Star Wars_ The Adventures of Lando Calrissia - L. Neil Smith [162]
Watching the watchers.
As always, his estimate of what was prudent differed somewhat from that of his cosapients. None of them could be persuaded to venture within light-years of the spot from which the periodic activities of their new enemies could be observed, if not entirely understood. Restless, Lehesu concentrated a moment, got his bearings in some manner no one but another Oswaft would be able to fathom, and hopped, without thinking much more about it, a few hundred thousand kilometers, as if the intervening distance didn’t exist. It was a gesture of frustration. He had been brought up to believe such fidgeting was infantile, undignified, not to mention impolite when in the company of others. But at the moment he couldn’t help himself. He was impatient, an emotion he shared in common with other species, but which would be beyond the comprehension of most Oswaft. Still he waited.
He wasn’t at all certain when Lando, Vuffi Raa, and the Falcon would arrive. He had difficulty yet, realizing that the freighter was not a real person. The existence of, and his friendship with, the chromium-plated robot made this realization even more difficult to achieve. That they would not fail to come to his aid he never doubted for an instant, despite the genteel jeering of family and friends. They had not believed the least of his tales about the Open Sea until the evidence had thundered up to the ThonBoka mouth, heavily gunned and, for some reason, angrily disposed toward the vacuum-breathing race.
This, of course, was somehow the adventuring Lehesu’s fault.
Concerning Lando Calrissian … The Oswaft’s brief sojourn into human territory still hadn’t educated him about cats; however there were certain aspects of that animal’s psychology he might have identified with. Hadn’t the gambler and his friends saved his life? Twice?
They were obligated, now.
Anxiety shifted Lehesu again, this time a quarter of a light-year, to one side of the nebula mouth, before he fully noticed it. He could “see” better from the vantage anyway. Metallic motes lost against a starry backdrop, the elements of the fleet themselves were invisible at this distance. But the aggregate was noisy. A welter of communication darted from ship to ship in a complex net of energies the operators of which fondly imagined was private. Lehesu had learned Lando’s language in a matter of hours. It did not occur to him that the stirrings and mixings of ideas that constituted top-secret military codes were anything other than amusing games to those who employed them. He puzzled them out in idle moments, much faster than he’d overcome the initial difficulty presented by communicating with the gambler and the robot.
Had those in command of the fleet, those who had ordered its destructive presence outside the ThonBoka, become aware of that minor Oswaft capability, they would have redoubled their efforts to exterminate the space people. In this instance, ignorance was mutual; Lehesu hadn’t a notion of the threat he and his people represented to those who cherished power for its own sake.
A small, thin cloudlet of intersteiler plankton drifted by, borne on the complex tide of gravity and photon pressure, tiny pseudoanimals and quasi-plants that formed the basis of the Oswaft diet, indeed for the diet of all the thousands of space-evolved species living in the shelter of the StarCave. Lehesu nibbled at them in a desultory fashion. To the small extent he was aware of them, he realized they didn’t taste particularly good. There was a reason for that: they were slowly dying.
The bottom rung of the ThonBoka food ladder was being ruthlessly and deliberately sawed out from under the rest of the nebula’s ecology. Every now and again the vessels of the picket fleet outside would blossom into glowing visibility as, in concert, they unleashed titanic energies, saturating the space around themselves with destructive particles and waves. It was at these moments that Lehesu (who had found