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.”
Dejectedly, Waywa Fybot handed over a few credits. “But that's ridiculous,” he said in his ridiculous voice. “It doesn't make sense. Two and three are five, not twenty-three, and besides, the addition of a zero-”
“That's why it's called the Idiot's Array, old passenger Pigeon,” Lando supplied. If things kept going that way, he was going to fly the ship and let Vuffi Raa do the gambling. Lando opened a flap in his tray, took a final bite of whatever it was, and slid the container into the mass recycler. “Why don't you play with them, Bassi? A three-handed game's more interesting.”
“Not on your life!” She shook her head ruefully. “I've played enough sabacc to last me a lifetime, thank you.”
“Master would it be presumptuous of me to say that your piloting of the ship earlier today was highly proficient?”
“Only if you don't call me master when you're doing it.”
Lando could not have been more pleased by this modest praise. He had been a perfectly terrible flyer when Vuffi Raa had taken him in hand - rather, in tentacle. Now, at least sometimes, it was as if he were wearing the Millennium Falcon instead of riding in her. The little droid had been mortified about his own failure to stand up to the sleet of radiation, at his momentary irrational irresponsibility.
But Lando had pointed out that even a diamond, subjected to the proper stress at the proper angle, would shatter.
He tightened down another micropole, this time on the upper surface of the Falcon, and went on to the next designated location. No bloody wonder the vessel was so vulnerable; there were a dozen spots where the fields failed to overlap properly.
Carefully he pulled his arm out of the suit sleeve, pulling at the glove with his other hand, snaked his fingers up through the collar into the helmet, and wiped perspiration off his nose.
You'd think that after all the centuries people had been wearing pressure suits that someone would have invented - a red light lit up on the surface just below his chin. Now what the devil did that mean? Great Edge! It meant a heat-sink overload! He was cooking himself to death! He examined the readouts on his left arm; everything looked nominal there. What was the matter, then? He keyed the suit's transmitter.
“Vuffi Raa, you'd better start the lock going. I've got to get out of this suit. There's something wrong!” No response.
“Vuffi Raa, do you copy?” Still no response.
Again he checked the indicators on the panel inset in his sleeve.
The communicator light was burning steadily. He hoped that his little friend was all right. The difficulty there lay in the fact that the high point of the Falcon's hull was precisely at the upper airlock. He'd had to crawl out from below, climb around the edge of the ship, to get to where he was. Now, with an apparently malfunctioning suit, he was going to have to repeat the procedure in reverse, with no guarantee he could do it in time to keep from being poached in the shell. Vuffi Raa could save him a critical few minutes-if only he'd answer!
“Captain to Millennium Falcon, do you read?”
Nothing. He sat as still as possible, thinking as hard as he could. It seemed to be getting hotter inside the suit by the second.
Suddenly, he glanced at the riveting gun in his hand and at the airlock wheel wedged against the rock that formed a roof over his head. Crawling slowly forward a meter, he rapped against the shank of the wheel. The clank!, transmitted by the hull, reverberated in his suit. He tried it again. And again.
A few moments later, there was another kind of reverberation in his suit.
“Master is that you making that noise? I can't raise you on the comlink.” Uncertain whether Vuffi Raa could hear him, he bashed the riveter against the wheel again, once.
“Are you in some kind of trouble other than communication's being down?”
Good guess, Vuffi Raa. Clank!
“I'll come and get you, right-” Clank! Clank!
“But, Master...
Clank! Clank!
A few sweaty minutes later, another suited figure clambered toward Lando over the edge of the ship. Bassi Vobah - her pistol strapped to the outside of her borrowed vacuum-wear - crawled beside him, placed her helmet in contact with his.
“Once a cop, always a cop,” Lando said before she got a chance to open her mouth.
“Don't be an idiot. What's wrong with your suit?”
He shook the sweat out of his eyes. It floated in tiny droplets inside the helmet, distracting him. “Coolant failure of some kind. I was worried about getting dinner; now it looks like I'm going to be din-”
“Oh, shut up! You relax and lie still. I'll pull you out of here. Your little five-armed friend and Officer Fybot are at the downside lock right now, waiting for us.”
“Not the bird, he's accident prone!”
“You should talk!”
Lando was approaching unconsciousness when they cycled through the lock. Vuffi Raa practically tore the helmet off his master - and his ears with it. The resultant blast of fresh air in Lando's face was like an arctic gale.
“Well, another small adventure,” the gambler observed as the three of them stripped him down to his underwear and handed him a plastic bag of water, “when what I really needed was a few days in a sensory-deprivation tank. That's the universe for you. Anybody think of slapping something in the food-fixer?”
