Hard Luck Hermit

A CO2 capture drone buzzed by as Tooley brought the Wild Card Wanderer in for a landing. She set them down on a grassy field, within sight of the run-down house Catay and Vatan worked out of, and set down the docking ramp. A burst of warm air wafted up into the entryway as soon as the door cracked open. Decades of carbon capture had yet to undo the damage of planetary warming on Tannis. Kamak took a quick breath of the stale air and looked down at the dry grass below.

“Come on, Kamak,” Doprel said. “Let’s go. In and out, quick check-in. I’ll offer them a ride if they want it.”

“She’s not going to want it,” Kamak said.

“Probably not,” Doprel admitted. “But it’s polite to offer, and we’re not going to rebuild any-”

“There is nothing to rebuild,” Kamak snapped. “In fact: Tooley, get your blue ass out here!”

“What?” Tooley said, as she stomped her way out of the cockpit. “You too chickenshit to talk to your old pilot?”

“Catay hates my guts, and she hates Doprel a little by extension,” Kamak said. “She knows you and I can’t stand each other. Anything that gets said, she’ll take more seriously coming from you.”

“I’m not your fucking messenger girl,” Tooley said.

“Sooner this all gets done, sooner we can leave,” Kamak said. “Go in, tell her what’s up, get the fuck out, easy.”

“I do think he has a point,” Doprel said. “She’ll be more receptive to you.”

“Fine. If you think so,” Tooley said. Doprel clicked his mandibles with pride. He often had to play that role when Tooley and Kamak argued. It gave them plausible deniability on actually agreeing about each other. With any damage to her ego prevented, Tooley marched down the ramp and headed for the farmhouse. Kamak watched her go for the first few steps, and then tore his eyes away before she could make it halfway to the building.

“So, hypothetically,” Doprel said. “If Catay took us up on the offer for a ride-”

“She won’t.”

“If she did,” Doprel said. “You just plan on not saying a word to them the entire ride back to Centerpoint?”

“That’s the plan,” Kamak said. “She told me not to talk to her and her kid. I’m not talking to her and her kid. Easy.”

“But you care about them.”

“And the Gentanians care about Tannis too,” Kamak said. He gestured out the doors to the homeworld of his people, and the barren expanses that had once been crowded with his kind. “See how that’s working out? Because smart people understand that sometimes the right way to care for something is to leave it the fuck alone.”

Overcrowding had been what choked Tannis’ atmosphere with greenhouse gases, and had nearly rendered it uninhabitable. A mass relocation to the neighboring planet of Ventan was the only reason they could still breath the air on Tannis, and even that was only barely.

“Shut the fuck up and stop trying to fix things,” Kamak said. “If I tried to patch things up with everyone who hated me I’d be at it all millenium.”

“Not everybody,” Doprel said. “Just the ones you don’t hate back.”

Kamak glared at Doprel wordlessly. The behemoth bent his mandibles in a crude approximation of a smile. Any further elaboration on the point was interrupted by Tooley making a breathless sprint back up the boarding ramp.

“Chased you off, huh?”

“They’re not there,” Tooley gasped.

“What?”

“They’re not fucking there, Kamak,” Tooley shouted. “Place is empty!”

Kamak nearly knocked Tooley off her feet as he bowled past and sprinted across the dry fields. Doprel was hot on his heels the whole way. He slammed through the open front door of the farmhouse, gun drawn.

“Catay! Vatan!”

He scanned the room with frantic eyes, and a tense energy that slowly melted. The room was barren, stripped of decorations and furniture, and what remained was covered in a thin layer of dust. Kamak let his grip on his gun relax.

“This was intentional,” Kamak said. “They moved. A while ago.”

“Looks like it,” Doprel said.

“Fucking Voice could’ve warned me,” Kamak said. He holstered his gun with a defiant grunt. If the farm had been abandoned this long, there was no way the Voice or any of his government contacts hadn’t known. “Waste of god damn time.”

Kamak walked back to the ship, stormed into the cockpit, and made a rude gesture at Tooley as he sat down.

“What?”

“Don’t come sprinting back panicking because they fucking moved, Tools,” Kamak scolded.

“Moved? What, like they got a new house?”

