Star Wars: The Adventures of Lando Calrissia (63 page)

“Let’s see them track us now,” he said, self-satisfied. Chewbacca snorted. The meaning of the snort was clear—this was temporary cover only. There was little danger of being detected either optically or by instrument over this seam in Duroon’s surface, for the
Falcon
would be lost against a background of ferrous slag, infernal heat, and radioactive discord. But neither could she remain there for long.

In the vivid orange light of the fissure that illuminated the cockpit, Han conceded that fact. At best, he’d broken trail so the Authority ship would be unable to spot the
Falcon
should the pursuer gain enough altitude to bring her back into sensor range. He poured on as much airspeed as he dared in an effort to keep Duroon’s mass between himself and the vessel hunting him while he sought his landing site. He cursed the fact that there were no proper navigational beacons; this was seat-of-the-pants flying, and no chance of leaning out the cockpit and stopping a passerby for directions.

In minutes the ship had neared the western end of the fissure. Han was compelled to dump some velocity; it was time to look for road signs. He reviewed the instructions given him, instructions he’d committed to memory alone. Off to the south a gigantic mountain range loomed. He banked the
Falcon
sharply to port, slapped a pair of switches, and bore straight for the mountains.

The ship’s special Terrain Following Sensors came on. Han kept the freighter’s bow close above a surface of cooled lava and occasional active rifts, minor offspring of the great fissure. For whatever small edge it might give against detection, he trimmed the
Falcon
off at virtual landing altitude, screaming over eddied volcanic flatlands. “Anybody down there better duck,” he advised, keeping one eye pinned to the Terrain Following Sensors. They bleeped, having located the mountain pass for which he’d been searching. He adjusted course.

Funny. His information said the break in the mountains was plenty wide for the
Falcon
, but it looked mighty narrow on the TFS. For a second he debated going for altitude fast, hurdling the high peaks, but that just might put him back onto the Authority’s scopes. He was too close to his delivery point, and a payday, to risk having to cut and run. The moment of option passed. He shed more airspeed, committed now to taking the pass at low level.

Sweat collected on his forehead and dampened his shirt and vest. Chewbacca uttered his low rumble of utmost concentration as both partners synched to the running of the
Millennium Falcon
. The image of the pass on the TFS grew no more encouraging.

Han tightened his grip on the controls, feeling the press of his flying gloves against them. “Pass, nothing—that thing’s a
slot
! Hold your breath, Chewie; we’ll have to skin through.”

He threw himself into a grim battle with his ship. Chewbacca caterwauled his dislike for all unconventional maneuvers as he cut in braking thrusters, but even those would not be enough to avert disaster. The slot began to take on shape, a slightly lighter area of sky lit by bright stars and one of Duroon’s three moons, set off by the silhouette of the mountains. It was, just barely, too narrow.

The starship took some altitude, and her speed slackened. Those extra seconds gave Han time to pilot for his life, calling on razor-edge reflexes and instinctive skills that had seen him through scrapes all across the galaxy. He killed all shields, since they’d have struck rock and overloaded, and wrenched his controls, standing the
Millennium Falcon
on her port-side. Sheer crags closed in on either side, so that the roar of the freighter’s engines rebounded from the cliffs. He made minute corrections, staring at rock walls that seemed to be coming at him through the canopy, and rattled off a string of expletives having nothing whatsoever to do with piloting.

There was a slight jar, and the shriek of metal torn away as easily as paper. The long-range sensors winked out; the dish had been ripped off the upper hull by a protrusion of rock. Then the needle’s eye was threaded sideways, and the
Falcon
was through the mountains.

Perspiration beading his face, dampening his light brown hair, Han pounded Chewbacca. “What’d I tell you? Inspiration’s my specialty!”

The starship soared over the thick jungle that began beyond the mountains. Han leveled off, wiping a gloved hand across his brow. Chewbacca emitted a sustained growl. “I agree,” Han replied soberly in the wake of his elation. “That
was
a stupid place to put a mountain.” He took up scanning for the next landmark and spied it almost at once: a winding river. The
Falcon
skimmed in low over the watery coils as the Wookiee lowered the ship’s landing gear.

