Star Wars: The Adventures of Lando Calrissia (34 page)

“What’s wrong with Officer Fybot, and why in the name of the Eternal is he smiling in that idiotic way?”

“Shock, perhaps,” Lando answered her. “He’s broken both his legs—rather, I’ve broken both his legs. I’m having a bit of trouble regretting it very much, considering the circumstances. Although I wish I knew how to examine him for further damage. I don’t know where he’s
supposed
to bend, let alone where he isn’t.”

Bassi seemed a bit hysterical all of a sudden, and Lando
subtracted a few of the points he’d given her. “Well, can’t you do something? We can’t just leave him lying there!”

He shook his head. “That’s exactly what we’re going to do, after I splint those legs. I don’t think we’d better move him.”

The birdlike creature sat up suddenly, opened his great blue eyes, and said delightedly, “Yes, I’ll have another centipede, Mother, if you don’t mind!”

“… A
ND THIS ONE
is worth a
negative
eighteen—am I clear, so far?” the robot asked. The gigantic yellow avian towering over him at the lounge table nodded, trying to shift to a more comfortable position.

Lando looked up from the covered free-fall dish that contained his long-overdue meal and chuckled, wondering who was going to take whom to the laundry when the bird and the droid had the rules of
sabacc
straight between them. Vuffi Raa’s literal-mindedness could be a handicap; on the other hand, Waywa Fybot was a bit preoccupied at present, between his injuries and whatever it was he’d seen during the onslaught of the Flamewind.

They’d gotten the narcotics officer splinted up all right: tinklewood fishing rods had turned out to be good for something, after all. Lando had never been able to sell the blasted things back in the Dilonexa. He still had a bundle of them stacked in one of the auxiliary holds.

Ah, well. Things could be worse.

They could all be dead.

Looking up again, he winked and smiled at Bassi Vobah, likewise feeding herself from a covered tray. It had taken them the better part of an hour to manhandle the bird into a position where his broken legs could be treated, even in free-fall. Then,
all at once, it seemed they had a million things to attend to, and it hadn’t been until later that they could think of food.

The first order of business had been the
Falcon
herself.

She’d been pretty badly battered by the desperate flight through the Flamewind and the battle with those tramp fighters—Lando still didn’t know who the Core they were or why they had attacked him. She’d never been constructed for astrobatics with her inertial dampers shut down. The stresses to her hull and frame must have been titanic.

In addition, she’d been shot at and even rammed, albeit by a tiny, lightweight single-seater with insufficient mass to do very much except momentarily overload her dynamic shielding. That was the key, of course: her force fields had held her together through everything; she was basically a loose pile of nuts and bolts kept in one place by electromagnetogravitic gimcrackery.

But—like his girlfriend the bootlegger’s daughter—he loved her still.

“
Master, that should be another centimeter to starboard, I believe
.”

Vuffi Raa had been on the other side of the hull—the inside—measuring the effects of Lando’s exhausting labor on the outside. There was a huge ugly dent—but no more than that—in the underside of the boarding ramp where the fighter had smacked it. Lando laughed to himself. You shoulda seen the other guy!

There was nothing he could do right now about the purely mechanical battering. Her seals were intact, the ramp would work perfectly (although there’d be a slight bulge to stumble over, exiting the ship), and what really counted was the shielding.

He moved the micropole another centimeter to the right, waited for the robot’s confirmation, and riveted it in place. He didn’t understand why the
Falcon
’s previous operators hadn’t done this long ago. They had the parts in stores. Just lazy, perhaps. When he was done, the effective density of her defenses would be doubled—of course with a correlative increase in what the shields pulled out of the power plant. Maybe that explained things.

It was hot and sweaty in the vacuum suit, and he was hungry again. Worse, it was extremely claustrophobic working in the skinny wedge of space between the
Falcon
’s belly and the
face of the asteroidal crevasse. Well, he had no one but himself to blame for that: he’d sheared half a dozen communications and sensory antennae wiggling her in there, items that by their very nature had to protrude through the defenses in order to operate.

