Saga - PT Interlude - Mandalore (Blood and Shadows short story) - OCs, Mandalorians [obviously]

Guess who's back?
Back again?
Hanna's Back.
Tell some friends.
Ewok Poet, Chyntuck, Amethyst, Findswoman and I'm sorry if I forgot anyone.


For new readers, welcome! This is a short sequel story to a fic I've already written and put here on the boards that serves a little extra character development and promises to be fun. I would recommend reading the first story before this one. You don't have to, of course, but it would help give this story a good deal more context. Read the original story here!

For my returning readers, I said I'd be putting a short story to Mandalore, and of course it wound up spiraling outward and away above my original vision. It'll go up over this weekend in a few different parts, so expect a few really long posts and check back frequently to see if there's been an update!

For everyone, this is going to be a more character-driven story with a few action sequences and some fun cameos, as well as my attempts to weld together some of the messy continuity revolving around Mandalore and the people who live there. Expect some laughs, some smiles, maybe a tear or two. My OCs are where my stories come from, and I'm excited to see where they take things from here.

[insert story crawl here]

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Interlude: Mandalore

The Arbiter bucked as it hit an air pocket and the turbulence caused it to sheer to one side. Hanna Shirid had to adjust the course with a forcible effort against her flight controls, chopping back on the throttle and easing the nose downward out of the turbulence. The boxy converted freighter bobbed and dropped out of the air pocket, steadying back up after a moment. Loronars were not the most stable or aerodynamic of starships, and though the Arbiter had been heavily modified, its hull had not changed enough to make it any more stable while in flight.

She sighed and shook her head. Her hand nipped to her mouth to remove her cigarra, then retreated when she remembered, belatedly, that she was not smoking one. “You know,” She said instead, “In a decent ship, this sort of thing wouldn't be a problem.”

“It is not a problem.” Her crewmate, co-pilot, and adoptive father T'ocs Le'tim said. He was sitting back in his chair, hands away from the controls and folded in his lap, watching her work. This was his ship, but he was letting her fly it and use it for all of her work, making it for all intents and purposes hers. Except, to make it such, she had to earn it. Which was why she was making the descent into Mandalorian aerospace without his assistance or guidance beyond giving her the initial course. “It is part of how the ship flies. You have to accept what she is, and not wish for something else, or you will never learn to fly her properly.”

“And that's another thing,” Hanna said, pointing at him for a brief second before returning her hand to the flight stick. “Since when are starships called she? Isn't it a little strange if every single ship out there is female?”

“Only if you have a mind to be offended by nonsensical things.” T'ocs was not an intense man, at least not on the outside. His tone was level, his expression slack, no matter whether he was speaking a rebuke, or dispensing praise. “A starship is a lady, not a female. She has to be treated right and respected, even loved. She will always bring you home, she might even be your home. But a starship that is not treated right is a starship that will fall to pieces at the worst possible time.”

Hanna shook her head and rolled her eyes. “Whatever.”

T'ocs' voice took on a slightly wistful, distant tone. “You will understand, someday.”

“Maybe, maybe not.” She turned and grimaced at the navigation screen. “Is that course right? It's just... a straight line.”

“Mandalorian airspace is not busy over this part of the planet. Nor most of the planet, actually.” T'ocs was gazing out through the cockpit window now. Ahead of them was mostly clouds at this height, but between breaks in the gray and white condensation particles, they could begin to see the planet below.

“Whoa.” Hanna squinted toward the window, then frowned as she looked back at the navigation board. “Is... it all desert?”

“A good portion of it. The ecosystem here used to be verdant and green, a veritable jungle paradise. But war, as you can see, leaves its scars; over time many parts of the planet became as you see it now, a sea of white sand and glass.”

“Who did it? And why?”

“No one knows for sure. The most common story is that it was the Jedi, as revenge for the times Mandalore allied itself with the Sith army. Others think it was the Sith themselves to remove the threat we present. A few say it was an industrial accident of epic proportions, an attempt at strip mining that went terribly wrong. It is my opinion that the answer is somewhere between all three.”

“Strip mining the Mandalorian iron, right, what my armor is made of? What did you call it, bestar?”

“Beskar, and yes. Mandalore's greatest strength, and its greatest failing. It gives us strong tools, strong weapons, but it paints a target on us as well.” T'ocs's forehead furrowed a bit as the planet's surface came into closer view, an endless sea of white dotted with black hills and rocks. “The number of powers who came here looking to gain beskar for themselves cannot be counted. Criminals, businessmen, traders, smugglers, officials of innumerable governments and even galactic imperium.”

“And now? The Empire is here, isn't it.”

“Of course. As pragmatic as the Emperor is, you do not think he would leave the planet here with vast mineral resources still untapped? Not when he can horde all of the beskar for himself and his soldiers and leave those who live here with less than nothing.”

Hanna looked at him out of the corner of her eye. “Some people might call that treasonous talk, T'ocs.”

“Others may call it the truth.” He turned to look at her squarely. “The Empire is not a utopia, Hanna, you know that.”

“Yeah.” Hanna sniffed, twitching her nose and now very focused on flying in a straight line. “Yeah.”

“No government is perfect. My team worked for the Empire because the Empire paid, and because the people they wanted us to kill were all worse than they were. Now, with this list that Vader gave us, I have no idea who any of these people are, if they deserve it, or if they are just loose ends Vader wants cut off.”

“So what do you suggest we do about it?” Hanna asked, turning to look at him. “Huh, T'ocs? What?”

T'ocs shook his head. “Right now, we follow our orders.”

Hanna shook her head as she turned back to the window and the controls. “I knew you'd say that.”

“Then why did you ask?”

“Because I thought you might have more to say, that you might suggest something we could do to change our fate. Apparently not.”

They were both silent for a long few moments, each alone with their own thoughts. The scarred surface of the planet Mandalore passed along beneath them, the inhospitable dunes of crystallized fragments of carbon and various mineral elements a dull, smoky white. Here and there, the surface bore massive craters kilometers wide, signs of a great battle once waged here, there, above or perhaps below. Small, cube-shaped structures dotted the horizon, outposts of civilization in a hostile environment. Those were the bastions of the New Mandalorian faction, one that had been reduced to scrabbling for diplomatic scraps by the onset of the Clone Wars and finally disintegrated in a bloody uprising, its remains left to bleach in the harsh sun. T'ocs had told Hanna about some of it on their way to the planet.

“I can't believe that people actually chose to live out here.” Hanna shook her head as they came into view of the old capital city, Sundari, a massive dome that rose up from the sand with all of the aesthetic subtlety of a pimple. “I mean, it's a desert, it's almost completely flat and lifeless, there's not even a spaceport except for the one they built. Why go to all this trouble?”

“Duchess Satine and her administration thought that the best way to serve Mandalore's future was to abandon its past.” If T'ocs had ever sounded disgusted with something, he did when he spoke of Satine and those who had come before her to set up her government. “Thus, they built their capital in the middle of one of the largest deserts on the planet, because no one else had been stupid enough to do so.”

“It must have been enormously expensive.”

“I do not recall. I do know that few go there now, except for those who have business to attend to. It is an Imperial headquarters here, or was when I was last here. Things may have changed.”

“We aren't going there.” Hanna pointed out what T'ocs already knew. “That's not our course. So where are we going?”

“To find someone who can re-fit my armor to you. Beskar'gam forging is no common practice, especially with the Empire occupying the planet and monitoring all mining. Having an existing set adjusted, however, should be an easier prospect.”

“But where would we go to do something like that in this barren wasteland? There's nothing out there!”

“Not here, no. Keep flying in the direction instructed, and we will find something worth coming here for.” T'ocs folded his arms across his chest. “If he is still alive.”

* * *

Mandalore was not entirely desert, as Hanna found out. Empty, barren wastes gave way to scrubby brush and rolling hills the further they flew along their course, and the white sand turned to brown and black dirt, scrubby brown and green grass waving in the wind. Trees began appearing, not enough to make a forest, but enough to make it seem like less of a desolate wasteland than it had before. Hills and dunes became short, squat mountains, and there was a river or two down there now, as well, winding through the hills and leaving patches of greenery in their wake.

Signs of civilization were starting to spring up as well. Small homesteads sat along clusters of woods or in the midst of cultivated land, and a town or two sat along the river, with boats bobbing along in the water nearby. There were no large cities, at least not in this part of the planet, the populace spread out and rather sparse even with the increase viability of living off of the land.

“Are there not a lot of people here, or am I just not seeing them?”

“Most of the people have moved toward the cities or the mines.” T'ocs said. He had slumped downward in his seat to take some of the pressure off of his prosthetics. Sitting down for a long time tended to jam the medical prosthesis up into his torso at a rather uncomfortable angle. “The Empire has monopolized the only profitable businesses on the planet, most of the ordinary citizens have gone to where the jobs are. Those who are more stubborn and independent live out here outside of the Empire's immediate line of sight.”

“Doing things like armor forging?”

“And weapons design, and mercenary work, and even plotting for retaking the planet. It takes a certain sort of being to become a Mandalorian warrior, and that is not one likely to knuckle under Imperial rule.”

Hanna pursed her lips and nodded. “So, what about that makes you think they'll do business with us? We work for the Empire pretty much directly, Darth Vader especially.”

“Because when your people are poor and the only other way to earn a living is to go down into the beskar mines, you brush over the allegiances ner vode may have off-planet.”

“Ner what?”

“Brothers or siblings.”

“Ah.” Hanna paused for a moment to sigh. “I have a feeling I'm going to be learning a lot on this trip.”

“You are adopted into the culture, Hanna, learning about it must happen at some point.”

The navigation system began to beep at them. Hanna leaned over and looked at it, then looked at T'ocs. “Looks like we're here, wherever here is.”

“There should be a small homestead near here, it will have a small lake nearby. Find a spot near it where you will not scare off the livestock and set us down.”

Hanna chopped back on the throttle and brought the Arbiter down lower, descending in a slow, shallow spiral. At the center of the spiral, not visible through the window but showing up on the scanners as they got closer to the ground, was a small cluster of buildings, a central house that was partially built into the side of a hill, and smaller block-like structures arranged around it in a random array. There were a few acres of cultivated farmland off to the polar north of the main house, a small, dirty lake to its immediate north, and a corral of some sort to the west with a connected barn or animal nursery. Hanna steered away from those places and set down to the east of the main house, in a broad, flat part of land.

She had to remember the checklist. Chop out the thrust, cut in the repulsorlifts, pull back out of the dive and level off, lower the landing skids, shut down the shields and pray that nothing went wrong. The Arbiter had never fully recovered from crashing in their last mission, despite all of T'ocs' efforts and the work of a fully-staffed Imperial mechanic team aboard a Star Destroyer. Sometimes, things just stopped working. In flight or in space, it was not hard to correct it with a simple power shunt or system reset. But on takeoff and landing, it took only a few seconds worth of power loss for the ship to go crashing to the ground.

Of course, Hanna being the one to fly the ship this time around guaranteed that something was going to go wrong. She had just extended the landing skids, about ten meters from the surface of the planet, when the repulsorlifts cut out. The ship dropped like a stone the whole ten meters to the surface, Hanna frantically trying to restore the system and T'ocs strapping himself into his crash webbing. He had the clasps done up just in time for the impact.

The lurch was tremendous. Hanna fell out of her seat, collapsing across the control board before falling to the floor. T'ocs' head rocked back and forth and he grimaced, but the crash webbing kept him in place. The ship itself groaned and banged about, the sounds of metal straining against metal angry and audible. Somewhere, back behind them in the bowels of the ship's internal workings, something clattered loose and made a series of loud noises as it made its way to join Hanna on the floor. Alarms started going off across the control board in front of them.

Hanna got up on her knees and looked over the control board. “We blew one of the pneumatic drives on the front landing skid and I think something shook loose on the number two engine cowling. And whatever that banging noise was.”

“Probably the repulsor drive blowing up. Again.” T'ocs grunted as he unstrapped and got to his feet. He was unsteady and hesitant, but not because of the crash. Having the bottom half of his body replaced with artificial hips and two stiff, unwieldy prosthetic legs had lowered his center of gravity and was forcing him to relearn how to walk.

Hanna dropped her head against the control panel in exasperation, then got up beside him. “Do we fix it before or after we go out there?”

“After. We need to let him know what we're doing on his land as soon as we can, before he sends his strill after us.”

Hanna blinked at T'ocs walked out toward the cockpit portal that led into the Arbiter's main compartment. Then she hurried up to follow. “Wait, sends what after us?”

T'ocs was already lowering the ramp and letting in the bright Mandalorian sunlight. “Never mind. Get the armor case, we will bring everything along with us. Bring your weapons, too.”

“You think we might get into a fight?”

“I would be shocked if we did not. But more than that, wearing a weapon means that you are at home here. Imperial law is strict about blasters, so having one in the open means that you are rejecting their authority in favor of your own personal safety.”

Hanna nodded, moving off to their weapons lockers. They had a large array of them, carrying all sorts of weapons for all sorts of situations. But the ones she liked the most were a pair of blaster pistols, one heavy, one lighter, one on each hip. Neither of them needed external power packs, but both had a limited number of shots before they had to recharge or cool off. Most of the time, though, someone she shot once stayed down in more pieces than they had started the fight in.

For this, she figured the pistols were enough. She had to re-adjust the straps, though, as they were fitted to go over the armor she wore and would have fallen off of her legs without her wearing it. She was wearing armor, an Echani-made bodysuit with armor sewn in, in fact, but it was a far cry from the all-encompassing and absurdly bulky and heavy beskar'gam she was used to wearing.

After strapping her weapons on, Hanna went to the armor case they had put the beskar'gam away in. It was a large, bulky case with double doors on the front that opened to a foam-padded interior that circulated air treatments and monitored humidity, salinity and other factors that might affect the armor's upkeep. T'ocs had spent quite a few credits making sure his armor stayed in pristine condition, something Hanna was most grateful to him for. The case also had its own built-in repulsorlift that caused it to hover a half-meter or so off the ground, allowing her to push it around with ease one it was activated. Carrying the case, as heavy as both it and the armor itself was, would have been out of the question without access to anything short of a front-end loader or cargo crane.

As she pushed the case toward the ramp, she saw that T'ocs was strapping a blaster on himself. He almost never left the ship now, with his limited mobility, and seeing him wearing a weapon caused her to realize just how serious this situation could become. Since Ome, T'ocs had not once fired a small-arm, he had never had the cause or opportunity. But here, on his home planet, he was ready to do so if needed.

“Should I be worried?” She asked.

He nodded, straightening up as best he could on his prosthetics. “Give me the case, keep your hands on your weapons and your eyes open. But do not draw or shoot anything unless I give you the word, or it is urgent.”

“Got it.” She slid the case over toward him. “And let you do most of the talking?”

