Star Wars - [Han Solo Adventures 02] - Han Solo's Revenge (by Brian Daley)

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The HAN SOLO Adventures
Han Solo's Revenge
Episode 2
Part 1
"CHEWIE, hey, I've got it!"
Han Solo's happy shout surprised Chewbacca so much that the towering Wookiee straightened
involuntarily. Since he'd been hunkered down under the belly of the starship Millen-nium Falcon welding
her hull with a plasma torch, he bumped his shaggy head against her with a resounding gong.
Snapping off the torch and letting its superheated field die, the Wookiee tore off his welding mask and
threw it at his friend. Han, knowing Chewbacca's temper, skidded to a stop and ducked with the reflexes
of a seasoned star pilot as the heavy mask zipped by overhead. He took a step backward as
Chewbacca stalked out from under the grounded Falcon into the brilliant light of Kamar's white sun.
Making temporary repairs on the damaged ship had brought the Wookiee pee-vishly close to mayhem.
Han pulled off his wraparound sun visor and grinned, rais-ing his free hand to ward off his copilot's pique.
"Hold on, hold it. We've got a new holofeature; Sonniod just brought it." To prove it, Han held up the
cube of clear material. Chewbacca forgot his anger for the moment and made a lowing, interrogative
sound.
"It's some kind of musical story or something," Han re-plied: "The customers probably won't understand-
this one either, but are we going to pack them in, now! Music, sing-ing, dancing!"
Han, waving the cube, beamed happily over their good fortune. He still retained a good deal of the
ranginess of youth, but combined it with much of the confidence of ma-turity. He had shucked his vest in
the heat of Kamar, and his sweat-stained pullover shirt clung to- his chest and back. He wore high
spaceman's boots and military-cut trousers with red piping on their seams. At his side was a constant
com-panion, a custom-made blaster that was fitted with a rear-mounted macroscope. Its front sight
blade had been filed off with the speeddraw in mind. Han wore it low and tied down at his right thigh in a
holster that had been cut away to expose his sidearm's trigger and trigger guard.
"Chewie, we're gonna be pulling in customers from all over the Badlands!"
With a noncommittal grunt Chewbacca went to pick up the fallen plasma torch. Kamar's sun was
lowering at the horizon, and he'd done just about all he could to make the ship spaceworthy anyway.
He was large, even for a Wookiee-an immense, sham-bling man-shaped creature with radiant blue eyes
and a lux-urious red-gold-brown pelt. He had a bulbous black nose and a quick, fang-filled smile; he was
gentle with those whom he liked and utterly ferocious toward anyone who provoked him. There were
few of his own species to whom Chewbacca was as close as to Han Solo, and the Wookiee was, in
turn, Han's only true friend in a very big galaxy..
Gathering his equipment, Chewbacca trudged back out from under the ship.
"Leave that stuff," Han enjoined him. "Sonniod's com-ing by to say hello." He indicated Sonniod's ship, a
light cargo job, parked on her sandskid-mounted landing gear some distance out on the flats. As he had
been close to the blast of his plasma torch, Chewbacca hadn't even heard the landing.
Sonniod, a compact, gray-haired little man with a cock-sure walk and a rakish tilt to his shapeless red
bag of a hat, was approaching slowly behind Han. He took in the Falcon's temporary resting place with
an amused eye, being a former smuggler and bootlegger. One of the fastest smuggling ship's in space, she
looked out of place here in the middle of the Kamar Badlands, with little to see in any direction but sand,
parched hills, miser-plants, barrel-scrub, and sting-brush. The hot white sun of Kamar was lowering and
soon, Sonniod knew, night scavengers would be leaving their burrows and dens. The thought of
digworms, bloodsniffers, nightswifts, and hunting packs of howlrunners made him shiver a little; Sonniod
hated crawly things. He waved and called a greeting to Chewbacca, whom he'd always liked. The
Wookiee re-turned the wave offhandedly, booming a friendly welcome in his own tongue while ascending
the ramp to stow his weld-ing equipment and run a test on his repair work.
