Ayli’s calm had nothing to do with her Force training. When a ship is catastrophically damaged, an experienced combat pilot’s reaction is to remain calm. It’s how one survives the experiences required to become an experienced combat pilot.

Surviving the loss of half the shuttle she was piloting, along with, unfortunately, the shuttle’s entire drive system did present some unique challenges to her survival though.

“Hang on,” she said, as though she or Nix had any choice in the matter.

They’d been knocked into a spin and were, from what Ayli could sense, hurtling towards the Star Destroyer the Silent Enclave’s Elders were on. That was adjacent to good news, but it was where the good news ended.

Rather than the docking bay Ayli had intended to land in, it looked like they were probably going to collide with the super structure, likely in some particularly armored spot where the Star Destroyer wouldn’t even notice the impact.

“Damn it,” Ravas said. “This should have been fixed.”

“It was,” Nix said. “We’re not dead yet.”

Which suggested several questions to Ayli. First, why weren’t they dead?

The answer there was fairly obvious. The shuttle they were flying was a pirate’s shuttle and Sali was used to being attacked often enough that her equipment was top notch. The blast which had exploded the back half of the shuttle had done tremendous damage but the shuttle was designed to survive that sort of thing, with pressure locks that sealed the ship into five independent compartments so that the loss of one wouldn’t endanger the rest, to an engine compartment which vented explosions outward rather than allowing them to obliterate the shuttle itself.

Had she been flying a cheap corporate shuttle, Ayli was reasonably certain she and Nix would be dead already.

Possibly.

The other major question that arose in her mind was why the Force hadn’t warned her of the incoming shot that wrecked her ship.

There the only answer Ayli could find to that question relied on intuition more than reason, but in dealing with the Force that seemed like the best path anyways. Intuition told her that the Force hadn’t warned her of the shot that disabled her craft because it was busy warning her of all the shots which would have atomized it.

The Force was a powerful shield, but all shields had their limits.

And it hadn’t failed to warn her of any immediately deadly attacks.

Not yet anyways.

Aly was keenly aware that the limits of her awareness were significant and that the Jedi Order had been wiped out en masse by regular soldiers with regular blasters when they were distracted and the conditions were right for the Force’s warning to be missed or misinterpreted.

She wasn’t a Jedi, but she was reasonably sure that she could still die like they had.

Especially with the confounding presence of the Silent Enclave Elders and their ability to artificially smooth out the Force and dull the impression Ayli could receive from it.

As if in confirmation of that, Ayli reached out and found once more that she couldn’t feel the Force reacting to their predicament, or to the rest of the battle which was unfolding around them. The cloak the Elders were projecting was powerful enough that no ripples of the destruction where showing up at all.

“Impact in two minutes,” Ayli said, aware of her impending demise but ignoring that in favor of working the problem before her.

No thrusters was bad.

No hyper drive was also bad.

On the plus though, the shuttle weighed considerably less.

And the pressure compartment seals hadn’t been damaged so the bridge still had a standard atmosphere.

The spin was disorienting, but enough of the inertial dampening system’s remained online that it amount to a slight swaying sensation and the stars spiraling by outside the viewport.

“Nix we need to adjust our course, can you help me with that?” Ayli asked. Either answer would work for her, she just needed to know what resources she had available.

“Yes. I can stop our spin if you want?”

“No. Leave that alone. We look like debris at the moment. The Star Destroyer’s targeting systems won’t lock onto us.”

“Do you think we can land like this?” Nix asked, her eyes closed as she reach for a meditative state.

“Yes. This shuttle won’t be flying again afterward, but that’s pretty much a given at this point.”

“Fair enough. The docking bay then?”

“That was my thought, but they’ll have debris deflection systems in place there. I think we want to target one of the officer’s lounges.”

“Yeah, the viewing windows won’t be able to take the impact will they?” Because of course Nix was familiar with the design specs on a ship she’d never flown on.

“I’m hoping for that, but I’ll trust my mechanic if she thinks otherwise,” Ayli said.

“They can deploy barriers over the viewing windows, but those have a habit of sticking because they’re not used often and they need to be maintained from the outside,” Nix said. “There will be a pressure lock on the door into the lounge that’ll seal if the windows are breeched but if we don’t slow down we should crash through that too.”

“Good. That means the only trick we need to worry about is surviving the crash,” Ayli said.

“Let us worry about that,” Ravas said and Kelda nodded in agreement.

As plans went, it wasn’t the worst one Ayli had been a part of. Under normal circumstances, it was one that would absolutely prove to be fatal but then Ayli had never been in anything that could be considered ‘normal circumstances’.

She nodded her agreement and signaled that she was ready to begin by taking her hands off the now-useless controls.

Reaching out to the Force was still a unique experience for Ayli. Unlike Nix for who it was merely a conscious awareness of something she’d been doing all her life, Ayli’s relationship with the Force held so many vestiges of other people in it. From Ravas who she’d absorbed her initial skill with the Force from, to the Jedi of old who’d left their imprint on Ravas, to the echoes of the people who’d crafted the various holocrons she’d spent a year learning from.

