Star Wars_ The Adventures of Lando Calrissia - L. Neil Smith [205]
The pinnace struck the Wennis—her own shields negligently still powered down to allow the sorcerer to debark—and penetrated her hull. There was a brief instant in which nothing else happened, a suspension of time as inertia was overcome, as systems attempted to control the damage and failed.
Then a titanic explosion as the cruiser belched flaming gases everywhere, consuming herself, the pinnace, and everyone aboard both vessels. Even two of the fleeing fighters were tumbled badly.
Farther away, Rokur Gepta, Vuffi Raa, and Lando were distracted by the explosion. Gepta stared insanely. Lando recovered first, took aim, and—
—was struck by a piece of flying debris. His shot went wild, hitting the sorcerer in the ankle. In shock, Lando recovered and watched as the form of Rokur Gepta withered and faded. He jetted up beside the magician in time to see a heavy military blaster swing around, fire, swing a little farther, and fire again. Vuffi Raa’s tentacle floated emptily with nothing left to hold onto. The third shot, cast by an unconscious and dematerializing hand, caught the robot’s torso, a hundred meters away, dead in the center.
The metal glowed momentarily. When the incandescence dimmed, so had the single red eye in the body’s center. It was flat, glassy, and black.
Lando pawed through Rokur Gepta’s empty spacesuit. Down in the leg was a small bundle of ugly, slimy tissue, resembling a half-cooked snail, an escargot with a dozen skinny, hairy black legs. It was one of the most disgusting things the gambler had ever seen, but he’d seen it before.
It was a Croke, from a small, nasty system he’d once visited. The species was intelligent and unvaryingly vicious, and they were all masters of camouflage and illusion.
This one wasn’t quite dead. The suit had protected it, and it was nearly impervious to hard vacuum. Lando ripped the suit away, took the stunned and putrid creature that had been Rokur Gepta, and squeezed. When he was through, his suit gloves were covered with greasy slime, but no Sorcerer of Tund would ever rule the galaxy.
As if Gepta’s death were a signal, the fleet began to open up on the Oswaft within range. In the space of a moment, hundreds died … until the fleet had other things to think about; Klyn Shanga’s squadron was shooting back, giving the vacuum-breathing sapients covering fire so they could retreat. One fighter exploded, then another, but they were saving Oswaft lives.
“CEASE FIRE IMMEDIATELY OR BE DESTROYED!”
The voice came over everybody’s communicators simultaneously, at every frequency. Lando looked up from his little friend’s scorched torso—he’d gathered in the tentacles, as well, but they would not attach themselves and lay in his arms like so many dead pieces of jointed metal—to see a figure that dwarfed the departed Elders, even the largest dreadnaughts in the fleet.
It was a starship, but it was at least fifty kilometers in diameter, a smooth, featureless, highly polished ovoid of silvery metal. Another, identical monster followed close behind it. Far to the rear, Lando watched as others, countless others, penetrated the supposedly impenetrable wall of the ThonBoka as if it were so much fog. Hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands.
Some fool aboard the Recalcitrant opened fire with the new meter-thick destructor beam, deep green and hungry. A red beam from the leading foreign ship met the green one squarely, forced it back a meter at a time until it reached the navy cruiser. A pause, then the Recalcitrant became a cloud of incandescent gas.
“CEASE FIRE OR BE DESTROYED! THERE WILL BE NO OTHER WARNING!”
Racked with grief, Lando watched as more and more of the titanic ovoids appeared in the nebula. There was no way to estimate their number. The gambler thought