1.05

One could neither hear nor see explosions in space; their eardrums would have ruptured and their eyes would have partially boiled and partially frozen due to the vacuum long before trying to see or hear those explosions became an issue. The same could not be said about spaceships, whether they were as small as a self-propelled space suit or as large as the Death Star. Any explosion big enough to affect the ship would create sounds moving through its usually metal frame, making it extremely loud against the silence of the void. I was lucky my quarters were in the central sphere of the KSS Doughnut; I didn't fancy running a few kilometers to the ship's bridge. Getting there still took a minute, the ship still vibrating minutely with every explosion. It was louder that I had expected, a visceral thumping moving through my bones, a dull roar coming from everywhere at once that was both alarming and disorienting despite how little it seemed to be moving the ship.

When I arrived at the cavernous command center, the bridge was in chaos. Nearly forty people, from mere sailors, to data analysts, to the navigator and Father's second in command, everyone was panicking. Just like back on Earth, these were simple traders and sailors that had no familiarity with violence, or desire to gain it. They were not cowards; a naval career in space was both more dangerous than its planet-side equivalent, and the dangers themselves were individually far more horrible. But there was something about facing another man with a gun that scared most people far more than any natural threat. Was it because we hadn't adapted to the threat of firearms - blasters in this galaxy - at a genetic level? I didn't know, and didn't want to find out either.

The only ones not panicking were Daddy Andrim, sitting there all serious in his Captain's chair, and about a dozen men in black, grey, and red uniforms with opalescent stripes. Those uniforms bulged ominously in all the wrong places, Astra's knowledge of fashion informed me. It wasn't hard to guess why; those men were members of the Trade Defense Force, the Trade Federation's naval security. Normally, they had their own patrol and escort craft, to protect merchant vessels and hunt down pirates. Lucrehulks like the KSS Doughnut however needed no escorts; they were far too big and powerful for pirates to attack. Thus the TDF men were relegated to the role of onboard security. Odd... I'd have expected droids instead.

"What is happening Father," I asked, seeing as despite the chaos nothing really important was going on.

"Pirates!" The older Arkanian man growled as if uttering a curse. "They blockaded the hyperlane with gravity mines and are now taking potshots at us with their peashooters. Bah, as if a Marauder-class corvette could ever threaten a Lucrehulk!" He was right, of course. Marauder corvettes were about six hundred feet long, armed with light laser cannons and a complement of a dozen small craft - starfighters and shuttles usually. Maybe if a few thousand of them attacked together they might threaten the two-mile-long Lucrehulk, but a single one? It was like shooting at a tank with a cheap handgun; annoying but hardly a threat.

I looked at the room-sized holographic projector at the center of the bridge, the one currently showing the surrounding space out to a thousand kilometers; anything beyond it became increasingly fuzzy. Star Wars sensor technology was thousands of years ahead of anything we had on Earth. Using subspace and hyperspace distortions, they could detect things half a star system away without lightspeed lag. Unfortunately, such sensors did not have the accuracy needed for targeting solutions, much like the HoloNet didn't have the bandwidth for decent videos. In combat, ships had to rely on realspace sensors... but those were affected by forcefields, jammers, and the Rayleigh limit. The minor distortion of an active shield became very important when you had to see something thousands of kilometers away.

"This is odd," I commented loudly to be heard over the slowly subsiding din. "If they can't breach our shields, why are they attacking?"

"Because they are pirates," Daddy spat back. "The greediest, laziest, stupidest bastards in space. Too incompetent to be honest traders, they want to make easy money by stealing the work of others." He pressed a few buttons on his control console, solid analogue circuitry clicking with dinosaur solidity, a trusty bulwark against program failures, hackers, droid revolts, and ion weaponry. "Well, not this time! Commander Tagget! Deploy heavy quad turbolasers!"

"Aye aye, sir!" a heavyset Devaronian in the tactical officer's chair responded. His reddish skin and the two thick horns growing from his forehead made him look like a demon, but his portly frame, shaking hands, and too-rapid breath broke the illusion; he was nothing more than a scared merchant. He pressed a button on his console, and a subtle groan spread through the Doughnut's frame as forty-two hatches opened in its equatorial belt, revealing the threat hidden inside. Tiny in comparison to the Doughnut's enormous bulk, each deployed a gun emplacement the size of a ten-floor apartment building. Against unshielded targets, without an atmosphere to dissipate much of the energy, a single shot would be the equivalent of a major nuke. And the Marauder's shields could handle a second hit only if the pirates were lucky.

Faced with eighty-four turbolasers aimed at it, the small pirate vessel started dodging frantically. You could dodge blasters and even beam weapons with a high enough acceleration, using lightspeed and targeting lags to generate misses. But if escape was all the pirates had planned to do against heavy firepower, why had they attacked a Lucrehulk? This was making less and less sense, and I had a feeling of something being terribly wrong.

"Father, why not bypass or destroy the gravity mines and jump back to hyperspace?" I tentatively suggested. Better to avoid potential risks, whatever they might be. "We do have a schedule to keep."

"I am not letting those bastards escape to prey on other merchants!" Daddy Andrim had turned around to glare at me, ignoring the developing situation as the Doughnut answered the pirates' attack a thousandfold. His normally pale face was red, his teeth bared, his pupiless Arkanian eyes wide in anticipation. One could practically feel his rage, his desire to hunt down the pirate scum and blow them up into subatomic particles as turbolaser shots breached their mosquito ship's hypermatter core. His bloodlust was so strong now, I could see that image going through his mind. "Or have you forgotten what happened to your mother?!"

I was about to respond with something calming and perhaps stupid, about how we shouldn't risk the cargo against any threat, however small, when his words jogged my memory... or rather Astra's. Months without any words from Mummy as she went to a long trip to the outer rim, the nightmares of a much younger girl that was only beginning to learn how dangerous the Outer Rim could be, then the dark news. More bleak months spent alone in her room, the only emotion a sense of loss, her only company more nightmares of the same thing happening to Daddy. A distant snap, only half-remembered, little Astra focusing on shoes, fashion, the latest make-up trends, embracing denial for all she was worth. By the time she'd been sent to space by the rest of the family, the dismal past was a dream, ignored and forgotten.

"No Father. I remember." Would the real Astra have, in my place? These foreign memories hitting me all at once, this younger body wanting to dissolve into tears... for the first time it struck me that Astra and her father were real people... had been, in the girl's case. Had my arrival in this galaxy effectively killed a sentient, sapient being? Should I ever tell the girl's father? What would happen then?

"Sergeant Bates," Daddy called out to his head of security, the man coming to attention instantly and saluting. "My daughter is obviously unwell. Have her escorted back to her room."

"Yes, sir!" He made a gesture, and two of the twelve security guards joined us. I did not protest as the four of us walked towards the exit.

"Commander Tagget! Redirect all sensor feeds to the primary computer core and apply its processing power to getting better firing solutions. I want those bastards blown out of space yesterday!"

That would work but would also shut down the half-million maintenance and cleaning droids said computer directed, I thought as we left the bridge behind. I wasn't sure I cared, at this point. I just tagged along as the three-man security team escorted me back to my room. A battle, however one-sided, was no place for little girls.

And all the while, this feeling of unease grew. In the storm of emotions Astra's memories had given me, it was barely noticed.