Kat and Cel’s journey through the Dinara City was a redundant memory of corridor floors and booted feet. Each was hung under a titanium rod that passed through rings on the electro-motive shackles around their wrists and ankles. One woman carried each end of the rod on their shoulder, four in all, and four others escorted the procession into the bowels of the ship. In another time and place, they’d have been secured with vines and bamboo and a war party would be carrying them to a stewing pot in New Guinea. Neither captive found the analogy comforting.

The escort’s fatal mistake was that all four had been leading the way. In a split second, all four were rendered hors de combat. The remaining four dropped their human bundles in an undignified show of panic. Their flight was short lived, however. Four laser bolts in quick succession finished the one-sided conflict.

Both Kat and Cel were too dazed from their fall to register much shock over seeing a naked Lucretia, in all her white noise splendor, freeing them from their bonds and giving them pistols and stun wands with which to fight.

“You two ok?”

Kat shook her head to regain her wits, while Cel nodded dumbly.

“Good. Head to the bridge. Somehow, some way. You need to be there.”

~/~

“C’mon Luthy. We haven’t got all day.”

OB1’s voice betrayed a rare nervousness. She was standing next to a jimmied access panel and looking up and down a little used corridor, her vorsashi held in readiness. Luthy was kneeling on the floor with a datapad, itself connected to the circuitry within the wall, running various decryption algorithms to gain access to a locked door 5 meters away.

With a sudden whoosh of air, the door slid open and a uniformed figure leapt out and fired in their direction. OB1, with her tuned senses, deflected the laser bolts with her sword and virtually danced her way to their attacker. She covered the ground quickly and thrust her sword between the fifth and sixth ribs, puncturing the heart and killing her opponent quickly, the body falling into the doorway proper.

“It’s open, Luth,” she called back.

Luthy sniffed and yanked the datapad connections from the wall. “Perhaps, we should just knock next time.”

After OB1 dragged the body into the room, Luthy followed and took a seat at the security system’s console. Luckily, the security chief’s account was still active.

“How long ’til you can change the master passw-”

“Done!” Luthy yelled with triumphant glee after several rapid-fire keystrokes. “‘Barscape’ is now active.”

~/~

“What is it with Jedi masters and tractor beam generators?” Lippy thought to herself as she crawled and wiggled her way down an engineering accessway. “And why do they put the frelling off switch in the most difficult of places?”

“They’re both attractive?” came the sudden thought. “At least, it’s true for you.”

“Moify! Where are you, hon? I’ve been worried about you.”

“Yeah? You’ve been worrying about little old me?”

“Well, yar. You and Han both. Where are you?”

“We don’t know. Blue’s trail took a strange turn about three days ago. My link with the hive has been tenuous at best since and I fear the worst. I don’t have enough time to fill in the details, but tell everybody…”

“Tell everybody what, hon?”

Suddenly, Lippy’s link to the hive became very active, a thousand consciousnesses filling the airwaves. “What’s happening?!”

An unfamiliar thought brushed the others aside. “Lippy, the one that is moif has been lost.”

“No!!”