Star Wars: The Adventures of Lando Calrissia (33 page)

“I believe that’s the most gumption you’ve shown since I met you. I rather liked it—but don’t make a habit of it. And don’t call me master!”

“Master, I’m still feeling the effects of the radiation. Can you get by without me for a while? I’m going to disconnect my manipulators, and ask you to close the door. I’m terribly sorry, but—”

“Don’t have another thought about it. That’s right, I’ll take care of your legs. I’m closing the door now. Have a nice nap. I’ll wake you when it’s over.”

He shut the door, suddenly feeling very lonely, and carefully placed the little robot’s tentacles on the pilot’s seat, strapping them down. He took a look at the instruments, decided there wasn’t very much he could do about them, and sat for a while, wishing he had a cigar.

Waywa Fybot awoke suddenly with the oddest feeling that he was home.

Familiar orange light poured in from somewhere, and suddenly the world felt better, looked better than it had since he’d left his native planet decades ago to join the police.

Why, yes! There was his hometown, a lovely place, not too large yet not so small it didn’t have all the conveniences a being could want. He could see it now, wavering a little on the horizon as the sun beat down upon it. He kept walking …

Egad
, it had been a long, lonely time out among all those weird alien races. Everywhere he went, they made bird jokes. Could he help it if his people were evolved—and proudly so—from avians?

He only wished that somewhere along the track of time they hadn’t lost the knack of—

—but what was this? He was
flying
! A glance to either side assured him that his arms had somehow lengthened, broadened, strengthened. Well, it was all in the genes somewhere, he supposed. Recapitulation, he recalled, recapitulation. He banked steeply, enjoying the sensation, banked the other way to get himself headed right, and passed over the rooftops of the town to the house that he’d been hatched in, a large place of cement and steel beams with a thatched roof. He saw now that the place had been reroofed with genuine straw. His folks were nothing if not stylish. Those checks he was sending home were going to a good cause, then!

He hopped over the fence, stirring the lawn lice with the power of his wings and making them complain in their mewling tones. There were thousands of them, of course. It was a well-kept lawn of a lovely shade of magenta, alive with crawling, rustling legs.

He went inside the house.

The
Falcon
seemed to be flying in right triangles as the Flamewind shifted from orange to red. Lando caught it in the act that time, blinked as many-branched lightning bolts blasted all around the ship.

He fought the urge to seize the controls as the apparent geometry of the
Falcon
’s flight path shifted with the colors from triangles to something indescribable that would nauseate a pretzel-bender. Well, I’ll be damned, he thought, we’re traveling on the inside surface of a Klein bottle.

Or so it felt.

Satisfied that the ship was flying true to course (or at least resigned to trusting its computer), he bent down and put his head next to the safe.

“Vuffi Raa?”

“Yes, Master?” the robot answered meekly, its voice severely muffled by the metal door and barely audible over the Flamewind’s titanic howling.

“Are you all right?”

“I’m all right,” the box said. “How are things with you?”

“I’m having a wonderful time, wish you were here. I—
by the Galaxy Itself
! Hold on, I’ll get back to you if we live!”

Directly ahead of the
Millennium Falcon
was a vision out of a nightmare. But it was no illusion. Half a kilometer wide, the
thing loomed up out of the glowing star-fog and ominous red glow like an impossible spider with too many legs.

It seemed to be a starship engine attached to a great number of obsolete one-man fighters. Even as he watched, the smaller craft detached themselves, leaped toward the freighter, their energy-guns spewing destruction.

These were no remote-control pirate drones. These were the real thing.

And they were ready and eager to kill.

S
TEADILY THE MOTLEY
fighter squadron bore down on the
Millennium Falcon
. Its instruments unreliable, bound to a predetermined course, the converted freighter was a helpless target. Lando reached to the panel without hesitation, flipped a bank of switches, cutting off the artificial gravity and inertial buffers. Loose items in the cockpit swirled and floated as he punched the override and took control of the ship from the computer.

