The Star Wars universe and all characters therein belong to George Lucas, LucasArts, BioWare and Obsidian Entertainment.
Taking the Galaxy
He was the last man in the fleet to have a right to feel afraid, but I could tell his palms were sweating under his armor suit. His pulsing carotid betrayed itself to the infrared sensors in my helmet's heads-up display. Maybe it was only an eagerness to board the Jedi general's command ship, the Crusader, the Republic's greediest carnage machine, a floating trophy he couldn't wait to add to his collection.
But I knew the Mandalore. He was afraid, and that terrified me.
He propped his boots up on the scout ship console when the Crusader drifted into view, blue flame sputtering from the chinks we'd made in her hull. Mandalore's breathing quickened with each passing minute. He laced his fingers together behind the tubes of his sealed helmet and kept his reflective T-shaped visor trained on the display. The Republic behemoth had lost attitude control and wheeled through space as slowly and aimlessly as the corpse of a sea monster, caught in the equilibrium between sinking and rising to the water's surface.
"Cassus did well," I said.
Mandalore made no indication that he'd heard me. Only the Crusader's cool fire reflected in the T of his visor.
It was generous of him to let an underling lead the battle. I didn't understand why Mandalore chose not to claim this victory for himself. He'd insisted that I fly our scout ship through Jaga's star cluster and plant us on the far side of an asteroid, just outside the Crusader's visual range. We watched Cassus' assault from the asteroid's shadow. Because his fleet of assault ships could keep their guns charged in hyperspace, and because the enemy fleet was missing a small but critical amount of starfighters, Cassus started out with the advantage, even though Republic guns outnumbered him fourfold. He decimated the fleet with the utmost elegance. Every time I watched his handiwork I wondered what the Mandalorian fleet would look like without him.
When Cassus contacted us from his ship to announce that he would be ready to board the Crusader in an hour, Mandalore spoke for the first time since we'd arrived: "Don't." Through the amplifier in his sealed helmet, his voice sounded almost human, but raw, as though he spent too much time yelling or was recovering from an illness. I knew neither were the case. He belonged to the old warrior race, the Taung people. He was the only Taung I knew. He might have been the only Taung left in the galaxy..
"Mandalore?" Cassus had responded.
"I told you to go straight to Onderon, Cassus. I will lead the boarding party."
"Mandalore, my ship is outfitted with –"
"That Jedi general is still alive and she'll rip you apart."
Crackling static filled Cassus' end of the comlink. After a moment he said, "I'm prepared to duel her."
"Ha!"
"Let me regain my honor, Mandalore."
"No. You shouldn't even be here. Go watch the Onderon blockade."
Over the comlink I heard a fist shatter a display monitor, but Cassus said nothing. He broke off the transmission. After a moment his assault ship's engines threw off their glare, white and red and green, and then the craft was swallowed by hyperspace, leaving the rest of his fleet in our care.
I called up the rosters of the ships Cassus had left behind, found a suitable replacement to babysit the fleet until we could rendezvous, contacted him and told him to continue Cassus' preparations for boarding.
"Me, sir?" Ordo asked over the comlink. I could hear his eyes widen on the other end of the link.
"Cassus moved ahead to scout. While your squad prepares to board, keep an eye out for any stray escape pods and shoot them down."
"Yes, sir. Thank you, sir."
I hated his humility. The weakness of it sickened me. I tried to put it out of my mind and watched the Crusader wind onto its back, old fires winking out, new violet plumes spurting from cracks against the darkness.
When it was clear to me that Mandalore would say nothing until he was done with his business on the Crusader, I asked, "What makes you think the Jedi general's still alive?"
"I don't."
"Mandalore?"
"It's a precaution."
"Oh." I stirred. Mandalorians didn't take precautions.
Our engines had been off for hours. The life support, communications, and sensor gear were powered by the reserves. The scout was silent as a tomb. I jumped out of my chair and slapped my palms against the view screen, pricked with blue fire and distant stars, distant planets our fleet was conquering at that exact moment. "Why are we waiting?" It was the first time in my life I had questioned the ruler of our people.
At first he didn't answer. I wondered if he'd even noticed I had spoken. Then he rasped through his helmet, "We let the Republic dogs flush themselves out through the escape ducts, we destroy them, we take the ship and turn it against them."
"We should have boarded hours ago when there would be someone left to fight."
