Read Online The Han Solo Adventures by Brian Daley - Free Book Online

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.”
    Chapter IV.
    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