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

on the Board will be able to deny it now; this con-
spiracy against the Authority and against me personи
ally involves everyonel"
Han shook his head, amazed. Hirken was sweating, bellowing, with a maniacal look on his face. "I don't know your real name, Marksman, but you've come to the end of this plot. What I need to know, I'll dig out of your 'droid, and the Trianii. But since you've spoiled my entertainment, you'll make up for it."
He went with the rest of his entourage and stood just inside the arena, safe behind the transparisteel slabs. Uul-Rha-Shan took Han's gunbelt from his shoulder and held it out to him. "Come, trick shooter. Let's see if you have any tricks left."
Hall moved warily and collected the belt. He checked his holstered blaster by eye, and saw that it had been drained of all but a microcharge, not enough to damage the primary-control circuitry. His gaze went to Hirken, who stood gloating behind 'invulnerable transparisteel. The belt control unit was out of the question. Hah climbed the amphitheater stairs slowly, buckling the gunbelt around his hips, tying down the holster.
Uul-Rha-Shan came after, returning his disrupter to its forearm holster. The two stepped out onto the open area overlooking the arena; the gathered Author-ity officials looked up at them.
It had been a good try, Han told himself, just a
touch shy of success. But now Hirken meant to see
him dead, and Chewbacca and Atuarre and Pakka in
his interrogation chambers. The Viceprex held all the
cards but one. Han made up his mind on the spot that if he was going to die anyway, he'd take all these warped minds of Corporate Security with him.
He went, carefully, and stood by the wall, unsnap-ping the retaining strap of his holster. His opponent, squared off a few paces away, wasn't through taunt-ing.
"Uul-Rha-Shan likes to know whom he kills. Who are you, imposter?"
Drawing himself up, Han let his hands dangle loosely at his sides, fingers working. "Solo. Han Solo."
The reptile registered surprise. "I have heard your name, Solo. You are, at least, worthy of the killing."
Han's mouth tugged, amused. "Think you can bring it off, lizard?"
Uul-Rha-Shan hissed anger. Han cleared his mind of everything but what lay before him. "Farewell, Solo," Uul-Rha-Shan bade him, tensing. Han moved with a dipping motion of the right shoulder, a half turn, all done with the blinding abrupt-ness of the gunfighter. But his hand never closed on the grip of his blaster.
Instead, feigning his draw, he hurled himself out on the floor. As he fell, he felt Uul-Rha-Shan's disrupter beam lash over him, striking the wall. It set off a belching explosion that caught the reptile full in the face, flinging him backward. His shot had blown apart the ancillary circuitry for Hirken's belt unit, freeing swirls of energy. Secondary explosions told of the de-struction of power-management routers.
Han had hit the floor rolling, surviving the blast with little more than singed hair. His blaster was in his hand now, the cautionary pulser in its grip tingling his palm in silent, invisible warning that the gun was nearly empty. As if he needed to be reminded. Uul-Rha-Shan, somewhere in the din and smoke, was shrilling, "Solo-ooo.t" in furious challenge. Hah couldn't pick him out.
A far-off vibration reached him, the overload spiral he'd had Blue Max build into the secondary defense program. Now that the primaries had been damaged and Hirken's belt unit circumvented, the power-rerouting had taken over. Won't be long now, he told himself.
Everyone in Stars' End suddenly felt as if he were being immersed in thick mud, as the weight of a planet seemed to be pressing down. The anticoncussion field ---Han had forgotten about it, but it didn't matter.
Then, with an explosion beyond words, the power plant blew.


ATUARRE restrained herself from running back through the maze of tunnel-tubes, conscious of the Espo guard at her heels. Han's desperate plan left her so much room for doubt. What would happen if the bluff failed? But on that thought she corrected herseft at once-Solo-Captain was not bluffing, and was more than capable of taking all his enemies with him in an act of awesome revenge.
But she approved of the gamble. This might be Stars' End's only vulnerable moment. Even so, she took her longest strides now, dragging a stumbling Pakka along breakneck-quick.
They passed into the final junction station, the one nearest the Falcon. A tech lounged on duty behind his console. The Espo's com-link signaled for attention, and Atuarre heard the crackled order, relayed from Hirken through the Espo major, as clearly as did her escort himself. The two Trianii were to be brought back to the tower. She wondered if that meant Han had successfully intervened in Bollux's combat.
But Atuarre had no intention of going back now;
Solo-Captain specifically wanted her onboard the Millennium Falcon. She tried her most reasonable tone. "Officer, I have to pick up a very important item on my ship, then we can return. Please? It's very vital; that's why I was given clearance to go in the first place."