In seconds they’d reached the landing area near a spectacular waterfall that dropped two hundred meters to the river in a flume like a blue-white, ghostly scrim under stars and moonlight. Han, reading the TFS, found a clearing in the heavy cover of vegetation and settled the ship slowly. The broad disks of the landing gear sank a bit in soft humus; then the hydrolics sighed briefly as the
Millennium Falcon
made herself comfortable.

Han and Chewbacca sat at their controls for a moment, too drained to do more. Outside the cockpit canopy, the jungle was an irregular darkness, tangles of indefatigable growth topped by a roof of fernlike plants that stretched up twenty meters and more. Gauzy ground fog rolled through the undergrowth and clearing.

The Wookiee gave a long, gusty, bass-register exhalation. “I couldn’t have said it better,” Han concurred. “Let’s get at it.” Both removed headsets and left their seats. Chewbacca picked up his crossbow weapon and a bandolier of metal ammo containers, which also supported a floppy carryall pouch at his hip. Han already wore his side arm, a custom-model blaster with rear-fitted macroscope, its front sight blade filed off to facilitate the speed draw. His holster was worn low, tied down at the thigh, cut so that it exposed the weapon’s trigger and trigger guard.

According to directories, Duroon’s atmosphere would support humanoid life without respirators. The two smugglers moved directly to the ship’s ramp. The hatch rolled up and the ramp lowered silently, letting in smells of plant growth, of rotting vegetation, of hot, humid night and animal danger. The jungle was filled with sounds, calls, clacks, and cries of prey and predator, and, over all, with the monumental spillage of the waterfall.

“Now it’s up to them to find us,” Han said. Checking the jungle, he saw no sign of life. Not surprising. The freighter’s landing had probably frightened most wildlife out of the area. He turned to his shaggy first mate/copilot/partner. “I’ll wait for them. Turn off sensors, shut down the engines, the works; kill all systems so the Authority can’t spot us. Then see how much structural damage she suffered topside when she got her back scratched.”

Chewbacca barked acknowledgement and shambled off. Han stripped off his flying gloves, tucked them in his belt, and stepped down the ramp, which stretched down and out from the ship’s starboard side, astern the cockpit. He thumbed his gun’s sights to set it for night shooting, then glanced around. A lean young man dressed in spaceman’s high boots, dark uniform trousers with red piping, and civilian shirt and vest, Han had cast aside his uniform tunic, stripped of its rank and insignia, years ago.

He ran a quick check of the
Falcon’
s underside, assuring himself that she had taken no damage there and that the landing gear had come to rest properly. He also made certain that the interrupter-templates had automatically slid into place along the servo-guides for the belly turret, so that the quad-mounted guns wouldn’t accidentally blow away the landing gear or ramp if he had to fire them while the ship was grounded.

Satisfied, he went back to the foot of the ramp. He gazed up at the empty sky and the stars beyond, thinking:
Let the Authority look for me; this whole part of Duroon’s spotted with hot springs, thermal vents, heavy-metal magma seepages, and radiation anomalies. ltd take them a month to find me, and in an hour or three, I’ll be gone like a cool breeze
.

He sat at the end of the ramp, wishing for a moment that he’d brought along something to drink; there was a flask of ancient, vacuum-distilled jet juice under the cockpit console. But he didn’t feel like going for it. Besides, he still had business to conduct.

Duroon’s nocturnal life forms began reappearing in the mossy clearing. Lacy white things swam through the air with ripples of their thin bodies, resembling flying doilies, while nearby fern-trees held creatures that looked like bundles of straw, making their slow way along the wide fronds. Han kept an eye on them but doubted they’d approach the alien mass of his starship.

As he watched, a smallish green sphere sailed out of the undergrowth in a high arc, landing with a
boink
. It appeared perfectly smooth at first, but then extruded an eyelike bump that studied the
Falcon
with jerky motions. But when it noticed the pilot, it flinched. The eye-bump disappeared, and the sphere-thing’s underside compressed. With another
boink
the thing bounced away into the jungle.

