Hard Luck Hermit

“So, this is all, uh, great,” Corey began.

“Having sex is great?” Tooley said. “Dang, wish somebody would’ve told me.”

Tooley was still naked and lying on top of him after their latest rendezvous. Corey was a big fan of the naked part, less so the lying on top of him.

“It’s just, do you have to nap right on top of me every time?”

“Don’t see anywhere else to nap,” Tooley said, poking the wall of the cramped quarters for emphasis. “And I ain’t letting you nap on top of me.”

“I feel like there are other options.”

“Like what, you want to finish inside me then tell me to hit the road? Not very gentlemanly of you.”

That managed to get Corey to squirm, which was exactly what Tooley had intended. Unfortunately she only got a moment to savor the delight before the ship’s intercom started buzzing.

“Tooley! Get off Corvash’s dick and on the pilot seat,” Kamak snapped over the comms. Corey cringed. They tried to be at least a little discreet about it, but there were only six people on the ship. When two went missing, the other four noticed, and made some very reasonable assumptions. “It’s almost our turn in the queue.”

“Fucking captain,” Tooley mumbled, before throwing on her clothes and going to get cleaned up. Corey followed suit, and by the time he was done, Tooley was already firmly planted in the pilot’s seat, watching the queue to get through the Bang Gate get shorter and shorter. Traffic into the Caro galaxy, home of the Doccan, was relatively sparse, but even the relatively short queue took a few dozen swaps of waiting.

“So what’s our first move when we get there, cap,” Tooley said. “Head straight for Doprel’s old place and see if we can crash on his parent’s couch?”

“I don’t have a home, and if my parents are still alive, they’ll try to eat me on sight,” Doprel said.

“Fucking brick the mood there, Doprel,” Tooley said. “It was a joke.”

“I think I should be pretty clear about this stuff. The Doprel are only slightly less deadly than anyone else we could be running towards right now.”

“We’ll take that ‘slightly’, thanks,” Kamak said. “We’re up, Tools.”

“I’ve got eyes,” Tooley snapped back. She gave their engines a light tap to send them lurching forward and through the Bang Gate. Corey took a deep breath as he they drifted into the gate of cosmic fire. He’d been on a few trips through by now, but he still hadn’t gotten used to it. The interior of the Bang Gate transit tubes were filled with an endless inferno in every direction. It reminded him a little too much of all the sermons about hell back in the Church.

Unlike the promised hellfire the Church said awaited anyone who lived outside the Church, drank alcohol, or had sex outside of marriage (all things Corey had done within the past cycle), the fires of the Bang Gate were only temporary. The Hermit emerged from the other end of the gateway and began to drift into the open space of the Caro galaxy.

“Give us some distance and park us,” Kamak said. “Let’s watch the gate for a while. See if anything suspicious comes or goes.”

“Fine. But if I see anything purple, I’m booking it,” Tooley said. She took the ship into the black abyss that surrounded the Bang Gate on all sides and set them to watch every ship that moved in and out of the gate, then got comfortable. Knowing Kamak, they might be here a while.

Tooley’s intuition proved correct, and two cycles later, they were still parked in the same spot, still watching the gate, and watching a security ship slowly drift their way.

“Kamak.”

“Easy,” the captain cautioned. “Keep our comms open.”

Tooley reluctantly flipped the switch, and after a short delay, the speaker in her dashboard crackled to life.

“You’ve been idling there for a while now, folks,” the clearly bored security officer said. “Mind explaining the hold up?”

“Sorry about that, Officer,” Kamak said, forcibly injecting his voice with false politeness. “Just a debate with our employer. We want to take the long way around Doccan space, but he doesn’t want to front the money for extra fuel.”

“Alright. Try to wrap it up,” the guard warned. “Or at least move away from the gate. There’s plenty of space to park your ship far away from here.”

“Will do, officer, just give us a minute to wrap this up.”

“Good. I’ll be here until you-”

The security guard cut himself off mid-sentence, and that momentary pause made Kamak start to sweat.

“Nevermind,” the guard said. “Just get out of here. Soon.”

Any relief they might have felt that the guard wasn’t on to them vanished when they hear the tension in the guard’s voice. The security ship drifted away, and started to join a formation with other patrolling security vessels.

“If they aren’t worried about us,” Kamak said. “What’s the issue?”

“Probably that,” Tooley said. She tapped their long-range sensor screen. They had two dozen ships incoming, about to drop out of FTL.

“Oh good, the party’s coming to us,” Kamak said. “We still have a clear shot out of here?”

“Fuckers are jumping in from our exit route,” Tooley said. She started recalibrating right away. Trying to cross paths with someone flying at faster than light speeds would only end with both ships atomized.

