Still tired out from the conference, so I’m going to tack on an extra vacation break to the earlier break. Since next week is Thanksgiving, new chapter will return on Sunday the 30th!

With work sending me off to my regular yearly conference this week, I’ll be talking a brief break – new Chapters will resume on Sunday November 16th!

“Have you seen the light?”

“Yeah, everybody did. It was kind of hard to miss.”

“Ugh, obviously I’m not talking about that. I mean the light everyone carries around.”

“Like candles? Sure, I’ve seen those.”

“Grrr. Not that kind of light. Here, look at that guy, what do you see?”

“He’s a dwarf. Looks kinda old I guess? Probably worked on a pipecrew today from how he’s dressed?”

“What’s he doing?”

“Walking with some guy? Or, no, he’s walking with a kid. A bugbear kid? Oh, wait, he’s helping him. Looks like the kid hurt his knee of something? Weird, a Dwarf helping a Bugbear, right? They must know each other. Or. Huh.”

“Yeah. Shouldn’t really be introducing themselves to each other if they’d ever met before, should they? What about her?”

“The old Goblin lady? She just…wait she’s serving food here? Where did she get…and why is she sharing it?”

“What about the people who are eating?”

“They…they’re arguing?”

“Arguing, but are they fighting?”

“No. This is weird. Why are they happy?”

“Because we’ve got each other. That’s what I mean by the light we carry. It’s that same feeling we got when we saw Sola for that moment there.”

“What feeling? I didn’t feel anything.”

“For just a moment, just a flash, didn’t it seem like the world maybe wasn’t made for us to be miserable? That maybe there’s some good things in it too, and when you looked around, you could see, just for a little bit maybe, that those good things were all of us, no matter how different we were? There’s something worth loving in everybody.”

– Hiin and Maygar, co-leaders of one of the rebellious groups in Mt Gloria the day they finally decided to step up.

Could I have had fame and adoration by simply introducing myself? Yes. Easily. Had I ever imagined being respected rather than overlooked? Of course, many times. Was being important rather than ‘too Little’ something I’d wished for every once in a while? I’d be lying if I said otherwise. Did that mean I had even the smallest, tiniest interest in any of that coming true as I sat in the philosophy circle?

Oh.

Hell.

No.

I would seriously rather be devoured by the beast again than face that.

Also, it would probably get everyone in the cavern killed.

So I did what I do best. I shut up and I stayed relatively but not perfectly still (perfectly still is for predators in ambush mode and people get justifiably uneasy about predators and ambushes). Predictably, that let the conversation continue on without my input or anyone paying particular attention to me.

What was amazing to me about that wasn’t that they overlooked me, or the ideas they’d seemed to develop about me (Brave? Fearless? Kind-hearted? Me?? Yeah, no), but how even when they were vigorously disagreeing with one another, there was a harmony between them.

It was like they could trust each other, like their ideas were important, but they all understood that the ideas weren’t more important than the real people around them. When the Ratkin lady who thought I was a new High Accessor talked about how people told her everything that was wrong with her was because of her weight, the others listened! And believed her!

Maybe that doesn’t sound rare or unusual, but in a city where food was always rationed, anyone who was overweight at all tended to be seen as a thief or worse, it definitely was. The truth though was that some people were just heavy, regardless of what they ate. And they were burned up or sent beyond the other portals just as often as the rest of us, maybe even more so.

The whole discourse between them went like that and was completely foreign to me. I expected people to leap out of their chairs and come to blows when instead they were evaluating what each other were saying and trying to understand not only what other people’s arguments were but why other people’s perspectives were what they were. Hell, most of them were even talking through figuring out what their own perspectives were.

I even started doing it!

Talking I mean.

It would have looked weird to stay silent, and I had plenty of experience too. I didn’t bring up any of the things I’d been going through lately of course, since that would have been an immediate giveaway for who I was, but as boring and mundane as my life had been, it was different enough from the others in the circle that I was able to speak about things they’d never experienced, or had experienced from a different angle.

As surprised as I was with myself  to be doing that, I was absolutely shocked when Zeph joined in too!

“I don’t think the gods laid traps for us in their scriptures,” she said. “I think we did that all on our own.”

“But what we just read contradicted itself within the same paragraph,” Harshant, still in the seat of main lecturer, said. “If it was from someone who did have direct contact with the divine and was speaking for them, why would it do that?”

“A few possibilities,” Zeph said. “First, it’s always possible for two contradictory things to both be true. Usually that means perspective matters in how they’re evaluated, or each represents a piece of something with multiple properties so while both points are ‘true’, they may be present to differing degrees and at differing times. They may also point to a third, or broader state. ‘Without light, we cannot see’ and ‘By the light we are blinded’ can both true as an example.”

“Sounds like what happens when you try to wrestle with a new idea that’s really big,” I said. “If the writer was having trouble wrapping her head around what the god was telling her then maybe ‘kindness in all things’ and ‘cast to their ruin those who would prey upon misfortune and strife’ are angles on a bigger idea that neither one can fully encompass.”

“I don’t know if I’ve ever had an idea that big,” Genuine, the Ratkin lady who had extolled my imagined, High Accessor-adjacent virtues said.

“I feel like we’re hearing ones like that from this book,” I said, carefully avoiding the various mind blowing experiences I could have cited as proof of my claim.

