Star Wars_ The Han Solo Adventures - Brian Daley [137]
Han led Fiolla to an inboard passageway and struck out aft again, still reading frame markings, until they came to a utility locker. Inside the locker was a hatch giving access to a service core that ran the length of the ship. Normally the hatch would have been secured shut, but it could, for safety’s sake, be opened manually when the ship was on emergency status. Han undogged it and entered the service core, squatting among power conduits and thick cables. Ventilation was never good in these cores, and layers of dust had settled everywhere, deposited by the liner’s wheezy circulators.
Fiolla made a face. “What good’s hiding? We’re liable to wind up adrift in a derelict, Solo.”
“We’ve got a reservation for two on the next boat out of here. Now get in; you’re letting in a draft.”
She entered awkwardly, trailing skirt gathered in one hand, and climbed under him so that he could dog the hatch, then clumsily shifted position to let him lead the way. He noticed, in the process, that Fiolla had two very nice legs.
The trip soon had both of them dirty, hot, and irritable as they hauled themselves over, under, and between obstacles. “Why is life so complicated around you?” she panted. “The pirates would take my money and leave me in peace, but not Han Solo, oh no!”
He sniggered nastily as he loosened the clips on a grating and wrenched it out of his way. “Has it occurred to you yet that this isn’t a pirate attack?”
“I wouldn’t know; I get invited to so few of them.”
“Trust me; it’s not. And they sure could’ve found fatter, safer targets out in the fringe areas. They’re taking an awful risk hitting this close to Espo patrols. And then there’s all this nonsense about not launching the boats. They’re after someone in particular, and I think it’s us.”
He was leading her in a strained, squatting progress over ducts and power routing, bumping heads on the occasional low-hanging conduit. There were only intermittent emergency lights, nodes that only slightly relieved the darkness. After what seemed like an eternity he found the hatch he had been searching for, just aft of a major reinforced frame.
“Where are we?” Fiolla asked.
“Just under and aft of the portside airlock,” he said, jerking his thumb toward the deck overhead. “The Lady’s probably swarming with boarders by now.”
“Then what’re we doing here? Has anyone ever criticized your leadership, Solo?”
“Never ever.” He ascended a short ladder and she followed dubiously. But when he tried the hatch at the top he found its valve frozen in place. Setting his shoulder to its wheel and nearly losing his footing did no more good.
“Here,” Fiolla said, handing up a short length of metal. He saw that she had pulled loose one of the ladder rungs from beneath her.
“You’re wasting your time doing honest work,” he told her frankly, and set the rung through the wheel’s spokes. The second try elicited a creaking of metal and the wheel turned, then spun. He cracked the hatch a fraction to have a look around and saw, as he’d hoped he would, the interior of the utility locker just off the airlock’s inner hatch. In it hung the maintenance ready-crew’s spacesuits and tool harnesses, waiting to be donned on a moment’s notice.
Drawing Fiolla up after him, he swung the core hatch shut as silently as he could. “There shouldn’t be more than a guard or two out there at the airlock,” he explained. “I doubt that they’re worried about counterattack very much; there won’t be more than two or three firearms onboard the Lady all told.”
“Then what’re we doing here?” She imitated his unconscious whisper.
“We can’t hide for very long. If they have to, they’ll sweep the whole ship with sensors, and I doubt