LordDarthYoda - I cannot even describe how much I hate Anakin blowing up the droid control ship in EP1. The kid is 9! It's a miracle he knows how to fly the thing at all (let alone not crash it the moment he takes off the autopilot). Yeah yeah, midiclorians made him do it. Whatever. I think Sascha should start walking around with a helmet on. Poor guy gets hit in the head too often!

Mr. Insane - Hmm, the Mandalorians could probably team up to kill one of the Jedi, but why bother when they have tons of droids to wear the Jedi? They'll plan to take them down when the Jedi are good and tired. Mandalorians are generally not stupid fighters, they are going to wait for fatigue to do their job for them.

SpeechBubbleMe - Thanks. Cliffhangers are slightly unavoidable in this case but at least this one ends off with slightly less of one.

A/N - Got nothing to say.

Anyways, all reviews, follows, and favourites are deeply appreciated as always.

Please enjoy the next chapter.

Chapter 58: The Battle for Ubrora, Part Three

Ravar Ecalt was kind of getting used to the vibrations that came when you were on a battleship that was in battle. It was like being in the middle of an earthquake. Like an earthquake, the ground (or deck) was shaking, it was loud, and you never could quite tell if the shaking was getting softer or more intense.

Hopefully they'd be able to give Vash Varless a taste of battle very soon.

Off to the port side of the Kuati Victory, the what had been the dormant looking Arrow lurched into action. It's engines cold-fired and sprung to life. Long and thin, the Arrow had impeccable engines, top of the line, really. And it was about to get an extremely hefty boost.

The Arrow had a simple concept behind it. The Reprisal was slow and not heavily armed, its defenses came from its good shields and from its droid fighters. The Arrow was the exact opposite. It was fast, agile and small.

It was also packed to the brim with explosives.

If Ravar's knowledge of military history had taught him anything, it was that the bow and arrow was possibly the single greatest weapon ever invented. The bow provided power to the arrow and then the arrow did the damage to its target. Ravar planned something similar here. The bow was the tractor beam of the Kuati Victory. And the arrow was...well the Arrow. A bit on the nose in terms of naming, but, it sufficed.

If everything went to plan, the Arrow would escape notice during the middle of the battle and make it to the Reprisal unmolested. And although the Reprisal's shields were still up, and were likely to be even if the Arrow reached its target, the theory was that the Arrow's high speed would allow it to pierce through and overload the Reprisal's shield. The theory there was that because the Reprisal was so big, its shields could not handle such an influx of energy focused on such a narrow area. The way shields worked for capital ships is that the shield tried to distribute energy across its surface area, lessening the energy and allowing the shield to 'absorb' the impact. But just like how the droid fighters were able to crash into the Kuati Victory because they were small and going quickly (making the impact focused on a small area of the shield), the Arrow followed that same concept. Except if the Arrow connected to the Reprisal, Ravar was sure the explosives would cause significant harm to the enemy ship. How significant, he wasn't quite sure.

"Tractor control. Are you ready?" asked Captain Kuat.

"I've got a solid lock. About to give the Arrow a good head start."

Another voice from the pit, "Arrow's engines approaching their max speed."

Ravar looked out the viewport and saw the Arrow on a path that was a fair distance away from the massive Reprisal. None of the Reprisal's lasers or droid fighters seemed to pay the ship the slightest bit of attention. For all the Reprisal's crew knew, this was a mercenary that was trying to flee the battle, not worth cataloging at all.

The Kuati Victory's tractor beam then latched on to the Arrow and upon calculating a ballistic path that would take it towards the Reprisal the tractor beam latched on and directed it in the general vicinity of the Reprisal. Usually a tractor beam was used to bring a ship closer to a capital ship. But it had other uses. In this case they were using centrifugal force, with the Kuati Victory as the center and the Arrow as the outward body being whipped around.

The G-Forces that the Arrow had to endure to survive the acceleration of the turn it had just taken would have broken almost every internal compensator ever made and knocked a flesh-and-blood pilot unconscious. That's why the pilot was one brave astromech. The only crew of the doomed Arrow. The irony that the Reprisal could be brought down by a ship piloted by a droid was not lost on Ravar Ecalt either.

