Nix woke to find herself in bed with a charmingly soft and warm companion nestled in her arms and a wedding ring on her finger.

That’s new. The thought bubbled up much like the sparkling Santo nectar had the night before. Or was it the night before that? She spent a long moment trying to recreate the events of the previous evening but her thoughts were sluggish and too eager to circle back to the dream she’d been enjoying. Why, they asked, worry about things like yesterday when today was starting off so nicely?

Feeling the woman in her arms stir brought Nix fully awake, but left her wondering which part of her dream had been memories after all. With how reality was turning out, her aching heart was hoping the answer would be “it had all been real”.

“Oh, good, I didn’t just imagine you,” the woman said, stretching lazily as she turned under Nix’s arm. In place of Nix’s long hair, the Twi’lek woman had a pair of long, graceful head tails, and where Nix’s skin was a light brown, the woman’s was the pale blue of an early morning sunrise on Nix’s homeworld.

“Did we get married?” Nix asked, perplexed by the matching rings they both seemed to be wearing.

“Uh? I think so?” the woman said. “Was it my idea? Or yours?”

“I don’t know,” Nix said. “Mine maybe? You’re Ayli?” 

Fragments of memory supported that guess as did the name etched around the band of ring Nix wore.

“Ayli’wensha, but Ayli’s fine. And you’re Nix Lamplighter, and you’re a mechanic, right?”

Nix chuckled. “I guess we got to know each other first at least.”

Ayli smiled in return, a playful grin that sent tiny wrinkles to the corners of her eyes. “Fairly well I’d say.”

More memories returned, drawn out by that smile. Adorable lips. Adoring lips. The better parts of Nix’s dream may not have been a dream at all she decided.

“Getting married might have been my idea,” Ayli said. “I’ve been looking for a mechanic for a while. I think at some point the idea of marrying one seemed more reasonable than trying to hire somebody. I’d say that was the Santo nectar talking but I’m pretty sure I’m sober now and for a change I do not regret my drunken choices.”

Ayli ran a hand along Nix’s back leaving goosebumps in the wake of her touch. Regret was the furthest thing from Nix’s mind as well, though there was a voice in the back of her head pleading for a moment’s rationality.

A random one night fling was one thing, but she could not seriously be thinking it would turn into any more than that? Was she? 

She was.

Nix couldn’t find words to explain it. Not even to herself. Looking at the woman beside her though she felt herself standing at a turning point in her life. The path she’d been following had led her down roads which had grown darker with every step she’d taken. It had all felt right, been right even, at the time, but gazing into eyes as dark and deep as the night sky, Nix saw new possibilities opening before her. And new challenges. And new heartaches. 

But it would be worth it. The pool of calm which filled her as she reflected on a future with Ayil left her sure of it.

Which had to be Santo induced madness. Wedding rings aside, they knew nothing about each other. Or remembered nothing about each other.

But wasn’t finding out where the fun was? 

“No regrets here either,” she said, drinking in Ayil’s warmth and touch for a delicious moment before an unfortunate thought occurred to her. “Are weddings on Canto Bight recognized on any other planet though?”

“Not exactly,” Ayli said, pushing herself up to a sitting position. “I think that’s why I kidnapped you.”

“Oh. Nice. Where are we?” Nix asked. She knew they weren’t in her hotel room, mostly because she couldn’t afford a hotel room or even a small box on the street at the moment.

“This is one of the cabins on my ship,” Ayli said. “Or a room that looks just like it I suppose. I may have told the ship to head out of the system after we stumbled onboard.”

Nix’s head cleared more as her senses reached out and the familiar thrum of an Incom 3M9 sublight engine greeted her. They were making good speed for a sublight run, except for an engine glitch which ran along Nix’s nerves like a rusty nail.

“Your vari-coupling is shorting to your overcharge capacitor,” she said.

“Oh, uh, wow, you can tell that how?” Ayli asked.

“Each engine has its own harmonics. I grew up with them so its not hard to feel when one’s out of alignment,” Nix said. “Still a decent job of kidnapping though.”

“I’m sorry, I can’t say that was my best idea ever,” Ayli said. “Fortunately the ship didn’t engage the hyperdrive, so I can have you back on Canto as soon as you like.”

“Hey if I’m going to be kidnapped by my wife, I expect her to do a proper job of it,” Nix said. “I seem to recall a promise of treasure and fortune in there somewhere? And a visit to the Crystal Gardens of Nep’Tham?”

Ayli’s expression shifted from embarrassment to intrigue as she put on her discarded clothes.

“I do recall talking about the Crystal Gardens,” she said. “They’re fantastic if you catch them in the right season. It is really not fair me of to try to hold you into coming along on my treasure hunt though.”

“Taking me back to Canto Bight would not be doing me any favors,” Nix said. 

“Aren’t you a ship’s mechanic though?” Ayli asked. “If we turn around now, I can probably get you back before your ship leaves.”

“Oh, it’s long gone,” Nix said. “I am more of an ex-ship’s mechanic to be honest.”

