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

Smoke and heat from both the ruined Executioner and the now-defunct primary-control ancillaries rolled and drifted through the dome, choking and blinding. There was a universal rush of indistinct bodies for the elevators. Han could hear Hitken yelling for or-der as the Espo major bellowed commands and the Viceprex's wife and others shrilled in panic.
Hah skirted the mob headed for the elevators, wad-ing through the anticoncussion field and the drifting smoke. Like all standbys, the anticoncussion field fed off emergency power inside Stars' End. The towefts reserves would be limited. Hah grinned in the murk and confusion; the Espos were in for a surprise.
He made his way down the steps of the amphithe-ater, groping along, coughing and hoping he wasn't being poisoned by burned insulation and molten cir-cuitry. His toe hit something. He recognized Viceprex Hirken's discarded belt unit, kicked it aside, and went on. He located Bollux when he stumbled over the 'droid's foot.
"Captain, sir?' Bollux hailed. "We'd thought you'd quite left, sir."
"We're bowing out now; can you make it?"
'Tin stabilized. Max improvised a direct linkup be-tween himself and me."
Blue Max's voice drifted up from Bollux's chest. "Captain, I tried to tell you when I rechecked the fig-ures that this might happen."
Hah had gotten a hand under the 'droid's arm, helping him to rise to his wobbly legs. "What did hap-pen, Max? Not enough power in the plant?" He started moving Bollux off unsteadily through the drift-lag reek.
"No, there was plenty of power in the plant, but the enhanced-bonding armor plate is a lot stronger than I thought at first. The exterior deflector shields contained the force of the explosion, all except the overhead one, the one that dissolved in the overload. All the force went that way. Us too."
Hah stopped. He wished he could see the little com-puter, not that it would have helped. "Max, are you telling me we blew Stars' End into orbit?"
"No, Captain," Max answered darkly. "A high-arc trajectory, maybe, but never an orbit."
Han found himself leaning on Bollux as much as the 'droid was leaning on him. "Oh, myl Why didn't you warn me?"
"I tried," Max reminded him sulkily.
Hah was in mental overdrive. It made sense: Mytus VII's relatively light specific gravity and lack of atmos-pheric friction must give it an escape velocity that was only middlin'. Still, if the tower's anticoncussion fields hadn't been on when the large charge had gone off, everybody in Stars' End would've been colloidal slime by now.
"Besides," Max added testily, "isn't this better than being dead? So far?"
Han brightened; there was no arguing with that logic. He shouldered part of Bollux's weight again. "Okay, men; I have a new plan. Forward!" They reeled off again, away from the elevators. "All the elevators will be out; life-support and whatnot will have preempted all the reserve power. I saw a utility stairwell in the floor plans, but Hirken and Company will be remembering it pretty soon, too. Shag it."
They rounded the curve of the utility core as Han took his bearings. They were almost to a yellow-painted emergency door when the door snapped open and an Espo jumped out, riot gun in hand. Cupping his hand to his mouth, the man called, "Viceprex Hirken! This way, sir!"
Then he noticed Hah and Bollux and swung his weapon to bear. With only a microcharge in the blaster, Han had to make a quick head shot. The Espo dropped.
"Brown nose," Hah grunted, still hanging on to the 'droid, stooping to grab the riot gun. He manhandled himself and his burden through the emergency door. A furor of shouting reached him; the others had found the elevators useless, and someone had remembered the stairwell. Han secured the door behind him and fired several sustained bursts at its latching mecha-nism. The metal began to glow and fuse. It was a durable alloy that would shed its heat again in mo-ments, leaving the latch welded shut. Those remaining on the other side would be able to blast their way through with hand weapons, but it would take pre-cious time.
As he and Hah half fell, half ran, down the stairs, Bollux asked, "Where to now, sir?"
"The stasis-booth tiers." They careened around a landing, nearly falling. "Feel that? The artificial grav-ity's fluctuating. In time the power-management rout-ers will cut off everything but life-support."
"Oh, I see, sir." Bollux said. "The stasis booths you
and Max mentionedV'
"Give the 'droid a prize. When those booths start conking out, there're gonna be some pretty cranky prisoners on the loose. The guy who might be able to pull our choobies out of the conflagration is one of them Doe, Jessa's father."
They made their way down, past Hirken's living quarters and the interrogation levels, encountering no one else in the stairwell. The gravity fluctuations less-ened, but footing remained unpredictable. They ar-rived at another emergency door, and Han opened it manually.
Across a corridor was another door, which had been left open. Through it Hah saw a long, wide aisle be-tween high tiers of stasis booths like stacked, upright coffins. The lowest rows of booths were already dark-ened, empty, the highest still in operation. Booths in the middle two rows flickered.
