No thanks to the droid, Ral pulls Mith out of the racks and back to the relative safety of the catwalks. He nods his thanks and casts a wary eye behind him, observing the shuttle as it rises and wincing as it fires its cannons into the walker.
Rod can't help but breathe a sigh of relief as Baldwin's shuttle turns around and fires back. A shuttle like that had losing odds against a walker, not to mention the fact that the Moff could have just flown straight out and escaped. Another sign of the Grand Moff's incompetence . "Zel!" Rod barks. "Still have access to systems? If you do, then get those hanger bay doors shut before Baldwin realises the value of a tactical retreat!" The clone lines up his next shot against the shuttle, adjusting as he goes according to Dara's advice. "Firing!"
"Hey, so what's the plan now? Hope the big walker kills everything?", the droid chirps out, before it pokes its head towards the troopers. "Does this place have any turrets we could turn towards those new bucketheads?", it blurts a question towards Mith, before turning towards the console, seemingly displeased to leave its cover. That marks the fourth time in my runtime that I wish I were an astrodroid., it thinks to itself as its fingers start tapping onto the keyboard.
Flan, steadily deteriorating into a nervous wreck, can barely even type with her hands shaking as they are, let alone help Zel pilot the Walker.
The walkers cannons splash against the Lambda's shield, rocking it as it hovers; the shield flickers in and out of sight, and once more, large burns and carbon scoring appear on the hull, starting to develop into serious damage. Smoke rises from the shuttle.
Mith confirms the presence of turrets.
Exiting the safety of cover, OOM-93b fumbles with the control console. But unfortunately for the droid, its silhouette is perfectly framed by the cannon blasts, and two Storm Troopers take aim.
One hits, the blaster bolt nearly breaking the droid in twain.
Zel reaches out to Ral and Mith via comlink, offering instruction in how to navigate the console and close the bay doors or activate the turrets.
A few keystrokes before finishing Zel's instructions, the Deception rumbles as more shielding and armor is lost in the ongoing barrage. Ral's hand slips, and he is forced to backtrack some.
(
(
The shuttle crew, now in their assigned stations, launches an all out attack against the AT-AT. Three brilliantly green shots thunder against its body, rocking it to the side. One shot, perhaps fired by the possessive, paranoid and vindictive Grand Moff in his co-pilot's seat, aims elsewhere, exploding against the TIE docking racks and the catwalk. The racks burst and fall, crushing the very Storm Troopers that fired upon the Battle Droid.
For its part, the catwalk rocks violently to and fro like an escape pod in an ion storm, and rips from its supports in three sections. Mith reaches out with The Force, protecting himself, his droid and the playboy from harm, but the three of them are nonetheless quite shaken by their fall. Curiously, the console still has power.
Four more Storm Troopers are crushed by the raining debris, and the remaining six do not notice the forms still alive on the fallen platform.
"We can't let them get away! Dara shouts, her adrenaline pushing her to become heedless of the damage sustained by the walker. "Their shields have to be weakening. Here! Aim right here!"
Nearly shoving Rod from the gunner's seat, she stabs her finger upon the targeting display to highlight what she hopes is a vulnerable emitter relay.
"Dara..." Rod starts, adopting the same strained-but-patient tone one might take when dealing with an overexcited five-year-old. "I can't keep my aim steady if you keep shoving me like that. And I'm looking at the same display you are, you don't need to point. Alright? Thank you." A high pitched beep announces that the walker's computer has the shuttle back in target lock and Rod again pulls the trigger. "Good tone! Firing!"
"I-E-E-E-eee!", the droid responds to the blaster shot, crashing down as the catwalk shakes. "Why didn't I go into the big armoured walker?", it mutters as it glances down at its injury, just in time to see the Storm Troopers get crushed. "You know what, organic, give me a hand this time. Should've just pretended to be a protocol droid...", it grunts quietly, and adding a stream of Binary capable of making a Wookiee blush.
Struggling to get up, it leans onto the console, it instead looks for the commands to shut down the door. Doors, doors, doors, come on, you scrap-heap!
Flan manages to hold herself together long enough to shout harried advice across the Walker at Zel.
Ral moves up beside the droid, looking over the console, which is largely gibberish to him.
"Maybe that one?"
With Flan's guidance, Zel maneuvers the walker, stepping away from his fallen friends and onto the group of Storm Troopers, crushing all of them.
Rod and Dara, for their part, continue their cannon barrage against the shuttle. The shields pop out of existence, and it begins to wobble and shake, barely holding together
The shuttle rapidly rotates and swings to face the openness of space, jetting forward in shameful defeat.
Just for the hangar bay door to slam shut! Thanks to Ral's quick and intuitive decision making, the Moff's shuttle destroys itself against the bay door.
Inside, the battle has ended.
