Star Wars - [The Adventures of Lando Calrissian 02] - The Flamewind of Oseon (by L. Neil Smith)

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THE ADVENTURES OF
LANDO CALRISSIAN
#2
Lando Calrissian
andthe
Flamewind of Oseon
by
L. Neil Smith
Based on the characters and situations created by
George Lucas
ADelRey Book
.lit by DrB 12/04
BALLANTINE BOOKS,NEW YORK
And this book is dedicated to J. Neil Schulman and VictorKoman , a pair of cards if there ever
was one.
I
HE WAS SLIGHTLY over a meter tall, from the faceted wide-angle lens glowingredly atop his highly
polished pentagonal body to the fine feathery tips of his chromium-plated tentacles. Of these, there were
five, which he felt was as it should be. After all, hadn't he been created in the image of his manufacturers?
He thought of himself as Vuffi Raa, an unsentimental designation from a different numbering system and
a different language, half a galaxy ago. It served well enough as a name.
At the moment, he was in a hurry.
The tree-lined Esplanade of Oseon 6845 was a broad,jungly ,cobblestoned thoroughfare built
exclusively for pedestrian traffic, no matter what the individualsentient's personal means of locomotion. It
was equipped with an artificial gravity field three meters deep to accommodate the most attenuated of
species. It was lined on both sides with elegantly restrained shops to accommodate the very richest. It
has been said that the commercial footage along the domed Esplanade of Oseon 6845 is the most
expensive in the known universe.
And that the patronsstrolling its landscaped and sculptured kilometers are the wealthiest. Vuffi Raa
didn't know about that rare failing of information on his part. In the first place, he hadn't the appropriate
statistics ready to hand (in a manner of speaking). And if compelled to base his opinion on any one - the
single case with which he was intimately familiar-he'd have had to hold the opposite was true.
Not everybody there was rich. Not everybody there had come to buy and sell.
Which conclusion neatly brought his musings back around to the reason for his present urgency: his
current master, latest of what had been, until recently, an embarrassingly lengthy list of thoroughly
dissatisfied customers.
Freebie-reeep!
From the heavily planted median on the Esplanade, an entity that might have been a songbird warbled
noisily in what may have been a bush, momentarily distracting the little robot. You could never tell.
In the plush, cosmopolitan resort, the creature doing the singing might wellbe a photosynthetic vegetable
attempting to attract pollen carriers, and the foliage it perched in, a soil-rooted animal. The entire Oseon
System was like that, a rich-man's playground, cleverly intended by those who had ordained its
construction to be full of surprises. But then, so was life itself. Their very presence in this overstuffed
watering hole, his and his master's, was ample testimony to that.
Vuffi Raa forced his jumbled thoughts back into relevant channels.
He was a Class Two droid, with intellectual and emotional capacities roughly equaling those of organic
sapients .And an uncorrected tendency in his programming to let his mind wander and to mix his
metaphors on occasion. It was a price he paid for being one of the rare machines abroad with an
imagination.
At the moment, it was a luxury he couldn't afford. He held the blackened evidence before his eye again
as a reminder. It was a fist-sized chunk of scorched metal and fused silicon. A few hours ago, it had been
a neutrino hybridizer, a delicate and critical component in the sub-lightspeed drive of a certain class and
vintage of starship.
Now it looked like amicrocredit's worth of asteroiddetailings .
Unconscious of a gesture he had acquired from long association with human beings, Vuffi Raa raised his
free tentacle to scratch at the upper portion of his five-sided torso - the closest thing he had to a head.
The little droid waspentadextrous , having no preference as to which of his five sinuous limbs he used for
getting around on, which he used for holding, carrying, or manipulating objects.Such as treacherous
lumps of recently molten quartz and platinum.
A well-rounded, versatile, andradially symmetrical fellow was Vuffi Raa.And a very worried one.
His brisk but absentminded pace carried him past a leaf-shaded decorative pond where something
between a green mammal and a small many-jointed insectdabbled a line - actually an extension of its right
front leg - into half a meter of water. There was a modest ripple, a splash, then a snap! The creature
reeled in a tiny, colorful fish, devouring it on the spot and spitting the bones back into the water.
