Star Wars - Han Solo at Star's End
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He couldn’t stifle an involuntary “Hey!” She turned back with a cant to her head that let him know he’d have to talk fast. Which he did. “I put my life—my one and precious life, mind you—on the line for your father—”
“—and all those other fine people,” she cut in, “including your good friend Chewie—”
“—and went through a couple of types of hair-raising situations, and all you have to say is thanks?”
She evinced shock. “Why, you only carried out your part of our deal. And I carried out mine. What else did you expect, a parade?”
He glared at her, hoping she’d wither from his gaze. She didn’t. He spun on his toe and headed for the Falcon’s ramp with long strides. “You win! Women, hah! I’ve got the whole galaxy, sweetheart, the whole galaxy. Who needs this?”
She caught up, whirled him around. Jessa looked good even in cold-weather gear. “Numbskull! What’s wrong with striking another deal?”
His brow furrowed. I am somehow slipping into some thing tricky here, he thought, but I can’t quite see what “What kind of deal?”
She considered it, looking him over. “What are your plans? Are you going to join this campaign against the Authority? Or clear out of this part of space?”
He looked up, sighing. “You should know better than that. Rob ’em blind, that’s my kind of revenge.”
Jessa leaned around him and called up into the ship: “Hey, Chewie, how’d you like an all-new guidance system? And a complete overhaul?”
The Wookiee’s delighted honks, preceding his appearance at the ramp, sounded like a happy foghorn. Jessa finished cheerily, “And to show you what a sport I am, boys, I’ll throw in some body work, repair all minor hull damage. I’ll reroute the ducting in the cockpit, too; get all those conduits and other head-knockers out of your way.”
Chewbacca was close to tears of joy. He threw his hairy arm around the Falcon’s landing gear and gave it a wet Wookiee kiss.
Jessa said, “See, Solo? It’s easy when you’re the boss’s daughter.”
He was flummoxed. “Jess, what am I supposed to offer?”
She slipped her arm through his, grinning slyly. “What’ve you got, Han?” She led him away, ignoring his objections. His outbursts became fewer as the pair walked across the landing field toward the distant buildings. Halfway there, Chewbacca saw, Han held his greatcoat open so that she could slip into it, safe from the bitter winds of Urdur, though her own suit was quite well insulated.
Leaning casually on the Falcon, the Wookiee watched them go, and thought about what he and Han Solo could do with a ship milled and tuned fine by the full resources of the outlaw-techs. His muzzle wrinkled back from his fangs. He was glad for the breather they’d have here on Urdur.
But after that, everybody had best hang on to his cash with both hands.
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.”
BY BRIAN DALEY
Coramonde Duology
The Doomfarers of Coramonde
The Starfollowers of Coramonde
The Han Solo Adventures
Han Solo at Stars’ End
Han Solo’s Revenge
Han Solo and the Lost Legacy
The Adventures of Hobart Floyt and Alacrity Fitzhugh
Requiem for a Ruler of Worlds
Jinx on a Terran Inheritance
Fall of the White Ship Avatar
Robotech
(Written with James Luceno under the shared pseudonym of Jack McKinney)
Robotech
No. 1 Genesis
No. 2 Battle Cry
No. 3 Homecoming
No. 4 Battlehymn
No. 5 Force of Arms
No. 6 Doomsday
No. 7 Southern Cross
No. 8 Metal Fire
No. 9 The Final Nightmare
No. 10 Invid Invasion
No. 11 Metamorphosis
No. 12 Symphony of Light
No. 18 The End of the Circle
No. 19 The Zentraedi Rebellion
No. 20 The Masters’ Gambit
No. 21 Before the Invid Storm
The Sentinels
No. 1 The Devil’s Hand
No. 2 Dark Powers
No. 3 Death Dance
No. 4 World Killers
No. 5 Rubicon
The Black Hole Travel Agency
(Written with James Luceno under the shared pseudonym of Jack McKinney)
Event Horizon
Artifact of the System
Free Radicals
Hostile Takeover
Gamma L.A.W.
