Ayna slid her feet out in front of her, then stuck them out beneath the landing. She slowly lowered them down until she was hanging on by nothing save her fingertips. There was no purchase at all on the wall, and so she just let herself drop.

Instinct cooperated with flexible joints as she landed, and the impact made no noise at all. Neither did the landing itself. That was one stroke of luck on her side. Now for several more.

The stairwell was every bit as poorly lit as the majority of this whole station. Ayna remained slightly unsure of her ability to assess the eyesight of others, but the bored, miserable man up above with the carbine remained oblivious.

She headed on up, hugging the depths of every shadow available. Her feet probed the metal beneath for an instant before applying weight. Occasionally they touched down on a loose part of the grating, and moved somewhere else before it had a chance to creak.

It was all instinct. All she had to do was empty her mind and do as she’d been taught while growing up. Until she reached the landing right below the guard.

No matter how virtually blind non-Dwyyk were, she was not about to walk on up towards the man. Instead she took a deep but discreet breath and knelt down. She reached underneath the landing, gripped the mess of metal poles that held the whole thing up, and swung herself out underneath it.

Ayna wasn’t strong, but she wasn’t heavy either, and her fingers alone could hold her weight for quite a while. So she climbed the rest of the way, grip by grip, hidden by the stairwell itself.

The guard stood at the top of the final set of stairs, idly drumming a hand on his thigh. He did not look down as she passed right beneath him.

Feeling the burn in her muscles, Ayna made her way to the very end of the landing. Then, choosing the deepest shadow available, she climbed back up. Her hand found a creaky portion and it made a slight sound, but the guard stayed oblivious.

Ayna was up, and she pressed her back against the wall, by what cover the door frame had to offer. She waited for a few moments, and then the rattle of plumbing she’d noticed during her earlier scouting started up. The noise served as her cover, and she brought out the access card and moved in front of the door.

It was a simple fact of life that regardless of caution and skill one was still at the mercy of random chance. In this case she simply had to wager that the door would open with a soft hiss, rather than an audible groan. And it did. The guard did not turn, and Ayna stepped inside.

As the door closed behind her she finally took a breath, then ducked into the gloom between two large closets to oxygenate her blood up again.

“I’m inside,” she whispered.

The Hunter stayed silent.

Ayna had understood this to be the very top of Zan-Kiko’s slice of the station, and the environment bore that out. Whatever purpose the narrow hallway had originally served, it now seemed to mostly be a storage area for random things people didn’t know what to do with. Boxes were stacked up against the walls and various fabrics and cables hung from hooks in the ceiling.

After a little while of careful listening, she ventured forth.

She passed an open door, beyond which was a room almost entirely filled with boxes. She passed a bathroom, and a room from which muffled music emanated. There were still a handful of people here. She’d expected as much, and any doubt was ruled out when she passed a staircase, up through which two voices echoed.

Ayna passed another room, and another, either one of which could have held a gangster that was simply being quiet. But then she found it.

There were letters on the wall, old and faded, presumably dating back to the station’s earliest days. There were three different types of script, one of which she understood.

Security Station.

She’d asked a subtle question here and there during these last ten hours, and established that Golga 3’s old command centre was indeed located within Zan-Kiko’s personal playhouse.

She headed up the stairs next to the sign, mindful of creaks.

It was a small room. The control panels were about what she had been expecting, if antiquated and much-repaired. At a glance they provided the ability to lock down any door within the station’s old control centre, speak through an intercom, and observe video feeds from various locations.

Ayna thought of heist films, and the way the heroes inevitably had to bypass absurdly complex security measures to reach their prize. But this was a forgotten little station in the depths of the void, lorded over by petty gangsters.

All she had to do was hit Rewind and Play to find what she was looking for. There was a separate screen and memory for each camera, but she focused on the one with a view of the main entrance. And she found it; the moment that Blue Strike member entered the hideout. He was greeted by Grego and a woman in a nice jacket, with a less appealing cybernetic tube of some sort in her neck.

Ayna took a pair of headphones off a hook and pressed one pad against her ear.

“I need to make this quick,” the merc said. “We need to get the full team together and it needs to happen fast.”

“And what do you want from us?” the woman asked.

“I want you to send someone sober and reliable to Ixill, on a fast ship. A two man-team is there. The other two-man team is at Feddo. I’ll go talk to them myself, with the same message. They are to meet us on Gveloh. On Unnak, specifically, like last time.”