The Millennium Falcon sat on her triangle of landing gear near a natural open-air amphitheater. The
encircling slopes showed the prints and tail scuffs left on previous occasions by the Badlanders, Down in
the middle of the depression the stubborn plantlife of Kamar had been cleared away. There rested a
mass-audience holoprojector, a commercial model that resembled in size and shape a small spacecraft's
control console.
"I got word that you wanted a holofeature, any holofea-ture," Sonniod remarked, following Han down
the side of the bowl. "Love is Waiting was all I could find on short ' notice."
"It'll do fine, just fine," Han assured him, fitting the cube into its niche in the projector. "These simpletons'll
watch anything. I've been running the only holo I had, a travelogue, for the past eleven nights. They still
keep coming back to gawk at it. "
The sun was ready to set and dusk would come rapidly; J this part of the Badlands was close to Kamar's
equator. Re-moving the sweatband he'd been wearing around his fore-head, Han bent over the
holoprojector. "Everything checks out; we have ourselves a new feature tonight. Come on back to the
Falcon and I'll let you help me take admission."
Sonniod scowled at having to turn around and climb the bowl again. "I got word on the rumor vine that
you were here, but I couldn't understand how in the name of the Orig-inal Light you and the Wookiee
ended up showing holo to the Kamar Badlanders. Last I heard, you two took some fire on the Rampa
Rapids. "
Han stopped and scowled at Sonniod. "Who says?"
The little man shrugged elaborately. "A ship looks like a stock freighter but she's leaking a vapor trail on
her ap-proach, and the Rampa Skywatch figures she's a water smug-gler. They shoot at her when she
won't heave to, but she dumps her load, maybe five thousand liters, and cuts deeper into the traffic
pattern. What with the thousands of ships landing and lifting off all the time, they never got a positive I. D.
on her. And you were seen on Rampa. "
Han's eyes narrowed. "Too much chatter can get you into trouble. Didn't your mother ever tell you that,
Sonniod?" Sonniod put on a big grin. "What she told me was never
to talk to strangers. And I haven't, not about this, Solo. But I'd have thought you'd have known better.
Didn't you check for leakage? "
Han relaxed and shifted his feet. "Next time I'll install the damn tanks myself. That was pure Walla
mineral water, sweet and natural and expensive as hell to haul-worth a fortune on Rampa, where all
they've got is that recycled chemical soup. Too bad. Anybody who makes it down the Rampa Rapids
with a load of fresh water these days is a rich man. "
What Han didn't mention, though he assumed Sonniod had concluded as much, was that he and
Chewbacca had lost all the money they had saved during those two-and-a-half minutes of fun and
excitement in the Rampa approach cor-ridors.
"As it was, I landed with nothing but the general cargo I was lugging as cover. And somebody messed up
on that, too! Instead of twelve of the Lockfiller holo models, I had eleven of them and this old Brosso
Mark II. The consignee would only accept the eleven Lockfillers and finally wouldn't pay because he'd
been shorted. The shipper liquidated right after I lifted off, and you know how much I hate police and
courts, so I was stuck with that holoprojector. "
"Well, I see you didn't let it put you out of business, Solo, I'll say that for you," Sonniod granted.
"Inspiration's my specialty," Han agreed. "I knew it was time to get out of the Corporate Sector for a
while anyway, and I figured the locals out here in the Badlands would be crazy over holos. I was right;
wait till you see. Oh, and thanks for fronting for the holo. "
"I didn't," Sonniod answered as they resumed their way. "I know someone who rents them, and Love Is
Waiting is about the oldest he's got. On my return leg I'll swap him whatever you've got and pick up a bit
of cash on the side. My cut, all right?"
The deal sounded good to Han.
