by Brian Daley
“The walls are probably too thick,” Han suggested as he set to work. When it had been built, the wall would have withstood any assault that could have been made with portable equipment, but Han was beneficiary of a long technological gap. Chunks of the wall began to fall away. Beyond was the glow of a perpetual illumi-system.
Han set the fusion cutter aside hurriedly, anxious to see for himself. A treasure beyond spending! He could barely contain himself. He ducked and stepped through, followed by Skynx. The vault was dust-free, dry, and as quiet as when Xim’s artisans had sealed it, moments before they were put to death, centuries ago.
His steps echoing in the stillness, Han smiled. “The real vaults; all the time they were right here!” Hunters had scoured this whole part of space for Xim’s treasure because his vaults were empty and all the time there had been complete duplicates, right under the decoys. “Skynx, I’ll buy you a planet to play with!”
The Ruurian made no answer, silenced by the weight of years hanging over the place. They followed the corridor through a few turns and came to a stretch where warning flashers blinked in their wall sockets, as they had been doing for centuries. This no-weapons zone was an antechamber to the true treasure vaults of Xim.
Han stopped, wishing neither to be burned by the defensive weapons nor to go on unarmed, aware he might face other dangers. He turned back with great reluctance. At the fusion-cut opening, Gallandro waited.
Han paused and Skynx waited uncertainly. “We found it,” the pilot told the gunman with a jerk of his thumb. “The real one. It’s back there.” He realized Gallandro had heard Skynx’s transmissions after all.
Gallandro registered no elation, only amused acceptance. Han knew without being told that everything had changed. The gunman’s abandoned equipment was stacked to one side, and he had doffed his short jacket, prelude to a gun duel. “I said, the treasure is back there,” Han repeated.
Gallandro smiled his frosty smile. “This has nothing to do with money, Solo, although I postponed it until you and your group could help me find the vaults. I have my own plans for Xim’s treasure.”
Han warily shrugged out of his jacket. “Why?” was all he asked, carefully unsnapping his holster’s retaining strap and rotating it forward out of his way. His fingers stretched and worked, waiting.
“You require chastening, Solo. Who do you think you are? Truth to tell, you’re nothing but a commonplace outlaw. Your luck has run out: now, call the play!”
Han nodded, knowing Gallandro would if he didn’t. “And this’ll make you feel superior, right?” His hand blurred for his blaster, the best single play of his life.
Their speeddraw mechanics were very different. Han’s incorporated movements of shoulders and knees, a slight dipping, a partial twist. Gallandro’s was ruthless economy, an explosion of every nerve and muscle that moved his right arm alone.
When the blaster bolt slammed into his shoulder, Han’s overwhelming reaction was surprise; some part of him had believed in his luck to the end. His own draw half-completed, his shot went into the floor. He was spun half around, in shock, smelling the stench of his own charred flesh. The pain of the wound started an instant later. A second bolt from the cautious Gallandro struck his forearm and Han’s blaster dropped.
Han sank to his knees, too startled to cry out. Skynx retreated with a terrified chitter. Swaying, clasping his wounded arm to him, Han heard Gallandro say, “That was very good, Solo; you came closer than anyone’s come in a long time. But now I’ll take you back to the Corporate Sector—not that I care about the Authority’s justice, but there are those who have to be shown what it means to stand in my way.”
Han gasped through locked teeth, “I’m not doing time in any Authority horror factory.”
Gallandro ignored that. “Your friends are more expendable, however. If you’ll pardon me, I’ll have to see to your Ruurian comrade before he gets into any mischief.”
He slapped a pair of binders he’d found onboard the Falcon around Han’s ankles and ground the pilot’s com-link under his heel. “You were never the amoralist you feigned to be, Solo, but I am. In a way, it’s too bad we didn’t meet later, when you were salted and wiser. You’re pretty good in a fight; you might’ve made a useful lieutenant.” He removed the charge from Han’s blaster, tucked it into his belt, and sauntered off after Skynx, who, unable to get past the gunman, had fled back down the corridors toward the treasure vaults.
