Star Wars_ The Adventures of Lando Calrissia - L. Neil Smith [193]
Shanga grinned inside his helmet, suppressed a chuckle. “Roger, Twenty-three, it’s your funeral. All right, men, synch your navi-mods to me. We’ll move on the tick. Four, three, two, one—unh!”
As a unit, the entire squadron lurched forward, propelled by the pinnace, began accelerating smoothly, and moved off toward the ThonBoka. Now, before the coming disorientation of the jump, Shanga and his men had time to look around them.
Ahead, the StarCave looked like a huge eyeball seen in profile. They approached the entrance obliquely to maximize the element of surprise. It was a stupid ritual, Shanga realized; they’d be seen coming anyway. But it was something to begin the program with; it didn’t really matter. A huge gray eyeball with no iris, a pupil that twinkled with three tiny, blue-white highlights. Down deep inside that thing was the Enemy. Deep down inside that thing was death.
With a joyous shout of violated natural law, the squadron leaped toward it.
W325 was the designation of a very small bathtub-shaped object whose size and power output did not quite earn it the status of an auxiliary vessel. More than anything else, it was a rigid, powered spacesuit, used to inspect and repair the hull of the Wennis while she was in deep space—but most assuredly not under way.
At the moment, W325 was electromagnetically tied in place well aft of the hull to a boxlike addition to the superstructure supporting the cruiser’s main drive tubes. While their fires were momentarily quenched to allow the launching of Klyn Shanga’s squadron, they still glowed with waste heat energy. Attached to the underside of W325 was a decal in the shape of a human being. More correctly, a human being in the shape of a decal.
The Ottdefa Osuno Whett, anthropologist and master spy knew he was taking a terrible chance. That was always the case when serving two masters. He owed Rokur Gepta his assistance and advice—and stood to benefit by it to the tune of the destruction of his enemies. To one other, he owed everything, including his life, if need be. His immediate assignment was keeping an eye on the perfidious sorcerer. Gepta was not trusted as naively as he may have thought, gift cruiser or no gift cruiser.
Thus, encased in a slim, flexible spacesuit whose color had been adjusted to match that of W325, the anthropologist lay spread, arms and legs stretched wide, as tightly as he could to the undersurface of the little space-faring object while its master was otherwise occupied. Whett’s own attention was elsewhere; he watched the readouts in his helmet closely, his curiosity and excitement mounting.
Above, Rokur Gepta cycled out of the small vessel, moved across to the rear surface of the superstructure addition. Whett had already determined, by means of various probes and rays, that the unconventional add-on was composed of hull armor, thicker than most and impenetrable to his devices. He’d suspected something like this and come forearmed. It had not been easy to strew the sorcerer’s path with a dozen information-gathering devices, each the size of a single dust mote, but he had done it. Some of them read out in real time. They would be useless in another moment. But some absorbed what they witnessed and would spew it all out in a fraction of a microsecond once Whett was within receiving range again.
Whett waited.
At the rear of the armored compartment, the sorcerer hung. There was no port within sight, no airlock. Whett wondered mightily about that. He did not believe in the reputed powers of the Sorcerers of Tund. He’d seen far too much primitive mumbo jumbo backed up by trickery and hidden technology to be impressed by such claims. He wished that he dared peek out around the hull of W325 to see what was happening. Instead, he relied on his devices.
Oddly, the real-time machinery gave the impression that Gepta hadn’t bothered with a spacesuit. Strange, but not totally unaccountable. No one was quite sure what