Star Wars_ The Adventures of Lando Calrissia - L. Neil Smith [159]
He had very few others left.
Somewhere ahead, hovering at the deep-frozen margin of the Tund System, his tiny fleet awaited the news he carried. They had towed themselves originally into this sector of the galaxy—a long, long way from home—by means of a scrapped and resurrected Centrality battleship engine that had been left among the ruins of their civilization by the departing marauders. To this they had attached, by cable, craft bought, stolen, and traded from a hundred cultures. Ultimately, the engine had become a weapon of despair, a fusion-powered battering ram. Even so, they had failed to accomplish their purpose for it, the destruction of Vuffi Raa.
Now, deprived of an independent method of ultra-lightspeed travel, they had to rely upon an uncertain ally. One who, without question, would betray them in the end.
Alone in the cramped cockpit of his fighter, Shanga reviewed the words he would employ to persuade his men that he had made the best of a bad bargain—those few who had survived the voyage to the Tund System and their first bloody encounter with the enemy at the Oseon. More had joined them afterward, dribbling out in the filthy holds of ancient freighters, hitching rides aboard the interstellar garbage scows.
Ironically, it was Rokur Gepta who, more than anybody else, represented the malign spirit that had destroyed the Renatasia. Somehow, too, it was fitting that they plotted together to use the navy as a sort of backstop against which they could crush their common foes. That same Navy had been the direct agent of his home system’s destruction. At the beginning of his vindictive adventure, Klyn Shanga had been fatalistically resigned to throwing away his life and the lives of his threadbare command in order to avenge their titanic losses. Now he realized with increasing clarity and weariness that there was more—much more—to live for. The capture and slow termination of the five-legged infiltrator would only begin the process. Somehow they must make their mark upon the Navy, upon the Centrality itself, upon everyone responsible in any way for the murder of a civilization.
Hopelessness breeds desperate measures. A partnership with the Sorcerer of Tund necessarily included a risk that the pitiable remains of Renatasian manhood might be used to some surpassingly evil purpose, to fulfill some objective even more hideous than the obliteration of a system-wide culture. If anyone was capable of engineering such a cataclysm, it was Rokur Gepta.
There was a Renatasian animal that planted itself by the waterside and, in the process of giving birth, provided fodder for a predacious toothy swimmer. Gepta was very much like that toothy swimmer, circling expectantly. Shanga, with his tiny fleet (call it, rather, a “school”) felt very much like that hapless littoral creature who must die herself—sacrificing, as well, a certain percentage of her young—in order to give whatever microscopic meaning to life that it was capable of possessing.
On the other hand, only sapient beings were foolish enough to imagine that the universe was anything but a sadistic battlefield where brutality was the natural order and agonized screaming provided the background music. Not even a man as bitterly demoralized as Klyn Shanga believed there was any meaning to death.
Perhaps he should never have retired from the military, he thought with a deeply felt sigh uncharacteristic of the role he presently played or the place he found himself now. All those years on his farm, amid fresh, growing things under a kindly sky, had made him far too philosophical to be a good soldier ever again. But he was all his world had left, so he would have to do.
Klyn Shanga flew onward through the star-strewn darkness, reviewing the words he would employ to persuade his