Gaylen sat in the pilot’s chair, tilted just far enough back that he could still keep an eye on the instruments. The Addax didn’t have cameras that could show detail from orbit, but a rough feed was all it took to see that the away team had entered, and no major disaster had struck.

So now it was just more waiting.

He toyed with an old dinota, waving a finger along and above the hand-sized device. He’d never make it on stage, but felt he’d learned to keep a pretty decent tune going. And more importantly, it was quite relaxing.

He was waving out a half-remembered commercial jingle when the floor hatch opened.

“Permission to enter, Captain?” Jaquan said in a playfully formal tone.

“Second officer on the bridge!” Gaylen replied in a similar manner, and Jaquan climbed all the way up.

“I take it the engine is doing fine?” Gaylen said.

“Yes, I left Herdis to keep an eye on things. She looked rather like I’d handed her a live bomb or something.”

The man smiled.

“It was pretty funny.”

He looked at the feed from down below.

“So, they’re in?”

“Yeah. Let’s hope they emerge, because I don’t know what kind of rescue we can possibly launch.”

Gaylen slid the dinota into his pocket, then gripped his head and let out the kind of frustrated groan he wouldn’t let the rest of the crew witness.

“This is not an auspicious start, is it? There was the possibility of a merc crew coming after us. Now it’s probably a fact, and we have Eldin and his petty band. One pirate attack followed by a void loony, and now we’re messing around on a null-world.”

“Well... we’re not. We have a crew for that now.”

“Hah. Yeah. It feels a lot different from the other side of things, doesn’t it?” Gaylen said.

“It does,” Jaquan said with a smile, then sat in the copilot’s chair. “Look...”

Gaylen saw incoming sincerity and braced for it.

“Look, there is never a point where one has won at life.”

“I know that.”

“I know you know that. But I feel you sometimes get caught up in the idea of beating the universe. Or life. Whatever.”

Gaylen digested this for a moment, and thought back on that conversation with Kiris after the derelict.

“I’ll consider a victory in all of this to just be able to lead a more peaceful life from now on,” he then said.

Old regrets came at him yet again, stubbornly scratching away at his inner calluses.

“I always just wanted a regular life,” he said, gazing down into his lap. “At this point I’d be happy for the closest thing I can get.”

He tapped the control panel with his foot.

“A bit of freedom.”

He tilted the chair back up, and felt a little passion return at the thought of it all.

“Just one last job for a psychopath. One. Then we can carry on with our lives. Then we’ll be free from the past.”

Jaquan nodded approvingly.

Those Blue Strike mercs would cease to be an issue once that canister was out of their reach. And Eldin and the Brecke Browns would burn themselves out. It was Lanson that Gaylen worried about. Lanson, with his long reach and love of power tools.

“We just need to finish this thing.”

# # #

“Did I just hear another one coming loose?” Ayna asked around her shoulder.

“You did,” Kiris told her. “That’s three out of four.”

“And they’re all good?”

“I don’t have the equipment needed to state that as a fact. But on a surface level... yes, the coils look fine.”

“Good.”

Ayna looked to the left, down the hallway and at the chemical glowstick they’d dropped for Kiris’s benefit, and to mark the way back.

Almost out of here.

The squeaks of Kiris’s tinkering continued, as she carefully worked the fasteners around the final coil. Ayna continued her watch. The distant glow of that stick, as well as the ones Kiris had lit in the engine room, was all Ayna needed for perfect clarity. But a big ship had lots of turns and doorways and corridors. There were plenty of spots danger could spring from.

At least Kiris had agreed to hand over the gun while Ayna guarded the only open door. In case of danger, she would actually have time for a second shot.

“I just hope Bers doesn’t wander off.”

Halfway to the engine room they’d come upon the scene of a deeply penetrating hit from that battle, and the stairs they needed had been utterly destroyed. Rather than wander about in search of another route they’d just agreed that Bers would wait there to pull them back up.

“He doesn’t strike me as duplicitous,” Kiris told her. “Or stupid, even. Just different.”

“Is that your official Chanei verdict?”

“If you want to call it that.”

Ayna automatically suppressed a smile.

“I know people tend to say this about Dwyyk, but: It’s simply eerie how much you notice.”

“It’s just observation,” came Kiris’s voice through the doorway. “Collating the data from all the little ticks and clues.”

She was silent for a moment.

“Us subtypes were designed for a purpose. Or so they say.”

Ayna shrugged, although the Chanei couldn’t see it.

“Those Pure Blood bastards insist Dwyyk were created by the First Civilisation to be assassins and spies. And not to... you know... adapt to a very dangerous world.”

“Well, it’s a bit different for us,” Kiris said.

Ayna cringed a bit.

“Chanei, the...”

She hated that her tongue caught in this moment.

“Sex pets?” Kiris said.

“I was... going to say... concubines.”

How did I end up in this spot?

