Star Wars: The Adventures of Lando Calrissia (31 page)

Lando sat quietly for a moment, thinking, then asked a question. “All right, so we’re boxed in, if I’m to believe your word. But—well, I’ve won rather a deal of money here in the Oseon in the last few days, nearly two hundred thousand creds. I can anticipate that it would suit certain interests if
I’m
arrested in the same illegal exchange, wouldn’t it?”

A predatory gleam became visible in Bassi Vobah’s eyes.

Lob Doluff, on the other hand, simply smiled sadly. “Lando, we already have you on the weapons charge; I repeat, a capital offense. Those whose interests I serve desire that no one besides themselves possess the means of deadly self-defense, and they enforce the rule—or expect me to, which amounts to the same thing—quite severely.

“Besides, although you have been quite fortunate—no, let us acknowledge your skill—at the gaming table, I assure you that no one you played with, excepting Miss Vobah here, who was appropriately subsidized, will miss so much as a micro of your winnings. We are a wealthy people.

“However, if it will make you feel more comfortable, you’ll recall I offered you an additional assurance of my goodwill in this awkward matter. This is what I had in mind: transport these two individuals and help them make the arrest. In return, I shall see that you take your winnings with you, along with every other item of your property, and you may depart the system directly from Bohhuah Mutdah’s estate. He owns a large number of small interasteroidal craft, and I believe that the Flamewind may have quieted enough that Bassi, here, and Officer Fybot can make their way with evidence and prisoner back to this place unassisted. Is that fair enough?”

Lando thought it over, nodded reluctantly.

“And you, my dear, have I made myself sufficiently clear to you? Should you oppose my will in this, inconvenience Captain
Calrissian in any way, I shall expect you to leave the system directly from Mutdah’s asteroid, in his place.”

The policewoman gulped visibly and nodded fully as reluctantly as Lando.

Once more Lob Doluff frowned at Waywa Fybot. “And as for you, you hyperthyroid whooping crane, should you interfere in my wishes concerning the good captain here, after you have been plucked and roasted, I shall stuff a cushion with your feathers and rest my fundament upon it for the remainder of my life. Do you understand?”

The bird nodded, adding a third portion to the general grudging atmosphere in the room.

Doluff folded his hands across his paunch, a satisfied expression on his face. “Very well, then, we are agreed, and everything is settled. By the Center, it is good doing business with a group as straightforward and understanding as you all are. I am feeling extremely fond of the three of you. Shall we see about having lunch, then?”

I
N THE
O
SEON
System during Flamewind, the inhabitants and their guests have little to do but party and watch the fireworks. But even the most spectacular display in the known universe begins to pall after sufficient time, and attending parties has its limits—and its consequences.

Thus it is an interesting fact of demographics that, although the majority of Oseoni, owing to what is required of them to achieve their high place in the general scale of galactic society, are long beyond childbearing age, yet the human birthrate in the system inevitably jumps every year nine months after Flamewind.

One reason for the increase is the peril of traveling during
Flamewind. The deadly rain of radiation accompanying the display vastly accelerates the decay of electronics that control navigation and life-support equipment.

Even travel on the surface of an asteroid is dangerous.

And yet, Lando Calrissian, once resigned to the journey, was anxious to be underway. Freedom in the Oseon, he was discovering rapidly, had its severe drawbacks. There would be no more
sabacc
games for a variety of reasons: he had effectively cleaned out the available talent, not so much depriving them of their discretionary funds as convincing them that it was pointless to oppose him at the gaming table. In this he had been, if not directly careless, then overly enthusiastic. It was not a mistake he would have made in less opulent surroundings; he had yet fully to appreciate how much more tenaciously the rich hold on to what they have.

Had he been a waitress or a bell-bot, no one would have needed to tell him. The wealthy are notoriously lousy tippers.

What was worse, given the local standard of living, the fact that there were so many wealthy inhabitants and that the commercial overhead was so high, he was once again watching his money—his winnings—being eaten up. Everything was expensive, from a simple meal in the humblest eatery to the equipment and supplies his ship required for the journey ahead.