“If you’re full up on big ideas then, how about we get you some food?” Lucky asked, stepping up to stand behind Zeph and I.

I wasn’t hungry. We’d, or I’d, gobbled up the last of Helgon’s food back in the wasteland before we set after resting. Also, I didn’t technically need to eat, and certainly was not going to rush off to a meal of ‘Hungry Packets’. That wasn’t what Lucky was suggesting though. Lucky was smart and was giving me an easy out from the group without alerting them to who I was.

So I took it.

There was plenty of space to eat in the cave, but Lucky lead us out one of the passageways, down and around a long, winding and branching tunnel to another, much smaller  cleft in the rock.

The one was not lit by the combined faith of the people who gathered there. Someone had stolen a lantern and the oil needed to run it. The light seemed garish by comparison to the soft luminance we’d been enjoying but it did make it easy to see the group that had been assembled. Xalaria, Fulgrox, and Kalkit were there, the Crowkin once again perched on Fulgrox’s shoulder for a better view of the map on the tap in front of them. On the other side of the table, Lucky took a seat beside Smiles, the overly brave Ratkin I’d met last time I’d dropped in on Lucky, and Goptrop Oolgo, the Bugbear foreman who’d saved me by buying the fraction of a second Zep had needed to snag me out of the big melee with Vaingloth.

“The city is in very different shape than when we left it last,” Xalaria said. She pointed to the map which had several pins with different colored heads pushed into it.

“Different good or different bad?” I asked, unable to make any sense of what the pins might mean.

“Different unknown,” Fulgrox said. “We’ve been trying to work out what that will mean for your plan.”

“Which you have not told them about?” I asked, hope standing on eggshells within me.

“Your secret is safe still,” Kalkit said, which answered the question I was most concerned with.

I was trying to avoid anyone beyond the Blessed in the room and Zeph being aware of my plan was for what I felt was a particularly critical reason; anything spoken of in the city was something Vaingloth could possibly hear. 

My original discussion with my companions had been in Helgon’s sanctuary. Letting him hear it was a risk, but given that he’d be able to confirm some of the suspicions my plan was built on, and since he had no reason to want anything but misery for Vaingloth, he felt pretty safe to include in those who were ‘in the know’.

Lucky, and anyone who was stuck within Vaingloth’s sphere of influence, however could all too easily let slip clues to what I was going to do, and for there to be any chance of success, I had to keep a lot of things secret.

Generally, that’s the sign of a bad plan. If you make it a requirement that no one knows what you’re doing, then you are guaranteed to run into something horrible when it turns out that someone has discovered what you’re up to.

In Vaingloth’s case, he not only had an incredibly wide array of tools for discovering things, he was also more than capable of putting defenses in place that I couldn’t overcome.

But first he needed to know that those defenses were required.

“These are the areas that we think are the safest,” Lucky said, indicating a precious few spots on the map which had green pins stuck into them.

“So the areas with the red pins?” I asked, surprised at their distribution.

“Those are the areas he’s been reinforcing the most,” Smiles said. “We’re keeping track of those since we figured it meant something important is being hidden there.”

“Yes. A trap. Or several,” Xalaria said. “Just as we are bait for you, our enemy is seeking to bait you into striking here.”

She indicated a building in the High Quarter which was marked as “Staging Warehouse #3”. 

“But that’s not where the biggest or the smallest concentration of his forces are,” Oolgo said, pointing to two other spots.

“He knows you won’t move against those,” Xalaria said. “Or he’s not worried about the people who are foolish enough to try. At this location,” she pointed to the one with the highest troop concentration, “he will have deployed his most sophisticated surveillance measures. He expects an attack there based on stealth as you try to determine what is being so heavily guarded and neutralize it before it can be brought to bear on you.”

“Which was exactly what we had been discussing before you arrived,” Lucky said, shaking her head. 

I’d thought Xalaria had no skill at tactics or strategy. Listening to her though I think it was more the case that she simply didn’t like to bother with either of them. As a Blessed of Battle though she was clearly adept at them regardless of her preferences.

“At this building, you will find a mix of elite forces and a direct line to his attention should the unthinkable happen and one of us appear there,” Xalaria said, meaning one of the Blessed.

“Yes. Certainly ‘unthinkable’ by anyone.” Zeph didn’t fully voice her sentiment and her eye roll was more audible than visible but it drew a scowl from Xalaria nonetheless.

“As I was saying, an assault here will be met with overwhelming defenses focused on your capture. The goal will be to acquire as many potential prisoners as possible, both to derive information from as well as for other purposes.”

I didn’t need to ask what those ‘other purposes’ might be. Vaingloth was creative in showing his displeasure and I had to imagine that noone who was captured would suffer or die in exactly the same manner as anyone else.

“Then our options are what? We give up on fighting back?” Oolgo asked, the surly edge in his voice the same anger we all felt at the weakness we found in ourselves.

“Nope,” I said, cutting in before Xalaria could offer a sensible plan. “You’re going to attack them all.”

“You mean both the strongest and the weakest spots?” Smiles asked.

“No. I mean all of them. Every red pin on this map. Every orange one. Every blue one. This city is yours and we’re taking it back.”

“What about, you know, him?” Lucky asked, pointing at the gold pin in the castle.

