“Who do you think arranged for all the clearance documents to be forged?” Lando asked, grinning more broadly still. “So when do I collect on that dinner?” He turned to Han.
Han frowned. “I’d say here and now, onboard ship with the family, before we take off, except we’re in a bit of a hurry to get away. Your people might have forged the paper and sliced into the data banks to show we passed all the safety checks, but I don’t think we should push our luck. Something might go wrong.”
Lando laughed again. “The man who plans to fly a museum piece across the galaxy is worried about pushing his luck with the safety inspectors! That’s a good one. Let’s just say I’ll pick my own time and place to collect,” Lando said. “Good enough for now?”
“Good enough,” Han said.
But it wasn’t good enough, Luke told himself. Not by half. “Han—wait a second,” he said. “It’s one thing to risk your own neck in a dicey ship. But you can’t take your wife and children along in a ship that the safety people won’t pass.”
“Take it easy, kid,” Han said. “You think I’d take chances on my children? Or that Leia would let me even if I wanted to try? I promise you all the safety systems they were worried about are at spec or above. That wasn’t the problem.”
“I don’t get it,” Luke said.
“Real simple,” Lando said. “According to the official records on file with Coruscant control, the Falcon is now a nice, normal light stock freighter. All of the illegal weapon systems and smuggling hardware removed. Except Han never did get around to removing all the handy little modifications and add-ons and military-specification sensors and weapons, and it wouldn’t be a good thing if the inspectors happened to notice all the things Han forgot to remove.”
“I’ve had other things on my mind,” Han said, with a deadpan voice and expression that didn’t fool anyone—and was not meant to. “Besides, that sort of gear could come in awfully handy out there. Peacetime or no peacetime, the Corellian Sector can be a tricky piece of space. Safety regs are all very well, but I want a little extra firepower on hand in case the pirates decide it’s time to go shopping.”
“Well, I certainly can’t blame you for that,” Luke said. He didn’t need his Jedi abilities to sense Han was worried about more than the remote possibility of tangling with half-mythical pirates. But whatever had Han worried, Luke was not going to make things better by pressing him on the subject. “You take care of your family, and never mind about the rest of it.”
“That’s the plan, kid,” Han said. “Anyway, come on aboard you two, and say your good-byes.”
Han led the way up the Falcon’s ramp with Lando and Luke following behind. Inside, they found Leia and the children in the lounge. It felt good to be aboard the old Falcon again, Luke thought. So many of the key events in his life revolved around the Falcon in one way or another. He looked around, letting the flood of memories wash over him. It was here, in the lounge compartment, that Obi-Wan Kenobi had given him his first practice with a lightsaber. It was this ship that had saved his life at Cloud City, that had given him the covering fire he needed to take out the first Death Star.
But all that was in the past. Just now the ship seemed too full of bustle and life for such things to matter. Han had already wandered over to the cockpit to check Chewie’s preflight settings. The twins were in their seats, their seat belts fastened, but were bouncing with so much excitement that the belts did not seem likely to hold them down for very long. Leia was just getting an equally bouncy Anakin strapped in for takeoff.
“All right, everybody,” Han said, coming back from the cockpit, Chewie right behind him. “Time to say goodbye to Lando and Uncle Luke.”
After a deafening chorus of shouted good-byes, Luke gave each child a kiss and a hug. He stood up, hugged his sister, slapped Han on the shoulder, and made a formal bow of farewell to Chewbacca. It was not wise to get too emotional or demonstrative with a Wookiee. If the Wookiee got demonstrative and hugged back, you’d be lucky to escape with crushed ribs.
Lando was making his own farewells, further complicating the choreography in the tight spaces of the ship. But at last all the good-byes were complete, and it was time to head down the ramp, offer one last wave good-bye to Han as he raised the ramp and sealed the ship, and move back to a safe distance for the takeoff.
No ship takes off without a few moments of delay that seem inexplicable from the outside—least of all the Falcon. Luke and Lando could see Han and Chewie settling into the Falcon’s cockpit, checking switches, setting up the controls.
