Star Wars: The Adventures of Lando Calrissia (35 page)

In the seat beside the robot in the cockpit, Lando’s shoulders jerked in surprise. “What? You mean you know where we are?”

“I know the catalog number and some other characteristics of the asteroid we’re on—or in, if you prefer. Its configuration is unique, and has been noticed in the past. On the other hand, I can’t say precisely where the
asteroid
is at the moment. I have its orbital elements, but everything in this system is subject to everything else, gravitywise—”

“ ‘Gravitywise?’ ”

“Yes, Master, and predicting where anything will be at any given moment amounts to a billion-body geometry problem. At any other time than Flamewind, there are continuous long-range sensor inventories, and the system’s databanks are updated hourly, but you see—”

“I see.” Lando turned a knob, activating the deck plates at their lowest intensity so he’d have just enough gravity to roll a cigarette. He lit it, kicked them off again, and reclined in his chair, mind working furiously.

“Once we get out in that mess again, we won’t be able to navigate,” he said, more to himself than to the robot.

Vuffi Raa agreed, adding, “However, I shall be of more assistance, now that you have increased the shielding, Master. The trouble is that we don’t know where to go.”

“We still have that dead-reckoning program of yours?” Reflexively, he flicked ash off his cigarette. It drifted in the cabin,
finally settling on Vuffi Raa’s carapace. The droid, equally absently, flicked it off. It broke up and they both lost sight of it.

“Yes, Master—with what amounts to a big ball of unknown squiggles at the end of it where you evaded those fighters.”

“Can you estimate how big a ball?”

“Yes, certainly. From the power consumption, if nothing else.”

“Then that’s our margin for error. We simply follow the course as if we’d never deviated and hunt through a sphere of space the same size for Bohhuah Mutdah’s estate.”

“I’m afraid not, Master, if for no other reason than that the sphere doesn’t stay the same size. It increases as a function of probable error as we travel sunward. During Flamewind, there’s no way of accurately estimating drift, and—”

“Does that catalog of yours give details on Mutdah’s asteroid?”

“Fifty-seven ninety-two? Yes, Master, I—”

“Then it should give us some hints about the other asteroids around there; it’s interested in the weird shape of this one. Let’s get as close as we can, then pick our way, rock by rock, until we find the right one.”

“Very well, Master, I see no other alternative.”

“Neither do I. Now, while we’re still up here and have some privacy, we’re going to talk about who it is
this
time that’s trying to kill me.”

“We’re nearly a day behind schedule!” Bassi Vobah protested. They were sitting in the lounge again. Lando had powered up the gravity, assuring himself beforehand that his passenger with the broken legs was settled comfortably, and asked Vuffi Raa to prepare another meal before they started.

“Do you realize,” the female officer continued to an unappreciative audience in general and an increasingly irritated Lando in particular, “that, under ordinary conditions, this trip would have required a little over two hours?”

“As an inhabitant of the Oseon System, my dear hired gun, you should appreciate better than anyone else the inapplicability of the expression ‘Ordinary conditions.’ There’s a storm going on out there, and although I’m not altogether unwilling to venture out in it again, some preparation is essential.”

“Captain, may I remind you that the discretion in this matter isn’t wholly yours to—”

“Officer, may I remind you that I am the captain, and that,
if you continue nagging me, I’m going to take that blaster away from you and stuff it up your nose?”

The policewoman blinked, sat back in stunned outrage. Even her superiors had never spoken to her like that! Lando grinned—not altogether unironically, and laid down the law:

“Now see here: one of you attempted to murder me when I was outside the ship. I’m going to be rather busy when we quit this refuge, both Vuffi Raa and I are, and I don’t want to have to watch my back. Therefore, until we can arrive at an agreement concerning arrangements, we will sit right here. My inclination—and if you think I’m joking, you’re woefully deceived—is to handcuff the pair of you together until we get to 5792. Unless you can think of an alternative that suits you better—and will satisfy me—that is what we’ll do.

“Or we’ll park here until the Core freezes over.”