"Consider our numbers, Aias."
"Numbers! We're Mandalorians!" I gripped the back of my chair, considered throwing it against the console and shorting the whole damn thing out.
Mandalore stood up. His reflective visor regarded me. "If you were the Mandalore," he said, "Onderon's pathetic military, alone, with no help from the Jedi, would have crushed us before we'd even left Dxun. Do you remember how they folded under us? Do you remember how they begged for mercy?"
"Yes, Mandalore." And I did.
"I fight to win. Victories are won with numbers. You and all the others can enjoy being a part of our glorious machine, but someone has to think of our numbers, just like every camp has to have a quartermaster to count the latrine sanitizers."
My jaw worked as I stared at him.
"Sit down, Aias." Mandalore walked to the back of the ship. The arsenal opened with a hiss. I heard him pick up light blasters and replace them for heavier ones, heard the clink of vibroblades being thumbed through. "When the most formidable warrior in their fleet is dead, the Jedi will lose their will to fight," Mandalore said.
The thought chilled me. I didn't want the enemy to lose its will to fight. They had just begun to bite back. After thirty years of preparation, after so much anticipation, I wasn't content to let the galaxy fall into my lap. I wanted to wrest it from the Republic's grip. Then I could die, because there would be nothing left for me to take.
Ordo contacted me with news that his squad was ready. I powered up the engines and floated us into the Crusader shuttle bay. "General Kell couldn't have survived the attack."
"You're probably right." Mandalore looked up at the ceiling of the scout ship, as though he could see through it, through the belly of the monster ship, to a precise location where Kell was either lying dead or waiting for him with her lightsaber in hand.
The Jedi Revan led the Republic armada, but our people considered Kell the better warrior. We first became aware of her at Dagary Minor, where she led a suicide mission, a ground assault, to take control of our hidden encryption center. She nearly succeeded. Only one ship escaped our defense. She somehow got herself onto it even though a soldier reported shooting her to death. Crushed with shame when he learned he had failed to kill her, the boy dumped his weapons and armor into the base's disintegrator, then threw himself in after them. Since then, Kell had personally led dozens of ground battles that decimated our armies. Cassus called her the greatest warrior in the galaxy, after Mandalore, of course. I agreed with him. Many of us did. She made the war worth fighting.
Ordo's shuttles followed us inside. I used our ship's external fire suppression system to put out the chemical fires that had sprung up in the hangar. Then I docked us and pulled my blaster carbine out of the arsenal, felt its grateful purr as I powered it up.
Ordo's men were already lined up in the hangar when Mandalore and I stepped out. The soldiers held their rifles before them ceremoniously, probably waiting for Mandalore to give their weapons some sort of blessing. They were young indeed if they thought Mandalore had time to squander on them; they had never stood in the presence of their leader before. But Ordo himself was close to my age, maybe even old enough to have fought in the Great War, and he barked at the boys to move ahead and secure the lower deck.
We followed Ordo's squad through the hangar bay doors. The corridor beyond was dim and hazed with smoke. Red and yellow hazard lights flashed overhead. The squad led the way over Republic corpses toward the control room. Among the bodies was a blue-robed Jedi, a woman, and I saw the pulsing in Mandalore's carotid artery quicken. I kicked the body onto its back. It wasn't Kell.
Ordo's boys blew open the blast door that blocked the way to the control room. A gun turret was still active. It killed the first soldier before someone lobbed a grenade. I saw Ordo turn to the keypad on his bracer and type in the boy's name, so it could be scribed later.
The control room held access to the locked-down elevators. While the squad's technician unlocked the access, Mandalore stepped up beside me to watch the wall of live security holofeeds. A dozen monitors clicked between decks and sections, revealing mostly fires, blown-open vents, and Republic corpses, their faces peeled open by plasma burns. The air flow into my helmet didn't keep out the stench of burning skin from the bodies in our corridor. I could have been back on the ground at Serroco, inspecting the damage from that last ground battle with Kell's army before we decided to bomb the whole planet and be done with it. Kell had used some new chemical weapon that burned through our soldier's armor as though it were woven grass. The reek of burning flesh had been everywhere, as had the screaming. That was the moment our conquest became a war. I praised the gods and I wept.
"The holovid," Mandalore said suddenly. "Click back monitor four."