But at last the moment came, and the Falcon’s repulsor lifts came to life, glowing with power. Moving with a smooth and perfect grace that seemed out of character for the cantankerous old freighter, the Falcon rose smoothly into the air, did a ninety-degree turn to port, and lit her main sublight engines to move off into the dusky sky.
“There they go,” Lando said, his voice betraying a low, quiet excitement. Luke could understand. Maybe they were only a family off on a vacation, a quick trip sandwiched in before Leia got caught up in the Corellian trade talks, but that didn’t matter. They were on a ship, and the ship was already heading out between the stars. It could have been any ship, going anywhere. To Luke, and to Lando, too, for that matter, there could be no more powerful symbol of adventure, of possibility, of hope and freedom, than a ship heading out into space.
Mon Mothma had told Luke that he craved adventure, and he had denied it. It hadn’t taken much to show him the error of his ways. He wanted to be out there, in the thick of things.
“Come on, Luke,” said Lando. “You and I have things to talk about.”
* * *
Luke and Lando were not the only ones to watch the departure of the Millennium Falcon. Pharnis Gleasry, agent of the Human League, watched as well, albeit from a discreet distance. He was several kilometers away, on an observation platform on another of Coruscant’s massive towers. The platform was crowded with tourists who took him for one of their own and paid him no mind. It was far enough away that he was obliged to use macrobinoculars to see much of anything. The constant jostling he suffered from the tourists did not make it any easier to keep the macrobinoculars steady.
But he could see the ship take off for all of that. And he could see two tiny figures, still on the hard stand. He could see them watch the Falcon vanish, see them turn away and head back inside. Pharnis was all but certain that the one on the left was Skywalker. The other was definitely Lando Calrissian. Good. Good. Pharnis was pleased to get visual confirmation that his target was on-planet. With Organa Solo safely on her way, it was time for Skywalker. But Pharnis had done his homework. He knew that the Millennium Falcon was not the most reliable of craft. Best to give her time to get out of the system. If the Falcon broke down and Organa Solo returned to Coruscant, after Pharnis had done the Skywalker job, it could prove most embarrassing.
No. Give them time to get well away. Tomorrow. He would do the job tomorrow.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Proposal Accepted
So what is this project you want my help with, Lando?” Luke asked as they made their way back from the landing bay.
Lando Calrissian smiled at Luke as they walked, and there was more than a bit of mischief in his expression. “A whole new approach to the way I do business,” he said. “Or it might be more accurate to call it an investment opportunity. Anyway, I want your help to get it off the ground.”
Investment opportunity? Luke thought. He glanced at his companion. Lando had always been one to go after high-stakes, large-scale projects, but he had never been one to invite his friends to join the wild schemes. Even Lando knew there were limits—or at least he had, up until now.
Not that it mattered, of course. Lando could hit up Luke for money all day long, but it wouldn’t do any good. You needed to have money before you could give it to someone—and Lando ought to have known that a Jedi Master was not the sort of person likely to have a stack of spare credits lying arou
nd. To put it rather crudely, saving the universe didn’t pay very well.
But Lando had to know Luke was not rich. Was it something worse still? Was he hoping to trade on Luke’s good name, get him to endorse the scheme so Lando could get others to invest? “Ah, Lando, I don’t think I can help you. I really don’t have the sort of big-stakes money you’re after. And I don’t think I’d be much good trying to sell it to others—”
Lando burst out laughing. “Is that what you thought I was after? Calrissian’s Fly-by-Night Investments, as endorsed by Luke Skywalker, Hero of the Galaxy? No, no, that’s not it. That kind of gall would be beyond even me.”
“Well, that’s a relief,” Luke said. “I was scared you were about to ask me to go on some sort of promotional tour.”
Lando gave him a funny look and smiled. “In a sense,” he said, “I am. But not for the sort of product you’ve got in mind.”
