“And then we’ll have them all.”
“Fifty-one,” Lando Calrissian growled, throwing a glare at Han and Leia as he paced a convoluted path around the low chairs in the lounge. “Fifty-one of my best reconditioned mole miners. Fifty-one. That’s almost half my work force. You realize that?- half my work force.”
He dropped down into a chair, but was on his feet again almost immediately, stalking around the room, his black cloak billowing behind him like a tame storm cloud. Leia opened her mouth to offer commiseration, felt Han squeeze her hand warningly. Obviously, Han had seen Lando in this state before. Swallowing back the words, she watched as he continued his caged-animal pacing.
And without obvious warning, it was over. “I’m sorry,” he said abruptly, coming to a halt in front of Leia and taking her hand. “I’m neglecting my duties as host, aren’t I? Welcome to Nkllon.” He raised her hand, kissed it, and waved his free hand toward the lounge window. “So. What do you think of my little enterprise?”
“Impressive,” Leia said, and meant it. “How did you ever come up with the idea for this place?”
“Oh, it’s been kicking around for years,” he shrugged, pulling her gently to her feet and guiding her over to the window, his hand resting against the small of her back. Ever since she and Han had gotten married, Leia had noticed a resurgence of this kind of courtly behavior toward her from Lando-behavior that harkened back to their first meeting at Cloud City. She’d puzzled over that for a while, until she’d noticed that all the attention seemed to annoy Han.
Or, at least, it normally annoyed him. Right now, he didn’t even seem to notice.
“I found plans for something similar once in the Cloud City files, dating back to when Lord Ecclessis Figg first built the place,” Lando continued, waving a hand toward the window. The horizon rolled gently as the city walked, the motion and view reminding Leia of her handful of experiences aboard sailing ships. “Most of the metal they used came from the hot inner planet, Miser, and even with Ugnaughts doing the mining they had a devil of a time with it. Figg sketched out an idea for a rolling mining center that could stay permanently out of direct sunlight on Miser’s dark side. But nothing ever came of it.”
“It wasn’t practical,” Han said, coming up behind Leia. “Miser’s terrain was too rough for something on wheels to get across easily.”
Lando looked at him in surprise. “How do you know about that?”
Han shook his head distractedly, his eyes searching the landscape and the starry sky above it. “I spent an afternoon going through the Imperial files once, back when you were trying to talk Mon Mothma into helping fund this place. Wanted to make sure someone else hadn’t already tried it and found out it didn’t work.”
“Nice of you to go to that kind of trouble.” Lando cocked an eyebrow. “So, what’s going on?”
“We should probably wait until Luke gets here to talk about it,” Leia suggested quietly before Han could answer.
Lando glanced past Han, as if only just noticing Luke’s absence. “Where is he, anyway?”
“He wanted to catch a fast shower and change,” Han told him, shifting his attention to a small ore shuttle coming in for a landing. “Those X-wings don’t have much in the way of comfort.”
“Especially over long trips,” Lando agreed, tracing Han’s gaze with his eyes. “I’ve always thought putting a hyperdrive on something that small was a poor idea.”
“I’d better see what’s keeping him,” Han decided suddenly. “You have a comm in this room?”
“It’s over there,” Lando said, pointing toward a curved wooden bar at one end of the lounge. “Key for central; they’ll track him down for you.”
“Thanks,” Han called over his shoulder, already halfway there.
“It’s bad, isn’t it?” Lando murmured to Leia, his eyes following Han across the room.
“Bad enough,” she admitted. “There’s a chance that that Star Destroyer came here looking for me.”
For a moment, Lando was silent. “You came here for help.” It wasn’t a question.
“Yes.”
He took a deep breath. “Well . . . I’ll do what I can, of course.”
“Thank you,” Leia said.
“Sure,” he said. But his eyes drifted from Han to the window and the activity beyond it, his expression hardening as he did so. Perhaps he was thinking of the last time Han and Leia had come to him for help. And what giving that help had cost him.
Lando listened to the whole story in silence, then shook his head. “No,” he said positively. “If there was a leak, it didn’t come from Nkllon.”
“How can you be sure of that?” Leia asked.
“Because there’s been no bounty offered for you,” Lando told her. “We have our fair share of shady people here, but they’re all out for profit. None of them would turn you over to the Empire just for the fun of it. Besides, why would the Imperials steal my mole miners if they were after you?”
