Star Wars - Han Solo and the Lost Legacy (24 page)

The Corps Commander fell into a marching step as the signals reached him. He didn’t question them; the commands were automatic, military, geared to a segment of him that didn’t doubt or ponder. Such was his construction.

Behind their commander the other war-robots responded to the signal as well, falling into ranks of ten, in step with their leader. Funneled onto the bridge, their ranks filled it from side to side. They stepped with meticulous precision. Metal feet tramped; arms swung in time.

“Will it work?” Bollux asked his friend.

Blue Max, tuned in with both their audio pickups, listened carefully, cautioning the ’droid not to bother him at this critical point. At Max’s instruction, Bollux adjusted the marching tempo, matching the forced vibration of the robots’ tread
to the bridge’s own natural frequency, creating a powerful resonance. The war-robots marched in to do battle for an overlord generations dead. The bridge began to quake, dust rising and forming a haze with the unified footfalls. Timbers reverberated, joints and stress members strained; the perfection of their marching made the robots a single, unimaginable power hammer. More of them poured onto the bridge and took up the step, adding to the concussions.

At last the bridge itself thrummed under them as Max found the perfect beat. All the robots were on the bridge, with no thought but to get to the other side and attack the enemy.

Han and the others rose, waiting. “I guess Bollux couldn’t pull off his plan,” Han said. The front rank, following their gleaming leader, had grown large. “We’ll have to fall back.”

“There’s not much room for that,” Hasti reminded him sadly. He had no answer.

Suddenly Skynx exclaimed, “Look!”

Han did, feeling a deep vibration through his boots. The bridge was shuddering in time with the robots’ march, its timbers creaking and cracking with the punishment it couldn’t absorb. Feet pounding, the robots marched on.

Then there was a rending snap; the vibration had found a member that couldn’t support it. A timber bent and turned in its bed of press-poured material. The bed wouldn’t accept the play and the timber twisted and split. All the supporting members at that side of the bridge gave way.

There were electronic bleats of distress from the war machines and the popping of aged rivets from the timber-joining plates. For a moment the whole doomed assemblage, robots and bridge, was suspended in space. Then all fell into the crevasse with a huge concussion, sending up clouds of rock dust and smoke and a wall of impact-noise that drove Han back from the crevasse’s edge.

Wiping the dust from his eyes and spitting it out of his mouth, Han returned to the brink. Among the drifted dust and smoke he could see bridge timbers and the gleam of
crumpled armor, the flare of circuit fires, overloaded power packs, broken leads, and shorted weapons. Suddenly Bollux appeared at the other side of the crevasse, waving stiffly, having divested himself of the scavenged equipment. Han returned the wave, laughing.
From now on those two are full crewmembers
.

A new sound made him look around in surprise and anger, mouthing a Corellian oath. The
Millennium Falcon
was lifting off. She rose on blaring thrusters, swinging out over the abyss. Han and Chewbacca watched in despair as they saw their ship whisked from under their noses despite all their efforts.

But the freighter settled gently on their side of the crevasse. They got to her just as her ramp-bay doors opened and the main ramp lowered, beneath and astern the cockpit. The main hatch rolled up, and there stood Gallandro. He welcomed them with a smile, his weapon conspicuously holstered. His fine clothing and beautiful scarf were soiled, but other than that, Han reflected, he looked none the worse for someone who had just waded through a horde of war-robots.

The gunman sketched a mocking bow. “I found myself obliged to play dead among the slain; I couldn’t get to the ship until the robots had all left, or I’d have been of more assistance. Solo, those ’droids of yours are priceless!” His smile disappeared. “And so is Xim’s treasure, eh? You’re out for high stakes for a change; my compliments.”

“You tracked me all the way from the Corporate Sector to tell me that?” Chewbacca had his bowcaster aimed at Gallandro, but Han knew that even that was no guarantee against the man’s incredible speeddraw.

The gunman made a wry twist of his mouth. “Not originally. I was rather upset about our encounter there. But I’m a man of reason; I’m prepared to put that aside in view of the amount of money involved. Bring me in for a full cut and we forget the grudge. And you get your ship back; wouldn’t that strike you as a fair arrangement?”

