ABOARD THE MALACHOR, 40 YEARS ABE:
Poe sidled his way through the hangar, flitting from the side of a ship to a pile of parts to a stack of supply crates. He was hoping that everyone would be too distracted by the alarms overhead and the emergency duties to which they were being called to notice one wandering human in the wrong uniform. With every step, he silently cursed the brilliant orange that he ordinarily adored.
Enumerating his lengthy mental collection of vulgarities at the expense of his uniform was better than worrying about Finn, Breha, and Bail, anyway. Too many people had died around Poe in the last few days. Even for a Rogue, losing an entire squadron in a single battle was a lot. He wasn't keen to lose anyone else.
He wasn't keen on dying, either, so when blasterfire suddenly erupted at the other end of the hangar, Poe immediately ducked down behind the nearest stack of crates. It was a good position for hiding: he was now crouched only a few meters away from the nearest wall, with not just the sturdy crates for cover but a quiescent load-lifter as well. Someone would have to come almost all the way behind the pile of crates to see Poe, and the alarms had already sent everyone scattering to their emergency assignments. The only other being moving nearby was one small mouse droid that was resolutely following its simple programming come hell, high-water, or high-alerts.
After checking his borrowed blaster to make sure the safety was off and the power pack was secured, Poe inched up high enough to peer over the top of a row of crates.
The hangar seemed much larger now than it had when they were landing. Perhaps Bail had been distracted the first time, focused more on the Imperial officer they were conning and the danger that he might see through their deception. Perhaps it just felt larger now that he was trying to walk across it with an orange-clad X-Wing pilot without attracting the attention of any of the technicians, mechanics, pilots, or stormtroopers criss-crossing the bustling, cavernous space.
He fixed his eyes on the distant shuttle that was their destination and hopefully their salvation, and spread the rest of his senses wide across the room in hopes of anticipating trouble. He could feel the tension radiating off his sister but, like him, she was doing her best to suppress it and walk casually. The fact that people would expect a prisoner in stun-cuffs to be tense would doubtless help keep from drawing attention, as would the fact that Bail's borrowed armor concealed the more subtle aspects of his body language. He still felt as though they both stuck-out like a Wookiee in a flock of gizka.
Apparently he wasn't the only one.
"You there-halt!"
Bail could tell by the shift of his sister's presence in the Force that Breha thought they should do precisely the opposite and was already bracing herself to run. Bail looked at how much open space lay between them and the shuttle-of course it was the one farthest away; they had landed it barely six meters from the magcon shield, both to sell the verisimilitude of their use of the distress beacon and to give them less ground to cover in an escape should the Imperials get suspicious and try to trap them by closing the hangar doors-and shook his head. It didn't matter that his sister couldn't see his face; they had tested their Force range before and they could read each other's emotions clearly enough to have a full non-verbal conversation from as far away as the other side of a planet if they wanted. One thin plastoid helmet wasn't nearly enough to block her out.
Breha was his twin. She would feel it.
Too far, he thought at her and came to a halt. The two stormtroopers following him did as well, still obedient although Bail could feel confusion beginning to swirl in their clouded minds. He took a moment to refresh his concentration, pulling them deeper in thrall to his will. He didn't like the way it felt, dominating the minds of sentient beings, but the only alternative had been to kill them and hope no one noticed the bodies. Quashing their free will beneath his mental boot was unpleasant, but it was better than that.
Of course, now that his suborned troopers appeared to be in cahoots with the Rebel infiltrators it still might get them killed, but there wasn't much Bail could do about that.
"Got a better plan?" Breha hissed at him, turning around to face their enemy.
Bail turned as well, his stormtrooper escort echoing the move like a holo-transmission running on a delay, and saw an extremely tall stormtrooper in gleaming silver armor leading a platoon of plain troopers towards them at a half-jog from the far end of the hangar.
"Yes," Bail said quietly. He tossed his blaster to his sister, who immediately shucked-off her useless stun cuffs to catch it. "Our ship's the Lambda-shuttle by the far wall closest to the magcon shield. Find Stella, get it ready to fly-"
"I'm not leaving you!" Breha retorted as the rest of his plan crystalized.
Bail shook his head, his helmeted gaze never leaving the approaching crowd of stormtroopers. "Stella was by herself and with the comm-jamming up, we won't know if she's in trouble or not until we find her." He reached for the back of his armor, where his lightsaber was secured, and snapped open the storage tube. A quick Force-tug pulled the weapon out into his gloved hand.
"If she's at the ship, good, see if you can break through the jamming with the shuttle's transmitters to contact Finn and Poe. If she's not, she's in trouble and you need to find her."
Breha hesitated, her face and her presence in the Force both torn with painful indecision, as her brother lifted his lightsaber into a guard position in front of him.
"Fine!" she snarled at last and turned, leaving her brother behind.
Bail settled into a comfortable combat stance, legs wide, booted feet light on the durasteel deckplates. He reached up to remove that awful helmet and threw it aside with relish. He allowed himself to revel in two sweet, unfettered breaths of cold, slightly oily hangar air before returning his focus to the oncoming enemy.
