Star Wars_ The Han Solo Adventures - Brian Daley [79]
Han crouched beside him and was about to ease around the corner for a squint upstairs when a volley of red bolts burned and bit at the floor and walls out in the field of fire. He shrank back.
“Get your damn bulb down, man,” the defender cautioned. “We ran into their point men right here at the turn. We drove them back, but the rest came down. It’s a standoff, but they have more weapons.” Then he repeated, “What’s going on below?”
“The others are headed for the lower levels, to rig a, a way out of this. We’re here to keep the riffraff out.” He began to sweat, thinking that the tower must surely be succumbing to the pull of Mytus VII by now.
The steady salvos from the next landing lit the stairwell. Chewbacca, checking it out with narrowed eyes, gobbled something to Han.
“My pal’s right,” Han told the other defenders. “See all the incoming bolts? They’re hitting the far wall and the other side of the floor, and that’s all, nothing on this side.”
He slid around on the seat of his pants, cradling the riot gun high across his chest. Chewbacca braced Han’s knees solidly to the floor. Han squirmed back on his buttocks, centimeter by centimeter, until his back was almost into the line of fire.
He and Chewbacca traded looks. The man’s was rueful, the Wookiee’s concerned. “Hang it out.”
Han let himself fall backward. The riot gun, clamped across his chest, pointed straight upstairs. Still dropping, he saw what he’d expected. A man in Espo brown was stealing down the stairs, hugging the near wall to avoid his covering fire. The scene burned into Han’s mind with an abrupt, almost painful clarity as he cut loose with a flurry of shots. Without waiting to see their effect, he leaned up again, long before his back could touch the floor. Chewbacca felt the move, pulled hard. Han came sliding to safety; his pop-up appearance had begun and ended so suddenly that nobody upstairs had managed to redirect his aim.
There was a rapid clattering on the stairs, and an Espoissue side arm spun to a stop on the landing. A moment later, with a weighty bouncing, the pistol’s owner rolled to a halt next to it, more than adequately dead. It was the Espo major.
Han nodded in tribute to the major’s devotion to duty.
The barrage from the next landing became more intense. The defenders answered with what weapons they had. Chewbacca picked up a pistol dropped by one of the fallen defenders, a feathered creature lying in a pool of translucent blood. The corpse’s beaked face had been partly obliterated by a blaster shot. The Wookiee found that the barrel of the pistol had been hit, and was twisted and useless.
Chewbacca, pointing at Han’s empty, holstered blaster, threw him the unusable gun. Han threw back the riot gun in exchange and drew his own side arm, to charge it from the ruined pistol. Chewbacca, whose thick fingers didn’t fit the human-sized weapon well, tore off the trigger guard, then began firing around the corner without looking—high, low, and in between, at every angle.
Han mated the adapters in the pistol’s grip to those in his own blaster’s power pack, just forward of the trigger guard. He wound up with only half-charge capacity, but it would have to do. Finished, he tossed the useless Espo pistol aside and joined the Wookiee. To frustrate counterfire, the two fired unpredictably, and they could be very unpredictable indeed. None of the Authority people seemed to want to emulate the major’s heroism.
Suddenly the firing from above stopped. The defenders also stopped, watching for a trick. It occurred to Han that if Hirken had even one shock-grenade—but no; he’d have used it already.
A flat, hissing