Han and Leia stood before the Falcon's airlock as C-3PO stood next to it. The droid was ready to introduce the ship's first guests for the Mandalorian negotiations in time for Mirta Gev, her helmet clipped to her belt, stepping onto the deck of the Falcon with two helmeted Mandos of her own.
"May I present to you," Threepio said to the Solos, "Mandalore Mirta Gev and her entourage... um..."
"There is no need to address them," Mirta said with a wave. She redirected her attention to the Solos. "Captain Solo, Jedi Solo, it is a pleasure to meet you both once again." Her tone was strictly diplomatic, and contained no hint of any genuine sincerity.
Leia offered the leading Mando a nod just as strictly formal and fake in courtesy. Han only presented himself as completely unreadable so that he wouldn't get the negotiations off to a bad start before they even began.
"Would you like to take your seat, Mandalore Gev?" Leia asked.
Mirta nodded wordlessly and proceeded to follow the Solos to the Falcon's lounge, which was specially prepared for the negotiations. A large, circular table was placed squarely in the center of the room with two chairs in total, one opposite the other, for the purposes of the negotiations. As it was felt that the ship that transported her and her bodyguards to the Falcon had departed from the latter, Mirta sat in the chair that would offer her a view of Belok Rhal when he would enter the lounge while her bodyguards stood at either side behind her.
Han, Leia, and Threepio then returned to the Falcon's airlock and waited for the next ship, the one transporting Rhal over, to arrive. Roughly half a minute after the Falcon reverberated slightly with its docking of Rhal's vessel, the door opened to reveal a lone helmeted Mandalorian who promptly stepped inside.
"Belok Rhal, I presume?" Leia asked. She was about to ask him why he didn't show up with a retinue of bodyguards when his next action cut her off.
The Mando reached both hands up to his helmet and pulled it off, only to reveal a light-skinned human male with several scars running along his grinning face.
Only it wasn't Belok Rhal.
"Guess again," the Rhal imposter said as he pulled out a small thermal detonator from his helmet. Without any hesitation, he pushed down on the detonator's button.
A millisecond before the explosion went off, however, Leia had already erected a Force-shield to redirect the brunt of the explosion's impact away from her and Han. Nevertheless, the impact wave was still powerful enough to throw the Solos and Threepio back across the docking ring.
They had scarcely hit the deck on their backs before the vacuum of space started to pull them right back for the airless void ahead. Once again, though, Leia managed to anchor herself firmly in place with the Force while simultaneously using her free hand to catch Han by the wrist from being blown out.
Unfortunately for Threepio, he had escaped Leia's attention in the heat of the moment and had ended up riding along the wave of decompression, screaming all the way.
"What did I do to deserve this?!" the droid tried to scream, even though his words were swallowed up the soundless void of space.
Mirta's bodyguards were just as unlucky. As Leia caught Han, the aforementioned Mandalorians flew from the open entrance of the lounge and out into space, where their advanced armor would protect them from the vacuum long enough for a rescue ship to pick them up. Mirta, meanwhile, caught with her helmet off, still saved herself from death as she caught onto Han's free hand, nearly yanking his arm out of its socket out of the way and almost blowing Leia's concentration from keeping the three of them from dying horribly.
The three of them were left like this for several seconds before the Falcon's emergency internal shields activated, halting the flood of air from escaping out into space and initializing the process of pressurization throughout this section of the ship again. Han and Mirta collapsed to the deck while Leia finally allowed herself to release her Force-hold to the deck, and then, after the sole Mandalorian and the sole man there stood back up, they looked out to find both fleets of Mandalorian ships engaging in battle.
"Of course this happens," Han said with a pointed wave of both arms to the scene before him and the women. "How come I knew this was gonna happen?" His question was completely rhetorical, given the sarcastic nature of his tone.
Meanwhile, Mirta was already answering her ringing comm. "Yeah?" she asked.
"Mandalore Gev," Goran Beviin's voice came through, "are you alright?"
"For the moment, Goran," Mirta answered.
"You want us to send a ship out to get you from the Millennium Falcon?" Beviin asked.
"No, keep to the battle," Mirta told him. "I'll be fighting in the Falcon."
Just after she said that, the ship rocked to and fro, nearly causing the three of them to lose their footing.
"You two, gun turrets, I'll be piloting," Han said to the women hurriedly. He then hurried off to the cockpit in a hurry, with Leia and Mirta hurrying over to the turrets just as quickly, the three of them still stumbling along as the Falcon continued to take more hits from the battle going on outside.
"I call top!" Leia called as she ran ahead of the other woman.
Mirta offered no objection as the Jedi Knight bounded up to the ladder to reach the dorsal gun turret while she dropped down to land squarely on the seat of the belly turret. They then began firing at the targets that identified Rhal's ships instantly while Han started to pilot the Falcon away from danger as best as he could.
.
Threepio flailed vainly out in space, his screams of fear still cut silent by the fact that there was no sound in space, as warships and projectiles rocketed all about him in battle, accompanied by the wild explosions of ships and the proximity detonations by the concussion missiles and proton torpedoes that littered the battlefield. It was some of these explosions' impact waves that sent him flying about every which way, and yet, even through all of his eerily quiet panic, Threepio couldn't help but think that the Force was on his side.
By all accounts, the odds of him surviving this battle, in any way, were exactly eighty-six thousand, three hundred, and twenty-three to one, and that was assuming that he was just blown apart in a way that he could still be salvaged from.
Threepio's panicked thoughts were further excited - and not in the way he would like to think of it - when a YT-2400 light freighter dropped out of hyperspace in front of him as he continued to tumble toward its direction. He quickly threw up his arms in front of his face so that he wouldn't see how he would be destroyed.
After about five seconds, he found himself to still be completely functional, and he removed his arms away from his face to find that the ship was now gone. Thinking about where it might have gone, he turned in his tumble to find that the freighter - which his visual scanners confirmed to be Mistress Jaina's Faux Harla - now involving itself in the main battle, with all of its weapons blazing at Belok Rhal's warships.
Threepio thought, for several seconds, that he would be doomed to tumble for the rest of his days in space when, once again, another ship dropped out of hyperspace in front of him. The droid threw up his arms again in defense, and once he found himself to still be functioning, he looked up and found that the new ship - a Nubian starfighter, he recognized - was now slowly hovering toward him.
Just as Threepio saw that the pilot was an aged male Gungun, he felt himself jerk abruptly just as his uncontrolled tumble just as suddenly stopped. The next thing he knew, his body was being pulled by an invisible force - most likely a tractor beam, he thought - that brought him facing the starfighter's underbelly.
"You no need to worry," a thick and high-pitched voice registered in Threepio's audio feed. It was coming over a subspace frequency, he realized. "Worrying will only causata your circuits to overloada."
Then Threepio felt the starfighter zoom straight ahead and begin performing deft maneuvers as it involved itself in the battle.
And yet, in spite of the Gungun's insistence to the contrary - for Threepio was quite sure, in spite of himself, that the speaker was this Gungun pilot - the droid began to panic again, his screams still lost in the silent void.