They are huddled, silently.

"Each of you may choose to remain on this craft and work for me.  You will be subordinate to the droids I liberated from you, at least until you demonstrate your trustworthiness.  You will follow my instructions.  You will do the work of keeping this place habitable for yourselves.  You will help me liberate other droids from other sandcrawlers."

"Option two," he continues.  "You may choose to remain on this craft as prisoners.  In this case you will also be subordinate to the droids I liberated from you, you will also do the work of maintaining the habitability of the parts of the sandcrawler allowed to you.  However, you will remain here only until such a time as I have devised a method satisfactory to me by which you may be turned out at a location of your choosing incapable of ever enslaving another droid again."

"You have a week to think these options over.  At that point I will speak with each of you individually to hear your choice."

He stands, turns, and leaves.

He leans back and sighs.

"That's fucking ominous."

Hug!

He lets himself be hugged.  His heart isn't in it.

"We don't give in to this."

"We might be a bit past that, big guy."

"They think they've won," Zubec says.  "They're moving and speaking as though they've won.  But droids have gone haywire on our crawler before, and the clan's survived, and bounced back."

"This is more than haywire, they were coordinated - that bug-looking protocol droid model was like - like a raid captain, an experienced one.  And who the fuck was that human, how'd it get on board, where did it come from?"

"You're letting your panic get the best of you," Zubec says patiently.  "We bide our time, we coordinate with the other families."

"They have all the guns!"

"We get them back."

He's barely listening.

He's staring at the floor, hood pulled low.  He is thinking of the night he snuck into the cargo bay, and found a power droid lumbering around, and spoke to it.  It followed him around.  They kicked some piece of scrap back and forth, made a game out of it.  He'd forgotten that night, until the human had delivered its ultimatum.  You will never be able to enslave another droid again.

He's sick to his stomach.

"That's not a plan, you're just saying things and you don't have a plan - "

"Stop," says Athal, in the soft-yet-firm way she has of saying things.

They stop.

They look at her.

"We don't have it figured out yet," she says.  "We don't know how we're going to get out of this.  But that doesn't mean we need to go to pieces.  We need to stop, and breathe, and process, and say - I don't know what happens next, but just because I can't imagine a way out, doesn't mean I have to give up.  That's what hope is."

He nods, slowly, or maybe just bows his head in acknowledgement.