A pair of scheming kitsune criminals who've gotten stuck.

Mom always said, when the police start firing nukes, you’ve struck it big.

Incidentally, she wasn’t around anymore, because no point defense system was one hundred percent effective. Catching nuclear missiles was a very sink-or-swim affair, as the two-kitsune family crew of the Iktomi discovered for themselves. Just as they were making the jump to lightspeed on the edge of the system, they caught the edge of a blast, and it nearly fried their systems.

They managed to execute the Violetta family’s trademark tactic, though. Jumping to a system so completely off the grid that it was only mapped for astrogation in the technical sense. In that, they knew it existed, and that a route through hyperspace could be found to this particular point of light in the night, but nothing else.

The downside of this plan being the same as her upside; they were all alone.

Just the scheming saffron-haired snake-oil salesman three-tailed fox sisters, Kiki and Vivi Violetta, forty lightyears from the nearest speck of civilization. A speck that had proven lucrative, as they’d lifted fat stacks of credits and certain valuable cargo. Though it was also the kind of place where police cutters were armed with nuclear fucking tactical warheads.

“FTL Jump successful. Whew! Never going back there again.”

Mercurial Kiki let out an explosive sigh, spinning about in her triple-reinforced, groaning flight chair on the tiny bridge. Far too tiny to make things comfortable for sisters; even one blocked a lot of the consoles by the sheer absurd mass of her ass.

Already wedged tight into form-fitting black flight suits, the bottomheavy, pear-shaped girls had always found the confines of the bridge uncomfortable. Of course, it was more uncomfortable to be dead, so they’d both squeezed in for the thrilling escape. Adrenaline was turning stale, though, and the air in the cramped command module was warming from all the consoles.

“We’re running low on places we can return to, sis, and we’re venting atmosphere…”

Melancholic Vivi was less thrilled with their egress, though grateful to be alive. She sighed, tapping holographic controls to deploy damage control drones. Unlike the excited wagging of Kiki’s tails, Vivi’s fluffy trio were still and silent.

“Yeah, that’s what happens when something explodes. But they missed us, we hit our score, and we got away scot-free!” Kiki glanced at a viewscreen from one of the drones, seeing the grievous gash that had been torn off the nimble Iktomi’s saucer-like hull, aft. “Almost scot-free.”

In fact, wasn’t that the engineering section where the hyperdrive was located…?

“Uh, I’m gonna go aft and check on the FTL,” Kiki said.

“Good idea,” Vivi sighed. “I’ll figure out where we are, one way or another.”

To get up, Kiki first had to wedge herself out of her seat, wiggling back and forth. The crushing enormity of her ass caused the chair groan in complaint; no many how many times they reinforced it, furniture just wasn’t built to handle being sat on by huge kitsune. Much like cute boys, though at least chairs could be tossed out when they got bothersome.

Well, Kiki had always had that policy towards the boys, too~

Next, she had to slide past her dour sister, which required Vivi to press herself up against the windows and consoles, leaning forward as far as she could go. Squishing so much fluff and softness, so that another massive bundle of the same lovely stuff could turn sideways, hold her tails and breath, and try and get through.

It was always the tightest of squeezes, but they were sisters, so it was fine. Share and share alike, even life’s many miseries.

Vivi did enjoy how much space she now had, at least. She could adjust her glasses, lean back to the staccato symphony of fatigued, overburdened metal, and crack open a cold one from the storage compartment. It had been thirsty, hot work, and she could use something to lighten the mood as she scanned this podunk system.

Luckily, as she was getting down some sake kept near-zero via the miracle of cold fusion, and delighting in the way it went down the hatch smooth and clear, the scanners were doing their work. They’d found a few boring, lifeless rocks around a yellow star, but one of the worlds was much different.

In fact, it might have been exactly what they needed, a stroke of pure fortune.

The world bearing dead ahead on screens had the unmistakable, beautiful deep blue sheen of a habitable planet. Not only was that always something spacers on long-haul voyages liked to see, but given how off-the-grid this place was, Iktomi might have been the first ship to survey a new habitable world. That was worth a lot to the right people, and several lots to the wrong ones.

Definitely worth downing the rest of her first can, and going for a second.

“Sis! Big trouble!”

Never that simple, huh.

“FTL’s fucked!”

Every spacer liked to catch sight of a marble stuffed full of air and water, and they likewise shared a universal horror at the idea of their hyperdrive going offline. This wasn’t like the Iktomi’s single, straining, always out-of-order bathroom. While they could mine resources from frozen moons or comets to repair pipes and plumbing, it wasn’t the same story with FTL drives. They needed very specific rare elements.

A standard scan of the system checked for those elements, just in case, and that was coming up with a big zero almost as fat as Vivi’s now-squirming ass. She didn’t look over to see Kiki in the open hatch.

“Define your terms, sister. How bad is it back there?”

“Uh, damn thing’s gone! Blown up by the nuke, fell out in transit, shit, I don’t know. All I do know for sure is, we’ve got no hyperdrive! None!”

Vivi turned her swivel-chair to and fro, using the noises that came from the long-suffering beast to try and focus. To think of something, anything, that they could do. Another thing that usually helped her focus, at first, was that beautiful cold fusion sake. So she finished her second can, offered one to her sis, which was gratefully accepted, and then got started on number three.

Getting drunk wouldn’t solve anything, but it would make them too drunk to care.