“He’s mine. You take the city. I’ll deal with the monster at it’s center.”

Storytreader will be on summer vacation starting today! New chapters will be back on July 17th!

Stay cool and see ya then!

“A night descends which shall never pass. The sun has fallen, devoured by the nameless beast, and with its last light faded, no more gods stand to bring us to salvation. I write this for the uncaring void and the empty wastes which will remain as we, the peoples of this mighty world descend into madness, and barbarism, and, at the last, the silence of unquiet death.”

– Grigo Weltham, recording an oracular vision on the day of the last sun fall. Cited in the following decades as how very wrong seers are capable of being.

The greatest city in the world was full of rats, and I was one of them. We huddled down in the unwanted places, snatched up the scraps people let go, and tried our very best to draw absolutely no attention to ourselves.

Predictably, that did not always go so well for us.

“Little! Move your ass! The patrol just got Pibby.”

I wasn’t overly fond of hearing my own name called out. In part because “Little” was annoying accurate, and in part because I really didn’t like the idea of the City Patrollers knowing that I even existed much less that there was someone with my name that they’d missed. There were a lot of things that pissed off the Patrollers but high up on the list was anything that reminded them what a bunch of screwups they were, like, for example, the fact that they were consistently failing to capture one tiny little Ratkin girl who had a habit of making acquaintances with other, more idiotic Ratkins.

Pibby wasn’t someone I’d known long. Which was true of most of the others who were scurrying down the alley with me. Unlike us though, Pibby hadn’t been clever or lucky enough to dive into the alley when the Patrol’s wagon came rumbling around the bend, and as a result, Pibby was going to be volunteered for the Holy and Sacred duty of taking part in the Kindling Tithe.

He didn’t deserve that.

None of us did.

No one at all did.

But that’s what the Lords said was needed. Sacrifices had to be made in order to keep the flame portals open. Without them we’d have no warmth and no light, which would mean no food either.

People like food. I know this because I’m people, and I like food a lot.

As it turns out, a lot of other people only disagree with the part where I get to be a ‘people’. That’s not unique to Ratkin. Lots of people who aren’t favored by the Neoteric Lords don’t get to count as ‘people’. We’re still useful as kindling. We burn just fine after all. And we can be put to work for a lot of different things which, if we’re lucky, is enough to get the Patrollers to look elsewhere when they go out to round up the month’s Kindling supply.

Pibby hadn’t been that lucky though, and as I ran so hard it felt like my lungs were going to explode, I had all kinds of visions that I wasn’t going to be that lucky either.

If we’d actually been rats, getting away would have been a lot easier. Vaingloth, our local Neoteric Lord, hadn’t built his city from the ground up. Like all of them, as far as I knew, he’d taken control of one of the big cities of the old world and spared it with the portals he’d been able to open when the sun got eaten up, which meant there were plenty of spots in it someone that was actually rat-sized could have used to escape. I’m sure the great and glorious Neoteric Lord would have preferred otherwise but saving the world hadn’t allowed for much time for architectural renewal in the process.

To be fair, ‘saving the world’ does sound like a big deal, and I’d have to guess it was since I don’t think anyone outside the Lord’s cities managed to, you know, survive. The cost of that survival was everyone who could be packed into the city, was. Then everyone had to deal with the fact that we’re all completely dependent on the Lord’s whim to continue surviving. If he says we’ve got to burn up a bunch of people each month to keep the portals open, then in they go.

“It’s a great honor”, “They only use the ones who deserve it, the criminals, and that sort”, “I think it cleans up the streets nicely”, “Well, we’ve got too many people as it is, of course we need to thin things out a bit”.  

It’s really amazing the kind of things you can overhear when, with a bit of an oversized cloak, you can be mistaken for a human kid who’s just hanging around. Not that it was just the humans who thought that. Or even all of them. Plenty of humans got tossed in as Kindling too, right along with Gobs, and Avians, and anyone else the Patrol decided looked annoying and/or flammable.

I liked to tell myself that as a little Ratkin girl, there wasn’t enough of me to be worth burning. I liked to tell myself I was too clever to get caught too. Too easily overlooked. Not worth anyone’s time really. And too good at keeping my head down and my nose out of trouble.  I liked to tell myself a lot of things.

And, I maintain, I am clever.

When I saw the others I’d been scavenging with take a hard right and head down one of the cross streets, I knew they were dead. The street was too wide. There were definitely going to be more Patrollers there.

And I was right. 

I had a better option though. A thin little gap between two houses on the left that only someone my size could manage.

I threw myself into it and learned, yet again, that sometimes, being clever is not even close to enough.

The patroller who caught me was human. Big guy. Couldn’t fit in the gap I was squirming through if you held a sword to this throat.

His arm though? Yeah, that fit in just fine. He snagged me with a single grab and yoinked me out of the illusion of safety with barely any effort at all.

If I had more ratlike features I could have bitten him with terrible rodent teeth, or scratched him with noxious claws. 

Or something.

Or anything.

All I’ve got are some good ears, whiskers, and a nose that works a bit better than most folks. 

I sagged and went limp. The dead weight of a body is supposed to be hard to lift.

I wasn’t.

“Hah! Got it,” he said, holding me up by one arm to show to the other patroller.

“Sure you didn’t leave some of it back there?” the other one said. “Gonna need three more like that it just to count for one real person.”

