Jen fired up the engines on her Preybird and ran through the checklist in haste. She and Jace had stopped off at the hotel they were staying at—in different rooms, of course—to pick up their stuff. While there, Jace had tried to contact the SSD, but he hadn’t gotten a response.

     “Eleven, Lead,” Jace called over the comm. “Be ready to lift off on my mark.”

     “Copy.”

     “Four to Bandito,” Jace called to Benny Nedran.

     “Go.”

     “What’s your twenty?” Jace asked.

     “Docking bay. Prepped and ready.”

     “I appreciate your timeliness,” Jace commented. “I am transmitting jump coordinates now.”

     Jen recognized the coordinates Jace had given her as the site they had left the SSD. She wasn’t really worried about their being unable to get through to the SSD, but something made her cross her fingers in the hope that it would be there when they came out of hyperspace.

     Getting off of Sova wasn’t going to be an easy task. Jen had asked why they couldn’t simply get clearance and leave, since troopers weren’t guarding the docking bay entrance. Jace had pointed out that the Sovans had a way about them, and that they were probably waiting for just that. He thought their only chance would be to lift off and make a run for it. But if the Sovans were waiting for that, too, well, that’s what was going to make this escape difficult. And even if they weren’t waiting for that, they had hundreds of ships to call upon to intercept three ships lifting off without clearance.

     “This is going to be a bitch,” Jace said, reflecting Jen’s thoughts.

     “No shit, Olie,” Jen said.

     “Ready?”

     “As I’ll ever be,” Jen said, gripping her flight stick.

     “Bandito?”

     “Let’s do this,” Benny said with an enthusiastic gusto. Perhaps the musician was going to enjoy the excitement.

     Jace lifted off with repulsorlifts, prompting Jen to follow suit. They ascended about thirty meters above the crater-like docking bay, and then kicked in thrusters. They pointed their snubs skyward, and it wasn’t long until the comm was blaring with queries and warnings from a spaceport traffic controller. Jen filtered that channel on her comm and checked her sensors. In addition to a large defense force in the form of starships, S.H.A.R. also maintained a space station in orbit of Sova, which was armed to the teeth with turbolasers. Luckily, it was currently out of range. There were several defense platforms, as well, but they were nowhere near as heavily armed as the much larger space station. The main concern would be the starfighters, no doubt.

     “Let’s try to get out of here firing as few shots as possible,” Jace said. “We don’t want to get tangled in dogfights.”

     “Copy,” Benny said.

     “As much as I like to vape stuff, I will have to agree with you.” Jen looked at her sensors. “Speaking of vaping stuff…”

     As they entered orbit, Jen’s primary sensor screen lit up with multiple contacts closing from port. She brought up her shields and checked her weapons status.

     “Get ready to break and engage,” Jace ordered.

     Jen nodded. If they continued on their current course, they probably wouldn’t make it to the jump point in time, and that would allow the Sovan fighters to slip in behind them. Still, with the odds being what they were, engaging the fighters wasn’t much more promising.

     Odds? What do I need with odds? I’m Corellian!

     “Let’s go,” Jace said.

     Jen hauled her flightstick over before Jace finished his order. As she approached them, the Edge fighters grew in size until she could see their blue and white paint. She sprayed random blasts at them, hitting their shields several times. Enemy fire made good with her shields, as well, but she juked around to try and minimize the successful hits. Then they were past the Edges. As she looped around, she glanced at her sensors, seeing that Benny had kept his ship on course. Several Edges were on his tail, taking shots. She remembered that the RX4 had a powerful rear-mounted ion cannon, but the power requirements were so large that the generator only allowed it to fire once per day. But the ship had turret-mounted cannons, as well, so Benny and his friends weren’t exactly helpless.

     Jen swung her Preybird around and acquired a target. She hit her trigger, sending laser bolts into the enemy fighter. She repeated the process until a few bolts lanced the shields, taking off half of the port wing and engine. The Edge swerved and spun away, so Jen moved to a new target. Before she could bring her crosshairs over the fighter, her ship shook violently and Spanky screeched. The inevitable had happened. Two or more enemy fighters had ganged up on her and scored. Spanky’s continued screeching prompted her to check her shield status. Down to twenty percent.

