The Han Solo Adventures (5 page)

Doc’s organization—now Jessa’s—was nothing if not thorough. They had the factory specs for the
Millennium Falcon
, plus complete design holos on every piece of augmentative gear in her. With Chewbacca’s help and a small horde of outlaw-techs, Han had the
Falcon
’s engine shielding removed and her control systems exposed in a matter of hours.

Service ’droids trundled back and forth while energy cutters flared, and techs of many races crawled over, under, and into the freighter. It made Han jittery to see so many tools, hands, tentacles, servogrips, and lift-locks near his beloved ship, but he gritted his teeth and simply did his best to be everywhere at once—and came close to succeeding. Chewbacca covered the things his partner missed, startling any erring tech or ’droid with a high-decibel snarl. No one doubted for a moment what the Wookiee would do to the being or mechanical who damaged the starship.

Han was interrupted by Jessa, who had come up to inspect his progress. With her was an odd-looking ’droid, built along human lines. The machine was rather stocky, shorter than the woman, covered with dents, scrapes, smudges, and spot-welds. Its chest region was unusually broad, and its arms, hanging nearly to its knees, gave it a somewhat simian aspect. Its finish was a flat brown primer job peeling in places, and it had a stiff, snapping way of moving. The ’droid’s red, unblinking photoreceptors trained on Han.

“Meet your passenger,” Jessa invited.

Han’s features clouded. “You never said anything about taking a ’droid.” He looked at the aged mechanical. “What’s he run on, peat?”

“No. And I warned you there’d be details. Bollux here is one of them.” She turned to the ’droid. “Okay, Bollux, open up the fruit stand.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Bollux replied in a leisurely drawl. There was a servomotor hum, and the ’droid’s chest plastron split down the center, the halves swinging away to either side. Nestled in among the goodies that were the ’droid’s innards was a special emplacement; secured in the emplacement was another unit, a separate machine entity of some kind that was approximately cubical, with several protrusions and folded appendages. Atop it was a phtoreceptor mount, monocular lensed. The unit was painted in deep, protective, multilayered blue. The monocular came on, lighting red.

“Say hello to Captain Solo, Max,” Jessa instructed it.

The machine-within-a-machine studied Han up and down, photoreceptor angling and swiveling. “Why?” it demanded. The pitch of its vocal mechanism was like that of a child.

Jessa countered frankly, “Because if you don’t, Max, the nice man is liable to chuck your teensy iron behind out into deep space—that’s why.”

“Hello!” chirped Max, with what Han suspected to be forced cheer. “A great pleasure to make your acquaintance, Captain!”

“The parties you’re picking up need to collect and withdraw data from the computer system on Orron III,” Jessa explained. “Of course, they couldn’t just ask the Authority there for probe equipment without raising suspicions, and your walking in with Max under your arm might cause a few problems, too. But nobody’s going to bother much about an old labor ’droid. We named him Bollux because we had so many headaches restructuring his gut. We never did get his vocal pattern up to speed.

“Anyway, that cutie in Bollux’s chest cavity is Blue Max; Max because we crammed as much computer capacity into him as we could, and blue for reasons that even you, Solo, can see, I’m sure. Blue Max was a piece of work, even for us. He’s puny, but he cost plenty, even though he’s immobile and we had to leave out a lot of the usual accessories. But he’s all they’ll need to tap that data system.”

Han was studying the two machines, hoping Jessa would admit she’d been joking. He’d seen weirder gizmos in his time, but never on a passenger roster. He didn’t like ’droids very much, but decided he could live with these.

He bent down for a better squint at Blue Max. “You stay in there all the time?”

“I can function autonomously or in linkage,” Max squeaked.

“Fabulous,” Han said dryly. He tapped Bollux’s head. “Button up.” As the brown segments of plastron swung shut on Max, Han called up to Chewbacca, “Yo, partner, find a place and stow this mollusk, will you? He’s with us.” He turned back to Jessa. “Anything else? A marching band, maybe?”

She never did get to answer. Just then klaxons went off, sirens began to warble at deafening levels, and the public-address horns started paging her to the base’s command post. Everywhere in the hangar, outlaw-techs dropped their tools in a ringing barrage and dashed off frantically for emergency stations. Jessa sprinted away instantly. Han took off after her, yelling back for Chewbacca to stay with their ship.

The two crossed the complex. Humans, nonhumans, and machines charged in every direction, necessitating a good deal of dodging and swerving. The command post was a simple bunker, but at the bottom of the steps leading to it, Jessa and Han entered a well-equipped, fully manned operations room. A giant holo-tank dominated the room with its phantom light, an analogue of the solar system around them. Sun, planets, and other major astronomical bodies were picked out in keyed colors.

