The planet was a verdant paradise, and Marcy was miserable.
“Look at all this,” she said, hands on her hips, scowling at the bright sunlight and colourful animals that lazily flew in slow circles overhead. “All totally worthless.”
“Oh come on, Mar,” said Jemma with a smile. “We haven’t even started the survey yet. Maybe we’ll find a particularly tasty tuber! Or a spice that is completely unknown in human space!”
“Yeah, that’d definitely pay the bills,” Marcy muttered under her breath, but it was no use. Jemma loved surveying new worlds, and her attitude was completely impervious to pragmatic applications of pessimism.
“Here, gimme your arm and let’s get this part over with,” Jemma beckoned Marcy over with one hand. Marcy’s scowl only deepened as she saw the long slender injector in Jemma’s grasp. “Forty hours. You know the drill.”
“I know, I know,” Marcy walked over and rolled up the sleeve of her utility suit. The thin fabric was interwoven with military-grade nanofibre armour, designed to be impervious to penetration. A short spike of pain and then the ice-cold spray of the dermal regenerator and she rolled her sleeve back down gratefully. She held her hand out.
“Here, I’ll do you.”
“You sure? I know you-“
“Shut up and give it to me so we can get on with the actual work.”
Jemma chuckled and handed a fresh immune booster to Marcy. She bared her arm, revealing a long stretch of smooth skin creased by muscle. Marcy placed her left hand delicately on Jemma’s arm, feeling its warmth. Her right hand shook for a second.
Marcy took a deep breath and then jabbed the injector into Jemma’s shoulder. If Jemma noticed, her eyes on a distant mountain, she gave no indication. Marcy pulled the injector back a centimetre, saw the targeting light flash green as it hissed out the dermal regenerator, and then relaxed.
Jemma rolled the sleeve down, her smile as brilliant as before. “You feel up for a climb?”
Marcy rolled her eyes, placing the spent injector in the recycler set up by the loading ramp to their starship. The clearing they had landed in was barely a hundred meters around and covered in indigenous moss that had been reduced to charred ash under the landing struts of The Metric Mile. The rock underneath was speckled with quartz and glimmered and sparkled softly where it was exposed, and the air was thick in the scents of rich earth, decomposing plants, and pollen.
“Let’s get the rest of the gear out,” Marcy said, fighting down the anxiety in the pit of her stomach.
“Roger,” Jemma said idly, still unable to take her eyes off the snow-covered mountain. “I thought the spectral readings said the snow on this planet was pink. It looks pretty white from here.”
“Atmospheric scattering?” suggested Marcy, trudging up the ramp, her boots clanging against the hull. “Or maybe the pink snow is a localized anomaly specific to one region of the planet? Do you remember which mountain range you saw it on?”
“Nah,” Jemma said with a shrug, and then finally turned her back to the distant peaks. “I just thought it was neat. Might’ve even been a calibration glitch.”
“The scanners have been a bit spotty recently,” agreed Marcy as she lifted the first crate from inside the cool, sterile cargo hold.
“We should get them recalibrated when we get back to New Geneva, Mar,” Jemma said, as she hoisted the next. “I can schedule it after we’re through the jumpgate, if you want.”
“No, no,” Marcy muttered, the coiled snakes living in her guts suddenly twisting. “I’ll handle it myself. Thanks.”
“Suit yourself,” Jemma said, settling her load down and heading back up the ramp.
It took about two hours to pull all the gear out of the cargo hold. Marcy was assembling the communications equipment when Jemma disappeared into the ship, reappearing with a gleam in her eyes and two plates of food.
“Groundbreaker sandwiches,” Marcy said with a sigh. Jemma’s smile wavered for a moment.
“Do you not like GBSs?”
“No, no, they’re fine.” Marcy wiped her sleeve on her forehead, trying to shake loose some of the silent fear gripping her. “And they are traditional.”
“And where would we be without tradition?” Jemma sat on one of the empty crates, holding the plate out to Marcy. “Banging stones together and calling it science.”
