Star Wars_ The Adventures of Lando Calrissia - L. Neil Smith [167]
He grew tired of standing. The discussion was altogether too much like being called to the school supervisor’s office, and it rankled. Shanga looked around, discovered a lounger beside the door to the corridor, tossed his helmet onto another chair, and reclined, stretching his customarily ship-cramped legs and relaxing.
Shanga groped around inside his spacesuit until he found tobacco in a shirt pocket. He withdrew the cigar, put it in his mouth, and lit it with a hundredth-power discharge of his blaster. Gepta’s guards hadn’t taken his weapon this time. He hadn’t let them. Three of them had broken arms and a fourth, who’d gone on insisting, was dead. That was the real reason for the conference.
“Let’s put our card-chips in the table-field, Gepta,” Shanga said through a cloud of blue smoke. “You’re up to something—the way you’ve redecorated this cruiser is evidence enough of that—and it amounts to more than simple revenge against one lousy gambler. And you need us. I’ve got twenty-three flyers in a battered assortment of fighters gathered from the scrap heaps of a dozen cultures, and yet any one of them is a match for any three of yours.”
The sorcerer gripped the arms of his chair, convulsively fending off the impulse to have the man disintegrated where he sat. There was too much light in the room for his comfort, and increasingly too much smoke. Yet he had always prided himself on an ability, a willingness, to withstand temporary deprivation and discomfort for the sake of future gains. “Oh, and how is it that you reach this conclusion?” he asked evenly. After all, the crew of the Wennis was the best the Navy had to offer.
Shanga blinked, considering his words. “It’s how you throw away good people. Your whole culture places no value on the individual. Funny, because that’s all there is: no ‘group,’ no ‘Navy,’ no ‘empire,’ only individuals, who do all the thinking, all the work, that gets done. Waste that, and it’ll come back to haunt you, Gepta. People aren’t plug-in modules you can use up. That’s why my guys are a match for any five of yours. They know they’re irreplaceable, and … Look: you’ve got a drive tech who’s pretty good, but doesn’t have the right family or connections, or espouses the wrong beliefs. Disregard his unique competence, pack him off to the life-orchards or the spice mines, and all that leaves you are the socially acceptable incompetents. Starts to show, after a while; the machinery grinds down.”
A tiny portion of the gray-robed sorcerer that was neither illusion nor altogether human shuddered. And controlled himself. Klyn Shanga’s time would come later. In the meantime, in order to prevent morale-destroying rumors from spreading through the crew, he would order that “complications” set in among the lesser casualties of Shanga’s intransigence. They’d be given space burial with full honors; he needed to shut down the ship’s drives briefly, anyway.
“We shall agree,” he said to the fighter pilot with forced amiability, “to disagree; it is not necessary that we hold the same philosophy in order to cooperate.”
“No,” Shanga nodded, “it isn’t. What’s important is that I have my squadron, you have this ship and passage through the fleet. Together, we both know Calrissian, have confronted him in the past. He’ll become your prisoner—or worse. We’ll have Vuffi Raa, the Butcher of Renatasia, to haul back in force shackles for public trial and execution!”
Knowing full well that a very different fate awaited the squadron commander—one not dissimilar to that which he planned for the gambler—Gepta nevertheless replied, “Yes, of course. Then you will be free to rebuild your civilization.” A hint of cordiality very nearly made it into his tone.
“Rebuild Renatasia? There’s nothing left to rebuild! We’ve become your stinking suburbs! Everything we have, everything we do is a pale, threadbare, plastic imitation of whatever was in fashion ten years