Star Wars - Lando Calrissian and the Mindharp of Sharu Page 2

  “I’ve seen dinosaurs,” Arun Feb interrupted. “On Trammis III.” The gigantic reptiloids of Trammis III were famous the galaxy over, and a chuckle circulated around the table.

  “I take it, however,” Lando said as he shuffled and dealt the cards, then watched the bets pile up again, “that you have your own theories.” Somehow the talk of treasure seemed to have loosened up the pursestrings a bit, except perhaps for Vett Fori and her assistant. The gambler took a puff of his cigarillo. “Would you mind talking about them?”

  The anthropologist looked as if he wouldn’t mind at all, even if requested to discourse standing barefoot on a large cake of ice while his ample gray hair were set on fire.

  “Well, sir, the ruins, for all that they are ubiquitous, are impenetrable, closed completely on all sides without a sign of entryway. I daresay that all the collected treasures of a million years of advanced alien culture await the first adventurer to gain admittance. I don’t mind confessing to you all that I attempted it myself on several occasions. But the ruins are not only impenetrable, they are absolutely obdurate. No known tool or energy yields so much as a smudge upon their surfaces. I’ll see that, and raise five hundred. Constable?”

  Grudgingly, the policeman threw in five hundred credits’ worth of tokens. Lando saw the bet with mild amazement and raised it a hundred credits himself.

  “Sabacc!”

  Hmmm. Things were looking up a little. He was now ahead two thousand credits. He dealt the cards a third time, wondering what prospects for a gambler might be met in the Rafa. The idea was tempting: only a handful of straight-line lightyears to navigate across, and, if he recalled correctly, a major spaceport with good technical facilities—which to him meant landing assistance from Ground Control. The Millennium Falcon was completely new to him. He’d be playing cards in the Dela System this very moment if he weren’t such an abysmally amateurish astrogator and ship-handler. He’d balked at the long, complicated voyage and reputedly tricky approach to a mountaintop landing field, despite well-founded rumors of rich pickings in an atmosphere friendly to his profession.

  But the Rafa …

  He won the third hand and a fourth, was now ahead some fifty-five hundred credits. The prospects of action seemed to be encouraging him, and he wasn’t noticing the heat as much anymore.

  “Oh, I say, Captain Calrissian …” It was Whett again. As the stakes mounted, the anthropologist seemed the only one whose interest in desultory conversation hadn’t lagged.

  “Yes?” Lando answered, shuffling and dealing the cards.

  “Well, sir, I … that is, I find myself somewhat embarrassed financially at this moment. You see, I have exceeded the amount of cash I allowed myself for the evening’s entertainment, and I—”

  Lando sat back disappointed, drew on his cigarillo. It was too much, he reflected, to have expected to get rich off this emaciated college professor. “I move around too much to extend credit, Ottdefa.”

  “I appreciate that fully, sir, and wish to … well, how much would you consider allowing on a Class Two multi-phasic robot, if one may ask?”

  “One may indeed ask,” the gambler replied evenly. “Thirty-seven microcredits and a used shuttle pass. I’m not in the hardware business, my dear Ottdefa.” There was an idea, however: he could rent a pilot droid to get the ship from here to the Rafa—or wherever else he decided to go. He reconsidered. A Class Two was worth a good deal, perhaps half again the value of his spaceship. In these circumstances …

  “All right, then, a kilocred—not a micro more. Take it or leave it.”

  The Professor looked displeased, opened his mouth to bargain Lando up, examined the determined expression on the gambler’s face, and nodded. “A kilo, then. I haven’t any use for the thing in any event, it was attempting to help me break into the Sharu ruins, and I—”

  “Will you have a card, Supervisor Fori?” Lando interrupted.

  “I’m out; this game’s gotten too rich for me, and I’m on shift in fifteen minutes.” Much the same was true for Arun Feb. They sat through the hand, enjoying watching somebody else lose for once.

  Osuno Whett, however, bet heavily with his borrowed thousand, perhaps in an attempt to tap the gambler out. He was assisted in this by Constable Phuna. The money on the table grew and grew as Lando met their every raise, increasing the stakes himself. He wanted the game over with, one way or the other.

  He’d dealt himself a Two of Sabres and a Four of Coins, taking an additional card after his two opponents had accepted them. Abruptly, the Four became a Three of Flasks, and his extra, which had been a Nine of Staves, transformed itself into the Idiot.