Bassi Vobah sat in angry silence, her arms folded across her chest, a sour expression on her face. Waywa Fybot blinked his huge blue eyes, looked thoughtful, but in the end said no more than did his colleague.

Finally: “Now look, you two, I’m not kidding! I haven’t figured out who’s doing what to whom and why, yet, but there’s something—possibly
several
somethings—going on. I make it a practice to avoid getting killed. One of you get out your handcuffs and lock yourself to the other immediately, or—”

“
Master
!” came a shout over the intercom. “
We’ve got trouble
—big
trouble! I need you on the flight deck
!”

Rising quickly, Lando glanced from one cop to the other, smashed a frustrated fist into the palm of his other hand, turned, and hurried to the cockpit.

“What is it, Vuffi Raa? Just now I’ve got—”

“Look forward, Master, to the edge of the crevasse.”

Lando settled in his chair, strapped himself in, and, as a happy afterthought, turned the local gravity in the lounge up to approximately three times the normal pull. “
That
ought to keep them in one place! I—
oh, no
!”

“Oh, yes, Master. You can make out the reflections from their hulls. The fighter squadron has found us. They’ll be firing into this canyon—without any chance of missing—in a very few seconds!”

“M
ASTER
, I
HAVE
failed you again! We cannot escape, my pilot skills are therefore useless. Nor can I man the guns—my programming forbids it!”

Lando waggled back and forth at the controls, loosening the
Falcon
in its rocky nest. He was wishing he could bring the starboard quad-guns to bear, but that was asking too much.

Aside: “We all have our limits, Vuffi Raa, remember what I told you about diamonds. Just—”

Diamonds? That gave the gambler an idea—a
gambler’s
idea, to be sure, but it was all he had at the moment.

“Get out of there, old automaton, strap yourself in the jumpseat behind us, and warn me if anybody comes up the tunnel to the cockpit. I may be able to get us out of this mess, but I want my back safe and my elbows unjogged.”

As soon as the droid had restationed himself, Lando began hitting switches. He had some time: the crevasse was deep, composed mostly of metal-bearing rock. It would take the enemy a while to find the
Falcon
, especially since they were out in that impossible …

Taking his first risk, he cut the gravity in the lounge. A needle on a power-consumption gauge dropped slightly to the left. Next, he began robbing power from every other system. Out went every light in the ship. Off went the life-support—they’d all be fine for a few minutes without it, and, if his plan didn’t work, they wouldn’t need it. He’d never reactivated the inertial damping; he placed it on standby, contingent on what happened next. When he was finished, only the panel lights were glowing, that and Vuffi Raa’s great eye behind him. The ship was deadly silent.

With enormous reluctance, he cut the standby power to every
gun on the ship. It made him feel naked, but they were useless for what he had in mind.

“All right, Vuffi Raa, everything quiet back there?”

“I can hear the pair of them wondering what’s going on, Master.”

“Let them wonder.”

He reached across the instrument array and flipped the shields on. Lights sprang into bright existence, making him feel better. Then he unlatched a metal cover over a graduated knob. Normally it was set at a tiny minus value, placing the main strength of the shields just under the first few molecules of the ship’s skin. There were sound reasons for this, but Lando didn’t care about them now.

He turned the knob, slowly, very carefully.

The ship’s structure groaned as the shields expanded, first a millimeter, then a centimeter away from the surface of the hull. Stresses were transmitted through the hull members to the heavily buttressed casing of the field generator. Lando turned the knob a little more.

The
Falcon
had been tightly wedged within the rock, the wheel of her upper airlock hatch scraping one side of the crevice, the bottom of her hull abraded by the other. There hadn’t been a millimeter to spare.

Now Lando was demanding more room, expanding the shields against the asteroid’s substance. He turned the knob again; something groaned like a living—dying—thing aft of the cockpit, but the panel lights still showed everything intact.

Half a dozen fighters shot by the lip of the crevasse, seeking, searching, probing. One of them fired an experimental shot. It penetrated and rebounded half a dozen times within the walls before it faded.

Another group of fighters swooped past.

And another.

