Star Wars: The Adventures of Lando Calrissia (14 page)

The gambler grinned wearily, accepted the proffered tentacle. “I’m gratified myself, considering some of the alternatives. But you look like you’ve been out in a meteor shower! Or is that the latest robot fashion you’re wearing?”

From eye lens to manipulator tips, the little droid was covered with small, rounded dents. Where they overlapped his joints—which was practically everywhere—his movements were a little stiff and uncertain, and he sounded, when he replied, just the slightest bit self-conscious.

“Yes, well, these arrow wounds are healing, Master. In not too many days I’ll be quite myself again. But you have suffered damage which will not be repaired so quickly. We must get you into the ship, where I can administer—”

“Hold it.” Grunting, Lando hauled on Vuffi Raa’s tentacle, pulled himself onto his knees, and, placing a palm firmly in the middle of the little robot’s lens, pressed himself upward, to his feet. He swayed a little, but he was vertical—and still had the blaster pointed straight at the constabulary contingent.

Meanwhile, Captain Jandler was beginning to do some grunting of his own. He rolled over, tears welling from his eyes and dripping on the inside of his visor, shook his head from side to side, and lay there, still doubled up.

“We’ll administer to me later, old pencil-sharpener. First we’re going to ‘administer’ to our military friend, here. He seems to be among the living, again, although how long …”

Lando offered the blaster to the droid, glancing significantly at the four undamaged troopers. “While I’m attending to Jandler, I don’t suppose you could …”

“Hold them at bay? I’m afraid not, Master. I cannot threaten a living being with bodily harm. Sorry.”

“Well, I’m not complaining, not anymore. I’ll just have to
keep an eye on them myself. But I am curious: how was it that, ten minutes ago, you could—”

“Use the
Millennium Falcon
’s armament to keep them from attacking you?”

“And to do that demolition job on the police cruiser. Neat, but a little outside your specialties, wouldn’t you say?”

Lando approached the semiconscious guard-captain, toed him not too roughly in the armored ribs. “All right, time to rise and shine! We’ve got a little talking to do!”

Vuffi Raa shambled up beside the gambler. “Master, I can watch the troopers for you, and they needn’t know I can’t initiate force against them.” The little robot continued in a louder voice, intended for a broader audience, “If one of them so much as twitches an earlobe, we’ll burn him off at the kneecaps!”

Lando chuckled, “Yeah, right up to the armpits! Just be sure”—he whispered to Vuffi Raa—“that you don’t compromise yourself into a nervous breakdown.” Then he added, more loudly, “I said get up, you!”

Jandler stirred, did some more groaning, rolled over, and sat up painfully. Wincing, he took off his helmet and wiped sweat from his face.

“Calrissian, you just plain don’t fight fair, do you?”

Lando aimed the confiscated blaster at its former owner’s nose. “I don’t like to fight at all. When I have to, I try to get it over with as quickly and neatly as possible. Now,
WHAT IN THE BLAZES IS THIS ALL ABOUT
?”

Jandler, his troopers, even Vuffi Raa jumped a little at this outburst. The police leader blinked, considered, then shook his head and sighed.

“Okay, Calrissian—I wish to perdition I knew! I’ve been sent on more crazy errands in the last couple of days than in my whole career, up until now: your hotel room, the Spaceman’s Rest, the spaceport, and now this. It puts a man in mind of retiring early, pension or not. What do
you
know about it?”

Lando squatted down on his haunches, keeping the blaster centered on Jandler. “I hate the devil to steal your line, Captain, but
I’m
asking the questions, here. Tell me, exactly where—rather, from whom—did you receive your orders, if one may ask?”

Jandler glanced quickly at his men, then back to Lando, and licked his lips. “Where do you think? From that fat son-of-a-”

“Captain!” shouted one of the cops, “you can’t—”

“The Entropy I can’t! Do you think that overstuffed chair-warmer gives a nit in a nova what happens to any of us? All he cares about is that Sharu doohicky, and if we come back without it, we might as well not come back! Well, I—”

“You mean this?” Lando drew the Key from his waistband. It gleamed in the early morning sunlight and, if anything, seemed more disorienting than before.

Lando could see the guard-captain calculating whether it was worth the risk jumping for it. He looked from the Key to his former blaster muzzle, across to Lando, up at Vuffi Raa, then back to the Key again. Finally, he shrugged.