“Really?” Ayli asked, a note of wonder creeping into her voice.

“I think that’s why I let you kidnap me,” Nix said. “In fact, if I remember right, I think the kidnapping was my idea wasn’t it?”

“Huh, yeah, I think it was,” Ayli said. “So, does that mean you really want to come along for this? I can’t exactly pay you until we find what we’re looking for.”

“I see why marrying a mechanic was easier than hiring one,” Nix said.

“That doesn’t count anywhere except on Canto Bight,” Ayli said, her gazing dropping to the floor. “And not even really there. I honestly don’t have any claim on you.”

“I think we’ve got whatever claim on each other that we chose to have,” Nix said, giving her heart leave to speak. “And I think what that means is something we can work out from here. If you want to give it a try. For now though, let me keep this,” she spun her ring with her thumb, “as a promise that we’ll see where this goes? Oh, and that you’ll feed me and give me a place to sleep.”

“Room and board? That’s it? You’re selling yourself short,” Ayli said. “I’m not going to be a fool and pass that offer up though. Ship, log Nix Lamplighter on as an official crew member and the ship’s mechanic.”

“Affirmative,” the ship’s deep voice responded.

“You have a droid?” Nix asked.

“Not exactly?” Ayli said. “The Goldrunner’s astrogation system was all shot up when I got it. Some friends of mine bashed together a working replacement but they went a little overboard on it.” 

“What did they do?” Nix had been accused of ‘going overboard’ on repairs once or twice and felt her curiosity starting to tingle.

“From what I could make out? Apparently took bits from what remained of an astromech droid, mashed those together with the core of a planetary landing coordination system, and welded the mess into more or less all of the Goldrunner’s systems with spit and prayers.”

“Ooo! That sounds clever!” Nix said, her mind racing as she considered the possibilities of how fully a medium freighter could be automated. “Can I see how it’s all wired together?”

“Sure, I’ll give you a full tour of the place,” Ayli said a moment before the entire cabin shuddered violently.

“That wasn’t the engine,” Nix said, jumping up from the bed too.

“No, no it was not,” Ayli said.

“Hostile vessels detected,” the ship said. “Beginning evasive maneuvers.”

“Who’s attacking us?” Nix asked. “Can we outrun them?”

“They were not supposed to find me this quick!” Ayli said.

“They who?” Nix scrambled around the bedroom and began to collect her own clothes, stumbling as another blast rocked the ship.

Well, no worries about the vari-coupler, she thought, picturing the extent of damage from the change in the engine’s whine.

“The, uh, bad news is that you may have married someone who’s wanted by the Klex Cartel,” Ayli said. 

“Wanted for what?” Nix asked, her eyes narrowing as she buckled her belt on.

“The Goldrunner has something of a history to it,” Ayli said. “Short version; they wanted it for smuggling, and I wanted it for treasure hunting. They were slow and I was not.”

The ship rocked again and Nix felt the Incom’s output drop by eighteen percent. They were not going to escape without a jump to light speed.

“They don’t seem too interested in getting it back in one piece,” Nix said, following Ayli out of the cabin and into the hallway that ran the length of the ship.

“That would be Darsus Klex,” Ayli said. “He is a big fan of the idea that if he can’t have it, it doesn’t get to exist.”

“So no chance of talking him down then I take it?” Nix asked a moment before another blast hit the ship sending her crashing into a bulkhead.

The good news was that the ships rear deflector had shielded them from the worst of the attack. The bad news was that there’d been spill over that had cooked the Goldrunner’s anterior drive stabilizer. Nix stretched out her senses for a  split second to be sure. Ah. It was the backup anterior drive stabilizer. Not the primary.  She smiled. The Goldrunner had backup stabilizers! Well, ‘had’ in the past tense. Still, that was a good sign. Someone cared about her. The ship that was. Nix always liked to see that.

“Won’t hurt trying to talk to him,” Ayli said. “Might buy us time to plot a jump out of here.”

“I’ll go make sure we’ve got engines left to make the jump with,” Nix said and started heading towards the engine room.

“How do you know…” Ayli didn’t get to finish the question before Nix jumped down the hatch which obviously led to the engines. 

The Goldrunner was a Wayfarer class medium freighter. Mediums were fun ships and people threw them together in all sorts of configurations, but ultimately the engines had to go where the engines had to go. It was just what made sense.

Nix knew that lot of people would disagree with her on that. Starship design was supposed to be some amazing esoteric art, but when you got down to the nuts and bolt and flux relays there was a poetry to every ship if you knew how to listen for it. Poetry whose form and structure would tell you where everything was (or should be) and what was inevitable wrong with the ship (all ships needed work done on them, some just needed it more urgently than others).

“Hey Klex, what’s the big idea shooting up my ship,” Ayli said, her voice coming from the ship’s comms which Goldrunner had patched into the broadcast of the ship-to-ship link.

There was an immediate crackle of static as Darsus Klex responded to the channel.