“Get us ready to go,” Kamak said. “But don’t pull the trigger right away. I want to see what they’re up to.”

The incoming ships all dropped out of lightspeed at once, slipping into visible space on the far side of the Bang Gate. Each of the ships that appeared looked like a jury-rigged mishmash of spare parts and blocky construction, held together by crude welding and hope. They didn’t look like any ship Kamak had ever seen, but he’d heard plenty of rumors.

“Hey Doprel, come here,” Kamak shouted. “I got a theory I want you to confirm.”

The makeshift fleet started closing the gap with the security team’s formation as Doprel lumbered his way into the cockpit.

“Oh no.”

“Oh yeah,” Kamak said. “Looks like the Doccan are on the move.”

The first salvo of laser fire illuminated the cockpit in bright red. Kamak didn’t blink.

“Scratch that. They’re on the warpath. Tools?”

“Still working, please shut up.”

“Not in too much of a hurry,” Kamak said. “Doccan aren’t even trying to kill us, as far as we know.”

If anything, the Doccan and the crew of the Hard Luck Hermit had a common enemy. It was too much to hope for an “enemy of my enemy” situation, but Kamak knew Doccan logic well enough to know they wouldn’t focus on a small problem while a much larger one presented itself.

“I’d still rather get out of here,” Doprel said.

“We’ll be alright,” Kamak said. “Doccan focus on one thing at a time, and they’re clearly here for the Bang Gate. Wouldn’t be the first lunatics to try and seize a Bang Gate. Only question is what they want out of it. They don’t do money, so no tolls…”

Kamak let himself drift off as the makeshift Doccan fleet drifted closer to the security team. The security ships fired the first salvo, but the light weapons of their fighter ships barely scratched the pragmatically tough hides of the Doccan ships.

The Doccan barely returned fire. They were drifting in a lazy cylinder, clearing a tunnel through the flock of security ships, but barely damaging them. All their laser fire amounted to little more than chaff on a cosmic wind.

“Huh.”

Doprel’s species didn’t operate on the same wavelength as any other race in the galaxy, but even the dumbest Doccan couldn’t possibly think they could lay claim to a Bang Gate just by parking a ship near it. There had to be some other logic to the ship’s motions. Kamak glanced at their long-range scanners, and saw the tell-tale signs of another ship approaching at faster than light speed, bearing right for the Bang Gate. Kamak had no idea what the Doccan wanted to accomplish with one ship that they couldn’t accomplish with the dozen they already had.

Unless that one ship didn’t plan on stopping.

“Tooley, move, now,” Kamak demanded.

“I don’t have an FTL route, calm the fuck-”

“Fuck FTL! Get us as far from the Gate as possible, now!”

Kamak grabbed Tooley by the hair and pulled her face up to look at the cockpit window, an act which might’ve gotten him stabbed in most other circumstances. Then the long range scanner started to beep. It was not a simple notification, but a warning: the incoming ship was not slowing down.

“Oh fuck. Oh shit oh fuck fuck fuck,” Tooley said, any semblance of coherent thought replaced by a terrified stream of expletives. She dropped her calculations in favor of grabbing the steering controls and slamming them into a sharp turn. The ship maintained it’s own gravity, but the sudden turn was still sharp enough to send things teetering to the side, passengers included. Farsus and To Vo stumbled into the unsteady cockpit as the ship rolled in place and started barreling into deep space.

“What’s going-”

“Farsus! Pull up the rear cams.”

The urgency in Kamak’s voice compelled Farsus to obey the seemingly nonsensical order without question. The ship’s rear camera’s, usually reserved for pursuing vessels, focused in on the Doccan ships as they kept the approach vector clear for their light-speed battering ram. The security team had focused their fire and managed to destroy one ship, but there were a dozen more still keeping space clear, and giving their final vessel a clear shot at the Bang Gate. Farsus watched them travel, his hairy face curling into a look of extreme concern as he glanced towards the blaring proximity sensor.

“They can’t possibly mean to destroy the Bang Gate?”

“I don’t fucking know, Fars, but we’re not sticking around to find out!”

“Just out of curiosity,” Corey mumbled, as he gripped the arms of his seat with white knuckles. “What happens if a Bang Gate blows up?”

“Nobody fucking knows,” Kamak shot back. The Bang Gates cost trillions of cece’s each, and contained complicated power systems that surged with all the energy of several dozen suns. Nobody had ever been desperate or dumb enough to blow one up. “But I’m willing to guess it’s not going to be good!”

