"On the Job" is going to be PUBLISHED.
Step one is de-Star Wars-ifying it which will happen at the same time as Step 2: new chapters. Here's an excerpt:
The Tacer smelled like fish. Tacers always smelled like fish. The rotund male wiped a string of drool from his chin. For a second the ink black skin of his flashed under the dense white fur covering his body. This was how Tacers sweat, but Rhea couldn’t tell if the scrapper was sweating from the warm weather or from the offer she had proposed. Behind him, a cooling unit hummed out frozen air. It was losing its battle with Gremlyn’s arid climate. The Tacer’s shop was open-air, like all the shops in this part of the city.
Rhea set her fists on the table among tech fragments from a dozen worlds. “What do you think? Do we have a deal?” she asked. Her dark eyes didn’t blink as she spoke. Bound back with a head wrap, her irdu tendrils shifted nervously.
The Tacer scratched the back of his neck with short claws, more drool running down his chin. “A couple of inquiries have come in about this,” he mused.
“But I can buy it now,” Rhea cut in. “Give me an hour to get the payment from my ship and I’ll take it off your hands today.”
The Tacer rolled his eyes in her direction. His merchant’s mind was at work. “I’d need a reservation fee,” he said.
Rhea’s lip twitched. She should have expected this. The battery link wasn’t worth its weight in credits for the raw materials inside. But that wasn’t why she was interested in it. She suspected that wasn’t why anyone was interested in it.
“How much?” she asked, irdu squirming.
The Tacer pretended to think, scratching his fur. “Ten percent sounds fair,” he said.
Internally, Rhea’s head dropped, but on the outside she didn’t flinch. This purchase was already costing her far more than she’d anticipated, and there wasn’t even a guarantee it would pay off. Ten percent more would leave her eating rehydrated noodles for at least a month. But she would live.
“Fine,” she agreed. She straightened her back, rising up half a meter above the diminutive Tacer. “Do I have your word you won’t sell it until I get back?”
He grinned with a mouth full of knives. “Grutto’s word is his bond.”
