The Han Solo Adventures (16 page)

Han came out of the elevator at a run. The Espos there, aware that the Viceprex wished him to see the spectacle, let him pass.

He skidded to a stop at the top row of the little amphitheater. Hirken was seated below with his wife and subordinates, cheering their champion and laughing at the ludicrous Bollux as the Executioner raised another weapon arm. This one was provided with a bracket of flechette-missile pods.

Bollux saw it, too, and used a trick, or, as he thought of it, a last variable. Crouching, still holding his shield, he loosed the heavy-duty suspension in his legs and jumped out of the Mark X’s cross hairs like some giant red insect. Miniature missiles exploded against the clear arena walls in a cloud, filling the amphitheater with crashing eruptions in spite of the sound-suppression system out in the seating area.

Hirken and his people roared their frustration. Han flung himself down the steps to the arena, three at a time. Bollux had landed badly; the strain on his mechanisms was becoming insuperable. The Viceprex changed his combat-automaton’s programming once more.

The Executioner retracted its missile-arm. Articulated catch-cables extended from ports in its sides, like metallic tentacles, and two circular saws swung out, their arms locking into position. The sawblades spun, creating a peculiar sound, the molecules of their cutting edges vibrating in a way that would shear through metal as easily as through air. The Mark X moved toward Bollux, its cables weaving, for a terminal embrace.

Hirken spied Han reaching the arena’s edge. “Fraud! Now, watch a true combat-automaton at work!” He shook with gruesome laughter, all the affected charms of corporate board rooms stripped from him now. His wife and subordinates followed suit dutifully.

Han ignored them and held up the computer. “Max, tell him!” Blue Max sent burst-signals at top volume, concentrated pulses of information. Bollux turned his red photoreceptors to home in on the probe. He listened for a moment, then returned his attention to the onrushing Mark X. Han, knowing it was crazy, still found himself holding his breath.

As the Executioner bore down on him, Bollux made no move to avoid it or raise his shield. The Executioner recognized that as only logical. The ’droid had no hope. Questing catch-cables spread wide to seize Bollux; circular saws swung close.

Bollux hefted his shield and threw it at the Mark X. Cables and cutters changed course; the shield was easily intercepted, caught, and sliced to pieces. But in the moment’s reprieve, Bollux had thrown himself, stiffly—with a huge metallic
bong—down
between the crushing treads of the Executioner.

The combat-automaton ground to a halt, but not in time. Bollux, lying beneath it, fastened one hand to its undercarriage and locked his servo-grip there. The other hand reached in among the components of the Mark X, ripping at its cooling circuitry.

The Executioner emitted an electronic scream. If it had sat there and pondered for an age, the killing machine would still never have considered the possibility that a general-labor ’droid could have learned how to do the irrational.

The Mark X broke into motion, rolling this way and that, randomly. It had no way to get at Bollux, who clung beneath it. No one had ever programmed the Executioner to shoot at itself, or cut at itself, or to crush something it couldn’t reach. Bollux was in the single safe place in the entire arena.

The Mark X’s internal temperature began rising at once; the killing machine produced enormous amounts of heat.

Hirken was on his feet now, screaming: “
Cancel! Cancel!
Executioner, I order you to
cancel!
” Techs began running around, bumping into one another, but the Mark X was no longer receiving orders. Its complicated voice-keyed command circuitry had been among the first things to go out of whack. Now it charged aimlessly around the arena, discharging blasters, flame guns, and missile pods at random, threatening to overload the noise-suppression system.

The arena’s transparisteel walls became a window into an inferno as the Executioner roamed, its trunk rotating, its weapons blazing, its malfunctioning guidance system seeking an enemy that it could confront. It was hit by shrapnel from its own missiles. Smoke and fire could be seen pouring from its ventilators. Bollux hung on to the Mark X’s undercarriage with both hands now, being dragged back and forth, wondering calmly if his grip would fail.

The Executioner rebounded from one of the arena’s walls. Surviving targeting circuits thought the killing machine had found its enemy at last. It backed up, preparing for another charge, its engine revving.

Bollux decided correctly that it was time to part company. He simply let go. The Executioner howled off again, all its remaining attention focused on the unoffending wall. The ’droid began to drag himself, squeaking laboriously, toward the exit.

The Executioner crashed head-on into the arena wall, bouncing back with a mighty concussion. Frustrated, it fired all weapons at close range and was engulfed in the backwash of blaster beams, flechette fragments, and acid spray. Then, as Hirken cried a last “
No-ooo!
”, the Mark X’s internal heat reached critical, compounded by external damage.

The Mark-X Executioner, latest word in combat automata, was ruptured open by a spectacular explosion just as Bollux, semiobsolete general-labor ’droid, got his tired chassis out of the arena.

Han knelt by him, pounding the old ’droid on the back while Blue Max somehow produced a cheer from his vocoder. The pilot threw his head back and laughed, forgetting everything else in the absurdity of the moment.

“Give me a minute, please,” Bollux begged, his drawl even slower now. “I must try to bring my mechanisms into some sort of order.”

“I can help!” Max squeaked. “Link me through to your brain circuits, Bollux, and I’ll handle all the bypasses. That’ll leave you free to deal with the cybero-stasis problems.”

Bollux opened his plastron. “Captain, if you’d be so kind?” Han put the little computer back into place.

“Touching, whoever you are,” said a smooth, dry voice behind Han, “but pointless. We’ll pick them both apart for the information we want. What happened to all your pretty braid and medals, by the way?”

Han turned and stood fast. Uul-Rha-Shan was waiting there, gun in hand. Han’s holstered blaster hung over the reptilian gunman’s shoulder.

Hirken came up behind Uul-Rha-Shan, followed by the major and the other Espos, his execs, and his wife, all the trappings of his corporate importance. The air was filled with the smell of charred circuitry and molten metal, all that remained of the precious Mark X. Hirken’s face held inexpressible rage.

He pointed a quivering finger at Han. “I should’ve known you’re part of the conspiracy! Trianii, ’droids, the Entertainers’ Guild—they’re all in on it. No one on the Board will be able to deny it now; this conspiracy against the Authority and against me personally involves
everyone
!”

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.”

Han 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. Han 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 Authority 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, unsnapping the retaining strap of his holster. His opponent, squared off a few paces away, wasn’t through taunting.

“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, in amusement. “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 abruptness 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 destruction 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!
” in furious challenge. Han 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 herself 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 displeased 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 backward, 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 station. The Espo buckled and lay still. She could hear alarms jangling through the tunnel-tube layout.

Atuarre was about to go to the junction station console, 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 incandescent 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 exploding power plant could utterly vaporize the nearly impregnable 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
!”

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 discipline expected of a Trianii Ranger, and a plan began 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 personnel must be coping desperately with pressure droppages 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
Falcon
’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 angled 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.