“Chewie!” Han yelled.
The Wookiee slammed both fists on the control panel and roared.
“No, we can’t turn around,” Han said. “I don’t care what the Trandoshans did to the Wookiees. Okay, easy, easy! Of course I care what they did, but we can’t deal with that right now, Chewie. We’ve got cargo to deliver, and payment to collect, and we also don’t have the firepower it would take to go head-to-head with these guys. Okay?”
Chewie grumbled and the Falcon blasted forward.
“I promise we can go after those reptilian freaks some other time, all right?”
Chewie yelped.
“And anyway,” Sana said over the comm, “those two ships with him…”
“TIE fighters?” Han yelled, gaping at the monitor. “Chewie, make the jump! I’ve had it with this—” The Falcon shook, cockpit lights flickering as several alarms bleeped out at once. “Chewie, get us out of here!”
Chewie roared, slamming the control panels. The stars slid into elongated stripes toward them and Han exhaled for what felt like the first time in hours.
Chewbacca muttered something under his breath and Han shook his head. “You ain’t kidding.” He clicked on the comm. “Sana!”
“You don’t have to yell,” Sana said, poking her head into the cockpit. “I’m right here.”
Han and Chewie both spun around and glared at her. “You have some explaining to do.”
“AND SEVEN IS TEN,” LANDO said, dropping another small wooden tile on the kirgatz board. He let out a lavish chuckle. “Which makes this a Crimson Rush, I’m sorry to say.” He sat back, arms crossed over his chest, and grinned at the old Mon Cal across the table from him. “What you got there, Zo?”
“Ahhh…” Those great big bulbous eyes on either side of Admiral Zo Ryda’s face glinted with joy as he chuckled and shook his head. “Lando, Lando, Lando…”
“This guy,” the Besalisk to Lando’s left grumbled, elbowing Zo with one of his four huge arms. “Always with the teeth and the smiles and the hehehe.” His whole wide face turned into a sharp reptilian grin.
The early-afternoon sun slid languidly past laundry dangling across the alley walls. Above them, neighbors called from one window to another, discussing politics both local and galactic, and debating who would be the new podracing champion.
Zo shrugged. “He can chuckle all he wants. But chuckling won’t make a Crimson Rush beat”—with much fanfare, he very carefully and achingly placed each of his wooden tiles on the board one after another—“a Damakian Tide!”
The Besalisk, Barpa, busted out laughing. So did old Sev Cataban, whom everyone swore had to be a distant relative of Lando’s (he wasn’t) because they looked so much alike (they didn’t).
“Well, that’s just perfect,” Lando grumbled, shoving his stash of credits across the table to Zo. “The one hand that outplays the Rush.”
“A toast!” Sev said as the laughter died down. “To our old buddy Lando here, the big-time war hero…”
Lando waved Sev away. “Oh, come on now!”
“…droid impresario…”
“I mean…”
“…former baron administrator of Cloud City…”
“Well, yes, that too,” Lando admitted.
“And most important…”
Lando shook his head. “Here we go.”
“…absolute scoundrel!”
“Just like us,” Barpa grunted with pride.
“Just like us!” the other two echoed, and then three glasses clinked over the table, spilling a fair amount over the blocks and credits alike.
Lando clinked with each of them in turn and then stood, accepting his honors with gracious nods and slight bows in all directions. “You old so-and-sos are too kind.”
“Ah,” Zo said, “we just love you ’cause you let us win all the time.”
Lando stepped back, brow furrowed. “I think you have me mistaken for someone who doesn’t care about winning, Zo. Do you really think I can just throw money away like that—or that even if I couldn’t, I would?”
More laughter, and Barpa slammed the table hard enough to send all forty-six kirgatz tiles flying, which led to a momentary pause as everyone watched the pieces fly through the air and come clattering down around them, and then they all burst out laughing again.
“How is it,” Han Solo said, walking up the alleyway toward them, “that I’ve lived here for three years and know a small handful of people at best and you swing by for a day and a half and have three best friends for life?”
