“They threw salvage at you?” Kuiil asked. He wasn’t surprised, merely intrigued by what he’d just heard. “That’s interesting. Usually Jawas aren’t so quick to let go of what they’ve found.”
“They were trying to kill me,” the Mandalorian said. “I was hanging off the side of their crawler.”
It was dusk again, and Kuiil had welcomed the bounty hunter back to his homestead, along with the strange creature he’d brought with him. The Mandalorian had repaid Kuiil for his hospitality with a fascinating story about what happened to him and his ship, and a group of Jawas. Apparently there had been a chase, followed by a mighty battle, which the Mandalorian had clearly lost.
Kuiil had listened to every detail. He was particularly fascinated by the bounty hunter’s failed effort to climb up the side of the sandcrawler, dodging the scraps of metal and refuse that the Jawas were pelting down at him. When the Mandalorian told him how he’d finally reached the top of the crawler, only to have a dozen Jawas blast him all at once and fling him back over the side, Kuiil shook his head in amazement. It was a testimony to the bounty hunter’s great resilience, as well as the strength of his armor, that he had survived such a fall. Kuiil turned his attention to Mando’s bounty, who was currently occupied by a passing frog, and pointed at him.
“This is what was causing all the fuss?” Kuiil asked.
“I think he’s a child,” Mando said.
Kuiil had never seen anything like him. “Better to deliver it alive then.”
“My ship has been destroyed.” The Mandalorian made an adjustment to one of the gauntlets on his wrist. “I’m trapped here.”
“Stripped,” Kuiil corrected, “not destroyed. The Jawas steal, they don’t destroy.”
“Stolen or destroyed,” Mando said, “makes no difference to me. They’re protected by their crawling fortress. I’ll never recover the parts.” Behind him, the bounty—the Child—made an excited, babbling coo as he pounced on the frog he’d been following.
Kuiil had an idea. “You can trade.”
“With Jawas?” Mando asked. “Are you out of your mind?”
“I will take you to them,” the Ugnaught said, and before the bounty hunter could argue, he added, “I have spoken.” He glanced back at the Child and saw that the frog he’d caught was just visible as a pair of long, wiggling legs sticking out of the tiny creature’s mouth.
“Hey,” Mando said, “spit that out.”
Instead, the Child gulped and the legs disappeared down his throat. His only response was a loud burp.
“At least you don’t have to worry about feeding it,” Kuiil observed. “It seems to find its own food.”
“I’m not going to have him with me that long,” the Mandalorian said.
Kuiil nodded at the horizon. “If we’re going to get your ship back,” he said, “we ought to get moving.”
They rode all night, across whole stretches of unmapped desert and beneath an electrical storm that flung wild streaks of lightning across the sky. Kuiil led the way astride his blurrg while the Mandalorian followed on an empty lev-loader that they’d brought along with them. The odds of getting anything back from the Jawas seemed slim, but there was no other way off the planet.
By the time they observed the sandcrawler and the Jawa encampment ahead of them in the distance, dawn was breaking and the Jawas had already seen them coming. Kuiil could see them picking up weapons and preparing what appeared to be a counterassault.
“They really don’t seem to like you for some reason,” the Ugnaught observed.
“Well…” The Mandalorian watched as more Jawas popped their heads out of hatches in the sides of the crawler. “I did disintegrate a few of them.”
“You need to drop your rifle.”
“I’m a Mandalorian. Weapons are part of my religion.”
“Then you aren’t getting your parts back,” Kuiil said.
The bounty hunter sighed. With great reluctance, he set aside his rifle while Kuiil stepped forward, approached the Jawas, and spoke patiently to them, then waited and listened while they responded. He’d been right about one thing: they really didn’t like the Mandalorian and were still upset about what he’d done to them. But after a moment more, Kuiil came back with an offer.
“They will trade all the parts for the beskar,” he said.