  “Sabacc!” Lando cried in double triumph. To judge from the money on the table before him, and the lack of it in front of Whett and Phuna, that was the game. “Where can I pick up that droid, Ottdefa? I’m going to put it to work immediately as a naviga—”

  “On Rafa IV, Captain. I left it in the custody of a storage-locker company, intending to sell it there or send for it—now, please don’t get angry! I have here the title and an official tax assessment indicating its true value. You may take these with you, or use them to get a fair price for the robot here!”

  Lando had risen, violence flitting briefly—very briefly—through his mind. That he had been gulled like any amateur was his first coherent thought. That he had a small but powerful pistol secreted beneath his decorative cummerbund was his second. That he could wind up dead, or in jail, on this sweltering fistful of slag was his third.

  There wasn’t time for a fourth.

  “Hold on there, son!” the Constable said, seizing Lando’s arm. “No need for any uproar. We’re all friends here.” He pointed with his free hand to the papers Whett had proferred. “The Ottdefa here can post bond to you in the full amount of—say, what’s this?”

  Lando felt something small, round, and cool thrust up beneath his embroidered sleeve. He glanced down just as Phuna was pretending to remove it, and groaned. It was a flat, smooth-cornered disk a centimeter thick, perhaps four centimeters in diameter. He knew precisely what it was, although he’d never owned one in his life.

  “A cheater!” the indignant Constable exclaimed. “He had a cheater all the time! He could change the faces of the cards to suit him any time he wanted! No wonder—”

  With a feral snarl, Osuna Whett took advantage of the asteriod’s minimal gravity, launching himself across the table at Lando. Just as his skinny frame was halfway to its target, a dirty denym jacket flopped over his head, followed by a knobbly set of knuckles belonging to Arun Feb’s right hand. There was a dull thump of contact and a muffled squeak from the anthropologist.

  “Get out of here, kid!” Feb shouted. “I saw Phuna plant the cheater on you!”

  The lawman whirled on Feb, fist upraised. Apparently Vett Fori trusted her assistant’s judgment—and knew how to maneuver in the absence of gravitic pull. She snatched up the nearest solid object—which happened to be the anthropologist’s already battered head—and dashed it sideways against the startled cranium of the police officer. Eyes crossed, he collapsed, drifting slowly to the floor. Still holding Whett by the occipital region, Fori pried the wad of official-looking papers from the unconscious scientist’s fingers.

  “Take these and get your ship out of the Oseon, Lando. I’ll talk sense with Phuna when he comes around. He’s crooked, but he isn’t crazy. Besides, in theory, he works for me.”

  It wasn’t the first rapid exit Lando had made in his brief but eventful career. However, it was passing rare for those whose money he had taken to assist him at it. With a pang of gratitude—and the feeling he’d regret it later—he made to toss his winnings back on the table beside the insensate Ottdefa.

  “Don’t you dare!” Vett Fori growled. “You want us to think you didn’t win it fair and square?” Behind her, Arun Feb tapped Phuna on the pate again with a stainless steel water carafe, tunk! He looked up from the pleasant occupation and nodded confirmation.

  Land
o grinned, waved a wordless farewell on his way out the door. Twenty minutes later, he was aboard the Millennium Falcon, bolting down a very hastily rented pilot droid. Ten minutes after that, he was above the plane of the ecliptic, blasting out of the Oseon System and headed for the Rafa. It was the last place Whett would look for him.

  He told himself.

  • I •

  GOLD-BRAIDED FLIGHT CAP carefully adjusted to a rakish angle, a freshly suave and debonair Captain Lando Calrissian bounded down the boarding ramp of the ultra-lightspeed freighter Millennium Falcon—and cracked his forehead painfully on the hatchcoaming.

  “Ouch! By the Eternal!” Staggered, he glanced discreetly around, making sure no one had seen him, and sighed. Now what the deuce was it Ground Control had wanted him to look at?

  They’d put it rather ungenteelly …

  “What’s that garbage on your thrust-intermix cowling, Em Falcon, over?”

  Well, it had been something they could say without insulting references to the amateurish way he’d skidded, setting her down on the Teguta Lusat tarmac. Atmospheric entry hadn’t been anything to brag about, either. Gambler he may have been, scoundrel perhaps, and what he preferred thinking of as “con artiste.”

