Star Wars: The Adventures of Lando Calrissia (45 page)

“Yes,” said the Admiral, “and afterward: what?”

The sorcerer smiled, an expression that manifested itself only in the sarcastic tone of his voice. Inside the dark gray windings about his hidden face, it was a far from pleasant expression.

“Afterward, my dear Admiral Shanga, we two shall go our separate ways, you to rebuild Renatasian civilization to glorious, dizzying new heights, while I, on the other hand—”

“Mynock muffins!” Shanga raised his gauntleted hand in a mocking salute. Then, without further ceremony, he turned on his space-booted heel and began the trek across the damp cavern floor to the elevator.

He itched to have his blaster once again—an itch he felt between his shoulder blades as he turned his back on the perfidious sorcerer—to get in his small fighter and rejoin the squadron hovering at the edge of the barren Tund System. The dead planet was giving him the creeps.

For his part, Gepta watched the figure of the Renatasian soldier diminish in the twilit distance, kneaded his gray-gloved hands together, once more stifling rage that bordered on gibbering insanity. To be walked out on by a mere underling! And especially one who possessed the gall to consider himself an equal partner in the sorcerer’s affairs!

It was almost more than the ancient magician could bear. Almost.

There are rituals, however, formulae for calming both the mind and body under such nerve-shredding circumstances, venerable practices of the long-dead Sorcerers of Tund.

Rokur Gepta applied them all with a will.

L
ANDO SAT IN
the copilot’s seat, smoking a cigar and thinking. The navy cruiser wasn’t naked-eye visible and he had no desire to crank up the telescope. He’d seen a cruiser before.

They’d been given ten minutes to make up their minds: prepare for boarders or be obliterated. Lando was using every second of those minutes, trying to produce a third alternative. He wasn’t having much luck. He’d known from the beginning that a moment like this was going to arrive, sooner or later—although he hadn’t imagined it arriving quite so soon. The plans he’d sketched out in the leisure and safety at their last port of call seemed fragile and silly now, however detailed and astute they had appeared at the time.

The trouble, of course, arose from the fact that Lehesu hadn’t gone straight home. Fortune or coincidence hadn’t had very much to do with his rescue. Lando and Vuffi Raa had stumbled across the same “desert” that had threatened to kill the young Oswaft. What it meant for them and the
Falcon
was a sudden drop to below light-speed while Vuffi Raa recalibrated the engines. In the empty sector, the engines had met almost no resistance and they threatened to race wildly until they tore themselves and their operators apart, atom by atom.

Thus they had been poking along on their reaction drive when they’d encountered a five-hundred-meter monster soaring out of nowhere. At first they’d taken Lehesu for a weird ship from an unknown culture. They’d been half right, but then Lehesu had mistaken the
Falcon
for a being something like himself. It had taken much longer to straighten out
that
misunderstanding than to puzzle out the vacuum-breather’s plight and do something about it.

Vuffi Raa had, as usual, been at the controls, as Lando kept a suspicious eye on Lehesu and a nervous thumb on the trigger from the quad-gun blister.

“
Master, I have communications on a very unconventional frequency
.”

“What’s being said?” Lando shifted the stump of his cigar to the other side of his mouth, hunched over the receiver of the quad-gun even farther, and strained to see the weird object floating half a klick away. It was transparent, and didn’t show up very well on the detectors, as if it were made of plastic instead of metal. There was no sign of shielding, and he’d seen much bigger ships. Nevertheless, its casual proximity raised the fine hair on the back of his neck and gave him the impulse to jam the triggers down and keep them down until it was reduced to harmless vapor.

“
I’ve got the
Falcon
’s computers working on it—they’re not very well suited to translation, I’m afraid—and I’m also plugged into things myself. It would appear—wait! We’re starting to receive a visual array. Repeating that first greeting seems to have done the … yes … yes … Master! It’s sending us a picture of ourselves!”

Great, Lando thought, here we are, parsecs from any known civilization, and we’ve stumbled across an itinerant portrait photographer. Usually they brought a pony or a young bantha with them, but … He let the sarcastic thoughts dribble away. They weren’t doing any good. He trusted Vuffi Raa to handle things in general, but hated to put his life in
anybody’s
hands but his own.