(Edited by James Luceno, and published posthumously)
Smoke on the Water
Screaming Across the Sky
The Broken Country
To Water’s End
Other Novels
Tron
A Tapestry of Magics
Kaduna Memories (written with James Luceno under the shared pseudonym of Jack McKinney)
STAR WARS—The Expanded Universe
You saw the movies. You watched the cartoon series, or maybe played some of the video games. But did you know …
In The Empire Strikes Back, Princess Leia Organa said to Han Solo, “I love you.” Han said, “I know.” But did you know that they actually got married? And had three Jedi children: the twins, Jacen and Jaina, and a younger son, Anakin?
Luke Skywalker was trained as a Jedi by Obi-Wan Kenobi and Yoda. But did you know that, years later, he went on to revive the Jedi Order and its commitment to defending the galaxy from evil and injustice?
Obi-Wan said to Luke, “For over a thousand generations, the Jedi Knights were the guardians of peace and justice in the Old Republic. Before the dark times. Before the Empire.” Did you know that over those millennia, legendary Jedi and infamous Sith Lords were adding their names to the annals of Republic history?
Yoda explained that the dreaded Sith tend to come in twos: “Always two, there are. No more, no less. A Master, and an apprentice.” But did you know that the Sith didn’t always exist in pairs? That at one time in the ancient Republic there were as many Sith as Jedi, until a Sith Lord named Darth Bane was the lone survivor of a great Sith war and created the “Rule of Two”?
All this and much, much more is brought to life in the many novels and comics of the Star Wars expanded universe. You’ve seen the movies and watched the cartoon. Now venture out into the wider worlds of Star Wars!
Turn the page or jump to the timeline of Star Wars novels to learn more.
PROLOGUE
“SABACC!”
It was unmercifully hot. Tossing his card-chips on the table, the young gambler halfheartedly collected what they’d earned him, an indifferent addition to his already indifferent profits for the evening. Something on the unspectacular order of five hundred credits.
Perhaps it was the heat. Or just his imagination.
This blasted asteroid, Oseon 2795, while closer to its sun than most, was as carefully life-supported and air-conditioned as any developed rock in the system. Still, one could almost
feel the relentless solar flux hammering down upon its sere and withered surface, feel the radiation soaking through its iron-nickel substance, feel the unwanted energy reradiating from the walls in every room.
Especially this one.
Apparently the locals felt it, too. They’d stripped right down to shorts and shirt-sleeves after the second hand, two hours earlier, and looked fully as fatigued and grimy as the young gambler felt. He took a sip from his glass, the necessity for circumspection regarding what he drank blessedly absent for once. No nonsense here about comradely alcohol consumption. Most of them were having ice water and liking it.
Beads of moisture had Condensed into a solid sheet on the container’s outer surface and trickled down his wrist into his gold-braided uniform sleeve.
What a way to live! Oseon 2795 was a pocket of penury in a plutocrat’s paradise. The drab mining asteroid, thrust cruelly near the furnace of furnaces, orbited through a system of pleasure resorts and vacation homes for the galaxy’s superwealthy, like an itinerant junkman.
The gambler was wishing at the moment that he’d never heard of the place. That’s what came of taking advice from spaceport attendants. A trickle of moisture ran down his neck into the upright collar of his semiformal uniform. Who said hardrock miners were always rich?
He shuffled the oversized deck once, twice, three times, twice again in listless ritual succession, passed it briefly for a perfunctory cut to the perspiring player on his right, dealt the cards around, two to a customer, and waited impatiently for the amateurs to assess their hands. Real or imagined, the heat seemed to slow everybody’s mental processes.
