In Ayli’s experience, when your mechanic tells you that the ship needs to move right now, you move the ship right now.

“I thought we weren’t ready to fly yet?” Ayli called out as she heard Nix finish dragging something heavy on board and hitting the button to close the hatch.

“Goldie’s fine,” Nix called back. “We will be too if you can get us up above the satellite layer. Like in under a minute hopefully?”

Ayli did not like the sound of that but since they seemed to be executing whatever escape plan Nix had been working on for the last few days, she understood the need for haste.

“Hang onto something and pick someone to pray to then,” Ayli said and angled Goldrunner straight up.

For most flights, taking off in the direction of the planet’s rotation was the most sensible approach. The added momentum help cut down the fuel requirements and placed less stress on the ship than the direct ascent Ayli had chosen.

Above her, the night sky was covered by the thick clouds of one of Calerpris’s seemingly constant torrential rainstorms. As the Goldrunner’s drives came to life underneath her, Ayli felt the ship punch through the atmosphere to reach them fast enough that a plasma sheath formed around the nose.

“What did you to the engines!” she shouted back and without waiting for an answer added, “I love it!”

The shock of their passing punched a hole in the storm clouds and sent lightning crackling along the Goldrunner’s hull in a blinding burst of light. The sensors cleared less than a second later to reveal the missing sky full of stars the storm had been hiding.

“Are we high enough to jump to hyperspace yet?” Nix called at the exact moment they passed by the last of the marked satellite orbits.

“Yep, I don’t know how, but we’re out of Calerprise airspace already!” Ayli said, savoring the blistering speed the Goldrunner had acquired under Nix’s care.

“Punch it then!” Nix shouted, still apparently struggling with something heavy.

“Where are we going?” Ayli asked.

“Not here!”

That was enough to convince Ayli. Being far away from Sali when she found out that she’d lost not only her two prisoners but also the ship she’d paid to have renovated seemed like an incredibly good idea for their continued survival.

The stars outside the window stretched out to the comforting streaks of a normal hyperspace jump the moment Ayli engaged the drive and a moment later the familiar blue swirl of hyperspace was all she could see outside the ship.

She breathed a sigh of relief. They were safe.

“Yo, Nix could use a hand,” a unfamiliar voice said from the ship’s comms.

“Do we have a stowaway Nix?” Ayli shouted, reaching for her two most accessible blasters.

“No stowaways,” the unfamiliar voice said. “But we do have a kidnapping victim onboard. I think?”

“Nix? What’s going on here?” Ayli said slowly as she stalked down the corridor to where she could hear Nix still struggling in one of the cabins.

“Oh, that’s just Goldie, say hi Goldie!” Nix called back.

“Hi Goldie,” the ship said, having apparently acquired a sense of humor to go with its new voice.

So. That was a thing. Ayli wasn’t sure she needed a ship with a sense of humor, but if it was a problem then it was one that could be dealt with later.

“Did we kidnap someone or are we being…” Ayli didn’t get to finish that thought because she rounded the corner to cabin Nix was in and discovered the answer.

“We didn’t kidnap her,” Nix said as she straightened Sali’s limp form out on a table in the center of the room. Ayli was relieved to see that Sali seemed to be breathing still, though on reflection she wasn’t entirely sure that was a good thing.

“You know the last beautiful woman I kidnapped in this ship was a lot more conscious when I brought her on board,” Ayli said.

“We’re not kidnapping her!” Nix said. “We’re…I don’t know, forcibly vacationing her.”

“I’m pretty sure that’s a crime against galactic law and the language standards of Basic,” Ayli said, amused at the sheer ridiculousness of the situation.

“Imagine being an accomplice to it,” Goldie said. “Oh wait, we all are!”

“She kept us prisoner for four days,” Nix said. “She owes us at least that much time to help with what we’re doing.”

“And if she disagrees with that clever bit of accounting?” Ayli asked, noticing that Sali was beginning to stir as Nix tended to her.

“Then we drop her off and find what we’re looking for without her,” Nix said.

“You do know that she has a literal armada of pirates at her beck and call right? And she’s not known for her wide and open forgiving streak.”

“No, I’m not,” Sali said in a bleary voice. “What am I not forgiving now?”

Nix helped her sit up and produced a gel pack from inside coveralls. 

“This stuff is sweeter than you like but it’ll knock out the headache you’re feeling in a minute or two,” she said, tearing the top off the gel pack and handing it to Sali.

Sali stared at it for a moment, eyes narrowed in suspicion.

“You zapped me, didn’t you?” she said.

“Yep.”

“And then you kidnapped me?”

“It’s not a kidnapping!” Nix said. “It’s a vacation.”

“I don’t remember scheduling a vacation,” Sali said.

“You didn’t. And you were never going to. Admit it.”

“I…” Sali said and scowled. She slurped down the gel pack rather than continue.

“Calerpris was killing you,” Nix said. “Not just the danger and backstabbing. You’ve obviously got that covered.”

“You’d be surprised how many people disagree with you on that,” Sali said.

“They’re idiots then. You’re the next best thing to invincible,” Nix said. “There’s only one person who can really beat you.”

“A certain sneaky ex-girlfriend?” Sali asked, seeming more amused by the idea than upset, which Ayli took as a promising sign and Nix seemed to have anticipated.