For a moment, Lando traded glances with the three old veterans. “Bah,” Barpa snorted. “We just pretend to like him ’cause he’s old Sev’s nephew.”
Lando sighed and rubbed his face. “No, I’m—”
“Oh, second cousin, was it?” Zo suggested.
“Maybe,” Lando said with a glint in his eye, “it’s because I let them win.”
Zo laughed so hard he fell backward off his stool and the other three had to help him up while Han shook his head. “Are you ready to go or do you want to hang around for another round getting your ass handed to you?”
“Come join us, Han,” Barpa called, waving a thick green arm and snorting. “We can hand you your ass, too!”
“I’m good,” Han said, waving them off. “I get that enough from the pilot's union.”
“All right, all right.” Lando finished placing Zo back on his stool and strode over to Han. “I’m out. But I don’t know how you’re all gonna decide who’s going to lose when you don’t have me around.”
Sev shrugged. “We’ll figure it out. And Barpa’s always here to take the fall if no one else does, whether he wants to or not.”
“Hey!” Barpa snarled. Then he shrugged a concession. “Probably true though, yeah.”
“Do you let them win?” Han asked once they’d walked out of earshot.
“Yeah, but only to stay in practice. Losing on purpose is one of the hardest things to do, quiet as it’s kept. Here.” Lando pulled a rusty crash helmet with a tinted face guard out of his pack as they strolled out of the alley and into the bustling streets of Hanna City.
“Can we not do helmets?” Han said. “This is really…a lot, man.” They crossed an avenue, rounded a corner, and walked into the crowded shuttle station. A garbled robotic voice blurted out departure times over the intercom. Beggars, commuters, pilots, and smugglers bustled back and forth around them.
“Do you want to be recognized shopping for a stolen New Republic prisoner transport freighter in the most notorious rogue pilot satellite saloon in the Core Worlds?”
Han pulled the heavy metal contraption over his head and yanked down the face guard. “Well, when you put it like that…”
He’d hated helmets since his time as a serviceman on Mimban. Even the tiny nod he’d just given had knocked him off balance, and it always threw him for a loop not being able to effectively scowl at people. Lando was definitely exaggerating about Frander’s Bay—it was notorious, sure, but orbiting the planet where the Galactic Senate resided had blown most of their street cred—but he still had a point.
“All I’m saying is,” Lando said, pulling a helmet over his own head, “I took your wife at her word when she said this has to be under the radar.” They found hangar eighty-eight and boarded a harried-looking transport shuttle.
“You said this has to be under the radar,” Han reminded him.
“Well, she agreed.”
“Welcome to the Frander’s Bay Shuttle,” the pilot droid droned as they sat on a ripped dewback-hide bench beside a scowling Neimoidian.
“Anyway,” Lando said, “what’d you think of Kaasha?”
The Neimoidian glared at them, beady eyes surrounded by dusty pale-green skin and a metallic breathing apparatus. “Brrocacha!”
“Excuse you,” Han sna
pped. He turned back to Lando. “Seems like she has a good head on her shoulders. Which makes me wonder what she’s doing with you.”
“Har har.”
“Balance, I guess?”
“Please secure your restraining belts,” the pilot droid announced. “This is a classic Model Eleven Corellian transport shuttle. Ignite engine rotors.”
Han made a face. “Model Eleven? That’s from like…”
The whole shuttle shook and the lights blinked as they lifted away from the docking bay. Something wiry and important-looking fell from an opening in the ceiling.
“…the Old Republic,” Han finished.
“Great,” Lando said. “We’re all gonna die.”
Thirty gut-rumbling minutes later, they stumbled off the shuttle into the dim front grotto of the satellite, where small-time hustlers had set up tables full of various scrap metal and damaged starship doodads.
“Man,” Lando said, throwing his back against a wall and exhaling. “I thought you Corellians were supposed to be the best starship makers in the galaxy.”
“Oh, we are,” Han said. “But imagine how many times that ol’ boat has gone back and forth between here and the main terra. A ship from any other of these ragtag wannabe shipyard planets would’ve been scrap metal by now.”