“I’m not trading anything!” Mando snapped. “Those are my parts. They stole them from me!” He turned to them, summoning his rudimentary knowledge of their language: “Dee-jugg…dee-jugg…je-jo-so—”
The Jawas erupted with laughter, mocking his attempts to communicate. “You speak terrible Jawa,” the one in front of him jeered. “You sound like a Wookiee!”
“You understand this?” Mando flung his arm out, the wrist-mounted flamethrower spewing an orange jet of fire that evoked a shriek of fright and surprise from the Jawas as they scrambled backward, no doubt cursing him as they did so.
But Kuiil hadn’t given up. He began speaking to the Jawas again, in the same calm and respectful tone, and they actually seemed to be listening. “Please,” he said. “There must be something else, something you want, something you would take in trade.”
This time, the answer came back in words that even the Mandalorian could understand.
“You must bring us the Egg. We require the Egg.”
“The Egg?” Mando looked back at Kuiil. “What egg?”
The only answer was that same word, chanted over and over.
“Egg. Egg. Egg.”
Kuiil looked at Mando, who was looking back at him, possibly with the same thought.
It was just an egg. How hard could it be?
WHAM!
The Mandalorian went flying backward out of the cave, unsure what had hit him. The thing inside had thrown him straight into the air, and he’d hit the ground with a spine-jarring crash that flattened his lungs and left him momentarily unable to breathe. It had all happened very quickly. The creature whose egg he’d been sent in to retrieve, to trade for the parts to his ship—the Jawa called it a mudhorn—had slammed into him headfirst. It was like colliding with a living wall of muscle and bone.
From the sound of it, the thing was coming out to finish the job.
Mando managed to lift his head, eyes starting to focus, and watched as the beast lumbered out from the stinking darkness of its lair. For a moment he could only stare. The mudhorn was even bigger and deadlier than it had appeared inside the cave. In broad daylight, the massive bone-colored horn sprouting from its shaggy head looked sharp enough to impale whatever it caught. Its matted brown pelt was caked with muck and filth.
It stank of death.
And it was furious.
Mando reached for his rifle. As the thing thundered toward him, he could actually feel the ground shaking under its weight, and he raised the rifle, aimed, pulled the trigger—
But nothing happened. Something had gone wrong. The rifle wouldn’t fire. The beast was charging faster, galloping, closing the distance between them—
WHAM!
Again he was airborne, and this time when he hit the ground, the only sound was the electronic crackle of malfunctioning sensors inside his helmet. His vision came back in a swarm of tiny, buzzing pixels, a landscape that eventually reformulated to become the face of the thing as it reared up and thundered toward him again.
At the last second, Mando rolled over, groaning. He raised his arm and blasted the creature’s face with a jet of flame. It bellowed with rage but didn’t retreat, even as the flame spluttered out. He fired his grappling wire at it, latched on, and too late realized his mistake. Now he was tethered to it, and the mudhorn whipped him furiously along behind it, the wire swinging him upward until it flung him back down again. He groped for his weapons, feeling nothing but empty space. His rifle was gone. His blaster was gone. And with them, all remaining hope.
The mudhorn, seeming to sense the moment of triumph had arrived, turned around and lowered its head. It pounded its head against the gr
ound, roared, and charged.
Reaching down, Mando drew his knife.
He held it in front of him with both hands. Maybe there was a vulnerable spot on the thing’s neck, a blood vessel that he could slash or puncture, and he might stand a chance. If not, then at least he could leave this creature with a scar, something to remember him by.
He closed his eyes and waited.
And then nothing happened.
A moment later, he was aware of the thing bellowing again somewhere directly in front of him. But this time it sounded different—more of the bewildered honk of a predator that had encountered something utterly new and incomprehensible.
The Mandalorian looked up and frowned, not quite able to believe his eyes.
Immediately in front of him, close enough that he almost could have reached up and touched it, the mudhorn floated in midair. Its stumpy legs paddled helplessly above the ground as it bucked and snarled and swung its head from side to side, caught in an invisible web it didn’t understand, its horn swishing through empty space.
