Star Wars: The Adventures of Lando Calrissia (49 page)

A small, thin cloudlet of intersteiler plankton drifted by, borne on the complex tide of gravity and photon pressure, tiny pseudoanimals and quasi-plants that formed the basis of the Oswaft diet, indeed for the diet of all the thousands of space-evolved species living in the shelter of the StarCave. Lehesu nibbled at them in a desultory fashion. To the small extent he was aware of them, he realized they didn’t taste particularly good. There was a reason for that: they were slowly dying.

The bottom rung of the ThonBoka food ladder was being ruthlessly and deliberately sawed out from under the rest of the nebula’s ecology. Every now and again the vessels of the picket fleet outside would blossom into glowing visibility as, in concert, they unleashed titanic energies, saturating the space around themselves with destructive particles and waves. It was at these moments that Lehesu (who had found it necessary to explain to his people something he didn’t altogether understand himself: that these were not living organisms that beseiged them, but artifacts
containing
living organisms) could see that the blockading fleet formed a carefully calculated pattern through whose fields of fire not one molecule of preorganic substance could sift unassaulted.

What did come through was spoiled and tasted terrible.

If that were not enough, the ships sprayed a kind of poison—enzymes designed to smash the complex natural molecular arrangements of deep space, reduce them to constituent atoms, and destroy their nutritive value. The Oswaft and their environment were being coldly and systematically starved to
death by an implacable enemy they did not know, hadn’t picked, had owed no animosity.

Until now.

“Yellow Niner, this is Hosrel XI Perimeter Control, we have a bandit at coordinates three-five-oh-two-three. Do you copy? Over.”

The young rating at the sensor screen had been bored until then. She had been bored for thirty-four solid weeks, and the constant drills, the frontier-duty pay, the promise of a chance at a commission, hadn’t helped. Not a bit. But she was no longer bored. If the bogey was a drill, it was something new. At that top-secret navy base on the freeze-dried edge of an already unspectacular system,
anything
new, however potentially threatening to life, limb, or the continued wearing of a uniform, was highly welcome.

“
Perimeter Control
,” the interceptor pilot replied with a studied drawling casualness that belied the fact that he was a year younger than the sensor operator, “
we copy. This is Yellow Nine Leader. Are you requesting a six-sixty-six? Over
?”

The operator leafed quickly through her procedures manual. It was so hard remembering … yes, there it was: six-sixty-six, scramble and visual checkout of an unidentified target. Scrambling, in effect, was already taken care of: Hosrel XI Command kept at least one full interceptor squadron spaceborne on the perimeter all the time, and Yellow Niner was
it
, at the moment. She hadn’t any idea what was being defended at the Core-forsaken base. Probably the navy was developing something unimportant, but they were giving security all the ruffles and flourishes.

“Yellow Niner, that’s affirmative. Give me your ETVC. Over.”

“
My what? Oh yeah: we ought to be eyeballing your bogey in about, oh, call it seven minutes, give or take. Got it on the scope repeater, now. Looks kinda like it’s made of plastic, doesn’t it? Over
.”

Both the interceptor pilot and the sensor operator had been briefed, fairly recently, on new developments in camouflaging shields. But neither could discuss it in the clear over an open communications band. Security is a sword that cuts both ways, and most often wounds the hand that wields it.

“Yes, yes it does, Yellow Niner. I have your ETVC at six minutes, now. Is that about right? Over.”

“
Yeah, yeah. Yellow Nine Squadron, this is Yellow Nine Leader. As far as I know, this is no drill, repeat, no drill. Unlock your arming switches and keep the thumb you aren’t sitting on near the button. No mistakes, now, or we’ll all be plucking crystals in the life-orchards. Out to you, and over to PC
.”

PC, thought the Operator, that sounded sort of nice and heroically terse. She said nothing, but simply watched a dozen hard, sharp, shiny blips converge on the single fuzzy, almost invisible one. She had already sent nervous fingers flying over an alphanumeric pad, alerting her superiors to the situation, and other eyes were monitoring other scopes, now, within the subterranean bowels of the installation. She fastened her military collar and straightened a crease. Almost, she hoped, the target would be a genuine pirate attack or rebel uprising. Promotions came fast in times of—

“
Perimeter Control, this is Yellow Nine Leader. Where the Core
is
this thing? We oughta be right on top of it, unless you’re—by the Great Lens, there it is! It’s
huge
and clear as glass! We’re making our first pass, using prerecorded hailing signals … oh yeah; over
.”

