Death Troopers: Star Wars (Star Wars - Legends) by Schreiber Joe

Author:Schreiber, Joe [Schreiber, Joe]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780307796080
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-06-28T04:00:00+00:00

38/Bridge

“I don’t know about you, pal, but I was hoping for better.”

That was Han Solo, as he finally set foot inside the command bridge of the Star Destroyer. He’d been around a long time and seen a great deal of strange things, but if he survived this he’d definitely have people buying his drinks for a long time to come.

The catwalk had—well, to be honest, it had almost been more than he could handle. Crossing over had been difficult enough, weaving their way along through open space with nothing to hold on to, the bowel-churning vertigo as his center of gravity whirled like a gyro with a broken ball-and-socket.

He hadn’t wanted to look down. But once the things down in the pit started shooting, he didn’t have much choice.

They fired randomly, like they hadn’t had much experience with blasters, but that was little reassurance when Han saw the sheer number of them. Firing back would have been a waste. There could have been thousands—at this distance it was impossible to say. It occurred to Han that they still seemed to be waking up, roused to consciousness by the presence of fresh meat, and their aim was poor, though by the end it had seemed to be improving. More than once the blasts had come close enough that he’d tasted ozone.

And if he’d lost his footing—if he’d slipped and fallen down into that sea of hungry bodies—

With deliberate effort, he forced himself back into the present moment. They were inside the command bridge, faced with the expanse of low-slung computer modules and navigation equipment with which the entirety of this kilometers-long miracle of interstellar destruction was steered.

It was smashed almost beyond recognition.

The screens had been punched through, banks of circuitry and sophisticated sensor arrays blasted, shattered, or yanked completely loose from their moorings, most of them flattened as if under some unthinkably heavy boot. Every step they took announced itself with the muffled crumple of broken glass.

“Looks like we finally found somebody that hates the Empire more than we do, huh?” Han asked, shaking his head. “You try the navicomputer yet?”

Chewie barked without bothering to look around.

“Okay, I’m just asking. Can’t blame a guy for hoping, right?” He sighed and brushed debris from a seat facing one of the less thoroughly demolished consoles, plopping down. “Only thing still running is the tractor beam, huh? What kind of encryption we looking at?” He reached for a working keyboard and punched in a series of keystrokes. “Guys who designed this stuff weren’t all that bright. How hard can it be?”

Something in the console chirruped, and crystalline patterns began to coalesce on the cracked screen, clarifying and sharpening into lines of navigational code.

“Hey, Chewie, I think I got something here—”

Beneath him, in response to his directive, the entire Destroyer tilted slightly on its axis. Han, who’d never flown anything remotely this big in his life, felt a kind of fatalistic good humor taking root in the floorboards of his psyche. What would the Imperial

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