Lednon Three was everything Nix hated about planets rolled into one big, ugly, and forgettable ball in the sky. Hot and dry planets were bad enough but hot and miserably humid were terrible for a place where humans to live while being excellent for the sort of insect life which was seemed to be purpose built for consuming the flesh of humans foolish enough to venture to a climate which simply hated them.

“It’s okay if you don’t want to go down there,” Ayli said as they got dressed in the supplies they’d picked up at the most convenient outpost on the no longer used hyperspace routes to the Lednon System. 

It was a tempting offer. Almost painfully so. There was something about Lednon Three which filled Nix’s stomach with the sort of loathing usually reserved for incompetent repairs to life critical systems on a ship. 

Which was why she needed to go down there.

That didn’t make any sense.

She knew it didn’t make any sense.

And she knew she was going down to the planet’s surface with the others anyways.

“I want to see Sali’s expression when we find the treasure and she realizes she should have backed your play,” Nix said, which was true, though only a small part of her actual reasoning.

“Confession time,” Ayli said. “It is distinctly possible that the ‘treasure’, such as it is, may only be in the form of the historical significance of the site. This place is well hidden, but it’s been a long time, and if we’re the second people to find it, the first ones will almost certainly have made off with all the easily portable stuff, where ‘easily portable’ means it wasn’t nailed down so tightly that they couldn’t pry it loose.”

“And the problem with that would be what exactly?” Nix asked.

“I thought you married me for my money?” Ayli teased.

“I thought I married you so I could carry you back to your room and have my way with you?” Nix said. “Or maybe it was so you’d be there in the morning afterwards.”

Ayli rolled her eyes, but Nix thought she detected a faint tremor in Ayli’s lekku that was somewhere between a blush and a shiver of desire.

“You know, you haven’t had your way with me nearly enough since then,” Ayli said, just in time for the door to their room to chime and Sali to bellow from right outside it.

“I know this place has been waiting for us for a million years now, but I’d rather it didn’t have to wait a million more,” the pirate queen shouted, remaining scrupulously on the far side of the door.

“Are the modifications to the prison pod done already?” Nix asked tucking a a hat with heavy netting into her travel sack.

“Nope,” Goldie said. “I got all the changes put in place, but until you inspect it, the job’s not done.”

That Goldie had arrived at that conclusion on her own filled Nix with a glow of pride. Of course that part of Goldie’s development curriculum had been the safety regulations on every brand of star ship Nix could get her hands on, as well as the awful stories whose blood the regulations were written in, probably had something to do with how safety conscious Goldie turned out.

“I’ll be right down,” Nix said, leaving Ayli to finish packing their away supplies.

The Goldrunner wasn’t a big ship compared to some that Nix had worked on, but it was large enough that she had a moment alone with Sali as they walked to the cargo bay.

“So, Wensha? Didn’t think she was your type?” Sali asked

“I’ve got a lot of types,” Nix said. “Including ladies tall enough to climb like trees and pretty enough to stop my heart even after they held me prisoner for four days.”

“I’ve never been pretty a day in my life,” Sali said.

“Excuse me? Did I ever leave you the slightest room to doubt how ravishingly gorgeous you are?” Nix said.

Sali blinked and paused, falling behind Nix.

“You know, I don’t think that’s how someone should be talking to their ex-girlfriend,” she said, blushing a more distinct shade than Ayli had.

“It is if my next best alternative is to kick your butt over towards a certain badass nun who can’t take her eyes off you,” Nix said. “Or, wait, you’d like that wouldn’t you? Right, I think I can still lift you. I’ll just toss you at her when we get to the cargo bay.”

“What? No! Shut up! It’s not…”

“”Yes, it is. It is exactly like that,” Nix said. “If anyone here isn’t someone’s ‘type’, it’s me for you. We both know I was fun and different, but I wasn’t what you needed.”

“What I need is my crew back,” Sali said, looking at a particularly fascinating run of piping in the ceiling. “And a blaster.”

“You have a blaster,” Nix said. “You have three unless I’m mistaken. What you need is to stop wasting time.”

“We’re about to go and find treasure and riches beyond our wildest dreams according to Wensha. Now’s not the time for distractions,” Sali said.

“Fine. Tell her when we get back then,” Nix said and started walking again.

“I’ll think about it,” Sali said before mumbling under her breath, “Can’t take her eyes off me?”

Down in the cargo bay, Nix found Sister Zindiana performing her own inspection on the work Goldie had done via the waldos. The prison pod no longer even vaguely resembled its former self.

What had once been a generally spherical and featureless white ball had been retrofitted into a sleek wing craft with a single ion drive in the rear and seating for four in the center of the wing. Stabilizers and ailerons spoke to the craft’s intended capacity of flying through an atmosphere, as did the micro-deflector screen which was enveloping the plane as part of its automated system test routine.

“What do you think?” Nix asked, coming up to stand beside Sister Zindiana.

“I’ve flown farther in worse.”

