On the road to the bonewall, abruptly and precipitated by no particular event that he can discern, he is swallowed up by black tentacles and wrenched violently in something that he is only moderately confident is a direction.
He blinks. His eyes refocus on the holo of the sandcrawler, and trace along the beam of light between the levitating image and Epsilon's projector.
*
Everyone's in position, for the revised plan. He and X are next to each other, sighting down stun blasters, at the wide sliding doors through which the Jawas will enter.
Epsilon whistles interrogatively. Everyone ready?
There is a chorus of affirmative beeps from a phalanx of astromech droids.
And Epsilon, and every astromech droid in a row behind it, immediately holoprojects the biggest and loudest holorecordings they have directly into the jawas' eyes.
She was right; without restraining bolts to keep order they just can't cope. But she knows what she's doing.
Knowing what was coming when the jawas didn't, they were able to drop most of them before they could so much as get in the bay, but a few had the good sense to charge forward out of the holo-cacophony.
He leaps clear over the phalanx of astromech droids and manages to stun one jawa in midair, landing smoothly - draw their attention -
But only a few; the vast majority are already down. She picks them off with ease, as he takes down the rest.
"We need to move the bodies," he says. "Lock them - " he twitches " - in here, for now, but someone will need to keep one eye on them in case there's some kind of medical emergency."
He nods. "We need to secure the rest of the crawler as well - take control of the bridge, any other weapon stores, and ideally all of the residential areas. Long-term the geas will complain least if we relocate all our prisoners back into their quarters and just enforce our control of the sandcrawler - is there anywhere in the crawler's range suitable for freed droids or exiled jawas?"
"Exiled jawas - if your geas needs you to be confident they'll be somewhat all right we can leave them in Mos Eisley, sell off their tools and leave them with the proceeds. But some of them will probably try to get back into the droid slave trade."
"We can work out the specifics later," he mutters. "Are the jawas likely to need protection from droid reprisals? The geas will also oblige me that."