We ran.

  Deck Seven was chaos—loose crates sliding along the floor from the emergency drop, ceiling panels half-hanging, a crewmember slumped unconscious against the wall while another tried to shake them awake. A pair of miners sat handcuffed nearby. Not the conspirators. Just terrified people swept up in the wrong moment.

  “This way,” Kirana said, guiding me toward the central lift shaft.

  As we ran, Meral’s presence cut into my mind like a bright thread weaving its way through fraying cloth.

  Kae’rin, Kae’rin—listen. The saboteurs on our ship are down. Kyp—Kyp dealt with the worst of the bridge. I think we’re still flyable.

  “Still?” I asked aloud.

  The lift doors opened with a stutter, a flicker, then finally a reluctant slide that made me think of an exhausted animal lifting its head. Inside, the lift groaned upward.

  “Toran?” I asked through the Force. “Status?”

  He answered with a grunt, then:

  Engine’s not dead. Kyle’s coaxing it back to life. We’ve got maneuvering thrusters. Maybe more if we’re lucky.

  His emotion bled into the connection—fear, determination, a strange glimmer of exhilaration.

  But you need to get to your bridge, Kae. The gravity well is getting stronger. Fast.

  The lift doors opened.

  And chaos met us.

  ? ? ?

  The first thing I saw when door opened was a planet that shouldn’t have been there.

  At least not that close.

  A swirling mass of browns and blues and poisonous greens filled the viewport of the hyperdrive diagnostic station—too large, too immediate, a giant’s shadow swallowing the stars. For a moment, my brain refused to connect the dots.

  Kirana swore under her breath. Not loud. Just a soft, sharp sound that carried all the weight of a veteran Jedi recognizing a very, very bad stroke of luck.

  ? ? ?

  Three officers were arguing over a star chart. Someone else was trying to restore the comm grid with one hand while applying pressure to a wound on their shoulder with the other. Captain Reethe barked orders over the din, her hair half-loose from its knot, eyes bloodshot but razor-focused.

  “Selin!” she snapped as soon as she saw Kirana. “You—what’s the emergency? What happened to the hyperdrive? What the hell is going on?”

  Kirana paused just long enough to look her square in the eye—a measured, deadly calm that only a Jedi on the brink of a difficult truth could manage.

  “No time,” she said. “Where’s your navigator?”

  “Dead,” Reethe said. “Or unconscious. Hard to tell with the state the bridge was in.”

  “Then you’re flying blind toward the biggest gravity well this side of the Mid Rim.”

  “I gathered,” Reethe said through clenched teeth. “Suggestions?”

  Kirana turned to me.

  ? ? ?

  That was when the nav computer decided to come alive and calculate our location.

  FILDROST — Honoghr System — Gas Giant, the words flickered on the display, followed by charts and numbers.

  Toran’s voice flared in my mind like a flare-shot fired through a storm.

  Kae’rin—look outside!

  “I am looking.”

  Good, he said. Then you’ll see why this is both great and terrible news.

  Well, the terrible news was obvious.

  ? ? ?

  This was my moment, apparently.

  I stepped forward.

  “Captain,” I said, “I need your star charts. Now.”

  She stared at me like I’d asked for her private bank codes.

  “What?”

  “Charts,” I said. “Mass estimates of Fildrost’s moons. Orbital speeds. Rotational drift. Any detailed scan from the past ten years.”

  “We don’t have ten years,” she said. “We barely have ten minutes.”

  “We don’t need minutes if we have the data.”

  “And you plan to do what with it?” she demanded.

  Kirana answered for me.

  “She’s going to save your ship.”

  Reethe hesitated. Just long enough to reveal a single flash of doubt.

  Then she shoved the nearest officer aside and pulled up the star chart holograms with trembling fingers.

  “Fine,” she said. “Prove it.”