“At first, yes. After introductions, feel free to chime in if you feel it appropriate.”

“You don't usually let me do any of the talking.”

“On Mandalore, children come of age when they turn thirteen. You are several years past that, you should be able to take care of yourself. If I speak for you, it looks like I'm coddling you, and that reflects badly on us both. Just be yourself, be fearless, and do not let anyone talk down to you, and you will be fine.”

They walked out into the sunlight. It was a cool day, aside from the sunlight, but there was also a cool breeze coming down from the north that kept it from getting too warm. Hanna blinked in the light, but resisted the urge to get her goggles out from her belt and shaded her eyes with her hand. Instead, she grabbed a cigarra. She had picked up the habit during a particularly stressful point in the recent past she preferred not think about, and the mild narcotic helped keep her emotions in check and her head clear. The smoke did not smell so bad after one got used to it.

It was hard to spot the homestead itself from the air, being constructed partially of natural topography helped with that. The other buildings, the barn, some storage sheds and what looked like a garage of sorts, were all more visible, but also more ramshackle and run down. There were a few animals wandering around, lumpy herbivores that seemed like livestock of some sort, but the fenced pasture was empty, the grass was long and untended, the fields were empty dirt, and the whole place looked as if it had been abandoned for some time.

“Are you sure this is the right place?” Hanna looked back at T'ocs as he came down the ramp, pushing the case in front of him and leaning on it to help keep himself upright.

“It was. I do not know if the clan has moved on, or if it still exists.” T'ocs took in the surroundings himself, and his expression slipped a bit. “They were not the greatest fans of the Empire. And, I will admit, this is not making a good first impression.”

“It doesn't look like there was a battle here.” Hanna commented. She pulled her electric lighter out of her belt, lit up, then replaced it whilst sending out of cloud of smoke from her mouth and nose. “It just looks like... there's no one living here.”

“It may be an illusion.” T'ocs resumed his pushing. “We will head toward the main house. Keep close.”

She nodded and waited until he passed by him, then followed, her hands resting on her belt near her blasters and eyes scanning back and forth across the homestead for any signs of life. The wind rustled its way through the grass and whistled past her, cooling her face and feeling strange across her head without a helmet to block it or long hair to manage as it whipped about. She realized how long it had been since she ventured out onto a world she visited without her armor on, to the point where even a breeze felt like an alien sensation. She had to remember to do this more often.

A growl interrupted her train of thought and caused her to draw her heavy blaster, head swiveling to discover the source. T'ocs had stopped walking as well, freezing with both hands flat on the case in front of him. The growl repeated itself, a low, slobbering snarl that rattled like an unbalanced speeder motor. Hanna did not know what sort of creature it was making the sound, but it certainly did not sound friendly.

She was a half-second ahead of the furious streak of golden fur, claws and drool that jumped at her, and past her, from out of the grass nearby her. It landed a short distance away and whirled back to face her, its broad face nothing but sharp white teeth, black eyes and loose skin that dripped with drool. Six clawed feet scrabbled in the dirt, finding purchase on small stones and carving ribbons through the grass. A long, rather formidable whip-like tail whipped through the grass behind it, and its squat body was all flapping, flabby skin.

Hanna had never seen the species before, but she knew a predator when she saw it. She circled right, putting herself between the creature and T'ocs. She knew that, with as large a mouth and thick a neck as it had, if that thing got its teeth in her arm, no armor in the world would keep it from snapping it off and shattering bone. Her best bet was to avoid it's next pounce altogether, but there was no way T'ocs could move fast enough to do so. Thus, she had to make sure it focused on her, and not on him.

The animal was crouched against the ground, matching her circle with the smooth ease of a practiced predator. Its black eyes tracked her every step, and its long tongue snaked out of its mouth and left a string of drool everywhere it went. It growled again, the same sound from before, and it dropped to its belly, tail thrashing through the grass, looking ready to pounce forward. Hanna braced herself to intercept, either with her blaster or her body, whichever hit first.

Then, T'ocs pushed her aside with a hand on her shoulder, and shouted at the creature. “Mird'ika, kuur!”

The animal remained crouched for a second, then leaped up to its feet and dropped to a sitting position, tongue hanging from one side of its open mouth. It looked rather deliriously happy all of a sudden, not at all threatening or even wild.

Hanna paused for a moment, mouth open, then turned to look at T'ocs, one hand outstretched toward the animal. “What? Is? That thing? And how did you do that?!”

“His name is Lord Mirdalin, and he is the strill I warned you about before we left the ship.” T'ocs walked past her and went to the animal, which came almost up to his chest as it sat back on its haunches. He grabbed the animal's face and rubbed its jowls, slathering his hand in drool but making the animal's tail thrash about in obvious happiness. “He belongs to...”

“He belongs to me.” A voice said from behind them, a rather aged, husky male voice. “At least for now.”

Hanna turned to face the newcomer. An old man was standing behind her, wearing worn but simple black clothes and an odd-looking rifle in his hands. He was rail-thin, but still strong enough to stand straight and show no sign of weakness. His hair was almost purely gray aside from a few black spots on his eyebrows and around his temples, and his face was the texture of worn leather. He looked at Hanna, cradling his rifle in both hands, his dark eyes studying her for an uncomfortably long time.

“I'm not sure why you came here.” He said at last, “And I'm not sure why you bothered to come back. I know it can't be a social visit.”

“Unfortunately, no.” T'ocs walked up around Hanna, the strill tagging along behind him like an obedient hound, tail wagging and tongue flopping out. “We have something we need, and I thought this was the best place to start looking for it.”

The man grunted. “That depends on what it is. Not much here anymore except an old man and his regrets.”

“The old man is what I am here for, believe it or not, because I know he is less regretful than he believes about himself.” T'ocs went to the man and offered him his hand. “I need your help, ner vod.”

The old man looked at him without regarding his hand. “Of course you do. You ran into something out there and you come scurrying back here with your tail between your legs. I'm surprised you had the guts to come back at all.”

“The help isn't for me.” T'ocs nodded his head back toward Hanna. “It's for her. She's the warrior. I just fly the ship.”

The man looked at Hanna again. She looked back at him without fear, flexed her right hand and made a fist, feeling her knuckles pop. With her left, she drew the cigarra out of her mouth for a moment and held it between her thumb and forefinger. This was a situation she had been in before: sizing her opponent up and planning potential courses and means of attack. Since the man was old, she figured overthinking it was her worst option. If he turned the rifle on her or on T'ocs, she could draw her pistol and blow a hole in his chest before he had pulled the trigger. The strill seemed passive for now, she figured she could kill it, too, before it turned on them.

The man did not turn the rifle on her or on T'ocs. He just nodded. “I see it. She's yours?”

“She is now.”

The man grunted again, then brought his rifle up and rested it on his shoulder. He grabbed T'ocs' arm, hand passing up hand and grasping the forearm instead. “You're still not going to find what you're looking for here.”

“That remains to be seen.” T'ocs gripped the man's forearm in return, then turned and gestured for Hanna to come forward. “Hanna, I want you to meet Walon Vau.”

Hanna approached, but kept a meter or so between them. She did not trust Vau, his eyes were too busy boring into her to be up to anything good. “An old buddy, I'm assuming?”

“Well, the old part is true.” Vau said.

“We fought together several times.” T'ocs said, “Walon taught me much of what I know about the philosophies of war.”

“Not enough, apparently.” Vau motioned to the strill. “Mird'ika, let's go, back to the house.” The strill bounded off toward the homestead with a loud whimper of joy. Vau then turned to his two guests. “No point standing out here to talk when there's shade and drinks right behind me. Let's go in, have a drink, and you can waste everyone's time by telling me how you think I can help you.” He pointed at the case, still hovering a short distance away on its on. “Bring the cargo, too.”

T'ocs looked at Hanna and nodded. She replaced the cigarra in her mouth, then turned and went back for the case without a word.

 

You're yet to deal with my nitpicking. At this point...timeframe, please?

 

IU? Pre-ANH. Before the formal Rebellion is founded, in the darkest of the dark times.

EDIT: If you're talking about when it takes place after the first story, a few weeks. Not long enough for anything major to take place.

 

Update 2: I'll be posting parts about every other day until it's done. Not a lot of material to get through, in all honesty, it'll go fast. Findswoman

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Vau dropped two wooden cups, smooth and polished after years of use, onto the creaky metal pre-fab table and turned to go into the kitchen. “It's been a while since we've had visitors. Sorry we don't have anything stronger than milk, but it's hard to get good brandy out here when the nearest bar is a hundred kilometers away.”

“Milk will be fine.” T'ocs was wandering around the homestead's loosely defined sitting/dining/living room, a cluster of rough wooden and fabric chairs around the low table. The décor was very rustic, almost non-existent in fact, aside from a few scattered mementos and trophies of battles long passed. Everything else was rustic stained wood, dirt and stone, about as old-fashioned as it got.

Hanna was sitting in one of the chairs, her arm draped over the still-closed armor case, alternating between watching Vau and watching the strill. Lord Mirdalin was laying across the largest of the chairs, more of a two-seat couch, with its head draped down one arm and tail thrashing over the other. It seemed relaxed, but every once in a while, its eyes twisted over and looked at her.

She wrinkled her nose at it. The animal smelled of musk and dead things. The strill opened its jaw in a smile, tongue dropped out of its mouth and onto the arm of the chair, then snapped shut.

“You two play nice.” T'ocs said without looking back at her. “Mird is a rather more intelligent creature than you are giving him credit for.”

“He's also capable of ripping either of our throats out the instant we turn our backs on it.” Hanna said, “So long as it has a problem with me, I have a problem with it.”

“Mird won't attack you,” Vau said from the kitchen, “Not unless I tell him to. And normally, I'd applaud someone for not letting your guard down around strangers, but I've already invited you in and offered you refreshment, so I would appreciate if you do not threaten my pet.”

Hanna sat back with a grimace, looking at T'ocs. “How far back do you two go?”

“Fairly far, all things considered. Vau and I are from the same clan. We served together before the Clone Wars and went together to train some of the Republic's clone soldiers, but we drifted apart after the war broke out due to... ideological differences.”

“I sided with the Republic, against my better judgment.” Vau came out into the sitting room with a large metal jug of something in his hands. “Le'tim here, in his even poorer judgment, returned here to Mandalore and supported Pre Visla's resurgent faction of Death Watch, a terrorist group that nearly brought on the collapse of Mandalorian civilization in the name of preserving our old way of life.”

“And then the Sith took control of Death Watch and started a civil war that collapsed the planet's economy and burnt multiple cities to the ground.” T'ocs shrugged. “Then the Republic became the Empire, the Empire squashed what was left of the Death Watch, and we both became soldiers without flags to march under.”

Vau snorted, pouring a thick, blue liquid from the jug into the two cups and then sliding them toward his guests. “So, now that you've had a lesson in ancient Mandalorian history, let me ask: Who are you and how did you happen to start tagging along with this bantha spawn?”

Hanna slid her chosen cup across the table toward herself, taking her cigarra out and dropping it to the floor before smashing it with the toe of her boot. “Do you want the abridged version or the one where I say its none of your business?”

“Abridged is acceptable.” Vau set the jug on the table before dropping into a chair between Hanna and the strill. He put his hand on the strill's head and started scratching it, but did not take his eyes off of Hanna. “Well, come on. We don't have all day.”

She sighed, picked up her cup, and took a deep drink of the milk to keep from having to talk. It almost made her gag. The milk was thick and sour, with a film across the top that crawled down her throat and clung to the roof of her mouth. She gulped it down, swallowed, and snarled, dropping the cup onto the table. “That's vile.”

“And you have atrocious manners. Threatening my pet, smoking indoors, refusing my questions, and now you insult my provisions.” Vau did not look offended, but he certainly sounded so. “If you were my charge, I would have corrected that streak before now.”

“I guess I am not the father that you are, Vau.” T'ocs finished his survey of the room's knickknacks and came over to sit down. “Tell him why we are here, Hanna. The abridged version, please.”

Hanna sat back in her chair, putting out her cigarra by smashing it against the armor case. “Okay, short story short. Circumstances put T'ocs and I together, and killed off pretty much everyone else close to either of us. Circumstances and Jedi.”

One of Vau's eyebrows rose. An expression he had either taught to or learned from T'ocs, it seemed. “Interesting.”

Hanna shrugged in reply. “One of them also liberated T'ocs' legs from the rest of him, and he's decided that was enough for him to basically retire. He's got it in his head to make me his replacement on the mercenary scene. But I can't wear his armor, it doesn't fit. So we came here to find someone who could refit it to me instead. I'm not sure why we came here, you'd have to ask him for the answer to that.”

“I will.” Vau turned his attention to T'ocs, who had managed to work his way into the chair without falling over or knocking both of them to the floor. “Why did you bring her and the armor here?”

“Because I've been away for too long to think of anywhere else to go.” T'ocs grabbed his own cup from the table and held it in both hands in front of him. “I do not know what the Empire has done, who they have on watch and who they let slide. I do not know which of the vode are still fighting back, which have knelt in submission, and which are dead. This was the only place I knew I could come.”

“So you first assumed that I would be willing to talk to you again, and also assumed that I would still have connections or contacts, or even be paying attention to what is going on outside of my own land.” Vau's head tilted sardonically, even though his tone did not change. “I thought I taught you better than to make those sorts of assumptions.”

“These past few weeks have been rather trying.” T'ocs said, “Enough so that I tend to forget pragmatism and call in favors for the few I might consider friends of mine.” He lifted his pant over his right leg. It looked somewhat natural, but every movement he made showed the odd musculature and form of mechanics moving under synthetic skin. “The prosthetic surgeon that replaced my legs a few weeks ago was someone I protected from a sniper's bolt some years ago who still felt he owed me a debt. He did a serviceable job, certainly, but... he is a private operation in a galaxy of corporations, and my injuries were rather severe. There was only so much he could do.”

“So that is why you have been stumping around here like a gnort with a glandular problem.” Vau seemed to appraise T'ocs afresh. “How far do they go?”

“To my appendix. My entire leg and hip structure had to be replaced, as did the base of my spine and some of my intestinal tract. Imperial technicians took care of the more vital parts, but they left the locomotion repairs up to me.” T'ocs looked at Hanna. For a moment, gratitude and pride shone on his face. “If it weren't for Hanna, I would have bled to death, or simply faded from shock and dehydration.”

“What happened?” Vau was interested now, a familiar detached intensity in his gaze as he looked from T'ocs to Hanna and back again. “Give me the unabridged version this time.”

* * *​

​

As the story finished, Vau had leaned back in his chair. He was staring into the mid-distance, hand idly scratching a now-dozing Mird. T'ocs had returned to drinking from his cup to help him recover from speaking, while Hanna had gotten up and started to pace around the room. The discussion about the recent past had dragged up a lot of unpleasant feelings for her, and not being able to smoke and blunt them was agitating her. She had put out her one cigarra and did not want to light another for fear of drawing Vau's wrath. They were on the man's good side for the moment, and she wanted to help ensure they stayed there.

