• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

His eyes went immediately to the high walls that hemmed them in.

Since from time immemorial there had never been a day on Nim Drovis without torrential rain, the architecture of Bagsho was of a solid order, heavy stone walls broken by lines of the thick timbers that supported additional floors. Even in these shoddy tenement districts by the Thousand Stinking Ditches, this type of building prevailed, the residents using the round, projecting ends of the floor timbers as fastening points for balconies, plank gardens, and bird traps. Han tore the length of emergency cable from his belt, primed the stubby firing tube, and shot the cable hook upward, to lodge in a timber some five meters down the alley and nearly that distance above the mold-crawling pavement.

“Can you swing?” he yelled to Hral Piksoar, pointing to the low balcony above the canal bank beyond the advancing molds and close to the plank bridge.

The sergeant regarded the thin cable with extreme doubt—Drovians averaged twice the weight of moderately sized adult humans—but Han said, “It’s tested at a thousand.”

“What about my pals?” Hral Piksoar nodded back to the two downed troopers.

“Are you kidding, Sarge?” said the larger of the two, struggling to sit up. “Between the slime-festering Gopso’o and them molds, believe me, I’ll try it. I got one good tentacle still.”

At their weight, Drovians are not good acrobats, but by scrambling up a makeshift heap of boards, broken doors, and furniture looted from the ground floor of one of the buildings opening into the alleyway, they could get enough height to make the swing to a low balcony, and thence clamber down and across the plank bridge. There was no problem of them throwing back the weighted end of the cable to the next swinger—Drovian tentacles are like mechanical pistons and with that many different sensory devices on their bodies, their aim is exceptional. Han and Dr. Oolos went last, maintaining cover fire against the Gopso’o who maneuvered, crouching, everywhere on the street outside and on the balconies of the various tenements above street level. It would only be a matter of time, Han knew, before they made their way through the mazes of alleys and tenements to surround the retreating party; only a matter of time, he reflected dourly, before the masses of advancing molds grew too thick and too insistent to be driven back. Since their first run-in with the Gopso’o, every summons Hral Piksoar had sent out for reinforcements had been met with, “We’ll be there when we can.” A polite euphemism, Han knew, for “You’re on your own, pal.”

Laser fire skinned the wall above him, tearing his face with burning chips of rock. He aimed for the muzzle flash but didn’t know whether he scored. No body fell from the balcony where it had originated, but no return fire came, either. Behind him, Dr. Oolos yelled, “Solo!”

The last Drovian had swung to safety. The molds were thick over the street now, churning sluggishly, the whole enclosed seam of the alley rank with oozing digestive acids and with the smoke of charring where the Drovians were forcing them to keep their distance. “Can you make it?” yelled Solo. After the physician had volunteered to escort him back to the docking bay—Solo suspected out of a very real fear that the Drovian troops would abandon him in the event of an attack—he’d hate to see the Ho’Din miss his grip and have the flesh burned off his bones by carnivorous fungi.

Dr. Oolos fired off a last shot at the molds that were now only fractions of a meter from his and Solo’s boots. He caught the end of the cable the waiting Drovians had flung to him, clambered up the pile of broken furnishings. “I can but try.”

“This way!” insisted Threepio, pausing in the mouth of one of the warren of noisome, unpaved alleyways between the end of the bridge where they had parted from Yarbolk, and the spot where they had last seen Solo and his party duck around a corner. “I can hear the shooting!”

Artoo made no reply.