Star Wars: The Adventures of Lando Calrissia (27 page)

The creature had a large Rafa orchard-crystal pendant from a chain around its thick, wrinkled neck. It wasn’t the only one here to sport the expensive gems. Lando had learned that they collected a sort of ambient life force given off by all living things, collected and refocused it on the wearer. He shunned them himself; they made him feel like a vampire.

“No,” he answered, handing the creature its second card. “I think the new management will eventually start shipping them again. Probably at substantially higher prices.”

Lob Doluff took his second card without comment. It was obvious to Lando that he had a winning hand—and that he’d managed to lose the advantage somehow before the play was over with.

The player to the Administrator Senior’s left was a female human being, younger than Lando, blond and not unattractive. She had been introduced to him as Bassi Vobah, and some vague reference made to her being an administrative officer. The young gambler wondered where she got her money. He was unimpressed with her playing so far, and more than a little bothered by the fact that she seemed to be watching him closely.

And not in a friendly way.

He handed her a card, dealt to Del Cycer and himself, then, without looking at his cards, took a tiny sip of
snillik
. “Cards?” he inquired.

The trunk-being nodded, its proboscis flopping obscenely, then threw all three down in disgust. “Thirty-seven!” it exclaimed. “Amazing!”

Lob Doluff stood pat.

Bassi Vobah took another card, said nothing.

De Cycer accepted a card, laid his hand down gently. “Out, confound it.”

“Anybody again?” Lando asked. Bassi Vobah responded, took the card, stared grimly at her hand. This time the centerpiece was not as rich. Lando finally looked at his cards: Nines, of Flasks and Staves. “Dealer takes one.”

Sweat began forming on Lob Doluff’s shiny pate, his fingers seemed to tremble a little. Finally, in an explosive gesture, he
threw his cards on the table, face up. “Twenty-two! Can you beat that?”

Lando glanced at Bassi Vobah.

“Fourteen,” she said. “Forget it.”

With the Four of Sabres Lando had drawn, he, too, had twenty-two. He displayed the hand, picked up the deck to deal again. “Sudden Demise.”

Doluff received the Three of Staves, breaking his hand. Lando could have stopped there, but flipped the next card over. The Idiot, worth exactly zero. The pot was his again.

“Let’s take a break.”

Since it was his winning streak, he could recommend a rest without engendering resentment. That was easy: he didn’t believe in winning streaks, and wasn’t afraid of interrupting them. He did need to consider, though, whether to begin losing a few hands deliberately. His livelihood, well-being, ultimately his survival depended on maintaining goodwill—which meant losing on the small bets and winning quietly on the big ones. He’d believed such a ploy to be unnecessary in a rich-man’s playground, but was discovering that it wasn’t any different from playing in a hard-rock miner’s bar. Psychology, human and otherwise, remained the same.

“
Five minutes to breakout, Master
.”

Once again, Lando sat in the lounge of the
Millennium Falcon
, riffling through the cards and thinking odd-shaped thoughts to himself. He and Vuffi Raa had repaired the damage to the ship as best they could. Luckily they carried a good many replacement parts in stores, and the boarding ramp seemed to be something that needed fairly constant upkeep in any event. Moving parts.

Then, they’d gone over the interior of the
Falcon
centimeter by centimeter, being the untrusting types that they were, looking for additional sabotage. They had found nothing. Vuffi Raa had wanted to climb outside and check the hull, but had been severely vetoed: the fields around a ship in ultralightspeed drive were not only physically dangerous, but the distortions of reality they created could drive even a droid insane. Besides, he’d studied the manuals enough to know that the defense shields flowed along the surface of the ship, in the first few molecules of her skin. A bomb attached outside could only do less than minimal damage.

They’d take their chances. He wasn’t a gambler for nothing,
and he had a friend’s concern for the continued health of his mechanical sidekick.

He realized suddenly that he hadn’t replied to the intercom.

“All right, old can-opener, I’ll be up in a moment.”

This was to be Lando’s first planetary landing under the tutelage of the talented robot. His previous attempts, before he’d acquired Vuffi Raa, had been fiascoes. Perhaps setting down on the surface (“
next
to the surface” might be a more accurate description) of an asteroid wasn’t a very spectacular exercise, but he needed the practice.

