“About fifteen or twenty of them came through here on foot,” he said, and gestured toward the trees ahead. “And something big sheared off those branches.” They went a little farther and stopped again, neither of them speaking as they squatted down next to an enormous print in the soft dirt.
“AT-ST,” Cara said.
“Imperial walker.” Mando was still examining it. “What’s it doing out here?”
“I don’t know,” she said as they stood up. “But this is more than I signed up for.”
He agreed. What the villagers had initially described had sounded like a standard gang of thieves, nothing out of the ordinary. But this was different. Since the fall of the Empire, there had been countless reports of stolen military supplies, weapons, and transports being sold on the black market and scattered across the galaxy. With enough credits, you could buy whatever you wanted.
“There’s only one way out of this,” she said, “as far as I can see. And they’re not going to like it.”
“Bad news,” Mando said. “You can’t live here anymore.”
The villagers gathered in front of the barn murmured in disbelief and confusion. Up in front, Omera and Winta were standing next to each other with matching expressions of uncertainty and concern.
Cara raised an eyebrow at the Mandalorian. “Nice bedside manner.”
“You think you can do better?”
“Can’t do much worse.” She stepped forward, spreading her hands in a gesture of sympathy. “Look, I know this isn’t the news you wanted to hear,” she told the villagers. “But there are no other options.”
“You took the job,” someone protested, and Mando saw that the speaker was one of the men who had approached his ship with the bag of credits.
“That was before we knew about the AT-ST,” Cara said.
She might as well have switched over to another language. The entire crowd looked totally bewildered.
“What’s that?” someone said.
“The armored walker with two enormous guns that you knew about and didn’t tell us,” Cara said. If she’d expected this to somehow convince the villagers, it had exactly the opposite result. Now everyone was pleading with them to stay and fight. The Mandalorian saw Omera looking at them, her daughter still at her side.
“We have no other place to go,” Omera said.
“Sure you do,” Cara said. “This is a big planet. I mean, I’ve seen a lot smaller.”
The crowd wouldn’t be convinced. “My grandparents seeded these ponds,” one of the farmers said. “It took generations to develop what we have here.”
“I understand,” Cara said. “I do. But there are only two of us.”
“No, there’s not. There’s at least twenty here!”
“I mean fighters,” Cara told them. “Be realistic.” Her tone darkened. “I’ve seen that thing take out entire companies of soldiers in a matter of minutes.”
For a moment the villagers murmured among themselves, and in the midst of it, Mando heard Omera’s voice above the others, not loud but still strong enough to command attention.
“We’re not leaving,” Omera said.
Cara met her gaze. “You cannot fight that thing.”
The bounty hunter found himself looking at the young woman who had welcomed him into their village, providing food and shelter. Her expression hadn’t changed. It was the face of a survivor refusing to give in to fear, determined to stand her ground, whatever the cost.
Mando turned to Cara. “Unless we show them how,” he said.
STANDING AT THE EDGE of a clearing, Mando and Cara outlined the plan for the villagers. “You’ve got two problems here,” he said. “The bandits and the mech. We’ll handle the AT-ST, but you’ve got to protect us when they come out of the woods.”
The group stood, listening attentively. Now that he and Cara had agreed to help them, the villagers were ready to do whatever was necessary to defend themselves—most of them, anyway. In the back, Mando recognized the faces of Stoke and Caben, the two men who’d initially offered him credits to fight for them, looking decidedly uncertain of their own ability to fight.
“How are we supposed to take down an Imperial walker?” Caben asked.
“Good question,” Cara said, and stepped forward. “There’s nothing on this planet that can damage the legs on this thing,” she said. “So we’re gonna build a trap.” She gestured to the swampland behind her, where the ground gave way to a series of ponds. “We’re going to dig real deep, right here. And when that thing steps in, it drops.”
“I need you to cut down trees to build barricades along these edges,” Mando said. “I need it high enough so that they can’t get over, and strong enough that it can’t break through.” He surveyed the faces in front of him and got to the big question, the one he’d been building up to. “Okay, who knows how to shoot?”
Silence. Nobody moved.
Then Omera raised her hand.
She wasn’t lying. At target practice, while the rest of the group potted away with varying degrees of accuracy at a row of pans and skillets hanging from a branch, Omera shot with confidence and precision, hitting her mark every time.
In the distance he could hear Cara Dune working with the others, training them on basic hand-to-hand combat maneuvers using the sharpened spears and pikes they’d made. They sounded determined, if nothing else, and that was good. In the end, when nightfall came they’d need every advantage they had, and the battle might come down to sheer willpower.
As dusk approached, Omera found Mando in the barn, making last-minute preparations. “We’ll be leaving soon,” he said. “When we return, we’re coming in hot.”
She nodded. “We’ll be ready.”
Mando looked at her, saying nothing.
“Let’s go,” Cara said, outside the barn, and he turned to leave.
The woods were almost completely dark, the night sky moonless, providing perfect cover for the operation. Mando and Cara made their way forward, their footsteps muffled by the layer of dried leaves and tree needles underfoot. Gradually they began to hear the indistinct grunts and voices of two raiders beside a perimeter bonfire in the distance.