Bassi Vobah huffed and stomped her way out of the lock area, not an easy thing to do in the absence of gravity. “You're welcome!” she said over her shoulder. The alien officer followed her, limping awkwardly on his sprinted and bandaged legs.
Vuffi Raa looked up at Lando from where he was minutely examining the vacuum suit. “Master,” he said cautiously, and in a very quiet voice, “did you remove this suit between the time you were working down below and when you went topside?”
Lando floated on his back beside the airlock hatch, thinking - but only thinking - about getting up and going forward. The cold metal felt extremely good to him at the moment.
“Had to,” he replied, hoping the robot wasn't headed where he thought he was headed. “Call of nature.”
“So that's when it was done. Master, somebody-”
“Sabotaged the suit when I wasn't looking, is that it?”
“I'm afraid so. They cross-programmed the communicator with the cooling system. Oddly enough, if you'd continued
trying to call me on the radio, it would have saved you from being roasted.”
Lando shook his head, grabbed a stanchion, and sat up stiffly. “That's a little obscure, even as practical jokes go. Which one of them do you suppose it is?”
“Bassi Vobah helped to save your life.”
“When she couldn't avoid it. Come on, I want a smoke. Do you suppose I could roll a cigarette out of one of those crushed cigars in the safe?”
“Why would you want to, Master?”
“Because it's there.”
The next order of business - after getting something to eat - was figuring out where they were. Lando's running battle with the fighter squadron had taken him through many turns and twists, and across what distances he couldn't guess. He and Vuffi Raa spent a good deal of time pondering all that over the navigational computer.
“The device is useless, Master. The radiation's finished it off. That gives me an eerie feeling, I must confess. However, the catalog has some information: this asteroid is uninhabited, but it isn't uncharted.”
In the seat beside the robot in the cockpit, Lando's shoulders jerked in surprise. “What? You mean you know where we are?”
“I know the catalog number and some other characteristics of the asteroid we're on - or in, if you prefer. Its configuration is unique, and has been noticed in the past. On the other hand, I can't say precisely where the asteroid is at the moment. I have its orbital elements, but everything in this system is subject to everything else, gravity-wise-”
“'Gravity-wise?'”
“Yes, Master, and predicting where anything will be at any given moment amounts to a billion-body geometry problem. At any other time than Flamewind, there are continuous long-range sensor inventories, and the system's databanks are updated hourly, but you see-”
“I see.” Lando turned a knob, activating the deck plates at their lowest intensity so he'd have just enough gravity to roll a cigarette. He lit it, kicked them off again, and reclined in his chair, mind working furiously. “Once we get out in that mess again, we won't be able to navigate,” he said, more to himself than to the robot.
Vuffi Raa agreed, adding, “However, I shall be of more assistance, now that you have increased the shielding, Master. The trouble is that we don't know where to go.”
“We still have that dead-reckoning program of yours?”
Reflexively, he flicked ash off his cigarette. It drifted in the cabin, finally settling on Vuffi Raa's carapace. The droid, equally absently, flicked it off. It broke up and they both lost sight of it.
“Yes, Master - with what amounts to a big ball of unknown squiggles at the end of it where you evaded those fighters.”
“Can you estimate how big a ball?”
“Yes, certainly. From the power consumption, if nothing else.”
“Then that's our margin for error. We simply follow the course as if we'd never deviated and hunt through a sphere of space the same size for Bohhuah Mutdah's estate.”
“I'm afraid not, Master, if for no other reason than that the sphere doesn't stay the same size. It increases as a function of probable error as we travel sunward. During Flamewind, there's no way of accurately estimating drift, and-”
“Does that catalog of yours give details on Mutdah's asteroid?”
“Fifty-seven ninety-two? Yes, Master, I-”
“Then it should give us some hints about the other asteroids around there; it's interested in the weird shape of this one. Let's get as close as we can, then pick our way, rock by rock, until we find the right one.”
“Very well, Master, I see no other alternative.”
“Neither do I. Now, while we're still up here and have some privacy, we're going to talk about who it is this time that's trying to kill me.”
“We're nearly a day behind schedule!” Bassi Vobah protested.
They were sitting in the lounge again. Lando had powered up the gravity, assuring himself beforehand that his passenger with the broken legs was settled comfortably, and asked Vuffi Raa to prepare another meal before they started.
“Do you realize,” the female officer continued to an unappreciative audience in general and an increasingly irritated Lando in particular, “that, under ordinary conditions, this trip would have required a little over two hours?”
“As an inhabitant of the Oseon System, my dear hired gun, you should appreciate better than anyone else the inapplicability of the expression 'ordinary conditions.' There's a storm going on out there, and although I'm not altogether unwilling to venture out in it again, some preparation is essential.”
