Star Wars_ The Adventures of Lando Calrissia - L. Neil Smith [78]
The snake floated downward, attached itself to one flat side of the pentagon, and waggled at the gambler. “Master, that wasn’t funny the first hundred times you said it.” Vuffi Raa began unstrapping his torso from the copilot’s seat, one-tentacled.
From the passageway outside, another snake drifted in, settled in the chair, and linked itself, becoming the second of Vuffi Raa’s limbs to rejoin his body. Lando looked over the ship’s instrumentation, and his glow of combative satisfaction evaporated completely.
“By the Edge! Look at those power-consumption gauges! Those quad-guns are expensive to shoot! We would have used less power going the long way around!”
It was a hell of a note, Lando thought, when even defeating a band of pirates had to be calculated on the balance sheet. And at a loss.
“We’ll be lucky to break even on this load, do you realize that?”
Regaining yet a third tentacle, the robot refrained diplomatically from pointing out that he’d opposed the shortcut in the first place. He hadn’t known exactly why. The big, regularly scheduled companies avoided the route although it took parsecs and whole days off the run, exactly as Lando had insisted. On the other hand, big, regularly scheduled companies seldom attempted anything new or daring—which was what always made the future so bright for newer, smaller companies.
Now, between the star-fog and the pirates it concealed, both of the partners knew what was wrong with the nebulosity.
Fourth and fifth manipulators in place, Vuffi Raa cautiously punched up the interstellar drive. The stars stretched into attenuated blurs and vanished.
Yet, none of that explained what was wrong with Dilonexa XXIII.
• III •
“FISHING POLES?”
The customs agent was a small man with wiry arms and legs, knobbly knuckles. He was dressed, like everybody else on that self-consciously agrarian planet, in bib overalls. In his case, they were made of a deep green satyn, heavily creased. His shiny pink scalp shone through a field of close-cropped gray stubble.
“You gotta be kidding, Mac! In the first place, there ain’t a body of water on the planet bigger’n a bathtub; we don’t like to spare the land. In the second place, nobody here has any time for fishing. An’ in the third place, the native fish taste terrible—lacka trace metals or something.”
The sun of the Dilonexa System (a catalog number Lando didn’t remember and hadn’t bothered asking Vuffi Raa about as they’d made their approach) was a gigantic blue-white furnace. The twenty-two planets nearest it were great places to get a suntan. In a couple of microseconds.
The outer seventeen were iceboxes.
But the planet in the middle, at least in the view of its early colonists, made it all worthwhile. It was large, nearly twenty-five thousand kilometers in diameter, composed mostly of the lighter elements, which gave it a surface gravity not too unreasonable. Nearly everything of metal had to be shipped in.
But Dilonexa XXIII was rich, an agricultural world whose fields stretched unimaginable distances around its surface, providing foodstuffs, plastics, combustible fuels—everything with an organic base. Its inhabitants, fat farmers and their fatter families, had acquired a taste for some of the finer things in life.
Which was why Lando had brought his valuable, somewhat perishable cargo there.
He shook his head ruefully as he watched the Dilonexan ground crew put fuel elements into the Falcon where it rested on the ferrocrete apron—and gaping wounds in his credit account.
“Well, then, how about the jelly and the hides? Surely—”
“Had a second cousin once named Shirley,” the little man explained, scratching a mole under his chin and squinting up at the cloudless sky as if in aid to memory. “Tried that wintenberry stuff you’re haulin’. Broke down with the gallopin’ gosharooties. Too many trace minerals for a fourth-generation colonist. We gotta watch what