by Brian Daley
Skynx flowed to the acceleration couch and on up into his nook. He began taking objects from his treelike storage rack. “If you have no further tasks for us, sir,” Bollux told Han, “Max and I would like to continue our study of Skynx’s tapes.”
“Whatever you want, old-timer.”
Bollux crossed to the tech station, where he and the computer resumed their perusal of the ancient records Skynx had brought along. The labor ’droid, who had worked his way across the galaxy and had already outlived one body, possessed an almost sentient streak of curiosity, and Blue Max was always ready to absorb new information. The two mechanicals were particularly interested in technical data and other references to the giant war-robots of long-dead Xim.
Skynx, sitting up on his rearmost two sets of limbs, took and held a miniature amplified hammer dulcimer in the next set and two hammers in each digital cluster of the next. He strapped a pair of tympanic pulsers around himself, tapping experimentally with the digits of his next-higher limbs. Above those he fastened a pair of small bellows to pump air to a horn held in his uppermost-but-one set of extremities. In the uppermost he took up a flute of sorts and tried a few runs. The sound was like the wind cones Han remembered from his own homeworld. He wondered what kind of brain could coordinate all that activity.
Skynx launched into a merry air, full of sudden runs, bright interplay and humorous progressions, and impudent catches made to sound as if the instruments or Skynx’s limbs were getting out of hand and taking their own course. The Ruurian made a great pretense of distress and bewilderment and a desperate effort to bring his extremities under control again. The others laughed, particularly Chewbacca, whose Wookiee chortles made the bulkheads ring. Badure rapped time on the gameboard and even Han was tapping a toe or two. He opened the flask, took a swig, and passed it to the Wookiee. “Here, this’ll put some curl in your pelt.” Chewbacca drank, then sent the flask along. Even Skynx accepted a drink.
They demanded another number after that, and a third. Badure eventually jumped up, both hands over his head, to demonstrate the Bynarrian jig. He capered around the compartment as if he were twenty kilos lighter and as many years younger.
At the height of the Bynarrian jig the ship’s hatch signaled. Badure and Chewbacca rushed off, eager to see what Hasti had brought back. Bollux and Blue Max looked up from the strobing rapid-readout screen, and Skynx began extricating himself from his instruments.
“Step one completed!” he said in his quick fashion. “Skynx, of the K’zagg Colony, off on a treasure hunt! If my clutch-siblings could see me now!”
But when the Wookiee reentered the compartment, he slumped dejectedly over to his partner and sank into the couch, head in hairy hands. Bad as that? thought Han. Badure followed, one arm clasped around a despairing Hasti. She took a sip from the flask, coughed, told her story quickly, then took another.
“Voice-coder?” Han exclaimed. “Nobody said anything about a voice-coder.”
“Maybe Lanni never realized her voice was being printed,” Badure replied.
“That steward,” Hasti muttered. “I should’ve jabbed my gun into his bellybutton and offered to glaze his gallstones for him.”
Han handed the half-empty flask to his copilot and rose. “Now we do it my way.” He headed for the cockpit, pulling on his flying gloves. Chewbacca fell in behind. “Want to know how to make a withdrawal? Stick around.”
Badure hurriedly interposed himself between the two partners and the main passageway. “Steady there, boys. Just what’ve you got in mind?”
Han grinned. “Swooping down on the vault, blowing the doors with the belly-turret guns, going in, and taking the disk. Don’t bother getting up, folks; it’ll all be over in a minute.”
Badure shook his head. “What if a Tion patrol cruiser shows up? Or an Imperial ship? Would you care to have a hunter-killer team on your neck?”
Han made a move to step around him. “I’ll chance it.”
Hasti jumped up. “Well, I won’t! Sit down, Solo! At least consider the options before you risk the death penalty for all of us.”
Chewbacca awaited his friend’s decision. Bollux watched impartially and Blue Max with a certain excitement.
“Some forethought might not be out of place here,” Skynx contributed in a very subdued voice.