“Harassment, maybe,” Han suggested. “I mean, why steal mole miners anyway?”
“You got me,” Lando conceded. “Maybe they’re trying to put economic pressure on one of my clients, or maybe they just want to disrupt the New Republic’s flow of raw materials generally. Anyway, that’s beside the point. The point is that they took the mole miners, and they didn’t take you.”
“How do you know there’s been no bounty offer?” Luke asked from his seat off to the right-a seat, Leia had already noted, where he and his lightsaber would be between his friends and the room’s only door. Apparently, he didn’t feel any safer here than she did.
“Because I’d have heard about it,” Lando said, sounding a little miffed. “Just because I’m respectable doesn’t mean I’m out of touch.”
“I told you he’d have contacts,” Han said with a grimly satisfied nod. “Great. So which of these contacts do you trust, Lando?”
“Well-” Lando broke off as a beep came from his wrist. “Excuse me,” he said, sliding a compact comlink from the decorative wristband and flicking it on. “Yes?”
A voice said something, inaudible from where Leia was sitting. “What kind of transmitter?” Lando asked, frowning. The voice said something else. “All right, I’ll take care of it. Continue scanning.”
He closed down the comlink and replaced it in his wristband. “That was my communications section,” he said, looking around the room. “They’ve picked up a short-range transmitter on a very unusual frequency . . . which appears to be sending from this lounge.”
Beside her, Leia felt Han stiffen. “What kind of transmitter?” he demanded.
“This kind, probably,” Luke said. Standing up, he pulled a flattened cylinder from his tunic and stepped over to Lando. “I thought you might be able to identify it for me.”
Lando took the cylinder, hefted it. “Interesting,” he commented, peering closely at the alien script on its surface. “I haven’t seen one of these in years. Not this style, anyway. Where’d you get it?”
“It was buried in mud in the middle of a swamp. Artoo was able to pick it up from pretty far away, but he couldn’t tell me what it was.”
“That’s our transmitter, all right,” Lando nodded. “Amazing that it’s still running.”
“What exactly is it transmitting?” Han asked, eyeing the device as if it were a dangerous snake.
“Just a carrier signal,” Lando assured him. “And the range is small-well under a planetary radius. Nobody used it to follow Luke here, if that’s what you were wondering.”
“Do you know what it is?” Luke asked.
“Sure,” Lando said, handing it back. “It’s an old beckon call. Pre-Clone Wars vintage, from the looks of it.”
“A beckon call?” Luke frowned, cupping it in his hand. “You mean like a ship’s remote?”
“Right,” Lando nodded. “Only a lot more sophisticated. If you had a ship with a full-rig slave system you could tap in a single command on the call and the ship would come straight to you, automatically maneuvering around any obstacles along the way. Some of them would even fight their way through opposing ships, if necessary, with a reasonable degree of skill.” He shook his head in memory. “Which could be extremely useful at times.”
Han snorted under his breath. “Tell that to the Katana fleet.”
“Well, of course you have to build in some safeguards,” Lando countered. “But to simply decentralize important ship’s functions into dozens or hundreds of droids just creates its own set of problems. The limited jump-slave circuits we use here between transports and shieldships are certainly safe enough.”
“Did you use jump-slave circuits on Cloud City, too?” Luke asked. “Artoo said he saw you with one of these right after we got out of there.”
“My personal ship was full-rigged,” Lando said. “I wanted something I could get at a moment’s warning, just in case.” His lip twitched. “Vader’s people must have found it and shut it down while they were waiting for you, because it sure didn’t come when I called it. You say you found it in a swamp?”
“Yes.” Luke looked at Leia. “On Dagobah.”
Leia stared at him. “Dagobah?” she asked. “As in the planet that Dark Jedi from Bpfassh fled to?”
Luke nodded. “That’s the place.” He fingered the beckon call, an odd expression on his face. “This must have been his.”
“It could just as easily have been lost some other time by someone else,” Lando pointed out. “Pre-Clone Wars calls could run for a century or more on standby.”
“No,” Luke said, shaking his head slowly. “It was his, all right. The cave where I found it absolutely tingles with the dark side. I think it must have been the place where he died.”
For a long moment they all sat in silence. Leia studied her brother closely, sensing the new tension lying just beneath the surface of his thoughts. Something else, besides the beckon call, must have happened to him on Dagobah. Something that tied in with the new sense of urgency she’d felt on the way in toward Nkllon . . .
