Star Wars_ The Adventures of Lando Calrissia - L. Neil Smith [120]
“Fine, fine. The reason why I wanted you to check it is that I didn’t want to be caught delivering a shipment of phony goods. The recipients would likely find a way to reprimand me. Terminally. Also, I didn’t want to be exposed to the stuff myself. I don’t know how addictive it is, but it’s potent applied to the skin.”
Lando checked the lightweight vacuum suit he was wearing, made sure his stingbeam was handy in an outside pocket. The part of the mission that had always worried him was coming up. His gambler’s wisdom told him it was a bad bet: when the owner of a big, well-defended estate found out he’d brought the law, there were bound to be some recriminations.
The Falcon drifted closer to Oseon 5792.
At approximately a hundred kilometers—farther than Lando would have expected under the current “weather” conditions—they were hailed by a cruising ship. It was small, like the fighters Lando had fought off, but brand-new and nearly as heavily armed as his own. Radio being out of the question, it was using a modulated laser to communicate. Unfortunately, Lando didn’t have a de-modulator.
“They say we’re supposed to stop here,” Vuffi Raa supplied.
“They say they’ll fry us out of the firmament if we don’t heave to for boarding. Good heavens, Master, they’re listing the weaponry they carry! If they’re only lying about ninety-five percent of it, we’re done for.”
“That’s all right, old electrodiplomat. How do we tell them that we’re stopping for inspection?” Lando had a password, but—with all the other details in his mind the past few days—it hadn’t occurred to him that there might be a problem using it.
“I can tell them, Master.” The robot leaned forward, directed his big red-faceted eye toward the security ship, and blat! a beam of scarlet coherency leaped through the canopy.
“Tell them the secret word is ‘dubesor’—I understand that’s a native insult on Antipose XII.” Lando took a final, not altogether relaxed, drag on his cigarette and put it out. Vuffi Raa’s laser beam winked out almost at the same moment, and he turned to his master.
“They say we’re late. I told them, who wouldn’t be, considering the Flamewind and everything, and gave them a little edited version of our trouble with the fighters—presumed to be pirates. Did I act correctly, Master?”
“First sabacc, and now bluffing your way past the bouncers. I’m not sure whether to be proud of you or worried. I think I’m a bad influence. What did they say?”
“That we’re expected and should set down on the small field opposite the surface mansion complex—but not to try any dirty tricks. They gave me another list of engines of destruction they can employ with pinpoint accuracy against a ground target.”
“That guy must have been a drummer for an arms company. All right, let’s set her down. You do it, won’t you? I’m a little too nervous to risk it, considering my amateur status as a pilot.”
“Very well, Master.”
I wonder what the folks on Antipose XII are doing tonight, Lando thought, whooping it up in the local saloon and calling each other dubesor?
It beat hell out of what he was about to do.
• XIV •
OSEON 5792 WAS not particularly large as asteroids in the Oseon go.
It was perhaps fifteen kilometers across its widest span, a flattened disk-shaped accretion of many smaller bodies or a peculiar fragment from a shattered planet. To Lando it rather resembled an island, floating on a sea of impossible blue—that being the color the Flamewind was concentrating on at the moment.
Yet it was an island with two personalities.
The top side, as the gambler thought of it—perhaps because it was the first view that he had of it—was a mythological garden, dotted with small lakes, spread with rolling lawns, and punctuated here and there by groves of trees, all held down by high transparent domes and artificial gravity. As the Falcon approached,