Tooley watched a handful of dead bodies drift towards the sun. She’d never thought it would be so unsatisfying to watch cops get incinerated.

“One more bit of stupid bullshit we’ve survived,” Kamak said. “Onwards to our next bit of asinine nonsense.”

“You want to make a grand tour of it now? Maybe we can go back to Turitha and see if we can convince the Structuralists to join us instead of murdering us.”

“Well we need to be doing fucking something, Tooley,” Kamak said.

“I would prefer to be doing something smart.”

“You know damn well that’s not an option!”

“Okay, we get it, you’re both very sarcastic,” Corey said. “Can we do something useful now?”

“Like what?”

“Like moving out of this galaxy, to begin with,” Farsus said. “I believe we’ve lingered here too long. Given the Caro galaxy’s importance to Morrakesh’s plans, and the increased security that will no doubt surround it after the destruction of the Bang Gate, we run significant risk of being discovered the longer we stay.”

“You’re not wrong, but how are we supposed to leave? Every remaining Bang Gate is going to be on lockdown, and-”

Kamak stopped himself mid-sentence to look out the cockpit window. They had parked themselves in an asteroid belt to avoid detection once again, and his narrow eyes darted across the black spaces between drifting stones.

“What’s going on? Is it the purple ship again?”

“I don’t know. Thought I saw something. Could be nothing, could be—there it is!”

Kamak pointed a finger at what seemed to be nothing but the blank expanse of space. Farsus scanned the blackness and found nothing.

“What did you see?”

“Something small. Fast,” Kamak said. “Darting between asteroids for cover.”

“Rules out the purple ship, then,” Corey said. It was too big to hide behind asteroids, though they didn’t really know how fast it was.

“It’s definitely not that, I set up an alert to let us know if the scanners ever pick it up again,” Tooley said. “Question is, who the fuck else knows about these hiding spots? For a ‘foolproof hiding place’, this asteroid shit gets us caught fairly often.”

“Well I learned it from- Tooley. Fly. Now.”

The last time Kamak had said something like that to her, a Bang Gate had exploded, so Tooley didn’t waste any time questioning the order. She decoupled their magnetic landing gears from the asteroid and gunned the accelerator as hard as she could, veering sharply to swerve past an asteroid in their path.

“Farsus, you ever fix the rear cams?”

“We don’t possess the parts!”

Kamak cursed his life for the millionth time.

“What the fuck are we running from, Kamak?”

“An old friend,” Kamak grunted. “Veer right, now.”

“There’s an astero-”

“Do it!”

Tooley rolled hard to the side, turning sharp around an asteroid in their path, and prayed to whatever gods were listening that they didn’t hit it. It was a close call, but the Hermit just made it, right as the empty space to their left burst in a neon-green flare of light.

“What the hell?”

“Swerve more, be erratic,” Kamak ordered. “Khem’s good at seeing patterns.”

“Khem? That scary fucker from the Guild?”

In the back of his mind, Corey had often wondered if that horrific alien would be on their tail now that Kamak was a wanted man. Khem had, by all appearances, just been waiting for an excuse, and now he had it.

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“Yeah, that guy. Bastard’s the one who taught me this trick, makes sense he’d know how to see through it.”

Khem’s tracking skills were half the reason Kamak had put up with him long enough to learn the hunter’s secrets. The alien knew every possible way to hide, and every way to find those who were hiding.

“Corvash, flip on the short range scanner,” Tooley ordered. She was too focused on evading the lances of green fire to do anything but fly the ship. “I want to know what this fucker’s working with.”

“Don’t bother, his ship won’t even show up,” Kamak said.

“You can do that?”

“Yes!”

“Why don’t we do that?”

“Because I like having thermal controls, radiation shielding, and life support!”

Khem’s fighter was a ghost on almost every form of scanners, but that stealth came at the expense of basic creature comforts every other ship enjoyed. He had to wear a special flight suit just to survive in the cockpit, and every passenger had to spend most of their time in survival pods strapped to the rear of the ship. Just one of many reasons Kamak had ultimately bailed on bounty hunting with Khem.

“We need to get the fuck out of here,” Kamak said. He knew Khem well enough to assume the hunter had them outgunned by a lot, so fighting was not an option. While he’d never say it out loud, were it anyone other than Tooley piloting the ship, they’d probably be dead by now. She not only had the skills, she had a naturally erratic nature that defied any of Khem’s attempts to get a lock on her. That element of chaos would be the only thing keeping them alive in a situation like this.

