Mando brought out the chit that Greef had given him at the beginning of the assignment and held it up so the red eye could see it, and a second later the door slid open. Inside stood a pair of renegade stormtroopers, blasters at the ready. The troopers stepped out, then glanced dismissively at the Child and back at Mando before taking hold of the pram and pulling it roughly inside.
“Easy with that,” Mando said.
One stormtrooper glared at him. “You take it easy.”
They went inside, down a narrow concourse, and through another pair of doors. Up ahead, in another, larger room, the Client was sitting behind a desk, with Dr. Pershing standing at his side. When the older man saw them come in, he rose to his feet, not bothering to disguise his excitement. “Yes,” he said, approaching the pram and bending down to look at the Child. “Yes, yes, yes.”
The Child whimpered softly as Pershing brought out a sensor and waved it in front of his tiny face and shined it in his eyes, the amber light casting complex patterns as the device passed over his features.
“Very healthy,” the doctor said. “Yes.”
The Client straightened up to look at the Mandalorian. “Your reputation was not unwarranted.”
“How many fobs did you give out?” Mando asked, thinking of the IG bounty droid, and the Trandoshans who’d ambushed him back on Arvala-7, and whoever else might have tried to kill him during the course of the assignment.
“This asset was of extreme importance to me,” the Client said, as if that were an answer, “and I had to ensure its delivery.” Turning, he went back to his desk and picked up a large, cylindrical carrier. “But to the winner go the spoils.” He tapped in the combination, and the carrier spread open like the petals of a metal flower to reveal a stack of beskar plates within.
The Mandalorian walked over and reached down to pick up one of the plates, hefting the unmistakable weight in his hand. He was aware of the Client watching him as he did so.
“Such a large bounty for such a small package,” the old man said.
Off to his right, Mando heard the sound of crying. He looked over and watched as Pershing began to push the pram out of the room. Mando could see the Child turning to look back at him, clearly not understanding what was happening, his expression increasingly fearful and confused. Then they passed through another doorway and were gone.
The door closed behind them.
The bounty hunter looked up at the Client. “What are your plans for it?”
The old man raised an eyebrow, seemingly amused by the question. “How uncharacteristic of one of your reputation. You have taken both commission and payment. Is it not the code of the Guild that these events are now forgotten?”
The Mandalorian said nothing. He was aware of another door whooshing open behind the old man and two additional stormtroopers coming in, their presence emphasizing the fact that his business there was complete and it was time for him to move on.
“That beskar is enough to make a handsome replacement for your armor,” the Client continued. “Unfortunately, finding a Mandalorian in these trying times is more difficult than finding the steel.”
Mando looked at him for a long moment, at the troopers, and down at the beskar. Then he reached for the container, sealed it, and picked it up. The metal was surprisingly heavy, and its weight dragged on him like an anchor as he turned and carried it out the door.
“This amount can be shaped many ways,” the Armorer said.
Mando gazed across the forge at her, the two of them seated in the shadows cast by the blue fire. “My armor has lost its integrity,” he said. “I may need to begin again.”
“Indeed. I can form a full breastplate,” she said, and then added: “I must warn you, it may draw many eyes.”
From behind the Mandalorian, as if to illustrate the Armorer’s statement, came the sound of footsteps, followed by a scoffing grunt of disapproval. A large Mandalorian male named Paz Vizsla was standing there. “These were cast in an Imperial smelter,” Vizsla said. “These are the spoils of the Great Purge. The reason we live hidden like sand rats.”
“Our secrecy is our survival,” the Armorer said. “Our survival is our strength.”
“Our strength was once in our numbers,” the other soldier said. “Now we live in the shadows and only come above ground one at a time.” As the man spoke, the anger in his voice grew steadily sharper and more intense. “Our world was shattered by the Empire, with whom this coward”—he indicated Mando—“shares tables.”
