Rebukes
From the Ord Mantell Incident
A SW fic by Morgan D.

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At the best of times, Ord Mantell wasn't a place you wanted to be in without a ship ready to take off at the first sign of trouble.

Han Solo hadn't seen good times in quite a number of years now.

"Raise the nose, kid! You're going down too fast!"

"I can fly my own ship, Han," came the voice through the intercomm. "You worry about yours."

Chewbacca pointed at the altitude and speed meters on the panel and suggested that Luke's advice was not bad.

Han ignored him. "If you knew how to fly your ship, we wouldn't be here now. Nose up!"

"We don't need to be here. I'm the one with a burning engine. You turn the Falcon around and get out of here."

"Why? Do you want privacy while you crash against that mesa?"

"I know what I'm doing."

"The hell you do! Get that damn nose up now!"

Luke didn't.

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"I told you to mind your own ship."

"Hey, you don't get to I-told-you-so me, okay? This is all your fault."

"Well, of course it's my fault," Luke rolled his eyes. "With you, everything is always my fault."

"I was having a nice morning at that cantina, minding my own business, with some decent ale in my mug and a curvy whore on my lap," Han reminisced bitterly. "Then you come in, sit at my table, and suddenly I'm the fourth most wanted criminal in the galaxy. So yeah, everything is your fault."

"I tell you to go, you decide to be stubborn and stay, and I'm the one to blame? Why couldn't you at least once listen to me?"

"What did you want me to listen to, kid? 'Han, I blew up my starboard engine, I'm diving like a mad missile into Ord Mantell's atmosphere, right into the rockiest terrain of the planet's surface, but don't worry, I'm on top of things here'?"

Luke crossed his arms over his chest. "You know what, Han? You're really starting to get tiresome. I feel like I've been trying to convince you that I'm a good pilot since the first time we met."

"Oh, you have. 'I'm not such a bad pilot myself'," said Han, mimicking the boy's tone and manners. "I didn't believe you then, and seeing you actually piloting hasn't done much to improve my opinion."

"That's not what you said after we destroyed the Death Star."

"Because then I thought you had the sense to save the suicidal manoeuvres for when they're needed! If I had known you'd find a way to throw yourself under enemy fire at any given opportunity..."

"Are you sure you're talking about me? Because unless I was hallucinating up there, you were the one challenging a Star Destroyer."

"You were hallucinating, I'm sure. You probably thought those turbolasers were sprinkling perfumed water at us and decided to take a nice, relaxing shower. But, oops! Seems like the temperature was a bit too high and burned your soft, sensitive skin there." Han pointed to the foam-covered spot on the X-wing's right engine. Ironically, the fire-extinguishing substance Artoo had sprayed all over it did look like some sort of burn ointment.

"Go on, scold me as much as you want. You're just embarrassed because I managed to land gracefully between the mesas and undetected by the planetary sensors, while you did exactly what you told me not to, came in too fast, and crashed."

"I did not crash."

"Your bow landing gear is in pieces."

"It's just a little bent."

Crouching down beside the offended mechanism, Chewbacca roared his agreement with Luke. The landing gear was indeed in pieces.

"Well, but I have the tools and spare equipment to fix that," Han countered, poking Luke's chest with his index finger. "You don't have enough space in that tiny crate of yours to keep a spare pair of gloves."

"Do you have the spare cooling vanes I need to repair my X-wing?"

"Why would I have vanes for an Incom starfighter?"

"Then I'm afraid I'm not impressed," Luke sneered.

Han gritted his teeth. "I'm telling you, Chewie. This kid sounds so much like Her Worship sometimes that it's scary."

The younger man's eyes turned deadly cold. "I'm flattered."

With a frustrated groan, Chewbacca got on his feet and came to stand near his friends. Things didn't look too good to the Falcon either, he informed them. They had the tools, they had the parts, but full repairs would require at least a couple of days of devoted effort.

"But you don't need to fix it to lift off again, do you?" asked Luke. "Just go back to the Fleet, use the upper clutches to park it under one of our escort Frigates, and ask someone to lend you a Treadwell droid to do the external repairs."

"First good idea I've ever heard from you," Han agreed. "Hey! You! Whistling bucket!"

Artoo answered with a rather discourteous shrill.

Unconcerned about the little droid's pride, the Corellian indicated the Falcon's gangplank. "Get onboard! We're leaving."

"Artoo, please stay where you are," said Luke, still glaring at Han.

"What now, kid?" Han huffed. "Are you stranding us all here until I say 'sorry', 'please' and 'thank you' to your damn droid?"

"That would do you good too, but no. He stays here because I'm gonna need him to help me fix the X-wing and fly it back to the Fleet. I'm not abandoning my ship."

"And just how are you planning to fix it? Cooling vanes don't grow on trees." Han glanced at the landscape around them. "Not that there are many trees around here anyway."

"We're a six-hour-walk away from the nearest town. I have money with me. I'll get the vanes and whatever parts I need, and I'll meet you at the Fleet in a week or so."

Chewbacca rested a hand on Luke's shoulder, letting out a worried howl. He didn't like that idea at all.

Han took a deep breath, asking the deities for patience. "Luke, do you have any idea where you are?"

"Ord Mantell. You might not believe me, but I can read an astrogation map."

"I don't suppose you know anything about Ord Mantell, do you?"

