Shield of Lies Read online

  When the initial scans produced no obvious red flags, Artoo moved in closer and extended his sensor probe. The scan head was too large to fit fully into the smaller sockets, but Artoo brought it as close to the first of them as he could without actually touching it.

  “Field, zero-point-zero-nine gauss,” said Threepio. “Flux density, one-point-six-zero-two. Alpha rate, zero. Beta rate, one hundred sixteen. Charge polarity, negative—Artoo, I don’t understand a word of this. Will someone please tell me what it means?”

  Artoo swiveled his head and emitted a sharp series of whistles, which Threepio did not translate.

  “I am trying to hold still,” Threepio said as Artoo moved the probe to the next socket. “It’s not my fault I wasn’t designed for weightlessness. Most sensible beings live on planets, where they belong.”

  The response from Artoo sounded churlish even to Lobot’s ears.

  “I don’t care what you think,” Threepio said. “Why, you’re only a mechanic. I was meant for nobler purposes. I should be at a diplomatic reception, helping to forge peace between bitter rivals, arranging a dynastic marriage—Oh, how I miss the old days—”

  Artoo’s response was an electronic bleat. “Very well, then,” Threepio said haughtily. “See if I care. I don’t need your help.” With that, the golden droid released his grip on Artoo’s right tread support and folded his arms across his chestplate.

  “But I need your help, Threepio,” said Lando. “So stop squabbling with your brother and call out the numbers.”

  “Why do you keep making that error, Master Lando? That egotistical little tyrant is no kin of mine,” Threepio sniffed.

  “I can help you, Lando,” Lobot said quietly, without explanation. “Field, zero-point-eight-two gauss. Flux density, one-point-seven-four. Alpha rate—”

  Lando looked at Lobot with annoyance, a sight that gave Lobot surprising satisfaction. Neither of them saw Threepio reach out and clutch one of the projections on the panel to steady himself. But both heard a loud burst of static on the contact suit comm unit and saw a blue glow in the passage.

  “Gracious me!” Threepio exclaimed.

  Quickly looking that way, Lobot saw that the end of the panel was crawling with blue-white snakes of energy. They were crackling between the tips of the projections, dancing up Threepio’s arm nearly to the elbow joint, and rapidly growing more intense.

  “Threepio—don’t let go—” Lobot began.

  The warning came too late. The moment his surprise abated, Threepio pulled back his hand in a reflex of squeamishness.

  An instant later a massive, squirming bolt of energy leaped from the panel to Threepio’s hand, flashed up his arm and one side of his head, and sprang from there to the face of the passage. Before anyone could react, it had raced away down the passage and disappeared, spreading as it went until it was dancing over the entire surface like a halo of blue fire. One finger of the bolt ran along the hand lines, leaving them crumbling into black dust in its wake.

  The bolt left Threepio convulsing and spinning in midair. His right arm was burned black and smoking from the servos and energizer controls, his head was frozen at an odd angle and quivering as though an actuator were caught in a feedback loop.

  Lobot loosed a string of curses he had forgotten he knew and started toward the injured droid. Lando stared dumbly for a moment, then did the same. But Artoo beat both of them to Threepio, latching on and dragging him away down the passage in the opposite direction from the one the bolt had taken. As Artoo passed Lando, the droid made a hostile noise.

  “I’m sorry,” Lando said, throwing his arms up in a gesture of surrender. “It’s not my fault. Lobot—tell him it’s not my fault.”

  Hastening up the passage after Artoo and Threepio, Lobot jetted past Lando in purposeful silence.

  Artoo would not allow Lando to approach Threepio. He had to content himself with watching from several meters away while Lobot and Artoo hovered over the protocol droid and tried to assess the damage.

  From several meters away, the damage looked to be considerable.

  An R6 or R7 could have survived the jolt handily. The latest combat-rated droids were armored against power surges and induced currents up to and including a near-direct hit from a class one ion cannon.