Ordo looked up. A featureless stretch of bulkhead showed on the screen. The tech found the control to that monitor and clicked it back. We all watched to see what would happen, and saw a woman, a Jedi, around twenty years old. She ran down the hallway under the monitor and was gone.
"I'll be damned. Was that Kell?" said Ordo.
Mandalore's breathing quickened. In one motion his blaster was unholstered and powered up, and he leapt past us through the other doorway of the control room.
"Mandalore!" yelled Ordo.
"Don't interfere," I said, placing myself between Ordo and the doorway.
The butt of a blaster hit the side of my helmet. My shoulder crashed against the wall of monitors. The blaster came at me again, but this time I expected it and ducked. My knuckles dug into his side, one of the only places of our armor suits that wasn't covered by plate. I felt a rib give way. The air rushed out of him.
"Traitor," he coughed. "He's going to fight that damn Jedi general alone. We're here to lay down our lives for the Mandalore and you let him run after that damned zealot alone."
"The Mandalore fights his own fights."
"That an order?"
The squad of boys stood around us, pretending to work, their gloved fingers hovering over keypads, their helmets pointed at the bulkhead as they eavesdropped.
"I'm Mandalore's first. You can assume that everything I say is an order."
Ordo straightened. His hand twitched up to cup his ribs, but he forced it back to his side.
"And do not, under any circumstances," I said, "watch the duel on the security cameras or allow your men to do so. It's for my eyes only."
"Yes, sir," he growled.
I forgave Ordo his frustration with me. Every Mandalorian dreamed as a small boy, as a teenager, as a fully proven soldier, and as a father, if he lived long enough, that he would someday receive the Mandalore's orders face to face on a battlefield and carry them out better than anyone else. No one dreamed of becoming the Mandalore. Only Mandalore could be the Mandalore.
"I can't believe you let him go alone."
"We're not his bodyguards," I said. "We're his servants. The Mandalore needs no one's protection."
"We didn't come halfway across the galaxy to see our leader killed in a useless duel!" Ordo lurched forward to grab my breastplate, screaming with frustration and pain. I let him sink his fingers around the edge of the durasteel. Then he weakly pushed me away, as though he hadn't planned what to do if I let him grab me. I let him stew in his own stupidity, the same as I had noticed my own, back in the scout ship, and I almost felt sorry for him.
"If he isn't the greatest warrior alive, he doesn't deserve to wear the helmet," I said.
"And if she kills him?"
"She can't. No one can. He's the Mandalore." But my palms started to sweat.
*
The Crusader's bridge was long and cool and empty, more like an army tent pitched high in the forest than a starship deck. We found a few bodies slumped over consoles or sprawled across the floor, all covered in spidery red plasma burns, but it looked as though most of the crew had made it to the escape pods. Their cowardice offended me. It was sin. I was grateful that Ordo shot all the pods down.
Ordo quickly assigned each member of his squad to monitor a major ship function. While the boys brought up flickering display screens to assess the damage they'd done to the ship's systems, I ran down a staircase into the belly of the bridge to find a secluded monitor. Only one monitor could patch into the security holofeed. A Republic corpse sat at the console, his blackened fingers still splayed over the controls. As I pushed him out of his seat I wondered whether the Republic commanders scribed the names of their dead, or if retreating from a losing battle was a higher priority. I heard my teeth grind past one another inside my helmet.
I told the computer to cycle through the decks and sections, one by one, looking for the one frame that contained Mandalore and Kell. Adrenaline spread through my stomach, down into my thighs, and up across my shoulders, as the security feed crept through the hundreds of cameras. I pulled out my blaster carbine, ejected and reinserted the energy cell over and over until I no longer heard the click and the purr of power meeting mechanism. The energy cell for the first blaster I had ever used was a quarter the size of my carbine's. That scout pistol served me until I turned seventeen years old, when I was permitted to leave the homeworld and join the Great War. I sparred a small Taung boy that day. Only thirteen, he'd been sent to the camp that trained boys who were preparing to enter the war. He was the smallest of the camp, and the only Taung. We wouldn't eat with him. I don't know whether it was because he insulted us with his youth, or if we felt that by being a Taung he was trying, somehow, to take part of the Mandalore's prestige for his own. When he walked across the camp, someone would always yell, There's the next Mandalore, and all of us would laugh.
