"Alright, boarding party," said Captain Osman's voice in my ear as I waited at the boarding hatch alongside a handful of deckhands I didn't get out of the engine room enough to know very well.  "Be careful, as this isn't our usual freighter.  That means you, Mister Cleary.  I prefer you in the land of the living, where I can keep an eye on you."

It was really too bad she wasn't here in person to witness my exaggerated eye roll.  I would have relished the look on her face, and she wouldn't have given me too much of a hard time in return.  She was a stern woman, but I would never have gotten away with half the things I did with the ship's systems if she didn't have a soft spot for me.  Behind the gruff attitude, she genuinely cared for the crew.

"On your marks…" said the captain in our ears.

The muffled BANG of a falling chunk of hull echoed from the boarding tunnel, and the heavy hermetic door swung ajar with a slight hiss as pressure balanced between the Kingfisher and her prey.

We all donned and locked our helmets with the speed and ease of many rehearsals.  We weren't planning on going outside anytime soon, but plans can fall apart.

"Go."

And then we were weightless.

We all shoved ourselves through the hatch, with me bringing up the rear as we drifted across the gap through a flexible tube.  It wasn't my first time making that trip, but it still felt a little surreal.

We kept on floating freely, right into the other ship, magnetic deck plates disabled.  Thrusters too.  Cap'n sure knew how to pick a gunner.

The ship at our mercy was a royal imperial transport, and every inch of the interior lived up to that standard.  Everything was meticulously kept from stem to stern, and it may as well have been a high-end passenger liner with its wide hallways and smooth, polished walls.

Whatever cargo was aboard had to be precious, and the ship herself would sport some of the finest parts to be had.  So naturally I'd begged the captain to let me go aboard and ransack the engine room.  I didn't mention the experiments I had in mind if I found a good enough particle condenser.  Her shayla would have caught fire from the sparks spraying out her ears.

There was no resistance waiting for us at the breach point, and with any luck the unexpected loss of "gravity" would dramatically slow down whatever response the security guards and pampered crew tried to make.

As planned, the raiding party split up, with most hands heading downward to the holds while I and a few others made aft to the engines instead.  I recognized one of my teammates as Crewman LaVert, who I sometimes chatted with in the galley.  Nice gal.

We met almost no resistance as we went: mainly crew members who did their best to clear out and avoid trouble, and a couple lone guards who my teammates had no trouble wrestling into wrist ties.  The rest were presumably drifting their way down to chase the rest of us away from their cargo.

The engine room itself was breathtaking.  It was beyond overdesigned, wasteful really, but every bolt and pylon was the tippiest of top grade.

I just shoved myself toward the access door and let myself sail right through to find where they kept the backup components while LaVert & company took care of securing the engineers to various railings.

"We'll be right over to help haul stuff back," LaVert assured me.

"Awesome, thanks!"

The treasure room, or, um, storeroom happened to be very conveniently located right next to the maintenance catwalk access.  Perfect for the engineer in a pinch.  Or one looking for things to pinch.  And it was an absolute trove.

"God, Cleary, you're like a kid in a candy store, it's freaking adorable," said LaVert over my radio as I did my shopping.  She wasn't wrong.  Well, about the candy store part at least.

I shoved the particle condenser of my dreams into a duffel bag along with a handful of reactor coils and tossed it to her.

"You have no idea.  Ask me about it all later at your own risk," I said jokingly.  Heck, maybe she'd even take me up on the offer...

I managed to toss our two friends a bag each before things took a turn.

"We have security in the cargo holds!  Time to clear out," said my radio.

And then we all hit the floor as the electromagnetic deck grabbed the ferric weights in our suits.  A mechanic in the crawl spaces must have managed to get power back to them around the damaged lines.

I pulled myself up first, and ran back out to the engine room.  LaVert and the others weren't far behind, but the loot would slow them down, so I might as well check that the coast was clear.

I peeked out the access door and down the hall.

Two guards stared right back at me.

It took a second to sink in that I was screwed.

"Shit!" I informed my comrades, and ran down the opposite hall.  The guards followed suit.  One wasted a perfectly good rail pistol bullet on missing me.  I huffed and puffed as I elaborated.  "LaVert, y'all are clear outside the engine room for now, I'll catch up when I can."

"So help me, Mister Cleary—"

I unclasped my helmet and threw it behind me before I swerved down a staircase.  The good news was it slowed down my pursuers.  The bad news was it knocked the headset off my ear.  Sorry, Cap'n.

I doubled back down the hall at the bottom of the stairs, then half skidded around a corner.  My lungs ached.  The guards were out of sight now, but it wouldn't stay that way for long.  I needed to hide and catch my breath, so I ducked into the next door I passed.

I leaned against a wall until my breathing stopped coming in gasps.  Nobody had come and caught me in the meantime, so there was that.  The adrenaline rush had begun to wear off, and my brain worked on catching up to the rest of me.  If my sense of direction could be trusted, I should be amidships, a good way afore of engineering.  A mad dash due starboard and back up a deck ought to bring me back to our breach.  Unless the Kingfisher had already detached, that is.  Then all I would find would be sealed bulkheads.  Without a comm line, there was no telling which it would be.

"Are you okay out there?" someone called out.  

The room I had ducked into was a brig, and an unkind one, despite all the polish.  I wandered toward the voice, down the row of half a dozen cells, each of them containing just an unpadded bench and a tiny cubicle of a head behind honest to goodness steel bars.

In the cell at the end stood one of the most regal-looking women I'd ever seen.  Her unbowed posture reminded me of Captain Osman, but where Cap'n was a sturdy medium-sized woman, this one was a full head taller than me, and was slim but by no means lanky.  Her hair hung loose down to her shoulders in a wavy black mane, framing a face that was soft yet striking.  Somehow she even managed to make a pressure suit look elegant.

