Star Wars - The Adventures of Lando Calrissian 02 - Lando Calrissian and the Flamewind of Oseon

by L. Neil Smith

  He hopped over the fence, stirring the lawn lice with the power of his wings and making them complain in their mewling tones. There were thousands of them, of course. It was a well-kept lawn of a lovely shade of magenta, alive with crawling, rustling legs.

  He went inside the house.

  The Falcon seemed to be flying in right triangles as the Flamewind shifted from orange to red. Lando caught it in the act that time, blinked as many-branched lightning bolts blasted all around the ship.

  He fought the urge to seize the controls as the apparent geometry of the Falcon's flight path shifted with the colors from triangles to something indescribable that would nauseate a pretzel-bender. Well, I'll be damned, he thought, we're traveling on the inside surface of a Klein bottle.

  Or so it felt.

  Satisfied that the ship was flying true to course (or at least resigned to trusting its computer), he bent down and put his head next to the safe.

  “Vuffi Raa?”

  “Yes, Master?” the robot answered meekly, its voice severely muffled by the metal door and barely audible over the Flamewind's titanic howling.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I'm all right,” the box said. “How are things with you?”

  “I'm having a wonderful time, wish you were here. I - by the Galaxy Itself! Hold on, I'll get back to you if we live!”

  Directly ahead of the Millennium Falcon was a vision out of a nightmare. But it was no illusion. Half a kilometer wide, the thing loomed up out of the glowing star-fog and ominous red glow like an impossible spider with too many legs.

  It seemed to be a starship engine attached to a great number of obsolete one-man fighters. Even as he watched, the smaller craft detached themselves, leaped toward the freighter, their energy-guns spewing destruction. These were no remote-control pirate drones. These were the real thing.

  And they were ready and eager to kill.

  XI

  STEADILY THE MOTLEY fighter squadron bore down on the Millennium Falcon. Its instruments unreliable, bound to a predetermined course, the converted freighter was a helpless target.

  Lando reached to the panel without hesitation, flipped a bank of switches, cutting off the artificial gravity and inertial buffers. Loose items in the cockpit swirled and floated as he punched the override and took control of the ship from the computer. He couldn't see - not with the dials and gauges acting the way they were - but he could feel. He could con her by the seat of his pants.

  Whether or not they reached their destination was of secondary importance; survival came first.

  A pair of fighters streaked by, spitting fire. The Falcon's shields glowed and pulsed, absorbing the energy, feeding it into the reactors. There were limits to the amount that could be absorbed that way - in which case the reactor would come apart, taking the ship and everything within a thousand kilometers with it - but for now, each unsuccessful pass fed the Millennium Falcon's engines.

  And her guns.

  Rolling to defeat another run by the fighters, he slapped the intercom switch. “Bassi Vobah, try and reach the starboard gun-blister! I need some help with the shooting!”

  Silence.

  Diving steeply, finishing up with a flip that left four fighters soaring helplessly past the freighter, Lando realized that Vuffi Raa, in a moment of demented frustration, had wrecked the intercom. He was on his own, for the first time since acquiring the little robot.

  He wasn't liking it much.

  A pair of smaller weapons on the upper hull was controllable from the cockpit. Lando started keyboarding until he had established fire control through a pair of auxiliary pedals beneath the console. Then, turning sharply - and feeling for the first time the stresses of acceleration as it piled his blood up in odd parts of his body - he trod on the pedals, blasting away at three of the enemy as they passed.

  They kept on passing. Either Lando had missed, distracted by maneuvering the ship, or he didn't have the firepower to do the job. It was like a nightmare where you shoot the bad guy and he doesn't fall down.

  Half a dozen fighters overtook the Falcon from behind, their energy-canons rocking her. She shuddered, staggered. Lando brought her back under control, rode the shock waves out, and continued to pour fire at an enemy he saw - to no effect at all.

  He slewed the ship around, getting angry, and found he faced at least a dozen of the fast, vicious little craft, coming head on. He picked out the leader, got it in the canopy cross-hairs, and stamped on both pedals. Every move the fellow made, he matched, keeping the fighter centered, keeping the guns going.

  The enemy's nose cowling suddenly disintegrated, the small craft burst into flames, showering debris over the Falcon and his squadronmates. One of the companion vessels staggered suddenly and veered off, trailing sparks and rapidly dispersing smoke. Two with one - rather prolonged, Lando admitted to himself - shot.

  The Falcon lurched, as if lifted suddenly from behind, then stabilized as Lando applied counterthrust. Something solid had smacked her in the underside vicinity of the boarding ramp, always a weak point. He skated her in a broad horizontal loop, gave her half a roll as she came around, and there it was: another fighter, its fuselage accordioned, its engines spouting flames.

  Ramming? In this century? They must be pretty desperate. And certainly not pirates, Lando thought as he fought the ship into a better attitude to fire from. No profit in ramming.

  The bombers, then? The man he'd killed on 6845 could have been a fighter pilot. What had he done to get an entire squadron of fighter pilots angry with him?

