35
PIXELITO’S N’BARR’ALAI DISTRICT (PUBLIC HOUSING)
After two days, Kevv felt healed enough to step out of the bacta tank. He and Namyr left the safehouse and split up for a while, walking across the city’s many plankways and glideways, taking turbolifts to rooftops and calling airspeeder taxis to take them in opposite directions. They took circuitous routes around Pixelito, performing surveillance-detection runs by stepping into bakeries and speeder rental stores and clothing shops, then changing clothes in the freshers before reemerging back onto the streets looking like different people.
They did this for the better part of three hours before they finally found their own prearranged airspeeders, then flew to meet one another at a rooftop tapcaf overlooking the distant Racing Plains where Kevv had risked his life the day before, and sat to have a talk about the closing of their operation.
The mission objective had come down from Mon Mothma herself, who passed it on to Director Eeja and Commander Fera of the Alliance Intelligence Network. Information from signals-intelligence agents near Mustafar had picked up comms chatter coming to and from an ancient castle believed to be the sometimes-home of Darth Vader. Mustafar was a heavily volcanic planet, and had been used in the past as a major source of raw ore and industry for the Empire. The intel had to do with a special communiqué between Vader and Palpatine. The message could only be partially decoded, and what little could be made out were mentions of a secret hyperlane route to the planet Ossus, discovered by a Hutt clan. Emperor Palpatine had given an order to obtain the hyperlane info from the Hutts and begin an excavation on Ossus.
The planet Ossus was a world lost to history. A large spatial anomaly (some said an ancient Sith weapon) had caused Ossus’s sun to go nova, or perhaps even hypernova, prematurely. Records from back then were sparse, but AIN’s analysts claimed there were mentions of a Jedi faction that once called Ossus home, and had had to flee before they were destroyed. According to historical texts, only about half of the Jedi got about before the sun stripped away much Ossus’s atmosphere.
But the solar anomaly also made it impossible to fly to Ossus by any previously established hyperlane. For hyperspace itself was affected by the goings-on in realspace. A large planet left a gravity shadow in hyperspace, black holes caused massive temporal distortions, and hypernovae caused such distortions that to even go near one while in hyperspace (even thousands of years later) would almost certainly mean the destruction of any ship and crew foolish enough to travel close to it.
The planet Ossus had been essentially off-limits for thousands of years.
Hyperspace was not a straight tunnel from point A to point B, it was another dimension of space entirely, where distances were compressed greatly. A ship had to enter lightspeed in order to be able to “punch” its way into hyperspace, but it could not remain there for the whole trip. Ships often had to exit hyperspace whenever they encountered the gravity shadow of a large comet, say, then reconfigure a way around it, and then shoot back into hyperspace, only to pop out once again to avoid a black hole or rogue planet or other cosmic body. That was the way hyperspace worked, the way it had always worked, and so a hypernova around a star system simply made too much of a distortion for ships to fly near it.
That was why Ossus had been a no-go zone for millennia.
But the Desilijic kajidic, in an attempt to find routes that circumvented Imperial Customs checks, claimed to have stumbled upon a safe passage around the anomaly, and they also claimed to have already sent surveyors to Ossus and found that the atmosphere had mostly recovered and life was returning there. They even claimed to have found evidence of primitive civilizations, perhaps the descendants of the Jedi left behind after the cataclysm four thousand years ago.
Namyr Abjura had been skeptical, but if the Emperor wanted something done quickly, it could only mean he believed it. It could only be bad for the Rebellion. He had already gotten the hyperlane data from Iytel the Hutt, current leader of the Desilijic. It was likely Palpatine had already sent a survey team there himself.
“Who do you think they’ll send to Ossus?” Kevv asked, sipping his joffa and looking out at the Racing Plains. He winced as he drank.