“Eating animals,” Marcy said, taking the plate and sitting next to Jemma. “Instead of crushed legume proteins and fruit spreads.”
Jemma made a face. “Sounds awful.” She took a big bite of her sandwich, closing her eyes and chewing slowly.
Marcy watched Jemma chew for a moment. How did she find such joy in everything? “Don’t you ever want to try meat, though? I mean, just to know what it’s like?”
“Nah,” Jemma sighed happily, and took a smaller bite. “I’ve had it before, and it’s not all that.”
“Really?” Marcy paused the upward trajectory of her own sandwich. “You’ve never mentioned it.”
“Never came up, I guess. The noble Ito Family,” Jemma straightened her spine and placed her right hand over her heart “has a long and bloodthirsty history of dominating and crushing all opposition. It is our birthright to consume the flesh of lesser creatures, and all creatures are lesser to the Ito.” She snorted and slouched back towards her plate.
“I literally can’t imagine you in the military,” Marcy breathed, her hunger temporarily forgotten. “But you’ve actually eaten animal? What’s it like?”
Jemma shrugged, scrunching up her face in thought. “Hard to describe. If you imagine soft bread soaked in butter and then infused with umami, it’s a little like that? Or a particularly firm mushroom that’s really stringy? I dunno, I had it like twice when I was young and then my dad and his brother had a big falling out and we didn’t eat it any more.”
Marcy blinked a few times. She looked at the sandwich Jemma had made her, the same sandwich they had for their first meal planet-side for the last ten planets. Quickbake Bread, protein spread, fruit-flavoured calorie spread, a single loop of RealHonii, and then lightly toasted in an antique sandwich pressing device.
It was too sweet, it was often too messy, the filling would spill out past the confines of the bread, and the ancient sandwich press would leave bits of char scattered across the imperfectly toasted surfaces of the sandwich.
Peasant food.
“But don’t you get sick of eating the same thing as everyone else? Wouldn’t it be nice to, I dunno… have bread that is made with actual flour? Or fresh fruit grown in actual soil under an actual fusion-powered star? Or maybe a food that has a name rather than a trademark?”
Jemma laughed softly, her voice like cool water in a babbling brook. “I’d take a GBS on an alien planet with a friend over the most expensive meals served in the fanciest restaurants anywhere in the galaxy.”
Marcy said nothing, but looked at her sandwich sadly. Maybe she would say the same thing, but it was crushing to not have the choice.
The hours faded into the usual rhythm of work. The instruments were reading air, soil, and environmental factors while the two explorers wandered around, taking pictures and cataloging their discoveries.
They crossed fields of purple flowers that smelled like cinnamon, waded through streams of flowing water with rainbows of multicoloured algae, and took soil samples as black as the night sky.
“What about this?” asked Jemma, using an optical spectrometer to scan a knee-high plant. “Solid wooden core, comparable density to oak, fifty-year growth cycle.” She ran a finger along the side of the bush, feeling the bark underneath, rough and firm. “Could be a great building material if harvested and cut correctly.”
Marcy shook her head, glancing at the spectrometer’s output. “We could fill our hold perfectly with those and they wouldn’t be worth the fuel required to get back into orbit, much less bring them to market.”
“These are scanning as edible,” Jemma said, collecting a handful of stalks of a blue-hued plant that resembled celery. She glanced at a broad field of them. “Enough food for a small colony for years right here alone.”
“No sugar content, barely any nutritional value, and I will bet you they taste exactly like pulped Vegamix-XII,” Marcy said with a sigh. “Plus, look at the lifecycle calculation: those things take a decade to grow to this size. There’s no way we could export them as even a semi-viable crop.”
“Well, I’m going to try cooking them anyway,” said Jemma, placing the vegetables in a bag and carefully writing the word “Bluelery” on it. She smiled, like a child might when showing a crayon drawing to a parent, as she turned to Marcy, but Marcy was already shuffling onwards, sweeping her scanner from side to side.
