Star Wars_ The Han Solo Adventures - Brian Daley [45]
But rounding a turn in the last stretch approaching the spaceport, Han discovered that somebody somewhere in the bureaucracy had actually done a bit of thinking. The skimmer nearly crashed head-on into a roadblock, an Espo troop-hovervan parked across the roadway, its twin-mounted guns nosing for a target.
Han jerked the controls hard, kicking the foot auxiliaries, and sent his small vehicle sailing off the road’s surface. The engine sang with effort; the low-built skimmer slammed down among the rippling grain and raced off through it erratically. The tall grain, an Arcon Multinode hybrid, was so high that it instantly swallowed them up, hiding them from the startled Espos. But Han zigzagged anyway, for luck, and sure enough, the Espos fired even though they had no clear target, most probably from sheer frustration. The troop-hovervan was a ground-effect vehicle, unable to climb above the field, Han knew. That meant that if his pursuers wanted to give chase, they’d have to eat a little cereal themselves.
He had to stand up, poking his head above the windscreen as he drove, in a mostly unsuccessful attempt to see where he was going. The skimmer sliced through thick rows of hybrid grain, sending a spray of mangled plants and chaff back over and around it. Han slitted his eyes and tried to peer through the hurricane of vegetable matter as best he could, which wasn’t very well. In moments, all of the skimmer’s grillework and trim was decked with stalks of grain that had gotten lodged there, and the craft looked like a strange agricultural float.
Chewbacca, standing and exhorting, reached forward over his partner’s shoulder and pointed. Han, asking no questions, changed course. He had to steer hard to slide past the hazard, a mountain of yellow metal, one of the enormous automated farm machines slowly and patently working this part of Orron Ill’s limitless fields.
Han broke out onto bare ground, reaped clean by the harvester. He conned the skimmer around in a wide arc, got his bearings on the spaceport and the ranked colossi of the berthed barges, and hotted off that way.
At that moment the Espo hovervan broke through, too, but farther down the field, away from the spaceport. Han couldn’t take time to watch it; instead he tried to throw enough twists and dodges into his course to keep them out of the Espo gunner’s sights. Heavy blaster salvos scored around the skimmer, starting small fires smoldering among the stubble of shorn stalks.
Han took the skimmer through a hairpin turn, trying to jump out of the line of fire, but the hovervan’s twin-mounted guns scored closer and closer to starboard, making the shaven field erupt. He jammed the control stem back to port. But the Espo gunner, trying for a bracketing salvo, had outguessed him. The ground blew apart just beyond the skimmer’s undercarriage.
The skimmer jarred violently, its nose plowing at the rich soil, crumpling, as the engine cowling was smashed and compressed. Smoke rolled from its engine compartment, and the little craft grounded, carving long scars in the crop-stubble.
Han, fighting to keep control, lost his grip on the control stem at the last moment, clipped his head on the windscreen, and was flung clear of the cab as it stopped short, ending up on his back. He watched the sky of Orron III, which appeared to be spinning, and wondered if his entire skeleton had actually been turned into confetti. That was just how he felt.
“Everybody off,” he announced woozily; “baggage claim to your left.”
The others tumbled off the wrecked skimmer. Han found himself being lifted as easily as a child; Rekkon’s