Kamak decided to stir the pot in his own special way. He reached over and clicked the open comms channel.

“Hey, Khem, buddy, how you doing? Wasn’t expecting to see you until the potluck.”

The only response he received was a salvo of superheated plasma flying through space. Judging from the rate of fire and the relative inaccuracy, Kamak assumed he had succeeded in distracting Khem. Kamak had a certain way of getting under his incredibly thick skin. Khem hated any and all oathbreakers, but Kamak was something far, far, worse: an annoying oathbreaker.

“So you know, Khem, I’ve always figured you were smart, somewhere underneath all that evidence to the contrary,” Kamak said. “And if there’s one thing I know you know better than anyone else, it’s ballistics. So I also know you know I didn’t kill that cop.”

At the mere mention of Mokai’s untimely death, To Vo visibly flinched. The recent addition of even more dead officers had done nothing to ease the trauma of that loss.

“Isn’t there anything in that code of honor about killing innocent people?”

Khem did not consider Kamak innocent by any stretch of the word, but hopefully the taunts would make him think, at the very least. Start reciting the code of Kalakai in his head, at least, anything that would fill his mind with thoughts other than killing Kamak.

“If you want any ‘justice’ in this scenario, you should be after Morrakesh!”

Kamak didn’t like being shot at, but he especially didn’t like suddenly not being shot at. In an instant, all the gunfire stopped, the streams of green plasma stopped flowing, and the space around them fell silent and calm. After that brief moment of peace, the communications channel crackled to life.

“Morrakesh?”

“Yeah. He’s our primary suspect in everything going on,” Kamak said. He didn’t know why this was giving Khem pause, but he hoped to make use of it. Tooley was slowly getting clear of the asteroid belt, giving them room to make an FTL jump and get away from the mad hunter. Their pursuer paused briefly before continuing the conversation.

“I offer this out of mercy now, not malice,” Khem said. “Die. Now. There is no worse fate waiting than what Morrakesh will do to you.”

Everyone in the cockpit hated the sound of that. Kamak couldn’t help but ask for more information.

“Khem, do you know something we don’t about Morrakesh?”

“I hunted him, once,” Khem growled. “Alongside others. They vanished, one by one, and Morrakesh...learned. He knew what they knew, their strategies, their words, their deepest secrets, as if he took the thoughts from their minds. Die, before he can do the same to you.”

The dire warning might’ve seemed almost cartoonishly overdramatic, if not for what the Doccan had told them not long ago. Morrakesh had learned their entire complex language all but overnight, a feat that should be impossible—unless one could take the knowledge directly from the mind of another.

“Khem, I know better than to ask you to help me, for anything,” Kamak said. “But there are other people at risk here, and I know you care about that kind of thing.”

If that impassioned (by Kamak standards) plea reached any part of Khem’s three hearts, they never found out. Something in the Hard Luck Hermit’s cockpit started to beep. A proximity alarm was going off.

“Mother fucker,” Tooley mumbled, confirming that the alarm signified what they all feared.

“Khem! We surrender,” Kamak snapped. “Take us wherever you want, just get us the fuck out of here!”

There was no response, and the open communications channel fell dead silent. Khem had either gone into hiding or fled outright, neither option boding well for Kamak and the crew. The situation was going from bad to worse as their proximity sensors ticked down, and the purple ship grew ever closer.

“Tooley, how soon can we get out of here?”

Tooley gripped the controls tight, held them firmly, looked at her instruments—and then released them. She sank into her seat with a heavy sigh. They were surrounded by asteroids on all sides. What had once been a safeguard was now a prison.

“Not soon enough.”

“Fuck.”

The resignation of their pilot proved infectious. If even Tooley’s defiance had run out, then the situation was truly inescapable. For the first time ever, Kamak regretted his decision to not keep alcohol in the cockpit. As the purple ship dropped out of faster-than-light and started to loom large in their vision, he found himself really wanting a drink.

The purple ship drifted to a halt. This close up, it proved to be even bigger than any of them had estimated. All they could see was a wall of shimmering purple, and the tiny spot that was their own ship’s reflection staring right back at them.

“We’re going to die,” Kamak said flatly.