“And what-”

There was the sound of stomping feet down below, approaching the stairs up to the security station. A man’s voice carried up, mumbling something with a modest slur, in a language she didn’t speak. He stopped down by the stairs and shouted at someone. Then he put a foot on the bottom step.

Ayna shut down the recording and put the headphones back. Then she sprang to the only available cover: The gloom above the door.

She leapt up as the man ascended, and pressed her heels against the wall and her palms against the ceiling.

The man entered, mumbling to himself and paying no particular attention to anything. But he was big, and clearly had a weapon of some sort under his poncho. The moment he was a few steps inside Ayna let herself drop. She made no sound on the stairs, and hurried down as the man apparently opened a drawer.

Enough was enough. This was all very exciting, but she had what she needed.

She returned the way she’d come, past the rooms with their potential occupants, the stairs from which voices came, and the room where either music had been left playing or danger awaited. And then she stood before the back door again. She waited for the plumbing to act up again, then waved the access card at the door’s sensor.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

One was always at the mercy of random chance. And as the door slid open a Zan-Kiko man stood right in front of her, with a card of his own in his hand.

“Hey, what are you doing here?!” he asked belligerently.

The man had a machete on one hip, a pistol on the other, and a chemically-induced glaze over his eyes.

“Well, I-” she started.

He turned towards the guard.

“Is she supposed to be-”

Ayna let the baton slide from its sheath and into her hand. It extended with a click, and he turned at the sound just in time to see her jab it into his torso. There was a flash and a crack of electricity, and the gangster convulsed with a scream before dropping.

Then she ran, straight on and over the fallen man. Hesitation would mean her death.

She hopped up, landing her feet on the guardrail, then leapt from across the shaft. The guard shouted something, as did the people inside the hideout itself.

Her feet hit the landing on the opposite side and one floor down, but there was no time to recover. She immediately turned and leapt again. The spot behind her hissed and sparked as the guard fired.

“Got someone in the shaft!” he shouted, presumably into a comm.

With less momentum on her side she couldn’t quite clear the leap, and her chest slammed into the guard rail. A lightweight body and flexible bones proved their worth yet again, and she wasn’t too stunned to catch a hold of the metal. She swung herself underneath the landing, took hold of the bars there, and then dropped.

The guard was coming at a run, boredom and frustration turning into welcome action at last. She caught sight of his feet just as she ran down herself. He fired again and missed by a mile, then again, missing by slightly less.

Stealth and speed were uneasy partners at best, and the stairs and landings rattled and shook, even under her minimal weight. There were shouts up above, as people emerged from the door to join the chase.

Ayna arrived at her entry point and leapt up, propelled herself up against the smooth wall, and caught hold of the edge up above. She climbed in and began a hurried crawl back through the dust and the darkness.

A plasma bolt hissed at the entrance behind her. The guard had seen her enter. And if they knew the layout they would know where she’d emerge.

“On my way back,” Ayna said. “I’m being chased.”

She squeezed back out between the steps, then hurried down to the same level as the Hunter’s ship.

This was the big problem with places like Golga 3. She could just make herself scarce and skulk around in the shadows. But conversely, Zan-Kiko could patrol the hallways for her, maybe even put a modest price on her head. And the longer she waited the harder it would be to make it to the ship.

So she ran.

She had left the stairwell and was racing towards an intersection when a man she recognised as a Zan-Kiko came around the corner, with a gun in one hand and a simple comm in the other.

“... it’s the Dwyyk,” someone said on the other end.

The man spotted her, and she leapt into the downwards stairs between them.

“I see her!”

She reached the bottom in two jumps and kept on running, and was disappointed to find herself in a straight corridor with no cover. Behind her echoed the sounds of the man running after her. A plasma shot flew by and hit the doorway in front. Then she ducked through it and cut to the right.

Ayna had scouted the station fairly thoroughly, most notably the routes to the docking airlock the Hunter had used. So she ran through a haphazard tent town, made baking hot by radiating machinery in the ceiling. The locals had managed to hang strings of lights every which way, causing an unfortunate amount of illumination. But she did have tents to duck between, and her agility narrowly sufficed to avoid slamming into people.

It helped that everyone just got out of her way when they saw her coming. Violence was common here, and people simply stayed out of disputes they had no stake in.

