The Brightstar’s Flame was an heirloom of the Ninda family of Duros. They had owned her since she came off the production line, and had developed something of a ceremony for passing ownership from one Captain to another. That ceremony would not be carried out this time.
The ‘Flame had encountered an Imperial patrol upon arriving in the Correllian System. They had been boarded, not by the Imperial customs officials as expected, but by a clutch of Stormtroopers who had nearly taken the ship by force. The then Captain, Atlo Ninda, had fought with his crew to slow down the troopers while his children, Lyaia and Oz, calculated a new jump to hyperspace and safety. The crew had done their work, and killed the Stormtroopers, but they had paid the price. Now the only living things aboard the ‘Flame were Lyaia and Oz.
Lyaia had just turned eighteen. Already an adult by Duros standards, she stood one and eight tenths meters tall, with blue-gray skin and orange-red eye-spheres. She was dressed in black pants and boots, with a red tunic and a black vest. She was nearly a head taller than her brother Oz, who was only now of age to be considered an adult, and much more diminutive of stature.
Oz Ninda shared his sister’s skin color, but his eyes were closer to crimson than hers. His build was more delicate than hers, which tended toward the muscular. He was dressed in black pants and boots as well, but had on a silver-gray shirt without a vest, which took on a pinkish hue in the red emergency lights which were still on from the battle.
Lyaia and Oz assisted each other in hoisting the last wrapped body into the airlock. This body was that of their father, Atlo Ninda. It had been the emotionally hardest to find, arrange, and wrap with blankets from the ship’s stores, for this corpse had once held their first guide and protector. With Atlo’s death, a part of them had died as well, and maneuvering the still warm corpse into the chamber with the others had been like throwing their own lives out the airlock. Oz had regurgitated until his muscles and gastro-intestinal tract heaved only air. Lyaia was made of sterner stuff, and had simply kept her own counsel during their grizzly work, though her heart was torn asunder by the task at hand.
Once the body was loaded Lyaia paused as the inner door to the airlock closed. “We should say something, don’t you think?”
Oz looked up at her, his flesh grayer than usual. “I-,” he began, “I don’t know what to say.” His voice was heavy and sluggish, as though spoken through soggy cloth. His eyes showed the despair he was feeling clearly, as though he were made of crystal instead of flesh.
“It’s alright,” Lyaia assured him. She felt tired, and more than physically so. It had been quite an effort to load all of the bodies into the airlock, and she was drained to the core of her being. Still, she inhaled sharply and opened her mouth. “May the void keep you, and the stars light your way” she said in flowing Durese, surprising herself by not lapsing into sobs.
Oz closed his eyes as Lyaia pressed the button, and forced the outer airlock door open. The explosive decompression blew the bodies of crew and family alike out into the starry darkness beyond. Lyaia’s eyes followed her father’s body out until the running lights of the ship could no longer reveal it to her sight. She felt her life go out with him, eclipsed by the darkness.
“What do we do now?” Oz asked his sister. When she shook her head, Oz’s will collapsed and he slid slowly down to the floor.
Lyaia slumped down to sit beside her already ailing brother at the foot of the door. Unmoving, they were like the corpses they had just blown out into the eternal night. Their eyes stared unblinking at the metal walls and dripping pipes around them. They both remained like two rag-dolls thrown together by some careless child for hours. They might have remained like that until their own deaths if not for a piercing sound which broke through their morbid revelry.
“What is that?” Oz asked his older sister and last kin.
Lyaia thought a moment, blinking while she did. “I think it’s coming from the bridge.” She rose slowly on shaky legs, and helped her brother to his feet as well. Both of them made their way slowly forward to the small bridge in the fore of the craft.
The Bridge was more of a four-man cockpit than a true bridge, but calling it a cockpit was somehow unwieldy, and so it was the ‘Flame’s bridge by custom. Panels, readout screens, and switches covered nearly every surface but the floor. The panels didn’t even match each other, evidence of the ‘Flame’s long history of modifications. Above and between the panels most to the fore, were three large-paned triangular transparasteel windows through which the vast starry night of the void shown. Bellow those and within easy reach of the portside forward chair were the control levers for thrust, pitch, yaw, and the like. Beside that chair was a secondary set of controls and the precious navcomputer, without which hyperspace travel was near-certain death. Weapons and shields were the next panels starboard side aft, communications, sensors and engineering was the next back portside aft.
The sound they’d heard was coming from the sensor panel. Lyaia got there first, some of her energy returning via the alarming nature of the sound being emitted. “It says there’s another ship closing fast on our position.”
“Out here?” Oz said tiredly, though his mind grateful to focus on something other than death, “I thought we were in deep space.”
“And lost, yes,” Lyaia responded. Their last hyperspace jump had not gone well. “it’s a one in a trillion chance that some ship would be here, or even come close enough for its emergency systems to drop it out of hyperspace.”
Oz sat down in the co-pilot’s chair and gazed out the windows while Lyaia worked the sensors. “It’s a fighter,” she continued, “Z-95 by its signature. What the heck is it doing out here?” She shrugged and moved over into the pilot’s seat. “We better move before it hits us.”