Han disliked complications and subterfuge, but his hasty action was stayed, for the moment, by the conviction that being dead was the least interesting thing in life. “All right, all right; who’s hungry?” he asked. “I’m sick of ship’s rations. Let’s go see what kind of meal we can get in town. But if nobody thinks of a new one, my plan still goes.” He clipped the flask to his gunbelt while Chewbacca gathered up his bowcaster and bandoleer of ammunition. Badure found the small purse of local currency he had brought, and Bollux shut his plastron halves on Blue Max.
Hasti saw Skynx shedding his instruments. “Hey, I never got to hear anything.”
Badure looked around. “Bring them along,” he bade Skynx. The Ruurian began tucking his instruments into carrying cinches he fastened around himself.
Pulling on his flight jacket, Han shut and sealed the hatch behind them. Storm clouds had moved in, and electrical discharges illuminated the clouds in strange flashes of red. Badure pointed out that the landlord’s cousins had disappeared. “They probably figured out they were guarding empty boxes.”
“More likely they didn’t want to sit around in that leaky barn,” Hasti reasoned. The rest of the onlookers who had been watching the starship from a distance, mostly children and the domestic yappers, were gone as well.
They set off downslope with Bollux bringing up the rear. Up this high, away from the docks, the streets were poorly maintained and lighting was unknown. They didn’t get far.
Han was first to sense something wrong—everything was too quiet, too many ramshackle windows were shuttered. No lights were showing and no voices could be heard anywhere nearby. He grabbed Chewbacca’s shoulder, and the bowcaster came up, the blaster appearing at the same time. By instinct, they stood back to back. Hasti had her mouth open to ask what was wrong when the spotlights hit them.
Han recognized them as hand-held spots and, figuring that a right-handed man would be holding the spot as far out with his left as he could, took an estimated aim.
“Don’t!” a voice ordered. “We’ll cut you all down if anyone fires a shot!”
They were surrounded. Han holstered his side arm, and the Wookiee lowered his bowcaster. Humans and various other beings appeared in the glare waving rifles, riot guns, slug-shooters, and other weapons. Han and his companions were easily disarmed and their equipment examined. Skynx chittered in terror while their captors pawed his delicate musical instruments, but he was allowed to retain them.
Three individuals strode forward to search the captives. The smaller two were mainbreed human—twins, a young man and woman who shared traits of thick, straight brown hair and widow’s peaks, startling black-irised eyes, and thin, intense, pale faces. The third personage hung back, a looming hulk in the light backwash of the spots. Han remembered the name Badure had mentioned: Egome Fass, the enforcer.
The twins approached them, the female in the lead. “J’uoch,” murmured Hasti, shivering.
The twins’ faces held the same rigid, lethal composure. “That’s it,” J’uoch replied quickly. “Where’s the disk, Hasti? We know you went to the vaults.” She gave Han a chilly smile. Then the smile vanished and she turned again to Hasti, “Give it up, or we burn down your friends, starting with the pilot here.”
Chewbacca’s great arms tensed, fingers curling. He prepared to die as he would be expected to, head of a Wookiee Honor Family, his life so intimately intertwined with that of Han Solo that there existed no human word for the relationship.
Han, in turn, was choosing among several tactics, all of them suicidal, when Bollux spoke. “Captain Solo mustn’t come to harm. I will open the Millennium Falcon for you.”
The woman eyed him. It
hadn’t occurred to J’uoch that the ’droid would be cleared for ship access. “Very well. All we want is the log-recorder disk.” Han, in the grip of adrenal overload, stared at Bollux and wondered what was going through the old labor ’droid’s logic stacks. One fact did not escape him: he had heard high-pitched communication bursts exchanged between Bollux and Blue Max.
Their captors herded them back toward the Falcon. Too late, Han understood why the Dellaltians had scattered. He just hoped the two machines had a workable plan.
Bollux, climbing the ramp, was at the main hatch lock with several of J’uoch’s people near. Strangely, just as the main hatch rolled up into its recess, the ’droid chose to swing his chest panels open. Then Han and the others heard Blue Max’s high-speed burst signals.
An ear-splitting hiss of a hurtling object echoed through the air. One of the men who was guarding Bollux was lifted off his feet by terrific impact, and in the next moment was stretched headlong on the ramp. Another captor, farther down the ramp, was slammed in the shoulder and knocked through the air.
