Corellian Trilogy_ Ambush At Corellia Part 9

But at last the moment came, and the Falcon's repulsorlifts came to life, glowing with power. Moving with a smooth and perfect grace that seemed out of character for the cantankerous old freighter, the Falcon rose smoothly into the air, did a ninety-degree turn to port, and lit her main sublight engines to move off into the dusky sky.

"There they go," Lando said, his voice betraying a low, quiet, excitement. Luke could understand. Maybe they were only a family off on a vacation, a quick trip sandwiched in before Leia got caught up in the Corellian trade talks, but that didn't matter. They were on a ship, and the ship was already heading out between the stars. It could have been any ship, going anywhere. To Luke, and to Lando, too, for that matter, there could be no more powerful symbol of adventure, of possibility, of hope and freedom, than a ship heading out into s.p.a.ce.

Mon Mothma had told Luke that he craved adventure, and he had denied it. It hadn't taken much to show him the error of his ways. He wanted to be out there, in the thick of things.

"Come on, Luke," said Lando. "You and I have things to talk about." broke down and Organa Solo returned to Coruscant, after Pharnis had done the Skywalker job, it could prove most embarra.s.sing.

No. Give them time to get well away. Tomorrow. He would do the job tomorrow.

Luke and Lando were not the only ones to watch the departure of the Millennium Falcon. Phamis Gleasry, agent of the Human League, watched as well, albeit from a discreet distance. He was several kilometers away, on an observation platform on another of Coruscant's ma.s.sive towers. The platform was crowded with tourists who took him for one of their own and paid him no mind. It was far enough away that he was obliged to use macrobinoculars to see much of anything. The constant jostling he suffered from the tourists did not make it any easier to keep the macrobinoculars steady.

But he could see the ship take off for all of that. And he could see two tiny figures, still on the hard stand. He could see them watch the Falcon vanish, see them turn away and head back inside. Pharnis was all but certain that the one on the left was Skywalker. The other was definitely Lando Calrissian. Good. Good. Pharnis was pleased to get visual confirmation that his target was on-planet. With Organa Solo safely on her way, it was time for Skywalker.

But Pharnis had done his homework. He knew that the Millennium Falcon was not the most reliable of craft. Best to give her time to get out of the system. If the Falcon

CHAPTER SEVEN.

Proposal Accepted So what is this project you want my help with, Lando?" Luke asked as they made their way back from the landing bay.

Lando Calrissian smiled at Luke as they walked, and there was more than a bit of mischief in his expression. "A whole new approach to the way I do business," he said.

r it might be more accurate to call it an investment opportunity.

Anyway, I want your help to get it off the ground."

Investment opportunity? Luke thought. He glanced at his companion. Lando had always been one to go after highstakes, large-scale projects, but he had never been one to invite his friends to join the wild schemes. Even Lando knew there were limits-or at least he had, up until now.

Not that it mattered, of course. Lando could hit up Luke for money all day long, but it wouldn't do any good. You needed to have money before you could give it to someone-and Lando ought to have known that a Jedi Master was not the sort of person likely to have a stack of spare credits lying around. To put it rather crudely, saving the universe didn't pay very well.

But Lando had to know Luke was not rich. Was it something worse still? Was he hoping to trade on Luke's good name, get him to endorse the scheme so Lando could get others to invest'? "Ah, Lando, I don't think I can help you.

I really don't have the sort of big-stakes money you're after.

And I don't think I'd be much good trying to sell it to others-"

Lando burst out laughing. "Is that what you thought I was after?

Calrissian's Fly-by-Night Investments, as endorsed by Luke Skywalker, Hero of the Galaxy? No, no, Ithat's not it. That kind of gall would be beyond even me."

"Well, that's a relief," Luke said. "I was scared you were about to ask me to go on some sort of promotional tour.

Lando gave him a funny look and smiled. "In a sense," he said, "I am. But not for the sort of product you've got in mind."

