"Sage and ochre? Really?"

Sera wore a satisfied smile. "Looks pretty good, doesn't she?"

"If you say so," Lyra Nimor quipped, though she looked skeptical and distracted. Her eyes were fixed on the words Allegra's Heart inscribed over the cockpit in flowing black script. "Allegra would have loved it, seeing her name on a ship like this."

Sera smiled at her pilot. "Too bad Rei's not here to see it, but she'll be happy when she gets back."

"Where'd she go?"

"She took Yuzu to pick up the bacta bed Doc bought."

Lyra's typically aloof expression devolved into a scowl. "I still can't believe you let him install a medbay. That's valuable cargo space we're losing. Money out of our pockets." She mumbled the last bit.

"You'll be glad we have it if anything happens out there. Plus, we can charge more for passage if we have a decent medbay."

DYR-214 spun its thick disk of a head and fixed two of its photoreceptor stalks on the pair of women conversing below. "Captain Rendix, I've completed your order," droned the droid in its dual-tone metallic timbre. It descended on dodgy-sounding repulsors, retracting all six of its specialized printing and spraying arms into its bulky body as it drew close to the duracrete landing pad. A plastic card poked out of a slot on the droid's midsection. Below that, a sealed pouch, ten by ten centimeters, sat in a bin. Despite its obvious age, the painter droid was immaculately finished in fresh sky blue, with darker accents. "Please inspect the work," it advised. "I'm sure you'll find the result to your satisfaction."

Sera glanced at the invoice card, then the women walked around the Corellian Engineering Corporation YV-929 freighter parked inside hangar seven at the Taloraan starport. The big droid hovered a respectful distance behind. The flat sage active nanoparticle coating with ochre and gray detailing made the boxy freighter look almost new. Block letters set off with white shadow lines on the cargo hull spelled out RIXON CHARTER SERVICE in crisp Aurebesh. On the tail vanes, their ship's ident code had been printed in plain black.

Sera drew her credit chip from her jacket pocket and swiped it across the droid's payment sensor. The remaining fifty percent of the invoice balance flashed on its display. "There you go. Maybe use some of that to get those repulsors looked at," she suggested to the droid.

"Everybody's a critic," the big droid intoned, but it lowered its auxiliary treads and rolled away, paint and various coatings sloshing around in the storage tanks bolted to its open tubular frame.

Sera grinned after it. She opened the packet, withdrew patches emblazoned with the company logo, and affixed them to the shoulders of Lyra's flight jacket. She applied another pair to her own, just above the Sector Force 767 patch with its stylized image of a Razorclaw. "What do you think?"

"Since we're a commercial outfit I suppose we ought to advertise."

"A little different than wearing the insignia of Imperial Customs," Sera suggested.

"Or the badge of a Rebel cell." She aimed a stark look at the Razorclaw patch.

Sera's green eyes narrowed by a degree. She wondered whether the strong-willed ex-Imperial officer was trying to start an argument. "Cargo status?"

"Ninety-four tons of refurbished machine parts bound for the water filtration plant on Mon Titia, all secured, Captain."

"You know, you can call me Sera," the former Rebel commando said. "Everyone else does."

The pilot of Allegra's Heart shrugged. "I'm slow to warm up to people."

"Yeah," Sera said, drawing out the word, "I picked up on that over the past couple of months." She stuck her hands in her jacket pockets. "When's our launch window?"

Lyra checked the chrono on her wrist link. "Little more than an hour."

"Alright. Let's get Allegra buttoned up." The two women trod up the ramp under the freighter's belly and retracted it behind them.

----------------------------------------

Yuzu and Taz shifted the heavy bacta capsule off the small repulsor dolly and shuffled it into the compact space that Reiko had partitioned in Allegra's starboard cargo bay. The whir of ventilation fans mixed with the scraping of the medical device along the composite deck plates.

"Just a little to the left, Yuzu," Taz said, kneeling so he could fish the power cable from behind the capsule and connect it to the wall socket.

