It wasn’t the first time Nix had stood in the wreckage of a starship. If she was feeling honest, it wasn’t even the tenth time she’d stood in the wreckage of a starship that she’d been responsible for. 

All things told though, it wasn’t really so bad. She wouldn’t even need much of a crew to get the broken viewports structurally sound again. Maybe an hour and a couple lifter droids? The rest of the officers lounge was, maybe, a bit worse of a job. The security door was a complete loss, as was all the furniture and the entertainment electronics. Even the comm system was trashed and those could be a devil to route the cabling for on an Imperial ship.

“You don’t have to fix this place up you know,” Ayli said, shaking Nix from her reverie.

“Oh, I know,” Nix said. They’d been talking about not letting the Imperials escape, which Nix was still committed to, when the state of the room had caught her attention.

“Do you need to catch your breath? We’ve probably got a minute or two before they can scramble a combat squad here?” Ayli asked, as she checked Nix over for injuries.

Nix paused for a moment. Had she been injured? A quick internal inventory suggested she was okay, though she knew some hits were easy to overlook.

“I’m good,” she said. “And I don’t think we’ve got that long.”

The Force was oddly muffled – or not so oddly given who their principal opposition was – but Nix was still able to catch the warning it was yelling at her.

With a flick of her left hand, she asked the Force to collapse the ceiling in the hallway which lead past the officer’s lounge. With her right hand she grabbed Ayli and tossed them both to the floor in time to avoid a barrage of blaster fire.

“Oh I really hate those Enclave jerks,” Ayli said, reaching out to drop more of the hallway on the strike team.

“I know they’re here on the Star Destroyer, but I can’t pinpoint them any closer than that,” Nix said. “Probably not in the room with us but I can’t even swear to that.”

“They’re on the bridge,” Ayli said. “That strike team would only have been this close if someone warned the command staff to have them in place, and the only ones who could have sensed us coming are the Elders.”

“We can verify that,” Ravas said.

“Be careful. The Elders knows about you. If the Enclave has any techniques that can hurt you, they’ll be masters of them and they’ll be expecting you to show up,” Nix said, knowing that Ravas and Kelda were both more aware of that than she was.

“We may have a few surprises in store for them too,” Kelda said and sunk through the floor, with Ravas following her a moment a later.

“They’ll send another team soon. We should be elsewhere by then,” Ayli said, looking for any viable exits which were left since the ruin filled hallway didn’t offer much hope of egress.

“There should be a maintenance tunnel underneath the deck,” Nix said. “That would be great if we wanted to sneak up on them.”

“But, of course, we can’t sneak up on the Elders.” Ayli’s grumble showed that she’d grasped the largest problem they faced.

“The good news is I don’t think they’ve worked out the danger they’re in yet,” Nix said, letting her senses expand to take in the ship she was on.

In her mind the schematics of the Star Destroyer flickered into memory, overlaid with the sounds and smells and more distant sensations she was picking up. 

There was the sound of the docking bay, right where she expected it to be and so much farther than she would prefer. 

Far to the rear, the engines hummed with restrained power, the ships reserves being diverted to deflector arrays and its weapon systems. Nix was closer to the engines than the docking bay, which wouldn’t have been her preference and presented some annoying difficulties, but was also perhaps an opportunity in disguise.

“To be fair, if they have anything like a full crew, a Star Destroyer should have enough onboard combat squads that I think we’d have trouble even if the Elders weren’t here.” Ayli had her eyes closed as well but was searching for different things in the Force than Nix was.

“Normally, I’d say we could sneak past them, but maybe this time we want to get their attention and hold it.” Nix didn’t so much have a plan as the germ of an idea and what felt like the tacit reassurance from the Force that it would be with her to help make things work out.

Against a group of more numerous and more experienced Force users, a capital ship full of enemies, and the automated defense systems which Nix knew came standard on Imperial vessels.

Plus the unknown.

That was the real peril.

“I don’t think holding their attention will be a problem,” Ayli said. “For people who don’t like to use the Force, I can feel the Elders twisting the hell out of it.”

“They know better than to try that Expunging nonsense on us,” Nix said. “They don’t have anyone to sacrifice to it and even if they did, Dolon has to know that I’d cram it back down his throat.”

“It doesn’t feel like they’re doing that.” Ayli frowned and concentrated harder. “Whatever it is, they want to kill us, but it’s not a direct attack. It’s something else.”

“Let’s make them work a bit to get to us then,” Nix said. 

From what she could remember the next room over from the officer’s lounge was a supply closet and the room beyond that was where the officer’s living quarters began. The walls between the rooms were solid enough to serve as pressure vessels, but weren’t exactly battle hardened since any explosion which went off inside the Star Destroyer was likely too powerful for even a thick wall to contain.

