Exo-Hunter

by Jeremy Robinson

  “Pirates need pirate music!” Hildy shouts over the magical guitar chords of Blitzkrieg Bop by The Ramones.

  When ‘Hey! Ho! Lets’ go!’ fills the air, genuine tears blur my vision. Kid just turned this shitty world into Christmas morning.

  We rise toward space, bopping our heads and tapping our feet, almost oblivious to the sound of lazzer weapons scorching the hull, and the flash of warning lights letting us know that we’re taking damage.

  19

  “Union Command is mobilizing a fleet,” Morton announces.

  “A fleet?” Carter glares at me. “I thought you said the Union was mostly placid, naïve, and had ‘less bite than a toothless hedgehog.’”

  “That’s silly,” Hildy says. “Hedgehogs are extinct.”

  “Poor little guys,” I say.

  Hildy makes a pouty face. “I know, right?”

  “Hedgehogs taste good,” Drago chimes in. “But fatty. Good in stew.”

  Even Carter, who is pissed at me, takes a moment to stare at Drago in disgust.

  “Man…” I say, “that’s just… Don’t talk for a while, okay?”

  Drago shrugs, leans his head back, and closes his eyes.

  Carter turns back to me. “What you should have said was, ‘In my limited experience at the outer fringes of known space, the Union is—’”

  “I get it,” I say. “But I stand by it. They might have hardware still lying around, might even know how to use it, but no one in the galaxy has seen battle in ages. Hell, most of their security guards were pregnant!”

  Hildy raises her hand.

  “Not you, too,” I say, and then I shake my head. I wave a hand at her. “Go ahead.”

  “Keeping the Overseers with child was a strategy implemented by Union Command more than two hundred years ago,” Hildy explains. “Crimes against the young and unborn carry the highest penalty.”

  “The highest…” Chuy shoots me with her lazzer eyes. “How many pregnant ladies did you punch?”

  “None!” I say. “I mean, I choked one out, but she’s fine.”

  “I punched one,” Drago says, eyes still closed.

  “And cudgeled the second with your head,” Carter says, and then she turns to me. “I hope you were serious about being renegades.”

  “Never been more serious,” I say.

  “Also…” Hildy holds up her index finger. “Union forces routinely participate in wargames, using uninhabitable planets as battlegrounds, and forbidden space for…well, space battles. Ammunition is live. The losers are those killed in battle.”

  Drago opens his eyes to shoot her an ‘Are you serious?’ look. Not even the Spetsnaz are that brutal.

  “Okay. So, I was wrong,” I say to Carter. Lil’ Bitch’n shakes from an impact. “Morton, give me a SitRep.”

  “Uhh, several…I don’t know what they are. Cruisers. Battleships. Angry looking things. They’re behind us. Gaining fast.”

  “Will they catch us before we reach Bitch’n?” I ask.

  “Two of them will,” he says.

  “Firepower?”

  “I don’t know!” he shouts, panic rising.

  “Drago,” I say. “You up to this?”

  Drago unbuckles. “Am up to anything. All the time.”

  Lil’ Bitch’n rolls hard and then drops a hundred feet in a second. Drago is lifted off the floor, spun, and slammed into the ceiling. When we level back out, he’s unconscious.

  “Morton… Try to keep us steady for a minute, okay?”

  “Sorry,” Morton calls back. “I was evading a missile.”

  “Strap him back in,” I say to Chuy, motioning to Drago. “And no one else unbuckle. Things are about to get bumpy.”

  “Ooh,” Hildy says. “Good line.”

  “Thanks,” I say, and I head for the cockpit. I take the gunner’s chair off to the right and behind the pilot’s seat. “Hey, big guy. You ready for your first combat mission?”

  “C-combat? I thought we were running away?”

  I buckle myself in, lower a VR mask to my head, and take hold of two joysticks. “Sometimes running away involves doubling back to shoot people.”

  “So…like a strategic pants shitting?”

  I laugh hard. That is the funniest damn thing he’s ever said. “Precisely.” I slip into the VR view, which is a feed from the underside of Lil’ Bitch’n, between our two cannons.

  “Sounds like fun,” he says, though it sounds forced. He’s trying to not let me down. I’ll try to do the same for him.