When the hand landed on Mando’s arm, he sprang up to meet his challenger, blade at the ready. Vizsla swung at him, his own knife coming to rest under Mando’s helmet. The two of them gazed at each other, neither one moving, each waiting to see what the other would do.
The Armorer stood up. “The Empire is no longer,” she said. “And the beskar has returned. When one chooses to walk the way of the Mandalore, you are both hunter and prey. How can one be a coward if one chooses this way of life?” She turned to Mando. “Have you ever removed your helmet?”
“No,” he said.
“Has it ever been removed by others?”
“Never.”
She nodded. “This is the Way,” and the others repeated it together, bringing a kind of unity between them, exactly as she’d intended.
Mando took a step back from the infantryman and felt some of the tension easing from the room. “This is the Way,” he said.
The Armorer turned her attention to the fractured breastplate and shoulder piece of his armor. “What caused this damage?”
“A mudhorn.”
“Then you have earned the mudhorn as your signet,” she said. “I shall craft it.”
“I can’t accept,” Mando said. “It wasn’t a noble kill.” He hesitated. “I was helped by an enemy.”
“Why would an enemy help you in battle?”
He thought of the Child holding up his hand, the strain of the effort making him tremble. “It…did not know it was my enemy.”
“Since you forgo a signet, I shall use the excess to forge whistling birds,” the Armorer said, referring to a Mandalorian weapon. “They are a powerful defense against enemies. Use them sparingly, for they are rare.”
The Mandalorian stepped back to wait. As the Armorer worked the metal in the forge, something about the crash of the hammer and the hiss of molten steel summoned memories with merciless clarity—sounds and sensations so vivid that they didn’t seem like memories at all but the events themselves happening all over again.
There he was with his parents, the three of them terribly exposed and hunted across open ground as the street exploded around them, the battle droids closing in. Mando could smell the smoke and hear the screams. He saw his parents’ faces as the world closed in around them. He felt his mother’s hands press against his shoulders, holding him tightly one last time before they placed him in a bunker, closing the doors. The final glimpse of them was reduced to a thin sliver of light before an explosion wiped away all trace that they’d ever existed—
Mando caught his breath. His heart was pounding, his throat dry as the sand of Arvala-7. He’d seen it all again—lived it again. It wasn’t the first time, nor would it be the last.
“I WANT MY NEXT JOB.”
Mando and Greef Karga were at the public house, seated at Karga’s regular table. The Mandalorian had walked in wearing his newly forged armor, made from freshly shaped beskar that still gleamed from the Armorer’s forge. The helmet and visor had kicked back glints of light as he made his way across the room.
As he’d sat down, there was no mistaking the jealousy and resentment in the eyes of the other hunters around them, all of whom had no doubt seen the Client’s reward as rightfully their own. Karga, who was delighted to raise his glass to his most famous hunter’s success, and the fortune it had brought them both, had tapped the plate of beskar he’d tucked away in his front pocket, over his heart.
“Even I’m rich.” Karga had chuckled, and then appeared disapp
ointed that his companion didn’t join him in his glee. He might not have expected the bounty hunter to gloat over his victory, but the Mandalorian’s immediate request for more work had clearly caught him off guard.
“Next job?” Karga’s face seemed to grow longer with disbelief. “Why don’t you take some time off? Enjoy yourself.”
“I want my next job.”
Karga sighed. “Fine,” he said. “I know you hunters like to stay busy.”
The Mandalorian waited. Before their conversation was over, he had accepted the highest paying bounty that Karga had to offer, a nobleman’s son who had skipped bail. With the bounty puck in his hand, he got up and walked out, determined to get to his ship and leave Nevarro as soon as possible…as if that would somehow erase the memory of the Child.
And at first it actually did seem to help.
A new mission, the new armor, the familiar rituals of boarding the Razor Crest, powering up the engines, and entering in the destination coordinates for the navigation system…all of these things were enough to take his mind off what he was leaving behind.