Vuffi Raa never even noticed.
At long last he reached the expensively decorated entrance surface of the exclusive HotelDrofo . With a
brotherly salute, Vuffi Raa strode past the door-being,a robot painted in the garish gold and purple livery
of the establishment, and went directly to one of the eight down-shafts leading into the hotel proper.
On an asteroid, even one like Oseon6845, and even where a first-rate hotel is concerned, surface area
comes dear. Volume is cheap.
Selecting LOBBY on the miniature display beside the entrance to the down-shaft, he waited for the
elevator to take his measure, then fell - ”drifted” might be a better word - at a fraction of the augmented
surface acceleration of the asteroid gently downward several dozen meters, coming at last to a cushioned
rest at the bottom of the shaft.
He stepped out into the whispery bustle of the underground hotel. Plenty of other droids were in
evidence, mingling freely with the humans, humanoids, and nonhumans present. Most of the automata
here were in service of one sort or another; they were unusually conspicuous in their number and
visibility.
The galaxy over, robots were the object of harsh and persistent prejudice. The Oseon was different,
however. Cynics pointed out that neither its current inhabitants nor their ancestors were ever to have
worried much about losing a job.
The place was filled with exiled and vacationing nobility.
Captains of industry, active and retired, gravitated here, along with majors, colonels, and generals.
Mercantile - and literal - pirates who had purchased themselves a little class, sometimes from that
selfsame deposed aristocracy, rubbed shoulders and less human body parts with media stars from a
million different systems.
The little droid knew the man he was seeking would be in one of the small, comfortably furnished
gambling salons just off the Grand Lobby, here on the first, or bottom, floor. Finding the room wouldn't
be any problem, but getting in might be. Gamblers tended to be jealous of their privacy. He “shouldered”
his way through the richly dressed crowd, thinking about the news he had for his master - and how very
reluctant he was to deliver it.
A human being can only stand so much bad news.
It had begun with an adventure. His master had won a starship - a small converted freighter, actually,
called the Millennium Falcon - in yet another card game, and had whimsically decided to add “captain” to
his other professional titles: gambler, rogue, and scoundrel. He was proud of every one of them, though
he preferred “con artiste” to what the authorities usually had upon the tips of their sharp and unforgiving
tongues.
He'd been a perfectly terrible pilot in the beginning. Vuffi Raa, an accomplished ship-handler by virtue
of inbuilt programming, was gradually taking care of that in two ways: piloting the Falcon when the need
arose; teaching his master to do it for himself whenever they had time.
He'd won Vuffi Raa in a card game, as well. That had triggered a series of events that culminated with
their leaving the Rafa System with the very last full cargo of the fabulouslifecrystals ever harvested there.
The only load ever removed from the system legally by a private cargo vessel.
And they were rich.
Temporarily.
Yet his master hadn't seemed very happy, filling out landing-permit forms, going over bills of lading,
figuring overhead and profit margin. Even with Vuffi Raa along to make the workload lighter... It was too
much like going straight. The gambler yearned to practice his original profession once again.
Thus, when the invitation had suddenly arrived out of nowhere to come and play sabacc in the Oseon,
where the pickings were the richest in the galaxy, the pair's free-lance cargo days had come to an abrupt
and highly welcome end. They'd blazed across a hundred parsecs to be here on time. The Falcon's
speed, in competent tentacles, was legendary. And here they were.
Trouble was,someone had attempted to assure that they be not only here, but also back in the Rafa, out
on the Edge, down at the Core, and everyplace else tiny little pieces of their respectively organic and
mechanical existences could be scattered. That someone, it would appear, didn't like them very much.
Vuffi Raa approached the heavy antiqued wooden double doors.
Standing before these was an enormous humanoid in an elegantly tailoredgroundsuit at least four sizes
too large for any other two men in the hotel. Beneath the hulking fellow's stylish armpits the robot could
make out the twin bulges of a pair of Imperial-issue blasters.