“Run for it!” Blue Max shrilled. As suddenly as that, chaos broke loose.
VII
THE two strongarm specimens still standing at the top of the ramp ducked instinctively. Something small and fast swooshed past Han, knocking the humanoid who had been guarding him off his feet. Bollux pivoted to follow the action.
From the now-exposed Blue Max more high-pitched beeps issued forth. Han realized with some amazement that the computer module had managed to summon the remote target-globe from the Falcon’s interior and was using it as a weapon.
Before J’uoch’s people could react, Han yelled, “Hit ’em!” He grabbed the nearest opponent’s weapon, a slug-shooter carbine with a drum magazine and, twisting his leg behind the other’s, toppled him over.
Badure rammed his elbows back into the face of his guard and turned to grapple with him. Chewbacca was less fortunate. Preparing to enter the fray, he was unaware that the massive Egome Fass had stolen up behind him. The enforcer’s hard fist crashed into the base of the Wookiee’s skull.
Chewbacca staggered, nearly falling to his knees, but his tremendous strength bore him up again. He turned groggily to give battle, but Egome Fass’s first blow had given the enforcer a formidable edge. He avoided Chewbacca’s slowed counterpunch and landed another blow, bringing his fist down on the Wookiee’s shoulder. And this time the Falcon’s first mate went down.
Badure was having a difficult time with his second guard, who was young and fast. They struggled, feet shuffling in the dry dust, but just as the older man was gaining the upper hand by dint of weight and reach, he was tackled low around the knees and went down.
The tackier was Hasti. She had seen that J’uoch’s men on the ramp were about to open fire on Badure. Propelled by its repulsor power and forced air, the remote globe had taken two antagonists out of the fight. J’uoch was shooting at it with Hasti’s confiscated pistol, missing, and screaming orders that her troops ignored.
Han had retrieved the carbine, knocking his opponent away with a stroke of the weapon’s butt. He spotted his partner struggling to rise as Egome Fass hovered over him. The enforcer’s hood was thrown back, and in the light spilling down through the hatch, Han saw the humanoid’s huge, square jaw and tiny, gleaming eyes set far back under thick, bony ridges of brow.
Han clamped the carbine stock to his hips and squeezed off a burst. The weapon stuttered with a deafening staccato and reeked of burned propellant. A stream of slugs plucked at the enforcer’s chest but only ripped away fragments of cloth. Egome Fass was wearing body armor under his outsized coveralls. Before Han could adjust for effect, the humanoid lunged for cover.
A wash of white fire flared on Han’s right. Turning, he saw that it was a power-pistol shot aimed at Badure by a man on the ramp who missed because Hasti had just tackled the old man. But it hit the man with whom Badure had been struggling. He shrieked once and died as he fell.
Han grabbed Chewbacca’s elbow as the Wookiee struggled to his feet, shaking his head to clear it. Retaking the Falcon was impossible; the two remaining guards at the ramp head were kneeling in the shelter of the hatchway and firing into the night. “Get back!” Han hollered to his companions. He moved back, firing in brief bursts, followed by Hasti and Badure with Skynx scuttling rapidly behind.
The spotty return fire, hasty and poorly aimed, never came close. But one guard, a leather-skinned creature with a horny carapace, blocked Bollux’s retreat. Blue Max beeped, and immediately the remote flashed out of the darkness, striking the creature from behind and knocking it over. Since the remote couldn’t operate at any great distance from the starship, Max gave the signal that sent it jetting back onboard.
The labor ’droid hurried after the others, bounding in long strides made possible by heavy-duty suspension. The group ran, bounded, and scuttled to the edge of the landing area. All the while Han raked the field behind them to keep J’uoch’s people pinned down. Then the carbine went silent.
“Drum’s empty,” he said. Off in the night he could hear J’uoch railing at her followers and calling for a comlink.
“She’s posting a guard on the ship and calling for reinforcements,” Badure announced. “We’d best lose ourselves in town for a while.”
