Star Wars_ The Adventures of Lando Calrissia - L. Neil Smith [202]
WENNIS
“—by edict! You are commanded to cease fire and to surrender to the nearest Imperial vessel immediately.”
Apparently, Vuffi Raa had found the navy’s frequency—or they had found the Falcon’s and had patched it through the intercom. As he listened, Lando saw one of his auxiliary target screens go momentarily blank, then fill with the dark and terrifyingly familiar image.
“This in the name and at the order of Rokur Gepta, Sorcerer of Tund.”
And then: “Private to Captain Lando Calrissian of the Millennium Falcon.” The wizard leaned conspiratorially into the pickup. “You have put up a valiant and brilliantly conceived fight, sir, but one which you shall inevitably lose, if only because I am willing to throw half the resources of civilization at you, should it prove necessary. I could bury you with dead bodies, and fill this entire nebula with the wrecks of ships, and I will.
“However, I offer you an opportunity to minimize unnecessary bloodshed, to settle things personally and at close hand between ourselves, once and for all. Nor have I need for the resources of half an empire to persuade you. At this very moment the power is mine to exterminate every sentient being in this nebula, every flyspeck of life, every hope that life again will ever flourish here.
“Behold and bear witness!”
He raised a hand, as if in a magician’s gesture. Outside, from one of the ungainly projections on the hull of the Wennis, there was a faint, fast squirt of brilliant life. Instantly it streaked toward a cluster of gigantic Oswaft who, since ceasing to fight, had been watching and listening. Sen and Fey were among them.
As the light point reached them, they began glowing a pale, sickly green and disappeared without a trace before their dying screams had faded. Whatever the weapon was, it could discriminate between real organic beings and the phony outlines Lando had taught them to create. Those remained like ghosts, hollow and insubstantial.
“That, my dear Captain Calrissian, was a demonstration employing one times ten to the minus seventeenth of the power available to me. The object was an electromagnetic torpedo, scarcely larger than a filterable virus and programmed to self-destruct after it had done its work. Had it not been so, this area around us would contain no life by now, nor, within a week, would the entire nebula.
“I offer you, however, an alternative. Should you triumph, the entire fleet shall go away. Should I win, I shall release a thousand tons of this destructive agent in the ThonBoka.
“As for ourselves personally, we shall fight a duel to the death.”
• XVII •
“WE HAVE ONE advantage, Master.”
Vuffi Raa had just returned from the Wennis, where, at Gepta’s command, he had gone as Lando’s second to receive the terms for the duel. Frost was turning into water on the little robot’s chromium-plated body and dripping off onto the floor of the tiny airlock below the topside hatch.
“That’s absolutely peachy, old go-between. Any little boost would be welcome, just now.” He looked out through a viewport. On one side the Falcon was englobed by the Navy, perhaps five hundred enormous capital ships.
From another port, he could see they were hemmed in by Klyn Shanga’s squadron, what was left of it, in formation once again about the pinnace. The tractor field was off, and would have been invisible in any case, but the arrangement gave them an instant choice between two modes of movement.
Lando shook his head, and went on running down the long-form checklist, getting his best spacesuit up and ready for the coming conflict.
“Yes, Master. You’ll recall he was the one responsible for your winning me in the first place? Well, it was he, who, well, supplied me to the Ottdefa Osuno Whett. He knows me rather well—and still believes that he can program me to betray you.”
The gambler looked up, set the pair