“How do you know there’s been no bounty offer?” Luke asked from his seat off to the right-a seat, Leia had already noted, where he and his lightsaber would be between his friends and the room’s only door. Apparently, he didn’t feel any safer here than she did.
“Because I’d have heard about it,” Lando said, sounding a little miffed. “Just because I’m respectable doesn’t mean I’m out of touch.”
“I told you he’d have contacts,” Han said with a grimly satisfied nod. “Great. So which of these contacts do you trust, Lando?”
“Well-” Lando broke off as a beep came from his wrist. “Excuse me,” he said, sliding a compact comlink from the decorative wristband and flicking it on. “Yes?”
A voice said something, inaudible from where Leia was sitting. “What kind of transmitter?” Lando asked, frowning. The voice said something else. “All right, I’ll take care of it. Continue scanning.”
He closed down the comlink and replaced it in his wristband. “That was my communications section,” he said, looking around the room. “They’ve picked up a short-range transmitter on a very unusual frequency … which appears to be sending from this lounge.”
Beside her, Leia felt Han stiffen. “What kind of transmitter?” he demanded.
“This kind, probably,” Luke said. Standing up, he pulled a flattened cylinder from his tunic and stepped over to Lando. “I thought you might be able to identify it for me.”
Lando took the cylinder, hefted it. “Interesting,” he commented, peering closely at the alien script on its surface. “I haven’t seen one of these in years. Not this style, anyway. Where’d you get it?”
“It was buried in mud in the middle of a swamp. Artoo was able to pick it up from pretty far away, but he couldn’t tell me what it was.”
“That’s our transmitter, all right,” Lando nodded. “Amazing that it’s still running.”
“What exactly is it transmitting?” Han asked, eyeing the device as if it were a dangerous snake.
“Just a carrier signal,” Lando assured him. “And the range is small-well under a planetary radius. Nobody used it to follow Luke here, if that’s what you were wondering.”
“Do you know what it is?” Luke asked.
“Sure,” Lando said, handing it back. “It’s an old beckon call. Pre-Clone Wars vintage, from the looks of it.”
“A beckon call?” Luke frowned, cupping it in his hand. “You mean like a ship’s remote?”
“Right,” Lando nodded. “Only a lot more sophisticated. If you had a ship with a full-rig slave system you could tap in a single command on the call and the ship would come straight to you, automatically maneuvering around any obstacles along the way. Some of them would even fight their way through opposing ships, if necessary, with a reasonable degree of skill.” He shook his head in memory. “Which could be extremely useful at times.”
Han snorted under his breath. “Tell that to the Katana fleet.”
“Well, of course you have to build in some safeguards,” Lando countered. “But to simply decentralize important ship’s functions into dozens or hundreds of droids just creates its own set of problems. The limited jump-slave circuits we use here between transports and shieldships are certainly safe enough.”
“Did you use jump-slave circuits on Cloud City, too?” Luke asked. “Artoo said he saw you with one of these right after we got out of there.”
“My personal ship was full-rigged,” Lando said. “I wanted something I could get at a moment’s warning, just in case.” His lip twitched. “Vader’s people must have found it and shut it down while they were waiting for you, because it sure didn’t come when I called it. You say you found it in a swamp?”
“Yes.” Luke looked at Leia. “On Dagobah.”
Leia stared at him. “Dagobah?” she asked. “As in the planet that Dark Jedi from Bpfassh fled to?”
Luke nodded. “That’s the place.” He fingered the beckon call, an odd expression on his face. “This must have been his.”
“It could just as easily have been lost some other time by someone else,” Lando pointed out. “Pre-Clone Wars calls could run for a century or more on standby.”
“No,” Luke said, shaking his head slowly. “It was his, all right. The cave where I found it absolutely tingles with the dark side. I think it must have been the place where he died.”
For a long moment they all sat in silence. Leia studied her brother closely, sensing the new tension lying just beneath the surface of his thoughts. Something else, besides the beckon call, must have happened to him on Dagobah. Something that tied in with the new sense of urgency she’d felt on the way in toward Nkllon …