Star Wars: The Adventures of Lando Calrissia (56 page)

That had been in the Oseon, and things had not turned out well for either the hopes of his superiors or for those of Rokur Gepta, who had personally supervised that particular operation.

Now, alone with his real pursuers, his memories, Whett realized that it was more than revenge he needed to accomplish in the ThonBoka. He had to see that robot destroyed. It was a dangerous link, in more ways than one, to an even more dangerous past. And he had to see an end, as well, to Captain Lando Calrissian, who could connect his new appearance, adopted before the game, with the robot.

Very well, then: Gepta sought to destroy Calrissian; Shanga sought to destroy Vuffi Raa (because he didn’t know the real mastermind was a “harmless” academic he had seen nearly every day); that academic must now seek to destroy them both, gambler and droid.

Still he wondered, after all this time: where
had
that accursed robot come from, anyway?

T
HAT ACCURSED ROBOT
scratched his head.

“Politics, saved our lives, Master? I’m not altogether sure I understand.”

In reality, the gesture was more a matter of flicking a delicate
tentacle tip around the bezel that retained the faceted red lens of his eye, mounted on the upper surface of his headless pentacular “torso.” But its meaning was clear; he had picked it up from long association with human beings. As usual, certain aspects of that association puzzled him.

“Well, I’m only guessing, mind you, but a massive operation such as that Edge-blasted blockade out there, especially when it’s being carried out in secret, presents a lot of opportunities to people envious of the boys on top.” Lando pried up his cigar from where he’d secured it to the edge of the bench top, drew deeply on it, expelled the smoke, and squashed it firmly once again, sideways, into the wad of chewing gum that, in the absence of gravity, held it where it wouldn’t float away.

“Do you want this end-wrench, Vuffi, or the adjustable spanner?”

The robot glanced back at his master, squatting on the deck plates with one leg thrust under the bench for leverage and security, much like the cigar. Lando leaned on a tool chest, assisting. They’d lifted a repair port and the robot peered now into a complex maze of working and semiworking parts.

“Adjustable, Master. This is a section I rigged after we beefed up the shields in the Oseon. All we had in stock were replacements from the Ringneldia, and everything in
that
system is standardized around the diameter of some native bean or other.”

It wasn’t just the sudden pullback of the murderous fleet that bothered Vuffi Raa, although it had left thousands of dead Oswaft in its wake. While genuinely ignorant, or at least amnesiac, about his own origins, he could infer certain facts about his makers and their culture, and the trouble was, several of the facts in question were contradictory. And current events were bringing him swiftly to a personal crisis involving those contradictions. It was not a situation that any intelligence—even that of a Class Two droid—finds comfortable.

He detached one of his sinuous manipulators, directing it remotely to thread its way into the starboard reactant-impeller units, deep in the bowels of the
Millennium Falcon
. Nothing was actually
wrong
with the system, but had it been a hair more sluggish, they would have been fried by the
Courteous
instead of cheating their way through hyperspace. It didn’t pay to tolerate the slightest malfunction, not when they were the only spaceship the ThonBoka had to put up against the fleet.
Those devices not only fed the engines, which was fairly important in itself, but the deflector shields as well. Vuffi Raa and Lando needed every fractional advantage if they weren’t going to sell their lives cheaply.

“For example,” the gambler continued, craning his neck to see what the robot was doing beneath the floor, “there’ll be one group which will loudly—and correctly—proclaim that this undeclared war against the Oswaft constitutes genocide, although they wouldn’t hesitate if they’d thought of it first themselves. Then there’ll be a gang of middle-of-the-roaders who could do it better or cheaper. Finally, there’ll be the ones who regard the action as too gentle and indecisive. They’ll want the fleet to sit back and toss in a few planet-wreckers, and
they’re
probably the ones we owe for this hiatus.”

A little cynical, Vuffi Raa thought before replying. “But Master, there aren’t any planets here to wreck, thank the Core.”