  But Threepio had been designed for wars of words. His buffers and breakers were minimal, and the bolt of energy from the panel had overwhelmed them. If the charge had passed across his body, through the primary processors, instead of up one side, Threepio would be dead.

  As it was, Lando could see that Threepio’s right arm was rigid and useless at his side, the servo controllers burned and the linkages fused. Even worse, his speech synthesizer or vocal processor had been crippled. When he spoke, his voice phased and changed timbre, as though he were a million klicks away on a pocket comlink. Twice already he had halted in midsentence, as though stuck searching for the most ordinary of words—something Lando had never heard him do before.

  After a few minutes, Lobot left Threepio with Artoo and joined Lando. To Lando’s surprise, there were no words of recrimination—only a businesslike coolness barely distinguishable from Lobot’s usual demeanor.

  “Threepio’s arm is beyond repair, given that we have no spare parts,” Lobot said. “Artoo is trying to free the lateral actuator and restore freedom of motion to Threepio’s head.” He nodded past Lando at the equipment grid, which Lando had towed away from the scene of the accident. “I need the tool kit.”

  “In a moment,” Lando said. “What happened back there—have you thought about it?”

  “I need the tool kit, Lando,” Lobot repeated, and moved to pass between Lando and the passage wall.

  Lando reached out and caught Lobot’s forearm. “You were right about these passages. They’re getting ready to—” Something moved at the periphery of his vision, and Lando’s gaze flicked past Lobot to the droids, then past the droids to the growing glow where the passage bent out of sight. “Blast!” he exclaimed. “Get away from the wall. Artoo, look out!”

  “What?” Lobot craned his head.

  Using his grip on Lobot’s suit, Lando dragged him toward the center of the passage, just as the energy halo appeared at the horizon of their vision and sped toward them. It surrounded them for only a moment as it raced through on its course, but its passage made the hair rise on the back of Lando’s neck.

  “It’s gone all the way around?”

  “Yes.”

  “It doesn’t seem to have lost any strength at all,” Lobot said in wonder.

  “No,” Lando said. “That’s what I was trying to tell you. You were right. These are conduits—superconducting accumulators. Perhaps even some sort of gas-tube cascade generator.”

  “For the weapons,” Lobot said slowly. “It has to be for the weapons.”

  “That panel is the ballast, the source of the spark. Threepio created an arc path while it was building up to fire—probably prematurely. He may have caused the system to report a failure, buying us a little time as it resets.”

  “The weapons are useless in hyperspace. That explains our reprieve.”

  “It also answers your question about the panel—about why it showed up now,” Lando said. “Smart. She’s a smart lady. The last thing I do before I enter an unfriendly room is check my weapon.”

  “Testing the integrity of the system. She must be getting ready—”

  “Wait,” Lando said. “Listen.”

  All at once, all around them, the ship began to groan and growl in a slow, deep voice.

  Lando released Lobot and dove toward the equipment grid, wresting the sensor limpet from its restraints. The limpet was secured in a harness of silk line, with a single trailing cord ending in a loop.

  “I have to do this now,” Lando said. “Artoo! Map! What’s the shortest way to the outer hull?”

  Artoo’s reply was a squawk.

  “Point out the direction—I can’t understand you!”

  “He’s not answ
ering you,” said Lobot. “He’s asking me why I’m not back with the tools yet.” He closed his eyes. The lights on his interface blinked at a furious rate. “Through there,” he said. “Eighteen meters. But I don’t know what’s between here and the hull.”

  “I’ll tell you when I get back,” Lando said. He drew his blaster, burned a hole in the direction Lobot had pointed, and was gone.

  With his thrusters holding his widely set feet against the outer bulkhead of the vagabond, Lando pointed the cutting blaster down between his legs and squeezed the actuator. A perfect circle of hull vanished in a puff of gray smoke, which was instantly sucked out through the opening.

  The limpet had been floating freely, tethered to Lando’s left wrist. Now it strained at the end of a taut line, rocking as the compartment’s air rushed past it. Pocketing the blaster, Lando let the line play out through his gloved fingers until the limpet slipped through the opening. Only the cord on Lando’s wrist kept it from escaping completely into space.

