Star Wars - Han Solo's Revenge Read online

  "But what'll you do with all the bulky stuff?" Sonniod asked, falling in as Han started down for the center of the amphitheater again.

  "We're planning a going-out-of-business sale," Han de-clared. "Very good deals, everything must go. Super dis-counts for steady customers and compact items offered in trade." He rubbed his jaw. "I may even sell old Lisstik, the holoprojector when I go. I'd hate to see the old Solo Holo-theater close down."

  "Sentimentalist. So I don't suppose you need work right now? "

  Han looked quickly at Sonniod. "What kind of work?" Sonniod shook his head. "I don't know. Word's out back in the Corporate Sector that there're jobs to be had, runs to be made. Nobody seems to know the details and you never hear names, but word is that if you make yourself available, you'll be contacted."

  "I've never worked blind," Han said.

  "Nor I. That's why I didn't get in on it. I thought you might be sufficiently hard up to be interested. I must say I'm glad you're not, Solo; it all sounds a bit too tricky. I just thought you might like to know. "

  Assuring himself of the holoprojector's settings, Han nod-ded. ` `Thanks, but don't worry about us; life's a banquet. I might even do this some more, hire out a few projectors and hire local crews on these slowpoke worlds to run them for a split. It could be a sweet, legal little racket, and I wouldn't even have to get shot at. "

  "By the way," Sonniod said, "what's the other feature, the one you've been showing all along?"

  "Oh, that. It's a travelogue, Varn, World of Water. You know, life among the amphiboid fishers and ocean farmers in the archipelagoes, deep-seat-wildlife, ocean-bed fights to the death between some really big lossors and a pack of cheeb,. things like that. Want to hear the narrative? I've got it all memorized. "

  "Thank you, no," Sonniod replied, pulling his lower lip thoughtfully. "I wonder how they'll react to a new feature?" "They'll love it," Han insisted. "Singing, dancing; they'll be tapping their little pincers off."

  "Solo, what was the word Lisstik used for the admission price? "

  "Q'mai. " Han was finishing fine adjustments. "They didn't have any word for `admission,' but I finally got the idea across to Lisstik in spotty Basic and he said the word's q'mai. Why?"

  "I've heard it before, here on Kamar. " Sonniod put the thought aside for the moment. The holofeature appeared in mass-audience projection, filling the air over the natural am-phitheater. The Badlanders, who had been swaying gently in the hot night breeze and clicking and chittering among them-selves, now became utterly silent.

  Love is Waiting was standard fare, Han recalled. It opened without credits or title, which would appear shortly, super-imposed on the opening number. That was just as well, Han reflected, since abstract symbols would mean about as much to Kamar Badlanders as particle physics meant to a digworm. He wondered what they would think of human choreography and music, of which there had been none in Varn, World of Water.

  The feature opened with the woebegone hero stepping off a transporter beltway en route, with some misgiving, to a job with a planetary modification firm. A catchy beat, in- tended to inform the viewer that a production number was coming, began. Something appeared to make the Badlanders uneasy, however. The clicking and chittering grew louder, nor did it abate when the hero collided with the ingenue and their introduction led to his song cue.

  Before the hero had even gotten through the first of his lyrics, discord among the Kamarians was drowning out the music. Several times Han caught the name of Lisstik. He raised the volume a little, hoping the crowd would settle down, puzzling over what had them so agitated. A stone sailed out of the darkness and bounced off the holoprojector with a crash. From the light spilled by the dancing, singing figures overhead there could be seen the angry waving of Kamarian upper extremities. Multi-faceted eyes threw the light back out of the dark in a million fragments.

  Another rock clanked against the holoprojector, making Sonniod jump, and a flung howlrunner thighbone, remains of someone's dinner, just missed Han.

  "Solo-" began Sonniod, but Han wasn't listening. Having spotted Lisstik, Han shouted up the slopes at him. "Hey, what's going on? Tell 'em to calm down! Give it a chance, will you?"

