The blurred beige wall of FTL travel smeared across the Wanderer’s cockpit as it flew. Tooley had nothing to do as they soared, and wouldn’t for several hours, but she stayed in the pilot’s seat anyway. It was comfortable, and she had nowhere else to be.
Traveling with a smaller crew had made Tooley realize what an important function Corey and Farsus played in the crew: entertainment. Kamak had been sulking in his room ever since they’d left Tannis. Tooley didn’t enjoy talking to him normally, but it was at least fun to insult him sometimes. Doprel was a perfectly decent conversationalist, but he lacked a certain element of fun that Farsus and Corey’s particular brand of insanity did. Or maybe they’d just had enough one-on-one chats recently that Tooley was a little bored of him now. Either or. Tooley wasn’t good enough at introspection to figure that out. The key takeaway was that she was really bored right now.
Kamak was sulking too much to talk about what had happened on Tannis, so Tooley assumed it was nothing good, but also nothing important. It was nothing relevant to their killer, so Tooley chalked it up as a waste of time. All the action had happened near Corey, and they’d completely missed it.
Tooley leaned on the arm of her chair and sighed. She just missed Corey in general. Somehow that little twerp had wormed his way into her life to such an extent that he was irreplaceable. Tooley was both annoyed and embarrassed at that. She’d always thought she was too cool to do something dopey like fall in love. She got about seven seconds to ruminate on the complexities of her romantic situation before Kamak stomped out of his room, briefly disrupting the boring status quo.
“Morning, Kamak,” Doprel said. “You hear Corey got stuck with Khem until we get back?”
“Sucks for him.”
After delivering that one scathing line, Kamak grabbed some food and a beer from the fridge and immediately grumbled his way back to his room. Tooley got out of her chair long enough to see him slam the door shut.
“I haven’t seen him this messed up since all that shit at the Timeka facility,” Tooley said. Kamak wasn’t sleeping, or even eating, as much as usual -and he’d been doing both less in general since the battle against the Horuk. Kamak was down to one meal a day now, and Tooley couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen him drink something without alcohol in it. That said, Tooley didn’t pay much attention to him, so maybe he was hydrating out of her very limited field of view.
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“Kamak doesn’t have many old friends,” Doprel said. “Losing one hurts.”
“Was Catay a friend? Seemed more like she hated his guts,” Tooley said. One of a few things she and the former pilot had in common.
“Yeah,” Doprel admitted. “But that’s still kind of a committed relationship, in a way. You wouldn’t necessarily feel bad if Kamak died, but you’d definitely feel something.”
“I don’t like it, but yeah,” Tooley said. She hated Kamak, but they’d been flying together for years now. Him dying would shake up her world, regardless of her feelings on him as a person. He was a bad presence, but he was a presence.
“So it’s probably that. And a lot of other things,” Doprel said. “Kamak’s a mess-”
“Yeah.”
“-and his past is a mess,” Doprel continued. “So is his future. This kind of thing is just going to keep happening to him.”
“I suppose the bastard is going to outlive all of us,” Tooley said. His long lifespan had that drawback, at least. Any Gentanian who palled around with other races ended up with a lot of dead friends.
“Frankly, I don’t think he expected to make it this far,” Doprel said. “Not that’s he’s suicidal or anything, he’s just in a job with a lot of gunfights. Statistically…”
“I know what you mean,” Tooley said. Most bounty hunters were lucky to make it through twenty years unscathed, Kamak had lasted forty and counting, plus one grand universal conspiracy/minor war. Jury was still out on him surviving the current serial killer incident. “Explains why he’s so pissy about Ghost and the spooky squad wanting him to retire. Dude never thought he’d actually have to live with his shit.”
“I’ve been trying to get him into a hobby,” Doprel said. “He doesn’t have a lot to channel his energy into.”
Tooley’s curiosity sparked, and that spark caught fire when she realized she didn’t care that much about Kamak’s problems and would rather be talking about something else.
“You know, I know how you two met,” Tooley began. It was a fairly boring story; Kamak had needed muscle to intimidate someone, and Doprel had been there and looked muscular. “But why’d you decide to stick around? Why put up with Kamak’s shit?”
“Because he was the first person to not look at me like I was a freak,” Doprel said.
“No, just as an asset he could exploit,” Tooley said.
“Better than a freak,” Doprel said. “I don’t think you really understand how upsetting it gets, being looked at like a monster everywhere you go, by everyone you meet.”
Even in his earliest days, before he’d really gotten acquainted with the facial expressions of the other species, Doprel had been able to tell they looked at him like an outsider. Kamak had been one of the first people to look past the fins and mandibles and exoskeleton and see that Doprel was something else. Even if that something else was just a very large, tough thing that was good at punching.
“Tagging around with one of the ‘normal’ species helped me fit in,” Doprel said. “And by the time I realized there were other options, I’d kind of started to like him.”
“I can’t imagine why.”
“If I ever figure it out, I’ll explain it,” Doprel said. It was inexplicable, but Kamak did have a certain charm -in spite of how utterly charmless he was.