The sun was being to dip low in the horizon when they began looping back towards the ship. The entire journey, hours upon hours of it, was punctuated by the excited declarations of Jemma and the dismissive ones of Marcy.
But above all of it, Jemma’s smile never wavered. She pointed out the beautiful mountains, she laughed at the flittering insects, she ran her hands across the low grasses and along the jagged edges of the rocks that protruded along the path.
And behind all of that stomped Marcy, a black hole to the light of Jemma’s joy. Jemma opened like a flower to the sun, beaming at everything, and Marcy scowled and flinched.
Jemma turned at last, the starship visible beyond the next rise, and her brow was furrowed. The wind blew tendrils of long, dark hair around her face, and even though Marcy could tell she was upset, her smile was still bright and brilliant.
“Okay Mar, what’s with you? You haven’t been this dour since… ever.”
Marcy had expected the question, but didn’t want to face it just yet. She avoided Jemma’s gaze and looked around her. An odd luminescence amidst the undergrowth caught her eye.
“Wait, what’s that?” Marcy asked.
Following the line of Marcy’s finger, Jemma initially couldn’t see anything. Marcy was pointing at something slightly to her left and low to the ground. She knelt and tilted her head. Underneath a bush was a small, glowing rock.
“The radiation detector isn’t pinging, so it’s probably safe…” Jemma said thoughtfully, and then extended her scanner towards the rock. The glow that suffused it was a flickering blue, soft and filling the small cavity created under the bushes.
“I’m not detecting anything,” she admitted, the scanner noting the increased light levels but no sources of energy or radioactivity. Marcy reached out her hand, her fingers brushing against the stone. Jemma had taken a single, hesitant step forwards.
And then a small animal, about the size of a domestic cat, jumped out of a nearby bush and sliced through the armour on Marcy’s leg like it was paper.
Marcy went down with a scream, right hand covering over the wound instinctively. Jemma rushed forward, but the animal spun and ran away. Wings, folded delicately on its back, unfurled and it launched itself into the air, soon rejoining the others of its kind that had been circling around the landing site.
“Let me see it,” Jemma said firmly. Marcy shook her head, pale, her teeth clenched against the pain. “Stop being so stubborn and let me see it.”
Four thin cuts, separated by about a centimetre, ran in parallel lines lengthwise down her right leg.
“Looks worse than it feels,” Marcy said with a grim smile.
“It looks like we’re going to go patch you up immediately, that’s what it looks like,” Jemma said.
She unslung her backpack and pulled out the emergency kit. Marcy kept an eye on the animals circling overhead, but they seemed content to remain far above.
There was a quick spray of antiseptic and dermal regenerator. Marcy bit her lip in pain, the regenerator stinging like a swarm of wasps over her cuts. “These are too deep for the spray on its own. We’re going to have to patch you up proper.”
“I’m sure it’ll be fine,” Marcy said, even as she watched long, thin tendrils of blood seep from the wounds. “I just need some rest.”
“Come on Mar, up ya get.”
Jemma stood, holding her hand out to Marcy, who reluctantly took it. Jemma placed one arm around Marcy’s waist, lifting and supporting under her shoulder to bear the brunt of the load.
Marcy was pretty sure if she wasn’t in such exquisite pain, she’d be pretty happy with this. As it was, staying on her feet took all her attention.
“I wonder what provoked it,” Jemma asked lightly, casting glances at the other low bushes between them and the campsite. “We’ve been out here for almost a full day.”
“Maybe we wandered close to a nest?” Marcy suggested between gritted teeth. The cuts were deep and razor sharp. The air, cold now that the sun had dipped beneath the edge of the horizon, sent icy fingers along each wound. “Maybe the glowing rock is an egg.”
“Must be it,” Jemma agreed, hoisting Marcy along. “Just one foot in front of the other, Mar. We’re almost there.”
