The cosmic dust of the planetary ring the Hard Luck hermit had hidden in made for a beautiful backdrop to an ugly staredown. Dancing bands of cosmic debris rotated overhead as Kamak held his ground.
“We are not going to dig ourselves any deeper into this mess,” Kamak said. “When you’re in a hole, you need to stop digging.”
“We’re not the ones digging,” Doprel said. “But if we start, maybe we can actually control where this pit is going.”
“Or we dig ourselves right where this mystery asshole wants us to go,” Tooley countered. “Some games you can’t win, the only thing you can do is just not play.”
“You assume our flight would end the game,” Farsus said. “The midst of a storm is not the time to take one’s hands off the tiller.”
“The fuck is a tiller?”
“It’s a component from an archaic waterborne vessel, pardon my metaphor,” Farsus said. “When we have fled our enemies, Tooley, you have always kept your hands on the controls. Letting go of control can mean certain death in some situations.”
A compelling argument that still failed to compel Tooley. Corey was getting kind of tired of watching the argument go in circles. At least he had company.
To Vo was sitting and attentively observing every detail of the cockpit, as if this were some kind of workplace meeting and not a bitter feud. Her hands occasionally twitched in a way that made Corey think she wanted to be taking notes. The oddly clerical focus kept her calm, for some reason, and for the first time since Mokai’s execution, To Vo seemed to be perfectly level headed. Considering that this meeting had begun with the entire crew agreeing the best thing to do with To Vo would be to drop her off somewhere safe(ish) and wish her good luck, her calm demeanor was almost worrying.
It only got more worrying, however, when that calm demeanor broke.
“Excuse me,” she said, raising her hand, once again as if this were some kind of workplace roundtable.
“You don’t get to talk,” Kamak snapped.
“I just-”
“You’re one step up from a stowaway, cop, you don’t get a vote-”
“But there’s-”
“Look, I’m sure you got some rule or bylaw about this shit you want to throw in,” Tooley said. “But let the grown ups talk.”
Since no one seemed to want to let To Vo get in more than two words, she settled on only using one, along with an emphatic point out the cockpit.
“Ship!”
All eyes turned to the cockpit’s glass, and looked up. Amid the dizzying colors of the planetary bands they drifted through, there was a single speck of purple.
“Fucking hell,” Kamak mumbled under his breath. “When did that get there?”
“It appeared roughly seventeen point two ticks ago,” To Vo said.
‘Thank you for your contribution, please go back to not talking now,” Kamak said.
The sleek purple vessel was drifting a few miles away from the ring, motionless in space. Tooley tightened her grip on the controls and watched with bated breath as the purple ship did absolutely nothing.
“Tooley. The scanner,” Kamak reminded her. Tooley managed to pry her eyes away from the speck of purple in the distance and checked the readouts.
“It’s the same fucking ship,” Tooley said, confirming what they already knew.
“How does it know we’re here?” Corey snapped. “You said this was foolproof!”
Kamak’s oft-boasted of techniques for hiding the ship hadn’t failed them yet, but it appeared to be failing in a big way now.
“They don’t know we’re ‘here’ here or we’d be dead already,” Kamak said, though he himself was uncertain. The heavy metal content and background radiation of the ring should’ve kept them hidden from any scanners. They’d even parked the Hermit on a chunk of rock roughly the same color, to make a visual ID harder.
“They’re looking right fucking at us, Kamak,” Tooley said.
“They’re looking in the direction of the ring,” Kamak said. “Just keep cool and keep your hands on the controls. And don’t say a word, Farsus.”
“I had no intention of doing so,” Farsus said. He was perfectly happy to sit back and let his metaphor prove itself right.
“It’s moving,” Tooley snapped. The cockpit fell to breathless silence once again as they all watched the purple ship drift closer to the ring, then pause once more and hover in place.
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“The fuck are they doing?”
If the ship’s intention was to take a closer look, they had failed to get close enough. As Kamak recalled, the purple ship didn’t have external windows like the Hermit did. The purple vessel didn’t have a chance of making a visual confirmation, and getting closer wouldn’t affect the scanners. They had to be up to something else.
“Tooley, start plugging in coordinates for a jump, now,” Kamak said. “Any luck, whatever they’re doing will take long enough for us to have that prepped.”
The purple ship remained motionless as Tooley started to calculate a safe trajectory. She was well into her final calculations when a hatch on the ship opened and a small, square object started to drift towards the ring.
“Tooley!”
“Almost done,” she snapped.
“If that’s a bomb, we’re all going to die,” Kamak hissed. It didn’t look like any explosive Kamak had ever seen, but he had no reason to believe it was anything else.
“If I don’t have a clear shot out of here, we’re going to die anyway,” Tooley said. The purple ship had them outgunned by an apocalyptic margin, and she doubted they could snap it in half with some trick of gravity the way they had the fighter.
“The device does not appear to be a weapon,” Farsus noted. “At least not one capable of threatening us on it’s current trajectory. The structure is too small to contain a sizable payload.”
