Star Wars_ Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor - Matthew Woodring Stover [107]
The growling became a deep, dry chuckle that he didn’t need Leia to translate.
“You think that’s funny? Turn on a light and I’ll show you something funny!”
“Han, don’t antagonize him!” Leia whispered.
“Why not? You think anything I do is gonna make this worse?”
“Yes,” she said. “I think he’s here for me. I think if you can keep your mouth shut, he might let you live.”
There came another deep, half-growled chuckle that didn’t need translating, and from off to Han’s left, a faint glow began, greenish and cold. In the featureless dark, he couldn’t tell how big it might be, or how far away, but the glow spread slowly, growing into an amorphous patch of light, and in the middle of that light there was a darkness, a shadow, in the shape of a man’s splayed hand. The glow spidered outward around the hand, sending forth filaments that themselves spread like ice crystals forming on the inside of a window, limning the silhouette of a huge, powerful man, crouching on the floor like a katarn preparing to spring. The glow came from some kind of luminescent lichen that seemed to grow outward from the man’s hand; the bigger it got, the faster it spread, until in one final rush it coated the entire floor and walls of the cavern and grew together across the ceiling.
Han’s mouth was dry as sand, and he had to cough his throat clear. “Did—did he do that?”
“I think so,” Leia whispered hoarsely.
The man stood. Han tried to swallow his mouthful of imaginary sand and adjusted his grip on his blaster. This guy was huge.
He was almost as tall as Chewbacca, and twice as broad across his bare chest and shoulders. He wore spacer’s pants, stretched drumhead tight across thighs as big around as Han’s waist. His skin was dark as timmosun, his hairless scalp shone as if it had been polished, and when he smiled, his teeth looked jagged and sharp enough to make a Barabel jealous.
The huge dark man spread his hands wide and welcoming. He wasn’t so much growling now as making a kind of whirring sound, like a cloud of flying insects.
“He says Here’s your light. What now? Will you shoot me with your empty blaster?”
Han said, “You mean this empty blaster?” and shot him.
The stun blast burst across the huge man’s chest, and he swayed but didn’t fall, so Han shot him again. And once more for good measure, because it was his last shot and he didn’t have anything better to do with it.
“Guess you never heard of the Smuggler’s Click, huh?” Han smiled at him. “Sure did sound like I was trying to fire an empty blaster, didn’t it?”
Han stopped smiling when he realized the huge man was smiling back.
The stun blasts didn’t seem to have affected him at all—though Han discovered to his astonishment that the man was standing ankle-deep in a puddle of liquefied stone.
Before Han could make sense of what he saw, the man had leapt across the floor and seized Han by the throat with one enormous hand and lifted him effortlessly into the air. Han smacked him across the face with his empty blaster hard enough to lay open one cheek to the bone, but the huge man didn’t seem to notice; he only cupped Han’s chin with his other hand and began to push his head back, and back, while pulling with the hand that wrapped Han’s neck and growling.
Cartilage crackled and something popped in his cervical vertebrae, and the only sound Han could make was a thin gargling rasp. He was starting to seriously wonder if maybe Leia’d had the right idea with her don’t antagonize him thing, until she shouted something that sounded, blurred and vague through the roaring in his ears, like Stop! If he dies so do I!, which Han thought was a pretty darn silly threat to make, since both of them dying appeared to be the point of this whole exercise—but to his foggily half-conscious astonishment, the pressure on his neck slackened and the roar in his ears faded as blood began to circulate again.
“Let him go.” Leia stood with the empty hold-out’s emitter jammed up under her