“Lando, so far you’re not making sense.”
“No, I suppose not.” Lando stopped walking for a moment, and Luke did as well. Lando turned toward Luke, took him by the arm, and seemed about to say more. But then he glanced around, as if he were trying to judge the likelihood of unwelcome eavesdroppers. “Look,” he said at last. “There’s something I’ve been meaning to show you. A new project of mine. Let’s head there. We can sit down quietly, in private, and I can explain the whole thing.”
“All right, I suppose,” Luke said, more than a little doubtful. “What sort of project?” he asked.
“My new home,” Lando said. “Something kind of special.”
“Special in what way?” Luke asked.
“You’ll see,” said Lando, slapping Luke on the shoulder. “Come on. We’ll take the scenic route.”
Luke had thought he knew Coruscant fairly well, but Lando led him through a labyrinth of passages and tunnels and lifts and moving walkways Luke had never seen or heard of before. All of the passageways seemed to lead off in every direction at once, but it soon became clear that they were going deeper and deeper into the bowels of the city.
By the time Lando had gotten to the level he wanted, Luke guessed they were at least one or two hundred meters below ground level—if Coruscant could be said to have a ground level. The planet-wide city of towers and monolithic structures had been built and rebuilt and overbuilt and dug up and reburied so many times that no one really knew where the original surface was anymore. Virtually all of the land surface had been built over. Here and there were hummocks of dirt where scruffy plant life had managed to secure a foothold. But hardly any of these were truly at “ground” level. They were just sheltered spots where the winds and rains had been able to deposit enough dust and dirt and detritus to form a soil of sorts, places where a stray seed or two from one of the lush indoor gardens had found its way.
But for all of that, Luke knew they were unquestionably underground. Half the tunnels were just bare, raw rock, solid granite. In places the tunnel walls were bone-dry. In others, they were clammy and wet, with riverlets of moisture oozing down the walls and pooling here and there.
If this was where Lando lived now, Luke could not help thinking that Lando had, quite literally, gone down in the world. An underground address was considered a mark of very low status on Coruscant.
That worried Luke. He had always known Lando to be very concerned with appearances. There had been times he had seen Lando quite literally threadbare—but even in the worst of times, Lando had made a determined and successful effort to seem prosperous. Part of it was vanity and ego. Lando had plenty of those in stock. But there was a more practical side to it as well. Lando was, among other things, a salesman, and a salesman who didn’t look prosperous was not going to get far.
Except that Lando did look prosperous—if anything, better than he had in years. But if he was doing so well, why was he living underground?
For that matter, why was he taking Luke to where he lived by such a round-about route? There had to be a more direct way to get where they were going. Probably that was nothing more than force of habit. Back in the bad old days, Lando had often felt the need to be rather secretive about the location of his living quarters.
While he had never had half the galaxy’s bounty hunters after him, the way Han had at one point, Lando Calrissian had managed to develop a pretty fair number of enemies over the years. There had been times when not even his most trusted friends knew where he lived. Even the most trusted person could be tailed, or be tricked into wearing a tracer tab, or tortured or drugged. Nowadays, there wasn’t any real need for such precautions, but old habits died hard in ex-smugglers who didn’t die young—and Lando was still very much alive. And it could very well be that Lando still had a few old associates he didn’t want to meet unexpectedly. Maybe it wasn’t so foolish to take the long way around.
Lando kept up a steady monologue as they walked, nattering on cheerfully about every subject under the stars, from the best odds to be found in the various small-stakes gambling houses—legal and otherwise—in the bowels of Coruscant, to the enormous profits to be realized by anyone in the right place at the right time, should the Corellian Trade Summit prove successful. That much about Lando had stayed the same, Luke thought. As interested in the five-credit bet as he was in the fifty-million-credit investment. And given his usual luck on the fifty-million side of things, he probably was wise to pay attention to those five credits.