Using his pale yellow foot and hand with particular dexterity, the L-1g droid nudged the device a few centimeters left. Some of the translucent bacta that they hadn't evacuated splashed back and forth at the foot end of the encapsulated bed. "How does that look, Oktos-nagrasha? Shall I make further adjustments?"

"That looks good, Yuzu," he assured the droid, resisting the urge to roll his eyes. Standing in the doorway, Reiko Hudson snickered behind her hand. "You had to teach him the honorifics?" Taz complained.

She held her hands up innocently. "Not me, sir— Taz." Weeks after they'd left the military she was still getting used to addressing him by name instead of his officer's title. "Yuzu insisted on learning about Filvian customs. He really has quite the curious streak." She smiled sweetly at the droid, who looked at her with his yellow-green optical sensors and tilted his domed head.

"Curiosity is a virtue is it not, Mistress Reiko-nagrasha?"

"I'd say it is."

Yuzu turned back to Taz. "If the location is correct, sir, I'll go ahead and bolt the capsule to the deck if you'd like."

The medic nodded. "Good idea. We don't need this thing banging off the walls if Lyra decides to bounce the ship around."

"Based on my observations, Mistress Lyra-nagrasha is an excellent pilot, sir. I don't believe she would mishandle Allegra's Heart."

"I'm sure you're right, Yuzu. I was making a joke."

Yuzu tilted his domed head. "Were you, sir? Your vocal modulation and somatic expressions did not connote humorous intent."

Rei laughed aloud this time. She was enjoying watching Yuzu's personality mature since she'd reprogrammed him. "That's called deadpan, Yuzu."

"Thank you, Mistress. I'll file that for now and look into it further during my next recharge cycle." Yuzu set to work with a drill and hydrospanner while Taz did the same on his side of the medical bed. Over the whine of the drill he said, "Lucky we found that Decimator in the desert." He waved around the ship. "All the equipment would have cost a fortune."

"It was a goldmine for sure," Reiko agreed. "Engines, repulsors, hyperdrive, reactor and power converters, sensors—" She ticked items off on her fingers. "A good percentage of Allegra is Imperial." She smiled with a sudden thought. "Kind of like her crew!"

"Don't forget the autochef and food synth. Say what you want about the Empire, they didn't skimp on amenities in their diplomatic transports." He finished bolting the pod's bracket to the deck and stood beside the doorway. Rei swiped her hand over the sensor on the wall and the lights came up, flooding the small medbay with bright illumination. The walls were spotless. She'd installed UV disinfectors to keep the room germ-free, and bio-seals around the door in the event they needed to isolate it.

They'd packed the small compartment nearly to bursting. A folding desk with a data terminal sat just inside the door. A meds locker hung on the wall between the bed and the bacta pod, with exam lights and a med scanner on segmented armatures overhead. Gas supply connectors, a vital signs monitor and resuscitation equipment were fixed at the head of the exam bed. Another cabinet held towels, dressings and surgical supplies. Drawers beneath the bed had sheets and blankets. They'd even managed to cram in a wash basin with filtered, recirculating water and a sonic lavage. The space was cramped, but definitely usable. Taz looked it over and smiled, crossing his arms.

"Do you like it?" asked Rei.

"It's perfect," he said. "Couldn't ask for more. Well, maybe a medical droid."

"Ooh," Reiko clapped her hands together. "Like an FX-model?"

"Hmm… too bulky for this space. Maybe an IM-series."

"The new IM-Tens are pricey. The older sixes and eights aren't too expensive, though." The engineer nodded firmly. "I'll keep an eye out."

"Oktos, you back there?" Lyra called from the cockpit.

Taz swore and looked like he'd suddenly remembered something he was supposed to do. "Thanks, Reiko, Yuzu," he said and hurried forward.

Lyra shot him an annoyed look over her shoulder as he entered the cockpit. The scarlet streak in her hair matched her tone. "You're late. You want to learn to pilot or not?"

