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.

Maxie had never got their ass to the control room faster. They yanked out of autopilot immediately and slammed on the gas to hightail out of the planet immediately.

They engaged all systems, boosting speed to overdrive. Almost immediately, a chorus of groans rose up from the body of the ship.

”Who turned the heating off?”

”I didn’t save my game yet!”

”The beer’s gonna fuckin’ go cold!”

Appearing behind them, were three incredibly pissed off team members.

Dwayne stood at the front of the group, beside Marlie. Behind him, A’aron, the scaly, floaty, snakey Venusian, and loyal cartographer.

“Maxie. Would you care to explain why you thought it wise to turn the WiFi off just before I level up in Adventures of Pluto?” His voice (accented ‘Australian’, according to Marlie) was steely cold, red light from the control room gleaming off of his dark temples.

Maxie stuttered. “I—“

A’aron spoke up next, voice low and croaky, light and melodic at the same time. “My heat lamps are off. So, if you would like this journey to be documented, and not have an unconscious cartographer until we see some Sun, kindly turn them back on.”

Maxie smiled awkwardly. “A’aron, you have to—“

Marlene cut them off. “Fridge’s off. My beer’s getting warm, and so is all your food.”

Maxie sighed. “Marlie, this is your fault. Team, I apologise for the apparent powercut, but I had to redirect all non-essential power to getting the fuck off of this planet.”

Fuck. Maxie liked that word. It was the only one Marlene had taught them that didn’t have a sufficient or superior equivalent in Martian.

Dwayne cleared his throat again.”I see that, oh Glorious Captain. May I ask why such a decision was made without consulting any of us lowly crewmates?”

Marlene gave Maxie a look that said ‘don’t you fucking dare.’

Maxie dared anyways. “Marlene heisted all of Kaiser’s gear, and it is all on this ship.”

That evening, despite the feast born from the necessity of saving as much food as possible from rotting in a lukewarm fridge, the atmosphere was tenser than Marlie’s trigger finger, even as they whizzed through the cosmos at untold speeds.

Dwayne cleared his plate in five minutes flat and excused himself to ‘the library’, otherwise known as the single bookshelf installed on the far side of the lounge, filled with majority shoplifted pulp books and porn mags, which he was clearly forcing himself to care about. A’aron followed suit, though he barely touched his plate, and began searching the ship like a cop, trying to find every spare blanket, comforter and hoodie currently going unused.

Neither of them looked at Marlene.

Maxie coughed an unchewed piece of cowmeat down, embarrassed by the little noise they were making in front of Marlene. She hadn’t spoken to them in some hours now, and they were staring to suspect she wouldn’t again for a while.

Marlene pushed a glass of water in Maxie’s spluttering direction.

“I’m…fine…” they choked.

Marlie raised an eyebrow.

Maxie gulped down the water.

Marlene sighed, pushing her half-empty plate away. “I’m going to bed. Goodnight guys,” she said, without addressing Maxie specifically.

Only when they heard her heels clacking off in the East Wing of the ship, did anyone speak.

Dwayne whistled a low note, not looking up from his book, a crappy looking Western featuring a sufficiently distressed and shockingly underdressed young woman on the cover. “Maxie, baby, you’ve really angered your girl.”

Maxie turned from their place at the table. “I have?”

A’aron piped up once from his blanket hoard in the corner. “She’s mad,” he said, voice thin with the effort of staying conscious on a ship ten degrees below normal.

“But, I—“

Dwayne cut them off. “I don’t like it either, Maxie. But you need to speak to her, so it doesn’t feel like we’re down a sharpshooter with the whole sector’s mafia after us.”

Maxie sighed. “How do I do that?”

Dwayne chuckled. “How do I cope with this boring ass analogue entertainment?”

“How do I stop feeling like you’ve all abandoned me on Neptune to die?”

And then, as if by magic, the cabinet door swung open, revealing a treasure trove of answers in the form of a fine, green powder.