"Lando, so far you're not making sense."

"No, I suppose not." Lando stopped walking for a moment, and Luke did as well. Lando turned toward Luke, took him by the arm, and seemed about to say more. But then he glanced around, as if he were trying to judge the likelihood of unwelcome eavesdroppers. "loook," he said at last. "There's something I've been meaning to show you.

A new project of mine. Let's head there. We can sit down quietly, in private, and I can explain the whole thing."

all right, I suppose," Luke said, more than a little doubfful.

"What sort of project?" he asked.

"My new home," Lando said. "Something kind of special. ' "Special in what way?" Luke asked.

"You'll see," said Lando, slapping Luke on the shoulder. "Come on.

We'll take the scenic route."

Luke had thought he knew Coruscant fairly well. but Lando led him through a labyrinth of pa.s.sages and tunnels and lifts and moving walkways Luke had never seen or heard of before. All of the pa.s.sageways seemed to lead off in every direction at once, but it soon became clear that they were going deeper and deeper into the bowels of the city.

By the time Lando had gotten to the level he wanted, Luke guessed they were at least one or two hundred meters below ground level-if Coruscant could be said to have a ground level. The planet-wide city of towers and monolithic structures had been built and rebuilt and overbuilt and dug up and reburied so many times that no one really knew where the original surface was anymore. Virtually all of the land surface had been built over. Here and there were hummocks of dirt where scruffy plant life had managed to secure a foothold. But hardly any of these were truly at "ground" level. They were just sheltered spots where the winds and rains had been able to deposit enough dust and dirt and detritus to form a soil of sorts, places where a stray seed or two from one of the lush indoor gardens had found its way.

But for all of that, Luke knew they were unquestionably underground. Half the tunnels were just bare, raw rock, solid granite.

In places the tunnel walls were bone-dry. In others, they were clammy and wet, with riverlets of moisture oozing down the walls and pooling here and there.

If this was where Lando lived now, Luke could not help thinking that Lando had, quite literally, gone down' in the world. An underground address was considered a mark of very low status on Coruscant.

That worried Luke. He had always known Lando to be very concerned with appearances. There had been times he had seen Lando quite literally threadbare-but even in the worst of times, Lando had made a determined and successful effort to seem prosperous. Part of it was vanity and ego.

Lando had plenty of those in stock. But there was a more practical side to it as well. Lando was, among other things, a salesman, and a salesman who didn't look prosperous was not going to get far.

Except that Lando did look prosperous-if anything, better than he had in years. But if he was doing so well, why was he living underground?

For that matter, why was he taking Luke to where he lived by such a round-about route? There had to be a more direct way to get where they were going. Probably that was nothing more than force of habit. Back in the bad old days, Lando had often felt the need to be rather secretive about the location of his living quarters.

While he had never had half the galaxy's bounty hunters after him, the way Han had at one point, Lando Calrissian had managed to develop a pretty fair number of enemies over the years. There had been times when not even his most trusted friends knew where he lived. Even the most trusted person could be tailed, or be tricked into wearing a tracer tab, or tortured or drugged. Nowadays, there wasn't any real need for such precautions, but old habits died hard in ex-smugglers who didn't die young-and Lando was still very much alive. And it could very well be that Lando still had a few old a.s.sociates he didn't want to meet unexpectedly. Maybe it wasn't so foolish to take the long way around.

Lando kept up a steady monologue as they walked, nattering on cheerfully about every subject under the stars, from the best odds to be found in the various small-stakes gambling houses-legal and otherwise-in the bowels of Coruscant, to the enormous profits to be realized by anyone in the right place at the right time, should the Corellian Trade Summit prove successful. That much about Lando had stayed the same, Luke thought. As interested in the five-credit bet as he was in the fifty-million-credit investment. And given his usual luck on the fifty-million side of things, he probably was wise to pay attention to those five credits.