I didn’t bother to stir. I wasn’t really that little, but it didn’t matter. There wasn’t exactly a minimum size for the ‘Holy Offerings’.

“Maybe they’ll call it a bonus,” the one that was holding me said. “You know, a little extra for the portal, to keep it happy.”

I was pretty sure the portals didn’t have a ‘happy’ setting, but what did I know? I was just kindling right?

Well not just kindling.

I was clever kindling.

Yeah, I was still hanging onto that despite all the evidence to the contrary. When you’ve got the fighting capacity of an over boiled noodle, you hang onto whatever you can.

Step one of being clever was lulling them into a false sense of superiority. That was incredibly easy since they were superior to me in pretty much every physical attribute.

Step two was not letting them put me into a spot I couldn’t escape from. Like, for example, the back of one of their collection wagons.

“They caught you too?” Pibby said as they swung the wagon door closed after unceremoniously chucking me inside.

“All part of the plan,” I lied to him. I didn’t mind when he shot me a skeptical look in response. I wasn’t try to make Pibby feel better. I was trying to make myself feel better.

I really didn’t want to burn.

Not like everyone else had. 

This city didn’t deserve the warmth it would get from burning me. 

The patrollers moved off to finish corralling the others, so I tried kicking the door, on the off chance that they’d forgotten to put the lock on it.

Patrollers are idiots, but patrollers who let people just walk out their collection wagons wind up on the kindling pile quickly enough that the ranks are not quite idiotic enough to make grandiose mistakes when I really need them to.

“We can’t get out of here like that,” Pibby said. As though that wasn’t staggeringly obvious.

“Of course not,” I said, imaging that I really did have a plan and everything I did was in service to it.

My “go to” strategy was hiding. When that failed, my backup was running. When that failed, I was supposed to hide some more. It wasn’t a wide repertoire of options, but it had served me well right up until it hadn’t.

Which meant it was time to try something new.

Something new that my fear drenched brain was going to dredge up right away.

Any time really.

But sooner would be better.

Since I would be on fire later.

Not a helpful thought I have to confess, and it was asking a lot for my brain to function at all under the circumstances, but I didn’t really have much else to work with. Just an empty wagon and no tools in sight.

My eyes drifted over to Pibby.

“Want to try something really stupid?” I asked.

“What could be stupid at this point?” he asked in return, so I explained my idea to him.

And he agreed it was stupid.

But he also agreed to try it.

It only took a few minutes to take our shot, since the patrollers wrapped up their hunt early.

“Hey, where’s the other one?” the patroller who’d grabbed me said when he peeked back into sealed cage we were in.

“She wiggled through the bars and took off,” Pibby said, sitting carefully so that I was able to hide completely behind him by curling up into a small ball.

Yes, my big plan was to go back to hiding.

But I was going to try something new too.

“Like hell she did,” the patroller said, at least not referring to me as ‘it’ anymore, which was nice. “Get out here.”

It was a stupid plan. Clever people come up with good plans, and this was a stupid one.

But it worked.

The patroller threw off the lock and reached in to drag Pibby out into the meager light of the aether torches they carried and I clung to Pibby’s back to stay obscured until the last second.

Whatever the patroller had been expecting, it hadn’t been for me to roll around Pibby and go for one of the knives on his belt.

He swung at me with his torch, which did not feel good, and went to grab the sword he was carrying.

I can understand being worried about losing a sword, but he was also carrying a dagger, and those not only fit my hands a lot better, but, as it turns out, they’re much easier to use when you’re inches away from someone.

In the stories they tell in taverns and at festivals, the brave fighter always seems to dispatch their foe with one terrible and/or swift blow.

I think the patroller took something like thirty or forty.

That didn’t take long.

I’m small but I’m not slow.

Not being slow was also what got me running again.

To my credit, I feel, I had the presence of mind to drag Pibby with me. He didn’t want to be dragged along. Which was fine. Following a Ratkin girl who was covered in patroller blood and was probably not going to live long enough to be fed to the fires was not the best company to keep. I at least dragged him away from the wagons though before the other patrollers made it the cart to see what I’d done. 

With precious few options to work with, I hurled us into an a building someone had forgotten to buy a door for.

Pibby, for reasons I can’t begin to fathom, went up, scaling the staircase in front of us three steps at a time. Maybe he planned to hop from rooftop to rooftop? Maybe he planned to spontaneously discover an aptitude for flight magics? Whatever his plan was I wished him luck with it and went with what I knew.

Down.

Lots of buildings have access to the old sewer tunnels, and I’d spent enough time in them that I was sure I could get lost better than the patrollers would be able to find me.

Not that they were ever going to stop looking.

But that was a problem for a Little who’d found a new hiding place and could manage to put at least two thoughts together in a row.

My luck, being what it was, left me in the building’s sub-basement running my hands along a wall which lacked the normal hatchway into the sewer tunnels. It was pitch dark of course. Even decent places had limits on how much light they were afforded from the Lord’s precious hoard. I knew what the hatchways felt like though, and working in the dark wasn’t exactly new to me.

Frustrated, I punched the wall, as though I could smash through it with all of my amazing brute force.

Punching walls is stupid, just in case that wasn’t clear.

My fist hurt enough that I stamped my foot and bit back a scream of frustration and pain. 

