This Shuttle Will Self-Destruct Shortly. Please Stand By

The stolen shuttle was called A Little Flutter. It mostly rattled, groaned, and questioned its own existence. Someone had painted a cartoon bee on the side. The bee was crying.

“This,” Caitlin said, climbing into the pilot’s seat and kicking aside a crate labelled "Mandatory safety equipment. Do not remove," “is the stupidest thing we’ve ever done this week.”

Maltz was already under the console with a screwdriver, two bypass keys, and a high-level intrusion program named Bob.

“Shuttle’s old Navy surplus. Standard class Type R. Probably from the Fourth Frontier War. Maybe earlier. It’s got a plasma coil held in place with chewing gum and crossed fingers. And someone tried to install a minibar where the nav computer used to be.”

Quinn locked his medikit into place with clinical precision. “That’s fine. We’ll either reach SkarnCell or scatter across the atmosphere. Both are valid outcomes.”

Scarred-Snout simply snarled and strapped himself in backwards, muttering the Aslan words for “this shuttle is clearly cursed, but I respect its will to die screaming.”

Morwen glanced around at the cracked screens, flickering interior lights, and a motivational sticker that said "Your safety is important. In the event of death, please notify your supervisor". She looked unimpressed.

Then she kicked the rear panel and something started humming that definitely shouldn’t. “Let’s fly, then. Before someone sober realises it’s missing.”

A Little Flutter shuddered as its engines spun up like a choir of dying toasters, lifted off the pad in a distinctly accusatory way, and launched into the sky with all the grace of a brick pretending to be optimistic.

They were off to an orbital platform named SkarnCell. In a stolen shuttle that was about to give up the ghost. They had a locker to find.

The shuttle rattled into Tobia’s air lanes in a juddering, sidewinding climb. Caitlin fought with the controls and the controls fought back with passive-aggressive beeping.

Below them, the Merchant’s District glittered like someone had given a migraine a marketing budget. Ahead of them, a sky full of skimmers and ad blimps, drifting like high-tech jellyfish, each one screaming capitalism directly into the heavens.

“Watch the skimmer on your six,” Quinn said, clinically. “It just tried to invoice us for ‘aesthetic airspace intrusion.”

“I am not paying a fine to a floating hat with LEDs,” Caitlin snapped, yanking the stick sideways.

Another skimmer zoomed past, broadcasting a 3D ad for “Sensu-Life: Flavoured Oxygen for the Sophisticated Lung”, briefly wrapping the shuttle in a holographic cherry-scented lung that winked and gave them a thumbs-up.

This was followed by a lumbering ad blimp, suggesting they might like “New Moodles™ - Like noodles, but legally not food.”

Maltz squinted at a panel. “We’ve been tagged. That last ad drone’s logging our route and our carbon footprint.”

“Log this,” Caitlin snarled, jamming the throttle. The shuttle roared indignantly.

They dove under a blimp advertising “Nürb™ SleepLoan – Dream Now, Pay When You Wake!” and pulled a hard bank around a skimmer running a looped PSA about not mixing pharmaceuticals and psionics without a permit.

Scarred-Snout bared his teeth as a smaller drone zipped too close, broadcasting “Limited-time offer! Tactical underpants, 40% off!”

He drew his knife. “Let me kill one. Just one. For honour.”

“No,” Caitlin barked. “We don’t have the ammo for a lawsuit.”

Finally, with a hiss and a thunk and a noise that sounded suspiciously like a mechanical sigh of relief, they broke orbit and slid into the open black.

“Right,” Caitlin exhaled. “Plotting a course for SkarnCell.”

Morwen, stared out the viewport at the shrinking city below. “That was the most aggressively branded flight I’ve ever had.”

***

A few hours later, A Little Flutter set down on SkarnCell with all the grace of a concrete pigeon having second thoughts. The landing struts groaned. The hull sighed. A loose panel fell off with the kind of clunk that said, “Well, I tried.”

