Zeros didn’t lift his gaze from the instruments,
his optical sensors narrowing with murderous calm.
“…You, idiot, just activated emergency jettison for Engine #1.”
Blindy blinked.
“Uh… yeah. Totally. That was intentional.”
Another explosion rattled the Z-P-N-E-S.
Burning shrapnel whizzed past the remaining engine.
Zeros turned his head slowly—too slowly to be normal:
“You dropped a three-ton thermonuclear engine
into the asshole of a space station the size of Dumsta.”
Blindy leaned back like a tactical genius unveiling a master plan:
“Yeah, buddy. Tactical improvisation.
Look—LOOK how they burn!
People say nothing burns in space—bullshit.
Where we go?
Everything burns.
Even vacuum, man.”
Zeros didn’t blink—because he couldn’t—
but the silence he emitted was so contemptuous
it could’ve emptied an entire bar.
“Now we’re a single-engine rustbucket
with asymmetrical thrust, ruptured fuel lines,
and a pierced hull.”
Blindy beamed:
“But we’re alive! See? Strategy. I’m smart too… kinda.”
He turned to Madeleine to wink—and froze.
She was floating in mid-air,
rotating slowly,
arms crossed,
one leg over the other,
wearing the expression of a woman thinking: “I’ll kill you both. Just not right now.”
She let out a sharp laugh.
“So that’s why my father sent these two idiots.
Not to rescue me—
but to deal maximum damage to MacroHard™.
And I’m just the collateral damage.
Classic. Fucking classic.”
At that moment a new alarm blared—
sharp, vicious, like a nerve being ripped out.
Zeros glanced at it.
“…That was a good engine.”
Blindy’s smile deflated like a sad balloon.
“Oh…”
Madeleine, still drifting:
“Congratulations. We’re now drifting through open space
with the grace of a brick fired from a slingshot.”
Blindy grabbed the controls:
“WE FIX THIS, RIGHT?!”
Madeleine, bored and tired:
“Just send a message to these coordinates.
Someone will pick us up.”
Zeros nodded, stood, and walked toward the comm module.
“Blindy… if you press one more button…
I will throw you out of the airlock manually.”
Blindy stood, helped Madeleine drift down onto the couch.
And so they spent half a day
floating in open space—
no comms, no thrust, no hope—
with only the soft, miserable beeping of
“engine died like a dog.”
Zeros was running out of patience—
and his patience exists only as the thin interval between
“I hate humans”
and
“burn this galaxy to ash.”
Madeleine kept glancing at Blindy’s blaster
with a thoughtful expression that clearly meant:
“If I shoot him… will the ship finally get quieter?”
When suddenly—
from deep inside the comm module—
a tiny, miserable chirp came through.
The kind of noise a dead android would make
if someone kicked it in the circuits.
A clean digital hologram flickered on—
the tired, overworked head of her personal agent.
“Lady Crook, we received your distress beacon.
Are you… alive?
Uninfected?
Not captured?
Not cursed?
Not married?
Not pregnant?”
Madeleine raised an eyebrow.
“Just fucking pick us up.”
Her private mercenary team dropped out of hyperspace seconds later,
scanned the battlefield,
and, after twenty excruciating hours of towing
that felt like intergalactic dental surgery,
dragged the crippled Z-P-N-E-S toward the nearest neutral zone.
A legendary, mythical place
everybody in the galaxy has heard about
but almost no one has actually visited.
Only 0.00001% of the population ever sees it—
because everyone else:
either dies earlier,
or is too scared to go,
or too poor,
or too smart.
Our duo fit none of those categories.
Which is exactly why they were delivered there.