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

by L. Neil Smith

  Through the plastic, the droid gave as much shrug as it was capable of. “I've simply been tidying up here, Master. There have been no communications, visitors, nor have I so much as seen anybody within a hundred meters of the ship except a few of the spaceport automata. Shall I come in and-”

  “Don't trouble yourself. Perhaps I still have time to return to my game.”

  The robot waggled a free tentacle in farewell. “Very good, Master I'll see you at the hotel.”

  “Good night, Vuffi Raa.”

  The light flickered momentarily, as if a ship had flown between the Falcon and the sun.

  Out of the blister and around the passageway, Lando went directly to the hatch he'd entered through. He clambered down the ladder, more careful this time not to get his semiformals greasy. On the next-to-last rung, he heard the sharp grit of a footstep behind him, twisted to see who it- CRUMMMP!

  Something hard and traveling fast smashed savagely across his lower back. Grunting with shock and pain, he released his hold on the ladder, fell rapidly in the artificial gradient, scraping his face on the ladder. A second swipe missed him, zipping over his head to clang noisily on the metal rungs.

  Hitting the floor with a gasp, Lando rolled over in desperate haste, clawing at his middle. A pair of dirty boots tromped toward him. They were all he had time to see before something came swooshing downward toward his head.

  He fired the stingbeam upward. There was a high-pitched piercing whistle from the weapon, a high-pitched scream of agony from the target. The club - whatever it was - clattered noisily to the surface. Lando's adversary fell backward, the chest area of his jacket bursting into flame. Smoke and the nauseating stench of flaming synthetic fabric began to fill the corridor.

  Lando rose stiffly, millimeter by tortured millimeter, pulling on the rungs of the ladder. There were tears in his eyes from smoke and pain. Leaning hard against the ladder, he reached around behind himself, felt his back where he'd been struck.

  His life had probably been saved by the forty-seven thousand credits distributed in his compartmented cummerbund.

  Stingbeam hanging limply along his thigh, he staggered over to see who had attacked him. The figure lay still, the brief-lived flames - accidental byproduct of a close-range discharge - had died.

  So had the assailant.

  A soldier of some kind. That's how he appeared to Lando. The gambler tugged a soft leather helmet off the fellow's unresisting head, the kind of headgear customarily worn under the larger bubble of a spacesuit during extended periods in hard vacuum. The club, a two-meter section of titanium pipe, was the only weapon visible, although Lando detected wear across the dead man's trousers where a gunbelt had abraded the fabric.

  The uniform, if that's what it was (hard to tell with only one of the things around) was patched and faded, many times mended. It seemed to match the wearer's condition. He was a large man, gray and weathered, his face deeply furrowed with age. Lando didn't recognize the insignia. In a million-system civilization, chances were he wouldn't.

  What to do now?

  In the big cities of many a civilized planet, one was far wiser, having disposed of a mugger or burglar, simply to pass on, leaving a small mystery behind for the authorities. Such was Lando's inclination. They were accustomed to it, as they had every right to be. They were the ones who had made the act of self-defense a worse offense than the crime that had provoked it. In the Oseon, would that be the case? Lando didn't know.

  He couldn't very well afford simply to walk away. A dead body, at the docking entrance of his ship, plenty of other physical evidence scattered around, and a partially discharged energy-weapon in his hand.

  Embarrassing, to say the least. Well, down the corridor there was a public communicator.

  He climbed back up the ladder.

  Vuffi Raa, back now from the hull, met him at the top of the ladder. In the dimly lit corridor, his eye glowed like the coal of a cigar.

  “Master, what is going on? I heard shouting, and-”

  “I’ve just killed a man, old thing. Be a good sort and com Lob Doluff. He may have a bit of pull in this system; I suspect we're going to need it.” He sat down suddenly on the decking, leaned against the wall, and collapsed, sliding over sideways.

  It wasn't bad, as jails go.

