IV IVTHERE were, perversely, no courtesy cabs to be had in the private hangar area of the spaceport. Han used up long minutes at a dead run to locate one. The thought of his friend in desperate trouble, and that of possible damage to his beloved ship, kept him fuming and fidgeting the entire way. He was only marginally relieved when he saw the converted freighter resting, apparently unharmed, where he had left her.
Because they were short of funds, the partners had been compelled to leave their ship parked on an approach apron rather than in a rented docking bay as was their preference. Han took the ramp in two long bounds. Even before reaching the main hatch he had noticed, with a meticulous eye for every detail of his ship, a variety of tool marks and discolorations where power implements had been used. He covered the lock with his palm, ready to charge through the hatch the instant it rolled up, unmindful that he wasn’t armed, all self-concern overriden by his anxiety over Chewbacca and fear that strangers were working who-knew-what atrocities on his source of freedom and livelihood, the Millennium Falcon.
But when the hatch was up he found himself, ready to spring into mortal combat, face-to-faceplate with Bollux. The ’droid’s blank, glittering visage didn’t convey much emotion, but Han could have sworn there was a note of relief in the vocoder drawl.
“Captain Solo! Are Max and I glad to see you, sir!”
Han brushed past him. “Where’s Chewie? Is he all right? Is the ship all right? What happened? Who was here?”
“Aside from minor damage to the main hatch lock, all is in order. First Mate Chewbacca made a brief visual inspection earlier, and left. Then the surveillance systems alerted Max and me that someone was attempting to make a forced entry. Evidently the equipment they brought wasn’t sufficient to compromise the ship’s security arrangements.”
That made sense to Han. The Falcon was no ordinary ship, and she had been modified to resist boarding or break-in efforts. Among other things, the relatively unsophisticated lock and other security gear had been replaced with the best Han could build, buy, or steal. Tools and equipment that could crack a stock freighter in minutes wouldn’t even make the Falcon nervous.
Bollux continued his narration. “I warned them over the hatch comlink that I would alert port Espos if they didn’t cease and desist and depart at once. They did, although in keeping with your standing orders I would have been very reluctant to involve any law-enforcement agency.”
Han was back out at the ramp, checking the lock. Its palm plate showed nicks and scratches where a decoder had been fastened to it in a futile attempt to unlock it. The armored cover plate was scorched from a plasma torch or baffled blaster. The cover plate was barely touched and probably could have resisted entry for an additional fifteen to twenty minutes. It would have taken a light cannon to burn through in a hurry. But the damage to his ship left Han beside himself with outrage.
The labor ’droid went on, undaunted. “I went forward to the cockpit to observe them as they left.”
“You stupid stack of factory rejects! You should’ve climbed down into the belly turret and erased ’em!” Han was so angry he could scarcely see straight by now.
The ’droid’s slow speech made him seem imperturbable. “That’s one thing I could not do. I’m sorry, Captain; you know my built-in constraints against harming or attacking intelligent life forms.”
Han, still brooding over the affront to his pride and joy, murmured, “Yeah. One of these days when I’ve got some time I’ll have to see about those.”
Alarmed at the thought of fundamental personality alterations as performed by Han Solo, Bollux quickly changed the subject. “Sir, I did get a view of the individuals who attempted to force entry. Both were human and wore blue standard coveralls. One was a man, but he wore a hat and I couldn’t discern very much about him from the elevation of the cockpit. The other was a female with short black hair and—”
“I’ve met her,” Han cut in, the color rising in his face. He was trying to calculate times and distances and determine whether it could have been her or her companion who had jumped him in the hangar. If, as he suspected, they had their own private transportation, it could easily have been. “Which way’d they go?”
“As a matter of fact, at Blue Max’s suggestion I followed their departure through the macrobinoculars you keep in the cockpit. They parted and the man went off toward the passenger terminal, but the woman boarded a repulsorlift scooter, one of the green rental-agency models. In addition to her safety helmet, I noted, she was carrying a homing unit. Blue Max plugged into the ship’s communication countermeasures package and resonated the homer; I’ve made a notation of the unit’s setting. Then she flew away at a course of approximately fifty-three degrees west of planetary north, Captain.”
