Star Wars_ The Adventures of Lando Calrissia - L. Neil Smith [6]
“Get out of here, kid!” Feb shouted. “I saw Phuna plant the cheater on you!”
The lawman whirled on Feb, fist upraised. Apparently Vett Fori trusted her assistant’s judgment—and knew how to maneuver in the absence of gravitic pull. She snatched up the nearest solid object—which happened to be the anthropologist’s already battered head—and dashed it sideways against the startled cranium of the police officer. Eyes crossed, he collapsed, drifting slowly to the floor. Still holding Whett by the occipital region, Fori pried the wad of official-looking papers from the unconscious scientist’s fingers.
“Take these and get your ship out of the Oseon, Lando. I’ll talk sense with Phuna when he comes around. He’s crooked, but he isn’t crazy. Besides, in theory, he works for me.”
It wasn’t the first rapid exit Lando had made in his brief but eventful career. However, it was passing rare for those whose money he had taken to assist him at it. With a pang of gratitude—and the feeling he’d regret it later—he made to toss his winnings back on the table beside the insensate Ottdefa.
“Don’t you dare!” Vett Fori growled. “You want us to think you didn’t win it fair and square?” Behind her, Arun Feb tapped Phuna on the pate again with a stainless steel water carafe, tunk! He looked up from the pleasant occupation and nodded confirmation.
Lando grinned, waved a wordless farewell on his way out the door. Twenty minutes later, he was aboard the Millennium Falcon, bolting down a very hastily rented pilot droid. Ten minutes after that, he was above the plane of the ecliptic, blasting out of the Oseon System and headed for the Rafa. It was the last place Whett would look for him.
He told himself.
• I •
GOLD-BRAIDED FLIGHT CAP carefully adjusted to a rakish angle, a freshly suave and debonair Captain Lando Calrissian bounded down the boarding ramp of the ultra-lightspeed freighter Millennium Falcon—and cracked his forehead painfully on the hatchcoaming.
“Ouch! By the Eternal!” Staggered, he glanced discreetly around, making sure no one had seen him, and sighed. Now what the deuce was it Ground Control had wanted him to look at?
They’d put it rather ungenteelly …
“What’s that garbage on your thrust-intermix cowling, Em Falcon, over?”
Well, it had been something they could say without insulting references to the amateurish way he’d skidded, setting her down on the Teguta Lusat tarmac. Atmospheric entry hadn’t been anything to brag about, either. Gambler he may have been, scoundrel perhaps, and what he preferred thinking of as “con artiste.”
But ship-handler he was definitely not.
He frowned, reminded of that rental pilot droid he’d wasted a substantial deposit on, back in the Oseon. Let ’em try to collect the rest of that bill!
Stepping—gingerly this time—around the hydraulic ramp lifter, he backed away from under the smallish cargo vessel (which invariably reminded him of a bloated horseshoe magnet), shading his eyes with one hand.
Intermix cowling … intermix cowling … now where in the name of Chaos would you find—
“Yeek!”
The noise had come from Lando, not the hideous leathery excrescence that had attached itself to his ship. It merely flapped and fluttered grotesquely, glaring down at him with malevolent yellow eyes as it scrabbled feebly at the hull, unaccustomed to the gravity of Rafa IV.
Two hideous leathery excrescences!
Four!
Lando pelted back up the ramp, slamming the Emergency Close lever and continuing to the cockpit. The right-hand seat was temporarily missing, in its place bolted the glittering and useless Class Five pilot droid, its monitor lights blinking idiotically.
“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,” the robot smirked, despite the daylight pouring through the vision screens from outside, “and welcome aboard the pleasure yacht Arleen, now in interstellar transit from Antipose IX to—”
The young gambler snarled with frustration, slapped the pilot’s OFF switch, and threw himself into the left acceleration couch, just as one of the disgusting alien parasites began