Initial bets were added to the ante in the middle of the table. It didn’t amount to a great fortune by anybody’s standards—except perhaps the poverty-cautious participants in the evening’s exercise in the mathematics of probability. To them the gambler was a romantic figure, a professional out-system adventurer with his own private starship and a reputation for outrageous luck. The backroom microcredit plungers were trying desperately to impress him, he realized sadly, and they were succeeding: at the present rate, he’d have to drain the charge from his electric shaver into the ship’s energy storage system, just to lift off the Core-forsaken planetoid.
Having your own starship was not so much a matter of being able to buy it in the first place (he’d won his in another sabacc game in the last system but one he’d visited) as being able to afford to operate it. So far, he’d lost money on the deal.
Looking down, he saw he’d dealt himself a minus-nine: Balance, plus the Two of Sabres. Not terribly promising, even at the best of times, but sabacc was a game of dramatic reversals, often at the turn of a single card-chip. Or even without turning it—he watched the deuce with a thrill that never staled as the face of the electronic pasteboard blurred and faded, refocused and solidified as the Seven of Staves.
That gave him a minus-four: insignificant progress, but progress nevertheless. He saw the current bet, flipping a thirty-credit token into the pot, but declined to raise.
It also meant that the original Seven of Staves, in somebody’s hand or in the undealt remainder of the deck, had been transformed into something altogether different. He watched the heat-flushed faces of the players, learning nothing. Each of the seventy-eight card-chips transformed itself at random intervals, unless it lay flat on its back within the shallow interference field of the gaming table. This made for a fast-paced, nerve-wracking game.
The young gambler found it relaxing. Ordinarily.
“I’ll take a card, please, Captain Calrissian.” Vett Fori, the player in patched and faded denyms on the gambler’s left, was the chief supervisor of the asteroid mining operation, a tiny, tough-looking individual of indeterminate age, with a surprisingly gentle smile hidden among the worrry-lines. She’d been betting heavily—for that impecunious crowd, anyway—and losing steadily, all evening, as if preoccupied by more than the heat. An unlit cigar rested on the table edge beside her elbow.
“Please, call me Lando,” the young gambler replied, dealing her a card-chip. “ ‘Captain Calrissian’ sounds like the one-eyed commander of a renegade Imperial dreadnought. My Millennium Falcon’s only a small converted freighter, and a rather elderly one at that, I’m afraid.” He watched her for an indication of the card she’d taken. Nothing.
A nasal chuckle sounded from across the table. Arun Feb, the supervisor’s assistant, took a card as well. There was a hole frayed in the paunch of his begrimed singlet, and dark stains under his arms. Like his superior, he was small in stature. All the miners seemed to run that way. Compactness was undoubtedly a virtue among them. He had a dark, thick, closely cropped beard and a shiny pink scalp. Drawing on a cigar of his own, he frowned as he added what he’d been dealt to the pair in his hand.
Suddenly: “Oh, for Edge’s sake, I simply can’t make up my mind! Can you come back to me, Captain Calrissian?” Lando groaned inwardly. This was how the entire evening had gone so far: the speaker, Ottdefa Osuno Whett, for all his dithering, had been the consistent big winner, perhaps owing to his tactics of continuous annoyance of the others. Fully as much a stranger in the Oseon as the young starship captain, at the moment he was operating on considerably less goodwill.
“I’m sorry, Ottdefa, you know I can’t. Will you have a card or not?”
Whett assumed an expression of conspicuous concentration that might have been a big success in his university classes. Ottdefa was a title, something academic or scientific, Lando gathered, conferred in the Lekua System. It was the equivalent of “Professor.”
Its owner was a spindly wraith, ridiculously tall, gray-headed, with a high-pitched whiny voice and a chronically indecisive manner. It had taken him twenty minutes to order a drink at the beginning of the game—and even then he’d changed his order just as the drink arrived.
Lando didn’t like him.
“Oh, very well. If you insist, I’ll take a card.”
“Fine,” Lando dealt it. Either the academic had an excellent poker face, or he was too absentminded to notice whether the resulting hand was bad or good. Lando looked to his right. “Constable Phuna?”