They reached the camp and Jemma set Marcy down with her back to several crates, her legs stretched out on the moss. “You stay put, I’ll get the medical gear.”
“Oh, I’m not going anywhere,” Marcy agreed. She felt lightheaded, and the wounds were still bleeding. “How do you think those things got through the armour?”
“What!?” shouted Jemma from inside the ship. Marcy could dimly hear the sound of rummaging as she waited, crates being pushed aside and knocked about as Jemma moved items out of the way on her approach to the medical crate.
Medical crate. That thought flickered past the pain in Marcy’s leg and head for a moment. Something important about the medical crate on The Metric Mile.
And then the world narrowed, the edges of her vision grew dark, and Marcy passed out.
When the world swam back into focus, the first thing Marcy noticed was the smell. The air was rich with the scent of ozone and smoke, the sound of crackling firewood and the low hum of the forcefield generator at the edge of her perception.
She opened her eyes and blinked slowly. She could see the gentle blue shimmer of the shield dome, and in the middle of it the small fire Jemma had built to keep the chill at bay. Jemma was sitting facing the fire, staring deeply into the flickering reds and yellows.
“Hey,” Jemma said, her voice low and sad. “You awake?”
“Barely,” Marcy managed. Her head was pounding, and her mouth tasted like she had licked the inside of a battery. “Neurotoxin?”
“Neurotoxin.” Jemma nodded once. She was seated on the ground, several crates behind her, her arms around her knees. “Nothing the autodoc couldn’t handle, but it was a close call.” The autodoc itself, long spider-like silver legs retracted inside its spherical body, sat dormant in its charging station next to Jemma.
“Well, that seals it,” Marcy groaned as she leaned back. “There would have to be veins of pure impossibilium for it to be worth what it cost us to get here. Nothing else we can find would come close to cost-effective with an indigenous airborne species that has a poison that bypasses immune boosters.”
“Fields of opoppy would do it,” Jemma said grimly. “Somebody would sure as hell pay for a planet covered in that, no matter what else lived there.”
Marcy snorted, which made her head hurt. “Sure. Or fields of a super narcotic…”
She trailed off.
There, sitting a meter from the fire, more or less directly between Jemma and Marcy, was a plain, metal canister. It was a refrigerated unit, exactly one point seven liters capacity, sealed, radiation-shielded and scanner-proof. Just sitting there, dull metal gleaming in the firelight, it looked cold and ominous.
“Would you care to explain to me why,” Jemma said softly, not taking her eyes off the fire, “we have a smuggler capsule on our ship?”
Marcy licked her lips. Her mouth was completely dry, and her head throbbed painfully from the after-effect of the anti-neurotoxin. Or was it fear? Jemma was looking at the fire, the flames flickering in her eyes dangerously. Marcy couldn’t remember the last time Jemma wasn’t smiling.
The moment extended past the point of comfort. Marcy licked her lips again.
“There’s water there,” Jemma flicked a finger towards her. Marcy looked, and sure enough a water bottle was next to her. She drank from it greedily, thin trickles leaking out the sides of her mouth in her haste.
“Thanks,” Marcy said, placing the empty bottle on the ground. She took a long, slow breath. “We’re broke.”
Jemma blinked, perhaps the first time Marcy had seen her do that since she woke up. “What? That’s impossible.”
“Jem, we’re broke,” she repeated. “We had maybe two, three more planets to survey, and then they’d take the ship.”
Jemma went back to staring into the fire.
The silence stretched. Marcy felt the slices along her leg. The skin was scabbed over, sensitive and itchy.
Jemma stood up, so suddenly Marcy flinched.
“I knew it was going to be money.”
Marcy was stunned from the anger that radiated off her. Jemma’s shoulders were shaking, her fists clenched.
“I wanted to believe it was something else. A threat, maybe a misunderstanding. But you risked both of our lives for money.”