"You think three stormtroopers can hold us all off?" The silver trooper barked the question, her filtered voice heavy with laughter. She hadn't bothered speeding-up to try and catch Breha, apparently content with the fact that most of her targets had chosen to stand their ground.
"No," Bail agreed. He raised his lightsaber and ignited the blazing green blade with a snap-hiss that crackled across the busy hangar like a lightning strike. "But one Jedi can."
The stormtroopers didn't falter in their run, but several of them did flinch or fumble to clutch their blasters a little tighter. A murmur of concern moved through the anonymous white ranks. The two ensorceled troopers standing near him started and glanced around themselves in bewilderment, reality suddenly becoming too much for Bail's mental control to hold at bay. Bail let them go and switched his focus to the blasters in their hands, ready for the inevitable point at which they would remember themselves enough to open fire.
"I'll handle this. Bring the girl back!" Commander Phasma snapped at her troopers, her own hands never leaving her blaster rifle, her visored eyes never leaving Bail, her legs pumping easily in a steady jog that seemed impervious to the weight and constriction of her armor. She moved as though the gleaming metal were a second skin, fluid and weightless. "Lord Revan wants her alive!"
"Yessir," said the stormtrooper over Phasma's left shoulder. "Set weapons for stun-" he began, and they all reached to adjust their weapons, but Phasma snarled, "I didn't say unharmed!" and they hesitated.
"Ah...yessir," the stormtrooper said again. He exchanged a glance with his neighbor, who shrugged, and they all peeled-away from Phasma to chase after Breha, lifting their blasters to fire as they ran.
She smirked, her pace slowing slightly as she began dodging. Phasma had, unknowingly, done her a favor: stun bolts were much harder to dodge. A regular laserbolt was a thin, small thing; stun bolts came out of a weapon as a series of expanding energy circles. Their range was much shorter, and their energy dissipated faster. By the time a stun bolt was as wide as the average human was tall, its outer edges were so depleted that they faded-out to nothingness; getting brushed by a stray stun bolt did nothing more than make your hair stand-up and your skin go numb and tingly. The problem lay in their breadth: a stun bolt was much wider than a blaster bolt. Had the stormtroopers converged on her with an overlapping field of those flickering blue circles, she would have found herself with nowhere to go to avoid them and would just as quickly have been lying immobile on the deck. Blaster bolts, on the other hand…
Well, a disciplined force could concentrate too much blasterfire on one area for a Jedi to avoid, too, and fell them that way just as easily as with stunners, and certainly more painfully. But it would take more than twenty-four stormtroopers firing in an undirected cluster to create a wave of fire overwhelming enough to make that happen.
Hot red lasers peppered the air around Breha. She ducked and spun and twisted, dodging them all, although a few came close enough to singe the fabric of her rumpled dress uniform. One even melted a thin, gooey line across her delicate dress boot as it passed. Twice she had to turn and raise a palm, deflecting a bolt directly and wincing at the burst of heat blistering across her bare skin, but even then she jogged backwards as she did, moving ever-closer to their waiting escape craft.
"Stang," Poe hissed to himself and shifted to one knee so he could prop the blaster across the top of the crates and sight-in on his distant targets. One blaster wouldn't do much to change the odds, but one blaster firing in ambush from a direction the stormtroopers didn't see as a threat? That was another matter entirely. He might be able to pick-off a few before they figured out what was going on, or make them scatter in an attempt to find some cover of their own. At the least, he'd make sure Breha and Bail weren't fighting alone.
The mouse droid, its processors too rudimentary for it to compute a deviation from its routine, bumped into his leg. Poe distractedly shooed it away. The mouse droid squeaked and bumped his leg again. "Not now!" Poe hissed, his gaze fixed on Breha. A few more meters and her pursuers would be close enough for some long-range fire-low-accuracy shooting, but enough to make them keep their heads down and give her some breathing space. Just a few more seconds…
The mouse droid shrilled insistently and rammed itself into his leg three times in quick succession.
"Not now-!" Poe began to snap, then the meaning behind its furious beeps penetrated his distraction. He turned away from Breha and the pursuing stormtroopers and gaped at the little droid. "Wait, what!?"
The droid beeped again, shrill notes rising and falling in a complicated jumble from which most organic beings would struggle to discern even the vaguest meaning-but Poe wasn't most beings. Poe was a veteran snubfighter pilot and the son of a veteran snubfighter pilot. He had grown-up surrounded by ships and droids and, more importantly right now, around the binary language with which they communicated. His life and the life of his squad-mates had often depended on the astromech droids who flew as a combination of navigator and support-system in their ships, and Poe had tuned his ear to their language long ago. He understood perfectly what the little droid was saying.
And he was flabbergasted by what he heard.
"Are you kidding me?" Poe asked.
The mouse droid trilled an insistent negative.