“Yeah, place is dusty as hell, they’ve been gone for weeks, if not longer,” Kamak said. “All their stuff is packed and gone, no signs of a struggle, they clearly just moved out. Dipshit.”

“Well fucking excuse me for not having the keen bounty hunter eye or whatever the fuck you’ve got,” Tooley said. “I find people missing when there’s a serial killer on the loose I make some assumptions, sue me.”

“Just get us going,” Kamak said. “Least you can do that right.”

After delivering her warning, Tooley had run back to the cockpit to get them primed for takeoff right away. She finished the process with far less urgency, and set them on a low, coasting cruise through the hazy atmosphere of Tannis.

“So where are we headed, then? They got some backup ranch you know about?”

“Nah. Head for the capitol, Sumontsa,” Kamak said. “There’s only like fifty-thousand people on this entire planet, got to be someone keeping track of where they live.”

The planetary capital of Sumontsa had been populated by nearly a hundred million, decades ago. Now it was less than a few hundred. It made for an eerie walk from the spaceport, as Kamak and company shuffled past long abandoned skyscrapers and derelict transportation terminals. Most of the windows were shattered and the interiors looted, but a few signs of the city’s former existence remained. Advertisements for decades-old vids and defunct products still dangled from rusted frames, in a snapshot of a life long extinct.

The city’s center was only marginally better. Here, a few cleaning drones bustled around on solar-powered tracks, keeping the streets clear, and the old government building clean. The bastion of functionality amid the decrepit city made everything around look much worse by comparison. The lobby of the building was empty, but for a few automated terminals, and Kamak mashed the buttons of one terminal until he found the option to summon an actual person. A clerk soon shuffled forth, supported by medical bracing on his legs, yet still wobbling with every step. The dermal ridges on his bald head were deep gray and almost scabby-looking, a telltale sign of a Gentanian reaching the end of their nearly four-century lifespan.

“Can I help you?”

“Yeah, I need records,” Kamak said. “Relocation of carbon farmers, Catay X-F-N and her daughter.”

“Oh. Do you have an access requisition form?”

“No, it’s important, I’m in a hurry,” Kamak said. “I don’t have time for forms.”

“Well I can’t just hand you personal information,” the clerk said.

“This is literally a matter of life and death,” Kamak shouted.

“It very well could be, for all I know,” the clerk said. “And you could be the death. Giving out information like that isn’t right, I need to know that everything-”

“Look, old timer, I am Kamak D-V-Y-B, and I saved the fucking universe,” Kamak said. “And if that doesn’t buy me a pass through red tape now and then, I’ll find a way to get back and let the Horuk have this fucking place!”

“Sir, I can’t just-”

“Easy, Lodo.”

To Kamak’s equal surprise and relief, Vatan herself appeared on the scene and gently pushed the clerk away. After a few more reassurances, the elderly clerk backed away, and let Vatan turn to face Kamak. A few years had made a surprising change on her face. She looked tired.

“Guessed it was you as soon as I heard there was a commotion in the lobby,” Vatan said, without an ounce of humor.

“Vatan. How’d you end up here?”

“Not a lot of other places to go for a girl who only knows carbon farming,” Vatan said. She gestured at the barren beige lobby of the government building.

“Why’d you-” Kamak bit his tongue and stopped himself. He wasn’t here to catch up. “Look. There’s trouble. I got a warning for you and your mom, then I’m out of here.”

Vatan looked at Kamak cross-eyed, and tilted her head.

“Mom?”

The way Vatan said the word hit Doprel like a gunshot. He grabbed Tooley by the arm and pulled her a few steps back. She did not protest.

“Yeah, you’re here, where’s your mom?” Kamak said. “We need to-”

Vatan visibly choked back tears, and the gunshot revelation finally hit Kamak.

“No. No,” Kamak said. “What happened? What did they do to her?”

The sadness Vatan felt was undercut by confusion, and she looked up at Kamak.

“‘They’? Kamak, no one did anything to her,” Vatan said. “She just...died.”

The four walls of drab beige closed in around Kamak like a tomb. For a moment, he looked like he might cry, but something about Kamak’s body rejected tears on a fundamental level.

Instead, he vomited. It wasn’t an improvement. A single solar-powered cleaning drone buzzed across the floor to clean up the mess.