He stood two heads shorter than me when the battle master brought us together in the dirt ring of the sparring circle. He hadn't yet earned his assault armor, and his face and neck were naked. A pair of deep-set eyes regarded me from a sharp, gray, hairless face. The eyes had no whites. They were completely yellow, a burnished yellow, each of them like a coin being heated through from below. I knew then that he wasn't afraid of me. I wore full assault armor, my weapon was far superior to his, and our bodies were a gross mismatch, but he wasn't afraid. When the round began he knocked me to the ground and let his vibroblade drop, with the utmost control, onto the back of my neck plate. The tang of dirt and animal dung stuck to the roof of my mouth.
After the duel I followed him until we were out of sight of the sparring circle. I pulled out my scout pistol, my arm trembling with rage, and shot him in the back.
He wheeled around with a little stumble. He didn't collapse. My hand was shaking so violently that I had only hit him in the shoulder.
I pointed the pistol at his face. "You shamed me, Taung."
"You shamed yourself."
"How's that?"
He crossed his narrow arms, appraised me with his yellow eyes, so much like a droid's photoreceptors. "You didn't push yourself to your limit and then twice as far, or that was truly the best you could do. Either way you deserved to lose."
Tears invaded my eyes, my knees weakened. I tossed my pistol at his feet. "Do it. I'm a disgrace."
"Your honor isn't worth the drain to this energy cell," he said. But he took the pistol.
*
A blue glare flashed on the security holofeed. I blinked. Already the computer clicked past the frame, and I hurried to click it back. The camera showed a narrow corridor and identified it as sixteen decks below and nearly a quarter mile aft of the bridge. If there were trouble, none of us could help. But then, if the whole squad were in that section of the ship, Mandalore wouldn't have allowed us to interfere anyway. I gripped the sides of the monitor.
General Kell paced back and forth down the length of the corridor section, her lightsaber ignited at her side. She walked out of view of the camera, came back into screen, paced back out, all the while with that blue beam humming, like a fusioncutter ready to carve a sheet of durasteel. She paused to bounce from one foot to the other, rolled her head in circles, as though to keep limber before a sparring match. She wore no armor, only a blue robe and a pair of boots that couldn't have had any real protective value. The only durasteel I could see was on the backs of her gloves. A blow to any part of her body could kill her. I wondered how she'd gotten away with that vulnerability as long as she had.
Then Mandalore appeared.
No words were exchanged. Neither of them stood to appraise each other's readiness. They just attacked, Mandalore discharging bolt after bolt from his heavy repeater, his shoulders jumping with the recoil, Kell struggling to deflect the blaster fire with her lightsaber and advance at the same time. Hazard lights flashed around them, a steady pulse of red, like a heartbeat.
Kell bolted inside the range of Mandalore's heavy repeater. My fingers curled tighter around the monitor. I held my breath until I saw the silver flash of Mandalore's vibroblade arc into Kell's blue beam, the two weapons cracking against each other like lightning meeting an exposed antenna. They prodded at each other for what felt to me like hours, neither of them landing a single blow, until Kell threw all her weight forward and struck Mandalore's helmet with her bare forehead.
I sucked in my breath through my teeth. My hands went cold. I was beyond fear – light years past it. Instead, horror, like a gorging parasite, snaked through my gut until all I could do to resist it was to let myself deaden.
Mandalore staggered back, reeling for a single instant, long enough for Kell to lodge her forearm in the groove at the top of his breastplate and muscle him against the bulkhead. His armor clanked against the wall. Kell's body pinned Mandalore's sword arm against his chest, and there they paused. The red pulse of the hazard lights was the only motion in the room.
With her free hand, Kell grabbed hold of Mandalore's helmet, the sacred helmet, and, panting, tore it from his suit. The noise of the durasteel visor striking the deck plating rang out against the silence.
I saw Mandalore's face for the first time in thirty years.
Kell's lightsaber extinguished with a hiss. "Your eyes," she said, peering into the burnished yellow discs. Her brow furrowed.
They panted into each other's faces, one gray, the other a pale pink, each one alien to the other, sweat dripping from their brows.
Then Mandalore pulled his pinned arm free and grunted. A gasp escaped Kell's lips. Slowly her chin sank to her chest. A vibroblade's hilt was pressed against her ribcage. Its slick red length glistened behind her, shoved clean through her back. A dark pool spread outward from the hilt, staining her blue robe. She blinked several times, coughed. Blood spattered Mandalore's bright silver breastplate.
