Merven didn’t get why she was so fascinated. Sometimes ships showed up in-system, popping in from hyperspace and appearing on his screens, and other times ships left…at which point their little icons disappeared from his screens. Nothing interesting ever happened—flight plans were logged ahead of time, so he usually knew what was coming or going. Merven was responsible for making sure those flight plans were followed, and not much else. On the off chance something unusual occurred, his job was just to notify people significantly more important than he was.

Scantech (third-class) Merven Getter spent his days watching people go places. He, in contrast, stayed still.

But maybe not today. He thought about Sella. He thought about her smile, the way she decorated her lekku with those intricate lacings she told him she designed herself, the way she stopped whatever she was doing to pour him his mug of ale the moment he walked in, without him even having to ask for it.

Yeah. He was going to ask her to dinner. Tonight. He’d been saving up, and he knew a place not too far from the cantina. Not so far from his place, either, but that was getting ahead of himself.

He just had to get through his blasted shift.

Merven glanced over at his colleague, Scantech (second-class) Vel Carann. He wanted to ask her if he could check out a little early that day, take the shuttle back to the Rooted Moon. She was reading something on a datapad, her eyes rapt. Probably one of the Jedi romances she was always obsessed with. Merven didn’t get it. He’d read a few—they were all set at outposts on the far Republic frontiers, full of unrequited love and longing glances…the only action was the lightsaber battles that were clearly a substitute for what the characters really wanted to do. Vel wasn’t supposed to be reading personal material on company time, but if he called her out on it, she’d just tap the screen and switch it to a technical manual and insist she wasn’t doing anything wrong. The trouble was, she was second-class, and he was third-class, which meant that as long as he did his job, she thought she didn’t have to do hers.

Nah. Not even worth asking for an early sign-off time. Not from Vel. He could get through the rest of his shift. Not long now, and—

Something appeared on one of his screens.

“Huh,” Merven said.

That was odd. Nothing was scheduled to enter the system for another twenty minutes or so.

Something else appeared. A number of somethings. Ten.

“What the—?” Merven said.

“Problem, Getter?” Vel asked, not glancing up from her screen.

“I’m not sure,” he said. “Got a bunch of unscheduled entries to the system, and they’re not decelerating.”

“Wait…what?” Vel said, setting down her datascreen and finally looking at her own monitors. “Oh, that is odd.”