Star Wars_ The Han Solo Adventures - Brian Daley [95]
Correcting his ship’s attitude of descent, he brought her in toward the landing point at very moderate speed. The TFS rig showed no obstacles or other dangers, but Han wished to take no chances with instrumentation on this stupid planet.
They settled into the clouds as precipitation was driven at the canopy, only to slide away when it met the Falcon’s defensive screens. Sensors had begun functioning normally, giving precise information on altitude. Visibility, even in the storm, was sufficient for a cautious landing. Lur materialized below them as a plain where winds hurried along endlessly, aimlessly.
Han eased the vessel down warily; he had no desire to find himself buried in an ice chasm. But the ship’s landing gear found solid support, and instrumentation showed that Han’s guess had been correct; they had landed on a glacial ice field. Off to starboard some forty meters or so was the landing beacon.
Han removed his headset, stripped off the flying gloves he had been wearing, and unbuckled his seatbelt. He turned to his Wookiee copilot. “You stay here and keep a sharp watch. I’ll go let the ramp down and see what the deal is.” The unoccupied navigator’s seat behind him held a bundle that he snagged and carried along as he left the cockpit.
On his way aft to the ship’s ramp he found Bollux. The ’droid was stooping down by an open inspection plate set in the bulkhead at deck level. Bollux’s chest plastron was open, and Blue Max was assisting him in his examination of the problem at hand.
“What’s the routine?” Han inquired. “Is it fixed?”
Bollux stood up. “I’m afraid not, Captain Solo. But Max and I caught it just before the last safety went. We shut down the entire system, but repair is beyond the capability of either of us.”
“You don’t need a tech for those fluidics, Captain,” Max chirped. “You need a damn plumber.” His voice held a note of moral outrage at the inferior design.
“Tell me about it. And watch your language, Max. Just because I talk that way is no sign you should. All right, boys, just leave things the way they are. This trip should make us enough to have all those waterworks replaced with good old shielded circuitry. Bollux, I want you to close up your fruit stand; we’ve got cargo to pick up and I don’t want you making the clients jumpy. Sorry, Max, but you do that to people sometimes.”
“No problem, Captain,” Blue Max replied as the halves of Bollux’s chest swung shut to the hum of servomotors. Han reflected that, while he still didn’t care much for automata, Bollux and Max weren’t too bad. He decided, though, that he would never understand how the pseudo-personalities of an ancient labor ’droid and a precocious computer module could hit it off so well.
Han opened the bundle he had brought from the cockpit—a bulky thermosuit—and began pulling it on over his ship’s clothes. Before fitting his hands into the thermosuit’s attached gloves, he adjusted his gun-belt, rebuckling it over the suit, then removing the weapon’s trigger guard so that he’d be able to fire it with his thermoglove on. He wouldn’t have dreamed of going out unarmed; he was always wary when the Millennium Falcon was grounded in unfamiliar surroundings, but especially so when he was doing business on the shady side of the street.
He donned protective headgear, a transparent facebowl with insulated ear cups. Touching a button on the control unit set in his thermosuit’s sleeve, he brought its heating unit to life.
“Stand by,” he ordered Bollux, “in case I need a hand with the cargo.”
“May I inquire what it is we’re to carry, Captain?” Bollux asked as he drew aside the covers of the special compartments hidden under the deckplates.
“You may guess, Bollux; that’s about all I can do right now myself.” Han prodded at the hatch control with a gloved finger. “Nobody mentioned what it’s going to be, and I was in no position to ask. Couldn’t be anything too massive,