Mandalore withdrew the vibroblade. A white glow leapt out of the steel when he drew it along the black fiber between his armor plates, wiping Kell's blood into his suit.
Kell dropped to her knees, bloody drool dangling from her lips. She pitched forward and crumpled onto her side, the white floor around her smeared with red. Her fingers remained curled tight around her lightsaber hilt.
Mandalore looked down at her, his brow cast in shadow, his yellow eyes glinting. He took up his helmet. Pulling it roughly over his head, he stared down at her, and his gaze was replaced with the black T of his visor. He stooped and reached out toward Kell's clenched fist. He paused just short of the extinguished lightsaber. Without its blue blade it could have been an oversized hydospanner. But he left it in her hand and walked out of the field of the camera and was gone.
I climbed the stairs to the upper level of the bridge, noticing the weight of my armor suit for the first time since I put it on thirty years earlier.
"Aias?" said Ordo, looking up from a holo-projection of the Crusader's ruined tractor beam.
"There's no one left to fight," I said.
"What?"
"The Jedi general is dead. There's nothing left to conquer."
Ordo threw back his head and laughed the laugh of a soldier who only thinks one battle ahead of him. "Nothing left? Listen to you! There's a whole galaxy!"
Every helmet turned up from its post when Mandalore walked onto the bridge. I could smell Kell's sweat and blood on his suit. A question hung in the dark air, and then all at once the soldiers resumed their work, as though it took each man exactly the same amount of time to realize how stupid it was for them to have worried over the outcome of the duel with General Kell. She was dead. The ship, along with its tactical secrets, were ours.
Mandalore strode up to me, clamped a hand on my shoulder, and steered me down the stairs to the belly of the bridge. When we had at least the illusion of privacy, he rasped, "I just had a terrific duel, Aias."
"I saw it."
"I feel like a child again. A boy."
"What happens now, Mandalore?"
He didn't hear me. He started to pace, the red bridge lights filtering down through the slatted steel decking of the bridge. "I have never faced anyone like her. I have never battled any Mandalorian with a surer command of a blade. And that sound!"
"Sound, Mandalore?"
His visor turned on me. I couldn't imagine the expression behind it. All I could see was that black T.
"That whirring," he said. "The sound of her weapon. A hum, a buzz, like a swarm of wasps. Like a living thing. As though she were the weapon and the weapon were her."
"She nearly killed you."
"Aias, you neophyte," he said. "That was the beauty of it. I never earned glory in my life until this day." He put his hands on my shoulders, each of them heavy as a disruptor rifle. "Aias, I am the greatest warrior alive."
*
We lost contact with our headquarters three weeks later.
I worked on the bridge in silence, finalizing our preparations to bring the Crusader's last point-defense laser cannon battery online. One of the boys, a scout from Dxun whom I had come to know as Kelborn, called out from his bridge post, "Commander Aias."
"What?"
"Our Dxun H.Q."
"Yes?"
"Sir, the H.Q. satellites, they're not transmitting, sir. They just winked off my grid."
My spine tingled. I blinked, double-checked, triple-checked what Kelborn was telling me, and called up Ordo and Mandalore.
Ordo was only a deck away. When he stood before me in the darkness of the bridge and I explained what Kelborn told me, he said, "What? What the hell are you saying?"
"Our fleet headquarters are under attack."
"No."
"They are."
"What about Onderon?"
"No communication with the entire system," I said.
"The whole damn blockade?"
"The blockade isn't talking."
Ordo threw back his head and roared at the ceiling. Through his helmet it was only a cloud of static with a man's voice buried somewhere inside, fighting to get out. "That's impossible! We cowed them! We killed their strongest. They're broken. They haven't moved in weeks!"
Mandalore walked up beside me, his arms crossed. I hadn't heard him pass through the bridge doors. Ordo and I stepped back to let him stare at Kelborn's communications grid himself.
"Get Cassus," he said.
Nodding, Kelborn tapped furiously at the console, his hands trembling between commands. He sent our transmission to Cassus.
We waited. No one spoke; we expected Cassus' response to interrupt any second. A minute passed, then another.
"Cassus isn't responding," Kelborn finally said.
"I can see that," I said.
Ordo cracked his knuckles into the silence. "We're days from Onderon. Where's Cassus?"
"When did he last send us coordinates?" I asked.
