Star Wars_ The Adventures of Lando Calrissia - L. Neil Smith [38]
He yelled the entire time it took Mohs to slit his trouser legs, exposing bare skin to the chilling air.
“Now,” said the ancient Singer, when he was satisfied with Lando’s disheveled condition. “All will notice that the Key remains with the Bearer.”
This was true. They’d taken it from his tunic and tucked it into the dirty gray cloth about his waist. That had been a scary moment—he’d held deathly still so they wouldn’t clank it against the tiny beamer hidden beneath both loincloth and cummerbund.
“Now we shall wait. In Their own time, They will take his life, either in the cold or through the tree. We shall then return and claim the Key which is our rightful heritage. We go.”
They went.
As the sun sank behind the highly unnatural skyline, shadows crept inexorably toward the helpless gambler, and as they did, his heart sank at approximately the same rate as the sun. He watched as small plants curled themselves into little protective balls for the night. He watched as frost formed on his toes. He watched as moisture in the ground forced up the top layer of the soil on frozen ice columns.
Mostly, he watched his nice warm parka, tunic, boots and socks gather frost of their own, not three meters beyond his bound and helpless reach.
He began cursing, first through genuine anger at himself and Mohs and Gepta and Mer, then simply in order to keep warm. He cursed in his native tongue and in the dozen and a half others he’d learned during a long and checkered career. He cursed in three computer languages and the warbling cheep of a race of musical birds he’d once played cards with—until it reminded him of the Toka.
He cursed the Toka all over again. And again. And again.
He woke up with a start!
And began cursing for no other reason than to stay awake. If he didn’t, he would freeze to death.
• XI •
DEATHLY SILENCE.
Beneath a looming, monstrous, crustacean form resting on stilted legs, the twin pale moons of Rafa V picked out metallic reflections in the night-blackened sand. Shadows overlaid at different angles with slightly differing shades: the enormous double shadow of the Millennium Falcon, hundreds of tiny double shadows of stubby wooden projectiles buried in a fragile metal carapace and nearby soil.
Deathly silence and deadly cold.
Everywhere within sight of the Falcon, small, ground-hugging plants had rolled themselves into compact olive-colored balls in order to survive the frigid darkness. The air was dry, even drier than the daytime atmosphere. The subtlest sparkling of frost showed here and there, on half-frozen plantlife, on the crest of miniature dunes, on the rims of a thousand footprints that surrounded the ship, even on the tortured, tangled mess of chromium cables lying in a heap just outside the Falcon’s shadow.
Fluid still stained the sand for a short distance around the pitiable heap, slow and thick and gummy now, in the frozen quiet. Yet, a few inches beneath the grainy surface, there was movement. Pseudo-organisms, shiny and metallic, motelike, hovering at the edge of human visibility, stirred within the thickened fluid, migrated a millimeter at a time back toward the larger pseudo-organism they had tumbled from before dark.
Microscopic flagella beat languidly, laboriously. Yet, centimeter by centimeter, millions of the tiny objects swam what was to them enormous distances, back to where they belonged. In their wake, the fluid became thinner, more liquid, and withdrew after them, carrying minerals and trace metals from the soil with it.
The same two moons cast double shadows several kilometers away. Beneath a spread of glassy boughs, a figure huddled, trying to stay alive in the cold. Lando Calrissian was dying. As Vuffi Raa’s life had run out into the sand, so he could feel his own life running out through his exposed skin into the frigid air, into the hungry sinister plant he was