Chapter Text
Prologue:
“Hey! You see those lasers, right?!”
“Yeah, I see them alright,” I grit my teeth as the G-force hits. Even in a ship like ours, you can still feel it. “There sure are a lot of them, aren’t there?”
“You are insane!” Val groaned as I turned us in another tight bank. “This is all because of that stupid plan of yours!”
“It worked out, didn’t it?” I shrugged as I spun the ship around using the manoeuvring thrusters, spinning us in a 360-degree turn.
A small, poorly made ship held together by means I could never understand crosses our bow for a split second, but that second was all I needed. A pair of green lights shoots from our ship and goes straight through the makeshift ship’s shields and pierces its hull. It must have hit something important as the ship explodes less than a second later.
“Besides,” I continue as I complete our spin. “Everything is going fine so far.”
“You… you think this is going fine?” Val threw her hands up. “Getting shot at this much is fine to you?”
“It is when they are bad shots,” I answered, slinging us past an astorid. “They’ve only hit us what? Fifty… sixty times, and we have plenty of shield cells left, so yeah, I’ll say everything is fine right now.”
“You’re unbelievable!” Val groaned as she turned to Elara. “El help me talk some sense into this idiot.”
But Elara was a lost cause.
“We’re going to die. We’re going to die. We’re going to die. We’re going to die. We’re going to die. We’re going to die. We’re going to die. We’re going to die. We’re going to die. We’re going to die.”
She has been muttering that ever since that small fleet of trash ships started shooting at us. She’s even curled up in her seat and squeezing her eyes shut.
“Hit the flares, we got missiles incoming!”
“If you get us killed, I will kill you!”
Despite her complaints, Val does her job, and the missiles fly off course. I dive as the missiles explode, dodging a large volley of lasers and head for cover. Skim around an asteroid and see shards of rock fly past the cockpit’s glass from near misses. Shields are still holding, and we only took two hits from that mass of lasers, so everything is fine.
“We’re going to die. We’re going to die. We’re going to die.”
Elara’s voice fills the silence as I focus on weaving through the crumbling rocks. Almost there.
“Hit the flares on my mark and brace!” I call out as we come close to the asteroid’s edge.
“You’d better have a plan!”
I pull up the nose, catching the pursuing ships by surprise, with most of their ships struggling to keep up.
“Three… two… one… flares now!”
Val lets off another round of flares as I flip us and dive down. The other ships barely have time to fire before I do. A pair of green lasers hits one ship as I turn off the internal damper and flight assist. I spin the ship, taking down a second, then a third ship, before we pass through them.
“See, I had a plan,” I smirk, but don’t turn as I turn the internal damper and flight assist back on.
“You’re the only person crazy enough to call that a plan!”
It doesn’t take long for laser fire to start appearing around us again. These guys really are persistent. I hope they are ready… no, I know they are.
We’re nearly there.
Three lasers hit our shields.
“I just had to use another shield cell!”
“Don’t worry about it and keep them up,”
Nearly there.
Their fire is getting pretty intense. I glance at the map, hoping I didn’t take a wrong turn.
Nearly there…
“We’re going to die. We’re going to die. We’re going to die. We’re going to die.”
Almost…
A barrage of laser fire cuts across the blackness of space, and I can see the enemy dots disappear faster than I can blink. Letting out a breath, I can finally relax.
“See, I told you everything would be fine,” I mutter as an incoming hail tone beeps.
“It looks like you are unharmed,” Captain Ryder says with an unreadable expression. “Good, you can leave the cleanup to us.”
“Just make sure not to loot the ships I tagged.”
“The Galactic Police would never sink so low,”
They ended the call right away. Typically. But at least the captain is one to keep their word. So I position us behind the police fleet and finally let go of the controls.
“So, we earned quite a bit on this job,” I smile as I swivel my chair around to face my crew while massaging my aching hands. “Any suggestions on how to spend it?”
“A few, but you are definitely going to pay for it after this,” Val says as she gets up and walks over to Elara. “We both deserve hazard pay for this one and some stress relief.”
I don’t know who I got so lucky. Getting shot at is lucky? That part wasn’t so much, but everything else, I sure lucked out on. I don’t know who I have to thank for this, but I know I owe them big time for giving me this life.
It seems so long ago that everything changed.