Chapter 76 - Dar'Manda Nayc Or'atu

Chewbacca watched Anakin disappear under the ship, and got into position. He still didn't understand why the others didn't take his idea seriously.

When he suggested he just rip off the door to the shuttle, Anakin balked. "Can you really do that?"

"Of course I can. They are only held on by metal screws." Chewbacca had replied in Shyriiwook.

"Remind me not to get you mad." Anakin replied slowly.

"A good philosophy to have with Wookies," Obi-Wan replied. "It's simple. Luke's in there, with what, one other agent. All we need to do is convince him to leave the ship."

"Humans," Chewy mumbled to himself as he waited.

Obi-Wan walked up and thumped on the side of the ship. "Extermination crew here. This hangar is about to be flooded with a noxious gas to kill the bugs. Please stay inside your craft the whole time." The door of the craft opened a slight bit and a mandalorian stuck his head out.

Chewy knew his signal. He pulled a cord and a droid slid across the room. Another fell down from a height and bounced off of the man before Chewy pulled it back out of sight again.

"Uh oh. This isn't good. The bug didn't scratch you or anything?" Obi-Wan reached out to examine the man's armor.

"What? No, I'm fine." he swatted him away. "And that wasn't a bug. It was a malfunctioning droid."

"Was. Was a droid. Then the bugs got to it. Turned it's processors to jelly. Does worse to the human nervous system. What's more, it can't be stopped by metal. Are any of these scratches new?"

"What scratches?" The man looked over his armor.

"You don't see the scratches? First symptom is confusion. Before the hallucinations. Can you hear any scraping metal?"

Suddenly, Anakin, from under the ship, started scraping a tool against the hull.

The man jumped.

"I think you should come with me. There may be just enough time to give you the antidote." Obi-Wan tried to pull him along.

The man turned and raised his hand. "I should…"

"There will be time for that after. Come with me now." Obi-Wan ordered and he turned to follow Obi-Wan out of the Hangar.

Chewbacca ran out of his hiding place and dove for the door of the ship as Anakin was slipping out from under the craft. It's door was closing as he reached under and pulled it back up. Inside the gears screeched. Anakin reached in and put his hand on the button to open it again.

"There we go. I knew that would work." Anakin tapped his shoulder before entering the craft. "Luke. You in here?"

"Dad? Yeah dad. Over here." Young Luke called out from where he was cuffed and tied down.

Chewbacca reached down to untie him.

Anakin slid into the ship's pilot seat. "Good to see you son. I've just got to change the access codes so he can't get back in here. There we go."


Obi-Wan led the mandalorian dressed bounty hunter out of the Hangar and away from where his Force-enhanced senses told him other pirates were going about their daily chores. "Okay, here we go." Obi-Wan picked up an empty hypo-syringe and tapped it demonstratively with his fingers. "I'm going to need you to remove your vambrace. What's your name, may I ask?"

With a quickness Obi-Wan didn't expect, the man pulled the part off his armor, then pulled up the sleeve of his tunic to reveal the skin below. "Lemal, sir." Obi-Wan put the end on his skin and pushed the end of the hypo-syringe to inject it's contents into his arm.

"It's nice to meet you. My name is Ben. There we go. Now how do you feel?" Obi-Wan asked.

"Fine. No more hallucinations, and I think my mind is clearer already. Thank you, Ben." Lemal nodded.

Obi-Wan credited that to the power of suggestion and the placebo effect. "That's very good. Why don't you go back to your ship and wait there while the treatment is in effect. With your ship sealed and it's life support running, you should be safe from the gas." Obi-Wan put his hand on Lemal's back to send him off to the hangar. Then he turned to travel the other direction.


It was with great trepidation that Lemal walked back into the Hangar. He didn't realize until he had walked away from Ben, that the man wasn't following him. And he didn't realize until he was at the door how much he really wanted him to.

Lemal gulped. "There's no going back now."

Jumping and turning every time he thought he heard a sound, he made his way back to his ship, and used his comlink to type the code in to open the door. "Come on now. One, three, seven, two." He repeated the process a second… "Why… Won't… You… Open!" … and third time, but the door wouldn't budge. If he were a less intelligent man, he'd be at the door banging on it with his fists, expecting that to help. "Confusion. He said that was a symptom. I'll bet I'd just forgotten the correct code. I'll go find Boba. He still knows the code." He turned to eye a vent that he could swear made a noise. "It's better than sticking around here, anyways."


Obi-Wan slipped through the ship with ease. He used an old trick with the Force to get past the other pirates. Unless he directly called their attention to him, weak minds would just look past him. It's a trick he may have used to get past the 212th medics on occasion. Though he wasn't confessing to anything. At least, every clone he'd tried it on had been susceptible to the trick. So Boba, he assumed, would fall for it as well.