“No. Yourself,” Nix said. “You were going to kill yourself on Calerprise rather than admit that’s its not what you really want to be doing.”

“Uh, isn’t that for her to decide?” Ayli asked, not sure exactly how far Sali would let Nix go before she did something violent and unpleasant. That they might have already crossed that line had not escaped Ayli either, but there wasn’t a lot to be gained in dwelling on that.

“No, she’s right,” Sali said. “I hated it there. But it was my place to hate.”

“Sure. And you can go right back to it if you want,” Nix said. “Say the word and we’ll drop you off anywhere you want.”

“My compound, in the repair bay, after I call my idiot droid guards.”

“Okay. Almost anywhere,” Nix said. “Ask yourself if that’s what you really want though.”

“Why wouldn’t it be?”

“You did just say you hate it there,” Ayli said.

“But it was my thing to hate. Now it’s all going to fall apart and all that work will have been for nothing.”

“What? No it won’t,” Nix said. “You took Calerpris from an unname ball of water no one ever heard of and made it a center for, well pirates, but a lot of legit businesses too. It’ll change a lot without you, but it needs to change. The people you left behind are going to fall down and screw everything up. Then they’ll pick themselves back up, and make a bunch of new mistakes. Over and over.”

“That sounds terrible,” Sali said and Ayli had to agree.

“That sounds like life,” Nix said. “The point isn’t that we never fall down, or never make a mistake. The point is that we recover from them. We learn. We try different things. You created something that’s grown enough to do that. Come back in a year and you’ll find chaos. Come back in five and there’ll still be chaos but it’ll be a different sort of chaos. Come back in fifty and a whole new world of problems and chaos will be waiting for, but the world will be stronger and more resilient than you can imagine.”

“That’s a pretty rosy picture you’re painting,” Sali said. “Odds are if I come back in a year, someone will have boiled the oceans off and then frozen the planet into a snowball.”

“Do you think so?” Nix asked. “Or is that what you’re hoping will happen if you’re not there to save them from themselves.”

“I don’t want to save anyone but me,” Sali said.

“There’s a cabin with your stuff in it then,” Nix said. “I had your butler droid pack a suitcase for you.”

“What? No. I’m not taking a vacation,” Sali said.

“Well then we’re kidnapping you and none of this your fault,” Nix said. “You made the terrible mistake of having feelings for someone and trusting them and they went and shocked you into unconsciousness. You can blame this whole thing on me. I didn’t give you a choice after all. You’re not responsible for anything that happens from here.”

“I never said I had feelings for you,” Sali grumbled.

“Of course not,” Nix said. “My mistake. Maybe I’ll make another one and you’ll be able to escape then. You’ll probably be able to haul me back to Calerpris and arrange an auction as soon as we get there. Sell me to Hutt or something. Make your money back and have your revenge at the same time.”

“I’d never sell you to a Hutt,” Sali said, looking away from Nix.

“I know,” Nix said. “Just like I know you’re going to need to sleep a bit to let that gel paste do its work.”

“I don’t feel sleepy at all though,”Sali said and promptly sagged into unconsciousness.

Nix caught her with gentle arms before Sali could tumble off the table.

“We should get her to one of the cabins,” Nix said. “She’ll sleep for about twelve hours I think. Or maybe ten. This is Sali after all.”

“You spiked her gel pack?” Ayli asked.

“They come like that,” Nix said, hoisting the thoroughly limp form of Sali into arms far more easily than Ayli would have assumed to be possible. “It’s an internal bacta-mix. Without it she’d have been a wreck once her body noticed how much bruising the zap inflicted. The mix makes sure that’s all patched back together by the time she wakes up.”

“You’re speaking from personal experience aren’t you?”

“Self-inflicted,” Nix said. “I’ve forgotten to cut power to the right relays a couple times now.”

“You’re amazing, you know that right?” Ayli said.

“Amazing good or amazing bad?” Nix asked, carefully navigating through the door without bumping Sali’s head.

“Just amazing. I’m honestly surprised Sali let you slip away.”

“I can be resourceful when I need to be,” Nix said.

“And I’m glad of that,” Nix said and found that she was rather delighted that Nix had escaped from Sali and that, despite the tenderness Nix was showing their ‘guest’, whatever feelings there were between them, neither Nix nor Sali seemed to regard the other as anything but an ‘ex-’ anymore.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t fill you in on any of this,” Nix said. “Sali had us bugged. Obviously.”

“And you didn’t want to tip your hand to her, I understand,” Ayli said. “Apart from our involuntary stowaway, I think we made a clean getaway. So clean in fact that I have no idea where we’re going.”

“Don’t worry boss, you’re gonna like it,” Goldie said, unprompted.

That brought images of warm, sandy beaches, cool nights by a roaring fire, and the sort of luxurious living that they’d flown away from when they left Canto Blight.

“Sali may or may not be willing to help us,” Nix said, “so I wanted to make sure we had another option for finding the trail you’re looking for.”

“And where would we find that?” Ayli asked, a subtle tremor of nervous anticipation running through her.

“Librarium Nocti!” Nix said.

The Grand Stellar Library.

Home to a repository of galactic knowledge even the deepest Holonet archives couldn’t match. Home to researcher of every discipline and calling. Home to countless conferences and symposiums and think tanks.

Also, just home.

Ayli frowned.

She hated going home.