Star Wars_ Planet of Twilight - Barbara Hambly [84]
“Good gracious!” exclaimed the protocol droid. “Artoo, that’s Captain Solo!”
Heavily armed and aided by strategic betrayals of the outlying guard stations, the Gopso’o clansmen poured into the town. In the enclaves within Bagsho itself where the Gopso’o lived in low-paid, ill-educated obscurity, they emerged from their foul-water tenements with new weapons in their hands, shouting the names of their murdered ancestors and of the Twenty-Five Personifications of Virtue and firing on their oppressors and anyone they associated with their oppressors.
“Stinkin’ scumtoes,” growled Sergeant Hral Piksoar, voice nasal and bubbly around the zwil plug because its pincers were fully occupied with the ion cannon it was trying to site. “Well, you better be proud of your handiwork, Solo …”
“Me proud?” yelped Solo, and flattened behind the corner of an alley wall to return fire. “I never even heard of Nim Drovis until last week!” Down in this district the canals hadn’t been disinfected for weeks. At the sound of voices and the trample of feet, the scummy, rain-pocked waters bulged and surged, and Han could see the molds beginning to emerge, glistening vilely in the dim reflection of streetlamps blocks away.
“Republic’ll send us troops, they said. No need to have big standing armies. The festerin’ Republic will help out if there’s need. Well, we sent for troops, pal …”
“Captain Solo had nothing to do with the dispatch of emergency forces,” put in Dr. Oolos severely. He leaned a long viridian arm around the corner and popped off four or five shots at almost complete random—Han guessed the physician had never had a weapon in his hands in his life—and ducked back under a storm of return fire. “There is a plague in the military bases of this sector …”
“All I know is your festerin’ Republic said they’d be here, and they festerin’ ain’t.” Hral Piksoar cursed as laser fire clipped the back of its rearmost tentacle. “And where have your patrols been that that kind of armament’s gettin’ through, hunh? Those maggot suckers got canister guns, fer the love a’ Truth and Beauty!” It spit a yellowish stream of zwil.
“Lando!” Han thumbed the toggle on the comlink, keeping a worried eye on the molds creeping toward them in a slobbering orange line. “We’re on our way back. The Gopso’o are overrunning this whole sector. Alert the port guards if they don’t know already and tell ’em we’re coming through. Have the Falcon ready for liftoff the minute we’re on board.”
“What the blue blazes is goin’ on?” yelled Lando’s distracted voice back. “We already know about the Gopso’o, old buddy, we just got done drivin’ ’em off the docking pads. You better get here in the next ten minutes or there ain’t gonna be liftoff.”
Solo cursed, and fired a blast of hot plasma at the oncoming molds, which melted in an unbelievably foul-smelling sizzle under the blast itself and kept right on coming. At the head of the alley, Hral Piksoar and its fellow troopers were holding their own, though two were down, Dr. Oolos plastering in synthflesh and cauterizing arteries with grim speed. It would be fairly simple, thought Han, for himself or the long-legged Ho’Din to dash, jump, and spring through the mottled field of advancing molds—they moved in clumps, and an agile human could get through between them if he or she kept moving—leaving the bottom-heavy Drovians behind. By the same token, once they were through the molds and across the canal—there was a ramshackle plank bridge about