• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“Not at all. What’s even better is that he still believes me to be bound by my earlier programming. He thinks I cannot fight.”

Lando grinned. “You know, I’m not sure I understand that, myself. But of course that’s why he offered to let you help me out in this duel, to make up for his powers of magic, so he said.”

The robot raised an affirmative tentacle. “What now remains is for us to plan what we will do once we’re out there. Have you an idea?”

Lando drew a deep puff, let it out slowly, savoring it. “I do, indeed, old Saturday-night spatial. The terms are one personal weapon apiece?”

“Not precisely, Master. You are allowed one weapon, I am allowed none. He didn’t specify what he would use. I didn’t ask. It seems we have no choice in this matter.”

“No, but tell me, does he know about the way you let your tentacles do their own thinking?”

The gleam in Vuffi Raa’s faceted eye grew brighter. “No, Master, I don’t believe he does.”

“Swell. Then here’s what we’ll do—and don’t call me master.”

Rokur Gepta stood in an airlock of the Wennis, watching the Millennium Falcon through the bull’s-eye in the hatch. He could see her captain and his droid climbing out of their own airlock as he himself suited up. The suit was a deep nonreflective gray, about the color of the walls of the ThonBoka. He turned to the officer beside him, the nominal captain of the cruiser.

“You are certain that you understand my instructions?”

“Yes, sir,” the unhappy-looking man replied. “I am to exterminate all life in the nebula, regardless of the outcome of the duel.” He gulped at speaking what he felt to be a dishonorable and unmilitary decision, and remained rigidly at attention as the sorcerer donned his helmet.

“Precisely, Captain, and if you are entertaining any ideas of countermanding that order in the event of my demise, please remember that the continued existence of your family depends on its being carried out. That was the purpose of sending the courier to your home system a few minutes ago. Their lives are in your hands.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Very well, then, stand aside so that I may exhaust the lock—unless you care to join me in the airless void?”

* * *

Klyn Shanga watched the accursed Vuffi Raa, Butcher of Renatasia, climb out of the airlock of the Millennium Falcon. The little monster was still wearing that spacesuit he’d affected in the Oseon that made him appear to be a robot. Shanga began flipping switches; turbines whined as power levels increased. One trembling hand remained on the button of his weapon system. Steady, old soldier, he told himself, only a few more minutes.

Suddenly, a fighter across the formation from him slid forward, gaining speed as it approached the Falcon. Shanga opened his mouth to scream “Bern, no!” when a man-thick power beam from the Wennis struck fighter number Twenty-three, blowing it to bits.

“Sorry, Admiral Shanga,” a voice said over the intership. “Orders from the Sorcerer of Tund. There is to be no interference.”

And no revenge, no justice, Shanga realized, unless he could figure out something quickly. Ten years of his life, of the lives of all his men, down the drain, unless—

Movement near the Wennis caught his eye. Rokur Gepta jetted from the airlock, crossed half the space between the cruiser and the freighter, and came to a skillful hovering stop. He folded his spacesuited arms and hung, awaiting his adversaries. Across the void that had become an arena, Lando Calrissian followed his example in a bright yellow spacesuit, rocketing to meet the sorcerer, stopping several dozen meters away. Vuffi Raa was right behind him.

Something on the order of a billion pairs of eyes—or equivalent sensory equipment—watched as the sorcerer inclined his head in a small, grudging bow. Without further warning, his right hand lashed out, and a beam of energy struck the place where Lando—

—had been. He tumbled, spun, and recovered, something small and glittering in his own hand, but didn’t return