There was a pirate navy dropping out of hyperspace. A pirate navy under the command of one of Nix’s ex-girlfriends. 

Nix hadn’t expected that. 

She welcomed it, certainly. Could feel the Force sitting in silent, smug satisfaction at the turn of events. But understanding it or explaining it? Nope. That was well beyond her capabilities.

“Oh good, we got here in time,” Kelda said, appearing in the seat behind Nix’s in the shuttle’s cockpit as was her wont.

“Not by much though,” Ravas said, appearing behind Ayli. “The other fleet was just about to jump to lightspeed.”

“They were,” Ayli confirmed. “The Interdictor’s shut that down though. Thanks for arranging that.”

“The alternatives were unappealing,” Ravas said.

“How were we going to die?” Nix asked, easily deciphering Ravas’ meaning.

“One of their ships was meant for planetary pacification,” Kelda said. “When you broke its drive to keep it from getting away, the crew overloaded the weapons system’s core to make sure it didn’t fall into anyone else’s hands.”

“Planetary pacification…they have an proton beam cannon on one of those ships?” Ayli asked, a tinge of familiar horror creeping in her voice.

Nix didn’t fault her for that at all.

Proton beam cannons had achieved a degree of notoriety late in the Galactic Civil War when a rather famous one had reduce the planet of Alderaan to a free floating debris field.

Like every other ship’s mechanic in the galaxy, Nix had followed the feeds and publications talking about the tech requirements for something like that and been disturbed not only by the sheer scale of malice required to build a moon-sized weapons platform, but, even moreso, by the fact that it was viable to mount a much smaller system on a capital ship. 

A ship based proton beam cannon couldn’t pack the power to explode a planet in a single shot, but apart from overwhelming terror there wasn’t much need to literally destroy planets when simply burning off all the surface life would ‘pacify’ them just as efficiently.

“Okay. We have a new target then,” she said. “The Silent Enclave Elders are a personal issue. We can’t leave an Imperial remnant out here roaming around with a genocide weapon at their fingertips.”

“We’re not letting them leave here at all,” Ayli said.

“The Blood Ravens agree with you there,” Sali said. “Seems like the Imperials have been trying to take over some of the local systems and provide ‘security’.”

“Wait, Blood Ravens? That’s not your usual pirate crew is it?” Nix asked.

“Nope. We’ve been enemies for years! Isn’t at right Isos?” Sali said.

“Enemies? You would me Saliandrus. Rivalry does not need to involve enmity. I’ve had nothing but the highest respect for you since Bartlo IV,” an older man’s voice, Isos’s Nix guessed, said.

“You shot me and threw me out on airlock with the ship’s trash over Bartlo IV,” Sali said, with no particular animosity in her voice.

“And you survived. Damnedest thing I ever saw. Knew you were one of the real ones after that,” Isos said.

“We’re glad to have your help Captain Isos,” Nix said with about half her attention. The rest was busy searching in the Force for some sign of the Enclave’s Elders.

“Oh, don’t be too grateful,” Isos said. “It’s not everyday a rival shows up and offers to double the size of your fleet.”

“Double? Sali what did you offer him?” Ayli asked.

“There’s a fleet sitting right here. One Isos has been putting in a lot of effort to find. Told him he gets all the salvage rights to whichever ships he can capture.”

Which meant the Imperial fleet would become a pirate one and the local sectors would be rather more perilous for New Republic business endeavors.

Nix considered that for a moment and shrugged. She’d worked with both pirates and legitimate business ventures and of the two at least the pirates only preyed on those with wealth. The Corporations of the Inner Rim worlds tended to be more diffuse in their predation but they stole from a far wider, and less affluent, base of the population.

“The ships are fine, but what about the Imperials?” Ayli asked.

“That’s the best part. Any of ‘em who aren’t too stupid to surrender, we can sell to the New Republic!”

“The Republic still has a bounty on active Imperial soldiers,” Sali translated. “And a higher one on Imperial Officers, active or not.”

“There’s a group of people here who aren’t Imperials,” Nix said. “You’ll want to leave them to us.”

“I can’t promise we’ll be exercising much restraint in our fire patterns,” Isos said.

“It’s not you killing them that I’m worried about,” Nix said.

“These more Sith guys?” Sali asked.

“No, not Sith. These guys are less ‘red laser swords’ and more ‘you won’t see them until after they’ve killed you’.” Nix knew, as warnings went, the pirates weren’t going to believe her, at least not at first.

“Sounds like a barrel of fun,” Isos said. “We’ll pack some plasma throwers just in case we do make their acquaintance.”

Nix shivered at the thought. Not because of the damage a sheet of plasma could do to human body but because of the absurd amount of collateral damage the ship’s interiors would sustain. She’d spent an entire month retrofitting a shuttle’s interior after it had been targeted by a single plasma thrower burn, a sustained fight with them though?

Would not be her mess to clean up after!

“They’re launching more Tie’s,” Ayli said. “We should get to their flagship now.”

“You’re thinking they might cloak it?” Nix asked, sensing a building tension in the Force.

