Charles Soule - ALREADY IN FICTION Star Wars: Light of the Jedi

All is well.

Captain Hedda Casset reviewed the readouts and displays built into her command chair for the second time. She always went over them at least twice. She had more than four decades of flying behind her, and figured the double check was a large part of the reason shed survived all that time. The second look confirmed everything shed seen in the first.

All is well, she said, out loud this time, announcing it to her bridge crew. Time for my rounds. Lieutenant Bowman, you have the bridge.

Acknowledged, Captain, her first officer replied, standing from his own seat in preparation to occupy hers until she returned from her evening constitutional.

Not every long-haul freighter captain ran their ship like a military vessel. Hedda had seen starships with stained floors and leaking pipes and cracks in their cockpit viewports, lapses that speared her to her very soul. But Hedda Casset began her career as a fighter pilot with the MalastareSullust Joint Task Force, keeping order in their little sector on the border of the Mid Rim. Shed started out flying an Incom Z-24, the single-seat fighter everyone just called a Buzzbug. Mostly security missions, hunting down pirates and the like. Eventually, though, she rose to command a heavy cruiser, one of the largest vessels in the fleet. A good career, doing good work.

Shed left Mallust JTF with distinction and moved on to a job captaining merchant vessels for the Byne Guildher version of a relaxed retirement. But thirty-plus years in the military meant order and discipline werent just in her bloodthey were her blood. So every ship she flew now was run like it was about to fight a decisive battle against a Hutt armada, even if it was just carrying a load of ogrut hides from world A to world B. This ship, the Legacy Run, was no exception.

Hedda stood, accepting and returning Lieutenant Jary Bowmans snapped salute. She stretched, feeling the bones of her spine crackle and crunch. Too many years on patrol in tiny cockpits, too many high-g maneuverssometimes in combat, sometimes just because it made her feel alive.

The real problem, though, she thought, tucking a stray strand of gray hair behind one ear, is too many years.

She left the bridge, departing the precise machine of her command deck and walking along a compact corridor into the larger, more chaotic world of the Legacy Run. The ship was a Kaniff Yards Class A modular freight transport, more than twice as old as Hedda herself. That put the craft a bit past her ideal operational life, but well within safe parameters if she was well maintained and regularly servicedwhich she was. Her captain saw to that.

The Run was a mixed-use ship, rated for both cargo and passengershence modular in its designation. Most of the vessels structure was taken up by a single gigantic compartment, shaped like a long, triangular prism, with engineering aft, the bridge fore, and the rest of the space allotted for cargo. Hollow boom arms protruded from the central spine at regular intervals, to which additional smaller modules could be attached. The ship could hold up to 144 of these, each customizable, to handle every kind of cargo the galaxy had to offer.

Hedda liked that the ship could haul just about anything. It meant you never knew what you were going to get, what weird challenges you might face from one job to the next. She had flown the ship once when half the cargo space in the primary compartment was reconfigured into a huge water tank, to carry a gigantic saberfish from the storm seas on Tibrin to the private aquarium of a countess on Abregado-rae. Hedda and her crew had gotten the beast there safelynot an easy gig. Even harder, though, was getting the creature back to Tibrin three cycles later, when the blasted thing got sick because the countesss people had no idea how to take care of it. She gave the woman credit, thoughshe paid full freight to send the saberfish home. A lot of people, nobles especially, would have just let it die.