“Sensors have painted an unidentified blip, Jessa,” said one of the duty officers, pointing out a yellow speck at the edge of the system. “We’re awaiting positive ID.”

She bit her lip, eyes fastened to the tank along with those of all the others in the bunker. Han moved up next to her. The speck was moving toward the center of the holotank, which would be, Han knew, the planet on which he was standing, represented by a bead of white light. The bogie’s speed decreased, and sensors painted a cluster of smaller blips breaking away from it. Then the original object accelerated, kept on accelerating, and faded from the tank a moment later.

“It was an Authority fleet ship, a corvette,” the officer said. “It launched a flight of fighters, four of them, then ducked back into hyperspace. It must’ve detected us and gone for help, leaving the fighters to harass and keep us busy until it can return. I don’t see how they happened to be searching this system.”

Han realized the officer was looking directly at him. In fact, everybody in the command post was, and hands had gone to side arms. “Whoa, Jess,” he protested, meeting her eyes, “when did I ever stooge for the Espos?”

For a moment an expression of uncertainty crossed her face, but only for a moment. “I guess if you’d tipped them you wouldn’t have stuck around while they dropped in,” she admitted. “Besides, they would have shown up in full strength if they’d known we were here. You’ve got to concede, though, Solo, it’s some coincidence.”

He changed the subject. “Why didn’t the corvette just put through a hyperspace transmission? They must be close enough to a base to call for support.”

“This area’s full of stellar anomalies,” she said absently, focusing back on those ominous blips. “It fouls up hyperspace commo; that’s why we picked it, partly. What’s the fighters’ estimated time of arrival?” she asked the officer.

“ETA less than twenty minutes,” was the reply.

She blew her breath out. “And we haven’t got anything combatworthy except fighters ourselves. No use ducking it; get ready to scramble. Order evacuation to start in the meantime.”

She looked to Han. “Those are probably IRDs’; they’ll eat up anything I can send up right now except for some old snubs I have here. I need to buy time, and I have almost nobody who’s done any combat flying. Will you help?”

He saw all the grave faces still staring at him. He led Jessa to one side, caressed her cheek, but spoke in a low tone. “My darling Jess, this definitely was
not
in our deal. I’m for the Old Spacemen’s Home, remember? I have no intention of ever plunking my rear into one of those suicide sleds again.”

Her voice was eloquent. “There are lives at stake! We can’t evacuate in time, even if we leave everything behind. I’ll send up inexperienced pilots if it comes to that, but they’ll be cold meat for those Espo flyers. You’ve got more experience than all the rest of us put together!”

“All of which cries out to me that there’s no percentage fighting the good fight,” he parried, but he burned from the look she gave him. He nearly spoke again but held his tongue, unable to untangle his own nagging ambiguities.

“Then go hide,” she said so low he could barely hear, “but you can forget your precious
Millennium Falcon
, Solo, because there’s no power in the universe that can make her spaceworthy before those raiders hit us and pin us down. And once their reinforcements arrive, they’ll carve this base and everything in it to atoms!”

His ship, of course; that’s what must have been biting at the back of my mind, Han told himself. Must have been. The turbo-laser cannon would never stop fast, evasive fighters, and the raiders would indeed take the base apart. He and Chewbacca might possibly escape with their lives, but without their ship they’d be just two nameless, homeless pieces of interstellar flotsam.

In the confusion of the command post, with the giving and receiving of frantic messages, she still heard his voice among all the others.

“Jess?” She stared, confused, at his lopsided smirk. “Got a flight helmet for me?” He pretended not to see the sudden softening of her expression. “Something sporty, in my size, Jess, with a hole in it to match the one in my head.”

Han tagged after Jessa in another quick run across the base. They entered one of the lesser hangar domes where the air was filled with the whine of high-performance engines. Six fighters were parked there, their ground crews attending them, checking out power levels, armaments, deflectors, and control systems.

The fighters were primarily for interceptor service—or rather, Han corrected himself, had been a generation ago. They were early production snubships; Z-95 Headhunters; compact, twin-engined swing-wing craft. Their fuselages, wings and forked tails were daubed with the drab spots, smears, and spray-splotches of general camouflage coats. Their external hardpoints, where rockets and bomb pylons had once been mounted, were now bare.

Indicating the snubs, Han asked Jessa, “What’d you do, knock over a museum?”

“Picked them up from a planetary constabulary; they were using them for antismuggling operations, matter of fact. We worked them over for resale, but hung on to them because they’re the only combat craft we’ve got right now. And don’t be so condescending, Solo; you’ve spent your share of time in snubs.”