     “Stang!”

     Jen took control of her ship and dove, rolled out to starboard and aimed her nose at a cluster of Edge fighters. She hit her trigger, sending dozen of shots at the group. She pulled down on her stick, executed a half loop, inverted and moved off to port. Two Edges showed her their profiles. Before they could maneuver, she fired several shots at them. One took the brunt of her attack, and exploded. The other’s engine pylon was grazed, but that didn’t disable or hinder the fighter.

     A stream of laser fire abruptly flew across her canopy from aft and starboard. Before she could react, more laser fire from port made good, definitely shrinking her shields down to nothing. Jen pushed on her flight stick, sending her snub into a steep dive, barrel-rolling as she went.

     “Eleven, what are you doing back there?” Jace called over the comm.

     “I got preoccupied,” Jen answered.

     “Try to fight them while heading this way.”

     “Try being the key word,” Jen said, her voice under strain.

     “Are you okay?”

     “Well, shields are gone and slowly recharging, I am surrounded by bogeys…but I’m okay.”

     “I’m on my way,” Jace said.

     An explosion to starboard caught Jen’s eye.

     “That was fast.”

     “What was fast?” Jace asked.

     “That wasn’t you?”

     Jen looked at her sensors and saw that a new ship had entered the battle zone. An HT-2200 medium freighter. Corellian make. Jen had only seen a few of them around, as the model had a short production run. She looked out her canopy at the ship in the distance, and saw that it was blasting away at the Edges.

     Who in Sadow’s name?

     The ship’s transponder read as Easy Rider. Jen switched to an open channel, leaving her comm on scan in case Jace would try to contact her.

     “Easy Rider, who are you?” she asked, dodging the attacks from the two fighters trailing her.

     “Hey, how can you forget the guy you beat in arm wrestling?”

     “Meltdown?”

     “Yeah!”

     “What in the hell are you doing here? Wait. Never mind. Just keep doing what you’re doing. And get those two fighters off my back if you can.”

     “Gotcha.”

     “Eleven, what’s going on?” Jace’s voice came over the comm.

     Jen switched back to the private channel. “Uh, those swoopers from Kiffu are here, and they’re helping us.”

     “What?”

     “I have no clue, either. Just get back on course and hopefully we’ll join you shortly.”

     “Yes, ma’am,” Jace said sardonically.

     “Sorry, Lead.”

     Jen looked down at her board and saw that her shields had recharged to fifteen percent. She also noticed that one of the Edges that had been on her tail was gone. Either Meltdown’s ship had taken it out or it had broken off.

     She made a sharp turn to starboard, in Jace and Benny’s direction. An Edge fighter was almost directly ahead of her, about a kilometer away. She switched over to torpedoes, dropped her aiming reticle over the fighter and let loose with a torpedo. The projectile found its target, and turned it into a ball of gas and debris. Jen switched back to the open channel.

     “Easy Rider, you copy?”

     “Yeah.”

     “Are you coming with us?” Jen asked, taking her Preybird into a barrel roll, still evading the last Edge on her tail.

     “Is that an invitation?”

     “Call it what you want.”

     “I’ve been in communication with Benny, so he’s already sent the coordinates,” Meltdown said, chuckling.

     “Hokay. In the meantime, can you do me a favor?”

     “What’s that?”

     “Get this fighter off my back!”

     Skate awoke to a sweet smell. She rolled over and saw Ryvo cooking something over the fire. He noticed she had awakened, and smiled.

     “Good morning,” he said.

     “Is it?”

     Ryvo’s smile slackened only slightly. “Of course. It’s not a great morning, but we can’t have everything.”

     “And why is it even a good morning?”

     Ryvo shrugged. “Well, there’s that fact that you slept with me.” Skate glared at him with malicious eyes. “You know what?”