  The hologram flickered to life—a sprawling, swirling map of the Honoghr system. Fildrost dominated the projection, massive and predatory, with fifteen major moons orbiting in violent, intersecting paths like beads on tangled strings.

  Most people saw chaos in that map. I saw math. Deep, complex, moving math — the kind I’d been force-fed since childhood. The kind that had once driven me to tears in a secret underground enclave on Coruscant.

  The kind that made sense now.

  ? ? ?

  “Look,” I said, gesturing at the orbital tracks. “If we hit a slingshot vector from Fildrost’s third moon—”

  “Ketharre,” the comm officer corrected automatically.

  “Fine, Ketharre. If we pass within its gravity corridor, we can bend our trajectory around Fildrost without dropping toward its event horizon.”

  “Event—what?” Reethe demanded. “It’s not a black hole.”

  “No,” I said, “but its gravity is strong enough to act like one at the wrong angle.”

  And right now, we were drifting toward that wrong angle.

  “Show me your ship’s current vector,” I said.

  The navigator—who was conscious after all—tapped weakly at his console, projecting our path.

  My stomach tightened. Hard.

  We were on a slow spiral inward.

  Not a collision course yet.

  But inevitable, if we did nothing.

  “Captain,” I said urgently, “we need to shift ten degrees portside. And down twelve degrees. And we need to do it before Ketharre finishes this rotation. The window isn’t long.”

  “How long?” she asked.

  I glanced at the chart.

  Math spoke in converging and diminishing vectors.

  “Forty seconds.”

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  Reethe’s skin went white.

  “I don’t think—” she began.

  Kirana didn’t wait for the rest. She strode to the pilot’s console, shoved the dazed pilot gently out of the chair, and slammed both palms on the controls.

  “This is Supervisor Selin,” she shouted across the bridge. “All thrusters, acknowledge!”

  The comm officer scrambled, pressing his earpiece. “Engineering hears you!”

  “Then listen closely,” she ordered. “Portside thrusters, full burn on my mark—”

  Behind her, the star chart flickered again as something new appeared:

  Blue icons. Dozens of them.

  Then red icons behind them.

  Enemy ships.

  Zann Consortium warships and Hutt raiders emerging like wolves picking up a scent.

  “Captain,” the comm officer whispered, “they found us.”

  Reethe smacked the console. “Of course they found us!”

  But they were far. Very far.

  Not enough time to intercept.

  Not yet.

  “Twenty seconds,” I said, voice trembling as I tracked the moon’s gravity corridor shifting.

  “Kirana—now!” I shouted.

  And she hit the firing command.

  The ship lurched — harder than I expected, slamming me sideways into a bulkhead. Half the bridge fell or staggered. Panels sparked. Someone cursed.

  The stars outside swung like a pendulum.

  Kae’rin! Toran’s voice flared in my mind. We stole maneuvering back on this ship! Kyle’s trying for more, but if you give us a heading

  I projected it toward him like a line drawn with fire through the Force — my unease, my urgency, my precisely calculated chaos.

  He absorbed it instantly.

  Meral, he sent, relay that to Kyp! They’ll need to sync with us!

  Kyp’s presence blazed back:

  Already on it.

  Kirana held the ship steady as we swung toward the moon gravity track. The deck vibrated like an animal about to break its leash.

  “Five seconds!” I shouted.

  “Thrusters ready!” Reethe answered.

  “Three!”

  The moon’s orbit drifted toward alignment—

  “Two—”

  Its corridor glowed, faint and thin—

  “One—”

  We hit it.

  ? ? ?

  The ship SLAMMED sideways, engines howling, metal groaning under pressure. It felt like falling without falling, being jerked by an invisible hand through a whirlpool of gravity and speed.

  The bridge lights flickered out.

  Then blazed back.

  We were moving.

  Fast.

  Very fast.

  And with Fildrost’s gravity sucking at us like a living thing.

  We were in it now.

  A path only a lunatic would take.

  A path only Toran could have thought of.

  A path only I could calculate.

