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

"Chewie..."

AS he overtook each of the escapees in turn, Max slowed the harvester just enough for them to board. First was Bollux, who had fallen behind the others despite his best efforts; he made a last bound with a deep sproing from his suspension, found a servo-grip hold, and drew himself aboard. Then came Term, who, pacing the harvester, made an athletically skillful mount. Lastly, Atuarre and Pakka came aboard, the cub clinging to his mother's tail. Blue Max accelerated for the spaceport perimeter.
Rekkon still held Hah to the catwalk, but now it was to make sure he wouldn't fall. "Captain, you must accept that there's no more you can do here. Your chances of getting to Chewbacca here on erron III are vanishing small. And, more to the point, it's doubtful he'll be here for long. Surely he'll be taken for interrogation, just like the others. Our mission is yours now; it's nearly certain the Weekice w'dl be put in with the rest of the Authority's special enemies."
Han wiped blood from his forehead, pulled himself upright, and began climbing a maintenance ladder. "Where are you going?" Rekkon demanded.
"Someone has to tell Max where he's going," Han answered.
The spaceport was guarded by a security fence of fine mesh, ten meters high, carrying a lethal charge maintained by transmitting posts along its length. An unprotected man, or even an armored one, would stand no chance of making it through, but the har-vester offered a special form of protection. "Everybody get to a catwalk," Rekkon called. "Stand on the insulated strips? His various compan-ions, Hah included, rushed for positions, bracing their feet on the thick runners of insulation on the mechan-ic's catwalks.
The harvester hit the field area as Max threw his cutter blades into motion again. Defensive energy spat and spattered all around the agrirobot, discharging across its bow in skittering strands. Then the fence was torn apart by the harvester's blades, a twenty-meter length of it ripped loose and engulfed. The defensive field faded along that part of the fence, its continuity broken. Whereupon the giant machine churned out on-to the fiat, press-bonded landing area.
Han hauled himself up and looked down at Max, nestled in the control niche. "Can you program this crate so it'll run without you?"
The computer prohe's photoreceptor swiveled around, coming up to bear on him. "That's what it's built to do, but it'll remember only simple things, Cap-tain. For a machine it's pretty dumb."
Hah weighed his suspicions, presumptions, and a knowledge of security procedures. "They'll be rushing their men to the passenger-ship end of the port; they won't think the barges are any good to us. But they'll certainly be looking for this tub, Max. Set it up so it'll give us a few seconds to get dear, then head itself down toward the main port area." To the others, he called, "Checkout time! Everybody pound ground!"
From Blue Max came low buzzes, beeps, and wonks of his labors. Then he announced, "Done, Captain, but we better get off right now."
Han reached down as Max disengaged himself from the harvester's controls, pulled free the connector jacks Chewbacca had inserted, and lifted the computer out of the niche. There was a carrying strap in a recessed groove on Max's top. Han pulled it out and slung Max over his shoulder.
When he reached the ground, Rekkon and the oth-ers were already there. They all stepped back as the harvester ground into motion again, wheeled promptly, and tore off between rows of barges. From the bar-vester, Han had already spotted, not far away, the barge shell concealing the Millennium Falcon. He handed Blue Max back to Bollux and started for his ship at a dead run, with the rest keeping up as best they could.
The outer hatch, the makeshift one, wasn't dogged, of course. He pushed it aside, palmed the ramp and inner hatch open. Then he dashed to the cockpit and began swiping at controls, bringing his ship back to life, yelling: "Rekkon, say the word the second every-body's onboard, and hang onto your heirlooms!" He pulled on his headset and deserted all caution, think-ing, Hell with prefiight. He brought the barge's engines up to full power all at once, and simply hoped they wouldn't blow or dummy out on liftoff.
His best hope lay in the nature of bureacracy. Some-where back in the fields, the Espo detachment com-mander was trying to explain to his superior what had happened. That man, in turn, would have to contact port security and give them the rundown. Given a creaky enough chain of command, the Falcon still stood a chance.
Han pulled on his flight gloves and ran through his preparations with a sharp feeling of incompleteness; he was used to dividing the tasks with Chewbacca, and each detail of the liftoff drove home the fact that his friend Wasn't there.
He checked the barge's readouts-and swore sev-eral of his choicer curses. Bollux, stumping into the cockpit to relay Rekkon's word that all was secure, added, "What's wrong, Captain?"
"The motherless barge is what's wrong! Some over-eager Authority expediter filled it up already!" The instruments proved it; several hundred thousand met-tic tons of grain were stowed in the barge's vast shell. There went Han's plan for rapid ascent.
