Star Wars - Lando Calrissian and the Flamewind of Oseon Read online

  “Missed! Vuffi Raa, hold her a little steadier!”

  The ship ducked and swooped, narrowly avoiding being skewered in a cross fire as the drone fighters split up, attacking from both sides.

  “Master, there are too many of—good shooting, sir!”

  The little droid’s voice issued from an intercom beside Lando’s ear. The gambler made an imaginary chalk mark on a purely mental scoreboard, manhandling the guns around for another shot. The drone he’d splattered was an incandescent and expanding ball of dust and gas, augmenting an already dirty region of space.

  Anyone else might have whooped! victoriously.

  Lando fumed in the transparent gun-bubble.

  All right, so it had been his idea to shortcut through this small nebulosity on the way to the next port. Blast it all, he was carrying valuable, somewhat perishable cargo. Crates of wintenberry jelly. Stacks of mountain bollem hides. Expensive tinklewood fishing rods. In short, the produce of a frontier planet. His corner-cutting could save them precious days, compared to routes preferred by scheduled cargo haulers.

  The shields pulsed with coruscating brilliance. They were taking hits again!

  He slewed the quad-guns hard, pressed the double triggers. Bolts of ravening energy rammed directly into a pair of tiny unmanned fighters screaming toward the ship. One exploded, the other, severely damaged, cork-screwed crazily out of Lando’s line of vision.

  Vuffi Raa rolled the ship, skated into a wild, stomach-wrenching yaw, adroitly avoiding a direct hit. They were a good team together, Lando thought.

  Besides, it wasn’t much as nebulosities go. Even deep inside the scruffy patch of gas, a few molecules every cubic meter produced very little visible clouding. They did slow a ship down, however, making it dangerous to use the faster-than-light drive. That’s probably why the regular lines avoided the place. But Lando, calculating distance over time, had figured that, even at a substantial reduction from lightspeed, they’d still gain time and profit thereby.

  He’d been wrong.

  Six more meter-diameter drones bore directly for his turret. The enemy seemed to have an endless supply. Lando caught a glance of their mother vessel, a pirate lying off and directing the attack in relative safety. She was approximately four times the displacement of the Falcon, clumsily built, a large sphere attached to a slightly smaller cylinder, the whole awkward assembly patched and mottled by hard use and long neglect.

  He could imagine half a hundred crew-beings, hunched over their drone panels in a dimly lit control center. They were probably as broke and desperate as he was.

  Waiting until the last possible moment, he let loose all four barrels on maxium power and dispersal. Lights dimmed aboard the Falcon. Two saucer-shaped drones blossomed into fireballs, the third was holed severely. The fourth, fifth, and sixth zoomed over his head in ragged formation, past the gun-blister, and out of his visual range before he could tell what he’d done to them. He released the triggers.

  Full illumination sprang forth again.

  Nebulosities were good for hiding spaceships. The gas, dust, and ions, the magnetic and static fields made a hash of long-range sensor instrumentation. That’s how they’d wound up in this confounded—

  “Vuffi Raa!” Lando shouted suddenly. “Close on the pirate herself! I’ve had enough of this. Give me a pass at her reaction-drive system!”

  “Very well, Master.”

  There was doubt in the robot’s doubly electronic voice—not concerning Lando’s combat abilities. Quite the contrary. It was simply that the droid’s most fundamental programming forbade him to take the life of a mechanical or organic sapient being. He was straining his cybernetic ethics severely even now, conning a fighting ship. Yet strain them he did.

  In a long, graceful arc with a little flip on the end, the Falcon soared toward the pirate, taking her by surprise. A few guns warmed up feebly—too late—as their startled operators switched attention from remote-control panels to fire-control systems. The tiny flying weapons might be adequate against an unarmed freighter or a pleasure yacht that stumbled into the cloud, but they hadn’t been conceived or built for mortal engagement with a vessel like the Falcon, half pirate ship herself and bristling with more guns than her crew could handle all at once.