“And the Empire does not know where you went after picking you off of Ome, I assume.” Vau said at length.

“Not as far as we know.” T'ocs said, “But, then, it is the Empire we are talking about here. There is no telling what they know and what they might not know.”

Vau seemed thoughtful, or at least pensive. “If we operate under the assumption that they know you are here, or at least that you would come here at some point, that puts all of those who might help you do something outside of Imperial jurisdiction at risk.”

“It also means we'd be operating under an assumption.” Hanna said, “And weren't you just telling us how you taught better than that?”

Vau looked at her. The slightest hint of a twinkle passed through his eyes. “I was. So then, let us operate pretending that we know nothing about what the Empire might know. Where does that leave us?”

“In the same place we were when we came here: waiting for information on the whim of an old man.”

Vau gave her a look that told her she had just evaporated all of the good will they had forged with the story's telling. It agitated her, somewhere in the back of her mind. The fact that they had conveniently left out that she was working for the Empire, for Darth Vader himself, was not doing her any favors, either.

Hanna went to her chair. But instead of sitting in it, she kicked it over, startling Mird into jumping awake. “We're wasting time sitting around here. I'm going back to the Arbiter to try and fix that broken hydraulic.”

“Something you have no idea how to do by yourself.” T'ocs pointed out.

“At least there I'll be able to smoke.” Hanna snapped back at him. “And don't call me back here unless you have a name and location for us to fly to. I'll be trying to do something productive and I'd appreciate not being interrupted.”

Hanna stormed out, stopping short of kicking the door open but still slamming it back into place after she had exited. The wind had died down, and the air was warm as she stalked back to the Arbiter along the rough path she and T'ocs had trod on their way in. She was not angry, not really, just frustrated and fed up with waiting. Every moment they spent hobnobbing with one of T'ocs' old war buddies was a moment they could be spending researching the names and planets on the list and planning out their next move. Or fixing the damn ship.

She was about halfway back to the ship when she heard something come pounding up behind her. She registered that it was likely the strill before she had even turned around to face it, hand resting on her blaster. The animal did not attack her and attempt to drag her back to the homestead as she expected it to, though. Rather, it pulled to a stop just slightly out of arm's reach and dropped to a sitting position, looking at her and panting, its tongue hanging out as always.

Hanna watched it for a moment, waiting to see if it made a move, before it struck her that Mird was actually there to follow her, not attack her. She sighed. “Look, I'm not in the mood to pet you or feed you or whatever weird thing you might want from me, I'm going back to my ship to try and fix it. And I don't want you following me.”

Mird just looked at her, lips smacking as it flapped its jowls, before it resumed its panting, open mouth almost resembling a smile. A big, dumb, idiot smile.

Hanna turned around and rolled her eyes. “Fine, whatever, you can follow along. Just don't get in my way, I'd hate to see how you'd react to an arc welder.”

She started walking again. Further pattering footsteps told her that the strill was continuing to follow. So long as it did not attack her or get between her and whatever she was supposed to do to fix the Arbiter's front landing skid, she did not care if it tagged along. What else needed to be fixed? The skid, the engine cowling, and something else within the ship had all been damaged on landing. None of which were necessarily essential parts, but neither were they unimportant enough for them to not require fixing before the ship took off again. The ship needed to be in optimal condition before they started working on the list.

The list. It always came back to the list. When Darth Vader had rescued her and T'ocs from an ignominious death, she had expected him to have done so for a reason. But she had not expected him to hand her, well, a list.

Sectors, systems, planets, cities, neighborhoods, buildings, apartment suites, listed down in methodical, almost uncanny detail. Imperial record keeping was almost too thorough at times, and she had access to everything on everything she might want to know, including many classified records that normally required someone in the Imperial diplomatic or military hierarchy to access. And all of that information was built to form a frame around one thing: a list of names.

Names of beings across the Empire. Names of criminals, anarchists, smugglers, terrorists, but also respected citizens, scientists, university faculty, even politicians and soldiers. The only thing they all had in common was that, since they were on the list, Darth Vader wanted them dead.

Not just incapacitated, captured or even brought to him bound hand and foot. No, he had been very specific and very insistent: every name on the list had to be scratched out in complete finality, and he required irrefutable proof of each one's death as she went along. Hanna had become a paid assassin answering directly to Darth Vader.

As she reached the Arbiter, she climbed halfway up the ramp, turned around, and dropped to her backside, draping her hands over her knees. Mird paused, looking at her for a moment, before climbing up the ramp beside her and laying down next to her. She wrinkled her nose at him again. He still stunk, no matter how oddly friendly he was acting.

She looked up at the sky. Mandalore's sky was a very pale blue, with high, white and gray clouds that were thin enough to allow the sun's glare through almost unabated. Not a very picturesque or desirable sky, by any definition. It was very plain, very basic and very much indicative of the sort of planet that lay underneath it. Hanna had not seen much of Mandalore thus far, but it had not made a very good impression on her in the least bit.

What parts of it were not irreparably scarred by battles too old for anyone to even remember were left to the wilds, scattered citizens scraping a meager living out from the ruins of a once-great civilization. T'ocs had said a lot about how the Empire was lording it over these people, but she had not seen or heard so much as a Stormtrooper in their entire time here, nor had they made any arrangements with the local Imperial authorities for landing or aerospace approach clearance.

Hanna had not been to a lot of different planets under Imperial rule in her short time as a mercenary, but every single one of them had an aerospace traffic authority of some description that tracked all incoming and outgoing ships to prevent exactly the sort of illegal activity they were attempting to accomplish. They had been able to arrive in-system, set their course and cruise halfway across a hemisphere without so much as a squeak from their commlink. There was simply no incoming or outgoing traffic with any regularity.

“What happened on this planet, Mird?” She asked, not expecting the strill to actually answer her. “T'ocs says it's under the Imperial jackboots, but the Imperials aren't anywhere to be seen. The people are all working in the mines, but apparently no one really cares about the ore being shipped anywhere. And there are people scattered all over without any reason except that they want to be left alone.”

Mird turned his head to look up at her as she talked, they lay back down when they both realized that he could not answer her. She reached down and scratched the back of his neck, between the flaps of golden fur and loose skin.

“I'm beginning to wonder if the Mandalorian way of life is all it's cracked up to be.” She said to him. “I mean, look where it got T'ocs and Vau. They're both broken old men who hate each other and admire each other at the same time, but don't have anyone they can actually call their friends. Do I really want that happening to me?”

Mird let out a rather forlorn sigh, hot and rather rank breath huffing out of his mouth as he rested his head down on the metal ramp and tucked his claws and paws underneath his body.

Hanna chuckled to herself as she drew a cigarra out of her belt. “Look at me. This whole thing has me on edge, I'm talking to someone else's pet. Like you can actually understand what I'm saying to you. Though, for all I know, you actually can.”

Mird's tail thumped against the ramp as she scratched down into a fold of skin, his eyes closed for a moment in obvious contentment. Then they snapped back open and his head came up, pointed and alert to something.

“What?” Hanna knew the sign. Something was happening that had set the strill in motion, activated its predatory instincts. Thousands of predators across the galaxy gained the same knife-edge attention, the same laser-straight focus the instant potential prey approached. Or, sometimes, when someone or something threatened to violate their chosen territory.

She looked around and saw nothing, not any more than what she had seen before when looking at the homestead. A silent horizon, battered buildings, waving grass, lowing livestock. Hanna squinted and pondered, looking a little more closely at everything she had just taken in. The grass should not have been waving, the wind had stopped and there was nothing moving around in it. At least, nothing she could see. And the livestock were not lowing to each other out of contentment or fraternity, they were lowing in fear, scattering across the hills around them. One was even ankle-deep in the lake and heading out further, apparently meaning to drown itself.

Hanna drew her blaster and stood up. Mird climbed to all six feet beside her. She could see it now: ripples in the grass that created the illusion of wind, something passing through it at an accelerated speed, low enough or small enough to be unseen otherwise. There were a lot of them, spreading out across the homestead. Some where headed toward the livestock, others toward the run down buildings and the livery. Two groups, the largest, were heading toward the homestead and the Arbiter, their line straight enough to make their objective irrefutable.

“C'mon, Mird.” She said, trying to remember the few Mandalorian words that T'ocs had taught her. One snapped to mind, one she had not heard him use but the once, back on Ome as he was sending a comrade off to his death. “Oya!”

Mird responded immediately, bounding off of the ramp and turning into a streak of fur as he dashed straight for the nearest oncoming whatever-it-was. Hanna wished for her helmet's targeting and diagnostic systems, then drew a bead on the next nearest one to her as she pulled her goggles out of her belt and slipped them on. They were flash suppressing and glare reducing, but also had a very basic threat detection system built in that alerted her to imminent threats within her line of sight with a hazy semi-transparent indicator around each one's basic shape.

It occurred to her, as she pulled her blaster's trigger for the first time, that the shape of whatever-it-was she was shooting at looked more machine-like than animal. The explosion of sparks and scraps of metal when her powerful heavy pistol blew the whatever-it-was apart confirmed it.

“Droids.” She said to herself, turning to another target. They were moving in very quickly, enough that she doubted she would be able to pick all of them off before they reached her. But she was certainly going to try.

Droid after droid exploded. Not every shot she took hit home, but it never took her more than two. Red laser fire creased through the grass, setting small fires wherever it hit. She blew apart four droids, five, a sixth, but the rest kept coming. She blasted one that was a meter or so from the ramp, just as one next to it burst into the air next to it, making the leap with the assistance of a quartet of tiny legs built into its body.

Hanna got a good look at the now-airborne droid as it kept coming toward her. It looked like a standard Imperial Viper probe droid, only much smaller and without the onboard repulsors that enabled them to take flight. This one was only a quadruped, as opposed to most Vipers with their variety of arms and implements meant for various tasks, and it did not seem to have an on-board blaster. It did, however, have a rather nasty-looking shock probe along its underside, which its leap managed to bring around to where it would plunge into Hanna if left to continue its course unabated.

It was coming too fast and too hard for her to shoot it out of the air, the angle would have made it impossible to hit even if it had not been traveling at several dozen kilometers per hour. Hanna had to avoid the attack by stepping to the side, almost falling off the ramp, and let the droid go past her. It hit the ramp, clattered and bounced into the air again, then landed at the top of the ramp back on all fours. Hanna's shot with her left-hand blaster, the smaller one, blew its head off and left the remains smoking within the ship's interior.

She turned back to the homestead in time to see Mird go bounding past, chasing one droid as two others clung to his back, their shock probes eliciting pained yowls each time they sent blasts into him. Hanna took careful aim and shot one off of him, the one clinging closer to his hindquarters. Then she jumped off the ramp and called him. “Mird! Come here!”

Mird skidded to a stop, turned and ran back toward her, all in less than a second. The droid that still clung to him bobbed and weaved as he ran, and it was not until he had almost skidded to a stop beside Hanna that she was able to blast it apart.

“Stay close, okay?” She told him, “There's a lot of those things out there. We need to get back to T'ocs and Vau, they might need our help.”

Mird's flopping tongue agreed with her. Hanna's goggles were picking up at least seven more droids, possibly more, and all of them clustered between them and the homestead.

“Back home, Mird.” She commanded, “Oya!”

Mird howled, a rather bone-chilling sound, and charged forward, Hanna running along behind him. The droids all turned and came to meet them en masse, as one, in the sort of mechanically precise unison that the Empire demanded and droids could deliver in staves. Mird hit the first droid in a shower of sparks, fur, metal and blood, and Hanna hit the next two with shots from her blasters. But the remainder were on top of her before she could draw clear shots.

One leaped toward her, and she swept it away with her left hand, knocking it back to the ground. Two more jumped. She shot one out of the air, but the other grabbed her side and hung there, its shock probe extending. Hanna yelped as a jolt shot through her body, her muscles involuntarily contracting for a split second before she was able to grab the droid and yank it free of her bodysuit, then blow it apart.

Mird had one in his mouth, another in his foremost pair of claws, and another one climbing up his side toward his head. Hanna shot the last one first, sending spindly metal limbs flying through the air, as Mird crushed the one caught in his jaws like a ripe fruit and ripped the last one apart with his claws.

Hanna looked around. There were no more in sight for the moment, but she knew that there had to be some out there somewhere. She gave Mird a congratulatory pat on the head as he spit out bits of metal and plastisteel, then headed at a brisk pace for the homestead. Her head was on a swivel now, watching the grass all around for any signs of more incoming droids. Why they were there and why they were attacking her was immaterial at the moment, she focused on surviving and on getting T'ocs back to the ship in one piece.

She stepped into the doorway, Mird right behind her, in time to see T'ocs trap a droid under his boot by stepping on one of its legs, then blew it apart with the blaster she had forgotten he was carrying. Other scrapped droids lay in pieces around him and Vau, who was standing in the doorway to the kitchen with his rifle. Neither of them seemed in any immediate danger.

“Are you two all right?” T'ocs asked her.

“I was about to ask you the same question.” She replied, “There were more of them outside. They attacked Mird and I, and I think they were going after the livestock, too.”

“Hunter-killers.” Vau grunted, “Nothing too fancy, just a life-form sensor attached to a shock probe and a swarming protocol. They based them on the buzz droids the Separatists used in the last war.”

“Who did?” Hanna asked.

“Whoever the Empire brought in to run this place.” T'ocs picked the remains of one of the droids up. “These are not standard Imperial issue, you can only buy them on the black market. But they are only used for one thing. Someone wants us dead.”

Vau started walking toward the door. “We need to go. We can discuss the nature of our enemy we set later, after we are in the air.”

“The ship isn't fixed.” Hanna said, “I mean, we still might be able to take off, but it won't exactly be a smooth ride.”

“Immaterial. We need to go before more droids arrive.”

She turned to T'ocs, who was also coming her way, tossing the scrapped droid remains aside and pushing the armor case out in front of him. “He is right. As usual. Once we get this back aboard, I will worry about fixing the landing skid; Hanna, you get to the engine cowling and bolt it back down. Vau, you watch the loading ramp and make sure none of them get inside our ship.”

Hanna turned to allow both of them to exit the homestead, Mird moving to flank Vau as he went past. Hanna fell in behind T'ocs. “What course do we set when we're airborne? Do we have a plan?”

“We head for Keldabe, it's the planet's trade capital and the most viable spaceport. According to Walon, we will be able to find a blacksmith there who is both skilled and discrete. And, hopefully, lose these droids in the process.”

“Less talking and more walking, please.” Vau said from in front of them, “I am already being chased out of my home, I do not want to have to drag two bodies with me as well.”