The strange vessel failed to respond, at least on frequencies the interceptors were permitted to receive. Instead, it simply disappeared as the squadron crowded it, leaving the fighters to mill around an empty spot like moths around a light that is suddenly turned out.

It reappeared to one side, a few thousand meters away, just as Yellow Nine Seven passed beneath its transparent wing, which twitched involuntarily as Lehesu struggled to regain his balance. Suddenly Yellow Nine Seven cork-screwed away, a smoking, flaming ball of crumpled metal, its pilot screaming something into his helmet mike about his deflector shields having failed to function properly.

The voice bit off suddenly.

Eleven pilots whipped their ships around savagely. Eleven thumbs mashed down upon their firing studs. Twenty-two eyes widened as eight destructive beams—three had not been maintenanced correctly—converged on empty space. One interceptor, Yellow Nine Four, was caught in the crossfire. He’d failed to make a turn, due to faulty attitude-control, and vanished in a flash of energy and atomized debris.

Lehesu stepped off half a light-year, astounded at the hostile reaction he’d encountered, not at all like his first contact with
the
Millennium Falcon
. And his people thought
he
was crazy. With the Oswaft equivalent of a shrug, he turned his face toward yet another star whose spectrum showed traces of artificial, highly ordered radiation, and prepared himself for a longer jump this time.

Unaware that a densely cloaked scout vessel was right behind him.

The next system had been much the same, except …

They’d been forewarned, somehow, of this bizarre unidentified craft that had managed to destroy three (Yellow Nine Nine had missed the mouth of its Launch/Reentry tunnel and splashed itself all over a mountainside of frozen nitrogen; little squiggles of liquid helium danced with glee at the sight) first-rate fighter-interceptors. The new group also ignored his frantic, placative signaling and suffered forty-three casualties, some of them on the ground, due to an unfortunate change of shift going on between two double-strength squadrons. Lehesu had given up and gone home.

Eventually the fleet had made its appearance. The ordeal was a little more bearable for Lehesu than for the others. He was the only Oswaft in a hundred generations who had come close to dying by starvation once before. As some human philosopher in a different time and place would observe, that which fails to kill us strengthens us. Lehesu knew his limits; he could tell that the pogrom was going to take rather a longer time than either side realized. To his less adventurous comrades, it was already agony, already an unprecedented emergency. They felt, for the first time in their long, long lives, a relatively mild discomfort, and were afraid. Some actually spoke of attempts to negotiate, to establish upon what terms the enemy would let them live, not knowing that their utter destruction was the only success the fleet’s mission profile recognized.

Lehesu wished his people would get angry, instead.

Thus, he waited.

It was some hours after the last of the energetic nutrient-destroying displays that something unusual happened. Lehesu felt a tight, powerful beam of communications energy coming from the blockaded nebula entrance. While he knew the language, he didn’t know the culture; the gulf between planet-bound species and free-fall dwellers was so enormous that
any
understanding was a gigantic tribute to the Oswaft’s intellectual
capabilities. Whatever they were saying out there, it was frantic, and not at all friendly.

It happened again! Judging from the manner in which this second burst was all bunched up into the higher frequencies, something was headed away from the fleet and toward the ThonBoka, fast. Lehesu maneuvered that way, both by straightforward distance-covering flight to keep an “eye” on the incoming signals, and by nonlinear distance-avoiding hops. Whatever was coming, it ought to have
some
kind of reception committee.

Suddenly an impossibly solid bar of unbearably bright light lashed out, connecting the two points in space with each other. There was a brilliant flash, a scattering of reflections, then nothingness. A sparkling hint of metallic debris and smoke lingered at the very edge of Lehesu’s sensory capabilities. The galactic drift carried traces of scorched titanium and plastic into the ThonBoka.

A long, quiet moment followed. Then, without warning, something materialized not far from Lehesu, out of the wherever-it-is that starships go when they’re traveling faster than the speed of light.

