After a tense exchange with some very agitated-looking space cops, Corey had been dismissed while Kamak finalized the details of their altercation with the cannibal cult. He had chosen not to tempt fate and made a beeline directly back to the Hard Luck Hermit, joining his crewmates in waiting for Kamak’s return. To his surprise, Doprel and Farsus were already waiting, looking like their wounds had been patched up. It made sense that medical tech was more advanced up in space, when Corey took a moment to think about it.

“Hey guys,” Corey said stiffly. “Good to see you’re alright. Sorry you got hurt, that was kind of my bad.”

“Apologize for nothing, Corey Vash,” Farsus said. “Considering the mental instability of our opponents, our injury was relatively inevitable.”

“Yeah, there’s not many ways out of a showdown with heavily armed cultist cannibals that don’t end in shooting,” Doprel said. “If anything, you made things better, not worse.”

“But you still could’ve been more careful,” Tooley said. She wasn’t quite as forgiving as the other two. “The bad guys had their backs to us. You could’ve given our team a signal, or something, given them some warning that shooting was about to start.”

“I know. It was pretty impulsive.”

“You got a thing about cultists, yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Cool. Murder as many of them as you want, just make sure we aren’t in the line of fire when you do it,” Tooley cautioned. While she offered warnings, Doprel offered sympathy.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“No.”

“Are you-”

“I’m sure,” Corey insisted. “How long is it going to take Kamak to get back?”

“Depends on how feisty the local cops are,” Tooley said. “Lot of the uniform types don’t like bounty hunters.”

“Some of them love us, though,” Doprel said, eagerly vouching for their (technical) brothers in law enforcement.

“Yes, many are quite fond of bounty hunters, as our active pursuit of criminals ensures they can grow fat behind their desks and file paperwork,” Farsus said. Tooley laughed, but Doprel didn’t.

“And speaking of paperwork, it might be a while,” Doprel said. “Cases with bodies involved tend to involve a lot of filing and documentation, Kamak might be gone for hours.”

Kamak walked into the room and sat down.

“Hey, what’d I miss?”

“We were just talking about how long it was going to take you to file paperwork,” Tooley said, looking up at Doprel with a wide grin.

“Oh, nah,” Kamak said. “Turns out those cultists actually killed cops to get their uniforms, so the fuzz was pretty excited to see them in body bags, paperwork be damned.”

“Sick. And since they added killing and impersonating officers to their rap sheet…”

“Yes, Tooley, our bounty got even bigger,” Kamak said. “Try not to sound so excited that multiple people are dead.”

“I’m just seeing the silver lining here,” Tooley said. “There’d be dead dudes either way. Now there’s dead dudes and a huge paycheck for us. Speaking of-”

“Yeah, yeah, give me a minute to do some accounting, you walking trashfire,” Kamak grumbled. His datapad light up with a long display of information, but, after seeing Tooley’s prying eyes, he set it to private mode, rendering the back side of the transparent plastic slab opaque.

“By the way, when do I get one of those?”

“Do you want one?” Doprel said. “We have like twelve in storage.”

He grabbed one of the boxes on the shelves of the common area and dug out a handful of the plastic tablets. The datapads were very cheap, and the crew members had a habit of breaking theirs for various reasons, so Doprel made sure to keep plenty of spares on hand.

“Why did I not get one sooner?”

“I think we all assumed you already had one,” Tooley said. “They’re pretty basic stuff. I keep forgetting you’re Uncontacted and we have to explain literally everything to you.”

“Speaking of, press your palm flat against the surface of the pad and grab the top left corner,” Doprel explained. Corey did so, and the invisible circuitry within the plastic tablet activated, keying the device to Corey’s biometrics. Doprel walked through a few more steps of device set up while Kamak finalized the accounting.

“Hey, Corvash, speaking of you not knowing things, you know what a cece is?”

“No.”

“Well it’s money, and now you have some,” Kamak said. He pressed one more button on his tablet and tucked it away. “Congratulations, don’t spend it all in one place.”

Tooley immediately grabbed her own datapad and sped through the commands to pull up her bank account. What she saw made her grey eyes light up with delight.

“That is the sexiest number I’ve seen in a while,” Tooley said.

“How do I check the -why does this have a weather app pre-installed?” Corey demanded. “We’re in space. Fuck off, weather. How do I open my bank whatever?”

Doprel demonstrated, tapping him through to the digital wallet that now existed in Corey’s name. Physical currency was unwieldy at best in a spacefaring environment, so all currency existed digitally in the form of a cryptocurrency called Council Currency, or cece by those with few syllables to spare. Whatever they were called, Corey now had about thirty-four thousand of them.

“This is a lot, right?”

“It is a significant sum,” Farsus said. “Especially in comparison to many jobs we do.”

“Okay. I kind of need some perspective here, though. Say I wanted to buy dinner at a shitty restaurant, how much would that cost me?”

“Like four cece’s,” Tooley said. “Two, if you want to go really shitty.”

“Okay, wow, this is a lot,” Corey said.

“High risk, high reward,” Kamak said. “And this is after I took out all the expenses for restocking supplies, the medical stuff those two needed, and the transit fees, so everything there is yours to keep.”

“Transit fee? What transit fee?”

“Well, since we had so much money to spare, I sprung for a quick ticket to greener pastures,” Kamak said. “Soon as everyone’s ready to go, I got us a Bang Gate ticket to the Arkenne galaxy.”

“God damn, finally,” Tooley said. “No offense, Corey, but your home galaxy’s kind of a shithole.”

“Why would I be offended? I’ve only been on one planet and I don’t even like it that much,” Corey said. “If there are cooler galaxies out there, let me at them.”

“Heh. You’ve seen nothing so far, kid,” Kamak said. Their circumstances had forced Kamak and his crew to seek jobs in the far reaches of the universe, where there was less competition for contracts. Now that they had some fallback funds, they could head back to the Arkenne galaxy, the de facto center of the universe, home to all the riches and all the problems that came with such a lofty status. Mostly the problems.