Han was looking at Bollux in amazement. “You know, you two lads constantly wozzle me.”
“You’re very kind, sir.” There was a brief squeal of electronic pulse-communication from deep within the ’droid’s chest cavity. “Blue Max thanks you, too.”
“A pleasure.” Han considered his next move. The woman’s course would take her out over some of the only open country in this part of Bonadan. He couldn’t go after her in the Falcon; strict local airspace regulations prohibited taking spacecraft out of approach-departure corridors. The only remaining alternative was renting a repulsorlift scooter of his own and locating her that way. But that also meant going past who-knew-how-many more of the omnipresent weapons scanners and forgoing his blaster. Taking Chewbacca along would be a logical precaution, but waiting for the Wookiee to return decreased his chances of catching up with the woman. Han was still boiling about having been jumped in the hangar, madder still about the damage to the Millennium Falcon, minor though that was. In this sort of mood he had seldom been noted for his cool reasoning.
That left one more problem, communicating with Chewbacca. “Bollux, I want you to leave Max here, linked to the ship’s surveillance system. If anybody else tries to tamper with the Falcon, he can do just what you did; if worse comes to worst, he can call in the Espos. Then I want you to go track down Chewie. He’ll be either making the rounds of the guild hiring halls or portmaster’s offices or waiting for me at a joint called the Landing Zone just outside the spaceport. I’ll catch up with you both there as soon as I can or, if I’m gone more than a few hours, I’ll meet you back here. Tell him everything that’s happened.”
The repulsorlift scooter was the fastest one the spaceport rental agency had, which was no particular mark of distinction. Han pushed the craft to its limits, its tiny engine sounding as if it had developed a lung condition, scanning ahead with the macrobinoculars he had brought from the ship.
He set a course to match the one Bollux had observed the woman to be taking. He had also brought a homing unit, adjusted to the setting Blue Max had resonated from hers.
The city was a dreary mosaic of factories, refineries, offices, dormitories, worker housing, warehouses, and shipping centers that stretched on and on. He moved, as was required, through the lowest levels of air traffic. Around him skimmers, gravsleds, and other scooters passed and flowed according to the directions of Traffic Control. Below, wheeled and tracked transportation and ground-effect vehicles moved along the city’s avenues and byways, and high overhead in the hazy smog cover the lanes were monopolized by long-distance mass transport craft, bulk haulers, and cargo lifters. Espo patrol ships swam among the flow at all levels like predatory fish.
Eventually he left the city behind, whereupon Traffic Control notified him that guidance and navigation of his little vehicle had been returned to him. The repulsorlift scooter was little more than a bucket-chair with attached control board, a cheap, simple, easily mastered vehicle common to any number of worlds. He’d slung the visored safety helmet given him by the rental agency from its storage clip at the board’s side; he wanted as wide a field of vision as he could get. The fact that helmets were mandatory didn’t matter much to him.
Once out of the metropolitan restrictions, Han poured on more speed than the scooter’s engine was supposed to be able to provide. Crouching behind the little windscreen, he ignored the ominous noises coming from the propulsion plant located under his seat.
Beneath him the surface of Bonadan came fully into view for the first time—it was barren, parched, eroded, and leached of its topsoil because plant life had been destroyed by large-scale mining, pollution, and uncaring management. The surface was predominantly yellow, with angry strips of rust-red in its twisted gullies and cracked hillocks. The Corporate Sector Authority cared little about the long-range effects of its activities on the worlds it ruled. When Bonadan was depleted and unlivable, the Authority would simply move its operations to the next convenient world.
The landscape gave way gradually to steeper peaks and crags. These mountains must have had little mineral wealth and no industrial value, for they were relatively intact. The single incursion made here by the grasping technology of the Authority was an automated weather-control station, a titanic cylinder set lengthwise on its giant aiming apparatus. At present it was directed seaward, no doubt to dissipate a storm center the Corporate Sector Authority found inconvenient. To hell with Bonadan’s natural weather patterns; ocean mining and drilling must go on, Bonadan’s seas were dying.
