In the end, it didn’t take Nix five days to retrofit the Goldrunner. Which wasn’t surprising. Engineering estimates are often inaccurate due to the complexity of the tasks involved and the necessity to change plans are further complications are discovered. Far from expecting tasks to be done in a quarter of the time specified, most people who work with engineers for an extended period will learn to add a generous amount of padding to the projections they’re given.

Nix therefor did not get the Goldrunner into a proper flightworthy state in five days.

She got it done in four.

In part that was because five days had never been her real estimate. She’d thought she could get it done in three and had added a heap of time that she thought she didn’t need to mask her true intentions. She wasn’t unaware that Sali had them bugged after all, but just because someone could hear everything you said, didn’t mean they could understand what you were saying.

That there’d also been a measure of professional pride and showmanship in the mix was something Nix chose not to reflect on. It wasn’t her fault that she was simply a better mechanic than the Garnocks. She had a knack for it after all, and if she prided herself on that, well, it was good to be self confident wasn’t it?

The four days had taken their toll on her though. By the end of the first day, she’d been convinced that she was looking at a five month effort, not five days. Ayli’s friends were, in Nix’s objective professional opinion, madmen. They hadn’t so much kitbashed the Goldrunner into shape as connected things to one another randomly until it started flying just to get away from them.

By the second day, Nix was convinced that they weren’t mad at all though. Only people who were being deliberately malicious would have created a system as disorganized and counterintuitive as the one Ayli’s friends had created. In her spare time, Nix looked up every Engineering Safety Board she could find in the hopes that one or more might have a fleet of gunships in the region of Ayli’s friends.

By the third day, she had the deflector array working, which sent her whooping in triumph up and down the length of the ship.

Until she noticed that in the process she’d taken the sublight drive and turned it into a highly effective parking brake.

Ayli had found other places to be in Sali’s fortress while Nix was working, claiming that she not only didn’t know the translations for the swears which were ringing through the Goldrunner’s hull, she also didn’t want to based on how horrible they sounded.

Nix would have missed her wife’s warmth and companionship if she’d been aware of it, but for as deep as her body was in the guts of the Goldrunner’s engines, her mind was lost even deeper in the perplexing mysteries of its myriad interconnected systems.

She wasn’t unfamiliar with being in that state. It was what drew her to engineering in the first place. Being able to see and hold an impossibly grand design in her head and understand its smallest pieces was exhilarating.

Or exasperating.

More often exasperating if she was honest.

But that was what made the moment of understanding and clarity so much more rapturous.

It was some time after both of Calerpris’s suns had set on the third day that everything finally clicked and Nix heard what she’d been listening for over the last three days.

The engines were straining and bound.

And she knew why!

One by one, the systems tumbled into place and the vista of beauty beyond the madness revealed itself to her.

Everything had been put in backwards for a reason.

It wasn’t a good reason – they were trying to work around a defective component which rather than replacing it – but it wasn’t arbitrary cruelty or blatant stupidity.

From there the rest of the pieces fell into place. All the bad decisions made so much more sense in light of the questionable ones the previous repair crew had made, even ones that bore no direct relationship to the damaged part or the weird workarounds they’d had to setup for it.

That wasn’t the end of the work of course. The life support system, the artificial gravity system, the drives, the deflector, the collision avoidance sensors, all of them required recalibration and repairs of one sort or another. And then there were at least twice as many enhancements that Nix wanted to make to each of them, several of which she placed orders for through Sali’s account.

She regretted that she wasn’t going to get to implement those changes, but the parts she ordered were high quality and general enough that the techs Sali employed were sure to find good uses for all of them.

With the Goldrunner still apparently in pieces, she tromped away to have her first meal of the fourth day just after the second sun reached it’s zenith. Her first impulse was to grab a shower since she’d lost track of the last time she’d done that. Canto Blight maybe? She had some hazy but happy memories of a shower stall there. 

Which reminded her of Ayli.

She was definitely going to need to find her before too much longer since she hadn’t exactly briefed Ayli on what the plan really was.

Her grumbling stomach though  told her that food was, at the moment, a higher priority> Obeying it for the first time in probably too long, she wandered off to the kitchens, hoping that Chef Marsbel was working today.

As it turned out he was, so lunch was as delicious as she’d hoped, but sadly Sali was entertaining some horrid group of guests and Marsbel was required to put on a show for them. Some Calerpris culinary art of fileting live fish onto the serving plates which sounded needlessly messy and cruel to Nix. 

They really weren’t a good couple Nix knew. She and Sali didn’t value the same things or agree on some important points of acceptable behavior. That didn’t stop Nix from seeing the good in Saliandris A’Prezzo, Tyrant Queen, Breaker of the Siege of Bokrund, Scourge of the 5th Begani Legion, and Collector of Stuffed Lolth Cat toys. The trick, Nix knew, was finding a path to ground for that goodness so that it would have time to grow and somewhere for it to take root that was less treacherous than the unsteady currents of Calerpris.

It may have been the thoughts of ground and growing which led Nix to the farthest of Sali’s meditation gardens. It had always been her favorite when they’d been together.

Or maybe it was that the path which lead her there was free from any people, which felt relaxing.

Or, just possibly, it was the strange old lady who was admiring the blossoms. 

And glowing blue and transparent.

Nix wasn’t startled by the old lady’s presence. Which was odd. But that the old lady felt like she belonged there. Like being surrounded by flowers blooming in a panoply of yellows and blues and greens and purples was her natural state.

What was even more odd was that  Nix didn’t feel like she was intruding on the old lady’s presence either, despite having clearly walked in on her while she was meditating. 