“Thank three little blue suns out there that went kablooie for that. You’re right, although planet-wreckers could make things pretty uncomfortable for our friends the Oswaft—not to mention our tender selves. And besides, in interstellar power politics, it’s gestures and appearances that count, not actual results. I’ve long suspected that’s why civilizations rise and fall. Especially fall. Try adjusting that vernier, will you? I thought I heard the field blades wobble a little when you nudged it before.” He unstuck his cigar again and took a puff.

Another tentacle clicked at Vuffi Raa’s “shoulder” and drifted away to check the readings on the control panels forward. It was possible, the droid thought, that the problem was simply an instrument failure, and it would be stupid to repair something that was already in perfect working order.

Each of the robot’s five tentacles, usually tapering smoothly to a rounded tip, could also blossom at the end into a small five-fingered hand. In the center of each rested a miniature replica of the large red eye atop his body; he would see what his tentacles saw. This, and the ability to send his limbs off on various errands, caused him to wonder about his creators.

They were hardly stupid; still, there were counter-indications. Here he was, preparing his master’s ship for a battle in which he, himself, dare not participate directly. Early in life, he had experimented: attempting combat, in contravention of his deepest-laid programming, had sent him into a coma that lasted nearly a month. He was extremely clever; he could run and hide; physically he was very tough; he could ally himself
with individuals like Lando,
quite
capable of the defensive violence necessary to protect themselves and their mechanical partner, Vuffi Raa. But he, himself, simply could not harm another thinking being, whether organically evolved or artificially constructed.

It just didn’t make sense. Vuffi Raa took a certain pride in the fact that he was a highly valuable machine, more so, strictly speaking, than the starship he was servicing. Simply as a market consideration, he had a duty to protect his life; anyone attempting to take it demonstrated, by that very act, that they were less valuable, at least in any moral sense that made sense.

Separating a third tentacle from his body, Vuffi Raa dispatched it to check the readiness of the ship’s weapons systems, particularly the quad-guns of which Lando was so fond. The
Millennium Falcon
had always fairly bristled with armament, yet, with only two crew-beings to man her, and one of them a pacifist at that, they’d always meant to tie the weapons together cybernetically somehow. In this brief interlude between confrontations with the fleet, they’d scarcely more than begun the task.

His inhibitions could be stretched, Vuffi Raa had discovered. Knowing full well, for example, that the preparations furthered violent activity, he could nevertheless perform them. Moreover, he could fly the
Falcon
for Lando, maneuvering properly to assure his destruction of the enemy.

How very peculiar, thought the robot. Who made me this way, and what did they intend by it?

“What in the name of the Edge, the Core, and everything in between are they
waiting
for out there?”

Lando fidgeted at the table as Vuffi Raa watched him disassemble and clean his tiny five-shot stingbeam as a final, albeit somewhat silly, preparation for the coming battle. They were in the passenger lounge. The deckplate gravity was set at full normal, and that, thought the robot, was a bad sign. His master liked free-fall best for thinking.

“
For somebody else to get here
,” a tinny, electronically relayed voice answered. It was Lehesu, visible in a monitor screen the robot had installed. In reality, the great being hovered outside in the void not far from the
Falcon
. Given his size, and Lando’s environmental requirements, this was the
closest the three could come to normal face-to-face conversation.

“What?”

Lando stopped what he was doing with a jolt, one hand poised on the cleaning brush, elbow in the air, shoulders suddenly hunched as if someone had punched him in the stomach. He rose. Slowly he turned, step by step he approached the monitor until his nose nearly rested on the screen. At his side, the half-cleaned weapon dripped solvent on the deck plates.

“
Who
—” he demanded of the manta creature, “—and how the deuce do
you
know?” Some sort of fire flickered in the gambler’s eyes, but even Vuffi Raa, long acquainted with the man’s moods, couldn’t guess what it signified now.

“
Why, Lando, somebody named Wennis
,” Lehesu answered in a tone of injured innocence. He’d come a long way, learning to interpret human vocal inflections and the images of facial expressions he received directly in his brain from the ship’s transmitter. He was disturbed now because his friend looked and sounded angry with him.