Gallandro moved cautiously, knowing the Ruurian was unarmed but counting no being harmless when it was fighting for its life. He rounded a corner to see Skynx cowering against the wall some distance along, gazing at him with huge, terrified eyes, paralyzed with fear. Around the far turn of the corridor he could see the reflected warning lights of a no-weapons zone.
Gripping his blaster, Gallandro smirked. “It’s a pity, my little friend, but there’s too much at stake here: Solo’s the only one I can afford to take alive. I shall make this as easy as I can. Hold still.”
Drawing a bead on Skynx’s head, he stepped forward. Energy discharges flashed from hidden emplacements; even Gallandro’s fabulous reflexes gave him no edge against the speed of light.
Caught in a flaring crossfire of defensive weapons, the gunman was hit by a dozen lethal blasts before he could so much as move. He was the center of an abrupt inferno, then his scorched remains fell to the corridor floor and the smell of incinerated flesh clogged the air.
Skynx uncoiled from his spot at the corridor wall bit by bit. He threw aside the warning flashers he had removed from their sockets along the corridor’s wall. He gave silent thanks Gallandro hadn’t noticed the empty sockets; a prudent Ruurian probably would have.
“Humans,” remarked Skynx, then went off to rescue Han Solo.
“Not much left of him, is there?” Han asked rhetorically an hour later as he stood over Gallandro’s blackened remains. Like the others, he had left his gun outside the no-weapons zone. Badure and Hasti had made temporary repairs to his shoulder and forearm with one of the ship’s medi-packs. If Han received competent medical attention soon, there would be no lasting effect from Gallandro’s blaster bolts.
Chewbacca was just finishing a careful examination of that corridor and the one beyond, running a thorough check along the walls to search out each weapons emplacement. He had opened each one with hand tools and deactivated it. Satisfied that there would be no danger in bringing power equipment and tools inside, the Wookiee barked to Han.
“Let’s get busy; I don’t like the idea of the Falcon being unmanned.” When Skynx had returned with news of the gun duel, Chewbacca had moved the starship so that she blocked the main door, her ramp extended down through it. He had warped the ship’s defensive mantle around and set her guns to fire automatically on sensor-lock should anyone come too close, one warning volley and then the real item. The Dellaltians trapped inside on the starship’s arrival had already surrendered and been permitted to leave; the Falcon would protect the treasure hunters for the time being, but Han didn’t want to press his already overextended luck.
They gathered their gear and moved on. At the end of the next corridor was a metal wall bearing a Wookiee-high representation of Xim’s death’s-head symbol. Chewbacca lifted the fusion cutter to it and began slicing, splitting the insignia in two amid flying, flashing motes. Then he began carving in earnest. Heat washed back across him.
In short order there was a wide opening in the door. Beyond, bathed in the glow of illumi-panels that had been keeping the place bright for generations, was the glittering of gems, the gleam of metals, piles of strongboxes, and racks of storage cylinders in warehouse-sized shelf stacks that stretched from floor to high ceiling and away into the distance as far as they could see.
And this was only the first of the treasure rooms.
Skynx was quiet, almost reverent. He had made the find of a lifetime, a discovery out of daydreams. Badure and Hasti remained solemn, too, as they considered the size and wealth of the place, the imp
act it would have on their lives, and the memory of what they had gone through to stand here.
Not so Han and Chewbacca. The pilot jumped through the gap in the door, wounded arm held to him by a traction web. “We did it! We did it!” he shouted in glee. The Wookiee lurched after him, tossing his long-maned head back with an ecstatic “Rooo-oo!” They slapped each other, laughter echoing away into the piles of treasure. Chewbacca’s huge feet slapped the floors in a thumping victory dance as Han laughed in joy.
Skynx and Badure had gone to open containers with Bollux’s help, to examine Xim’s spoils. Chewbacca offered to assist them. “Spread it out here!” Han enjoined him. “I want to roll around in it!”
He paused when he noticed Hasti nearby, eyeing him strangely. “I always wondered what you’d be like,” she told him, “when you found your big win, you and the Wook. What now?”
