Star Wars_ The Adventures of Lando Calrissia - L. Neil Smith [66]
“Oh?” the gambler asked beneath raised eyebrows. “Well, suppose I’d fled to the Dela System, as I’d intended, or simply—”
“There was the ‘treasure’ as an inducement, plus the fact that you had a valuable asset to claim in the droid, here. And, of course, if you hadn’t come, our Ottdefa Osuno Whett would simply have found a new prospect. You were our first—I’m rather proud of the Ottdefa.”
Lando shook his head resignedly. “I get it. That’s why Vuffi Raa was left here: if you’d missed your chance with me, and I’d had him in my possession in the Oseon, you would have lost a valuable ’bot, whereas any poor jerk who took your bait—”
“Precisely. I’m gratified that you appreciate the subtlety of the scheme. That will be all. Officers, take him away.”
Lando didn’t even have time to protest. The police hauled him from the office, along the corridor, and down a flight of stairs to a waiting hovercruiser. They whisked through the streets to the edge of town, where they entered a force-fence around a series of corrugated-plastic buildings.
“Give him the usual processing,” one of the anonymous visored officers told a fat man in a dirty tunic. “You’ll have the paperwork in the morning.”
“Very well,” the fat man beamed. He was short and greasy looking, but the neuronic whip in one hand and the military blaster in the other added something to his personality. The cruiser roared away.
“Welcome to the penal colony of Rafa IV.” The fat man grinned.
Midnight.
Listening to the chanting of the Toka, Lando lay on a steel-slatted cot in a barred cell. Offworld prisoners occupied cells on one side of the corridor; the Toka shared an unlocked kennel-like affair on the other side. Lando was unusual in that the other three bunks in his own cell were unoccupied.
He figured that the governor didn’t want him talking to anyone until he was “processed”—whatever that meant.
To say he found the native chanting annoying would have been a calamitous understatement. It was unpleasant enough in itself, but it further served to remind him of Mohs—the little man who wasn’t there. If he had been. The question bothered the gambler almost as much as his present predicament did.
More, perhaps, because he’d been in jail before.
Less, perhaps, because he’d never faced a sentence in the life-orchards.
And, unlike the other freshly arrived convicts in the cells around him, he knew what that meant, had had a taste of his mind’s being sucked away by the trees from which the crystals were harvested.
And his memories of Mohs were clear; the chanting across the hallway was in no way inconsistent with them. The language was distressingly familiar. He could almost imagine he understood it. Not for the first time, he reasoned that it was a corrupted version of some tongue spoken in a place he’d been once. If only he could remember …
“ALL RIGHT, RISE AND SHINE!”
The fat man had friends, at least five of them, also armed with blasters and whips. They paced up and down in front of the barred cells, shouting to wake up the offworld prisoners. The Toka were already gone, sometime in the night.
Lando groaned, turned over. Before they’d placed him in the cell, they’d taken his clothes, replacing them with rough-woven pajamas of unbleached cloth. Now he was being ordered to remove even that minimal dress.
He quickly found out why. Two of the guards placed their weapons to one side, manhandled a huge fire hose into place before the cells, and turned it on. Lando was dashed to the back of the cell, where he fetched up against the rough plaster