He almost made it.
But then he reached for the lever.
That was where the ball had been, the one that the Child had unscrewed because it was small and bright and round, and caught his eye. The Mandalorian looked down. The ball itself was lying next to the lever.
He picked it up and rolled it between his fingers, thinking again of the Child’s frightened face as Dr. Pershing had pushed the pram away, remembering that fearful, plaintive cry. As he reattached the ball, screwing it back into place, he paused, lost in thought.
He powered the engines down, climbed out of the ship, and started back to town.
“I don’t care,” the Client was saying, his voice crackling from the long-distance microphone Mando held to the earpiece inside his helmet. “I order you to extract the necessary material and be done with it.”
Mando was perched on a rooftop using the scanner in his helmet to listen in on the conversation. He’d crept up there after emerging from the alleyway alongside the safe house, where he had found the Child’s hover pram shoved into a refuse bin. Seeing it there, tossed out like common trash, eliminated any remaining doubt he might have had about what he’d come back to do.
He walked up to the entrance to the safe house, placed the thermal detonator against the door, and set the timing device. What happened next would either succeed or fail, but he already knew there was no other choice.
From that point on, there would be no turning back.
—
In the years to come, when the balladeers of Nevarro spoke of the day the Mandalorian broke the Code and signed his own death warrant, there were as many different versions of the events as there were ears to hear it.
But it always started with the explosion.
The gray charge was powerful enough to rip the door from its gaskets, and a moment later Mando was inside the safe house, making his way through the smoke and flying sparks, already taking fire from the stormtroopers (some said a dozen, some said more) who’d come running at the sound. The troopers did what they were famous for—fighting, then dying—while Mando fought his way back through the tunnel leading to Dr. Pershing’s lab.
When he walked in, Pershing was already in the process of extracting something from the Child. Mando grabbed the doctor and thrust him aside, and Pershing landed on the floor, on his knees, hands held up in front of his face.
“Please!” he said “I’m trying to save it! I’m the only reason it’s still alive!”
Mando picked up the Child and tucked it under his arm. Turning, he stepped back out into the corridor, blaster at the ready.
The stormtroopers were already swarming toward him, firing from all sides. Dodging, the bounty hunter drew back, fired, and disappeared into the shadows. He could hear more troopers running down through the adjoining corridor, conferring with one another, determined to flush him out. A volley of blaster fire tore through the hallway. A shot struck the wall beside his head, and he felt the Child flinch in his arms.
The Mandalorian fired back, then turned and saw a trooper in front of him preparing to shoot. He pointed the prongs at the end of his disruptor rifle at the attacker’s breastplate and sent a crackling burst of electricity through his armor. Aiming at the second trooper, behind him, the bounty hunter blasted him with his flamethrower and sent him backward, howling.
Still they kept coming. At the end of the hallway, he cut back the way he’d entered, pausing to listen to the footsteps of more troopers, then taking them out. By the time he’d reached the Client’s office, where he’d first accepted the beskar, he found himself surrounded.
“Freeze!”
“Don’t move!”
“Hands up!”
“Drop the blaster!”
The Mandalorian felt the weight of the Child in his arms, heard him whimper, saw the gleaming eyes moving to look up at him. Slowly, he lowered his weapon.
“Wait,” he said. “What I’m holding is very valuable. Here…”
He knelt down and placed his blaster pistol on the floor in front of him, and as the stormtroopers came in closer…
Whistling birds.
The tiny projectiles burst out of his gauntlet, spiraling and corkscrewing in a dozen different directions at once, cutting through the troopers with lethal precision. Within seconds, they had all dropped to the floor.
Mando stepped over their bodies and kept moving.
All across Nevarro, in every cantina and on every street corner, every bounty hunter’s fob began blinking red.