Mando stood there, wondering if what he was seeing was a hallucination, the result of some kind of head injury or a malfunctioning visor. Nothing—literally nothing—about this made any sense. And yet there it was, and the longer he stared, the more convinced he was that it was real. But how…?
Then he looked back at the Child.
The Child was right where he’d been all along, in the floating silver pram that had followed Mando out to the cave. But he was doing something Mando hadn’t seen before.
The Child’s eyes were closed, his features pinched in concentration, and one tiny hand was extended outward in the direction of the mudhorn. His entire body was trembling, practically quivering with the intensity of his efforts—straining as if he was using every drop of strength to lift some unimaginably great weight.
Mando realized that was exactly what was happening.
The moment lingered, until all at once the Child seemed to reach the limit of whatever it was he was doing. He fell backward into the pram while—at the same moment—the mudhorn dropped to the ground with a startled bray of confusion.
The Mandalorian saw his chance.
Launching forward, he swung his arm up and drove his blade into the thing’s neck, pushing it to the hilt. The beast roared again, but it was already weakening, staggering, all the fight pouring out of it. With a final, defeated breath, it fell back, rolled onto its side, and sank into the mud, the knife protruding from its neck. Mando fell next to it, completely wrung out.
A moment later he forced himself to stand up, reached over, and plucked his blade loose, then made his way over to the silver pram. Inside, the Child lay motionless, eyes closed. He looked as drained as the Mandalorian felt. Gazing down at him, the bounty hunter was aware of the first of a thousand questions rising in his mind, questions that weren’t going to have any easy answers.
But there wasn’t time for that yet.
He turned and walked back toward the mouth of the cave.
When he returned to the sandcrawler with the Egg, the Jawas were already packing up to leave. The Mandalorian could see the loading ramp being retracted and knew that if he’d been any later, it all would’ve been for nothing. Kuiil was waiting, and when the Jawas saw Mando coming, they turned hopefully in his direction.
“I’ve got it,” Mando said. “I’ve got the Egg.”
When they realized what was in his hands, a great cheer went up among the Jawas, and they rushed toward him, surrounding him and taking it from him. The object in question was a large oval covered in a layer of slippery, mud-caked hair.
Mando watched as the Jawas carried their prize back toward the crawler, one of them taking it and holding it up with a cry of victory, displaying it to the others like a sacred artifact. A moment later, the Jawa leader pulled out a knife and hacked off the top of the egg to expose the bright yellow fluid within it. All the others pushed in close, dipping their hands in the stuff and pulling it out in thick, gooey strands, then shoving it delightedly into their mouths.
The Mandalorian looked at them and shook his head. He walked over to where Kuiil was standing. “I’m surprised you waited.”
“I’m surprised you took so long,” Kuiil said, and examined the Mandalorian’s battered armor. “I assume there’s another story to tell?”
“There is,” the Mandalorian said.
They rode back to camp that night, Kuiil astride his blurrg, pulling the lev-loader, which was piled high with all the parts of the Razor Crest that the Jawas had returned. The Mandalorian sat in front with the Child, who was in his pram, eyes still closed.
“Is it still sleeping?” Kuiil asked.
“Yes.”
“Was it injured?”
“I don’t think so,” Mando said. “Not physically.”
“Explain it to me again,” Kuiil said, reflecting back on what the bounty hunter had told him. “I still don’t understand what happened.”
“Neither do I.”
They rode on in silence, each lost in his own thoughts. Kuiil kept looking at the Child. He had never seen anything like it, and although he didn’t doubt a word of what the Mandalorian had told him, it was still difficult to believe. Defeating a mudhorn was one thing. Making such a beast float in the air…especially done by a tiny creature such as this…He simply couldn’t grasp it.
When they reached the Razor Crest, Kuiil watched as the Mandalorian climbed down and assessed his badly damaged ship, then shook his head in resignation.