“Captain, may I remind you that the discretion in this matter isn't wholly yours to-”
“Officer, may I remind you that I am the captain, and that, if you continue nagging, me, I'm going to take that blaster away from you and stuff it up your nose?”
The policewoman blinked, sat back in stunned outrage. Her superiors had never spoken to her like that! Lando grinned - not altogether unironically - and laid down the law: “Now see here: one of you attempted to murder me when I was outside the ship. I'm going to be rather busy when we quit this refuge, both Vuffi Raa and I are, and I don't want to have to watch my back. Therefore, until we can arrive at an agreement concerning arrangements, we will sit right here. My inclination - and if you think I'm joking, you're woefully deceived - is to handcuff the pair of you together until we get to 5792. Unless you can think of an alternative that suits you better - and will satisfy me - that is what we'll do.
“Or we'll park here until the Core freezes over.” Bassi Vobah sat in angry silence, her arms folded across her chest, a sour expression on her face. Waywa Fybot blinked his huge blue eyes, looked thoughtful, but in the end said no more than did his colleague.
Finally: “Now look, you two, I'm not kidding! I haven't figured out who's doing what to whom and why, yet, but there's something- - possibly several somethings - going on. I make it a practice to avoid getting killed. One of you get out your handcuffs and lock yourself to the other immediately, or-”
“Master!” came a shout over the intercom. “We've got trouble - big trouble! I need you on the flight deck!” Rising quickly, Lando glanced from one cop to the other, smashed a frustrated fist into the palm of his other hand, turned, and hurried to the cockpit.
“What is it, Vuffi Raa? Just now I've got-”
“Look forward, Master, to the edge of the crevasse.”
Lando settled in his chair, strapped himself in, and, as a happy afterthought, turned the local gravity in the lounge up to approximately three times the normal pull. “That ought to keep them in one place! I - oh, no!”
“Oh, yes, Master. You can make out the reflections from their hulls. The fighter squadron has found us. They'll be firing into this canyon - without any chance of missing - in a very few seconds!”
XIII
“MASTER, I HAVE failed you again! We cannot escape, my pilot skills are therefore useless. Nor can I man the guns - my programming forbids it!”
Lando waggled back and forth at the controls, loosening the Falcon in its rocky nest. He was wishing he could bring the starboard quad-guns to bear, but that was asking too much.
Aside: “We all have our limits, Vuffi Raa, remember what I told you about diamonds. Just-” Diamonds? That gave the gambler an idea - a gambler's idea, to be sure, but it was all he had at the moment.
“Get out of there, old automaton, strap yourself in the jumpseat behind us, and warn me if anybody comes up the tunnel to the cockpit. I may be able to get us out of this mess, but I want my back safe and my elbows unjogged.”
As soon as the droid had restationed himself, Lando began hitting switches. He had some time: the crevasse was deep, composed mostly of metal-bearing rock. It would take the enemy a while to find the Falcon, especially since they were out in that impossible storm.
Taking his first risk, he cut the gravity in the lounge. A needle on a power-consumption gauge dropped slightly to the left. Next, he began robbing power from ev
ery other system. Out went every light in the ship. Off went the life-support A nee they'd all be fine for a few minutes without it, and, if his plan didn't work, they wouldn't need it. He'd never reactivated the inertial damping; he placed it on standby, contingent on what happened next. When he was finished, only the panel lights were glowing, that and Vuffi Raa's great eye behind him. The ship was deadly silent. With enormous reluctance, he cut the standby power to every gun on the ship. It made him feel naked, but they were useless for what he had in mind.
“All right, Vuffi Raa, everything quiet back there?”
“I can hear the pair of them wondering what's going on, Master.”
“Let them wonder.” He reached across the instrument array and flipped the shields on.
Lights sprang into bright existence, making him feel better. Then he unlatched a metal cover over a graduated knob. Normally it was set at a tiny minus value, placing the main strength of the shields just under the first few molecules of the ship's skin. There were sound reasons for this, but Lando didn't care about them now. He turned the knob, slowly, very carefully.
The ship's structure groaned as the shields expanded, first a millimeter, then a centimeter away from the surface of the hull. Stresses were transmitted through the hull members to the heavily buttressed casing of the field generator. Lando turned the knob a little more.
The Falcon had been tightly wedged within the rock, the wheel of her upper airlock hatch scraping one side of the crevice, the bottom of her hull abraded by the other. There hadn't been a millimeter to spare.
Star Wars - The Adventures of Lando Calrissian Trilogy Page 26