Also not the brightest move since making any sound to attract the patrollers was a terrible idea under the circumstances.

In this particularly case though, it was a spectacularly bad idea since the floor I was standing on was not, it turned out, especially sound.

I plummeted through the boards as they gave way beneath me and sent me tumbling down a slanting shaft into sheer darkness.

Falling was disorienting, but I knew I’d dropped below the levels of the old sewers and was still going for a while before I came to a hard stop against something that thankfully was neither ‘spikey’, ‘stabby’, nor ‘impaling’. 

Feeling around, I found roots. Thick, old roots. I expected them to crumble away at my touch since most of the old trees had withered and died long before I was born, but these were supple? And warm?

Squirming a hand in between them, I managed to part a few.

And my world shattered.

Down, lost in the depths, rays of golden light unseen in the world for a century flooded through the vines.

The Force gave Alyi supernaturally quick reflexes. Few Twi’leks had ever moved like she did, and even among Twi’lek Force Users her response times to danger was phenomenal. It was the part of using the Force she’d gravitated too the most naturally. The part she saw, in time, that she’d been relying on for far longer than she’d been aware of the Force’s existence as a real phenomena. The part that had saved her life countless times, and was currently the only thing buying her the few precious seconds of life she was experiencing.

But it wasn’t enough to buy her safety, or her survival.

Kelda was helping her. Deflecting blaster bolts as they poured down the hallway and trying, unsuccessfully to push their attackers away.

Normally that would have been enough to decide any battle. Regular storm troopers wouldn’t have withstood Kelda’s first telekinetic shove. Rattling them into the walls would have been more than enough to leave them addled and disoriented so that, worst case, Ayli could shoot them all (or run away, but Ayli hated running from Imperials).

These storm troopers were unaffected by Kelda’s Force techniques though.

No.

Not unaffected.

Protected from them.

Ayli had sensed that the Elders were doing something, taking a hard to discern action against Nix and herself. Apparently the Silent Enclave had developed a technique to shied and empower others with the Force.

It was an ability that was blatantly at odds with their espoused tenants, but discovering that the Enclave’s Elders were complete hypocrites was like discovering that it was a bit hard to breathe in space – unpleasant but far from surprising.

“Ayli!” Nix yelled from the cover of the room Ravas had tossed her into. 

Ayli couldn’t look to see what Nix was doing, but the Force told her that Nix was reaching out to deflect the blaster bolts too.

Which helped.

With Nix turning some of the fire aside, Ayli was able to start weaving a few inches closer to the shelter of the room Nix was in.

But the room Nix was in was not a shelter.

Ayli felt, more than saw, the attacks aimed at Nix. Two of the Elders had been tossed into that room first.

They weren’t in the best of the shapes, but neither was Nix.

Ayli couldn’t help herself.

She flung her arm sideway to shove one of the attackers away from Nix.

And promptly caught a blaster bolt with her forearm.

For a moment, adrenaline kept her going. She didn’t feel the pain. She wasn’t distracted. She was able to keep deflecting the other blaster fire that was coming at her.

But only for a moment.

As soon as the burning agony from her arm registered, her concentration was shattered.

She survived for another moment thanks to Kelda’s effort.

And the moment after that thanks to Nix pulling her to safety, though that cost her another hit from a bolt to her right lekku which was so instantly painful that she blacked out.

Unconsciousness lasted seconds but those seconds were long enough to shift the battlefield.

When Ayli blinked the pain out of her eyes, she found Nix and Ravas both holding fully energized Rexnarian Vibroblades. They were nasty weapons and the blood that coated them said they’d been put to nasty work.

The two Elders were dying. Mortally wounded from a number of rather brutal knife strikes. With medical attention they could probably be saved, but bacta tanks weren’t exactly plentiful in the middle of a firefight.

“We can get you out of here,” Ravas said, as a wave of suffocating pressure landed on all of them.

The knife Ravas had been holding dropped to the floor as she and Kelda faded and winked out of sight.

“That’s the other Elders,” Nix said, trying to catch her breath. “We’re cut off.”

“The storm troopers are advancing,” Ayli said, calling the fallen vibro blade to her hand. She still had her blast rifle but having options was always a good idea.

“Can you stand?” Nix asked.

Ayli tested her leg and stifled a scream.

“No. Which means I get to stay here,” she said. It was more than the Rebellion’s standard procedure. It was their only path to victory.

“We both do,” Nix said. “I don’t have any feeling in my left leg yet. Stupid stun blades.”

“We can’t defend ourselves here,” Ayli said.

“Yeah.”

“I’m not going to let them kill you,” Ayli said, desperation waking her Dark Side even more than the pain had.

“We’re not going to die here,” Nix said, shaking her head. “I don’t know how, but we’re going to…oh.”

Without warning she threw herself over Ayli, forming a human shield against the blastwave which ripped the hull wide open.

Hull breeches were not, at any point in Ayli’s life, good things. 

Any point up until that precise instant.

She felt the mass of storm troopers, Force protected though they were go spinning out into the void and the pounding of automatic blaster fire quieted.

The rush of air of which had slammed her and Nix against the remains of the wall to the destroyed hallway continued to gush out. Star Destroyers are large enough that even multi-room holes in their superstructure are nowhere near capable of venting a meaningful amount of their atmosphere. 

