Star Wars_ Fate of the Jedi 01_ Outcast - Aaron Allston [40]
Dark-skinned and well dressed—the image showed him wearing a maroon dress tunic and a black, sparkling hip cloak—Lando was, Han grudgingly admitted, aging nearly as well as Han himself. His hair had thinned and receded a bit but remained dark, and his features, though more lined, were still handsome and elegant—and still ideally suited to wear expressions of suave self-confidence or comic dismay.
Looking to one side as the picture went live, Lando snapped his attention back to the holoscreen and smiled. “Han! Leia! Good to see you. Oh—is it morning there?”
Leia, binding her hair back with an elastic band, glowered at him. “I'm not a gambler, but I'll bet a thousand credits that you knew exactly what time it was before you called.”
“And I am a gambler, so I won't take that bet. You'd be right.” Lando gave her a look of apology. “I need help. Jedi help, I think, as well as friend help. That adds up to you and Han. And about the hour, after the last … event, we decided that there was no time to waste.”
“What sort of event?” Han turned to C-3PO, standing attentively off to the side, and mouthed the word caf. Then he turned back to Lando. “And who's we?”
“Nien Nunb and Tendra and me. Here, let me show you.” Lando reached forward, his hands disappearing to either side of the picture view, as he evidently grabbed his monitor. He turned it, swinging its holocam view off him. Han expected it to focus on Tendra, Lando's wife, or Nien Nunb, his Sullustan manager, but instead it settled on a view of another gray wall, this one decorated with a holo of a shiny, skeletal YVH combat droid, which was manufactured by one of Lando's companies, Tendrando Arms.
But it was not the three-dimensional picture of the menacing droid that drew Han's attention. It was the jagged crack in the wall behind it, stretching from upper right to lower left, passing beyond the holo-comm's field of view in either direction.
Leia snorted. “What caused that? A Hutt sat on your roof?”
Lando swung the monitor back to face him. “Quakes. Ground-quakes, nasty ones. They're increasing in strength and frequency, and the scientists I've brought in can't figure out why.”
Han frowned. Nien Nunb was the manager of Lando's glitterstim spice mines, which strongly suggested where Lando must be now. “You're on Kessel?”
Lando nodded. “I'm in the auxiliary comm center of my main office building. The primary comm center was destroyed in the last quake.”
Han grimaced. “Lando, let it go. Kessel is a doomed world.” Kessel, an undersized planet near the Maw, was notorious for many things. It was the origin of glitterstim, a drug with just as many illegal applications as legal ones, and the source of a great deal of smuggling activity. Its spice mines were infamous, having been operated by convict labor for so long that, decades after the system had changed, “going to the spice mines of Kessel” was still a fate promised to children to convince them to behave. The planet was also one of the marker points on the smuggler and race route that bore its name, the Kessel Run.
Over time, the low-gravity planet was bleeding atmosphere into space. Ancient atmosphere generation plants increasingly struggled to keep up with the loss, but they were gradually failing. The world would eventually become a lifeless environment.
Lando shook his head. “It's still a profitable operation, and the only source of glitterstim anywhere. Efforts to transplant colonies of the energy spiders that produce the stuff haven't been very successful.”
Han sat upright. “You're trying to get them to survive on other planets?”
“Yes, but they just stop feeding and die—”
“Good!”
Lando waved his outburst away. “We need more time to work on the problem. Lots more time.”
Han repressed a shudder. Once, back in his smuggler days, before he'd ever met Luke or Leia, he had dumped a load of glitterstim rather than be caught with it by Imperial