Taz waved his hands apologetically and hastened into the copilot's chair. "Sorry," he said. "Rei and I got working on the medbay and I let the time get away from me."

"Well don't," she said. "My time's as valuable as yours."

"I know it is. I'm sorry, really," he repeated, wondering what had her in such a bad mood.

Nimor scowled, but her tone had lost its edge. "Just be on time, next time."

"I will. So, what am I doing today?"

"Simulated landing vectors for low-gravity bodies."

Taz chewed his lip. "Sounds like… something I won't use much."

"You'd be surprised. Some orbital stations, even the bigger capital ships, carry enough mass to affect an approach. The DS-One station was like landing on a small moon."

Taz gave her a suspicious look. "You were on the Death Star?"

Lyra shook her head, catching the cockpit lights in her dark hair's platinum highlights. She'd let it grow since joining Allegra's crew so that it fell just to her shoulders. It was long enough that she tied it back in a ponytail when she was flying. "No, but one of the pilots in my patrol group was assigned there. She had some stories to tell."

"I'll bet she did," he responded with a sour look. More than two billion sentients on Alderaan, wiped out in a second by that station. Taz had felt sick and uneasy for days afterward. It seemed like Palpatine's war machine was an unstoppable juggernaut, and Rebel cells like theirs were just insects for the Empire to swat away. He didn't think anything could eclipse the horror of Vrast. Alderaan had shown him how wrong he was.

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

"Hey, Oktos," Nimor said, snapping him out of the past. "The simulation's loaded on bank four." Lyra let go of the controls. "Your ship."

"My ship," Taz acknowledged and grasped the grips on either side of the control column. They were jammed with controls; triple thumbwheels for the sublight drives, thrusters, and repulsors, plus multi-function selectors, safety switches, and dual triggers for the warhead launchers and guns. A display in the middle of the trapezoidal column managed communications, advanced maneuvering options, and secondary ship functions.

The transparisteel windows went opaque and the projection of the simulation began. Taz steered the approach toward a big orbital platform displayed on the viewports.

"Let's start at one-quarter thrust."

"Quarter thrust, aye." He dialed back the freighter's dual ion drives until the display showed twenty-five percent.

The comm pinged. "Kosbin Station Control to inbound YV Nine-Two-Nine transport. Transmit ident code and state your business." The voice bore an uncanny resemblance to Lyra's.

Taz smirked and keyed his mic. "Kosbin Control from Allegra's Heart," he began, then thought for a second. "We're transporting four passengers and incidental cargo. Requesting approach vector and transmitting ident code now." He flipped a switch on the console beside him to ping out their transponder signal.

After a few seconds, the simulated traffic controller with Lyra's voice came back over the speaker. "Allegra's Heart, your ident code checks out. Our auto-approach system is down for scheduled maintenance. Confirm you can land on manual."

"Uh," Taz stalled, looking over at Lyra.

"Hey, you're flying. Tell the lady if you think you can bring her in on manual."

Taz swallowed. "Kosbin Control from Allegra's Heart. Manual landing confirmed." Nice simulation, he thought dryly. "Awaiting approach vector."

"Allegra's Heart, you're cleared on vector one eighty-seven by two thirty-two galactic north relative. Maintain current speed until Terminal, then maintain below twelve meters per second for landing. Bay six-oh-three is yours."

"Acknowledged, Kosbin Control, one-eight-seven by two-three-two galactic relative for Terminal, bay six-oh-three."

Taz twisted the controls, angling the boxy freighter to align it to the heading he'd been given. A structural spine jutted toward him from the station's central hub. At the end of the half-kilometer spar sat a big gray orb. A wide rectangular bay awaited them, its containment field indicated by the solid white glow around the perimeter. Blue and amber lights blinked at the corners. The platform grew in the virtual viewport, a sprawl of faceted domes connected by transit tubes and a webwork of structural members. Other ships of various classes and sizes floated nearby in every imaginable orientation, maneuvering on their own approaches. A huge pusher tug flew overhead, its six engines driving a train of cargo modules that looked to be about four kilometers long.