"Well, let's see... A smuggler's haven, close to some major trade routes, full of casinos and spice spas and brothels, most of them placed along the southern shore of Worlport continent. Best place to buy weapons in large quantities, to bank great amounts of money without attracting attention, and to run your business free of Imperial taxation. Even if lately the Imperial Navy decided to use this sector as a stage for training manoeuvres and keeps sending cadets down here in their shore leave — probably because quite a number of Governors have chosen the planet as safe port for their own less-than-licit transactions. Do you want me to go over climate, terrain and demographics too?"

Han took a moment to reorient himself. "Okay. Fine. So you did your homework. But have you ever been here?"

"No, I haven't," Luke conceded. "I suppose that automatically means I'll be killed by the first time I ask for directions."

"As a matter of fact, that is exactly what will happen. You ask anyone for directions and in five seconds word will be out that there's an outsider roaming around, and you'll find yourself deprived of your money, your droid, your ship, your clothes and your kidneys before you can say 'disembowelment'."

"And that's why I need you to protect me, right? Because, oh my, I'm so, so scared..."

"You should be, if you had any survival instincts. And you've already proven that you don't."

"Excuse me?" Luke snarled. "You blame me, but we wouldn't be here if you had any survival instincts. What in the name of the Force were you thinking up there?"

"Me? What were you thinking?"

"Gee, Han, I don't know. Maybe I thought you and Chewie were about to get in big trouble, with your shields going down and all. Maybe I thought you'd appreciate a little hand there. My mistake, okay?"

Chewbacca barked his thanks. He appreciated the cub's help, despite what any hotheaded Corellian had to say.

"We still had shields," Han snapped. "The Falcon has real shields, kid, not those Incom toy... bucklers!"

Luke arched an eyebrow. "Fine, so your shields are thicker. But you see, I don't have to check the chrono every five seconds when my... 'bucklers' are on. I don't have to worry about them dropping all of a sudden because the engines were not designed to withstand that much power."

With a poorly suppressed chuckle, Chewbacca suggested that this was probably not the best occasion to discuss the matter of thickness versus endurance.

Han gave him a vicious glare. Luke found something very interesting on the tip of his boots to stare at.

"I'm done arguing with you, kid," said Han. "You wanna argue, you try the hairy comedian here. Maybe he thinks leaving you here alone is a good idea."

It was a low trick, but effective. Chewie had grown too fond of the boy to leave him behind and, lack of survival instincts or not, Luke knew better than to dispute the opinion of a Wookiee.

"All right, Han. You win this round. But don't even bother to suggest that I should stay here and watch the ships while you and Chewie go and fetch those vanes. It's my starfighter, my responsibility. You wanna argue, you try talking to my lightsaber. Understood?"

Han raised his arms in defeat, less fearful of the Jedi weapon than of the kind of trouble Luke would find himself into if they left him alone. "Have it your way, Skywalker. But the droid stays here."

"He won't like it," Luke whispered.

"And I should be terribly concerned about that because..." Han left the sentence hanging, waiting for the kid to complete it with some other piece of nonsense.

Surprisingly, Luke didn't protest that one. "I'm just saying he won't like it. So give me a couple of minutes to convince him, okay?"

Han's mouth hung open in exasperation as the younger man walked back to his X-wing. "He's not real, is he?" He asked his co-pilot. "We do not know a guy that feels he has to coax his droid into following instructions."

Chewbacca pointed out that, considering that particular droid's personality, that was probably a good idea. They wouldn't want the R2 unit running amok trying to find his master.

"Yeah, they make a good pair," Han snorted, watching as Luke knelt in front of the droid under the starfighter's wing, addressing the machine with the patience and affection one usually reserved for children. "It's a wonder they're both still in one piece."

The reproachful tone in Chewbacca's next remark would have been obvious even for those who didn't understand his language.

"My fault?!" Han protested. "He gets all cocky and suicidal and somehow this is all my fault?"

Chewie thought so. If Han weren't so keen on patronising Luke, the young one wouldn't be so keen on trying to impress him.

"He's not trying to impress me," Han snorted. "If I were two feet shorter, made a different rococo sculpture with my hair every day and went around bossing my way through the crowd, then Luke'd be keen on impressing me." Chewbacca opened his mouth to say something else, but the other cut him off. "And don't you start with that 'you are just jealous' routine of yours, alright? I couldn't possibly care less about whose pants the kid wants to get inside. If Her Worship's attitude turns him on, well, good for him; I'm sure she'll never run out of fuel there. Besides, I'm the one Luke's been sleeping with, not her. All she's got so far are hugs and a few dull pecks; I could go over there right now, topple him to the ground and screw him blind if I wanted. So what do I really have to be jealous about?"

The Wookiee tilted his head to the side as he stared attentively at his partner, the way he did when he tried to understand a puzzling mechanism or choose his next move in a holo-chess game.

"Anyway, he doesn't do stuff like that to impress me," Han insisted, uncomfortable under the scrutiny. "He lived too long under Tatooine's twin suns, they're bound to have fried the best half of his brain-cells. That's the real problem with him."

Chewbacca didn't agree, and repeated his admonition about underestimating the cub.

Han merely rolled his eyes. "And since when have you become the expert on human brats' psychology?"

Chewie scratched his head, trying to remember exactly how many years it had been since he had first met Han Solo.

"Funny," the Corellian growled. "Very funny."

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