Star Wars_ The Han Solo Adventures - Brian Daley [112]
That left one more problem, communicating with Chewbacca. “Bollux, I want you to leave Max here, linked to the ship’s surveillance system. If anybody else tries to tamper with the Falcon, he can do just what you did; if worse comes to worst, he can call in the Espos. Then I want you to go track down Chewie. He’ll be either making the rounds of the guild hiring halls or portmaster’s offices or waiting for me at a joint called the Landing Zone just outside the spaceport. I’ll catch up with you both there as soon as I can or, if I’m gone more than a few hours, I’ll meet you back here. Tell him everything that’s happened.”
The repulsorlift scooter was the fastest one the spaceport rental agency had, which was no particular mark of distinction. Han pushed the craft to its limits, its tiny engine sounding as if it had developed a lung condition, scanning ahead with the macrobinoculars he had brought from the ship.
He set a course to match the one Bollux had observed the woman to be taking. He had also brought a homing unit, adjusted to the setting Blue Max had resonated from hers.
The city was a dreary mosaic of factories, refineries, offices, dormitories, worker housing, warehouses, and shipping centers that stretched on and on. He moved, as was required, through the lowest levels of air traffic. Around him skimmers, gravsleds, and other scooters passed and flowed according to the directions of Traffic Control. Below, wheeled and tracked transportation and ground-effect vehicles moved along the city’s avenues and byways, and high overhead in the hazy smog cover the lanes were monopolized by long-distance mass transport craft, bulk haulers, and cargo lifters. Espo patrol ships swam among the flow at all levels like predatory fish.
Eventually he left the city behind, whereupon Traffic Control notified him that guidance and navigation of his little vehicle had been returned to him. The repulsorlift scooter was little more than a bucket-chair with attached control board, a cheap, simple, easily mastered vehicle common to any number of worlds. He’d slung the visored safety helmet given him by the rental agency from its storage clip at the board’s side; he wanted as wide a field of vision as he could get. The fact that helmets were mandatory didn’t matter much to him.
Once out of the metropolitan restrictions, Han poured on more speed than the scooter’s engine was supposed to be able to provide. Crouching behind the little windscreen, he ignored the ominous noises coming from the propulsion plant located under his seat.
Beneath him the surface of Bonadan came fully into view for the first time—it was barren, parched, eroded, and leached of its topsoil because plant life had been destroyed by large-scale mining, pollution, and uncaring management. The surface was predominantly yellow, with angry strips of rust-red in its twisted gullies and cracked hillocks. The Corporate Sector Authority cared little about the long-range effects of its activities on the worlds it ruled. When Bonadan was depleted and unlivable, the Authority would simply move its operations to the next convenient world.
The landscape gave way gradually to steeper peaks and crags. These mountains must have had little mineral wealth and no industrial value, for they were relatively intact. The single incursion made here by the grasping technology of the Authority was an automated weather-control station, a titanic cylinder set lengthwise on its giant aiming apparatus. At present it was directed seaward, no doubt to dissipate a storm center the Corporate Sector Authority found inconvenient. To hell with Bonadan’s natural weather patterns; ocean mining and