  But it was no use yelling to Lisstik. The Kamarian was surrounded by an irate crowd of his fellows, all waving their upper extremities and thrashing tails, making more noise than Han had ever heard Badlanders make. One of them swiped at the burned-out integrator banded to Lissfik's skull. Elsewhere on the slopes around the holoprojector, shoving, arguments and differences of opinion had erupted into vio-lent disagreement.

  "Oh, my," said Sonniod in a very small voice. "Solo, I just remembered what q'mai means; I heard it in one of the population centers to the north. It doesn't mean `,admission,' it means `offering.' Quick, where's the other holo, the trav-elogue?"

  By then a mob of hostile Badlanders was slowly closing in around the holoprojector. Han's hand descended toward his blaster. "Back onboard the Falcon, why? What are you talking about?"

  "Don't you stop and analyze things, ever? You've been showing them holos of a world with more water than they'd ever dreamed existed, filled with cultures and life forms that they've never even fantasized about. You haven't set up a holotheater, you idiot; you've started a religion!"

  Han gulped, pulling his blaster indecisively as the Bad-landers closed in. "Well, how could 1 know? I "m a pilot, not an alien-contact officer! "

  He took a handful of Sonniod's coverall sleeve and, pull-ing gently, led him back slowly toward the Falcon. He heard Chewbacca's alarmed roaring from farther up the slope. Overhead, the hero and the ingenue and everybody else at the transporter beltway were engaged in- a meticulously cho-reographed dance routine built around the ticket kiosks and turnstiles.

  The Badlanders at that side of the circle began to give way uncertainly before Han, who tugged the frightened Sonniod along after him. A number of the bolder Kamarians rushed the holoprojector and began beating at it with sticks, stones, and bare pincers. Overhead, the dance number began to dis-solve into distortion. Some of the vandals-or outraged zeal-ots, depending on one's orientation-turned from the projector after a moment and advanced in a vengeful throng on Han.

  Sensing correctly that by simply refunding the q'mai he stood little chance of mollifying his former audience-cum-congregation, Han fired into the ground before them. Sandy soil exploded, throwing up rocky debris and burning cinders. Whatever flammable material there was in the soil caught fire. Han fired twice more to.his right and left, gouging holes in the ground in spectacular bursts. Badlanders fell back for the moment, their enormous eyes catching the crimson of blaster beams, ducking their small heads and shielding themselves with upraised brachia. Han didn't have to fire at the disgruntled Kamarians between him-self and his ship; they were giving way. "Stay up there," he hollered up into the darkness at Chewbacca, '.'and get the engines started! "

  The crowd was doing a pretty fair job of disassembling the holoprojector. Its sound synthesizer was making simply ran-dom noises now, though at high volume. Love is Waiting had devolved to a sluggish flow of multicolored swirls in the air.

  As Han watched, walking backward as calmly as he could, Lisstik rushed in from the darkness, wrenched the integrator from his forehead and hurled it to the ground, stamping and grinding it into the dust as he beat at the holoprojector with his pincers.

  "It looks like your high priest has split with the church," observed Sonniod. Lisstik succeeded in wrenching loose a piece of the control panel casing and flung it in Han's general direction with a vindictive series of clicks.

  Feeling himself more the aggrieved party than the one at fault, Han lost his restraint. "You want a show? Here's a show, you rotten little ingrate!" He fired into the holopro-jector. The red whining blaster bolt elicited a brief, bright secondary explosion from somewhere in the projector's in-ternal reaches.

  Suddenly the sound synthesizer was producing the most appalling string of loud, piercing, unrecognizable aggluti-nations
of noise Han had ever heard. The projection filled the sky over the amphitheather with nova bursts, solar flares, pinwheels, sky rockets, and strobe flashes. The entire crowd gave a concerted bleat and charged off in all directions up the slopes of the bowl. Han and Sonniod took considerable advantage -of the con-fusion by sprinting madly toward the Millennium Falcon. They could hear harsh chitters and clacks from both sides as Badlanders, having not yet vented their full outrage, began giving chase. Han pegged unaimed shots into the air and the ground behind him. He still hesitated to fire at his former customers unless it meant life or death. As they neared the Falcon's gaping ramp, Han and Son-niod were gratified to see the starship's belly turret fire a volley. The quad-guns spat lines of red annihilation, and a rocky upcropping already passed by the racing men was transformed into a fountain of. sparks, molten rock, and out-lashing energy. The heat scorched Han's back and a stone chip whistled past Sonniod's ear, too close for comfort, but it put a halt to the Badlanders' chase for the moment.