Namyr looked at the bruises on his face. The bacta tank and kolto patches were helping him heal fast, but there was still swelling. She shrugged. “I don’t have the foggiest.” In truth, she really did not know how much this had all been worth it, but she found comfort in telling herself that anything that undermined Palpatine was a service to the entire galaxy and freedom-seeking peoples everywhere. She finished off her joffa and signaled the server droid for a refill. “You know, when they pulled you out of that burning wreck, I thought I might’ve lost you for good.”
“I thought we agreed not to talk about this. How close I came.”
“That a rule of combat pilots?”
“As a matter of fact, it is. Every moment can be our last, so we try not to dwell on it. If we do, we’ll just tear a hole in our brains.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Come again?”
“An expression among Duros. Most humanoids feel stress in their gut, but we tend to feel it in our heads, like acid burning a hole, or a shovel digging into our brains. Anyways, I don’t like talking about how close I came to dying. Better to move forward.”
Namyr nodded. “Fair enough. Then let’s talk about our next move. We need to sweep-clean our apartments, make sure we do it thoroughly. We can’t leave a trace we were here; we don’t want the Empire knowing we got a copy of the same Ossus data they got.”
Kevv massaged his temples and nodded. “Yeah, I figured we’d start on that today, then signal the bosses that we’re ready to go. How do you want to handle transportation?”
Namyr had been thinking about that, and already had a plan. “After we leave this tapcaf, we don’t see each other again, not until we’re off-world. We take separate transports. I’ve got a ticket reserved for you at the spaceport, aboard a ship called the Inherent Bliss.”
“Got it.” He finished off his own joffa, then stared at the empty cup a moment. “Thank you,” he said.
“For what?”
“You were up there on the balcony with the Hutts. I know you were assigned to be my racing manager. That was your cover story. You were meant to be near the Hutts, building me up, promising them they can count on me to win. You weren’t supposed to leave their sides while the race was going on. But I saw you. Down there on the field, in the fire, just as I was blacking out, you were racing over to help me. You were the first one there. You pulled me out, didn’t you?”
Namyr smiled. “Thought you said we weren’t gonna talk about it.”
Kevv chuckled. They left it at that.
Namyr slid across a commlink. “It’s your new burner. Destroy the other one.”
“Copy that,” he said, pocketing the commlink. Once they received their refills, Kevv held up his cup for a toast. “To seeing the end of Malastare.”
She clinked her glass. “I’ll drink to that. The gravity here is too heavy for me.”
The gravity on Malastare was indeed higher than most humanoids were used to. Namyr had been dragging ever since she arrived, feeling tired, languid. Even picking up her cup felt like, for just a second, a magnet was keeping the cup stuck to the table. But it was only an illusion, one she still sometimes felt overwhelmed by.
She made two fists, clenched them, relaxed them, and clenched them again, just to keep her circulation flowing right. Heavy gravity would slow down circulatory systems on most beings. When she stood up, there was a vertiginous lurch, a brief dizziness spell, and then she was solid. Another problem with high gravity.
Kevv, for whatever reason, wasn’t too affected by it. He reached out to steady her. “Careful there, partner. Don’t want to lose you this close to the finish line.”
* * *
The steps were old and wooden, and each one was a slight labor. Namyr remembered her training, and kept to the side of the stairs where the wood met the wall, where there would be no creaking. At the top of the stairs, she saw the Dug landlord, Hizinulka, casting such a baleful gaze at her, one that she knew was not just aimed at her but at the whole world. Namyr kept her eyes downcast, which was only polite—Dug society had its own social mores, just like all sentient species. Non-Dug beings that were not on a first-name basis had to keep their eyes averted from the Dugs. At the door she balanced her groceries in her hand, groceries she had purchased so that, if any enemy eyes were on her, it looked like she was going to be staying for a while. In actual fact, she was planning on leaving Malastare tonight.