Lobot, it seamed, had also gotten into the ship's computers in the meantime. So their friend was able to direct him with subtle clues, blinking on various screens, all the way to Han's cell. On the way there, Obi-Wan noticed the higher percentage of Weequay pirates. None of which he recognized, but it did make him think of Hondo for a second. 'Every Weequay in the galaxy doesn't know each other,' he reminded himself. 'Don't jump to conclusions.'

When Obi-Wan located Han's cell, the man was alone, and lying on a bench with a large frozen bacta pack on his face.

"Han… Han…" he whispered.

The man jumped and pulled the pack off his still healing face.

Obi-Wan saw the swollen reddish purple mark and asked him, "Did they hit you?"

"What, this? No. Lobot said to make it look real, and I figured if I really were to be captured, I'd fight to get away. So I slammed my head into the one Mando's chestplate. I know, stupid idea."

"Hmm," Obi-Wan hummed as he reached up to the cell door. He used the Force to unlock it and let it swing open. "Impulsive decisions are characteristic of the very desperate. Likely they believed it anyway."

"So, what's the plan now?" Han asked.

"Anakin and Chewy are onboard Boba Fett's shuttle. That's the mandalorian you likely met…" Obi-Wan reached up to his own forehead to demonstrate. "I sense they found Luke in there. Now we are going to meet up with Lobot again and try to get away. With any luck we'll be able to get on that ship with the others and off without anyone's notice."

Han gave him a look, clearly questioning the Jedi's sanity.

Said Jedi didn't seem to notice. He began to putter as his mind worked out the best pathway for them to take next. In a few moments he'd decided and waved Han to follow him.

"I don't have a good feeling about this," Han moaned lowly, as he turned to follow.


"Alright Dad, let's get out of here." Luke said. Now free of the binds, he was making himself comfortable on one of the chairs in the cockpit, behind his father.

"Grooooooooooooghhhhh," Chewy agreed.

"Alright, I'm working on it." Anakin said as he began to tap at controls. A few seconds later, his face became concerned. He tapped a button again, but nothing happened.

"Raaaaaaaaawrrrrrrrghr," Chewy suggested.

"Yeah, I did that already." Anakin insisted. Then his face became very worried as he closed his eyes. "Oh, don't tell me, they…"

Luke looked around him in confusion as his dad never finished the statement.

Instead Anakin jumped out of his seat and went to pull a panel off the back of the ship. "Restacking the regression drivers!" He slammed his fist onto the back panel. It made a very loud noise, but was likely only a poor substitute for the stream of curses his father wanted to lay down.

Luke knew that any restacking of such vital systems would essentially ground them until it was complete. Still…


Han followed Obi-Wan through the ship. Along the way he led them into an open room with several Weequay pirates.

Obi-Wan just kept walking and got nearly to the other side without being noticed.

Han stopped and gasped as soon as he noticed the room's other occupants.

The largest one threw his glass down so it crashed on the floor. He stood up. "Where are you going?"

"You will let us pass." Obi-Wan turned around to state, waving his hand with his words. "You saw no one."

Han almost laughed at it, until the Pirate repeated him. "We will let you pass. We saw no one."

"Good." Obi-Wan pulled Han through the room and to a door on the other side. "I can try to make it harder for them to spot us, but it is hard to do perfectly. It would be best to stay in the background. Keep your head down and try to move quickly."

Han was tempted to use one of Master Yoda's oft repeated quotes about do or do not try. 'Eeh, remembering old philosophy-mumbo jumbo was never my strong suit.'

In the end he decided to just nod and go along with it. Han tried to follow his advice. He hoped to see if it would work. Unfortunately the next few pirates they passed weren't even looking in their direction.

Then they got back to the Hangar Han had arrived in. There was a small crowd there, all gathered outside one of the ships.

"Then I typed in the code, and it wouldn't open. See. Try it," one of them, a mandalorian, waved his hands to enunciate.

"Lemal, It isn't working. What did you do?" The other Mandalorian, Boba something, looked accusingly between Lemal and Hondo.

"What, me? I did nothing to your craft. I still don't understand, why did you step out in the first place?" Hondo asked.

"Because, I needed the shot when that infected Droid scratched my armor," Lemal rushed to explain. "At first I thought it was the confusion, but you just confirmed the same number, and it's not working for either of us." He didn't stop to see the looks of confusion on the men listening.

"Wait, infected Droid?" Hondo asked.

Han found it a pretty fishy story, and he wasn't surprised the others were looking at him like a purple bantha with wings.