“I take your point.” Lando shook off the roiling nausea of nearly dying and straightened his maroon dress shirt. “Now listen. We just need a pilot with a—”
“Imagine two of the greatest pilots in the galaxy looking to hire a pilot.” Han shook his head. “It just feels wrong.”
Lando put a comforting hand on his shoulder. “I know, old man. But perk up, at least no one will know it’s you.”
“Yeah, but…wait a minute.” Han looked up. The trading bazaar stretched off down a dank corridor in a series of makeshift tents and dangling display cages. “Didn’t you say the droid that got the jump on you back in Cloud City was wearing a dark-green hooded cloak?”
“Yeah, why?”
Han took off into the bazaar, pushing his way through a crowd of Teek and dodging a lumbering Kullp. “What is it?” Lando called, heading after him.
“Last time I was here…” Han said.
“Wait, why would you come to Frander’s Bay?”
“Recruiting pilots for the guild.”
“Heh. How’d that go?”
“Not so well. Turns out a lot of these guys aren’t all their barkers make them out to be.”
“You mean to tell me,” Lando demanded, “that someone who is paid to say good things about a pilot isn’t always telling the truth?”
“I know,” Han yelled over the din and rattle of a marching band made up of little horned Gotals playing pipes and throngo drums. “Shocking. I just wanted to shake up the standard, rebel-trained protocol mavens and get some new blood in the system. Anyway, there was an old Toydarian telling fortunes for change out here. Popsies? Popatee? Everyone said he was top-notch, and I saw him once; the guy didn’t have wings, and he was wearing a dark-green hooded cloak.”
“Like…that one?” Han followed Lando’s glare to where a tall hooded figure made his way through the crowds up ahead. They shoved their way forward, upsetting a table of poached nuna eggs and ducking beneath a low-slung Karvathian sequined tarp.
“Over there,” Han said. The robed figure disappeared into a narrow side corridor. “Come on!” They turned into the alley, past more random knickknacks spread out on carpets and stacked in chaotic towers amid the smoke-stained air.
Lando drew his blaster as they approached, keeping it low and out of sight. If this was the same droid as the one who’d jumped him, he would make sure to repay every wretched moment of that experience with interest. And for Kaasha, too. The figure turned to the side just as they were closing, and Lando glimpsed a pale human face beneath the hood.
“Ah ah ahhh!” a voice wheezed from the ground in front of them. Lando holstered his blaster. Two yellow eyes peered up over a dangly, wrinkled snout. “Aheeeee you must have come for to have your future divined, hmm?”
“Ah yes!” Han said. “My friend Varto here did, actually.”
“Varto,” Lando repeated, disgusted. “Yes, indeed.”
“Very good!” the Toydarian chortled. “Very very good! Svindar, make our two guests at home, yes?”
The hooded man bowed, then retrieved two pillows from behind a tarp and placed them in front of a circular stone tablet with grooved lines etched into it. He motioned for Han and Lando to sit.
“I am Poppy Delu,” the Toydarian said. “Many call me the greatest diviner in the galaxy, and you know…” He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply, then opened them again. “They are right!” Poppy let out a cackle that sent his dangling snout flapping.
Han and Lando lowered themselves onto the cushions.
“It’s fine, it’s fine,” Poppy said, still chuckling. “No need to remove your helmets. Vazaveer, the Path of Metal and Bone, does not require a face to be seen, you know.”
“Path of…what now?”
“Never mind, youuu,” Poppy crooned. “If you don’t know, well, maybe one day ah—you will know, hm? One can hope. Anyway…Aaahhh…” He closed his eyes again, then lowered his cowl to reveal a bulbous forehead. “Now let me see…” Eyes still closed, he fished around in his green robes, then pulled his hands back out and, stern gaze on Lando, presented three small objects. Tiny colorful wires wrapped in and out of yellowed bone fragments and rusted bolts; some ended in what looked like miniature memory chips and power couplers, others in sparkling metal fibers. “These are what we call the Vazaveer fichas,” he explained. “Each is sacred. They are made up of parts of the Original Dozen.”
