Star Wars_ The Jedi Academy Trilogy 01_ Jedi Search - Kevin J. Anderson [19]
The boarding party wore oxygen masks fitted over their faces to let them breathe the thin atmosphere of Kessel. Their voices were muffled as they shouted orders to each other.
One man, looking scarecrowish with impossibly long arms and neck, strode into the Falcon’s cockpit. Han felt recognition stir inside him, but he couldn’t pinpoint a name. The scarecrow wore armbands from an Imperial prison, but at his side he carried a modified double-blaster that was patently illegal on most planets. The scarecrow turned wide-set, flinty eyes on Han.
“Han Solo,” he said. Though the breath mask covered his lower face, Han could tell the man was grinning widely. “You’re going to wish you never survived landing on Kessel.”
With a flash of memory, the scarecrow’s name came to Han. Skynxnex. That was it! But Skynxnex had been locked up in the Imperial Correction Facility, barely avoiding a death sentence. Questions had just begun forming in his mouth when Skynxnex brought an armored fist down on Han’s head, sending him back into unconsciousness.…
Kessel. Spice. His thoughts mixed into nightmares as he fought to come back to himself.
Han had always been proud to boast that the Falcon had made the Kessel run in record time, but he rarely recounted the whole tale, that he had actually been fleeing Kessel with a full load of spice in his secret belowdecks compartments, when Imperial tariff ships had tagged him.
Han got the shipment, as always, from Moruth Doole, the froglike man in charge of skimming black-market spice from Imperial production quotas. Doole was some sort of official in the gigantic Imperial prison complex, from which came most of the spice-mine laborers. The Empire maintained strict control over the spice output, but Doole managed to keep quite a little side market of his own. Han Solo and Chewbacca had run spice for him, whisking it past Imperial patrols and putting it into distribution channels run by gangsters such as Jabba the Hutt.
But Moruth Doole had a habit of stringing along his helpers until he decided he could gain bigger favor by turning them over to the authorities. Han had never been able to prove it, but he suspected that Doole himself had tipped off the tariff ships on the Falcon’s flight away from Kessel, providing the exact coordinates where Han planned to enter hyperspace.
Han had been forced to jettison his entire cargo of glitterstim spice, worth a fortune, just before being boarded. When Han tried to circle back later and retrieve the floating cargo, the Imperials had given pursuit. During the chase he had desperately skimmed closer to the gravity influence of the immense black hole cluster than the naveharts claimed was possible. One of the tariff ships had been lost in the swirling maelstrom of hot gases plunging into a bottomless singularity. But the Falcon had survived, breaking into hyperspace and fleeing to safety.
Temporary safety. The lost cargo of spice alone had been worth 12,400 credits and Jabba the Hutt had already paid for it in full. Jabba had not been pleased.…
The thought of all those months frozen in carbonite, motionless, hanging on Jabba’s wall, made him shiver. The cold was black around him, and he couldn’t see. His teeth chattered together—
“Cease your thermal convulsions!” a raspy metallic voice snapped. It sounded like a plasma saw cutting through rock. “The temperature in the medical center has been lowered to minimize surgical shock to your metabolism.”
Opening his eyes, Han stared up into the bulletlike face of a medical droid. Most of the metal was a primary green, but a black hooded attachment extended over its optical sensors. Segmented mechanical arms reached toward him, displaying a wide variety of out-of-date medical implements, all of them sharp.
“I am the prison medical droid. I have not been programmed for anesthetics or the niceties of making you comfortable. If you