic, indetectible by the usual run of security scanners.

Unlike his pistols.

He wore similar crude armor around his lower legs, knee to ankle.

Wriggling an elbow, he finagled one of the rod ends until it was free of the force cuff on that wrist. This would have been a futile effort while Gepta had the upper hand. Now, fighting the incredible wind blowing into space through the broken dome, the sorcerer was too busy to interfere.

The rods had added enough girth to Lando’s wrist that he
was able—very painfully—to tear his hand through the manacle just as Gepta reached him. Quickly, he slipped one of the rods out of his sleeve,
jammed
it through the turban slit into the sorcerer’s eye.

Gepta screamed, clapped a hand to his shrouded face, and stumbled backward. The wind caught his voluminous cloak and took him away in a tumbling, fabric-covered ball of curses. He vanished into a nearby grove of thorn trees. There was more screaming.

Liberating the feet was more difficult. Lando finally pulled his suit-boots off, scraped his way past the restraints, and had begun to gather up his shoes and wits and Mutdah’s money, when a silvery snake appeared in the grass before him. It had fingers for a face and a red glassy eye in the palm.

It couldn’t bite; it was programmed not to.

“Vuffi Raa, you’ve got to pull yourself together!” There was no response; the independent appendage couldn’t talk, and vulgar gestures were beneath the robot’s dignity. “I don’t know exactly what’s going on around here, but it’s our chance to get out! Move!”

Behind the uptilted table, Lando found his suit helmet. He also found a complex pile of electronic equipment, cables leading to a large flat, complexly braided coil that had been situated at the back of his head.

“I’m a little disappointed,” he said to the tentacle. “And here I’d thought he was doing all that spellbinding by sheer force of personality!”

Somehow the chromium appendage managed to convey impatience as Lando dawdled. It lay on the ground fidgeting while he pulled on his boots. Overhead—directly overhead—there was a resounding bellow. Jagged sheets of curved plastic began falling.

“Relax, old boy, I’m pedaling as fast as I can! I wish you could tell me what the deuce is going on!”

As he shoved his foot into the boot, snapped the vacuum clasps tight, Lando saw the lightning flash of high-powered energy-weapons above them.

And several of the fighter-craft he’d battled on the way to 5792.

“Edge take me,
that
makes things a little clearer!”

Together the gambler and the disembodied tentacle hurried into the deceased trillionaire’s deserted mansion, robot appendage in the lead and seeming to know where it was going. Inside,
they took an elevator down into the planetoid. Even as they let it bury them, they could feel the asteroid shake and shudder from the assault overhead.

In the blink of an eye, the carriage passed the ruined door of the library, swung on its gimbals, turning at least one startled occupant on his head, and whisked onward in this new orientation. Adding injury to insult, Lando was nearly dashed to the floor as the machine crashed to a stop inside the spaceport service building.

Rasping on damage-distorted ways, the pneumatic door ground halfway open, then froze. The gambler squeezed through, chrome snake underfoot, and the pair leaped from the building a fraction of a second before it collapsed in flames.

Fire and explosions rocked the airport as more fighters strafed and bombed it. A scarlet beam lashed the waiting
Millennium Falcon
as they approached her. The backsplash nearly fried the gambler. But her shields held.

Gasping, Lando ran up the boarding ramp, pausing only to punch buttons to retract it, then sprinted forward around the corridor, momentarily outdistancing even the tentacle as it hastened back to its owner. Vuffi Raa had climbed down out of the ceiling access, and was strapped into the pilot’s seat.

Lando took the right-hand position without complaint. “Let’s get the devil out of here!” he screamed above the chaos roaring outside.