  Though my seat remains stationary, I swivel around in VR and the guns outside Lil’ Bitch’n do the same in the real world. A cloud of what look like bees fills the gray sky behind us, streaming out of now-open hangars. The planet must be covered with them. Two of the fighter craft are closer than the rest—and gaining fast.

  They look a lot like the Zorak, but their unpainted metal is as black as Union Command’s surface. Where the Zorak was sleek curves, these things are all angles. But they’re still clearly the same design. And they cut through the planet’s atmosphere like Ginsu knives. Lil’ Bitch’n is as aerodynamic as a sausage, but she can take a hit.

  Hopefully more than one.

  I grip my controls, visualizing what I want to do. “Full stop when I say.”

  “Full stop?” Morton says. “That’s going to hurt.”

  “Not as much as being dead!” I shout.

  “Everyone: hold on!” Morton says through our comms.

  I grit my teeth and brace myself for the movement. “Full stop!”

  Lil’ Bitch’n isn’t great at moving forward, but she can screech to a halt like we’ve just careened into an invisible wall. The pilots of the two fighters flinch, veering to either side to avoid pancaking into our hull. As they part, I open fire, unleashing a constant stream of lazzer fire. I miss the rumble of real bullets, but the high-powered lazzers carve long molten lines down the undersides of both fighters.

  The fighter on the right rolls as it passes. Chunks of armor plating fall away, but it’s not out of the fight. The fighter on the left isn’t as lucky. The lazzer punches through a soft spot in the armor and strikes something important, resulting in a very satisfying explosion.

  I’m about to whoop, when I realize I’ve just taken a life—maybe more than one—for the first time in five years. I’d forgotten that it takes a toll on the psyche. But, they are future Nazis, and since we’re now Public Enemy Numero Uno, I think they’ll be the first of many. Unless…

  Oh God.

  “Hey, Hildy?” I shout, because she doesn’t have comms yet.

  “Yeah?” she replies.

  “The Union doesn’t use pregnant pilots, do they?”

  “No!” she replies. “That would be horrible. They use really aggressive assholes who take drugs to be fearless!”

  “Are you just saying that to make me feel better?” I shout.

  “No!” She sounds a little angry. “Also, what the hell kind of space pirate are you?! Shoot ’em out of the sky!”

  “Morton!” I shout.

  “I’m right next to you!” he hisses, flinching from the volume of my voice.

  “Right. Sorry. Take us up. Fast as you can without moving in a straight line.”

  “That doesn’t make a lot of sense, but…yes, sir!”

  I’m pinned to my seat as we accelerate again. Then my bodyweight shifts, keeping me pinned as we rocket upward at a nearly vertical angle. Lil’ Bitch’n starts shaking from the strain.

  My VR view of the world looks straight down at the planet’s black surface. A kind of haze twists beneath us, as thousands of fighters climb behind us. Flashes of light sparkle in time with the sound of lazzers impacting our thick hull. Lil’ Bitch’n can take a big beating, but she’s not a war machine.

  C’mon, baby. Hold it together until we’re home.

  I switch to a full auto lazzer spread and hold the trigger down. Not much to aim at, but if I fire enough…

  A mile below, orange bursts
of light join the fireworks display, as my fire punches through the faster, but less armored fighters. Several explosions rock the fleet.

  But it’s not enough.

  Not nearly enough.

  Keeping my fingers on the triggers, I say, “Porter, open the hangar door. Ready all weapons systems. I want to rotate the moment we’re on board.”

  “What?” he says. “Huh?” He’s shifted from confusion to panic in the time it takes Speedy Gonzales to rub one out.

  I hear the vacuous suck of a toilet. “Are you taking a shit right now?”

  “Didn’t have anything to do until you—”

  “Porter, did you skip wiping? Wait. Never mind. You can clean up later. Right now, I need to you do everything I asked in the next… Morton, ETA to Bitch’n?”

  “Sixty seconds,” Morton says, as the ship starts shaking, not from lazzer fire, but from leaving the atmosphere.

  “…in the next sixty seconds. After that, we’re all toast.”

  “Is toast…bad?” Porter asks, breathless from running to the bridge. “Because…I like…toast.”

  “The toast will be burned, Porter. Hard as a brick.”

