Star Wars_ The New Rebellion - Kristine Kathryn Rusch [197]
Chewie let out a low, throaty rumble, the Wookiee equivalent of a chuckle, and then growled a retort.
“What?” Kalenda asked. “What’s funny? What did he say?”
Han smiled, even if the joke was more or less at his expense. “Something to the effect that I’ve never been one to let facts or information interfere with my decisions. But in all seriousness, it might just be that the less I know the better. If you want me to blunder around like an ignorant fool, maybe I’d do better if I was ignorant.”
“We half expected you to say that,” Kalenda said.
“If you know me that well, then the next thing you should be expecting me to say is that it’s dinnertime and the family’s waiting.”
Kalenda stood up. “Very well.” She turned toward Chewbacca, who was still blocking the exit. “If your friend will excuse me?” she asked, staring straight at Chewie. The Wookiee gave a sort of snort and let her by.
After she was gone, Chewie looked toward Han. “I know, I know,” he said. “You’re going to say it’s none of my business. But our agents are vanishing on my turf. Is that my people doing that? She said something is going wrong in the Corellian Sector, my home sector. Should I just turn my back? You tell me. What should I have said?”
Chewie didn’t have an answer for that one. Instead he grunted and turned back toward the cockpit. Han followed behind him to help him power down the ship.
But the Wookiee stopped dead just inside the entrance to the cockpit, and Han nearly walked up his back. “Hey!” he cried out. “What are you—”
Chewie moved his left arm slowly back until it was behind his back. He gestured for silence with a wave of his left hand as he stared straight ahead, out the cockpit’s viewport. Han froze, and tried to see around Chewbacca’s looming bulk. He saw nothing, but that told him as much as he needed to know. A probe droid or a living snooper. Chewie had spotted something, some tiny movement or other. Nothing else would explain his reaction.
“What—what are we going to do about the shields?” Han asked, trying to make it sound smooth and convincing. Chewbacca took the cue, and growled a casual-sounding answer as he plopped down into the copilot’s seat. Han followed Chewie’s gaze as the Wookiee scanned his panels. Han saw Chewie’s eyes flicker toward the packing cases at the edge of the hard stand for just a moment. All right, then.
Han sat down in the pilot’s seat and tried to think fast. Someone or something had been listening in on their little chat with Kalenda. The fact that the snooper was still out there could only mean they were hoping to hear more. Otherwise, the snooper would have pulled back the moment Kalenda was gone.
And that meant the only chance of catching the snooper would be to keep him or her or it busy until Chewie and he had managed to set something up. Better do something to sound interesting. “That sounds good on the repulsor,” Han said. “But if our visitor was right, hardware glitches are going to be the least of our troubles.”
Chewbacca looked toward Han in some surprise. “Oh, yeah,” Han said, improvising as best he could. “With what she was saying, we’re going to have a lot to talk about on the way home. Lots of profits in it for us if we play it right.” That ought to be intriguing enough to keep their friends interested. Han gestured with his hands, being careful to keep them well out of view of the cockpit ports. He pointed toward himself, and waggled his first two fingers back and forth in a pantomime of walking. He pointed toward the outside of the ship, and then pantomimed pulling a trigger.
Chewie nodded very slightly, then pointed at himself, pointed down, indicating he would stay where he was, and then tapped the controls for the ventral laser cannon. Chewbacca burbled his agreement on the subject of profit and nodded a bit more emphatically for the benefit of whoever was outside.
“Listen,” Han said. “You finish up the power-down, all right? I want to go