The year? Seventeenth of July Twenty-three thirty. The place? Hell if I know. Well, it’s not Hell, it’s Mars, but I have no damn clue where on the face of it. Me, I’m sitting on a crate full of stolen Earth Rocks hoping to God there are no leaks in my spacesuit. Suit is standing on the deck of our crashed carrier looking for her favourite stars. As usual, she is leaving everything to fate and is wearing nothing but a silk shirt, a straight tie and a pair of my lace panties. She’s not even wearing trousers for fuck’s sake. I place a gloved hand on my cheek- or where my cheek should be. The dome that covers my head looks like someone placed a giant glass over my head. The only consolation I have is that I can’t see how ridiculous I look. Despite our contrary moods, we both wait for the same end: as two smugglers with a contraband ship, contraband cargo, and contraband spacesuits, crashed in a forbidden sector of Mars. To be fair, all of Mars is forbidden without a permit so it wouldn’t have helped anyways. Instinctively, I pull out my logbook and report.

        “Pilot-in-Command Ashley Kenner reporting; Date on Mars is seventy-eighty-two-oh-one. MY captain and I await our capture or death eagerly. Our client has left us with a faulty ship and about twenty tons of contraband rocks. Our crew is on Earth unaware of our location or status and God help us we’ve upset the Corsair Family.” The contraband was all stolen from an underground organization named the Corsairs by our client- A Sir Brent Marshall (I reflect on how it sounds like ‘arsehole’). My guess is that he’s neither knighted nor named Marshall. He was also responsible for our crash, as the jets clunked out within half a parsec.

        “Our options are limited at best. If we’re not captured by either the police or the Corsairs then we’ll surely die of starvation or lack of air since no one else would dare come within this sector. If we’re captured, we’ll either be tortured or killed. That goes for the Interstellar Police too. Chances of survival: Basically zero.” I end the log solemnly. Unsurprisingly, my sarcasm did little but to depress me more. I wasn’t surprised at a lot of my situation, however. Once again I had entrusted all the mission details to Suit. Once again we had landed in a hopeless situation. This time, however, we weren’t backed up by a professional crew who were able to pull our asses out of the fire like usual. It was just the two of us: two girls (to call us women would overstate our maturity) alone on the bare face of Mars.

        I looked over at Suit. She was adjusting her hair, but her eyes were still fixated on the starry Martian night sky. From what I could tell, she was fixated on the Ptolemaic Draco, a favourite of hers. Of the little I knew about Suit’s life, the one thing I was sure of was her love for mythical winged beasts. Her ship was named the Drake; her car the Pegasus…even her scooter had a name- though I hadn’t bothered to remember it. I could also tell she was looking at it as she traced it with her finger on the dashboard of the deck. It was a shame that the ship was both illegal and crashed. It was the smoothest ride I had ever driven, especially compared to the rickety Drake. My staring eventually caught her attention, and she waved me over. I begrudgingly stood and made my way to the ship.

        I kept my suit on inside the ship. Unlike Suit, I valued the little time I had left. Most of the safety procedures programmed into the ship were disabled by the crash so I had an easy time getting into the main hull-way. As I entered the deck, I was hit by a stream of steam which obstructed my vision for a second. This ship was on its last legs. I wiped my dome so that I could see. Suit was still in my panties, but her tie had, for some reason, drifted upwards to become a headband.

        “Ash,” Suit started. “We are in a perilous position yet again.”

        “Yes, Suit. We are. Again.” I replied. Suit turned to face me, her eyes narrowed seriously.

        “What is your plan then, Ash? We don’t have much time left.” She said.

        “I don’t have one. We’re going to die, Suit.” I replied, somewhat drily.

        “Ah. I misunderstood your stare for a plan. Usually, when you stare at me, you have a plan. No matter, we shall contact our client and ask for aid.” She didn’t miss a beat. I sat defeated in my pilot’s chair.

        “Our client betrayed us Suit. We’re stranded here.”

        “What about the ship? Can you repair it?”

        I frowned. Suit’s absurdity was grating on me. “Maybe if it were just the jets that needed repair, but the whole port side of the ship was blown off. I’m surprised that there’s still air flowing through the deck.” Suit shrugged and looked back at the stars.

        “That asshole Marshall sent us on a suicide mission. And for what?” I was ranting. “So that the people he stole it from would get it back? So that the police would find it? It just doesn’t make sense. It’s not even useful contraband! It’s a pile of rocks! We’re dying because of twenty pounds of illegal rocks!”

        “Twenty tons.” Suit corrected. “Ash, I have a plan.” That was new. I glanced back over to Suit, who was still staring off into the distance. She paused, then looked at the console. “We must get captured by the Corsairs.”

        “They’re not going to search for us now, not with the ISPD circling the skies,” I replied tartly.

        “They will if they think the ship can still fly. Right now they believe that the ship is smashed beyond compare.”

        “Which it is.”

        “Yes, which means that the ISPD will send a collection unit to collect the scrap that’s left. The Corsairs will inevitably hijack that part of the operation and retrieve their ship and rocks. Normally, that process would take a couple weeks to complete, but if we give them a reason for emergency…” she trailed off, tapping her fingers rhythmically across the dash. I started to piece together her plan. She wanted me to hack the tracking sensor on the ship to send a false signal to the Corsairs. I wasn’t exactly sure why she wanted us to get killed by them first, but I decided to trust her.

