After the relatively easy task of polishing the interior of the Hard Luck Hermit’s cargo bay, Corey had allowed himself some optimism about cleaning the exterior. That had proven to be a mistake. Not only was the exterior a much coarser, tougher material than the polished interior, he had to crawl all over the awkwardly shaped exterior of the ship. The ship’s main body was cube-shaped, with rounded protrusions for the cockpit and engine nacelles. Two sets of large, rectangular wings also folded to the sides of the sizable vessel for occasional atmospheric maneuvering, and their complicated folding mechanism made the exterior scrub even harder.

The fact that he was stuck doing the scrubbing while the rest of the guys went off to do cool bounty hunter stuff made it even worse. Finishing a prisoner transport wasn’t exactly exciting or glamorous, but it was still preferable to scrubbing hulls. He’d even rather be napping in the ship with Tooley.

“Corvash!”

Apparently Tooley had woken up. Corey nearly fell off the hull when she screamed his name.

“What?”

“Put down the rag and get the fuck in here,” she said. “It’s an emergency.”

Corey seized on the excuse to not be scrubbing anymore and climbed down the side of the ship, back into the cargo bay. Tooley was waiting for him, pacing side to side through the empty space nervously.

“About time,” Tooley said. “You know how to shoot, right?”

“Your space guns are a bit new, but I know how to point and shoot,” Corey said. His mother had insisted that they be able to defend themselves if the Church of the Guiding Truth tried to “reclaim” them more aggressively, so Corey knew his way around a firearm. Thankfully, ‘point and shoot’ appeared to apply to even the most advanced firearms of the wider universe.

“That’ll do,” Tooley said. It now registered with Corey that she sounded worried. “Come on. Kamak hit his panic button.”

“What happened?”

“Something panicking, I don’t know,” Tooley said. She led the way into the spare living quarters that Farsus had converted into an armory. All of the gun safes that were normally shut and locked now sat wide open, waiting for someone aboard the ship to grab one and spring to the crew’s rescue. “Come on, pick your favorite and lets go. We have to check it out, and maybe bail out the guys.”

“Aren’t there space cops for this kind of thing?” Corey asked. In spite of his questions, he did grab a very pointy rifle with a lot of glowing bits and head out of the ship.

“If he trusted the space cops, he would’ve hit his cop button,” Tooley said. She had grabbed a small pistol, not much larger than the one Corey had claimed during his escape from the slave ship, as her own weapon. “Shit happens, Corvash. Sometimes cops are on the take, or just shit at their job.”

“Understandable.”

“Slow your roll a bit, and keep your weapon casual,” Tooley advised. “We go too fast, we’re going to get the kind of attention we don’t have time for.”

At Tooley’s insistence, they tried to feign a casual stroll while also keeping a swift pace towards their destination. Tooley’s datapad was pinging them the route to Kamak and the rest of the crew. They weren’t far, but their projected path took them into the guts of an already derelict station. They were on an out of the way stopgap station, mostly used by bounty hunters and other mercs, and as soon as one stepped away from the crowded hanger, the halls showed clear signs of disuse and disrepair.

“How did Kamak get lured into a place like this?”

The dilapidated halls looked suspicious even at a casual glance, and the absence of any bystanders made them even sketchier.

“They’re bounty hunters, Corey, half the places they hang out are like this,” Tooley said. “It’s why I stay in the ship half the time.”

This borderline derelict station was probably one of the nicer places Tooley had ever taken a stroll through. It was also on the smaller side. Tooley held up a hand and grabbed Corey’s chest, forcing him to stop.

“We’re almost on top of them. Guns up, voices down.”

With a nod, Corey raised his gun and slowed his footsteps, carefully proceeding down the halls. Tooley muted her datapad and led the way, taking them around two more corners before holding up her hand again. She pointed around the corner with two fingers and then held her hand in front of her mouth. It was an alien gesture, but Corey knew “stay quiet” when he saw it. He followed her lead and pressed his shoulder to the corner, just barely daring to peek around it.

On one end of the hall, Farsus, Kamak, and Doprel had their backs to a wall, with the caged cannibal still in their custody and guns in their hands. A wall of humanoids in matching uniforms stood between Corey and the rest of the crew, also with guns in their hands. It looked like the standoff had been going on a while. While still firmly pointed in each others direction, most of the guns had relaxed, if only due to tired hands not being able to point them more threateningly.

“Another standoff, fun,” Corey whispered. “Aren’t those cops?”

They had the uniforms, at least, but Tooley knew better than to assume a few pieces of cloth made you belong to anything. She raised her datapad. All the “cops” had their backs turned, but thankfully, universal criminal databases included full 3D body scans.

“Okay, good news, if we make it out of this, we’re going to get a huge payday, maybe,” Tooley whispered. “Most of these guys are wanted dead or alive.”

“Bad news?”

“The bad news is if we don’t make it out of this, we’re all going to get eaten,” Tooley said. “These guy are in the same creepy cannibal cult as our passenger. They must be trying to spring him.”

Corey’s eyes narrowed, and his finger slipped onto the trigger of his gun.

“We’ve had a cultist in our cargo hold the whole time? Why didn’t anyone say anything?”

“It seemed less relevant than the cannibalism,” Tooley said. She stopped scrolling through criminal profiles and looked up long enough to see Corey getting more and more tense.

“So, the cult, what do they believe?”