Lando Calrissian was famous for developing a huge project, living high off the proceeds-and then, through no fault of his own, having the whole thing crash down around his ears. He had done a splendid job of running Cloud City on Bespin-and gotten out with not much more than the clothes he was standing up in. It was more or less the same story for his mole-mining operation at Nkllon. And then there was that mining on Kessel . . . If he hadn't had a fair bit of skill at the gaming tables, Lando would never have been able to recover from those disasters.

And now, it appeared, he was gearing up to start up all over again.

But if he didn't want Luke's money, and didn't want to trade on Luke's name, then how in the galaxy did it have anything to do with Luke?

On they walked, through increasingly squalid and dirty pa.s.sages.

The occasional pools of water grew more frequent, and more filthy. There were a number of unpleasant odors, some of which Luke could identify, and a number that he was just as glad he could not.

At last the walkway they were on came to a halt before a huge blastproof door. Lando punched a combination into a keypad, and the door slid back into the wall with a ponderous rumbling of machinery.

They stepped onto a terrace overlooking a huge subterranean cavern, a hollow dome, easily a kilometer across.

Luke, quite astonished, found himself on a platform that looked down into a complete pocket city of low stone buildings and cool green parks. The dome was brightly lit, the air sweet and pure, the walkways and byways clean and tidy. The buildings were widely s.p.a.ced, their stone walls brightly painted. Pathways snaked through neatly kept lawns, and the roof of the dome was painted a royal blue.

"Welcome to Dometown," Lando said.

"Very nice, Lando," Luke said as he leaned over the low wall of the terrace and admired the view. "Very nice indeed. Not at all what I expected."

"Well, our developers kept it quiet," Lando said.

"Didn't want just anyone knowing about it. We found this underground chamber. it'd been built for s.p.a.ce knows what reason, and who knows how old it is. Back then it was full of ruined machines, and old junk, and a whole herd of mutant hive rats and practically everything else you'd ever want to find. We got it cleaned up, refurbed the air and water and security system, and built some decent housing.

It's not exactly in the poshest neighborhood, but who cares?

You can rent a nice big place here for a tenth what it would cost to get a high-status broom closet on the surface."

"I supposed you were one of the investors in this little project?"

Luke said.

Lando laughed, clapped him on the shoulder, and led him down a low, wide ramp into the dome. "Suppose away," he said. "I decided, just for once, to put my money into something small and local. Just this once, why not be one of many partners, instead of being the whole show myself?

Why not think small, and build a nice neighborhood? I've run a whole city by myself, and take it from me, this is easier."

"So you're no longer thinking about the grand-scale projects?" Luke asked.

Lando looked at him as they walked along, clearly surprised and maybe a little bit hurt. "I'll never quit doing that, Luke. If you don't think big, what's the point of thinking at all? I just got tired of having nothing at all to fall back on.

It might not be in a high-status neighborhood, but status isn't everything-and no one has to know where I live, anyway. Now I've got a little bit of income from this place, enough to live on and just a bit more, and I have a place to live that's mine, that no one can take away from me.

And it's all in the most bombproof and secure depths of the capital planet."

"A safe, secure investment," Luke said, grinning at his friend.

"I know, I know," Lando said. "Don't let it get around, or I'll ruin my reputation. Come on, my house is just up this way. Let's go in."

Five minutes later they were relaxing in the elegant, if somewhat spartan, confines of Lando's house. Luke had to admit that Lando had a point about s.p.a.ce. Only the richest of beings, or the most exalted of government officials, could have afforded anything this size anywhere near the surface.

The house was built of stone-a highly cheap and available building material when one is building underground-and the walls and floors were smooth-polished granite. It was cool and quiet, and the rooms were comfortably expansive.

Lando sat Luke down on a low, luxurious couch and brought him something cool to drink before sitting down on a matching chair next to the couch. Then Lando began to talk-and talk about everything but the matter at hand.