“The Kingdom’s nobility insists we were engineered by the First Civilisation to be their slaves,” Kiris said in a dull tone. “That freedom is unnatural to us.”

“They would say that,” Ayna said.

Stolen story; please report.

“Of course they would. They wouldn’t want to lose beautiful obedient lovers and status symbols.”

Kiris paused for a short while, and Ayna just let her.

“Of course... they might be right. About the Chanei being designed to be servile. I mean, who is to say those ancient bastards didn’t? We probably were always intended to be slaves, and who is to say the Firsts weren’t thorough?”

“Wellll...” Ayna dragged her reply out, feeling out of her depth. “Some of you do run away. Such as yourself. So I’d say that disproves it right there.”

She used the silence as an excuse to throw in a question.

“How did you escape, anyway? I hear the Kingdom monitors every flight.”

“It seems to get harder every year. But the Chainbreakers carried out an operation on my planet. They quietly approached a few of us and offered to smuggle us away. I tried to get my sister to come too, but... she’d managed to make herself the favourite of some lordling. She didn’t want to throw it away for the sake of an entirely unknown future.”

Ayna thought of her siblings back home, and the idea of being cut off from them for all time.

“I’m pretty sure she felt I was being foolish. And on a purely pragmatic level she was probably the wiser. You know, given where we are.”

“At least things aren’t dull.”

“No, things certainly aren’t dull. But...”

“But what?” Ayna asked after another brief silence.

“But I worry our instincts still follow us out into the wider galaxy. Being...”

The woman sounded a bit disgusted with herself, but pushed on regardless.

“Being told what to do feels right,” she said. “It. Makes. Sense. If that makes any sense at all.”

Ayna made a neutral sound.

“It seems that whenever one of us gets a job outside of that one refugee community in the Fed it’s always in service of some kind, or at least requiring strong empathy. I’m just back from a period of trying to drift alone but... well, I’m no good by myself.”

“Sorry,” Ayna said, and the Chanei accepted it with a nod.

“But when I’m not on my own... I’m always watching myself. Always trying to make sure I’m not just going along out of instinct. And that’s... why I’m so damn crabby. All the damn time.”

It dawned on Ayna that this conversation was largely one big apology. She’d never gotten the impression that Kiris enjoyed being a source of tension.

“Again, I’m sorry,” Ayna said. “About... all of that stuff.”

“Thank you,” the Chanei said simply.

Ayna sensed an end to that particular discussion; Kiris had said what she wanted to say.

So Ayna stood guard and Kiris worked with her tools. After a while the little tinks and metallic groans stopped, but there wasn’t the rasping sound of a coil being pulled free.

“Can you help me with this?” Kiris said. “I need a flap held out of the way.”

“Sure.”

Ayna slung the scattergun onto her back and stepped into the engine room.

The engines themselves were fully intact, but for some reason old skeletons were spread out over the floor, clad in the remains of military uniforms. Kiris had spread out four light sticks and hung one around her neck as she stooped over the leap-reactor, causing a small pool of illumination Ayna found borderline uncomfortable. She turned away from it all for a moment, which was why she caught sight of something that interested her.

“I remind you that I can’t hear you, Ayna,” Kiris said. “So please don’t sneak up on me.”

The woman looked up, and as so often before Ayna was faintly amused and amazed at seeing a gaze pass through her without seeing.

“I’ll be right...”

She knelt by the narrow flight of maintenance stairs leading up to the gantry and picked up the object. It was a circa ten-centimetre long claw, designed for gripping and rending.

“... there.”

Ayna scratched it with her fingernail. The claw hadn’t decayed to any significant degree, and seemed to have been shed naturally to make room for a replacement. Her eyes travelled up that short, steep flight of stairs, and her hands swung the gun back around.

A predator would have acted already, and she almost surely would have detected it. But an unpleasant suspicion was dawning.

“Ayna?”

She crept up the stairs, now being stealthy entirely on purpose. Up on the gantry she found a crude bed, made up of plant matter and chewed bones, held together by a layer of stiffened mucus.

Ayna gave silent, sarcastic thanks to the First Civilisation and centuries of giant cargo ships for letting some species spread between planets. Then she hurried down.

“Kiris, we need to leave.”

“What?”

“A slykan has taken this as its lair.”

Kiris poked her head around conduits that blocked Ayna’s view of her.

“What?”

“I just found its bed.”

Ayna glanced around and kept her finger near the trigger.

“They seek out deep, dark places to sleep and digest, and this is the dead centre of the ship. And they are daytime hunters. I’m surprised it isn’t back already.”

Kiris looked back towards the reactor.

“The last coil-”

“Leave it. We have three. Come on.”

Ayna didn’t raise her voice; not with a powerful predator around. But her urgency got through to the Chanei and she hurried over, carrying their find in a big shoulder bag.