The fact that they hadn’t been operating at all, on account of the Flamewind, had helped to guide his instantaneous decision. That and the twenty-odd hostile spacecraft determined to blow the
Falcon
to smithereens.

He began to back from the cramped enclosure. “Let’s see about those soft spots on the upper hull, now. Then I’m going to have to quit for a while. This is rather tiring, I’m afraid.”

The little droid’s response was laden with apologetic overtones. “
Master, if it were possible, I would be doing that for you right now. I—
”

“Vuffi Raa, for once shut up and let somebody else do the donkeywork. You come out here and the blasted sun will start frying your brains again. It’s like that safe in the cockpit: we’re shielded by the asteroid, but not perfectly. You need the extra protection of the hull.”

“
Yes, Master. How lucky it was that this crevice runs perpendicular to the direction of the Flamewind. Were it a few degrees the other way, it would function as a funnel or a wave guide and concentrate the—
”

“Yes,” said Lando with a shudder, “how well I know!” He hadn’t been thinking about all that when he’d ducked the
Falcon
in there. He’d simply been trying to get away from the fighters. He’d been flying and fighting by the seat of his pants. Even now it gave him a chill to contemplate.

“All right, I’m out from under. Start the lock cycling. I’ll rest for five minutes and then get out on the upper hull.” This may be hard work, Lando thought, but when I’m finished, my ship and passengers—and
I
!—will be as well protected from the Flamewind as we are now.
Without
having to hide inside an asteroid and go wherever it feels like taking us.

“
Sabacc
!” Vuffi Raa cried, displaying his cards to the bewildered bird. “You see, this comes under a special rule: whenever you have the Idiot—that’s worth zero, you know—then a Two of anything and a Three of anything are considered an automatic twenty-three.”

Dejectedly, Waywa Fybot handed over a few credits. “But that’s ridiculous,” he said in his ridiculous voice. “It doesn’t
make sense. Two and three are five, not twenty-three, and besides, the addition of a zero—”

“That’s why it’s called the Idiot’s Array, old passenger pigeon,” Lando supplied. If things kept going that way, he was going to fly the ship and let Vuffi Raa do the gambling. Lando opened a flap in his tray, took a final bite of whatever it was, and slid the container into the mass recycler. “Why don’t you play with them, Bassi? A three-handed game’s more interesting.”

“Not on your life!” She shook her head ruefully. “I’ve played enough
sabacc
to last me a lifetime, thank you.”

“
Master, would it be presumptuous of me to say that your piloting of the ship earlier today was highly proficient
?”

“Only if you don’t call me master when you’re doing it.” Lando could not have been more pleased by this modest praise. He had been a perfectly terrible flyer when Vuffi Raa had taken him in hand—rather, in tentacle. Now, at least sometimes, it was as if he were
wearing
the
Millennium Falcon
instead of riding in her. The little droid had been mortified about his own failure to stand up to the sleet of radiation, at his momentary irrational irresponsibility. But Lando had pointed out that even a diamond, subjected to the proper stress at the proper angle, would shatter.

He tightened down another micropole, this time on the upper surface of the
Falcon
, and went on to the next designated location. No bloody wonder the vessel was so vulnerable; there were a dozen spots where the fields failed to overlap properly.

Carefully he pulled his arm out of the suit sleeve, pulling at the glove with his other hand, snaked his fingers up through the collar into the helmet, and wiped perspiration off his nose. You’d think that after all the centuries people had been wearing pressure suits that someone would have invented—

A red light lit up on the surface just below his chin. Now what the devil did that mean? Great Edge! It meant a heat-sink overload! He was cooking himself to death! He examined the readouts on his left arm; everything looked nominal there. What was the matter, then? He keyed the suit’s transmitter.

“Vuffi Raa, you’d better start the lock going. I’ve got to get out of this suit. There’s something—”

No response.

“Vuffi Raa, do you copy?”

Still no response.

Again he checked the indicators on the panel inset in his sleeve. The communicator pilot was burning steadily. He hoped that his little friend was all right. The difficulty there lay in the fact that the high point of the
Falcon
’s hull was precisely at the upper airlock. He’d had to crawl out from below, climb around the edge of the ship, to get to where he was. Now, with an apparently malfunctioning suit, he was going to have to repeat the procedure in reverse, with no guarantee he could do it in time to keep from being poached in the shell.