"Just how much time did you put into this sim?" he asked, impressed by the details.

"Pay attention, Oktos. You're off vector by negative five degrees Y-axis."

"Yes ma'am," he answered. Only five weeks after mustering out of the military, he reacted to commands the same way he had for the past eight years. Taz added some lateral thrust to correct the deviation. The ship took an unexpected dip. He was supposed to be going up, not down, and he changed his angle of attack. Out of the corner of his eye, the former Imperial pilot nodded ever so slightly. Taz worked the sensor controls on his panel with one hand while he flew with the other. He superimposed his approach vector on the viewport image as a series of light blue squares that diminished in size. The final few that disappeared at the landing bay were outlined in red.

As they approached, the squares expanded off the edges of the display to indicate their forward progress. When only a few remained, Lyra advised, "Get your speed down before you pass Terminal, or they'll be on your case."

"Got it," he said, reducing thrust and applying back force via the etheric controls. He made a few minute corrections, drifting around like the inexperienced pilot he was. His shoulders felt stiff.

"Don't oversteer her. She likes to be coaxed. Relax, Oktos."

"Relax, right," he acknowledged, loosening his grip. The ship passed through the containment field and the coaxial scanner beams that checked for contraband and hazardous cargo. Taz flipped the switch to extend Allegra's landing struts and nulled out the forward momentum.

He was just about to put the ship down on the simulated permacrete when a sudden shock behind his eyes made him wince painfully. He drew in a sharp breath and uttered, "He needs help."

"Who?" asked Lyra. "What are you talk—"

The comm pinged a sudden emergency signal. Lyra switched off the simulation and looked over at Taz, who was already manipulating Allegra's communications system. He looked pale and in pain. "My ship," she said, taking control.

Taz worked the controls. "Distress call. It's on a narrow burst subspace carrier."

The speakers crackled. Beneath heavy static a voice said, "...Attack… perial research cent… orbiting… Allegra..." More static followed. The voice sounded tinny, mechanical, and fearful.

Reiko appeared at the back of the cockpit. "Did they just call us by name?"

Lyra poked the intercom button. "Captain, you better get up here."

Taz fought the rising bile in his throat. He'd never felt a Force warning this strongly before. It made his gut twist terribly. He dragged in a hard breath and tried not to think about being sick. He couldn't shake the feeling something had been taken from him. He'd think about that later, though. For now, he wanted more answers. He cut in a filter and tried to clean up the signal, drawing deep breaths to stave off his nausea.

"Sitrep?" Sera asked as she strode in, followed by Kallista, their gold and black BD-3000 droid. Taz stood to relinquish her seat, but she waved him back down and strapped into the gunner's station behind him. Reiko did the same.

"Distress call on a subspace narrowcast," reported Taz, sounding a little more like himself. "It's piggy-backed on a frequency band that's normally used for navigational data." He shook his head. "Wish I'd paid more attention to Boragog-aktuu when he showed me how to isolate subspace carrier signals."

"Kalli, can you help?"

"Why, yes I can, Captain," said the luxury droid in a sultry tone that sounded terribly out of place in the current circumstances. Her index finger opened along its axis and reconfigured into a scomp probe. She inserted it into the data socket on the wall, making its concentric disks spin. "Signal isolated." After a few seconds she added, "I'm patching in the navcomp."

"Why?" inquired Sera.

Taz had been monitoring the signal that Kallista was cleaning up. "There are hyperspace coordinates encoded on a subchannel." Sweat stood out on his ashen forehead. Over the speaker, the tinny voice repeated its message, still as garbled as ever.

"Doc, you feeling okay?"

"I'll be fine, Sera," he assured her. "We need to go there."

"Go where?"

Lyra punched in the coordinates. "Tozen system, in the Freestanding Subsectors, grid Isk-nine. What do you want to do?"

