Star Wars_ The Adventures of Lando Calrissia - L. Neil Smith [149]
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.
• IV •
LANDO 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