"HEY, D'ARGO!" shouted Hope over the comms. "Come down to the maintenance bay! I have something to show you!"

In the hamman-side docking bay, a youth of fifteen cycles, clad in black leather, slid out from under his Prowler and tapped his own comms. "I'm kinda busy, sis. Mom said that I have to finish checking the Prowlers' pulse cannons by dinner."

"Aw, come on!" pouted eleven-cycle-old Hope. "It'll only take a few microts, and it's really drad!"

D'Argo sighed and set aside the toolkit. There was no point in arguing; Hope took too much after her father.

o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o

"Well?" asked D'Argo when he arrived. "What's so important that you had to drag me-"

"Away from your precious Prowlers and pulse cannons, L.D.?" teased Hope. The girl had grease and grime on her face, except around her eyes, where a pair of goggles (which were momentarily pushed up onto her forehead) normally sat.

"Don't call me that," said D'Argo sourly. "L.D." stood for "Little D'Argo", and he hated being called "little".

"Aw, you're just sore that you might not get to fly or shoot anything today," said Hope. He's such a soldier, she thought, so much like Mom that it scares me. She turned back to the workbench, set the goggles back over her eyes, and made a final connection with a micro-torch.

Uh-oh, thought D'Argo. What's "Daddy's little tech" up to now? He peeked curiously over Hope's shoulder at the collection of parts on the workbench. They were disassembled pulse pistols, he noted right away, most of them pretty old. In fact, they were the obsolete Peacekeeper field-issue model, the kind that fired a plasma blast by releasing a drop of chakan oil into the pulse chamber and heating it with a high-powered laser pulse. Being totally worthless against scarrans, they all but disappeared during the Peacekeeper Wars. "Hope," said D'Argo, "where did you find these old guns? The only prewar pulse pistols left on board Moya were..." Oh, no, thought D'Argo. Please, God, or any gods who are listening, please don't let it be... "That's not Winona, is it, Hope?"

The girl just shrugged her shoulders and said, "Maybe. I found it in Dad's room."

"But - I - you didn't - I mean - I don't believe this!" shouted D'Argo. "Dad is going to freak out, do you hear me? Freak. Out. This is... this is worse than the time that you took apart the Farscape 1's hetchdrive!"

"Dad didn't complain when I put it back together and added a StarBurst chamber."

"This is worse than the time that you 'modified' 1812 and gave it to baby J.T. for his first birthday!"

"Every kid deserves a pet."

D'Argo snorted and said, "Hope, thanks to you, Moya is the only leviathan in the galaxy with a red, white, and blue, puppy-shaped DRD that sings and barks and walks on four legs instead of chirping and rolling on wheels."

Hope just smiled and said, "Yeah, that was pretty awesome, wasn't it? But check this out: it's way cooler!"

D'Argo looked down at the finished product in Hope's hand, pulse pistol emitter set directly atop a modified handgrip and trigger. The object was no longer pistol-shaped; now it looked more like a flashlight. "You snurched Dad's favorite gun... so that you could straighten it? Why in hezmana would-"

Then Hope pressed the trigger.

D'Argo cried out and jumped back when a yellow blade of light, at least a motra (or thirty denches, depending on how you measured) long sprung forth from the emitter.

"Watch this!" Hope gleefully shouted over the hum of the blade. She brought the weapon down and sliced cleanly through the workbench, cleaving it into two neat pieces that fell over with a clatter. Then, the glowing blade flickered a few times, sputtered, and died. "That's the only problem," said Hope. "After about fifteen microts, the cartridge runs out of chakan oil."

D'Argo just stared at his little sister with his mouth hanging open. He had seen her accomplish some amazing feats of technological wizardry, but pulling something out of Star Wars and then actually building it was entirely beyond his comprehension. "You built a lightsaber. You built a frelling lightsaber!"

"It's still not finished," said Hope. "I need to find a power-source that'll sustain the blade for longer than a fraction of a minute, but even so, isn't this just the draddest thing you ever seen? I can't believe I got it working!"

"I can't believe you haven't lost a hand!" shouted D'Argo. "This has got to be the most dangerous thing I've ever seen! What in the living hell do you need with a lightsaber?"

"I just-"

"I'll tell you what you'll need it for! Fighting off Mom and Dad when they find out what you've done!" D'Argo shook his head in utter bewilderment. He turned around and headed out of the maintenance bay, muttering, "I can't believe she 'modified' Winona to make a frelling lightsaber..."

Hope wasn't entirely sure that she believed her brother's tirade. Why would Dad care about some old pulse pistol, anyway? And besides, he loves those movies as much as I do. Hope grinned, picked up her new toy, and bounded off down the halls of Moya, looking for her father.

o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o

The End