The squat, curly-headed tough-guy he addressed was T. Lund Phuna, local representative of law-and-order under the Administrator Senior of the Oseon. It was not, apparently, the happiest of assignments in the field. The uniform tunic hanging soddenly over the back of his chair looked nearly as worn as his companions’ work clothes. He lit cigarette after cigarette with nervous, sweaty fingers, filling the cramped, already stifling room with more pollution. He wiped a perspiration-soaked tissue over his jowls.
“I’ll stand. Nothing for me.”
“Dealer takes a card.”
It was the Idiot, worth zero. Given the circumstances, Lando felt it was altogether appropriate. If only he’d headed for the Dela System as he’d planned, instead of the Oseon. He’d seen richer pickings in refugee camps.
Bets were placed again. Vett Fori took another card, her fourth, as did her assistant, Arun Feb, asking for it around the stub of his cigar. Ottdefa Whett stood pat. A Master of Sabres brought the value of Lando’s hand up to a positive ten, as a final round of wagering commenced.
Arun Feb and Vett Fori both folded with a nine and minus-nine respectively. The cop Phuna hung grimly on, his broad features misted with sweat. Lando was about to resign himself, when Whett excitedly cried, “Sabacc!” slapping the Mistress of Staves, the Four of Flasks, and the Six of Coins down on the worn felt tabletop.
The Ottdefa raked in a meager pot: “Ah … not exactly the Imperial Crown jewels, nor even the fabulous Treasure of Rafa, but—”
“Treasure of Rafa?” echoed Vett Fori.
She might as well ask, thought Lando, she isn’t doing herself any good playing cards.
“I’ve heard of the Rafa System,” the mine supervisor continued, “everybody has. It’s the closest to our own. But I haven’t heard of any treasure.”
The academic cleared his throat. It was a
silly, goose-honk noise. “The Treasure of Rafa—or of the Sharu, as we are now compelled to call it, not for the Rafa System, my dear, but for the ancient race who once flourished there and subsequently vanished without a trace—is a subject of some interest.”
This had been delivered in Whett’s best professional tones. Vett Fori’s weathered face, impassive enough when it came to playing cards, plainly displayed annoyance at being patronized. She picked up her cigar, stuck it between her teeth, and glared across the table.
“Without a trace?” Arun Feb snorted with disbelief. “I’ve been there, friend, and those ruins of your—what’d you call ’em?—‘Sharu,’ are the biggest hunks of engineering in the known galaxy. What’s more, they cover every body in the system bigger than my thumbnail. They—”
“Are not themselves the Sharu, my dear fellow, of whom no trace remains,” Whett insisted, his tone divided between pedantry and insulted reaction. “I certainly ought to know, for, until recently, I was a research anthropologist for the new governor of the Rafa System.”
“What’s a bureaucrat want with a tame anthropologist?” Feb asked blandly. He blew a final smoke ring, mashed his cigar out on the edge of the vacuum tray, and took a long drink of water. It dribbled down his chin, soaking the collar of his soiled shirt.
“Why, I suppose,” sniffed Whett, “to familiarize himself thoroughly with all aspects of his new responsibilities. As you are no doubt aware, there is a native humanoid race in the Rafa; all of their religious practices revolve about the ruins of their legends of the long-lost Sharu. The new governor is a most conscientious fellow, most conscientious indeed.”
“Yes,” Lando said finally, wondering if the anthropologist was ever going to deal the next hand, “but you were speaking of treasure?”
Whett blinked. “Why, yes, yes I was.” A shrewd look came into the academic’s eyes. “Have you an interest in treasure, Captain?”
More interest than I’ve got in this game, Lando thought. I wish I’d steered for the Dela System, no matter how much easier it is to land a spaceship on an asteroid than a full-scale planet. Soon as this farce is over, that’s precisely what I’m going to do, win or lose, even if the astrogational calculations take me twenty years.