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Sylvestri Yarrow tried not to scream in frustration as she looked at the numbers before her. Why hadn’t anyone warned her how expensive it was to own a ship? Between the rising cost of fuel and the Nihil threat forcing them to alter their routes, she and her crew were barely scraping by. Once the shipment of gnostra-berry wine—the most lucrative cargo they’d had in months—was delivered, they’d still be in massive debt because of the cost of their last fuel pickup in Port Haileap. Not to mention the bill they still owed on Batuu. At this rate she was going to be in debt to half the galaxy.
Syl leaned back in her seat in the cockpit of the Switchback, her pride and current frustration, and watched the peaceful blue of hyperspace stream by. The cockpit was dark enough that she could clearly see her own reflection in the viewport, and the dark-skinned face that looked back at her was long past worried; it was positively distraught, and if her copilot, Neeto, saw her, he would know things were bad. Syl took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and forced herself to think.
There had to be an answer. If they had still been part of the Byne Guild, which was dissolved because of its abuse of indentured crews, there would have been some protection from creditors, but without the guaranteed jobs and profit sharing of the Guild, Syl was at the mercy of her own business sense. Which was why she was floundering, searching for an answer to her money problems. She’d spent her entire life as a hauler, but somehow that didn’t seem like enough anymore. The galaxy had changed, and not for the better. And as always, it was the folks who were barely scraping by who felt the biggest pinch.
What to do? Lengthen routes? Haul passengers? Double fees, which were already higher than they had been a year earlier? 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? How did she get herself out of debt and keep her home?
If her creditors came calling, they would take the Switchback, and then Syl would be left with absolutely nothing, and so would Neeto and M-227. Just considering it made her stomach ache. She had to find a way to keep things afloat like her mother always had. But she didn’t know the answer, and trying to puzzle it out was giving her a headache, too.
“Emtoo,” she said, opening her eyes and turning toward the droid sitting in the copilot’s seat. “I think we might be in trouble.”
The security droid turned his 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, and was also pretty worthless at security. Like the Switchback, he had been part of Syl’s inheritance after her mother was killed by Nihil raiders, and he was one of the few things Syl could call her own. She should have traded him away after the past few weeks of mounting debt, 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 earlier, in fact. It was a time that Syl had started thinking of as Before. Before the Nihil had destroyed a good portion of Valo’s capital city and killed hundreds of thousands of people. Before the Republic had realized they were a real threat. Syl’s mother, Chancey Yarrow, had known the Nihil were dangerous from the beginning, their violence plaguing the edge of the galaxy more than anywhere else. She’d joined with a number of other shippers to demand that the frontier planets align to try to protect the shipping lanes from the Nihil, especially after the dissolution of the Byne Guild. 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 vocoder hadn’t been updated in years, and in the past few months the problem had progressed more rapidly. Just one more task 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 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 or Neeto, let alone repair the finicky hyperdrive or improve the engines the way she 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. His liquid black eyes never reflected the slightest hint of worry, and it was rare to see his facial ridge tensed with concern. Syl sometimes wondered if he knew the meaning of “hurry up” or if that was something he didn’t believe in, like minding his own business. “What did you hit?”
“Nothing! We were just in hyperspace. And before you ask, I didn’t do anything, we got kicked out. This seems to be a bit early,” Syl said, looking at the readouts. She put her datapad to the side, facedown. No need for Neeto to know they were not only 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.
Not everything about the Byne Guild had been great, now that Syl took a moment to think about it. Neeto had been one of the numerous victims of its predatory indenture contracts prior to coming to work for Chancey Yarrow, and neither Syl nor her mother had discovered that until after the Guild was dissolved.
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 and his large ears twitching. “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.” Neeto said. “You think the rumors back at Port Haileap were true?”
While picking up their cargo, a dockside gossip had told Syl and Neeto about ships going missing from their hyperspace routes, mentioning that a few of the more superstitious haulers thought it was the Nihil. “You saw what they did to the Republic Fair on Valo,” Migda, the crusty old spacer, had said, mandibles clicking. “What if they have Force users?”
