Calamity || The Mandalorian

twenty-three

Come on, hold together, Mando told his ship, glancing up at its walls. Kasia might not have believed in its stability or durability but he did... mostly.

"You know what, maybe I should take over control of the ship," Kasia suggested from behind him, and it took everything in Din to keep from turning around to glare at her.

Kas, you literally told me you don't know how to fly.

"Well, I can't do much worse than you're doing right now," came her quick-witted reply.

Mando ignored her as he continued to frantically maneuver the vessel, trying his best to avoid the barrage of shots from the bounty hunter's ship. He cursed under his breath as another blast landed, causing the ship to shake slightly and an alarm bell begin ringing.

In Kasia's lap, the child gave a small whimper. At the sound, something in Mando's chest clenched, and he gripped the controls, a new resolve washing over his body. He would get them out of there. He would.

The bounty hunter managed to land one last shot on the Razor Crest engine before Mando began his attack.

"Hold on," he warned Kasia and the child before he jerked the controls, spinning the ship expertly to avoid the enemy blasts. "Come on," he muttered to himself under his breath, bringing the ship level again.

"I can bring you in warm, or I can bring you in cold," the bounty hunter informed him coolly over the radio.

Behind him, Din heard Kasia chuckle softly, the first noise she had made in minutes. "Is that like a saying all you bounty hunters use to sound badass?" she asked mockingly, obviously amused despite the rather serious situation they were in.

Din rolled his eyes internally at the comment, but kept his gaze pinned straight forward and on the controls in front of him. If he was going to pull off this next move, he had to be perfect.

As the enemy hunter zeroed in on the shot that Mando had perfectly aligned for him, Mando suddenly hit the figurative breaks, halting his ship as the enemy ship zoomed past. The Razor Crest rattled slightly as the bounty hunter's aircraft skimmed one of the side engines, and Mando grimaced as he lined up the shot.

"That's my line," he remarked coldly before blowing the ship in front of him to smithereens with one blast.

There was silence in the cockpit for a moment as they flew through the wreckage of the other ship, the Razor Crest's damaged engines barely sputtering with life. Then from the chair next to him, Kasia began to clap slowly.

"That was simultaneously the most badass and most cheesy thing I have ever seen in my life," she told him, a wild grin on her face as he turned to look at her. At the look he gave her, she held her hands up in mock innocence, "I speak only the truth."

Sighing, Din shook his head at her as he turned back to face the front of his ship. He could practically sense the smirk she threw him at the movement, but he ignored it. For a moment he frowned as he looked at the auto-generated report of the damages his ship had taken, sucking in a sharp breath.

Immediately sensing something was wrong, Kasia placed the child on the seat and came to stand next to him, unthinkingly resting a hand halfway on the chair he sat and his shoulder. "What's wrong?" she asked, bringing her face next to his helmet as she stared down at the control panel.

From behind his visor, Din blinked for a moment before swallowing the lump in his throat as he tried to ignore the hand on his shoulder and nodded towards the panel. "The ship took a lot of damage. We'll need to stop at a nearby planet and get a good mechanic to repair it before we go anywhere else," he informed her.