“Excuse me,gentlebeing ,” offered the little droid, “I have a message for one of the players inside.” He
produced a card his master had given him for usein just such a circumstances . To Vuffi Raa's
overwhelming relief, the bouncer/bodyguard looked at theholocard as the letters of instruction danced
across its surface, nodded politely, and stepped aside. The doors parted slightly; Vuffi Raa squeezed
past them.
The air inside the small, luxurious chamber was full of smoke, at least a dozen different, mingling odors,
despite the best efforts of its starship-class life-support systems.In the center, seated at a table ringed
with players and kibitzers, lounged his master, resplendent in tasteful and expensivevelvoid semi-formal
shipclothes .
The robot approached, waiting until the hand was finished,his master raked in a substantial pile of credit
tokens - then tugged gently at the hem of his short cloak.
“Master?”
The figure turned, looked down.White teeth in a dark face, irresistible smile, intelligent and mischievous
eyes.
“What is it, Vuffi Raa - and how many times have I asked you not to call me master?” They were both
whispering against a noisy background.
The droid held up the oddly shaped clump of debris for his master's inspection. “There wasn't any
spontaneous breakdown in the phase-shift controls aboard the Falcon, Master. I'm afraid you were right,
that this makes two such incidents.”
His master nodded grimly. “So it was a bomb.”
“Yes, Master, someone is trying to murder you.”
II
LANDO CALRISSIAN SHOOK his head ironically and grinned.
He had good reason. His first evening in the Oseon, his first sabacc game, and already he was ahead
some twenty-three thousand credits.
The dashing young gambler stood, dressed impeccably at an hour when most people were rumpled and
tired, before a full-length mirror, stroking the brand-new mustache he'd begun only a few weeks ago,
when things looked so much bleaker.
Yes, by the Core, it did give hima certain panache, a certain élan, a certain...
And without filling out so much as a single form in triplicate (if that was logically possible) - his mind was
drifting back again to the money tucked into the pockets of hisvelvoid semi-formals - without acquiring a
permit, easement, license, variance, or Certificate of Mother-May-I. Here was one fat bankroll that
wasn't going to evaporate when he wasn't watching it!
What added amusement to triumph was that sabacc was a game considerably more complex and
infinitely riskier than the entrepreneurship he'd been attempting since he'd acquired the MillenniumFalcon.
It called for quicker judgment, greater courage, and a more sophisticated understanding of human (in a
broadly tolerant manner of speaking) nature.
So whywas he so casually accomplished at the former and so miserably rotten at the latter? He
shrugged to himself, crossed the hotel room from the door he'd closed and locked securely not very
many moments before.
Let's see - just the most recent example. He'd won the Falcon and Vuffi Raa,then proceeded to con a
handsome fee (work he'd been coerced into doing) that, by all rights, ought to have set him up for life.
Orchard crystals from the Rafa System had never been cheap to begin with. Humanoids who wore
them found their life spans extended, their intelligence somewhat enhanced. They were both valuable and
rare. They grew in only one place in the universe.
Lando had known, when he and the ‘bothad quit the Rafa, that there would be no morelifecrystals , at
least for a while. The colonial government there had been overthrown by insurgent natives. Thus, he'd
held out for the highest possible prices. Yet, somehow, the money - several millions - had seemed to
disappear before his very eyes, eaten up in spacecraft maintenance, docking charges, taxes, surtaxes,
sursurtaxes , and bribes. Every time he closed a deal, no matter what margin he'd built in at the beginning,
he wound up losing. It didn't seem sensible: the more money he earned, the poorer he became. If he got
any richer, he'd be broke.
Perhaps he simply hadn't been playing in the right league.
One of the rules of this new game (new to Lando, anyway) was that they didn't tell you the rules until it
was too late. His figurative hat was off to anyone who could survive in the world of business, let alone
prosper.
A small noise in the next room alerted him. He peeked in: Vuffi Raa was laying out tomorrow's
wardrobe for him. He'd told the little fellow a hundred times that it wasn't necessary. He needed no valet,
and long ago had begun thinking of the robot as a friend more than anything else. But exactly like a good
friend (or consummate servant), the droid understood the gambler's need for some time alone without
conversation, while he unwound from the evening's tense preoccupations. Lando suspected that Vuffi
Raa actually wanted to discuss the bomb he'd discovered - the second since their last planetfall.