By the time that the Reprisal seemed to realize that the Arrow was heading on a direct course for it, it was too late. The Arrow rocketed in to the Reprisal at an almost absurd speed and exploded in a blinding flash of light. The Reprisal wasn't quite swallowed by the explosion that the impact had created (and the subsequent explosives detonating, but at least one quarter of the ship seemed to be engulfed by the fading remnants that had been the Arrow.

"Direct hit!" yelled someone from the command pit.

Ravar clenched his fist in victory. Now to see what damage the Arrow had managed to do.

"Reprisal's shields are down," yelled another Kuati officer. "Unknown further damage. Trying to get further readings"

The diminutive Kuati Captain leapt in and punched the air, "Kriff further readings! Weapons! Hit the Reprisal with EVERYTHING! TAKE IT DOWN, NOW!"

Ravar Ecalt let a small smile creep onto his face. He wondered if the historians would correctly credit him with this unorthodox tactic that had potentially won the day. Probably not.

A series of tremors rocked the ship, causing Ravar to slip and fall on his posterior, wiping his triumphant grin off his face. What the heck was that?

The Kuati Captain had much the same question that he did, "What now?"

"The droid fighters...they've been deactivated."

"What?" asked Captain Kuat in total disbelief.

Lieutenant Torical swung around in her chair, "There's no signal coming from the Reprisal. The droid fighters aren't getting instructions so they are continuing on their last course. Some of which, inevitably, led them crashing into us."

"So the droid fighters...are deactivated?"

"Yes, Ma'am," replied the Lieutenant.

For the first time, Ravar Ecalt was feeling optimistic about the battle for Ubrora.

Captain Kuat gesticulated at the Reprisal, "Keep up the barrage on the Reprisal until they surrender! I don't want those droids coming back on line!"

As the Reprisal floundered, the Kuati Victory found new life, hammering away at the suddenly beleaguered opposition ship.

All thanks to one well placed arrow.

It took a few moments for Aurine Brynar to realize what had occurred. She had been carving through droids, deactivating them with less and less ease as she tired, when she realized that the droids weren't firing back.

Aurine carved through the rest of the squad of droids she had been engaging just in case this was some sort of advanced psychological fake out. After that task was complete she looked around. The only movement that she could detect in her immediate vicinity was from the droids was them falling over, or Droiedekas curling into their 'deactivated' position.

Not sure how to react, she let her arm fall to her side, pointing her lightsaber at the ground. But she came to her senses quickly. She continued to use her lightsaber to carve through the droids, "Keep going! This might only last for a few minutes."

Aurine cut through a squad of deactivated, motionless droids when her eye spotted something that was actually moving. It was the Mandalorians, all six of them. They were flying together on their jetpacks, forming up as a group some distance away from her. Aurine dropped into a defensive posture, and pointed her lightsaber at the Mandalorians, "SHOOT THEM!" she shouted, hoping that there were some Ubrorans around that could hear her.

The few Ubrorans that were in earshot responded , firing their weapons at the grouped up Mandalorians. One particularly well aimed shot glanced off the shoulder of one of the Mandalorians, no doubt that the Mandalorian's armor had had some effect on abating the blaster bolt, but damage had been done. Then Coren Vox put power to his jet pack and flew away from the battle. Right behind him were his five remaining Mandalorian buddies. So predictable.

Aurine finally stepped out of her combat posture and took stock of her surroundings. She was still in the middle of the droid army. Miraculously, besides a few minor cuts and bruises, she was physically okay, though she was pretty close to being out of breath from having to be in close combat for...however long the battle had lasted.

Some Ubrorans were continuing to fire their weapons at the newly comatose droid army, but more and more, what Aurine could see and hear was celebrations. Celebrations of an improbable, impossible victory.

She wasn't quite in celebration mode yet. Instead she decided that she would sit down, deactivating her lightsaber as she did. The import of what had happened was still yet to sink in, but it was only a matter of time before the cold numbness in her brain was replaced by some other emotion.