Han returned to his musing as he listened to Chewbacca tramping around on the ship’s upper hull. The unfamiliar constellations here were how many light-years from the planet of Han’s birth? He couldn’t even make a close guess.

Being a smuggler and a flyer-for-hire had its dangers, and those he accepted with a philosophical shrug. But a run into a prohibited sector with a cargo that would earn him a summary execution if caught, those were different table stakes altogether.

The Corporate Sector was one wisp off one branch at the end of one arm of the galaxy, but that wisp contained tens of thousands of star systems, and not one native, intelligent species was to be found anywhere. No one was sure why. Han had heard that neutrino research showed abnormalities in the solar convective layers of every sun hereabout, something that might have spread like a virus among the stars in this isolated sector.

In any case, the Corporate Sector Authority had been chartered to exploit—some called it plunder—the uncountable riches here. The Authority was owner, employer, landlord, government, and military. Its wealth and influence eclipsed that of all but the richest Imperial Regions, and the Authority spent much of its time and energy insulating itself from outside interference. Competition, it had none; but that didn’t make the Corporate Sector Authority any less jealous or vindictive. Any outside ship found off established trade corridors was fair game for the Authority’s warships, which were manned by its feared Security Police.

But what do you do, Han asked himself, when your back’s to the wall? How could he have said no to a nice, lucrative run when usurious Ploovo Two-For-One described the riches that were to be had.

I could always hit the beach, he thought. Find a nice planet somewhere, go native. It’s a big galaxy.

But he shook his head. No use fooling himself. If he were grounded, he might as well be dead. What could one planet, any planet, offer someone who had knocked around among the stars? The need for the boundless provinces of space was now a part of him.

And so when, broke and in debt, he and Chewbacca had been approached for a run deep into Authority steer-clear territory, they’d jumped at the job. In spite of all the perils and uncertainties, the run still let them raise ship again and experience the freedom of star-travel. Risk of death or capture had been, in their eyes, the lesser of two evils.

But that brought up another point. The Authority ship had somehow picked up the
Millennium Falcon
before her own sensors had detected the other. No doubt the Security Police had something new in the way of detection equipment, thereby making Han’s and Chewbacca’s lives more complicated by an order of ten. This situation would require immediate future attention.

Han kept a close watch on the jungle around him, wishing he could have left the ship’s floodlights on. So, when a voice at his side announced, “We are here,” he twisted around with a yelp, his blaster appearing in his fist as if conjured there.

A creature, barely out of arm’s reach, was calmly standing next to the ramp. It was almost Han’s height, a biped, with a downy, globular torso and short arms and legs boasting more joints than a human’s. Its head was small, but equipped with large, unblinking eyes. Its mouth and throat were a loose, pouchy affair; its scent was the scent of the jungle.

“That,” Han grumbled, recovering his composure and putting his blaster away, “is a good way to get yourself roasted.”

The creature ignored the sarcasm. “You have brought what we need?”

“I’ve got cargo for you. Beyond that, I know zero, which is the way I want it. If you came alone, you’ve got your work cut out for you.”

The creature turned and made an eerie, piping noise. Figures seemed to grow up out of the ground, dozens of them, motionless, regarding the pilot and his ship with silent gazes. They held short objects of some sort, which he assumed to be weapons.

Then he heard a growl from above. Stepping forward, Han looked up and saw Chewbacca standing out on one of the ship’s bow mandibles, covering the newcomers with his bowcaster. Han gave a signal. His hairy first mate put up the bowcaster and headed back inboard.

“Time’s wasting,” Han told the creature. It moved toward the
Falcon
, taking its companions with it. Han stopped them with upheld hands. “Not the whole choir, friend. Just you, for starters.” The first one burbled to its fellows and came on alone.

Inside the ship, Chewbacca had turned up the blackout lights to a minimal glow in strategic parts of the interior. The towering Wookiee was already drawing cover plates off the hidden compartments, concealed and shielded to be undetectable, under the deck near the ramp. Into this space, where he and Han usually hid whatever contraband they were carrying, Chewbacca lowered himself to stand with his waist at deck level. Releasing clamps and strapping, the Wookiee began lifting out heavy oblong cases, the huge muscles beneath his fur bulging with effort.