They returned to the Falcon, where a variety of local trade goods had been heaped at the foot of the
starship's main ramp. As Han and Sonniod arrived, a labor 'droid came clumping down the ramp bearing
a plastic-extrusion carton containing more Kamarian wares of various sorts.
The 'droid was somewhat shorter than Han, but barrel-chested and long-armed, and moved with the
slight stiffness that indicated a heavy'-duty suspension system. It had been designed in the image of man,
with red photoreceptors for eyes and a small vocoder grille set in his blank metallic face where a mouth
would have been. His durable body was fin-ished in a deep, gleaming green.
"How's you afford a brand-new 'droid?" Sonniod asked as the machine in question set down its burden.
"I didn't," Han answered. "He said they wanted to see the galaxy, but sometimes I think they're both
circuit-crazy. " Sonniod looked puzzled. "Both?."
"Watch. " The 'droid having completed his chore, Han commanded, "Hey, Bollux, open up."
"Of course, Captain Solo," Bollux answered in a casual drawl, and obligingly pulled his long arms back
out of the way. His chest plastron parted down the center with a hiss of pressurized air and the halves
swung outward. Nestled among the other elements in his chest was a small, vaguely cubical computer
module, an independent machine entity painted a deep blue. A single photoreceptor mounted in a turret
at the module's top came alight, swiveled, and came to rest on Han.
"Hello, Captain," piped a childlike voice from a dimin-utive vocoder grille.
"Well, of all the-" Sonniod exclaimed, leaning closer for a better look as the computer's photoreceptor
inspected him up and down.
"That's Blue Max," Han told him. "Max because he's packed to his little eyebrows with computer-probe
capacity and Blue for obvious reasons. Some outlaw-techs put these two together like that. " He thought
it best not to go into the wild tangle of crime, conflict, and deception surrounding a previous adventure at
the secret Authority installation known as Stars' End.
Bollux's original, ancient body had been all but destroyed there, but the outlaw-techs had provided him
with a new one. The 'droid had opted for a body much like his old one, in-sisting that durability,
versatility, and the capacity to do use-ful work had always been the means to his survival. He had even
retained his slow speech pattern, having found that it gave him more time to think and made humans
regard him as easygoing.
"When they were manumitted they asked to sign on with me," Han told Sonniod. "They're swapping
labor for pas-sage."
"Those are the last of the trade articles we've accumu-lated, sir," Bollux informed Han.
"Good. Close up and go re-stow all the loose gear we had to move around. " The plastron halves
swished shut on Blue Max, and Bollux obediently returned up the ramp.
"But, Solo, I thought you always said you disavow all machinery that talks back," Sonniod reminded him.
"A little help comes in handy sometimes, " Han answered defensively. He avoided further comment,
remarking "Ah, the rush is about to start. "
Out of the gloom, figures were hurrying toward the star-ship, pausing at a cautious distance. The Kamar
Badlanders were smaller and more supple than other Kamarians, and their segmented exoskeletal chitin
was thinner and of a lighter color, matching the hues of their home terrain. Most of them rested in the
characteristic pose of their kind, on their low-ermost, set of extremities and their thick, segmented,
prehen-sile tails.
Lisstik, one of the few Badlanders whom Han could tell from the others, approached the Falcon's ramp.
Lisstik had been among the very few to watch the holos on the first evening Han had offered them, and
he'd shown up every evening thereafter. He seemed to be a leader among his kind. Now Lisstik was
sitting on his tail, leaving his upper two sets of brachia free to gesture and interweave as Kamarians loved
to do. The Badlander's faceted, insectile eyes showed no emotion Han had ever been able to read.
Lisstik wore an unusual ornament, a burned-out control integrator that Chewbacca had cast aside. The
Kamarian had scavenged and now wore it, bound by a woven band to the front of his gleaming, spherical
skull. Lisstik spoke a few phrases of Basic, possibly one of the reasons he was a leader. Once more he
asked Han the question that had become something of a formula between them. In a voice filled with
clicks and glottal stops, he queried, "Will we see mak-tk-k1p, your holo-sss, tonight? We have our
q'mai."