The Hermit’s long range sensor started to beep faster and faster, as the approaching vessel got closer to their position -and to the Bang Gate. Every ship in the vicinity had caught on to the same thread as the Hermit and it’s crew, and streaks of starlight framed fleeing ships as they traveled in every direction. Even a good portion of the security team had bailed on the Bang Gate’s defense, leaving just a few very brave or very stupid stragglers to try and fail to hold off the Doccan attack. Corey sure hoped somebody knew the names of all those defenders staying behind, because an honorable memory would soon be all that was left of them.

The long range alarm let out one final beep, and the universe broke in half.

Farsus only saw a flash of white on the rear cameras before their optics burnt out entirely in the storm of all-consuming fury. Even facing away from the explosion, the edges of the cockpit started to burn with a bright white intensity that was close to blinding. Tooley started screaming and leaned as hard as she could on the ship’s controls, as if that could somehow compel it to go faster.

As the furious light of the explosion grew brighter, the noise followed. There was no boom, not in the vacuum of space, but as the concussive force of the explosion caught up to them, the entire ship started to shake and rattle, until it was vibrating so hard Corey began to worry his teeth would shake right out of his skull. Not content with such violent rattling, the Hard Luck Hermit increased the volume with a bevy of sirens and alarms. Every sensor array and warning siren on the deck started to blare all at once, screaming at the crew about radiation levels, engine heat, and most distressingly of all, a proximity alarm. Something was right on their tail.

“Farsus! You got any tricks up your sleeve?”

“I know many gods, which one would you like to pray to?”

Kamak took that as a resounding no. He grabbed on to his seat and tried to embrace what was, very literally, the ride of his life. Tooley, meanwhile, started to look at her FTL calculations. Any work she’d done was completely useless now, and she cursed herself for not working faster. Even a short FTL jump could’ve taken them lightyears away from this explosion in seconds.

The proximity sensor started to beep a little louder.

“Oh, fuck this universe.”

Tooley undid her restraints, and let go of the ship’s controls. At this point, momentum was carrying them as fast as she could go, so leaning on the controls did nothing but make her feel better. She gripped the arm of her seat tight and tried to stand. She struggled to keep her footing in the shaking cockpit, but she managed to turn to Corey.

“Corey! Knife!”

“What?”

Tooley said a few curses that got lost in the cacophony of sirens and dove at Corey. She had seen him undress enough times to know where he kept the knife in his boot, and she managed to slip it out of it’s sheath. She held the knife in one hand, braced herself with the other, and spared a quick glance at Corey. He looked scared.

The fact that he looked scared didn’t bother her in the slightest. He should be scared. What bothered Tooley was the fact that all of a sudden she didn’t want him to look scared. It had been a long time since someone else’s suffering had made her feel anything but amused. She didn’t know if she liked that.

Since she had no idea what else to do, Tooley gave Corey a quick kiss. He seemed to like that sort of thing. She then took her knife back to the pilot’s seat and pried open a panel near her controls.

“Hey! What the fuck are you doing?”

Tooley ignored Kamak’s cries of protest, reached into the exposed mechanisms of the ship, and cut a single wire. She threw the knife to the ground, grabbed her jump controls, wiped away all the useless calculations, and hit the button to fire the FTL thrusters.

The ship lurched so hard the crew started to worry the explosion had caught up to them. The moment of terror passed as the light in the cockpit shifted from white to beige -the familiar blurred canvas of faster-than-light travel. The tan blur lasted only a moment before they shifted back into a blissfully black realspace. The ship was no longer shaking, and while a few notifications were still beeping, the blaring warning sirens had gone silent.

It took a bit for everyone’s brains to catch up to the fact that things had gone silent and still. To Vo’s stomach lurched, and she unbuckled herself to go throw up. Her motion broke the spell that paralyzed the rest of them, and Kamak turned fully to Tooley.

“The fuck did you do to my ship?”

“Bypassed the FTL safeguards,” Tooley said. The mechanisms that kept them from making blind FTL jumps was easily bypassed by those who knew what they were doing. It came with the risk of immediate death by slamming into a celestial body at light speed, but Tooley had only needed to make a short jump. “It’s just one wire, so don’t get your panties in a twist.”

“You are lucky we lived through that,” Kamak said accusingly.

“As opposed to staying in the explosion and definitely dying?”

Kamak slumped back into his seat. He’d walked into that one.

“Turn us around. I want eyes on the thing.”

Tooley pulled the controls back and turned the ship around, to face the explosion they’d only barely escaped.

What had once been a Bang Gate had now collapsed into what appeared to be a small star. The celestial fireball rapidly flared and burst in lances of cosmic fire as it expanded. Nobody had any way of knowing where they had once been, relative to the current fireball, but everybody could agree they were glad to be far, far away from it now. Tooley stared at the core of the white-hot inferno and scratched her chin.

“Can we get drunk now?”

“I ain’t stopping you,” Kamak mumbled.