“I don’t think that did what you wanted it to do,” Trevyn pitched in unhelpfully as Mikita moaned again and helplessly dropped her forehead against the control panel. 

“Computers,” she whined, although despite all her desperate moaning, she was rapidly going through possible solutions in her head. “I don’t do computers… do you slice?”

She suddenly sat upright, pinning Trevyn with a hopeful gaze just as the droids started peppering the ship’s door with blaster bolts. He was starting to shift anxiously, getting the feeling that Mikita was out of options as he helplessly shook his head in response.

Cursing, Mikita jumped to her feet and started pacing. Trevyn continued his nervous commentary, “Too bad they don’t make ‘em like they used to. I had a buddy that used to swipe speeders with a jolt to the gears – no slicing needed.”

Mikita froze as Trevyn punctuated his thought with a nervous laugh, apparently having a moment of life flashing before his eyes as their apparent end neared.

“You… are…” She jumped over to him, taking him by both shoulders to turn him towards her, “Can you fly?!”

“Uh… not really…” He looked confused, then anxious again as the blaster fire continued at the door. Leave it to a hutt to try to destroy his own ship… if he couldn’t have it, no one could, right?

“You do now.” She dragged him over to the pilot seat and pushed him into it by his shoulders. “When that light flashes red, gun it.” She pointed to another lever. “Push that to the top and hold on tight. Just…” she glanced at the half-open hangar bay doors in front of her. Even she would have a hard time squeezing cleanly through a gap like that. “Just point it in that direction and pray.” She started to dart off the bridge, but hesitated and stepped back to him to add, “And pull up, not down, on the way out.”

His eyes wide with uncertainty and fear, he was edgy enough to snap back at her, “I know that much!”

But she was already gone, flinging herself around corners and jumping over a rail to the belly of the ship, where the heart of the engine was encased in the maintenance bay.

Mikita threw off her dusty brown jacket and left it lay on the floor as she went to work. She didn’t even bother to properly hydrospan panels, just pried them off with the butt of her blaster and added them to the scrap pile that her jacket had started.  The guts of the engines were certainly different that the ones she’d put on her own ship, but it was hardly foreign to her anyway. Same concept, different method – not hard to figure out once you’d seen enough variations, and she had. Lacking any real tools, she used the edge of one of the panels she’d pried off to cut through wires, breaking the connection to the security system and re-wiring the start-up channel past it all. There was a faint hum as the thing regained the ability to get going, but the security feature had already cut the command and the repulsorlift didn’t properly engage.

She started to flee back to the bridge to get it going herself, but was thrown back off her feet by a huge explosion that rocked the whole ship.

“Blasted hutts!” Mikita rolled onto her hands and knees, scrambling back to her feet. There was no time for a proper start up. This slimeball was seriously not going to let his ship go to anyone else if he could help it.

Throwing herself against the engine casing, Mikita worked her arm back into another crevice that would have been much easier to access, had she the time to pry off another slab of metal. Her fingers searched blindly, praying that the layout inside was close enough to what she’d calculated it should be. Sure enough, her fingertips made contact with a bar on the internal generator that would manually spark life into the sublight ion drive. Sure, a pilot tended to reserve the ion engines for after the ship was off the surface of a planet, but she was out of time and frankly didn’t care who got radiated in the process of her escape.  Admittedly, she didn’t know where the antigrav generator would be found on this ship, anyway, so repulsorlift was no longer a viable option.

Nearly in tears with relief, Mikita clenched the bar in her hand and pulled back with all her weight – which turned out to be overkill. The bar broke as she flew back against the floor again, but it did its job anyway. She heard life wake the engines as they hummed around her, and Trevyn came through too. Unrestrained, Mikita was tossed across the floor into a railing as the ship burst forward, and she curled into a protective ball as an ear-shattering blast made the whole ship quake again.  She wasn’t sure if that one had been more hutt cannon fire or Trevyn missing the center of the hangar bay door gap, but as her stomach sunk with the momentum of upward flight, she didn’t care. She lay back on the floor between the engines, surrounded by her small pile of discarded shredded metal, and cheered.
 


Covered in bruises, and bleeding from a small gash on her forehead, Mikita snatched up her jacket as she climbed achingly to her feet. She made her way carefully back up toward the bridge, where she found Trevyn gripping the edges of his seat as if he thought he might fall off. She raised an eyebrow as she climbed up to the control panel, eyeing him cautiously. “You gonna make it…?

“I think I might be sick,” he breathed, and she saw that his face was ghastly pale.

She snorted. “You look more like you’re gonna pass out. Can you wait til we’re back on my own ship, so I don’t have to carry you?”

Apparently the mere thought of inconveniencing a lady was enough to shake him from his shock. He blinked a few times with a slow intake of breath, blinking once more as he finally looked at her. The blood and the darkened areas of her skin where bruises were forming seemed to alarm him. “What happened?!” He bolted to his feet, peering past her into the belly of the ship. “Did the droids get on board?!”

