The Han Solo Adventures (30 page)

“Bugging your eyes out at them won’t help,” said Fiolla, referring to the gambling tables and other games of chance in the swank wagering compartment just off the passenger liner’s main salon.

She was wearing a sheer, clinging gown and soft evening slippers of polychromatic shimmersilk. She had brought the outfit with her, packed away in her upper-right thigh pouch and lower-left calf stuffpocket, on the assumption that her coveralls would do for all but the most formal places. She wore it now for a change of pace and a morale booster. Han still wore his ship clothes, but had closed his collar.

“We could go over what we know so far,” she proposed.

“That’s all we’ve been doing since we came onboard,” he grimaced.

That wasn’t entirely true. They had spoken of any number of things during the trip; he found her a spirited and amusing companion, much more so than any of the other passengers, aside from a frustrating tendency to keep her stateroom door locked during the liner’s “night.” But they had exchanged stories.

For instance, Fiolla had explained to him how she and her assistant, Magg, had been doing an audit on Bonadan when her portable command-retrieval computer terminal malfunctioned. She had turned to Magg’s, which, having a more comprehensive cybernetic background, was a more complicated instrument with a number of keyboard differences. Some miskeying or accident had opened up a restricted informational pocket in Bonadan’s system. There she had found records of the slavery ring’s activities and the notation of Zlarb’s impending payoff.

Han’s eyes were still riveted to players trying their luck or skill at Point Five, Bounce, Liar’s Cut, Vector, and a half-dozen other games. For two Standard timeparts, ever since coming aboard the passenger liner
Lady of Mindor
, he had been trying to come up with a way to get into a game. Now that he was completely rested, inactivity was nearly intolerable.

Fiolla had absolutely refused to back him, though Han had promised bountiful returns on her investment. He then pointed out that if she hadn’t squandered money on separate accommodations, she would have had plenty to loan him.

“I didn’t have time to brush up on my hand-to-hand” had been her retort. “And besides, if you’re such a good gambler, how come you’re flying around in that cookie-box freighter instead of a star yacht?”

He changed the subject. “We’ve been on this mud cart for two Standard timeparts. To get to Ammuud! No wonder I’m going crazy; the
Falcon
could’ve gotten us there in the time it took these idiots to clear port.”

He rose from the little table where they had eaten an indifferent meal. “At least we’ll make planetfall soon. Maybe I’ll go run my clothes through the robo-valet one more time for fun.”

She caught his wrist. “Don’t be so depressed. And please don’t leave me here alone; I’m afraid that priest of Ninn will corner me for another lecture on the virtues of formalistic abstinence. And no comments! Come on, I’ll play you a game of Starfight.
That
we can afford.”

Not many passengers remained in the lounge, for the
Lady of Mindor
was due to reenter normal space shortly; most of them were packing or making other last-minute preparations. He gave in and they crossed to the bank of coin games.

She mimicked his rangy walk, swaggering along next to him, arms dangling a bit and shoulders slumped back. There was an exaggerated sway to her hips as she swept the room arrogantly with narrowed eyes and an invisible blaster weighting her side, right in step with him.

When he noticed, he recognized himself at once. He glared around the salon in case anyone was inclined to laugh. “Will you quit that?” he said out of the side of his mouth. “Somebody’s liable to call you out.”

She chuckled. “Then they’ll stop a blaster bolt, handsome; I’ve been studying with the master.” He found himself laughing, as she’d intended.

The Starfight game consisted of two curved banks of monitors and controls, almost surrounding each of the two playing stations. Between them was a large holotank with detailed star charts. With the stacks and stacks of controls, each player sent his myriad ships out to do battle in computer modeled deepspace.

He stopped her as she was about to drop a coin into the game. “I’ve never been too partial to Starfight,” he explained. “It’s too much like work.”

“What about a last stroll through the promenade?”

It was as good a diversion as any. They ascended the curved staircase to find they had the promenade to themselves. The novelty of the place must have worn off for the other passengers. A single pane of transparisteel ten meters long and five high curved to follow the ship’s hull, showing them the tangled luminosity of hyperspace. They stared with the age-old fascination, their human minds and eyes trying to impose order on the chaos beyond the transparisteel so that, at times, they believed they saw shapes, surfaces, or fluxes.

She noticed he was still distracted. “You’re thinking about Chewie, aren’t you?”

A shrug. “He’ll be all right. I just hope the big lug didn’t worry himself sick when we were overdue and start shedding or something.”

The ship’s public-address system announced final warning of transition, though it was for crew members rather than passengers. Shortly thereafter Fiolla pointed and breathed a soft exclamation as the distortions and discord of hyperspace melted away and they gazed out at a field of stars. Due to the liner’s position they could see neither Ammuud nor its primary.