He couldn’t see—not with the dials and gauges acting the way they were—but he could feel. He could con her by the seat of his pants. Whether or not they reached their destination was of secondary importance; survival came first.

A pair of fighters streaked by, spitting fire. The
Falcon
’s shields glowed and pulsed, absorbing the energy, feeding it into the reactors. There were limits to the amount that could be absorbed that way—in which case the reactor would come apart, taking the ship and everything within a thousand kilometers with it—but for now, each unsuccessful pass fed the
Millennium Falcon
’s engines.

And her guns.

Rolling to defeat another run by the fighters, he slapped the
intercom switch. “Bassi Vobah, try and reach the starboard gun-blister! I need some help with the shooting!”

Silence.

Diving steeply, finishing up with a flip that left four fighters soaring helplessly past the freighter, Lando realized that Vuffi Raa, in a moment of demented frustration, had wrecked the intertalkie. He was on his own, for the first time since acquiring the little robot.

He wasn’t liking it much.

A pair of smaller weapons on the upper hull was controllable from the cockpit. Lando started keyboarding until he had established fire control through a pair of auxiliary pedals beneath the console. Then, turning sharply—and feeling for the first time the stresses of acceleration as it piled his blood up in odd parts of his body—he trod on the pedals, blasting away at three of the enemy as they passed.

They kept on passing. Either Lando had missed, distracted by maneuvering the ship, or he didn’t have the firepower to do the job. It was like a nightmare where you shoot the bad guy and he doesn’t fall down.

Half a dozen fighters overtook the
Falcon
from behind, their energy-cannon raking her. She shuddered, staggered. Lando brought her back under control, rode the shock waves out, and continued to pour fire at an enemy he saw—to no effect at all. He slewed the ship around, getting angry, and found he faced at least a dozen of the fast, vicious little craft, coming head on.

He picked out the leader, got it in the canopy cross-hairs, and stamped on both pedals. Every move the fellow made, he matched, keeping the fighter centered, keeping the guns going. The enemy’s nose cowling suddenly disintegrated, the small craft burst into flames, showering debris over the
Falcon
and his squadronmates. One of the companion vessels staggered suddenly and veered off, trailing sparks and rapidly dispersing smoke. Two with one—rather prolonged, Lando admitted to himself—shot.

The
Falcon
lurched, as if lifted suddenly from behind, then stabilized as Lando applied counterthrust. Something solid had smacked her in the underside vicinity of the boarding ramp, always a weak point. He skated her in a broad horizontal loop, gave her half a roll as she came around, and there it was: another fighter, its fuselage accordioned, its engines spouting flames.

Ramming? In this century? They must be pretty desperate.

And certainly not pirates, Lando thought as he fought the ship into a better attitude to fire from. No profit in ramming. The bombers, then? The man he’d killed on 6845 could have been a fighter pilot. What had he done to get an entire squadron of fighter pilots angry with him?

The
Falcon
jumped again. This time the instruments—if they could be relied upon—showed heavy fire being poured into the hull about where the fighter had rammed her. Sure enough, the shields, never at their strongest there, were steadily deteriorating. He rolled the ship, only to be attacked in the same place by another group of fighters. The battle was getting serious.

All right, then: he hadn’t anyone to help him, and a battle by attrition was a losing proposition. He only had one ship to lose. He’d taken the measure of the fighters. They were maneuverable and fast—more maneuverable than the freighter, that was only natural. But not as fast, either, not on a straight course. Trusting his feel for direction, he ironed out the circle he’d been making, rolled through three-quarters of a turn to bring him parallel to the Oseon ecliptic, and shoved all throttles to the ends of their tracks.

Behind him, the sublight thrusters outshone the Flamewind for a moment. Then, from the viewpoint of the fighters, they were gone, lost in the multicolored mist.

Lando knew his enemies—whoever they were, confound it!—would not be long in following. They’d had that gigantic antique battleship engine they were using as a collective booster. He had to think of something clever, and he had to do it
fast
.

Momentarily, the Flamewind paled. They were out of the Sixth Belt where they’d begun, and crossing the narrow space between it and the Fifth Belt, their destination.

