Cal dragged the unconscious enforcer out the back door and into the blinding glare of the twin suns. He didn’t take him far, just into the alley behind the workshop, where he used a discarded length of power conduit to bind the man’s wrists and ankles. Efficient. Disabling, not fatal. That was the training. He frisked the man, relieved him of a comlink and a handful of scrip, then left him in the shade of a corroded vaporator.
Back inside, the smell of ozone and fear hung in the air. Zia was standing exactly where he’d left her, her gaze fixed on the smoking hole in the durasteel door.
“He’s secured,” Cal said. The words came out clipped, a field report. “He’ll wake up with a headache and a story Krayn won’t like.”
Zia finally looked at him, her eyes tracing the lines of the DC-17 he now had holstered at his hip. Her expression wasn’t just fear anymore. It was a question she didn’t know how to ask.
Cal didn’t give her the chance. Action was the only anesthetic for a moment like this. “We need to move. Now.” He pointed to a stack of empty cargo containers. “Find one with a lid. Big enough for the droid.”
As Zia scrambled to obey, her movements jerky, Cal went to his workbench. RA-7X stood silently, save for the low hum of its power cell. Its red photoreceptor followed Cal as he approached.
“...Coronet Sector… Compliance is mandatory…” the droid whispered, its looping broadcast now at a barely audible volume.
Cal reconnected the datapad. Code scrolled across the screen. He wasn’t trying to break through firewalls this time. He was looking for a single command string. *Audio Output: Internal. Power Divert: 2%.* He found it and executed the command.
The droid’s vocalizer went dead. A small icon on Cal’s datapad confirmed the broadcast was now contained, looping endlessly inside the droid’s own logic center, a whisper in a sealed tomb. It was still a beacon, but only to anyone physically plugged into it.
“Is it off?” Zia asked, dragging a large, scuffed container from the stack.
“It’s quiet,” Cal corrected. He disconnected the datapad and gently lifted the RA-7 unit, laying it inside the crate. It was surprisingly light, an empty shell housing a universe of trouble. He fit the lid on top. “We take this. Everything else stays.”
“Stays? Cal, this is your whole life! Your tools, your…”
“This life is over,” he cut her off, his tone leaving no room for argument. He moved to his footlocker, pulling out the second DC-17 and a spare power cell. He shoved the cell into a pocket and held the blaster out to her, handle first.
Zia flinched back. “I can’t.”
“You’re not a child anymore, Zia. Not after today.” His voice was flat, but not unkind. “You don’t have to fire it. You just have to be willing to. There’s a difference. It changes the way they look at you.”
She stared at the weapon, then at his unyielding face. Hesitantly, her small, grease-stained fingers wrapped around the grip. The blaster was heavy, pulling her arm down. Cal’s hand guided hers, showing her how to thumb the safety.
“Keep it hidden. Don’t draw it unless I do,” he instructed. “Let’s go.”
He grabbed a heavy canvas rucksack, the same one Zia had used to bring him the droid, and began filling it with essentials: the datapad, a water canteen, a handful of nutrient bars, and the scrip he’d taken from the thug. He slung it over his shoulder, his movements spare and practiced. He was a soldier packing his gear.
“Go where?” Zia asked, tucking the massive pistol into the waistband of her trousers, where it was mostly concealed by her loose tunic.
“My ship,” Cal said, heading for the back door.
Zia hurried after him. “You have a ship? Why is it not at the main spaceport?”
“Because people like Krayn watch the spaceports.”
The alley behind the workshop opened onto a narrow service corridor that snaked between towering stacks of derelict machinery and discarded ship hulls. Xylos’s primary settlement wasn’t a city so much as a sprawling, multi-level junkyard with shops carved into its foundation.
Cal retrieved a beat-up cargo speeder he kept hidden under a tarp. It was little more than a rusty platform with a repulsorlift engine. He loaded the container with the droid onto the back.
“Get on,” he ordered, taking the controls. “Stay low.”