Klatooinians.
They were humanoid, with greenish-brown skin, imposing brows, and toothy, snarling underbites that made them look especially vicious. The ones by the fire were eating and drinking—mainly drinking, from the sound of clinking cups of blue spotchka being gulped down and their increasingly slurred words. Their recent successes in the village had left them bullish and overconfident, and they’d made no effort to stay vigilant.
He and Cara stepped into the firelight. Both guards looked up, utterly startled. One dropped his cup and started to stand, but he never made it to his feet before Cara hit him, doubling him over and finishing him off with a punch to the head. Mando took the other out, and a moment later, they were moving again, heads down, running farther into the camp.
Up ahead was the main encampment, an outpost of solid buildings with some sort of blue light trickling from inside. The Mandalorian glanced at Cara, and she nodded. This was the place.
Lifting the tent’s flap, they slipped inside.
The tent appeared to be deserted. All around them, large circular tanks filled with blue spotchka cast watery shadows around the inside of the canvas, giving the space an ethereal, haunted look. Mando took out a gray charge, switched it on, and attached the blinking red device to one of the walls. Outside he could hear voices, talking and laughing, as more raiders drew near. Then, abruptly, the voices fell silent.
He glanced at Cara, saw that she understood what was happening, and the tent flaps opened again.
The bandits came bursting in with a roar of fury. Mando and Cara took them out with a combination of punches and kicks. One unlucky raider ended up with his head shoved into a bubbling pool of blue spotchka. But when the second wave arrived, someone started blasting, and Mando saw he and Cara were penned in. Getting out was going to be harder than he’d ant
icipated. Meanwhile the detonator’s timing device had sped up to an almost panicky beep-beep-beep-beep.
He turned, drew his blaster, and opened fire on the opposite wall, blowing it apart until it was weak enough for Cara Dune to smash through. “Go, I’ll cover you!” he told her. A moment later, he followed her through the hole in the wall and the entire operation erupted in a fireball behind them, big enough to throw them both to the ground and ignite the whole outpost.
Cara sat up, spitting dirt, and looked over at him. “I hope the plan worked,” she said, and then they saw the pair of red eyes rising from the tree line until it towered over them with a grinding mechanical roar.
The run back to the village was a blur. Charging through the woods, the Mandalorian was aware of the walker immediately behind them. He heard and felt the heavy thunder of its feet and its cannons blasting dirt into the air on either side of them. The trench was up there somewhere, he knew, with the barricade behind it, a landscape dotted with orange flames from dozens of torches.
He and Cara ran across the narrow walkway that the villagers had built over the trench. Among the flickering torches, villagers waited, blasters and homemade weapons at the ready. They stared back at the forest. “It’s coming!” someone whispered, and a surge of adrenaline passed through the line like an electric current.
Trees crashed, branches splintering, as the reddish portals of the AT-ST’s control deck emerged from the forest, the thing stepping fully into view. From there it looked even bigger as it marched its way forward on bent, stork-like legs.
That’s right, Mando thought. Keep coming. Mentally, he measured the remaining distance as it stalked closer—twenty meters. He could feel his body tensing in anticipation. It took another step, and another.
Fifteen meters. Ten…five…
The walker stopped.
He scowled, sensing Cara’s similar reaction alongside him. What’s it doing?
A bright light from the walker snapped on, the beam sweeping the terrain in front of it, throwing long shadows across the shimmering expanse of ponds and huts. It swung across the barricade, and then behind it to the line of faces.
“Get down!” Mando hissed. “Get down!”
All at once, the thing started firing again, the cannons deafening. Cara looked back at the villagers. “Stay there!” she shouted. “Hold your positions!”
That was when he heard it coming out of the woods—a battle cry. An instant later, the Klatooinian raiding party burst forward, yelling and whooping, spilling toward the barricade with weapons held up.
“Open fire!” Cara yelled.
All at once, the landscape came alive with blaster bolts flying back and forth. Villagers rose up, firing on the bandits as they charged. The Mandalorian aimed at the walker’s control cabin, but the thing’s reinforced armor deflected the shots so they bounced harmlessly off its outer shell. It still hadn’t budged from its place on the edge of the trench, and it didn’t need to—from there, its twin blaster cannons rained down havoc on the village. The situation was deteriorating rapidly. From where he crouched, Mando could hear screaming as the people he’d agreed to protect found themselves helplessly outgunned, and it wouldn’t be long before the walker finished the job.
He glanced at Cara. “We gotta get that thing to step forward!”
“I’m thinking,” she said. “Give me the pulse rifle!”
“I’ll cover you.” He handed it to her, and she jumped up from behind the barricade, running hard for the trench, drawing the walker’s fire. He got one last glimpse of her as she leapt into the trench and disappeared.
Come on, Cara, he thought. You got this.
The walker took another step, close enough that the tips of its feet were curling over the edge of the trench. Then abruptly it stopped again, firing down directly on Cara. She was shooting back with the Amban rifle, but Mando already knew she wouldn’t last long.
“Take the bait, you hunk of junk,” he muttered, and behind him, he heard Omera speaking to the others.