“How long to—” Fiolla was saying, when emergency klaxons began hooting all through the ship. The lighting flickered and died and was replaced by far dimmer emergency illumination. The outcries of frightened passengers could be heard as distant echoes in the passageways.

“What’s happening?” Fiolla yelled over the din. “A drill?”

“It’s no drill,” he said. “They’ve shut down everything but emergency systems; they must be channeling power into their shields.”

He grabbed her hand and started back for the staircase. “Where are we going?” she hollered.

“The nearest escape-pod station or lifeboat bay” was his shouted answer.

The salon was deserted. As they got into the passageway the entire liner rocked under them. Han recovered with the agility of a seasoned spacer, keeping his balance and stopping Fiolla just before she collided with a bulkhead.

“We’ve been hit!” he called. As if to underscore what he said, they heard massive airtight doors sliding into place automatically throughout the ship. The
Lady of Mindor
had taken hull damage of some sort and been breached.

A steward came running down the passageway with a medipack under one arm. When Han saw he wasn’t about to stop, he grabbed a double handful of the man’s heavily braided jacket.

“Let go,” the steward said, trying to twist free. “You’re supposed to proceed to your quarters. All passengers proceed to quarters.”

Han shook him. “First tell me what’s going on!”

“Pirates! They shot out the main drive as soon as we made transition from hyperspace!” The news shocked Han so much that he released his grip.

As he ran off on his way, the steward shouted back at them. “Return to your quarters, you fools! We’re being boarded!”

“This vessel is a fraud,” Spray announced, keying his next move into the gameboard in the
Millennium Falcon
’s forward compartment.

Chewbacca took just enough time from what he was doing—analyzing Spray’s unorthodox stratagem—to snarl threateningly.

Spray, who had grown more used to the Wookiee’s outbursts, didn’t flinch much at all. He was dividing his time between the compartment’s technical station and the gameboard, giving the
Falcon
’s first mate a very difficult match while running a combination inventory and inspection of the ship out of a sense of duty to Interstellar Collections Limited. Chewbacca permitted it more to keep the skip-tracer busy than anything else, but this slandering of the
Falcon
, if unchecked, could only lead to retribution.

Come to think of it
, the Wookiee reflected,
the Tynnan wasn’t a bad technical pilot
. He had even assisted on the liftoff from Bonadan, once Chewbacca had judged that Han and Fiolla had won enough time to get offworld. Spray had copiloted and aided in hyperspace transition with a fussy proficiency, though he’d been startled to learn that Han and Chewbacca habitually spaced by themselves, Han reaching back to his left to carry out navigator’s chores and the Wookiee leaning to his right to run the commo board when needed.

“The exterior is a deception,” Spray was continuing. “Why, some of the equipment you’ve installed is restricted to military use; are you aware of that? And her armament rating’s way too high, as is her lift/mass ratio. How did Captain Solo ever get a Waiver to operate within the Authority?”

The Wookiee, cupping his hirsute chin in both hands, leaned down even closer to the gameboard, ignoring the question. Even if he had been able to communicate eloquently with Spray, he wouldn’t have explained about the Waiver, which had involved an amazing variety of lawbreaking and the total destruction of the covert Authority facility known as Stars’ End.

Miniature holomonsters waited on the circular gameboard, throwing challenges to one another. Chewbacca’s defenses had been penetrated by a lone combatant from Spray’s forces. The question of external versus internal threat was a very subtle one, involving closely matched win/lose parameters. The Wookiee’s nose scrunched in thought. He reached a hairy finger out very slowly and punched his next move up on the game’s keyboard, then reclined on the curving acceleration couch, arm pillowing his head, his long legs crossed. With his free hand he scratched his other arm, which the somatigenerative effect of the flaking synth-flesh had made itchy.

“Uh-oh,” blurted Blue Max, who was following the contest from his habitual place in Bollux’s open thorax. The ’droid sat on a pressure keg among the other clutter to one side of the compartment, amid plastic pallets, hoisting toggles and a rebuilt fuel enricher that Han hadn’t gotten around to installing yet. The computer probe’s photoreceptor swiveled to track on Spray as the Tynnan returned to the board and made his next move without hesitation.

Spray’s lone combatant had been a decoy. Now one of his supporting monsters slithered across the board and, after a brief battle, threw Chewbacca’s defenses wide open.

“It’s the Eighth Ilthmar gambit; he drew you out with that loner. He’s got you,” Blue Max observed helpfully.