“There was no risk!” Marcy countered. “I ran four scans myself! There was no way the jumpgate scanners would detect-“
“You don’t fucking know that!” Jemma screamed, and Marcy winced and recoiled. “You don’t fucking know anything! Do you know what kind of scanners are on the jumpgate!? Did you know before you risked both our lives that they wouldn’t pick up some microgram, some whiff, some thought about opoppy seeds on the ship!?”
Marcy shrunk before Jemma’s rage. “I scanned-“
“You didn’t even ask me! You hid it in the medical crate, and then decided that our lives weren’t worth as much as the money you would make when we found a virgin world with a biome capable of supporting that mind-melting shit.” Jemma spat. “I am done.”
Jemma marched up the ramp into the ship.
“Jemma, please!” Marcy called, tears stinging the sides of her face. “Please, just let me-“
“You didn’t ask me, Marcy. I’m not listening now.”
The door to the cargo bay slammed shut with an echo that reverberated into Marcy’s bones.
And she leaned back and cried silently.
Marcy awoke on the ground, the smell of moss thick in her nose. She didn’t remember falling asleep, exhaustion apparently overwhelming sadness. She pushed herself back up to sitting, wincing as a lance of pain ran down her right leg.
“You okay Marcy?” said a voice right by her ear.
“Eep!” Marcy squeaked, hand over her heart. “Oh, Jemma, I didn’t hear you there. I’m sorry.”
“That’s okay,” Jemma had the research stunner in her hands, the long black rifle held gently. She placed it on the ground, and then knelt next to Marcy. “I’m going to lift this up, it’ll sting for a moment.” She put her hands on the long bandage on Marcy’s leg.
“No probl-ow!” Marcy winced. She cast a sideways glance at Jemma, who was smiling grimly. “You did that on purpose.”
“Maybe a little,” Jemma agreed. She ran her fingers, as gentle as a breeze, over the long gashes. “They’re healing up nicely. Stopped bleeding, sealed up pretty well. You’ll have to stay here for the day, let the nanobots finish up, but you should be good to go by tonight.”
“Jemma,” Marcy said as the bandage was carefully reapplied.
“Don’t. I’m still mad at you.” Jemma stood. “I’m going to go finish surveying. You stay here and, I dunno, balance the books or whatever.” She held out the controls for the shield. “Turn it back on after I’m out, okay?”
“You shouldn’t go out there alone, Jemma,” Marcy said, smoothing the bandage idly.
“Yeah, well, let’s not talk about things we shouldn’t do right now.” Jemma walked to the other side of the firepit, and shouldered her backpack again. “Besides, I think I need some time away from you. You can reach me on comms if anything serious happens. Otherwise, I’ll see you at sunset.”
Marcy nodded and clicked the controls that deactivated the big shield. There was a quiet snap, and the shield disappeared, the blue glow fading almost instantly.
In its place there was silence. The sky was lightening from red to orange as the sun rose, and a faint whisper of breeze penetrated into the camp, ruffling Jemma’s hair for a moment. She stood, back straight, shoulders proud, eyes again on the distant mountain peaks.
Jemma opened her mouth to say something, but then closed it again with a nod. She cast a glance at Marcy and then marched off.
No, Marcy corrected herself, Jemma wasn’t looking at her. She was looking at the smuggler capsule. She watched Jemma stride away, and clicked the shield back on.
The hours ground by. Marcy walked very slowly and carefully, which was frustrating, but she didn’t want to risk reopening any of the cuts. She drank some water, since she was parched, but not hungry, and then sat down with her pocket computer and started tabulating the data they had collected so far. It wasn’t strictly necessary, and the shipboard computers could do it faster, but she needed to do something to pass the time.
She catalogued everything they had discovered and the ledger was still firmly in the red. Not a big loss, but a loss regardless. About the same as the previous worlds. A string of bad luck, some might say. The Exploration Corps was reputed to provide solid, secure work, a little dangerous but definitely lucrative. One good world could set a team up for life. A string of half-decent ones could lead to decades of secure employment. But apparently twelve bad ones could wipe out years of training, schooling, and hard work.
