Star Wars_ Millennium Falcon - James Luceno [131]
Concern rose in Leia like a tide. She had limitless faith in Han's ability to pilot the ship to a safe landing, but conditions were rapidly deteriorating. The structure itself was trembling beneath her.
“Threepio!” When the droid turned to her, she gestured to what looked to be a safer spot at the extreme edge of the platform. “Take Amelia over there!”
The wind made off with C-3PO's response, but he obeyed, taking Allana by the hand and leading her away.
The Falcon was just five meters from touching down when the port braking jets flared out and that side of the ship crashed down onto the platform. From inside the structure came the sound of aged machinery grinding into service. Massive parts slid into place, cogs engaged, and the turbolift began to descend into the structure, taking with it the suddenly lopsided ship and everyone outside it. The Falcon's repulsorlifts were still holding the starboard side of the ship aloft, a few meters above the deck of the turbolift, when all at once the lift tipped violently to the opposite side.
Leia was sliding toward the edge when she felt someone grasp her outstretched arm. Looking up, she saw Poste, flat on his back, with one hand clasped on an illuminator and the other vised around her wrist. At the same instant Leia heard Allana scream and twisted her head around in time to see the girl and C-3PO plummet over the edge of the tipped turbolift and land in foliage that had fastened itself to the pyramid's interior walls.
“Grandma!” Allana shouted.
Giving herself over to the Force, Leia scrambled to a squatting position. Still anchored by Poste's hand, she gazed down over the edge of the deck. C-3PO, who had fallen backward into the vegetation, had managed to find handholds among the branches. By landing on top of him Allana had missed being impaled on the thorns, but her grip on him was tenuous.
Scattered illuminators shone through the foliage, but their light wasn't strong enough to penetrate the gloom beneath the turbolift. The floor could be hundreds of meters below.
“Link your arms around Threepio's neck!” Leia said. “Threepio, don't let her fall! Just hold on! I'm coming for you.”
But even as she said it she knew she couldn't reach them. Strength in the Force didn't confer superhuman abilities; those had to be earned through practice, and the distance to Allana was simply more than she could leap with any surety. She experienced the same lack of faith in herself that she had experienced at Coruscant three years back, when she had tried to hold the Falcon together during a difficult landing.
Her blood ran cold.
Had they come this far only to lose another member of their family?
* * *
Han's hands flew across the instrument console with the accuracy of a concert keyboardist. Functioning intermittently, the Falcon's front left repulsorlifts had lifted the mandible from the tilted turbolift, so that now the ship was hovering almost parallel to it. But touching down was out of the question, since the Falcon could very well slide right over the edge.
Concealed behind vegetation that had crept into the structure, banks of illuminators affixed to the interior walls had winked on, adding to the luminosity provided by the Falcon's running lights and floodlamps. Even so, Han couldn't see more than twenty meters in front of him. A moment earlier, Leia, Allana, C-3PO, and Poste had been visible off to port, but they were now out of view, and Han was worried that they had been knocked off their feet the way Jadak had. Where he had been flapping his arms like a man intent on flying, he was currently spread-eagled on the slanted deck, only his fingertips and bent toes keeping him in place.
Judging by the manner in which the lift had tipped, Han suspected that it had been designed to do so for some reason, which meant that