The groceries went on the kitchen counter. After a quick check of the apartment to make sure she was alone, Namyr turned on the bedroom light, left it on for five seconds, then switched it off. Kevv, who was at his apartment a block away, would see the light in her window and know that she had made it to her room safely. These little signals were the tradecraft of the spy world, a second language all spies had to get used to.
Once the groceries were away, she stepped over to the single window overlooking ak’Manh District. So dead this time of night. After she took out her electrobinoculars and watched Kevv switch his living-room lights on and off three times, Namyr closed the curtains and got to work.
The cleaning was done thoroughly. All computers and datapads were smashed and their motherboards tossed into a microwave and cooked. She took the ten thousand credits in bugout money from under the mattress, as well as the blaster pistols hidden underneath the sink—a pair of holdout blasters and a DL-22—and ripped up the carpet in one corner of the living room to remove the false ID slates taped to the duracrete floor. It was all done in less than fifteen minutes, and once she had everything she needed in a small tote, Namyr got ready to leave.
Just then, she heard a metallic tap on her door.
Her muscles tensed.
Blaster out, she moved up beside the door and waited a beat. “Who is it?”
“Management, ma’am,” said a mechanical voice. Sounded like a droid.
Namyr checked the viewscreen beside the wall, and saw a silver protocol droid standing outside in the hallway. She saw no one else with it. She tapped a button and the door swished open. “Yes?”
“Very sorry to disturb you, mistress, but a call was just received at the leasing office, and I have been sent with a message for you. The party said it was most urgent.”
“Who’s the party?”
“He did not say.”
“What’s the message?”
“ ‘They know you’re here, and they’re coming for you shortly.’ That was all,” the droid said primly.
A needle of ice suddenly threaded through her heart.
“I beg your pardon, mistress, but are you expecting an air-taxi soon? Is that what the message meant? If so, I want to remind you that the lease you signed strictly forbids anyone from picking you up from the rooftop, as it is reserved only for emergency vehicles—”
“Did the party say anything else?” she said urgently.
“Er, no, ma’am.”
“Did they leave any contact information? Any at all?”
“No, ma’am. None. But did you hear what I was saying about—?”
She cut him off by closing the door. Namyr’s hand went inside her jacket pocket and grabbed the commlink. She did not send a transmission, merely a series of brief comms static-checks that, if Kevv was anywhere near his commlink, he would hear as crackling blips, and he would interpret according to their agreed-upon emergency code: GET OUT NOW.
Namyr took a deep, steadying breath, and let it out slowly. She had an idea who the warning was from, and if she was correct, it meant she was in the utmost danger.
She stepped out into the hallway and headed for the turbolift, watching every shadow, nook and cranny around her. The lift went down two floors before it stopped and two female Twi’leks got on. She stood at the back of the lift so she could watch them, one of her hands in her jacket pocket, gripping her DL-22. She watched their hands, listened to their speech as they gabbed about one of their husbands. When the lift let them out on the first floor, she walked briskly out of the front lobby and onto the street.
Namyr knew exactly which streets and plankways she meant to take to avoid detection. She walked the short distance to the Old Historical District, through its marketplace filled with stalls and dozens of Dugs putting up their wares for the night. She slipped through the narrow lanes between stalls, pausing here and there to haggle with a merchant to disguise what she was really doing: checking for coverage.
So far, so good.
She took a turbolift down to the city’s lower level, called the Basket by the locals, filled with historic cathedrals and half-crumbled statues badly in need of restoration. A cold, lonely wind blew down here, a prevalent thing in the summer, when the sewage belowground began to fester and smell in the sweltering heat, and the city countered this by switching on massive fans that hummed and rattled on every street corner. Namyr buried her hands in her jacket pockets, glancing in windows to look for any coverage in their reflections. She stepped through a vestibule that led into a roofless courtyard, one filled with red grass and purple vines dangling from old stone columns engraved with tales of ancient Dug history. Steam rose up from the sewers, and created a misty caul just a few inches above the street, and that mist coiled in her wake and obfuscated her. But it also half concealed the pedestrians and landspeeders crowding the lanes.
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Within half an hour, she had clocked the four Imperial agents following her on a bounding overwatch.
* * *
She started evading them by walking calmly but quickly through fields of holograms. The advertisements shot up from the ground, or else were created by holoprojectors the city’s engineers had built into the walls of the buildings all around Hajavvi Square. Advertisements for a new perfume, a new droid-repair service, an airspeeder dealer nearby with all the best prices. Namyr had studied the streets of Pixelito and had five routes memorized for evading coverage.
But how did they find me?
That question had been nagging at the back of her mind ever since she confirmed that the two male Humans in the gray and blue slashcoats were repeats—they changed out their jackets whenever they broke line-of-sight, but it was clearly the same people. The other two Humans were females, one blonde, one brunette, both wearing casual clothes. The blonde walked with a blaster strapped to her side openly, with a pilot’s kind of swagger. She was the bait. If any of them were going to get tagged, the Imperial agents wanted it to be the blonde. Her jacket was bright red and so were her boots. She stood out, drawing all eyes to her.
Namyr stepped through a holographic ad for an air-taxi service, then through another large hologram of a female Dug going on about how many credits she saved by using Pixelito Banking. “Ina poshta a grub’nik!” she said. And below it, translated in Aurebesh, it said, “You won’t believe the savings!” Namyr knew this hologram well. It was the same holographic advertisement she saw upon entering Hajavvi Square, and that meant a sharp right turn would take her to—
There it is.
—the landspeeder taxi that was driven by a droid and always parked in the same place this time of day. She hopped in, paid the droid to take her six blocks away, got out at Iveszio Street, and ducked into an alley.
Namyr stepped into a bakery and told the Twi’lek proprietor she needed to use the fresher. She had been here before and knew the layout, and had made sure the proprietor was amenable to visitors using the facilities. Down the short hallway, she turned sharply away from the fresher and ducked out a window into the back alley, then jogged down a street that led to an underground pedestrian walkway.
It was dark down here, and narrow. Only a single Dug and his droid were walking it. Namyr had selected this path because it would block the view of the inevitable surveillance droid the Imperials would have flying above her, tracking her.
She also knew of a tiny wall sconce in which her small frame could squeeze, hidden from the men she knew must be on her trail.
Thumbing her commlink, hoping that Kevv was receiving the message to flee, Namyr waited in silence until she heard the pair of footsteps approaching. She reached her hand into her jacket and thumbed her blaster to stun. When they were almost upon her, she heard their footsteps slow down. They knew something was up. They sensed her trap a moment before she stepped out and snapped off a shot at point-blank range. She hit one, but even as he dropped, the other slashcoated man lunged for her, grabbed her blaster, and they fought over it briefly before she headbutted him and knocked him against the wall, then shin-pressed his left leg and reaped his foot out from under him. He fell onto his back and reached into his waist to grab his blaster. He was too late, Namyr shot him and he went unconscious before he even drew the weapon.
Heartrate up, Namyr looked up and down the tunnel to make sure they were alone (the Dug and his droid had already gone) then quickly searched their bodies. No surprise, nothing truly identifying on them, just a few hundred credits, fake ID slates, and commlinks. Those might be useful, she thought, hoping to listen in on the chatter with the two female Imperials. Blast! She should’ve known the commlinks would be encoded.
She tossed them, then bolted to the other end of the tunnel, and emerged underneath the Salaso Bridge, where landspeeders went swishing by at breakneck speeds. Only droids dared come down here, for to walk below Salaso Bridge was to take one’s life into their own hands. The traffic was never not fast and dangerous.
It was dark under here, except for the blinding headlights from the speeders. There were huge, black duracrete columns that supported the bridge, and behind one of them was a gray Civiligo FF-91 speeder bike, one of three Namyr had rented under a false name weeks prior and regularly moved around to random hidey holes throughout the city. Ensconced in shadow where not even homeless people would dare go to take a nap (it was far too loud under the bridge for sleep), the bike had a go-ready satchel tied to its rear. There were red and black wigs inside, as well as a makeup kit and a small change of clothes. She tugged on the red wig, applied skin-toner to darken her complexion, and changed into a noblewoman’s outfit, complete with a green half-cape that had started as a trend among Humans in the Outer Rim but was now spreading.
She drove the bike out from underneath the Salaso Bridge and started east across the city. The route she took was another roundabout way, but it only took five minutes to realize the two females were tailing her—one of them in a landspeeder, the other in a black 74-Z speeder bike.
* * *
All she could figure was that a surveillance drone had seen her coming out from under the bridge. There weren’t that many Humans in Pixelito, so her silhouette was going to be difficult to hide.
The spaceport is two kilometers ahead, she judged. But I can’t arrive in the red. I need to shake these slamos. There’s Namol’dis Avenue up ahead, but it has too many cameras, and the Imps will definitely be using those to track me. There’s the repulsor-train on in’Gannic Street to the east, but the train won’t be there for another ten minutes, so I’ll be waiting at the station, a sitting mynock waiting to be shot…
Namyr began to slowly increase her speed. She blew through intersections where the automated traffic lights regulated vehicle flow, hoping to lose her two pursuers. But the ladies must have been in constant communication with each other, and were well-versed in this type of pursuit, because whenever she lost one of them, the other appeared on a street to her right or left, keeping parallel. If she lost one in a tunnel, the other was waiting for her not far away from the tunnel’s exit. If she increased elevation, her pursuers followed her from parallel rooftops.
Pixelito had several strange, noodle-shaped intersections, where the roads rose up from the ground, creating steep inclines that towered above some of the buildings and twisted around one another, and some of the streets even went through the buildings, which had been built with gaps in their centers to accommodate the heavy ground traffic.
The cool air blew across her face and the smell of her bike’s exhaust filled her nose. The city raced by all around her, and she took big, spiraling, looping roads around skyscrapers and then back down to the street, and back up again. Glancing back, she saw no sign of her pursuers, but she had been doing this too long and knew she had not completely lost them. They’ve just fallen back, or they’re on a parallel skyway.
She looked at the elevated skyways all around her, wending this way and that through skyscrapers, searching for a way out of this floating box they had her in—
Namyr’s bike made a buzzing noise. It was an alert from traffic control, a warning that an aerial traffic droid had spotted her. They were telling her to slow down. Now.
She got back to street level, then double-backed, heading the direction whence she came, then took the Ivarmay Underground Tunnel (driving illegally against the flow of traffic) before emerging onto K’kondui’i Street, which was a sort of arcade of many different types of leisure pubs and cantinas. She pulled onto the sidewalk and drove through a dozen holographic ads, receiving curses from the Dugs walking all around before she turned down an alley and wended through the streets, still trying to confuse her trail.
None of it worked.
One of the agents appeared on Namyr’s right, and about a hundred meters behind her. It was the woman on the speeder bike, and she wasn’t messing around. The agent now knew the score was up, and that her target must recognize they were following her. The agent now surrendered all subterfuge and was accelerated right towards her, right in front of everyone.
Namyr pressed the pedal and her bike screamed. She held tight as she slashed across traffic and up onto another skyway.
Moving at almost a hundred kilometers an hour, all vehicles fell behind her, and she had to rely on her vehicle dynamics training to slew, slide, dip, and dodge around vehicles. She cut across lanes, then aimed her bike at the guardrail and elevated herself and kicked all power to thrust and sailed right over the edge of the skyway—
She fell ten meters to the skyway below her and was jarred as the bike’s repulsors fought to keep her from hitting the pavement.
Something crackled in her sleeve. Her commlink! A static-filled transmission barely came through: “—amyr! Can you hear me? Namyr!”