  When they reached the ramp, Sonniod dashed up at max-imum speed while Han slid to a stop on one knee to gather up what he could from the more valuable q'inai. A hurled stone bounced off the Falcon's landing gear and another ric-ocheted from the ramp while Han groped.

  "Solo, get up here!" Sonniod screamed. Spinning, Han saw Badlanders closing in around the ship. He fired over their heads and they ducked, but kept coming. Backstepping rap-idly up the ramp, Han fired twice more and fell when he dodged a thrown rock. He ended up crawling through the hatch.

  As the main hatch rolled down, Chewbacca appeared at the passageway, leaning out of the cockpit with an incensed snarl in this throat.

  "How should I know what went wrong?" Han bellowed at the Wookiee. "What am I, a telepath? Get us up and head for Sonniod's ship, now! " Chewbacca disappeared back into the cockpit.

  As Sonniod helped him up off the deck, Han tried to re-assure him. "Don't worry, we'll get you back to your ship before the grievance committee arrives. You'll have time to lift off. "

  Sonniod nodded thankfully. "But what about you and the Wookiee, Solo?" The starship trembled slightly as she hov-ered on her thrusters and swung away toward Sonniod's parked vessel. "I wouldn't come back for my profits if I were you. "

  "I suppose I'll have to head back for the Corporate Sec-tor," Han sighed, "and see what kind of jobs there are float-ing around. At least the heat should be off; I doubt if anyone's looking for me or this freighter anymore. "

  Sonniod shook his head. "Try to find out what the job is before you get into it," he encouraged. "Nobody seems to know what kind of run it is. "

  "I don't care; I'm in no position to be picky. I'll have to take it," Han said, resigned. They heard Chewbacca's de-. jected hooting drifting aft from the cockpit. "He's right,"

  he said. "We just weren't cut out for the honest life. "

  Part 2

  THE Millennium Falcon seemed a ghost ship, a spectral spacecraft like the long-lost, sometimes-sighted Permondiri Explorer, or the fabled Queen of Ranroon. Trailing sheets of crackling energy, with dancing lines of brilliant discharge playing back and forth over her, she might have flown di-rectly out of one of those legends.

  Around the starship seethed the turbulent atmosphere of Lur, a planet quite close, as interstellar distances go, to the Corporate Sector. Its ionization layer was interacting with the Falcon's screens to create eerie lightninglike dis-plays. The shrieking of the planet's winds could be heard through the vessel's hull, and the fury of the storm had cut visibility virtually to zero. Han and Chewbacca paid scant attention to the uproar pounding at their canopy with rain, sleet, snow, and gale-force winds.

  They lavished closest attention on their instrumentation, courting it for all the information it could provide, as if by concentration alone they could coax a clearer picture of their situation from sensors and other indicators. Chewbacca growled irritably, his clear blue eyes skipping all over his side of the console, leathery snout working and twitching.

  Han was feeling just as cross. "How am 1 supposed to know how thick the ionization layer is? The instrumenta-tion's jittery from the discharges, it doesn't show anything clearly. What do you want me to do, drop a plumb line?" He went back to closely monitoring his share of the console.

  'The Wookiee's rejoinder was another growl. Behind him; in the communications officer's seat that was usually left va-cant, Bollux spoke up. "Captain Solo, one of the indicators just lit up. It appears to be a malfunction in some of the new control systems."

  Without turning from his work, Han uncorked some of his choicer curses, then calmed down somewhat. "It's the mis-erable fluidics! What timing, what perfect timing! Chewie, I told you there'd be trouble, didn't I? Didn't I?"

