The Han Solo Adventures (20 page)

For Cargo-master-apprentice Dane Thorson, Chief Scout Adam Reith, Jason dinAlt, Jame Retief of the
Corps Diplomatique Terrestrienne
and all others of that rare stripe

And who are they anyway, these so-called free traders and independent spacers? Rogues, scoundrels, and worse! The common slangtalk term “freighter bums” is more applicable, surely. Beware to the shipper who would entrust them with cargo; woe to the being who books passage with them!

At best, they are feckless ruffians whose unconscionable social values allow them to undercut the fee rates of established, reliable companies. More often, they’re con artists, frauds, tariff-dodgers and, yes, even smugglers!

Is any rascal with a spacecraft to be entrusted with your livelihood? Overhead, administrative apparatus, and managerial proprieties—these are the best guaranties of a dependable business arrangement!

(Excerpted from Public Service Message #122267-50,
sponsored by the Corporate Sector Authority)

“Chewie, hey, I’ve got it!”

Han Solo’s happy shout surprised Chewbacca so much that the towering Wookiee straightened involuntarily. Since he’d been hunkered down under the belly of the starship
Millennium Falcon
welding her hull with a plasma torch, he bumped his shaggy head against her with a resounding gong.

Snapping off the torch and letting its superheated field die, the Wookiee tore off his welding mask and threw it at his friend. Han, knowing Chewbacca’s temper, skidded to a stop and ducked with the reflexes of a seasoned star pilot as the heavy mask zipped by overhead. He took a step backward as Chewbacca stalked out from under the grounded
Falcon
into the brilliant light of Kamar’s white sun. Making temporary repairs on the damaged ship had brought the Wookiee peevishly close to mayhem.

Han pulled off his wraparound sun visor and grinned, raising his free hand to ward off his copilot’s pique.

“Hold on, hold it. We’ve got a new holofeature; Sonniod just brought it.” To prove it, Han held up the cube of clear material. Chewbacca forgot his anger for the moment and made a lowing, interrogative sound.

“It’s some kind of musical story or something,” Han replied. “The customers probably won’t understand this one either, but are we going to pack them in now! Music, singing, dancing!”

Han, waving the cube, beamed happily over their good fortune. He still retained a good deal of the ranginess of youth, but combined it with much of the confidence of maturity. He had shucked his vest in the heat of Kamar, and his sweat-stained pullover shirt clung to his chest and back. He wore high spaceman’s boots and military-cut trousers with red piping on their seams. At his side was a constant companion, a custom-made blaster that was fitted with a rear-mounted macroscope. Its front sight blade had been filed off with the speeddraw in mind. Han wore it low and tied down at his right thigh in a holster that had been cut away to expose his sidearm’s trigger and trigger guard.

“Chewie, we’re gonna be pulling in customers from all over the Badlands!”

With a noncommittal grunt Chewbacca went to pick up the fallen plasma torch. Kamar’s sun was lowering at the horizon, and he’d done just about all he could to make the ship spaceworthy anyway.

He was large, even for a Wookiee—an immense, shambling man-shaped creature with radiant blue eyes and a luxurious red-gold-brown pelt. He had a bulbous black nose and a quick, fang-filled smile; he was gentle with those whom he liked and utterly ferocious toward anyone who provoked him. There were few of his own species to whom Chewbacca was as close to as Han Solo, and the Wookiee was, in turn, Han’s only true friend in a very big galaxy.

Gathering his equipment, Chewbacca trudged back out from under the ship.

“Leave that stuff,” Han enjoined him. “Sonniod’s coming by to say hello.” He indicated Sonniod’s ship, a light cargo job, parked on her sandskid-mounted landing gear some distance out on the flats. As he had been close to the blast of his plasma torch, Chewbacca hadn’t even heard the landing.

Sonniod, a compact, gray-haired little man with a cocksure walk and a rakish tilt to his shapeless red bag of a hat, was approaching slowly behind Han. He took in the
Falcon
’s temporary resting place with an amused eye, being a former smuggler and bootlegger. One of the fastest smuggling ships in space, she looked out of place here in the middle of the Kamar Badlands, with little to see in any direction but sand, parched hills, miser-plants, barrel-scrub, and sting-brush. The hot white sun of Kamar was lowering and soon, Sonniod knew, night scavengers would be leaving their burrows and dens. The thought of digworms, bloodsniffers, nightswifts, and hunting packs of howlrunners made him shiver a little; Sonniod hated crawly things. He waved and called a greeting to Chewbacca, whom he’d always liked. The Wookiee returned the wave offhandedly, booming a friendly welcome in his own tongue while ascending the ramp to stow his welding equipment and run a test on his repair work.

