Star Wars_ The Han Solo Adventures - Brian Daley [229]
“Where to, citizens?” Han grinned.
“Just turn on the heaters!” yelled Hasti.
The valley widened quickly, then gave way down to an open plain carpeted with bobbing, spindly amber grass. The hover-raft was equipped with rudimentary navigational gear. Han set a course for J’uoch’s mining camp. Not wanting to use the raft’s running lights, he cut his speed back and peered through the windshield, thankful it was a bright night.
The wind of their passage snatched the warmth out of the heater grids. Hasti discovered a folded tarp in one corner of the cargo bed and pulled at it, but stopped and called to the others. “Look at what they had onboard!”
Han couldn’t turn from his steering, but Chewbacca, sitting next to him, pulled a handful of the tarp over the back of the driver’s seat. Carefully fastened to the tarp were strands of plastic, meticulously fashioned to look like the amber grass of the plains. A camouflage cover.
“This crate comes equipped with an aerial-sensor, too,” Han noted. “With a little warning and time to cover up, this thing would be just about impossible to spot without first-rate equipment.” And the cave had been big enough to hold more rafts like this one. But that left the question of how a group of primitives like the Survivors, on a back-eddy planet like Dellalt, had set up an operation like this.
Han slowed just enough for Chewbacca to wrestle the collapsible canopy into place. They crowded onto the short couches of the cramped pilot-passenger compartment, lit by the glow of the dashboard instruments and Bollux’s photoreceptors. Outside, the moons and stars lit a sea of waving grassland as it blurred under the raft’s darkened bow. Eventually the heaters made some headway, and Han opened his flight jacket.
Badure sighed. “If that was the Queen’s log-recorder disk back there, we can write it off. The antenna mast destroyed it completely.”
Han posed the question: “But how did the Survivors get it in the first place? I thought it was back in the vaults.”
“They were talking like it’s been theirs all along,” Hasti put in, shifting in a futile attempt to find more room between Bollux and Badure in the back seat.
Skynx, in his best classroom voice, chimed in. “The facts, as we know them, are as follows. Lanni somehow obtained the log-recorder disk and deposited it in a lockbox in the vaults. She evinced an interest in the mountains. J’uoch discovered her secret, or some part of it, and killed Lanni in trying to obtain the disk. And, here were the Survivors with either the same disk or one identical to it.
“Now, Lanni was a pilot, flying freight and operational missions, isn’t that right? Suppose she happened to be airborne when the Survivors were holding one of their outdoor ceremonies, and either traced their signal or saw the light?”
Han nodded. “She could’ve landed somewhere, scouted, and bagged the log-recorder!” He trimmed the craft and corrected its course a bit.
Hasti agreed. “She could have. Dad taught her to fly, and a lot about wilderness survival and reconnaissance.”
Badure picked up the thread. “So she put the disk in the lockbox and stopped off across the lake to see if she could detect a bounce or signal leakage or find out anything about the Survivors’ base, or if she’d stirred them up. I bet the treasure’s back there under the mountain.”
They rode in silence for a time. Then Han spoke: “That would only leave two questions: how to get the Falcon back … and how to spend all that money.”
Han’s best efforts failed to nurse much speed from the antiquated raft. He kept the airwatch sensor on, depressed as low to the horizon astern as possible, but he detected no pursuit.