  Trusting his ship’s shields, Lando bore down upon the quad-gun, drilling its quadruple high-power beams at the reaction-drive outlet at the far end of the pirate’s spherical section. Once again the Falcon’s interior lights dimmed, and for the first time, it occurred to Lando that his heavy trigger finger was costing something. However, the enemy’s thrust tubes were beginning to glow. First red, they quickly became orange-yellow. They’d been molded to withstand heat and pressure right enough, but not from the outside in.

  Suddenly, a starburst appeared in space between him and the pirate.

  “Good shooting, Master. You got another one!”

  “Nonsense, I didn’t even—Great Merciful Heavens!”

  All around them, balls of fiery gas stood out against the starry background. The drone fleet was destroying itself! The pirate swiveled on her center of gravity, glowed savagely from her own internal fires, and streaked away.

  At the extreme end of her flight line, toward the edge of the nebulosity, Lando could make out the flash as she shifted into faster-than-light. It was a deadly risk even so; they must be frightened badly.

  “Well, well! Stand down from Battle Stations,” he informed his mechanical partner, “I’ll be up to the cockpit in a minute. Put some coffeine on, will you? And by the way, Vuffi Raa …”

  He unstrapped himself from the gun-chair webbing, turning his captain’s hat—the one with all the golden braid—around the right way, and zipped his shipsuit up a couple of inches.

  “Yes, Master?”

  “Don’t call me Master!”

  Stepping into the broadly curving main corridor, Lando passed the sublight-drive area of the Millennium Falcon. As if sprouting from the floor, there stood a tapered chromium snakelike entity, about a meter long, tending the control panel. At its slenderest end, it branched into five slim, delicate “fingers” that twisted knobs and adjusted slide-switches. In the center of the “palm,” Lando knew, was a small glassy red eye-spot.

  Farther along, where a cluster of instruments comprised the radar and other detection devices, another metallic serpent stood watch. There were three more like it elsewhere in the ship, giving attention to sensitive areas that could not be handled from the cockpit monitors.

  Up front, Lando flopped into the left-hand seat, a pride-preserving concession tacitly made between himself and the real pilot of the vessel. It lay in the other seat, a pentagon-shaped slab of bright silvery-colored metal and electronics. A large lens pulsed redly at the top. The object was strapped down firmly to the seat. One of the “snakes” hovered over an instrument panel, half a meter away.

  “Vuffi Raa, you’ve got to pull yourself together,” Lando chuckled, fumbling under the panel. He brought out a slim cigar and lit it, eyeing the armless, legless contraption next to him and waiting for a reaction. Outside, the fog began to disperse as their own reaction drives brought them to the margin of the nebulosity. Was he imagining things, or was the plastic window transparency slightly pitted? More dust in the region than he’d calculated—and another expensive repair.

  The snake floated downward, attached itself to one flat side of the pentagon, and waggled at the gambler. “Master, that wasn’t funny the first hundred times you said it.” Vuffi Raa began unstrapping his torso from the copilot’s seat, one-tentacled.

  From the passageway outside, another snake drifted in, settled in the chair, and linked itself, becoming the second of Vuffi Raa’s limbs to rejoin his body. Lando looked over the ship’s instrumentation, and his glow of combative satisfaction evaporated completely.

  “By the Edge! Look at those power-consumption gauges! Those quad-guns are expensive to shoot! We would have used less power going the long way around!”

  It was a hell of a note, Lando thought, when even defeating a band of pirates had to be calculated on the balance sheet. And at a loss.

  “We’ll be lucky to break even on this load, do you realize that?”

  Regaining yet a third tentacle, the robot refrained diplomatically from pointing out that he’d opposed the shortcut in the first place. He hadn’t known exactly why. The big, regularly scheduled companies avoided the route although it took parsecs and whole days off the run, exactly as Lando had insisted. On the other hand, big, regularly scheduled companies seldom attempted anything new or daring—which was what always made the future so bright for newer, smaller companies.

  Now, between the star-fog and the pirates it concealed, both of the partners knew what was wrong with the nebulosity.

  Fourth and fifth manipulators in place, Vuffi Raa cautiously punched up the interstellar drive. The stars stretched into attenuated blurs and vanished.

  Yet, none of that explained what was wrong with Dilonexa XXIII.

  • III •

  “FISHING POLES?”