The
Millennium Falcon
sat on her triangle of landing gear near a natural open-air amphitheater. The encircling slopes showed the prints and tail scuffs left on previous occasions by the Badlanders. Down in the middle of the depression the stubborn plantlife of Kamar had been cleared away. There rested a mass-audience holoprojector, a commercial model that resembled in size and shape a small spacecraft’s control console.

“I got word that you wanted a holofeature, any holofeature,” Sonniod remarked, following Han down the side of the bowl. “
Love is Waiting
was all I could find on short notice.”

“It’ll do fine, just fine,” Han assured him, fitting the cube into its niche in the projector. “These simpletons’ll watch anything. I’ve been running the only holo I had, a travelogue, for the past eleven nights. They still keep coming back to gawk at it.”

The sun was ready to set and dusk would come rapidly; this part of the Badlands was close to Kamar’s equator. Removing the sweatband he’d been wearing around his forehead, Han bent over the holoprojector. “Everything checks out; we have ourselves a new feature tonight. Come on back to the
Falcon
and I’ll let you help me take admission.”

Sonniod scowled at having to turn around and climb the bowl again. “I got word on the rumor vine that you were here, but I couldn’t understand how in the name of the Original Light you and the Wookiee ended up showing holo to the Kamar Badlanders. Last I heard, you two took some fire on the Rampa Rapids.”

Han stopped and scowled at Sonniod. “Who says?”

The little man shrugged elaborately. “A ship looks like a stock freighter but she’s leaking a vapor trail on her approach, and the Rampa Skywatch figures she’s a water smuggler. They shoot at her when she won’t heave to, but she dumps her load, maybe five thousand liters, and cuts deeper into the traffic pattern. What with the thousands of ships landing and lifting off all the time, they never got a positive I.D. on her. And you were seen on Rampa.”

Han’s eyes narrowed. “Too much chatter can get you into trouble. Didn’t your mother ever tell you that, Sonniod?”

Sonniod put on a big grin. “What she told me was never to talk to strangers. And I haven’t, not about this, Solo. But I’d have thought you’d have known better. Didn’t you check for leakage?”

Han relaxed and shifted his feet. “Next time I’ll install the damn tanks myself. That was pure R’alla mineral water, sweet and natural and expensive as hell to haul—worth a fortune on Rampa, where all they’ve got is that recycled chemical soup. Too bad. Anybody who makes it down the Rampa Rapids with a load of fresh water these days is a rich man.”

What Han didn’t mention, though he assumed Sonniod had concluded as much, was that he and Chewbacca had lost all the money they had saved during those two-and-a-half minutes of fun and excitement in the Rampa approach corridors.

“As it was, I landed with nothing but the general cargo I was lugging as cover. And somebody messed up on that, too! Instead of twelve of the Lockfiller holo models, I had eleven of them and this old Brosso Mark II. The consignee would only accept the eleven Lockfillers and finally wouldn’t pay because he’d been shorted. The shipper liquidated right after I lifted off, and you know how much I hate police and courts, so I was stuck with that holoprojector.”

“Well, I see you didn’t let it put you out of business, Solo, I’ll say that for you,” Sonniod granted.

“Inspiration’s my specialty,” Han agreed. “I knew it was time to get out of the Corporate Sector for a while anyway, and I figured the locals out here in the Badlands would be crazy over holos. I was right; wait till you see. Oh, and thanks for fronting for the holo.”

“I didn’t,” Sonniod answered as they resumed their way. “I know someone who rents them, and
Love Is Waiting
is about the oldest he’s got. On my return leg I’ll swap him whatever you’ve got and pick up a bit of cash on the side. My cut, all right?”

The deal sounded good to Han.

They returned to the
Falcon
, where a variety of local trade goods had been heaped at the foot of the starship’s main ramp. As Han and Sonniod arrived, a labor ’droid came clumping down the ramp bearing a plastic-extrusion carton containing more Kamarian wares of various sorts.

The ’droid was somewhat shorter than Han, but barrel-chested and long-armed, and moved with the slight stiffness that indicated a heavy-duty suspension system. It had been designed in the image of man, with red photoreceptors for eyes and a small vocoder grille set in his blank metallic face where a mouth would have been. His durable body was finished in a deep, gleaming green.

“How’d you afford a brand-new ’droid?” Sonniod asked as the machine in question set down its burden.

“I didn’t,” Han answered. “He said they wanted to see the galaxy, but sometimes I think they’re both circuit-crazy.”

Sonniod looked puzzled. “Both?”

“Watch.” The ’droid having completed his chore, Han commanded, “Hey, Bollux, open up.”