  But ship-handler he was definitely not.

  He frowned, reminded of that rental pilot droid he’d wasted a substantial deposit on, back in the Oseon. Let ’em try to collect the rest of that bill!

  Stepping—gingerly this time—around the hydraulic ramp lifter, he backed away from under the smallish cargo vessel (which invariably reminded him of a bloated horseshoe magnet), shading his eyes with one hand.

  Intermix cowling … intermix cowling … now where in the name of Chaos would you find—

  “Yeek!”

  The noise had come from Lando, not the hideous leathery excrescence that had attached itself to his ship. It merely flapped and fluttered grotesquely, glaring down at him with malevolent yellow eyes as it scrabbled feebly at the hull, unaccustomed to the gravity of Rafa IV.

  Two hideous leathery excrescences!

  Four!

  Lando pelted back up the ramp, slamming the Emergency Close lever and continuing to the cockpit. The right-hand seat was temporarily missing, in its place bolted the glittering and useless Class Five pilot droid, its monitor lights blinking idiotically.

  “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,” the robot smirked, despite the daylight pouring through the vision screens from outside, “and welcome aboard the pleasure yacht Arleen, now in interstellar transit from Antipose IX to—”

  The young gambler snarled with frustration, slapped the pilot’s OFF switch, and threw himself into the left acceleration couch, just as one of the disgusting alien parasites began suckering its way across the windscreen, fang corrosives clouding the transparency.

  “Ground Control? I say, Ground Control! What the devil are these things?”

  A long, empty pause. Then Lando remembered: “Oh, yes … over!”

  “They’re mynocks, you simpering groundlubber! You’re supposed to shake them off in orbit! Now you’ve violated planetary quarantine, and you’ll have to take care of it yourself: nobody’s gonna dirty his—”

  With a growl of his own, Lando punched the squelch button. If they weren’t going to help him, he could do without their advice. Mynocks … ah, yes: tough, omnivorous creatures, capable of withstanding the rigors of hard vacuum and Absolute temperatures. They were the rats of space, attaching themselves to unwary ships, usually in some asteroid belt.

  The Oseon System was nothing but asteroids!

  Hitching a ride from sun to sun, planet to planet, mynocks typically—

  Good grief! He jumped up, banging his head again, this time on the overhead throttle board—stupid place to put it!—and made quick, if clumsy progress aft to the engine area. He’d just remembered something else he’d read or heard about mynocks: subjected to planet-sized gravity, they collapsed, dying rapidly …

  After reproducing.

  In a locker, he found a vacuum-tight worksuit, also scrounged up a steamhose and couplings. Shucking into the greasy plastic outfit—a pang of regret: he was ruining his mauve velvoid semiformals!—he ratcheted the steamline to a reactor let-off, cranked open the topside airlock, and, trailing hose, clambered out onto the hull.

  A mynock waited greedily for him, alerted by the unavoidable rumble of the hatch cover, its spore sacs shiny and distended. It was ugly, perhaps a meter across, winged like a bat, tailed (if that was the proper word for it) like a stingray, poison-toothed like a—

  “Yeek!” The mynock, this time.

  It floundered toward him, dragging itself along by a ventral sucker-disk. The only thing uglier than mynocks, Lando thought, were the larvae they spawned on planet surfaces. He leaped as it flicked a clawed wingtip at him, his awkwardness aboard ship bred more of unfamiliarity in a new environment than any native lack of agility. He twisted the hose nozzle, spraying the monster with superheated vapor from the Falcon’s thermal-exchange system.

  It screamed and writhed, flesh melting away to expose the cartilage it used instead of bones. This, too, reduced quickly, washed down the curved surface of the ship, leaving nothing but gelatinous slime steaming on the spaceport asphalt.

  A noise behind him.

  Side vision impaired by the suit, Lando whirled just in time to ram the nozzle into a second mynock’s gaping maw. It swelled and burst. Fastidiously, he played steam over himself to remove the dissolving organic detritus, then stalked grimly forward, finally destroying seven of the sickening things in all.

  “Good going, Ace!” Teguta Lusat Ground Control sneered through his helmet receiver as he wiggled back through the upper airlock hatchway. “Didn’t you get an instruction booklet when you sent your box-tops in for that pile of junk you’re flying? Over.”