“Well, send them back a picture of themselves, for Core’s sake! Pretend we’re a pair of tourists taking each other’s snapshots. It beats shooting it out.”

“
Yes, Master, I had already arrived at that conclusion, and am transmitting a slow-scan with the proper characteristics. I can put it on one of your gunnery screens if you think it’s worth the risk
.”

“Go ahead. I can do better with the naked eye anyway, given our range and this thing’s weird composition.”

On a display to his left, the outline of the
Falcon
, as seen by the alien object, faded away to be replaced with an enhanced representation of the object itself. Vuffi Raa’s vision was better than Lando’s. He was making out or inferring a good deal more detail. The thing remarkably resembled some marine creatures Lando had seen in his travels although it was
too large by at least an order of magnitude. It was also somewhat like a bird—

The picture jerked, the viewpoint changed, the object curled and uncurled its “wings.”

“
Master, this picture’s coming from them! Master, I don’t think this is a spaceship! I think it’s a—
”

At this point, Lehesu began his little video drama, showing himself starving to death and dying, then changing things to show himself feeding and prospering. By the time he was finished, Lando and Vuffi Raa had a much better idea of what they had encountered in that odd, empty region of interstellar space.

Lando knew that it was theoretically possible for organisms to evolve in free space. Chemical compounds formed spontaneously there, many of them very sophisticated and much like those that had preceded life in the oceans of millions of worlds. There were even substances which scientists argued
were
ultrasimple life, somewhere below the level of viruses on a scale of organization.

What bothered Lando was that they’d encountered Lehesu in a region utterly devoid of the chemical soup that was supposed to give rise to life. It didn’t make sense. One didn’t expect to find human beings in places where there was no light, no heat, no oxygen, no—then he remembered where he was, the same lifeless, empty stretch of nothingness the odd creature was navigating, and liked the situation even less than before.

“
Master, I think it’s asking for help
!”

“Tell it we gave at the office!”

“
Master, those symbols! They’re atomic nuclei! It’s telling us what it needs. That settles it: those aren’t fuel compounds, they’re
food.
It’s a living creature, and it’s been starving to death
!”

Lando thought about it. “What does it want, Vuffi Raa? We’re not very likely to have anything this alien can eat, are we?”

“
Simple organic compounds, amino acids. Master, the contents of the ship’s recyclers are almost made for its requirements. Could we?…
”

“Oh, very well, go ahead. We could always use a friend who breathes vacuum and can cross interstellar space by sheer force of personality. Let him have what he—”

The
Falcon
gave a small lurch as Vuffi Raa vented the recyclers. The creature reacted immediately, swooping and
soaring ecstatically through the haze of muck they’d released into the void. Lando nearly went crazy trying to keep the energy weapons trained on it, then gave up. The thing wasn’t going to harm them; it ate garbage and had been starving to death. They’d made a friend, and friends don’t point guns at one another.

He switched off the gunnery circuits, unstrapped himself from the swiveling chair, and lumbered forward to join Vuffi Raa in the cockpit.

They’d remained in that one spot for several days, learning Lehesu’s language while Vuffi Raa adjusted the engines. At one point it had become necessary for the gambler to suit up and step outside so that the giant Oswaft could be made to understand that the
Falcon
was a
thing
containing people of a different size and shape than the Oswaft had been capable of imagining. For all his size and the idiotic fix he’d gotten himself into out there, the alien was not stupid. Artifacts were not entirely unknown to his culture, and, as soon as he’d grasped the concept of a spaceship, he’d come up with an idea of his own.

Which meant that Vuffi Raa had to go to work again. In the end, the robot had cobbled up a huge tank out of metal and sheet plastic and filled it with recycler contents. Now Lehesu could travel without running out of nutriment. It had taken both man and droid to maneuver the tank into position beneath the enormous space-going creature. He grasped it in several dozen of his tentacles, gently stroking his new friends with a couple of others as his voice filtered through Lando’s suit-helmet radio.

