Shield of Lies Read online

  “Seems even longer than that,” said Lando. “Am I the only one who’s noticed? Shouldn’t we have run out of ship by now?”

  “Obviously we haven’t.”

  “Nothing’s obvious here,” Lando said. “We’re cruising at a meter per second, minus overhead for a couple of stops. Forty-five minutes is twenty-seven hundred seconds. And this ship is only fifteen hundred meters long. We should be a kilometer out in front of the bow by now.”

  “The conduits we saw on the surface of the vagabond wind around it in complex patterns,” Lobot said. “If we are inside one of those, as I believe we are, that could account for the length of this passage.”

  “No, it couldn’t, because we’re still heading forward. Aren’t we? If this passage had turned back, we’d have noticed.”

  “Would we?” asked Lobot. “Without landmarks and referents, I find it difficult to be sure.”

  “You’re right about that. No matter how I try, I can’t keep a picture of this place in my head,” Lando complained, turning to face the others. “Artoo, let me see your map again.”

  Artoo’s holoprojector flickered into life. The map superimposed the data from Artoo’s inertial movement sensors over the scans of the vagabond performed by Pakkpekatt’s technicians, showing their path through it as a bright red line. The line wiggled back and forth like a low-frequency sine wave across the hull of the ship and extended out beyond it.

  “See?” Lando said. “We are out in front of the ship.”

  “Artoo, are your gyros operating normally?” Lobot asked.

  The droid’s affirmation was indignant.

  “Then how do you explain this data?”

  Artoo chirped a curt reply. “The ship is longer now?” Threepio translated incredulously. “What an absurdity. Even you can’t be that foolish. You are obviously malfunctioning.”

  Lando sighed and surveyed the passage’s face—they had dropped the words “wall” and “bulkhead” as inappropriate some time earlier. “It makes as much sense as anything else,” he said tiredly. “We’ve seen something of the tricks their technology can do. Maybe nothing about this ship is immutable, not even its dimensions. Maybe the Qella don’t play fair.”

  “You have beaten rigged games in the past,” Lobot said.

  “Yeah—I guess I have,” said Lando. “But it helps a lot if you can watch the table for a while first. Kill the map, Artoo, but keep tracking us as best you can. We’re going to pick up the pace a little. Two meters per second, on my mark—”

  Most of another hour dragged by before Artoo made a discovery that set him to beeping agitatedly.

  “What is it?” Lando demanded.

  “Artoo says that there is an irregularity ahead,” Threepio said. “It may be an artifact of some kind.”

  Lando jetted ahead, scanning the passage face hopefully. “Which side?”

  “Ahead and high to your left, Master Lando,” said Threepio.

  “I see it,” said Lando. “Blast, it’s tiny. Wait—oh, no.”

  “What is it? Lando?”

  Lando did not explain, but when the others joined him, they got all the explanation they needed. A fragment of metal diamond grid protruded from the face of the passage, and a short cord waved from its anchoring knot.

  Threepio gave voice to the unspoken. “Why, we’re back where we started.”

  “That’s impossible,” Lobot said, with a touch of irritation.

  “Yeah, you’d think so, but how else do you explain this?” Lando said, gesturing.

  “Perhaps it was moved,” said Lobot.

  “How? You think there’s someone else on this ship?”

  “I do not know,” said Lobot. “This could be a copy of our marker, a deception. Artoo’s sensors still indicate that we’re heading toward the bow.”

  “Oh, we are—for the second time, most likely. What kind of crazy ship are we on? This passage doesn’t go anywhere, and it doesn’t do anything.”

  “It occupied us for two hours,” Lobot pointed out.

  “So it did. And we’ve wasted those two hours and”—Lando checked his readouts—“about nine percent of my thrust mass. Same for both of you, I’d guess.”

  “This is most distressing. What do we do now?” Threepio asked.

  “We start playing smarter,” said Lando. “How much carbon line do we have?”