  The Wookiee flailed a huge, hairy paw in the air by way of dismissal, wishing to be left to his tasks, rumbling loudly. "Where's the problem?" Han snapped back over his right shoulder.

  Bollux's photoreceptors scanned the indicators that were: located next to the commo board. "Ship's emergency sys-tems, sir. The auto-firefighting apparatus, I believe."

  "Go back and see what you can do, will you, Bollux? That's all we need, for the firefighting gear to cut in; we'd be up to our chins in foam and gas before you could ask the way to the exit. " As Bollux staggered off, barely staying upright on the bucking deck, Han resolutely thrust the problem out of his mind.

  Chewbacca yowlped. He had gotten a positive reading. Han dragged himself halfway out of his chair for a look as another spitting globe of ball-lightning drifted out and spun off the Falcon's bow mandibles. The ionization levels were dropping. Then he threw himself back into his seat and cut the ship's speed back even further. He had terrible visions of the ionization level extending down, somehow, to the surface of Lur, blinding them right up to the time of collision.

  Of course, the party who had hired the Millennium Falcon for this run hadn't mentioned the ionization layer, hadn't mentioned anything very specific for that matter. Han had put the word abroad that he and his ship were available for hire and disinclined to ask questions, and the job had come, as Sonniod had predicted it would, from unseen sources in the form of a faceless audio tape and a small cash advance.

  But with creditors hounding them and their other resources exhausted in the wake of the debacle in the Kamar Badlands, Han and his partner had seen no alternative but to ignore Sonniod's advice and accept the run.

  Was 1 born this stupid, Han asked himself in disgust, or am I just blossoming late in life? But at that moment both the storm and the ionization layer parted. The Falcon lowered gently through a clear, calm region of Lur's atmosphere. Far below, features of the planet's surface could be seen, moun-tain peaks protruding through low-hanging, swirling clouds. Another light flashed on; the freighter's long-range sensors had just picked up a landing beacon.

  Han switched on the Terrain Following Sensors and poised over the readouts. "They picked us a decent spot to land at least," he admitted. "A big, flat place slung between those two low peaks over there. Probably a glacial field. " He flipped the microphone on his headset over to intercom mode: "Bollux, we're going in. Drop what you're doing and hang on. "

  Correcting his ship's attitude of descent, he brought her in toward the landing point at very moderate speed. The TFS rig showed no obstacles or other dangers, but Han wished to take no chances with instrumentation on this stupid planet.

  They settled into the clouds as precipitation was driven at the canopy, only to slide away when it met the Falcon's de-fensive screens. Sensors had begun functioning normally, giving precise information on altitude. Visibility, even in the storm, was sufficient for a cautious landing. Lur materialized below them as a plain where winds hurried along endlessly, aimlessly. Han eased the vessel down warily; he had no desire to find himself buried in an ice chasm. But the ship's landing gear found solid support, and instrumentation showed that Han's guess had been correct; they had landed on a glacial ice field. Off to starboard some forty meters or so was the landing beaco
n. Han removed his headset, stripped off the flying gloves he had been wearing, and unbuckled his seatbelt. He turned to his Wookiee copilot. "You stay here and keep a sharp watch. I'll go let the ramp down and see what the deal is." The unoccupied navigator's seat behind him held a bundle that he snagged and carried along as he left the cockpit.

  On his way aft to the ship's ramp he found Bollux. The 'droid was stooping down by an open inspection plate set in the bulkhead at deck level. Bollux's chest plastron was open, and Blue Max was assisting him in' his examination of the problem at hand.

  "What's the routine?" Han inquired. "Is it fixed?" Bollux stood up. "I'm afraid not, Captain Solo. But Max and I caught it just before the last safety went. We shut down the entire system, but repair is beyond the capability of either of us."

  "You don't need a tech for those fluidics, Captain," Max chirped. "You need a damn plumber. " His voice held a' note of moral outrage at the inferior design.