“
Many thanks to you, for you have given me life twice. My regret is that there is nothing I can do for you, you who can make food out of nothingness in the middle of nothingness
.”

Lando was about to say a perfunctory “forget it” when Vuffi Raa raised a cautionary tentacle. “
Master, he’s making pictures again, I can see them in my mind
!”

“You’re a droid of many talents, and there are advantages to having an electronic brain. What’s he showing you, naked dancing-droids?”

“Master!
On the contrary, he’s displaying things which he can fabricate from the chemicals he doesn’t need in his food. Apparently he does it atom by atom. Master! He’s showing me
opals, sapphires, flame-gems and sun-stones. Why, that’s a life-crystal from the Rafa System! Lehesu, can you truly—
”

“
Yes, my little friend, if these objects interest you. There is more, much more that I can make. But tell me, is it true that Master cannot see what I am showing you this moment, without an artifact to assist him
?”

Lando interrupted. “Core blast you, Vuffi Raa, now you’ve got
him
calling me master! I want him to stop it immediately, do you hear me, Lehesu? And Vuffi Raa?”

“
Yes, Master
?”

“Come on inside and we’ll take a look at what Lehesu’s offering over a screen.”

Lehesu’s people, the Oswaft, had had yet another talent, and that was what had gotten the young vacuum-breather into trouble the second time.

The interior of the StarCave, over a dozen light-years in extent, was huge even for the relatively enormous organisms and the rest of the complex ecology that inhabited it. Simply boring along at sublight velocities, as Lehesu had been doing on his last (figurative) legs when the
Falcon
had found him, wasn’t enough.

Lehesu hadn’t gone straight home when he left the
Falcon
. His curiosity hadn’t been satisfied—in fact it had been sharpened exponentially by contact with the human and the droid. He wanted to see what things were like in the regions of space that had produced them.

Holding firmly onto his canister of nutrients, he’d bidden them farewell and exchanged promises to get in touch again someday. The gambler had taken these no more seriously than any frequent traveler does with the strangers he gets to know superficially for a short time. He and Vuffi Raa had gone on about their own business, flipping switches and turning knobs to bring the
Falcon
up to full power once more when they reached the margin of the “desert.”

Lehesu had gone in search of civilization.

Unfortunately for the Oswaft and the subsequent security of his people, he had done his searching in a region patrolled by the Navy, whose sensors, acquired at the unwilling expense of quadrillions of taxpayers, were more sophisticated than those of the
Falcon
. They’d ferreted out the truth about the strange being upon first spotting him, noticing an ability Lando and Vuffi Raa had missed: not only to soar through space in a linear
fashion, but to “skip” vast distances when it suited him, as hyperdrive starships do. They’d tracked him back to the ThonBoka when he’d returned with joyous news of his discoveries.

The navy, of course, had recognized a threat when they saw one: a race of beings at home in space, capable of faster-than-light travel—a terrible thing to contemplate. Their scouts’ estimate of the number of Oswaft was even more terrifying. It was like encountering a previously unknown superpower with millions of fully operational starships. There was only one thing to do.

The ThonBoka was an open system. It had to be, or exhaust its resources rapidly. The idea was to starve the Oswaft to death, denying them the chemicals drifting in on the galactic tide. Once the vacuum-breathers were sufficiently weakened, they could be finished off neatly, their threat erased forever.

But the Navy didn’t know that Vuffi Raa’s canister handiwork had included a radio relay and transducer—he had truly meant to stay in touch—through which Lehesu had shouted a cry for help across the parsecs. Lando, seeing in the creature’s problems a solution to problems of his own, had loaded his ship and come arunning. Now he was having second thoughts.

Less than a hundred kilometers away, point-blank range as distances in space are reckoned, a battle cruiser waited impatiently for an answer. The
Falcon
was fast, but not fast enough to evade the vessel’s tractor beams or destructive weaponry. As freighters go, she was well armed and heavily shielded against impecunious pirates and the usual run of free-lance riffraff one was likely to encounter in interstellar space. But her quadguns and other weaponry were no match for the armament sprouting from what seemed like every square meter of the warship that confronted them. And worse, at that range, the Falcon’s shields would buy her only seconds of extended life.