A weird whine went through the deck beneath her and the torrent of air slowed leaving them happily able to breath rather than enjoying the embrace of the hard vacuum like the Storm Troopers were.

“The deflectors modulated for atmosphere. Wow the pressure seals must be wrecked if the systems defaulted back to that,” Nix said, gazing out as though she could see the innards of the ship and was watching them work.

“What was that? Someone’s engaged the flagship?” Ayli asked, her senses scrambled as much from the explosion as from the pain wracking her body.

Head wounds uniformly suck among all of the galaxies many species. Lekku wounds were far worse though.

Or at least Ayli was prepared to testify to that fact under her current circumstances.

“Not just someone,” Nix said, a delighted smile lighting her face like a sunrise.

“There’s no airlock left, so I’m docking here. Anyone shoots at me and I’ll be firing another proton torpedo at you.” Goldie’s voice ran out from an external speaker system loud enough to rattle the durasteel deck.

Before Ayli could question the arrival, she heard the crash of metal on metal and felt a hard jolt go through the deck. Goldie’s idea of ‘docking’ was a trifle more destructive than most and Ayli was beyond certain that the threat to unleash more proton torpedoes at point blank range had been made in ernest. Fortunately that did not prove to be necessary since the enemy combatants who would have provoked such an action were in the process of drifting away into the void.

“Found them, Nulo, bring the medkits,” Lasha the Horizon Knight said, drifting into view in one of the EVA suits from Goldie’s stores.

“Are they hurt?” Goldie asked, her mechanical voice the precise sort of emotionless to serve as a prelude to cataclysmic levels of violence.

“We’re fine. Slightly shot up, but your timing was impeccable,” Nix said. “Tend to Ayli first. I just need a stim for my leg.”

Lasha took one look at both of them, closed her eyes and waved her hand back and forth.

“You need wound sealant, and she needs burn care,” Lasha said, while Nulo was on hand to provide before Lasha could finish speaking.

Being tended to by a medic wasn’t a new experience for Ayli, though being tended to by one with Force sensitivity was new. Lasha didn’t need to ask where things hurt, or if the treatment was sufficient. Also, Lasha had apparently brought along some very high end medical products, because the anesthetics had brought both her arm and lekku pain down to an annoying ache and Ayli could almost swear that her skin had started regrowing already.

That the medical supplies had the same branding as the ones from Goldie’s stores didn’t make a lot of sense, but Ayli had more important things to worry about.

“How did you find us?” she asked, amazed that the Elder’s cloaking field hadn’t made that impossible.

“Deduction,” Nulo said, as she held her hands against Nix’s side where a stab wound had left her bloody and bruised.

Which also didn’t make sense. Stab wounds and bruises are produced by very different sorts of trauma.

“I knew you’d be on the flagship since that had to be where the Elder’s ran,” Goldie said over the comm that Lasha was carrying. “From there I just had to scan for your entry point and then look for heat signatures.”

Muffvok whuffed a few times.

“We helped from there,” Nulo translated. “Its really hard to sense anything here, but the pain from these wounds stood out.”

“If you can move them, we should get out of here,” Goldie said. “Aunt Sali is keeping them busy but I’m not exactly in a good spot if any of the Tie’s they’ve scrambled come to check out what’s happening.”

‘You need to take off, now,” Nix said.

“Nope. Not leaving without you,” Goldie said, her adamant tone the exact same one Nix was using.

“We can’t leave. We had to stop the Elders now,” Nix said.

“You’re not in much shape for that,” Lasha said.

“We’re doing to have to be,” Ayli said, rising to her feet and finding her leg shockingly firm and supportive. All she had to do was limp a little and she was fine.

“What you have to do is get to safety, which is not here,” Goldie said. “Let Aunt Sali blow up the Elders.”

“They have Kelda and Ravas,” Nix said.

Goldie was silent for a long moment.

“Bantha poodu,” she said at last. 

“Yeah. It is,” Nix said. “I’m not sending you away though. We need you. Just not right here.”

“Where do you need me then?” Goldie asked.

“If we’re not onboard, you can unlock your thrusters and hit maneuvers than even the inertial dampeners won’t hold up to, right?”

“Yes?” Goldie asked hesitantly.

“I need you to crash a Tie-Fighter into the docking bay. More than one if you can.”

“That’s going to make getting you off this ship a bit difficult,” Goldie said. “Not impossible, but why do you want me to block off your primary escape route.”

“Because I don’t want the Elders escaping either.”

“And then I come get you?”

“Not quite. There’s one more task I’ll have for you.”

“Which is?”

“I don’t know yet. Just get close enough to comm us after you take out the docking bay. The pieces will be in place by then.”

“That sounds terrible. I hate this plan.”

“You’re the only one who can make it work.” Nix’s words were fond. And manipulative. And honest. It was probably the combination of the three that won Goldie over, though Ayli suspected that getting to destroy a docking bay was a serious enticement all on its own.

“And what are you going to be doing?” Goldie asked.

“Rescuing Kelda and Ravas,” Ayli said.

“And putting a stop to the Elders and their Imperial backers,” Nix said. “I think the Force is fed up with all of their nonsense.”

“This is outside our usual purview, but I’d have to agree,” Lasha said. “Even with whatever this horrible thing they’re doing to the Force, I can still feel the pull to finish this here and now.”