Kelborn's hands twitched at the console. While he searched, I turned to Ordo. "You say we're days from our own H.Q.? Is this glorified Republic barge's hyperdrive that sub-par? Why didn't you tell me?"
Kelborn interrupted to read off a date that meant nothing to me at first. Then I remembered it was the day we took the Crusader.
"Is Cassus lost in hyperspace?" Ordo asked.
Mandalore rubbed the chin of his helmet. "He's not lost."
Several battles ago, Mandalore had told me to contact Cassus while our tiny scout ship hurtled through hyperspace. When I established the link he suggested that I leave the cockpit and inventory our personal arsenal.
Rising from the pilot chair, I frowned behind my helmet and did as I was told. From around the divider that separated the cockpit from the cargo compartment I tried to ignore the shouting I heard through the comlink and Mandalore's own speech as it steadily grew louder. In the arsenal, here was Mandalore's heavy repeator. There was a scout pistol, obsolete and puny and not suitable for a warrior's use, but maintained as immaculately as the rest of Mandalore's weapons.
Cassus' voice leapt from the transmission in the cockpit, intermittent and blurred with static. "I swear to you, Mandalore, the men, they transformed into rakghouls, the Sith magic turned them –"
"I don't want to hear any more about magic," Mandalore said. "That isn't real. But my twelve thousand and sixty-four troops were real. We had only our own shocktroopers on the surface, ready to launch an assault at your command. Twelve thousand and sixty-four troops. Now there are none. None."
"Mandalore –"
"All you had to do was move them!" Feedback whined from Mandalore's helmet.
A steady stream of static filled the cabin as silence passed over the comlink. I continued my work in the arsenal. A stray energy cell slipped through the gun rack and banged against the floor.
"And Cathar," Mandalore said.
"Mandalore, I had to. Our people needed to regain the honor the Cathar stole from us. They fought against us in the Great War. They humiliated –"
"What you did there wasn't war. I don't know what you thought it was, Cassus. It was slaughter, honorless genocide."
"It drew the Jedi out of hiding," Cassus said. "It wasn't until the Jedi joined the war that we had a worthy opponent. You told me that yourself, Mandalore. You must admit –"
"What you did was not Mandalorian. It was an act of perfect cowardice. It was sin."
Cassus said nothing.
"You've shamed my fleet."
Again my shuffling was the only noise in the cramped ship.
Mandalore added quietly, so quietly it was little more than a thought, "You will never lead another battle."
"Mandalore –"
The whisper of static broke off.
"Sir?" Kelborn looked up from his console, as though Mandalore had read some critical line of data that Kelborn had missed.
"He's deserted," Mandalore said.
Ordo laid his hand on the back of an empty chair, as though he were suddenly dizzy or had been shot with a sedative. "Cassus? Deserted?"
"He was always a coward," Mandalore said. "Get us to our H.Q. Aias, gather the fleet."
"Mandalore, our last cannon still isn't online."
The black visor turned on me. "Are you a quartermaster, now? I thought you were a warrior."
*
We staggered out of hyperspace, our fleet of assault ships firing into the swarm of battlecruisers that waited for us. My monitor flickered on. Fire and twisted metal pocked the space between innumerable Onderonian and Republic ships. A debris field was all that was left of our blockade.
Ordo had the same view on his monitor. Between giving orders to our ship's cannon posts, he slapped his console, turned over chairs, yelling, "Damn Cassus! Damn him!"
"Enough," said Mandalore. He stood over a console at the front of the bridge, issuing commands to our fleet.
Kelborn called me to his side and showed me that at this close range, we could receive data again from our headquarters on Onderon's moon, Dxun. He opened a comlink with the command center.
"What's going on down there?" I said.
A soldier stooped in front of his camera. "Our lines aren't holding. We've fallen back to the H.Q. compound."
"What about your minefields?"
A guard tower behind the soldier burst into flame, and static washed across the image. When the transmission came back into focus the boy said, "The Jedi are taking heavier losses than us, ten to one, but they're still coming, sir." The transmission blurred and sputtered again. "They're going to get through."
Mandalore looked over from his console. "No, they're not. Aias, tell him that no Jedi is getting through."
"Yes, sir. We'll keep them out."