  Pile of junk?

  The only pile of junk in the neighborhood, thought Lando, sweating in his bulky armor as he cranked the hatch back down and stowed the steamlines, was that brainless rent-a-bot up forward. Hmmm. That gave him an idea.

  “Hello, Ground Control,” he warbled pleasantly from the cockpit only seconds after worming back out of the plastic vac-suit. “I’ll have you know that this stout little vessel’s often made the run to your overrated mudball in record-breaking time.”

  Once upon a time. At least that’s what her former owner claimed, trying to bid up the battered freighter’s pot value in a sabacc game he was losing badly. Lando’s rented droid had failed miserably to coax anything near the advertised velocities out of the ship.

  Probably some trick to it.

  “By the way,” Lando continued, “I seem to have the knack of handling this baby now. Would anyone care to purchase a practically new pilot droid? Over?”

  “We’ve heard that one before, Millennium Eff. That rental outfit in the Oseon may not maintain offices here, but they’ve got treaty rights. You’ll have to send it back fast-freight. Expensive. Over and out.”

  It wasn’t quite as bad as he’d expected.

  Lando shipped the droid back slow-freight, balancing the extra rental time against the transportation costs. Evening had begun to fall before he’d taken care of that, plus all of the complicated official paperwork attendant upon grounding an interstellar spacecraft anywhere the word “civilized” is considered complimentary.

  Tonight, he’d relax.

  He needed it, after traveling with that confounded robot. Get a feel for the territory—by which he meant identifying potential marks, locating those social gatherings that others foolishly regarded as games of chance.

  Tomorrow, he’d take care of business.

  The Rafa System was famous for three things: its “life-crystals”; the peculiar orchards from which they were harvested; and what might have been called “ruins” if the colossal monuments left by the Sharu hadn’t remained in such excellent repair.

  The crystals were nothing special—as long as you regarded quadrupling human life expectancy
“nothing special.” Varying from pinhead to fist-sized, their mere presence near the body was said to enhance intelligence (or stave off senility) and to have some odd effect on dreaming.

  They could be cultivated only on the eleven planets, assorted moons, and any other rocks that offered sufficient atmosphere and warmth, of the Rafa System.

  The life-orchards themselves were nearly as famous—after the manner of guillotines, disintegration chambers, nerve racks, and electric chairs. It was not the sort of agriculture amenable to automation—the crystals were harvestable only under the most debilitating and menial of conditions. However, the operation was attractive financially because it came with its own built-in sources of cheap labor, two, to be exact: the subhuman natives of the Rafa, plus the criminal and political refuse of a million other systems.

  The Rafa was, among its other distinctive features, a penal colony where a life sentence meant certain death.

  That much was known by every schoolchild in civilized space—at least that minority with an unhealthily precocious bent for unwholesome trivia, Lando reflected as he secured the Falcon for the night. He strolled across the still-warm asphalt to the fence-field surrounding the spaceport, intending to catch public transport into Teguta Lusat, capital settlement of the system-wide colony.

  An old, old man dressed only in what appeared to be a tattered loin-cloth, hunched over a pushbroom at the margin of the tarmac. He looked up dully for a moment as Lando strode by, then back at the ground, and resumed pushing dead leaves and bits of gravel around to no apparent purpose.

  Slanting sunset caught odd angles of the multicolored alien architecture that constituted foreground, background, and horizon everywhere one cared to look on this planet. Pyramids, cubes, cylinders, spheres, ovoids, each surface was a different brilliant hue. The least of the monumental structures was vastly larger than the greatest built by living beings anywhere in the known galaxy. What passed for a town lay wedged uncomfortably into the narrow spaces between them.

  Under a scattering of stars, Lando stepped lightly aboard the open-sided hoverbus, arrayed in his second-best blue satyn uniform trousers, bloused over bantha-hide knee boots. He wore a soft white broad-sleeved tunic, dark velvoid vest. Tucked into his stylish cummerbund was enough universal credit to get him into a semihealthy table game—and the tiny five-charge stingbeam that was all the weapon he ordinarily allowed himself. Those who carried bigger guns tended, in Lando’s brief but highly observant experience, to think with them instead of their brains.