Vuffi Raa could save him a critical few minutes—if only he’d answer!

“Captain to
Millennium Falcon
, do you read?”

Nothing.

He sat as still as possible, thinking as hard as he could. It seemed to be getting hotter inside the suit by the second.

Suddenly, he glanced at the riveting gun in his hand and at the airlock wheel wedged against the rock that formed a roof over his head. Crawling slowly forward a meter, he rapped against the shank of the wheel. The
clank
!, transmitted by the hull, reverberated in his suit. He tried it again. And again.

A few moments later, there was another kind of reverberation in his suit.

“
Master, is that you making that noise? I can’t raise you on the comlink
.”

Uncertain whether Vuffi Raa could hear him, he bashed the riveter against the wheel again, once.

“
Are you in some kind of trouble other than communication’s being down
?”

Good guess, Vuffi Raa.
Clank
!

“
I’ll come and get you, right—
”

Clank! Clank
!

“
But, Master …
!”

Clank! Clank
!

A few sweaty minutes later, another suited figure clambered toward Lando over the edge of the ship. Bassi Vobah—her pistol strapped to the outside of her borrowed vacuum-wear—crawled beside him, placed her helmet in contact with his.

“Once a cop, always a cop,” Lando said before she got a chance to open her mouth.

“Don’t be an idiot. What’s wrong with your suit?”

He shook the sweat out of his eyes. It floated in tiny droplets inside the helmet, distracting him. “Coolant failure of
some kind. I was worried about getting dinner; now it looks like I’m going to
be
din—”

“Oh, shut up! You relax and lie still. I’ll pull you out of here. Your little five-armed friend and Officer Fybot are at the downside lock right now, waiting for us.”

“Not the bird, he’s accident prone!”

“You should talk!”

Lando was approaching unconsciousness when they cycled through the lock. Vuffi Raa practically tore the helmet off his master—and his ears with it. The resultant blast of fresh air in Lando’s face was like an arctic gale.

“Well, another small adventure,” the gambler observed as the three of them stripped him down to his underwear and handed him a plastic bag of water, “when what I really needed was a few days in a sensory-deprivation tank. That’s the universe for you. Anybody think of slapping something in the food-fixer?”

Bassi Vobah huffed and stomped her way out of the lock area, not an easy thing to do in the absence of gravity. “You’re welcome!” she said over her shoulder.

The alien officer followed her, limping awkwardly on his splinted and bandaged legs.

Vuffi Raa looked up at Lando from where he was minutely examining the vacuum suit. “Master,” he said cautiously, and in a very quiet voice, “did you remove this suit between the time you were working down below and when you went topside?”

Lando floated on his back beside the airlock hatch, thinking—but only thinking—about getting up and going forward. The cold metal felt extremely good to him at the moment.

“Had to,” he replied, hoping the robot wasn’t headed where he thought he was headed. “Call of nature.”

“So that’s when it was done. Master, somebody—”

“Sabotaged the suit when I wasn’t looking, is that it?”

“I’m afraid so. They crossprogrammed the communicator with the cooling system. Oddly enough, if you’d continued trying to call me on the radio, it would have saved you from being roasted.”

Lando shook his head, grabbed a stanchion, and sat up stiffly. “That’s a little obscure, even as practical jokes go. Which one of them do you suppose it is?”

“Bassi Vobah helped to save your life.”

“When she couldn’t avoid it. Come on, I want a smoke. Do you suppose I could roll a cigarette out of one of those crushed cigars in the safe?”

“Why would you want to, Master?”

“Because it’s there.”

The next order of business—after getting something to eat—was figuring out where they were. Lando’s running battle with the fighter squadron had taken him through many turns and twists, and across what distances he couldn’t guess. He and Vuffi Raa spent a good deal of time pondering all that over the navigational computer.

“The device is useless, Master. The radiation’s finished it off. That gives me an eerie feeling, I must confess. However, the catalog has some information: this asteroid is uninhabited, but it isn’t uncharted.”