Star Wars_ The Adventures of Lando Calrissia - L. Neil Smith [95]
They were friends.
And now, Vuffi Raa was helpless to aid his master.
Outside, a braid of raspberry red, lemon yellow, and orange orange twisted through the heavens, across a constellation locals called the Silly Rabbit.
No sentient sighted being could have cared less than Vuffi Raa.
Rokur Gepta floated in an utter blackness not half so dark as the secret contemplations of his soul.
Deep underground, where the final traces of the minuscule natural gravity of the asteroid were canceled, he hung suspended in the center of an artificial cavern, momentarily free of all sensation, free of the annoyances attendant upon suffering the incompetence of his underlings, free of the steady, grinding presence of the warmth and bustle of life.
His plans were well in motion. The Wennis was some distance away, its crew performing drill after endless drill, not so much to sharpen their abilities—they were, after all, only the best of a hopeless lot—as to keep them out of the kind of trouble that uncontrolled individuality never fails to generate. Gepta smugly affirmed to himself that chance favors the prepared mind: a happy turn of fate had placed his enemy, Lando Calrissian, in the custody of Oseon officialdom. Since that officialdom was a government, and he was who he was, Calrissian was already three-quarters of the way into his hands.
They would be cruel hands, once they received their prey.
And deservedly so. Who had kept the sorcerer from obtaining and using the Mindharp of Sharu, an instrument of total mental control over others? Lando Calrissian. Who now owned the ancient enigmatic robot that seemed the key to yet another sheaf of tantalizing unanswered questions—and limitless power? Lando Calrissian. Who had evaded trap after trap, including that prepared for him on Dilonexa XXIII and the device planted aboard that cursed wreck, the Millennium Falcon! Lando Calrissian.
How he hated that name! How he would make its owner squirm and writhe until he learned the secret of his weird luck, or the other, hidden powers for which he was a front! How he would crush the life—slowly, very slowly—out of Lando Calrissian’s frail body, after first destroying most of the mind (but not enough so that its owner couldn’t appreciate the final moments).
Gepta thought back to an earlier, a happier time, to his first years as an adept among the ancient Sorcerers of Tund. How he had deceived the doddering fools, even while stealing their esoteric and sequestered learnings. As intended, they had mistaken him for a young apprentice and had been unable to penetrate his disguise. Already, he had been, even those thousands of years ago, far older than the most ancient of the sorcerers, and they knew how to stretch a life span!
Ah, yes. The galaxy still believed that somewhere the hidden planet Tund was home to the mysterious Order. Only Gepta knew it was a sterile ball. Not so much as a tiny fingerbone was left. The thought—the memory of what he had done on that final day—filled him with delight and satisfaction.
Someday he’d do it to the entire universe!
Meanwhile, that universe wasn’t big enough for Rokur Gepta and Lando Calrissian. As Lando Calrissian was going to discover very soon.
Slowly, with elaborate precision, the sorcerer everted his body—turned inside-out on the axis of his digestive system as a form of meditative relaxation—and resumed a true appearance only slightly less disgusting than the one he had given a few seconds before. No human being had ever seen him thus, none ever would—and live to relate the horror of it. He relaxed his numberless alien appendages, stretched them, and relaxed, then spun about himself the appearance of the gray-swathed presumably humanoid sorcerer the world knew.
Summoning a power of which the universe was equally ignorant, he drifted slowly, deliberately, toward the floor of the cavern. There was work to do, and