“Subparagraph sixteen of the Bondsman Guild protocol waiver compels you to immediately produce said asset,” it said, and advanced forward with the unswerving confidence that was a unique quality of bounty droids.
Mando moved around the corner. “IG unit, stand down!”
The droid shot him. The Mandalorian felt the blaster bolt smash into his breastplate, the force of the impact powerful enough to throw him backward into a row of barrels lined up along the wall behind him. At the same moment, pain slashed through his shoulder and down his rib cage, and he fought to catch his breath. The beskar had deflected the worst of the shot, but there would be plenty of pain in his immediate future.
In front of him, the droid was watching, perhaps still processing why its blaster hadn’t done more damage. Mando sat up, realizing he might have less than a second to convince the IG to hold off on finishing him with a head shot.
“I’m in the Guild!” he shouted, holding up the tracking fob.
“You are a Guild member?” For the first time, the droid’s voice revealed a note of uncertainty. “I am IG-11,” it added with professional courtesy. “I thought I was the only one on assignment.”
“That makes two of us.” Mando turned to survey the fortified entrance in front of them. No doubt there were more of the Nikto inside, all of them fully aware that something outside had gone very wrong. “So much for the element of surprise.”
But the IG had more pressing matters to discuss. “Sadly, I must ask for your fob. The bounty is mine.”
The Mandalorian looked at the droid, weighing his options. “Unless I am mistaken,” he said, “you are as yet empty-handed.”
“This is true.”
“I have a suggestion,” Mando said.
“Proceed.”
“We split the reward.”
Without hesitation, the IG replied: “This is acceptable.”
“Great,” Mando said. “Now let’s regroup, out of harm’s way, and form a plan.”
If the droid had an answer, he didn’t hear it.
That was when the second wave hit.
There were more of the Nikto this time, spilling out of the shadows and onto the rooftops, raining down blaster fire from all directions. Ducking for cover, the Mandalorian shot back and watched as the IG pivoted and fired bolt after bolt. Every shot was a direct hit, thanks to its programming—but even so, the situation was rapidly slipping out of control. More and more Nikto kept appearing. After a certain point, Mando and IG-11 would be too outnumbered.
Mando checked the tracking fob. Its signal was intensifying. He glanced across the plaza at the closed gate. No mistake: the asset was in there. They were so close. But twenty meters away, under a steady hail of blaster fire, they might as well have been on the other side of Wild Space.
“It appears we are trapped,” the droid said, seemingly programmed to state the obvious. “I will initiate self-destruct sequencing.”
“Whoa!” The Mandalorian whirled around, wondering if he’d heard properly. “You’re what?”
“Manufacturer’s protocol dictates I cannot be captured. I must self-destruct.”
“Do not self-destruct!” Mando ordered. “Cover me!”
Apparently willing to entertain this alternative, at least temporarily, the IG whirled around and continued firing while the bounty hunter ducked and ran across the plaza to the entry point. There was an outdated security panel with an access pad, and given time and the absence of blaster fire, he might’ve been able to run a bypass, but right then there wasn’t enough of either. A second later, a blaster bolt struck the panel and reduced it to a sizzling pan of wires and circuitry.
“They’ve got us pinned!” he shouted.
“I will initiate self-destruct sequence,” the droid announced cheerfully.
“Do not self-destruct! We’re shooting our way out!”
But something had changed in the attitude of the Nikto surrounding them. They had paused and were looking back over their shoulders. When the Mandalorian followed their line of sight, he saw what had caught their attention—a heavy-artillery laser cannon mounted on a hover pad was being pushed into position across the plaza, its massive barrel aimed directly at him and the droid.
“Okay,” Mando said. “New plan. We—”
The cannon roared, spitting a massive hail of fire. Thanks to the cannon’s hover mount, its operator had an unlimited range, and the Mandalorian knew that the weapon packed enough firepower that one direct hit would be more than any amount of armor could handle. Somewhere in the background, he heard the IG announcing that it was, once again, initiating its self-destruct protocols.
