Hardcore Honey & the Rogue Asteroid

Dance-Off

“The fuck is this bullshit?” Honey turned to the jukebox in disgust, as if she expected the machine itself to answer her. It did not, of course. The bartender did, but Honey did not really pay too much attention to her reply. Mostly, it has to be said, because she was distracted by what she guessed was at least a pair of double Ds that were squeezed into, and were therefore making every conceivable attempt to escape from, a brassiere that was at least two cup sizes too small.
Without making any effort to look away from the bosom before her, Honey was vaguely aware of words like ‘love’, ‘devotion’, ‘emotion’, and the phrases, ‘look into your heart my friend’, ‘just believe in destiny’, and others that only the pussy-whipped would ever utter. There was some chanting, too, and that really was more than Honey could take.
With a deft flick of her wrist she flung a somewhat damp and soggy coaster towards the jukebox, and perhaps more by luck than judgement, though she would certainly claim the latter, the moist coaster made contact. The result of said contact was that the track instantly changed to something much-less shitty.
“Uh-oh…” the bartender muttered, and such was the tone of her voice that Honey did, indeed, divert her attention to her words rather than what was in her brassiere. “You’ve no idea what you’ve just done.”
As much as it pained her to do so, Honey tore her eyes away from the bartender and spun her barstool around as all around the establishment, a dive bar on a dirt moon where whoring was the main source of income as it was, chairs and tables were dragged or flung out of the way to reveal a surprisingly large open area in the middle of the room.
She clenched her fists, ready to pile in when things kicked off, however the bartender reached across the countertop and gently placed a hand upon her shoulder. “It’s not a bar fight, it’s a dance-off.”
“You’re fucking shitting me?”
But Honey very quickly discovered that the bartender was not shitting her at all, as two groups of men and women faced off against each other, each group challenging the other for some kind of supremacy.
“It’s pretty much ingrained in the culture of this rock,” the bartender continued. “No idea why, it goes back way longer than anyone alive can remember I wager, but when Wig Wam is played a dance-off ensues.”
“Fair enough,” Honey replied with a shrug, tapping her feet upon the wooden floor in time with the beat as she turned back to the bartender and her bosom. “So tell me, where does a girl need to go to find herself a decent ruck on this rock?”

Nuclear Pasta

With a swollen left eye, blood pooling at the corner of her mouth, and a trio of teeth fewer than she’d had, Honey slammed her shoulder into the doorframe. Despite the fact she was, per the vernacular, tough as shit, she could not help but briefly whimper as her shoulder joint clunked painfully back into place.
Feeling slightly better, or slightly more symmetrical at the very least, she accepted the proffered ice pack from the bloke on the door and made her way outside into the irritatingly warm night air.
Off to her right some kind of tentacled statue was situated, silhouetted against the moon’s planet, an enormous gas giant. According to her ship’s systems, the moon was tidally locked and tidally heated, the hugely-strong gravitational pull of the planet keeping its insides in motion to such a degree that the moon’s electromagnetic field was akin to that of Earth.
Honey could count the number of fucks she gave about that on zero fingers. She had only set down upon the moon to refuel and blow off a little steam, after all. As such she turned and headed in the opposite direction toward the docks.
Surprisingly busy and bustling for what really was very much a backwater moon, the docks were a veritable hive of activity despite the late hour. Honey picked her way through the throngs of people coming and going, and skipped around the various crate-carrying droids.
And then before her was the Nietzsche, her beloved vessel, complete with its microscopically-thin coating of Nuclear Pasta making it a vessel that could, in theory, though it was a theory Honey had never had any desire to put to the test, remain completely and totally unscathed while sitting directly on top of a supernova.
You need chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star.
The phrase was painted on the hull, just above the bay doors. Honey always thought it was kind of welcoming, and certainly very apt considering what the Nietzsche was made of.
It was as she was in the process of boarding the Nietzsche, making her way up towards the vessel’s cargo bay, that a klaxxon sounded.
“The fuck is this bullshit?!” she demanded as she made her way back down the ramp.
“Short-range scanners have picked up a rogue asteroid knocked out of its orbit!” someone, she did not see who, shouted in reply. “Happens every now and then, but this one’s due to hit an inhabited area!”
“Well that is bullshit,” she muttered, turning back towards her vessel. “Looks like we’ve got ourselves some work to do.”

Crepuscular Like a Motherfucker

To say the Nietzsche was rapid would have been somewhat of an understatement. Obviously the vessel’s maximum speed was well-shy of the speed of light, the absolute speed limit of the Universe, though advances in temporal travel centuries prior enabled ships of all shapes and sizes to skirt around that speed limit as if it was nothing more than a minor inconvenience.
But while the vessel’s sub-light engines had a top speed of, as has already been mentioned, well-shy of the speed of light, the Nietzsche was still capable of travelling at well over half a million miles an hour. That was rapid as fuck, by anyone’s definition.
And as the vessel was so quick, Honey was up up and away, out of the moon’s atmosphere before she could recite her favourite poem. She could never remember the title but it contained the line, ‘crepuscular like a motherfucker’, and though she had never been entirely certain what the poet was talking about, she was certain the poet had no fucking idea, either, something about that particular line made her panties moist - on those occasions she was of a mind to wear such undergarments, anyway.
“Do us a favour, babe, and lock onto that big fucking space rock,” she said out loud, talking to the Nietzsche as she was. “Find me the best point on its current course to take it out without risking any of the folk on that moon.”
Such was the vessel’s computing power it took mere seconds before the desired result was returned, and Honey grinned at the display before her. “Thanks, babe. Cutting it a bit fine though, don’t ya think?”
Her ship did not reply as it was not equipped with any kind of vocal capabilities, but Honey trusted the Nietzsche and her systems well enough to know that the point it had selected, a few clicks shy of the moon’s upper atmosphere, was the most ideal option.
It was not only the location though, for Honey would need to bring the Nietzsche in at a one hundred and seventy degree angle, going almost straight up in relation to the moon itself and the plane of the distant star.
“This shit has the potential to get all kindsa’ messy…” she muttered, cricking her neck as she set the vessel’s course.
One thing she was not even close to being worried about was her ship. The Nietzsche would plough through that asteroid as if it wasn’t even there and come out the other side without so much as a love bite. If her course was the most minute of fractions off though, that was when the messy part would come in.
Honey need not have worried, for as she lined up was effectively an attack run and the rogue asteroid loomed larger and larger on her viewscreens, she knew the Nietzsche was going to hit true. She gripped the controls so tightly that her fingers went white, and squinted nanoseconds before the event.
And then the job was done, and she had not even felt so much as a slight judder on the initial impact, nor as the vessel did, indeed, plough through the space rock, shattering it into trillions of fragments which would, Honey hoped, either burn up in the moon’s atmosphere or drift away from the inhabited world.
“Good girl,” she said quietly, as she slowed the Nietzsche down enough that turning back towards the moon was possible. The world was barely visible, such was the enormity of the dust cloud, but Honey did not need to physically see the moon to know that what she and her vessel had just accomplished was a job well done as the Nietzsche’s short range scanners showed the predicted path for every piece of debris large enough to do any damage, of which there were precious few, and not a single one of those pieces was going to hit anywhere close to an inhabited area.
“Nice.”
Honey lit a cigarette, leaning back in her chair with her feet up on the console in front of her as she did so.
“Alright then babe, open up a wormhole and get us the fuck out of here.” She grinned again. “Preferably to somewhere I can get fucked and fuck some shit up, though maybe not at the same time.”