Star Wars_ The Han Solo Adventures - Brian Daley [43]
Han had raised the cannon’s snout to extreme elevation, and now he swept it across the railing. Heavy blaster charges flashed and crackled; parts of the railing and the balcony’s edge exploded, melted, or burst into flames. Several Espos were hit, falling to the floor below, and the rest backed hastily out of the line of fire, darting out to snap off a volley when they could, in a constant, determined exchange of shots. The firefight and its echoes, heat, and smoke enveloped the gallery.
Han kept the Espos’ heads down with long traverses of the cannon, letting go at the floor of the balcony, scoring the walls. The gallery heated up like a furnace from the energies unleashed. Red beams of annihilation bickered back and forth, and Han knew that the cannon’s shield wouldn’t hold out forever against constant fire from the riot guns and rifles.
A squad of armored figures appeared in the low corridor, the one leading directly onto the gallery. Han depressed the cannon’s mouth and filled the lower hallway with raging destruction. These Espos drew back, too, like the others, stayed just out of range to risk firing whenever they could. Atuarre, Pakka, and Torm, drawing their guns, joined Han and Chewbacca in returning fire, while Rekkon kept working at the chute.
“Rekkon, if you can’t get that drop field working, that’ll be all for us,” Han hollered over his shoulder. A Security man leaned out from the balcony above and snapped off a shot. It rebounded from the gun’s shield, but Han could tell from the residual heat the deflector let through that it was beginning to fail.
“It’s no use,” Rekkon decided as his strong, sensitive fingers probed the mechanisms. “We’ll have to find another way out.”
“This is a one-way street!” Han shouted without looking back. Chewbacca’s angry, frustrated roars sounded above the din.
“Then you dive headfirst down the shaft!” Torm bellowed back. Han’s rejoinder was lost in an electronic whooping that filled all their ears, catching at their hearts. It was a warning signal, standard throughout much of the galaxy.
“Hard radiation leak,” Rekkon shouted. “That wasn’t one of the alarms Max put in.”
Not only that, Han thought, but it had only just begun to sound, and it was sounding right in the corridors off the gallery. A hard radiation exposure would leave little chance for any of them to live; they’d be receiving lethal dosages even as they listened. Han swore at himself for ever having gotten out of a nice, cushy racket like gunrunning sideways through mountains. He scrambled up. “Get ready. We’re going to have to shoot our way through them, or else we all get signed off.”
Over the alert sirens, Atuarre shrilled, “Wait—look!”
Han’s blaster was out again, ready to target on what he presumed to be another Espo. But the figure tottering down the lower hall toward them was moving stiffly, its arms extended horizontally, holding some burden.
“Bollux!” cried Torm, and it was. The ’droid stiff-legged out into the stronger light of the gallery, holding a globular public-address speaker in either hand. Wires from them ran back to his open chest, patched in near Blue Max’s emplacement. From the speakers beat the whooping radiation alarm.
They gathered around Bollux, yelling in Standard, Wookiee, Trianii, and one of two other tongues, but nobody could hear anybody else because of the alarms. Han was getting a headache that he was willing to ignore only because he was too overjoyed at being alive.
Then the alarms stopped. Bollux carefully lowered the P.A. speakers and patiently unplugged their cables from himself while the others clamored for an explanation.
“I’m gratified that my plan worked, sirs and ma’am; but I confess it was merely an extension of Max’s false alarms,” Bollux told them. “He learned about the radiation alarms while he was in the network. Under his guidance, I vandalized these two speakers from the corridor walls