“Draw their fire!” Mando shouted. “I’ll take it out!”
“Acceptable,” the droid replied, and stepped out into the open. Immediately, the laser cannon’s operator focused the attack on IG-11, hammering its reinforced body with a nonstop volley of blaster fire. Mando couldn’t help admiring it. Droid or not, it didn’t hesitate to put itself directly in harm’s way when the situation called for it.
He slipped forward, taking advantage of the diversion to move low and quickly through the shadows around the back of the cannon’s operator while the IG continued to take heavy fire and eventually dropped to the ground. From his current position, Mando saw the opportunity he’d created and took advantage of it. Raising his wrist gauntlet, he fired a grappling wire into the side of the cannon, pulled the wire taut, and yanked it hard enough to spin the entire hover platform around, hurling the surprised gunman from his perch.
Now! Go!
The bounty hunter jumped onto the platform, grabbed the cannon, took hold of the triggers, and squeezed. Spinning, he opened fire on the remaining Nikto, the weapon pulsing in his grasp as they fell in waves. Within seconds, it was over, the last of them defeated.
“Well done,” the IG said. “I will disengage self-destruct initiative.”
Mando walked over and extended his hand, helping the IG to its feet. “You know, you’re not so bad,” he said. “For a droid.”
“Agreed.”
“That blaster hit looks nasty.” He glanced at the droid’s carbon-scored metallic chest plates. “You okay?”
The IG ran a quick diagnostic and confirmed that the shot had missed its central neural harness. The Mandalorian nodded, took a breath, and glanced down at the tracker.
“Well,” he said, “now all we have to do is get that door open.”
He and the IG stood for a moment, and then they both looked back at the cannon.
AS EXPECTED, the cannon made short work of the security gate. After a series of direct hits, the whole thing gave way with a thundering crash.
Mando stood for a moment in the doorway, looking inside. The air smelled old and stale. Dust swirled in the shafts of light streaming from above and falling on the storage crates and packaging scattered randomly against the walls. Aside from the Nikto, there was no sense of who else had been living there, what exactly they’d used the place for, or if there were any stragglers remaining.
As if summoned by the unspoken question, a lone Nikto sprang out from around the corner, blaster in hand. The Mandalorian fired, hardly pausing to aim, and the guard flew backward and hit the floor.
“Anyone else?”
Silence, except for the beep of the tracking fob. The IG turned to him. “My sensors indicate that there is a life-form present.”
Mando held the tracker in front of him, walking forward as the beeping intensified, following the signal until he found himself looking at a silver egg-shaped container hovering just above the floor. Leaning down, he tapped a release button, and the cover sprang open to reveal a small shape partially covered by a blanket.
For a moment he just looked at it. The creature raised a small, three-fingered hand and pulled down the blanket to reveal its green face, the tiny mouth and nose set beneath large, watchful eyes and ears so long they almost touched the inside edges of the vessel where it lay cradled. The mouth opened, and Mando heard s
omething like a soft cooing noise, the sound of a very small child who hadn’t yet learned how to use language.
“Wait,” the Mandalorian said. “They said it was fifty years old.”
“Species age differently,” the IG remarked. “Perhaps it could live many centuries.” It raised its blaster. “Sadly, we’ll never know.”
“No,” Mando said, stopping the droid. “We’ll bring it in alive.”
“The commission was quite specific. The asset was to be terminated.”
Mando looked at the droid, sensing its resolve—a simple matter of programming, nothing to be bargained with—and considered his options. The decision didn’t take long. He raised his blaster and fired a single point-blank shot through the IG’s cranial vault, dropping the droid to the floor. A thin ribbon of smoke rose from the hole in its steel plating. Lowering the blaster, Mando turned back to the hover pram, then held out one hand to the creature gazing up at him.
It raised its finger to his and touched it.
A moment later, they walked out of the safe house and stepped into the light.
