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“Vuffi Raa!” Lando shouted suddenly. “Close on the pirate herself! I’ve had enough of this. Give me a pass at her reaction-drive system!”

“Very well, Master.”

There was doubt in the robot’s doubly electronic voice—not concerning Lando’s combat abilities. Quite the contrary. It was simply that the droid’s most fundamental programming forbade him to take the life of a mechanical or organic sapient being. He was straining his cybernetic ethics severely even now, conning a fighting ship. Yet strain them he did.

In a long, graceful arc with a little flip on the end, the Falcon soared toward the pirate, taking her by surprise. A few guns warmed up feebly—too late—as their startled operators switched attention from remote-control panels to fire-control systems. The tiny flying weapons might be adequate against an unarmed freighter or a pleasure yacht that stumbled into the cloud, but they hadn’t been conceived or built for mortal engagement with a vessel like the Falcon, half pirate ship herself and bristling with more guns than her crew could handle all at once.

Trusting his ship’s shields, Lando bore down upon the quad-gun, drilling its quadruple high-power beams at the reaction-drive outlet at the far end of the pirate’s spherical section. Once again the Falcon’s interior lights dimmed, and for the first time, it occurred to Lando that his heavy trigger finger was costing something. However, the enemy’s thrust tubes were beginning to glow. First red, they quickly became orange-yellow. They’d been molded to withstand heat and pressure right enough, but not from the outside in.

Suddenly, a starburst appeared in space between him and the pirate.

“Good shooting, Master. You got another one!”

“Nonsense, I didn’t even—Great Merciful Heavens!”

All around them, balls of fiery gas stood out against the starry background. The drone fleet was destroying itself! The pirate swiveled on her center of gravity, glowed savagely from her own internal fires, and streaked away.

At the extreme end of her flight line, toward the edge of the nebulosity, Lando could make out the flash as she shifted into faster-than-light. It was a deadly risk even so; they must be frightened badly.

“Well, well! Stand down from Battle Stations,” he informed his mechanical partner, “I’ll be up to the cockpit in a minute. Put some coffeine on, will you? And by the way, Vuffi Raa …”

He unstrapped himself from the gun-chair webbing, turning his captain’s hat—the one with all the golden braid—around the right way, and zipped his shipsuit up a couple of inches.

“Yes, Master?”

“Don’t call me Master!”

Stepping into the broadly curving main corridor, Lando passed the sublight-drive area of the Millennium Falcon. As if sprouting from the floor, there stood a tapered chromium snakelike entity, about a meter long, tending the control panel. At its slenderest end, it branched into five slim, delicate “fingers” that twisted knobs and adjusted slide-switches. In the center of the “palm,” Lando knew, was a small glassy red eye-spot.

Farther along, where a cluster of instruments comprised the radar and other detection devices, another metallic serpent stood watch. There were three more like it elsewhere in the ship, giving attention to sensitive areas that could not be handled from the cockpit monitors.

Up front, Lando flopped into the left-hand seat, a pride-preserving concession tacitly made between himself and the real pilot of the vessel. It lay in the other seat, a pentagon-shaped slab of bright silvery-colored metal and electronics. A large lens pulsed redly at the top. The object was strapped down firmly to the seat. One of the “snakes” hovered over an instrument panel, half a meter away.

“Vuffi Raa, you’ve got to pull yourself together,” Lando chuckled, fumbling under the panel. He brought out a slim cigar and lit it, eyeing the armless, legless contraption next to him and waiting for a reaction. Outside, the fog began to disperse as their own reaction drives brought them to the margin