Hanna walked in sullen silence for a few moments, watching out for more droids, then turned back to T'ocs when it was evident they were alone on the field. “He doesn't like me, does he?”

“Walon does not like anyone, Hanna. Not even his friends. But you did impress him, and he has agreed to help us.”

“I impressed him? How?”

“By making friends with Mird. By not backing down or knuckling under when he called you out. By being you, just as I told you to. The instant that strill was off of the seat in there and followed you out here, he turned to me and said, That girl has a spark in her, Le'tim. Don't you dare let someone put it out.”

 

Yay, they're back

I'm so far behind on all my reading that I thought I'd limit myself to a very short comment on each story, but of course now that I read this I need to say more.

First of all, I'm one of those people who delved into Mandalorian history mainly through the Wook, so I can't tell how much of your world-building conforms to canon, but I love it in any case -- between the planet that's been devastated by Mandalorians-go-boom forgotten wars and the isolated home of a warrior who just wants to be left alone and lives with only the absolute necessities, you've drawn a great picture here in just a few pencil strokes.

Which brings me to my second point, namely Vau and his pet. Why am I not surprised that you'd come up with characters like these, and even more, why am I not surprised that they would end up liking Hanna despite everything (and that's a lot) that could go wrong between them? I'm looking forward to finding out why Vau sided with the Republic in the Clone Wars "against [his] better judgement". My guess his that it will go a long way to explain who he is, but also his relationship with T'ocs.

And T'ocs... well, as you probably guessed from my comments on your previous story, I have a total crush on him and I'm really happy to see him back, even in this physically diminished state which is not really preventing him for functioning despite what he might say or think. Here again, I'm curious to hear why in the Galaxy he chose to side with Death Watch -- the man with no allegiances we saw so far must have come a long way from what he used to be -- and I like how, despite his disability, or perhaps because of it, you cast him even more in the role of Hanna's mentor than before.

Last but not least, Hanna. Becoming Darth Vader's personal assassin wasn't what she had in mind when she graduated back on Empress Teta, did she? And now, she has to deal with the complicated relationships that her adoptive father has with people on his homeworld, plus someone trying to kill her (for a change). But she hasn't lost her spunk, that's for sure.

Eagerly waiting for the next instalment!

 

I'd love to take credit for coming up with Vau and Mird, but I actually have to give props to Karen Traviss for that. She made Vau as the training sergeant who oversaw Delta Squad, the main characters of the Republic Commando video game.

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Walon_Vau

 

“Your ship is not the most broken ship I have flown about in.” Walon Vau commented, busily stroking Mird's head in an effort to keep the strill at ease. “But, then, I have been shipped about in some absolute rattletraps.”

“Arbiter is not a rattletrap.” T'ocs objected, “She is just... quirky.”

Hanna could hear the two arguing from the cockpit. It made her roll her eyes enough that it was hard for her to keep focused on flying. T'ocs had laid in a course for them that would bring them across the planet's more desolate areas, out of the way of prying eyes and further droid attacks, on their way to the temperate equatorial areas and, eventually, some of the last of Mandalore's native jungle. In it, Vau said, they would find Kedalbe, or Keldabe, or whatever it was, the planet's erstwhile capital from long before the New Mandalorian group had sought to transplant it to Sundari.

“The ship is shaking in normal flight, Le'tim, to the point where Mird is agitated. That is not a quirk.”

“We did not have time to repair the damage done to the engine cowling, that would solve the shaking.”

She did not know exactly what to expect from the city, anymore than what she had expected from the planet itself. She had certainly not expected to make enemies and friends out of an old warrior and his six-legged pet, or to be attacked by a swarm of killer droids. The droids were the most confusing part of it all, really. T'ocs had been looking at the remains of the one that had landed aboard the ship since takeoff, and he was no closer to finding out who or what had sent them. Their purpose was clear enough, though: someone wanted all of the beings on the homestead dead, whoever that might be.

“And how was the damage done in the first place? It wasn't blasterfire, there's no scarring or other damage.”

“My ship is as dependable as Mird, Vau, she has never let me down or left me hanging.”

Perhaps it was intended to clean out a place for known rebellious sorts to connect and stay out of the way of prying eyes. Perhaps it was an attempt to remove Walon Vau from being of any future or past importance. Or perhaps it was directed toward T'ocs, or toward Hanna herself. Whatever the case, whoever had sent the droids had covered their tracks well, with no incoming or outgoing control signals and only the most basic programming information stored in the droid's memory banks, no locations, no faces or names, only the simplistic hunt, swarm and kill logic needed to direct a group of droids to act in sinister harmony.

Whoever had sent them, they knew exactly what they were doing, and had planned in case something went wrong. They were dealing with a professional who did not want to get their hands dirty.

“Mird is a living being, Le'tim, he cannot break down or fall apart when I need him most, and he is smart enough to be human.”

“I re-built the Arbiter from the ground up, Vau, I know every rivet and bolt like the back of my own hand.”

Hanna hated professionals. She had helped to bring one in while working with Captain Sloane and the Ultimatum on a wet-work assignment on Ord Mantell. A professional had cost her the only friend she had on the ship's Stormtrooper corps, along with nine other troopers, two pilots and a troop deployment gunship. A professional had also nearly cost Hanna her own life, it had only been her armor, the wonderfully durable beskar'gam, that had saved her.

If someone had a professional on their tail for whatever reason, or if a professional had some sort of grudge against them, then Mandalore would not be the short detour that T'ocs had assured her it would be. It made her wonder if Darth Vader would tolerate a delay on her beginning work on the list.

“It seems you should have tightened a few of those bolts before making this takeoff attempt.”

“And perhaps you should tighten a few of your own before I do it for you.”

Hanna was done listening. She leaned her head over her shoulder and shouted back through the portal and into the lounge. “Are you two going to bicker like schoolkids the whole way there or am I going to have to come back there and teach you how to be quiet?”

There was a few moments of silence. Then T'ocs called forward to her. “How much further do we have to go, Hanna?”

“The computer says a hundred klicks or so. I'm saying about fifteen minutes of stony silence, or I'll set this thing down in the desert and we can all walk to Keldabe.”

The two old Mandalorians behind her, in unison, said “Yes, buir.”

Hanna assumed for the time being that buir was not some sort of curse word and returned her focus to flying. She thought she might have heard the word before at some point, but when and in what context she had no idea. If it was important, T'ocs would undoubtedly teach it to her eventually. And if it was a curse word, she would figure out from the context what it meant in time. Then she would start to use it herself and make T'ocs uncomfortable as she always did when she used Mando'a words and phrases out of nowhere, almost always mispronouncing them to such a degree that his mask of impassivity slipped, just a bit, in exasperation. It always made her smile inside.

She glanced down at the navigational console. A straight course, around a hundred kilometers away. Everything on this planet seemed to be a straight course. At least the terrain was more pleasant to look at here, with lush forests taking over for deserts, to the point where it was hard to see the ground in some places under an endless canopy of green. There were no signs of civilization around them, though, it seemed that the Mandalorian people did not enjoy the jungle as much as they did the barren wastelands.

A twist on one of the knobs in front of her, along with the flip of a switch, and she had adjusted the Arbiter's reactor output, shunting more power from the online but not necessarily needed weapons and into the engines. She then worked a pair of switches to her left to send that additional power away from the main engines and into the maneuvering rockets and stabilizers, trying to smoothen out the ride however she could. She did not mind as much if it bucked and heaved as she flew, she rathered it be that way than to not feel anything about the atmosphere around them, but if it would keep her two passengers from picking a fight with her copilot, then it was worth the effort. She just had to hope that the extra energy output did not cause one of the rockets to short-circuit, the ship to lose power to the propulsion systems and tumble out of the sky.

* * *​

​

“You did good, Hanna.” T'ocs said. He was patting her on the shoulder in an effort to seem proud of her, when he really was not. He was more grateful that they were all still alive.

Vau grunted from where he was standing, well away from the Arbiter with Mird wound between his ankles. “As well as could be expected, I suppose, flying that rusty bucket of a starship.”

T'ocs' hand tensed on Hanna's shoulder, but he did not rise to the bait. “We have to get those repulsorlifts checked out while we are here, I do not think the hasty repairs we made before takeoff were sufficient.”

“Understatement of the century.” Hanna said. She was resting one leg against the hovering armor case and was rubbing her hands against her clothes to try and dry them of sweat. The descent into Keldabe had been hair-raising, even by her standards, and had left the ship a smoking, immobile heap on the landing pad, two of its landing pads crumpled back up into the hull. “Lucky the aerospace controller was able to find us an open landing pad to crash on.”

“I would bet that it wasn't hard.” Vau commented. “This city is a ghost town compared to what it once was. I have seen more life out of a corpse.”

It was true. Keldabe's streets and pathways were all but deserted, to the point where their rough landing had elicited no more response than a couple of outdated mechanic droids with fire extinguishing equipment. The few people they could see from the exposed landing pad were all keeping their distance, content to mind their own business. Or perhaps afraid to approach the strangers who were crazy enough to fly in a ship that could fall out of the sky at any moment.

The city itself was situated on a plateau made of almost solid granite that was surrounded by a river on three sides, making almost impossible to access by land. A few scattered bridges allowed foot traffic across, but they were disused and falling apart. A wall had been erected around the city's outer edge along the river, giving the whole place the air of a fortification. Not that it had helped them against the Empire at all.

Unlike everywhere else on Mandalore Hanna had seen, the presence of the Empire could be felt the moment they had touched down in Keldabe. Imperial insignia hung on the tallest building in the city, the MandalMotors tower, and on several of the other largest buildings, all of them rather pristine compared to the more motley and roughshod buildings of the rest of the city. The Empire had moved in to renovate parts of the city and take over what they saw as being worthwhile, leaving the rest to rot in squalor.

Not that the city was squalor necessarily. It was poor, to be sure, just as the whole planet was, the lack of revenue created by the iron mining having a rather obvious effect. The mining towns were where the people crowded to now, Keldabe was not a living place so much as a meeting place, a central locale where the citizenry all knew to come. But the town looked like it had never been a truly prosperous city, only that it had once been more populated than it was at the present. Hanna, having grown up on a Core world, thought it looked small and very old fashioned, but it was far from the worst city she had been in since starting a new life.

“What do you think, ad'ika?” T'ocs asked her, having noticed her staring out into the city. “A rather lackluster place to be considered the capital, isn't it?”

“The Empire leached most of the life out of this place.” Vau said with a growl in his voice, “Their planetary headquarters is only a few kilometers south of here, in a place they call the City of Bone. Their soldiers take over the pubs and taverns when they're on leave from the base. After fights started understandably breaking out, the local Suprema cleared out most of the old guard by sending them off to work in the mines. Pretty soon, Keldabe became a ghost town, the only people who stay here are the ones who don't have anywhere else to go.”

“So why are we here, then?” Hanna asked him and T'ocs together, “To meet another old friend of yours?”

“To meet a new one. I hope.”

Hanna looked at T'ocs sideways. “What's that supposed to mean?”

“It means I know this man by reputation only.” Vau clarified while kneeling to give Mird a scratch on the chin. “So he may wind up slamming the door in our face. We will see.”

“Great. So we might have come all this way, wrecked our ship and gotten attacked by killer droids on a farm in the middle of nowhere, only to have a door slammed in our face.” Hanna threw her hands into the air and walked away. “This day just keeps getting better.”

Vau turned to T'ocs behind her. “Is she always this dramatic?”

“Only when she is frustrated or angry. So, yes.”

“We're going to have to find a mechanic, too, maybe get replacement parts for the landing skid, make sure no more killer droids come scurrying up our exhaust pipes.” Hanna rambled to herself for a bit, then mopped up her forehead. This close to the equator, with all of the jungle around them, the air was humid and sticky, and she was already sweating profusely. She turned back toward the two men standing behind her. “Well, are we going to start walking or just wait around for the public transport that isn't coming?”

The two old warriors looked at each other. T'ocs glanced down, as if he were checking something underneath his feet. Vau folded his arms over his chest and stood where he was. Even Mird did not follow her anywhere, content to sit at his master's feet, sniffing the air and letting his tongue roll out of his mouth as usual.

“We're waiting for our ride.” Vau told her. His voice was actually cold. She had not thought he could sound more unfriendly than he usually was, but he did. “I may not know the smithy we will be visiting, but I know someone who does. And he will be meeting us here with transport to get there that will not attract Imperial attention. If you had stuck around when we were making the plan, you would know this.”

“You're going to hold it against me if I don't like listening to two old windbags banter? I'm sor-ry for not having the attention span to deal with that sort of thing, I am just a silly little girl, you know.” Hanna walked back in their direction, hands in the pockets of her belt. “Is that what you want me to say? Because I'm not going to apologize.”

“I'd rather you not say anything, actually.” Vau said, “I do not find conversation with you at all scintillating.”

“Then why are you helping me?”

“I am paying back a debt to someone who barely deserves it already, and your antics are making me regret my decision. But I also do not go back on my word. I will take you to this blacksmith, but that is as far as my help extends.”

“I suppose you do owe us for lifting you out of your farm ahead of those droids. Or were you talking about something else?”

Vau's expression darkened a bit before he replied. “Something else. I do owe you for the rescue from the farm, unfortunately enough. Your piloting skills are much more credit to that than the ship was.”

“Glad you think so.”

“It is the truth. I do not make emotional judgments. I will have to think of a way to repay you before you leave the planet, because I do not want to be in your debt for any longer than that.”

Hanna shrugged, going to stand beside T'ocs and away from Vau. “Fair enough. I'm not really looking for your approval, anyway. Ask T'ocs, I never ask him for approval either.”

“It's true. She doesn't. She started her cigarra habit while it was still my ship.”

That reminded Hanna. She rustled through her pockets for a pack of cigarras. After everything that had happened, she figured that she needed one to help calm her nerves. Maybe she would find it easier to tolerate Vau's brusqueness with a slight narcotic in her system. She realized, as she pulled the pack out of her pocket, that she was starting to run low. Hanna made a mental note to pick up a few new packs in the future, as she lit up and replaced the remainder of the crumpled pack in her belt along with her lighter.

The cloud of fragrant smoke she exhaled hung low and heavy in the air. The humidity made everything seem heavier. It also made her cigarra taste rather gritty and thick in her mouth and throat. But it still had the calming effect that she had wanted. Her heartbeat slowed down, and the scattered, hasty thoughts she had running through her brain organized themselves into a rather more comprehensible format.

“I don't want you to owe me anything either, Vau.” She said, dropping the cigarra to the ground and stomping on it. “Mostly because I don't like you. But I'd also rather not force that sort of commitment on a being. If it's all the same to you.”

“It is. But the obligation still stands, for now.” Vau shaded his eyes with his hand. Mird had started to whine at something, his tail thrashing against the ground. “Here he is, at last. Took him long enough.”

