Star Wars_ The Han Solo Adventures - Brian Daley [5]
Then he heard a growl from above. Stepping forward, Han looked up and saw Chewbacca standing out on one of the ship’s bow mandibles, covering the newcomers with his bowcaster. Han gave a signal. His hairy first mate put up the bowcaster and headed back inboard.
“Time’s wasting,” Han told the creature. It moved toward the Falcon, taking its companions with it. Han stopped them with upheld hands. “Not the whole choir, friend. Just you, for starters.” The first one burbled to its fellows and came on alone.
Inside the ship, Chewbacca had turned up the blackout lights to a minimal glow in strategic parts of the interior. The towering Wookiee was already drawing cover plates off the hidden compartments, concealed and shielded to be undetectable, under the deck near the ramp. Into this space, where he and Han usually hid whatever contraband they were carrying, Chewbacca lowered himself to stand with his waist at deck level. Releasing clamps and strapping, the Wookiee began lifting out heavy oblong cases, the huge muscles beneath his fur bulging with effort.
Han pulled the end of a case around and broke its seals. Within the crate weapons lay stacked. They had been so treated that no part of them reflected any of the scant light. Han took one up, checked its charge, made sure the safety was on, then handed it to the creature.
The firearm was a carbine—short, lightweight, uncomplicated. Like all the others in the shipment, this one was fitted with a simple optical scope, shoulder sling, bipod, and folding bayonet. Though the creature obviously wasn’t used to handling an energy weapon, its ready acceptance, grip, and posture showed that it had seen them often enough. It shifted the carbine in its hands, peered down the barrel, and examined the trigger carefully.
“Ten cases, two hundred rifles,” Han told it, taking up another carbine. He flipped up its butt plate, pointing out the adapters through which the weapon’s power pack could be recharged. These were obsolete weapons by current standards, but they had no internal moving parts and were extremely durable, so much so that they could safely be shipped or stored without Gel-Coat or other preservative. Any one of these carbines, left leaning against a fern in the jungle, would be fully operable ten years from now. Those advantages would be important on this world, where the carbines’ new owners would be able to provide little maintenance.
The creature nodded, understanding how the recharging worked. “We have already stolen small generators,” it told Han, “from the Authority compounds. We came here because they promised us jobs, and a good life, and we celebrated our good fortune, for our world is poor. But they worked us like slaves and would not let us leave. Many of us escaped to live in the wilds; this world is not unlike our own. Now, with these weapons, we will be able to fight back—”
“Stop!” Han snarled with a slashing gesture of his hand, and a violence that made the creature recoil. Reining in his temper, he went on, “I don’t want to hear it, get me? I don’t know you, you don’t know me. It’s none of my business, so don’t tell me!”
The large eyes were fixed on him. He looked away. “I got half my pay on account when I lifted off. The other half comes when I get out of here, so why don’t you just take your stuff and scratch gravel? And don’t forget: no firing those things until I’ve left. An Authority ship just might register the noise.”
He recalled that advance, paid in glow-pearls, fire nodes, diamonds, nova-crystals, and other precious gems smuggled off this mining planet at terrible risk by whatever sympathizers the contract-slaves had found. Rather than buy their own freedom in a quick dash aboard the Falcon, these fugitives were about to throw themselves into a doomed rebellion against the power of the Corporate Sector Authority. Morons.
He stepped out of the creature’s way. It watched him for a moment, then went and piped at the open hatch. Others of its kind came scampering up, crowding around the hatch. Their weapons could be seen now, primitive spear-throwers