Mark F Hunt
by Mark F Hunt
“Two purple moons and a gravity flux,” Jake declared, slapping down a card with a flourish that was entirely unjustified by its scribbled-on surface. “That’s a full destabilizer. I win this round. Again.”
“You just made those rules up!” Emily protested, tossing a card of her own that said Wormhole, Probably. “Yesterday, gravity fluxes canceled purple moons.”
“That was before Mike recalibrated the rules using quantum chaos theory,” Jake replied, eyes twinkling. “Also, I found a glitter pen in the storage locker, and I feel like that gives me a narrative advantage.”
Across the table, Anna leaned back in her seat, arms folded, one eyebrow arched with surgical precision. “If anyone brings glitter into my command logs, I’m spacing them. Slowly.”
“Dibs on the glitter corpse,” Emily quipped, reaching for a stale protein bar from the stash under the table. She offered it to Mike, who’d just entered the common area with his usual silent tread. He accepted it with a slight nod, his gaze sweeping the makeshift card table like he was already assessing the statistical probability of everyone’s defeat.
“You’re playing Starflux again?” he said, voice low, amused in that way that made Emily lean back in her seat just to get a better look at the rare phenomenon of Mike-smirking.
“It’s Starflux: Annihilation edition now,” Jake corrected. “We added black hole tax codes and time travel coupons.”
Mike sat, folding into the corner like he belonged to the ship more than the chair. “Who’s winning?”
Jake raised his hand.
Emily reached out and pushed it down. “Nobody. Ever.”
Anna glanced over her shoulder at the blinking nav screen. The stars ahead weren’t going anywhere for another 41 hours. “Good. Means I’ve got time to learn this absurdity and destroy you all.”
Emily grinned. “Now that’s the spirit, Captain.”
“Deal me in,” Anna said coolly.
Jake gave a mock salute and began reshuffling the cards. Or at least, shuffling them in ways that made Emily suspect he was just redistributing the chaos. Outside the viewport, the stars shifted imperceptibly. Inside, the Orchid’s Spine pulsed with half-suppressed laughter, flickering lights, and the warmth of a crew who had survived just enough together to be family, even if none of them were ready to say it out loud. Emily reached into her jacket and pulled out a new card. It featured a stick-figure in a pilot’s chair and the words Emergency Snack Protocol. She slid it into her deck without comment. Mike saw it but said nothing. He smiled. Just slightly.
While the others were playing, something caught Mike’s eye outside the viewport. His brow furrowed. The black of deep space was unyielding, silent, familiar. Right until it wasn’t. Out past the thin shimmer of the Orchid’s deflective field, a single point of light pulsed like a heartbeat. Bright, steady, and new.
He leaned forward, one hand braced on the table, the other lifting to gesture toward the viewport. “That… wasn’t there five minutes ago.”
Emily, halfway through mocking Jake’s attempt to summon a time anomaly coupon, turned in her seat. “Mike, I swear if this is another one of your… oh.”
The star was growing. Unfolding. Layers of energy expanding out like molten petals, golden-white laced with piercing blue like a blooming celestial wound.
Anna was up before the rest of them, crossing to the sensor console in three steps, already flipping switches and dragging up spectral data. “That’s not just a flare. That’s-”
“A nova,” Mike said, voice quiet but steady. “Mid-stage. Maybe earlier. Far edge of the field, maybe six light-years out.”
Emily pressed closer to the glass, hand shielding her eyes even though the viewport dimmed automatically. “She’s beautiful.”
“She’s deadly,” Anna said, checking radiation levels, coronal mass ejection data, pulse timings. “The wavefront’s directional. We’re not in the danger cone. Yet.”
“I wasn’t going to marry her, Captain,” Emily muttered, though her voice lacked its usual defiance.
Mike stepped forward, arms folded, eyes locked on the expanding fire in the dark. “Stars don’t just die like this without reason. That one wasn’t flagged for instability. I know the stellar charts. That was supposed to be a mid-life red dwarf.”
Anna glanced at him. “You’re saying this was… pushed?”
“I’m saying,” he replied, “someone hit a trigger.”
A silence settled into the common room, heavier than vacuum. The hum of the ship’s systems faded into the background. Even the playful lights of the Starflux deck seemed to dim in reverence.
Then Jake, gravity in human form, cleared his throat. “So, uh… are we just gonna pretend that’s not exactly the kind of sign the universe sends before bad things happen?”
Emily gave a small, crooked smile, but didn’t look away from the viewport. “I mean, it’s not not a portent.”
The nova flared brighter, shedding tendrils of radiation like warning banners unfurled.
Anna tapped the console once, twice, then turned to the rest of them. “Get to stations. I want a full diagnostic on the hull shielding, updated nav data, and long-range comms scanned for anything weird. And I mean weirder than usual.”
Emily spun on her heel, grabbing her half-eaten protein bar like it might somehow protect her. “Copy that, O Glorious Herald of the Apocalypse.”
Jake followed, already muttering to himself about omen hierarchies and celestial red flags. Mike lingered, just a moment longer, eyes still locked on the light.
Somewhere in his mind, old memories, classified, burned, buried, stirred like embers in a dead star’s wake. He turned, slow and quiet, and followed the others into the darkened spine of the ship. Behind him, the nova pulsed again.
Jake’s fingers danced across the nav console with the practiced grace of a man who made instinct look like science. His brow creased as he pulled star charts, overlaid drift telemetry, compared spectra across timestamps. When the computer beeped a soft confirmation he sat back in his seat, the weight of knowledge pressing down like cold vacuum.
