The port of Port Kepler was a scar of metal and rust on the planet's face. There were no private guild hangars draped in proud banners, no luxury trade terminals built by magnates. There was only that port: public, ugly, and brutally functional.
As Ishtar passed through the security scanners, the system recognized her new property. On the far side of the boarding platform, a section of the floor split open, and her ship began to rise, lifted by a hydraulic elevator that groaned in protest.
Up close, it was even uglier.
The scratched ladybug looked like it had been used as target practice. The red hull was faded and covered in deep gouges and scorch marks—a silent testament to a previous pilot who had clearly learned the art of flying, a notoriously difficult skill in *Odyssey*, through repeated and painful collisions.
She walked up the boarding ramp and stepped inside. If her real-world room was a cubicle, the interior of the Star-Mite was a claustrophobic corridor. The walls on both sides weren't really walls, but a series of cargo crates and built-in storage lockers, leaving only a narrow passage down the middle. No fighter bays. No engineering deck. No crew quarters for the crew she no longer had. A fleeting image of the Unbowed, with its four attack-fighter launchers—each housing a small ship of pure fury—flashed through her mind and was violently suppressed.
Ishtar sat in the pilot's chair, which creaked under her weight. The control panel in front of her was… simple. Almost childish. There was a throttle, a small keypad, and maybe twenty buttons, all clearly labeled with universal icons.
And for the first time since her world had shattered, Ishtar laughed.
It was a dry sound, joyless, the sound of a queen seated on a plastic throne. Her mind drifted to the cockpit of the Unbowed, a cocoon of more than two hundred buttons, switches, and holographic displays, each with a function she knew as intimately as the palm of her hand. This felt like a toy.
With a familiarity born of thousands of hours, she ran through the pre-flight checks in seconds. Lights on. Shields (minimal) online. Thrusters engaged. She pressed the takeoff button.
The ship jolted, the engines whining with effort, but it stubbornly stayed put. Confusion. For a moment, she didn't understand. Then a small red icon blinking in the corner of the panel gave her the answer.
Fuel.
She had forgotten. She was so unused to thinking about something so mundane. The Unbowed ran on an atomic reactor. She filled its fuel bay with enriched uranium rods and didn't have to think about it for months. This little ladybug ran on refined hydrogen.
With a sigh, she opened the port interface and selected the refueling option.
[Refueling Cost: 125 CR.]
Another small stab to her balance. She paid it. Outside, a rusted mechanical arm extended from the platform, latched onto the ship with a metallic clank, and filled the tank in seconds.
Ishtar engaged ignition again.
This time, the sound was right. A deep, steady hum. The ship lifted off the platform, wobbling for a moment before her pilot's instincts took over and steadied it.
She didn't look back. She didn't grant Port Kepler the courtesy of a final glance. She angled the nose of the ship toward the rust-colored sky and engaged the main engines. The acceleration was pathetic, but it was upward motion. Space seemed to draw closer with every second, the atmosphere thinning, darkening.
The instant the last layer of air fell away and the silent darkness of the vacuum closed around her, the universe greeted her not with silence, but with fire.
Alarms screamed. The hull shuddered violently. Green laser blasts tore past her cockpit.
The attacks had begun.