  The customs agent was a small man with wiry arms and legs, knobbly knuckles. He was dressed, like everybody else on that self-consciously agrarian planet, in bib overalls. In his case, they were made of a deep green satyn, heavily creased. His shiny pink scalp shone through a field of close-cropped gray stubble.

  “You gotta be kidding, Mac! In the first place, there ain’t a body of water on the planet bigger’n a bathtub; we don’t like to spare the land. In the second place, nobody here has any time for fishing. An’ in the third place, the native fish taste terrible—lacka trace metals or something.”

  The sun of the Dilonexa System (a catalog number Lando didn’t remember and hadn’t bothered asking Vuffi Raa about as they’d m
ade their approach) was a gigantic blue-white furnace. The twenty-two planets nearest it were great places to get a suntan. In a couple of microseconds.

  The outer seventeen were iceboxes.

  But the planet in the middle, at least in the view of its early colonists, made it all worthwhile. It was large, nearly twenty-five thousand kilometers in diameter, composed mostly of the lighter elements, which gave it a surface gravity not too unreasonable. Nearly everything of metal had to be shipped in.

  But Dilonexa XXIII was rich, an agricultural world whose fields stretched unimaginable distances around its surface, providing foodstuffs, plastics, combustible fuels—everything with an organic base. Its inhabitants, fat farmers and their fatter families, had acquired a taste for some of the finer things in life.

  Which was why Lando had brought his valuable, somewhat perishable cargo there.

  He shook his head ruefully as he watched the Dilonexan ground crew put fuel elements into the Falcon where it rested on the ferrocrete apron—and gaping wounds in his credit account.

  “Well, then, how about the jelly and the hides? Surely—”

  “Had a second cousin once named Shirley,” the little man explained, scratching a mole under his chin and squinting up at the cloudless sky as if in aid to memory. “Tried that wintenberry stuff you’re haulin’. Broke down with the gallopin’ gosharooties. Too many trace minerals for a fourth-generation colonist. We gotta watch what we eat, us Dilonexicans, that’s a fact.”

  Lando shook his head again; it was getting to be a habit. “But look here, Inspector, I—”

  “Call me Bernie. You wouldn’t happen t’have a cigar on you?”

  The gambler visualized the big chest of cigars in his safe aboard the Falcon. “Even if I did, they’d be from Rafa IV, a place just lousy with heavy metals. Probably kill you. What about the leather, then? I have a hold full of beautifully furtanned hides, and—”

  The wizened customs officer interrupted Lando again, this time with an upraised hand. He pointed toward the prairie that surrounded them. Lando knew that virtually the entire globe was plains just like the scenery he saw now. He also knew that city-sized tornados swept, unimpeded, around the planet’s circumference—that is, they had until gigantic weather-control satellites had been installed. Their potent, tornado-destroying energy-weaponry also made it impossible to smuggle on or off the planet—or to get away with unpaid bills.

  “Whaddya see out there, Mac? A zillion acres of grain crop, that’s what. We can’t eat it, but the native bovines can, an’ we can eat them. Lookie here! when’s the last time you saw a genuine leather awning? You got it—over on that building right there. We got leather comin’ out our ears. There’s a sixty-five percent import duty on hides, seventy-five percent on fishin’ poles an’ other recreational goodies, a hundred an’ five on poisonous substances like that jelly you’re pushin’.”

  Lando groaned. First the expensive battle with the pirates, now this—plus he was out his landing fees, permits, and refueling costs.

  “But say, you’re Cap’n Calrissian, ain’tya, from the Millennium Falcon? Gotta message for you somewhere here.” He fumbled in his overall pockets until he pulled out a chip with a keyboard displayed on its face, punched numbers and letters into it.

  “Right! From the Oseon, it says. That’s quite a ways away, ain’t it? You want it now?”

  “Oh, very well,” Lando answered despondently. He didn’t really care. All he really wanted was a nice quiet place to lie down for a century or two.

  “Okay, that’ll be thirteen-fifty, Mac.”

  Lando blinked. So it wasn’t a paid message. Odd, and thirteen and a half credits seemed a little cheap for interstellar communication, but … He pulled a few bills out of his pocket.

