Star Wars_ The Adventures of Lando Calrissia - L. Neil Smith [130]
“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.
• XVII •
MAGENTA 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