  Lobot knew the answer without looking. “Two spools, five thousand meters each. Why?”

  “If we keep going around in circles, we could find ourselves unable to get anywhere for lack of propellant. There’s not enough grid to spare to make handholds the length of the passage, but there might be enough for line anchors. I think we’d better start stringing some hand lines now,” Lando said. “And they’ll help keep us from getting fooled again.”

  “Yes—we can build a topological map rather than a representational one,” Lobot said. “We will at least know the relationships between the places we have been, even if the exact geometry escapes us.”

  Lando nodded. “Something had better start happening. I’m starting to get seriously annoyed.”

  According to the counter on the line spool, they had gone 884 meters down the passage, staking four improvised line anchors along the way, when they came to the junction.

  “This is nuts,” Lando said, hovering in midair before the twin openings. “This passage didn’t branch the last time we were through here.”

  “If we’ve been through here before.”

  “Don’t start with me,” Lando said, turning.

  “It was not a jest,” Lobot said. “It remains a possibility that these passages are channels or conduits, related in some way to the operation of the ship. What we have seen in here may have nothing to do with us.”

  “Conduits for what? They’re dry as a bone.”

  “There are other types of fluids and flows—gases, energy plasmas, electrical charges,” Lobot said. “And conduits generally require stops, valves, and switches of some sort. This is likely to be one, directly ahead of us. There may be another somewhere behind us that placed us on this path.”

  Lando slowly spun back to face the junction. “If I had a fat toe, a short toe, a black toe, a new toe, I would know, where to go,” he chanted softly.

  “What?”

  “Pardon me, sir. It is a children’s counting rhyme, from Basarais,” Threepio said. “Master Lando, may I make a suggestion?”

  “Anytime, Threepio. The last thing I want is for the last thing I hear to be someone saying, ‘You know, I wondered about that earlier—I guess I should have spoken up.’”

  “Very well, Master Lando. My suggestion is that we should separate into two parties and explore both passages at the same time. This would be the most efficient method. If each party consists of a human and a droid, I believe we should be able to maintain communications even if we become separated by some distance.”

  “Not bad, Threepio,” said Lando. “We have two spools—we could set lines in both passages. Lobot?”

  “I strongly advise against separating,” Lobot said. “Valves and stops which open seemingly at random can as easily close. It is also possible that we have been presented with this choice precisely for this purpose—to divide us.”

  Lando frowned. “If we don’t separate, which passage do we take?”

  Lobot shook his head. “It will not matter, Lando. Just choose.”

  It did not matter. The passage Lando chose ended three hundred meters later, after turning downward—inward?—nearly ninety degrees. When they doubled back, the alternate passage led them to another junction that was the reverse of the first, and to another short passage that turned sharply before ending abruptly.

  “There’s something down there,” Lando said, lingering as the others turned back. “Both dead ends go to the same place. The hyperdrive could be down there.”

  Lobot could tell that the baron was powerfully tempted to test his theory by blasting a hole in the wall, and touched his shoulder with an ou
tstretched hand. “Come,” the cyborg said.

  “I’m tired of this.”

  “I know,” said Lobot. “But you know that disabling a hyperdrive and destabilizing one are two very different matters. We will find a better way.”

  Lando glanced at his telltales. “All right,” he said. “But if we haven’t found it by the time these numbers reach single digits, I’m coming back here. I’m not just going to wait for death, Lobot.”

  “I would not expect that of you,” Lobot said. “But for now, please, my friend.”

  They jetted back up the passage together, side by side.

  With an artfulness born of desperation, Lando and Lobot managed to improvise forty-one line anchors from the equipment grid and the supplies attached to it. Spaced two hundred meters apart, those anchors secured more than eight kilometers of hand lines, covering three major passages and more than fifteen branches.

  In the course of their explorations, the team cataloged eleven stop valves, eighteen switch valves, and three different routes back to their original marker. The purpose of the mechanisms and the pattern of their movements remained impenetrable, but Artoo-Detoo’s holographic map steadily took on more useful form, framing the unknown with the known.