“Well,” he said, voice almost too calm. “That dying star belongs to the Virelai Pact.”
Emily, halfway through reprogramming the coffee dispenser to accept snack tokens as currency, froze mid-keystroke. “Oh hell no.”
Anna, at her station, turned slowly. “Are you sure?”
“Triangulated the core remnant’s signature. It’s Virelai sector, confirmed by two satellites and an old beacon ping. One of those longwave pulse keys they embed in the noble houses’ ancestral systems.” Jake’s eyes didn’t leave the screen. “It wasn’t just a star. It was a throne.”
Emily groaned, leaning back dramatically. “Why is it always ancient political murder cults? Why can’t it ever be a supernova that just wants to teach us about love?”
Anna was already pulling up a secure comms buffer, though her jaw had set like a captain expecting the universe to demand blood. “The Pact doesn’t send messages. They send… absences.”
“And we just watched them get one,” Mike said, voice quiet as he entered from the corridor. He’d overheard enough. “Which means someone just sent the Pact a message.”
“Or,” Anna said slowly. “The Pact is sending a message of their own.”
Jake nodded. “To one of their own.”
The Virelai Pact wasn’t officially on any map, but everyone who mattered knew where it was. They didn’t trade, they didn’t negotiate, and they didn’t forgive. They moved like myth: an empire of oaths and bloodlines nestled in the spine of old constellations. Entire systems aligned their navigation paths just to avoid catching the edge of Virelai’s shadow.
“Has a throne ever gone nova before?” Anna wondered. No one answered.
“Any chance we pretend we didn’t see it?” Emily asked, halfway serious.
“We’re not in the line of fire,” Anna said slowly. “And there’s nothing in our logs yet that pings the Pact.”
Jake glanced sideways. “Which means we scrub everything. Any signal leakage. Any errant sensor packets. No comms bursts, no pings. We ghost this, Spine-style.”
Emily spun in her seat. “Oh baby, I was born to ghost.”
“Mm,” Mike muttered. “Born to leave a glitter trail the size of an asteroid belt.”
She flipped him off affectionately. Anna leaned on the console, her eyes fixed on the silent burn of the nova beyond the viewport. The light had begun to fade, retreating into the quiet violence of celestial memory.
“We saw something we weren’t meant to,” she said finally. “But we didn’t do it. So, we keep moving. Quiet. Unremarkable. Curious as a rock.”
“A sexy rock,” Jake offered.
“No,” she said.
“A smuggler’s rock?”
“Jake.”
“Glitter rock?”
Anna didn’t answer, but the corners of her mouth twitched just slightly. They all understood. The Orchid’s Spine didn’t pick fights with empires, especially not ones built on silence and unmarked graves. Outside, the stars wheeled onward, unburdened. Inside, the ship slipped back into dark-mode protocols, cruising steady through the black. Emily returned to her pilot’s seat, humming tunelessly, fingers tapping on the edge of the console. Mike stood behind her a moment longer, eyes lingering on the last ember of the Pact star.
He whispered, too soft for the others to hear: “And the galaxy was never the same again.”
They drifted in silence for almost a full minute after the decision. Just long enough for the weight of it to settle and start calcifying into something uncomfortable. Jake, of course, couldn’t let that happen.
“Right then,” he said, clapping his hands together and standing from the nav station like a man emerging from a grave and deciding to throw a party. “New round, new rules. Starflux: Witness Protection Edition. Any card with a planetary body now counts double if you say ‘we didn’t see shit’ while playing it.”
Anna slowly turned in her chair. Her fingers splayed, deliberate. Her head tilted just slightly, as if trying to decide which angle would most efficiently deliver a slap to his face without disrupting the deck. “You made that entire sentence up just now.”
Jake held up the deck solemnly. “Emergency morale restructuring. Article three of my duties.”
“You wrote that article in crayon,” she said, already regretting engaging. “On the back of a protein wrapper.”
“And yet,” he said, fanning out cards with exaggerated grace, “it remains the only part of the crew handbook anyone’s ever read.”
Emily cackled from the pilot’s seat. “He’s not wrong. I learned to fly a five-ton freighter using notes on a napkin and sheer spite.”
Mike, once again in the corner with his legs folded beneath him like he was part of the ship’s circuitry, exhaled a short laugh through his nose. “You almost killed us on Europa Prime.”
“Keyword: almost,” Emily said brightly. “Which means I win.”
Jake slid a fresh card toward her like a peace offering. It featured a crudely drawn asteroid and a speech bubble that read, This Isn’t My Problem. “Double points. Extra denial bonus.”
Anna reached for her mug, sipped stale lukewarm coffee, and leveled a gaze at Jake so flat it could have cut through bulkhead plating. “Do you ever feel the urge to not be the worst thing in my peripheral vision?”
Jake didn’t even flinch. “Captain, in times of galactic tension, I thrive on being a safe emotional target. You’re not mad at me. You’re mad at the looming political fallout of witnessing a centuries-old blood empire’s version of a press release.”
Anna blinked.
Emily whistled low. “He’s not wrong, though.”
Jake plopped back into his seat and tossed a new card onto the deck. It was labeled Temporal Alibi and had a stick-figure ducking under a blanket labeled “It Was Tuesday.”
“Play your cards,” he said cheerfully, “or be emotionally implicated in an interstellar war crime. Your choice.”
Anna made a soft, strangled sound that might have been a laugh. Or the prelude to a punch. She reached for the deck anyway. Outside, the stars kept their secrets. Inside, the crew of the Orchid’s Spine wrapped their own in glitter cards, gallows humor… and the hope that the galaxy wasn’t listening.
tags: