The Action VI class freighter Lothcat
Thesme Sector - somewhere in deep space


"We're back in realspace, ma'am."

The helmsman of the Lothcat quickly handled the transition from hyperspace, letting the motivators cool down while the navicomputer began it's arduous several million computations to the next jump. The mood on the bridge was quiet tension. They weren't that far from home base, and though this sector of the galaxy was lawless badlands, that didn't mean that the two superpowers weren't watching. Far from it.

"Time to next jump?" Captain Bandar wrung her hands together. The Cathar skipper had a vested interest beyond just her ship and livelihood. The supplies they carried were intended for the resistance - as it was - on Cathar. It was barely a resistance movement at all at this point. More a means of giving a repressed, hand-to-mouth people a pause in their misery. A little breathing room.

"Fifty seconds."

It always felt like fifty minutes. Bandar couldn't still her restless legs, and the felinoid rose from her seat, walking around to prop her hands on the back of it. They were well off the Hydian now, and well past Thesme, nearly at the sector frontier. Imperial space was a stone's throw away, and then the converging snarl of hyperlanes that led to the Dathomir sector and home.

"Forty seconds."

The route they took conformed to no intersector hyperlanes. It was a hodgepodge of wildcat corridors that were often separated by hours of realspace journeys from what would otherwise be two adjacent dots on the map. It was necessary. The Empire made plain their edict that all inbound traffic from the border would approach the final parsec in realspace. If they didn't, the Imperial Navy had enough Immobilizer cruisers to make sure any runners regretted their decision.

"Thirty seconds, ma'am."

Captain Bandar sighed, closing her eyes as her clawed fingers kneaded her headrest. Another eternity passed, and when she didn't hear the countdown checkup, she opened her eyes once again - a part of her fearful to see an Imperial wolfpack suddenly defiling her view of unbroken starfield. She felt silly to feel so relieved at the sight of nothing. She wasn't some wet-behind-the-ears midshipwoman on her first journey. She'd been a merchant marine for years, and even flown for the Rebel Alliance, back when there was such a thing. Now they were the Alliance of Free Planets, a pretty name for a miasma of moral vaguery. She wasn't angry about the treaty. It wasn't that simple. Disillusioned? Disappointed? Maybe.

"Twenty seconds."

Bandar let out a breath she'd been holding, tugging at the hem of her jacket. She tapped at her wrist comm, set to ship-wide intercom.

"All hands prepare for light speed."

Not that anyone needed reminding. Still, navy habits died hard. She rounded back the way she came, preparing to return to her seat when a sight ahead paralyzed her legs and robbed her of breath once again

"No!"

It only took a blink of an eye for space to be violated by several million pounds of durasteel. There was no mistaking the look of an Imperial Star Destroyer.

"GET OUR SHIELDS U--"

The Lothcat thrashed violently in the ether from the impact of turbolaser shots against naked hull. Consoles exploded into electrical fire as the air on the bridge began to fill with a closeness more than simple ozone. The fear of all aboard had been released out of thoughts and made manifest.

The Star Destroyer raked the Action VI as she passed close, precision turbolaser fire boiling away specific sections of hull plating on the aft quarter, virtually guaranteeing a fatal impact to the hyperdrive motivator.

It ended as quickly as it began. Captain Bandar righted herself from where she pitched to the deck, giving a look around. Her engineer had taken nasty burns to his hands and face, which were getting seen to by a medic. It could have been worse.

No.

It was already worse. She just didn't know the extent of it. The Star Destroyer was now just as silent as Lothcat. They both hung in space like mute statues of some ancient civilization. The only sign of motion lay in the plume of shrapnel and venting gas bleeding from the Action VI's aft section.

"Captain, they're hailing us."

Bandar turned to her comm officer, barely able to mask the dread in her expression. Who shoots first and says hello later? The Empire, clearly.

Squaring herself, Bandar gave her comm officer the nod to open the line.