Han remained suspicious. “All of a sudden you’re ready to kiss and make up?”

“The treasure, Solo, the treasure. The wealth of Xim would buy affection from anyone. All other considerations are secondary; surely that’s in keeping with your own philosophy, isn’t it?”

Han was confused. Hasti, who had come up behind him, said, “Don’t trust him!”

Gallandro turned clear blue eyes on her. “Ah, the young lady! If he doesn’t accept my offer, you’ll be in a bad way as well, my dear; this vessel’s weapons are functional.” His voice went cold, the playacting evaporating. “Decide,” he ordered Han crisply.

The defenders were beginning to emerge from the barracks, having seen the bridge collapse and the ship land. In another moment, escape might be much more complicated. Han reached out and pushed down Chewbacca’s bowcaster. “Everybody onboard; we’re back in business.”

In moments they had lifted off with Han at the controls, uttering angry maledictions at the techs who had torn the starship apart in search of the log-recorder disk and reassembled her so inexpertly. “Why did J’uoch have the ship repaired, anyway?” Badure asked.

“She was either going to keep it for her own use or sell it,” explained Gallandro. “She tried to sell me a lame story about her disagreements with you people, but considering the things I’d already discovered about your movements, the truth wasn’t hard to guess.”

Han brought the ship in to hover over the camp. “What about the other miners, the ones who lived?” Hasti asked.

“They’ve got food, weapons, supplies there,” Badure said. “They can hold out until a ship shows up, or slog it over to the city.”

Han was bringing the
Falcon
down again on the other side of the crevasse. A gleaming metal form waited there. Chewbacca went aft to let Bollux aboard.

“Like you said,” Han found himself telling Gallandro defensively, “they’re valuable ’droids.”

“I said ‘priceless,’ ” Gallandro corrected him. “Now that we’re comrades, I’d never offend you by suggesting you’ve gone soft. May I inquire what our next move is?”

“Direct collection of intelligence data,” Han declared, lifting off again. “Interrogation of indigenous personnel for tactical information. We’re going to make a couple of locals sweat and find out what all this was about.”

The Survivors who had activated the war-robots had decided to escape together in one large hover-raft rather than spread out across the plains in a fleet. A few passes and a barrage from the
Falcon
’s belly turret brought them to a halt. They threw down their arms and waited.

Han prudently left Chewbacca at the ship’s controls. He and the others, weapons recharged, went to confront the Survivors. Hasti, first down the ramp, waved her gun at them, shouting, and fairly dragged one of them off the raft. Han and Badure had to pull her off the man, while Gallandro looked on in amusement and Skynx in confusion.

“It’s him, I tell you,” she yelled, straining to go after the frightened man again. “I recognize the white blaze in his hair. It’s the vault steward’s assistant.”

“Well, clubbing him silly isn’t going to help,” Han pointed out as he turned to the man. “Better spill it, or I’ll let her loose.”

The assistant licked dry lips. “I can say nothing, I swear! We are conditioned in youth not to reveal the secrets of the Survivors.”

“Old-fashioned hypno,” Han dismissed it, “nothing you can’t overcome if we scare you enough.”

Gallandro stepped forward with a wintry smile, pulling his pistol in one fluid motion, adjusting it one-handed. A low-power, high-resolution beam sizzled into the ground at the captive’s feet, blackening and curling the grass. The man paled.

Bollux had come up, his chest plastron open. “There’s a better way,” Blue Max advised. “Circumvent his conditioning, and we can find out anything we want. We can rig up a strobe and key it to the same light pattern the Survivors use.”

Gallandro was dubious. “Query, computer: can you duplicate the Survivors’ light pulses exactly?”

“Quit talking to me like I’m some kind of
appliance
!” snarled Max.

“Beg pardon,” said Gallandro politely. “I keep forgetting. Shall we proceed?”

XVI

THE
Millennium Falcon
moved through the Dellaltian air at what was for her a conservative speed. Even so, Han was recovering the distance from the city in minutes.