Mith pulls himself to his feet and limps fast towards the remaining shuttle. "Get these doors back open," he announces to no one. "I'll prep the shuttle."
Dara's adrenaline still races. She continues to lean over Rod's shoulder and push her way to the console. Her face blanches.
"We gotta go. I think he gave the order to destroy this ship," she hisses with deadly seriousness.
She scarcely even completes the sentence before she has pushed away from the gunnery section and has retreated back into the body of the walker.
"How do we get out of this thing?" she exclaims, struggling to hold back bubbling panic.
Rod is up and out of the gunner seat in a flash, almost barreling right into Dara in his haste to get up. "Yeah, he gave the order." The clone taps his stolen helmet. "I'm seeing it on my HUD. He must've sent the message to every damn device in the fleet. And I saw the Rapacity start to open fire right as those bay doors shut." Rod beelines back through the walker to the troop section, calling upon past experience to point out the four air-tight sphincters to the others as he moves. "Sphincters, two there, another two back there. Drop through and you'll be able to rappel right down. Get moving! Hustle!"
Ral turns to see to which doors Mith refers.
*boop*
Ral turns and quickly gleans that the door Mith is referring to is the very same one the noble just slammed shut in time for the Grand Moff's cruiser to obliterate itself against.
Since closing the door was the last command used at the console, opening it back up would require no more than a single button press.
Doing so, the door slides back open, revealing to all the state of the battle. The Rebel fleet has retreated, and the Imperials are focusing their full firepower on the Deception.
Without another word, Dara follows Rod's example - like a cadet mimicking a drill sergeant.
She slides down the line, the whine of the cable rubbing against her jumpsuit briefly drowning out the distant roar of turbolaser fire striking the hull. No sooner does her first foot touch down upon the hanger floor but she turns to dash for the remaining shuttle. A runner's tunnel vision seizes upon her, blurring the rest of the world except for her goal: escape.
"Yeah, tha-", the droid snarkily starts replying to Ral, before the shuttle crashing sends it sprawling into cover. The might of the Imperial fleet facing towards the Deception, however, seems to send it into flight, as the droid seems to break into a dash towards the second shuttle, the blaster damage on its flank seemingly limiting his ability to flee very little. "Can you organics stop talking about sphinters? Not the time!", it blurts out over the radio as it closes to the ramp. "I can co-pilot, let me handle astrogation!", OOM shouts over its shoulder, its carbine lowered towards the bay waiting for any additional Imperial troopers to appear.
"Oh yeah!" Zel whoops with excitement at the sight of the shuttle plowing into the bay doors at full speed. Almost as soon as this happens, he sees a message pop up on the HUD in front of him. His excitement vanishes as quickly as it came. Time to go. In an instant the Mon Calamari is up out of his seat and dashing across the interior of the walker, wordlessly following Rod's directions and getting to one of the open ports near the AT-AT's legs.
The smuggler grabs one of the rappelling lines and descends from the walker as quickly as he feels he safely can.
Flan leaps away from the console and barely manages to grab hold of the cable as she launches herself out of the walker. She lands clumsily on the floor of the hangar, struggling to get her feet under her, and starts running toward the shuttle.
"Wait! Wait for me!" She cries, hoping that everyone can hear her over the noise of the battle and she won't accidentally be left behind.
As Mith pulls himself up and runs to prep the shuttle, he does so in near darkness. The only light in the bay comes from the smoldering remains of the fuel canisters, the demolished fuselage of the Lambda-class shuttle, and the red viewplate of the AT-AT walker. He makes it to the docking ramp and heads inside.
But with a press of a button, light pours in from the opening bay doors, the blinding blue of the ocean far below, faint glints of starlight far away, and sudden blasts of green, ignited tibanna gas shooting for the Deception.
The droid pulls itself out of cover and scrambles after its master and to safety, a scant few meters away from its destination. The walker crew deploys the rappelling lines and descends, frantic, terrified the whole place might blow up.
Then it does.
A massive bolt of green shoots through the ray shield, which immediately dissipates. Unhindered, it continues, cutting through the spare shuttle and the floor below without pause.
Without the ray shield the atmosphere is expunged, only for the hangar bay doors to close once more, knocking everyone around, but preventing any from getting spaced.
The fires have gone out. What air remains is thin. The electricity has failed. But for now, you live.
But Mith and the shuttle? There remains no more than a hole in the ground.
"Spice!" shouts Ral - as best he can, given the thin atmosphere. "Now what? We don't have any other way off!"
The the edge of the pressure wave from the destroyed shuttle and the brief decompression leaves Dara knocked onto her side on the hangar floor. She gasps like a beached fish, struggling to replenish the air sucked from her lungs. Of course, a fair amount of shock also seizes at her muscles, keeping her nearly paralyzed.
Nothing even approaching words escapes her lips. She can only muster the occasional whimper as she tries to process what just happened.