“I would object and say you don’t have to, but we could really use your help,” Nix said.

“They can empower regular soldiers,” Ayli said. “And the Imperials are never shy about expending legions of Storm Troopers, especially if they feel personally threatened.”

“That sounds difficult to fight against,” Lasha said. “Which means you will likely need these.”

From her sack, she draw forth a pair of hilts and handed Ayli and Nix the lightsabers they’d left on Goldie when a stray thought months earlier had told them it might be a good idea.

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.

Dropping out of hyperspace to find an armada waiting with weapon systems powering up wasn’t as alarming as it should have been. In part that was because Ayli could feel the Force guiding her and knew that she wasn’t about to be reduced to space dust in the next few moments. More than that however was the fact that the make and model of the armada’s warship woke her slumbering rage.

“Got multiple targeting locks from, well it looks like everyone over there,” Nix said.

Evasive maneuvers were called for, but Ayli kept their shuttle flying straight and true towards the fleeing Enclave racing yacht.

“Comm alert coming in too,” Nix said. “Do you want to take it or shall I?”

“Go ahead.” Ayli was too focused on closing the distance with the much faster yacht and staying alert for the targeting locks turning into confirmed attacks to feel like dealing with the people she knew were on the ships in front of her.

“Zardewill Consortium shuttle, you have violated an Imperial control sphere. Power down your weapon systems and prepare to be boarded.” The speaker’s crisp core world accent left Ayli reaching for the Force to strangle him at range.

That wasn’t going to solve their problems though. Killing one Ex-Imperial Officer was good but killing an entire armada of them was always better.

“I’m going to need to see some Imperial Security codes. We’ve run across a lot of pirates claiming Imperial navy privileges.” Nix wasn’t speaking the lingo a professional navigator would have used but it didn’t matter. Pushing back against the authority they’d never deserved to have and was entirely illusionary was an effective tactic for inciting anger no matter what words were used.

“You will stand down now,” the faux-Imperial officer commanded. “Any attempt to flee the system will result in your immediate destruction.”

Ayli brought the hyperdrive up to full power for an instantaneous jump and held it there for a moment, giving the armada a chance to fully lock onto them and make the decision to blow them out of the sky before they got away.

In the instant that the lead ship fired, she threw the shuttle into hyperspace and brought it right back out.

Nix wasn’t going to be happy with that move. Rapid jumps into hyperspace were an astrogation nightmare and, worse, played havoc on the hyperdrive. Even with the inhumanely smooth skip the Force had let her pull off, the drive was going to need replacement parts soon, and would start behaving unpredictably after a few more jumps, which was never ideal.

“I’m sorry, where you threatening us instead of providing legitimate credentials?” Nix’s communique was not designed to deescalate the situation, which was probably further proof she wasn’t a Jedi, and it made Ayli love her all the more for it.

“Zardewill Shuttle, you will stand down this instant!”

“Random pirate armada, you are harboring a group of elite criminals,” Nix said. “They just docked with your flagship in a Incomm Starburst class racing yacht. If you’d care to send them back out so that we can return them to the justice they fled from, we…well I guess we won’t be leaving you alone even if you do that.” Nix looked over al Ayli who nodded in response.

She’d spent so many horrible years, all of her childhood really, fighting Imperial Forces. Leaving this remnant of the Imperial navy to regroup, rebuild, and become a new menace to the galaxy was simply not going to happen.

“Yeah, you should probably surrender now,” Nix said. “You won’t like what happens if you test us.”

The targeting systems on most of the armada had locked onto their shuttle again, but the lightspeed skip had given them enough distance that a fair portion of the armada’s weaponry was ineffective. The ones which could reach them were still a problem, but not one that Ayli was overly concerned with.

At least not until the Force went abruptly silent around her.

“Oh. That was a mistake.” Nix had closed her eyes. Nix was not referring to what she’d said. Nix was concentrating. And whispering to the Force.

Ayli was only somewhat aware of that however. Facing an armada of ships firing at her, if even from their maximum range still demanded more or less the entirety of her natural piloting talent, hard won experience, and battle honed attention.

“Ah. There we go,” Nix said, her tone perfectly calm. “Imperial pretenders, check your sensor. Your new guests are disembarking now in your main dock. There are eleven of them. Watch the one in the lead. See how he’s suffering from fairly severe burns? I did that to him. Because he displeased me. He has now displeased me for a second time.”

Nix tightened her hand into a fist and gave a small snarl.

“In case your curious where he just went, the flight path should be obvious from the third starboard camera in your docking bay, but I would recommend turning on your external sensors. He’ll be out of tractor beam range shortly and if you wait a moment you might even catch the moment when he pops like a blood balloon.”

People exposed to hard vacuum did not, in fact, pop like balloons of any sort, but a remarkable number of people were unaware of that fact and it made for a satisfying visual image in the case of Primus Dolon.

An easily circumvented outburst of revenge aside, Nix’s assault also had the benefit of casting the Enclave’s Elders into chaos, which shredded the field of silence they’d wrapped Ayli’s shuttle in.

“Jedi scum!” The wanna-be Imperial’s voice held as much disgust as fear but Ayli could tell that fear was easily winning the contest between the two. “You may have escaped the Emperor’s justice so far, but we will destroy you in his name!”

