You have to be freaking kidding me. There’s got to be another-. No. Just this. Why am I not surprised?

“Tina, hurry up already!” Brett yells over comms.

“I’m on my way out now. You won’t have to exert yourself much longer.”

“You try fending off four Enforcer fighters and a cruiser!”

I disconnect the data stream. “But you’re so much better at piloting than me.” Something explodes on his end. “Better not be hurting my ship, Brett.”

“I regret ever seeing you on Deziet.”

“Wow, you didn’t even last a week.” I shut the cruiser’s shields down. “Ready to test that transporter I installed?”

“It’s your life.”

I step into my ship’s cockpit and whack the back of his head. “You should trust me skills as a... What happened to my food synthesiser?”

“Someone decided it was a good idea to run auxiliary power right behind it.” He takes out one if the fighters. “So when I redirected more power to the shields-.”

“You just had to turn the synthesiser off first. Why was it even on during battle?”

Brett powers up the lightspeed drive. “I get hungry during high stress situations.”

“Well you’re going to go hungry for the next two hours because that’s how long it’ll take to fix it!”

I grab my repair kit and drop into the co-pilot chair.

“You got a location?” Brett asks.

“Earth.”

We make the jump.

*

“And you’re sure that they’re only operating out of Earth now?” Brett asks for the millionth time.

“Yes, I’m sure. If you don’t believe me, you can just read wha I pulled off TIE’s database, again.”

“But wouldn’t someone have noticed? I mean your planet is infamous for how strict their enforcers are.”

“Wow, it’s not like I learned that firsthand or anything,” I retort.

“Sorry, I forgot. Guess that’s going to make getting clearance to land a little difficult.”

I turn away from the pulled apart synthesiser. “You do realise that I rarely get clearance to land anywhere, right? How else do you think I got on Torline?”

Brett stops mid-pace. “But surely someone would’ve reported a slave operation on Earth.”

“Like they probably did on your home planet? Oh wait, the enforcers there didn’t do anything about it. Almost like they just don’t care.”

“But-.”

“We got this intel off TIE’s database, Brett. Earth’s enforcers obviously know.” I replace a fried wire. “And they couldn’t care less.”

“You’re not going to blow anything up, are you?”

I laugh. “Pretty sure that would just get in the way of the job.”

“This isn’t a-.” Brett sighs. “Maybe it will clear your name on Earth.”

“Doubt it.”

“I see now why you needed Yana’s constant optimism.”

I smile. “She was the best.” I add a seventh tally to the inside wall of the synthesiser. “And she also had a habit of mid-battle snacks.”

“Then why didn’t you reroute the auxiliary power?”

I replace the cover. “It was either here or the speakers. And we always had music blaring during a fight. Makes them more fun.”

Brett looks around. “But those speakers couldn’t possibly work.”

“Yeah, I took a hammer to them last year after... Never got around to fixing them.”

Something strangely similar to sympathy passes over Brett’s face. “It’d be nice to have some music as we make our epic descent into Earth’s orbit.”

What? Oh. He’s trying to cheer me up, isn’t he? Am I meant to be nice back or...

“Poor innocent Brett doesn’t know the first thing about sneaking onto a planet. We’re going to have to shut all power off and drift down. You know, let gravity do the job.”

“You want us to crash?”

I laugh. “Not if you engage the engines at the right moment. Or if it’s too hard, I can always pilot.”

“No! It’s fine. I’ve seen this down plenty of times before.”

“Just try not to break anything.” I stand up. “I’m sure I’ve got something in my room that can buff out those speakers. Give me a yell when we’re five minutes out.”

“Hey, Tina.”

“Yeah?”

“If things go bad and the enforcers get us, I-.”

“You won’t get caught.”

He sighs. “You know what I mean. We’re probably not going to get caught, but if we do-.”

“You don’t understand.” I look him in the eye. “I am not letting Yana’s little brother end up in prison or captured or anything like that. If things look like they’ll end badly, I will get you out of there. Even if I have to take the fall. And if you don’t agree with that then I’ll drop you off at Mars on my way through.”

“Yana was right about you,” he says, smiling. “You are a good person.”

I tap the synthesiser. “Yana wasn’t always right.”

*

I look out the viewport at the all too familiar blue planet lurking in the distance. It’s been so long since I last saw it with my own eyes. Earth, the only place I haven’t gone back to after being kicked out. There was no point before. Nothing was waiting for me there. No family (that acknowledge my existence) and no friends. If it was possible to piss off an entire planet, I did it in the span of two hours. And that’s saying something considering I didn’t even blow anything up like on Torline.

If this was any other planet, I’d finish the job in a week, two max. But here... Even Yana couldn’t convince me to come back here. And once this job is finally over, I might even say goodbye to the Milky Way just to get away from this stupid planet. It depends on whether someone ends up paying me for eradicating a galaxy’s worth of slavery. So, probably not.