The holo-image rotated in the center of the main cabin like a glowing blue wheel with a large spherical hub and two rims. Dai-Men Jinn was a tall, lean shadow off to one side his voice brisk and businesslike.
"As you can see the redoubt has two defensive rings around a central core. We need to hit them at three points simultaneously; I recommend the power center, main armory and hanger." The three areas flashed red; power center on the outer ring, armory on the inner and hanger right in the middle of the hub.
Gef Aiton nodded to himself, Jinn knew what he was about all right. All three targets were vital yet widely separated. The Mandalorians would have to divide their forces to defend them.
"But how are you going to bypass the outer ring?" Lieutenant Nentres objected.
"I thought one of your tunnelers." Jinn replied.
"Up from below or down from above?" the Captain asked.
"From above. You've gotten them used to traffic overhead, they might fail to notice the tunneler until it's too late."
"Agreed." Aiton nodded, ignoring his second's scandalized look. "And the hanger?"
"The Falcon will blast her way in." Jinn announced calmly.
"Say What?" the freighter's human captain started to his feet anything but calmly while his Wookiee co-pilot yowled a supporting protest.
Jinn didn't turn a hair. "I'm sorry, it has to be the Falcon. The Jinx is just too big."
"That'll be fine." Princess Leia cut in, giving the pair a stern look. "The hanger's just where we want to be."
The two pilots didn't look happy but they didn't argue any more.
Aiton hid a smile. Once he'd recognized her Highness it hadn't been hard to guess who 'Lando', 'Luke' and the Wookiee were. He wondered idly where Han Solo had gotten to, he was supposed to be a regular member of the Princess' circle.
Jinn on the other hand was a complete mystery. Aiton was sure he'd never heard his name before or his companions', though the girl's seemed to ring a distant bell. As did the long brown robes they all wore like a uniform. Whoever he was Jinn had obviously done this kind of thing before which was reassuring. Aiton had no idea why the Rebel Alliance had decided to concern itself with Had Abaddon and frankly didn't much care. But Nentres was a worrier.
"If headquarters ever finds out you've co-operated with the Rebs -"
"Headquarters wouldn't care if I sold Had Abaddon to the Hutts." Aiton had countered.
That was inarguable forcing the Lieutenant to shift ground. "What makes you think they can stand up to Mandalorians?"
"They got the Deathstar didn't they?" That had shut him up. Temporarily anyway.
The tunneler smashed through the outer plascrete shell then a ferroplas ceiling to land with a reverberating crash, nose down in the middle of the armory. The tunneler itself pretty much plugged the hole it had made but a couple of troopers spayed sealant around it anyway, to prevent pressure loss, as the main body dispersed to the cover of assorted crates and lockers and the special weapons team set up the heavy turbos. The brown robes, looking incongruously human and vulnerable amidst all that white armor, stayed near their leader who stayed near Aiton.
"Lt. Nentres, report." the Captain said into his helmet comlink.
"We're in." his second responded. He was commanding the assault on the power center.
"Remember stay under cover, take no chances. All you've got to do is keep them busy."
"Yeah, I know. I was at the briefing." Nentres snapped back.
His C.O. grinned at the Lieutenant's by now traditional bad temper and switched frequencies. "Lando?"
"We're through." The Rebel reported over the crumph of blaster fire. "And the welcoming committee is pretty unhappy about it!"
"Good luck."
"Yeah, thanks." Lando snorted and clicked off.
At that moment the armory doors and entire front wall began to glow a soft lambent orange.
"Here they come!" a trooper shouted - probably one of the most unnecessary warnings in all military history - then the entire front of the room imploded.
Blaster fire streaked through the smoke and dust, blanketing fire with no hits. As the air cleared Aiton made out some eleven Mandalorians in staggered ranks. The stormtroopers returned fire with a will blasting holes in walls and ceiling but splashing ineffectively off the Mandalorian armor. Not even the heavy turbo lasers seemed to effect them.
Aiton wasn't surprised, Mandalore immunity to conventional weaponry was legendary. Still the plan was working, they had split their forces as predicted. Suddenly he felt Jinn's hand on his shoulder. "Cease fire, Captain."
Aiton echoed the command, ignoring the snorts and grunts of protest from his men. "Okay, Jinn, your move."
The enemy stopped firing when the stormtroopers did and stood there, motionless and menacing, waiting. To Aiton's astonishment Jinn calmly stepped out into the open followed by his team of brown robes. They formed a line facing the Mandalorian ranks; three men, a boy and a girl, apparently unarmed.
Yet the enemy seemed intimidated. One raised his rifle to fire only to have it knocked aside by the warrior next to him. Then, in almost perfect unison the Mandalorians laid down their blasters and drew palm sized hand devices that emitted a high, shrill whine.
'What the-?' Aiton wondered. But before he could finish the thought five, meter long bars of light, two green and three blue, hissed into existence in the brown robes' hands. Suddenly the pieces fell together. 'Jedi!'
The two bands of mythic warriors, neither of whom was supposed to exist any longer, joined battle. Aiton remembered the Mandalorians' hand to hand weapon of choice was the sonic rapier; a thin beam of sculpted sound which was effectively invisible. He quickly saw that their style of fighting also varied from the Jedi's. The latter used the edge of their weapon in strike and counterstrike, but the warriors preferred the tip, thrusting and parrying. And their armor was resistant though not invulnerable to lightsabre.