“There’s no way we’re going to get this to work without a full maintenance facility,” the bounty hunter said. “This is gonna take days to fix.”
“If you care to help,” Kuiil said, “it might go faster. There is much work to do.”
They labored through the rest of the night, reinstalling the pieces the Jawas had ripped out, soldering the wires, and welding components into place. For Kuiil, it was an opportunity to lose himself in something he loved. He had always found deep satisfaction in repairing broken things, listening to what was wrong with a piece of machinery and coaxing it back to life. Occasionally he even caught himself speaking softly to the ship’s onboard computers as he worked, like a doctor assuring a patient that everything was going to be fine.
Little by little, the Crest began to come back together. By morning, he and the Mandalorian were standing side by side in the cockpit. The bounty hunter activated the ship’s main engines, looking out as the burners responded.
“I can’t thank you enough,” Mando said. “Please allow me to give you a portion of the reward.”
Kuiil regarded him with an appreciative gaze. “I cannot accept,” he said. “You are my guest, and I am therefore in your service.”
The bounty hunter nodded, and then seemed to consider a different tact. “I could use a crew member of your ability,” he said, “and I can pay handsomely.”
“I am honored,” Kuiil answered, “but I have worked a lifetime to finally be free of servitude.”
Mando nodded again. “I understand. Then all I can offer is my thanks.”
“And I offer mine,” Kuiil told him. “Thank you for bringing peace to my valley.”
They left the cockpit and made their way down the boarding ramp and out of the ship, where the Ugnaught’s blurrg waited for him. Kuiil mounted it, then raised one arm to the bounty hunter in a salute. “And good luck with the Child. May it survive and bring you a handsome reward.” He paused. “I have spoken.”
AS THE RAZOR CREST lifted off, the Mandalorian entered coordinates into the navicomputer and waited as the ship made its calculations for the long flight ahead. He grasped the throttle and eased it steadily forward.
He glanced back at the pram, and the tiny, motionless shape inside.
The Child still hadn’t moved or opened his eyes. The effort of levitating the mudhorn had worn him out. Mando gave the pram a gentle shake, but nothing happened. Maybe the occupant was only sleeping. He returned his attention to the
flight console.
From behind him, he heard a soft cooing sound.
Turning, he saw the Child was sitting upright, bright eyes open and gleaming, watching him with the same interest he’d shown earlier. The Mandalorian looked back at him.
The Child was alive and well, and for the moment that was enough.
The Mandalorian did a final check on their course to Nevarro and prepared for the long journey back.
Later, he heard the soft rustle of fabric, blankets being pushed aside, and realized that the Child had climbed out of his silver hover pram, had dropped to the floor, and was toddling toward Mando. Something on the ship’s console had caught his eye, some small, shiny object.
Before Mando could see what it was, he heard a shrill beep, and the holoprojector came online to reveal the image of Greef Karga, standing with hands on hips, looking unmistakably pleased.
“Mando,” he said. “I received your transmission. Wonderful news. Upon your return, deliver your quarry directly to the Client.” The Guild agent chuckled. “I have no idea if he wants to eat it or hang it on his wall, but he’s very antsy.” Then, with a nod: “Safe passage. You know where to find me.”
Mando glanced over at the Child, who was busy unscrewing the ball from one of the ship’s control levers and holding it up in front of him, looking like he was going to put it in his mouth. The bounty hunter took it away. “That’s not a toy,” he said, and hoisted the Child by the back of his cloak, hearing a slight squeaking coo as he settled him in his hover pram and prepared to make the final approach to Nevarro.
—
Walking through the crowded streets amid the mingled smells and gray postindustrial grime of the city, the Mandalorian made his way back to the safe house where he’d agreed to meet the Client. He went down the alleyway, with the Child in the pram hovering along behind him, then stopped and pounded on the door.
Moments later, a sentry droid extended a long, telescoping stalk ending in a single red eye. The droid gibbered something, a combination of a question and a challenge.
Star Wars: The Mandalorian Junior Novel Page 3