"But, sir," Bollux asked in his unhurried speech pat-tern, "can't you release the barge shell?"
"If the explosive-releases worked, and i/ I didn't damage the Falcon, I'd still have to get above the port's close-proximity defenses, and maybe a picket ship." He turned and yelled back down the passage-way, "Rekkon! Get somebody in those gun turrets; we may have to stand tall!" Hah could operate the ship's top and belly turrets by means of serves from the cockpit, but remote control was a poor substitute for sentient gunners. "And screw your navels in; we go in twenty seconds!" He fumed over the fact that the barge's engines took so much longer to heat up than the Falcon's.
Port control, having noticed that the barge was pre-paring to lift, began transmitting to what it still pre-sumed to be a robotized ship orders to abort liftoff. Hah hit the overrides and had the barge's computer answer by acknowledging clearance as if it had re-ceived permission to go. Port control repeated the com-mand to hold, convinced it was dealing with a com-puter malfunction along with all its other problems.
Hah brought the engines up. The barge wallowed up from its pit, bending aside the boarding gantry, ig-noting all directions to do otherwise. As his radius of vision increased with altitude, Han spied the aban-doned harvester. It was halfway to the other end of the giant port, surrounded by Espo hover-vans, skim-mers, and self-propelled art'filery. The harvester had been partially disabled, but still obeyed its preset pro-gramming mindlessly, trying to grind forward.
As Han watched, a cannonade from all sides stopped the huge machine for good, gouging large chunks from it, turning most of the harvester's lower chassis into wreckage. Someone no longer cared whether prisoners were taken or not. The harvester's power plant went up in a fireball, and the harvester split in half with a force that rocked the Espo field pieces back.
As the barge rose higher, responding sluggishly un-der its burden of cargo, ignoring chatter from the port control, Han saw the place where Chewbacca had been captured. Other Espo vehicles were gathered near the wreck of the hovervan. Hah couldn't tell whether his partner was there or had already been taken away, but the fields were crawling with Security Police, like a pestilence among the golden-red grain, searching for possible stragglers. Rekkon had been right; going back would've spelled certain disaster.
The barge gave a sudden, convulsive shudder, and the Falcon's passengers felt as if someone had caught them by the collar and given a yank. With an ominous feeling, Hah punched up the rear screens. Bollux, hav-ing nearly fallen, lowered himself into the navigator's chair, inquiring what was wrong. Hah ignored him.
It had been a picket ship, in transpolar orbit, that he and Chewbacca had picked up just prior to land-ing. Even Rekkon hadn't realized how security-minded the Authority was about Orron III. Moving up hard astern the barge was a dreadnaught, one of the mili-tary's old Invincible Class capital ships---over two kil-ometers long, bristling with gun turrets, missile tubes, tractor-beam projectors, and deflector shields, armored like a protosteel mountain. The dreadnaught hailed them with the demand that the barge halt, and at the same time identified herself: the Shannador's Revenge. She'd locked her tractors onto the barge, and com-pared with her raw power, the lighter's beam back on Duroon had been a mere beckoning finger.
"Church is out," Han observed, bringing his ord-nance up to charge and preparing to angle deflector shields, for all the good it would do. The dreadnaught had enough weaponry to hold and vaporize a score of ships like the Falcon. Han opened the intercom. "That shake-up was a tractor. Everybody stay cool-things could get rough." As if we have a prayer, he finished to himself. But he had no intention of being caught alive. Better to shorten a few Espo careers, and go out in style.
There were sounds of banging, tearing metal from the barge shell, of parting supports and struts. Some of the superstructural features, weakened or loosened by alterations to the hull, had been pulled free by the trac-tor beam and gone flying back toward the $hannador's Revenge.
Han took inspiration from it. He bad at his side breadboarded computer overrides for the barge's every function. His fingers stabbed at them as he shouted, "Everybody brace! We're gonna-" and was slammed back in his seat. He'd hit the cargo release, opening the barge's rear dump-doors. Hundreds of thousands of tons of grain were poured into the dreadnaught's tractors, pulled toward the Shannador's Revenge by her own brute power, fanning out in a blinding con-trail, as the barge surged ahead with a lightening load.
The dreadnaught was engulfed, her sensors muffled by the tidal wave of grain. Han, with one eye on his own sensors, saw that the warship was driving straight on through the hail of grain, closing quickly on the barge even though she was blinded. Her tractor beams were still clamped onto the barge's stern, and Han wondered how long it would be before her skipper gave the command to open fire.