  “You don’t unnerstand, Mac. There’s an import fee on interstellar messages here. We figure a fella oughta be content with what’s on just one planet, an’ not go sashayin’ off … Anyway, that’ll be thirteen hundred an’ fifty credits.”

  “Forget it, then,” said Lando in disgust. “It’s probably just an—”

  The little man grinned up at him. “There’s a two-thousand-credit penalty for not pickin’ up interstellar messages. Ain’t neat t’leave ’em lyin’ around.”

  In the comparative quiet and sanity of what passed for a lounge aboard the Millennium Falcon, Lando inserted the coded chip into a playback machine. An overstuffed, cheerful face materialized above the instrument.

  “To Captain Lando Calrissian of the Millennium Falcon: greetings and salutations! I am Lob Doluff, Administrator Senior of the Oseon System. You haven’t heard of me, I’ll wager, but, my dear boy, I have heard of you!”

  The recording continued: “Your reputation as a player of sabacc is perhaps wider spread and more salubrious than you know. My associates and I, a small group of fanciers of the game, would like to invite you here at your convenience, to play with us. If you are interested, please name the time and stakes. Every courtesy will be extended to you during your stay with us. My very warmest and anticipatory regards to you. Lob Doluff, signing off.”

  A grin began to spread itself across Lando’s face. In that context, he could cut his losses. All he needed was a small stake when he got to the Oseon. He thumbed a communicator switch.

  “Vuffi Raa?”

  The robot was below, out on the concrete, supervising the last of the fueling operation. “Yes, Master?” came his voice.

  “Don’t call me Master.” He’d sell the fishing rods to somebody—there wouldn’t be a scheduled import duty if there wasn’t some market, no matter how small. Too bad no one needed tinklewood radio antennas. Not surprisingly, he’d learned the agricultural planet would pay top credit for the contents of his ship’s waste-cycling system. “Get up here and give me a hand, will you? We’ve got a thousand hides to chop up and several hundred crates of jelly to put down the disposal.”

  He’d used his own communications equipment, once they were out of the atmosphere of Dilonexa XXIII, saving several hundred credits in the process. Doluff was delighted that Lando was on the way, and promised a high-stakes game in the most luxurious of surroundings. Lando shaved and showered, dressed himself in civilian clothing, though they were still several days’ transit from the Oseon. He simply wanted to get the feeling back of doing what he was properly cut out to do. As Vuffi Raa droided the controls, Lando sat in the lounge practicing with the cards.

  There were seventy-eight of these, in five suits: Sabres, Staves, Flasks, and Coins, plus the special suit of face cards with negative values. The object was to build a two- or three-card hand adding up to twenty-three, no more. What made it especially difficult was that the cards were “smart”—each was, in fact, a sophisticated electronic chip capable of changing randomly to another value, while the card it replaced changed to something else. This made for a fast-paced, nerve-wracking game combining elements of skill and fortune.

  Lando thought of it as relaxing.

  He held up a card, watched it blur and shift and refocus, from Commander of Staves to Three of Coins. In the surface field of a gaming table, the cards would retain their identities. This was necessary for scoring: imagine tossing down a perfect twenty-three, only to have it transmute itself into a losing hand.

  Another card, the Seven of Sabres. It stayed its old familiar self for rather a longish time, finally changed into Endurance, one of the negative cards. Lando shuffled it back into the deck.

  The Oseon, he thought: I should know a great deal more about it and its people. Principally, what the traffic will bear. He turned from the cards to a datalink, punched a few buttons. There it was: oh, yes! While it might be remarkable for its rich inhabitants, it was downright famous for its seasonally spectacular scenery.

  Oseon was the home of the Flamewind.

  Many stellar systems have asteroid belts, where whole planets have come unglued or never quite managed to coalesce. Circular zones occupied by rocks rather than worlds, their constituents could range in size from sand grains to objects hundreds—even thousands—of kilometers in extent. Some few systems had more than one such belt.

  The Oseon had nothing else.

  In the Oseon there were no planets at all in the proper sense of the word. Not even the Core knew what disaster had taken place there, perhaps billions of years before the advent of humankind. Maybe a rogue star had passed too close, its gravity well disrupting the planet-forming process. Maybe some unique element in the makeup of the system had caused the planets to blow themselves up.