Star Wars_ The Adventures of Lando Calrissia - L. Neil Smith [165]
A long, quiet moment followed. Then, without warning, something materialized not far from Lehesu, out of the wherever-it-is that starships go when they’re traveling faster than the speed of light.
It was an absurdly shaped object, like something resembling a coral-encrusted horseshoe magnet a tenth the Oswaft’s size and possessing none of his fluid grace. The thing was tumbling slowly, end over end, while enormous volumes of dense white smoke billowed from its blast-blackened rear surface.
Naturally, Lehesu recognized her at once.
“Lando! Vuffi Raa! Can you hear me in there? Are you all right?”
The vacuum-breather swam closer, carefully avoiding the foul-smelling effluents issuing from the curved rear edge of the freighter. Nothing indicated that life had ever inhabited the strangely shaped craft. The glow-spots he now knew to be windows lay dark and foreboding along her surfaces as she continued to somersault gently before the space-going sentient, the random motion itself a grim presentiment that nothing rational lived at the controls.
“Vuffi Raa! Lando! Speak to me!” the Oswaft beamed on every frequency he knew. “This is Lehesu!”
Nothing replied.
Much more figuratively than literally, Lehesu cast a backward glance at the fleet besieging his home. He didn’t know how he could accomplish it, but he swore, in that moment of grief, a terrible revenge against those who were responsible for the tragedy. To gain and lose new friends, good friends—in some respects the only friends he’d ever had—in what seemed to the extremely long-lived creature like the mere space of minutes … It was almost more than a being could bear.
Thrashing frantically back and forth, he peered into the vessel’s darkened ports, learning nothing. Gently, he nudged the spaceship, unintentionally adding an additional vector to her tumbling motion.
“Lando! Vuffi Raa! Are you in there?”
He thought a moment, then, despite everything he had struggled to understand about his new companions, added: “Falcon, my little friend, please talk to me! This is Lehesu the Oswaft! Are Vuffi Raa and Lando still alive?”
• VIII •
THE REFITTED CRUISER Wennis was a trowel-shaped wedge of metal bristling with instrument and weapons implacements arranged to overlap yet not interfere with one another’s fields of effectiveness. At an unusual—and unusually heavily shielded—point on her after surface, between the great blinding arrays of drive tubes and deflectors, was a small chamber with windowless walls two meters thick. It could be entered only by a small auxiliary craft, available to the vessel’s master alone, and then only when he had ordered the drives temporarily shut down. To navigate the small craft while the cruiser’s massive engines were in operation would be instantaneous suicide.
Two hundred centimeters is a great deal of wall, especially when it is composed of the latest, state-of-the-art battlewagon armor. Yet the armoring of the special chamber was not intended to protect its contents from the ravening drive radiations of the Wennis. It was to protect the Wennis from what lay in the chamber. Even so, it was a futile effort, intended more to comfort the one entity who knew what the arrangement was all about, to provide some sense, however illusory, of security.
Inside the chamber, Rokur Gepta stood before a chest-high metal pylon capped with a transparent bubble the size of a man’s head. Gepta knew the chamber and controls by memory. No light burned within it. He ran a gray-gloved hand along the surface of the pylon, watching with unseeing eyes as his fingers pressed inset keys. Inside the bubble, he had begun to create an infinitessimal speck of the most dangerous single substance the universe had ever known. A sickly green light