So far they had spent forty days together on planets, and the same period of time together travelling to and from those worlds from jumpgate to jumpgate. If you included the downtime aboard the New Geneva spacestation, Marcy and Jemma had been partners and friends for just shy of ninety galactic-standard days.
“Hey Mar, I wish you could see this,” Jemma said, the comms crackling to life. “There’s a small waterfall here. The pool at the bottom is full of glowing fish.”
Marcy limped over to the communication panel, set on the ground a short distance from the firepit. She placed the headset on, tapped a few buttons to refine the signal, and then clicked to begin two-way communication.
Marcy smiled. “Sounds pretty.”
“You’re supposed to say that they’re going to taste like mud, and their spawning area is too isolated to be a viable source of fishery production, and the cost-per-fillet would need to be a hundred basmillion ruple-stilskins for it to be worthwhile.”
Marcy snorted. “That’s not a number, nor is that a currency.”
“Yeah, well, blah blah blah finances. I was never very good at it.” Jemma’s breathing was laboured, like she was climbing uphill while talking. “An unfortunate side-effect of growing up rich. No sense of monetary concern.”
“Must be nice,” Marcy said with a sigh. “Money looms in my mind constantly. Next paycheck, next meal, next student loan payment… it’s like carrying around a boulder in my brain.”
“Sounds awful. Try being rich instead, it’s much nicer!”
Marcy snorted. “I’ll try to remember that next reincarnation.”
“But if you were so concerned about money, why didn’t you talk to me about it?” Jemma let out a long sigh, like one might do while stretching.
“Because I didn’t want to put this boulder in your brain too, Jemma,” Marcy said softly. “You’re so…”
She paused to think. Happy? Was that the problem? Jemma was so happy, and Marcy so worried, that if this burden was shared then they’d both be worried and Marcy didn’t want to do that.
“Look, I know I’m kinda flighty and head in the clouds, but that doesn’t mean you can’t rely on me, Mar,”
“Is that what you think? Jemma, I trust you more than I trust anyone alive.”
“Apparently not.”
“This isn’t about trust! It’s about-“
A burst of static, white-noise like crinkling paper, overwhelmed Marcy’s voice for a moment.
“I’m sorry Mar, I couldn’t hear… what’s going on with the co-“
And then the signal died.
Marcy looked down at the console in front of her. The bulky metal instrument, small antenna extended a few meters over her head, seemed to be operating normally. But nothing other than loud static came through her earpiece or the device’s own speakers when she switched the outputs. If Jemma was also just hearing static, then it wasn’t a problem with the speakers, but nothing she could see seemed to indicate a problem specifically with the connection.
Some kind of radiation, perhaps? But then why would it only be showing up now? Marcy pursed her lips in frustration. Jemma was the engineer, and this was definitely within her field of expertise, not Marcy’s. And she wasn’t exactly sure where Jemma was, aside from east.
She booted up the Troubleshooting setting on the comms, sighed, and starting running through the checklist.
Overhead, a long white contrail passed unseen.
Troubleshooting the comms system progressed at a pace that was so slow it was painful. A lot of it required cross-referencing settings and hardware that Marcy had no idea about. Step 2 was just to turn the entire system off and on again. Step 7 involved resetting the comm hyperwave relay, and that took a solid hour of frustration. Step 12 was confirming the full power output train from the ship to the comm network. And at Step 14, she was asked to reboot the Frequency Modulation Device.
What exactly was a Frequency Modulation Device? Probably hardware, and some quick searching in The Metric Mile’s manual gave her confirmation of that, but not what it looked like. That required searching on the image database, and then she knew what it looked like but no idea of scale. She assumed a device about the size of a shoebox, because she had to start somewhere, and limped into the cargo hold of the ship to search.
She was still searching when she heard the shield sputter, the distinctive hum-whine changing in pitch as it blocked something from entering.