This time he’d made it to the cockpit
before
the explosion occurred.

Afterward, they spent some time untangling arms and legs from tentacles. Lando hadn’t had the time to strap in, and Vuffi Raa had momentarily unstrapped himself to check a gauge at the rear of the control deck. They both wound up between the pilot’s seats, stuffed under the control panels.

The
Millennium Falcon
turned lazily, end over end.

“Master, I hate to point this out, but that explosion was on the
outside
of the ship, in the outboard phaseshift adaptor.”

Lando studied the boards, while rubbing several bruises. “Yes, but I think it may have been spontaneous. Look at the readings on the phase-shift controls—they aren’t very far away from where that bomb went off the other day, are they?”

It was the droid’s turn to ponder. “I believe you are right. Nonetheless, had we been making a genuine planetary reentry, into a full atmosphere and full gravity, this accident would have destroyed us, Master. Observe the remote cameras; the cowling’s been torn and lifted. It would have ablated away, leaving us with—”

“Uh, I think that will do, my friend. I can well imagine us tumbling and burning out of control. How long to fix it?”

“Not more than a few hours, nor will it interfere with our landing now.”

Lando dealt the cards again, not quite as honestly as before. Of course it had turned out to be a second bomb. Whoever had planted it apparently hadn’t known their ultimate destination was to be an airless worldlet too small to suck them in and burn them up. Vuffi Raa had found part of the control module, like that in the first bomb, a device built to detect a
change in their velocity relative to the speed of light. This one had been set to go off when they dropped below lightspeed.

Somebody really meant to kill him.

He tried to remember all the really big coups he had made at the gaming table. Had he unknowingly pushed someone with enough resources and anger to carry out a vendetta? Well, it appeared that caution might be in order, now. And a little sleight of hand.

He dealt the trunk-creature a Two of Staves, Lob Doluff a Ten of Staves, Bassi Vobah the Queen of Air and Darkness, valued at a minus two. Cycer got a Master of Coins; the young gambler dealt himself a Commander of Coins.

Going around a second time, he handed the alien the Star, a negative card worth seventeen; Doluff took a Nine of Sabres; Bassi Vobah got a second negative, the Evil One, which brought her count to minus-seventeen. He dealt to Cycer and had scarcely given himself the Nine of Coins for a respectable but unspectacular twenty-one, when the tall, thin retiree shouted “
Sabacc
!” excitedly and slapped his original Master on the table, along with the Nine of Staves.

Lando breathed a secret sigh of relief and passed the deck over to Cycer for the deal. Sometimes winning included knowing when to lose.

Cycer had the deal for exactly one hand, which Doluff, barely able to contain himself, won. Then the deal passed to the trunk-thing (Lando was beginning to feel a little guilty about not remembering the creature’s name—which was humanly unpronounceable in any case), where it stayed for two hands, then back to Del Cycer.

Bassi Vobah didn’t seem to be having much luck.

Cycer was dealing the cards when a small spherical droid rolled up beside Lob Doluff and whistled imperatively, then split into a pair of hemispheres.

Doluff looked up from the screen and keyboard thus revealed, all colored drained from his face.

“Captain Calrissian, I believe you’d better hurry to the spaceport. I have a message here that your ship, the
Millennium Falcon
, is on fire.”

T
HE ASTEROID
O
SEON
6845 had been artificially accelerated to complete a rotation every twenty-five hours, giving its inhabitants a comforting sense of day and night—and those whose task it was to land spaceships there a severe headache. Touching down upon a surface moving at eighty-eight kilometers an hour in the tight and tiny circle that was the planetoid’s circumference doesn’t seem a difficult job until one tries it.

Consequently, from the Administrator Senior’s equatorial garden home, Lando took a pneumatic tubeway to the north pole of Oseon 6845. There a small and relatively stationary spaceport had been leveled out of the barren rock.

Unfortunately, the tube car had no communicator of its own, nor did Lando make a habit of carrying one. Momentarily, he regretted it: he could learn no more in transit about the fate of the
Millennium Falcon
. All he had with him was the forty-seven-odd thousand credits he’d acquired that evening, and a tiny, unobtrusive five-shot stingbeam pistol tucked into his velvoid cummerbund.

