• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Droma’s eyes opened wide.

“Hold on!” Han yelled, even as the landspeeder was tipping forward.

The waterfall was no more than fifteen meters high, but the strength of the current was such that the speeder was propelled right out of the water as it went over the brink. For the briefest moment it seemed as if they would nose-dive into the swollen river below, but then the stern of the landspeeder began to tip forward inexorably, and a heartbeat later the vehicle was upside down, spilling its contents of passengers and porridge into yet another muddy deluge.

Han made his body rigid as he fell, breaking the water with his feet and letting momentum carry him along. Above him he heard the concussive report of the landspeeder slamming into the river facedown. Ascending, he feared that he might surface directly under the inverted cab, but as it happened he and Droma emerged with the landspeeder between and slightly ahead of them.

Han raised his hand and pointed to the southern bank, which was not only closer but also a lot less steep.

“Can you make it?”

“I’m not a very strong swimmer!” Droma replied with a note of desperation.

Han maneuvered alongside him and hooked his left arm around Droma’s waist. “Just kick like mad. Leave the steering to me.”

Droma nodded. “Just be sure to miss those rocks.”

Han twisted around to see them closing fast on whitewater rapids, made all the more perilous by protruding boulders. He let go of Droma and rolled over onto his back, paddling hard to keep his head above water. Caught in the current, there was nothing to do but surrender to it and hope for the best.

The first drop took them across the face of a water-smoothed boulder and down into a pocket, from which they were quickly flushed down another drop. Skirting the edge of a froth-covered whirlpool, they rode a sinuous course between tall rocks, then plunged several meters into a swirling pool. Off to Han’s left the landspeeder rammed into a sloping rock, went airborne in an end-over-end flip, and wound up impaled on a sharp-topped rock. Droma followed, barely missing the same rock and falling like a stone into the pool.

As suddenly as they had appeared, the cataracts were behind them, but the current was still strong enough to keep the swimmers from reaching the bank. Allowing the current to buoy him, Han craned his neck to get a look at what lay ahead. More white water came into view, but this time without rapids. Instead, a line of turbulence stretched clear across the river, as if the flow was being impeded by something just below the surface. Blinking water out of his eyes, Han saw through the rain that they were headed straight into a fine-mesh net strung bank to bank.

The resilient net gave as they struck it, but the current pinned them in place. Han was trying to claw his way along the net to the closer shore when a new sound from upstream compelled him to look over his shoulder. Soaring toward them on repulsorlift power a meter above the river was what might have been a flying garbage bin, except for the fact that it was equipped with a pair of reverse-articulated manipulator arms, which ended in padded jaws. Lights on the garbage bin’s front panel blinked and tones sounded, as if in excitement at locating what it obviously had been sent to retrieve.

The same panel bore the corporate logo of Salliche Ag.

The three-meter-tall box slowed and hovered directly over the net. Han and Droma squirmed to avoid the thing’s extending arms, but with scant effort the padded jaws succeeded in clamping around their waists and plucking them from the mesh. Lifting them out of the river, the arms swung inward. Hatch doors on the machine’s dorsal surface hissed open, revealing a dark interior chamber waiting to receive them.

They alighted on a cushioned floor. The hatch doors closed before either of them could scramble out, and the garbage bin began to move away from the river in a southerly direction. In the amber glow of telltales, Han ran his hands over the walls, bringing them to a halt at an arrangement of sprayer nozzles.