“Let him get it for himself!” Jandler decided out loud. “Is there any way my men and I can get out of this alive, Captain Calrissian? I won’t give you those hull-scrapings about ‘just following orders again’—only, well, I’m not too fond of the idea of dying, just now. Especially since I seem destined to taste the fruits of civilian life for a while.”

Lando turned, winked at Vuffi Raa, and looked back at Jandler.

“Well, old Constable, you people do seem to present us with a problem. I’m impressed with your change of heart, but insufficiently so to be too happy about your breathing down my neck while I’m on this planet. Giving you all the Big Push would seem to be the answer—”

He held up a hand.

“—But I am highly disinclined in that direction, believe me. As you know, I am a gambler by profession, certainly no killer. I live by my wits, not by the gun, however useful the things may prove to be at times. If we can think of a way to let things work out for everybody, I’ll certainly cooperate.”

Jandler grinned, scratched his head. His men, a few yards away, seemed to relax a few notches as well.

“Now, Captain Jandler,” said Lando, “this is what I think we’ll do …”

The idea worked out better than Lando had expected.

Aboard the
Millennium Falcon
, there were several tough, inflatable life-bubbles that could be jettisoned, with air and other short-term supplies. A man could live inside one for several days in moderate discomfort. They weren’t much use if something went wrong in interstellar space, but, in the neighborhood of a solar system—where most accidents happen
anyway—they could keep one alive until assistance, summoned by an automatic radio beacon, arrived.

Lando’s original plan was to haul the constabulary contingent out a few astronomical units and abandon them in space. They’d be out of his and Vuffi Raa’s figurative hair for a few days, and yet live to tell their grandchildren about the experience. Happy ending all around.

The little droid made it happier.

“Well, Master, that takes care of that. I believe the gentlemen can go aboard now.” He was exiting a hatch in the side of a powered interplanetary cargo barge, large, dark, and rusty, in which the police team had originally traveled to Rafa V. The humble vessel’s presence had helped Vuffi Raa to locate Lando in the nick of time.

Lando transferred the blaster to his left hand, extended his right to the constabulary boss. “I suppose this is farewell, then, old bluecoat. I trust you and your comrades will enjoy the trip.”

Jandler grinned. “It beats a beam in the eye from a hot laser, Captain Calrissian—”

“Call me Lando, nobody else seems to be able to do it.”

“Lando, then. And when we get there, none of us will be in any particular hurry to report,
will we, guys
?” This last had a bit of an edge to it. The other four policemen quickly assumed a what? who, me? expression, and Lando trusted Jandler to keep them all in line. Not that it mattered. The plan was perfect.

The officers trooped aboard. Lando waved, then watched Vuffi Raa weld the hatch shut behind them.

“Thirty seconds, Master.”

“Very well, let’s get back out of the way.”

Slowly, gently, with impossible grace, the ungainly tub of a spaceship lifted from the sand, guided by a program Vuffi Raa had punched into its miniscule electronic mind. Lando glimpsed the fused and blackened end of a communications antenna, one of three the little droid had ruined. For the duration of its trip, the barge would be out of contact with the rest of the Rafa System. It would take the vessel a week to reach Rafa XI, last and least planet of the colony, a bleak ball of slush circling in the dark.

A considerable research installation had been built there, and a fairly impressive helium refinery.

“You didn’t forget the torches, did you?”

“
Please
, Master, it was difficult making myself do it, don’t rub it in.”

“Oh, very well. But sabotaging the ship’s controls was
your
idea, I’ll remind you. The cops can’t alter the taped course, and they can’t communicate with anyone until they’re close enough to do it with flashlights out the viewports. You did send along that Oseon brandy, I trust?”

“Yes, Master, and those … those …”

“Holocassettes? Absolutely imperative, old gumball machine. The scenery where they’re going is remarkably boring.” He gave a final salute as the barge lifted through a rack of rare, high cirrus clouds and disappeared.

Vuffi Raa said nothing. In truth, he was rather proud of his master for sparing the men’s lives, and especially for parting with them under somewhat cordial circumstances. Perhaps humans—this one in particular, at least—weren’t such a bad lot, after all.