“It’s now or never!” she said.
That was all the encouragement the other villagers needed. They sprang out of hiding and rushed forward to engage the bandits, as they’d been trained, in hand-to-hand combat—swinging staffs and spears, fighting back with everything they had. As the Mandalorian rose up to join them, he realized they might actually have a chance. If they could somehow manage to take out the walker. And that was an increasingly big if.
Cara stood up in the trench, the rifle at her shoulder, and fired a single shot into the right-side viewport of the AT-ST’s command deck—a direct hit. The thing reared back as its red eye exploded in a shower of sparks, and the walker lurched forward, planting one foot over the edge of the trench, the dirt already beginning to crumble under its enormous weight.
That was all it took. Mando saw the walker’s legs fold sideways and crumple underneath it, the upper control cabin hitting the ground with a deafening crash. He pulled out a gray charge, switched it on, and started running for the downed walker until he was close enough to toss the charge through the shattered viewport.
The explosion threw him headfirst into the trench. Rising up a moment later, he and Cara looked around to see what was left of the walker, and found its formerly imposing bulk reduced to a massive pile of flaming mechanical rubble.
The effect on the remaining bandits was almost immediate. With the AT-ST down, they suddenly found themselves on the losing end of the battle. The Mandalorian watched as they began turning around and running back into the woods, bellowing with dismay at how quickly they’d lost their advantage. Across the makeshift battlefield, he heard a cheer go up from the villagers as they raised their spears above their heads in victory.
You’ve earned it, he thought, and looked at Cara. “Was that the plan?”
She laughed, still trying to catch her breath. “Something like that.”
THE DAYS THAT FOLLOWED were some of the most restful Mando had experienced in recent memory. After the smoke cleared and the village returned to its normal rhythm, Mando found himself settling into his place in the barn. Omera continued to make them feel welcome, and the Child spent hours with Winta and the other children, playing and chasing swamp frogs.
The days blended together, and one afternoon, he and Cara Dune were outside the barn, watching as the Child caught a frog and popped it into his mouth so that its long legs wiggled and twitched from between his lips. The other children groaned in delight and disgust, and the Child spat out the frog and allowed it to hop away. A moment later, Omera came out to join them, watching the kids together.
“He’s very happy here,” she said.
Mando nodded. “He is.”
“Fits right in.” She smiled and walked away, going down to the krill pond. Cara glanced over at the bounty hunter.
“So, what happens if you take that thing off?” Cara asked. “They come after you and kill you?”
“No,” he said. “You just can’t ever put it back on again.”
“That’s it?” The former shock trooper looked at him in surprise. “So you can slip off the helmet and settle down with that beautiful young widow, and raise your kid sitting here, sipping spotchka?”
Mando didn’t say anything for a moment. “You know,” he said, “we raised some hell here, a few weeks back. It’s too much action for a backwater town like this. Word travels fast.” He looked over at her. “We might want to move on.”
Cara gestured with her cup to where the children were gathered around the Child. “Wouldn’t want to be the one who’s gotta tell him,” she said.
“I’m leaving him here,” Mando said. “Traveling with me, that’s no life for a kid. I did my job. He’s safe. Better chance at a life.”
“It’s gonna break his little heart,” Cara said, and took another drink from the cup in her hand.
“He’ll get over it,” Mando said. “We all do.”
Before she could respond, he stood and left the porch, walking
down toward the pond where Omera was kneeling down with a basket for the krill.
“Excuse me,” he said. “Can I have a word?”
“Of course.” She stood up to follow him away from the others. When Mando stopped, he realized he wasn’t sure how to start the conversation.
“It’s very nice here.”
“Yes,” Omera said.
“I think it’s clear the kid’s…he’s happy here.”
She smiled. “What about you?”
“Me?”
“Are you happy here?” When he didn’t answer right away, she took in a breath. “We want you to stay. The community’s grateful. You can pack all this away in case there’s ever trouble.” Her eyes searched for his behind the visor, gleaming softly in the afternoon light. “You and your boy could have a good life. He could be a child for a while.” The gentleness of her voice seemed to blend with the general sense of peace that came out of the place, the people he’d come to know, the freedom they’d found there. “Wouldn’t that be nice?”
“It would,” Mando said.
Omera reached up with both hands and touched the sides of his helmet. He made no immediate move to remove her hands, not for several seconds. Finally, though, he took her wrists and guided them back down to her sides.
“I don’t…belong here,” he said, and glanced over at the Child. “But he does.”
Omera swallowed and nodded. “I understand,” she said. “I will look after him as one of my own.”
“Thank you.” He took a step back. “I should go.”
He was turning to leave when a blaster shot rang out, sending flocks of startled birds up from the trees, jolting his thoughts, and setting the children screaming.
“Go get the kids!” Mando shouted at Omera, and drew his blaster, glancing down to make sure the Child was safe before running into the woods, in the direction of the shot.
He went scrambling between the trees, then up the slope. Reaching the place where the branches gave way to open air, he saw the outline of a figure standing at the top of the hill, blaster in hand.
Star Wars: The Mandalorian Junior Novel Page 6