As usual, Lando’s luck, both good and bad, was operating at full blast.

The day after his revealing conference in the Administrator Senior’s office, he and Vuffi Raa were bolting down the weirdly shaped seating rack that had been sent over for Waywa Fybot.

“One more turn ought to do it!” Lando grunted. “I wish there was room for an autowrench in this corner—unh!”

The head of the bolt had twisted and torn off. This meant they had to undo all the other bolts and move the rack while Vuffi Raa drilled out the broken hardware and removed it for a second try.

“Master, why is the installation necessary? We could override the gravfield in this part of the ship and let Officer Fybot spend the trip in free-fall. It would be much more comfortable.” Having drilled a hole through the soft metal of the bolt, he inserted a broken-screw remover, the twist of its threads being opposite those of the bolt, and tightened it, turning the offending artifact neatly out of the deck.

“What, and have his birdseed floating everywhere? Not a
chance. Besides, his physiology is supposed to be delicate or something, like a canary’s. Don’t ask me why they made somebody like that a cop—that would require an assumption that logic functions at some level of government.”

Together, they moved the distorted chair back into place over the boltholes drilled for it in the decking. Somehow, thought Lando, the parties responsible for this—the final straw of messing up his nice, neat spaceship—would be brought to a reckoning.

The first three bolts went in perfectly. Again. Lando and Vuffi Raa looked at each other with resigned expressions (Lando reading the little droid’s body posture since it had no face), placed the fourth bolt in its hole, and locked the wrench around its hexagonal head.

“If it doesn’t work this time, old power-tool, we’re going to send for a big wire cage!”

Deep within the honeycombed recesses of Oseon 6845, down where enormous pipes the diameter of a man’s height conveyed air and water and other vital substances from fission-powered machinery to hotels and offices and stores and other places habituated by human beings, down where no one but an occasional robot made its perfunctory rounds, a meeting was being held.

“So you came,” a gray-clad figure whispered. The clothing had the look of a uniform, although it was barren of the insignia of rank or unit markings. The face above the stiff collar, below the cap, was young. It was the first officer of the
Wennis
, lurking in the shadows of a ship-sized power transformer, his voice drowned within a meter or two by its titanic humming.

The other figure was even less conspicuous, hidden more deeply in shadows, cloaked for anonymity in many yards of billowy fabric. It was taller than the
Wennis
second-in-command, and stood there silently, acknowledging the greeting with a nod.

“Good,” the officer hissed. “And do you understand what you are supposed to do when you get to 5792? There must be no mistake, no hesitation. The Administrator Senior has found a legal means of circumventing our intentions in this matter, and it must not work! The orders come from very nearly as high as they can.”

Once again, the tall disguised figure nodded.

“All right, then. In return, you will be richly rewarded. Our, er … principal understands the pragmatic value of gratitude. Be sure
you
understand the consequences of failure.”

The cloaked form shuddered slightly, but that may have been the cold. Even with the machinery in full operation, there was a chill in the air that converted both their breaths into clouds of barely visible vapor.

It shuddered again. And it may not have been the cold.

The gray-uniformed officer departed without further conversation. He was in a hurry. Before he returned to the
Wennis
, he had another meeting, even deeper in the planetoid’s core, and it was not one he was looking forward to particularly.

Behind him the tall, cloaked figure departed as well, leaving a single, downy yellow feather that trembled in the cold draft along the floor, then was still.

With understandably mixed feelings, Lando tucked his freshly recharged stingbeam into the waistband of his shipsuit. Mere possession of the thing inside the Oseon System was a capital offense, and the manner of execution made hanging, gassing, perhaps even the nerve rack seem desirable ways to end it all.

On the other hand, he was operating under the direct verbal orders of Administrator Senior Lob Doluff, whose concern for Lando’s continued existence, it appeared, was sincere and rivaled only by his desire that Bassi Vobah and Waywa Fybot carry out the mission precisely as the administrator had instructed. Lando’s pistol was a small but additional guarantee he had insisted upon.