"Sure, why not?" Han replied. "Just leave the q'mai in the usual place and take a-" he almost said "seat, "
which would have been a difficult concept for a Kamarian, --a place below. The show starts when
everybody's down there. "
Lisstik made the common Kamarian affirmative, a clashing-together of the central joints of his upper
extremi-ties, sounding like small cymbals. From his side he uncorded a wound scrap of miser-plant leaf
and laid it down on a trad-ing tarp Han had spread out at the base of the ramp. Lisstik then scuttled
down into the open-air theater with the swift, fluid gait of his species.
Others began to follow, leaving this leaf-wrapped treasure or that handicraft or artwork. Often one
Badlander would offer something that constituted the contributions for himself and several companions.
Han raised no objection; business was good and there was no reason to push for all the market would
bear. He liked to think he was building good will. The Badlanders, who weren't used to congregating,
tended to find their places on the slopes in small clusters, keeping as much distance between groups as
possible.
Among the payments were water-extraction tubes, phar-ynx flutes, minutely carved gaming pieces, odd
jewelry in-tended for the exotic Kamarian anatomy, amulets, a digworm opener chipped from glassy
stone and nearly as sharp as machined metal, and a delicate prayer necklace. Earlier on, Han had been
forced to dissuade his customers from bringing him nightswift gruel, boiled howlrunner, roast stingworm,
and other local delicacies.
Han picked up the twist of leaf Lisstik had left; opened it on his palm and showed it to Sonniod. Two
small, crude gemstones and a sliver of some milky crystal lay there.
"You'll never get to be a man of leisure at this rate, Solo," opined Sonniod.
Han shrugged; rewrapping the stones. "All I want is a new stake so I can lay in a cargo and get the
Falcon re-paired. "
Sonniod studied the starship that had once been, and still looked very much like, a stock light freighter.
That she was heavily armed and amazingly speedy was something Han preferred not to have show
externally. Such display of force would have been too likely to arouse the curiosity of those entrusted
with enforcement of the law.
"She looks spaceworthy enough to me," Sonniod com-mented. "Same old Falcon-looks like a garbage
sledge, performs like an interceptor. "
"She'll run, now that Chewie's welded the hull," Han conceded, "but some of the control circuitry that
was shot up over Rampa was about ready to give up when we got here. Before we came out into the
Badlands we had to lay in some new components, and about the only thing you can get here on Kamar is
fluidic systems."
Sonniod's face turned sour. "Fluidics? Solo, dear fellow, I'd rather steer my ship with a blunt pole. Why
couldn't you get some decent circuitry?"
Han was poring over the rest of this take. "This is a no-where planet, pal. They've still got nationalism and
their weapons-in the advanced places, I mean; not out here in the Badlands-are at the missile-delivered,
nuclear-explosive stage. So, of course, someone developed a charged-particle beam to mess up missile
circuitry, and naturally everyone turned to fluidics, because shielded circuitry was a little be-yond them.
So now fluidics is the only type of advanced systems they've got here. We had to load up on adaptor
fit-tings and interface routers and use gas and liquid fluidic com-ponents. I hate them."
Han stood up again. "I can't stand the thought of all those flow-tracks and microvalves in the Falcon and
I can't wait to rip 'em out and retool her." He held up and studied with pleasure a statuette carved from
black stone, exquisitely de-tailed and no bigger than his thumb. "And the way things are going, that
shouldn't take too much longer. "
He put the statuette down in the much smaller of two piles of goods that had been stacked around the
starship's ramp. The larger one consisted of trade articles of relatively great bulk and little value, including
musical instruments, cooking utensils, tunneling tools, chitin paints, and the portable awn-ings the
Badlanders sometimes used. The smaller pile held all the semiprecious stones, much of the artwork, and
a num-ber of the finer tools and implements. The amassed goods had been cluttering up the Falcon,
stored here and there in available corners of the ship over the past eleven local days. While Chewbacca
had been completing repairs that after- noon, Bollux and Han had hauled all the stuff out for sorting and
to determine just what it was they had accumulated.
