Star Wars_ Planet of Twilight - Barbara Hambly [69]
Chewbacca’s growl rumbled in Han’s earpiece. The Wookiee pilot knew more about out-of-the-way smuggler bases in this part of the galaxy than the average miser knew about the contents of his or her creditbox, and Han believed him when he said there was no place in forty parsecs where a planet-hopper fleet could have put in.
Great, Han thought. So there’s a Destroyer—or a fleet of Destroyers—roving around out here someplace. Just what I needed to make my day complete.
The crew they found in the outer holds were dead. Under the white mounds of frost and ice it was difficult to tell, but Han thought these were men and women who’d died during the initial battle. In addition to the ruptured coolant lines and dangling wires indicative of major systems blowouts, the holes in the outer hull through which Han and the Wookiee climbed were too huge for the emergency sealant systems to cope with. The blast doors had shut at once, to save the atmosphere in the rest of the ship, and Chewbacca had to cut out the switch boxes to manually let himself and Han through.
Beyond, the bodies were simply white with frost. They glittered softly in the dark, hundreds of them, oriented along the corridors like iron filings in a magnetic field, crawling inward to the warmer heart of the ship as the cold seeped through the breached insulation and killed them as they crawled.
They lay facedown. Han was glad of it. He’d seen men and women who had died of cold, and mostly their faces were peaceful. Still, picking his way among the corpses like some clumsy intruder in his green plast e-suit, he would just as soon not see their faces.
Farther in, a few panels still glowed with power, candle-dim spots of amber or red. Radiation warning lights were on all over the ship, and a garbled female voice from the tannoy repeated over and over, with the pleasant persistence of a droid, that radiation levels were critically high, and all crewmembers were advised to implement antiradiation procedure D-4 in mitigation. After seven or eight times through the announcement Han wanted to find that droid and hammer it into tiny fragments, but it went on as a demented background to the escalating hell of the search as long as he and Chewie remained on the dying ship.
There was enough heat now to make their suits smoke—the gauges on his wrist showed Han that they were just a touch below the freezing point of alcohol—and the dead were not so thick on the floors. Into his helmet mike he said, “They’re in the reactors.”
Chewie nodded. Night caught on the snows of Hoth, Han had slit open the body of his dead tauntaun so that its lingering warmth might keep his friend Luke from dying of cold and shock. What remained of the Corbantis crew, by the same expedient, had made their way inward, to crouch by the fading heat of the reactors in a last despairing bid to outlast the cold until rescue could arrive. This was where Han and Chewie found them, radiation burned as if they’d been rolled in a supernova, seventeen of them still alive among twisted heaps of the dead. Two more died during the agonizing process of loading them onto antigrav tables from sick bay and struggling out across the windswept waste and up the cliffside to the Falcon with them: One by one, fifteen exhausting journeys that left Han and Chewbacca numb with fatigue as they rigged salvaged life-support equipment in holds originally stocked with the smuggled glitterstim and rock ivory that had been Han’s stock-in-trade