Star Wars_ The Adventures of Lando Calrissia - L. Neil Smith [84]
Yet those of Tund had their own beliefs about things that transcended science, and Rokur Gepta was a superstitious soul. He believed that some perverse kind of luck, some fate, karma, kismet, or destiny kept throwing Calrissian in his face. Sometimes it appeared the young gambler wasn’t even aware that it was happening.
Now the sorcerer would have an end to it.
He pressed a button set in the arm of his chair. An officer materialized, one a little younger than the captain.
“You are the second in command?” Gepta hissed.
The officer saluted uncertainly. He’d seen his superior dragged from the bridge. “Y-Yes … yes, sir, I am. I, er … shall we maintain our course for the Oseon, sir?”
Rokur Gepta waited a while to reply, knowing that the prolonged silence would further ravel the young officer’s nerves. In a military hierarchy there was always something to feel guilty about. It was designed that way, so that an individual couldn’t go through a single day without having to stretch, bend, or break a rule. This, of course, worked to the advantage of those at the top of the pyramid.
Just as it was working now.
When a fine sweat sprinkled the officer’s brow, Gepta finally spoke.
“No, no. We shall digress for a short time. I’ll give you the heading. Your captain will be indisposed for several hours, and I want to be well on my way by the time of his … recovery.”
Many parsecs away, in space equally as deep as that which enveloped the cruiser Wennis, a strange apparition manifested itself.
At its center lay the naked core of a dreadnaught-class ultralightspeed drive engine, pulsing, glowing, seeming to writhe with unholy energies as it twisted space around itself to deny the basic laws of reality. A closer examination would have disclosed that it was old, very old, patched and welded together out of many such drive engines, long past obsolescence, verging on dangerous fatigue.
Surrounding it were at least two dozen equally weary and obsolete fighters of nearly as many separate pedigrees, some constructed by inhuman races and sloppily converted. They were connected to the drive core with gleaming cables that glowed and sparked and writhed in time to its fundamental frequency. The fighters appeared to be towing the engine. In fact, the reverse was true. These small craft were incapable of making the translation to faster-than-light velocities themselves. They let the core field do it for them.
Militia Leader Klyn Shanga sat before the controls of his aged spacecraft, his eyes unseeing, his mind turned inward. It had been thus for over eleven days—this was the most excruciatingly dull voyage he had ever endured. Yet it was necessary: honor demanded it.
Though alive with lights, his controls were, for practical purposes, inert, locked into the controls of all the other fighters, each of them in turn slaved to a cobbled-together navigational computer on the drive engine.
There was nothing to do, and all the time in the universe to do it.
He had long since stopped thinking of his home, a little-known backwater planet, settled long generations before the present wave of Imperial colonization—settled even before the Old Republic had sent its own explorers outward. He had long since ceased thinking about his family. There was little point: it was highly unlikely he would ever see them again.
He had devoted even less time to thinking about his present task, the mission of this motley group of militiamen, retired policemen, adventurers, and professional soldiers as ancient and obsolete as the craft they flew. They were their culture’s expendables. The task was simple and straightforward: find someone and kill him. It didn’t matter that their target, their enemy, had damaged their civilization severely, exposed it to a galaxy-wide culture more potent and wealthy, stripping away its hidden safety. It mattered less that the life they sought to take was the