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And despite their words, the approach to Razor’s Kiss, made in near silence, wasn’t boring. As they approached the enormous arrowhead-shaped vessel, now wrapped up in the spars and projections of the shipbuilding satellite, which looked like a monstrous insect stinging the destroyer into submission, she felt her pulse and breathing increase, her temperature rise.

One mistake and she’d die aboard that ship. Even, perhaps, if she didn’t make a mistake. The innocuous-looking datapad in her pocket could mean the difference between life and death for thousands in the New Republic.

Her father would be proud.

And that thought, recollections of the irascible man, already old when he’d falsified records of his death, resettled on the world of Ingo, and begun fathering children, the man who’d taught his daughters to look out for evil and watch out for good, calmed her. If he were here now, he’d be whispering in her ear: Now you’re Qatya. Keep your mercenary face on. Be nice to these people because they might hire you again in the future. Watch out for the backstab in case they decide to save themselves your fee. It won’t happen before you take the bridge; right now they’re anxious for you to succeed. It might not happen at all; Melvar was impressed with you, and they noticed. With the sound of his soothing voice in her ear, she finally relaxed. She gave Raslan a confident smile. “Don’t get too bored,” she said. “You’ll be asleep by the time we land.”

Razor’s Kiss grew before them until it blotted out the entire universe. Raslan guided them toward a tiny white dot that gradually grew into a standard rectangular bay opening. He brought the shuttle into a bay that was half-filled with other shuttles and with a pair of interceptors.

There were no people in the bay. Shalla frowned over that. Was it unguarded, with no mechanics on duty? But if the duplicitous colonel had automated instructions set up, he might require bay personnel to absent themselves when vehicles using specific passcodes arrived.

In silence, they exited the shuttle. Shalla was the first out of the bay, entering a long corridor that was eerily dim and quiet.

As she moved along the deserted corridor toward the bridge—a hike of over three kilometers—she decided that this was a ghost ship. Every other ship she’d been on had pulsed with life, a steady vibration that one could feel in the soles of her shoes and every rigid surface, a sensation so commonplace that spacegoers no longer noticed it after their first few days. This ship had no such vibration, and she imagined that if she saw someone materializing out of the gloom ahead of her, it would be a ghost.

But the first contact she had with the inhabitants of Razor’s Kiss was not so ethereal. Barely a kilometer into her walk, a doorway to a set of private quarters hissed open beside her and a stormtrooper emerged.

He tried to bring his blaster rifle in line. “Say—”

She leaned into him, pinning the rifle to his chest, and brought her hand up, an open-palm blow that caught the trooper’s helmet just at the chin. The force of the blow popped the helmet free of his head, sent it clattering into the quarters from which he’d emerged.

He backed away, trying to free his weapon, and she followed him. She crossed her arms and got both hands on the weapon, then stopped and yanked. The sudden torque ripped the blaster from his grip.

He lunged forward, grabbing, and she swung the butt up into his jaw. He fell like an anesthetized bantha.

Shalla looked around. This was a small office, perhaps a junior officer’s. No one else was present. She took a look in its interior door, but it led only to an empty refresher.

Raslan was in the office when she emerged. “You could hear his helmet bouncing for fifty meters,” he said, complaint in his voice, and held out his hand.

She handed him the rifle and slid past him. “You would have heard a blaster shot from three hundred.”

For the next kilometer, she encountered nothing except some floor-scrubbing droids, machines