Aurine calmly stretched out in the Force for her Padawan. Sascha was alive and...well not well. But he was alive. That was enough for now. She also sensed that Tiplee was coming towards her and quickly. She opened her eyes to see the Rishati driving a speeder and making a beeline right for her. Wearily she stood and waved her friend down.

The Rishati was not in as pleasant a mood as she was, as Tiplee's face was set in a thin, agitated expression, "Get in," she said without preamble.

"Why?"

Tiplee pointed in the direction where the Mandalorians had fled, "The Mandalorians are going after the Dream and our Padawans."

A cold feeling of dread formed in Aurine's stomach. The Padawans were in absolutely no shape to fight a newborn nexu, let alone six Mandalorians. Aurine used a Force empowered jump to land in the passanger seat of the open-topped speeder. "Drive fast."

Tiplee did.

Nara Nalto awoke with blood trickling down her face, and a pounding headache. The around her air smelled of smoke and the ship's ear piercing alarm jolted her addled senses.

For a moment, she wasn't exactly sure where she was. The Togruta tried to piece the last couple seconds of her life back together as she tried to sit up straight.

She remembered that she had been operating as the gunner of the Emerald Dream and that she had been causing carnage in the battle.

...then something had hit them. And then they had crashed. Which explained the blood, the headache and the smell of smoke. They'd obviously make some sort of half-successful crash landing.

Still in the gunner's seat, she dabbed at her forehead with her hand and looked at the result. There was blood on her hand, but there wasn't much of it. That meant that she had been cut, but not badly. A flesh wound. Manageable. With a groan she undid her crash webbing, which had likely saved her from being thrown bodily through the viewport, but hadn't done much beyond that. During the crash she figured that she had probably hit her head on something – probably the controls to the turret. That would explain the cut, and the headache and the temporary unconsciousness.

Nara stumbled out of her chair and spoke into her comlink, "Sascha?"

No response.

Maybe her comlink was just damaged. It was certainly possible.

Nara gingerly slid down the ladder that led from the turret to the main section of the ship. As she regained more of her senses she was starting to realize how hurt she was. She could feel that she had been bruised in a number of places and though she was pretty sure she hadn't been seriously hurt, her body was letting her know that it hadn't appreciated being brought in for a crash landing.

Once she reached the main section of the ship, she started coughing almost immediately. The smoke that she had smelled earlier in the was clearly visible in this section of the ship, and she dropped low to the floor immediately to improve the air quality. It helped. A little.

Finally, her mind made the right connection. Smoke meant fire...which meant...

The ship was on fire!

And she didn't know where Sascha was!

"Sascha!" she shouted. And then regretted that action immediately as she inhaled some smoke and instantly started coughing. Okay. No more shouting, thought Nara.

While it was possible that Sascha had already escaped the ship, she thought it rather unlikely that Sascha would have left her behind. He wasn't the type to do that.

Crawling on all fours, she made her way towards the ship's cockpit. Parts of the ship were smoking, control panels were sparking, with exposed wires seeping from the bulkhead had previously contained them. Thankful that the Dream wasn't that big a ship, she was able to get to the cockpit relatively quickly. Nara saw that Sascha was slumped over in the pilot's seat, his head pressed against the dashboard. The crash webbing that was supposed to have kept him from hitting his head on the dashboard had clearly failed. Though he was mostly still, Sascha's eyes were fluttering, but not staying open, which probably meant that he had been knocked unconscious by hitting the dashboard, and was yet to fully regain his senses.

Nara quickly crawled over to his seat, undid Sascha's crash webbing and spoke his name insistently. Sascha's head lolled around like he was partially able to hear, her, but he was clearly too hurt to respond or react in anything resembling a cogent manner.

She took a brief look around at the deteriorating conditions in the ship and decided that she needed to move him. While moving a partially unconscious human who had an obvious head injury was not exactly textbook first aid, she knew that with the ship on fire that extracting Sascha came first, worrying about his condition came after she got him to safety.

With Sascha free of his crash webbing, she gently slung her arm underneath his shoulder and started sliding him out of his seat. When she had gotten him out of his seat, that was when Nara realized that she had a problem. While she could fairly easily carry Sascha (who was pretty slender for an adult human), she didn't have that luxury with the smoke that was rapidly filling the ship which meant that she had to stay low to the floor.

