Together, Val and the Kree chick watched through the pod’s one porthole as the great hulking shadow of the pirate vessel receded into the dark. It receded pretty fast; the escape pods got a decent boost as they were ejected, it seemed. When an occasional blinking light was all that was still visible of the ship, a bright glow flared suddenly where the ship had been, like a miniature nova.
“Well, fuck,” the Kree chick said, pushing away from the window. She drifted across the pod until she bumped gently against the opposite wall. It was not a long journey; the pod wasn’t built for two.
“My people will come looking,” Val said.
“Yeah?” Kree chick leaned her head back against the wall and closed her eyes. “Wake me when they get here.”
Val was mostly off the sauce these days, but just then she’d have given anything for a bottle of something vile.
The pod had emergency rations for one. Specifically, one person of ordinary appetite, for example Ms. Blue Sky over there, not one Asgardian. Val was pretty sure they were expired. The water tasted of metals leached from the storage canisters, which she thought would probably poison the ordinary person if they drank too much of it.
Fortunately, the water would probably run out before it caused problems for the Kree chick.
“It’s Minn-Erva,” the Kree chick said.
Val considered that for a while before she answered. She had plenty of time, after all. It wasn’t like she had anything else going on. “Val,” she said at last.
Minn-Erva slitted her eyes open and gave Val a long look. “What were you doing on that ship, anyway?”
Val shrugged. “Same as you. Stealing.”
Val had planned on using her axe to bash a hole through the door into the treasure hold, but when she got there, someone else had already done the job with a laser rifle. Inside, she’d found Minn-Erva rummaging in a crate. They barely had time to look each other in the eye before the klaxons went off. They weren’t the only ones looking to pillage the ship’s ill-gotten gains, it turned out.
“I thought the Asgardians were loaded.” Minn-Erva cast a meaningful eye at Val’s tattoo. Someday Val was going to get that thing taken off. Any millenium now, definitely. “A whole fucking stockpile of—something. Some kind of raw material. A metal.”
“That would be gold,” Val said, as though a Kree were going to be any more impressed once she knew what specific metal it was. “And circumstances change.”
Minn-Erva grunted. Strands of hair had come loose from her tight black braid and were floating around her face. Val wondered what her circumstances had been, and how’d they’d led to her raiding stashes of pirated biologicals. She wondered whether Minn-Erva’s cunt had that weird fruity tang to it like the last Kree woman Val had fucked.
Val had spent centuries not wondering about anything at all. She hadn’t yet decided whether she liked the change.
“You really think they’re coming,” Minn-Erva said. It was sometime in the middle of day two. With the pod’s life support calibrated for one, it was too warm for the two of them. Sweat glistened on Minn-Erva’s skin.
“They’ll come,” Val said. “They’re idiots like that.” Thor wouldn’t stand for anything else, however much better off they’d be. Val had meant this little side venture to add to the Statesman’s fuel stores, not reduce them further. She’d meant to help, but see how well that had turned out. See how she rewarded Thor’s misplaced faith in her.
Minn-Erva snorted. “You fit right in, then.”
In retaliation, Val said, “That’s a Kree Starforce rifle.” Currently it was wedged behind Minn-Erva’s shoulder and pointing at the ceiling.
Minn-Erva gave her a cool, unimpressed look. “Yeah.”
“Did you steal it?”
“No. Or—it depends on who you ask, but it was mine first,” which answered several of Val’s most pressing questions and sketched outlines for the rest. Minn-Erva must have known it; it was the first time she’d looked uncomfortable.
Abruptly she sat up from her slouch. “What’s that?”
That was when Val realized she’d been hearing it, too: a hissing sound coming from the seal at the pod’s hatch door.
“Oh fuck,” Minn-Erva said.
The seal had definitely sprung a leak. For one thing, they found the source of the hissing sound pretty fast, and when Val held her finger close to it, she could feel the suction. For another, the pod’s interior was already getting colder. The life support had revved up to a steady whine, but it could only do so much.
Of course the pod had no self-repair mechanism and no tools. Val was starting to think the pirate vessel had blown up from bad wiring, no weapons discharge required.
“What a fucking stupid way to die,” Minn-Erva said. She’d taken a hat from her supply belt and jammed it on her head, but she was still shivering. Kree weren’t particularly warm-blooded, it turned out.
“We’re not dead yet,” Val said.
“Easy for you to say. Asgardians can survive out there for weeks.”