Well, morning was time enough for that. He closed the connecting door softly and returned to his
private thoughts. A second irony struck him as he watched the bed turn itself down.
He shucked out of his dressy bantha-hide knee boots and reclined, one foot dangling over the edge of
the bed to the floor. The very individuals who had prospered most, either at legitimate businesses like
freight hauling, or shadier ones such as smuggling (the avocation, in fact, for which the Falcon had
originally been constructed), those who had made their way to the top, lived here in the Oseon, where
one Lando Calrissian, a dismal failure by their standards, experienced little difficulty at all separating them
from their hard-won money.
It wastheir own fault. They'd invited him...
Fire streaked from the starboard weapons turret of the Millennium Falcon. In desperate haste, Lando
swung the quad-guns down and to the left as the drone squadron whooshed by, their own energy-guns
coloring the misted space around the freighter.
“Missed!Vuffi Raa, hold her a little steadier!”
The ship ducked and swooped, narrowly avoiding being skewered in a cross fire as the drone fighters
split up, attacking from both sides.
“Master thereare too many of - good shooting, sir!”
The little droid's voice issued from an intercom beside Lando's ear. The gambler made an imaginary
chalk mark on a purely mental scoreboard, manhandling the guns around for another shot. The drone
he'd splattered was an incandescent and expanding ball of dust and gas, augmenting an already dirty
region of space. Anyone else might havewhooped!victoriously .
Lando fumed in the transparent gun-bubble. All right, so it had been his idea to shortcut through this
small nebulosity on the way to the next port. Blast it all, he was carrying valuable, somewhat perishable
cargo. Crates ofwintenberry jelly.Stacks of mountainbollem hides.Expensive tinklewood fishing rods.In
short, the produce of a frontier planet. His corner-cutting could save them precious days, compared to
routes preferred by scheduled cargo haulers.
The shields pulsed with coruscating brilliance. They were taking hits again!
He slewed the quad-guns hard, pressed the double triggers. Bolts of ravening energy rammed directly
into a pair of tiny unmanned fighters screaming toward the ship. One exploded, the other, severely
damaged, cork-screwed crazily out of Lando's line of vision.
Vuffi Raa rolled the ship, skated into a wild, stomach-wrenching yaw, adroitly avoiding a direct hit.
They were a good team together, Lando thought.
Besides, it wasn't much asnebulosities go. Even deep inside the scruffy patch of gas, a few molecules
every cubic meter produced very little visible clouding. They did slow a ship down, however, making it
dangerous to use the faster-than-light drive. That's probably why the regular lines avoided the place. But
Lando, calculating distance over time, had figured that, even at a substantial reduction from lightspeed,
they'd still gain time and profit thereby.
He'd been wrong.
Six more meter-diameter drones bore directly for his turret. The enemy seemed to have an endless
supply. Lando caught a glance of their mother vessel, a pirate lying off and directing the attack in relative
safety. She was approximately four times the displacement of the Falcon, clumsily built, a large sphere
attached to a slightly smaller cylinder, the whole awkward assembly patched and mottled by hard use
and long neglect. He could imagine half a hundred crew-beings, hunched over their drone panels in a
dimly lit control center. They were probably as broke and desperate as he was.
Waiting until the last possible moment, he let loose all four barrels on maximum power and dispersal.
Lights dimmed aboard the Falcon. Two saucer-shaped drones blossomed into fireballs, the third was
holed severely. The fourth, fifth, and sixth zoomed over his head in ragged formation, past the gun-blister,
and out of his visual range before he could tell what he'd done to them. He released the triggers.
Full illumination sprang forth again.
Nebulositieswere good for hiding spaceships. The gas, dust, and ions, the magnetic and static fields
made a hash of long-range sensor instrumentation. That's why they'd wound up in this confounded-
”Vuffi Raa!”Lando shouted suddenly. “Close on the pirate herself! I've had enough of this. Give me a
pass at her reaction-drive system!”
