Star Wars_ The Han Solo Adventures - Brian Daley [89]
Sonniod looked puzzled. “Both?”
“Watch.” The ’droid having completed his chore, Han commanded, “Hey, Bollux, open up.”
“Of course, Captain Solo,” Bollux answered in a casual drawl, and obligingly pulled his long arms back out of the way. His chest plastron parted down the center with a hiss of pressurized air and the halves swung outward. Nestled among the other elements in his chest was a small, vaguely cubical computer module, an independent machine entity painted a deep blue. A single photoreceptor mounted in a turret at the module’s top came alight, swiveled, and came to rest on Han.
“Hello, Captain,” piped a childlike voice from a diminutive vocoder grille.
“Well, of all the—” Sonniod exclaimed, leaning closer for a better look as the computer’s photoreceptor inspected him up and down.
“That’s Blue Max,” Han told him. “Max because he’s packed to his little eyebrows with computer-probe capacity and Blue for obvious reasons. Some outlaw-techs put these two together like that.” He thought it best not to go into the wild tangle of crime, conflict, and deception surrounding a previous adventure at the secret Authority installation known as Stars’ End.
Bollux’s original, ancient body had been all but destroyed there, but the outlaw-techs had provided him with a new one. The ’droid had opted for a body much like his old one, insisting that durability, versatility, and the capacity to do useful work had always been the means to his survival. He had even retained his slow speech pattern, having found that it gave him more time to think and made humans regard him as easygoing.
“When they were manumitted they asked to sign on with me,” Han told Sonniod. “They’re swapping labor for passage.”
“Those are the last of the trade articles we’ve accumulated, sir,” Bollux informed Han.
“Good. Close up and go re-stow all the loose gear we had to move around.” The plastron halves swished shut on Blue Max, and Bollux obediently returned up the ramp.
“But, Solo, I thought you always said you disavow all machinery that talks back,” Sonniod reminded him.
“A little help comes in handy sometimes,” Han answered defensively. He avoided further comment, remarking, “Ah, the rush is about to start.”
Out of the gloom, figures were hurrying toward the starship, pausing at a cautious distance. The Kamar Badlanders were smaller and more supple than other Kamarians, and their segmented exoskeletal chitin was thinner and of a lighter color, matching the hues of their home terrain. Most of them rested in the characteristic pose of their kind, on their lowermost set of extremities and their thick, segmented, prehensile tails.
Lisstik, one of the few Badlanders whom Han could tell from the others, approached the Falcon’s ramp. Lisstik had been among the very few to watch the holos on the first evening Han had offered them, and he’d shown up every evening thereafter. He seemed to be a leader among his kind. Now Lisstik was sitting on his tail, leaving his upper two sets of brachia free to gesture and interweave as Kamarians loved to do. The Badlander’s faceted, insectile eyes showed no emotion Han had ever been able to read.
Lisstik wore an unusual ornament, a burned-out control integrator that Chewbacca had cast aside. The Kamarian had scavenged and now wore it, bound by a woven band to the front of his gleaming, spherical skull. Lisstik spoke a few phrases of Basic, possibly one of the reasons he was a leader. Once more he asked Han the question that had become something of a formula between them. In a voice filled with clicks and glottal stops, he queried, “Will we see mak-tk-klp, your holo-sss, tonight? We have our q’mai.”
“Sure, why not?” Han replied. “Just leave the q’mai in the usual place and take a—” he almost said “seat,” which would have been a difficult concept for a Kamarian, “—a place below. The show starts when everybody’s down there.”
Lisstik made the common Kamarian affirmative, a clashing-together of the central joints of his upper extremities, sounding like small cymbals. From his side he