"Your man was preparing to treat the hangar for the pests. He knocked on the hull to inform me about it, when it flew down and bumped me." He touched a part of his armor.

Hondo shook his head. "If we have pests, it's news to me."

"You say it scratched you?" Boba asked.

"Yeah, right here." Lemal tapped his chest plate.

"There are no scratches," Boba pointed out.

"What do you mean? Look, why don't we just ask Ben. Over there. Hey Ben!"

Han guessed that the Force trick thingy they were using to hide didn't work on this Lemal character. And probably, now that he'd called them out, it wouldn't work on anyone else either.

A guess, which proved right when Boba turned to see who his underling was pointing at. "Kenobi!"

With an, "Uh-oh," Obi-Wan turned and ran the rest of the way to enter the very same ship he and Lobot had arrived on.

Speaking of which, the very same man was already onboard waiting for them, along with Anakin, Luke, and Chewy.


Lobot had found extracting himself from the Pirate/ Bounty Hunter's presence easy. After the boy plugged his own device into the ship's computer, and after Lobot hacked through its firewall, he told the boys that he needed to recharge the implants in his head. 'And they believed it, can you imagine that, huh?' He was tempted to shake his head and mumble, 'Organics,' derisively, like a Droid he knows. Of course, they offered him a number of plugs and power-cores, but all Lobot had to do was tell them what he needed was already on board his ship, and he was excused to come back here.

"Hello everybody, love to sit and chat, but we really should be getting out of here," Obi-Wan insisted. "Did you work out how to open the bay doors?"

"I am still connected to the computer here, and will be able to open them at will. You may also like to know, I have identified the Pirate captain…" Lobot said.

"Hondo Ohnaka," Obi-Wan filled in the blanks. "Thanks, we've met. Anakin, let's go."

He sat down while Anakin started the ship.


"Ah, Obi-Wan! Is he the other party yous are waiting for?" Hondo asked.

"No. He's a Jetise Chakaar. That thief just stole my package." Boba growled. To think, he'd work for Kenobi. Boba still remembered him from the day his father died. "Get the guns. I don't want them getting away. Prize or no prize, they're coming down." He ordered Lemal.

"Wait a minute. They're not going anywhere. I grounded the craft already."

The others looked at Hondo in surprise.

"What, it's my property. Anyways, if Obi-Wan wasn't the other party, who's got a bounty out on one of his friends? The Jedi saved Aco. I owe him my consideration, and we may be able to make a deal."

Boba rolled his eyes. The pirate, always thinking about his profit. "The Empire," he answered, and the nearby pirates all opened their eyes wide with shock. "They'll be here soon, and they won't accept being told they're too late."

Hondo shouted, "Comm the bridge. Tell Aco to jump to Hyperspace. Now!"

Boba was beside himself. "What are you doing? They're right there, and there're bounties on all of them. Large ones. We can split them fifty fifty." He turned to Venham to try to persuade him, when Hondo didn't turn around. "I have issues with the empire as well. Their leader basically arranged a war, and used my Buir as an expendable pawn in one of his first battles. Then used his clones, his tal ade, to take down his enemy without honor. Cowards. I have no love for them. But they pay well, and in this universe, that's what counts."

"Look, sir. I know what you're saying. But no credits are worth a brother's soul. Take it from someone who learned that the hard way," said Venham.

Boba's mouth dropped. Something about the lad's words reminded him of his Buir's teachings. His father was never very religious, but he wanted Boba to have a well-rounded education. 'worth a brother's soul,' According to one interpretation, Palpatine, when he used the clones as he did, made his brothers dar'manda, or soulless. A terrible fate, if the ancient mandalorians were correct.

But the clones were educated in Mandalorian ways. His father saw to that. Therefore, the only thing that went wrong was the darjetii mand'bor, the Sith magic that made every clone fire on their Jedi commanders without honor.

Boba gulped. He was coming to a realization. One he didn't want to make. "Leave them." He commanded Lemal, putting a hand out to get him to lower his weapon.


Hello everyone,

This chapter struggled with me, and it wasn't until I got to the very end, that I knew what I wanted to happen exactly. I hope you can understand the Mandalorian parts. It's based off of a very quick skim of the Wiki pages, and some interpretational thinking. The Mando'a Language is from an internet translator. It should be obvious what each phrase means as you read, but if anything is unclear, go ahead and ask.

And I did subtly refer to events in an earlier story arc, when I had Venham talk to Boba at the end there. The events are in chapter 48.

In other news, I think I have officially broken spell check. That or google docs is getting smarter on me. When the spell check suggests such fictional spellings of Shyriiwook and Weequay for you, you know you've entered the twilight zone.