  The life of a gambler was somewhat checkered. Often people took offense when they lost money. Sometimes they were in a position to do something about it outside the rules of whatever game they'd lost money at.

  The suite was semi-tastefully decorated in cheery plastic colors that did not quite make up for the colorless music drifting blandly from a speaker in the ceiling. A separate bathroom offered modest privacy - as long as one overlooked the large mirror over the sink that was undoubtedly a window from another point of view. There was a genuine skylight, heavily barred and shielded, that served to reduce claustrophobia and gave a fine, undistorted picture of the stars overhead. There had even been a band of plastic around one of the ceramic facilities stating that it had been sanitized for Lando's protection. Somehow, he couldn't quite summon up the appropriate gratitude.

  His injuries had been properly attended to. They weren't many: a couple of cracked (or at least severely bent) ribs, some abrasions. The tape was supposed to fall off of its own accord sometime in the next fifty hours.

  They'd confiscated his clothing and personal papers, his cummerbund with the forty-seven thousand credits, and, of course, his stingbeam, leaving him a set of shapeless drab pajamas with a number on the back and front in six languages and a pair of step-in slippers that threatened to deposit him on his head every time he took more than three paces.

  There was only the one bed, and it wouldn't turn itself down when Lando told it to. Technically, he was in solitary confinement. That was all right with him, the acquaintances one makes in jail arc seldom broadening, nor was he enamored of any sort of company at the moment. There was nothing to read, nothing to watch, nothing to do but think.

  Lando was good at that.

  Lob Doluff had answered the call himself.

  The Administrator Senior expressed gratification that Lando's ship hadn't actually been on fire. He couldn't understand the false alarm, however. Such criminal offenses were prosecuted harshly in the Oseon.

  “There is one small complication,” Lando added, “however.”

  “However? And what is it, Captain?”

  In the background, Lando could make out the figure Of Bassi Vobah, drink in hand. They were still in the starlit garden dome. He wondered whether the other players were still there as well, and if not, what else might be going on in the upper echelons of Oseon Administration.

  “Well, sir, the false alarm seems to have been intended as a trap. Someone ambushed me as I was preparing to return to the sabacc game - a stranger.”

  “I'm rather afraid I've killed him, Administrator Senior.”

  The older man's eyebrows danced up a fraction of an inch and he leaned into the video pickup. “You aren't joking, are you, Captain Calrissian?”

  Lando sighed. “I don't believe I'd joke about something like this. He surprised me, attacked me with a piece of pipe, and I was forced to shoot him.”

  The Administrator Senior's eyes widened and his eyebrows soared impossibly close to the crown of his naked scalp.

  “Shoot him? Did you say?”

  “Hold on a moment,” Captain Bassi Vobah leaned over and whispered something. Doluff looked puzzled a moment, then nodded.

  “Captain Calrissian - Lando, my boy, stay right where you are. I'm going to send Miss Vobah directly over to you. I believe she can be of help to both of us in this affair. In the meantime, leave everything exactly as it is; I'll order access to your service corridor closed off. We'll get this over with a quickly and discreetly as possible.”

  Another whispered conference.

  “Yes, and by the, way, it is perhaps better that you tell Miss Vobah and myself nothing else about what happened. We are duty-bound to te
stify in court about it, being administrative personnel, the both of us. You understand.”

  Lando understood. He nodded, signaled off, slouched back in his pilot's chair disconsolately. Outside, the light seemed unnaturally harsh, even for an airless asteroid, and flickered now and again as if a fleet of ships were passing overhead. The colors all seemed a bit off, as well, but that may have been explainable by the mood of the observer. Finally he turned to Vuffi Raa.

  “Well, old vegetable-slicer, it looks as though we're in for it again. I must be losing my touch.”

  “Now, Master,” the robot replied, patting the gambler on the shoulder with a gentle tentacle, “I'm sure everything will work out. You would not have done what you did, had you not been forced to.”

  He extracted a cigar from beneath the control panel, trimmed it, handed it to Lando, and lit it with a glowing tentacle tip.