Mandalore's commands allowed our fleet to thin the Republic ships around the moon, but we couldn't make progress without exposing ourselves to the Onderonian military. Only a third of the greater Mandalorian fleet had made it to the star system in time. The rest remained scattered in little battles for resource worlds across the galaxy.
The Crusader rocked under a lucky torpedo hit, and, suddenly, I realized we weren't going to clear a path to the moon's surface in time. There were too many of them, too few of us, and our cannon array wasn't completely operational. By the time we made enough space to land shocktroopers our headquarters would be overrun and the enemy would have already downloaded our encryption codes.
An alarm rang out on the bridge. From the lower level a boy cried out, "Incoming!"
The ship rocked again. This time the hazard lights began their red and yellow flash. As the impact threw me into the bulkhead, I watched a clutch of debris burst from our own hull on the view screen.
Mandalore got up off the floor and kept issuing commands to the fleet as though nothing had happened.
"What the hell was that?" Ordo yelled down the bridge.
"That was a starfighter," Kelborn said. "It flew into our proton cannon."
My stomach sank until I felt that all my internal organs had compressed into a single, useless sack of plasma.
"The hull's breached," Kelborn added.
Ordo sent him and all the other bridge crewmen to repair the damage. I took Kelborn's place at the ship system station. The hull breach and weapon failure reports scrolled off the screen, kept scrolling. It didn't stop.
The comlink request flashed. Peering at it, I said, "There's a transmission. One-way. It's coming from General Vaklu."
"Who?" said Ordo.
Mandalore didn't look up. "What does he want?"
I routed the transmission to all three of our monitors. A man with bloodshot eyes and graying stubble flashed onto the screen. He leaned on his console below his camera as though it were a bar counter, his chin jutted forward and hung over his chest, his black uniform creased and rumpled. My lip curled with disgust as I watched.
"This is General Vaklu, commander-in-chief of the Onderonian military. I am contacting you to demand your immediate and unconditional surrender. None of you will be harmed if –"
A woman's voice interrupted. "Vaklu."
The bloodshot, red-rimmed eyes looked away from the camera.
"Stop it. That word doesn't even translate in their language," the woman said. "Surrender. They don't have a word for that."
Vaklu rubbed his brow. Dirt was caked under his fingernails. "They understand Basic."
"They're too stupid to retreat," she said. "And they'll never give up my ship. Mandalore will force us to take it deck by miserable deck, section by section, meter by meter. He knows he can't win so he may as well turn it into a bloodbath."
Vaklu's mouth worked.
"Get out of my way," the voice said.
Pushing himself up from the console, Vaklu sighed and wandered away from his camera. A woman, robed in deep blue, walked into view. She was the palest woman I'd ever seen, the surfaces of her eyes hard and gray, her neck long and white, so long it was almost inhuman. She didn't take Vaklu's seat. Instead she stooped over the camera, clamping her armored hands on either side of it, her jaw set. A broad, brown stain marred her robe just beneath her breast.
Silence spread out between the three of us on the bridge.
Then Ordo slapped his palm against his console. "What the hell is this!"
I looked over at Mandalore. If he recognized the woman on the monitor, he made no show of it.
"I saw her die," I said. "I saw Kell die." And I told myself this over and over, like a mantra, as she spoke.
"Mandalore. I'm begging you. I am begging. Don't make me murder you all."
"She's dead!" Ordo said. He grabbed his chair, raised it high over his head and threw it across the bridge. It clattered over itself before sliding to a stop.
Kell lowered herself into Vaklu's seat. All the tension in her face and neck seemed to converge in her mouth, her lips squeezing together until they went white. "I'll kill every Mandalorian in the galaxy if I have to. I'll do anything to stop you. I'll do anything, Mandalore. Please don't make me." Her voice broke. A faint glittering trailed down her cheek. She rose up from the chair to shut off the transmission, and when she reached for the control pad a wince tightened her eyes. The screen went dark.
I opened up a link with our headquarters. When my transmission was answered, a taller, dirtier man stood in the command center. Yellow flames leapt far in the background.
"Yes, Commander?" he said, a little breathlessly.
"Shoot the databases."
"Sir?"
"Destroy our databases and our encryption computer and destroy the armories. No, wait. Take anything left in the armories and bury it."
"Bury the weapons, sir?"
"Yes, just do it."
Someone on his end of the transmission shouted, and he turned away. Robed figures and Republic soldiers were jumping into the headquarters from the wall. The boy turned back to me, gave a quick nod, and punched his belt. His stealth field generator rippled the air around him. He disappeared.