The Espo wasn't paying heed. He drew his side arm.
"Orders say at once. Move it!"
The attention of the duty tech was aroused now, but the guard was the immediate danger. Atuarre held Pakka's paw high, so that his toes barely touched the floor, showing him to the guard. "You see, I was also told to leave my cub onboard ship. His presence dis-pleased the Viceprex." She felt Pakka's short, elastic muscles tighten.
The Espo opened his mouth to reply, and she whipped the cub up. Pakka took snapping momentum from the launch, and both of the Trianii split the air with predatory howls, astounding the Authority men.
Pakka's dropkick caught the astonished Espo in the face and throat. Atuarre, coming in behind her cub, threw herself on the man's arm, prying his hand loose from his blaster. The Trianii bore their antagonist over backward, the cub with arms and legs and tail wrapped around the Espo's head and neck, Atuarre wrenching the blaster free.
She heard a scuffle of sound behind her. Whirling, she saw the duty tech half standing from his chair behind the console. His left forefinger was stabbing some button on his board, hard. She assumed it to be an alarm, but the tech's right hand was bringing up a blaster, and that was first on the agenda. She fired with the dispatch of a Trianii Ranger. The brief red flash of the blaster knocked the tech off his feet, back-ward, overturning his chair.
The Espo, bleeding from his wounds, threw Pakka off and charged at Atuarre, hands clutching for her. She fired again, the red bolt lighting the junction sta-tion. The Espo buckled and lay still. She cotfid hear alarms jangling through the tunnel-tube layout.
Atuarre was about to go to the junction station con-sole, to disconnect the tunnel-tubes and cut off pursuit, when the station jolted on its treads, as if the surface of Mytus VII had surged up under it. She and Pakka were bounced in the air like toys by the tremors of an explosion of incredible force.
Atuarre picked herself up dazedly and staggered to one of the thick exterior observation ports. She couldn't see the tower. Instead, a column of incandes-cent fire had sprung up where Stars' End had stood. It seemed impossibly thin and high, reaching far up into the vacuous sky of Mytus VII.
Then she realized that the force of the explosion had been contained by deflector-shield generators around the tower. The pillar of destruction began to dissipate, but she could see nothing of Stars' End, not a fragment. She couldn't believe that even an explod-ing power plant could utterly vaporize the nearly im-pregnable tower.
Then, on some impulse, she looked up, beyond the tip of the explosion's flare. High above Mytus VII she saw the wink of the small distant sun off enhanced-bonding armor plate.
"Oh, Solo-Captain," she breathed, understanding
what had happened, "you madman.t"
She pushed herself away from the port unsteadily and assessed her situation. She must move without hesitation. She raced to the console, found separator switches, and matching them with indicators over the junction station's tunnel-tubes, worked the three not connected to the Falcon. The tubes disengaged, their lengths contracting back toward the junction, pleating in on themselves.
Then she brought the junction station's self-propulsion unit to life, setting its treads in motion, steering it toward the Millennium Falcon, gathering in the intervening tube length as she went.
She chilled the discord in her mind with the dis-cipline expected of a Trianii Ranger, and a plan be-gan to form. One minute later, the Millennium Falcon raised from Mytus VII.
Atuarre, at the controls with Pakka perched in the copilot's chair, scanned the base. She knew the per-sonnel must be coping desperately with pressure drop-pages and air leaks through their ruptured systems. But the armed Espo assault ship had already boosted clear of the base; she could see its engine glowing as it climbed rapidly in the distance. That someone had comprehended what had happened and responded so quickly gave her one more worry. No more Authority ships must be allowed to lift off.
She guided the starship in a low pass at the line of smaller Authority vessels. The FaIcon's guns spoke again and again in a close strafing run. The parked, pilotless ships burst and flared one after another, yielding secondary explosions. Of the half-dozen craft there, none escaped damage. She swooped past the deep crater where Stars' End had once stood.
She opened the main drive, screaming off after the departed Espo assault craft. She kept all shields an-gled aft, but there was only sporadic, inaccurate turbo-laser cannon fire. The personnel at the base were too busy trying to keep the breath of life from bleeding off into the vacuum. That was one advantage, a small help to her in what seemed like a hopeless task.
Stars' End's anticoncussion field must very nearly have overloaded, Hah thought; for the first seconds af-ter the power plant blew, stupendous forces had been exerted on the tower and everything in it. But the ira-mobilizing effect began to recede as the systems ad-justed.