Zia climbed aboard as the speeder hummed to life, floating a meter above the dusty ground. Cal pushed the throttle, guiding them not toward the open sky but deeper into the canyon-like alleys of the scrap yard. He navigated the maze from memory, his knuckles white on the control yoke.
They passed scavengers who kept their heads down, sensing trouble. They shot past workshops that had hurriedly shuttered their doors. News traveled fast here. The sound of Krayn’s enforcer hitting the dirt had likely echoed all the way to his throne of scrap metal.
As they rounded a corner, Cal slowed the speeder to a halt. Up ahead, the alley opened into a wider plaza. Two of Krayn’s thugs, clad in the same piecemeal armor, were setting up a checkpoint, scanning the few passersby with handheld ID readers.
“Scrag,” Zia breathed, shrinking down behind the container.
Cal’s eyes narrowed. He scanned the area. The plaza was the only direct route to the outer scrap fields. To the left was a sheer wall of fused metal, a hundred meters high. To the right, the corrugated wall of a massive, defunct ore hauler.
“Hold on,” he said.
He veered the speeder sharply right, straight toward the hauler’s wall.
“What are you doing?” Zia yelped.
Cal didn’t answer. He was looking at a specific point on the wall—a place where a maintenance ladder had rusted away, leaving a series of jagged holes in the metal skin. He angled the speeder, nudging its nose against the wall directly below the lowest hole. Then he killed the repulsorlift. The speeder fell with a hard crunch, its nose wedged against the wall, its rear canted up at a steep, forty-five-degree angle. It was a makeshift ramp.
“We climb,” Cal said, grabbing the rucksack and swinging it onto his back. “Through the ship. It’s a straight shot to the other side.”
He started up the angled deck of the speeder. He moved like a man half his age, finding handholds on the hot metal and pulling himself up to the first hole in the hauler’s hull. He squeezed through and disappeared into the darkness within.
Zia followed, her heart pounding. The DC-17 at her waist dug into her hip. She scrambled up the speeder, mimicking Cal’s movements, and slipped through the hole into the cavernous interior of the old ship.
It was pitch-black. A thick, metallic dust filled the air, and the silence was absolute.
“Cal?” she whispered.
A beam of light sliced through the darkness. Cal had found a small utility lamp on his belt. It cast long, distorted shadows that danced across the skeletal remains of the ship’s cargo bay.
“This way,” his voice echoed. “Don’t touch the walls. Some of these support struts are unstable.”
He led them through the metallic crypt. It was a dead ship, a ghost like him, picked clean of anything valuable decades ago. They were mice in the belly of a leviathan’s skeleton. After a few minutes of walking, Cal stopped at another wall. He ran his light over it until he found what he was looking for: a circular maintenance hatch, its release wheel frozen with rust.
Cal braced himself, grabbed the wheel with both hands, and pulled. His muscles strained, the tendons in his neck standing out in sharp relief. The metal groaned in protest, a sound like a dying beast. With a final, earsplitting shriek, the wheel turned. The hatch dogs retracted with a series of heavy clicks.
Cal pushed the hatch open. The light of the twin suns flooded in, making them both squint. They were on the other side of the plaza, looking out over a vast, forgotten valley of scrap. It was a graveyard of starships, stretching for kilometers.
“Where is it?” Zia asked, shielding her eyes. “Your ship?”
Cal pointed.
In the center of the valley, half-swallowed by rust-red dunes of shredded metal, sat the largest wreck of them all. It wasn’t a sleek freighter or a nimble starfighter. It was a Gozanti-class cruiser, an old Republic gunship, its frame stripped of its engines and its hull plating scarred and pitted. It looked less like a ship and more like a fallen monument, a metal corpse that had been there since the end of the war.
Zia stared at it, her hope sinking. “That? But… it’s a wreck. It hasn’t flown in years.”
Cal slid down the embankment of scrap toward the derelict cruiser, his boots sinking into the loose metal with each step.
“It will,” he said, his voice carrying on the dry wind. “It’s a long hauler. It just needs a little persuasion.”