“Kevv?” she said. “That you?”
“Who else would it be?”
“Where are you?”
“Where are you? I went back to your apartment—”
“Forget that, I’m on the move! I’m being pursued by at least two ghosts! You need to make sure you’re clear and then get out of here!”
“I already did. That is, I got clear and I made it to the spaceport but the Inherent Bliss was on lockdown. Imperials have it impounded. So I stole a ship—tell you about it later—but right now I’m airborne and I’m homing in on your commlink’s signal.”
“Negative!” she shouted, turning onto a turnpike. The wind pressed her cheeks and tore the wig off her head. “Negative, just get clear! Get clear of this place, don’t risk yourself on my account!”
“Where are you?”
“Kevv—”
“Listen, I’m not leaving without you, so stop wasting time and tell me where the blazes you are!”
Namyr bit back a curse. Suddenly, the road ahead of her ended, and her heart leapt into her throat as she throttled up and blasted across the ten-meter gap to the next skyway (for a brief moment seeing the two-hundred-kilometer drop below her, which made her dizzy) and landed and slewed left and right before correcting herself and jinking out of the way of an oncoming U-885 landspeeder.
The dizziness spell made her almost feint. Malastare’s heavy gravity once again affecting her senses.
“I’m, uh, headed northbound on the Yoncun’zi Skyway!” Namyr shouted. She looked around for recognizable landmarks, and saw a glimmering, spear-shaped, cathedral-wrought skyscraper with tall, circular transparisteel windows to her right. “I’m just passing the Ogondis Bank! Headed for the Utari Skyway—”
Something slammed into her right arm, and she cried out. Something hot and agonizing. She knew a blaster bolt when she felt it. Namyr almost lost her composure and fell off her bike at the next hard turn. Looking back, she saw the Imperial on the speeder bike, driving one-handed while aiming with a snub-nosed DL-6.
“I got you!” Kevv came back. “I see you!”
“You do?”
“Check your six.”
Namyr looked behind her again, just in time to see a gray VCX-122, old and battered-looking, a complete pile of junk on its last leg, and in total violation of all air-traffic laws flying this low. The Imperial agent on her tail seemed to hear the roar of its engines, and turned around to see the ship right on top of her. She started firing up at it, desperate to hit anything critical to slow it down.
“Coming around to you!” Kevv shouted. “Lowering the cargo ramp! Get ready, we’ll only get one shot at this!”
Namyr already knew what he was going to do before he said it. The VCX pulled ahead of her and dropped low on the road, just five meters above the pavement. Landspeeder commuters came to a stop or else steered to the side of the road to avoid the ship. The cargo ramp slammed onto the pavement with a clang! and sent out a welter of sparks that flashed in Namyr’s face. The ship decelerated as Namyr hunkered down and hit the accelerator to maximum. Another shot hit her, this time in her left shoulder. She wanted to cry out but the shear force and pain robbed her of her oxygen.
She drove straight up the ship’s ramp, having to hunker down even more to squeeze in, and even then cut her cheek on a metallic corner of the doorway. She shouted, “I’m in!”
The ramp started closing and Namyr was still going at full speed, down the ship’s short and darkened corridor. She slammed into a maintenance droid (probably belonged to the spaceport where Kevv stole the ship) and it exploded into a dozen pieces and caused her to ricochet off the walls and crash and go flying onto the deck. She landed on the floor and skidded, even as she felt the ship start to take flight. Then the artificial gravity and inertial dampers kicked in and she felt Malastare’s intense gravity melting away. She lay there, grunting against the pain of her two blaster bolt wounds.
“Are we clear?” she croaked into her commlink.
“Uh, not exactly,” Kevv replied.
She tried climbing to her feet, and failed. “What does that mean?”