"Maybe not," Sonniod agreed. "Badlanders don't usu-ally trade like this; they're very jealous of their
territory. I'm amazed that you've got them flocking together here. "
"There's nobody who doesn't enjoy a good show," Han told him. "Especially if they're stuck out in a hole
like this place. Or else I wouldn't have all this junk. " He watched the last of the stream of Kamarians
make their way down and take up their three-point resting positions. "Wonderful cus-tomers," he sighed
fondly..
"But what'll you do with all the bulky stuff?" Sonniod asked, falling in as Han started down for the center
of the amphitheater again.
"We're planning a going-out-of-business sale," Han de-clared. "Very good deals, everything must go.
Super dis-counts for steady customers and compact items offered in trade." He rubbed his jaw. "I may
even sell old Lisstik, the holoprojector when I go. I'd hate to see the old Solo Holo-theater close down."
"Sentimentalist. So I don't suppose you need work right now? "
Han looked quickly at Sonniod. "What kind of work?" Sonniod shook his head. "I don't know. Word's
out back in the Corporate Sector that there're jobs to be had, runs to be made. Nobody seems to know
the details and you never hear names, but word is that if you make yourself available, you'll be
contacted."
"I've never worked blind," Han said.
"Nor I. That's why I didn't get in on it. I thought you might be sufficiently hard up to be interested. I must
say I'm glad you're not, Solo; it all sounds a bit too tricky. I just thought you might like to know. "
Assuring himself of the holoprojector's settings, Han nod-ded. ` `Thanks, but don't worry about us; life's
a banquet. I might even do this some more, hire out a few projectors and hire local crews on these
slowpoke worlds to run them for a split. It could be a sweet, legal little racket, and I wouldn't even have
to get shot at. "
"By the way," Sonniod said, "what's the other feature, the one you've been showing all along?"
"Oh, that. It's a travelogue, Varn, World of Water. You know, life among the amphiboid fishers and
ocean farmers in the archipelagoes, deep-seat-wildlife, ocean-bed fights to the death between some
really big lossors and a pack of cheeb,. things like that. Want to hear the narrative? I've got it all
memorized. "
"Thank you, no," Sonniod replied, pulling his lower lip thoughtfully. "I wonder how they'll react to a new
feature?" "They'll love it," Han insisted. "Singing, dancing; they'll be tapping their little pincers off."
"Solo, what was the word Lisstik used for the admission price? "
"Q'mai. " Han was finishing fine adjustments. "They didn't have any word for `admission,' but I finally got
the idea across to Lisstik in spotty Basic and he said the word's q'mai. Why?"
"I've heard it before, here on Kamar. " Sonniod put the thought aside for the moment. The holofeature
appeared in mass-audience projection, filling the air over the natural am-phitheater. The Badlanders, who
had been swaying gently in the hot night breeze and clicking and chittering among them-selves, now
became utterly silent.
Love is Waiting was standard fare, Han recalled. It opened without credits or title, which would appear
shortly, super-imposed on the opening number. That was just as well, Han reflected, since abstract
symbols would mean about as much to Kamar Badlanders as particle physics meant to a digworm. He
wondered what they would think of human choreography and music, of which there had been none in
Varn, World of Water.
The feature opened with the woebegone hero stepping off a transporter beltway en route, with some
misgiving, to a job with a planetary modification firm. A catchy beat, in- tended to inform the viewer that
a production number was coming, began. Something appeared to make the Badlanders uneasy,
however. The clicking and chittering grew louder, nor did it abate when the hero collided with the ingenue
and their introduction led to his song cue.
