Star Wars_ The Han Solo Adventures - Brian Daley [216]
He tried to concentrate, either to find a way out of his predicament or to experience his last moments fully, but instead kept drifting into passivity.
His first indication that the paralysis was wearing off was when he was unceremoniously dumped onto a cold stone floor; he didn’t quite let out a yelp but came close. He hurt where he had hit: his shoulder, back, and rump.
He heard someone—Badure, he thought—groan. Han tried to sit up. A bad mistake; a flare ignited in his forehead. He lay back down, knowing now what had elicited Badure’s groan. He clasped his forehead, a major victory of movement, and ran his tongue over his teeth, checking to see if fungus were really growing there.
Suddenly an enormous shaggy face was hovering over him. Chewbacca hauled him up by great fistsful of his flight jacket and sat him up against a large stone. Han’s faltering hand went automatically to his holster and found it vacant. That frightened him, but galvanized him as well.
He clamped both hands to his head, whispering so that it wouldn’t come apart. “Best time to escape’s the soonest,” he told his first mate. “Kick the door over and let’s leg it.”
His friend urrffed with a disgusted gesture to the door. Han made a major effort and looked up, setting off little shooting stars on the periphery of his vision.
The door was barely discernible, an oblong of stone fitted into the wall so tightly that barely a hairline crack showed. There was a glow-rod on either side of it, but the rest of the room was unlit. Han frisked himself—no tools, no weapons, not even a toothpick.
Badure and Hasti had been dumped together. Skynx was still rolled in a tight ball, but of Bollux there was no sign. The Wookiee plucked Han to his feet, and the pilot moved to one of the glow-rods and pulled it from its socket. The filament retained enough power to run independently for some time. Han moved farther into the chamber, waving the light as he explored; his partner trailed behind, huge fists ready.
“Check the size of this place!” Han found the breath to whisper. The Wookiee grunted. The stone ceiling arced away into the gloom beyond the light. Han came upon row after long row of low stone monoliths, about the height of his sternum, twice as wide as they were high. He couldn’t see an end to them.
A voice behind them made both partners jump. “Where are we?” It was Hasti, who had just recovered enough to rise and follow. “And what are those things? Shelves? Work tables?”
“Runways?” Han added, wincing at the throbbing in his head. “Paperweights? Who knows? Let’s look the rest of this granite gymnasium over.” At least, he thought, moving about would help counteract the paralysis. Best to let the others rest for now.
But a search of the gargantuan room, which was about the size and shape of a medium spacecraft hangar, yielded no other doors, no other features at all, simply a vast space filled with the stone slabs.
“The whole mountain’s probably hollow,” Han conjectured, keeping his voice low. “But I don’t see how those hopping half-wits we saw could’ve done it.” They started back toward the door.
Chewbacca uttered a low sound.
Han translated. “He’s saying how dry it is in here. You’d expect it to be damp, from condensation if nothing else.” Their footsteps clacked and echoed.
By that time Badure was sitting up and Skynx had uncurled. Interrupting one another with several simultaneous conversations and frequent crossovers, they established the bare facts of what had happened.
“What will they do with us?” Skynx asked, not concealing his trembling.
“Who knows?” Han responded. “But they took Bollux and Max. I hope those two lads don’t end up as drill bits and belt buckles.” He regretted now his own and Chewbacca’s abuse of the aircraft mockups on the landing field, and wondered if this was the standard treatment of vandals, recalling the Swimmer