A rather battered cargo speeder, about the same shape as a speeder bus but with solid side panels instead of windows and a sliding door in the side meant for loading large items, rounded a corner and rumbled toward them. It shook and rattled as it approached, and shuddered to a stop in front of them with the most teeth-grinding groan that Hanna had heard since the last time the Arbiter's main drive had decided to give her and T'ocs both a heart attack by stopping while they were in mid-flight. The speeder's side door opened and slid aside, revealing a fair-skinned man with brown hair that was almost entirely gray and dressed in a dull gold shirt and brown pants.

“I'm here to pick up some antiques.” He said, “Is this the right landing pad?”

Hanna grinned. She liked this man already. “Two antiques, a strill, and one brat who's saved their butts.”

The man gave her a smile and climbed down out of the speeder. “You must be Hanna, then.” The hand he offered her was clean and smooth, but instead of grasping her hand he took her forearm instead. His fingers were rather strong as well.

She gripped his arm back, even if she did not understand why. “Nobody but.”

“I'm Mij Gilamar.” The man introduced himself, “An old... let's say acquaintance of your father's.”

Hanna wanted to say that T'ocs was not her father, but she bit her tongue. “I'm assuming that means you two hated each other at some point in the past.”

“Oh, vehemently. But, there have been other di'kut who never saw the error of their ways, he isn't the worst by a long shot.” Gilamar nodded to T'ocs with a casual smile. “Le'tim. Glad to see you aren't dead yet.”

“Because you want to kill me yourself, I assume.” T'ocs replied, his hands tucked into the front of his belt.

“You aren't dar'manda, Le'tim. Not now, maybe not ever. There aren't enough of us old warriors left to fight among ourselves.” Gilamar left his final greeting for Vau, but it was also the warmest. He grasped Vau's forearm just as he had Hanna's, but also gave him a hearty clap on the shoulder. “Su cuy'gar, ner vod, it's been a long time.”

“Too long, Mij.” Vau actually looked happy for a brief moment, a smile creasing his face in a thoroughly unnatural way. “Though you will be seeing more of me than you would like, I'm sure. I may need you to host Mird and I for a time.”

“Oh?” Gilamar's frown was deep and worried. “Why so?”

“We can explain on the way.” T'ocs said, “Take us to your friend the blacksmith, the scenic route if you please.”

Gilamar nodded, looking from them to the ship they had rode in on. “Well, I supposed we should start driving before your ship explodes and kills us all.” He pointed at the case Hanna had returned to leaning against. “Jurir that up into the bay and we'll get going.”

Hanna nodded to him and pushed the case to the speeder, having to semi-lift it up until it was high enough to slide in through the open door. She mopped her forehead again, then climbed up into the speeder and turned back to the others. “You all coming, or am I going to have to fly this rusty crate around too?”

T'ocs and Vau looked as unimpressed as ever, but Mij flashed her another smile and came over to the speeder himself. “No no, this is my ride, you get to sit back and enjoy the scenery.”

“Don't flatter her too much, Gilamar.” Vau warned him, “She has a rather low view of most authorities in her life.”

“You've obviously never dealt much with teenagers, Walon.” Gilamar said. He patted Hanna on the back as he moved into the speeder's driver seat. The entire interior was one large chamber, with a single seat in the front and the rest of it bare deckplating with holes here and there to run cords or bungees for securing cargo. It was about as utilitarian as it got, and had to be at least two decades old.

T'ocs, Vau and Mird were still climbing up into the speeder when Gilamar turned back from where he was putting the speeder's engine through its startup sequence. “Could you close that door for me?”

Hanna nodded and did as he said. For some reason, it did not rankle her to listen to what he said and do it. Maybe it was the cigarra in her system now. Or maybe it was the fact that he knew how to ask without sounding like either a jerk or a military officer about it. She slid the door closed and lowered the latch to lock it, leaving them all in the compartment with only the light coming through the windshield to see by.

“Hold on.” Gilamar advised them, “This may be a little bumpy until the engine gets warmed up.”

Walon Vau had already slumped against the side opposite the door, cradling Mird's head in his lap to try and keep the strill still. The rattling and groaning old speeder seemed to excite it rather than terrify it. “How far is it, Gilamar?” He asked.

“About three klicks or so, across the city from here.” Gilamar put the speeder into gear and they lurched off of the ground and into a slow, rumbling forward shuffle. “It'll take us about ten minutes to reach. But if you need me to, I can take longer.”

“We need to state the situation, and discuss what happened to us on Vau's homestead.” T'ocs explained, “However long that takes is however long we need.”

“What did happen out there?” Gilamar asked, “Did something attack your ship?”

“Not the ship, no.” Vau looked at T'ocs, who glowered back but said nothing. “A swarm of hunter-killers ravaged the homestead and chased off all of the livestock that was left. Le'tim and his ad'ika got me and Mird out, but that's about all we could save.”

“A swarm of hunter killer droids, you say.” Gilamar sounded rather casual about the matter, as if this sort of thing happened all the time. “Targeting anything living on the homestead?”

“Exactly.”

“And we checked their path.” T'ocs mentioned. He was sitting in the center of the compartment, riding out the bumps without bracing himself. “They were focused enough on the homestead that the swarming pattern did not go over any of the wild ghaar or uliik around it.”

“Wait,” Hanna turned to him and sat down, her back now to the door. “Over the what?”

“Fish and animals. Basically, they were only after us.”

“So, someone knew exactly where we were?”

“Or where I was.” Vau said. “I highly doubt it had anything to do with you.”

“Vau has a point.” Gilamar said over his shoulder. “Neither of you have been on the planet long enough to make your presence known.”

“Or make enemies?”

Mij shook his head. “No, Hanna, that's the thing about Mandalore these days. From the moment you set foot here, you are shuffled into a group and make a lot of enemies all at once. You in particular are associated with Vau and I, the old guard, Republic supporters whose stars faded when the war ended. And there are a lot of beings out there who still hold grudges. It's a Mandalorian axiom: Munit tome'tayl, skotah iisa. Long memory, short fuse.”

“And we just got caught in the crossfire?”

“More than likely.” Gilamar swung the speeder's steering yoke to one side and they made a wide, lumbering turn onto a main street. Hanna could see glimpses of people now, walking along the sides of the road with their heads down. “I didn't tell you earlier on the comm, Vau, but we may have a bigger problem than a few droids.”

“Oh?”

“Reau is back.”

Hanna heard Vau take a sharp, deep breath. “Isabet Reau?”

“None other. One of my assistants spotted her at the Oyu'baat a week or so ago.”

“Is she... working to bring them back?”

“I don't know. They said she was toasting the Empire with a few officers and enlisted men from the garrison.”

“Osik.” Vau muttered to himself. He actually seemed disturbed, his face genuinely troubled.

“I thought she was dead.” T'ocs said.

Gilamar looked over his shoulder again. His face was grave. “We all did. But if she is alive, she may be the one responsible for the hunter-killer droids.”

“It does not seem like something she would do.” Vau said, voice dark. “Have a thousand droids rip your enemy's body to pieces while you sit comfortable? That is not Reau, not the one we knew.”

“Maybe she learned. Maybe she has changed.”

“No. If she is alive, and back on Mandalore, nothing has changed. She will still have the same insane dream she has always had, the same delusions of grandeur and fixation on the primacy of strength.”

“So, I take it that this Isabet Reau is bad news?” Hanna asked them all.

“About the worst we could have heard.” Vau told her. “Reau is a fanatic, obsessed with restoring Mandalore's glory days by restarting the Kyr'tsad.”

“The Death Watch.” T'ocs translated before she could ask. “We mentioned them before, but you should understand that there have been a number of factions through the years, with differing ideologies and philosophies, united only by their name and their ruthlessness. I was a member when Pre Vizla's faction were the only ones opposing Satine's government. The group I belonged to was smashed at the end of the war, but Reau and her man-toy Dred Priest were working to restart it as soon as the Empire took over.”

“And the Empire didn't stop them?”

“No, the Empire encouraged them.” Gilamar sounded disgusted. And rather angry. Old wounds ran deep, it seemed. “And Priest and Reau were both a dozen times worse than Pre Vizla, even on their best day. They ran a Battle Circle where clone cadets, kids, fought to the death because they think that only the strong deserve to live. The Empire must have figured that they could use Kyr'tsad to keep control of the planet. They were wrong. The Death Watch is a force of chaos. They can't build, they can only destroy.”

Hanna squinted at him in puzzlement. “Then why would she be working with the Empire? Aren't they the ones who're occupying this planet right now?”

“That's what makes me think her goals have changed. At least for the moment.” Gilamar said, “Reau disappeared around the same time the Empire started cracking down on us, outlawing beskar'gam, confiscating weapons. Everyone assumed that she had been caught up in their raids and killed along with the hundreds of others who were.”

“She was never one to just fade away into the shadow.” T'ocs said. He sounded more thoughtful than disturbed. “Especially after Priest disappeared. If anything, she was worse after that.”

Gilamar cleared his throat. “Yes, I suppose she was. But that doesn't answer the question of why she's reappearing now.”

“Or whether she had anything to do with the attack on the homestead.”

“It was not her style.” Vau said. He had not spoken in a while, likely to think through what had happened. “Whatever may have happened since then, it is not her style. Reau would have done it herself. She would have kitted out in full armor, come down in person, stabbed us all to death and burned the homestead to the ground. It is a very Imperial style to send in a swarm of expendable drones when a single assassin might do best.”

“But what would the Empire have to gain at killing you?” Hanna asked, “Or us? I mean, I work for the Empire, I work for Darth Vader. If anything, they should be helping me.”

Vau looked at T'ocs, and Gilamar looked over his shoulder at her in open shock. There was a rather heavy silence for a moment.

“You work for the Empire?” Gilamar asked.

Hanna looked at him, then back at Vau, and finally at T'ocs. “Yes, of course. Didn't... oh. I guess you didn't.”

“No, we didn't.” Vau said. He was giving Mird's head a rather vigorous scratching, but did not show any other outward signs of emotion. “What exactly do you do for Darth Vader?”

Hanna got the distinct feeling she had put her foot in her mouth, but T'ocs gave her no sign, so she forged onward regardless. “I have a list of targets he wants me to take out. I haven't started on it yet, I wanted to get my armor fixed up first.”

“What sort of targets?”

“All sorts. Smugglers, pirates, AWOL soldiers, typical bounty hunter stuff. Except, it's more of a long-term agreement than a per-head contract. I'll probably be reporting back in after I take out the first target, whenever that happens.”

“Any of your targets Mandalorian, per chance?”

“No. No, I don't think so, not as far as I remember.” Hanna paused to let her brain process what Vau's question could mean. “Wait, you think I'm here to kill someone? Like, one of you?”

“It is a possibility I am considering. I would not put it past Le'tim to nestle in with Vader and betray us all.” Vau held up a finger before Hanna could speak. “However. You are the one who made the decision, not him. You have never been on this planet before, do not speak mando'a, and barely know anything about us. If you were an Imperial assassin, you would be far better informed than you are, and try to fit in more naturally. But you have been nothing but abrasive and irreverent since we met. Whatever else you are, I am confident that you are not an Imperial plant. You may work for the Empire out there, but not here.”

Hanna was not sure whether she should be grateful or relieved. She settled on nodding in Vau's direction. “Thank you for being reasonable. I don't like what the Empire's done here and a lot of other places. But they're the ones who fill out the biggest credit cheques right now.”

“I was not judging you. Mandalorians historically have made a bad practice of serving whoever is strongest. You simply do it on a galactic scale, while people like Reau do it on a more planetary one with aspirations of more.” Vau looked up toward the driver's seat. “What about you, Gilamar? Do you have a problem with the path this young warrior has chosen?”

Gilamar shook his head, but did not speak.

“Nothing to say, Gilamar?” T'ocs asked.

The older Mandalorian turned and looked at them. “We're here.”

 

For everyone: this is the penultimate update. One more after this, and we'll be off into our next story. Make sure you've caught up on any updates that you missed! Findswoman

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The blacksmith shop was small, dirty and dark, lit only by fires and forges and smelling of sulfur and other ores. It was a place of work, not hospitality, where metals were made and shaped and given their form. But the big, burly man who greeted them was actually rather warm and friendly, offering handshakes and back-slaps to all of the men and giving Hanna a rather embarrassingly genuine hug.

“I heard that you brought me beskar'gam to remake for you.” He said to her, “Right under the Empire's nose. And for that, anything in the shop is yours, just ask for it.”
“Really?”

“Of course! The chance to work with such material again, to mold and form and hammer out the very bones of Manda'yaim, is something I haven't had in years. And in you walk today, bringing this...” He turned to caress the case, which lay open, exposing the full set of armor within. “Mesh'la beskar'gam, the finest I have seen since the Empire came, strong, ures trattok'o, and such a beautiful color, ne'tra, the color of justice.”

Hanna hesitated. This is when she was usually looking for T'ocs to give her prodding or instruction. But he was not here. He and the other two old men of Mandalore had left her with the blacksmith and gone off on other business. Exactly what, she had no idea. What mattered was, in this, she was on her own. “So, how much will it cost me?”

The blacksmith, Batiir by name, turned his twinkling eyes on Hanna again. “This is what I was born to do, burc'ya, and you have given me a chance to do it again. Such an opportunity cannot have a price put on it. Money would only soil it.” He put his massive arm around her shoulder and led her deeper into the shop. “Now, I will show you some examples of my wares. When I remake your armor, it will be smaller to better fit you, and there will be beskar left over. Pick something else to add to it, and I will make it for you of the purest and strongest metal in the galaxy.”

Hanna let him lead her through the shop, eyes running over each shelf, rack and hook on the wall, over all of the disparate parts and pieces of armor. It was fascinating. Each bit of armor she already had was represented here in the shop, along with dozens of others. Most were variations of the basic armor plates that were longer, shorter, wider and more narrow than hers, and all sorts of combinations thereof and beyond. Some plates had spikes, ridges and other flair, all of them just as hardy as the plates themselves and likely rather vicious impromptu weapons.

Beyond the armor plates, there were other things that her armor did not have that could within reason be added to it. There were weapons mounts, knives and blades meant to go on wrist gauntlets, helmets of all shapes and styles, boots with blades embedded in the toes that could be extended and retracted at will, and even straight-up swords. She hunted through the selection, fighting against the greed the sight of such weapons that could each be reasonably added to her repertoire at no cost to her. Whatever she wanted, she could have.

“All of these are made of durrasteel, durraplast and other such things. They are forged as best I could do, but whatever I make for you will be properly forged with beskar.” Batiir swept her around and gestured to a shelf filled with different kinds of gloves and gauntlets. “These, most of them are barred by both Imperial law and Mandalorian edict. They are shuk'orok, crushgaunts in Basic. Each one is woven on a micro-level with beskar and a reactive fabric that enhance the wearer's strength such that they can shatter bone with just a squeeze. I cannot sell them to you, or even give them to you.”

