Hard Luck Hermit

Kamak stripped his fancy suit jacket off the minute he stepped back onto the ship. The fancy clothes had been a nice change of pace back at the start of all this, but now the suits were starting to feel like straightjackets.

“Doprel, have I told you how god damn jealous I am that you get to be naked at these things?”

“I’m not naked,” Doprel said. “I get to wear these fancy bracelets.”

Doprel’s unique, and massive, physiology defied most attempts at tailoring, but he had gotten himself some nice ornamented cuffs to wear for special occasions.

“You like wearing those, though,” Kamak said. “And you could take them off whenever you want.”

“You could take your shit off whenever you want,” Tooley said. She demonstrated her point by stripping off the jacket she wore, as well as the shirt underneath it. “Not like we’re getting invited back anyway after your whole ‘righteous protector of the working class’ routine.”

“What routine?” Kamak said. “You hold a gun to someone’s head for a gag, you should pay them. I’ve always believed that.”

“That’s a weirdly specific belief.”

“Shut the fuck up, Tooley.”

She did shut up, but only so she could hop into the pilot’s seat and start calculating the fastest route away from Loben’s shitty estate. The now-quiet manor reflected off the Wild Card Wanderer’s reflective hull as it took off and headed for the stars.

“So where’s our next fancy dress party, Kamak?”

“I don’t know. Loben was the last one I lined up.”

They had been doing these “security” gigs for the better part of a solar year now, and Kamak’s patience for rich people bullshit was wearing thin. Unfortunately, his desire for money was stronger than his distaste for the people who had it.

“I believe we should seek a more conventional contract,” Farsus said. “While profitable, these contracts from wealthy benefactors depend on our reputation, a reputation that will surely degrade if we do nothing but entertain aristocrats.”

“Good point,” Kamak said. “I’ll get us something lined up. Tooley, put us in- nevermind.”

Even after all this time, Kamak was still getting used to not having complete control. Tooley owned their new ship, and while she still deferred to Kamak on bounty hunting gigs, whenever they had downtime, she decided where they went. Right now she was smugly exerting that control and piloting them towards a nearby nebula, to drift in front of the cosmic vapors.

As soon as she parked the ship, Tooley reached for a drink, and found nothing. She cursed herself for moving all the alcohol into the kitchen.

“Alright Corvash, park yourself, time for another lesson,” Tooley demanded. Corey took his seat and scooted over towards the pilot’s station. The cockpit of the Wanderer was far more spacious and flexible than the Hard Lock Hermit’s cramped spaces, making it much easier for him to look over Tooley’s shoulder as she flew.

“You still remember what I told you about gravity interpolation?”

“Yeah, at speed, a zero point five pitch tilt in dead space is a bigger turn than the same tilt near a planet, or a star.”

“Do you remember the numbers?”

“Yeah, I think,” Corey said. He glanced at some of the display readouts to remind himself of the terms. “The pitch varies depending on each point of the stellar mass index, each point corresponds to...zero point zero two eight?”

“Wrong,” Tooley snapped. She held her hand up, waved it like a flying starship, and then crashed her mimed ship into the dashboard. “Critical failure, crash landing, everyone’s dead.”

“I thought that was right?”

“It’s zero point zero two eight zero one,” Tooley said, emphasizing the last two miniscule digits.

“I always forget those tiny fucking numbers,” Corey sighed.

“Those tiny numbers are the difference between a successful flight and you getting sucked into the inescapable gravity well of a star,” Tooley said. “Don’t ever underestimate how important they are.”

“I get it, I get it,” Corey said. He had never had anything but respect for Tooley’s piloting skills, but hands-on lessons had taught him an entirely new appreciation for her skills. Every time they took flight, Tooley was casually doing the kind of physics calculations that it took an entire team of NASA engineers to accomplish back on earth.

“Good. Now get thinking, I want you to plot a course to the far side of the nebula.”

Corey looked to the nearest readout and started plugging in the numbers. He asked a lot of questions, even when he really didn’t need to. Giving him lessons was one of the ways Tooley distracted herself when she was craving a drink. He kept the questions coming so she could keep her head full of calculations.

“Okay, I think that about covers it,” Corey said. “Want to check my work?”

Tooley leaned over to examine his screen for exactly seven seconds.

“Well, the good news is we’re not dead,” Tooley said. “But only because it’s a gas cloud you’ve flown us right into.”

She pointed at the nebula and then back at Corey’s work.

“Forgot to carry the tenth decimal place when accounting for density striations in the gas,” Tooley said.

“God damn it. Always the little numbers.”

“The little fucking numbers indeed,” Tooley said. “But hey, all things considered, not bad work. If we got you an actually competent teacher, maybe set up a flight sim in a spare room, we could get you certified in a few solars.”

“You’re doing just fine teaching,” Corey insisted.

“I’m really not, I kind of don’t remember teaching you the gas striation thingy, that might be my bad.”

“Oh.”

Tooley wiped the bad navigational data and reset the systems in preparation for their actual course. Whenever they had one.

“Kamak! Do you have a job yet?”

“In a tick!”

Approximately thirty-seven ticks later, Kamak walked into the cockpit and transferred all the necessary data to Tooley’s piloting station. She input the coordinates and set them on the course as the rest of the crew took their seats.

“Alright, who are we killing?”

“Only thing we’re killing is time,” Kamak said. “Planetary military set up some new defense station and want us to give it a tour.”

“What? Kamak, I thought we were supposed to be doing actual bounty hunting,” Tooley said. “This is more of the same pompous bullshit.”

“It’s military,” Kamak said. “We’re not dancing to any dumbass billionaire’s tune. We look at some guns, comment how sturdy their metal looks, collect our money, and we’re done.”

“And what about the matter of our reputation?”

“It’s military,” Kamak protested again. “We’re being vigilant, ‘standing on guard at the frontier of the universe’. It’s good PR.”

“That’s just a less shiny version of the same shit,” Tooley protested.

“Look, all the other jobs lined up were even worse,” Kamak said. “You think assassinating some corporate leaker would do our reputation good?”

The heightened interest in Kamak’s history had brought his long period of doing corporate wetwork for Timeka to light. Their reputation had been relatively unscathed by that questionable history, but it had drawn the attention of other corporate interests who wanted a paid killer. Kamak had, so far, ignored every such request.

“Fine,” Tooley grunted. “But after this we are taking a real job. I don’t care if we’re hunting drunken pirates on rusty space stations again, I want to do work, not dance for the cameras.”

“You don’t do shit on hunts, you sit on the ship while we do the actual hunting.”

“Feels cooler anyway,” Tooley grumbled, before she plugged in the last coordinate and sent them streaking into faster-than-light travel.