But down in the aisles a line of six guards wavered before a mass of humans and nonhumans. The re-leased prisoners, members of dozens of species, growled and roared their hostility. Fists, tentacles, claws, and paws shook angrily in the air. The Espos, waving their riot guns and advancing, tried to contain the break without firing, afraid they might be over-whelmed if they opened up.
A tall, demonish-looking being broke from the mob and launched himself at the Espos, his face splitting with mad laughter, hands grasping. A burst from a riot gun brought him down in a groaning heap. The pris-oners' hesitation disappeared; they advanced on the Espos in unison. What did they have to fear from death, compared with life in the interrogation cham-bers?
Han pushed Bollux aside, knelt behind the emergency-door frame, and cut loose at the guards. Two of them fell before they realized they were tak-ing fire from their rear. One turned, then another, to exchange shots, while their fellows tried to hold back the seething prisoners.
Red darts of light crisscrossed. Smoke from charred metal rose from the doorframe with the ozone of blaster fire. The smell of burned flesh was in the air. The unnerved guards' bolts zipped through the open emergency door or hit the wall, but failed to find their target. Han, kneeling to make himself as small a mark as possible, winced and flinched from the intense counterfire and cursed his own riot gun's poor sighting characteristics.
He finally nailed one of the two Espos shooting at him. The other dropped to the floor to avoid being hit. Hah, seeing that, used an old trick. Reaching through the doorframe, he placed his weapon fiat on its side on the floor, triggering frantically. The shots, aligned di-rectly along the plane of the floor, found the prone Espo and silenced him in seconds.
The remaining guards broke. One let his piece fall and raised his hands, but it did him no good; the mob poured over and around him like an avalanche, bury-ing him in murderous human and alien forms. The other Espo, trapped between Han's sniping and the prisoners, started scaling one of the ladders connecting the catwalks along the tiers of stasis booths.
Partway up, the guard paused and shot those who had tried to follow him. Han's shots, at the wrong an-gle, missed. Han gathered up Bollux, headed for the tier room.
The last Espo's gunfire had made the prisoners draw back as he climbed for the third catwalk. From out of the pack of prisoners, three shaggy, simian crea-tures swarmed up after him, disdaining ladders, swing-ing up arm over long arm along the tiers' outerworks. They overtook the Espo in moments.
He hung from the rungs long enough to shoot one of the simians. It fell with an eerie caw. The other ape-things drew even with the Espo, one on either side. As he tried to fire again, his weapon was snatched from his hand and dropped to those below. The yowling guard was then caught up by both his arms, swung, and hurled with incredible strength straight upward. He slammed against the ceiling above the highest row of booths and fell to the floor in a windmilling of arms and legs, with an ugly sound of impact.
Hall, setting Bollux aside, ran to join the milling prisoners. Overhead, more and more of the stasis booths were being shut down to power the overtaxed life-support systems, yielding inhabitants of many planets. Now that the immediate challenge of the guards had been eliminated, the recent escapees were at a loss. Many of them had been killed or wounded by the guards' fire, and many others were dead or dy-ing, unwounded, because their physiologies weren't compatible with Stars' End's atmosphere and they hadn't entered stasis with their life-support equipment. Voices overbore one another: "Hey, where are-" "The gravity's funnyl What's happ--- ....What place is this?"
Han, yelling and waving, got their attention. "Grab
those guns and take up positions in the stairwell! Espos
will be finding their way here in a minute!" He spotted
a man in the uniform of a planetary constabulary,
probably a bothersome official the Authority had de-
cided to put on ice. Han pointed to him. "Get them
organized and set up defenses, or you'll all find your-
self back in stasisl"
Han turned, heading for the corridor. As he passed the 'droid, he told him, "Wait here, Bollux; I've got to find Doc and Chewie."
As the prisoners scrambled for the fallen Espos' weapons, Han dashed into the connecting corridor, swung right, and headed for the next tier block. But as he closed on the next door, it snapped open, un-locked from the inside. Three Espos crowded, elbows and hips, each trying to be the first to get out of the tier block, as a pandemonium of fighting and shooting echoed from the room behind them.
The guards made it only halfway through the door. There was a deafening roar, and a familiar pair of long hairy arms reached out to gather all three of them back into the fray.
"Yo, there you are now," Hah called happily.
"Chewie!"
The Wooldee had finished draping the guards' limp forms over a nearby handrail. He saw his friend and hooted ecstatically. Han, his protestations ignored, was caught up in a comradely embrace that made his ribs creak. Then the artificial gravity waffled for a second and Chewbacca nearly fell. He let Han down.