Star Wars_ The Han Solo Adventures - Brian Daley [74]
The Espo, bleeding from his wounds, threw Pakka off and charged at Atuarre, hands clutching for her. She fired again, the red bolt lighting the junction station. The Espo buckled and lay still. She could hear alarms jangling through the tunnel-tube layout.
Atuarre was about to go to the junction station console, to disconnect the tunnel-tubes and cut off pursuit, when the station jolted on its treads, as if the surface of Mytus VII had surged up under it. She and Pakka were bounced in the air like toys by the tremors of an explosion of incredible force.
Atuarre picked herself up dazedly and staggered to one of the thick exterior observation ports. She couldn’t see the tower. Instead, a column of incandescent fire had sprung up where Stars’ End had stood. It seemed impossibly thin and high, reaching far up into the vacuous sky of Mytus VII.
Then she realized that the force of the explosion had been contained by deflector-shield generators around the tower. The pillar of destruction began to dissipate, but she could see nothing of Stars’ End, not a fragment. She couldn’t believe that even an exploding power plant could utterly vaporize the nearly impregnable tower.
Then, on some impulse, she looked up, beyond the tip of the explosion’s flare. High above Mytus VII she saw the wink of the small distant sun off enhanced-bonding armor plate.
“Oh, Solo-Captain,” she breathed, understanding what had happened, “you madman!”
She pushed herself away from the port unsteadily and assessed her situation. She must move without hesitation. She raced to the console, found separator switches, and matching them with indicators over the junction station’s tunnel-tubes, worked the three not connected to the Falcon. The tubes disengaged, their lengths contracting back toward the junction, pleating in on themselves.
Then she brought the junction station’s self-propulsion unit to life, setting its treads in motion, steering it toward the Millennium Falcon, gathering in the intervening tube length as she went.
She chilled the discord in her mind with the discipline expected of a Trianii Ranger, and a plan began to form. One minute later, the Millennium Falcon raised from Mytus VII.
Atuarre, at the controls with Pakka perched in the copilot’s chair, scanned the base. She knew the personnel must be coping desperately with pressure droppages and air leaks through their ruptured systems. But the armed Espo assault ship had already boosted clear of the base; she could see its engine glowing as it climbed rapidly in the distance. That someone had comprehended what had happened and responded so quickly gave her one more worry. No more Authority ships must be allowed to lift off.
She guided the starship in a low pass at the line of smaller Authority vessels. The Falcon’s guns spoke again and again in a close strafing run. The parked, pilotless ships burst and flared one after another, yielding secondary explosions. Of the half-dozen craft there, none escaped damage. She swooped past the deep crater where Stars’ End had once stood.
She opened the main drive, screaming off after the departed Espo assault craft. She kept all shields angled aft, but there was only sporadic, inaccurate turbo-laser cannon fire. The personnel at the base were too busy trying to keep the breath of life from bleeding off into the vacuum. That was one advantage, a small help to her in what seemed like a hopeless task.
Stars’ End’s anticoncussion field must very nearly have overloaded, Han thought; for the first seconds after the power plant blew, stupendous forces had been exerted on the tower and everything in it. But the immobilizing effect began to recede as the systems adjusted.
Smoke and heat from both the ruined Executioner and the now-defunct primary-control ancillaries rolled and drifted through the dome, choking and blinding. There was a universal rush of indistinct bodies for the elevators. Han could hear Hirken yelling for order