Star Wars_ Planet of Twilight - Barbara Hambly [68]
“Looks like a heat reading on the fifth planet of that system there. Damonite Yors B—nothing there, never has been. The graph’s cooling fast …” He tapped the black bands in the colored spectrum, “… but those are reactor fuel lines.”
Han reached past his shoulder to punch through a more accurate readout and swore.
“Good thing I brought my mittens.” Lando reached to adjust another screen. “That’s sure big enough for the Adamantine. By the heat streak in the atmosphere they’ve been down there for about ten hours.”
Han was already at the main console, keying the course. “Hang on, Leia,” he whispered. “Don’t check out on me now.”
Planetfall was a nightmare. The whole atmosphere a whirling wrack of storms, the Falcon was buffeted and thrown like a plastene plate in a riptide. Han and Chewbacca worked side by side over the console, fighting ion storms that struck them in sheets and fritzed out the sensors that were their only guide to the terrain below. Han allowed himself to think of nothing, to be aware of nothing except the elusive spot of heat on the readout—the spot that slowly dimmed from orange to brown in the hours it took them to struggle down through titanic gales.
She couldn’t die, he thought. He had literally no idea—none—of what he would do, what would become of him, if she should die.
He couldn’t imagine life without her.
Through a millrace of flying atmospheric garbage, the sensors began to pick out the debris track on the ice below. Most of it was imbedded meters deep already in the long, hard melt slick where the primordial planetary ice had been liquified by the passage of the crashing ship, to refreeze within minutes; a rummage of hull fragments, broken-off stabilizers, deformed nodules unrecognizable already from atmospheric friction. The slick ran at a steeply acute angle toward a chasm in the ice, kilometers deep and nearly half a kilometer across. Han brought the Falcon in low over it, holding his breath as he followed the trail—It didn’t go over. Tell me it didn’t go over.
The ice slick ended in a shallow vee at the chasm’s edge.
“There she is,” said Lando.
For a minute Han thought his friend was speaking of Leia herself, rather than the wreckage of the ship.
There was a ledge that you could have put a small manufacturing plant on, forty or fifty meters below the edge of the chasm—the drop was unguessably deep beyond that, and the visibility appalling. The crashing ship’s hull had ruptured when it had gone over the edge of the glacier plain above, and the whole business balanced near the dropoff to the deeper chasm like a billion-credit house with a seaside view. A dull rubicund glow showed where the dying engines lay, through the buckled panels and flying ice.
The serial numbers were visible.
“What ship is that?”
Chewie was already punching them in. The Corbantis, out of Durren orbital. Reported missing barely two hours before the Falcon had lifted out of Hesperidium.
Not the Adamantine. Not the Borealis. Han didn’t know whether to feel relief or despair.
It was a fight to bring the Millennium Falcon around for another pass, to put her down on the lip of the first drop, a dozen meters from the V-shaped notch where the Corbantis had gone over. They dropped a towline first, using the notch as a site, so that the weighted end of sixty-five meters of megafilament cable hung down the face of that first cliff only a short distance from the wreck. Leaving Lando at the Falcon’s controls, Han and Chewie suited up and went out, following the line across the waste, hanging on for dear life against the butcher winds that obscured the face plates of their e-suits with flying ice, and let themselves down the ragged black mess of frozen cliff toward the dying glow of the wreck.
Even the powerful sodium glare of