Star Wars_ The Han Solo Adventures - Brian Daley [92]
A stone sailed out of the darkness and bounced off the holoprojector with a crash. From the light spilled by the dancing, singing figures overhead there could be seen the angry waving of Kamarian upper extremities. Multi-faceted eyes threw the light back out of the dark in a million fragments.
Another rock clanked against the holoprojector, making Sonniod jump, and a flung howlrunner thighbone, remains of someone’s dinner, just missed Han.
“Solo—” began Sonniod, but Han wasn’t listening.
Having spotted Lisstik, Han shouted up the slopes at him. “Hey, what’s going on? Tell ’em to calm down! Give it a chance, will you?”
But it was no use yelling to Lisstik. The Kamarian was surrounded by an irate crowd of his fellows, all waving their upper extremities and thrashing tails, making more noise than Han had ever heard Badlanders make. One of them swiped at the burned-out integrator banded to Lisstik’s skull. Elsewhere on the slopes around the holoprojector, shoving, arguments and differences of opinion had erupted into violent disagreement.
“Oh, my,” said Sonniod in a very small voice. “Solo, I just remembered what q’mai means; I heard it in one of the population centers to the north. It doesn’t mean ‘admission,’ it means ‘offering.’ Quick, where’s the other holo, the travelogue?”
By then a mob of hostile Badlanders was slowly closing in around the holoprojector. Han’s hand descended toward his blaster. “Back onboard the Falcon, why? What are you talking about?”
“Don’t you stop and analyze things, ever? You’ve been showing them holos of a world with more water than they’d ever dreamed existed, filled with cultures and life forms that they’ve never even fantasized about. You haven’t set up a holotheater, you idiot; you’ve started a religion!”
Han gulped, pulling his blaster indecisively as the Badlanders closed in. “Well, how could I know? I’m a pilot, not an alien-contact officer!”
He took a handful of Sonniod’s coverall sleeve and, pulling gently, led him back slowly toward the Falcon. He heard Chewbacca’s alarmed roaring from farther up the slope. Overhead, the hero and the ingenue and everybody else at the transporter beltway were engaged in a meticulously choreographed dance routine built around the ticket kiosks and turnstiles.
The Badlanders at that side of the circle began to give way uncertainly before Han, who tugged the frightened Sonniod along after him. A number of the bolder Kamarians rushed the holoprojector and began beating at it with sticks, stones, and bare pincers. Overhead, the dance number began to dissolve into distortion. Some of the vandals—or outraged zealots, depending on one’s orientation—turned from the projector after a moment and advanced in a vengeful throng on Han.
Sensing correctly that by simply refunding the q’mai he stood little chance of mollifying his former audience-cum-congregation, Han fired into the ground before them. Sandy soil exploded, throwing up rocky debris and burning cinders. Whatever flammable material there was in the soil caught fire. Han fired twice more to his right and left, gouging holes in the ground in spectacular bursts.
Badlanders fell back for the moment, their enormous eyes catching the crimson of blaster beams, ducking their small heads and shielding themselves with upraised brachia. Han didn’t have to fire at the disgruntled Kamarians between himself and his ship; they were giving way. “Stay up there,” he hollered up into the darkness at Chewbacca, “and get the engines started!”
The crowd was doing a pretty fair job of disassembling the holoprojector. Its sound synthesizer was making simply random noises now, though at high volume. Love is Waiting had devolved to a sluggish flow of multicolored swirls in the air.
As Han watched, walking backward as calmly as he could, Lisstik rushed in from the darkness, wrenched the