SkarnCell was a desolate orbital platform orbiting a forgotten rock, covered in scars from meteor strikes, welding patches, and what looked suspiciously like a low-budget firefight. The kind of place you only docked at if you were desperate, stupid, or delivering something you didn’t want questions about.

Inside the shuttle, Caitlin was already kicking open the locker marked “Emergency EVA equipment. Not for use in actual emergencies.”

What emerged could, by the most generous interpretation of technical language, be called vacc suits.

Suit one was missing a left glove and had "SEXY BEAST" scrawled on the chest in faded marker. It hissed quietly when unrolled, as though begging for death.

Suit two had a cracked visor held together with thermal tape and what looked like a cartoon sticker of a duck saying “Breathe easy!”.

Suit three was less a suit and more a suggestion, stitched together from three manufacturers, two centuries, and one deeply dubious oxygen recycler branded “Sploot™ - The Budget Air Experience.”

Scarred-Snout held up a glove with two fingers fused together.

“This one… is insulting.”

“It’s that or hold your breath,” Caitlin said, already pulling on the Sexy Beast. “Just don’t do anything dramatic and no one’ll notice your left leg’s exposed to vacuum.”

Maltz looked at his suit with genuine fear.

“Is this one… melted?”

“Partially,” Quinn confirmed. “It still seals. Mostly.”

By the time they had found replacement parts, suited up, strapped in, taped over, and mentally prepared to die stupidly, they resembled a doomed one-act play about bad decisions and worse spacesuits, staged somewhere between airlocks.

Caitlin looked at the crew, her visor fogging slightly.

“Right so. Let's find the locker, avoid being shot, and try not to become a footnote in a salvage report.”

They stepped into the airlock with all the confidence of people who knew they were probably going to regret this - but were going to do it anyway, because payday was a hell of a motivator.

And because the only thing worse than going in was going back empty-handed.

The airlock cycled with the clunk and wheeze of a tired lung, followed by the hiss of pressure equalisation and a faint mechanical voice saying “We value your reckless patronage.”

Then the doors opened, revealing Storage Level Five, also known as The Place They Store Things No One Wants to Talk About.

The lighting flickered like it owed someone money. Walls were stained with decades of coolant leaks, grease, and the haunting memory of that one guy who tried to smuggle in a live cephalopod in a briefcase.

The place was silent, except for the hum of distant machinery and the soft crunch of duct tape underfoot as Maltz’s vacc suit began to delaminate in protest.

Caitlin consulted her map coordinates, which had the clarity and user-friendliness of a ransom note.

“Down that corridor, turn left at the suspicious moisture and twenty paces past the dead light." Locker G-09.”

“Does the ‘G’ stand for ‘Gonna Die Here’?” asked Morwen, fiddling with a patch over a suspicious bubbling seam in her leg seal.

They moved down the corridor, past rows of sealed containers, each one labelled with things like “Property of nobody important,” “Do not open - again,” and “If found, please apologise.”

Locker G-09 stood at the end of the hall. It looked perfectly ordinary in the way that very dangerous things often do, a squat, unassuming beige locker the size of a coffin, if the coffin had been designed by someone who hated ergonomics and loved secrets.

Quinn scanned it. “Sealed. Passive biosensor. Vague radiation. Faint… rhythmic pressure.”

“It’s breathing,” Morwen said, flatly.

Caitlin tilted her head. “If this thing starts talking, it’s getting spaced.”

They inspected it slowly. No traps. No blinking lights. Just a locker with a heartbeat.

“So,” said Maltz, toolkit already out. “Do we open it?”

Scarred-Snout nodded solemnly. “Lockers are not meant to remain closed. Especially breathing ones.”

Caitlin nudged the locker with one boot. “Fine. But if it’s a clone of me with better hair, I’m shooting it.”

Maltz tapped the override. The locker hissed.

It opened.

Maltz squinted. "That’s... not right."