With a final clunk, the noises of hard-dock abate, leaving just the hum of air conditioning units and electrical systems. It seems unnaturally quiet after all the alarms, high thrust manoeuvring and main armament activity, intermixed with the occasional thump and bang as shields took hits from the enemy. A total engagement time for this phase of the operation: 6 minutes 23 seconds. Seemed like longer, but then things do when you're having fun.

It gets trickier from here on in. The run to Kessel was made exactly to schedule and, with small adjustments here and there, exactly to the planned course. A total of six hyperspace jumps with one placed close enough to a known deep space monitoring probe to provide just a hint of our incoming trajectory, giving the star-destroyer Armoured Evangelist just enough time to get wind of our arrival and intercept us as we came out of hyperspace, 0.2 AU from Kessel itself.

Just another hunk of junk, making the spice run in the hope of turning a tidy profit and not getting blasted while trying. Or so it seems.

But now the real mission begins.

Noises in the access way beyond my hiding space signal the imminent arrival of stormtroopers. Sure enough, a second later, the airlock door is blasted open and a unit of white suited 'troopers enter the ship.

The stormtroopers run past me and down the corridor towards the bridge and cargo space. I can sense that two remain stationed outside the airlock. There's some encrypted chatter back and forth between the troopers. Probably wondering where the crew are hiding (good luck with that - just little old me here!), and why the cargo hold is empty - except, that is, for the bomb on the cargo bay door.

I send a signal to the bomb to blow the device. The cargo bay has a big door, and there is pure vacuum outside, so the resultant explosive decompression is pretty impressive. Air screams through the airlock as that which is lost from the freighter is replaced by air from the star destroyer's dock-space. Within half a second the pressure loss condenses the moisture out of the air and visibility becomes a greyed-out zero.

Normally the dock's blast doors would automatically close to seal the breach, but I'm holding the nearest one open by an extension of Force.

Time to move. I come out of my hiding place and float out of the airlock against the raging current of air, stopping just inside the blast door to link to the Armoured Evangelist's network using a droid interface. At the moment I have all the advantages - the element of surprise, and a full set of schematics and illicit access override codes uploaded into my processor.

It takes me a fraction of a second to countermand the order the panicked ship sends to close all the blast doors​ on the dock level, and another couple of seconds to upload a hijacking routine to the destroyer's internal comms network that allows me to remain linked to the ship without a physical connection. As soon as it's done, I'm off.

The fog clears as the remaining atmosphere in the dock space fades to vacuum. The blast doors are still open in the dock but air has stopped escaping, so someone with their wits about them must have manually activated the blast door beyond dock space. A few stormtroopers are revealed, scrabbling around, clutching their throats and generally suffocating. Threat risk is low. As I move down the access way, I transmit one of my purloined codes that gives me access to the Armoured Evangelist's core AI and begin uploading a set of instructions that are so large, it will take a full 10.68 seconds to complete.

There are things to do before the upload is finished.

The best kind of plans have plenty of resilience built in. If something goes wrong - an objective not possible to achieve, say, or an attack beaten off - then you need to switch seamlessly to the next priority, or attempt an already thought-out alternative tactic to achieve your primary aims. This plan - the one I'm following now - doesn't have that. This is a one chance only, blink and it's gone dash-for-glory attempt that the highly annoying C3 unit back at Polis Massa kept telling everyone who would listen had only a three-point-two percent chance of success. Cretin. What does it matter when your mission is almost certainly going to end in your death, even if it succeeds?

Anyway - back to business. I'm at the closed blast doors between dock space and ship interior. No application of the Force will open these now they are locked shut. Brute force is what's required. Blasters are no good ('blast' doors, remember?) and so I rely on my other particular weapon - a light sabre. Not your normal, Jedi issued sabre though. Being a droid means I have certain, ahem, advantages over my biological brethrens. Massive parallel processors in a really tiny space mean I have the ability to build three dimensional shapes in real time out of my sabre-generator ports - from lance like projections to a fully-enclosing (but sensor-blinding) sphere out to two meters from case exterior. In training there was no way a single sabre-wielding Jedi could best me in one-on-one combat. And as for stormtroopers...

Lighting up a lance from a 'sabre port I push through the blast door; globs of molten metal and carbon-diamond composites bounce and fizzle all over the floor, then I extend the sabre's circumferential dimensions outwards to form a hollow cylinder through which I can fit. Another vortex blasts through the hole as air rushes in to fill the void in the dock space. Strangely enough, resistance on the other side is more concerned with breathing than taking careful aim. I'm through and away and off down the Armoured Evangelist's keel lateral access way that leads directly to engineering space.

When I'd reviewed the stolen designs for this class of star-destroyer, it had been with a sense of awe and incredulity that I'd seen the keel lateral access way. Just over two thousand meters long from where I'd entered it, and a dead straight line from docks to just one bulkhead away from engineering, it offered an almost laughably easy route to the decks directly beneath operations, weapons control, communications and command.

A pulsed laser-ranging shot down to the far end of the access way confirms a distance of 2032.56 meters from my position to the far end, and no obstructions in my path. All blast doors are open (no one has thought to manually close any - yet), and I make sure ship keeps it that way. I push up to maximum speed, passing through the sound barrier less than a second later, at which point the balance of available Force vs. resistance is achieved. A small object travelling at at 343.2 meters per second through a corridor makes for a hard target, but a few plucky 'troopers have a go. They all miss. Stormtroopers and droids scatter and tumble in the shock wave behind me. A few fall from the access way into the keel space beneath. I can't resist taking a look through one of the Armoured Evangelist's security cameras as I pass ... pretty awesome, if I say so myself.

Exactly 4.98 seconds after setting off I begin braking, at the same time sending a spread of stuttered x-ray laser pulses a nanometer wide at the bulkhead wall. The bulkhead gives way in a shower of sparks, heat and light, and with a shrewd nudge with my shields, a diamond shaped section gives way and tumbles to the floor leaving a space just large enough for me to fit through. As I come to a stop inside the bulkhead wall and begin to make my way upwards, the upload of illicit code I started earlier completes. I execute the code, sending all access overrides I possess to make the Armoured Evangelist think it's being given commands by a Grand Admiral, and hope that by the time I reach the top the instructions have done their work. Things might get a little hot otherwise.

As I negotiate through a maze of ducting, pipework, power conduits and thick, glowing bundles of optic waveguide cables, I hear alarms through the bulkhead wall. That can only mean the Captain has authorised the activation of the secondary internal defence system (thoroughly independent of the Armoured Evangelist's own systems, and therefore immune to my fiddling). Enforcer droids will now be let loose on a shoot-to-kill engagement protocol. I tangled with a K series some years ago and they make for pretty tricky opponents, with lightning fast target-and-fire routines. Far more accurate than your average biological stormtrooper. Better be careful.

By the time I reach the level of the weapons control deck, space is getting tight. I'm having to move things around to keep heading upwards. Progress is slow. It's 36 seconds since I left the airlock. I'm behind schedule. Like a Siche-Tick bite making its host Worrt subservient to its parasitic whim, the illicit code has the Evangelist's AI under my command - at least for the next several minutes or so, until someone realises what's happened and reboots the ship's dyanamid quantum-core processors.

I hope the courier makes it on time...