Star Wars_ The Adventures of Lando Calrissia - L. Neil Smith [104]
It didn’t need to be drawn to be used, which was a blessing, as nature had not provided Fybot’s people with the quickest or most adroit of manipulators.
He looked over at Bassi Vobah as she tried hard to keep her attention on the entertainment tape. It wasn’t easy. Calrissian and his robot were running the Falcon’s engines through a series of tests that shook the vessel like a leaf at irregular intervals and left stunning silences between. Their caution in assuring themselves of the ship’s operating condition only served as a grim reminder of what risks they were all about to take.
Which brought Waywa Fybot around again to his nervousness. He settled deeper into his resting rack, enjoying the reflexive drowsiness that came with the action, and wished his species still had sufficient flexibility to tuck their heads under their wings.
Come to think of it, he’d only bruise himself on the weapon he carried.
A gentle snoring sound began to issue from the small round nostrils pierced through the narcotics officer’s beak.
“Item one ninety-six,” Lando quoted from the manual, “navigational receivers on standby. Well, old can-opener, we can skip that one. How’d that dead-reckoning program of yours turn out, or do you want to say?”
Vuffi Raa paused, a tentacle tip over a switch on the panel before them. “I wish, Master, that there was another name for it. It sounds awfully final, doesn’t it?” He flipped the switch, watched the panel indicators go crazy as the Flamewind’s ionization attacked the navigation beam receivers.
He flipped the switch to off again. Both partners felt relieved.
“Item one ninety-seven,” Lando said, ignoring Vuffi Raa’s rhetorical squeamishness. “This begins a subseries of thirteen intermediate items before we get to one ninety-eight. First item: check main reactor core-temperature, which should be up to optimum by now. Check. Second item: make sure that moderator fluid is circulating freely in the heat exchangers. Check—at least according to the instruments. Third item …”
Administrator Senior Lob Doluff had stoically suffered the indignity of ordering the datalink, normally tucked inoffensively away in an alcove and concealed by a hanging fern, rolled out into the center of what was supposed to be his office and what was, in reality, a miniature of his greenhouse home.
By landline he was having a view transmitted to him of the north polar spaceport, specifically, the central area where the Millennium Falcon vibrated in readiness.
Maybe, he thought to himself, he hadn’t the intestinal fortitude to be a first-rank administrator. He found it difficult in the extreme to order those beings, Lando Calrissian and his doughty little Class Two droid, into the fury of the Flamewind at its most colorful and dangerous moment. His heart would be traveling with them, he knew, and might never return to its proper location.
He wished them well.
However, he sighed, he did know a cure for the anxiety and guilt he was experiencing. In another alcove, across the room from that in which the datalink normally was exiled, he kept a terrarium filled with odd spongy growths from a planet a quarter of a galaxy away. Even to him, the great lover of green, growing things, they were utterly repulsive. But they were necessary to nurture and conceal an even more repulsive specimen of lizard that lived in symbiosis with them and shared the planet Zebitrope IV.
On the back of the lizard, another symbiont, there grew a rather disgusting purple mold.
Lob Doluff locked his office doors, extracted a small plastic spatula from beneath the datalink, trod over to the terrarium, seized the lizard, and scraped a bit of mold from its back. This he rubbed with thumb and forefinger into the hollow at the base of his throat, covering the resulting stain, which looked rather like a bruise, with some flesh-colored powder he kept for just that purpose.
He settled