Star Wars_ The Han Solo Adventures - Brian Daley [44]
Han broke in, “Get Max over there by the drop chutes. If he can’t get one running again, we’re still gonna be old news.” He tugged Bollux over that way.
“All the chutes cut out, right?” Blue Max piped up. “No sweat, Captain!”
“Just turn ’em on, huh?” Han pleaded, adding, “What’s a runt like you know about sweat, anyway?”
Bollux’s plastron swung wide as the ’droid approached the panel. But the adapter input was too high. So Chewbacca, who was closest, slung his bowcaster, took Max out of his emplacement, and held the computer up to the chute’s control panel. Max’s adapter extended itself and engaged the receptor. The metal tumblers twirled back, forth, back again. The panel lit up.
“It’s working!” Rekkon exulted. “Quickly, follow me, before someone notices and has the thing shut down again.” He made a hand motion to Han, so fast that no one else caught it, and the pilot knew he was to go last. Rekkon was still unsure of the loyalty of his people. He hopped into the drop chute and Atuarre followed after him. Then came Pakka, spinning, tumbling, and chasing his own tail playfully in the chute’s field. Torm leaped after, gun in hand.
They could hear the tread of cleated boots in the corridor. With Blue Max still tucked under his arm, Chewbacca jumped into the drop chute, too. Han held back long enough to fire at the blaster cannon from its unshielded side. There was a bright eruption as its power pack began to overload. Han spun and dived headlong down the shaft, as Torm had invited him to do. Behind, he heard the explosion of the portable cannon.
They plunged down, in varying postures and attitudes, strung out behind Rekkon in a ragged line. Craning their heads upward, they waited nervously for the first blaster bolt to come raving down the chute, but none did. Han decided that the Espos had been delayed by the exploding cannon. He hoped it would take them awhile to figure out that the drop chute was on, but feared that any moment would bring the stomach-wrenching fall, once the field was shut down again, that would plunge him, Chewie—all of them—to their deaths.
They descended all the way to the garage levels. Rekkon left the chute at last, beckoning them to do the same. They found themselves standing in a large parking area as alarms sounded off in the distance. “I thought there would be a flyer of some sort here,” Rekkon said sourly; “worse luck.”
“We’re not going back into that chute, and that’s that,” Han stated.
“There’s a ground skimmer. Let’s take it,” Atuarre suggested. They piled in, with Han taking the controls and Rekkon next to him. Chewbacca sat back in the cargo bed with the others, keeping his back to his partner and his eyes on the others as he fit a new magazine into his bowcaster. Before the Wookiee could take time to return Max to Bollux’s chest, Han had thrown the skimmer into motion and shot away, barely making the turn onto the up-ramp, scarcely avoiding the wall.
He kept the control stem’s steering grips pushed forward, giving the skimmer all the acceleration she could safely stand and a good deal more. The ramp went by in a wild corkscrewing of Formex, the walls whirling past the skimmer’s front cowling at hair-raising speed. Rekkon saw at once the wisdom of yielding the controls to the younger man.
Han hoped that nobody had gotten around to sealing off the computer complex yet, and they hadn’t. The security network was inundated with everything from reports of insurrection to drunk-and-disorderly calls from the executives’ club, spread across the Center and the face of Orron III. The skimmer left the garage like a missile out of a launch tube. In his haste, Han had departed through a door clearly marked ENTRANCE. A traffic-monitoring scanner dutifully logged the skimmer’s license number for a citation and mandatory court appearance.
The skimmer tore through the city, guided partly by Rekkon’s instructions and partly by Han’s instincts. Han left