Hard Luck Hermit

Tooley brought the Hard Luck Hermit in low and slow. A little too low. The ship occasionally made a scraping noise as it bumped into the tops of the coral-like fauna that grew all over the planet.

“Fuck me,” Tooley mumbled. “If Kamak makes me buff all those scratches out, will you help me? I’ll buy you more booze.”

“Let me look at the scratches first,” Corey said. They sounded deep, and he wanted to know what he was getting into.

“Fair play.”

Tooley found the clearing Kamak had indicated as a landing zone and set the ship down. She flipped a few switches to put the Hermit into idle and kept the engine running. Corey didn’t waste time on a goodbye, and headed to the cargo hold to grab a lev-lift. He didn’t know the finer details of the machine, but Kamak had said to press the green button, so he pressed the green button. The small pallet popped into the air, lifted by unseen forces. Corey saved figuring out how that worked for later and dragged the lev-lift into the ruins.

The ruins of the ancient Kentath society were a lot less impressive than Corey had been hoping for. The decrepit building had more in common with an Earth office building than any elaborate space station he’d seen in a sci-fi show. Broken windows and crumbling pillars lined both sides of the long hallways Corey walked through, following the map Kamak had sent to his tablet.

“Corey, that you?”

Doprel’s voice caught him off guard, since he was a few stops away from his destination. The lumbering alien lurched out of a side hallway, hunching over to squeeze through a doorway designed for much smaller creatures.

“What’s up, Doprel?”

“We were doing some last minute sweeps of the building. You got here sooner than Kamak said you would,” Doprel said.

“He probably factored in time for Tooley to sober up,” Corey said. “But she was never drunk.”

“Really?”

“Really,” Corey said.

“He owes me ten cece’s, then,” Doprel said.

“Good for you. Come on, I got the thingy, now let’s go get...the other thingy. What are we getting?”

Corey messaged Kamak and Farsus to let them know he was on-site, while Doprel gave a noncommittal grunt.

“I don’t know, we’ve been split up,” Doprel said. Farsus, who hadn’t been far away, swooped in, and Corey asked him next. He didn’t know either. Luckily for Corey, his answer was not far away. Kamak and the professor were at the appointed meeting spot, flanking a large metal cylinder. It was about as tall as Corey, perfectly cylindrical, and had what appeared to be several small hatches on it’s exterior.

“Okay, what’s this?”

“A filing cabinet,” Kamak said, opening up one side of the cylinder to reveal a row of documents. The professor hurriedly shut the cabinet door and slapped Kamak on the wrist.

“Careful with those, the documents may be sensitive to light,” he scolded.

“A filing cabinet?”

“Yes. Help us put it on the lift,” Kamak said. While just a filing cabinet, it was a very large filing cabinet, and Professor Drrok insisted it be handled with the utmost care.

“I was expecting something little more high-tech,” Corey said.

“It’s been thousands of years, all the high-tech shit is broken,” Kamak said. “And probably obsolete anyway.”

“Reverse-engineering Kentath technology was once standard practice, but their inventions are now long out of date,” Farsus explained. Kentath society had peaked at the Bang Gate, and that technology had been reverse-engineered centuries ago. Even the most advanced tech in their ruins was now purely a matter of historical curiosity.

“But there are still myriad insights to be gained from their relics and records,” Drrok said. “These documents relate to Project Reconverge, their never-executed plan to unite all their gene-seeded races into a new Kentath empire. There may even be some details on how they hard-coded universally understood facial expressions into their gene sequencers!”

“Fascinating,” Corey said, hoping that the translator would bury most of the sarcasm.

“Quite so.”

“The professor says it’s important, so it’s important,” Kamak said. He could care less about ancient paper, but his paycheck was now dependent on these dusty documents, so they were temporarily the most important thing in the universe. While Kamak dreamed of money, Corey checked his datapad. He had a message.

“Any idea why Tooley sent me the word ‘fuck’ sixty-two times?”

“It means we’re in trouble, lugnut,” Kamak grunted. “Push!”

Doprel and Farsus got behind the lev-lift and used their prodigious combined strength to push it faster than it would naturally move. A panicked Professor Drrok ran in front of the device to keep it steady, but the lift stayed stable in spite of the rush, and the ancient filing cabinet made it aboard the Hermit safely. Kamak was the first to rush to the cockpit.

“What do you see?”

“Lights in the forest, headed this way,” Tooley said. She pointed out the cockpit window, at a row of lights in the woods, like the headlights from a trail of vehicles. “Everything aboard?”

“Last time I checked, and if anyone jumped ship in the past fifteen ticks, that’s their own fault,” Kamak said. “Close the bay and take off.”

Tooley complied, and set the bay doors to shut so they could safely take off. By the time the Hermit’s heavy doors had shut, their pursuers had made it to the clearing. Corey could see dozens of people pushing through the coral-like trees, and while he couldn’t quite make out their faces, it wasn’t hard to tell they were upset. A few members of the crowd ran around the ship to gawk at the “defiled” Kentath ruins, while others expressed their anger in a far more direct fashion.

Corey knew the spaceship cockpit had to be pretty damn durable, but he still flinched when a large stone impacted and bounced off. It was soon joined by a few dozen other bits of angrily thrown debris, all of which bounced off the Hermit’s hull. The only thing to stick was one of the very same meat sticks Corey had eaten earlier that day. Corey wondered if that merchant had joined the angry mob or if someone had bought a meal only to end up hurling it at their ship in a rage. Either way, he felt bad.

The meat stick, and the mob, slid away as Tooley gunned the engines and took off, leaving the pink soil of Kilikiss behind and soaring skyward.

“Another day, another angry mob,” Tooley said. “You do have that effect on people, Kamak.”

“Ha-fucking-ha.”

“Hope all that shit they threw didn’t scrape up the ship too bad,” Tooley said.

“Nice try, Tools, but I saw those scrapes on the bottom long before the mob showed up,” Kamak said. “You’re buffing those out.”

Tooley cast a pleading glance over her shoulder at Corey. He avoided her gaze to the best of his ability as the atmosphere of Killikiss gave way to the vast expanse of space.