Star Wars_ The Adventures of Lando Calrissia - L. Neil Smith [187]
That had been in the Oseon, and things had not turned out well for either the hopes of his superiors or for those of Rokur Gepta, who had personally supervised that particular operation.
Now, alone with his real pursuers, his memories, Whett realized that it was more than revenge he needed to accomplish in the ThonBoka. He had to see that robot destroyed. It was a dangerous link, in more ways than one, to an even more dangerous past. And he had to see an end, as well, to Captain Lando Calrissian, who could connect his new appearance, adopted before the game, with the robot.
Very well, then: Gepta sought to destroy Calrissian; Shanga sought to destroy Vuffi Raa (because he didn’t know the real mastermind was a “harmless” academic he had seen nearly every day); that academic must now seek to destroy them both, gambler and droid.
Still he wondered, after all this time: where had that accursed robot come from, anyway?
• XIII •
THAT ACCURSED ROBOT scratched his head.
“Politics, saved our lives, Master? I’m not altogether sure I understand.”
In reality, the gesture was more a matter of flicking a delicate tentacle tip around the bezel that retained the faceted red lens of his eye, mounted on the upper surface of his headless pentacular “torso.” But its meaning was clear; he had picked it up from long association with human beings. As usual, certain aspects of that association puzzled him.
“Well, I’m only guessing, mind you, but a massive operation such as that Edge-blasted blockade out there, especially when it’s being carried out in secret, presents a lot of opportunities to people envious of the boys on top.” Lando pried up his cigar from where he’d secured it to the edge of the bench top, drew deeply on it, expelled the smoke, and squashed it firmly once again, sideways, into the wad of chewing gum that, in the absence of gravity, held it where it wouldn’t float away.
“Do you want this end-wrench, Vuffi, or the adjustable spanner?”
The robot glanced back at his master, squatting on the deck plates with one leg thrust under the bench for leverage and security, much like the cigar. Lando leaned on a tool chest, assisting. They’d lifted a repair port and the robot peered now into a complex maze of working and semiworking parts.
“Adjustable, Master. This is a section I rigged after we beefed up the shields in the Oseon. All we had in stock were replacements from the Ringneldia, and everything in that system is standardized around the diameter of some native bean or other.”
It wasn’t just the sudden pullback of the murderous fleet that bothered Vuffi Raa, although it had left thousands of dead Oswaft in its wake. While genuinely ignorant, or at least amnesiac, about his own origins, he could infer certain facts about his makers and their culture, and the trouble was, several of the facts in question were contradictory. And current events were bringing him swiftly to a personal crisis involving those contradictions. It was not a situation that any intelligence—even that of a Class Two droid—finds comfortable.
He detached one of his sinuous manipulators, directing it remotely to thread its way into the starboard reactant-impeller units, deep in the bowels of the Millennium Falcon. Nothing was actually wrong with the system, but had it been a hair more sluggish, they would have been fried by the Courteous instead of cheating their way through hyperspace. It didn’t pay to tolerate the slightest malfunction, not when they were the only spaceship the ThonBoka had to put up against the fleet. Those devices not only fed the engines, which was fairly important in itself, but the deflector shields as well. Vuffi Raa and Lando needed every fractional advantage if they weren’t going to sell their lives cheaply.
“For example,” the gambler continued, craning his neck to see what the robot was doing beneath the floor, “there’ll be one group