The homing unit began registering. Han turned onto the course it indicated, hurdling the peak on which the weather station stood. He passed down over the lower hills beyond, scanning with the macrobinoculars, checking the homing unit from time to time.
A movement below caught his eye. Han brought the scooter to a hover while he focused on it more clearly. Another small air vehicle, something faster than a scooter, was dropping toward a flat table of land. Han could make out, already waiting on the ground, a tiny figure standing next to another scooter, a green rental job.
He cut in full thrust again. In a more leisurely moment he might have held off and surveyed the situation before going in, but he and his copilot had been cheated of ten thousand in cash and almost killed, which had made them vengeful ever since. Then somebody had pummeled Han to the ground and an attempt had been made to cut his ship open. Given conditions on Bonadan, the fact that no one below was likely to be carrying a firearm counted only lightly in his decision.
As he dove toward the ground, his rage built into something that was closer to an adrenaline seizure than to courage. He hit full emergency braking thrusters at the last instant, turning what should have been a prodigious crash into a startlingly abrupt precision touchdown, taking delight in the bone-shaking force of it.
Leaping from the scooter, Han was greeted by a dumbfounded stare from the woman and angry suspicion from the man who had landed just seconds before him. The man was a bit taller than Han, but very lean, with deep-set eyes and gaunt cheeks. He, too, wore standard worker’s coveralls. The vehicle he had ridden, though, was far from commonplace. It was what was usually called a “swoop”—essentially an overpowered repulsor engine pod with handlebars. It was sitting on its landing skids, its engine making it throb gently.
The swoop-rider turned to the woman with an odd smile. “I thought you said Zlarb sent you alone.” He then stared at Han. “You have a fatal sense of timing, friend.” His hand dipped into the utility pouch on his belt. When it came up again it held something that filled the air with an insistent hum.
Han identified it as some sort of vibroblade, perhaps a butcher’s tool or surgeon’s instrument that the weapons scanners would register as an industrial implement. It had been home-altered to include a large blade, and its haft was fitted with a bulkier power pack. The blade, half again as long as Han’s hand, was difficult to see, vibrating at an incredible rate. It would cut through flesh, bone, and most other materials with little or no resistance.
Han jumped backward as the vibroblade slit the air where he had stood, its droning field sounding aroused now. The woman’s voice rang out firmly, “Just stop right there!”
Both men saw that she had produced a small pistol, but when she motioned with it the vibroblader turned on her, blade held ready. His defiance put doubt on her face, but she still pointed the weapon directly at him.
“Quit fanning him with it and shoot!” Han yelled. He saw her finger convulse at the trigger.
Nothing happened. She looked at the pistol in amazement and tried to fire again with no more success. The vibroblader turned to advance at Han again, light-footed, making quick cuts and exploring Han’s defenses, which, in brief, were retreat and avoidance. Against a regular blade Han might have tried to block or parry; a simple laceration, even a deep one, could be set right with the contents of any medi-pack and would have been a price he would have accepted to end the match. But a vibroblade would simply lop off anything that got in its way; standard responses would only get him carved to bits slowly.
Whoever he was, the vibroblader was good. Han was suddenly and tardily sorry he had descended. The man advanced on him more confidently now, weaving his blade in the air, driving Han back step for step, ready to leap forward in an instant if the pilot turned to withdraw.
Han caught sight of his scooter out of the corner of his eye. He side-stepped that way hastily, still facing his opponent. The man circled that way just as quickly, slashing where he thought Han would be, assuming he meant to escape.
But Han stopped and bent sideways at the last moment, snatching his safety helmet off its clip. Enraged at having been tricked, the vibroblader hurried a clumsy backhand stroke. Han swung the helmet by its chinstrap with all his might but only caught the man with a badly aimed blow that bounced from his shoulder and glanced off the side of his head. The light material of the helmet wasn’t enough to down him.