Emerging from the safe house and into the open, the Mandalorian didn’t need to look around to sense the net closing around him. He recognized the footsteps of his competitors, heard the high-pitched electronic alerts going off, pinging off the walls of the city. The atmosphere seemed to constrict around him, as if the air itself was a web. At the far end of the street, he saw Greef Karga waiting for him, his old friend’s hands spread in a gesture of false pleasantry.
“Welcome back, Mando!” Karga exclaimed, and then, with all his pretense draining away: “Now put the package down.”
The Mandalorian didn’t move. “Step aside,” he said, aware of the sheer scope of firepower pointed in his direction from all sides. No one moved. To his right, perhaps a meter away, there was a slight humming sound coming from a commercial speeder piloted by a frightened-looking R6 unit. “I’m going to my ship.”
“You put the bounty down,” Karga said, “and perhaps I’ll let you pass.”
“The kid’s coming with me.”
“If you truly care about the kid,” Karga replied, “then you’ll put it on the speeder, and we’ll discuss terms.”
This was the standard back-and-forth, and Mando knew what his next question was expected to be. “How do I know I can trust you?”
“Because I’m your only hope,” Karga replied, with the utter confidence of someone who completely believed every word he was saying.
It seemed that Greef Karga had flattered himself into believing that he knew Mando, and could predict what the Mandalorian would do, what he would choose, and how he would react. The Mandalorian looked at Karga and waited, letting the moment draw out.
Then, in a single, fluid motion, he leapt into the speeder, flipping his body to protect the Child, and started firing, taking out two of the nearest bounty hunters in the time that it took to land on the speeder’s inside deck. The element of surprise was just enough for him to get the attention of the speeder droid.
“Drive!” Mando told it, and when the droid beeped a panicked refusal, he pointed his blaster at it. “Drive!”
The droid whooped, and the speeder burst into motion, careening down the street while Mando kept shooting, keeping the Child close to him, taking out hunters on either side—then switching over to the disruptor rifle to obliterate those last few before they could get in a shot. Somewhere Karga was roaring at them, somewhat absurdly, not to shoot
the target. Everyone seemed to be shooting everywhere. At the far end of the street, the speeder finally collided with a pile of rubble, jerking to a halt, and from inside, Mando heard its thrusters die with a final hiss.
He raised his head, rifle at the ready. He saw Karga, the man very close to him, flanked by more hunters, nodding at the disruptor with genuine appreciation.
“That’s one impressive weapon,” the Guild agent said.
Mando didn’t answer. He felt the Child stirring again in his arms. The adrenaline spike that had gotten him this far had begun to ebb. He’d taken the element of surprise as far as he could, and what would happen next was anyone’s guess.
“Here’s what I’m gonna do,” Mando said. “I’m gonna walk to my ship with the kid, and you’re going to let it happen.”
“No,” Karga said, “how about this. We take the kid, and if you try to stop us, we kill you and we strip your body for parts.” This time, there was no sense of expectation in Karga’s voice, no hint of trust or confidence. He was prepared to shoot, as were all the other hunters surrounding him.
Cornered, the balladeers of Nevarro would say, when they spoke of it, the Mandalorian saw no way out. All that he had fought for, risked his life for, was about to come to an end as a consequence of his foolish defiance, the recklessness of his sin—
The next explosion, when it struck, came from above.
Mando looked up, as startled as everyone else to see heavily armored figures flying over the rooftops of the city. His eyes widened as he recognized who they were.
His fellow Mandalorians, their jet packs carrying them over the mob below, fired down at the hunters, sending them scattering. As they descended, Mando recognized Paz Vizsla, the Mandalorian soldier who’d challenged and confronted him at knifepoint by the Armorer’s forge. Vizsla and several others had set up a tightly organized fire team that was forcing the bounty hunters backward, creating a pathway of escape.
“Get out of here!” he told Mando, shouting to be heard over the roar of heavy blaster fire. “We’ll hold them off!”
Star Wars: The Mandalorian Junior Novel Page 4
