Enemy Lines II_ Rebel Stand - Aaron Allston [66]
Leia raced to join him and plunged her lightsaber into the floor there, dragging it around in a crude circle. Han waited until he saw the first set of feet appear at the bottom of the ramp, then began firing on the pursuers. “How’s it coming?”
“Slow. I forgot at first to angle the cut outward instead of inward.”
“What difference—never mind.” Cutting through the duracrete with the edges angled inward as they descended created a plug that would have to be hauled up; cutting it the other way would yield a plug that should just fall away.
Except that it didn’t. Leia finished her cut and stepped back, panting, and the plug remained stubbornly in place.
Han continued firing. “Artoo!” he shouted. “How thick is the duracrete here, anyway?” He stole a glance at the datapad screen.
LESS THAN A METER.
“Then why doesn’t it fall?”
Aggravated, Leia stamped on the plug. It remained obstinantly in place. “Check the map again,” she said. “Maybe we’ll have to cut through somewhere else.”
“You check it!” Han tossed her the datapad and fired three times in quick succession. Return fire bounced off the duracrete around them. “I’m obviously not fit to read a map.”
“No, you’ve got it right.”
“Fall, blast it! Fall!” Han stomped on the plug. It didn’t vibrate. He leapt clean upon it.
It fell.
R2-D2 sent the command through the cable that snaked out through the false escape pod to the landing bay door computer datajack. Immediately, his audio sensors picked up the grinding noise of the bay roof levering open.
He ejected the cable from his own datajack and watched it snake down through the hole to the bay floor below.
With a little musical squeal that betrayed his eagerness, the astromech rolled out of the escape pod and up to the Falcon’s bridge. He plugged into the dataport there and began an abbreviated, computer-speed power-up sequence. It wouldn’t take long for the spaceport authority to realize that a supposedly unoccupied bay was opening to release a supposedly impounded transport, and he wanted to be out of here by then.
It wasn’t every day R2-D2 got to fly the Millennium Falcon, after all.
Captain Mudlath was in his office, calculating just what he could purchase with the Solo reward, when his comlink buzzed into life. “Captain,” his administrative aide told him, “the Solos have escaped.”
Mudlath actually felt himself grow dizzy for a moment as adrenaline jolted through him. “This had better be a joke,” he said. “And a funny enough joke that I laugh until I forget about killing you.”
“They’re not out of the prison,” his aide said. “They won’t get out. But they’re out of their cell.”
Mudlath lowered his voice to a near-whisper. “I suggest you put them back in their cell.” Not waiting for a reply, he switched the comlink off, then sat back to try to persuade his stomach muscles to unclench.
If he didn’t get them back … well, his Peace Brigade superiors would not only decline to reward him for the capture of the Solos, but they might choose to take the news badly. And if things continued as they were, and the Peace Brigade became the legitimate government of this backwater planet, he might have to leave. Quickly. Surreptitiously.
Jarred back into activity, he reached into a desk drawer and pulled out a handful of identichips taken from prisoners. Perhaps, with a little modification, one of them would serve to get him off-world.
The duracrete under Han’s feet fell into darkness, but only about three meters, a deep enough drop for him to begin to worry that he was dropping into a mine shaft, a short enough drop that, with his experience, he was able to absorb most of the shock of impact with bent knees, to roll forward off the plug and across another hard floor to come up on his feet with a minimum of bruises.
A minimum. Not none. His middle-aged back would feel that one in the morning. Amazingly, he still had his blaster pistol in hand.
He was in another duracrete tunnel,