“Very well, Master” There was doubt in the robot's doubly electronic voice - not concerning Lando's
combat abilities.Quite the contrary. It was simply that the droid's most fundamental programming forbade
him to take the life of a mechanical or organic sapient being. He was straining his cybernetic ethics
severely even now, conning a fighting ship. Yet strain them he did.
In a long, graceful arc with a little flip on the end, the Falcon soared toward the pirate, taking her by
surprise. A few guns warmed up feebly - too late their startled operators switched attention from
remote-control panels to fire-control systems. The tiny flying weapons might be adequate against an
unarmed freighter or a pleasure yacht that stumbled into the cloud, but they hadn't been conceived or
built for mortal engagement with a vessel like the Falcon, half pirate ship herself and bristling with more
guns than her crew could handle all at once.
Trusting his ship's shields, Lando bore down upon the quad-gun, drilling its quadruple high-power
beams at the reaction-drive outlet at the far end of the pirate's spherical section.
Once again the Falcon's interior lights dimmed, and for the first time, it occurred to Lando that his heavy
trigger finger was costing something... However, the enemy's thrust tubes were beginning to glow. First
red, they quickly became orange-yellow. They'd been molded to withstand heat and pressure right
enough, but not from the outside in.
Suddenly, a starburst appeared in space between him and the pirate.
“Good shooting, Master You got another one!”
“Nonsense, I didn't even - Great Merciful Heavens!”
All around them, balls of fiery gas stood out against the starry background. The drone fleet was
destroying itself! The pirate swiveled on her center of gravity, glowed savagely from her own internal
fires, and streaked away.
At the extreme end of her flight line, toward the edge of the nebulosity, Lando could make out the flash
as she shifted into faster-than-light. It was a deadly risk even so; they must be frightened badly.
“Well, well! Stand down from Battle Stations,” he informed his mechanical partner, “I’ll be up to the
cockpit in a minute. Put some coffeine on, will you? And by the way, Vuffi Raa...”
Heunstrapped himself from the gun-chair webbing, turning his captain's hat - the one with all the golden
braid-around the right way, and zipped his shipsuit up a couple of inches.
“Yes, Master?”
“Don't call me Master!”
Stepping into the broadly curving main corridor, Lando passed the sublight-drive area of the Millennium
Falcon. As if sprouting from the floor, there stood a tapered chromium snakelike entity, about a meter
long, tending the control panel. At its slenderest end, it branched into five slim, delicate “fingers” that
twisted knobs and adjusted slide-switches. In the center of the “Palm,” Lando knew, was a small glassy
red eyespot. Farther along, where a cluster of instruments comprised the radar and other detection
devices, another metallic serpent stood watch.
There were three more like it elsewhere in the ship, giving attention to sensitive areas that could not be
handled from the cockpit monitors.
Up front, Lando flopped into the left-hand seat, a pride-preserving concession tacitly made between
himself and the real pilot of the vessel. It lay in the other seat, a pentagon-shaped slab of bright
silvery-colored metal and electronics. A large lens pulsedredly at the top. The object was strapped down
firmly to the seat. One of the “snakes” hovered over an instrument panel, half a meter away.
“Vuffi Raa, you've got to pull yourself together,” Lando chuckled, fumbling under the panel. He brought
out a slim cigar and lit it, eyeing the armless, legless contraption next to him and waiting for a reaction.
Outside, the fog began to disperse as their own reaction drives brought them to the margin of the
nebulosity. Was he imagining things, or was the plastic window transparency slightly pitted? More dust in
the region than he'd calculated - and another expensive repair.
The snake floated downward, attached itself to one flat side of the pentagon, and waggled at the
gambler. “Master, that wasn't funny the first hundred times you said it.” Vuffi Raa beganunstrapping his
torso from the copilot's seat, one-tentacled.
From the passageway outside, another snake drifted in, settled in the chair, and linked itself, becoming
the second of Vuffi Raa's limbs to rejoin his body. Lando looked over the ship's instrumentation, and his
glow of combative satisfaction evaporated completely.