Before the hero had even gotten through the first of his lyrics, discord among the Kamarians was
drowning out the music. Several times Han caught the name of Lisstik. He raised the volume a little,
hoping the crowd would settle down, puzzling over what had them so agitated. A stone sailed out of the
darkness and bounced off the holoprojector with a crash. From the light spilled by the dancing, singing
figures overhead there could be seen the angry waving of Kamarian upper extremities. Multi-faceted eyes
threw the light back out of the dark in a million fragments.
Another rock clanked against the holoprojector, making Sonniod jump, and a flung howlrunner
thighbone, remains of someone's dinner, just missed Han.
"Solo-" began Sonniod, but Han wasn't listening. Having spotted Lisstik, Han shouted up the slopes at
him. "Hey, what's going on? Tell 'em to calm down! Give it a chance, will you?"
But it was no use yelling to Lisstik. The Kamarian was surrounded by an irate crowd of his fellows, all
waving their upper extremities and thrashing tails, making more noise than Han had ever heard
Badlanders make. One of them swiped at the burned-out integrator banded to Lissfik's skull. Elsewhere
on the slopes around the holoprojector, shoving, arguments and differences of opinion had erupted into
vio-lent disagreement.
"Oh, my," said Sonniod in a very small voice. "Solo, I just remembered what q'mai means; I heard it in
one of the population centers to the north. It doesn't mean `,admission,' it means `offering.' Quick,
where's the other holo, the trav-elogue?"
By then a mob of hostile Badlanders was slowly closing in around the holoprojector. Han's hand
descended toward his blaster. "Back onboard the Falcon, why? What are you talking about?"
"Don't you stop and analyze things, ever? You've been showing them holos of a world with more water
than they'd ever dreamed existed, filled with cultures and life forms that they've never even fantasized
about. You haven't set up a holotheater, you idiot; you've started a religion!"
Han gulped, pulling his blaster indecisively as the Bad-landers closed in. "Well, how could 1 know? I "m
a pilot, not an alien-contact officer! "
He took a handful of Sonniod's coverall sleeve and, pull-ing gently, led him back slowly toward the
Falcon. He heard Chewbacca's alarmed roaring from farther up the slope. Overhead, the hero and the
ingenue and everybody else at the transporter beltway were engaged in- a meticulously cho-reographed
dance routine built around the ticket kiosks and turnstiles.
The Badlanders at that side of the circle began to give way uncertainly before Han, who tugged the
frightened Sonniod along after him. A number of the bolder Kamarians rushed the holoprojector and
began beating at it with sticks, stones, and bare pincers. Overhead, the dance number began to dis-solve
into distortion. Some of the vandals-or outraged zeal-ots, depending on one's orientation-turned from the
projector after a moment and advanced in a vengeful throng on Han.
Sensing correctly that by simply refunding the q'mai he stood little chance of mollifying his former
audience-cum-congregation, Han fired into the ground before them. Sandy soil exploded, throwing up
rocky debris and burning cinders. Whatever flammable material there was in the soil caught fire. Han
fired twice more to.his right and left, gouging holes in the ground in spectacular bursts. Badlanders fell
back for the moment, their enormous eyes catching the crimson of blaster beams, ducking their small
heads and shielding themselves with upraised brachia. Han didn't have to fire at the disgruntled
Kamarians between him-self and his ship; they were giving way. "Stay up there," he hollered up into the
darkness at Chewbacca, '.'and get the engines started! "
The crowd was doing a pretty fair job of disassembling the holoprojector. Its sound synthesizer was
making simply ran-dom noises now, though at high volume. Love is Waiting had devolved to a sluggish
flow of multicolored swirls in the air.
As Han watched, walking backward as calmly as he could, Lisstik rushed in from the darkness,
wrenched the integrator from his forehead and hurled it to the ground, stamping and grinding it into the
dust as he beat at the holoprojector with his pincers.
"It looks like your high priest has split with the church," observed Sonniod. Lisstik succeeded in
wrenching loose a piece of the control panel casing and flung it in Han's general direction with a vindictive
series of clicks.