  Then he simply waited, watching the hull breach knit closed. When the opening had shrunk enough to prevent the limpet from being pulled back inside, Lando took up the slack and pulled the limpet back against the hull. Reaching through, he pressed the dual switches that activated the limpet’s sensors and armed its attachment system. Letting a little line play out again, Lando waited until the hole had closed to the size of a peephole, then yanked the limpet toward him.

  There was an audible thwack as the crisscrossing anchor spines fired and drew the limpet flush against the hull. For insurance, Lando knotted the cord around the safety tab that had covered the limpet’s switches, pulling it snugly against the inner face. Lando hoped that even if the ship was somehow able to slough off the limpet’s barbed anchor spines, the harness and improvised stop would keep it in place.

  That job accomplished, Lando turned away to examine for the first time the compartments he had crashed through en route to the outer hull.

  Unlike in the accumulators, where the entire face of the passage itself gave off a pale yellow glow, the only light in the outer compartment came from the twin “ear lamps” located on either side of Lando’s helmet. When he swept their beams through the dark volume that enclosed him, a great emptiness swallowed the light forward, aft, and around the circumference of the ship. It was as if he were alone in the darkest corner of space.

  Only when he looked up, away from the outer hull near which he hovered and back the way he had come, did the light catch and reflect to him any of the substance of the ship. And what the light revealed there made Lando shiver with a chill no warmer could drive away.

  For the lamps showed that the inner wall was covered with alien faces—a collage, a portrait gallery, a mural, a memorial, stretching as far as the light could carry, and likely beyond. There were thousands of different faces, or thousands of variations on the same face, each gazing out from its own hexagonal cell. The faces were unlike any Lando had ever seen, and yet he keenly felt the intelligence in the large, round eyes that seemed to seek him out.

  More than by any other gift, Lando had found his way by reading the faces of strangers and knowing them better than they knew themselves. He read in the sculpted, deeply lined faces of the Qella both strength and surrender, a settled wisdom and a thwarted curiosity, and most of all a terrible knowledge of the impermanence of life. The beings who had sat for these portraits, and the artisans who had created them, had known when they did so that these images might be all that survived them, and they had held nothing back.

  There was a circular gap in the mural where Lando had burned his way through it from behind. The supporting wall had healed, but the overlying portraits had not—four were damaged in varying degrees, one obliterated forever. Lando fought off sharp pangs of guilt as he jetted up toward the mural and reopened a hole at that same spot.

  “I’m sorry,” he said to the surviving faces as he left them behind. “But this is your tomb—your memorial. I’m trying to keep it from becoming mine. I like to think that if life meant this much to you, you’d be rooting for me to succeed.”

  Lando found the others where he had left them, still tending to Threepio. The golden droid was the only one to react strongly to his return, turning his head toward Lando and greeting him cheerfully.

  “Master Lando!” he said in a crackly voice. One glowing eye flickered. “What are you doing on Yavin Four? Why are you wearing that costume? Do you know, you look rather like a droid?”

  “Threepio, take a look around,” Lando said. “Do you recognize this place?”

  The droid’s head swiveled. “Oh. Oh, yes, I see. The Qella vagabond. I seem to have had an accident.” He turned and clanged Artoo on the dome with his good arm. “And it’s all your fault, you good-for-nothing saboteur. You belong in a waste compactor, along with all the other—”

  “No,” Lando said sharply. “It was my fault. I gave the orders. I made the mistake. I’m sorry, Threepio. I promise you, we’ll get you put back to specs as soon as we get home.”

  “It is I who should apologize, Master Hambone,” said Threepio. “I am sure that my clamminess was the approximate corpse of my mishop.”

  “Don’t try to talk, Threepio,” Lando said. “Just keep running your diagnostics. Your parser will map the damaged regions and relocate those functions.”

  “Fairy wall, monster lambda.” The droid’s head returned jerkily to the neutral position.

