Lekku. LOG-013. Teeth Of The Dragon.

LOG-013. Teeth Of The Dragon.

We gut the forward storage bay and turn it into something mean.

Mag locked harness rails. Shock sealed breaching door. Rigged the floor for grav cycle deployment too. Kedo welds in a retractable launch frame for low atmo drops. Trix swears through the whole process, but programs the breach AI without blinking.

We don’t build for comfort.

We build for entry.

The kind that leaves a mark.

Krayt’s Mercy was always mine. But now she breathes different.

Tighter. Hungrier. More like a predator than a ship, though that’s getting a little too poetic for my taste. I upgrade the shields. Reinforce the undercarriage. Lira installs a pressure sealed sniper nest above the main ramp. Says nothing while she does it. No one asks how a slave knows how to do something like that.

By the time we lift off again, everything inside feels heavier. Not from weight, but from intention.

—

We start small.

One job at a time. Escort runs. Corporate retrievals. High risk cargo. Smuggler extractions. A contract from some mid tier Republic blacksite, phrased carefully enough to keep deniability intact.

Nobody talks much.

But the work?

It gets done.

Clean.

Fast.

Loud when it needs to be. Quiet when we want it to be.

Naturally, word spreads.

Not fast. Not wide.

But right.

Someone out in Hutt space calls us ‘Krayt’s Teeth.’ Probably meant it as a slur, but it’s the exact kind of name I was hoping for, considering I’d been the one to initially spread it around.

Naturally, we keep it.

We start using it in transmission tags. On docking logs. On encrypted listings through the undernet. Our jobs triple in a month.

And just like that, we go from a ship to a name.

A brand, even. One you whisper when you need something done that no one else will touch. Just another service, like any other.

I keep the crew lean.

No tourists. No bleeding hearts. No one who asks for orders twice.

They learn fast that while this isn’t a family, it’s something a little more personal than a business.

It’s a pretty solid setup, for something founded by a young Twi’lek.

—

The pirates make three mistakes.

First, they jump the job. Double cross us on a shipment we were already halfway through extracting, blame it on a payment delay, act like it’s business.

Second, they try to run.

Third, they don’t run fast enough.

We find them two systems over, dead heat between a gravity well and a refueling moon. Sloppy. Predictable.

Their ship’s an old CEC hauler. Modified. Ugly. Turret mounts welded over fuel lines. Hull plating looks like someone painted it with carbon scoring and bad intentions.

We hit them mid repair.

No warning.

Trix scrambles their distress signal (for who remains unknown, perhaps another ship) while Kedo and Torren vent their aft section with precision shots. Lira takes out the dorsal cannon with one clean round through the coolant port. I board through the maintenance hatch before they know it’s open.

The fight’s short.

Three down before they fire back.

The last one tries to beg.

I slit his throat and drag him off the bridge before leaving the rest for Trix to strip.

—

We tow the hauler back to neutral space, patch the worst of it, and wipe the logs.

Trix stands in the engine bay with both arms crossed, chin tilted, datapad in one hand, grease on their cheek.

“Ugly as sin.” They mutter, rubbing the back of their neck. “...But she flies.”

I nod once.

We keep her.

End up calling her Krayt’s Bite.

Refit her with holding cells. Reinforce the engine housing. Paint the teeth emblem under the nose, same as Mercy.

She becomes our hauler, our decoy, our prisoner rig.

Second ship in the fleet.

One way or another, it’s the first real hint we’re building something more than just a reputation.

Oh, and we leave the pirates’ corpses on an unmarked moon. That’s probably worth mentioning. Maybe.

—

We find the cracks in the system and crawl through them.

Not bounty board stuff. Not freelancer scraps. We’re past that at this point.

Now it’s encrypted drops, unregistered comms, no names on the contracts. Just coordinates, creds, and a clause. If we get caught, no one admits we existed.

Some groups call it black ops.

We just call it work.

We hit a Hutt weapons cache for a Coruscant aligned noble.

Extract a whistleblower from a mining cartel’s lockdown station, halfway through CorSec space.

Sabotage a starship foundry with ties to Republic military R&D, but we’re never told which part of the Republic ordered it.

They pay well.

They pay fast.

And they don’t ask for loyalties.

Which is good.

Because we don’t offer any.

All in all, the Teeth run clean.

It’s still just two ships for now. Bite stays quiet, takes the slow paths, stores the messes we don’t want traced. Mercy stays fast, loud when needed, and quiet when we feel generous.

Clients cycle fast. Names come and go.

But a few start whispering it outright.

‘Krayt’s Teeth get it done.’

Kriff, we don’t even need to advertise, word of mouth does the job for us.

And if someone tries to dig too deep, Trix digs back deeper.

Of course every now and then, Clan Ordo pings me.

Not orders. Not debts.

Just information.

A cargo escort route through unprotected space.

A name to keep off our contract list.

An old Mando ship in trouble, asking for help but entirely too proud to beg for it.

We answer when it makes sense.

They don’t thank us and we don’t ask them to. It’s a good arrangement.

Still, the galaxy’s shifting.

Subspace maps change week by week. Whole sectors blink out of Republic patrol range and reappear under new security signatures. Some systems start aligning flags that haven’t flown since the last war. Others just vanish into red tape and rumor.

Every time I sit down in the cockpit and check the nav grid, the sand feels different.

Looser.

Hungrier.

Like something underneath it all is getting ready to move.

And when it does…

Well, we’re already in the middle of it, aren’t we?