Feeling himself more the aggrieved party than the one at fault, Han lost his restraint. "You want a show?
Here's a show, you rotten little ingrate!" He fired into the holopro-jector. The red whining blaster bolt
elicited a brief, bright secondary explosion from somewhere in the projector's in-ternal reaches.
Suddenly the sound synthesizer was producing the most appalling string of loud, piercing, unrecognizable
aggluti-nations of noise Han had ever heard. The projection filled the sky over the amphitheather with
nova bursts, solar flares, pinwheels, sky rockets, and strobe flashes. The entire crowd gave a concerted
bleat and charged off in all directions up the slopes of the bowl. Han and Sonniod took considerable
advantage -of the con-fusion by sprinting madly toward the Millennium Falcon. They could hear harsh
chitters and clacks from both sides as Badlanders, having not yet vented their full outrage, began giving
chase. Han pegged unaimed shots into the air and the ground behind him. He still hesitated to fire at his
former customers unless it meant life or death. As they neared the Falcon's gaping ramp, Han and
Son-niod were gratified to see the starship's belly turret fire a volley. The quad-guns spat lines of red
annihilation, and a rocky upcropping already passed by the racing men was transformed into a fountain
of. sparks, molten rock, and out-lashing energy. The heat scorched Han's back and a stone chip whistled
past Sonniod's ear, too close for comfort, but it put a halt to the Badlanders' chase for the moment.
When they reached the ramp, Sonniod dashed up at max-imum speed while Han slid to a stop on one
knee to gather up what he could from the more valuable q'inai. A hurled stone bounced off the Falcon's
landing gear and another ric-ocheted from the ramp while Han groped.
"Solo, get up here!" Sonniod screamed. Spinning, Han saw Badlanders closing in around the ship. He
fired over their heads and they ducked, but kept coming. Backstepping rap-idly up the ramp, Han fired
twice more and fell when he dodged a thrown rock. He ended up crawling through the hatch.
As the main hatch rolled down, Chewbacca appeared at the passageway, leaning out of the cockpit with
an incensed snarl in this throat.
"How should I know what went wrong?" Han bellowed at the Wookiee. "What am I, a telepath? Get us
up and head for Sonniod's ship, now! " Chewbacca disappeared back into the cockpit.
As Sonniod helped him up off the deck, Han tried to re-assure him. "Don't worry, we'll get you back to
your ship before the grievance committee arrives. You'll have time to lift off. "
Sonniod nodded thankfully. "But what about you and the Wookiee, Solo?" The starship trembled slightly
as she hov-ered on her thrusters and swung away toward Sonniod's parked vessel. "I wouldn't come
back for my profits if I were you. "
"I suppose I'll have to head back for the Corporate Sec-tor," Han sighed, "and see what kind of jobs
there are float-ing around. At least the heat should be off; I doubt if anyone's looking for me or this
freighter anymore. "
Sonniod shook his head. "Try to find out what the job is before you get into it," he encouraged. "Nobody
seems to know what kind of run it is. "
"I don't care; I'm in no position to be picky. I'll have to take it," Han said, resigned. They heard
Chewbacca's de-. jected hooting drifting aft from the cockpit. "He's right,"
he said. "We just weren't cut out for the honest life. "
Part 2
THE Millennium Falcon seemed a ghost ship, a spectral spacecraft like the long-lost, sometimes-sighted
Permondiri Explorer, or the fabled Queen of Ranroon. Trailing sheets of crackling energy, with dancing
lines of brilliant discharge playing back and forth over her, she might have flown di-rectly out of one of
those legends.
Around the starship seethed the turbulent atmosphere of Lur, a planet quite close, as interstellar distances
go, to the Corporate Sector. Its ionization layer was interacting with the Falcon's screens to create eerie
lightninglike dis-plays. The shrieking of the planet's winds could be heard through the vessel's hull, and the
fury of the storm had cut visibility virtually to zero. Han and Chewbacca paid scant attention to the uproar
pounding at their canopy with rain, sleet, snow, and gale-force winds.
