[Han Solo] - 03(21)

Even though it looked through the viewport as though they were going to be engulfed and smashed to flinders, nothing touched the ship. Chewie barked an order, and Han shouted, “Hard to port … now!”

He sent the Falcon into a screaming left turn, then, before him, saw something that the Corellian at first took to be a huge cave, a vast black hole waiting to swallow them up.

But as he neared it, Han realized that what it was in actuality was a massive wroshyr branch, balanced across other equally huge branches.

Either by accident or design, the branch had split off from the main tree, and been hollowed out, to form a “cave” the size of a small Imperial docking bay.

“You want me to land in there?” Han hollered at the Wookiee. “What if we don’t fit?” Chewie’s snarled comment assured Han that of course they would fit. Han fired his braking thrusters hard as he neared the “cave” opening.

They passed through it, and suddenly the muted sunlight was gone, and the space before them was revealed only by the Falcon’s infrared sensors and the beams of the landing lights.

Han killed the last of their forward motion, then lowered them onto their landing struts, using his repulsors.

Moments after they touched down, Jarik appeared in the doorway of the cockpit. The youth’s hair was practically standing on end. “Han, you’re crazier than I thought! That landing—!”

“Shut up, kid,” Han snapped. Chewie was howling at him insistently, demanding that Han immediately turn off all power in the Falcon except for the batteries to power the airlocks, and to do it now!

“Okay, okay,” Han muttered, doing as he was told. “Keep your fur on ….

“Quickly he killed all the power, save for the batteries. The interior of the ship was now lit only by the weak, red-tinted emergency lights.

“So, want to tell me just what is going on?” the Corellian grumbled.

“Fly here, turn there, land here, turn off the power … good thing I’m a sweet-natured guy who learned to take orders while I was in the Navy. So what gives?”

Chewbacca urgently beckoned the humans to follow him. The Wookiee seemed nearly beside himself with excitement. He roared his pleasure and his eagerness to breathe the air of his homeworld.

Outside, something clanged against the Falcon’s new armorplating.

“Hey!”

Han yelled, jumping up and elbowing his hairy friend out of the way, “watch it, that’s my hull!”

Hitting the “open ramp” release, Han raced down the ramp, then stopped in wonder. When he’d first flown into the “cave” it had seemed a tight fit, but now he realized the place was so big it had echoes.

Back at the entrance, a hydraulic lift whined as it raised a huge “curtain” of some kind of camouflage net over the entrance. Teams of Wookiees were busily draping the Falcon in more netting.

Chewie came up behind him, and growled a soft apology for not warning his friend better about what was going to happen. “Let me guess,” Han said, surveying the “nets.”

“Those things contain either jamming nodes or they send out some kind of camouflage frequency, so the Imps can’t trace us here.”

Chewbacca confirmed Han’s guess. Local Wookiees used this landing site to receive smuggled goods, and they knew the drill.

“Wow,” Jarik muttered. The young man was staring around the “cave” in openmouthed wonder as the lights came up. The inside of the “cave” was a well-stocked, completely functional docking site and repair facility.

“Wow! This is something!”

Han still couldn’t believe they were standing inside a tree. No, not a tree, but a tree branch. If one branch of a wroshyr was this big, the idea of the whole tree was mind-boggling. He shook his head. “I gotta admit, Chewie, your people have got a slick operation here.”

After carefully locking the Falcon, Han and Jarik followed Chewie out toward the front of the “cave.” There they were introduced to a crowd of Wookiees. Han had some trouble following the conversation, because he wasn’t used to hearing seven Wookiees talking rapidly all at the same time. Chewbacca was howled at, hugged, thumped, shaken, thumped some more and generally exclaimed over with great joy.

When Chewie introduced Han as his “honor brother” to whom he owed a life debt for freeing him from slavery, Han in turn was in grave danger of being similarly thumped, shaken, etc., but, thankfully, Chewbacca intervened and provided more conventional introductions. Not all of the Wookiees understood Basic, so a lot of translating was necessary.

Three of the Wookiees Han met were relatives of Chewie’s … the Wookiee with the whorls of auburn hair turned out to be his sister, Kallabow.