"Brian Daley "Han Solo at Stars' End"" - читать интересную книгу автора

Bollux, who had remained silent during all this commotion, now came to the terminal and prepared to take Max back the moment the computer's work was done. Rekkon stood with him.
"There're two ways out of here that might be open," Max announced, and flashed the positions on the screen. The two paths, picked out on the level's lay-out, both led back to the gallery where the lift and drop chute banks were located. One route was on their floor, the other on the floor above.
Security alarms began clanging and warbling in the corridors. The room's equipment blazed with ripples of light as every circuit reacted to Max's prompting. Then, suddenly, the room became dim, except for light from the window-wall. The Center's automatics had shut down main power sources in response to the supposed emergency. Alarms continued to sound, run-ning on reserves.
"Illumination in the corridors will be very low, on standby power," Rekkon told the others as they gathered by the door. "We may be able to slip by." He carefully set Blue Max back into his eraplacement. As his plastron swung shut, Bollux, followed by Rekkon, joined the rest of them at the door.
"If I may suggest," said the 'droid, "I would, per-haps, attract less suspicion than any other individual here. I could walk well in advance of you others, in case there are Security Policemen present."
"That makes sense," Atuarre said. "Espos won't waste time and power shooting a 'droid. They'll halt him, though, and that will warn us off from any traps."
The door slid up, and Bollux started off down the corridor, preceded by the noise of his stiff suspension. The others followed afteraRekkon and Hah in the lead, with Term behind. Atuarre and Pakka came next, and Chewbacca brought up the rear, his bow-caster cocked and ready. The Wooldee was watching the conspirators as well as rear-gnarding. With the possibility of a traitor in the group, he and Hah trusted no one, not even Rekkon. The first wrong move on the part of any of them would be the Wooldee's signal to shoot.
They came to a turn. Bollux went around first, but as the others approached it, they heard: "Halt!
You, 'droid, get over herel"
Hah, peeking cautiously around the corner, spied a contingent of heavily armed Espos clustered around Bollux. He picked up bits of the conversation, mostly questions about whether the 'droid had seen anyone else. Bollux put up a front of supreme ignorance and lethargic circuitry. Beyond the gathered Espos, the corridor opened onto the chute gallery, but it might just as well have been on the other side of the Corpo-rate Sector.
"It's no good this way," Hah said.
"Then it's the more desperate route for us," Rekkon replied. "Follow me." They went back the way they had come, at a trot. As they rounded the next corridor, the footfalls of the Espo detachment drifted to them. They hadn't gone far when they heard another squad approaching from the opposite direction.
"Nearest stairwell," Hah instructed Rekkon, who led them a few meters more, then ducked through a door. "Keep it as quiet as you can," Han whispered in the semidarkness of the emergency-lighted stairwell. "Up one floor, and we'll make our way to the balcony overlooking the chutes." Of course, Chewbacca, for all his bulk, moved quietly, as did the sinuous Atuarre and her cub. Rekkon, too, seemed used to running with stealthy efficiency. That left only Hah and Torm to guard their steps, both laboring to keep the noise of their movements to a minimum.
When they reached the second floor of that level, they found it empty. Blue Max's flurry of crazy alerts had drawn the security forces away from their con-tingency posts. The fugitives raced along the corridors as through a hall of mirrors, keeping close to the walls.
They came to the balcony overlooking the gallery. Crouching low, they edged up to its railing. Han risked a quick peek over the top, then drew his head down again. "They're setting up a crew-served blaster down by the chutes," he told them. "There're three Espos working it. Chewie and I will fix that up; the rest of you get set to jump. Chewie?"
The Wooldee rumbled softly, his finger tightening on the bowcaster. He moved off, staying low, along the railing. Hah leaned close to Rekkon's ear and whispered, "Do us a favor and watch things here; we can only look one way at a time." He scuttled off in the opposite direction from his partner. With Rekkon armed and watchful, Hah doubted that any turncoat would show his hand now.