"Oh, thank goodness, you're not hurt!" she said as I came near.  Her voice was low and smooth.  "Listen, I don't suppose you would be willing to help me out of here, would you?"

The enemy of my enemy is my friend, right?  If she was someone the empire wanted locked up, then she couldn't be too bad in my book.  I ran a hand through my hair awkwardly.

"Well, I don't see why not.  Do you need a lift?  There's almost always room on the Kingfisher, if you don't mind earning your berth.  Though, uh, I'm afraid I've lost contact with my crewmates."

Surprisingly, she smiled at that.

"Luckily for you I know a sure way out, then," she said with entirely too bright of a grin, leaning down to meet my eyes.  There were little sparks of yellow in her gray irises.  Oh, she could play me like a fiddle if she wanted to.  "There should be a hangar at the bow, and they'll have my ship stowed there.  We can just steal back what's mine.  If you actually let me out, that is.  The panel is over there."  She pointed to it, just on the far wall, plain as day.  Why didn't I lead with that?  Embarrassing.  I scurried over in a hurry to rectify that.

The flick of a switch, the dull thump of a mechanical lock disengaging, and her cold, polished cage was open.  She strode out like she owned the place.

"Thanks," she said.  And ruffled my hair.

It is with great pride that I say I only shorted out for a few seconds at the friendly contact.  I was a little bit shut-in most of the time, after all.

"I'm Stella, by the way.  Ready to move?"

Aye aye, Miss Stella.  Wait, what was I doing?  I was still in the belly of the beast.  I needed to focus.  I gave my head a good shake.

"Uh, yeah, I'm good to go.  At the fore, you said?"

She nodded, and took off through the forward door.  I followed her lead.

The hangar, it turned out, was just a dead sprint afore from the brig.  As we ran, I could hear security walking and chatting around corners, but didn't dare slow down enough to take stock of where they were or whether they followed us.

By the time I skidded through the hatch, Stella, with her head start and long stride, was already pounding away at a console to open the hangar door and unlock the docking clamps on her ship.  And what a ship she was.  Even with a stitch in my side and ice in my lungs, I managed to find it in me to stare through the portholes of the boarding tunnels.  Parked in the hangar, before my eyes, was a vessel fit for a queen:  Barely big enough to fit a power plant and zero point scoop both, but small meant less mass to push, less volume to heat, and less area to bounce radar off of.  Retractable warp ring.  Transparent windows.  Sleek form.  (Could she make landfall? No need for a shuttle?)

And then I was being led along by the wrist, toward the airlock.  Oh, what would she look like on the inside?

"You can ogle her later, right now we have to go!"

Right.  Of course.

Stella dragged me aboard and right to the helm, which was a cockpit rather than a full bridge, and sat me down right in the co-pilot seat.  She got right down to business taking off.

"What's your name, by the way?" she asked me between checking gauges and flipping switches.  "I really need something I can call you instead of just pulling you along behind me."

For some reason it took me a while to think about that.  My full name felt weird to tell anyone, if I was honest with myself.  It sort of felt like wearing my dad's pajamas on a spacewalk.  These days I mostly just stuck to, well…

"Engineer Cleary, from the Kingfisher!"

Stella eased the throttle forward, I felt acceleration push me against my seat, and we finally slipped away from that damned imperial ship.

"Well met, then, Miss Cleary."  She said it with that smile of hers.

"Huh?"  Wait, for real?  Where'd she get that idea from?  Well, no time to worry about it just yet.

A light on the console informed us the warp ring had fully deployed, and it occured to me we might be able to get a channel through to the Kingfisher, to let Cap'n and the others know I made it.

We never got the chance.

The magnetic flux sensor lit up brightly and sirens rang.  The lighting in the helm turned blood red.  Whatever gun had just missed us was one hell of a high energy cannon.  And it might have been a deliberate warning shot.  We needed to get away, and fast, before they lost patience and lanced us right through.

As far as ideas went, I only had one.  Hopefully Miss Stella was as forgiving as Captain Osman.

"How would you rate this ship's warp engine, Stella?"

"One of the best in the galaxy.  Why?"

"No time.  Keep the comm open to the engine room, and be ready to step on it as soon as I say."

I reached over to her console and punched in the heading myself.

"Won't they just follow us?"

"Not if this works."

I leapt to my feet and bolted for the stern.  I was running equations in my head the whole way there.  Most of them I had already spent months trying to suss out.  That shiny new condenser would have been my chance to test it all out on an unmanned boat back at Sanctuary.  But it was now or never.

I was emptying my brain into the engineer's console without even stopping to catch my breath.  This change to the containment fields would reshape the exotic matter lattice in the ring.  Shifting the resonance of the condenser would gather a different mix of particles.  Feed the whole system extra power for good measure.

"What exactly are you doing?" Stella asked through the speaker on the console.  I watched the readouts as the shapes I felt in my mind's eye all too slowly appeared.  I wasn't sure what to tell her.

"Weaving satin."  Close enough for now.  I'd explain it to her later.  Warning: Atypical warp field.  Allow.  All systems green.  "Take us away, Miss Stella."

My breathing was evening out.  I might have been holding my breath for a while there.  I heard the capacitors whine as they charged to kickstart the stardrive.  I heard the pop as they discharged.  I felt the telltale drop in my stomach as the drive gained potential.

Something rattled the ship, hard.  A shot from that cannon, grazing us?  I lost my footing.  The console headed for my face.  Crack.  My senses went blank for a second, then came back.  And then the ship leapt away, finally.

I don't remember much from after that.  Stella came and helped me up.  She asked me the usual questions you ask when someone cracks their head on something.  She asked me something about a medical pod, but it didn't quite make it through.

She laid me down, and I fell asleep.