Although a short may not be exactly the same as a Uint16, I believe it may serve your purposes.
You will need to use Byteconverter library, and something like this :
Sub Activity_Create(FirstTime As Boolean)
Private a(2) As Byte
Private result() As Short
a(0)=0x12
a(1)=0x08
result=ConvertShort(a)
End Sub
Sub ConvertShort (barray() As Byte) As Short()
Private bc As ByteConverter
Private shorts() As Short
shorts=bc.ShortsFromBytes(barray)
Return shorts
End Sub
in the end, the result array[0] will hold the value you want.