Star Wars_ The Adventures of Lando Calrissia - L. Neil Smith [76]
The very individuals who had prospered most, either at legitimate businesses like freight hauling, or shadier ones such as smuggling (the avocation, in fact, for which the Falcon had originally been constructed), those who had made their way to the top, lived here in the Oseon, where one Lando Calrissian, a dismal failure by their standards, experienced little difficulty at all separating them from their hard-won money.
It was their own fault. They’d invited him …
Fire streaked from the starboard weapons turret of the Millennium Falcon.
In desperate haste, Lando swung the quad-guns down and to the left as the drone squadron whooshed by, their own energy-guns coloring the misted space around the freighter.
“Missed! Vuffi Raa, hold her a little steadier!”
The ship ducked and swooped, narrowly avoiding being skewered in a cross fire as the drone fighters split up, attacking from both sides.
“Master, there are too many of—good shooting, sir!”
The little droid’s voice issued from an intercom beside Lando’s ear. The gambler made an imaginary chalk mark on a purely mental scoreboard, manhandling the guns around for another shot. The drone he’d splattered was an incandescent and expanding ball of dust and gas, augmenting an already dirty region of space.
Anyone else might have whooped! victoriously.
Lando fumed in the transparent gun-bubble.
All right, so it had been his idea to shortcut through this small nebulosity on the way to the next port. Blast it all, he was carrying valuable, somewhat perishable cargo. Crates of wintenberry jelly. Stacks of mountain bollem hides. Expensive tinklewood fishing rods. In short, the produce of a frontier planet. His corner-cutting could save them precious days, compared to routes preferred by scheduled cargo haulers.
The shields pulsed with coruscating brilliance. They were taking hits again!
He slewed the quad-guns hard, pressed the double triggers. Bolts of ravening energy rammed directly into a pair of tiny unmanned fighters screaming toward the ship. One exploded, the other, severely damaged, cork-screwed crazily out of Lando’s line of vision.
Vuffi Raa rolled the ship, skated into a wild, stomach-wrenching yaw, adroitly avoiding a direct hit. They were a good team together, Lando thought.
Besides, it wasn’t much as nebulosities go. Even deep inside the scruffy patch of gas, a few molecules every cubic meter produced very little visible clouding. They did slow a ship down, however, making it dangerous to use the faster-than-light drive. That’s probably why the regular lines avoided the place. But Lando, calculating distance over time, had figured that, even at a substantial reduction from lightspeed, they’d still gain time and profit thereby.
He’d been wrong.
Six more meter-diameter drones bore directly for his turret. The enemy seemed to have an endless supply. Lando caught a glance of their mother vessel, a pirate lying off and directing the attack in relative safety. She was approximately four times the displacement of the Falcon, clumsily built, a large sphere attached to a slightly smaller cylinder, the whole awkward assembly patched and mottled by hard use and long neglect.
He could imagine half a hundred crew-beings, hunched over their drone panels in a dimly lit control center. They were probably as broke and desperate as he was.
Waiting until the last possible moment, he let loose all four barrels on maxium power and dispersal. Lights dimmed aboard the Falcon. Two saucer-shaped drones blossomed into fireballs, the third was holed severely. The fourth, fifth, and sixth zoomed over his head in ragged formation, past the gun-blister, and out of his visual range before he could tell what he’d done to them. He released the triggers.
Full illumination sprang forth again.
Nebulosities were good for hiding spaceships. The gas, dust, and ions, the magnetic and static fields made a hash of long-range