On the third hand (Lando looked at Vuffi Raa, whose capable tentacles were flicking switches, turning knobs, and doing other things mandated by the preflight checklist), the Administrator Senior had adamantly refused to issue the young gambler a written permit to carry the weapon, fearing, perhaps, that his original leverage on Lando would be weakened thereby.

Ah, well, Lando thought, if things went according to plan (he had no great confidence that they would, being a cynic by inclination and having lived long enough to see his natural suspicions confirmed more often than not), he and Vuffi Raa would be out of the confounded system in a few days, and the whole issue would be irrelevant.

He had taken some pains of his own to assure this.

He intended to take even more.

As Lando and his mechanical partner warmed things up in the cockpit of the
Millennium Falcon
—illuminated through the forward canopy by the multicolored glare and flash of the Flamewind—their passengers were in the lounge area, each keeping his or her trepidations about the coming voyage to him- or herself. Bassi Vobah, having reluctantly abandoned the psychological protection of her police uniform, sat in a sort of semicircular booth with an electronic table in its center, glumly watching an entertainment tape from the
Falcon
’s meager library. It was the saga of some early star travelers, marooned on a harsh and barren world through the failure of their spacecraft during a magnetic storm. At present, the characters were casting lots to determine which of them would eat the others.

Somehow it failed to elevate her mood.

Waywa Fybot was essentially a bird in his anatomy and physiology, although no more bound by the characteristics of such creatures than are men by their fundamental origins. While he was nervous, he could remind himself that what he was about to endure was in the line of duty, what Emperor and Empire expected of him, and consistent with future promotion and increases in salary. While he felt murderously angry at the local administrator who had verbally savaged him (Fybot’s own people had plenty of snappy remarks applicable to mammalian species in general and simian ones in particular, but Doluff’s office hadn’t seemed the place to trot them out), the prospect of bigger game and future rewards helped him smooth his ruffled feathers.

Damn! He’d done it to
himself
that time.

Beneath the long thick plumage of his stubby left arm—a vestigial wing useless for flight long ages before his people had chipped their first crude stone tools—Fybot wore a small energy-projector that was something of an advance on Bassi Vobah’s openly sported blaster. Half the military weapon’s size, it had six times the power, coming close, in theory, to one of the modules of Lando’s four-barreled quad-gun. The projector was a Service Special and a closely guarded secret, even from the regular military.

It didn’t need to be drawn to be used, which was a blessing, as nature had not provided Fybot’s people with the quickest or most adroit of manipulators.

He looked over at Bassi Vobah as she tried hard to keep her attention on the entertainment tape. It wasn’t easy. Calrissian and his robot were running the
Falcon
’s engines through a series
of tests that shook the vessel like a leaf at irregular intervals and left stunning silences between. Their caution in assuring themselves of the ship’s operating condition only served as a grim reminder of what risks they were all about to take.

Which brought Waywa Fybot around again to his nervousness. He settled deeper into his resting rack, enjoying the reflexive drowsiness that came with the action, and wished his species still had sufficient flexibility to tuck their heads under their wings.

Come to think of it, he’d only bruise himself on the weapon he carried.

A gentle snoring sound began to issue from the small round nostrils pierced through the narcotics officer’s beak.

“Item one ninety-six,” Lando quoted from the manual, “navigational receivers on standby. Well, old can-opener, we can skip that one. How’d that dead-reckoning program of yours turn out, or do you want to say?”

Vuffi Raa paused, a tentacle tip over a switch on the panel before them. “I wish, Master, that there was another name for it. It sounds awfully final, doesn’t it?” He flipped the switch, watched the panel indicators go crazy as the Flamewind’s ionization attacked the navigation beam receivers.

He flipped the switch to off again. Both partners felt relieved.

“Item one ninety-seven,” Lando said, ignoring Vuffi Raa’s rhetorical squeamishness. “This begins a subseries of thirteen intermediate items before we get to one ninety-eight. First item: check main reactor core-temperature, which should be up to optimum by now. Check. Second item: make sure that moderator fluid is circulating freely in the heat exchangers. Check—at least according to the instruments. Third item …”