  A path that could get all of us killed or save us all.

  ? ? ?

  The gravity well wasn’t a force pulling us — it was a hand pressing against the hull from every direction at once. I felt it even in my teeth.

  The deck shuddered hard enough that my knees nearly buckled. Alarms shrieked in multiple tones, layering over each other like a choir of frightened animals. The holographic chart jittered, struggling to keep up with the velocity increase.

  “Hold her steady!” Captain Reethe screamed.

  Kirana didn’t answer. She didn’t need to. Her jaw was locked, her shoulders taut, her entire body braced against the pilot’s chair as if she could will the ship into staying on its razor-thin trajectory.

  I stood behind her, gripping the railing so hard my knuckles felt carved from stone.

  Kae’rin—vector update! Toran’s voice shot through my head like a flare.

  I reached out—eyes half on the chart, half on the Force.

  “Ketharre is shifting forward in orbit,” I sent. “Adjust three degrees starboard, point-seven downward pitch.”

  Got it!

  Then Meral’s presence blazed in, fast and frantic:

  Kae’rin—we’ve still got saboteurs trying to break through the midship hatch! Kyp’s holding them off, but—

  Kyp’s mental voice cut in, as unsubtle as a mallet:

  Tell her we’re fine, he snapped. We’ve handled worse. Just keep us away from the giant gravity monster outside the window.

  “Kirana,” I said urgently, “the Zann ships—they’re rerouting vectors. They’re coming after us.”

  Reethe spun toward her sensor officer, who was already staring at the display in horror.

  “They gained our trajectory,” he whispered. “Too fast. They must have precomputed fallback approaches.”

  “So they expected we might break early,” Reethe breathed.

  “Not from here,” Kae’rin added. “But close enough.”

  Kirana’s voice cut through the rising panic. “What’s our distance to the nearest pursuer?”

  “Half a million kilometers and closing,” the sensor officer said. “Two minutes until weapons range.”

  “And the rest?” she asked.

  “Another minute behind them.”

  Not enough.

  Far too close.

  ? ? ?

  We didn’t have real engines yet—only partial thrust, minor course correction, inertia, and a moon’s gravity threading us between death and worse death.

  “Kae’rin.”

  Kirana’s voice was steady, but there was a tremor underneath.

  “Look at the moon.”

  I raised my eyes to the viewport. Ketharre—Fildrost’s third moon—loomed to our left, a swollen sphere of cracked ice and reflective dust. Its gravity corridor stretched out like a thread of silver-blue light in the chart—thin, precise, relentlessly moving. We were slingshotting around it—far too close.

  Too close for a ship this size.

  Too close for any ship.

  “Captain,” I said, “if we hit that moon’s magnetosphere wrong—”

  “We won’t,” Kirana said.

  “You don’t know that!”

  “Yes,” she said. “I do.”

  Her calm wasn’t bravado. It was necessity given voice.

  Kae’rin! Toran’s voice knifed through my skull.

  “Yes!”

  Vector update—NOW!

  I looked at the chart and froze.

  Not with fear. With calculation.

  The orbit paths. The moon’s rotational pull. Our velocity curve.

  The distance between the incoming attackers’ formation lines.

  The exact mass and shape of our ships.

  The numbers aligned themselves in my head without asking permission, a shimmering lattice of motion and timing.

  “My gods,” I whispered. “We can thread it.”

  “Thread what?” Kirana demanded.

  “Between Ketharre’s primary and secondary magnetospheric layers. A narrow belt—stable for only a few seconds. If we run electromagnetic shields as we dive in, we'll be playing the metal core of an electromagnet. We hit it dead-on, we get a boost from the magnetosphere, Fildrost’s gravity will throw us around the moon and spit us out at escape velocity.”

  Reethe’s voice cracked. “That’s suicidal.”

  “Yes,” I said. “But less suicidal than getting caught.”

  Kirana didn’t hesitate.

  “Give me the course.”

