Star Wars_ The Han Solo Adventures - Brian Daley [158]
But right now Han didn’t care if he ended up owing the Wookiee his shirt. Chewbacca brought his weapon around and just barely failed to get a bead on the pinnace out in the Money Lane, chopping the air behind it with crimson cannonfire.
“Spray, keep your eye on the long-range sensors,” Han called into his mike. “If their parent ship sneaks up on us, Interstellar Collections will have nothing to auction off but a gas cloud!”
The ship missed by Chewbacca came up into Han’s field of fire. He led it, reaching out for it with red cannon blasts, but the pinnace’s pilot was quick and threw his ship out of the line of fire before his shields gave. The enemy scored on the Millennium Falcon’s upper hull, and the freighter bucked. Han caught the smell of smouldering circuitry.
“Captain Solo, there’s a large vessel moving up rapidly from magnetic southwest. At current courses it’ll close with us in another ninety seconds!”
Han was too busy to answer the skip-tracer. Hearing his first mate’s frustrated growl at a near miss, reverberating in the ladderwell, he saw the ship the Wookiee had just lost. It arced out beyond the bow mandibles, its pilot going into a fast bank as he realized he’d flown into another line of fire.
Han didn’t bother with the targeting computer but tracked by eye, catching the pinnace at the slow point in its turn with a sustained burst. A moment later the pinnace disappeared in a fireball, shreds of it hurled outward.
The third pinnace, coming about for another run, swerved to avoid the explosion of its companion, rolled, and was again in the Money Lane. Han’s and Chewbacca’s fire probed at it simultaneously. It, too, became an eruption of enormous violence.
Han was instantly at the ladderwell, not bothering to climb down but sliding with toes clamped to its side-pieces, braking himself with his hands, worrying about the oncoming mother ship.
As he reached main deck level, he found Chewbacca swarming up the rungs beneath him. The Wookiee crowed happily and Han found time to sneer “What d’you mean, pay up? I made the kill in the Money Lane; you never even touched him!”
Chewbacca snarled as they dashed together toward the cockpit, but the issue of who owed whom had to be dropped. Once Chewbacca was in place, Spray squirmed out of the pilot’s seat, breathing with relief as Han dropped into it.
“That ship’s coming at vector one-two-five-slash-one-six-zero,” Spray said, but Han had already read that information off the console. Bringing the starship’s helm over and accelerating, he angled all deflectors aft with one hand, belting himself in with the other.
Spray had taken on more altitude than Han would have liked. With the hyperdrive still inoperable, things boiled down to a simple race. His best chance to deny the enemy a clear shot at him was to put the planet between them.
He was still increasing speed, the engines’ rumble growing louder and louder, when the Falcon was jolted by a teeth-rattling explosion. Checking combat information feeds, Han found that the approaching mother ship was firing from extreme range even though its shots had little chance of penetrating the freighter’s shields at this distance.
Their pursuer was indeed the slaver, the would-be “pirate” that had stopped and grappled the Lady of Mindor. That left him nonplused about Fiolla’s part in matters and why the lifeboat transceiver had been left keyed open. Surely the slavers were out to get Fiolla, too?
Then he had no more time for imponderables; the slaver ship was closing the gap between them and nothing he did seemed to make any difference. She was an extremely well-armed vessel, easily three times the Millennium Falcon’s size, and fast in the bargain.