Mikita actually laughed that time, taking the captain’s chair he’d vacated. “Sure, I served them tea and made them comfortable. I’m sure they’ll be along any time now.”

Trevyn was bright enough to recognize the sarcasm in her dry voice. “That ain’t funny…”

“Actually, I have your fancy flying to thank for this.”

“Hey, I did just what you told me to! Got us out of that hangar, didn’t I?”

She arched an eyebrow, shaking her head. “If you’d done just what I told you too, we would have gotten to the ship without me taking a rifle to the head!”

Folding his arms in determination, Trevyn frowned. “Not my fault you can’t stay focused in a fight.”

“Focused?!” Mikita threw her own arms up in the air. “I was completely focused on what I was planning to do – getting us the hell out of the fight and out of the hangar!”

Whatever bright remark Trevyn might have had to counter hers, it was lost as he turned to make eye contact with her. His expression softened suddenly, and he got a dreamy far-away look in his eyes as he tilted his head and said in wonder, “You are dazzling when you’re angry… has anyone ever told you that?”

Mikita dropped her hands to hold her head, half-covering her eyes as she groaned, “Oh, Trevyn, not you too…”

He opened his mouth as if to speak again, but didn’t seem to know what to say. His dreamy look turned confused and he looked away, as if reviewing what just happened and wondering if that was really him that spoke.

As a perfect interruption, the ship’s system came on to alert them that they were approaching orbit now.  She hoped their contact would be along soon, because she didn’t imagine the hutt was going to waste time gathering his own ships to follow. Not that she’d mind the excuse to take this lovely bird for a test spin. . .

But she was disappointed to find that a small transport shuttle was just making connection with the airlocks. Figures. She shot Trevyn a silent glare as she stood and started out toward the docking hatch. His jaw flexed in irritation, but he stayed quiet too as they stood on deck, waiting for their contact to enter. When the door slid open, Mikita nearly groaned.

Behind her, Trevyn voiced her thoughts well, “Oh, you gotta be kidding me…”

It was the dark-haired messanger from the cantina.  He was holding a bottle of Deltron spice wine, which Mikita glanced at and chose promptly to ignore.

“You’re here for the pick-up? I thought you said you weren’t with this group.”

He smirked at her, apparently pretty pleased with her surprise. “Like I said – I’m just a messenger. I’m told that they’ll choose to be in touch or not once I drop this…” His smirk faded suddenly, as he finally saw Trevyn standing behind her. “You brought him with you?!”

“Oh, don’t act like you weren’t expecting me,” Trevyn piped up with a voice that sounded like it was supposed to be cheerful, but was coming across true to his irritation, “I see you brought me some celebratory drink! That’s very kind of you.”

The man’s eyes narrowed, as he apparently wasn’t bright enough to catch on to sarcasm. Mikita was starting to wonder if this mysterious company intended to send out such a dull representative. “No, you idiot, the wine is for the lady.” He looked to Mikita, the cocky grin returning. “I thought we’d spend some time getting to know this magnificent…” he paused, his eyes wandering over her figure before he continued, “…ah, ship, before I have to turn it in.”

She heard Trevyn’s knuckles crack behind her, but he miraculously didn’t move as Mikita put on a sultry smile of her own and sauntered forward to close the distance between herself and the messenger. As she approached, she reached up to run her fingers intimately through his dark, surprisingly thick hair, drawing her hand down the back of his neck to his shoulder and arm as he stood half-frozen, apparently not expecting things to go quite so well quite so soon.

“And risk making an irresponsible bad impression on my brand new employer?” she questioned, her voice low and soothing and her fingers slid down his wrist. “Not a chance.”

Her hand connected with the bottle he was holding, and she slipped it easily out of his limp fingers, then stepped to stroll on past him into the docked shuttle. “C’mon, Trevyn,” she called back, without looking to either of them. “We have to toast to our success.”

Trevyn beamed like a kid at the Galactic Fair, trotting forward to join her. He gave the unnamed messenger a bruising jolt to the shoulder on the way out, and once he was on board, Mikita undocked the shuttle without ever bothering to turn to see if the guy had recovered from his shock.

As the shuttle pulled away from the ship, Mikita turned on its sensor jammers to prevent any unwanted attention from searching eyes. She then sat back, gazing out the window dreamily at the ship they’d undocked from as they drifted away. As more of the ship came into her view, though, her smile slowly faded.

It was, to put it delicately, a mess.

There were cannon blasts marring the hull, not to mention a gash along the underside where Trevyn had presumably missed the gap of the hangar doors. It looked like half of one of its laser cannons had been broken off and lost completely at some point, and she couldn’t be sure, but it also appeared that part of a patrol droid which must have been trying to climb onto the ship had been grafted onto the hull when she’d fired the ion engine.

Wisely, Trevyn stayed silent beside her as they surveyed the wreckage. They were halfway back to the surface before Mikita finally spoke. She sat up with a sigh, reached for the wine, and shrugged. “Might as well enjoy this. I don’t anticipate we’ll be getting any more jobs from that company.”