The group descended through the city in an informal race, past shuttered shops and locked doors. No lights could be seen; the Dellaltians who had seemed so curious earlier wanted no part of this lethal dispute among offworlders. Leading the others, Han plunged into an alley, followed it to a market plaza, and hurried down a trellised side street that smelled of strange foods and fuels.
They came to a factory district. Pausing in the shadows, the humans and the Wookiee leaned against a wall and fought for breath while Bollux waited impassively and Skynx, with a superior respiratory system, checked his carrier cinches to make sure that none of his precious instruments had been damaged.
“You should’ve snagged a gun,” Han puffed, “instead of worrying about that one-man band of yours.”
“These have been making music in my family for a dozen generations,” Skynx replied indignantly. “And I’m sure I don’t know how I could’ve wrested a weapon away from some malodorous ruffian four times my size.”
Han gave up the argument and checked the nearby rooftops. “Can anybody spot a ladder or staircase? We have to see if they’re trailing us.”
“Now I can be of help there, I believe,” Skynx announced. A nearby pole supported fiber-optic cables for intown communications; wrapping himself around it, Skynx spiraled up the pole, protecting his instruments carefully. Since all the buildings were one-story affairs, he had a good view of the surrounding area.
Having reconnoitered, Skynx corkscrewed his way down the pole again. “There are search parties working their way down through town,” he told them. “They have hand-held spotlights; I assume them to be using comlinks.” He tried to hide his fearful quaking.
“Did you see their ship?” Han asked eagerly. “It must be around here somewhere. Perhaps we could pick up some fire power there.”
But Skynx hadn’t spotted it. They decided to try to skirt the search parties’ pattern and see if they couldn’t get back to the Millennium Falcon. Skynx’s feathery antennae wavered in the air, attentive to vibrations. “Captain, I hear something.”
They all held their breath and listened. A rumbling swelled until it shook the ground. “Looks like J’uoch got through on the comlink,” observed Badure over the tumult. An enormous vessel mounted with heavy guns was hovering above the landing area, its floodlights playing over the city. The fugitives pressed backs into the shadows.
The ponderous lighter couldn’t hover and search for long; instead she descended. “There’ll be more manpower onboard her,” Badure warned. “Skynx, shinny up and take a look. Be careful.”
The Ruurian went up a nearby line-pole and was down again almost at once. “The big ship must have dropped off parties down in the lakeside
area,” he told them urgently. “I saw them spreading out, coming up the hill. And there’s a group of three coming down this way from above. One of them is carrying Chewbacca’s bowcaster.”
The Wookiee growled ominously. Han agreed, “Let’s take care of them, but good.” No one mentioned surrender; it was plain J’uoch would do anything to get what she wanted.
The search party flashed hand-held spots into alleys and doorways. Teams were being organized to scour the rooftops; virtually every trustworthy being who could be spared from the mining camp had been armed and brought to the scene.
The man leading this particular party, the man whose carbine Han had appropriated, carried Chewbacca’s bowcaster and had tucked Han’s blaster into his belt. He had seen a Wookiee bowcaster used in the holo-thrillers and was determined to get even with the two by downing them with their own weapons. He was delighted, therefore, to see a looming, shaggy shape step out of the darkness before him.
Blocking his companions in the process, the man with the bowcaster took a stance and fired. But Chewbacca ducked at the last instant, knowing that the man’s unfamiliarity with the feel and aiming characteristics of the bowcaster would cause a first-round miss. In a flash the Wookiee hurled himself forward.
The man gave the bowcaster’s foregrip a yank to recock it and strip another round off the magazine for a second shot. But he got nowhere; the weapon’s mechanism was set for a Wookiee’s brawn and length of arm. Before he could cast it aside and pull out Han’s blaster, a mountain of angry brown fur descended upon him.
The other two searchers fanned out to either side. One was felled immediately as Han Solo stepped out of the shadows and knocked him out with a swipe of the carbine’s butt. The other was stunned by masonry brickbats flung by Hasti and Badure.
Han adroitly snatched his victim’s pistol and fired at the brickbat-stunned searcher. Yelling, the man clenched his calf and fell. Meanwhile Chewbacca had separated his man from the bowcaster and thrown him against a wall. The man crashed with an impressive thud and slid to the ground.
