Star Wars: The Adventures of Lando Calrissia Read Online Free

of the hatch cover, its spore sacs shiny and distended. It was ugly, perhaps a meter across, winged like a bat, tailed (if that was the proper word for it) like a stingray, poison-toothed like a—
    “Yeek!” The mynock, this time.
    It floundered toward him, dragging itself along by a ventral sucker-disk. The only thing uglier than mynocks, Lando thought, were the larvae they spawned on planet surfaces. He leaped as it flicked a clawed wingtip at him, his awkwardness aboard ship bred more of unfamiliarity in a new environment than any native lack of agility. He twisted the hose nozzle, spraying the monster with superheated vapor from the
Falcon
’s thermal-exchange system.
    It screamed and writhed, flesh melting away to expose the cartilage it used instead of bones. This, too, reduced quickly, washed down the curved surface of the ship, leaving nothing but gelatinous slime steaming on the spaceport asphalt.
    A noise behind him.
    Side vision impaired by the suit, Lando whirled just in time to ram the nozzle into a second mynock’s gaping maw. Itswelled and burst. Fastidiously, he played steam over himself to remove the dissolving organic detritus, then stalked grimly forward, finally destroying seven of the sickening things in all.
    “
Good going, Ace
!” Teguta Lusat Ground Control sneered through his helmet receiver as he wiggled back through the upper airlock hatchway. “
Didn’t you get an instruction booklet when you sent your box-tops in for that pile of junk you’re flying? Over
.”
    Pile of junk?
    The only pile of junk in the neighborhood, thought Lando, sweating in his bulky armor as he cranked the hatch back down and stowed the steamlines, was that brainless rent-a-bot up forward. Hmmm. That gave him an idea.
    “Hello, Ground Control,” he warbled pleasantly from the cockpit only seconds after worming back out of the plastic vac-suit. “I’ll have you know that this stout little vessel’s often made the run to your overrated mudball in record-breaking time.”
    Once
upon
a time. At least that’s what her former owner claimed, trying to bid up the battered freighter’s pot value in a
sabacc
game he was losing badly. Lando’s rented droid had failed miserably to coax anything near the advertised velocities out of the ship.
    Probably some trick to it.
    “By the way,” Lando continued, “I seem to have the knack of handling this baby now. Would anyone care to purchase a practically new pilot droid? Over?”
    “
We’ve heard that one before
, Millennium Eff.
That rental outfit in the Oseon may not maintain offices here, but they’ve got treaty rights. You’ll have to send it back fast-freight. Expensive. Over and out
.”
    It wasn’t quite as bad as he’d expected.
    Lando shipped the droid back slow-freight, balancing the extra rental time against the transportation costs. Evening had begun to fall before he’d taken care of that,
plus
all of the complicated official paperwork attendant upon grounding an interstellar spacecraft anywhere the word “civilized” is considered complimentary.
    Tonight, he’d relax.
    He needed it, after traveling with that confounded robot. Get a feel for the territory—by which he meant identifying potentialmarks, locating those social gatherings that others foolishly regarded as games of chance.
    Tomorrow, he’d take care of business.
    The Rafa System was famous for three things: its “life-crystals”; the peculiar orchards from which they were harvested; and what might have been called “ruins” if the colossal monuments left by the Sharu hadn’t remained in such excellent repair.
    The crystals were nothing special—as long as you regarded quadrupling human life expectancy “nothing special.” Varying from pinhead to fist-sized, their mere presence near the body was said to enhance intelligence (or stave off senility) and to have some odd effect on dreaming.
    They could be cultivated only on the eleven planets, assorted moons, and any other rocks that