“
As to how I know: it’s practically the only thing they’re talking about out there, can’t you hear them? Something’s going to happen when Wennis gets here, something big. Somebody else named Scuttlebutt has it that—
”

“Oh my aching field density equalizers!” As the robot watched, his master’s expression changed, like the face on a
sabacc
card, from puzzled to exasperated to delighted. The gambler crossed the room again in two strides, threw himself into a recliner, dug around in his shipsuit pockets and extracted a cigar.

“No, Lehesu, I
can’t
hear them, remember? And even if I could—well, Vuffi Raa can ‘hear’ radio signals, but the military uses codes that are intended to preclude eavesdropping.”

He lit the cigar, heedless of the flammable fluid all over his hands.

“
Dear me
!” cried the Oswaft in real distress, “
have I been doing something unethical? I shall cease immed—
”

Lando sat up abruptly, pointing his cigar at the monitor like a weapon. “You’ll do nothing of the sort—you
can’t
do anything unethical to those goons, it’s philosophically impossible! Here I’ve been getting ready to die bravely, and now, casually, you’ve given us all a chance to survive! By gadfrey, Vuffi Raa, old corkscrew, let’s break out a bottle of—
OWWWWCH
!”

Lando’s hands glowed a flickering blue as he leaped up
from the recliner and began running around the room. Without hesitation, Vuffi Raa thrust out a tentacle and tripped him; he flopped on the deck, yelling, while the robot tossed a jacket that had been hanging on the back of the lounger over the gambler’s hands, and wrapped it tight. The fire was out.

“
What’s the matter over there
?” the monitor demanded. “
Are you all right
?”

“I will be, once I learn not to play with fire,” Lando answered as he sat up. He winced as Vuffi Raa unwrapped the jacket. His hands were tender, but not badly burned. The droid was gone a moment, returned with a sprayer of plaskin and coated Lando’s hands until they were shiny with it.

The gambler flexed his fingers with satisfaction. “Pretty close, old fire extinguisher. I’d have had to pick a new profession if it weren’t for your quick thinking. And if it weren’t for this stuff—” With freshly dried digits, he examined the first-aid spray, then his brow furrowed in thought. He helped Vuffi Raa tidy up the gun-cleaning mess while explaining to the Oswaft what had happened, but his voice had an absent quality the robot recognized as the sign of an idea under incubation.

Finally, stubbornly, he relit the cigar he’d flung across the room, sat back in the recliner, and was silent for a solid hour. Vuffi Raa played a few hands of radio
sabacc
with Lehesu, and let the gambler think. He was fresh out of ideas himself, and, like his master, had been resigned to dying at as high a cost to their assailants as possible.

An odd thing, violence, he pondered, watching the computer change a Commander of Sabres in his “hand” to an Ace of Flasks. He’d inflicted violence on Lando in order to save him from a nasty burn, and hadn’t felt a qualm down in his programming. Yet, had some third person tried to harm Lando, the robot would have been helpless to remove the threat. Definitely a glitch there.

It bothered him.

“The
Wennis
is a ship, Lehesu, like the
Falcon
here,” Lando said an hour later over a steaming plate from the food-fixer.

“
So Vuffi Raa tells me. It’s a difficult concept to grasp
.”

“Well, grasp this: it’s the personal yacht of Rokur Gepta, Sorcerer of Tund. We’ve run into that fellow twice before, and not nicely either time. Now that I know he’s involved, this whole blockade makes sense. The truce’ll be over when he gets here.”

The gambler suppressed a shudder, remembering previous confrontations. Once, in the Oseon, the sorcerer had used a device to stimulate every unpleasant memory Lando had, then recycle them, over and over, until he nearly went mad. It had been interference from Klyn Shanga, intent on destroying Vuffi Raa, that had accidentally saved him. They’d rescued Shanga from the wreck of his small fighter afterward and turned him over to the authorities in another system. He wondered where the man was now.

“Well, in any case, I think I’ve got an idea. You know, in order to win a war it isn’t necessary to defeat your enemy, just make the fight so expensive he’ll give up and go away.”

“
I wouldn’t know
,” the Oswaft answered, “
but what you say makes sense
.”

“Sure. As I explained to Vuffi Raa, this blockade’s bound to have some opposition. It’s already expensive, we merely have to make it more so.”