“Original…?” Lando tried.
Poppy hushed him. “As such, they are still touched by dust from the land of plains and chasms, blessed by microfibers of the Dozen and the Original Master! The unifying power of the original source of our new era flows through them, much like what many organics foolishly call”—he raised both hands, crooking all six fingers into crude quotation marks, and rolled his eyes—“ah, the Force!”
“Oh, that ol’ thing,” Lando said, shrugging.
“This is the Malcontent,” Poppy said, holding up a humanish metacarpal with red and black strands circling it loosely. “It means the house wins and you lose.”
“Lose what?” Lando asked.
“Everything,” Poppy said with a wiggle of his eyebrows. “This is the Neuronaught.” A thighbone encased in fiberwire and dried strands of ligament. “It is a neutral. It means the house takes half and you take half.”
“Half of everything,” Han said.
“Now you’re getting it,” Poppy agreed. “And this is the Octopent.” A small beaked skull with eight wires stretching out from a metal base piece, tiny pincers at the end of each. “It means you win and the house loses, eh?”
“I thought this was divination,” Lando said. “Looks more like gambling to me.”
Poppy opened one eye very wide and leaned in toward Lando. “What’s wrong, you don’t like, ah—the gambling?”
“Heh, that’s not something that could ever be said about me, no.”
“What is divination anyway, if not gambling, hm?”
“I mean…” Lando started.
“If you win at gambling, your future is bright, is it not?”
“Well, when you put it that way…” Han said.
Lando grinned at the Toydarian. “That’s a philosophy I can get down with.”
Poppy chuckled to himself as he emptied a small cloth sack full of old screws and bolts onto the divining plate and started shuffling them around beneath his palm. “Money,” he said, without looking up.
Lando slid fifty credits onto the tablet.
Poppy nodded approvingly. “Ahh, a true gambling man. Very nice. Yes, ye
s. Now you take these.” Still swirling the rusted metal pieces beneath his palm, he placed the three bricolage figurines into Lando’s hands. “And when I say drop them, you simply let them fall onto the board, yes? Don’t whip them, like your wily-hearted friend here would’ve done if he had the chance, hehehe…”
“Hey!” Han snapped.
“Just simply let them fall, yes? As a tree lets go of her leaves, hmm.”
A strange wave of calm swept over Lando. He nodded.
“Aaand release,” the Toydarian croaked, pulling his hand away from the board.
Lando dropped the three pieces and they clattered down amid the screws and bolts.
“Waaaiiit,” Poppy cautioned as all the pieces settled. “Waaait. Ah! All right, let me see let me see here.” The Neuronaught lay closest to Lando, surrounded by a cluster of bolts and screws. The Octopent and Malcontent lay off to the side amid scattered metal bits. “It saaays…ah! You are going to die!”
“Wait, what?” Lando said.
Poppy let out a wild peal of laughter. “I kid! Aha! Just in jest, yes? Ahahahahaha!”
Lando and Han traded glances, each sure the other shared his skeptical snarl beneath the helmet.
“Sort of,” Poppy conceded. “No, no, with seriousness now, eh? It says: You will come to a crossroads, hm? And there you will have a choice, yes?”
“Sounds pretty generic,” Lando said.
“And in this choice, you who once walked the neutral path, the road that is neither this nor that, will suddenly demand a road that is all roads at once. It is a road that some call death, eh? That is why the joke, hehehe, but really, it only means the kind of death that must happen before one is born again.”
“I could’ve sworn I gave up being neutral three years ago when I joined the Rebel Alliance, but what do I know?”
Eyes suddenly narrowed to slits, the Toydarian reached across the tablet and bapped Lando on the shoulder. “Not neutral in war, you swamp slug.”
“Hey!” Lando jerked away.
Poppy held up one finger. “Neutral.” Another. “In.” Then the third. “Love.”
“Oh,” Lando and Han both said at the same time.
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