“By the Edge!Look at those power-consumption gauges! Those quad-guns are expensive to shoot! We
would have used less power going the long way around!” It was a hell of a note, Lando thought, when
even defeating a band of pirates had to be calculated on the balance sheet.
And at a loss.
“We'll be lucky to break even on this load, do you realize that?”
Regaining yet a third tentacle, the robot refrained diplomatically from pointing out that he'd opposed the
shortcut in the first place. He hadn't known exactly why. The big, regularly scheduled companies avoided
the route although it took parsecs and whole days off the run, exactly as Lando had insisted.
On the other hand, big, regularly scheduled companies seldom attempted anything new or daring -
which was what always made the future so bright for newer, smaller companies.
Now, between the star-fog and the pirates it concealed, both of the partners knew what was wrong
with the nebulosity.
Fourth and fifth manipulators in place, Vuffi Raa cautiously punched up the interstellar drive. The stars
stretched into attenuated blurs and vanished.
Yet, none of that explained what was wrong with Dilonexa XXIII.
III
“FISHING POLES?”
The customs agent was a small man with wiry arms and legs,knobbly knuckles. He was dressed, like
everybody else on that self-consciously agrarian planet, in bib overalls in hiscase, they were made of a
deep greensatyn , heavily creased.
His shiny pink scalp shone through a field of close-cropped gray stubble.
“You gotta be kidding, Mac! In the first place, there ain't a body of water on the planetbigger'n a
bathtub; we don't like to spare the land. In the second place, nobody here has any time for fishing. An' in
the third place, the native fish taste terrible -lacka trace metals or something.”
The sun of the Dilonexa System (a catalog number Lando didn't remember and hadn't bothered asking
Vuffi Raa about as they'd made their approach) was a gigantic blue-white furnace. The twenty-two
planets nearest it were great places to get a suntan.In a couple of microseconds.
The outer seventeen were iceboxes.
But the planet in the middle, at least in the view of its early colonists, made it all worthwhile. It was
large, nearly twenty-five thousand kilometers in diameter, composed mostly of the lighter elements, which
gave it a surface gravity not too unreasonable. Nearly everything of metal had to be shipped in.
But Dilonexa XXIII wasrich, an agricultural world whose fields stretched unimaginable distances around
its surface, providing foodstuffs, plastics, combustible fuel, everything with an organic base. Its
inhabitants, fat farmers and their fatterfamilies, had acquired a taste for some of the finer things in life.
Which was why Lando had brought his valuable, somewhat perishable cargo there.
He shook his head ruefully as he watched theDilonexan ground crew put fuel elements into the Falcon
where it rested on the ferrocrete apron - and gaping wounds in his credit account.
“Well, then, how about the jelly and the hides? Surely-”
“Had a second cousin once named Shirley,” the little man explained, scratching a mole under his chin
and squinting up at the cloudless sky as if in aid to memory. “Tried thatwintenberry stuff you'rehaulin '.
Broke down with thegallopin 'gosharooties . Too many trace minerals for a fourth-generation colonist.
We gotta watch what we eat, usDilonexicans , that's a fact.”
Lando shook his head again; it was getting to be a habit. “But look here, Inspector, I-”
“Call me Bernie. You wouldn'thappent'have a cigar on you?”
The gambler visualized the big chest of cigars in his safe aboard the Falcon. “Even if I did, they'd be
from Rafa IV, a place just lousy with heavy metals. Probably kill you. What about the leather, then? I
have a hold full of beautifullyfurtanned hides, and-”
The wizened customs officer interrupted Lando again, this time with an upraised hand. He pointed
toward the prairie that surrounded them.
摘要:

  THEADVENTURESOFLANDOCALRISSIAN#2LandoCalrissianandtheFlamewindofOseonbyL.NeilSmith BasedonthecharactersandsituationscreatedbyGeorgeLucasADelReyBook.litbyDrB12/04BALLANTINEBOOKS,NEWYORK   AndthisbookisdedicatedtoJ.NeilSchulmanandVictorKoman,apairofcardsifthereeverwasone.   I HEWASSLIGHTLYoverameter...

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