Gallandro was off gathering equipment elsewhere in the ship, with Bollux’s help. Hasti and Badure sat, respectively, in the navigator’s and communication officer’s high-backed chairs behind Han and Chewbacca. Skynx, his injuries dressed and treated, as theirs had been, was curled in Hasti’s lap.

“It’s hard to accept,” Hasti was saying. “All these years. How could a secret be kept for generations?”

“Secrets have been kept for ages,” Badure pointed out. “It was easy enough in this case; there’re really two strata in the Survivors’ organization. The dupes lived and died there in the mountains, maintaining the war-robots as a religious ritual, holding their ceremonies once in a while. Then there were the others, the ones who knew the secret of Xim’s treasure and waited for the time they could use it.”

“But they all got the conditioning as children, right?” Han asked.

“And when Lanni happened on the mountain base and got her hands on the log-recorder disk and put it in the lockbox at the vaults,” Hasti murmured, her voice thick with sorrow, “she couldn’t have known that the steward was part of the Survivors’ apparatus.”

Such had been the assistant’s testimony once his conditioning had been overcome. The steward had sent the disk
back to the Survivors’ mountain warren as soon as it had come into his possession, of course. And he had contrived a nonexistent voice-coder to keep Lanni, Hasti, or anyone else from claiming it. He was aware that J’uoch had learned something about the disk from Lanni before killing her, and that the woman was actively seeking it. He had passed word to her through Survivor double agents that the
Millennium Falcon
had landed, knowing he couldn’t cope with the starship if force were brought to bear on the vaults. He knew J’uoch could, and hoped that Hasti and the others and their ship would be destroyed in battle, and the matter closed.

But instead, J’uoch had mounted the ambush that had resulted in the capture of the
Falcon
. Not having found the disk onboard the starship, J’uoch had made pointed inquiries at the vaults. The steward had managed to put her off but, knowing it was only a matter of time until she used force to inspect the lockboxes herself and put him to a more harrowing interrogation, he ordered the long-dormant Guardian Corps sent out against the mining camp. The war-robots, maintained through generations for just such an emergency, had come close to accomplishing their purpose.

“So why are the Survivors still sitting on their money after all this time?” Han wondered.

“The Old Republic was stable and unbeatable,” Badure answered. “They had no hope of moving against it, even with Xim’s treasure backing them. It’s only now, with the Empire having its troubles, that the Survivors smelled a setup they might be able to exploit, especially here in the Tion Hegemony. I bet small-timers everywhere are getting the same sort of idea.”

“A new Xim, and a new despotism,” Hasti mused. “How could they have believed it, even under conditioning?”

“They can believe one thing,” Han said, watching the land roll by quickly beneath them. “The Survivors are about to suffer a capital loss.”

“Shouldn’t we have a bigger ship?” Hasti inquired.

Han shook his head. “First we make sure the treasure’s
there, and put what we can in the
Falcon
. Then we unship a quad-battery and some defensive shielding generators. Gallandro and I will hold the fort while Chewie and the rest of you go find a bigger ship, about the size of J’uoch’s lighter, say. It won’t take too long.”

“And what will you do with your share of the money?” Badure asked casually. He saw doubt and confusion cross the pilot’s face.

“I’ll worry about that when I’ve got a stack of credits so high I’ll have to rent a warehouse,” Han replied at last.

Gallandro, who had just entered the cockpit, carrying the equipment he had gathered, said, “Well put, Solo! Indelicate, but on target.” He checked their progress. “We’ll be there in a moment. I haven’t ransacked a bank in a long time; there’s a certain zest to it.”

Han reserved his reply and put the starship into a steep dive. The
Falcon
dropped out of the sky ahead of her own sonic boom. Dellaltians near the vaults suddenly saw the vessel appear above them, its braking thrusters thundering, its landing gear extended like predatory claws. People scurried for shelter as the shock wave of the freighter’s passage caught up with her, making the ground tremble and the buildings shake. She came to rest on the roofless portico outside the vaults’ single door.