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In addition, she’d been shot at and even rammed, albeit by a tiny, lightweight single-seater with insufficient mass to do very much except momentarily overload her dynamic shielding. That was the key, of course: her force fields had held her together through everything; she was basically a loose pile of nuts and bolts kept in one place by electromagnetogravitic gimcrackery.

But—like his girlfriend the bootlegger’s daughter—he loved her still.

“Master, that should be another centimeter to starboard, I believe.”

Vuffi Raa had been on the other side of the hull—the inside—measuring the effects of Lando’s exhausting labor on the outside. There was a huge ugly dent—but no more than that—in the underside of the boarding ramp where the fighter had smacked it. Lando laughed to himself. You shoulda seen the other guy!

There was nothing he could do right now about the purely mechanical battering. Her seals were intact, the ramp would work perfectly (although there’d be a slight bulge to stumble over, exiting the ship), and what really counted was the shielding.

He moved the micropole another centimeter to the right, waited for the robot’s confirmation, and riveted it in place. He didn’t understand why the Falcon’s previous operators hadn’t done this long ago. They had the parts in stores. Just lazy, perhaps. When he was done, the effective density of her defenses would be doubled—of course with a correlative increase in what the shields pulled out of the power plant. Maybe that explained things.

It was hot and sweaty in the vacuum suit, and he was hungry again. Worse, it was extremely claustrophobic working in the skinny wedge of space between the Falcon’s belly and the face of the asteroidal crevasse. Well, he had no one but himself to blame for that: he’d sheared half a dozen communications and sensory antennae wiggling her in there, items that by their very nature had to protrude through the defenses in order to operate.

The fact that they hadn’t been operating at all, on account of the Flamewind, had helped to guide his instantaneous decision. That and the twenty-odd hostile spacecraft determined to blow the Falcon to smithereens.

He began to back from the cramped enclosure. “Let’s see about those soft spots on the upper hull, now. Then I’m going to have to quit for a while. This is rather tiring, I’m afraid.”

The little droid’s response was laden with apologetic overtones. “Master, if it were possible, I would be doing that for you right now. I—”

“Vuffi Raa, for once shut up and let somebody else do the donkeywork. You come out here and the blasted sun will start frying your brains again. It’s like that safe in the cockpit: we’re shielded by the asteroid, but not perfectly. You need the extra protection of the hull.”

“Yes, Master. How lucky it was that this crevice runs perpendicular to the direction of the Flamewind. Were it a few degrees the other way, it would function as a funnel or a wave guide and concentrate the—”

“Yes,” said Lando with a shudder, “how well I know!” He hadn’t been thinking about all that when he’d ducked the Falcon in there. He’d simply been trying to get away from the fighters. He’d been flying and fighting by the seat of his pants. Even now it gave him a chill to contemplate.

“All right, I’m out from under. Start the lock cycling. I’ll rest for five minutes and then get out on the upper hull.” This may be hard work, Lando thought, but when I’m finished, my ship and passengers—and I!—will be as well protected from the Flamewind as we are now. Without having to hide inside an asteroid and go wherever it feels like taking us.

“Sabacc!” Vuffi Raa cried, displaying his cards to the bewildered bird. “You see, this comes under a special rule: whenever you have the Idiot—that’s worth zero, you know—then a Two of anything and a Three of anything are considered an automatic twenty-three.”

Dejectedly, Waywa Fybot handed over a few credits. “But that’s ridiculous,” he said in his ridiculous voice. “It doesn’t make sense. Two and three are five, not twenty-three, and besides, the addition of a zero