“No, that particular horrible thought hadn’t occurred to me,” Ayli said. “I’m more concerned that keeping track of every fighter the flagship launches is going to be hard and any one of them could have an Elder in it.”

“Can you get us there?” Nix asked, even her Force enhanced senses having a difficult time keeping the swarm of ships and turbo laser battery fire from overwhelming her.

“Yes. In one piece? Maybe.” Ayli said.

“We just need to land,” Nix said. “Once we’re in the docking bay, we can find the Elders and snag a new ship if we need.”

“Or you could hang back and not get my shuttle shot to pieces,” Sali said.

“What’s that…comms are…breaking up…not…hearing.” Nix flipped the comm switch off with a smile at the face she imagined Sali would be making.

“That’s not at all what comm interference sounds like, you do know that right?” Ayli asked.

“More importantly, Sali knows that,” Nix said.

“She is a Pirate Queen.”

“Yes, but she’s my Pirate Queen,” Nix said. “She’d forget about me if I didn’t annoy her from time to time.”

“Nix, my beloved, trust me that no one will ever forget you.”

“Want to surprise her by bringing her the shuttle back in pristine condition?” Nix asked.

“That’d be delightful. What did you have in mind?”

“The Enclave Elders are busy corrupting the Xah out there,” Nix said, gesturing to an Imperial ship a moment before it faded from view. “Very naughty of them.”

“That’s going to be hard on Isos’s fleet.”

“Yes and no. I don’t think the Impy ships can move too far away or the Enclave cloak over them will fall away. In fact, from what I can sense, I’m pretty sure the Enclave’s technique doesn’t extend as far as the interdiction field goes.”

“Good. I don’t want to have to spend anymore time in my life hunting down Imperials.”

Nix could hear old wounds reopening as the thought crossed Ayli’s mind.

“I’m guessing if the Imp ships fire it’ll give away their position too. That’s not the important part though, or not the important part for us.”

“Tell me you’ve figured out how to do what they’re doing?”

“Sort of?” Nix offered a noncommittal shrug. “I don’t think I could set the cloak like they can, but I’m pretty sure I can drag one of its edges over us.”

“That would make flying into that mess a lot easier,” Ayli said as she began inputting a series of semi-random thruster burns.

“Yeah, it’s once we get there that the hard part begins.”

“Believe it or not, I have infiltrated an Imperial Star Destroyer before,” Ayli said.

“It’s not the Star Destroyer or its crew I’m worried about,” Nix said. “The Elders out number us by quite a lot. And they’ve been practicing their techniques for a lot longer than both of us combined.”

“True, but they’ve mostly been practicing them on people who they’ve trained since birth not to fight back. What are the chances that they’re ready for something like us?”

“We’ve surprised them a couple of times already. Dolon has to be getting paranoid at this point about what I can do to the environment around him. Which will make him even stupider probably, but also harder to pull those specific tricks off against.”

“Then we’ll use some new tricks,” Ayli said. “I don’t care if they outnumber us. I want a life with you. A real one. Not running and hiding and being afraid of some super powerful organization coming down on us like an asteroid strike.”

“If I have to blow up that entire Star Destroyer, I promise you, that’s exactly what we’re going to have. You, me, and maybe a couple of kids?”

“Kids? Never thought of being a Mom. Not quite sure how we would make that work..oh, wait, you mean Rassi and Solna? Absolutely. Skip the whole diapers and vomiting everywhere stage and start right in with the good bits.”

Nix felt her heart flutter at the thought of how much she wanted ‘the good bits’. She took a deep breath though. Her desire was so strong that she really would have blown up the Star Destroyer, right then, and while that was an option she wasn’t going to take off the table, she knew, intellectually at least, that it couldn’t be the first one she followed.

“Time to fly then!” she said and reached out to the Force.

Which was strangely quiet.

Unnaturally so for a battle. There were ships full of people in an incredibly heightened emotional state. Or states. Though it was muted, Nix could sense the fear, the excitement, the bloodlust, and the anger which suffused the people who were floating out among the stars with her.

What she couldn’t sense anymore was where the Silent Enclave Elders had gone.

But she could feel the quiet, awareness averting weave of the cloak they’d covered local space in.

It was a gossamer thin working of the Force. More intricate and subtle than anything Nix had ever tried to do. She could make out its extent, and could feel some small part of it, but it would take her years of practice and meditation to even begin to spin the threads the cloak was made of.

Since she didn’t have years, she took the best path open to her and gathered up as much of the cloak as she could with the Force, dragging it over herself and the rest of the shuttle.

The Elders of the Silent Enclave would know what she was doing.

They would likely even be able to stop her and strip away the edge of the cloak Nix had clutched onto.

But they wouldn’t be able to do it quickly, and with Ayli at the shuttle’s helm, speed was the only tool that could have saved them.

Nix was feeling confident of that, wrapped in the safety of the Enclave’s cloak to hide them from enemy fire and the security of Ayli’s piloting to get them to the flagship via the fastest and safest route.

But the safest route through a battlefield is still not necessarily safe.

The bolt that caught the shuttle disintegrated Nix’s hopes of returning the shuttle to Sali unharmed.

It also disintegrated the back half of the shuttle and left them spinning out of control through the void of space.