Hanna turned a confused eye to him. “So why show them to me?”

“Because, I did notice that your armor set has normal gloves, fabric weave, serviceable but not special. I have another option I could show you, if you wish, something you will not be arrested for wearing and I will not be arrested for making.”

“Let me see.”

The blacksmith went to the shelf with the crushgaunts on it, but went into the space underneath the shelf instead, opening a cabinet, sliding out a drawer, and returning to Hanna with a rather detailed and complex blueprint sketched out on a piece of flimsiplast paper. It was a glove, but a glove with armor plating embedded into it in segments, leaving enough fabric around the joints free to retain flexibility, but still encasing the wearer's hands and sealing them from almost anything hostile, be in environment or sentient being. She also noted that there were other things installed in them as well, small servos and compensator units like those built into crash helmets to prevent concussions.

“These are my plans. I have not built them yet, but when I do, they will give your hands the feeling of effortless impact. Each blow you take or receive is cushioned by the compensators and servos, you could punch a durrasteel wall with all of your strength and not even bruise a knuckle.”

Hanna ran her hand over the diagram, tracing out the glove's fingers. “Why haven't you built one yet?”

“Because, from these materials,” He swept his free hand to take in the room full of his other creations, “These gloves would be a failure. The metal would crease, it would chip, it would crack. The plating would damage the servos and the gloves would fall to pieces, more useless than if they were just fabric. But, with beskar...”

“With beskar,” Hanna answered for him, understanding dawning over her. “You can make the plating out of something that won't wear down, and weave it into the glove fabric so that it would protect the servos. That make the gloves so strong you could punch a durrasteel wall.”

“With your gift, burc'ya, my gloves will let you punch through that wall.”

Hanna grinned. “Let's do it.”

* * *​

​

It was a long, sweaty and rather exhausting day for Hanna. Because, after she and Batiir decided on exactly what to do with her armor, sketching out how the plates would lie and how each piece would fit together, they had to actually put them together. T'ocs' armor had been made up of individual pieces and parts, attached to a bodysuit with straps and seals, which meant it could fit on any number of bodysuits, but it also meant it took quite some time to get on and off. As a part of the process of reshaping and reducing the plates to better fit Hanna's body, Batiir proposed working them into sections, pants, a shirt, and of course the gloves, wrist gauntlets and helmet. It meant she could get in and our of her armor much faster, and made it easier to wear without worrying about pieces coming loose or falling off.

The issue was, re-forging the armor was an involved process that required hours of time sweating over the forges, melting the armor down and hammering it out into new shapes. That meant, while Batiir was doing that, he was also instructing Hanna how to ready the bodysuit for combination with the armor. She had to cut, sew, stitch, weave two different sorts of fabric together, hem edges and adjust seams where necessary to make it fit her body.

One fabric was a sort of reactive synthetic armorweave, lacking the pure protective nature of beskar or any other metal plating, but still enough to stop some shrapnel. Its main purpose was to serve as a seal around the armor, hardy enough to preserve against all but the harshest of environments, but lacking any real protection against lasers, shrapnel or impact weapons. The other fabric was not really a fabric, it was beskar, each piece of metal one Batiir had taken and pounded out so thin and fine that it could be woven into another fabric, making that fabric stronger. Not invincible, but strong enough to keep out water, fire or even preserve against the vacuum of space for a short time. It would make the armor a sealed unit, protecting and preserving her from every angle and side.

They were not just working to make the armor to fit her, they were working to make it better.

But the work involved was rather exhausting. Hanna had some experience with sewing, it was one of the only traditional homemaking tasks that her father had made her learn. Sewing was useful to a soldier, to help repair a torn uniform or bodysuit, or to stitch up a large wound. But having to weave, sew and stitch for hours on end made her fingers stiffen, her back ache and her eyes blur. She had to work methodically, slowly and precisely on every stitch, her life would inevitably depend on the quality of the job she did. But is was numbing, monotonous and physically tiring work.

“I'd be a lousy seamstress.” Hanna commented. She was taking a break, mopping her hands and forehead with a dirty forge rag to keep the sweat at bay. The entire shop filled with hot, dry air whenever the forges were lit, and they had been lit and working for most of the day. She and Batiir were sitting in his shop's makeshift kitchen, basically a basin, a few cabinets and a small table with crude stools around it. There was no oven, no food preservation unit, not even proper running water.

Batiir smiled at her. He was even more tired that she was, and could not even summon the energy to grin. He had a large flagon of Mandalorian ale, he called it a buy'ce gal, in his hand and was taking swallows in-between bites of a large chunk of some sort of dried meat. “You've done good work today, burc'ya. This sort of project might take me a week if not for your help.”

She smiled back at him. He had taught her more than just how to make armor, he was teaching her more of the language and culture at the same time. Burc'ya was a term of loose endearment, meaning friend, and gal was ale; the buy'ce part of buy'ce gal came from the same root as the word for helmet. While the massive cup he held probably would not hold a helmet's worth of ale, it had to be close.

Hanna sat back on the narrow three-legged stool she had commandeered as her resting place. He was making that ale look very good, the only water was lukewarm and rather stagnant. “Have anything for me to drink?”

He looked at her for a moment, then laughed and grabbed another, smaller cup from a cabinet near him and tossed it to her. “Help yourself, ner vod, just not so much that we can't finish the job.”

She laughed back, then thrust her cup under the spigot of the keg Batiir had sitting atop one of the cabinets. The foamy amber liquid stank of spices and baked grain. It occurred to Hanna, just as she was taking a large gulp of it, that she had never indulged in alcohol in this sort of volume previously. It exploded into her mouth with flavors, bitterness, sweetness and spice, and a thick and bubbly texture that was so unlike anything she had drunk before that she almost gagged.

The liquid rolled over her tongue, a riot of flavors and the bitterness of drink filling her every sensuous station in her mouth and nose. When it started descending into her throat, it left a warmness and foamy relief behind, quenching her thirst and filling her stomach with fuzziness. But the most incredible thing was what it did to her head; for a moment, her head was swimming with sensations, lights and sounds that she had never experienced before. Her vision was filled with colors and lights, sound rippling like water, everything swam, spun and waved in front of her as if she were watching the heat rise off of the desert sands. She almost tumbled off of her stool and had to brace herself against the table to keep from falling over.

It took her for a moment or two to come back to herself. As she did, she noticed that Batiir was roaring with laughter. “That's it ner vod, haili cetare!”

Hanna coughed and set the cup down on the table, pounding her hand on her chest to help the drink descend into her stomach. She groaned before she could speak. “What's in that stuff?”

“You'd have to ask Veenre Lokun about that.” Batiir set his cup down on the table, shook his head and grinned. “That was about the best thing I've seen in a long time, ner vod.”

“Glad one of us enjoyed it.” Hanna blinked and tried to clear her throat, but something clung to the inside of it with a rather annoying tenacity. “Who's Veenre Lokun?”

“The proprietor of the Oyu'baat, the best bar and cantina in Keldabe. He gets me my drinks for free, and I help keep his bar in good repair.” Batiir pounded the table with his hand, then picked up his cup again, “Come on, ner vod, one last drink and we'll get back to work.”

“Ner vod, what does that mean?”

“My brother, my sister, my comrade, someone I can trust and consider a friend.” He proffered his cup in Hanna's direction. “The one who brought me beskar and gave me something to hope for Manda'yaim's future.”

Hanna picked her cup up and held it toward Batiir. “The one who is making my armor the best in the galaxy.”

Batiir rapped his cup against hers, causing a bit of the ale to spill onto the floor. “To new friends you've met before.”

Hanna recognized it, the first line of an old toast. She had heard it before, at a formal dinner back when she was just a little girl. She gave the second line: “And old ones you're meeting for the first time.”

They drank. Hanna's cup seemed to hold far more than she thought possible. But she drank it all, down to the dregs, and plopped the cup back on the table before Batiir had finished. Her head was swimming non-stop now, and her eyes refused to fully focus on Batiir's face as he smiled at her again. She coughed, wiping foam from around her mouth with the back of her hand.

Batiir finished his drink and set his mug down. “Impressive, ner vod! You drink with a warrior's vigor!”

Hanna felt a proud warm tingling spread through her whole body. She tried squinting at Batiir to get her eyes to focus, but it did not help at all. “I can't... my eyes won't focus on anything Batiir. I don't...” She giggled. “I think I might be drunk. Is this what being drunk feels like? It's all soft and fuzzy.”

Batiir stood up and came over to her. “Here, let me help you up, ner vod, we will go back out to the shop floor and get back to working on your beskar'gam.”

Hanna accepted his help up, but, as they walked back into the main force room, she also thought of a problem. “I don't know if I'll be able to keep sewing for a bit, my eyes aren't working right.”

“Then just sit back and wait until they are.” Batiir let her down in a corner of the forge room alongside the table where she had been working on sewing the bodysuit. “I will keep working with the armor plating, let me know when you are ready to start again.”

Hanna nodded as she slumped into the corner between the table and the wall. “Thank you, ner vod. I'll...” Her vision split, and she was seeing two of Batiir's friendly faces instead of the one he actually had. “I'll just sit back here and wait until this... wears off.”

He nodded to her, smiled and went back to his work. Hanna watched him for a while, letting the heat of the fire wash over her, the warmth of the drink in her stomach spreading through her whole body. It was interesting to watch, beskar forging, all sorts of flames and sparks shooting off, hammers pounding, water sizzling and turning to steam. The issue was, it was getting harder and harder for her to actually watch it. Her vision got fuzzier and fuzzier, it did not clear up at all. She decided to close her eyes for a bit and hope that it cleared up.

She fought back a yawn as she settled back and shut her eyes, rubbing her face with her hands. The steady ringing of the hammer, the soft crackle and roar of the fires under the forges, the grunts of exertion and approval from the blacksmith as he worked, it all swirled around in her ears until she could not hear the individual parts anymore, only the song they were singing, the rhythm and rhyme. The warmth draped over her like the softest and most gentle of blankets, caressing her, whispering in her ear to curl up a bit tighter, to relax her tired muscles from their tenseness, to rest her head against the wall.

It was hardly a minute after she had shut her eyes that Hanna was completely asleep.

* * *​

​

Hanna stirred before she woke up. It took her a moment to uncurl from where she was sitting in the corner of the blacksmith shop. Her head was pounding, her back was stiff and her neck ached. She groaned, moaned and crawled up to a sitting position, gripping her forehead with her hand to try and hold the throbbing at bay. The shop was, thankfully, quiet and dark, Batiir nowhere to be seen and the forges having gone dormant. She was able to get up and move around, but her legs felt like lead weights and her arms did not move as quickly as she wanted them to.

“Wow.” She tried to think back to whatever she had been doing before having gone to sleep. She remembered sewing a bodysuit together and cutting it apart at the same time, Batiir forging, the both of them drinking... something.

She rubbed the back of her head and winced both on her face and in her soul. “What was in that drink? I guess this is what people call the hang-under, or over, or whatever. Whatever it is, it sucks.”

She turned and looked around, checking everywhere for signs of life. But the shop was dark and there was no one else in sight. “Where did Batiir go?” She wondered aloud. “I mean, he wouldn't just leave me here passed-out drunk, would he?”

Then again, she had no real idea about what he might do. He obviously considered her an equal, perfectly capable of taking care of herself, rather than someone who needed protecting or coaching. But why would he just leave her alone in his shop after, apparently, completing his work? Had he forgotten about her?

Hanna went to the shop's front room, the sales room, and realized, by looking out through the front door and window, that it was nighttime now. Or at least some point after the sun had set. The world outside was dark, lit only by a couple of lamps beyond her range of vision. Even the shop itself was dark, with no lights or glow-lamps or even a candle. Ending the day's work when the sun went down made sense, but again, Hanna felt confused and rather miffed that she had been left behind.

It was not until she looked at the front display table, just as she was about to go out the door, that she stopped being miffed and started being curious. Because on that table, she saw a very familiar, yet also very different, set of armor.

The black beskar'gam was hers, almost exactly how she and Batiir had laid it out. Seven pieces, a top, a bottom, a helmet, her brand-new and brilliant pair of gloves and a pair of boots that had come from nowhere. All of them were shortened, re-shaped and re-forged to match her body, each one designed to fit with the ease and comfort of a silkweave stocking. Stuck on the breastplate with a simple adhesive was a short note on flimsiplast paper.

“It's all finished,” She read, “Sorry to have to run out. Business is business. I even made you some boots, they're on the floor. Thank you again, ner vod, -B.”

She smiled, put the note down, then picked up her new gloves and weighed them in her hands. They were heavy, but the fabric was soft and flexible, and the armor plating in them was the same cool, solid tempered beskar alloy she had become familiar with wearing over most of the rest of her body. The boots were much the same way, each boot made of durable armorweave and leather, and infused with armor plates that made them heavy, but also almost impossibly durable. The other two pieces, the top and bottom, together made a full armor set that she could slip in and out of as quickly as she could put on her shirt or pants. And of course, the helmet, just as she remember it, had been polished and all of the scars buffed out, all of the remnants of the abuse heaped upon it in the past.

Her armor. It was her armor now.

She started shucking off her Echani-made bodysuit. No point putting it off or waiting, the armor was here and ready, and she had no idea what the rest of the night would bring. She started with the bottom half, pulling it up tight and doing up the simple strap in the middle to keep it in place. It really was not necessary, the bodysuit was almost skin-tight in how perfectly it fit her body, hugging every muscle and bone on her lower half. The top was just as snug as she slid it on, and doing up the seal to attached the two halves surrounded her in a protective glove that felt heavy, but still comfortable, and did not ride up awkwardly or clank pieces together the way it used to.

The boots were next. They fit well, about as well as any boots she had worn. She was reluctant to give up her reliable pair of traveling boots, ones she had worn for about as long as she had been in this life. But these new ones would serve her well, she knew, and when she put them on and stood up in them, she realized how much she would enjoy being able to kick things and not worry about how much damage her toes might be enduring.

It was the gloves that she was most exited about, of course. She could feel the soft vibrations in them as she put them on, attuned to her body's natural frequency for ideal comfort. Each one fit like, well, a glove, weighing a good deal more than any glove she had previously worn but not uncomfortable or awkward at all. As she did up the seals, she curled and uncurled her fingers, watching the fabric and plating stretch and recede to ensure the more vulnerable parts of her hands were always protected. She decided to test them. Making a fist with each hand, she rapped her knuckles together in front of her. There was a clanging sound, a short burst of sparks, but no pain, no feeling of real impact. They worked.

As she scooped her helmet off of the table, Hanna turned it over and looked at the visor. Once, she had been in awe of the T-shape and what it represented, seeing the person within as some sort of legendary figure with unattainable levels of skill and ferocity in combat, a ruthless and brutal man who would stop at nothing to accomplish his goals.