Luke looked up sharply, as if sensing the flow of Leia’s thoughts. “We were talking about Lando’s smuggler contacts,” he said. The message was clear: this was not the time to ask him about it.
“Right,” Han said quickly. Apparently, he’d gotten the hint, too. “I need to know which of your marginally legal friends you can trust.”
The other shrugged. “Depends on what you need to trust them with.”
Han looked him straight in the eye. “Leia’s life.”
Seated on Han’s other side, Chewbacca growled something that sounded startled. Lando’s mouth fell open, just slightly. “You’re not serious.”
Han nodded, his eyes still locked on Lando’s face. “You saw how close the Imperials are breathing down our necks. We need a place to hide her until Ackbar can find out how they’re getting their information. She needs to stay in touch with what’s happening on Coruscant, which means a diplomatic station we can quietly tap into.”
“And a diplomatic station means encrypt codes,” Lando said heavily. “And quietly tapping into encrypt codes means finding a slicer.”
“A slicer you can trust.”
Lando hissed softly between his teeth and slowly shook his head. “I’m sorry, Han, but I don’t know any slicers I trust that far.”
“Do you know any smuggler groups that have one or two on retainer?” Han persisted.
“That I trust?” Lando pondered. “Not really. The only one who might even come close is a smuggler chief named Talon Karrde-everyone I’ve talked to says he’s extremely honest in his trade dealings.”
“Have you ever met him?” Luke asked.
“Once,” Lando said. “He struck me as a pretty cold fish- calculating and highly mercenary.”
“I’ve heard of Karrde,” Han said. “Been trying for months to contact him, in fact. Dravis-you remember Dravis?-he told me Karrde’s group was probably the biggest one around these days.”
“Could be,” Lando shrugged. “Unlike Jabba, Karrde doesn’t go around flaunting his power and influence. I’m not even sure where his base is, let alone what his loyalties are.”
“If he has any loyalties,” Han grunted; and in his eyes Leia could see the echoes of all those fruitless contacts with smuggling groups who preferred to sit on the political fence. “A lot of them out there don’t.”
“It’s an occupational hazard.” Lando rubbed his chin, forehead wrinkled in thought. “I don’t know, Han. I’d offer to put the two of you up here, but we just don’t have the defenses to stop a really serious attack.” He frowned into the distance. “Unless . . . we do something clever.”
“Such as?”
“Such as taking a shuttle or living module and burying it underground,” Lando said, a gleam coming into his eye. “We put it right by the dawn line, and within a few hours you’d be under direct sunlight. The Imperials wouldn’t even be able to find you there, let alone get to you.”
Han shook his head. “Too risky. If we ran into any problems, there also wouldn’t be any way for anyone to get help to us.” Chewbacca pawed at his arm, grunting softly, and Han turned to face the Wookiee.
“It wouldn’t be as risky as it looks,” Lando said, shifting his attention to Leia. “We should be able to make the capsule itself foolproof-we’ve done similar things with delicate survey instrument packs without damaging them.”
“How long is Nkllon’s rotation?” Leia asked. Chewbacca’s grunting was getting insistent, but it still wasn’t loud enough for her to make out what the discussion was all about.
“Just over ninety standard days,” Lando told her.
“Which means we’d be completely out of touch with Coruscant for a minimum of forty-five. Unless you’ve got a transmitter that would operate on the sunside.”
Lando shook his head. “The best we’ve got would be fried in minutes.”
“In that case, I’m afraid-”
She broke off as, beside her, Han cleared his throat. “Chewie has a suggestion,” he said, his face and voice a study in mixed feelings.
They all looked at him. “Well?” Leia prompted.
Han’s lip twitched. “He says that if you want, he’s willing to take you to Kashyyyk.”
Leia looked past him to Chewbacca, a strange and not entirely pleasant thrill running through her. “I was under the impression,” she said carefully, “that Wookiees discouraged human visitors to their world.”
Chewbacca’s reply was as mixed as Han’s expression. Mixed, but solidly confident. “The Wookiees were friendly enough to humans before the Empire came in and started enslaving them,” Han said. “Anyway, it ought to be possible to keep the visit pretty quiet: you, Chewie, the New Republic rep, and a couple of others.”