Leyla was jolted around violently as the ship maneuvered. Cursing she thrust out both hands, attempting to brace herself against the walls of the shaft. The slick metal rendered this only partially successful but she was able to avoid having the side of her skull caved in against a bulkhead. The shuddering of the shields being hit was unfortunately familiar but there was no sound of circuits overloading or consoles exploding which seemed to her to be a positive sign. The deck vibrated with return fire, though the ship was clearly very heavily gunned for its size as the weapons seemed to shake the very frame. When she choose this ship to escape Moff Parnel's troopers she had picked the most beat up looking freighter she could find, the logic being that the more out of place a ship looked, the more likely it was to be headed into the outer rim. She might yet be proven right in that assumption, but she hadn't considered she might be blow to floating atoms as the result of some battle she knew nothing about.

After a few minutes the ship abruptly steadied and began, what she imagined was a decent into the atmosphere. There was a brief buffet of turbulence, but even the most under-powered of freighters had no trouble except in the worst weather. She was about to breath a sigh of relief when there was a sudden snap of arcing electrical energy and her right leg convulsed, slamming her into the side of the maintenance sharp. The pain bought tears to her large eyes and she instinctively tried to wriggle away from what she thought was an unfortunate short. A chittering binary war cry followed her retreat and she managed to look back to see a beat up R5 unit advancing on her with a sparking electrical arc.

"Cut it out!" she commanded, but the R5 trilled in victory and charged in for the kill. Leyla kicked out with her numb leg and fetched the droid a blow to the body that flipped it into the air. Her sense of smug satisfaction evaporated as its wheels hit the roof and stuck fast so that the R5 hung from the seeling like a stalactite. 

"Oh you have got to be kidding ..." the R5 trilled its war-cry again and drove into her, the electrical arc catching her across the chest and sending her stumbling out of the maintenance shaft, gasping for breath and clutching her chest where tendrils of smoke rose from the burnt polymer of her dark gray field jacket. 

"I said cut it out!" she yelled and the droid fell from the ceiling, before it could hit the ground, there was a hiss of propellant as the droids thrusters, intended for maneuvering in zero g, fired. The droid rocketed up the passage way and hit her across the chest, driving the air from her lungs with an audible whoosh and pitching her halfway across a cargo hold to crash into a heavy plastic packing crate.

"That is so it!" she snapped, whipping both her pistols free of her belt and leveling at the droid which froze in mid charge, electrical arc still snapping. Leyla blew a lock of pinkish white hair out of her eye in exasperation and the looked up to find a figure standing in one of the circular hatches that lead to the cargo hold. The Zabrak looked between her and the dented droid. The R5 appeared to be leaking coolant from where she had kicked it, and her face had an irritating tick from the electrical shocks she had received.

"Well," she said somewhat lamely, "this is awkward."