He paralleled the railing, rounding its corner, down to the far wall. Peering over the rail, he saw the Wooldee's big blue eyes edging up over the opposite railing. Halfway between them and several meters be-low, the gun crew was making final adjustments on the heavy blaster and its tripod mount. In a moment they would be ready to activate the weapon's deflector shield; going after them would then become an almost hopeless venture, and the drop chutes would be inac-cessible. Apprehension would be a matter of time. One of the Espos was bending even now to throw on the shield.
Hah stood, drew, fired. The man who had been about to activate the shield slumped, clasping a burned leg. But one of the others, with no regard for niceties like fire-discipline, spun and sprayed a steady stream of destructive energy from a short riot gun. The riot gun's fire blasted material from the walls and railing; the Espo slewed the weapon around carelessly, search-ing for his target.
Hah was forced to duck back out of the way as the rain of energy lashed through the air, striking walls, ceiling, and most things in between. That innocent by-standers might've been hurt didn't seem to have en-tered into the Espo's calculations.
But the Espo gave a cry and fell, his finger easing off the trigger, accompanied by the metallic twang of Chewbacca's bowcaster. Hah looked over the rail again and saw the second man slumped over the first, brought down by one of the short quarrels from the Wooldee's weapon. Now Chewbacca stood, jacldng the foregrip of his bowcaster down to recock it and strip another round off its magazine.
The third gun crewman kicked the bodies of his fellows out of the way while firing wildly with his pis-tol and yelling for help. Hah shot him just as the Espo's hands were closing on the heavy blaster's grips. Chewbacca was already over the balcony railing. Han, straddling the railing on his side, called, "Rekkon, get 'em moving!" He pushed himself off.
He missed his footing and fell to all fours, then raced to help his partner throw assorted Espos off the blaster cannon. Term leaped down, landing lightly for all his weight, and Atuarre came after him, all grace and form. Her cub launched himself off the rail, gathered his limbs and tail in for a somersault, and landed next to her. Atuarre slapped him on his way, as if to say this was no place to show off, even for an acrobatic Trianii.
Last to come was Rekkon, moving skillfully, as if this were something he did all the time. Han wondered for a half-second about this versatile university don who never seemed to lose track of the problems at hand. In sending all the others ahead, Rekkon made sure no potential spy remained behind, to be tempted by an unguarded back.
Torre stopped short of the drop chutes, luckily for him. "The fields have been shut offi" he shouted. Rekkon and Atuarre were with him in a moment, fumbling at the emergency panel beside the chute opening. Rekkon's sturdy fingers closed around the panel's grille, and he yanked it away without ap-parent effort.
Calls and a general hubbub could be heard in the upper corridors. Han squirmed himself down behind the blaster cannon, setting his feet on the pegs of its tripod, and switched on the deflector shield. "Heads up!" he warned his companions. "The party's start-ing!"
A squad of Espos, wearing combat armor and car-tying rifles and riot guns, burst out onto the balcony above, fanning out along the rail, and started firing down. Their bolts splashed in polychrome waves from the cannon's shield. Torm, Rekkon, and the others, directly behind Han as they worked on the drop-chute panel, were protected, too, for now. Chewbacca stood behind his partner, firing his bowcaster whenever he had an opening. Soon his weapon was empty, and he pulled another magazine from his bandolier. He chose explosive quarrels and started firing again. The deto-nations filled the gallery with smoke and thunder.
Hah had raised the cannon's snout to extreme ele-vation, and now he swept it across the railing. Heavy blaster charges flashed and crackled; parts of the rail-ing and the balcony's edge exploded, melted, or burst into flames. Several Espos were hit, falling to the floor below, and the rest backed hastily out of the line of fire, darting out to snap off a volley when they could, in a constant, determined exchange of shots. The fire-fight and its echoes, heat, and smoke enveloped the gallery.
Han kept the Espos' heads down with long traverses of the cannon, letting go at the floor of the balcony, scoring the walls. The gallery heated up like a furnace from the energies unleashed. Red beams of annihila-tion bickered back and forth, and Hah knew that the cannon's shield wouldn't hold out forever against con-stant fire from the riot guns and rifles.
