Star Wars_ Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor - Matthew Woodring Stover [69]
Chewie slowly relaxed and lowered his head, but not until Han saw the gleam of agreement in one bright blue eye.
“On the floor.” Aeona Cantor braced her other hand on her gun wrist to steady Han’s DL-44 straight at his nose. “Now.”
Han sighed. “You picked a lousy time to pirate my ship, lady.”
She shrugged at him. “Is there ever a good time?”
“What do you think you’re gonna do with it?” Han gave her a pitying look. “Where do you think you’re gonna go? Shadowspawn’s got this whole system so loaded with gravity stations that it’ll take you two days to make jump.”
“Didn’t I tell you to get on the floor?”
“Listen to me.” Han took a step toward her. “Those asteroids are about to start falling into the star. Take this ship out of atmosphere and we’ll all roast.”
“Not your problem.” She leveled the BlasTech at Han’s right eye. “Your problem is getting on the floor before I blow your brains all over Princess Kissy-Face.”
“Princess excuse me?” Leia snapped with that instantly dangerous tone Han knew so well. He put out one arm to hold her back but she ducked under it without breaking stride. “You want to put down the blaster and say that again?”
“What is it with you people?” Aeona said. “Get on the floor! Now!”
“I have a better idea.” Han hooked his thumbs behind his belt. “How about instead you give me back my blaster while my partner demonstrates what we mean by the easy way?”
Chewbacca’s demonstration was straightforward. Vast hairy hands shot out, seized the throats of the two irregulars on the deck in front of him, and knocked their heads together briskly, which made a sound very like a very large hollow tok nut landing on a very large hard rock. The two men sagged. Chewbacca didn’t. Instead he simply stood, holding his victims so that they dangled from his fists in front of him and made a pretty efficient shield.
“They’re still alive, so far. That’s what easy way translates to in Shyriiwook,” Han informed Aeona helpfully. “And before you get any ideas about trick shots, you should know he gets a little excited when people start shooting—and then people’s heads tend to pop right off their necks. Makes a heckuva mess. Now, you want to hand over my blaster, or should we start a pickup game of borgleball with your friends’ skulls?”
The blaster in her hand had never wavered. “Maybe I’ll just shoot you, instead.”
Han shrugged. “Knock yourself out.”
She yanked the trigger, and its dry click elicited from her an incomprehensible snarl that Han confidently interpreted as some sort of obscenity. He turned over his left hand to reveal the BlasTech’s power cell that he’d kept tucked in his palm. “Think I’m gonna hand over a charged weapon? To you?”
Her next comprehensible utterance was a shrill shriek of “Take them!” as she hurled Han’s blaster at his head and charged with her hands outstretched as if she wanted to rip his face off with her fingers.
Han snagged his blaster neatly out the air, thumbed open the charge compartment, and had the power cell back in place before she made three steps, though this was due less to superb reflexes on his part than to the fact that by the time Aeona had taken her second step, Leia had jumped forward and kicked the other woman’s legs out from under her, dropping her in a face-first flat-cake, then jumped on her back and pounded her head into the deck.
About this time, a preposterous number of blaster bolts began zinging through the cargo hold more or less at random, as pretty much all the irregulars with the little hold-out blasters had opened up at once, filling the air with a lethal red storm of plasma packets.
The main reason these bolts flew at random—instead of, say, detonating inside the flesh of Han, Leia, and Chewbacca—was that the Wookiee, with his customarily unsubtle approach to combat, had simply hurled both unconscious men bodily into the mass, then charged in himself right behind them, on the personal conviction, acquired over years in Han