She cut a left, through a water filtration room, then onto a landing. There was the flight of stairs she needed. The one that took her up near the airlock.

Ayna leapt up three steps at a time. Beneath her came the echo of her pursuer, giving her speed. She glanced back down, half expecting another gunshot, and looked up just in time to see the foot that hit her chest.

All of her momentum impacted on her ribs and she was flung back. Reflexes kicked in, controlling the roll down the steps to a certain degree and minimising harm, but she couldn’t stop herself. The bottom floor did that, and she looked up to see a Zan-Kiko man come running down, machete in hand. A woman came up behind him, with a pistol.

“You came to the wrong place, sneak!” the man in the lead snarled. “What are-”

He stopped a moment as the man who’d been on her heels entered the landing. He still had his gun out. And Ayna was on her back, disoriented, stunned, and still had only her baton.

“I said, what are-”

Something came from up above and slammed into the woman, throwing her into the man with force enough to send them both flying forwards. The man on the landing fired, but missed as the Kavian Hunter leapt again and brought her combat staff down on his arm. The limb snapped, and she immediately followed up by cracking his knee, sending him to the floor.

Ayna crawled backwards as the pair at the bottom of the stairs tried to gain their bearings. The woman raised her pistol, but the Hunter dashed across the distance between them and broke her shoulder with a sharp blow. The man managed to grab the staff with one hand and strike at the Hunter with his blade.

Kavia Sari let the blow glance off her gauntlet, then sent her armoured fist right into his jaw. That broke his grip, and probably his awareness as well, but she still swung the staff into him, just before giving the prone woman another blow.

“My hero...” Ayna said.

It was meant to be melodramatic, but with her battered state it came out with rather embarrassing sincerity.

The Hunter folded the staff and stuck it to her armour, just as she strode over to Ayna. She reached down and took her arms, swinging Ayna up onto her shoulder.

“Whoa, okay, I can...”

The Hunter ran up the stairs, and Ayna just saw old, bouncing metal.

“Nevermind...”

There was the hiss of the airlock opening, followed by two more hisses and they were back inside the impeccably neat hunting ship. Kavia Sari set Ayna on her feet, then hurried over into the cockpit.

Feeling a bit dazed, Ayna just stood there gathering her bearings as the ship left the dock and sped away from the station. She realised the ship had already been ready to go, and in no time at all the Hunter sent it into a leap. And almost as quickly she brought them back into realspace. This had just been a quick getaway, in case of further pursuit.

The Hunter swivelled her chair around and stood up.

“Are you hurt?” she asked, walking up to Ayna.

“I... no,” Ayna admitted. “Just... a bit sore. And dusty.”

She brushed away some of the dust she’d gathered while crawling. That was when her hands started shaking.

“Being shot at is a new experience for you, isn’t it?” the Hunter asked.

“Y...y...”

Ayna was reminded of the way her nerves had carried her through the fight with the pirates, only to launch a ferocious assault as soon as it was all over.

“Yes, well, it’s an unfamiliar one for most people, isn’t it?” she said through a nervous smile. She really wished the Hunter would take that helmet off.

“It is,” Sari agreed.

She reached out and closed a hand around both of Ayna’s. It wasn’t a grip. It was gentle.

“There is nothing wrong with being normal.”

“N-no.” Ayna managed to get her hands to stop, then softly pulled them loose. “Normal is... normal,” she added.

By the stars, what a dumb thing to say.

Kavia Sari took a step back and Ayna could sense they were back to talking business. Whatever that had been was over.

“Did you get it?”

“I did, actually.”

Ayna cleared her throat.

“They’re going to Gveloh. Do you know of it?”

“I do, yes.”

“Anyway, that mercenary who stopped by said they were to meet up on Unnak on Gveloh.”

“Unnak is an entire landmass,” the Hunter told her. “Anything more specific?”

“Nnno,” Ayna admitted with some reluctance. “They... well, said something about ‘last time’, but that’s it.”

“That does not help me much. But I can ask around once I arrive on Gveloh.”

“Once we arrive on Gveloh, I take it?”

“Yes.”

“And that’s where we’ll decide if you’ll cut me loose?”

“Yes. And we had best not delay.”

The Hunter strode back to her seat, in the cockpit that Ayna couldn’t enter.

“If we are to have a satisfying outcome to all of this.”

“I won’t argue,” Ayna said as the Hunter started the engine up again.