Somewhere in there too was the tumult which she’d labeled as her own Dark Side. It seemed to only appear as a separate entity within Dark Side nexuses, and Ayli knew she should be concerned that she could compare and contrast the feel of multiple locations which were overwhelmed by the Dark Side, when the overwhelming majority of the galaxy went their whole lives without visiting a single one.

In a startlingly un-Jedi-like turn, Ayli found she’d developed a fondness for her Dark Side though. She wasn’t going to listen to it of course. Her Dark Side wasn’t exactly a bastion of reason after all. It did want to protect her though.

Which was probably why, despite the beating it had sustained, it was beginning to thrash around restlessly the closer they got to the Star Destroyer.

Ayli breath in, held it for a moment, and released it slowly.

She was going to be okay.

She and Nix had this.

And Ravas and Kelda where here to help them.

She wasn’t alone.

And the people she was with were more than capable of protecting themselves.

Except her memories were all too ready with a full sensory vid and audio show of the times when very competent people in the Rebellion had still failed to save both the people they were trying to protect and themselves.

There were no guarantees in life.

No safety.

Her Dark Side made its best arguments, resurrecting old fears and older heart breaks.

Ayli breathed slowly again.

Her fears were old companions. She wasn’t ready to say goodbye to any of them yet – they’d saved her life more often than she could count – but she was also beyond letting them overwhelm her.

The Force felt both the conflict within her and the moment she moved past it. It was there for her as either a storm of lighting to lash out with or the gentle hand she needed to guide the remains of the shuttle with. 

On the other side of shuttle, the Force responded to Nix’s request for a similar helping hand and together Nix and Ayli gently guided the shuttle on its path.

Right into a cataclysmic collision with a wall of glassteel.

The impact happened too fast for Ayli to fully perceive, even with her Force heightened senses. One instant they were tumbling through the space with the Star Destroyer looming ever large and the next there was a fading echo of a titanic crash and emergency klaxons screaming everywhere.

Ravas and Kelda both sagged in place as the wreckage of the shuttle sloughed off the shield they’d conjured into place to protect their two living charges.

“Let’s not do that again,” Ravas said.

“We said that last time too,” Kelda said.

“We really had people fooled when they called us quick learners didn’t we?” Ravas asked.

“Oh good,” Nix said. “The atmosphere shield wasn’t destroyed!”

Ayli followed Nix’s glance over to the gaping hole in the Star Destroyer’s hull where a thin, flickering forcefield was keeping almost all the atmosphere that remained in the room from venting into space.

“If they’re smart they’ll turn that off right now,” Ayli said. “Which means we’ve got plenty of time.”

Underestimating Imperial Intelligence wasn’t a terribly safe thing to do, but Imperials tended too be so certain of their own superiority that they routinely made the most idiotic mistakes imaginable.

Which was great.

Right up until they didn’t make the mistake you were counting on.

“We need to move,” she said.

“I still can’t find the Elder. They’re too well hidden. Do we have an alternate destination in mind?” Nix asked.

“Yes. The Bridge.”

“That’s going to be well guarded won’t it?” Nix asked.

“Most secure part of the ship.”

“Ah, and also where the fleet leadership will be.” Nix had grasped Ayli’s intent but Ayli felt that clarity was important.

“They don’t get to leave this ship.”

She expected some pushback on that. As a Rebel plotting the murder of an Imperial Officer was part of the days that ended in ‘y’. She wasn’t a Rebel anymore though. In fact she very much wanted to put that chapter of her life behind her, but she knew her ghosts would never forgive her if she let the cancer that was an Imperial command staff remain in the galaxy.

In place of pushing back on Ayli’s plan for bloody homicide though, Nix simply chuffed a little laugh.

“Yeah, I don’t think that’s going to be a problem,” she said.

“What do you mean? You’re okay with this?” Ayli wasn’t sure anything about this was okay, and Nix was one of the least bloodthirsty people she knew.

“No, no, this situation sucks. The only good thing is that I’m not in it alone,” Nix said.

“But you see why eliminating them is necessary?” Ayli asked, again unsure if murder really was necessary. Her Rebel heart said yes, but the Force…

What was the Force saying?

“Not so much necessary as inevitable,” Nix said. “It was our idea to come here, but I’ve been following the Force like I usually do and if the Force decided it was going to send us four to deal with this, I think it’s pretty much done with both the Elders and these Imperial buttwipes.”

“So you think the Force is going to kill them for us?” Ayli asked, not sure if that was better or worse than what she had in mind.

“I think I’m willing to play it by ear, and if my wife says the Imperials don’t get to leave her, then I know several methods of making sure that happens.”

Nix wiggled her fingers and Ayli saw tiny but highly worrying sparks dance from digit to digit.