     “What?” she said in an equally malicious tone.

     “You are ugly when you wake up.”

     “You have a death wish, don’t you?”

     “That, or I am incredibly stupid,” Ryvo said, nodding. “I’d prefer to think it was he former.”

     “What are you cooking?” Skate asked, changing the subject.

     “Some local fruit I found about a half klick from the cave.”

     “Cooking fruit?” Skate asked incredulously.

     “Oh yeah,” Ryvo answered. “Back home we used to fry fresh sidi almost every morning. I’m sure this stuff won’t taste as good, but it’ll do. Want some?”

     Skate looked at the fruit skeptically. “I don’t know…”

     “There’s always the plentiful supply of rations,” Ryvo said, tapping his small pack.

     “You’ve convinced me.”

     Skate sat up and stretched, then stood and took a seat on one of the boulders surrounding the fire.

     “Did you account for the STAPs?” Skate asked as Ryvo handed her a piece of the fried fruit in a metal cup.

     “You mean did I take them out, too? I didn’t see any in the hangar. But even if they do have them, I don’t think they’ll be a threat to us.”

     “I saw about thirty of them when they captured me.”

     Ryvo shrugged. “They have no clue where we are. They could search the planet for weeks with all forty of their remaining craft and they still won’t find us. And within an hour, we’ll be on the move again.”

     “If you say so,” Skate said, smelling the fruit. “How much longer do we have to go?”

     “Not very far.”

     Skate tasted the fruit, “Wow, this is really good.”

     Ryvo took a bite of his own fruit. “Not as good as sidi, but still good.”

     For a moment, Skate felt uncomfortable. She remembered all of the conversations she had with “Wrenn Valto”, and she saw some of Wrenn in Ryvo right now. She didn’t know why she felt uncomfortable; perhaps it was the fact that he knew so much about her, yet she didn’t really know who he, Ryvo Lorell, was. A part of her was also angry that he had hidden certain aspects of himself while she had been so open with him.

     After they had eaten their breakfast, they had packed up what little equipment there was and loaded it onto the ULAV. This time Ryvo took the front seat. Skate didn’t mind, as it would free her to think about everything. She had made some mistakes that needed rectification, and while putting it all off until later sounded good to her mind, her heart demanded she deal with it now.

     Ryvo fired up the engines and the whine of the repulsorlifts reverberated in the entrance to the cavern. Then they began to moan like a wounded bantha, lessening in tone until only clicks and thuds could be heard, and the ULAV fell to the ground.

     “You okay?” Ryvo asked, concerned.

     “Yeah. Lucky I had my straps on. What the hell happened?”

     “I’d guess the repulsor coil went out.”

     “Well, can you fix it?” Skate asked hopefully.

     “I am many things, but a mechanic is not one of them. Let’s get out this thing.”

     They unstrapped and jumped down to the ground.

     “How much further do we have to go?” Skate asked as she hunkered down onto a rock. Ryvo took a seat next to her.

     “About two-kay klicks.”

     “Great.”

     “The way I see it, we have two choices. One, we use my beckon call to-“

     “You have a beckon call?” Skate interrupted.

     “Yeah.”

     “Why didn’t we use it a long time ago?”

     “Because my ship would have been picked up on sensors and they would have had us. Remember that sensor dome I destroyed? That was an Omniprobe. It can scan ground targets that conventional sensors are unable to. It works even if the targets are under cover, since it uses gravity to hug the beam to the ground. If I call my ship, it will automatically ascend several meters before heading my way. The reason I destroyed the Omniprobe is because the full-spectrum transceivers can’t scan close to the ground.”

     “And since the flight ceiling of the ULAV is about half a meter, they couldn’t have picked us up unless they had the Anal Probe, or whatever you called it.”

     Ryvo smiled. “You catch on pretty quick.”

     “No shit, Olie.”

     “Olie?” Ryvo repeated, confused.

     “Nevermind. Inside joke. So what’s the second choice?”

