Unconstant Love

by Timothy J Meyer

  Twitch took an experimental swig.

  This was the moment of truth. This was the moment that the whole afternoon’s planning and plotting and peril had been building up to. There was still a chance, as the acrid sourness washed over Twitch, that he wouldn’t actually like it. It might make him sick, like that Yellowtooth he’d bummed off Dimwit Dengo last week had. Zoot would laugh at him, Twitch knew, just like all the rest of the waifs did then too.

  He could only stomach one gulp and, even then, it was a near thing. He grimaced and shook his head a few times, allowing the booze to slosh back and forth across his brain.

  “Howzit tastee?” Zoot wanted to know, a little apprehensive to hear Twitch’s thoughts.

  “Blue,” was the only answer Twitch could provide.

  This was somehow still enough to convince his greenskinned accomplice. “My go!” Zoot chirped, grasping for the bottle. “My go! My go!”

  Happy to put a little distance between himself and that substance, Twitch thrust the bottle into her empty hands. He watched her a moment, curious to see whether her greenskin biology or her greater experience would better handle the liquor’s vicious kick.

  “And?” Twitch wondered in a whisper.

  Zoot stalled a moment, wrestling with her gag reflex and wiping her mouth with the meat of her hand. “Blue,” she confirmed with a croak, attempting to keep her cool all the while.

  At that exact moment, something rattled the grating over their heads. Twitch glanced upward, watching the passing silhouettes of Shoddy Showder’s thugs and their stomping boots. He recognized Impara from her Yaveelish accent and from her love of throwing around the term “blazz”, a piece of profanity Twitch was pretty sure she’d invented.

  “There’s a small mountain of credits,” she announced from somewhere above, “for the first one of you blazzbags what lays eyes on the Boss’s bottle or them brats.”

  This was answered by much muttering and stomping about and overturning of driftdumpsters. None have the foresight to consider the incinerator beneath their feet. Who in their right mind, after all, would hide in an active incinerator?

  Obviously, neither Impara nor her goon squad had ever been a guttersnipe on Takioro Defederate Station.

  Where exactly the thing’s safety plate disappeared to, no one knew, but the street-access incinerator outside Horny Devil Holos was considered, among the station waif population, the Third Ring’s greatest hiding place. Only a simple grate protected passing pedestrians from the sporadic gouts of flame that would leap up from beneath the street. Otherwise of interest only to the station’s custodial drones, the Horny Devil’s incinerator was now home to two station waifs and a boosted bottle of booze.

  The two were in no immediate danger. Sooner or later, the igniters would kick on and burn anything inside the incinerator – rubbish, rugrats and all – to a crisp. Until then, there was plenty of time for Impara and her thugs to go search somewhere else and for the two of them to make their escape.

  They squat, arses to elbows, in the cramped incinerator, hemmed in by teltriton walls and heaps of garbage. It occurred to Twitch, in that sudden moment, that he’d never been this close to an actual girl before and he wasn’t completely sure how he should be feeling about that.

  Zoot was his partner, though, and there was no bond more sacred to a station waif.

  “Wheres next?” she wanted to know, ignorant of Twitch’s confusion about her.

  “Givee they a mite or two yet,” Twitch allowed, with all a mastermind’s authority. “When buggee they off, then makee we our hoof, yeah?”

  “Affi,” agreed Zoot, a little perturbed by how thick he was, “but wheres?”

  Their options weren’t legion from here, as far as hiding places were concerned. Up the street a little ways and under the grav control matrix was vent access, meaning Twitch and Zoot could escape into Takioro’s bones – assuming Zoot could hotwire the door. Down the street, the pickings were slimmer – a few driftdumpsters, the burnt wreck of that driftcart that exploded yesterday. It all ultimately depended on which way Impara would continue the search.

  “Coupla spots could tryee we,” Twitch responded casually, cultivating that air of control as best he can. “All pends on hoofee they where and when. Howzee much tock we got?”

  Zoot planted a hand against the back wall a moment, taking the incinerator’s temperature and estimating how much longer before it would immolate them both.

  “Thirteen, gimme or take,” she reported with a shrug.

  “Ain’t rushee, then,” Twitch shrugged back and made a beckoning gesture towards the bottle Zoot still clasped. Without argument, she passed their booty back for him to make his second attempt.

  This particular bottle was, until very recently, the property of Shoddy Showder. Station lore held that Showder, owner of Shoddy Showder’s Suds and Spins, respectable Obaxi businessman and famous douchebag, kept a legendary vintage of Gitterswitch Gin smuggled away in his personal strongbox.

  It had proved quite an intricate affair to see that bottle liberated from Showder’s clutches. It required a complex web of lies, four hours spent smuggled inside a drying unit and the legendary dime-a-dozen, the type of maneuver Twitch’d heard about but never actually performed.

  The caper went far from flawlessly. The encryption lock was a caliber more sophisticated than Twitch assumed. Zoot took a nasty shock when her arm was caught momentarily inside the closing security shield. The entire operation was nearly bungled at one point by one of Showder’s horny goons wandering into his employer’s office, searching for a quiet place to jerk off.

  Now, though, they ought to be in the free and clear. Eventually, Showder’s people would grow tired of canvassing the same stretch of station street and they’d fan further out. Twelve minutes from now, Twitch and Zoot would be disappearing between the legs of the Third Street’s evening crowd, half a bottle of Gitterswitch Gin sloshing around in their stomachs.