Chewbacca was filling his lungs for a vituperative outpouring and levering himself up to the board again when the navi-computer clamored for attention. The starship’s first mate forgot his ire and scrambled up from the acceleration couch, but not before he cleared the board of his humiliating defeat. He hastened off to prepare for the reversion to normal space.

“And just look at this; some of these systems are fluidic!” Spray squeaked after him, whiskers aquiver, waving a tech readout screen. “What is this, a starship or a distillery?”

The Wookiee paid him no heed. “Good game, Spray,” attested Max, who was himself a fair player.

“He held me for three extra moves,” admitted the skip-tracer. “I wish things were going as well with this technical survey. Everything’s so modified that I can’t trace the basic specifications.”

“Maybe we can help,” Max piped brightly.

“Max
is
conversant with ship’s systems,” Bollux said. “He might be able to dig out the information you require.”

“Just what I need! Please, step over to the tech station!” Spray was behind the ’droid, webbed feet scrabbling on the deckplates, pushing him to a seat at the station. As Bollux sat heavily into the acceleration chair, Max extended an adaptor, the one Chewbacca had repaired after the encounter with the slavers.

“I’m in,” Max announced as technical readouts began marching across scopes and screens at high speed. “What d’you want to know, Spray?”

“All data on recent jumps; you can patch into the navi-computer. I want to see how the ship’s been operating.”

“You mean accuracy factors and power levels?” Max asked in his childish voice.

“I mean hyperspace jumps, date-time coordinates, all relevant information. It’ll give me the simplest evaluation of how the ship performs and what she’s worth.”

There was a momentary hesitation. “It’s no use,” Max told Spray. “Captain Solo’s got all that stuff protected. He and Chewbacca are the only ones with access.”

Exasperated, Spray pursued. “Can’t you find a window to it? I thought you were a computer probe.”

Max achieved a wounded tone. “I
am
. But I can’t do something like this without the Captain’s permission. Besides, if I make a mistake, the safeguards will wipe everything clean.”

As the Tynnan sat and stewed, Bollux drawled, “As I understand it, a general examination would begin with things like power systems, maintenance records, and so forth. Would you like Blue Max to run a thorough check of current status?”

Spray seemed distracted. “Eh? Oh, yes, yes, that would be fine.” Then he sat, bucktoothed chin poised on a stubby paw, stroking his whiskers in concentration.

“Whoops,” chirped Max, “what d’you suppose
that
is? Whatever it is wasn’t there when we did the preflight warmup.”

The skip-tracer suddenly became attentive. “What are you—oh, that power drop? Hm, that’s a minor conduit on the outer hull, isn’t it? Now what could be draining power there?”

“Nothing in design schematics or mod-specs,” Max assured him. “I think we should tell Chewbacca.”

Spray, never one to trust the unexplained, was inclined to agree. Yielding to the skip-tracer’s nervous exhortations, the Wookiee left the cockpit only under protest, and seated himself at the tech station. But when he saw evidence of the highly improbable power drain, his thick red-gold brows beetled and his leathery nostrils dilated reflexively, trying to catch a whiff of what was wrong.

He turned and brayed an interrogative at Spray, who had been around the Wookiee long enough to understand that much.

“I haven’t a clue,” the skip-tracer answered stridently. “Nothing in this slapdash ship makes any sense to me. She looks like a used loadlifter, but she’s got higher boost than an Imperial cruiser. I don’t even care to think about how jury-rigged some of those reroutings must be.”

At Chewbacca’s order Blue Max showed him, on a computer model, exactly which length of the conduit was experiencing drainage. The Wookiee marched to the tool locker, withdrew a worklight, a scanner and a huge spanner, and continued on aft with Spray and Bollux bringing up the rear.

Near the engine shielding, the
Falcon
’s first mate removed a wide inspection plate and wormed himself down into the crawlspace there. He had even less room than normal—a good deal of the fluidic systems had been installed here.

He barely managed to turn his wide shoulders and squeeze the scanner in by the hull. He played its invisible tracer beam over the metal, watching the monitor carefully. At last he found the spot where, on the other side of the hull, the power conduit was showing droppage. It didn’t look like any malfunction he had ever seen; there should be no reason for the conduit simply to lose power. Something must be drawing it from the conduit, but Chewbacca could think of nothing that would do so. Unless, of course, something had been added.

In a moment he was wriggling his way back out of the crawlspace like an enormous red-gold-brown larva, honking his distress. Bollux’s vocoder and Max’s vied with Spray’s high-strung squeak, demanding to know what was wrong. Sweeping them out of his way with one wide swing of his arm, Chewbacca headed for the storage compartment where his oversized spacesuit was stored.