“All right,” Lando said, breaking into the robot’s reverie, “let’s get moving ourselves. We’ve got to find the Toka. I’m going to kill that buzzard-necked Mohs if it’s the last thing I ever do!”

The first thing they had done, after sending off the constabulary contingent, was to attend to Lando’s wounds. Frostbite—of which he had been plentifully supplied by the previous evening’s adventure—is no minor matter, can be as serious as a blastershot under some circumstances, and, even with all the facilities of modern medicine, can lead to gangrene in a matter of hours.

The
Millennium Falcon
did not provide all the facilities of modern medicine. In a locker, Vuffi Raa discovered a portable gel-bath, miniature version of the large, full-body devices used to heal serious wounds. It would fit Lando’s feet nicely. He unfolded it in the common room and slid it under the gametable where Lando was considering a problem in Moebius chess.

Or appeared to be.

“Dash it all, Vuffi Raa, where would
you
be, on this planet, if you were an ancient savage with an angry outworlder after you?”

“I couldn’t say, Master, the inscrutabilities of the organic mind—”

“Nonsense, old android. Your mind is every bit as organic as—”

“
Please
, Master, I have done nothing to deserve insult. If you truly wish, I will consider the problem you have just posed.” Silence, then: “Why do you suppose he had us land the
Falcon
near that giant pyramid, Master?”

Lando gave up on the game, slapped the
OFF
switch, and watched the weird serpentine playing board fade and vanish from the tabletop.

“I’ve been wondering about that, myself. It’s much the largest building on the planet—perhaps, in the system, which would make it the largest in the entire galaxy, I’m sure. On the other hand, the Sharu—now
there
are some inscrutable minds for you—the Sharu may have used it to store potatoes.”

“Or the Mindharp.”

“Yes, although I’d venture that if the Mindharp were simply a device to tell the Toka to run and fetch their masters’ pipe and slippers, it wouldn’t deserve quite so august a resting place. However, one thing is certain: it
is
where that scoundrel Mohs met up with his savage cohorts. As such—”

“As such,” Vuffi Raa ventured, “it may be a wonderful place to get ambushed—again. Hold still, please, Master, while I tape your ears.”

“Leave my ears out of this, you mechanical menace, they were fine before.”

“Master, please! I am programmed to—”

“All right, all right! Then limber up your piloting appendages. We’re headed for that pyramid again. Only this time, I’m carrying
two
heavy blasters—and an umbrella to keep arrows out of the muzzles.”

Mohs wasn’t hard to find. When the
Millennium Falcon
arrived, he was sitting on a sand dune in the shadow of the pyramid, smoking a lizard.

“T
WICE HAVE
I doubted thee, O Lord, yea, even as twice hast thou proved me in error! Kill now thy miserable excuse for a servant, that he may disgrace thee no further!”

The fire, built of twigs and leaves in a scooped-out hollow in the ubiquitous reddish sand of Rafa V, was no larger than a teacup. It failed to warm Lando although he sat cross-legged not more than two feet away, trying to avoid noxious fumes rising from a branch that sported a small, disgusting reptile skewered neatly from end to end.

An ugly way to die, the gambler thought, even for a lizard. And it made an even uglier lunch.

“Look, Mohs, see me about that sometime when I’m not so tired. I may surprise you and take you up on the offer. In the meantime, are you still interested in trying to use the Key?”

“Of a certainty, Lord! Too long have my people, the wretched Toka, suffered under the tyrannical thumb of the—”

“Save it for the union meeting, Singer. All I want to know is where to put this thing. If somebody—your people, for instance—benefits, and somebody else loses as a result, well, that’s no paint off my hull, I can assure you.”

Secretly, the amateur star-captain was thoroughly enjoying the chance to use what he imagined was tough-sounding spacefaring jargon. Now that he’d had a hot meal, plenty of coffeine, and was wearing a fresh change of clean, undamaged clothes, he felt downright jaunty, even considering the miserable night he’d spent in the life-orchard.

“I don’t give a hiccup out the airlock, even if
Gepta
benefits, as long as I get out of this confounded system with a full cargo and a whole skin—not necessarily in that order, mind you.”

Mohs had started a little at the mention of the sorcerer’s name. Now he positively reeled, managing to wring his bony hands at the same time. “O Lord, they servant knoweth full well that thou sayest these cynical things only as a test of my faith, fortitude, and other virtues—”