Han still rode the wave of elation. “What now? Why, we’ll, we’ll—” He stopped, giving the subject some serious thought for the first time. “We’ll pay off our debts, get ourselves a first-class ship and crew, uh …”
Hasti nodded to herself. “And settle down, Han?” she asked softly. “Buy a planet, or take over a few conglomerates and live the life of a good man of business?” She shook her head slowly. “Your problems are just beginning, rich man.”
His joy was receding fast, replaced by a tangled knot of doubts, plans, the need for forethought and mature wisdom. But before he could berate Hasti for being a spoilsport, he heard Chewbacca’s angry roar.
The Wookiee held a metallic ingot, frowning at it in disgust. He dumped a handful of them onto the floor in a chiming avalanche and gave the pile a kick that sent ingots skittering every which way. Han forgot Hasti and went to his friend. “What is it?”
Chewbacca explained with frustrated grunts and moans. Han picked up one of the ingots and saw that his copilot was right. “This stuff’s kiirium! You can get it anywhere; Skynx, what’s it doing in with the treasure?”
The small academician had located a vault-directory screen at the end of the nearest shelf stack, an old televiewer mounted on a low stand. He brought it to flickering life, and columns of ciphers and characters raced across the screen as Skynx answered distractedly.
“There would seem to be a great deal of it here, Captain. And a huge quantity of mytag crystalline vertices and mountains of enriched bordhell-type fuel slugs, among other things.”
“Mytag crystals?” Han repeated in puzzlement. “They run those things off by the carload; what kind of treasure’s this? Where’s the real treasure?”
A belly laugh distracted him. Badure had found a canister of the mytag crystal and flung a double handful into the air. The crystals rained down around him, catching the light, as he convulsed in laughter. “This is it! Or was, an age ago. Don’t you see, Slick? Kiirium is artificial shielding material, not very good by modern standards but a major breakthrough in its time, and tough to produce to boot. With quantities of kiirium to shield heavy guns and engines, Xim could field warcraft that were better armed and faster than anything else in space at the time.
“And mytag crystals were used in old subspace commo and detection gear; you needed lots and lots of them for any spacefleet or planetary defenses. And so forth; all this was critical war materiél. With the stuff in these vaults, Xim could have assembled a war machine that would have conquered this whole part of space. But he lost big at the Third Battle of Vontor, first.”
“That’s it?” Han bellowed. “We went through all this for a treasure that’s obsolete?”
“Not quite,” Skynx commented mildly, still bent over the screen. “One whole section is filled with information tapes, art works, and artifacts. There is a hundred times more information contained here than everything we know about the period altogether.”
“I’ll bet the Survivors have long since forgotten just what it was they were guarding,” Hasti put in. “They believed the legends, just like everyone else. I wonder what did happen to the Queen of Ranroon?”
Badure shrugged. “Perhaps they plunged her into the system’s primary after she offloaded the treasure, or sent her off with a skeleton crew to arrange misleading sightings of her and create a false trail. Who knows?”
Skynx had left the viewscreen and started a delirious dance, first on his hind limbs, then on the front ones, hopping and capering much as Han and Chewbacca had a moment before. “Marvelous! Miraculous! What a find! I’m sure to get my own chair funded—no, my own department!”
Han, leaning against a wall, slowly sank to a squatting position. “Artworks, hmm? Chewie and I can just stroll into the Imperial Museum with a bunch under our arms and start haggling, right?” He rested his forehead on his good arm. Chewbacca patted his shoulder solicitously, making mournful sounds.
Skynx gradually stopped cavorting, realizing what a disappointment all this was to the two. “There are some things of intrinsic value, Captain. If you choose carefully, you could fill your ship with items you could dispose of relatively simply. There would be some profit.” He was fighting the urge to hoard the entire find, knowing that the Millennium Falcon could bear away no more than an insignificant part of it. “Enough, I suppose, to get your ship repaired properly and have your wounds looked after in a first-class medicenter.”
“What about us?” Hasti interposed. “Badure and I haven’t even got a starship.”
Skynx pondered for a moment, then brightened. “I can write my own ticket with the university, an unlimited budget. How would you two like to work with me? Academic pursuits will be dull after this, I suppose, to a pair of humans. But there’d be generous pay and retirement benefits and quick promotions. We’ll be years and years working on this find. I’ll need someone to look after all the workers, scholars, and automata.” Badure smiled and put an arm around Hasti’s shoulders. She nodded.
