Star Wars_ The Adventures of Lando Calrissia - L. Neil Smith [181]
“Silence! I have no further need for you, Klyn Shanga. You have foolishly told me where Lando Calrissian might be found. We will soon be there, and he is trapped by the fleet, cannot get away from the justice I shall mete out. You serve no purpose. You are dispensable!”
Shanga obtained another cigar from inside his suit, lit it, and spat out a flake of tobacco onto the carpeted floor.
“Yeah? Well, I spent a little time with your pet professor today. You’ll recall you instructed him to be free and easy with information bearing on combat operations in the nebula? What he had to say about the guff relayed this morning from the fleet was very interesting. Very interesting, indeed.”
Gepta, his back turned to the squadron commander, spoke to the wall. “And what was that?”
“Ask your own people if you don’t believe me. We’re up against it, Gepta. There are something like a billion Oswaft in that sack, every one of them as dangerous as a fighter ship. Something about folks like us being electrochemical in nature, our nervous systems, anyway. Well, the Oswaft are what your boy is calling ‘organœlectronic.’ I don’t know exactly everything that implies, but they can think and act and maneuver a lot faster than we can. What’s more, a flock of them destroyed the Courteous. Nobody knows how.”
Gepta whirled on Shanga. “What has this to do with disposition of your group, Admiral?” The way the sorcerer pronounced his title may have been the most sarcastic thing that Shanga had ever heard. With difficulty he shrugged off the implied threat, returned to calculated insult.
“So you think you’re going to get anywhere with the clumsy children you’ve got manning this ship? I told you, Gepta, they’re amateurs, and they’re so scared at balling things up, they’ll ball them up anyway! I think what Bern Nuladeg tried this morning ought to demonstrate pretty well how frightened we are, of you, or of anything else. You need us, you pretentious idiot, and you’re going to lose this operation without us. You may have already. Have you heard from the fleet?”
There was a long, long silence while Rokur Gepta gained control of himself. No one, not for perhaps twenty thousand years, had spoken to him in such a manner and lived—or even died a quick and merciful death. In fact some of them had lasted, under one instrument of both torture and regeneration or another, for centuries. Klyn Shanga might be one such, after this was over.
Very well, then, the sorcerer reasoned, it should not matter what immediate disposition he made of Shanga or his underlings. They would serve their purpose in the coming conflict, and any who survived … But he had one more source of information to consult. He strode rapidly to the chair that Shanga occupied, ignored the man, and pressed a button. “Send me the Ottdefa Osuno Whett immediately.”
Not three minutes later, the compartment door whisked aside, and the anthropologist stepped in. The tall, emaciated professor took in what was to be seen, sensed conflict momentarily postponed, and vowed to himself to get out of the way as soon as he could manage it.
“You have been following the information from the fleet?” the sorcerer asked without preliminaries.
“Of course, sir, I—”
“What do they tell you of the capabilities of the Oswaft?”
Shanga grinned, but kept his silence.
“Well, sir, it is a confirmation of my earlier studies. In a cellular sense, these beings seem to exist on a sort of solid-state level, something like primitive electronics. This accounts for their communications abilities and—”
“How is this known? Is it merely surmise, or are there data?”
The anthropologist’s astonishment grew every time Gepta snapped at him. Along with his fear. “Sir, a number of vessels did a full-range scan at the moment the creatures were destroyed. Most of them were vaporized when the Courteous went up. In fact, it’s possible that not one of them was injured