Star Wars_ Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor - Matthew Woodring Stover [127]
Lancer and Paleo were equipped with conveyor bridges; they were also the closest to the flying volcano. Lancer, in fact, was able to match trajectories and deploy its conveyor bridge with pinpoint accuracy in less than two minutes.
At the coordinates Luke had given, Lancer discovered only a broad, flat plain of solid rock. Captain Tirossk was understandably reluctant to risk his crew by bringing his ship so close to a flying mountain in the process of shaking itself to pieces simply to deploy a conveyor bridge that nobody could possibly use. He growled over the comm, “Once I anchor the bridge and pump in atmo, what then? Will the rock just magically open up and let people out?”
And because the captain of Lancer occasionally indulged a guilty pleasure by viewing holothrillers such as Luke Skywalker and the Dragons of Tatooine, when Luke replied simply, “Yes. It will.” Tirossk discovered, against all his better instincts, that he believed it would.
Han Solo didn’t share that faith. He didn’t have any faith to spare. He hunched over the Falcon’s controls, glaring out through the cockpit’s transparisteel at the Shadow Base as it swelled entirely too slowly, his knuckles white on the yoke, his teeth clenched as though he could make the ship go faster by pure force of will. Now he twisted to look at Luke, who crouched behind Chewbacca’s seat. “What, your new Melter friends? How do you figure to pull that off when we’re a good two minutes out from you getting that hand on the rock?”
Luke said, “Artoo, I need a signal boost.”
The astromech, socketed behind Han’s seat, extended a datajack toward Luke like a trusting child offering a hand; in the same moment, the comm port on his dome slid open and his parabolic antenna popped up. Luke gripped the extended datajack, and Han watched a thatch of those glossy black crystals grow out of Luke’s hand and thread themselves into the datajack’s ports.
Han grimaced. “No offense, Luke, but that really creeps me out.”
“Imagine it from my side.”
“I’d rather not.”
Luke didn’t quite smile. “Now I need a second or two to concentrate.”
The Lancer swung into position, and its conveyor bridge extended like a tongue going for a taste of the rock. An instant after the bluish shimmer of the force tunnel flickered into existence around it, the rock dimpled and began to melt away, retreating like a time-lapse image of a glacier in high summer. Light sprang upward from the hole, which shaped itself perfectly to the force tunnel. The conveyor bridge extended farther down into the hole, all the way down to the civilians and stormtroopers and Mandalorians waiting there.
First onto the bridge came a pair of Mandalorian mercenaries. They leapt up and grabbed the moving belt, flipping their bodies expertly through the ninety-degree gravity shift; for them, the artificial gravity’s orientation made the bridge seem entirely level, the Lancer now appearing to cruise serenely alongside the volcano instead of hovering above it. They strode briskly in the opposite direction of the belt’s motion so that they could stay in place and assist others through the transition.
A dozen pairs of Mando commandos spaced themselves along the conveyor bridge, while the balance of them helped organize the civilians on the cavern floor. Solicitous stormtroopers assisted any who were too incapacitated by age, injury, or disease to make their own way. Mandos along the bridge reminded everyone to “keep walking. Do not run. If you fall and can’t get up, move to the side and someone will assist you.” In this fashion the Sorting Center began to swiftly empty, despite the pitching and jouncing of the cavern’s floor from the ongoing destruction of the Shadow Base.
None of them knew, either, that the convulsions they felt were substantially less than those experienced by other parts of the base. They also had no way to know that