Lando shrugged. “Well, if not those two, then there are plenty of other lovely ladies here in Cloud City. And I want to check out the business opportunities here. I kind of like the place.”
Han grinned smugly at his friend. “Suit yourself. Myself, I can’t wait to get home and take my ship out for a spin.” He signaled the robobartender.
“What’s your pleasure, my friend?”
Lando rolled his eyes. “Polanis red for me, and a nice shot of poison for you.”
Han laughed.
“So … where are you going first in your new ship?” Lando asked.
“I’m gonna keep a promise I made to Chewie almost three years ago and take him to see his family on Kashyyyk,” Han said. “With the Falcon I ought to be able to slip past those Imp patrols, no sweat.”
“How long has it been since he was on Kashyyyk?”
“Almost fifty-three years,” Han said. “A lot could have happened in that time. He left a father, some cousins, and a lovely young Wookiee female behind. ‘Bout time he went home and checked up on ‘em.”
“Fifty years?” Lando shook his head. “I can’t think of any human woman that would wait fifty years for me …. ” “I know,” Han said.
“And apparently Chewie never did have an understanding with Mallatobuck. I warned him he’d better expect to find her married and a grandmother.”
Lando nodded, and, when the drinks arrived, raised his in a toast. Han lifted his glass of Alderaanian ale. “To the Millennium Falcon,” Lando said. “The fastest hunk of junk in the galaxy. You take care of her, now.”
“To the Falcon,” Han echoed. “My ship. May she fly fast and free, and outrun every Imp vessel in existence.”
Solemnly, they clinked their glasses, then together, they drank.
It was a sultry day on Nal Hutta, but, then, almost every day was sultry there. Sultry, rainy, damp and polluted … that was Nal Hutta. But the Hutts liked it that way; they loved their adopted homeworld. “Nal Hutta” meant “Glorious Jewel” in Huttese.
But one Hutt was too intent on his holo-cast unit to even notice the weather. Durga, the new leader of the Besadii clan since his parent Aruk’s untimely death six months ago, had eyes and attention only for the full-sized holo-image projected into his office.
Two months after Aruk’s death, Durga had hired a team of the best forensic examiners in the Empire to journey to Nal Hutta and conduct a rigorous autopsy on his parent’s bloated corpse. He’d had Aruk frozen, then placed in a stasis field, because Durga was convinced that his parent had not died from natural causes.
When the examiners had arrived, they’d spent several weeks taking samples of every kind of tissue to be found in the Hutt leader’s massive corpse, and running tests on them. Their early results had turned up nothing, but Durga insisted that they keep on looking—and he was the one paying, so the forensic specialists did as ordered.
Now Durga stared at the coalescing holo-image of the leader of the team of forensic specialists, Myk Bidlor. He was human, a lightskinned, slightly built male with pale hair. He wore a lab coat over his rumpled clothing.
As Bidlor saw Durga’s image forming before him, he bowed slightly to the Hutt Lord. “Your Excellency. We have received the results from the latest round of tests on the tissue samples we brought back to Coruscant … I mean, to Imperial Center.”
Durga waved a small, impatient hand at Bidlor, and addressed the man in Basic. “You are late. I was expecting your report two days ago. What have you learned?”
“I regret, Your Excellency, that the test results were somewhat delayed,” Bidlor apologized. “However, this time, unlike our other rounds of tests, we have discovered something I believe you will find very interesting.
Unexpected, and unprecedented. We had to contact specialists on Wyveral and they are currently checking to see if they can discover where it was manufactured. The morbidity factor has been difficult to test, since we have no pure quantities, but we are persisting, and when we tested the PSA count of the specimen’s—” Durga slammed his small hand down on a nearby table, sending it crashing over. “Get to the point, Bidlor! Was my parent murdered?”
The scientist drew a deep breath. “I cannot say for certain, Your Excellency. What I can tell you is that we have discovered a very rare substance concentrated in the tissues of Lord Aruk’s brain. The substance is not natural. None of my team has ever encountered it before. We are running tests even now to discover its properties.”
Durga’s birthmarked face grew even uglier as his scowl deepened. “I knew it, he said.