Star Wars_ The Adventures of Lando Calrissia - L. Neil Smith [94]
Flamewind had begun, and she was going to miss it.
Vuffi Raa paced the curved companionways of the Millennium Falcon. He was a most unhappy machine. Below, the hatchway to service corridor 17-W was closed, clamped with an impound seal, and it had been all he could do to persuade the authorities not to stencil a seizure notice on his body—or take him away and lock him up in some warehouse.
Maintaining a modest silence about his manifold additional capabilities, he’d convinced them that, as a pilot, navigator, and repairbot, he was essentially part of the ship. As a consequence, they had affixed to his torso a restraining bolt—a bit of electronic mischief that was supposed to inflict enormous pain on his nervous system should he attempt to leave the Falcon.
It had taken him all of thirty seconds to disable it, once the police had departed. Nonetheless, prudence dictated that he stay there unless he could think of something useful to do for himself and his master.
Outside, huge sheets of polychrome gas filled the sky, punctuated every few minutes by terrifying displays of lightning. Flamewind was barely underway and yet, for most observers, the phenomenon was overwhelming.
Vuffi Raa didn’t even notice it.
He supposed that Lando had offered at least a hundred times to set him legally free. For some reason it bothered the gambler deeply to own another sapient being, even a mechanical one. Vuffi Raa had always turned him down, preferring to stay with his adventurous master. Now he wondered—very briefly—whether it mightn’t have been a better idea to accept. As a manumitted droid, he would have been at liberty to deal with the situation.
Although what, specifically, he would have done remained a mystery.
As an article of property, he was told nothing by the authorities about Lando’s fate or that of himself and the Falcon. However, from long, long experience with human culture, the robot could make a fairly accurate guess. Somehow all of that must be prevented, some bargain struck that would at least leave them even, leave them in the condition in which they’d arrived.
Vuffi Raa had very little experience making deals.
Outside, the sky writhed with the seven colors of the spectrum—and with every possible mixture in between. For Vuffi Raa, there were more than a hundred basic colors, from lowest infrared to highest ultraviolet, and the permutations and combinations possible had to be expressed in exponentials.
Yet the spectacle was lost on him, and not from any lack of aesthetic sensitivity.
He liked Lando Calrissian. The little droid had a deceptive appearance; he always looked brand-new, and his mere meter of height made people think diminutive thoughts about him. In reality, he had a powerful mind and a lifetime that stretched back centuries, even further than he could remember.
Apparently, that was the result of a pirate attack on a freighter in whose hold he’d occupied a commercial shipping crate. It was his first clear memory, the jarring, shouting, screaming. The groaning of the fabric of the victimized ship. He hadn’t been supposed to awaken until arrival at his destination. The premature activation was a survival mechanism, but it had cost him something. He could remember nothing of his origins; had only the vaguest impression that the race who had created him looked something like him.
In all the time since, through hundreds of owners, hundreds of systems, planets, cultures, he’d never grown so fond of a human being. He couldn’t exactly say why Lando Calrissian affected him so, but affection was the truth. They laughed together; Vuffi Raa’s separating tentacles (once the robot had disclosed this capability) had become the basis for a number of Lando’s rare but elaborate practical jokes.