Rod groans and returns to his feet, heaving, gasping and cursing in a rapid-fire string of Mando'a, Basic and a bit of Ithorese. The swearing solder finds himself wishing the Ithorians were a less gentle people, if only so their language would have a larger pool of profanities for him to draw upon. "Fierfek! Of all the spiteful, vicious, bloodthristy-" With great effort, the clone bites back his rage and frustration. If he was going to die here, Rod didn't want to go to his end angry.
Still, Rod was in no particular hurry to die. The clone runs over towards the smashed up wreckage of the Grand Moff's shuttle, intending to search it for anything that might aid in surviving a vacuum. Emergency life-support equipment, maybe an intact spacesuit or something?
With just the AT-AT's glowing viewplate for light, Rod quickly examines the wrecked fuselage. It's rather unrecognizable as a Lambda-class shuttle, large parts missing, but there are no gaps in the armor or other easy ways in; it squashed itself like some kind of space accordion on impact. And though he does find an airlock access corridor, the entrance is stuck fast.
With time and effort, the door could be opened and the interior explored, but the hangar bay shakes once more, reminding you that time is exceptionally scarce here.
Flan flaps her arms wildly, trying to keep her balance as the hangar bay rapidly depressurizes and re-pressurizes, but is slammed to the ground the same as everyone else. She staggers to her feet, head ringing, and with no other ideas, runs back toward the Imperial Walker. She grabs hold of the still-deployed ropes and starts climbing, desperately taking shelter inside the thickly armored vehicle.
The droid stumbles onto its legs, its arm shaking clearly from the damage. Glancing up at the remains of the shuttle, it seems to let out a distorted groan, just in time to see Janara run back to the walker. "Y-Yeah! Run back to the walker, unless you can breathe vacuum!", it blurts out, limping quickly towards the vehicle. Well, don't I just have the luck with masters. Or in general. The dinged droid clammers next to the ropes, stowing its blaster onto his back.
Rod gives up on the wreckage and sprints back towards the walker with the others, ready to climb back up the ropes.
The Onderonian grabs the droid and helps drag him to the rope, then pushes him from below.
Zel groans as he gets back to his feet. He'd never been almost-spaced like that, and he'd have preferred to keep it that way. He glances around the darkened hangar and sees the others beating a hasty retreat back toward the walker. He shrugs and shakes his head. "Die out here, die in there, same deal," he remarks cynically to himself before taking off running back to the ropes.
"What — What are we going to do?" Flan splutters nervously to Rod as he joins her in the body of the walker. She looks like she might faint, but knows in the back of her mind that she and the clone trooper probably can't pilot the AT-AT by themselves. And that he probably wouldn't approve of leaving the others behind, anyways.
She drops to her knees and grabs the deployed rope, trying to haul OOM-93b up with all her might.
The nobleman shouts up into the walker, "Hey! Anyone know how to launch one of these things? Are in we in orbit? I dunno how these usually land. Can we just drop it from orbit and land safely on the ground?"
From the brief spacewalk taken by Rod, Ral, Dara and OOM-93b, as well the glimpses of outside these past few minutes, it's safe to conclude that the Deception is in still in low orbit over the water planet of Mon Cala.
Ral's words trigger something in Dara's mind. A thought. A story. An idea.
"Drop..." the word falls from her lips as she finally reasserts control over herself. "Yeah! Dropships!"
She pushes herself up from the hangar floor, finding a second wind in her excited desperation.
"Walkers are usually deployed by specialized dropships or cruisers, like the Titan or the Gozlanti. If they have a walker aboard this ship, they must have a way to deploy it!"
Her eyes dart around the hangar, unsure of where to land just as she is unsure of whether to board the walker again or search for a dropship.
"Great! So how do we find that?" says Ral, struggling to keep from coughing in the thin air.
Despite Dara's hopes, the hangar is empty, except for yourselves, the walker, the ruined catwalk, the smear that was once your only way out, and the wreckage of the Grand Moff's shuttle. With no obvious way to launch the walker, it seems Mith was correct in his assertion that this walker was kept here only for the Grand Moff's entertainment.
"No time!" Rod shouts down to Dara, Ral and OOM. "This ship is going to break apart any second and we do not want to be here when it does! We have a sealed vessel and a door out! We're leaving now!" Rod makes for the cockpit of the walker and settles back into same gunner position as earlier. "Zel!" Rod jerks his head toward the pilot seat. "Get us moving! As soon as everyone's aboard I want us straight out those hanger doors!" The clone turns his attention back to his own station, warming up the AT-AT's cannons.
Dara heeds Rod's command and tightly grips the rappel line, holding on for dear life as it spools and pulls her upward. She scrambles through the hatch and into the passenger compartment. Her eyes briefly turn to the gunnery station, but she thinks better of the situation and practically tumbles onto one of the seats and straps herself in.