  “Oh my God,” he says. “That’s horrible. Hangar door open. Slew drive charged. Annnd…weapons systems ready to go! Eat my sweet and spicy tater tots!”

  I have a nice chuckle. ‘Eat my sweet and spicy tater tots’ is something Chuy and I occasional shout in victory, just to see if it will catch on and become a thing. Morton and Burnett have both said it, but it’s become something of a catch-phrase for Porter.

  “Okay. Here’s the hard part,” I say.

  “I’m ready for anything!” he says.

  “Great. I’m going to need you to shoot anything that isn’t us.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “In about ten seconds, a fleet of angry Union ships are going to clear the atmosphere behind us. I need you to shoot them. Let them have it.”

  “You want me to shoot…Union ships?”

  Aww, shit. Porter doesn’t know the situation. Doesn’t know we’ve gone full-on Rebel Alliance versus the Galactic Empire. And I have no idea which way he’s going to swing.

  “Oh no,” Morton says. I can’t see what’s got him upset, but his voice has risen two octaves, so it can’t be good. “Porter, what are you doing? No! Stop! Brace for impact!”

  20

  I don’t really brace for impact as much as I clench for impact. I’m still shooting at the Union ships behind us, so all I can really do is pucker my asshole and hope for the best. And in this case, that’s hoping that Porter hasn’t chosen the life of a Future-Nazi over his pals. Granted, I didn’t give him, Morton, or Burnett much of a choice when I commandeered Bitch’n, but they didn’t really put up a fight, either. And I’ve offered to cut them free several times. They’ve all chosen to stick with us.

  But maybe Porter was playing us all along? Maybe he was tracking our efforts? Reporting back to Command? Maybe he was the reason the Zorak knew exactly where to find us? It makes sense.

  Holy shit. Porter is going to kill us!

  A twisting tangle of rockets slides into view, wrapping around Lil’ Bitch’n’s backside, headed straight for the fleet pursuing us. Not a one strikes us.

  Porter didn’t kill us.

  He saved us.

  “Yes! Porter! I never had a doubt!”

  “Had a doubt?” Porter asks. “In what, sir?”

  “Never mind…” I release the joysticks when Bitch’n’s hangar doors close behind us, blocking my view just as the cloud of rockets meets the approaching fleet. Explosions fill the atmosphere.

  We haven’t just declared our intention to be pirates, we’ve declared war.

  “Time to go,” I shout.

  “Where are we going?” Porter asks.

  Anywhere but here, I think, and then I realize that the Union knows every place we’ve been, and they’ll no doubt check the planets marked as habitable. But we need a destination for the Slew Drive to work. Without celestial coordinates, there’s no telling where we’ll end up. We need to go someplace so horrible that the Union will assume we’d avoid it, no matter the cost.

  Only one place fits the bill. “Elysium.”

  “I…don’t know where that is,” Porter says.

  “003189,” Chuy says.

  “Go!” I shout.

  We roll into the white of the fourth dimension and linger there for a few moments. Then we roll back out. From inside Lil’ Bitch’n and most of big Bitch’n, nothing has changed. The only way to know we’ve escaped the jaws of a monster we’ve just poked in the eye is Porter’s word.

  “Rotation complete,” he says. “We have safely arrived at 003189. But…are you sure this is the right place?”

  I yank the VR headset off and unbuckle, racing toward Lil’ Bitch’n’s opening cargo bay door. I’m worried that something has happened to my retirement plan. “What do you mean?”

  “Just that we’ve been here before,” he says.

  Thank God. “Yes. That’s the point.”

  Hildy puts her hand on my arm as I pass, pleased as a peacock with a peach. “That was amazing!”

  “I know, right?” I walk past her, but I make eye contact with Chuy. “Find her a room?”

  “I ain’t a concierge, cabrón,” she says, but I know she’ll do it.

  When I leave Lil’ Bitch’n, Porter, who has been able to hear the conversations, says, “But…this was one of the most inhospitable planets we discovered in the past five years. Also, who is the new voice? Sounds like a young woman.”

  “Hildy. She is a young woman. What’s wrong with the planet?” I jump down from the lowering hatch before it’s all the way open, and then I hustle toward the bridge on the ship’s far end…and that will take a few minutes.