It was all the personal weapon he allowed himself in a dark and perilous universe; he preferred to rely on his brains for the heavy firepower.

The tubeway shot him northward through a chord beneath the curvature of the asteroid’s surface at several thousand kilometers an hour. Lando fidgeted every second, every centimeter. He’d sent Vuffi Raa to the space terminal to continue repairs on the
Falcon
. And to keep a big red glassy eye on her.

What had gone wrong?

The little robot was a pacifist by nature, it was ineradicably programmed into him. Could some saboteur have taken advantage
of this handicap, overpowered him, and set fire to the ship?

With a plastic-gasketed wheeze, the tubeway lurched to a halt. Its transparent doors opened to let Lando out into a maze of service corridors underneath the landing field. He ran down seemingly endless crossing and countercrossing passageways until he reached one numbered 17-W. A temporary holosign in a bracket on the wall displayed in six languages the legend:

Overhead, a large circular pressure door hung open, connected by a short, accordion-pleated tube to the underside of the
Falcon
. A metal ladder led upward through it. Oddly, there was no one else about in the harshly lit cylinder of the service corridor. The only sounds Lando could hear were those of small mechanical things going about their business.

Shaking his head, Lando climbed the ladder.

He emerged in the curving companionway of the
Falcon
, the somewhat dimmer light and familiar clutter something of a comfort after the stark, brightly lit port corridor. Everything was perfectly quiet. He stalked along the passage until he came to the first intertalkie panel he found set in a bulkhead.

Nervously, he pressed a button. “Vuffi Raa?”

“
Yes, Master
?” a cheerful voice replied. “I’m
out on the hull, finishing up with the phase-shift adaptor
.”

“Oh. Well, I’m aboard, very confused. You didn’t happen to have a fire here tonight, did you?”

“
Master? Why, no, aside from some welding—and that was vacuum-synergetic, no open flame of any kind. Why do you ask
?”

Suspicions of several and various distinct flavors began to fill Lando’s mind. “Er, this may sound silly, but how do I know it’s really
you
I’m talking to?”

“
Master, what’s wrong? Of course it is really I. Please come to the starboard gun-blister and I’ll show you
.”

That could be an altogether different kind of invitation than it sounded. Lando drew his stingbeam, every nerve on edge. He crept into the short tunnel leading to the gun-blister, his back tight against the low, curving wall, and slid sideways until he could see out past the quadguns through the hemispheric plastic.

Outside, the Oseon sun shone garishly on a stark and rocky scene.

The spaceport had begun as a huge natural crater many kilometers in diameter. The
Falcon
sat in its approximate center. Here and there a ship lay, positioned over its own assigned service hatchway. Pleasure yachts, company vessels, those of traders, distributors, and caterers. Halfway across the crater to the rim, Lando could make out the impressive bulk of an elderly but well-maintained battle cruiser. Well, everyone to his own taste. Stars beat feebly downward, making a miniscule contribution to the solar brilliance.

A flicker of movement at the corner of his eye sent Lando into a tense crouch, both hands wrapped professionally around the small grip of his pocketgun, its muzzle seeking, sniffing after something to bite.

A chromium tentacle rasped across the plastic before him. Lando found himself staring into Vuffi Raa’s eye as the robot swung down in front of the blister and hung on one manipulator.

The gambler punched the intercom button beside the gun chair.

“Sorry, old boltcutter, I’m a touch paranoid tonight. Some thoughtful individual interrupted my game—and quite a profitable one, I might add—with a fire alarm. Anything at all exciting happening at your end of the planet?”

Through the plastic, the droid gave as much shrug as it was capable of. “
I’ve simply been tidying up here, Master. There have been no communications, visitors, nor have I so much as seen anybody within a hundred meters of the ship except a few of the spaceport automata. Shall I come in and—
”

“Don’t trouble yourself. Perhaps I still have time to return to my game.”

The robot waggled a free tentacle in farewell. “
Very good, Master, I’ll see you at the hotel
.”