  The Falcon jumped again. This time the instruments - if they could be relied upon - showed heavy fire being poured into the hull about where the fighter had rammed her. Sure enough, the shields, never at their strongest there, were steadily deteriorating. He rolled the ship, only to be attacked in the same place by another group of fighters. The battle was getting serious. All right, then: he hadn't anyone to help him, and a battle by attrition was a losing proposition. He only had one ship to lose.

  He'd taken the measure of the fighters. They were maneuverable and fast - more maneuverable than the freighter, that was only natural. But not as fast, either, not on a straight course.

  Trusting his feel for direction, he ironed out the circle he'd been making, rolled through three-quarters of a turn to bring him parallel to the Oseon ecliptic, and shoved all throttles to the ends of their tracks. Behind him, the sublight thrusters outshone the Flamewind for a moment. Then, from the viewpoint of the fighters, they were gone, lost in the multicolored mist.

  Lando knew his enemies - whoever they were, confound it! - would not be long in following. They'd had that gigantic antique battleship engine they were using as a collective booster. He had to think of something clever, and he had to do it fast.

  Momentarily, the Flamewind paled. They were out of the Sixth Belt where they'd begun, and crossing the narrow space between it and the Fifth Belt, their destination. Either that or they were headed from Six to Seven - Lando didn't trust his navigational capacities at the best of times, let alone now.

  No, they were headed toward the Oseon's fractious primary. His hand swept instrument switches. The screens still showed an indecipherable hash, but coming up a little to the starboard was a small cluster of asteroids, irregulars, following their own course through the belt. He modified his course to meet them.

  As he switched the instruments back off, he could see the tiny fleet of fighter craft behind him. The screen had shown him half a hundred asteroids. His naked eyes showed him half a hundred more, all small - none greater than a few kilometers - all very tightly bunched together. Taking a great chance, Lando cut straight through them until he saw a sort of miracle ahead.

  Whether it had been a single rock, struck and not quite split in half, or a pair of floating worldlets that upon colliding had not quite wholly fused, there was a clear crack around its circumference, seventy or eighty kilometers long, no more than twenty meters wide.

  Using eve
rything he had to stand her on her nose - without smearing everybody aboard into roseberry jam in the absence of inertial buffering - he steered for the crack, orienting himself correctly and establishing a tangent course to the double asteroid. At the last moment he killed everything but the attitude controls and the docking jets, brought her to a gentle stop deep within the crevasse.

  The portside windows showed a half a dozen fighters streaking past without noticing where he'd hidden. Puffing little bursts of attitude reactant, he ground the Falcon gently into place. The guns he could control he aimed at open sky. The Flamewind pulsed luridly, looking like a far-off fireworks display.

  Which is when he noticed the instruments. One by one, as he checked them, most of his instrumentation seemed to turn reliable again. He guessed his hidey-hole was an iron-nickel asteroid that acted as a shield against the storm of radiation. The protection wasn't perfect, but it was within the abilities of the ship's electronics to correct.

  He ducked his head beneath the panel, spoke loudly and distinctly.

  “Vuffi Raa, come out of there! Coffeine break's over!”

  Reconnecting the little robot's tentacles was not as easy as it was under ordinary circumstances. They themselves were sophisticated mechanisms, the equal of the fully equipped droids that drove buses and typed stories in newsrooms everywhere in the galaxy. Even deactivated, they had taken a lot of radiation, and their self-repair circuits, set in motion once they were attached to their owner, would require some hours to bring them to full efficiency.

  Lando left Vuffi Raa in the cockpit to watch for enemy strays, and wended his way around the corridor to the passenger lounge.

  Where he was greeted by utter chaos.

  It looked as though a herd of house-sized animals had stomped through. Freed of the restraint of artificial gravity, impelled by sudden changes of direction without inertial damping, everything loose in the room had collided with everything stationary at least once.

  Perhaps more than once.

  And that included Waywa Fybot and Bassi Vobah.

  Wires hung loose from ceiling and walls. Small articles of furniture had ended up in extremely strange places. The female police officer was beginning to stir. She moaned heartily, lifted herself up on an elbow, and shook her head.

  “What happened? Where are we?”

  “Two very good questions,” the captain responded. “We were attacked - I don't know by whom - and we escaped. But I don't know to where. Are you all right?” He stopped beside her, assisted her in righting herself. She breathed deeply, made a sketchy self-examination. “I don't think anything is broken - although to look at this room, that would require a small miracle. Ohhh, my head!”

  “Take it easy, you're not expected anywhere very soon. That's me: Lando Calrissian, miracles made to order. You stay there, I'm going to look at our fine feathered fuzz.”

  He rose and stepped over the debris toward Waywa Fybot's sleeping rack. In the bird-being's case, there had been something less than a miracle. Both the creature's legs were broken, in exactly the same place, apparently where a bar of the rack crossed them. The arrangement had never been intended for free-fall and high acceleration.

  Nonetheless, the avian officer seemed to have a blissful expression on his face, if Lando could rely on his interpretation of it. The gambler felt a presence at his elbow. Bassi Vobah had made it to her feet and across the room. She stood a bit unsteadily, but she wasn't leaning on anything or anybody.

  Lando liked her a little bit more for that, but not much.

  “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!”

  XII

  AND 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 him to blame for that: he'd sheared half a dozen communication and sensory antennae wiggling her in there, items that by 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.”