The Wookiee detested the confinement of a suit and loathed even more the idea of clambering along the hull and undertaking delicate and dangerous work while protected from the annihilation of hyperspace only by the thin envelope of the
Falcon
’s drive field. But more than that he dreaded what he believed he would find on the other side of the hull.

The decision was taken out of his hands. There was a loud
ploow!
Out of the still-open inspection port came a burst of flame and explosive force along with gasses and vaporized liquids from the fluidic components. There followed a sustained whistle of air that let them know the vessel had been holed, confirming the Wookiee’s worst fears. During the ground-time on Bonadan, someone, most probably the enemies waiting for Han and Fiolla, had taken precautionary measures to ensure that the
Millennium Falcon
wouldn’t escape. They had fastened a sleeper-bomb to the starship’s hull where it would do the worst damage. It had been applied inert, unpowered, undetectable except by the most minute inspection. Once in flight it had become active, draining power from the ship’s systems to build its explosion. Then it had released in a shaped charge and blown out control systems in flight. The device was meant to produce the cleanest possible kind of murder, one that would leave no evidence, blasting the ship and all it contained into meaningless energy anomalies in hyperspace.

Chewbacca and Spray were driven back by the multicolored reek belching from the ruptured fluidics. Unprotected, they could be killed as easily by breathing those concentrated gases as by a miscalculated transition.

But Bollux could get along quite well where they couldn’t. They saw the ’droid clank through the billowing smoke, lugging a heavy extinguisher he had pulled from a wall niche. Chewbacca had occasion now to curse the same auto-firefighting gear that had saved them all on Lur; the system’s inability to operate now might spell their deaths.

Bollux’s chest panels closed protectively over Blue Max even as he set the extinguisher down and lowered himself stiffly into the crawlspace, his gleaming body poorly suited to an area designed for limber living creatures. Once he had entered the space, his lengthy arm reached back out to drag the extinguisher after him. There was still the shriek of escaping air and the
whoop
of warning sirens to tell them the
Falcon
was depressurizing.

Chewbacca had run for the cockpit with Spray crowding behind. At the control console he kicked in filtration systems full-all, to carry away toxic fumes, and checked damage indicators.

The bomb must have been relatively small, placed in a precise location by someone who knew stock freighters like the
Falcon
well. The Wookiee realized it before Spray—whoever had planted the sleeper-bomb hadn’t been aware of the starship’s tread-boarded fluidics setup. With the control design radically altered, the bomb had failed to do a complete job of rendering the starship derelict.

Transition to normal space was imminent. Without taking time to seat himself, Chewbacca reached over his seat and worked at the console. At least some of the fluidics were functioning; hyperspace parted around the freighter like an infinite curtain.

The
Falcon
’s first mate bellowed an angry imprecation at the Universe’s sense of timing, picked Spray up bodily and deposited him in the pilot’s seat, bayed a string of uninterpreted instructions while pointing at the planet Ammuud, which had just appeared before them, and tore off in the direction of the explosion.

He paused long enough to pick up a hull-patch kit and a respirator. Hunkering down over the inspection plate, he saw Bollux sitting in the midst of shards and fragments of fluidic tubing and microfilament. The fire had been quelled. The shriek of escaping air had stopped: Bollux had firmly planted his durable back against the breach, an adequate sort of temporary seal.

The labor ’droid looked up and was relieved to see Chewbacca. “The hole is rather large, sir; I’m not sure how long my thorax will withstand the pressure. Also, the armor surrounding the breach is cracked. I suggest using the largest patch you have.”

Chewbacca analyzed the thorny problem of getting Bollux out of the crawlspace and simultaneously plugging the hole. He settled on the plan of preparing two patches, one smaller and lighter that could be set in place quickly, and the other a sturdy plate that would hold up even against the massive force exerted by the
Falcon
’s air pressure toward the utter vacuum outside. He handed the smaller patch down to Bollux and yipped instructions, gesturing to make himself understood, frustrated that he’d never mastered Basic.

But the ’droid grasped what he meant and gathered himself for the effort. Using the agility of his special suspension system and his simian arms, Bollux managed to push himself free, swing around, and slap the patch into place in rapid sequence. He swarmed for the inspection opening, having seen that the temporary patch was trembling before the strain placed upon it.

Chewbacca had seen it, too, and worried; the hole was bigger than he had thought. He reached down with both arms and hauled the ’droid up through the inspection opening. Just as he did the patch gave way, sucked into nothingness so quickly that it seemed to vanish With it went several jagged pieces, enlarging the hole.

It was suddenly as if Chewbacca was standing in the middle of a wild river-rapids, fighting raging currents of air that, in escaping the ship, were dragging him inexorably toward the hole. Scraps and loose debris swirled around and past him and zipped down the inspection opening.