“I’m not happy with the deflector field strength, and the complete lack of weapons isn’t going to do us any favors if it we get into a fight, but I can promise you the engine’s sound and the crew compartment is solid.”

“I still don’t understand how you took the little station keeping drive they put in the prison pod and turned it into that,” Zindiana said, pointing at the kitbashed ion drive that was central to Nix’s design.

“It wasn’t as hard as you might imagine,” Nix said. “It’s cheaper for Trino System to buy off-the-self ion drives and throw limiters on them than to make speciality drives for station keeping the pods. All I really had to do was cut out the limiter and then have Goldie resculpt the exterior housing to make it fit the new fuselage and add a few control surfaces to it help with maneuverability.”

“She’s leaving out the part where she built the control system for it from the flight components she scrapped from Goldrunner’s old kit when she was putting Goldie in,” Ayli said, joining them all with the exploration kit they’d assembled in tow.

“That’s just repurposing stuff to do things it’s already design to do. Anyone could do that,” Nix said, keenly aware that their drop ship would not be winning her any design awards.

She wasn’t sure why the other three looked at her in disbelief but some unspoken agreement seemed to pass between each of them and the conversation moved on.

“So is it done?” Goldie asked.

“The automated tests look fine,” Nix said. “Give me about ten minutes to check the last few things.”

No one was troubled by that, which wasn’t too surprising given how bad it would be if their landing crafting failed them.

They’d talked about avoiding that possibility by simply landing the Goldrunner on the surface, but as a medium freighter, Goldie was not exactly the stealthiest of crafts and for the first run in, it seemed wise to discover if there was anyone still on Lednon Three before those people discovered them.

Keenly aware of the trust the others were extending her, Nix spent a good half hour going over Goldie’s work, offering feedback where the ship had done well and showing Goldie how to make spot corrections in the few areas where she’d made mistake.

The end result wasn’t perfect, but it would see them through at least a month of flying before it would need  any touch up work. 

“You’ll keep a channel open to me, right?” Goldie asked as Nix and the others climbed aboard their new dropship.

“Yep. Though if we do find someone there already we may need to go silent while we check them out,” Nix said. “You’ve got our encrypted token though so you’ll still see our transponder and you’ll be able to check the wing’s vitals..”

“If we get in trouble…” Ayli started to say.

“I’ll come get you right away!” Goldie said.

“No, if we get in trouble, stay in orbit till you can figure out what happened. We can take care of ourselves,” Ayli said.

“You can come pick up me,” Sali said.

“Me too,” Zindiana said.

That the two of them couldn’t see the connection they already shared was bamboozling to Nix, but then that was why she preferred working with ships for the most part. Making connections there was simple and easy and came with a manual for when you ran into something new and confusing.

“Stay safe,” Nix said to Goldie. “There shouldn’t be anyone down there to cause problems, but if there is they’ll probably have some ships hidden up here that you’ll need to avoid.”

“That won’t be a problem,” Goldie said, which worried Nix but not for the reason any of the others would have picked up on.

Goldie had weapon systems, sure, but she also had a drive, like all other warp drives, that could twist the fabric of space and a record of how Nix had used that property of a warp drive to turn a deflector array into something akin to a matter conversion bomb. The fun thing was, while Nix had used a charged up deflector array for her bomb, really any old piece of baryonic matter would work just fine as a substitute. 

“No getting lost on us,” Nix said.

“Okay, Moooom!”, Goldie said with all the put-upon suffering any child might show their mother.

“We good to go?” Sali asked.

“You belted in?” Nix asked.

“Yeah. Why do we need belts though?” Sali asked.

Nix looked at the control panel she’d constructed. Everyone was strapped in, the outer doors to the cargo bay were ready to open, and her new ship was showing green lights across the board.

“Because of this,” Nix said, slamming the button to open the cargo doors and then the one to ignite the ion drive a moment later.

Most ships have some kind of inertial compensators to help buffer the crew from the rigors of extreme acceleration. Nix’s new ship did too. They just weren’t exactly enough to deal with the engine modifications she’d made to the ion drive.

“Grk!” said Sali, eloquently expressing the experience of being rammed back into her seat with a half dozen multiple of the force of general gravity.

The stars didn’t blur – they weren’t anywhere near lightspeed – but the planet which had been a pale fingernail sized orb in the distance grew closer fast enough that Nix’s passengers, hardened spacefarers the lot of them, grew audibly worried.

“Relax,” she said. “It’s going to be a very controlled crash!”

“I don’t remember signing up for any sort of crash at all, controlled or not,” Sali said.

“It’ll fool our enemies,” Nix said, delighted at the thought of how silly Sali was going to feel when they touched down as gently as a feather.

“We’re not supposed to have any enemies here,” Ayli said.

But they did.

Nix felt a cold presence waiting for them on Lednon Three, and knew that whatever else they found, they were going to find an unwelcoming reception to go along with it.

And that was when the laser barrage began to target them.