Star Wars_ The Han Solo Adventures - Brian Daley [90]
Others began to follow, leaving this leaf-wrapped treasure or that handicraft or artwork. Often one Badlander would offer something that constituted the contributions for himself and several companions. Han raised no objection; business was good and there was no reason to push for all the market would bear. He liked to think he was building good will. The Badlanders, who weren’t used to congregating, tended to find their places on the slopes in small clusters, keeping as much distance between groups as possible.
Among the payments were water-extraction tubes, pharynx flutes, minutely carved gaming pieces, odd jewelry intended for the exotic Kamarian anatomy, amulets, a digworm opener chipped from glassy stone and nearly as sharp as machined metal, and a delicate prayer necklace. Earlier on, Han had been forced to dissuade his customers from bringing him nightswift gruel, boiled howlrunner, roast stingworm, and other local delicacies.
Han picked up the twist of leaf Lisstik had left, opened it on his palm and showed it to Sonniod. Two small, crude gemstones and a sliver of some milky crystal lay there.
“You’ll never get to be a man of leisure at this rate, Solo,” opined Sonniod.
Han shrugged, rewrapping the stones. “All I want is a new stake so I can lay in a cargo and get the Falcon repaired.”
Sonniod studied the starship that had once been, and still looked very much like, a stock light freighter. That she was heavily armed and amazingly speedy was something Han preferred not to have show externally. Such display of force would have been too likely to arouse the curiosity of those entrusted with enforcement of the law.
“She looks spaceworthy enough to me,” Sonniod commented. “Same old Falcon—looks like a garbage sledge, performs like an interceptor.”
“She’ll run, now that Chewie’s welded the hull,” Han conceded, “but some of the control circuitry that was shot up over Rampa was about ready to give up when we got here. Before we came out into the Badlands we had to lay in some new components, and about the only thing you can get here on Kamar is fluidic systems.”
Sonniod’s face turned sour. “Fluidics? Solo, dear fellow, I’d rather steer my ship with a blunt pole. Why couldn’t you get some decent circuitry?”
Han was poring over the rest of this take. “This is a nowhere planet, pal. They’ve still got nationalism and their weapons—in the advanced places, I mean; not out here in the Badlands—are at the missile-delivered, nuclear-explosive stage. So, of course, someone developed a charged-particle beam to mess up missile circuitry, and naturally everyone turned to fluidics, because shielded circuitry was a little beyond them. So now fluidics is the only type of advanced systems they’ve got here. We had to load up on adaptor fittings and interface routers and use gas and liquid fluidic components. I hate them.”
Han stood up again. “I can’t stand the thought of all those flow-tracks and microvalves in the Falcon and I can’t wait to rip ’em out and retool her.” He held up and studied with pleasure a statuette carved from black stone, exquisitely detailed and no bigger than his thumb. “And the way things are going, that shouldn’t take too much longer.”
He put the statuette down in the much smaller of two piles of goods that had been stacked around the starship’s ramp. The larger one consisted of trade articles of relatively great bulk and little value, including musical instruments, cooking utensils, tunneling tools, chitin paints, and the portable awnings the Badlanders sometimes used. The smaller pile held all the semiprecious stones, much of the artwork, and a number of the finer tools and implements. The amassed goods had been cluttering up the Falcon, stored here and there in available corners of the ship over the past eleven local days. While Chewbacca had been completing repairs that afternoon, Bollux