Razor’s Edge: Star Wars (Empire and Rebellion) by Martha Wells

Author:Martha Wells [Wells, Martha]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9780345545244
Publisher: LucasBooks
Published: 2013-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

LEIA STOOD BY THE HATCHWAY, blaster drawn, braced to hit the door release. The others gathered behind her, with Han still in the cockpit and Andevid working the map utility. Han asked her, “Ready?”

The borer was buried in solid rock some fifty or so meters below what Leia sincerely hoped was the guard station for the living quarters the pirates had converted into a slave pen.

“If this thing doesn’t come apart,” Kifar said worriedly.

At this point, Leia was more concerned about the asteroid coming apart than the tunnel borer, considering how riddled the rock was with tunnels and pockets that weren’t on the map. She told Han, “Ready.”

Han leaned on the controls and the hull shook as the borer leapt upward, the laser disk slicing through the rock. Warning lights blinked in the cockpit. Leia held on to the overhead handrail and exchanged a grim look with Sian. They had agreed the borer would need to move as fast as possible so no one in the chamber above realized it was coming, but it felt like Han had apparently found a way to push the machine past its already generous safety limits.

Their comlinks still weren’t picking up any signals, but if Anakaret had kept her promise, she had sent her transmission just a few moments earlier. The docking ring and the ships in orbit should have just gotten the message warning of an Imperial force moving into range of the asteroid.

Leia very much hoped that Anakaret had kept her promise.

The borer rumbled and shuddered, then the deck swayed and bucked underfoot and the borer stopped abruptly, angled upward. All the warning lights flashed and the engines made an ominous clunking noise. But Han said, “We’re there. Go!”

Leia hit the hatch release and Kifar jumped out. He could have looked first, Leia thought, exasperated. But Kifar obviously thought he had something to prove. He fired twice, then yelled, “We’re clear!”

Sian and Terae surged out after him. As Leia started to follow, Han scrambled out of the borer’s cockpit behind her. “Sweetheart, this thing is dead,” he told her. “One of the power cells went out when we broke through the shielding on this floor.”

Leia hesitated. “But we won’t need it to get out of here.”

Han shrugged. “Probably not.”

Leia groaned under her breath and jumped out of the hatch into a chamber that looked as if it had been hit by an ion cannon. Lumas clustered near the high ceiling, pushed there by the tunnel borer’s shields. They shone down on a jumble of stone rubble and torn metal floor plates. The hatch that must have secured a large archway lay in the next chamber, twisted and mangled. Two armed pirates lay sprawled near it, unconscious or dead. Leia lifted her comlink, already tuned to the asteroid’s emergency frequency, and heard a babble of voices in Basic and other languages. Some were warning comrades of an Imperial attack, others demanding to know the heading the Imperials were coming in on; all were panicked.

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