“The Jedi would never allow it,” Neeto had said, and Syl agreed. There was no chance that the most powerful Force users in the galaxy would let the Nihil exploit the Force for violence. According to the holos the Jedi were at that moment fighting the Nihil at the behest of the Republic, a combined operation that promised to shortly put an end to the threat.
Syl still didn’t think the ragtag group of pirates could do something so sophisticated. “Maybe we ran afoul of a solar flare,” she said.
Neeto grunted, neither agreeing nor disagreeing. “This feels off.”
Syl swallowed dryly. Because he was right. 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 again? She had planned a route that avoided any sector that had ever had any reported sightings of the marauders. It should be safe.
Syl pushed her worries aside and began to run system tests 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 did happen occasionally, especially if they’d rushed the calculations and the triangulation wasn’t tight. They needed a new hyperdrive and probably a new navicomputer, one of the more modern, more accurate models.
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 got pulled out into the Berenge sector. 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 looks, and a chill ran down her spine. “Nihil,” she said.
Neeto nodded. “Sure enough. Guess Migda’s rumor mill had a kernel of truth.”
Dread blossomed in Syl’s middle. “You don’t think they’re the reason we got kicked out of hyperspace, do you?”
Neeto shrugged. “No clue. But I am not about to sit around and wait to ask them.”
Syl nodded, all her worry 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. In rarely used parts of space like the Berenge sector, beacons were the best way to chart a path. Beacons were like miniature lighthouses in deep space, strategically placed transmitters that emitted a faster-than-light signal a navicomputer could use in hyperspace when a safe route wasn’t known. They were a vital resource for outdated navicomputers like the one on the Switchback.
But jumping while only knowing the location of a single beacon was dangerous. Ideally, a pilot would be able to calculate a jump off of at least three beacons. The more hits, the better a ship could understand its precise location, and how to get somewhere else, hence the need for triangulation.
“Can we jump without a destination?” Syl asked, trying to coax even a short jump from the navicomputer. 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, found a beacon. Hold on,” Neeto said, rerouting their jump based on that single signal.
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, watching the approaching ships. “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 cargo and maybe 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. Emtoo? 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. She’d spent her entire life aboard the ship, hauling cargo with her mother. Every memory of her mother she had, good and bad, was there on that beloved heap. “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. Beti 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 Beti 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 killed the marauders who’d boarded their ship the day her mother was killed.
Neeto sighed. “Syl.”
“A captain doesn’t quit their ship, no matter how bleak things get.” Syl blinked away hot tears and turned back to Neeto. “This is all I have left and it’s worth fighting for.”
Neeto stood and pointed through the cockpit’s window at the ships approaching. “How many people do you think have died just like your mother? We have to tell someone what is happening out here. Do you think the Republic or the Jedi know that the Nihil are even in this sector? They’ve already killed so many, but this means nowhere is safe. We have to let someone from the Republic know. Otherwise, how will we keep other haulers from routing through here?”
Syl blinked, and M-227 began to move toward the escape pod like a very old man, each movement punctuated by a squeal of rusty hinges. It was really something when not even her security droid wanted to fight. Syl knew they were right, but in this moment she couldn’t help herself. She didn’t want to do the smart thing. She wanted her heart to stop breaking.
“The Switchback is my home,” Syl said.
“It’s become my home, too,” Neeto said, his voice clogged with a rare show of emotion. “And I promise you we will get it back. But first we have to survive.”
Syl nodded and reluctantly stood, sliding Beti into the backpack holster she wore. And then she ran to the escape pod with Neeto and M-227, fleeing for her life, giving up one of the last things she had left of her mother.
They made it to the escape pod just as the sounds of the Nihil breaching the air lock reverberated through the ship. As they launched out into the darkness of space, Syl’s thoughts were only for the Switchback.
She would do everything in her power to get her ship back.
Either that, or she would extract its price in Nihil blood.
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