There was only one other possibility. He hit the con-trols, cutting in the barge's retrothrusters, and with virtually the same motion, slapped the emergency re-leases. His other hand hovered over the main drive control of the Millennium Falcon.
The barge shell shook, losing much of its velocity, while the reports of exploding bolts sounded through both the freighter and the larger ship around it. Super-structural elements, added to secure the Falcon and disguise her lines, were blown clear. A split second later, the Falcon's engines howled to life, their blue fire tearing the smaller ship free of the breakaway sup-ports holding her and severing her external control hookups.
Han took the Falcon on the same course he'd been holding, keeping the barge shell between himself and the Authority warship. The Shannador's Revenge, her sensors impaired, had failed to note the barge shell's drastic drop in speed. The dreadnaught's captain was calling for a vector change just as the warship rammed the decelerating barge. The Shannador's Revenge's for-ward screens flared with impact, and her anticoncus-sion fields cut in instantly on collision, as she cut the floating hulk of the barge shell in half in a terrific im-pact and suffered structural damage of her own. The warship's forward sensor suite was disabled; she ro-sounded with alarms and damage reports. Airtight doors began booming shut automatically, triggered by decompressire hull ruptures.
The Millennium Falcon was clawing for the upper atmosphere. The thought that he'd bloodied the nose of a battlewagon, escaping against all odds, didn't lighten Han's mood, nor did the thought that hyper-space and safety were only moments away. Occupying his mind was one simple, intolerable fact: his friend and partner was now in the merciless hands of the Corporate Sector Authority.
When the stars had parted before him and the ship was safely in hyperspace, Han sat for long minutes thinking that he couldn't remember the last time he'd spaced without the Wookiee beside him. Rekkon had been right in arguing for escape, but that didn't change Han's feeling that he'd let Chewbacca down.
But regrets were a waste of time. Han stripped off his headset and shoved himseft out of his seat. Rekkon was his only hope now. He headed for the forward compartment, the ship's combination lounge-mess-me area, and realized something was wrong while he was still in the passageway. There was the pungent smell of ozone, the smell of blaster fire. "Rekkon!"
Han ran to where the scholar slumped over the gameboard. He'd been shot from behind, by a blaster set on needle-beam at low power. The sound of it probably hadn't even carried across the compartment. On the gameboard, under Rekkon's body, was a port-able readout. Next to it a clear puddle of molten liquid bubbled, the remains of the data plaque. Rekkon was dead, of course; he'd been shot at close range.
Hah leaned on a bulkhead pad, rubbing his eyes and wondering what to do next. Rekkon had been his sole hope for rescuing Chewbacca and for getting him-self out of this insane jam. With Rekkon dead, the hard-won information gone, and at least one traitor-murderer onboard, Han felt alone for one of the few times in his life. His blaster was in his hand, but there was no one else in the compartment or in the passage-way.
A tattering on the rungs of the main ladderwell. Han ran to it just as Torm came climbing up from the Falcon's belly turret. As he came up, Torre found him-self staring into the muzzle of Han's gun.
"Just give over your pistol, Torm. Keep your right hand on the rung, and do it with your left, easy. Don't make a mistake; it'd be your one and only."
When he had the other man's weapon, Han let him ascend, then made him shuck his tool belt. Patting him down and finding no other weapons, Han motioned for him to move into the lounge, then called up the lad-derwell for Atuarre to come down from the ship's top quad-mount.
He kept one eye on Torm, who was staring in shock at Rekkon's body. "Where's her cub?" he asked the man quietly.
The redhead shrugged. "Rekkon told Pakka to look around for a medi-pack. You weren't the only one who was injured along the way. The cub went off to rum-mage around. I guess when you yelled for everyone to stay put and hang on, he did." He looked back to Rek-kon, as if he couldn't fathom the fact of the man's death. "Who did it, Solo? You?"
"No. And the list of possibilities is awfully short." He heard Atuarre's light tread on the rungs and cov-ered her as she came down the ladderwell.
The Trianii's features became a mask of feline ha-tred. "You dare point a weapon at me?"
"Gag it. Toss your gun out here, careful, then step out and drop the tool belt. Somebody's killed Rekkon, and it could be you as easy as anyone. So don't push me. I'm not telling you twice."
Her eyes were wide now, the news of Rekkon's death appearing to shock her out of her fury. But how can I tell if it's real or an act? Han asked himself.
When he had them both in the forward compart-ment, he still found he couldn't pick up anything but shock and dismay. Theirs, at least, served to prod him out of his own.
A clanking on the deckplates marked Bollux's arri-val from the cockpit. Han didn't look around until he heard the urgency in the 'droid's voice. "Captain!"