Lando Calrissian was famous for developing a huge project, living high off the proceeds—and then, through no fault of his own, having the whole thing crash down around his ears. He had done a splendid job of running Cloud City on Bespin—and gotten out with not much more than the clothes he was standing up in. It was more or less the same story for his mole-mining operation at Nkllon. And then there was that mining on Kessel … If he hadn’t had a fair bit of skill at the gaming tables, Lando would never have been able to recover from those disasters.
And now, it appeared, he was gearing up to start all over again. But if he didn’t want Luke’s money, and didn’t want to trade on Luke’s name, then how in the galaxy did it have anything to do with Luke?
On they walked, through increasingly squalid and dirty passages. The occasional pools of water grew more frequent, and more filthy. There were a number of unpleasant odors, some of which Luke could identify, and a number that he was just as glad he could not.
At last the walkway they were on came to a halt before a huge blastproof door. Lando punched a combination into a keypad, and the door slid back into the wall with a ponderous rumbling of machinery.
They stepped onto a terrace overlooking a huge subterranean cavern, a hollow dome, easily a kilometer across. Luke, quite astonished, found himself on a platform that looked down into a complete pocket city of low stone buildings and cool green parks. The dome was brightly lit, the air sweet and pure, the walkways and byways clean and tidy. The buildings were widely spaced, their stone walls brightly painted. Pathways snaked through neatly kept lawns, and the roof of the dome was painted a royal blue.
“Welcome to Dometown,” Lando said.
“Very nice, Lando,” Luke said as he leaned over the low wall of the terrace and admired the view. “Very nice indeed. Not at all what I expected.”
“Well, our developers kept it quiet,” Lando said. “Didn’t want just anyone knowing about it. We found this underground chamber. It’d been built for space knows what reason, and who knows how old it is. Back then it was full of ruined machines, and old junk, and a whole herd of mutant hive rats and practically everything else you’d ever want to find. We got it cleaned up, refurbed the air and water and security system, and built some decent housing. It’s not exactly in the poshest neighborhood, but who cares? You can rent a nice big place here for a tenth of what it would cost to get a high-status broom closet on the surface.”
“I supposed you were one of the investors in this little project?” Luke said.
Lando laughed, clapped him on the shoulder, and led him down a low, wide
ramp into the dome. “Suppose away,” he said. “I decided, just for once, to put my money into something small and local. Just this once, why not be one of many partners, instead of being the whole show myself? Why not think small, and build a nice neighborhood? I’ve run a whole city by myself, and take it from me, this is easier.”
“So you’re no longer thinking about the grand-scale projects?” Luke asked.
Lando looked at him as they walked along, clearly surprised and maybe a little bit hurt. “I’ll never quit doing that, Luke. If you don’t think big, what’s the point of thinking at all? I just got tired of having nothing at all to fall back on. It might not be in a high-status neighborhood, but status isn’t everything—and no one has to know where I live, anyway. Now I’ve got a little bit of income from this place, enough to live on and just a bit more, and I have a place to live that’s mine, that no one can take away from me. And it’s all in the most bombproof and secure depths of the capital planet.”
“A safe, secure investment,” Luke said, grinning at his friend.
“I know, I know,” Lando said. “Don’t let it get around, or I’ll ruin my reputation. Come on, my house is just up this way. Let’s go in.”
* * *
Five minutes later they were relaxing in the elegant, if somewhat spartan, confines of Lando’s house. Luke had to admit that Lando had a point about space. Only the richest of beings, or the most exalted of government officials, could have afforded anything this size anywhere near the surface. The house was built of stone—a highly cheap and available building material when one is building underground—and the walls and floors were smooth-polished granite. It was cool and quiet, and the rooms were comfortably expansive.
Lando sat Luke down on a low, luxurious couch and brought him something cool to drink before sitting down on a matching chair next to the couch. Then Lando began to talk—and talk about everything but the matter at hand. Most uncharacteristically, he seemed reluctant to come to the point. He fussed about, worrying that the room was too hot or too cold, that Luke was not comfortable, and that his drink needed freshening up.
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