“It means we’re clear of local air-traffic control and law enforcement, but there’s an Imperial patrol ship up above. Gladiator-class, high orbit. And she’s demanding we stand down and await to be tractor-beamed, or else she’s unleashing a squadron of TIEs on us.”
“So what did you say back?”
“Some gibberish about a malfunction and I’ll be right with them. We’re almost in orbit and I’m trying to set a course, but I’m already seeing those TIEs popping up on sensors.”
Namyr groped along the wall, looking for something to grab onto to help her stand. She gritted against the pain and got to her knees. “This ship got any weapons?”
“Just one. A quad-cannon turret. You good for the seat?”
“The seat’ll take me whether I like it or not,” she said, and stumbled through the corridor, coughing from the smoke of the speeder bike and looking for the entrance to the turret.
By the time she was climbing up the turret’s ladder, the ship was already shaking from impacts from turbolaser fire. The lights went out, but came back on a few seconds later. The ship trembled as she climbed into the seat drunkenly. “I’m in!” she shouted as she pulled on the headset. “Cuing up the targeting computer now!” As her targeting screen lit up with contacts, Namyr looked out the turret’s window at the planet Malastare falling away below them. Kevv banked them hard to port and the inertial dampers fought to keep her in her seat. Namyr felt queasy for a second, and then saw the TIEs coming up behind them, probably three hundred meters away.
A few more green laser shots sliced across their hull, and she fired back at them, if only to give them something to think about. Namyr had no chance of getting rid of them but she could at least cause them to split up, which would dis-coordinate their attack vector.
The turret juddered in her hands as the turret’s quad barrels pumped like pistons and released bright-red laser blasts. She nicked the portside wing of one of the TIEs, causing it to heat up for a second, turning orange before it cooled down. The TIE broke off its attack, but it would soon return.
Her computer chimed another warning. A second squadron was moving in, coming around the planet in an east-to-west orbit. Namyr sent the warning to Kevv’s computer in the cockpit.
“I see them,” he said tensely. “Uh, Namyr?”
She fired off another salvo. “Yeah?” One of the TIEs came up from underneath, targeting their exhaust and nailing them hard. The VCX jolted hard to starboard.
“Uh, I’m going to have to do something desperate.”
“What do you mean?”
“We’re being targeted by a tractor beam.”
“Where?”
“Star Destroyer, just came from around the moon and did a micro-jump right in our faces.”
Kevv turned the ship hard to port and now Namyr rotated her turret around to see only space, and a massive Star Destroyer closing in on them. Kevv kicked all power to speed, jinking left and right to avoid more enemy fire to their engines, and Namyr fired desperately in a spray-and-pray display, trying to keep the TIEs all scattered. It worked to a point, but the TIEs fell back into place just like water after you’ve splashed through it.
The entire ship shuddered, and rocked, and for a horrifying second Namyr realized what was happening. The tractor beam was locking on—
“So, like I said, I’m going to try something—”
“What?”
“You’ll see. Hang on.”
“Kevv, if you’re thinking what I think you’re—”
Before she could finish the sentence, the stars all around her elongated and she felt herself falling forward for a second before the inertial dampers and artigrav caught up to her. And then they were in hyperspace.
Then all the lights went out and she heard multiple alarms going off. A second later she heard a series of percussive explosions that shook the walls.
Namyr climbed out of the turret clumsily, fell down the last few rungs of the ladder, and looked around, coughing through smoke. Red-blinking emergency lights were on and she could hear emergency extinguisher foam being vented somewhere.
She knew what Kevv had done. He had quick-calculated a jump into hyperspace without conferring with the navicomputer. Rather than be taken prisoner while waiting on the navicomputer to spit out the jump coordinates, he had made a desperate jump to lightspeed. But that had meant overloading all systems to get out of the tractor beam, which had not yet fully cohered around them and established the lock. The hyperdrive’s power core had suffered a backfeed and now it was on fire. Soon they would revert back into realspace, and be stranded.
Without a working hyperdrive.