Rei laid her hand over Sera's. "They asked for us, Sera-sha."

"They also said they're under attack. We might be getting ourselves into a fight." She looked at Lyra. "How far?"

"Three hours at best speed."

"Can we emerge a few hundred thousand klicks from the coordinates?"

"Sure." She entered adjustments into the nav console between the two pilots' stations.

Rendix drew a deep breath and let it out. She glanced at Taz, who still had a haunted look. "Let's go see who needs our help."

Taz grasped the hyperspace motivator levers and looked over at Lyra. The pilot nodded and he shoved them forward.

----------------------------------------

Allegra's Heart emerged into realspace beyond the fourth of seven gas giants that comprised the Tozen system. Tozen 4 was an angry-looking world covered with blood-red and ghastly yellow bands of swirling clouds oriented nearly perpendicular to the system's ecliptic. Taz's sensor sweep started seconds later. He confirmed fourteen moons within range of the military-grade sensors they'd salvaged from the disabled Decimator Imperial assault transport back on Jakku. Most of the contacts measured no more than a few thousand meters. It didn't take long to locate energy signatures on the innermost satellite. Taz narrowed the field and boosted power to the sensor dish below the freighter's cockpit.

"Well, Doc?" Sera asked. She'd swapped seats with Taz during the transit and was staring out the front viewport.

"Energy readings consistent with fusion reactors on or near the innermost moon," he answered from the gunnery station behind her.

"Any sign of ships? Attackers?"

He shook his head. "Nothing big enough to see this far out, although—" he keyed in adjustments, "I'm picking up intermittent flares of radiation. Could be some kind of leak, or plasma blasts."

Sera pursed her lips. "Okay, let's move in for a look, but I want an escape vector and emergency jumps pre-programmed."

"On it, Captain," Lyra acknowledged, tapping at the navcomp while she steered with her other hand.

"Doc, can you transmit back on the frequency that sent the distress call?"

"It's a navigational beam— one-way only. To be honest, I'm not even sure how you'd tap into something like that."

"Standard frequencies, then. Let's see if we can raise someone. Rei-sha, let's get weapons and shields online."

"Weapons and shields," Rei repeated, sounding nervous as she powered up the ship's guns, missiles, and deflectors.

"This is the transport Allegra's Heart, responding to the distress call sent from the Tozen system. If you can hear me, identify yourself and state your emergency." Taz recorded his hail and programmed a transmit loop with a twenty-cycle frequency change for each iteration. There were nearly ten thousand civilian frequencies though, so cycling through them was going to take a while.

"Why hijack a nav beacon carrier?" Reiko wondered.

"Either that's the only frequency the sender had available—" Lyra began.

"Or they didn't want anyone to know they were sending." Sera finished. "If that's the case, then—"

"We're blowing their cover," Taz said. He cursed and shut down the recorded hail.

Sera looked back at him. "Doc and Yuzu on the turrets. I've got the ion cannons and missiles. Forward guns are yours, Nimor."

"Understood," Lyra said tautly. She hadn't fired a ship's guns since TIE training during her academy days. She cleared the safeties, feeling uneasy.

A minute later the gas planet's innermost moon came into view. At fifty klicks Taz projected the magnified view from Allegra's sensors on the center viewport. What had been a quartet of domes near the moon's terminator were little more than ruptured, twisted wrecks of transparisteel and structural tubing. A few hundred meters away, a ship banked tightly and strafed the facility. Green plasma bolts flashed from dual laser turrets on either side of its command module. Its angular wings had the classic downturned style of Imperial shuttles, although the typical high tail was absent.

"That's a Nu-class attack shuttle," said Lyra. "It's an obsolete model, a holdover from the old Republic."

The comm speakers crackled. "Civilian transport, this is a military operational area. You are ordered to depart immediately." The shuttle continued its attacks, sending gouts of ionized dust into the airless space above the little rocky moon with every laser strike.

