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“Ground Control? I say, Ground Control! What the devil are these things?”

A long, empty pause. Then Lando remembered: “Oh, yes … over!”

“They’re mynocks, you simpering groundlubber! You’re supposed to shake them off in orbit! Now you’ve violated planetary quarantine, and you’ll have to take care of it yourself: nobody’s gonna dirty his—”

With a growl of his own, Lando punched the squelch button. If they weren’t going to help him, he could do without their advice. Mynocks … ah, yes: tough, omnivorous creatures, capable of withstanding the rigors of hard vacuum and Absolute temperatures. They were the rats of space, attaching themselves to unwary ships, usually in some asteroid belt.

The Oseon System was nothing but asteroids!

Hitching a ride from sun to sun, planet to planet, mynocks typically—

Good grief! He jumped up, banging his head again, this time on the overhead throttle board—stupid place to put it!—and made quick, if clumsy progress aft to the engine area. He’d just remembered something else he’d read or heard about mynocks: subjected to planet-sized gravity, they collapsed, dying rapidly …

After reproducing.

In a locker, he found a vacuum-tight worksuit, also scrounged up a steamhose and couplings. Shucking into the greasy plastic outfit—a pang of regret: he was ruining his mauve velvoid semiformals!—he ratcheted the steamline to a reactor let-off, cranked open the topside airlock, and, trailing hose, clambered out onto the hull.

A mynock waited greedily for him, alerted by the unavoidable rumble of the hatch cover, its spore sacs shiny and distended. It was ugly, perhaps a meter across, winged like a bat, tailed (if that was the proper word for it) like a stingray, poison-toothed like a—

“Yeek!” The mynock, this time.

It floundered toward him, dragging itself along by a ventral sucker-disk. The only thing uglier than mynocks, Lando thought, were the larvae they spawned on planet surfaces. He leaped as it flicked a clawed wingtip at him, his awkwardness aboard ship bred more of unfamiliarity in a new environment than any native lack of agility. He twisted the hose nozzle, spraying the monster with superheated vapor from the Falcon’s thermal-exchange system.

It screamed and writhed, flesh melting away to expose the cartilage it used instead of bones. This, too, reduced quickly, washed down the curved surface of the ship, leaving nothing but gelatinous slime steaming on the spaceport asphalt.

A noise behind him.

Side vision impaired by the suit, Lando whirled just in time to ram the nozzle into a second mynock’s gaping maw. It swelled and burst. Fastidiously, he played steam over himself to remove the dissolving organic detritus, then stalked grimly forward, finally destroying seven of the sickening things in all.

“Good going, Ace!” Teguta Lusat Ground Control sneered through his helmet receiver as he wiggled back through the upper airlock hatchway. “Didn’t you get an instruction booklet when you sent your box-tops in for that pile of junk you’re flying? Over.”

Pile of junk?

The only pile of junk in the neighborhood, thought Lando, sweating in his bulky armor as he cranked the hatch back down and stowed the steamlines, was that brainless rent-a-bot up forward. Hmmm. That gave him an idea.

“Hello, Ground Control,” he warbled pleasantly from the cockpit only seconds after worming back out of the plastic vac-suit. “I’ll have you know that this stout little vessel’s often made the run to your overrated mudball in record-breaking time.”

Once upon a time. At least that’s what her former owner claimed, trying to bid up the battered freighter’s pot value in a sabacc game he was losing badly. Lando’s rented droid had failed miserably to coax anything near the advertised velocities out of the ship.

Probably some trick to it.

“By the way,” Lando continued, “I seem to have the knack of handling this baby now. Would anyone care to purchase a practically new pilot droid? Over?”

“We’ve heard that one before, Millennium Eff.