They were circling the asteroid, searching the long canyon, hundreds of kilometers in extent, for the hidden freighter that had burned at least two of their number out of the polychrome skies of the Oseon.

Their flybys were becoming more frequent as they narrowed the search.

Lando turned the knob a little more, a little more.

A brilliant beam of energy cascaded across the forward shields. By accident or design, the enemy had found its prey.
The power needle jumped. Lando slammed the knob to the right as far as it would go.

There was a deafening exploding sound. Multicolored light showered in on Lando and the robot as the asteroid burst under the stresses of the shields and the Flamewind swept around them again.

Secondary explosions punctuated the space around them: one, three, five—Lando lost count as the hurtling rock fragments smashed and scattered the fighter squadron—seven, eight. Perhaps more, he wasn’t sure. No one turned to fight. He diverted a little power to the inertial dampers, cut the shields back to normal, fired up the drives and kicked in the deadreckoner.

They were on their way again.

He turned up the gravity in the lounge. Even he could hear the thump and a curse from Bassi Vobah. He grinned and shook his head.

The improved shields seemed to help considerably. Vuffi Raa retained his reason, Bassi Vobah was as rational as she ever was. Waywa Fybot dozed in his rack, recovering from his injuries with the aid of an electronic bone-knitter from the
Falcon
’s medical bag of tricks. He ought to be completely well in a few more hours, just in time to arrest the trillionaire addict.

Swell.

Lando, for the most part, stayed up in the cockpit. He was tired of having police for company, preferred the company of Vuffi Raa. The little robot scurried around, tidying up and doing minor repairs. He reported that the hull was perfectly sound, despite the torture inflicted on it, and, in a spare hour, checked the mountings of the shield generator for stress crystallization.

There wasn’t any.

Now that he had time to think about it again, Lando realized that his life had become very complicated.

He’d had many of the same thoughts in jail back on Oseon 6845, but things had been simpler, even as recently as then.

He was a simple man, he told himself, a relatively honest gambler who usually only cheated to avoid winning too conspicuously. Yet someone—several someones, it would appear—kept trying pretty hard to kill him. First with a bomb. Then with another bomb. Then, just to show a little versatility,
with a big piece of titanium pipe. Finally, most recently, with a cleverly jimmied spacesuit. He didn’t even count the pirate attack or the two encounters with the fighter squadron, although the latter seemed at least tangentially connected. He simply didn’t know where it all fit in.

Everybody has enemies, especially a gambler who makes a habit of winning. But the vendetta was ridiculous. For the hundredth time, he reviewed his life over the past few years, trying to discover some person he’d known and hurt badly enough to merit such attention.

He was a skillful
and
fortunate man with the cards, and, despite his failings as a merchant captain, he was becoming a pretty good ship-handler, as well. If he did say so himself. Vuffi Raa said so, himself.

Unfortunately, when closely examined, his proficiency was a talent of no practical value. All it seemed to do was get him into trouble. He belonged on a luxury interstellar liner as a passenger, educating other passengers about the follies of trying to fill an inside straight. The soldier-of-fortune routine was beginning to pall.

Well, if by some slim chance he got out of this mess, he’d see about rearranging his life. He had come to love the
Falcon
, but it was a dangerous affair, one that threatened to get him killed at just about any moment. Vuffi Raa was quite another matter, a good friend and partner, an astute adviser. But this captain business …

With a sinking heart, Klyn Shanga inspected the remnants of his command. One lost at Oseon 6845. Two lost in the first engagement with that tramp freighter. And now, between the Flamewind and that exploding asteroid, a mere five fighters left. It was possible that more had survived, were even now trying to find their way back to the squadron through storm and radiation. Some of them might even live past the misadventure
because
they’d lost touch with their comrades.

Five tiny fighting craft, no two alike, except in general size, range, and firepower. They drew on the battle-cruiser engine, restoring their own power even as it pulled them through the nightmarish void.

Well, each of the men had known from the beginning what he faced: a cruel and cunning enemy; a being that took delight in human misery; a creature willing to sacrifice whole cultures,
entire planets to satisfy whatever unknowably evil objectives it set for itself.