  I fed it to them all through the Force — optimal frequency and charge of the shields, angles, speed, the exact curve of the path like a mathematical knife-edge. She adjusted thrusters in tiny increments, aligning our trajectory like threading a needle while sprinting through a collapsing building.

  The ship lurched as the gravity corridor narrowed.

  Metal groaned. Panels shook loose. A few personnel shouted, clinging to consoles.

  “We’re too close!” Reethe barked.

  “No,” Kirana said. “We’re perfect.”

  She wasn’t wrong.

  We hit the magnetosphere.

  Not gently.

  The ship bucked sideways with a force that compressed my lungs and blurred my vision. For a moment the stars outside spiraled like a drunk man’s dream. My knees hit the deck. Kirana slammed her shoulder into the pilot’s frame to keep from being thrown.

  Then the ship shot forward—

  —fast—

  —faster—

  —tearing through the corridor like a rock fired from a railgun.

  And the gravity well that should have crushed us instead hurled us outward.

  We weren’t free. But we were moving.

  Hard enough to make pursuit almost impossible.

  Almost.

  Because the lead Zann ship had been smart.

  They’d followed our curve.

  Kae’rin, Toran’s voice broke through again. Confirm the trajectory!

  I did. The Force connected our minds like a shared nerve.

  Three ships aligning. Three navigators improvising. Three sets of engines screaming against physics.

  And behind them, the killbox catching up.

  ? ? ?

  Except — not all of it. Not fast enough.

  Because at that moment, like a second sun igniting, Kyp Durron unleashed a surge of raw Force energy so sharp and bright it nearly blinded me.

  I staggered as his presence flared:

  Move aside!

  “Kyp—what are you—”

  A gravitational wave tore across space.

  An entire asteroid cluster — loose debris from Fildrost’s outer ring—shifted course in one violent pulse, rearranged like pieces on a board.

  Kirana gasped. “Oh stars—”

  The sensor screens lit up.

  The Zann ships had no time to dodge.

  Five of them smashed into the redirected asteroids like insects hitting a windshield. Another three veered off course, scraping against each other in frantic attempts to avoid the collision. A few disintegrated outright—metal and fire scattering through the void.

  The entire killbox hesitated.

  Just long enough.

  You maniac, Toran said through the Force, laughing and terrified. Do it again!

  Kyp’s mental growl answered:

  No. Once is enough. I need my spine.

  The remaining Zann ships broke formation, regrouping.

  Pursuit would continue.

  But the gap was real now.

  It was breathing room we should never have had.

  “Kirana,” I whispered, “full slingshot in three seconds…”

  “Already bracing,” she said.

  The ship vibrated with a rising scream—Fildrost’s massive gravity reaching out, twisting our course, then snapping us into its curve.

  “Three—two—one—”

  The stars distorted.

  Everything outside went white.

  Then the ship leveled. The pressure eased. And we were clear.

  Clear of the moon. Clear of the gravity. Clear of the pursuit.

  ? ? ?

  Reethe collapsed against her console in relief, half-sobbing. Officers hugged each other. Someone sank to their knees.

  But we weren’t done.

  “Captain,” Kirana said, “prepare for hyperspace.”

  “We can’t,” Reethe said. “Not yet. The engines—”

  “Yes,” Kirana said. “You can. You have a window now. A small one.”

  She turned to me.

  “Kae’rin. Final vector.”

  I exhaled, chest tight.

  “Kashyyyk.”

  Her mouth twitched into something like a smile.

  “Good choice.”

  Toran’s voice hit me again, urgent:

  Kae—are you safe?

  “Not safe,” I answered. “But alive.”

  His relief washed through me like warmth after frost.

  “Don’t let go,” I whispered.

  Not planning to.

  The stars outside aligned.

  The last sliver of safe trajectory snapped into place.

  Kirana’s hand slammed the hyperspace control.

  And Silver Gull leapt into the blue.