“Do please be quiet,” Ayna said as they entered the hallway, cringing at the woman’s attempt at stealth.

She looked one way, then the other, then they hurried towards that marking glowstick. They’d almost made it when Ayna heard a noise. She grabbed Kiris by the shoulder and stopped her.

The sound came again. Up ahead.

Ayna raised the scattergun and Kiris aimed the crossbow. They’d take a few steps back when the slykan stepped into view.

That familiar old focusing fear sharpened everything in Ayna’s body and mind. It was a large male; longer than a human, with the thick, hard hide of a mature adult, beneath which powerful muscles radiated power. And illuminated by the stick behind it the slykan looked to Ayna’s eyes like some otherworldly monster.

The animal reared its head up and let out a low, rattling growl that echoed in their tight confines. Out of the corner of her eye Ayna saw Kiris tighter her finger around the crossbow’s crude trigger. She wanted to object. She wanted to say that predators didn’t threaten prey; that the slykan was sated and posing to drive away intruders.

But there wasn’t time for a single word. Kiris let the bolt fly and it hit the animal in the shoulder.

It grunted and charged them with great loping strides. Ayna let off a shot, the stock kicking at her shoulder, even as she ducked to the right.

Kiris joined her and they were both just slim enough to make it through a doorway at the same time. The slykan overshot and skidded to a stop. Kiris grabbed the open door and began sliding it closed. The old metal groaned and resisted. The animal came at them again and Ayna fired, definitely hitting it this time. But some miracle of evolution or ancient genetic engineering left the slykan barely more than scratched.

It did flinch, and Kiris managed to almost close the door before it simply stopped on something. The predator flung itself at the obstruction and Ayna jumped back. There was a loud bang and a groan, but Kiris swung the handle, locking the door in place.

A paw tried to claw through the crack and now the Chanei leapt away from the door. The claws withdrew, and now the beast reared up on its hind legs before slamming its entire weight against the door.

There was a louder bang and groan. It just might make it through.

“Damn damn damn,” Kiris muttered and began the work of fitting in another bolt.

“We... ah...” Ayna stammered, and took in their new surroundings.

She also tried to estimate the chances of Bers having heard the shots, deciding to do something about it, and making it here fast enough to make a difference.

The slykan slammed itself against the weakened metal again, and she opted against betting her life against it.

“The charges!” Kiris told her.

“Give me yours!” Ayna said and held her hand out.

The Chanei gave her two of the breaching charges.

“Keep its attention!” Ayna said as she ran off. “Keep it there!”

She consulted her mental map of the route they’d taken and chose a spot around the bend, which she estimated to be right by a ladder leading up. She ripped the cover off one and stuck its sticky patch to the wall, then added another, and then the third.

From behind her came the sounds of more slams, failing metal, and Kiris’s gasps as she did her part.

“Hurry!”

Nervous as all hell, Ayna ripped a small plug out of one of the charges and began a quiet countdown. Then she ripped out the second and third before backing away from the wall.

“Come on!” she shouted at the Chanei, turned around, and pulled up the hood of her jacket.

… three... two... one.

There was a loud hiss of searing heat that penetrated right through her clothes. For a moment she actually thought she was on fire. But the heat faded, and she risked turning around.

It had worked, and she now leapt over the pool of melted metal on the floor and out into the hallway. The ladder was hot to the touch but the footsteps of the slykan sent her up the rungs as fast as possible. Kiris was right on her heels, and upon reaching the top Ayna helped her.

There was an angry snort, but the opening was too narrow for the angry beast. Instead it ran, and Ayna felt she sensed purpose in it.

“It’s coming around!” she said and hurried towards the next glowstick. “It knows the area!”

So they hurried back the way they’d come, the route Jaquan had explained to them in great detail. And off the walls, along the corridors and through openings echoed the footsteps of the great predator they’d angered.

Ayna didn’t let out a shriek when movement suddenly came around a corner; such reactions were quickly disciplined out of the children of Dwyyk. But she did leap back with a sudden burst of strength, and almost fired the gun before recognising Bers.

“Raga vas! What is?!”

“Let’s just go!” Kiris replied, sounding rather ragged.

“I think it’s coming!” Ayna said, just before her ears confirmed it as fact.

She started running again, and so did Kiris. Bers stepped into a doorway. Ayna looked over her shoulder as the slykan came around a corner at a hard run.

Bers leapt out with a scream and drove his keremak axe into it as it passed him. The slykan let out a yelp, and a shift of its large body slammed the man aside and into a wall with a boom. But now actually injured the animal retreated back the way it had come.

Ayna stopped, and a moment later so did Kiris. Bers got to his feet with an angry jerk, wheezing air into battered lungs. He looked in the mood for more fighting and actually took a step after the slykan.

“No!” Kiris said, and the man turned her way.

She tapped her bag, and Ayna remembered their reason for being here.

“Let’s just get out of here and start up that damn flare.”