“Of course, Captain Solo,” Bollux answered in a casual drawl, and obligingly pulled his long arms back out of the way. His chest plastron parted down the center with a hiss of pressurized air and the halves swung outward. Nestled among the other elements in his chest was a small, vaguely cubical computer module, an independent machine entity painted a deep blue. A single photoreceptor mounted in a turret at the module’s top came alight, swiveled, and came to rest on Han.

“Hello, Captain,” piped a childlike voice from a diminutive vocoder grille.

“Well, of all the—” Sonniod exclaimed, leaning closer for a better look as the computer’s photoreceptor inspected him up and down.

“That’s Blue Max,” Han told him. “Max because he’s packed to his little eyebrows with computer-probe capacity and Blue for obvious reasons. Some outlaw-techs put these two together like that.” He thought it best not to go into the wild tangle of crime, conflict, and deception surrounding a previous adventure at the secret Authority installation known as Stars’ End.

Bollux’s original, ancient body had been all but destroyed there, but the outlaw-techs had provided him with a new one. The ’droid had opted for a body much like his old one, insisting that durability, versatility, and the capacity to do useful work had always been the means to his survival. He had even retained his slow speech pattern, having found that it gave him more time to think and made humans regard him as easygoing.

“When they were manumitted they asked to sign on with me,” Han told Sonniod. “They’re swapping labor for passage.”

“Those are the last of the trade articles we’ve accumulated, sir,” Bollux informed Han.

“Good. Close up and go re-stow all the loose gear we had to move around.” The plastron halves swished shut on Blue Max, and Bollux obediently returned up the ramp.

“But, Solo, I thought you always said you disavow all machinery that talks back,” Sonniod reminded him.

“A little help comes in handy sometimes,” Han answered defensively. He avoided further comment, remarking, “Ah, the rush is about to start.”

Out of the gloom, figures were hurrying toward the starship, pausing at a cautious distance. The Kamar Badlanders were smaller and more supple than other Kamarians, and their segmented exoskeletal chitin was thinner and of a lighter color, matching the hues of their home terrain. Most of them rested in the characteristic pose of their kind, on their lowermost set of extremities and their thick, segmented, prehensile tails.

Lisstik, one of the few Badlanders whom Han could tell from the others, approached the
Falcon
’s ramp. Lisstik had been among the very few to watch the holos on the first evening Han had offered them, and he’d shown up every evening thereafter. He seemed to be a leader among his kind. Now Lisstik was sitting on his tail, leaving his upper two sets of brachia free to gesture and interweave as Kamarians loved to do. The Badlander’s faceted, insectile eyes showed no emotion Han had ever been able to read.

Lisstik wore an unusual ornament, a burned-out control integrator that Chewbacca had cast aside. The Kamarian had scavenged and now wore it, bound by a woven band to the front of his gleaming, spherical skull. Lisstik spoke a few phrases of Basic, possibly one of the reasons he was a leader. Once more he asked Han the question that had become something of a formula between them. In a voice filled with clicks and glottal stops, he queried, “Will we see
mak-tk-klp
, your holo-sss, tonight? We have our
q’mai.
”

“Sure, why not?” Han replied. “Just leave the
q’mai
in the usual place and take a—” he almost said “seat,” which would have been a difficult concept for a Kamarian, “—a place below. The show starts when everybody’s down there.”

Lisstik made the common Kamarian affirmative, a clashing-together of the central joints of his upper extremities, sounding like small cymbals. From his side he uncorded a wound scrap of miser-plant leaf and laid it down on a trading tarp Han had spread out at the base of the ramp. Lisstik then scuttled down into the open-air theater with the swift, fluid gait of his species.

Others began to follow, leaving this leaf-wrapped treasure or that handicraft or artwork. Often one Badlander would offer something that constituted the contributions for himself and several companions. Han raised no objection; business was good and there was no reason to push for all the market would bear. He liked to think he was building good will. The Badlanders, who weren’t used to congregating, tended to find their places on the slopes in small clusters, keeping as much distance between groups as possible.

Among the payments were water-extraction tubes, pharynx flutes, minutely carved gaming pieces, odd jewelry intended for the exotic Kamarian anatomy, amulets, a digworm opener chipped from glassy stone and nearly as sharp as machined metal, and a delicate prayer necklace. Earlier on, Han had been forced to dissuade his customers from bringing him nightswift gruel, boiled howlrunner, roast stingworm, and other local delicacies.

Han picked up the twist of leaf Lisstik had left, opened it on his palm and showed it to Sonniod. Two small, crude gemstones and a sliver of some milky crystal lay there.