She brushed her grease-streaked hands on her pants, heading down the ramp at a fast limp. She held the shield controller as she exited the ship.
Jemma wasn’t there. At least, not where she expected Jemma to be.
Marcy looked around the shield. Aside from the part of the bubble blocked by the bulk of The Metric Mile, there didn’t seem to be anything currently trying to get in. She glanced overhead, and if any of the slowly circling animals had attempted entering, they had returned to their previous positions.
“Hey Marcy!” called Jemma, and Marcy flinched in surprise. “Drop the shield. I think I have some news!”
Marcy nodded, flicking off the forcefield. Jemma was smiling, her face and hands streaked with dirt. “Did you find anything?”
“Yes, did you find anything?”
Both Marcy and Jemma spun as a short man, clad head-to-foot in black combat armour and a short, stubby pistol in his fist stood up from behind a bush. The helmet was an opaque black glass that reflected the overhead sun as a hazy blur.
Marcy cast a quick sideways glance at Jemma. The stunner was slung over her shoulder, but more importantly she was standing on the black circle that demarcated the edge of the bubble shield.
“Ah! Ah!” the man said, wiggling the barrel of his weapon. “None of that. You drop the shield activator, and you drop the stunner. Nice and slow, folks, and I can be on my way.”
Marcy carefully placed the shield control device on the ground, and she heard Jemma slide the rifle off her backpack.
“What do you want?” Jemma spat.
“Oh, I think the two of you know what I’m here for,” he said, striding forwards. He had the cocky swagger of somebody who was used to this sort of work. “Just hand over… ah! How lovely. There’s my prize.”
He was standing over the smuggler capsule. He gestured for Marcy to stand next to Jemma with quick twitches of the pistol.
“You should be careful who you buy these things from,” he said, not taking his eyes off the two women as he crouched and picked up the canister. “Never know when some unscrupulous type will sell the fact that somebody bought a full harvest of opoppy seeds to a motivated buyer of such information.”
“You’ve got what you want,” Jemma growled. “Now get out of here.”
“Certainly, certainly. I was told that the capsule has a specific voice-activated lock which is impossible to bypass, but thankfully once I’m back at New Geneva I can laser it open.” He lifted the capsule a few times like he was doing bicep curls with it. “Oh, that feels like a lot of money.”
Both of the women glared at the faceless pirate.
“Well! I can’t say I haven’t enjoyed our little chat, but I’m afraid it’s time for me to go.”
Marcy saw the pistol moving in slow motion, already raised. She didn’t wait. She pushed herself forward, arms pumping, leg screaming in pain, but moving forward.
The pistol swerved towards her. The barrel was suddenly huge, and she was still meters away. The pirate was backpedalling, and his aim swung wide as the pistol spat.
The bolt of green energy flew wide, but already his aim was correcting. Marcy threw herself forward, snarling as she jumped.
The pistol spat another green beam, and this one caught Marcy square in the middle of the torso. She felt the air knocked out of her and she was thrown back by the force of the blast.
A blue beam hit the pirate in the hand, and Marcy heard him curse as she hit the ground. There was a flurry of shots, all blue flashes overhead as she stared, gasping for air, at the sky above her.
There was the sound of receding footsteps, more shots from the stunner flying towards the pirate, and then silence.
“Mar, are you okay?”
Jemma was on one knee over her, rifle still held to her shoulder. Marcy tried to respond, but just coughed, her lungs and ribs on fire.
Jemma slapped the shield back on, and only then looked down at Marcy.
“I’m okay. I think the majority of the blast was absorbed by the nanofibres. Hurts like hell, but I’ll live,” is what Marcy tried to say. What came out was more of a hacking cough punctuated by a wheezing inability to breathe.
“Just stay still, I’ll get the autodoc.”
Ten minutes later Jemma had removed Marcy’s uniform shirt and was frowning at the scans of the autodoc carefully injecting and directing nanobots around Marcy’s injury. She had been injected with some muscle relaxant that stopped her lungs from heaving, but it made thinking difficult.