IN HIS YEARS as a bounty hunter, the Mandalorian had gone after all manner of quarry—some violent, others timid, some charismatic and seemingly friendly—but never had he encountered anything quite like this…child.
If it even is a child, he thought. Fifty years old, yes, but still, the IG’s words echoed through his mind: Species age differently. Mando found himself looking back at the thing, trying to figure it out. Everything about the way it gazed up at him with a mixture of curiosity, wonder, and trust indicated that it was still very young, perhaps even an infant. But there was cleverness behind those eyes.
As he walked, the hover pram floated along not far behind him. They made their way across the plaza toward the escarpment, to the place where the mountains bulked jaggedly against the reddening horizon. Looking ahead, the Mandalorian already found himself thinking about the Client, back on Nevarro, and what possible use the man might have for this most highly prized asset. Of course the galaxy was crawling with valuable and deadly things that made themselves appear unremarkable and helpless to take advantage of those who misjudged them.
He looked again at the Child in its pram, floating an arm’s length behind him. The Child’s eyes gleamed back in his direction, attentive, drinking in the details of the landscape. Perhaps the Client’s fascination was more that of a collector of exotic species and he’d wanted this one as an addition to some private menagerie.
But why all the protection? Why was the path to the Child so heavily guarded?
The Mandalorian paused to survey the low, rock-enclosed caverns that stood between him and the way back to his ship. Tiny creatures—the quick, lizard-like gorvin snu—scampered across the rocks. The Child peered at them. Soon it would be dark, and Mando had to figure out how to get back. His blurrg was gone—it must have wandered off at some point to seek its own path—so it appeared they would be making the journey to his ship by foot, which meant—
He paused midstep, listening to the silence. A lonely whistle of wind through the open canyon was followed by the faint but unmistakable rustle of fabric. They weren’t alone. A shadow flickered across the rock wall to his immediate left.
He reached down and released the catch on his holster, resting his hand on his blaster.
A second later, the Trandoshan leapt down at him with a snarl, brandishing a vibro-axe. The Mandalorian twisted clear of the blade and reached out to shove the Child’s pram as hard as he could, out of harm’s way, hearing—could it be?—a faint giggle of delight from inside.
A second Trandoshan sprang out to join the first, both of them swinging axes, roaring and snarling, charging him from either side. Mando flung up his rifle to block the first Trandoshan’s attack, but the second came in low with his weapon and connected with Mando’s chest. The bite of the blade was deadly sharp, cleaving through his armor and slashing into skin, and the bounty hunter felt a bright lance of pain.
Catching the scent of blood, the assailants doubled their efforts. The Mandalorian managed to knock the legs out from beneath one of them, pivoted, and brought the rifle up swiftly from below. He hit the Trandoshan in front of him with a jolt of electricity and clubbed him across the back of the skull. When the other backed away, spun around, and ran, Mando raised the rifle and fired the disruptor, reducing the runaway to a pile of loose clothing that fluttered to the ground.
But not just clothing.
Looking down at the fabric, Mando saw the tracking fob that the Trandoshans had brought with them. More bounty hunters had come to claim their prize. How many of their kind had the Client engaged? A dozen? A hundred?
He drew in another breath. At this point, there was no reason not to expect more hunters. But with the desert wind rising and night on its way, they needed a place to stop and rest, preferably on higher ground, so he could repair his armor and treat his injuries.
They went on.
Darkness fell with a suddenness that was both surprising and inevitable. By then, the Mandalorian had found a suitable place to stop, activated his lantern, and sat down with a low-voltage cauterizing tool to treat the wounds on his chest and arm. The bite of the vibro-axe had been painful but not particularly deep, and the cauterizer sealed the flesh into a puckered, blackened soon-to-be scar—another in a collection of many.
Glancing up, he saw that the Child had climbed out of his vessel and toddled over with one arm extended, as if he sensed what Mando was doing—the pain he was in, the harshness of the healing process—and wanted to help.
The Mandalorian looked at him and shook his head. “Get back in there.”