 I pulled up to the console and started working my magic. By magic, I mean tinkering. I didn’t have a bloody idea how this console operated. The first thing I did was get the console itself running. I had to play around with some wires to get the horrid thing to turn on. Once it turned on I had to reboot it. Several times before it started responding to my commands. The console was written in some antiquated language which used some confounding hexadecimal inputs. If there was ever such a thing as paint-by-numbers in coding, this was it (there is simply no other way to explain it). After I’d painstakingly filled in enough digits of hexadecimal data the console started up into its operating system. This too was something I’d never truly experienced before and I found myself near masking the keyboard to get it to respond. A few content computer beeps later, it decided to cooperate with me. Once it listened to me, it worked like magic.

“Okay, I’ve sent the signal,” I said finally. Suit was reading a magazine. Now she was shirtless. The tie was still around her head.

“Excellent. It shouldn’t take them more than a couple minutes to get here I presume. Now, turn off the air.” Suit said, not bothering to look up from her copy of Space Babes Monthly.

“You’re not wearing your spacesuit!” I exclaimed. I couldn’t wrap my mind around her plan. She only smirked. I wasn’t sure if it was at my foolishness or something in the magazine. Either way, it irritated me. “What’s your plan? Kill yourself first, then leave me to be tortured by the Corsairs?”

She shook her head. “No, of course not. I wouldn’t let myself die like that.” I didn’t hear any concern for my fate. “Just listen to my commands, please. I know what I’m doing.”

“My concern is that you don’t,” I said flatly. She ignored me and buried her head in deeper to the magazine. I begrudgingly did as she said, but passed her a helmet in the vain hope that she would wear it anyways. The only way to turn off the air supply was to turn off the ship’s power. One quick brush of an emergency lever and the air was off. I looked over to Suit. She was still reading her magazine, unfazed. I stared at her with wonder as she continued as before. Minutes passed and nothing happened. She looked to me with a vague smile on her face.

“Take off your spacesuit,” she commanded. I obeyed hastily as I heard the sounds of fighters overhead. I wasn’t surprised to find air in the room, but I was perplexed at how that could be. I was sure I heard the air hiss out of the room before. Apparently I was wrong. Suit didn’t wait for my questions, ushering me to stay silent and down. It felt like hours, those moments before the ship was lifted up. The emergency lights switched off, submerging us in darkness. Only the stars were visible, out the window.

“Stay as still and low as you can.” She reprimanded me as I started to move towards the window. “Their sensors catch movement in the ship. If we’re lucky they won’t do a heat scan.” We continued to wait. I watched the stars drift with the ship as we were towed along. It was a while before we saw our destination: the Corsair planetoid. The planetoid was tiny, more of an asteroid really, and it wasn’t until we reached its atmosphere that we could see the building that encapsulated the rock. The planetoid was more man than anything now. I looked towards Suit in horror, but she couldn’t see my face in the pitch blackness.

We landed with two of the smaller vessels that had been towing us on a landing bay of steel. The ship creaked as it rested onto the bay. Pause. Tap. Tap. Creeeeeeak. They entered into the ship. We heard muffled voices talking in some Euro-Hungarian language that I couldn’t understand or really place due to the blockage of sound through the doors. I could finally see Suit again- except I couldn’t. She was gone, and I was alone. The voices came closer and closer until they reached my room. They entered with their full space gear on and had plasma pistols at the ready. I winced pre-emptively as they spotted me. They didn’t shoot. They stopped talking. I opened my eyes to look at the pair. They struggled against some invisible force, their faces turned red. I gawked at the sight. They fought a little longer, and then were dead. I dared not move, I was frozen in terror. Suit emerged behind me.

“They suffocated. Serves them right for equalizing their suits,” she tutted. Sensing that I was confused, she continued. “I didn’t want you to move since, outside this area, there is no air. There never was. All their technology is rather outdated compared to ours, you see. We have this:” she brought to my attention a small module on the ground that I hadn’t noticed before. “It’s an air modulator. It works in a small area to make sure the air in that bubble is consistent. It stores excess air and releases that consistent stream of oxygen over a certain amount of time. It’s extremely experimental. Since their tech is behind ours- they wouldn’t know a thing like this existed unless they stole one- they manually adjusted their air flow so that their own suits wouldn’t take in more air than needed. They didn’t realize that, since only you were in the bubble, they were cutting off their own air supply. Poor souls couldn’t even bring themselves to turn their air back on. That’s why I got these suits that automatically adjust by measuring the air outside the suit and modulating it. It’s just plain simple.” Her monologue finished, she finally donned her spacesuit. She was still in panties but the tie had come off too. I wondered if this would also factor into her hare-brained schemes. I wasn’t sure- I couldn’t be when Suit was in such a mood as I had never experienced before. She ushered me to follow her lead and I gladly obliged. The words “experimental technology” never filled me with much hope. I followed her out of the door and into the heart of the Corsair’s base.