Star Wars_ The Adventures of Lando Calrissia - L. Neil Smith [143]
Just to make things really complicated, Vuffi Raa had already had enemies of his own. Although the robot hadn’t known it. His previous master, while spectacularly untalented at games of chance, had been a highly effective government employee in the spy business. This fellow, ostensibly an itinerant anthropologist, had used the little robot, forced him to help undermine a previously undiscovered system-wide civilization in a manner that had resulted in the brutal military extermination of two-thirds of its citizens. The remaining third, understandably perturbed, had sworn eternal hatred for the droid, and had enthusiastically begun to do something about it.
Subsequent attempts at negotiation, as in Lando’s case, had been nearly lethally futile. Some people just won’t listen.
Well, life is like that, Lando thought as he hovered in what had been designed as the passenger lounge of the Millennium Falcon. It served as their living room; just then, it was the gambler’s private thinking-parlor, and the thoughts he was thinking were reasonably ironic. He took another puff on his cigar.
The trouble with two partners having separate sets of mortal enemies is that said enemies don’t always make distinctions. Particularly when using fragmentation grenades. Poor Vuffi Raa had gotten badly dented by an assassin in the employ of the sorcerer at their last port of call. The idiot had confessed before expiring; with the nervousness of a beginner, he’d thrown the pin instead of the grenade. The robot’s injuries would work themselves out after a while. He had excellent self-repair mechanisms.
In another incident, Lando had been pushed over a rail into a vat of vitamin paste he had considered acquiring for that very trip, somehow fracturing both arm and toe and picking up a shiner. What really hurt was that he’d simply ruined his second-best velvoid semiformal captain’s uniform. He was certain Vuffi Raa’s enemies were responsible. It felt like their style. Clumsy.
Nor was the Millennium Falcon considered immune. In fact, she’d rather taken the brunt of things, with bombs planted inside her (two of which had actually gone off) and having felt the fury of several small space battles in recent months. A fighter pilot had deliberately rammed her, crumpling her boarding ramp. She’d strained her engines getting them in and out of various places in a hurry. Her battery of quad-guns, under Lando’s capable direction, had staved off the occasional pirate vessel, who probably hadn’t anything at all to do with vendettas. Surprised at the ferocity with which her captain had taken it all out on their hides, defeated pirates were giving the battered old freighter quite a reputation.
Pirates they could handle. The Falcon was a good deal faster than she looked, terrifyingly well armed; he and the robot were pretty hot pilots, but Vuffi Raa had taught Lando everything he knew in this regard. Lando told himself again that the business at the StarCave would pay off all other debts, as well. He was thoroughly fed up, loaded for whatever furry omnivorous quadruped the fates cared to place in his path.
Tugging gently at the vacuum ashtray hose, Lando drifted to the ceiling of the lounge, gave a little shove against the overhead, which propelled him near the floor. He switched on the gravity and walked both forward and starboard around the Falcon’s curving inner corridor, to the cockpit, which was set in a tubelike construction projecting from the front of the ship.
In the left-hand pilot’s seat, an equally weird construction perched, a five-limbed chromium-plated starfish with a single glowing red eye set atop its pentagonal torso. Its tentacles were at rest just then, having reduced the Falcon’s speed as Lando had requested.
The meter-high entity