“Weeks,” Val echoed, impressed. “Word really gets around. No, I’d last a couple of hours on the outside.” And wouldn’t that be just about right? A thousand years on Sakaar trying to drink herself to death, and then snuffing it as soon as she might care a bit about living.
“If you hadn’t dragged me into this pod, I might have found an actual ship to fly out of there. Or at least an escape pod that wasn’t shit.”
Val had sort of thought she was going to get away without ever talking about how, exactly, they’d come to share a pod. “Or you’d have exploded with most everyone else on the ship. And come on, you really think the other lifeboats on that rusty soup can were in any better shape?”
“Fuck,” Minn-Erva said, which meant she knew Val was right. Still shivering, she shrugged a little deeper into her corner, though Val doubted there was any more heat to be had. At the rate the temperature was dropping, Val figured they had another eight or so hours before things got really uncomfortable for Minn-Erva. Val would last maybe another eight beyond that, breathing near-vaccuum with Minn-Erva’s blackened corpse for company.
Of course, the Statesman might arrive before then. It felt almost likely. Those were the sort of last-ditch heroics Thor enjoyed, no matter how much he always blamed them on his brother.
Val pushed off from the wall of the pod and floated over to Minn-Erva. She didn’t object when Val wedged herself in next to her. Minn-Erva wasn’t all that large underneath her tac gear; she didn’t take up much space. There was room for them both. They were both too bundled up to share much warmth, but it was something.
“Why did you drag me in here?” Minn-Erva asked.
“Hell if I know,” Val said. She knew it wasn’t an answer; it wasn’t even strictly true. “I was curious, I guess. I wondered what a Kree was doing, breaking into a pirate’s treasure hold. Normally I wouldn’t have given a shit.”
“But?”
Val shrugged. “But I’ve recently started giving a shit about things.”
“Sounds like hell,” Minn-Erva said. She might’ve meant it.
“And you were fucking hot,” Val added. “That probably had something to do with it.”
Minn-Erva turned to look at Val. Her breath was warm on Val’s face, and her eyes were brown and deep. “I was?” Minn-Erva asked.
She didn’t move when Val closed the distance. She tasted of stale rations, and her breath was sour—a flavor Val had forgotten since she’d last fucked someone, which was a lot more years ago than she’d really noticed before—but her mouth was warm and generous against Val’s, and that wasn’t nothing. Val cupped the back of Minn-Erva’s neck and pulled her closer.
It was an awkward fuck, all told. Neither of them was willing to take off any of their clothes, so it was a matter of hands slipped under catches and inside waistbands. She got Minn-Erva’s zipper down far enough to palm her tit, though, and it was a really nice tit, just the right kind of handful. If Val was going to die in a few hours, at least she could take this memory with her, of Minn-Erva’s nipple pebbling under the pad of her thumb.
They dozed after, tucked together. Val came to with something digging into her back. For a while, half-awake, she wondered what it was. Hazily it came to her that it must be Minn-Erva’s laser rifle.
Val sat straight up. “Minn-Erva,” she said, shaking her.
“What the fuck? What?”
“Your rifle.”
“What about it?” Minn-Erva said, scowling at Val and not yet awake. It was a good look; another time, Val maybe would have tried taking advantage of it.
She had other business now. “What’s the lowest setting?”
Minn-Erva looked at her like she was nuts, but rattled off a number that meant nothing to Val. She didn’t even recognize the units. Had the Kree overhauled their system of measurement again? Val had only just gotten around to half-learning the last one a century or so ago. A surprising number of Kree ships ended up on the surface of Sakaar; a scrapper had to be able to read the specs.
“What I mean,” Val said, “is that it can melt things, right? Like the door to the treasure hold. Can’t it melt the hatch shut?”
“It’s a precision weapon, not a fucking soldering iron.”
“That you melted the door to the treasure hold with.”
Minn-Erva scowled, but she also started shifting around to get the rifle free. And even if it didn’t work, at least they’d have tried something. At least they’d have gone down fighting.
In fact, the rifle was a reasonably adequate soldering iron. Val would have preferred some ventilation, but the little life support unit immediately kicked in to start clearing the air. Already the pod felt a little warmer.
“We’re still running out of food,” Minn-Erva pointed out, as they looked together at their newly-sealed hatch. “And water.”
Val leaned into Minn-Erva’s shoulder. Minn-Erva leaned back. “Thor’ll show up eventually,” Val said. “We’ll be fine.”
She was right; Thor showed up just after the last of their rations ran out. In the meantime, Val discovered that Minn-Erva did have a weird fruity flavor to her.