  Screw it, I think, and I stop. I put my hand on the PSD. Saving a few minutes with a slew drive is reckless, but it’s been working like a champ. And I suppose it will, right up until the moment it doesn’t. But this planet is important to me.

  “Hold up,” Carter says. She rushes up, puts her hands around my waist. “Okay, let’s go.”

  I’m incredulous for about a half second and then I decide, Why the hell not? Pirates do stupid shit all the time. I put one arm around Carter and rotate to the bridge.

  Porter startles at our sudden arrival. Puts a hand to his chest. Takes a deep breath. Doesn’t piss himself—or the bridge. He smiles at me. “Did you see that?”

  I give his shoulder a pat. “You’ve come a long way, man.”

  “Probably helps that I was in the bathroom when you called.”

  “Mmm,” I say, staring out the windshield toward a planet that looks painfully like Earth, but isn’t. “Elysium…” To Porter I ask. “What’s wrong with the planet?”

  “Well, we visited this world more than three years ago,” he says.

  “Annnd?”

  “There’s no one here. It could have been settled right away, but there isn’t a single city that I can see, or a pre-settlement satellite network. It’s like the Union doesn’t know—” He gasps like I’ve just stepped out of my quarters wearing a sheer negligée and nothing beneath it—like I’m a naughty bitch, but in a good way. “You didn’t tell them?”

  “How would you feel about it, if I didn’t?” I ask.

  He’s torn, vacillating between horror and delight, like he’s just been asked if he wants a spanking from a sexy lady…or me in that negligée. “I—I’m not sure. But there really isn’t a choice now, is there?”

  He slumps in his chair, the full weight of what he just helped us pull off settling in. There’s a good chance that he killed even more Union pilots than I did, but he didn’t know why, and he wasn’t given a choice.

  I sit down across from him, serious, elbows on knees, hands clasped. “Look, buddy, that wasn’t the way I wanted anything to play out. If you want to bail, I’m cool with that. Only we know you were behind the controls. It’s too late to change what happened, but
let me fill you in, so you can decide what’s best for yourself.”

  I give him a rundown of everything that happened at Union Central, leaving out the embarrassing bits. I let him know about Hildy, about being pirates, about Burnett and Morton signing on. And then I apologize again for not giving him the same choice.

  When I’m done, he seems to shrink deeper into his chair, looking like he might sprint from the bridge—if he can sprint. Speed-lumber might be a better word.

  The bridge door slides open. Drago, Morton, and Burnett enter, the former looking annoyed by our obvious Kodak moment, the latter two concerned for Porter, based on his expression alone.

  “Hey,” I tell him. “It’s okay. If you don’t want to join us, just say so.”

  “It’s not that,” Porter says, looking me in the eyes. “It’s… I just realized I still haven’t…you know…” He glances back as his own posterior. “…cleaned up.”

  The BCS extracts urine and fecal matter—when it’s being worn. Typically, they need to be cleaned out later, and sometimes if the system is overloaded, it ejects the piss and shit. People fill up their BCSs all the time without a second thought, but it is still preferable, and more comfortable, to use a toilet. Porter was using the toilet when I called, and he pulled on his skintight BCS before he was cleaned. Ipso facto, his suit’s gonna have the mother of all skid marks when he takes it off.

  “Ugh.” Drago slaps a palm to his shaking head and takes a seat at his station. “Little men with big feelings.”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” I say holding up my palms. “Hold up. Rewind. Does that mean you’re in? That you want to be a pirate? That you’ll stand with us in a hopeless rebellion against the Union?”

  “Huh?” He radiates befuddlement. “What? Yeah. Of course. We’re friends.”

  I sit up straight, a stupid smile on my face. I reach out my hand. “Yeah, we are.”

  He shakes my hand, pleased to have pleased me.

  “Now,” I say. “Go clean up.”

  He nods and exits the bridge, walking like he’s got an egg clenched between his cheeks…and then it occurs to me that he might.

  Erasing the image from my mind, I turn to Drago. “Keep an eye out for Union ships.” To Morton and Burnett, I say, “Check Lil’ Bitch’n for damage. If she’s good, we’ll need to take her to the surface. Fill up on water. Maybe hunt for some protein. We might be on the run for a while, and it won’t be long before we’re persona non-grata at every inhabited planet and space station.”