Now, it was her. She was the one behind it. It was her eyes that looked out through it, her voice that spoke through the speakers and powered the weapons systems. She was Mandalorian.

She put the helmet on. The lights danced, the displays did their diagnostic work as she did up the remaining few seals and let the armor remap all of its systems to the new configuration. The integrated armor integrity circuits were the best thing T'ocs had ever done with it. It even brought her gloves and boots into the equation after a few moments of processing exactly what they were. She put checked the wrist-mounted weapons, now fully integrated into the rest of the armor, and made sure they were all powered up and ready to go. Everything was working, everything was where it was supposed to be.

Hanna scooped her belt off of the floor where she had dropped it and reattached it to her body, over the armor. She then folded her old bodysuit and tucked it under her arm. She would go and leave it back aboard the Arbiter, then go looking for T'ocs. The fact that he had not come to check on her after leaving her with the blacksmith did not surprise her; she imagined he, Vau and Gilamar had business to attend to with that Reau woman being in town, but she did not want to leave without him. As much of a hassle it was to listen to him ramble and scold her about things sometimes, he was still all she had left, the closest thing she had to a friend, or a father.

The door closed and latched behind her, Hanna set off across the city in search of her crewmate. She only had one location in the whole city she knew by name: the Oyu'baat, a cantina that Batiir had mentioned. He had said it was the biggest in the whole city. That meant it would not be hard to find. And cantinas tended to be great sources of information. Even if T'ocs was not there, she was willing to bet that someone there would know where he was.

 

It's a testament to how used you got us to things going wrong that I expected something to go terribly wrong at every turn in your last entry... Now I'm sure something will go wrong in the Oyu'baat

But let me backtrack a bit, to your Thursday chapter. The bickering between T'ocs and Vau was priceless It reminded me of the two old schmucks in the Muppet Show, just more ominous because you'd think these two could start killing each other anytime. And the moment they chorused "yes, mom" had me literally laughing out loud -- I had to go and check what 'buir' means in Mando'a, but my guess was right.

More seriously, I found it interesting that Gilamar (and later Batiir) would immediately like Hanna, as opposed to Vau. Is it because he has an old grudge to settle with T'ocs, or is he just particularly foul-tempered?

I enjoyed very much the insights into the various Mandalorian factions and Mandalorian culture -- in both entries, that is; the background about the Death Watch was very useful for me, and the fact that the blacksmith would see the opportunity to work "real" armour as a gift was a great addition to the description of the run-down city. The feel of the place is very starwarsy in general.

Fantastic blunder from Hanna, when she drops casually in the conversation that she's working for Vader. So like her, and it was interesting to see that Vau analysed it rationally, whereas friendly Gilamar doesn't seem too cool with it. I imagine that this will have implications?

And how she gets drunk for the first time -- another fantastic moment. She almost misses her own final transformation into a true Mandalorian, but then it happens, and wow. She's almost a grownup now, isn't she, if she's beginning to think of T'ocs as a friend rather than a father.

Eagerly waiting for the last instalment!

 

And here's the end. As I said, a good deal shorter than my last story. I'll be moving on to the next full installment in this series at a future date TBD, and the same note stands: if you want to be notified when I start it up, let me know and I'll tag you.

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The Oyu'baat was not hard to find. It was the one place in the whole of Keldabe that was still open and active at this hour, a decent-sized three-story wood and stone structure that looked like an amalgamation of three or four smaller buildings at one end of a large, paved square. It had plenty of lights on inside, visible through the slatted wooden double-doors and numerous shutter-less windows, and looked more like an ancient hotel of some sort than a cantina. The building was anything but uniform, with only the most basic of leveling and visible floor planning, windows thrown about haphazardly and a sloped roof that faced both the north and south, its loose brick and tile construction posing a healthy hazard to those without helmets.

Aside from its size and obvious importance, two things told Hanna that she was in the right place. First was the sign on wall next to the main entrance that said Oyu'baat in both Basic and Mandalorian scripts, along with a notice restricting the presence of strills. Second was the sounds: a rousing drinking song of which she only caught one word in ten coming from somewhere deep inside, along with other shouts, laughs and cheering. A cantina was very rarely a quiet place, and one populated almost entirely by Mandalorians was no exception to that rule.

Hanna went inside. The double doors swung open as she pushed on them, and she found herself looking down a short staircase into a massive hall. Each of the four walls was lined with booths, the floor of the hall was full of scattered tables, and in the center were two long, curved bars, one that was serving food, the other drinks. A staircase at the back of the hall led up to the second and third floors, the balconies and galleries of which could be seen from the ground floor as well as doors that led to separate rooms. The décor was rather tattered and old, as upkeep seemed a low priority at the moment, everything looked worn out or worn down. At least it was clean.

Her helmet's rangefinder and visor scanners did most of the looking for her, but it just took her own two eyes to tell her that she was the only being in the entire cantina in full beskar'gam. Everyone else was in civilian clothes or Imperial military fatigues. The patrons she could see were divided into two obvious groups: natives and the Imperial soldiers looking to relax while on leave. The two groups did not mix. Each had staked out their own half of the cantina and remained there without looking in the direction of the other. While the laughter and singing seemed real enough, Hanna had to wonder how much of the mirth was forced in an effort to show the other side that their presence was doing nothing to prevent them from having a good time.

She was about to walk down into the hall when a noise from an upper floor got her attention. A blaster shot, unmistakable in its sharpness and bite. The patrons below all went quiet, aside from a few of the more oblivious, or drunk, and looked in the same direction she had, searching for the source of the sound.

A second shot rang out, one Hanna's ears more readily identified as belonging to an Imperial regulation BlasTech E-11 blaster carbine. A quick glance at the Imperial soldiers scattered across the hall told her that several of them, the older ones, the veterans, also knew the sound. There was no song or laughter anymore. The mirth had been sucked out of the room, as even the bartenders paused in their work and looked up toward the second floor in curiosity tinged with fear.

One of the doors banged outward, almost flying off of its hinges as a body was propelled through it at a rather incredible velocity for a human to achieve. The man, for it was a man, went across the gallery from where he had been launched, hit the rail above the floor of the main hall, and his momentum carried him up over it and tumbling down onto the floor of the hall itself. Someone shouted in horror as he crashed into a hastily-vacated table and shattered it into splinters and matchwood.

Two more figures appeared at the gallery rail above them now, a man and a woman fighting over what looked like a rather long knife. Hanna gasped. The man was Mij Gilamar. She did not know the woman, but her instincts told her it was probably Isabet Reau. The woman was wearing armor, golden-yellow beskar'gam over almost her whole body, lacking only her helmet to complete the set. Her hair was in a tight, thin braid over one shoulder, and was in the process of graying from a medium brown color. And the expression on her weathered face spoke of pure hatred and murder.

Hanna started running for the stairs at the far end of the hall. The man who had fallen through the table was being helped back to his feet, and she saw at a glance that it was Walon Vau. He was bleeding from his head and one arm sat at a rather wrong angle, but he did not look too bad otherwise and was already trying to wave off those who helped him. She did not pause to check on him, shouldering through the crowds of Mandalorians and Imperial soldiers alike. A few of the latter shouted and grabbed for her, likely to complain about her armor being illegal. But she did not care to stop and explain to them when a friend of hers was fighting for his life.

Reau had gained the upper hand as Hanna mounted the stairs and turned to look at them over her shoulder. She had pinned Gilamar against the rail and was holding the knife to his throat, saying something that was lost in the commotion of the hall. Hanna took the stairs two at a time, reached the second-floor gallery and sprinted toward the melee as fast as her legs could carry her.

“Just a nick, that's all it will take.” Reau was saying, “That's how you killed Dred, isn't it? Just a nick or two, cut him open and let him bleed like an animal.”

“If you're going to kill me, go ahead.” Gilamar said through gritted teeth, “I'd recommend severing the femoral artery, on the back side of my thigh. That's how I killed your psycho chakaar boyfriend, before I dumped him in the river.”

Reau scraped his throat with the knife, drawing a trickle of blood. “You admit it!”

Gilamar did not flinch away from the pain as the blade cut his flesh. “I do. I did it, I'm proud and I hope he's still burning in haran where the both of you belong.”

Reau let out a strangled scream of rage, but before she could do any more cutting or dig the blade any deeper, Hanna slammed into her from the side and sent the both of them to the floor, freeing Gilamar. The aged Mandalorian clasped his hand to his throat and gasped in relief and surprise.

“Hanna?”

Hanna was too busy pounding away at Reau's head to answer him. The quarters were too close for her to wind up a proper punch, so she had to settle for ramming with the elbow and forearm plates of her armor, trying to disorient Reau further and prevent her from using her knife. Reau took the first few blows on the cheeks and jaw, then started to fight back, kicking her knees into Hanna's chest and scrambling for leverage, trying to get enough room to stab between the plates on Hanna's chest or arm.

An impact hit Hanna in the side with enough force for her to feel it through the armor, picking her up off of Reau and throwing her to the floor with a grunt of pain and surprise. She glanced in the direction of the shot, and saw a tall, thin, scraggly man in Imperial Army fatigues, a Lieutenant if his rank badge was accurate, with an E-11 in his hand, pointed at her.

Hanna's first instinct was to draw a weapon of her own and put the man down. But he was an Imperial soldier, and she was still working for the Empire. She would not want to face Darth Vader with the knowledge that she had killed an Imperial officer hanging over her. Then again, the man had shot her, it was only her armor that kept her from being a smoldering corpse on the ground.

She got to her feet. “Stay out of this,” She growled at him, “This isn't Imperial business.”

“Everything on Mandalore is Imperial business.” He said in response, voice gratingly snobby. “Stand down.”

“No.” Hanna raised her right gauntlet toward him, hoping to get him to back down under threat of being hit with an unknown weapon. But Reau's surging attack from below, hitting her in the chest where she had just been shot and knocking the wind out of her, knocked Hanna off-balance and nearly sent her over the edge of the rail. Only a last-second tumble to one side and back to the floor saving her from a rather nasty fall. The officer fired again, blast going wide and digging a black hole in the wooden platform they stood on.

“She's mine, Proga.” Reau snarled in his direction. She had produced another knife from somewhere and pointed it toward him. “The little hut'tuun likes to stick her nose in where it doesn't belong.” She looked back at Hanna and grinned, a wide, feral and disturbingly cheerful grin, as she scraped her knives against each other. “And I've going to teach her what curiosity does to the curious.”

Hanna climbed to her feet and ran a hand along where the laser had hit her. It had scuffed the metal and left a char mark, but had not done any lasting damage. She turned to appraise Reau. The woman was older, in her middle age, but still looked strong and fit. Her armor was scarred and heavily pockmarked with blast points, telling Hanna that it was not true beskar, likely just an inferior alloy of durrasteel or durraplast. But the fact that she was still alive after taking that much punishment spoke of the woman's tenacity. Or, perhaps, insanity.

The more experienced warrior obviously knew how to fight in armor, and likely how to kill someone wearing it, as well. She also had two knives that looked more than sharp enough to penetrate the armorweave fabric between the armor plating and dig into Hanna's flesh and bones beneath. If they were to fight on an even footing, it would be a contest too close to call. Those were not odds that Hanna liked. She needed to get Reau off of her game, do something to make her uncomfortable, to disrupt her concentration and focus. No sense in leaving anything up to chance, every advantage to be gained should be taken.

Hanna laughed at her, as clear and ringing a laugh as she could manage with her wind still partially knocked out. “Look at you. Isabet Reau, the one who'll resurrect the Death Watch, a half-blind old lady fumbling around in a cantina and swinging knives at old men for nothing more than petty revenge.”

Reau's grin turned into a snarl as she jumped forward, knife in her right hand swinging. “You little brat! I was killing before you were even born!”

“Yeah, I'll bet you were.” Hanna turned the knife aside on her wrist gauntlet, jumping to the side and away from the railing. “You're probably old enough to remember the days before blasters, that's why you like knives so much.”

Reau's scream of rage was accompanied by a wild flurry of swipes, stabs and slices, almost too fast for Hanna to follow. She had to keep backing away, intercepting the blows intended for vulnerable areas with her gauntlets, and wincing as she felt one, two, three of them slip past and scrape across her breastplate. Reau was past planning or being tactical, which was good, but her skills with her knives were so deeply ingrained in her body that not even a mindless rage could keep them back. She was a whirlwind of limbs and banshee-like screaming, terrifying to behold.

If Hanna had any sort of fear left in her.

She stopped the assault by going on the offensive. One of Reau's wide swings left her open in the middle, with no guard and no way to block the right jab Hanna threw into her jaw. The impact knocked Reau out of her berserk rage and caused her to stumble backward, holding a hand to her cheek. Hanna glanced down at her glove, at the few flecks of glistening blood on it, and relished how the impact of glove on bone had not even left an achy knuckle in its wake. Her new gloves worked brilliantly.

“You're pathetic,” Hanna said, stalking closer to Reau as she spoke. “A harpy with her feathers falling out, clinging to the past by shredding the last few bits of her sanity. If you weren't so disgusting I'd pity you.”

Reau let her hand down and swung again, a wild left-to-right strike meant to slash Hanna's throat open. Hanna caught the blade in her right glove, then brought her left up into Reau's closed grip and jarred the weapon loose. She tossed it aside, where it clattered against the floor. Then she drove another right, this time a hook, into Reau's astonished, wrathful face. The woman spun with the impact and sprawled into the rail, catching herself against it. She spat something, blood and possibly a bit of broken tooth, into the hall below.

Then, she turned, another feral grin slowly spreading across her face. “Oh, I like you. This is going to be fun.” She held her hand out toward the doorway, toward the Imperial officer who still stood there. “Proga!”

The officer ducked inside the room for a moment, then returned with a yellow helmet in his hands, tossing it to her. Reau spat one more time, leaving a splatter of blood on the floor between her and Hanna, before putting her helmet on and doing up the seal around her neck. She turned her remaining knife over in her hand, so that the blade pointed down from her closed right fist, and dropped into a combat pose, left arm back and down, right arm up and blade pointed across her body. “Now.” She said, voice all the more threatening with its tint and distortion from the helmet's speakers, “Let's start this again.”

Hanna took a deep breath and flexed her fingers, leaving her hands open and at the ready. Reau had changed gears rather abruptly, and what was worse, she did not seem unfocused or distracted anymore. Everything Hanna had done to that point had backfired. Now she was facing an armed, armored and very angry Mandalorian warrior and Death Watch member. This fight had become rather more dangerous rather quickly.

“Ready when you are.” Hanna said.

Reau attacked. But her attack was not wild or reckless, she came at Hanna with quick, controlled slashes, backhand and forehand, aiming for the soft spots at Hanna's shoulders, throat and elbows. Hanna dodged most of them, walking backward and keeping her hands between her and Reau's knife. The few slashes that she could not move out of the way of, she caught on her gauntlets and gloves, letting the sharp blade ring against the tempered beskar and knowing that it could do no more than scratch it, if that.

