Star Wars_ The Han Solo Adventures - Brian Daley [84]
Suddenly another figure was at his side, a furred and sinuous Trianii Ranger, bearing a smoking blaster. “Solo-Captain?” It was a male’s voice. “Come, I will aid you. We have but seconds.”
Han let the other do so, both of them tugging the ’droid’s hulk along much more quickly. Dull curiosity made Han ask, “Why?”
“Because my mate, Atuarre, said not to bother coming back without you, and because my cub, Pakka, would have come if I had not.” The Trianii called out, “Here, I’ve found him!”
Others arrived, to give supporting fire, throwing the Espos into a brief confusion. The assaulting troops, not having gotten their heavy blaster into the corridor yet, fell back. More willing hands dragged at Bollux.
Then, somehow, they were all standing at the air lock, and the Espos seemed to have broken off their attack. The ’droid was floated into the tunnel-tube, along with the other defenders and Atuarre’s mate. Only then did Han enter the air lock, leaving behind a strangely silent chamber. The fresher, thicker air of the tube hit him like a drug. He waved the rest on. The Millennium Falcon was still his ship, and he would be the one to cast off.
“Solo, wait!” A man stumbled out of the smoke. Viceprex Hirken, looking a century older. He spoke with hysterical speed.
“Solo, I know they’ve moved the assault ship away from the lower lock. I told no one, not even my wife. I ordered the Espos back and came in by myself.”
He shuffled closer, hands imploring. Han stared at the Vice-President for Corporate Security as if he were a specimen under a scope.
“Please take me, Solo! Do anything-anything-anything to me, but don’t leave me here to—”
Hirken’s handsome face jumped, as if he’d forgotten what he was about to say, then he fell, squirming and reaching uselessly for the wound in his back. His obese wife came waddling up behind him with Espos at her back and a smoking pistol in her hands.
Han had already hit the inner air-lock hatch closure. He dived through the outer, into the tunnel-tube, hitting that switch, too. As the outer air-lock hatch closed, he irised the tunnel-tube shut, released its seal with an outgushing of air, and unclamped the tube. He floated there, watching through a viewport as Hirken’s wife and the Espos beat at the air lock’s outer-hatch viewport, unavailingly. Stars’ End’s descent speed had already drawn it away, and it plunged deeper into the planet’s gravity well.
Around him he could see and hear the wobble of the tunnel-tube as packed prisoners were gradually absorbed into the assault craft and the Millennium Falcon.
Everyone in the two ships and the tunnel-tubes was so busy crowding elbow to pseudopod, or helping the injured or the dying, that only one survivor thought to watch the tower’s fall.
As his mother and Doc labored over the Falcon’s controls, conning the freighter under its extreme burden and maintaining tractor-grip on the junction station, Pakka hung from an overhead conduit in the cockpit, the only one with both an unoccupied mind and a vantage point.
The cub stared down at Stars’ End’s descent, the flawless trajectory of an airless world. And even the sudden, brilliant flash of its impact didn’t distract the others, who had lives to worry about. But Pakka, unblinking, unspeaking, saw the symbol of Authority flare and die with the brevity of a meteor.
The wind pulled hard across the landing field on Urdur, a no-nonsense wind, chilling, biting, but fresh and free. The former inmates of Stars’ End, those who had lived to reach this latest outlaw-tech base, breathed it without complaint as they were herded off to temporary quarters.
But Han still pulled his borrowed greatcoat tighter around him. “I’m not arguing,” he argued. “I just don’t understand, is all.” He was addressing Doc, but Jessa was listening, as were Pakka, Atuarre, and her mate, Keeheen.