     “We hike the rest of the way.”

     Skate snorted. “You’re kidding right?” Ryvo didn’t answer. “Right?”

     “I never said we could make it there fast. But we can make it.”

     “By the time we get there, they’d be sure to have some ships here that could find us in no time. Even you said it might be a possibility that they have a patrol ship out and about.”

     “Highly doubtable. Having a ship roam around would be highly visible to anyone in the planet’s vicinity. I think they prefer to let the ion mines do their job. If we really move, we can make it there in….” Ryvo bit his lip in thought. “Ten days.”

     “And you don’t think your ship can make it to us before they do if you call it?”

     “I’m sure it could, unless any of their search vehicles are in the vicinity. They could get the heading of the ship and trace it right to us. But even if they’re not in the vicinity--and we don’t know that they aren’t--we’re not going to use the beckon call.”

     “Why not?” Skate asked, curious.

     “Because they could easily get an ID on my ship and figure out who it is that infiltrated their base and extracted their newest prisoner.”

     “Your parents…”

     Ryvo nodded. Skate put her hand on his.

     “I really appreciate what you have done, and at what risk you have done it at.”

     “It really speaks volumes, doesn’t it?” he said, looking over at her.

     “About what?”

     “Nothing. We have to get going.”

     What? Skate thought. She would let it go for now, as they did have to get going. It was a ten-day trip, according to Ryvo. Plenty of time for him to reveal what he meant, although she already had a pretty good idea of what it was.

     Jen pulled back on the proper lever and the mottled tunnel of hyperspace turned to starlines and then a starfield. She took a quick look around, but didn’t see the SSD. She did see Jace’s interceptor off to port. The rest of the party popped out of hyperspace a few seconds later. She ran a quick scan for the SSD, but didn’t find it.

     “Lead?”

     “Problem,” he came back.     

     “Don’t tell me they’re not here…”

     “They’re not here.”

     “Damn it, I told you not to tell me that.”

     “I have no idea where they could be,” Jace said, ignoring Jen’s comment.

     “I hope they didn’t take the SSD into Sova.”

     “I hope Skate didn’t take it based on the information she got from Bran.” Jace sighed. “Now’s a chance for you to introduce me to your friends.”

     “My friends? I wouldn’t exactly call them friends.”

     “Hey, I heard that!” Meltdown cut in.

     “Jace, that’s Meltdown. Meltdown, Jace.”

     “Hey.”

     “Yo.”

     “So now I can ask the question I started to ask you earlier,” Jen said. “Why in the hell are you here?”

     “Well, me and Havoc scoped out Ryvo’s pad after we left you and Skate.”

     “You saw us,” Jen said.

     “Yeah, and I got in contact with Ryvo’s cousin Jalia. She said she had no idea who you guys could be. So you show up on Sova asking questions about Ryvo, she recognizes my descriptions of you and calls me this time, and we head this way. We drop out of hyperspace, Benny calls me from his ship and apprises me of the situation and I save your ass.”

     “And I thank you,” Jen said.

     “You’re quite welcome. Now, I get this feeling that there’re some things you’re hiding-“ Meltdown started.

     “Let’s see if we can cut through all this sentimental crap and find out what happened to the SSD,” Jace cut him off.   

     “I love it when you talk dirty,” Jen said.

     “I doubt they would have taken the SSD into Sova,” Jace said, ignoring Jen’s comment.

     “Who is ‘they’?” Jen asked. “Are the rest of the Sith on the SSD or did they head to Sova?”

     “I sent Thunder a short message via telepathy telling her to return here, so either way she should come back, whether she is in her snub at Sova or on the SSD.”

     “That’s if she is in control of the SSD,” Jen added bluntly.

     “You don’t think Skate would mutiny, do you?”

     Jen felt a tinge of guilt for briefly considering Jace’s suggestion. She was certain there was a legitimate reason for the SSD missing. “No.”

     “What now?” Benny asked after a few moments of silence.

     “We wait,” Jace answered.