He picked up the Child and settled him back in the pram. It was almost fully dark, and above them, the first few stars had crept into view, more and more materializing in clusters of light. He abruptly felt very tired.
I’ll just close my eyes for a minute.
When he opened them again, it was daylight.
BY THE TIME they reached the Razor Crest, it was already too late.
Coming up over the hillside with the pram still floating along behind him, the Mandalorian heard the unmistakable cackle of high-pitched voices that somehow sounded both irritated and jubilant. The language wasn’t one that he spoke, but the voices were instantly familiar.
Jawas.
Standing atop the bluff, he gazed down at the small army of brown-hooded forms as they scurried busily around the Crest, stripping the parts from his ship and carrying them up the loading ramp of their enormous sandcrawler. As longtime dwellers of the desert, the Jawas considered themselves entitled to whatever they found there, in the same way that wind, sand, and sun might claim dominion over the rest of it.
From the look of things, they’d already loaded a good bit of the Razor Crest aboard the sandcrawler.
Leveling his disruptor rifle and aiming it down at the Jawas, Mando picked one at random and squeezed the trigger, watching its brown cloak fly up in the air and flutter empty to the ground. The effect on the rest of the scavenging party was instantaneous. At once, the salvage operation erupted into a general panic, work forgotten and voices squealing as all the other Jawas scrambled for cover. After reloading the disruptor, Mando took his time, picking off two of the slower ones as the rest of the group clambered up the ramp into the sandcrawler, the hatchway slamming shut behind them.
Rising to his feet, the bounty hunter took off running down the cliffside, rifle at the ready. Ahead of him the crawler had already jolted into motion. The vehicle was a fortress, sand-pitted and seemingly ancient, and the most surprising thing about it was how quickly it moved. He ran faster to catch up to it, already gauging the distance, knowing that he needed the parts of his ship that the Jawas had taken, and that he’d do whatever it took to get them back.
Even if it meant scaling the side of the crawler itself.
Mando fired a cable and began to pull himself up the side. The vehicle swerved, heading for a rocky outcropping in the distanc
e. Mando saw the rocks coming and yanked himself tight against a recessed area of the crawler, tucking his body in mere seconds before he would’ve been crushed. The crawler scraped along the cliffside. He clutched the metal edge of the vehicle, waiting as it passed, before swinging free.
Then he had the space to resume his climb up the side of the crawler, his cape blowing out behind him in the rush of wind. The upward climb was like scaling a metal cliff, but it was the only way. If he could get to the top—
Wham! Something hit him in the shoulder, and he looked up. Rusty metal hatchways were swinging open all over the side of the crawler, and Mando saw Jawas popping their heads out, eyes glowing with malicious glee as they pelted him with bits of debris—a rusty wheel, a droid’s leg, a jagged metal sprocket. He ducked and slipped, clinging with only one hand, his feet dangling beneath him as another makeshift projectile whistled past his head, missing him by centimeters.
Mando aimed his free arm above his head and fired the grappling cable straight up. The cable found its mark and wrapped around one of the skinny metal arrays that protruded from the top of the crawler. With a grunt of effort, he started pulling himself up, hand over hand.
More debris came flying down, smacking into his visor. The Jawas’ mobile junkyard had no shortage of ammunition. Mando could hear them up there laughing, making a game of it, seeing how many times they could nail him as he climbed. But it wouldn’t be long; he was almost—
A hatchway popped open immediately in front of him, and a Jawa leaned out with an electrical prod and jabbed him in the chest. Mando felt the current shoot through him and groaned with pain, dangling helplessly from the cable. He grabbed the Jawa and yanked him loose, hearing the high-pitched wail as he fell.
Reaching the top of the crawler, Mando pulled himself up and drew his blaster.
A dozen Jawas were standing there, ion blasters pointed at him. With a unified cry of victory, they all fired at once, and Mando saw everything go black as he fell backward, down a great distance to more darkness below.
Star Wars: The Mandalorian Junior Novel Page 2
