Star Wars_ The Adventures of Lando Calrissia - L. Neil Smith [90]
Outside, the Oseon sun shone garishly on a stark and rocky scene.
The spaceport had begun as a huge natural crater many kilometers in diameter. The Falcon sat in its approximate center. Here and there a ship lay, positioned over its own assigned service hatchway. Pleasure yachts, company vessels, those of traders, distributors, and caterers. Halfway across the crater to the rim, Lando could make out the impressive bulk of an elderly but well-maintained battle cruiser. Well, everyone to his own taste. Stars beat feebly downward, making a miniscule contribution to the solar brilliance.
A flicker of movement at the corner of his eye sent Lando into a tense crouch, both hands wrapped professionally around the small grip of his pocketgun, its muzzle seeking, sniffing after something to bite.
A chromium tentacle rasped across the plastic before him. Lando found himself staring into Vuffi Raa’s eye as the robot swung down in front of the blister and hung on one manipulator.
The gambler punched the intercom button beside the gun chair.
“Sorry, old boltcutter, I’m a touch paranoid tonight. Some thoughtful individual interrupted my game—and quite a profitable one, I might add—with a fire alarm. Anything at all exciting happening at your end of the planet?”
Through the plastic, the droid gave as much shrug as it was capable of. “I’ve simply been tidying up here, Master. There have been no communications, visitors, nor have I so much as seen anybody within a hundred meters of the ship except a few of the spaceport automata. Shall I come in and—”
“Don’t trouble yourself. Perhaps I still have time to return to my game.”
The robot waggled a free tentacle in farewell. “Very good, Master, I’ll see you at the hotel.”
“Good night, Vuffi Raa.”
The light flickered momentarily, as if a ship had flown between the Falcon and the sun.
Out of the blister and around the passageway, Lando went directly to the hatch he’d entered through. He clambered down the ladder, more careful this time not to get his semiformals greasy. On the next-to-last rung, he heard the sharp grit of a footstep behind him, twisted to see who it—
CRUMMMP!
Something hard and traveling fast smashed savagely across his lower back. Grunting with shock and pain, he released his hold on the ladder, fell rapidly in the artificial gradient, scraping his face on the ladder.
A second swipe missed him, zipping over his head to clang noisily on the metal rungs.
Hitting the floor with a gasp, Lando rolled over in desperate haste, clawing at his middle. A pair of dirty boots tromped toward him. They were all he had time to see before something came swooshing downward toward his head.
He fired the stingbeam upward.
There was a high-pitched piercing whistle from the weapon, a high-pitched scream of agony from the target. The club—whatever it was—clattered noisily to the surface. Lando’s adversary fell backward, the chest area of his jacket bursting into flame. Smoke and the nauseating stench of flaming synthetic fabric began to fill the corridor.
Lando rose stiffly, millimeter by tortured millimeter, pulling on the rungs of the ladder. There were tears in his eyes from smoke and pain. Leaning hard against the ladder, he reached around behind himself, felt his back where he’d been struck. His life had probably been saved by the forty-seven thousand credits distributed in his compartmented cummerbund.
Stingbeam hanging limply along his thigh, he staggered over to see who had attacked him. The figure lay still, the brief-lived flames—accidental byproduct of a close-range discharge—had died.
So had the assailant.
A soldier of some kind. That’s how he appeared to Lando. The gambler tugged a soft leather helmet off the fellow’s unresisting head, the kind of headgear customarily worn under the larger bubble of a spacesuit during extended periods in hard vacuum.