Star Wars_ Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor - Matthew Woodring Stover [94]
And the ship just stayed there. It didn’t fall over. It didn’t blow up. It didn’t do anything that any reasonable person would expect a ship to do after a full-on crash.
Nick stared at it with his mouth open. Some few seconds later, he realized he hadn’t been breathing. “Did you … I mean, did I just see …?” he gasped. “Did you just now catch that ship?”
Luke opened his eyes. “Not exactly.”
“And that’s not your best trick?” Nick shook his head, blinking. “What is your best trick?”
“I hope you never find out,” Luke said. “Come on.”
LEIA HAD KNOWN THEY WERE IN DESPERATE DANGER even before the floor had melted away beneath her feet. Chewbacca’s sudden reappearance in the cavern they’d fallen into had given her an instant’s hope—but only an instant’s, as the Wookiee was almost immediately felled by these rock creatures and now lay twitching on the ground, smoke curling from his singed fur. Then one of them had flowed around Han’s ankle and shocked him with some kind of energy discharge that had made all his hair stand on end, spitting sparks and smoke, before he collapsed in turn. Another woman might have lost heart then; or when all the rock creatures seemed to turn and converge on her together; or when, just as she was leaping for Han, one of the rock creatures flowed over the glow rod and the cavern plunged into impenetrable darkness … but Leia wasn’t the type to lose heart. Something about being in trouble this deep made her calm and focused. And determined.
Even in the darkness she seemed to somehow just know where Han was—and where the rock creatures weren’t. Her hand found the top of Han’s boot, and she latched on to drag him back—and her efforts were rewarded with an ear-shattering electronically fierce Thooperoo HEEE! as R2 launched himself through the air, so haloed in sparks from his overdriven antitamper field that he lit up the cavern like flares of summer lightning.
Seeing the rock creatures melt to slag at his touch gave her an inspiration. “Artoo! The hold-out!”
The astromech’s dome spun and a concealed hatch popped open, releasing a spring-loaded ejector that had been, less than a year before, engineered to deliver a lightsaber to Luke Skywalker’s hand. What shot forth from it now was no lightsaber, though, but instead a SoroSuub ELG-5C hold-out blaster.
The compact pistol flipped through the air, and Leia lost sight of it in the uncertain light—but she put out her hand anyway, and somehow wasn’t even surprised when the blaster smacked neatly into her palm. She swung the hold-out through a quick arc, firing as fast as she could squeeze the trigger. The stun blasts triggered more discharges from the rock creatures as they sagged and liquefied; the walls around her crawled and crackled with blue fire.
“Artoo! Grab Chewie and get behind me!”
The droid chirped an affirmative and shut down his antitamper field before he extended a pair of manipulators to grip the unconscious Wookiee by the bandolier. Leia covered them, driving back the rock creatures with a barrage of stun blasts. The servos in R2’s locomotors whined in protest as he dragged Chewbacca past Leia. “And see if you can wake him up!”
Keeping up the fire with one hand, she used the other to shake Han. When that didn’t work, she gave him a couple of sharp smacks across his face, which elicited only a thin groan. Finally she grabbed one of his earlobes and pinched it as hard as she could, digging her thumbnail in deep enough to sit him bolt upright with a wide-eyed howl of protest.
“Ow-wow-ow-okay-I’m-awake-lay-off-the-EAR, huh?” Han scrambled to his feet, then half sagged again, dizzily clutching his head. “Woo. What hit me?”
Leia was still firing as she backed up. “What do you think? What am I shooting at?”
“Good question.” Han blinked, trying make his eyes focus through the flashes and flickers of stun blasts and energy crackles. “What are those things?”
“Unfriendly,” Leia