Yet outnumbered though they were, the Jedi were more than holding their own. In fact they were winning! Somehow - magically - they seemed to know exactly where their opponents' invisible blades were every second and accurately anticipated their every move. The whirling attacks the Jedi seemed to prefer at first struck Aiton as pointless and dangerous then he realized they were using the momentum of their spins to slice into the super-hard armor.
Jinn was visibly the best of the lot. Fast, powerful and elegantly economical using to the full his advantages in height and reach. But the girl was a close second. Suddenly synapses fused; Of course, Kenobi! Obi-Wan Kenobi the Jedi General. This sweet young thing must be a relative. Certainly she was a spectacular fighter; small and lightening fast she seemed to dance circles around her bulky opponents.
The two other men were less dazzling but no less dangerous. Darklighter in particular had an icy precision, a sort of focused deadliness that Aiton would hate to find himself on the wrong side of. Naberrie was a genuine surprise. His gawkiness vanished when he had a lightsabre in his hand, and his attacks had a calculated randomness that made them hard to predict or counter.
Young Skywalker was a tyro by comparison with none of the grace or technique exhibited by his colleagues, but he was just as fast and the Mandalorians didn't seem to be finding him any easier to handle. Suddenly seven of the enemy were down and the four survivors were pounding away up the corridor, retreating!
Jinn turned on Darklighter who was clutching his arm. "How bad."
"A glancing blow," the other Jedi replied tightly. "arm's numb."
"Stay close to me." Jinn instructed. "Luke, stay with Mei-Qan."
"Yes, Master." no false pride there.
"We are going to pursue, aren't we?" Aiton asked, joining them.
"Yes" Jinn glanced at him with eyes at once distant and utterly focused, as if he were getting messages from some sense other than the conventional ones. "Keep behind us, Captain. We've lost the advantage of surprise, they'll be ready for us now."
Life is full of little surprises but finding himself fighting shoulder to shoulder with a bunch of hardbacks was one hell of a twist. Crouching behind one of the Falcon's landing struts Lando felt his frustration mount as blaster fire just splashed off Mandalorian armor.
"We're not even denting them!" he shouted to the Imp sergeant sharing his cover.
"What about your ships' guns?" the other yelled back.
"No good. Dorsal and belly turrets, we couldn't even align them." the Falcon's weaponry had been designed for use in the three dimensions of outer space.
The sergeant's head turned sharply. "Rik! Tobit! hit dirt!"
Lando looked over in time to see two troopers tackle Chewy, all three falling flat just as a ball of plasma sizzled over them to impact on the Falcon's underside, sending white hot bits of reflector dish flying in all directions. He winced. 'Han's gonna kill me for that!'. Then scrambled over to see how Chewy was.
One of the Imps was patting the Wookiee on the back. "Sorry about that, didn't have time to explain."
"S'all right." Lando interpreted Chewy's slightly abashed growl for the hardbacks then looked around. "Where's Leia?"
"She followed the advance team." the other stormtrooper replied, a grin evident in his voice. "Real little spitfire isn't she?"
"You can say that again!" the gambler agreed with fervor.
Peering into the continuous fire ahead he could make out Leia and a clutch of troopers pinned down behind a stack of cargo crates. Lando took a bracing breath then ran the heart stopping dozen or so meters, bent almost double, to join them. He collapsed breathless beside the Princess.
"I don't see Slave I!" she shouted above the blaster impacts. Talk about your one track minds!
"There are a dozen ships in here, Leia!" he yelled back. "Remember this is a holding action. Wait till the Jedi get here, then we'll find it."
"Jedi?" an incredulous hardback turned his expressionless helmet to them. "You gotta be kidding!"
"I don't believe it either." Lando admitted, "But I'm not kidding."
"The Jedi are all dead!" another trooper protested.
"Yeah, and so are these guys." Lando retorted, firing another useless burst at the Mandalorians.
"Cap'n," Nentres voice crackled over Aiton's helmet com. "the Mandalorians just pulled out. Should we pursue?"
"No! stay under cover, it could be a fient." But Aiton was willing to bet it wasn't.
He hurried to catch up with Jinn's long stride. "The Mandalorians have abandoned the power center."
The Jedi nodded. "They've gone to join their comrades somewhere ahead."
"We'll be at the junction tunnel to the outer ring in another two turns." Skywalker contributed.
"They'll hit us there." Jinn agreed. "Fall back, captain."
Aiton obeyed, this was no time for false pride on his part either. He and his men were outclassed and everybody knew it.
There was no standoff this time. Jinn and his Jedi sailed right into the Mandalorians not even breaking stride. The first fight had been a series of individual duels. This time the enemy seemed to have a strategy. After a moment Aiton realized they had succeeded in driving a wedge between the Jedi with Jinn, Darklighter and Naberrie on one side and Luke and the girl, on the other, forcing the latter into the corridor to the outer ring.
But it didn't seem to be doing the Mandalorians any good. Their number had been halved in the first minutes of the fight. Suddenly the remainder pulled back, but before the Jedi could either regroup or reengage the enemy the blast doors came down cutting them off from the Mandelorians and the two kids too.