"Okay, okay! I believe you. I just...well. I'll be spaced." Poe shook his head in bewildered admiration and eyed Breha and her pursuers with a newly speculative eye. She turned a cartwheel one-handed and snap-fired a shot from her blaster while upside-down. It caught one of the stormtroopers chasing her directly in an eyeplate, and that trooper went down in a smoking tumble. Breha had to twirl herself sideways as she landed to avoid the answering fire of two other troopers, but she stayed upright and launched herself into another erratic sprint. The stormtroopers jogged behind, still firing as they ran.
Poe glanced down at the mouse droid beside him and half-grinned. "All right! We might just get out of this yet, little buddy…"
Breha didn't dare let herself look at Bail; while she could use the Force to improve her reflexes and awareness enough to dodge the lasers coming her way, she didn't have her lightsaber. Without that, she couldn't risk letting her attention wander-no matter how much she wanted to. Through the bond that had connected them even before they were born she could feel that her brother was unharmed, that he was calm; for now that would have to be enough.
Bail was taking comfort in the same bond, the same certainty about his sister's safety, even as he faced-off with Phasma. The tall stormtrooper commander advanced at a swift, steady pace that wasn't quite a jog, her large blaster rifle held out in front of her in an easy two-handed grip. She fired continuously, pouring laser bolts towards Bail in a steady stream-and just as steadily, he swatted them away.
His attention was focused more on where he was sending the blasts than where they were coming from; Phasma was only one enemy, armed with only one blaster. There was nothing she could do to surprise him, no way she could overwhelm him with her limited armaments. Each shot she took at him, Bail caught on the glowing green blade of his lightsaber and flicked away.
The first two he tossed sideways, taking down the two stormtroopers he had conscripted even as they belatedly raised their blasters towards him. Of the rest, some went into the ceiling far overhead, some into the walls or the floor or the ships standing around them; two he sent into the panels that controlled the nearest doors into the hangarbay, effectively cutting-off those entrances until someone could come down with tools to cut through the melted circuits and override them. He knew that in doing so he might have been sealing Finn and Poe out, too, but the Force gave him no prickling of premonition to warn against the action-and besides, Finn had Breha's lightsaber. It wasn't a weapon that was safe for a non-Force user to wield in battle, but cutting through recalcitrant doors was simple enough that even a former stormtrooper should be able to figure it out.
The current stormtroopers, the ones shooting at his sister, were where Bail directed most of his deflected fire. They went down one-by-one, screaming or silent, felled by their own commander's weapon redirected by Bail and the power of the Force. Phasma didn't seem to notice, or maybe she just didn't care. She kept shooting, kept advancing.
When she was almost within arm's reach, Bail finally pulled his gaze from the stormtroopers back to their commander. He took a single step towards her, his lightsaber reaching forward.
Her blaster fell from her hands in two glowing pieces, bisected. Bail's lightsaber swung back towards Phasma, ready to slice her as neatly as her weapon-but the green blade jerked to a stop in a shower of sparks as Phasma raised one heavy gauntlet to block the blow.
Bail staggered, surprised, and gaped at her. Phasma took advantage of his shock to press the attack, punching and kicking ferociously. Bail swung his lightsaber in desperate defense, stumbling backwards, and more sparks flew from her armor, but she landed almost as many blows as he blocked. His common stormtrooper armor was flimsy in comparison to hers, and the sleek white surface was soon crumpled with cracks and dents. One shoulder pauldron shattered so badly that it snapped free and went spinning across the smooth deckplates like a child's whirly-top.
He thrust one hand towards her, palm out, meaning to shove her away with the Force, but she caught his wrist and twisted it savagely before he could act. Bail managed to turn with the motion enough to pull himself loose before she could snap any bones, but that left her with a broad opening in which to press her assault.
Phasma punched, kicked, and at one point even bent and head-butted him in a glittering metal flurry. They moved across the hangar in Breha's wake, Bail helpless to stop Phasma's ferocious advance. He did his best to turn her blows with both his saber and the Force, shielding his face from the worst of it, but the pummeling was too fast and relentless for him to land more than a few glancing strikes of his own. None penetrated her gleaming armor.
The thin white plastoid that covered his own arms and shoulders splintered under the weight of Phasma's heavy gauntlets. One blow snapped in under his guard as he was trying to shake broken plastoid off his wrists and caught him full on the chin. He staggered backwards and his heel caught on the heavy form of a dead stormtrooper. Bail went down hard, raising his saber over his head protectively. His eyes were wide as he stared up at Phasma. "That's not cortosis," he gasped. "How-"
Phasma kicked the lightsaber from his hands. The blade snapped-off as the hilt skittered away across the sleek deckplates. She planted her foot on Bail's torso, holding him solidly in place despite his frantic efforts to squirm free.
"This beskar'gam has been passed-down and reforged by my clan for generations," Phasma said proudly, thumping herself on her metal chestplate. "I am Phasma of Clan Ordo. I wear the armor of Mandalore the Preserver. I earned the right to it in combat and in service to my master, Revan. And now, with nothing but its strong iron and my own two hands, I will kill my first Jedi."