Marlene tumbles into the ship with an urgency that makes Maxie scramble into action before she can even hear Marlie yell ‘fuckin’ go, go, go!’ and collapsing into short-breathed pants until they’re out of the Aerelian atmosphere. Marlene fixes her hair, black and electric blue, before slinking off to her room without so much as a greeting.

Only when they begin to cruise in orbit, masked by layers of radar scrambling and tech so beyond Maxie’s capabilities they resorted to just calling it magic, did they flick the ship into autopilot and join Marlene in the lounge.

“You mask us?” She asks, feet propped up on the sofa, flicking a beer cap at Maxie’s face.

Maxie nods, catching it and rolling it around in their palm like a coin. “I don’t know what Duane did to the ship, but it works.”

Marlene shrugs. “He’s a tech wizard, man. Check it,” she rises, crossing the room to the cabinet in the far corner.

She opens its doors in one graceful, dramatic sweep, her arms flourishing in a way that highlighted her collarbone and swan-neck. Maxie loves that uniform on her, black, skin-tight save for some very tactically placed cut-outs for ‘ventilation’. It almost makes them want to keep doing heists.

Marlene grins. “Stop looking.”

Maxie burns up immediately. “I wasn’t.”

”Don’t worry, sugar. You can see all you want tonight,” she replies, stepping back from the cabinet.

Maxie’s insides jolted at the pet-name. Humans from Gaia had speech variations called ‘accents’, and Marlene always called hers ‘Southern’. This had led to a good three months of Maxie thinking her to be Bangladeshi, and when ‘Southern American’ finally entered the mix, Maxie had thought Chilean. It took a year until they had realized that the ‘South of The United States’ meant Mississippi.

The existence of a ‘Mississippi’ a ‘State of Alabama’ within a ‘United States of America’ within a ‘continent of Northern America’ within ‘Gaia’, was another sociopolitical mess that had taken the Martian whole year to wrap their head around.

But they didn’t have time to dwell on that. Not with a cabinet stacked high with the purest grade Pixie Dust in this sector of the Milky Way.

“Oh…great Dunes, Marlie, this is—“

Marlene finished their sentence for them. “The entirety of Kaiser Escobar’s stash. All for us, and the great citizens of Gaia, Mars, and any other sad soul in this sector. For a small price, of course.

Maxie’s stomach tightened, though they still didn’t understand Marlie’s nickname for Kaiser Enlascarr, they knew one thing:

They had stolen from the most prolific mafia man in the solar system. And he surely was going to be after them next.