The vibroblader brought his weapon around and up in a move that would have opened Han vertically, but he had jumped back out of range. They shuffled on again, Han still retreating.
The fight had changed subtly. Han swung away with the helmet, aiming for the hand that held the weapon. Though he was still at a tremendous disadvantage, he just might connect, opening the vibroblader’s guard. Then he might close with the man and immobilize his wrist, the only chance he needed.
But his opponent knew that as well as Han. His advance was still strong, but he was careful to avoid the flailing helmet. Then the vibroblader caught the safety helmet with a slash; a broad segment of the tough duraplas went flying free. Seeing that the helmet was too slow and clumsy, Han whirled what was left of it underhand and flung it upward at his opponent’s face.
The man avoided it, ducking quickly to one side, but in that split second Han was inside his guard, his left hand around the wrist that held the weapon. Their free hands locked and they strained against one another. The man was far stronger than he looked; he forced his vibroblade nearer.
Han heard the dull burring of the knife’s field by his left ear and, distracted by it, fell victim to a deft leg-trip. He fell to his back and the vibroblader fell with him, the two still locked together.
Han managed to roll over, gaining the top position, but his antagonist used the momentum to force another roll, regaining it and bringing Han up sharply against some unseen obstruction. The vibroblader rose a bit, using his weight, straining to bring the blade down. Its drone filled Han’s ears as the duel narrowed to a singleminded contest over the few centimeters that separated the blade from Han’s neck.
Suddenly the atmosphere of Bonadan seemed to be filled with a tremendous roaring, a flood of sounds. The vibroblader was ripped away so quickly that Han was almost dragged with him. As it was, he was hauled around, nearly wrenching his shoulder before his grip was torn free of the other’s hand and wrist.
Han sat up, confused. Looking in one direction he saw the vibroblader lying some meters away, not doing a great deal of breathing. Turning his head slowly, shaking it a little to clear it, Han saw the young woman, off some distance in the other direction. She was clumsily bringing the swoop around in a slow turn.
She guided the vehicle with a jerky lack of skill. Failing to coordinate braking thrust and lift, she stalled it out completely. Giving it up, she dismounted and finished the rest of the way back on foot. By that time Han had risen and brushed much of the dust off himself.
She studied him, left hand on hip.
“That wasn’t a bad move, rocketsocks,” he admitted.
“Don’t you ever pay attention to anybody?” she scolded. “I kept hollering ‘look out, look out’; I was going to toss a rock at him but you kept getting in the way. I don’t know what I would’ve done if he hadn’t been right behind the engine pod. If he’d been any farther—Hey!”
Han had stepped forward, grabbed both her hands and pulled her palms up roughly, inhaling them deeply. He detected no scent of either the anesthetic that had impregnated the gloves of his assailant at the spaceport or any solvent that might have been used to remove it. But her companion might have executed the ambush in the hangar, or it was possible that the stuff in the gloves might not have contacted her skin. This didn’t prove she was innocent; it only failed to prove she was guilty.
He let her go. She was watching him with arch interest. “Should I sniff you back or clap my hands on your nose or what? You’re a really strange one, Zlarb.”
That explained a few things anyway, if she meant it. “My name’s not Zlarb. Zlarb’s dead, and whoever he worked for owes me ten thousand.”
She stared at him. “That tallies, provided you’re telling the truth. But you were where Zlarb was supposed to be, doing more or less what he was supposed to be doing.”
Han angled a thumb at the vibroblader’s body. “Who was that?”
“Oh, him. That’s who Zlarb was supposed to meet at the lounge. I was playing off both sides, Zlarb and his boss. Or, I thought I was.”
Han began warming up to an interrogation session when she interrupted. “I’d love to chat this over at length but shouldn’t we get out of here before they arrive?”
He looked up and saw what she meant. Bearing down on them was a flight of four more swoops. “Scooters are too slow. Come on.” He snagged his macrobinoculars from his repulsorlift scooter and ran for the swoop belonging to the late vibroblader. Climbing on, he brought the engine pod back to life. The woman was bent over the vibroblader’s body.