  “I didn't know you could do that. Do you suppose he was the party behind the bombings, the fellow I shot?”

  “The idea had crossed my mnd, Master. I do not know.”

  A glum silence settled over the pair.

  The control panel beeped. Lando flipped a switch. “Yes?”

  “It's Bassi Vobah here, Lando. I'm in the service accessway beneath you. Come down and meet me, will you?”

  “Very well. Shall I bring a toothbrush?”

  Her voice was apologetic. “It might be a good idea.”

  Lando gave the robot a few instructions, then turned and retraced his steps to the bottom of the ladder. When he turned around, she was bending down, dispassionately examining the body. She was wearing the uniform of the Oseon police.

  In his cell a few hours later, Lando once again resisted the urge to get up and pace. He'd never taken very well to confinement. It was well past local midnight, there on a different spot on the equator, closer to the small city of which the Esplanade formed the core. Yet the lights had been left on-more or less standard practice in jails everywhere. Worse yet, the syrupy music still dribbled from the overhead. Resentfully, he looked up - and was nearly blinded by a flash of overwhelming brilliance in the sky. As his eyes began to readjust, he saw that long streamers of color had begun to creep across the zenith, deepening every second in hue, like mutant fingers closing over the transparent bowl of the heavens.

  Crimson flared. Yellow seethed. Blue and green pulsed steadily against a syncopated counterpoint of violet.

  The Flamewind had begun.

  VII

  A POLICEPERSON'S LOT is not a happy one.

  Sometimes, it was downright discouraging, thought Peacekeeper Bassi Vobah as she wrote up her report on the Millennium Falcon killing. What a time for something like this to happen! Flamewind had begun, and she was going to miss it.

  Born in the Oseon System, she was one of the many who served the few, her function - not terribly different from that of the countless robots that populated the asteroids - spare her masters all possible inconvenience. That this has been the essential task of police officers everywhere in time and space, she was unaware. Her education had been specific and to a point. It had not been noticeably cosmopolitan or analytical.

  Her parents, even less well off than she was, had originally immigrated as merchants after passing batteries of examinations, probes into their backgrounds and intentions, studies of their attitudes and goals. Nevertheless, they had not been terribly successful. In the end, she had worked to support them, and by the time it was no longer necessary, what she did for a living had become a habit with her, although not a particularly comfortable one.

  Her one relief, her one vacation every year, was Flamewind.

  It was a deadly and spectacular time. Brightly colored streamers of gaseous ionization filled the open spaces - a thousand kilometers on average - between floating mountains. Fantastic lightnings blasted from rock to rock. The seven belts of the Oseon fluoresced madly.

  Radiation, static discharges, and swirling, colored fogs distorted navigational references, drove instruments and men alike insane. All interasteroidal commerce was grounded by law for the duration, averaging three weeks, to protect would-be sojourners from their own folly. The sleet of particles that lashed the system was only one opportunity for misadventure and destruction. Communications of any sort between the asteroids or with the rest of the galaxy were physically impossible, blotted out by wailing electrons.

  No one went anywhere. Or wanted to.

  And there were spooky stories of a less scientifically verifiable nature that circulated every year during Flamewind. Legendary disappearances, ominous apparitions, phenomena of the oddest, ghastliest, most relishably gossipable sort.

  Yet - or consequently - tourists flocked to the Oseon just before the cataclysmic display. It had become a carnival of continuous parties, public and private, unceasing gaiety. Hundreds of different intelligent species intermingled from a million systems, giving some meaning and adventure to the otherwise humdrum life of a small-town girl.

  Like Bassi Vobah.

  And now this. Aside from the arrest itself and the keyboardwork it engendered, there were the impoundment documents, to be completed in nanolicate, it seemed. This Lando Calrissian, a wandering tramp who hadn't filled out so much as a single visa form, had so far collected one hundred seventy-three thousand credits from his betters (and hers) without lifting a finger to do any honest work. That had been confiscated, of course, and, whether he was ultimately found innocent or guilty, would go to pay the expenses he'd imposed on the administrative services of the Oseon.