Either that or they were headed from Six to Seven—Lando didn’t trust his navigational capacities at the best of times, let alone now.

No, they were headed toward the Oseon’s fractious primary. His hand swept instrument switches. The screens still showed an indecipherable hash, but coming up a little to the starboard was a small cluster of asteroids, irregulars, following their own course through the belt. He modified his course to meet them.

As he switched the instruments back off, he could see the tiny fleet of fighter craft behind him.

The screen had shown him half a hundred asteroids. His naked
eyes showed him half a hundred more, all small—none greater than a few kilometers—all very tightly bunched together. Taking a great chance, Lando cut straight through them until he saw a sort of miracle ahead.

Whether it had been a single rock, struck and not quite split in half, or a pair of floating worldlets that upon colliding had not quite wholly fused, there was a deep crack around its circumference, seventy or eighty kilometers long, no more than twenty meters wide.

Using everything he had to stand her on her nose—without smearing everybody aboard into roseberry jam in the absence of inertial buffering—he steered for the crack, orienting himself correctly and establishing a tangent course to the double asteroid. At the last moment he killed everything but the attitude controls and the docking jets, brought her to a gentle stop deep within the crevasse.

The portside windows showed a half a dozen fighters streaking past without noticing where he’d hidden. Puffing little bursts of attitude reactant, he ground the
Falcon
gently into place. The guns he could control he aimed at open sky. The Flamewind pulsed luridly, looking like a far-off fireworks display.

Which is when he noticed the instruments.

One by one, as he checked them, most of his instrumentation seemed to turn reliable again. He guessed his hidey-hole was an iron-nickel asteroid that acted as a shield against the storm of radiation. The protection wasn’t perfect, but it was within the abilities of the ship’s electronics to correct.

He ducked his head beneath the panel, spoke loudly and distinctly.

“Vuffi Raa, come out of there! Coffeine break’s over!”

Reconnecting the little robot’s tentacles was not as easy as it was under ordinary circumstances. They themselves were sophisticated mechanisms, the equal of the fully equipped droids that drove buses and typed stories in newsrooms everywhere in the galaxy. Even deactivated, they had taken a lot of radiation, and their self-repair circuits, set in motion once they were attached to their owner, would require some hours to bring them to full efficiency.

Lando left Vuffi Raa in the cockpit to watch for enemy strays, and wended his way around the corridor to the passenger lounge.

Where he was greeted by utter chaos.

It looked as though a herd of house-sized animals had stomped through. Freed of the restraint of artificial gravity, impelled by sudden changes of direction without inertial damping, everything loose in the room had collided with everything stationary at least once. Perhaps more than once.

And that included Waywa Fybot and Bassi Vobah.

Wires hung loose from ceiling and walls. Small articles of furniture had ended up in extremely strange places. The female police officer was beginning to stir. She moaned heartily, lifted herself up on an elbow, and shook her head.

“What happened? Where are we?”

“Two very good questions,” the captain responded. “We were attacked—I don’t know by whom—and we escaped. But I don’t know to where. Are you all right?” He stopped beside her, assisted her in righting herself. She breathed deeply, made a sketchy self-examination.

“I don’t think anything is broken—although to look at this room, that would require a small miracle. Ohhh, my head!”

“Take it easy, you’re not expected anywhere very soon. That’s me: Lando Calrissian, miracles made to order. You stay there, I’m going to look at our fine feathered fuzz.”

He rose and stepped over the debris toward Waywa Fybot’s sleeping rack. In the bird-being’s case, there had been something less than a miracle. Both the creature’s legs were broken, in exactly the same place, apparently where a bar of the rack crossed them. The arrangement had never been intended for free-fall
and
high acceleration.

Nonetheless, the avian officer seemed to have a blissful expression on his face, if Lando could rely on his interpretation of it. The gambler felt a presence at his elbow. Bassi Vobah had made it to her feet and across the room. She stood a bit unsteadily, but she wasn’t leaning on anything or anybody.

Lando liked her a little bit more for that, but not much.