That he had. Han dashed over to one of the Headhunters as a ground crewman finished fueling it. He took a high leap and chinned himself on the lip of the cockpit to eyeball it. Most of its console panels had been removed in the course of years of repair, leaving linkages and wiring exposed. The cockpit was just as cramped as he remembered.

But with that, the Z-95 Headhunter was still a good little ship, legendary for the amount of punishment it could soak up. Its pilot’s seat—the “easy chair,” in parlance—was set back at a degree angle to help offset gee-forces, the control stick built into its armrest. He let himself back down.

Several pilots had already gathered there, and another, a humanoid, showed up just then. There was little enough worry on their faces that Han concluded they hadn’t flown combat before. Jessa came up beside him and pressed an old, lusterless bowl of a flight helmet into his hands.

“Who’s flown one of these beasts before?” he asked as he tried the helmet on. It was a bad fit, too tight. He began pulling at the webbing adjustment tabs in its sweat-stained interior.

“We’ve all been up,” one pilot answered, “to practice basic tactics.”

“Oh, fine,” he muttered, trying the helmet on again. “We’ll rip ’em apart up there.” The headgear was still too tight. With an impatient click of her tongue, Jessa took it from him and began working on it herself.

He addressed his temporary command. “The Authority’s got newer ships; they can afford to buy whatever they want. That fighter spread coming in at us is probably made up of IRD ships straight off the government inventory, maybe prototypes, maybe production models. And the guys flying those IRDs learned how at an academy. I suppose it’d be too much to hope that anybody here has ever been to one?”

It was. Han went on, raising his voice over the increasing engine noise. “IRD fighters have an edge in speed, but these old Headhunters can make a tighter turn and take a real beating, which is why they’re still around. IRDs aren’t very aerodynamic, that’s their nature. Their pilots hate to come down and lock horns in a planetary atmosphere; they call it
goo
. These boys’ll have to, though, to hit the base, but we can’t wait until they get down here to hit them, or some might get through.

“We’ve got six ships. That’s three two-ship elements. If you’ve got anything worth protecting with those flight helmets, you’ll remember this: stay with your wing man. Without him, you’re dead. Two ships together are five times as effective as they would be alone, and they’re ten times safer.”

The Z-95s were ready now, and the IRDs’ arrival not far off. Han had a thousand things to tell these green flyers, but how could he give them a training course in minutes? He knew he couldn’t.

“I’ll make this simple. Keep your eyes open and make sure it’s your guns, not your tail, that’s pointed at the enemy. since we’re protecting a ground installation, we’ll have to ride our kills. That means if you’re not sure whether the opposition is hit or faking, you sit on his tail and make sure he goes down and stays down. Don’t think just because he’s nosediving and leaving a vapor trail that he’s out of it. That’s an old trick. If you get an explosion from him, fine. If you get a flamer, let him go; he’s finished. But otherwise you ride your kill all the way down to the cellar. We’ve got too much to lose here.”

He made that last remark thinking of the
Falcon
, shutting out human factors, telling himself his ship was the reason he was about to hang his hide out in the air. Strictly business.

Jessa had thrust his helmet into his hands. He tried it on again; it was a perfect fit. He turned to say thanks and noticed for the first time that she was carrying a flight helmet, too.

“Jess, no. Absolutely not.”

She sniffed. “They’re my ships, in the first place. Doc taught me everything; I’ve been flying since I was five. And who d’you think taught these others the basics? Besides, there’s no one else even nearly qualified.”

“Training exercises are different!” Of all things, he didn’t want to have to worry about her up there. “I’ll get Chewie; he’s done some—”

“Oh, brilliant, Solo! We can just build a dormer onto the canopy bubble and that hyperthyroid dust-mop of yours can fly the ship with his kneecaps!”

Han resigned himself to the fact that she was the logical one to fly. She turned to her other pilots. “Solo’s right; this one’ll be a toughie. We don’t want to engage them out in space, because all the advantages out there are theirs, but we don’t want to let them get too close to the surface, either. Our ground defenses couldn’t cope with a fighter spread. So somewhere in the middle we’ll have to draw the line, depending on how they play it when they come at us. If we can buy time, the ground personnel will have a chance to complete evacuation.”

She turned to Han. “Including the
Falcon
. I gave orders to finish her and close her up as soon as possible. I had to divert men to do it, but a deal’s a deal. And I sent word to Chewie what’s happened.”

She pulled her helmet on. “Han’s flight leader. I’ll assign wing men. Let’s move.”