  Through it all the vagabond bored on through hyperspace, seemingly oblivious to the passengers within. The early fears faded. The vessel remained mysterious, giving up few of its secrets, but it was no longer menacing in its own right. The threat to their lives was as impersonal as the graph of an equation—one in which none of the variables was under their control.

  At a point when yet another unexplored passage had disappointed them by leading them to a passage already hung with hand lines, by unspoken mutual consent they lingered there—to rest, and to recover their resolve.

  Lando looped the slack of a hand line around one wrist and let it hold him in place. “How long is this jump now?”

  “A little over thirty-seven hours,” Lobot said.

  “Going a long way to somewhere,” Lando sighed. “Let’s see, four times three-point-one-four times thirty-nine cubed divided by three—by now we could be anywhere in a quarter of a million cubic light-years of space. They’ll need a telepath to find us.”

  “You and I should sleep,” said Lobot.

  “Why?”

  “Sleeping will conserve our consumables. And human beings do not perform at peak efficiency when fatigued.”

  “We don’t get very much done when we’re dead, either,” Lando said. “The five hours we spend napping might be five hours we need to get out of this fix.”

  “And the five hours we do not spend ‘napping’ may result in one of us making a nonrecoverable error.”

  “We have the droids to keep us from making mistakes. They don’t get tired,” Lando said. “Besides—I’m hungry. I’m kinda counting on turning up an after-hours café somewhere around here.”

  “Lando, that is not a rational expectation.”

  Lando chuckled tiredly. “I know when I’m being silly,” he said. “Do you know when you’re being stuffy?”

  “Master Lando—”

  “What is it, Threepio?”

  “Is it possible that this vessel could already have exited hyperspace, without our knowing? Perhaps we were distracted by our other activities. We may not have gone as far as you fear.”

  “No,” Lando said curtly. “I’ve never heard a ship growl like this one does going in and coming out. We couldn’t have missed it. I couldn’t have, anyway. That’s something I’ve been thinking about. Thinking about how long this ship’s been jumping at shadows, hopping in and out of hyperspace. About how long it’s been since it was in for a structural inspection and an overhaul.

  “I had a friend in the yard at Atzerri who showed me scanning holos of the ships that’d come through there—microfractures in the hyperdrive cage, the inner stringers, even the keel of a Dreadnaught.

  “No, even if we had all the oxygen, all the water, all the hot café food we could eat, all the time we could ask for, I don’t think I’d want to hang around here long enough to hear that growl too many more times. Because someday soon, no matter how well the Qella tightened the nuts, this old crate is going to turn herself into a deep-space junkyard.”

  Artoo cooed worriedly.

  “I wonder where Glorious is now,” said Threepio.

  “That I won’t think about,” said Lando, and laughed. “I don’t want to get depressed.” He released the hand line and floated free. “You rest if you want. Show me the map, Artoo. There’s still a lot of ship to explore.”

  They found the coupling panel in the seventy-first hour of their imprisonment. It was pure luck that they did, since it appeared in a section they had already passed through twice and would not have returned to if a new passage they were marking had not brought them there.

  Nearly two meters long and more than a meter wide, the round-cornered panel was inset flush in the “ceiling” of the passage. (Lando had established by fiat that the hand lines defined the “right” face of the passage and all other directions derived from it.) The panel was liberally decorated with sockets and projections of various heights, depths, and diameters, with the sockets clustered symmetrically in the center third and the projections flanking it.

  “Master Lando, what do you think it is?”

  “Some sort of intelligence test, maybe,” Lando said, trying to peer through one of the larger-diameter sockets. “Anyone feel up to taking it?”