  Lobot shook his head in sympathy. “Lando, the test charge—if that is what it was—has been around four more times. I could see it weaken when it passed your new hole, but other than that, it did not seem to lose any strength at all. I expect that it would still be circulating if the panel had not reabsorbed it the last time it passed.”

  Lando acknowledged the report with a nod. “These passages are a nearly perfect energy bottle,” he said. “This explains a lot about the power of their weapons. It must get pretty exciting when they’re running a capacity charge through here.”

  “I believe our consensus is that we have had enough excitement for now.”

  “You’re right—we need to get out of here. But there’s something that has to be done first,” Lando said. “Artoo, I was able to place the limpet on the outside of the ship. I need you to pick up its signal and make it available to Lobot.”

  The little droid turned its dome away from Lando and remained mute.

  “Artoo, we need to find out where we are. Step two of our plan, remember? I don’t know how long we can count on getting data from the limpet. And we don’t know how long we’ll be in realspace.”

  Still the droid was silent.

  “Lobot?”

  Lobot cleared his throat. “Ah—Artoo just said something rude to me about your leadership ability. Then he told me to tell you that he’s on strike.”

  Working to restrain a flaring temper, Lando said evenly, “Artoo, you’re the only one of us who can receive the data from the limpet. If we don’t have that data, we can’t plan an escape. If we don’t escape soon, we’re going to run out of air, and you’re going to run out of power. Is whatever point you’re trying to make worth the four of us expiring?”

  Artoo emitted one small beep.

  “Receiving data,” Lobot said. “Artoo said to tell you that he’s doing it for Threepio, not for you.”

  “I don’t care if he does it for the Blood Prince of Thassalia, as long as it gets done,” said Lando. “How long will it take to get a navigation fix?”

  “Artoo is calculating the triangulation now,” Lobot said. “Lando, only one local star is in the spectral database. Artoo is searching for other reference stars.”

  “What? Where the frack are we?”

  “One moment,” Lobot said. “Coordinates zero-nine-one, zero-six-six, zero-five-two. Uncertainty due to measuring error, two percent.”

  “Triple zeroes? That can’t be right. That would put us in Sector One.”

  “Correct,” Lobot said. “We are presently one hundred six li
ght-years past the border of the New Republic, in the Core. The nearest inhabited system is Prakith.”

  “Prakith,” Lando repeated. “Foga Brill.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “At last report, Prakith was controlled by the Imperial warlord Foga Brill.”

  “I see. Prakith is eight light-years away.”

  “Are there any other ships out there? Any security buoys, drones, probes, anything?”

  “None that the limpet can detect. However, the hull of the vagabond blocks a substantial portion of the sky.”

  Lando muttered grimly, “Well, we’re sure not going to be putting out any calls for help in this neighborhood. All right—let’s get out of this accumulator while things are still quiet. We’ll go right back through where I just came out. I don’t know quite where it puts us, but nothing bad happened the first time.”

  Artoo trilled.

  “What?”

  “Never mind,” Lobot said. “You don’t want to hear.”

  Lando thought dark thoughts about lax maintenance schedules and the consequences of letting droids go too long without a memory wipe. Your decision, Luke, but they’ve both got entirely too much personality for my taste. But he kept those thoughts to himself.

  “Once we’re through,” he continued, “I’d like to see if we can avoid blowing any more holes in the walls—”

  Lobot nodded approvingly at that.

  “—but that means one of us is going to have to solve the puzzle of what a Qella door looks like and how to open it,” Lando said. Then he looked directly at Artoo. “So the first thing we’re going to do when we get over there is get six hours’ rest—all of us. I should have insisted on it sooner. I’m sorry, Artoo. I don’t know if it would have changed anything. But I never meant for Threepio to get hurt.”

  Artoo’s dome swiveled back toward Lando. “Chirr-neep-weel,” he said.

  “He told me to tell you that he is considering giving you a second chance,” said Lobot.

  Lando nodded, drawing the blaster from its pouch. “You tell him for me that that’s all a smart player should need.”