Most uncharacteristically, he seemed reluctant to come to the point. He fussed about, worrying that the room was too hot or too cold, that Luke was not comfortable, and that his drink needed freshening up.

At last Luke decided he was going to have to push a bit.

"Lando, you didn't bring me down here to find out how much ice I like in my drinks. Why am I here?"

"All right," Lando said. He paused for a long moment, and shifted in his seat. Even if he was coming to the point, he seemed to feel the need to do so gradually. He set down his own drink on the side table and leaned forward, an earnest expression on his face. "I told a bit of a fib back there as we were walking up this way, when I was talking about building this place," he said. "The truth is I did stop thinking big, for a little while there. I didn't even realize it at first. I got all involved in getting Dometown put together.

It was a safe, secure job, and they needed someone with my skills, and I liked the work. Heck, after putting Nkllon together, getting this place built was more like a hobby than a job-and I liked the way it was easy. I'd been shot down and kicked out and blown up and wiped out so many times I just didn't want to deal with that kind of big-time struggle anymore. So I put all my energy into getting Dometown put back together and cleaned up and families moved in.

"Nothing at all wrong with that," Luke said. "You've really accomplished something here.

"Yes, I have," Lando said, a touch of pride in his voice.

He looked around his parlor, obviously seeing beyond the walls to the town he had made. "That is to say, I did a good job here. But then, after a while, it dawned on me I was still doing the job, even though the job was done."

"I don't understand," Luke said. "How could you be doing the job if it was finished?"

Lando shook his head sadly. "That's easy, Luke. Billions of beings do it every day. They get up in the morning, push some pieces of paper around on a desk, make some com calls, decide on the blue-gray paint for the corridor over the gray blue, have a meeting, and feel like they've accomplished enough for one day. They go home, and then they come back the next day and do it all again. That might be all right for some, but not for me, and when I caught myself doing it I realized it was time to move on."

"Move on to what?"

"I don't know," Lando said, making a rather abrupt gesture of dismissal. "That's not even really that important just now. The main question is move on with what? My father used to say, 'You can't think deeper than your pockets,' and there's a lot of truth to that. I started thinking back on all my schemes that had crashed and burned one way or the other. It seemed to me that I could have stuck it out if my pockets had been deeper, if they had been filled with more credits.

"If I had the reserves, the resources, I could have ridden out the bad times and gotten Bespin or Nkllon back on a paying basis. Deep pockets give you staying power, let you hang in and lose money until you're earning it again. I realized that the question was: How to get money? Serious money. How could I get those deep pockets?"

"And now you've figured out how, and you want my help to do it"'

Luke said, more than a little amused.

"Right," Lando said. "Exactly right. I've figured out how to get deep pockets full of money, and I need your help to do it."

"Well, then," Luke said. "How do you get deep pockets?"

"Simplest thing in the universe," said Lando. "You marry them."

There was a moment of dead silence as Luke stared straight at Lando. It wasn't easy to surprise a Jedi Master, but Lando had done it. "You're getting married?" Luke asked at last. "To whom?"

Lando shrugged his shoulders and laughed. "I haven't the faintest idea," he said. "Well, that's not strictly true.

I do have a short list of candidates, but it could be anyone on the list, or maybe even someone I haven't thought of yet."

"But-but-how can you marry someone you don't know?"

"I'm not marrying a who," Lando said. 'm marrying a what. I'm marrying money. What's so strange about that?

People have done it since the beginning of time. A rich wife could do me a lot of good-and I could do her a lot of good, too. Make her richer, for one thing." Luke looked at his old friend, and asked a careful question. "Where do I come into all this?" Luke asked.

"Ah, now that's the tricky part," Lando said. "I'm not altogether unknown in the galaxy. People have heard of me.

Unfortunately sometimes they haven't liked what they've heard.

Stories get started. Some of the stories aren't even true. But they're out there just the same. That's why I want you to come with me while I'm searching for my wife-"

"What? That's the reason for the trip you want me to go on?"