Nix looked over at Ayli is disbelief.

“I just threw someone out of a docking bay and slapped the hell out of a bunch of old people? In what galaxy is that something a Jedi would do?” 

“I don’t think they’re up on the fine points of religious doctrine among the different Force traditions,” Ayli said, diving into the path of a turbo laser battery a fraction of a second before the plasma bolts could reach them.

Closing the distance with the armada was neither a safe, nor a smart play, but it did ensure that the Imperials…

Ayli had to stop that thought.

These weren’t Imperials.

Not anymore, if they ever really had been.

What was more likely was that they were the newest generation of pathetic losers to be recruited by the fading remains of an Imperial navy task group which the Alliance hadn’t been able to track down. There might be a few of the senior staff who’d once served as actual Imperial officers, but the rank and file were usually drawn from the sort of people who’d gleeful serve a fascist regime if only they could find one to join which would justify their hatred and small mindedness.

That the galaxy had no shortage of such people during the Emperor’s reign, and was still abundant with them was balanced in Ayli’s heart only by all the people she’d known who were so much better than that.

Giving up on the galaxy was easy, and she suspected that a lot of ‘Imperial soldiers’ in the armada’s ships had done just that. She couldn’t though. Not when there were so many people in it still worth fighting for.

As she piloted the shuttle into a deadly hail of fire therefor, she banished the idea that she was still fighting Imperials. The people in front of her weren’t the boogeymen of her childhood. They didn’t hold unconquerable power and control over everything in the galaxy.

Not that the Imperials ever had either, but as a child up against a machine which had seized control over ever facet of life she could see, it had been hard to imagine what path could possibly lead them to victory.

As an adult, starting down an enemy that was, in an immediate and personal sense, every bit as overwhelming as the Galactic Empire had been, she still couldn’t see a path to victory.

But she saw more than ever the need to fight for one.

“You seem to be having some problems with destroying us. It’s probably because Imperial maintenance standards sucked,” Nix said. “I mean, you know that the galaxy moved away from them like almost immediately after you all lost to the Alliance right? The last Imperial shipyard was even decommissioned two standards ago. And it wasn’t that people minded that it had been churning out stuff for the losing side. Business’s just want to make money and your stuff? It sucked. Gotta swap out all the Imperial trash that people loaded their ships up with because it was cheap, when you think they’d realize that the Empire never gave a flying bantha poodu about quality or safety. Just look at the Tie Fighter design, right? Worst safety record of any single man fighter in galactic history. Oh, you’ve got some! That’s nice.”

Ayli was not at all surprised to see a flight of Tie’s launch from one of the nearest ships. Capital ship weapons were great in a space battle but demonstrably terrible at dealing with small ships.

Tie-Fighters, on the other hand were excellent in dogfights. Potentially deathtraps for their pilots, as Nix had pointed out, since they lacked the shielding of a better built fighter like an X-Wing, but nimble and deadly nonetheless.

Which made it all the more amusing when they started plowing into one another in the tight formation they were flying in.

Ayli glanced over to see Nix deep in concentration again.

Most shuttles were not armed. Corporate shuttles in particular often flew to destinations where combat vessels were not allowed to land out of safety concerns.

Since they’d borrowed the ship from Sali though, armaments were not a concern. There might be a pirate out there who would fly around in an unarmed shuttle, but if so, Sali had probably already shot them down.

Which meant Ayli got to dogfight.

With a twenty to one advantage, it should have been a short and unpleasant experience.

With the Force directing her where to go and when to shoot though, the odds were not at all what they appeared to be.

Especially since the pilots who were most in position to cause they problem found control switches and triggers flipping or freezing up exactly when they didn’t want them too.

“Well that was fun,” Nix said as the last two Tie-Fighters plowed into each other leaving the galaxy none the worse for their loss. “Do you have anymore toys we can break?”

Angry static answered her question and from the flagship, Ayli could feel plumes of unbridled rage rising.

 “Ah, you only had a few of those. That’s a shame. Probably hard to keep your gear in working order when it was so badly made in the first place,” Nix said. “So are you going to  return our prisoners to us then?” Nix asked, the hint of amusement in her voice calculated to even further enrage everyone who could hear it aside from Ayli who found it delightful.

“You failed to kill me, you witch!” Primus Dolon said, cutting into the line.

“I didn’t fail at anything,” Nix said. “You’re alive because I want you alive. For now.”

“Lies. You will die and you will never see who killed you,” Dolon said.

“Pretty sure I will,” Nix said, and focused again.

On the open comm, Ayli heard a scream of pain and surprise, though oddly not Dolon’s.

“I’m guessing you were thinking to send Elder Korgruv as your first assassin?” Nix asked. “You might want to get him to a bacta tank, like right now. That broken plasma conduit he was standing near didn’t really make him any uglier but there’s probably time to save his eyes if he gets treatment right away.”

“Nix, I think you broke them,” Ayli said. “The armada’s powering up their hyperdrives to jump out of here.”

“Oh. That’s not going to be a problem,” Nix said as a second armada slammed out of hyperspace and a gravity well enveloped a fair portion of the solar system.

“Did someone order an interdictor?” Sali asked, joining the comms.

Went to a Con this weekend and forgot to put up a post yesterday that the Con ate up all my writing time – next chapter should be on Tuesday as usual though!