"What are you doing?"
I spun around. Mandalore looked at me and looked at the monitor. The comlink stayed open. All I could see were blaster bolts and the blue and green beams of lightsabers through the smoke.
"Mandalore," said Ordo. He was stooping over his screen. "Vaklu's flagship just deployed troop crafts. They'll be here in two minutes."
"Get your rifles," Mandalore said.
We rushed out of the bridge and bolted up the stairs to the officers' quarters. As Mandalore and Ordo raided their arsenals, I pulled the energy cell from my carbine and cracked it. The carbine gave a faint whirr when I shoved the energy cell back in. An error light flickered for a moment. Then I holstered it on my belt.
Fully armed, Mandalore and Ordo stomped down the stairwell. I pulled two stealth field generators from Kelborn's locker and followed them back to the bridge.
Ordo checked the nearest monitor. "They're in both shuttle bays."
"How many?" said Mandalore.
"Twenty."
"Twenty what? Twenty marines?" I said.
Ordo laughed. "That's great, Aias."
"Just tell me."
"Twenty troop ships. Each of them carries fifty men." Glancing at the monitor again, Ordo said, "They've already unlocked the hangar deck elevators. We need to get going."
"A hundred and twenty of us," I said, unholstering my carbine and powering it up. Again the error light sputtered. "A thousand of them."
"It'll be glorious," Ordo said, and went for the elevator.
"We're going to lose the ship," I said.
Ordo stopped.
"Win or lose," Mandalore said. "Kell has offered us a worthy battle."
"Abandon ship, is that it? You want to run away, Aias? Like Cassus?" Ordo sneered.
"This is just one battle. We can regroup, gather our fleet, make another push."
Ordo and Mandalore stood on either side of me, saying nothing.
"We can't just let Kell win, right here, where our conquest started. We can leave this worthless ship. We can still lead our people to victory. We have to. We're the greatest warriors in the galaxy."
"No, Aias," said Mandalore. Holstering his rifle over his shoulder, he reached up and pulled off his helmet.
Ordo turned his helmet away while I averted my eyes.
"We will go down to them," said Mandalore, "and fight and die in a battle that will be remembered forever."
I shook my head, keeping my eyes trained at the floor. "Stop."
"The Jedi are the greatest –"
I raised my carbine and fired. A half-energy bolt hit Mandalore in the forehead. His burnished eyes darkened while his knees buckled under him.
Stunned, Ordo stood across the deck from me, his charged rifle in his hands. I pointed the carbine at him and shot. The weapon gave a stronger recoil this time. The damaged energy cell fed the blaster more than half-power for the bolt, but it was still less than full force. Either he would die from my shot, or the Jedi would take him prisoner and, in a cell somewhere, Ordo would find a way to kill himself out of embarrassment. But bringing the Mandalore back to his fleet was more important than any one warrior's honor.
I stooped to sling Mandalore over my shoulders and to collect his helmet. In his armor suit he was almost impossible to lift. I pulled Kelborn's stealth field generators from my belt pack and fastened one to my waist, the other around Mandalore's neck. I rushed to the elevator, jabbed the hangar deck key, and activated our stealth fields. The bright white compartment shimmered, grew gray. I hadn't used a stealth field generator since I was a boy, a scout, and I had forgotten how, when invisible, the world becomes nauseatingly blurry.
There wasn't a single Republic guard on the hangar deck. They had all moved deeper into the ship to kill our men. I carried Mandalore into our scout ship. Since Kell hadn't bothered to lock us out of the shuttle bay controls, the bay doors opened without my needing to override them. We lurched into hyperspace.
Mandalore stirred on the cockpit floor beside me but didn't wake. I knelt beside him. Raising his head, I carefully pulled the helmet over his face and hooked the ventilation tubes into his suit. I listened to his breathing, even and slow, and knew he would survive the trip to the homeworld, where he would order the fleet to regroup when he'd come to his senses.
I climbed back into the seat where I had spent most of the war. Decades earlier, in the Great War against the Jedi, I'd spent all my time on the back of a basilisk war droid, crashing through planetary defense grids and leveling cities. The Mandalore had fought alongside me then. Now he was my cargo as we plunged through swaths of blackness between a billion roiling stars to prepare what was left of our people.