“Can’t we scan it, or something?” Corey pleaded. He really did not want to be in suspense any longer. He’d almost rather the thing just explode right now and be done with it.
“If we had half a cycle, ma- fuck that, Tooley, it’s moving,” Kamak said. The purple ship was slowly rotating in space, turning their direction.
“I see it, I see it,” Tooley said, as she redoubled her calculations for their FTL jump. “Just a little more…”
“We may not have that much time, Tools, get it moving,” Kamak said. The purple ship had now turned to face them completely -and kept turning. “Huh.”
The far off vessel made a full rotation and then started to fly away from the planet at speed, before blinking out of existence as it made an FTL jump. The crew stared at the blank space where it had been for a while.
“Did it work?” Corey finally asked. “Did we just...stay hidden?”
“They deployed the thingy,” Tooley said.
“Maybe that was some kind of short range probe,” Doprel said. “And it didn’t find anything either.”
“Farsus, scan the thing,” Kamak ordered. “We’re sitting right here and staying buckled in until we get answers.”
The silence that followed was at least less tense, given the absence of the purple ship, but it was still uncomfortable. The Hard Luck Hermit didn’t have very precise scanners, and it took Farsus a long time to glean any useful information about the strange object the purple ship had deployed.
“It appears to be a...container,” Farsus said. His confusion at the results was apparent. “A standard issue shipping crate, in fact.”
“Well what the fuck is in it?”
“A very small amount of whatever this is,” Farsus said, indicating to his readout screen. Their scanner could only read general materials, not specific details. While iron was easy enough to identify, the chemical compounds that made up the small sheet of material inside the crate were entirely unfamiliar. To most people aboard, at least.
“Sir, that is paper,” To Vo said.
“Of course the pencil pusher can identify paper on sight,” Kamak said. “What’s paper made of again? Can it explode?”
“It can burn,” Corey said. “But that looks like maybe a fraction of an ounce. I don’t think it can hurt anything. Should we...go get it?”
Kamak put a hand on the dashboard and leaned forward. The strange container was just an idle gray dot in the distance, slowly being drawn in with the rest of the ring’s celestial debris.
“We’re going to wait and see.”
----------------------------------------
After one of the longest swaps of their lives, the crew finally resolved to collect the mysterious crate. It was scanned again, carefully brought aboard, scanned again, cleaned and inspected, and then scanned one more time just to be sure. Kamak hefted a crowbar, took a few cautious steps towards the crate, and then stepped back.
“Actually, To Vo, how about you do the honors,” Kamak said. “You’re the one who saw the ship and warned us, you should-”
“Kamak,” Doprel said.
“Okay, I will do it,” To Vo said. She took a step forward before being pulled back by Doprel.
“He’s only asking because if there is a trap, he wants it to kill you instead of one of us,” Doprel said.
“Oh.”
To Vo took a moment to look dejected, and then grit her fangs.
“I will still do it,” she said. “You rescued me. I owe you this.”
Since she was now volunteering, Doprel raised no further objections, and let Kamak hand the crowbar over to To Vo. Everyone else took cover while she stepped forward, pressed the crowbar’s hook into the seam of a crate, and pulled.
After about three seconds of waiting, it became clear that the crate was not going to explode, so everyone stepped out of their hiding spaces.
“Well, what is it?”
“Just paper,” To Vo said. She was already wearing gloves, so she’d reached in to grab the small sheet. “I don’t understand anything written on it.”
While digital displays and personal translation chips could synch up, there was no such functionality to automatically translate words on paper. To Vo turned around to display the lines of gibberish and the unrecognizable symbol to the rest of the crew. Corey froze in place on the spot.
“What is that? Farsus, how many languages do you know?”
“Two. My scholarship does not extend to languages.”
“Then how do we-”
“It’s English,” Corey said. “It’s in fucking English. My language.”
Silence returned for what felt like the hundredth time in the past few swaps. As far as anyone had been able to tell, Earth was completely unknown in the cosmic community, and the slavers who’d taken Corey in the first place -almost all of whom were now presumably dead- had only found it by accident. If somebody had tracked it down again…
“Well what’s it say?”
“It says ‘There is nowhere you can run that we cannot find you.’,” Corey said. “And that symbol at the end...that’s the logo of the cult that ruined my mom’s life.”
All this time and all these lightyears traveled later, the sight of it still made Corey sick to his stomach. Now that hated symbol had added an entirely new level of disgust. Someone was taunting him. Taunting all of them.
“Nowhere we can run,” Kamak mumbled to himself. Farsus said aloud what they were all thinking.
“If these people are capable of tracking down Corey’s homeworld, learning Corey’s language, the details of his personal life…”
“Then they can learn just about god damn anything, can’t they?” Kamak said. “Including wherever the fuck we run.”
Kamak put his hands on his hips and let out a deep, rumbling sigh. Tooley restrained herself slightly better, but she wasn’t any happier about being proven wrong than Kamak was.
“Any one of you fuckers says, ‘I told you so’, I’ll kill you my damn self,” Kamak said.