So Nara went with the only option she could think of. She dragged Sascha behind her while she crawled back towards the main section of the ship and what (she hoped) was a functioning docking ramp. As she crawled on her hands and knees, her muscles strained at carrying the dead weight of Sascha behind her. Dead-lifting was a much different proposition than dragging Sascha's dead weight. But adrenaline powered her, because she knew that eventually, something big was going to explode and then there was going to be more than just smoke and isolated fires in the Emerald Dream.

Nara coughed once again from the smoke. Her eyes were now watering constantly and she was having a hard time figuring out exactly where she was in the ship. That was probably because she had been knocked unconscious for an indeterminate amount of time just recently. Not a problem she could worry about now. Nara kept herself to the left side of the ship, hopeful that she would quickly get to where the boarding ramp lowered.

As the smoke continued to fill the interior of the ship, Nara felt herself starting to fade. The adrenaline seemed to have have worn off rather quickly and she was feeling dizzy from both the smoke inhalation and her head injury. Gotta keep going, Nara thought through her increasingly woozy mind.

Nara felt along the side of the ship with her left hand. She was sure that the manual latch that would release the docking ramp was around here somewhere. She tried to look upwards, but had to close her eyes and cough as smoke agitated her eyes. She would have to do this by touch.

Nara brought her left hand upwards again, searching for the latch. Finally, she found it and pulled.

And nothing happened.

She pulled the latch again, and again. It simply didn't lower the docking ramp as it was supposed to.

"Work, damn you!" she shouted. She pulled again.

With a loud groan of metal grinding against metal, the docking ramp lowered. It didn't make it all the way to the ground, but she didn't care. It felt like fire was licking at her from every direction and she knew that she had to get off the ship, and soon. She crawled on her hands and knees, dragging Sascha behind her, and then slid down the ramp, gaining momentum as she went. The ramp stopped a few feet short of the ground, and with her momentum carrying her, she slid off the ramp and to the ground like a sack of tubers. She managed to break her fall a little bit but still landed hard on the ground.

It all wouldn't have been so bad if Sascha's semi-conscious body hadn't followed immediately behind her and fallen on top her. Coughing and wheezing from finally inhaling non smoke infested air, Nara shoved Sascha's body off of her. She still needed to get away from the dying embers of the ship, because if the fire spread to something critical, like the engines, or the power core, the whole ship might decide to go up in a fireball and she wanted to be far, far away when that happened.

So despite an aching body desperate for rest, despite lungs that wanted to just calmly breath fresh air for a few moments, and despite the fact that her memory was so hazy she was having trouble remembering what had happened thirty seconds ago, she got to her feet, hefted Sascha on to her shoulders and staggered away from the dying wreck that was the Emerald Dream.

She wasn't quite sure how she did it. It might have been the Force. It might have been pure survival instinct, but she carried Sascha until she could carry him no longer. When she wasn't sure she could take another step, she dropped Sascha as gently as she could on the ground and then finally collapsed beside him.

Nara laid on her back, her chest heaving from her heroic exertions. She could have laid there forever, just staring blankly up into the midday sun of Ubrora, totally and utterly exhausted. Had she just cared about herself, she probably would have. But she cared about the person beside her and his health. So, she rolled over and got up to her knees, and started checking on Sascha.

Sascha was laying flat on the ground, his eyes closed. The cut on his face had opened again and it was dripping off the side of his head. Nara tore a small part of her robe off and pressed it against his cut. Sascha winced and tried to raise his arm. Nara held it in place, "It's okay Sascha. I got you."

Sascha nodded slowly and tried to speak, but whatever word he was trying to speak was so soft that she couldn't make sense of it. "Just stay down, we're okay," she said calmly. "I need to check you out. Yelp if it hurts."

Sascha swallowed and managed to croak, "Okay."