Working the handlebar accelerator, he tugged the swoop through a tight turn, helping with his foot. A quick surge of power took him to her side in a moment.
He braked hard. “Are you coming or staying?” he asked as he fit his knees into the control auxiliaries. She set her boot on a rear footpeg and swung up into the saddle behind him, showing him the vibroblade she had stopped to collect.
“Very good,” he conceded. “Now belt in and hold on.” He did the same, securing the safety belt tightly at his waist, and each donned a pair of the flying goggles that hung from clips at the swoop’s side. He gave the accelerator a hard twist and they tore away into the air, the wind screaming at them over the swoop’s low fairing. She clasped her arms around his middle and they both bent low to avoid the fairing’s slipstream.
The oncoming swoops were approaching from the direction of the city, so Han turned deeper into open country. At the edge of the table of land he threw his craft into a sudden dive over the brink, straight down into a chasm beyond. The ground rushed at them.
He threw his weight against the handlebars and leaned hard against the steering auxiliaries. The swoop came up so sharply that he was nearly torn from the handlebars by centrifugal force and the woman’s grip on him. The rearmost edge of the engine pod brushed the ground, making it skip and fishtail. Han just avoided a crash, slewed in midair and headed off down the sharply zigzagged chasm.
He calculated that, due to the steep, twisty nature of the gulches and canyons in the area, his pursuers couldn’t simply stand off at high altitude and search for him, for he might escape through a side canyon or simply hide under an overhanging ledge and out-wait them. If, on the other hand, they came in direct pursuit; they would have to hang on his tail through these obstacle course gullies and draws.
Han hadn’t been on a swoop in years but had once been very good on them, a racer and a course rider. He was willing to match himself against the four who rode after him. The one thing that worried him was the chance that they might split their bet, one or two of them going high and the others clinging to his afterblast.
“What’re you worried about anyway?” his passenger yelled over the engine’s howl and the quarrelsome wind. “They won’t have guns or that first man would’ve had one, right?”
“That doesn’t mean they can’t jump us,” he called back over his shoulder, trying not to let it distract him from negotiating the crazy turns and switchbacks of the maze. He decided that she must have little experience with swoops. She made some remark he didn’t catch, sounding as if she understood, but he was too busy conning the aircraft to answer.
Then he found out what she’d been worried about. Coming out of an especially sharp turn he almost lost control and had to touch his braking thrusters, swearing at the necessity.
It saved both their lives. A sudden blast of force erupted in the air to their right. Even the turbulence at its very edge was nearly enough to send them into the rock wall so close to their left. Under Han’s desperate efforts the little swoop wobbled, then righted and flew on.
Overhead and to the right banked one of the other swoops; its pilot had brought it down in a steep dive and snapped past, opening his accelerator at the bottom of the dive in an effort to knock Han’s vehicle out of the air or tear its riders from their saddle with the sheer force of an engine blast. Played for near-misses and scares, this sort of thing had been a game Han had known well in his youth; played for real, it was an efficient form of murder.
He knew there would be at least one backup man; they wouldn’t leave more than half their number on high cover. He came up on a forking of the way, took a split second’s bearing on the angle of the sun and dodged into the canyon he had selected. The woman was pounding him on the back, demanding to know why he’d taken the more confining way.
There was a long overhang running along one side of the canyon, but he clung to the other side, dividing his time between the harrowingly fast decisions of the ride and stolen, microsecond glances at the canyon floor. He fought the urge to pull up and get clear of the insane obstacle course; with its double burden, his swoop would almost certainly be overtaken and hemmed in and someone flying high cover was a good bet to buffet him right out of the sky.
A flash of warning was all he got. The sun’s slanting rays showed him another shadow not far behind his own on the canyon’s floor. His instantaneous brake-and-accelerate sequence was based more on intuition than on computation of angles and speeds. But it served its purpose; the other swoop overshot, its rider’s aim thrown off by Han’s maneuver. The other rider pulled out of his dive, but by then Han had pulled into a position to meet him as he brought his swoop into an ascending curve. As he rose, the other rider found himself gazing into the rear end of Han’s swoop’s engine pod.