“That’s my ship Wensha! You stole it and now you’ll learn why no one steals from the Klex Cartel.”

“Nobody owned the ship when I took it Darsus,” Ayli said. “It’s not stealing if you salvage it.”

Another blast shook the Goldrunner, but Nix had the deflectors concentrated on the quadrant Klex’s ships were coming from. They weren’t going to hold forever but she only needed to buy them enough time for the hyperjump calculation to complete.

“My brother owned that ship! It belongs to me!” Darsus’s anger seemed to be matched by the firepower his ships were directing at the Goldrunner. 

Which suited Nix just fine. Deflector shields were great against people who mindlessly blasted forward without any tactics or strategy.

“You were the one who killed him!” Ayli said. “It’s not my fault you shot first and tried to pillage afterward.”

“I’m going to destroy you,” Darsus said.

“You won’t get a ship out of it if you do,” Ayli said. “Might as well just leave us alone. It’s just one ship after all, and you can always steal it back later right?”

“I’ll tell you what,” Darsus said, “You talk a walk out the airlock and leave the ship to me, and I won’t do anything too terrible with your corpse when we drag it in.”

Another series of blasts punctuated his words and the primary larboard deflector array smoked out.

That wasn’t good. 

The deflector arrays should have been far more resilient than that. 

Someone hadn’t installed them right.

Quite apart from the danger the shoddy work placed her in, Nix felt a surge of anger at the disrespect the poor workmanship demonstrated. 

“I’m sorry beautiful,” she said, whispering to the Goldrunner. “We’ll give you a full refit as soon as we can get to a proper dock.”

Of course, arriving at any dock would require surviving another minute and that was looking like a dicey proposition as the loss of the larboard deflector array had forced the jump calculation to reset.

“How are we going down there?” Ayli asked, the quality of the audio indicating that she’d cut the ship-to-ship link.

“Not great,” Nix said. “If we lose any more systems, the jump calculation’s going to pend and they’ll take us apart.”

“I’m sorry. This is a terrible honeymoon isn’t it?”

“To be fair, I can’t say I’ve ever had a better one!” Nix said. “Do you mind if I do something terrible that only has a tiny chance of saving us?” 

It was a silly questions. Ship captains never allowed their engineers do terrible things to the ship. You couldn’t trust engineers after all. Especially not one who admitted they were intending to do something dangerous.

“Better a tiny chance than no chance. Go for it!” Ayil called back without hesitation.

Nix’s heart skipped a couple of beats, but her hands were happy to keep working regardless.

“Get ready to hit the jump to lightspeed on my mark.” Nix had always wanted to try what she was about to attempt. Part of her said it should work. It had to work. That she didn’t know of anyone who’d ever managed it was probably more a sign of how limited her experience was than evidence that it wasn’t a viable tactic.

“We don’t have a route calculated yet,” Ayil noted as a point of curiosity rather than refusal.

“We will!” Nix called back and turned to focus on her newly beloved ship systems.

The astrogation system was a nightmare. She knew far better than to touch it before she’d done a thorough review of any component and dataline in it. The calculation module on the other hand was as stock as they came. That was the first lucky break she needed.

The next lucky break came in the form of the smoked larboard deflector array. It had blown ever fuse and slagged half its wiring because it was installed backwards, but apart from that it was in great shape. Plenty of charge still kept in it.

The last lucky break came in the firing pattern from the Klex ships.

They were directly behind the Goldrunner and gaining quickly thanks to the reductions in the Goldrunner’s sunlight drive. That was a problem which was getting swiftly worse as the ever shortening distance made the Klex’s weapons more accurate and damage and the additional damage in turn dropped the Goldrunner’s speed further and further.

Which was exactly what Nix needed.

With a few quick slices with a plasma cutting torch, she knocked the primary and secondary larboard deflector arrays loose from their couplings. Apart from a few cables that left them unmoored and free to move around the engine room. 

The Goldrunner didn’t have bomb doors, but it did have exterior maintenance panels that allowed access to the engine room from outside the ship, and those could be made to serve a surprisingly similar function to a bomb door, all one needed was a bomb to drop out of them. 

A hasty bypass on the controls to those exterior maintenance panels let Nix tie them into the control for the hatch she’d entered the room through. Which she promptly returned to.

And with that, her trap, such as it was, was set.

All she needed to trigger it was…

Another series of blasts slammed into the remaining deflector shields at the Goldrunner’s rear and Nix slammed down control to cast wide the maintenance panels.

“Why did we just lose pressurization in the engine room?” Ayli asked.

“All part of the plan!” Nix said and listened for the sound of a disconnected deflector arrays snapping free from their cables the outside of the Goldrunner.

The decompression of the maintenance doors opening had blown them out just as she’d hoped and the moment their cable’s snapped, she called out.

“Punch it!” she shouted and felt space instantly lurch around her as a much stronger explosion than any previous blast rattled everything in the ship.

The new jump calculation hadn’t been completed but they were going to be just fine.