Star Wars_ The Han Solo Adventures - Brian Daley [132]
He turned and brayed an interrogative at Spray, who had been around the Wookiee long enough to understand that much.
“I haven’t a clue,” the skip-tracer answered stridently. “Nothing in this slapdash ship makes any sense to me. She looks like a used loadlifter, but she’s got higher boost than an Imperial cruiser. I don’t even care to think about how jury-rigged some of those reroutings must be.”
At Chewbacca’s order Blue Max showed him, on a computer model, exactly which length of the conduit was experiencing drainage. The Wookiee marched to the tool locker, withdrew a worklight, a scanner and a huge spanner, and continued on aft with Spray and Bollux bringing up the rear.
Near the engine shielding, the Falcon’s first mate removed a wide inspection plate and wormed himself down into the crawlspace there. He had even less room than normal—a good deal of the fluidic systems had been installed here.
He barely managed to turn his wide shoulders and squeeze the scanner in by the hull. He played its invisible tracer beam over the metal, watching the monitor carefully. At last he found the spot where, on the other side of the hull, the power conduit was showing droppage. It didn’t look like any malfunction he had ever seen; there should be no reason for the conduit simply to lose power. Something must be drawing it from the conduit, but Chewbacca could think of nothing that would do so. Unless, of course, something had been added.
In a moment he was wriggling his way back out of the crawlspace like an enormous red-gold-brown larva, honking his distress. Bollux’s vocoder and Max’s vied with Spray’s high-strung squeak, demanding to know what was wrong. Sweeping them out of his way with one wide swing of his arm, Chewbacca headed for the storage compartment where his oversized spacesuit was stored.
The Wookiee detested the confinement of a suit and loathed even more the idea of clambering along the hull and undertaking delicate and dangerous work while protected from the annihilation of hyperspace only by the thin envelope of the Falcon’s drive field. But more than that he dreaded what he believed he would find on the other side of the hull.
The decision was taken out of his hands. There was a loud ploow! Out of the still-open inspection port came a burst of flame and explosive force along with gasses and vaporized liquids from the fluidic components. There followed a sustained whistle of air that let them know the vessel had been holed, confirming the Wookiee’s worst fears. During the ground-time on Bonadan, someone, most probably the enemies waiting for Han and Fiolla, had taken precautionary measures to ensure that the Millennium Falcon wouldn’t escape. They had fastened a sleeper-bomb to the starship’s hull where it would do the worst damage. It had been applied inert, unpowered, undetectable except by the most minute inspection. Once in flight it had become active, draining power from the ship’s systems to build its explosion. Then it had released in a shaped charge and blown out control systems in flight. The device was meant to produce the cleanest possible kind of murder, one that would leave no evidence, blasting the ship and all it contained into meaningless energy anomalies in hyperspace.
Chewbacca and Spray were driven back by the multicolored reek belching from the ruptured fluidics. Unprotected, they could be killed as easily by breathing those concentrated gases as by a miscalculated transition.
But Bollux could get along quite well where they couldn’t. They saw the ’droid clank through the billowing smoke, lugging a heavy extinguisher he had pulled from a wall niche. Chewbacca had occasion now to curse the same auto-firefighting gear