He couldn’t avoid Han’s afterblast. The other swoop careened off the canyon floor, wobbled in the air for a moment, then plowed into the ground. Han didn’t stop to see whether the rider survived the spill or not; he poured on all the speed he safely could, and considerably more besides. Climbing, diving, and sideslipping, it was all he could do to keep from having a collision of his own.
It was a shock when, coming out of a frantic bank that had their swoop’s underside within centimeters of a vertical canyon wall, Han and his passenger broke into the open, leaving the hills behind. Unexpectedly, the other three pursuers, who had lost track of Han in the maze, came flying at an almost leisurely pace across his course.
He had a moment’s view of their astounded faces, a human and two humanoids whose gold-sheened skins gleamed in the hazy sunlight of the long Bonadan afternoon. They swung their swoops around to resume the chase as Han accelerated.
Even as he did, he knew a straight run would be futile. With the woman aboard he was bound to be overtaken before he could reach the safety of the patrolled city traffic patterns. What he needed was something to break off the pursuit.
Something off to his left attracted his attention. The huge cylinder of the automated weather-control station was just beginning a slow swing on its aiming apparatus, realigning for a new assignment. Han yanked at the handlebars and cut a new course for it.
His passenger screamed. “What are you doing? They’ll catch us!”
He couldn’t take time to tell her they would be overtaken anyway. Closing fast on the station’s supporting framework, he had to cut speed. Quick looks told him that his swoop was being bracketed above and to either side by the remaining pursuers. He cut speed even more as the support framework loomed directly before him.
For the moment his pursuers held back, not sure why he was riding straight at this huge obstruction. They had no desire to be lured into a fatal accident.
At the last second he shed almost all his speed and threaded in through the girderwork support. It wasn’t a particularly hard maneuver; the thick girders were widely spaced, and his speed was, by then, comparatively low. The pursuers, closely grouped behind him, chose to follow rather than detour around the support tower. They were determined not to lose him as he broke out the other side. That wasn’t, however, his plan.
He pulled at the handlebars and went into a vertical climb, straight up the central well of the support tower, hoping that this station followed standard design.
It did; he shot between two catwalks and directly out into the cavernous emission cylinder, a gridwork with open squares some meter and a half or so on a side. The emission cylinder was 150 meters long, less than a third of that in diameter. He swung down toward one end of the slowly rotating cylinder, orienting himself and figuring out just which way the station was pivoting.
He turned back to see the three pursuers soar into the cylinder in determined chase. They were moving a good deal slower than Han; they had never played this game before.
“Stay gripped,” he shouted over his shoulder and swung back toward the others. The cylinder was more than spacious enough for them to scatter and avoid him, thinking he was trying to ram. Then they dropped in on his tail again, following him down toward the far end of the cylinder where, they were sure, they could trap and halt him.
Until he speeded up again. The engine pod blared its power. The far end of the emission cylinder was still swinging and Han had to compensate carefully for its movement. He crouched forward, sighting carefully through the fairing, lining up the swoop precisely. The openings in the gridwork were frighteningly small.
The woman saw what he was about to do and burrowed her head into his back. The opening he had selected expanded before him. There was a terrible moment of doubt, far too late to change his mind.
The gridwork passed him like a shadow. And he was in the open, pointed more or less toward the city, the swoop’s engine howling. He took a quick look behind. Pieces of wreckage were raining slowly to the ground and some lengths of gridwork stuck out jaggedly; one of his pursuers had tried to emulate him and failed.
The woman’s face was pallid.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“Just fly this thing, you psychopath!” she shouted back.
He faced forward again with an arrogant smirk. “Deft hands and a pure heart triumph again! You were never in any—” He gulped as he saw that the top edge of the fairing had been neatly sheared away. He’d been spared by no more than millimeters.
“—danger,” Han Solo finished in a much more subdued voice.