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“Killing me won’t change that,” Lando said.

“Oh, but it will. My colleagues here will spread the tale of your death, the ways you suffered, and how, at the end, you begged me for mercy. We may even defile your corpse—humans find that disagreeable, don’t they?—and leave it on Skip 1 for all to see. And then, of course, I will confiscate all you own, and there will be no opposition. Instead of saying I can be bested, they will say that Nandreeson waits for his revenge, and then he makes it very, very sweet.”

Lando shook his head, got water in his mouth, and spat, nearly hitting Nandreeson. “To make up for the last twenty years, you’d have to kill me a hundred times.” Then he winced. That was no way to convince Nandreeson, especially now that flames were flowing between Nandreeson’s teeth.

“You think I will favor you, don’t you, Calrissian?” Nandreeson said, the fire spreading around his face. “You think that I will appreciate your intelligence, your courage, your superior abilities in defying me. You think that you will escape this. But the one thing you must know is that I have spent the last twenty years hating you.”

A lick of flame came so close to Lando that he had to duck underwater to avoid it. His lungs still ached from the last time he had been submerged. Nandreeson hadn’t moved, nor had he inflamed the water again. Lando was about to come up when a realization hit him. His lungs should have recovered by now. He should feel a bit of strain from the treading, but he had been breathing regularly for some time.

Only the oxygen had to be thin here. Or polluted with something else. Or the Glottalphibs kept burning it away. With the exertion and the thinner air, Lando didn’t have as much time as he thought.

He scanned the water, and saw only algae, green particles, and Glottalphib feet soaking in the pool. No escape unless he wanted to try that hole from which the bubbles emerged. And he wasn’t sure he could stand the heat.

He resurfaced, and blew the foul-tasting water from his nose and mouth.

“Hiding underwater will do no good,” Nandreeson said. “I can come after you much more easily there.”

“If you’re going to kill me, Nandreeson,” Lando said, “just get it over with.” If Nandreeson made a move, it might point Lando toward escape.

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Nandreeson said. “But you will die slowly, Calrissian, and I will enjoy every moment of it.”

“Well, if you have something planned for me, Nandreeson, get to it.” The quicker they got him out of the water, and out of this cavern, the better off he would be.

“I have gotten to it, as you so quaintly say.” Nandreeson was smiling at him now, his scaly lips pulled back to reveal smoke-blackened, pointed teeth. “We’ll see how long you survive in my world, Calrissian. Glottalphibs live in the water. We eat there. We sleep there. We mate there. Humans, as I understand it, cannot tolerate the water.”

“I can tolerate it just fine.”

“But it will kill you if you aren’t careful. How long can you keep swimming, Calrissian? Without food, without rest, without help of any kind? How long?”

A terror Lando never knew he had rose in him. He couldn’t swim forever. He would drown. “I can survive long enough,” he said.

And that, at least, was true. He would survive long enough to get Nandreeson, or to die trying.

Twenty-five

The guards had allowed Cole to climb out of the prototype X-wing. He, in turn, had convinced them to contact General Antilles. Not that Cole knew what he would say to the general when he arrived. Skywalker’s droid hunched near the computer terminal, tendrils of smoke leaking out of the droid’s round head compartment. If the blaster shots were as bad as they looked, they might have caused damage to the droid’s memory, which, from what Skywalker said, had to be the part of the droid he valued the most.

“Enough waiting,” the Kloperian said. “Let’s take him to detention like any other saboteur.”

“No.” The voice came from the back of the room. The guards turned and so did Cole. General