Nara started using her hands to check on Sascha. Head came first. His head was okay, despite the obvious concussion and the cut on his face – there wasn't any obvious swelling that she could detect. A good sign. Nara moved lower on Sascha's body and immediately noticed that something wrong. Sascha's shoulders were weirdly off, out of alignment. Nara pulled away the first layer of Sascha's robe and instantly saw the issue, Sascha's collarbone had clearly been broken. She gently prodded at it and Sascha tensed up and grimaced, "That hurt," he managed.

"Your collarbone is broken, I think."

"...great."

Nara agreed that it wasn't particularly good news, but Sascha at least seemed to be coming back to his senses. His words were no longer slurred and he seemed to be in control of all of his faculties. "Anything else hurting?"

"I think my right knee is damaged," Sascha said as he tried to sit up.

She gently pushed him back down, "Stay down, Sascha. Was that the knee you tweaked a few days ago?"

"Yeah. It's more than tweaked this time."

Nara shuffled towards Sascha's legs and lightly probed at Sascha's knee. His right knee was swelling up fairly dramatically and she didn't want to damage it further by doing anything more than a light probe, "I think you should probably keep off that leg as much as possible, Sascha."

"That bad, huh?"

Nara shrugged and felt a spike of pain go down her spine, her right shoulder was hurting more than a little bit now that the adrenaline was almost totally gone. "We've done our part. Now we just wait for the final accounting."

Sascha nodded, "You're favouring your left leg, you know."

Now that he mentioned it, her leg was really hurting. She rolled up her pant leg to see what the issue was. Her knee was purple, well purpler than it usually was, and it was rather tender when she poked at it. Probably not major damage, but she should probably not be putting much weight on it at this point. "Yeah I didn't exactly get out of the ship unscathed."

Sascha turned his head to watch the Emerald Dream continue to burn, "My poor ship. It always seems to get shot down."

Nara settled on to the ground beside Sascha, lying parallel to him, "Needs a better pilot," she joked lightly.

"Probably true."

Nara paused for a moment, "What happens now?"

"I don't know. We've done our part. It's up to everyone else now. Maybe we already won."

"Maybe we already lost," she replied, acutely feeling how hurt her body was at this moment. She could have probably used a nice dunk in a bacta tank, but she would have settled for a nice, warm, bath. Or a nice long sleep.

"Cynic," Sascha replied mockingly. He sat up, wincing badly as he did, "Does your comlink still work?"

Nara had to search for a bit but she found the comlink that she had stored in one the pockets of her robe for safekeeping. She inspected the device, "Seems like it should still work."

"Hmm. Maybe try contacting Pravin Ecalt at the main base. He might know what is going on." As if on cue, the comlink started buzzing, indicating an incoming call. She glanced at Sascha who shrugged, "It might be Pravin."

Nara answered the call and put it into speaker mode, "Hello?"

"Nara! You're okay?"

"Yes Master Brynar. Sascha and I are a bit banged up but we'll survive. What's happening with the battle?"

"It's over," said Aurine with disbelief evident in her voice, "We think the Reprisal has been destroyed or knocked offline."

Sascha started laughing and wincing as he did. Nara could hardly believe it. Someone had managed to disable the Reprisal? That meant the droid army was down. "We won?"

"Not quite yet," said Aurine. "The six remaining Mandalorians are on their way to you. We think they are going to try to get your ship to fly."

Sascha looked over at the Emerald Dream. Fires still dotted it's hull and while it had never become a raging inferno, the ship wasn't going to be spaceworthy for weeks. "I don't think the ship will fly anywhere," he said.

"Then I suggest that you flee, Padawans."

Nara looked over at Sascha who shook his head slightly, "I don't think we can run anywhere, Master Brynar. We're a bit beat up."

"Hide then," Aurine said plaintively. "Tiplee and I are coming. The Mandos will get there first though."

"I can feel them coming," Sascha said quietly.

"Go hide, Padawans," said her Master.

"We'll try," promised Nara. "Get here as fast as you can."

Nara ended the call and she saw Sascha struggling to his feet, so she helped him up. "Not much use of hiding when those Mandos probably have thermal imaging in their visors is there?"

"Shut up and walk," she replied as she slung an arm under Sascha's armpit. Together, both Padawans limped away from the wreck of the Emerald Dream.