They said it was the worst plasma storm the Helion Belt had seen in centuries. Raging geomagnetic winds that could fry any electronics unlucky enough to be exposed, roiling clouds of superheated ions, and electromagnetic pulses that interfered with even hardened military comms. A navigational nightmare that any sane pilot would do everything to steer clear of.

But then, nobody had ever accused me of being sane.

My name’s Ava Carthright, rogue freighter captain, smuggler, and scavenger extraordinaire. I make a living running the lucrative but risky shipping lanes along the galaxy’s outer periphery. When burgeoning colonies get desperate for supplies, shadier operators like me are who they turn to when all legal options have been exhausted. For the right fee, I’ll brave pirate gangs, asteroid fields, you name it to make a delivery.

This storm though? I’ll admit it had me sweating ion trails. The kind of electromagnetic interference it was giving off could scramble my ship’s systems into next year. But the payday set up by the Umbra Colony was… motivating, to say the least. A million credits just to play delivery girl? For that kind of pay, I’d buckle in and ride my junker of a ship through the devil’s armpit itself if I had to.

The only catch was I had to make the delivery within the week. No small feat when the route took me through the eye of a rampaging plasma hurricane. But hey, when you’re an outlaw hauler like me, you get used to cutting it close. I signaled my droid to plot a course and we burned toward the storm’s vortex, wingtip ion trails streaking in our wake.

It didn’t take long before my ship started getting jostled like a kid’s toy, metal groaning and protesting as we were tossed every which way by turbulent geomagnetic winds. Radiation meters started pinging in the red and proximity alerts screeched as chunks of stellar debris pelted the hull. I reined in the bucking controls, leveling out our entry vector as best I could. The storm’s core lay dead ahead, a blinding tangle of ionized particles swirling in a maelstrom of almost solid light.

And that’s where I had to fly to make my delivery window. Right through the blazing tempest’s nuclear heart.

A glancing ionic burst made my ship’s systems momentarily short, filling the cabin with the stench of ozone and frying my long-range scanners. Great. Now I had to run this gambit half-blind, relying only on visual instrumentation and my own iron nerves. Fighting against the turbulence, I wrestled the sluggish controls toward the roaring vortex. The aged Istanrav freighter’s hull rattled and shook from the barrage of charged particles as we punched into the storm’s leading edge.

Another electromagnetic surge and I lost primary engine thrust, leaving me pulling hard to starboard on the dorsal vectoring thrusters just to maintain heading. At this rate, I wasn’t going to be able to hold course long enough to transverse the storm core’s narrow navigable corridor.

“Rerouting auxiliary power to sublight engines,” my droid Cal chimed from the engineering console. “I am also transferring shield reserves to augment forward deflectors.”

Cal’s quick system juggling bought me a few more precious ticks on the clock. Now it was up to me to wrestle us through the final push. I jammed the thrust modulators to their stops, shoving the lurching freighter’s velocity to its redline. Ahead, the churning plasma funnel loomed, twisted tendrils of annihilating energies pulsing and writhing. This was it – the literal eye of the hurricane. I bound my crash webbing tighter and grit my teeth, slamming the ship’s bulk straight towards the flaring tempest’s vortex.

Scouring ionic gusts battered the freighter as we pierced the raging storm’s cyclonic sheath, instruments flickering and rain static falling across external cams. The cabin filled with the deafening shriek of the storm’s alien thermonuclear force buffeting the ship. Failing shield projectors sparked and fizzled, leaving the naked hull to be sandblasted by high energy particles. Fire blossomed along the armored plating as the stress began to overwhelm structural integrity. Worse, my auxiliary thrusters began redlining from the strain of the delicate flight corrections needed to navigate the gyring forces.

“Deflector array is down to fifteen percent,” Cal warned. “We have insufficient power reserves to maintain this velocity.”

But we were so close! The eye of the storm was dead ahead, a mercurial lull amid nature’s furious tantrum. All I needed was just a few more…

Suddenly, a careening bolt of ionized stellar matter slammed into my ship’s dorsal quarter, shunting us beam-on to the vortex’s maw. Shuddering impacts pounded every inch of the lurching freighter as we tumbled out of control into the inferno. My crash webbing bit into my shoulders while the vessel’s growling protests grew shrill. Any second now and the relentless forces would rip my poor ship apart like a toy in a lank’s jaws.

Through the screeching cacophony, Cal’s synthesized tones cut through with unflappable calm. “Rerouting all available power to structural integrity fields.”

My faithful robot was expending its last reserves to reinforce the ailing deflectors rather than pursue escape, buying me a few more precious seconds of tenuous shielding… and maybe just enough of a chance. Trusting in Cal’s alien power calculations, I locked my grasp on the wildly bucking flight trajectory and jammed inputs for an emergency Peznal intravelocity reversal maneuver.

Our battered ship rocked as if struck by a lunar-masser’s broadside, then rolled hard 180 degrees around its longitudinal axis. The ancient reverse-thruster technique traded all forward momentum for stability, angling us like a gravitic re-entry vehicle. With a single titanic groan, the freighter shed its tumbling descent and resumed a stable atmospheric orientation. For a handful of heartbeats all was silent as we rode the lull of tenuous plasma eye. A cyclopic beat of stillness before the storm’s raging energies refocused…

And then just ahead, the mercurial wormhole signature that was my destination finally shivered into view. Its cosmic contrail was subtle as a whisper amid the tempest’s shrieking wake, but there could be no mistaking the faint emerald aura of quantum transited power. Thanks to Cal’s heroic efforts, we would pierce the threads of reality’s tapestry after all and deliver ourselves to Umbra Colony.

Just as the glaring plasma hurricane began reforming around us, I rolled our bow through the gossamer moongates of the wormhole’s ingress point. Slipstream runnels embraced our freighter’s flanks in cosmic quicksilver and we rode the tides of rippling space-time to the safety of the distant colony world.

As our ship shuddered back into normal atmospheric transit within Umbra’s outer thermosphere, my instruments flickered and the cabin started sealing pressure, Cal initiating emergency hull integrity fields. I exhaled a long breath I didn’t realize I was holding, sweat-soaked fatigues clinging to my skin.

“Folding target achieved,” Cal announced with robotic equanimity. Then processing a shipwide sensor sweep, its vocabulator took on a rare somber cadence. “However, I must advise sustaining structural integrity failure across multiple compartments. You may wish to prepare for imminent decompression.”

Of course not even Cal’s geometric perfection could guarantee delivery. But as my trusty freighter creaked its last cries before inevitably sloughing itself apart, I toggled cockpit controls and confirmed our payload had transmited to the surface. I’d made the storm run against all odds, soon to happily collect my million credit fee. All that remained was finishing the job with some flair.

Looking forward through the sizzling canopy, I flashed a weary smile at Umbra’s crimson sunrise now slipping over the planet’s dusky horizon. I may have gotten a bit scorched along the way, but you couldn’t make an omelet without hazarding a few eggs among the plasma.

After all, only a fool would let a little thing like annihilation get in the way of a paycheck.

Feature Photo by R Bude