“I dunno, they’re brainrot cannibals,” Tooley hissed. “Something about genetic memory, and if everybody keeps eating each other’s bodies, eventually all the memory will be combined in one uber-being or something? Why?”

“Just curious,” Corey said. Nothing like the Church of the Guiding Truth back on Earth, at least, but a cult was a cult. In the end, only the central authority of the cult mattered, and everyone else was just a lamb to the slaughter -more literally, in the case of these cannibals. Corey could see shades of the old cult in these new, alien faces. He looked at them and all he could see were so-called family members like his aunt, his cousins, and the “family” of strangers the Church had forced on him and his mother, all of them parasites sucking the joy out of their life and offering nothing but suffering in return.

And the fact that he could only see the faces of the past made it much more satisfying when Corey raised his gun and put those faces squarely in the crosshairs.

“Corey, what are you-”

The answer to Tooley’s question came in the form of a round of high-velocity plasma. The unexpected kick of the rifle threw his aim off a bit, but Corey was smart enough to aim for the center of mass. The first volley tore a hole through the ribcage of the cultist he aimed at. The yelp of pain hadn’t even ended when Corey put the next target in his sights and pulled the trigger again.

Guns went up, and in several different directions, as the cultists realized they were being fired on from a different angle. Farsus also took the blaster fire as an excuse to start shooting, and unloaded a barrage of his own at the cultists. The weapons master of the crew was, predictably, a better shot than Corey, and had already taken out three of the cultists in the time it took Corey to drop his second. Their matched gunfire made everyone else realize the fight had started in earnest, and the momentary confused panic was replaced by confused panic with a lot more bullets.

In the entire hail of bullets, Tooley would guess she maybe managed to clip somebody in the thigh once. She tended to stay out of firefights for this very reason. Thankfully Corey, Farsus, and Kamak had her covered in the accuracy department. Doprel also contributed a few shots in the right direction, but he focused mostly on keeping his allies safe. His alien physiology was significantly sturdier than that of his humanoid comrades, and they used him (with his consent) as a living shield. Albeit an imperfect one.

As the last body hit the ground, Kamak stepped up and looked over Farsus.

“Shit, Farsy, you alright?”

“My wounds are not beyond a doctor’s ability to fix,” Farsus grunted. Since he’d had the foresight to wear armor to the prisoner hand off, the hits to his thigh and shoulder hadn’t maimed Farsus, but they still hurt.

“What about you, Doprel? You good?”

There were a few oozing holes in Doprel’s carapace, but he was barely bothered by them. Unlike humanoids, Doprel didn’t need to keep most of his fluids inside him to stay alive.

“I’m alright,” he said. “Barely broke the carapace.”

“Good. Tooley! Get these two to a medic, fast,” Kamak commanded. “Corey. You stay right fucking here.”

The command carried a bit too much of a “scolding parent” tone, but Corey complied regardless. Tooley helped guide the wounded while Kamak and Corey were left to look over the dead. Corey took one last look at a still-twitching cultist before pulling the trigger one more time to stop the twitching. The captain of the crew scowled heavily as he looked down at the gaping wound in the face of the cultist. Kamak didn’t know if it counted as a mercy kill if you were the one who’d put him on the ground in the first place.

“What the hell was that, Corey?”

“They had guns pointed at you, and Tooley said they were wanted dead or alive,” Corey said. “I figured dead was the better option.”

Kamak breathed a sigh of relief. At least Corey had confirmed they were wanted dead before he’d started shooting. He didn’t have another complete psychopath on his crew, at least. The standing authorization to kill the cultists downgraded Corey’s behavior from homicidal to just inadvisable.

“Alright, so, fairly justified here, but in general, try to be smarter about when you pull the fucking trigger,” Kamak said. “They’ve got cop uniforms on. Shooting at them can cause a bit of confusion, yeah?””

“Uniforms don’t change what they are. I killed cultists, anyone worth shit will understand,” Corey spat. Kamak stared at him for a second and then looked down at the dead bodies.

“I’m sensing some personal issues here,” Kamak said. “This time it was okay, because these guys also killed people and ate their dead bodies, but I need you to promise me you aren’t going to go blasting every cultist you see.”

“Not all of them,” Corey said. “But if we happen to meet any more cultists we can kill-”

“I see where you’re coming from, but no,” Kamak said. “You make a habit out of blasting anyone we don’t have a bounty on, I’m kicking you out. We’re bounty hunters, not serial killers. Be a professional, or you’re done.”

A thin wisp of smoke rose up from one of the plasma-scorched corpses of the cannibal cultists. Even Corey could recognize that he had perhaps gone slightly overboard. Though even that small amount of guilt was mostly born from Farsus and Doprel’s injuries. Corey could care less about dead cultists, only about how recklessly he had made them dead.

“Alright, you’ve got a point,” Corey said. “I’ll be more careful.”

“Good. Glad we’re done with the lecturing, because holy shit this is a lot of bounties to cash in,” Kamak said. “Nice job, Corvash.”

After factoring in the cleaning and processing fees associated with killing a bunch of people inside a space station, as well as Doprel and Farsus’ medical fees, the pile of fugitive cannibals had just about quadrupled their payout for an otherwise only mildly profitable job. Kamak was, frankly, more concerned with the payout than the mess that had been made. His enthusiasm for the blood money slightly undercut Kamak’s point about restraint, but Corey vowed to be more careful in the future anyway.