  That much money would have supported half a hundred families like Bassi Vobah's for a year. It was simply indecent for an individual to gain so much so easily. At least justice reached a long arm out to punish evil-doers sometimes. This was one occasion when her job generated a great deal of satisfaction.

  And then there was the broken-down smuggling vessel he claimed was a freighter. That was worth fifteen or twenty thousand. If she could think of additional appropriate charges, the ship would go on auction to pay for them. Also that pilot/repair droid. It was worth considerably more than the ship and would have a much more enthusiastic market in the Oseon.

  Mark it down at fifty thousand credits.

  Incidental personal items of property, worthless - and, of course, the murder weapon. No, she wasn't legally justified calling it that.

  Yet. The confiscated stingbeam, then. It would make a nice addition to her tiny department's “museum.” Such killings didn't happen often in the fat, complacent community she served. It would make an interesting story to tell.

  But that scarcely made up for the trouble Calrissian was causing, and if possible, she'd see him fried for that. The other complication was his fault, indirectly, as well. She'd argued with her superior, Lob Doluff, about it, but pressure was being put on him, and the pressure worked its way down onto her shoulders. Calrissian would pay for that, as well.

  Flamewind had begun, and she was going to miss it.

  Vuffi Raa paced the curved companionways of the Millennium Falcon. He was a most unhappy machine. Below, the hatchway to service corridor 17-W was closed, clamped with an impound seal, and it had been all he could do to persuade the authorities not to stencil a seizure notice on his body - or take him away and lock him up in some warehouse.

  Maintaining a modest silence about his manifold additional capabilities, he'd convinced them that, as a pilot, navigator, and repairbot, he was essentially part of the ship. As a consequence, they had affixed to his torso a restraining bolt - a bit of electronic mischief that was supposed to inflict enormous pain on his nervous system should he attempt to leave the Falcon.

  It had taken him all of thirty seconds to disable it, once the police had departed. Nonetheless, prudence dictated that he stay there unless he could think of something useful to do for himself and his master.

  Outside, huge sheets of polychrome gas filled the sky, punctuated every few minutes by terrifying displays of lightning. Flamewind was barely underway and yet,
for most observers, the phenomenon was overwhelming.

  Vuffi Raa didn't even notice it.

  He supposed that Lando had offered at least a hundred times to set him legally free. For some reason it bothered the gambler deeply to own another sapient being, even a mechanical one. Vuffi Raa had always turned him down, preferring to stay with his adventurous master. Now he wondered - very briefly - whether it mightn't have been a better idea to accept.

  As a manumitted droid, he would have been at liberty to deal with the situation.

  Although what, specifically, he would have done remained a mystery.

  As an article of property, he was told nothing by the authorities about Lando's fate or that of himself and the Falcon.

  However from long, long experience with human culture, the robot could make a fairly accurate guess. Somehow all of that must be prevented, some bargain struck that would at least leave them even, leave them in the condition in which they'd arrived.

  Vuffi Raa had very little experience making deals.

  Outside, the sky writhed with the seven colors of the spectrum-and with every possible mixture in between. For Vuffi Raa, there were more than a hundred basic colors, from lowest infrared to highest ultraviolet, and the permutations and combinations possible had to be expressed in exponentials.

  Yet the spectacle was lost on him, and not from any lack of aesthetic sensitivity.

  He liked Lando Calrissian. The little droid had a deceptive appearance; he always looked brand-new, and his mere meter of height made people think diminutive thoughts about him. In reality, he had a powerful mind and a lifetime that stretched back centuries, even further than he could remember.

  Apparently, that was the result of a pirate attack on a freighter in whose hold he'd occupied a commercial shipping crate. It was his first clear memory, the jarring, shouting, screaming. The groaning of the fabric of the victimized ship.