Star Wars_ The Adventures of Lando Calrissia - L. Neil Smith [72]
He thrust the doors aside and walked into a burst of radiance. Gepta was thrown against the corridor wall as energy streamed out all around him. He squinted his eyes, employed certain other protections, and gazed briefly at the governor’s desk.
The Mindharp of Sharu shone far too brightly to be looked upon, even by the sorcerer. Behind it, his fat hands wrapped around the base, stood the governor, his mouth and eyes opened wide, frozen, paralyzed.
And doomed.
Even as Gepta watched, both governor and Harp began to melt, to fuse, showering the room and hall with deadly radiation. He regained his feet and ran back up as the earth tremors redoubled.
It was a scene from hell. All around, as far as the horizon, the giant forms left by the Sharu were shifting, fusing, melting like the Harp or, occasionally, detonating rather spectacularly. Something else was rising from the rubble, something Gepta didn’t want to see.
He leaped into his scoutship but neatly tumbled it off the roof before he got it properly airborne. Ahead, toward the spaceport, an ungainly crustacean-shaped object lifted from the runway.
Gepta cursed.
He heeled the fighter around, then aimed it straight for the Millennium Falcon. Closing, closing, he laid a thumb on the firing stud, his crosshairs on the unsuspecting freighter.
Two things happened.
Aboard the Falcon, another thumb rode another stud. Energy streaked toward the fighter Vuffi Raa had noticed landing on the roof. The Falcon’s radar was good, and they’d both been alert against flying debris.
I may not be much of a pilot yet, but I can shoot, Lando thought.
Almost simultaneously, a small obelisk of Sharu manufacture exploded beneath Gepta’s fighter, driving fragments into the small craft. The explosion staggered the scout, disabling it but throwing it from the path of Lando’s beam.
Seconds later, Rokur Gepta clambered from the wreckage as the Millennium Falcon soared away, safe, and with a precious load: the last life-crystals ever to be harvested in the Rafa System. Lando would be very, very rich.
Gepta shook a fist at the departing ship.
Someday …
LANDO CALRISSIAN
• AND THE FLAMEWIND OF OSEON •
And this book is dedicated to
J. Neil Schulman and Victor Koman,
a pair of cards if there ever was one.
• I •
HE WAS SLIGHTLY over a meter tall, from the faceted wide-angle lens glowing redly atop his highly polished pentagonal body to the fine feathery tips of his chromium-plated tentacles.
Of these, there were five, which he felt was as it should be. After all, hadn’t he been created in the image of his manufacturers?
He thought of himself as Vuffi Raa, an unsentimental designation from a different numbering system and a different language, half a galaxy ago. It served well enough as a name.
At the moment, he was in a hurry.
The tree-lined Esplanade of Oseon 6845 was a broad, jungly, cobblestoned thoroughfare built exclusively for pedestrian traffic, no matter what the individual sentient’s personal means of locomotion. It was equipped with an artificial gravity field three meters deep to accommodate the most attenuated of species. It was lined on both sides with elegantly restrained shops to accommodate the very richest.
It has been said that the commercial footage along the domed Esplanade of Oseon 6845 is the most expensive in the known universe. And that the patrons strolling its landscaped and sculptured kilometers are the wealthiest. Vuffi Raa didn’t know about that—a rare failing of information on his part. In the first place, he hadn’t the appropriate statistics ready to hand (in a manner of speaking). And if compelled to base his opinion on an n of one—the single case with which he was intimately familiar—he’d have had to hold the opposite was true. Not everybody there was rich. Not everybody there had come to buy and sell.
Which conclusion neatly brought his musings back around to