A squad of armored figures appeared in the low corridor, the one leading directly onto the gallery. Hah depressed the cannon's mouth and filled the lower hallway with raging destruction. These Espos drew back, too, but, like the others, stayed just out of range to risk firing whenever they could. Atuarre, Pakka, and Torre, drawing their guns, joined Han and Chew-bacca in returning fire, while Rekkon kept working at the chute.
"Rekkon, if you can't get that drop field working, that'll be all for us," Han hollered over his shoulder. A Security man leaned out from the balcony above and snapped off a shot. It rebounded from the gun's shield, but Han could tell from the residual heat the deflector let through that it was beginning to fail.
"It's no use," Rekkon decided as his strong, sensi-tive fingers probed the mechanisms. "We'll have to find another way out."
"This is a one-way street!" Han shouted without looking back. Chewbacca's angry, frustrated roars sounded above the din.
"Then you dive headfirst down the shaft!" Torre bellowed back. Han's rejoinder was lost in an elec-tronic whooping that filled all their ears, catching at their hearts. It was a warning signal, standard through-out much of the galaxy.
"Hard radiation leak," Rekkon shouted. "That wasn't one of the alarms Max put in."
Not only that, Han thought, but it had only just be-gun to sound, and it was sounding right in the corri-dors off the gallery. A hard radiation exposure would leave little chance for any of them to live; they'd be receiving lethal dosages even as they listened. Hah swore at himself for ever having gotten out of a nice, cushy racket like gunrunning sideways through moun-tains. He scrambled up. "Get ready. We're going to have to shoot our way through them, or else we all get signed off."
Over the alert sirens, Atuarre shrilled, "Wait- look!"
Han's blaster was out again, ready to target on what he presumed to be another Espo. But the figure totter-ing down the lower hall toward them was moving stiff]y, its arms extended horizontally, holding some burden.
"Bolluxl" cried Torm, and it was. The 'droid stiff-legged out into the stronger light of the gallery, hold-ing a globular public-address speaker in either hand. Wires from them ran back to his open chest, patched in near Blue Max's eraplacement. From the speakers beat the whooping radiation alarm.
They gathered around Bollux, yelling in Standard, Wookiee, Trianii, and one or two other tongues, but nobody could hear anybody else because of the alarms. Hah was getting a headache that he was will-ing to ignore only because he was too overjoyed at being alive.
Then the alarms stopped. Bollux carefully lowered
the P.A. speakers and patiently unplugged their cables
from himself while the others clamored for an expla-
nation.
"I'm gratified that my plan worked, sirs and ma'am; but I confess it was merely an extension of Max's false alarms," Bollux told them. "He learned about the ra-diation alarms while he was in the network. Under his guidance, I vandalized these two speakers from the corridor walls and adapted them. The corridors are empty now; the Espo armor is for combat, not radia-tion protection. They appear to have withdrawn hastily."
Han broke in, "Get Max over there by the drop chutes. If he can't get one running again, we're still gonna be old news." He tugged BoIlux over that way.
"All the chutes cut out, right?" Blue Max piped up.
"No sweat, Captain!"
"Just turn 'era on, huh?" Hah pleaded, adding, "What's a runt like you know about sweat, anyway?"
Bollux's plastron swung wide as the 'droid ap-proached the panel. But the adapter input was too high. So Chewbaeca, who was closest, slung his bow-caster, took Max out of his eraplacement, and held the computer up to the chute's control panel. Max's adapter extended itself and engaged the receptor. The metal tumblers twirled back, forth, back again. The panel lit up.
"It's working!" Rekkon exulted. "Quickly, follow me, before someone notices and has the thing shut down again." He made a hand motion to Hall, so fast that no one else caught it, and the pilot knew he was to go last. Rekkon was still unsure of the loyalty of his people. He hopped into the drop chute and Atuarre followed after him. Then came Pakka, spinning, tum-bling, and chasing his own tail playfully in the chute's field. Torre leaped after, gun in hand.