“Maybe it’s a derelict?” Oz offered.
“Maybe,” his sister agreed. She punched the controls, and the ship’s maneuvering jets fired, causing them to drift in a safer direction. “That should do it.”
Oz continued to stare out of the windows.
Lyaia sighed deeply and sat back in her chair, suddenly unaware of why she bothered moving the ship at all. Their family was dead, and they had no knowledge of what to do next. Despair was starting to return now that the danger was over, and Lyaia began to join her brother in his vacant stare until yet another sound penetrated the gloom of their moods.
A voice that was a barely audible rasp came crackling over the comm. system in Basic. “This is Drex Odagon, I am off course and in bad need of supplies. I thank the Force that you were in my hyperspace path, though I can’t say how fortunate this is for me that you were.”
“The odds of this happening,” Lyaia whispered to herself as she listened in shocked awe.
“Can you help me?” the voice of Drex continued after some heavy breathing, “I could use some oxygen, and a walk around a deck, not to mention a proper bathroom.”
Lyaia looked at her younger sibling, who was now returning her gaze. His face was as amazed as hers.
“I’ll understand if you want to refuse,” Drex continued, “but-“ he choked and coughed, “it sure would be nice if you could help.”
“What harm could it do?” Lyaia shrugged. By Oz’s expression she took it he agreed. Turning around in her chair she pressed the comm. switch and spoke in her best Basic, “This is the Brightstar’s Flame,” she paused. “Captain Ninda here, we will assist you. Do you have anyway of coming aboard. I don’t believe we have a way to dock with your craft.”
“Quite alright, I have a flight-suit capable of withstanding hard vacuum, I’ll come to you.” The voice responded weakly, but gratitude was clearly evident. On the sensor readout, the Z-95 shifted course and started to head for the ‘Flame.
“Should I get some blasters?” Oz asked slowly.
“No, that’s alright. I think we’ll be ok.” Lyaia responded, “and if not, what does it matter?” Oz had no response to this.
They sat aboard the bridge waiting for some minutes before the Z-95 pulled up beside them and the pilot exited his craft. They watched as he kicked off of his fighter and drifted through the void to their airlock, his form slowly growing brighter as it approached the ship. They headed down to it as the stranger cleared the hull, and then cycled the airlock properly so that he could breathe and they wouldn’t get sucked out into the void.
The stranger was roughly the same height as Lyaia. He was wearing a beat-up looking armored flight-suit which didn’t seem to fit him quite right. It was colored light-gray and sky-blue, and had some kind of corporate symbol on it that Lyaia didn’t recognize. That in itself wasn’t anything special, there were a lot of corporations out there, too many to keep track of.
The stranger collapsed the moment the artificial gravity of the ship took him in its grasp. Lyaia and Oz rushed to his side the moment the inner door cycled open and rolled him into a more comfortable position than his fall had put him in. While doing so Lyaia noted his broad shoulders and the feel of taunt muscles beneath the suit. Oz began to detach his helmet from his suit, and had it off in short order.
In their laps now lie a heavily breathing human with dark red hair and amber colored eyes. His skin was tanned, heavily freckled, and weathered, indicating he’d been on a planet recently and for a prolonged period of time, though Lyaia hadn’t seen enough humans in her life yet to make a judgment about this, nor his age. He didn’t look old to her, so she presumed he wasn’t.
“Thank you,” he wheezed out.
“Oz,” Lyaia said in Durese, “go turn off the gravity. It will help him.”
The smaller Duros nodded and hurried off to do so. The man in Lyaia’s lap looked on the verge of a coma.
“What happened to you?” Lyaia asked in Basic.
“I’ve been in the fighter for the last eighty hours or so,” the man coughed hard, “I was running out of air and food. Thank you for rescuing me. I’m afraid I don’t really have much money to reward you with, and to tell you the truth I intend to ask of you another favor when I’m well enough to.” He half-laughed at this, though if there was a joke there Lyaia failed to understand. Cross-species understanding was a difficult and touchy science.
Her brother found the gravity controls. There was a sound of electrical devices powering down, and slowly Lyaia and the stranger began to drift upward off the floor. “Better?” she asked him.
“Yes,” he responded, “thank you. My name is Drex Odagon, nice to meet you.”
“Lyaia Ninda,” Lyaia responded, but the man in her lap had already drifted off into unconsciousness. “Oz,” Lyaia said loud enough to be heard. “Help me get him to the infirmary.”
The smaller Duros drifted back into the corridor and up to Lyaia, stopping perfectly on the wall opposite her with a well trained touch of his foot to pipe. “We’re going to help him then?” From his tone, Lyaia wasn’t sure if he really cared or not.
“If we can, though I doubt it. We can barely help ourselves right now.” Lyaia sighed.
“Maybe he can astrogate?” Oz shrugged, “maybe he knows where we are.”
“Maybe,” Lyaia agreed, grasping that shred of hope as tenuously as her brother. If he couldn’t help them, help him, they all would die out here when their food ran out, or the air recycler failed.
“Come help me now,” Lyaia said moving to move her unconscious guest. Oz nodded and pushed off the pipe behind him.