Star Wars_ Planet of Twilight - Barbara Hambly [80]
Maybe he was learning something from Leia, he thought, willing the flush of anger from his face.
“What’s the story?” he asked softly, as the treelike physician ducked through into the next hold. “You tell me there’s forty guys down with the plague on the base here; we get attacked by something I’ve never seen anywhere out there—a partisan revolt on Durren—somebody sure shot down these poor bastards …”
“Galactic Med Central is trying to contain the plague,” said Dr. Oolos worriedly. “Trying hard.” His head tendrils flexed uneasily, a hundred shades of crimson and scarlet ribbed and straked with violet; his dark eyes were filled with concern. “They bring them to us dying of no perceptible ailment—no virus, no bacteria, no poison, no allergy. Bacta-tank therapy only seems to accelerate the progress of the slow bleeding away of life.”
He shook his head, and glanced across at Sergeant Hral Piksoar, who was peering paranoically around the corner and into the hall. “With Gopso’o raids on the suburbs—bombings of public buildings—they’ve seized one minor spaceport already—the atmosphere here has been terrible, unbelievable.” He touched a gas mask hanging from his belt, and followed his team back into the corridor with the last of the victims, Han striding in his wake. “Take one of these with you if you plan to leave the vessel for any reason. The Gopso’o are rumored to be using bilal and rush gas in their attacks, though we haven’t had any documented cases yet at the center.”
“Think again if you think we’re gonna leave this vessel.” Lando Calrissian stepped through the door of the bridge as they passed it, dark face taut with anger but fear in his eyes. “My advice to you, old buddy, is to seal and lift.”
“Not without finding out something about what’s out there.” Leaving Lando and Dr. Oolos in the corridor, Han ducked back onto the bridge and scooped up the five wafers onto which he’d downloaded the unfortunate Corbantis’s log. “Can you get me an unscrambler for this, Doc? I need to know what and who axed that ship and anything else they might have seen out there before it happened.”
“I’ll certainly try.” Dr. Oolos held out his hand for the wafers—Han glanced at Sergeant Hral Piksoar, coming down the corridor toward them, and simply pocketed the information himself. Through the Falcon’s open boarding ramp the sound of shots could be clearly heard, the heavy, percussive cough of ion cannons almost drowning the harsher zap of blasters.
To Lando he whispered, “Don’t take the engines all the way down and keep an eye on the lift-off window. I’ll be back in two hours.”
Lando followed them to the doorway. The med team made a little caravan across the rain-pocked permacrete of the bay, water sluicing off the mist-filled coffins of the stasis boxes. Drovian guards surrounded them, weapons at the ready, as if they expected the burned, pain-racked husks inside to leap out with guns blazing in the cause of the Gopso’o tribe. “And what if you’re not?”
Han ducked his head against the rain, which was as warm as bathwater as he stepped out into it. “If I haven’t linked with you by then,” he said, feeling for the comlink in his pocket, “take off. Tell Chewie whatever you have to, to keep him from coming to look for me.” By the sound of it the shots were closer, and a confusion of voices. The wet air was rank with smoke. “But find Leia. Whatever it costs.”
Human beings were most odd.
Given the capabilities of a high-quality protocol unit to reproduce any given language, complete with its inflections and tonalities. See-Threepio could, of course, duplicate nearly any of the thirty thousand songs popular in the Core Worlds over the past seventy-five standard years verbatim, note by note and tone for tone. It was not a function he filled particularly often, for there were automatons and semianimates with