Lyra punched in a frequency on the panel. "Imperial pilot, this is Allegra's Heart calling on channel TN dash one-oh-eight dash RQ."

There was a slight delay. "This channel is restricted to military comms only. Who is this?"

Lyra took a deep breath. "Ensign Lyra Nimor, Imperial Customs Office," she said in her best command tone. "We've been detailed to transport a civilian from this facility. Stand down until we've completed our pickup."

"This is Lieutenant Granthen of the Imperial Navy. I don't take orders from ensigns in unregistered civilian ships. Depart immediately," repeated Granthen. "Second warning," he added, with just a hint of malice.

"He's not going for it, Nimor," Sera said. She grasped the control column's handgrips that were driving the dual ion cannons in the chin turret beneath the cockpit. They'd flown close enough to see the ship and the facility without magnification. She looked at Taz. "What do you want to do, Doc?"

Taz was looking sick again, worse than before. "He's still down there," he said, breathing like he'd just run an endurance race. "He's terrified, and in pain."

"How do you know that?"

Taz shook his head and waved his hand. "I can— feel it. I think he's communicating with me. Through the Force, I mean. We have to get him out of there, while we can."

"What's wrong, Taz?" Reiko asked. She felt his forehead. "You're burning up!"

"I'll manage," he said in a shaky voice. "I don't think he'll survive another strafing run, though."

Sera gave Lyra a hard look. "I don't want to have to fire on them, Nimor."

Lyra nodded tightly. "Imperial shuttle, that facility is unarmed. You don't—"

Laser fire erupted from the shuttle's cannons as the Imperial ship swept toward Allegra on an aggressive intercept vector. Lyra dialed up the throttles and steered away, diving down and hugging the moon's surface.

"Granthen, cease fire!" shouted Lyra, pulling up suddenly and rolling the ship in an evasive pattern. The shuttle stayed on their tail. There was a bright flash and Allegra rocked as the rear shield took a blast. Reiko let out a little yelp of surprise.

"Doc, let 'em know we're not pushovers," Sera said. Taz fired a burst from the dorsal rapid-fire turret, striking the shuttle's underside as it sped overhead.

"Wait Oktos, don't shoot!" Lyra shouted. She keyed her comm. "Granthen, we don't want to fight you!"

"I'm not letting them destroy my ship, Nimor," Sera warned, lining up the shuttle in her sight.

"Let me handle this!" Lyra looked desperate. "Granthen, please, don't make us fire on you. Please." The speaker was silent save for some background static; the shuttle had cut the channel. It banked hard for another attack run. With an angry cry, Lyra adjusted her heading to align the Imperial ship in the reticle superimposed on the viewport in front of her. Her index finger hovered over the trigger on her control grip.

Sudden blue flashes erupted as Sera fired Allegra's ion cannons, striking the onrushing shuttle with a blast that enveloped it in a tracery of lightning. A secondary detonation near one of its engines made the shuttle wobble for a second before it spun out of control. It slammed into the moon's bright surface, tumbling end over end before disintegrating amid huge clouds of ice and dust.

Lyra reversed Allegra's thrusters, then circled around the crash site. "Granthen! Granthen!" she called into her comm, to no avail. She snarled in wordless fury, leaped out of her seat and stalked away, swearing furiously. At the back of the cockpit she turned. "You didn't have to kill them!" she shouted, enraged tears in her eyes. "Hasn't there been enough killing?" She fled to the lift tube and disappeared to the lower level.

"What was that about?" Sera asked.

Reiko looked shaken. "I don't know. I'll go find out."

Sera shook her head. "I'll go. Doc, can you get us on the ground?"

His brow was furrowed with pain and covered in sweat, but Taz nodded and took Lyra's seat.

"Rei, prep some suits. You and the doc need to find whoever called us. Who knows if that Imp called in reinforcements." Nothing made sense to her— not the strange covert distress call, the Imperial's attack, or Lyra's outburst. She wanted answers, but most of all she wanted to get well away from the Tozen system.