They lavished closest attention on their instrumentation, courting it for all the information it could provide,
as if by concentration alone they could coax a clearer picture of their situation from sensors and other
indicators. Chewbacca growled irritably, his clear blue eyes skipping all over his side of the console,
leathery snout working and twitching.
Han was feeling just as cross. "How am 1 supposed to know how thick the ionization layer is? The
instrumenta-tion's jittery from the discharges, it doesn't show anything clearly. What do you want me to
do, drop a plumb line?" He went back to closely monitoring his share of the console.
'The Wookiee's rejoinder was another growl. Behind him; in the communications officer's seat that was
usually left va-cant, Bollux spoke up. "Captain Solo, one of the indicators just lit up. It appears to be a
malfunction in some of the new control systems."
Without turning from his work, Han uncorked some of his choicer curses, then calmed down somewhat.
"It's the mis-erable fluidics! What timing, what perfect timing! Chewie, I told you there'd be trouble,
didn't I? Didn't I?"
The Wookiee flailed a huge, hairy paw in the air by way of dismissal, wishing to be left to his tasks,
rumbling loudly. "Where's the problem?" Han snapped back over his right shoulder.
Bollux's photoreceptors scanned the indicators that were: located next to the commo board. "Ship's
emergency sys-tems, sir. The auto-firefighting apparatus, I believe."
"Go back and see what you can do, will you, Bollux? That's all we need, for the firefighting gear to cut in;
we'd be up to our chins in foam and gas before you could ask the way to the exit. " As Bollux staggered
off, barely staying upright on the bucking deck, Han resolutely thrust the problem out of his mind.
Chewbacca yowlped. He had gotten a positive reading. Han dragged himself halfway out of his chair for
a look as another spitting globe of ball-lightning drifted out and spun off the Falcon's bow mandibles. The
ionization levels were dropping. Then he threw himself back into his seat and cut the ship's speed back
even further. He had terrible visions of the ionization level extending down, somehow, to the surface of
Lur, blinding them right up to the time of collision.
Of course, the party who had hired the Millennium Falcon for this run hadn't mentioned the ionization
layer, hadn't mentioned anything very specific for that matter. Han had put the word abroad that he and
his ship were available for hire and disinclined to ask questions, and the job had come, as Sonniod had
predicted it would, from unseen sources in the form of a faceless audio tape and a small cash advance.
But with creditors hounding them and their other resources exhausted in the wake of the debacle in the
Kamar Badlands, Han and his partner had seen no alternative but to ignore Sonniod's advice and accept
the run.
Was 1 born this stupid, Han asked himself in disgust, or am I just blossoming late in life? But at that
moment both the storm and the ionization layer parted. The Falcon lowered gently through a clear, calm
region of Lur's atmosphere. Far below, features of the planet's surface could be seen, moun-tain peaks
protruding through low-hanging, swirling clouds. Another light flashed on; the freighter's long-range
sensors had just picked up a landing beacon.
Han switched on the Terrain Following Sensors and poised over the readouts. "They picked us a decent
spot to land at least," he admitted. "A big, flat place slung between those two low peaks over there.
Probably a glacial field. " He flipped the microphone on his headset over to intercom mode: "Bollux,
we're going in. Drop what you're doing and hang on. "
摘要:

TheHANSOLOAdventuresHanSolo'sRevengeEpisode2Part1"CHEWIE,hey,I'vegotit!"HanSolo'shappyshoutsurprisedChewbaccasomuchthatthetoweringWookieestraightenedinvoluntarily.Sincehe'dbeenhunkereddownunderthebellyofthestarshipMillen-niumFalconweldingherhullwithaplasmatorch,hebumpedhisshaggyheadagainstherwithare...

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