“ ‘Almost positive’ won’t cut it, sweetheart,” he warned her.
“I know,” she said. “Hang on; I’ve got an idea.”
Han cut himself back into the radio circuit. “—said that if I had a slave circuit they could get me in a lot faster,” Luke was saying. “A hyperspace jump as close to Nkllon as the gravity well will permit, and then just a few minutes of cover before I’d be in the planetary umbra and could go the rest of the way in on my own.”
“Except that X-wings don’t come equipped with slave circuits?” Han suggested.
“Right,” Luke said, a little dryly. “Some oversight in the design phase, no doubt.”
“No doubt,” Han echoed, beginning to sweat a little. Whatever Leia was up to, he wished she’d get to it.
“Actually, I’m glad you don’t have one,” Leia spoke up. “It feels safer traveling in convoy this way. Oh, before I forget, there’s someone here who wants to say hello.”
“Artoo?” Threepio’s prissy voice said tentatively. “Are you there?”
Han’s headphone erupted with a blather of electronic beeps and twitters. “Well, I don’t know where else you might have been,” Threepio said stiffly. “From past experience, there are a considerable variety of difficulties you could have gotten yourself into. Certainly without me along to smooth things out for you.”
The headphone made a noise that sounded suspiciously like an electronic snort. “Yes, well, you’ve always believed that,” Threepio countered, even more stiffly. “I suppose you’re entitled to your delusions.”
Artoo snorted again; and, smiling tightly to himself, Han keyed off his control board and dropped the lasers back into standby status. He’d known a lot of men, back in his smuggling days, who wouldn’t have wanted a wife who could sometimes think faster than they could.
Speaking for himself, Han had long ago decided he wouldn’t have it any other way.3
The shieldship pilot hadn’t been exaggerating. It was nearly ten hours later when he finally signaled that they were on their own, made one final not-quite-impolite comment, and pulled off to the side, out of the way.
There wasn’t much to see; but then, Han decided, the dark side of an undeveloped planet was seldom very scenic. A homing signal winked at him from one of the scopes, and he made a leisurely turn in the indicated direction.
From behind him came the sound of a footstep. “What’s happening?” Leia asked, yawning as she sat down in the copilot’s seat.
“We’re in Nkllon’s shadow,” Han told her, nodding toward the starless mass directly ahead of them. “I’ve got a lock on Lando’s mining operation—looks like we’ll be there in ten or fifteen minutes.”
“Okay.” Leia looked off to the side, at the running lights of the X-wing pacing them. “Have you talked with Luke lately?”
“Not for a couple of hours. He said he was going to try and get some sleep. I think Artoo’s running the ship at the moment.”
“Yes, he is.” Leia nodded, with that slightly absent voice she always used when practicing her new Jedi skills. “Luke’s not sleeping very well, though. Something’s bothering him.”
“Something’s been bothering him for the past couple of months,” Han reminded her. “He’ll get over it.”
“No, this is something different.” Leia shook her head. “Something more—I don’t know; more urgent, somehow.” She turned back to face him. “Winter thought that maybe he’d be willing to talk to you about it.”
“Well, he hasn’t yet,” Han said. “Look, don’t worry. When he’s ready to talk, he’ll talk.”
“I suppose so.” She peered out of the cockpit at the edge of the planetary mass they were speeding toward. “Incredible. Do you realize you can actually see part of the solar corona from here?”
“Yeah, well, don’t ask me to take you out for a closer look,” Han told her. “Those shieldships aren’t just for show, you know—the sunlight out there is strong enough to fry every sensor we have in a few seconds and take the Falcon’s hull off a couple of minutes later.”
She shook her head wonderingly. “First Bespin, now Nkllon. Have you ever known Lando when he wasn’t involved in some kind of crazy scheme?”
“Not very often,” Han had to admit. “Though at Bespin, at least, he had a known technology to work with—Cloud City had been running for years before he got hold of it. This”—he nodded out the viewport—“they had to think up pretty much from scratch.”
Leia leaned forward. “I think I see the city—that group of lights over there.”
Han looked where she was pointing. “Too small,” he said. “More likely it’s an outrider group of mole miners. Last I heard he had just over a hundred of the things digging stuff out of the surface.”
“Those are, what, those asteroid ships we helped him get from Stonehill Industries?”4
“No, he’s using those in the outer system for tug work,” Han corrected. “These are little two-man jobs that look like cones with the points chopped off. They’ve got a set of plasma-jet drills pointing down around the underside hatch—you just land where you want to drill, fire the jets for a minute or two to chop up the ground, then go on down through the hatch and pick up the pieces.”
“Oh, right, I remember those now,” Leia nodded. “They were originally asteroid miners, too, weren’t they?”
“The style was. Lando found this particular batch being used in a smelting complex somewhere. Instead of just removing the plasma jets, the owners had hauled the things up whole and wedged them into place on the line.”
“I wonder how Lando got hold of them.”
“We probably don’t want to know.”
The transmitter crackled. “Unidentified ships, this is Nomad City Control,” a crisp voice said. “You’ve been cleared for landing on Platforms Five and Six. Follow the beacon in, and watch out for the bumps.”
“Got it,” Han said. The Falcon was skimming the ground now, the altimeter reading them as just under fifty meters up. Ahead, a low ridge rose to meet them; giving the controls a tap, Han nudged them over it—
And there, directly ahead, was Nomad City.
“Tell me again,” he invited Leia, “about Lando and crazy schemes?”
She shook her head wordlessly … and even Han, who’d more or less known what to expect, had to admit the view was stunning. Huge, humpbacked, blazing with thousands of lights in the darkside gloom, the mining complex looked like some sort of exotic monstrous living creature as it lumbered its way across the terrain, dwarfing the low ridges over which it walked. Searchlights crisscrossed the area in front of it; a handful of tiny ships buzzed like insect parasites around its back or scuttered across the ground in front of its feet.
It took Han’s brain a handful of seconds to resolve the monster into its component parts: the old Dreadnaught Cruiser on top, the forty captured Imperial AT-ATs underneath carrying it across the ground, the shuttles and pilot vehicles moving around and in front of it.
Somehow, knowing what it was didn’t make it the least bit less impressive.
The transmitter crackled again. “Unidentified ship,” a familiar voice said, “welcome to Nomad City. What’s this about playing a hand of sabacc?”
Han grinned lopsidedly. “Hello, Lando. We were just talking about you.”
“I’ll bet,” Lando said wryly. “Probably remarking on my business skills and creativity.”
“Something like that,” Han told him. “Any special trick involved in landing on that thing?”
“Not really,” the other assured them. “We’re only going a few kilometers an hour, after all. Is that Luke in the X-wing?”
“Yes, I’m here,” Luke put in before Han could answer. “This place is amazing, Lando.”