It was an absurdly shaped object, like something resembling a coral-encrusted horseshoe magnet a tenth the Oswaft’s size and possessing none of his fluid grace. The thing was tumbling slowly, end over end, while enormous volumes of dense white smoke billowed from its blast-blackened rear surface.

Naturally, Lehesu recognized her at once.

“Lando! Vuffi Raa! Can you hear me in there? Are you all right?”

The vacuum-breather swam closer, carefully avoiding the foul-smelling effluents issuing from the curved rear edge of the freighter. Nothing indicated that life had ever inhabited the strangely shaped craft. The glow-spots he now knew to be windows lay dark and foreboding along her surfaces as she continued to somersault gently before the space-going sentient, the random motion itself a grim presentiment that nothing rational lived at the controls.

“Vuffi Raa! Lando! Speak to me!” the Oswaft beamed on every frequency he knew. “This is Lehesu!”

Nothing replied.

Much more figuratively than literally, Lehesu cast a backward glance at the fleet besieging his home. He didn’t know how he could accomplish it, but he swore, in that moment of
grief, a terrible revenge against those who were responsible for the tragedy. To gain and lose new friends, good friends—in some respects the only friends he’d ever had—in what seemed to the extremely long-lived creature like the mere space of minutes … It was almost more than a being could bear.

Thrashing frantically back and forth, he peered into the vessel’s darkened ports, learning nothing. Gently, he nudged the spaceship, unintentionally adding an additional vector to her tumbling motion.

“Lando! Vuffi Raa! Are you in there?”

He thought a moment, then, despite everything he had struggled to understand about his new companions, added: “
Falcon
, my little friend,
please
talk to me! This is Lehesu the Oswaft! Are Vuffi Raa and Lando still alive?”

T
HE REFITTED CRUISER
Wennis
was a trowel-shaped wedge of metal bristling with instrument and weapons implacements arranged to overlap yet not interfere with one another’s fields of effectiveness. At an unusual—and unusually heavily shielded—point on her after surface, between the great blinding arrays of drive tubes and deflectors, was a small chamber with windowless walls two meters thick. It could be entered only by a small auxiliary craft, available to the vessel’s master alone, and then only when he had ordered the drives temporarily shut down. To navigate the small craft while the cruiser’s massive engines were in operation would be instantaneous suicide.

Two hundred centimeters is a great deal of wall, especially when it is composed of the latest, state-of-the-art battlewagon armor. Yet the armoring of the special chamber was not intended
to protect its contents from the ravening drive radiations of the
Wennis
. It was to protect the
Wennis
from what lay in the chamber. Even so, it was a futile effort, intended more to comfort the one entity who knew what the arrangement was all about, to provide some sense, however illusory, of security.

Inside the chamber, Rokur Gepta stood before a chest-high metal pylon capped with a transparent bubble the size of a man’s head. Gepta knew the chamber and controls by memory. No light burned within it. He ran a gray-gloved hand along the surface of the pylon, watching with unseeing eyes as his fingers pressed inset keys. Inside the bubble, he had begun to create an infinitessimal speck of the most dangerous single substance the universe had ever known. A sickly green light began to seep from the bubble, filling the darkened chamber with malignant luminosity.

The trouble with a man like Klyn Shanga, the sorcerer thought, wasn’t that he was not afraid to die. It had taken Gepta an unprecedentedly long while to figure that out, so tortuous and alien was the line of reasoning involved. Rokur knew many individuals who were not fearful of death, in fact they seemed to welcome the idea, embrace the opportunity. They were eager to die, for their beliefs, for the government or the numerous causes that opposed it, even for Gepta himself. Such men were easy to control and extremely useful. Down deep somewhere they hated and feared life and were anxious to be relieved of the burden of living in a manner that would not disturb their other, contradictory beliefs.

It was clear Klyn Shanga enjoyed being alive, which was what made things confusing. Rokur Gepta was not used to being confused, and it infuriated him. How was it that someone who loved life could be unafraid to die? The first conclusion the sorcerer had reached—not much help in understanding the perverse phenomenon, but of high pragmatic significance—was that the original expedition to Renatasia hadn’t done a thorough enough job. They had done only two-thirds of it, and it badly wanted finishing.