Клаудия Грэй: Into the Dark

There had to be an answer. Longer routes? Hauling passengers? Doubling fees, which were already higher than they had been a year ago? What was the magical equation that would make shipping profitable, especially in a time when the Nihil—space pirates without any sense of honor or self-preservation—plagued the shipping lanes?

Syl didn’t know, and trying to puzzle it out was giving her a headache.

“Em-Two,” she said, opening her eyes and turning toward the droid sitting in the copilot’s seat. “I think we might be in trouble.”

The droid turned its head with a shrieking sound, and Syl winced. “And we need to quit buying you that cheap oil.” She grabbed the nearby oil can and went to work on the droid’s joints. At over two hundred years old, M-227 was the oldest droid Syl had ever met. Like the Switchback , he had been part of Syl’s inheritance when her mother was killed by Nihil raiders and one of the few things Syl could call her own. She should have traded him away, but she couldn’t bring herself to sell the droid. He was like family. He reminded her there had once been better times.

Just a few months ago, in fact. It was a time that Syl had started thinking of as before . Before the Nihil had destroyed a good portion of Valo and killed hundreds of thousands of people. Before the Republic had realized they were a threat. Syl’s mother, Chancey Yarrow, had known the Nihil were dangerous from the beginning. She’d joined with a number of other shippers to demand that the frontier planets align and try to nullify the threat. But it hadn’t done much good.

It hadn’t stopped Chancey from losing her life to the raiders, either.

Syl dashed sudden tears from her eyes.

“Please. Do not worry,” M-227 said in his stilted voice. His speech box hadn’t been updated in years, just one more task that Syl had been putting off until she had some extra funds.

“Too late,” Syl whispered, mostly to herself. She rested her head in her hands and took a deep breath, running her fingers through her dark, frizzy curls until they stood even farther out from her head. Syl loved the Switchback . She loved flying through the darkness of space and jumping into the cool blue of hyperspace. She enjoyed meeting new people and going to places that seemed impossibly strange and exciting. And most of all, she loved that no one questioned her about any of it. She had far more independence than so many other eighteen-year-olds in the galaxy.

But at this rate she wasn’t going to be able to feed herself, let alone repair the finicky hyperdrive or improve the engines the way she’d wanted to.

The Switchback came out of hyperspace with a bump, and every single proximity alarm began to blare all at once.

“I leave for one minute and things go sideways,” Neeto Janajana said, strolling down the corridor from the crew mess. The Sullustan did not run, just stretched out his legs a bit more. Syl sometimes wondered if he knew the meaning of “hurry up” or if that was just something he didn’t believe in, like minding his own business.

“I didn’t do anything. We just got kicked out of hyperspace. This seems to be a bit early,” Syl said, looking at the readouts. She put the balance sheet to the side. No need for Neeto to know they were not just broke, but hemorrhaging credits. He might seem unflappable, but the threat of indenture could get a rise out of anyone, and he’d been down that road once before.

M-227 stood with a screeching of metal, and Neeto sat down in the copilot’s seat, taking the droid’s place. He frowned, the ridges around his large black eyes narrowing a bit. “Well, it wasn’t debris. Otherwise you and I would be having this conversation with a lot less oxygen.”

Syl nodded. “Running diagnostics right now to see what happened.”

“Good idea. Although I will say this feels a bit too familiar.”

Syl agreed. When they’d lost her mother there had been a bit of strangeness before the attack: weird readouts, alarms, and then the sudden appearance of ships bearing down on them. But surely it couldn’t be the Nihil? M-227 had planned a route that avoided any sector that had ever had any reported sightings of the marauders. It should have been safe.

Syl pushed her worries aside and began to run the diagnostic on the hyperdrive as the ship drifted. It was standard procedure. It wasn’t common for a ship to get knocked out of hyperspace, but with the Switchback ’s sketchy hyperdrive it happened occasionally. And just like that, Syl was worrying about credits all over again.

“This is wrong,” Neeto said, dragging Syl from her despair spiral. “Did you see this? It looks like we somehow circled back to the Berenge system. Nothing out here but a dead star and a whole bunch of nothing.”

Syl blinked as a number of ships appeared on her readout. “How—nonononono. Not again.”

Neeto looked out the viewscreen. “Is that… ?” he asked, voice low.

She and Neeto exchanged a look, and a chill ran down her spine. “Nihil,” she said.

Neeto nodded. “Sure enough. They must have discovered a way to kick ships out of hyperspace without damaging them. But I am not about to sit around and ask them for the recipe.”

Syl nodded, all of her worry now focused on the ships bearing down on them. “Let’s get out of here.”

“Already on it,” Neeto said, flipping switches.

The Switchback powered up and moved around, away from the approaching ships and back toward the spot where they’d been ejected from hyperspace.

“I can’t find a single beacon,” Neeto said.

“Can we jump without a destination?” Syl asked, trying to cycle the navicomputer so that it could calibrate the path. It was a rhetorical question. She knew the answer; she just didn’t much like it.

“It’s not a good idea, but it’s preferable to whatever our friends on the approach have planned. And yes, I know. But it’s a risk we have to take.”

Syl grimaced. “I was afraid you were going to say that.”

“All right, hold on,” Neeto said, rerouting all of the ship’s power to the hyperdrive to help them jump just that much faster. Any other ship would have been caught by surprise by such an attack, but Syl and Neeto had tangled with the Nihil before. They knew this dance.

That was, of course, when the engine blew.

The sound of the ship shutting down, of every component losing power, left a cold lump of dread in Syl’s middle. “Oh no. Not now.”

Neeto grimaced. “I’m guessing that the coaxium regulator couldn’t wait to be replaced, after all,” he said, not a hint of fear or stress entering his voice. The only sign that he was not having a great day was the extra line that had appeared between his large, liquid eyes.

“We’re spine fish in a barrel,” Neeto said. “We have to evacuate.”

“No,” Syl said. Her fear hadn’t lessened at all, but she straightened just a bit.

“Yes. The Nihil want the ship, which we do not have time to fix. If we run we can maybe save our lives. I doubt they’d notice an escape pod. Em-Two-Two-Seven? Tell Syl our odds of survival if we evacuate now. Before they get to us.”

M-227 turned creakily. “Evacuation is best.”

“No,” Syl said, hunching over in her seat. She wrapped her arms around herself, suddenly chilled at the idea of leaving the Switchback . “This is all I have, Neeto. And you know running is not my style. If the Nihil want my ship, then they can take it from me. Betty and I can handle them.” Syl reached down and pulled the modified blaster rifle from its holster under the control panel. It had been a joke when her mother had first given her the rifle, naming it after her childhood doll. But the name had stuck, and Syl and Betty were a lethal combo. She’d never missed a shot with the snub-barreled blaster rifle, and it had only been because of the gas the Nihil used that she hadn’t stopped the marauders who’d boarded their ship the day her mother was killed.