The Force was not a explosion. It did not have an issue with reducing the two walls to a flying cloud of debris either though.

“You would have been so handy to have around when I was kid,” Ayli said.

“I was a menace as a child. You would have hated me.” Nix smiled at the thought of meeting Ayli years earlier though.

“I’m pretty sure I could never have hated you,” Ayli said.

The first officer’s quarters did not have an Imperial officer in residence. It did however have the officer’s belongings, including a few trophy weapons he’d hung on his wall.

“He left a charged Pogos-12 Blaster Rifle on his wall? I should shoot him just for failing basic Blaster safety,” Ayli said, helping herself to the rifle and one of the pistols which was hanging below it.

“Shame he hadn’t picked up one of those gatling rigs,” Nix said, scoring a pair of blaster pistols for herself. She didn’t recognize the make or model but the trigger and the blasty end of the barrel were obvious enough that she knew she could make them work. “Sali took me a range once to show off her armory. I love the gatling. So little need to aim.”

“She’ll probably be a bit worried about us, won’t she?” Ayli asked, leading Nix out in the only somewhat demolished hallway and trotting forward at a quick walk.

“Probably. We could have Kelda or Ravas let her know what we’re up to.”

“I don’t sense either them at the moment,” Ayli said, pausing well before the next intersection as though listening for something.

“I don’t either. The Elder’s cloak is growing thicker.” Nix wasn’t precisely worried about that but she wasn’t happy with it either. 

“They’re on the bridge,” Ravas said, appearing from behind them a bit more haggard than usual. “We can tell you that much based on the intensity of what they’re doing, but we can’t get in there to pinpoint precisely where they’re standing.”

“Or how many of them are there,” Kelda said, looking similarly fatigued.

“Which means there are definitely a few who are out hunting us on their own,” Nix said.

Whatever else they were, the Silent Enclave was also a training ground for assassins and the Elders were the ones who were the most intimately familiar with that. That their playbook began and ended with “runaway, hide, attack when the target is unaware, then hide again” was more or less a given.

“They won’t be alone,” Ayli said. “Basic operational security. You only send out a single asset when the asset of expendable. None of the Elders think of themselves like that. They’ll have a main group on the bridge focused on blocking out ability to sense anything, and a hit team of at least four out hunting for us.”

“Four?” Nix asked.

“Better to outnumber your foe if possible,” Ravas said. “Ideally, in their view, they’d bring along a pack of apprentices too as cannon fodder to distract you with.”

Nix felt a stabbing jolt from the Force and spun just in time to avoid a slash from a vibroknife with an odd red field around it.

There was an attack coming in from her other side which she could dodge at the expense of bumping into Ayli.

Who was a hair slower than Nix but was shifting away from a blade which was trying to slice her throat open and another which had awful intentions for her right kidney.

Sensing that a stab in her left side wasn’t going to be instantly fatal, Nix focused instead on tossing her first attacker through the nearest wall into one of the other officer quarters.

Fear for Ayli and anger at the (mostly) unprovoked attack made Nix’s fingers tingle with the old, bad lightning. 

But that wasn’t who she wanted to be.

The Force was with her whatever she choose, but that meant it was on her to choose to be better.

Being stabbed wasn’t fun. Especially not when the red field on the vibroblade turned out to be a shock charge that disabled all of Nix’s muscles and left her wide open for a follow up strike.

Ayli fared a little better, managing to dodge the neck strike entirely and avoid the kidney stab through Kelda’s intervention.

Ravas ensured that the followup strike Nix was about to be beheaded by never landed, tossing the assassin away into a pile with the one Nix had pushed.

And then Nix shot them.

It wasn’t exactly hard. Blasters are simple to use and quite accurate at short ranges. Typically they’re quite lethal too, but they do have one unusual drawback.

The Elders demonstrated that by parrying both bolts that Nix shot with their enhanced vibroblades.

Ravas deflected the bolts into the wall, but the point had been made. Random blaster fire was not going to win the battle.

Unless of course it was blaster fire from the opposition.

From around the left and right corners of the intersection two squads of Storm Troopers ran forward and took up firing positions.

Four on two odds had briefly shifted to four on four with Kelda and Ravas joining the fray, but that ratio had flipped against to be closer to twenty on four.

Nix did not like those odds.

Surrendering and playing for time later however was not an option.

The Storm Troopers opened fire and Nix felt Ravas hurl her into the same room the Elders had been tossed into. 

The Elders who were still quite active and getting to their feet.

Through the hole in the wall, Nix could see Ayli and Kelda deflecting the blaster fire with the Force but a lot of bolts were only being slowed for a moment. That was enough for Ayli to dodge them but Nix could see Ayli’s strength draining with each bolt she held back.

This wasn’t a fight they could win, and Nix wasn’t sure if it was one they could even survive.