She resolved to wait. Reau had the weapon and the initiative, but Hanna was also wearing almost impenetrable body armor and had the measure of what Reau was willing to do at the moment. She could afford to bide her time and be on the lookout for an opportunity, an opening, some way to gain an advantage over Reau and bring the fight to an end. There was not much debate of what Reau's fate would be; Hanna fully intended to kill her. The problem lay in figuring out how to do it. It almost felt like cheating to use one of her more powerful weapons against someone who only fought with a knife.

It took Hanna several more strikes before she found the opening she was looking for. Reau struck for Hanna's right shoulder with a backhand swing, and Hanna was able to extend the blade in the gauntlet on her right wrist as it came at her. She caught the knife on her blade, then yanked it out of Reau's grasp before Reau could do anything about it and sent it skipping to the floor.

Then, she went back on the offensive. Hanna sheathed her blade and unleashed a flurry of punches into Reau's helmet and body plating. Jabs, crosses, hooks, from every angle and with all of the speed and strength she could muster. Armor hit armor, clanging and clanking, each impact reminded Hanna distinctly of punching a wall. But Reau was taken completely off-guard, barely even fighting back or defending herself, taking the battering and backing away from it.

As withering as the assault was, it did no real damage. Blunt blows were all but useless against armor. Reau was able to gather herself after she recovered from her surprise, and fight back after absorbing a few more hits, catching Hanna's right arm in her hands and twisting it around with frightening speed, threatening to break it or trap it against Hanna's back. Hanna had to drop into a half-crouch, spin in the same direction her arm was being twisted, and sweep her boot through Reau's ankles to preserve her arm. But Reau was fast enough to avoid the counter, jumping over Hanna's legs, but also releasing Hanna's arm.

Hanna surged upward, much as Reau had before to her, and drove a fist in an uppercut toward Reau's chin. The yellow-clad Mandalorian leaned her head back and let the blow whistle past, then kicked out and caught Hanna in the chest, knocking her backward a few paces. Then Reau reached into her belt and drew out two more knives, one with each hand. These were shorter, but they were also shaped more like leaves than knives, with broad double-sided blades that came to a triangular point, with two smaller blades breaking off from the main one just above the handle.

She attacked. The broad-blade knives whistled as they slashed through the air, each cut scraping a line across Hanna's armor somewhere. Hanna scrambled to get out of the way, but Reau was too quick, too light on her feet. A stab got through, and Hanna felt burning pain surge upward from her left arm, her helmet warning her of a breach in the armorweave around her left elbow. Reau's keen blade had sliced through the beskar weave. Perhaps it was made of beskar itself. Blood seeped out and turned the matte black fabric wet and glistening.

That was it. The game was over. Hanna twisted to her left around a stab, sliding up closer to Reau and raising her right hand as if she were about to deliver a punch. Reau saw the blow coming and shifted to her right to avoid it. That put her within easy range of Hanna's left hand, something Reau obviously discounted due to the injury she had dealt it. But it did not take much strength for Hanna to ball up her left fist, raise it toward Reau's chin, and order her armor to unleash one of its wrist-mounted weapons.

“Fire sonic.” She ordered.

The blast was almost invisible, a ripple effect through the air akin to water that had swallowed a stone. But its impact was immediate and unmistakable. Reau cried out in pain, dropping both of her knives and clutching her helmet in both hands. She went reeling backward, staggering a few steps and turning away from Hanna, all of the soft tissues and organs in her head shuddering with the impact they had just experienced.

Hanna did not lower her hand as she advanced, keeping the sonic blaster trained on Reau's turned back. The older woman was reeling, her hands both on the sides of her helmet, knees wobbling, barely able to stay upright. She dropped to one knee and put her hands on the floor as Hanna was about to reach her, and it took Hanna a moment to realize that she was not trying to stabilize herself, she was going for one of her knives.

Another sonic wave aimed directly for her head caused Reau to double over and clutch at her head again, knife dropping back to the ground. She tried to get back up to her feet, but her feet could not seem to find the ground and she fell on her face. Hanna could hear her retching inside of her helmet.

Now Hanna had a decision to make. Her helmet's readout was telling her that all of her weapons were operational, as they had been since the beginning of the fight. But somehow, none of them seemed appropriate. No, this needed something cruder than a voice-activated wrist-mounted flamethrower to be the ushering baton into the haran or whatever the Mandalorian version of hell was called. She scooped up the longer of Reau's knives, scraping the edge along her gauntlet and drawing out a rather intensely keen sound.

“You...” Reau's voice sounded rather sick and like she was trying not to vomit in her helmet. “You're cheating.”

“Wrong.” Hanna corrected her. She kicked Reau in the side and turned her over onto her back. “I'm winning.”

“No... glory.”

“What made you think I want any?” Hanna stabbed Reau in the throat with her own knife, between the collar of her armor and the chin of her helmet. She let the knife bite deep into the soft tissue of the throat, twisted both clockwise and back again before yanking it free. Reau gurgled and groaned, her body convulsing, neck oozing blood that bubbled with each breath she tried to take. Each gush of blood turned Reau's soft yellow and gold armor a dark and gory red.

Hanna stood up and dropped the knife on Reau's body, letting it clank off of her breastplate. “I prefer not being dead.”

She walked back toward where Gilamar was standing, and had been standing through the whole event. The Imperial Lieutenant had disappeared somewhere, and the two of them were alone on the gallery. Her right hand gripped her left arm where Reau's knife had gone through her armor and drawn blood. It hurt, especially now that the hype and adrenaline was draining from her body. The pain, the ache, the slow twisting in her gut as blood leaked free through her fingers. She was familiar enough with the human body and common injuries suffered in battle to know that Reau's knife had missed the important tendons in her elbow, but had cut through a vein, and that if she did not stop the bleeding, she might lose her arm.

“Here, let me see that.” Gilamar stepped over to her. His throat was bandaged with a loose wrapping, and he had another bandage for her arm that looked like it had been torn off of his shirt. He moved her hand aside and wrapped her elbow up, not looking her in the face. The speed and confidence he worked with told her that he had patched wounds like it before.

“You're a medic, aren't you?”

He shrugged with one shoulder. “A doctor, technically. Was one long before I put on the beskar'gam.”

Hanna pondered for a moment. The fact that Gilamar was not looking at her unsettled her a bit. “Why'd you do it?”

Mij threw a glance at her up from underneath his brows. “That's personal. I have my reasons.” He tightened the bandage with a jerk on her arm, drawing a wince of pain from Hanna. “Just as you must to work for the Empire.”

“I work for the Empire because... I made a promise to someone. Someone who...” She ran out of words. The wall of pain and emotion that came up slammed right into her and cut off her thoughts and voice. Her eyes began to fill up and she had to close them before they started to leak.

“Are you all right?” Mij asked her. He had let her arm go and stepped back, leaving the bandage in place.

Hanna opened her eyes again. She clenched her hand and flexed her arm, testing the bandage. “It hurts.”

Mij took a deep breath, and sighed. He smiled at her and rested his hand on her shoulder. “I know it does, ner vod. I made a promise once, too.”

* * *​

​

The mechanic was wiping the grease on his hand off on a rag. It did not help all that much except to spread it around. He crooked his thumb back in the direction of the Arbiter. “Engine cowling's back in place and the hydraulics are patched. Couldn't get the hull straightened out all the way, but it'll hold the vacuum at least.”

“Good enough for me.” Hanna said. She had her helmet under one arm, the injured one. Her right was in one of the pouches in her belt, playing with a small stack of credit chips with rather large denominations. She had intended to use them to pay for her armor's renovation, but that had wound up costing her nothing, so she had plenty left to pay one of the local Mandal Motors employees to work a little off the clock. “How are the landing struts?”

“You can take off and land on 'em.” The man shrugged. “They need to be replaced, but we don't have the parts here.”

“Like pretty much everything else on the ship.”

The man grinned. “Well, I wasn't going to say anything...”

“Were there any other problems you found when you were working on it?”

The man shook his head. “Not that I saw. Ship's pretty solid, the last mechanic who worked on it did some good work.”

Hanna nodded. “Yeah, he did.” She pulled a handful of credits out of her belt and tossed them to him, one at a time. “Here, buy yourself some drinks at the Oyu'baat.”

The man looked at the stack of credits he had just received. His eyes grew for a moment, then he stuffed them away in one of his many pockets. “Thank you, ner burc'ya. Whenever you come back to Mandalore...”

“I'll be sure to let you know next time I need my ship patched back together.” Hanna turned and gestured to T'ocs. “T'ocs, let's go.”

T'ocs nodded to her, gave Walon Vau a warm hand-to-wrist shake, and started stumping his way in her direction. Mird gave him a rather mournful yowl as he walked away, but T'ocs did not look back. He passed by Hanna, gave her a look that could have meant any number of things, and kept walking toward the ship.

Hanna did look back, at Vau and Mird, who stood by the landing pad, Vau's arm in a loose sling after the tumble he had taken at the Oyu'baat and Mird bearing a few extra scars from the fight against the droids. But both of them still looked back at her and seemed relatively sorry to see them go. It was hard to tell with Vau, but Mird definitely looked unhappy. Mij Gilamar was standing a short distance away, arms crossed over his chest, but he was smiling, and gave her a loose salute as she turned to face them again. She returned the salute in their general direction, then turned and headed toward her ship.

T'ocs met her at the bottom of the ramp, scaling it beside her and entering the ship at the same time. “So,” he asked, “How did you like Mandalore?”

“The people were okay enough. Drinks were good. Wasn't a huge fan of the scenery.” Hanna turned to close the hatch and raise the ramp. “Not too bad overall. Wouldn't want to live here, though.”

T'ocs nodded as he stumped toward the entrance to the cockpit. “That was my approximate assessment, years ago.” He turned back to face her before entering the cockpit. “You realize that you killed one of the most dangerous women on this planet, right?”

“Yeah, I gathered that from all the free drinks at the Oyu'baat.” Hanna grimaced and tossed her helmet over onto the grav-couch against the far wall of the lounge. She held her hand over the part of her arm that had been stabbed. “We never did figure out who sent those droids after us, did we?”

“No, but Vau's best guess was that hut'tuune Imperial Lieutenant we caught with Reau at the Oyu'baat. He and Gilamar are going to be digging into it, but it's none of our business anymore.” T'ocs leaned against the wall on one arm. “Our business is setting our next course. Where do we go from here?”

“Good question.” Hanna pondered for a moment, then tossed up her hands in an exaggerated shrug. “Tell you what, you get us into orbit, I'll look up the first name on our list and get us started from that.”

T'ocs nodded and headed forward. “Good plan.”

Hanna went over and sat down beside her helmet on the couch. She powered up the hologram projector in the table in front of her, then plugged it into the datapad they had left there. On it, aside from the most basic, generic information that could be found on any datapad, was an encrypted data file, a rather sizable one. She opened it up and started going through the necessary data walls and layers of organization to get what she wanted.

There was a lot of information in this file, all of it taken from official Imperial records. Planetary locations and ecological surveys, population demographics, census data, species profiles, mechanical blueprints and cross-sections, it was an enormous amount of data. But all of it was framework, supporting and building structure around the main function of the file.

The list.

A list of names and locations, that was all it was, around fifty-some separate entries long. Each name had a planet associated with it, but that was all. A name and an approximate location. The way the file was set up, however, meant that Hanna could access all of the relevant data about that planet, and that being, just by highlighting the entry that she wanted to focus on. All of it was assembled and summarized on a separate report that provided links back to the raw information files elsewhere within the network. There was always enough to put together a fairly decent profile of the being in question, skills, strengths, profession, and their day to day activities most of the time. Whoever had gathered the intelligence had been very thorough.

Hanna glanced through the list, looking at the names spin and fuzz in and out as the ship rattled and bucked through its takeoff sequence. She had been putting this off, but with her armor fixed up and the Arbiter back in working condition, there was no reason for her to stall further. Someone on this list was going to become her target. Someone on this list, she had to go out and find, and then kill.

She steepled her fingers together in front of her mouth and pondered the names. So many choices. So many beings that needed to die for Darth Vader's purposes. As much as she wanted to just pick one at random, this was the sort of decision that could meant the different between life and death for her. She needed to take all of the information at her disposal and make an informed, accurate and solidly logical choice.

The Arbiter surged beneath her as it climbed through Mandalore's atmosphere and headed for open space. Hanna opened up the first target profile and started to read.

 

Because I'm not sure anyone saw the mid-week post with the conclusion, I'll drop by again to give a status update on my next full story. It's about eight chapters deep now, and I'll be posting the opening part later in July. It'll be weekly installments, just like Hanna's Story was. It's also got some of my favorite scenes that I've ever written, entirely because of the characters. I try to make the characters I write "live" in my head so when I craft a story their actions make sense within their understanding and skill set. When I put a good character together, they start to become almost self-aware, and the story begins to write itself outside of the broad strokes of plot. Hanna and T'ocs are both characters who do that, and the main character yet to be introduced does as well.

To comment a bit on the Mandalore story, a lot of the history of this era in Mandalorian culture, between the TCW era and the era of the films, is unwritten right now in official canon. Obviously something happened after TCW's "The Lawless" demolished the planet's government and started a civil war, but we don't know what that is, yet. I tried to follow the most logical conclusion, which is that after the fighting ended, the planet's government was gone and the economy was in shambles, leading the Empire to step in and help reassemble it. I tried to mash together the different Clone Wars era Mandalorians as best I could as well, including a few of Karen Traviss's creations and (obviously) a lot of the actual Mando'a language, as well as a few references to the original Marvel comic run wherein we first saw Mandalore itself.

Isabet Reau was a character Traviss came up with, but never was able to flesh out. She likely would have been a villain in the second Imperial Commando book, but that never happened, so I used her here as a sort of stepping stone for Hanna, being able to try out of her new armor and gain the respect of the older generation of warriors. Her fighting against stated Imperial designs is not something she'll be doing regularly, though, she's still loyal to the larger Imperial structure (and to Darth Vader). The droid attack on the homestead was meant to kill Vau and anyone else living there, assuming that they were aiding and abetting anti-Imperial activists or resistance fighters. A larger resistance is brewing on Mandalore and Hanna just barely brushed the edge of it, but did not get drawn in. It simply is not her fight, or a part of her story.

Chyntuck Findswoman Ewok Poet

 

I finally got around to reading the last instalment of this story, and I'll be back for more detailed comments later, but I wanted to say that I love the idea of Hanna as a Mandalorian celebrity. How was the hangover this time?

Also, I'll be away (or rather I'm hoping to be away and offline) for part of the summer. Can you please PM me when you start the next story so I can catch up when I'm back? Thanks