  “Why, it does bear some resemblance to the busy box Ambassador Nugek gave to Anakin Solo,” Threepio said. “My, how he enjoyed spinning the wheels and pushing blocks through the holes—”

  “Shut up, Threepio.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Lobot was carrying out his own examination of the artifact. “Twenty-four sockets, in two sizes. Eighteen projections. I can see no obvious moving parts. The metal has a high sheen and reflectivity, and no protective finish. Yet there are no scratches or scars, even in and around the sockets.”

  “It looks like some sort of bus port to me,” Lando said. “Like the diag rack on the Falcon, or the maintenance cabinet on Lady Luck. Plug in here and you have access to the ship’s systems.”

  “That is what you have been looking for,” said Lobot. “How likely is it that you would find it?”

  “It’s the only mechanism we’ve seen in nine klicks of passageway.”

  “It is the only mechanism we have been able to recognize,” said Lobot. “But the design of this vessel apparently provides for mechanisms to be concealed until they are needed. I ask you to consider why this mechanism has appeared now.”

  “You tell me.”

  “Most likely because the ship will shortly need whatever function this mechanism serves—”

  “Which gives us a chance to slip in and take care of ourselves,” Lando said. “These couplings weren’t designed for us, but maybe we can make use of them anyway. Energy is energy—Artoo can cope with thermal, plasma, or electrical ports. And data is data—if Artoo can read it, Threepio can interpret.”

  “Lando, you have no basis for concluding that this is a system port,” Lobot pressed. “It is more likely that the function of this mechanism is related to the function of these passages.”

  “Which is what?” Lando snapped. “Holding cell? Ventilator? Rodent maze? A fungi farm? Are you saying we’re not supposed to touch this, either? Blast it all, how long are we supposed to wait before we do something?”

  “You have not had more than two hours’ sleep in nearly three days,” Lobot said. “Your sense of urgency has been heightened—”

  “That’s right,” Lando said. “I haven’t had anything to eat in so long I’d cut a friend dead for a fracking cracker. My water supply tastes like it’s gone around half a dozen times already. Are you more machine than man? Doesn’t any of this affect you?”

  “I am as human as you are,” Lobot said. “I doubt that you could be any hungrier than I am. My water supply is as di
sagreeable to me as yours is to you. But I do not understand the discoveries we have made—”

  “Then don’t you want to learn more? I want the droids to try to interface with this port. That’s all. No blasters. No creative structural renovations.”

  “Please listen,” Lobot said earnestly. “I do not understand why structures as extensive as these have been inert throughout our tenure on this ship, or why we have been permitted to move about in them unimpeded. These questions trouble me. And I am concerned that the appearance of this artifact may signal the end of either or both of those conditions—”

  “All the more reason for us to make the first move,” Lando said. “Artoo, Threepio, come on up here. I want you to try to interface with the vagabond.”

  Lobot turned toward the droids. “Threepio—Artoo—I ask you to wait until we know more. None of our supplies are critical yet. We do not know what we are dealing with.”

  “I am sorry, sir, but Master Luke placed us in the care of Master Lando,” Threepio said, allowing Artoo to tow him toward the panel. “We are obliged to follow his instructions, no matter what reservations you may have.”

  “Thank you, Threepio,” Lando said, fixing Lobot with a baleful gaze touched with a hint of smug triumph. “I’m glad to know that you’re still on the team.”

  Whether it was due more to Lobot’s misgivings or to Artoo’s innate sense of self-preservation, the astromech droid proceeded cautiously in carrying out Lando’s instructions, and Lobot was glad to see it.

  At first Artoo stopped a safe distance from the panel and began to scan it, his dome rotating back and forth as he brought different sensors to bear—optical, thermal, radionic, electromagnetic. Threepio called out the results of each reading to the two men, who were watching from opposite sides of the passage.

  Lobot already knew the results by the time Threepio pronounced them, for the droid—on his own initiative, and without any notice to Lando—had opened another of his data registers to the cyborg’s neural interface. It was a signal of support that Lobot accepted in silence, saying nothing that would betray the small mutiny.