That made Skynx think of something else. “Bollux, would you and Blue Max care for positions? You’d be of great help, I’m sure. After all, you two are the only ones who interacted with the war-robots at any length. There’s certain to be an effort to study their remains; we have a great deal yet to learn about their thought processes.”
Blue Max answered for them both. “Skynx, we’d like that a lot.”
“If the locals don’t march in here and take it all away from you,” Han reminded them, as Chewbacca helped him to his feet. Seeing their concern, he added, “I guess we’ll leave you a portable defensive generator and some heavy weapons and supplies out of the Falcon. That’ll give us more cargo space.”
Badure sounded uncharacteristically angry. “Han, how gullible do you think the rest of the universe is? You always want to do the right things for the wrong reasons. Well, what will you do the day you run out of excuses, son?”
Han pretended not to hear. “We’ll punch through a distress call just before we make our jump out of this system. There’ll be a Tion Hegemony gunboat here before you know it. Come on, Chewie; let’s break out the handtruck and get the ship loaded before anything else happens.”
“Captain,” Skynx called. Han paused and looked back. “Here’s a funny thing: I still think this adventuring was basically just danger and hardship a long way from home, but now that it’s ended and we’re parting company, I find myself saddened.”
“Look us up for a refresher course, any time,” offered Han.
Skynx shook his head. “I have much to do here; all too soon I’ll be called away by my blood, when it’s time to go chrysalis, then live a brief season as a chroma-wing. If you wish to see me then, Captain, come and look on Ruuria for the flyer whose wing markings are the same as my own banding. The chroma-wing won’t recognize you, but perhaps some part of Skynx will.”
Han nodded, finding no adequate way to say good-bye. Badure called, “Hey, Slick!” Han and his copilot looked to him and he laughed. “Thanks, boys.”
“Forget it.” Han dismissed the entire incident. He started off again with his sidekick, both of them moving with s
ome pain due to their injuries. “After all, a Life-Debt’s a Life-Debt, isn’t it, partner?”
On this last note, he poked a knuckle into his copilot’s ribs. Chewbacca swung angrily but not too quickly. Han ducked and the Wookiee backed off. “Look,” Han said, “that’s it for missions of mercy, all right? We’re smugglers; that’s what we know and that’s what we’re good at and that’s what we’re sticking to!”
The Wookiee growled concurrence. The others, surrounded by the endless shelf stacks of Xim’s treasure, heard the discussion echo back from the corridor. Han broke into Chewbacca’s rumblings with, “When the Falcon’s repaired and this wing of mine’s fixed, we’re going to try another Kessel spice run.”
The Wookiee croaked an irritated objection. Han insisted. “It’s fast money and we won’t have to look at any dirt! We’ll get Jabba the Hut or somebody to back us for a cut. Listen, I’ve got this plan …”
Just as they were moving out of earshot, Chewbacca’s protests stopped. He and Han Solo shared some joke that made both laugh slyly. Then they returned to their schemes.
“There,” Badure declared to Hasti, Skynx, Bollux, and Blue Max, “go the real Survivors.”
About the Author
Brian Daley’s first novel, The Doomfarers of Coramonde, was published on the first Del Rey list in 1977. It was an immediate success, and Brian went on to write its sequel, The Starfollowers of Coramonde, and many other successful novels: A Tapestry of Magics, three volumes of The Adventures of Hobart Floyt and Alacrity Fitzhugh, and, under the shared pseudonym Jack McKinney, ten and one half of the twenty-one Robotech novels. He first conceived of the complex GammaL.A.W. saga in Nepal, in 1984, and worked on its four volumes for the next twelve years, finishing it shortly before his death in 1996.
Brian was enthralled by the Star Wars saga and very excited by the possibilities it afforded for popularizing science fiction for a mass audience, so he was very pleased to be chosen as the author for the first Star Wars spin-off novels, the three volumes of The Han Solo Adventures. He continued his association with Star Wars by writing the radio plays for “Star Wars,” “The Empire Strikes Back,” and “Return of the Jedi.”