“Huh, I guess that does work?” the old lady said, opening her eyes and offering Nix a smile which suggested one of them was getting away with something they possibly shouldn’t be.

“Have we met before?” Nix asked, looking around for the holo-emitters which had to be projecting the image of the woman she was seeing.

“Seems like we have, doesn’t it?” the old lady said.

“It does, but I’m not great with remembering names,” Nix said in the hopes of prompting the old lady to fill in the details of their acquaintance which Nix had clearly forgotten.

“Names aren’t that important,” the old lady said. “You forget those because its not how you remember people.”

That was probably true Nix decided, but not the answer she was looking for.

“I thought I remembered everyone Sali employed,” Nix said, it having been important to her at the time that she not get swept up in the romance of dating the Great and Powerful Saliandris and in the process forget about all of the regular people who gave substance to the myth Sali was building around herself.

“Oh, I’ve never worked for your girlfriend. Or your ex-girlfriend I guess,” the old lady said. “I’m not here for her. I’m here for you.”

Nix wasn’t all that fond of people focusing their attention on her. In her experience it usually meant that they wanted something from her, typically something that was bad for her, for them, or, in most cases, both.

So why wasn’t she getting that sense from the old lady?

“I’m not sure what I can do for you?” Nix said. “I’m sort of a prisoner here.”

The old woman glanced around as though taking in her surroundings for the first time.

“Oh? Oh, that’s just wonderful,” she said. “Oh, that takes me back.”

Which, again, was not the response Nix had been looking for.

“I wish I could stay around to see that,” the old lady said. “But I don’t think we get much time yet. I suppose we never do. But, still, it worked. Maybe it will again.”

“What worked?” Nix asked, reasonably sure the old lady was of perfectly sound mind despite the fact that nothing she said made any sense.

“Nothing you need to worry about right now,” the old lady said. “All you need to know is this; you can trust yourself. You’ve been training for far longer than you know, and you’re capable of so much more than you’re aware. So trust in yourself. And trust in the Force.”

And just like that, she was gone. 

There wasn’t the winking out of a holo-emitter turning off, the old lady just vanished.

Which.

Okay.

That was a thing that happened.

With absolutely no evidence left behind.

Nix paused for a moment and tried to recall how long had it been since she’d last slept?

Only a day or so right?

Maybe two?

She didn’t feel…okay that was lie, she felt plenty tired.

But not “hallucination level” tired.

She didn’t get that tired.

Did she?

The garden would have made a great place for a nap, but falling asleep surrounded haunted plants didn’t feel like it was a thing that was going to happen, so Nix headed back to her room, nibbling on the food she’d pilfered from the kitchens as she went.

Either the walk, the food, or finding Ayli waiting for her banished the fatigue she’d been feeling and left her with the tingle of anticipation that told her events were moving into just the place she’d hoped they would.

“I think I’ve got the navigation array sorted out,” she announced, as much for Sali’s eavesdropping benefit as for Ayli’s. “If you’ve got a moment could I ask you to help me run through Goldie’s memory archives to make sure they’re in order?”

“Goldie?” Ayli asked, putting down the datapad she’d been reading.

“Yeah, you put a droid at the heart of the ship. It needed a name,” Nix said.

“I thought it wasn’t fully enabled?” Ayli said.

“Well…” Nix grimaced and wondered if she should have okayed those particular changes before she made them. “It’s a lot more useful now!”

Ayli laughed and flashed Nix what looked like a genuine smile.

“You don’t ever have to apologize for fixing things, especially not when no one else even thought that was possible,” Ayli said. She looked like she wanted to embrace Nix, but she settled for nodding towards the door. “Let’s go see what Goldie’s like.”

Nix felt bubbles of happiness floating up within her like she’d become a human-shaped bottle of Santo Nectar. Those carried her back to the repair dock where they were joined by a swarm of Ilythian Butterflies in her stomach at finding Sali waiting for them.

A Sali who looked as tired as Nix was supposed to feel.

“The repairs are coming along great!” Nix said, offering Sali and encouraging smile in lieu of the cup of Caf Sali clearly needed.

“So I’ve heard. Apparently you’re down to cursing in Basic again?” Sali asked, answering Nix’s smile with a wan one of her own.

“Oh, uh, you heard that?” Nix asked.

“Everyone in the fortress heard it,” Ayli said. “I think I saw a protocol droid died of fright.”

“Well, the ship’s making sense now,” Nix said. “Mostly. Just got a few more things I need to get in place.”

“Don’t let me stop you,” Sali said. “I’m inspecting. Give me something to inspect so I can put off the rest of today’s work for a bit longer.”

“Aren’t you the boss of this place?” Ayli asked.

“You would think so,” Sali said. “You’d damn well think so, except all that really means is everyone’s problems are my problems.”

“Delegate them to someone else?” Nix suggested.

“Tried that. They just come back the next day as twice the problems. Or my minions get drunk on power and try to backstab each other and/or me.”

“You can’t go on like that forever.” Nix opened one of the external hatches on the Goldrunner and removed a mass of cables which she started connecting to each other. “Ayli can you power up the aft-collision detectors. They were a little flakey this morning.”

Which had been true, before she’d fixed them and tested them herself.

“What’s wrong with the ship?” Sali asked, ignoring the statement Nix had made.

“Nothing!” Nix said with the kind of gusto engineers often use when they’re willing that sentiment to be true, usually in the face of reason and historical precedent. “Here, could you hold this?”

She offered a cable to Sali who’d risen to see what she was working on.

“Sure,” Sali said without really thinking about.

“Good, cause it’s time for us to go,” Nix said, and flipped the switch that sent a torrent of electricity surging through Sali’s body.