“Hey,” Marcy said, pointing. Jemma looked. There was a long, thin white contrail of a starship leaving the planet surface and back into deep space. “How long to the jumpgate?”
“Two, maybe three minutes.”
“Comms still down?”
“Haven’t checked, but if he was jamming us, probably not. Nobody else for us to call but him.”
Marcy made a gesture with her left hand. Jemma held it tightly. “You’re going to be fine, Mar. The autodoc is doing good work. You’ll be fine.”
“Thanks Jem. But I meant gimme the headset for the comms.”
“Oh! Yeah, sorry… wait, what?”
“I need you to trust me, okay?”
Jemma pursed her lips, and then nodded.
“Then gimme the comms.”
Jemma nodded, handing over the small headpiece, which Marcy slipped over her ear. “Hey, pirate,” she wheezed into the device.
There was a long stretch of silence.
“Listen, I know you can hear me. I just wanted you to know we outsmarted you.”
“No you didn’t,” came the mocking reply. Marcy smiled.
“Yes, we did. You’re, what, thirty seconds from the gate? Safety, wealth, and more sexual partners than you know what to do with?”
“Something like that, yeah.” The pirate’s voice was satisfied, confident.
“That’s only fair. You beat us. But I thought you should know one thing.”
“Yeah? What’s that. Better speak fast, I’m almost outta here.”
Marcy looked up at Jemma and smiled.
“I just want you to know: I admit I love Jemma Ito with every fiber of my being.”
Jemma blinked down at her, her smile confused, and her brow wrinkled.
“Well, thanks for th-“
The line went dead.
“Not the most romantic way I’ve ever been propositioned to, I’ll admit, but-“ Jemma’s smile was radiant, and her face was slightly flushed.
Marcy’s expression grew serious. “Hey Jemma, you remember how you said the scanners on the jumpgates were probably super, super sensitive.”
“Yeah.”
“And that despite all the care I’d taken, they might be able to scan even a perfectly sealed smuggler capsule?”
“Yeaaaahhhh…?”
“What do you think the odds are they’d be able to successfully scan it if it was open?”
Jemma opened and shut her mouth a few times, blinking as she thought. “That was the vocal code to open capsule, wasn’t it?”
“That was the vocal code to open the capsule.” Marcy giggled, and then groaned. “Oh, laughing was a very bad idea.”
“Well, this probably isn’t a better idea,” Jemma said, and leaned down to kiss her.
They parted a moment later and Marcy sighed happily. “Definitely a better idea.”
Jemma lay down next to Marcy, one hand on her exposed stomach, her warm fingers pleasant against the cool air.
“You wanna know what I was going to tell you earlier?”
“I’m stuck here at least as long as it takes this thing to finish,” Marcy gestured at the thin spider machine on her chest. “Might as well.”
“I found a dead cat-bat-monster-thing.” Marcy could feel Jemma rummaging around in a pocket. “Guess what their skeletons are made of.”
Jemma held out a single claw, three centimeters long and about half that thick at the widest point. It glowed softly blue in her hands.
“Bone? Glowy-bone?”
“This, my dear Mar, is ten point two grams of pure, unrefined impossibilium.”
“Bullshit.” She reached up to take the claw.
“This stuff runs through their entire skeletal system. Don’t ask me how, but those little deadly bastards are worth a fortune each.” Jemma sighed and snuggled into the crux of Marcy’s arm. “I mean, I suspect. I’m not very good with finances or currencies.”
“Explains how they got through the armoured plates so easily,” Marcy breathed, her eyes wide as she held a piece of the most valuable material in the galaxy.
“Oh, I don’t know. I’m starting to suspect that these nanofibres aren’t terribly protective. Sure, these claws went straight through yours, but all you have to do to get through mine is wait until that autodoc is finished.”
Marcy felt her heart skip a beat.
The autodoc took an eon to finish.