  When they spoke – in hushed whisper, lest they be overheard – they spoke their own language, that very special strain of spacer’s cant so garbled even other jabberheads could hardly follow. To Twitch and Zoot and all the Station’s other urchins, it was the rest of the galaxy that talked all funny and used the wrong words for things.

  “Where d’you suppose,” Twitch wondered, soon as he’d surfaced from the bottle and gathered enough wits to speak, “it comes from?”

  Zoot scowled. “Where’s what come from?”

  “This,” Twitch replied, passing her the bottle.

  “Oh.” Zoot considers the offered prize at arm’s length. “I think Showder’s got a bloke. Somebody in Gandora Sector, what I heard.”

  “I mean, like, originally,” Twitch clarified. “Where’s it come from?”

  Zoot scowled at him again, the kind that suggested he was a blazzbrained idiot. “It’s Gitterswitch Gin, innit?” Still scowling at him, she took her second swig and bloom if she didn’t comport herself like a true drinking professional.

  “So,” stammered Twitch, playing that exact idiot she pegged him for, “from Gitterswitch?”

  “Gitterswitch,” Zoot answered, adding a zesty “aah!” to the end of her second swig, “ain’t a where. It’s a what.” When Twitch continued to blink stupidly at her, she raised an eyebrow questioningly. “You’ve heard of the spice, right?”

  “‘Course I have,” Twitch shot back instantly, though his conception of what “spice” actually meant was limited to snatches of conversation overheard while pickpocketing in spacer’s dives. “Crews is always blowing through here with spice to sell.” He made a greedy gesture towards the bottle and Zoot was kind enough to oblige him. “That’s what I’m drinking? Is spice?”

  “No,” Zoot considered a moment, concentration creasing her forehead. “You’re drinking the fruit.”

  “The fruit,” Twitch echoed into the bottle.

  “The Gitterpeach?” dangled Zoot suggestively, waiting for him to pick up the slack. “The ones they mash
up to make the booze?”

  The third gulp doesn’t really taste like how he imagined a peach would taste, potent enough to roll his eyes back into his skull for a second after swallowing. “And that ain’t the tea?” he endeavored to clarify. “That slime that Vel drinks?”

  “The tea,” an exasperated Zoot attempts to separate. “The fruit. The booze. They make them all.”

  “Right,” Twitch answered, nodding. He should quit now, he knew, while Zoot might still retain some modicum of respect for his intelligence in planning this whole caper. Unfortunately, the Gitterswitch Gin had a rather curious effect on his better judgment and Twitch was surprised to discover his mouth moving of its own accord. “They?”

  “The Consortium,” Zoot sighed, understanding now the true depths of Twitch’s ignorance and taking upon herself the grim burden of educating him. “They’re the ones with their bloomholes on all the galaxy’s blue gold. Won’t share, won’t let anybody else grow or sell or even sniff the shit.”

  “What?” spat Twitch, the concept utterly foreign to a child reared by thievery on Takioro’s tough streets. “Who’s gonna stop them?

  “The Consortium,” Zoot repeated, reaching out to swipe the bottle from him.

  That’s a term that Twitch had certainly heard before – typically from the mouths of those selfsame spacers – but he’d be bloomed if he understood what it actually meant. In his mind, he attempted to conjure the phrases he might’ve heard, the contexts in which these spacers might’ve mentioned the “Consortium”. Beyond a vaguely negative connotation, he drew a great big blank.

  “How?” was his extremely discreet reply, precisely the kind of subtle question sure to trick Zoot into thinking he wasn’t a brainless child.

  “Well, they’re the Consortium, ain’t they?” She shrugged, like this was a sufficient answer to Twitch’s question, before taking another few gulps of Gitterswitch. Only when she’d finished and the bottle sloshed somewhere around the halfway mark did she elaborate any further. “They got warships and spice rangers and moons knows what else. Filching from them ain’t easy.”

  This brought a scowl to Twitch’s face. “Showder had guards, didn’t he? And alarms and encryption locks and security screens and whatnot.” He wiggled forward a little, suddenly full of inebriated confidence in his new criminal credo. “There ain’t nothing in the galaxy,” he swore, with very little practical experience of the galaxy, “that can’t be filched, long as you make a blooming effort.”

  Zoot rose to the challenge. “There’s one thing,” she countered, waggling the bottle to make its contents dance about. “One of the fucking trees this shit grows on.”

  This inspired another of Twitch’s scowls. “It grows on trees?”

  “Peaches grow on trees,” Zoot informed him and Twitch was forced to admit – only inwardly – that his understanding of trees, born and raised on a space station, was pretty rudimentary.

  “Why? What’s so special ‘bout them bloody trees?” Twitch demanded to know and also demanded the bottle back. “Motherbloomers come through here all the time with Gitter whatevers in their holds. Why can’t nobody steal no trees?”

  “‘Cause nobody can find no trees,” Zoot explained mysteriously, ignoring his gestured demand for the bottle. “There’s this one planet they got and that’s where they tell everybody they grows ‘em but that ain’t where they grows them.” She nodded vigorously a few times, becoming enraptured with her own storytelling now. “I know, I heard it from a coupla Greatgullet’s guys, when they took my tagalong.”

  Twitch crossed his arms. He'd always been dubious of this whole Greatgullet story, one she'd told multiple times before and whose details kept changing. “Where they grows them, then?”

  “Nobody knows, I said,” Zoot scoffed, amazed that he didn’t remember. “They got someplace secret where they do all the growing. Somewhere underground, maybe, or on some space station somëplace that nobody’s ever found. All that’s just talk, though,” she dismissed, pressing the bottle to her lips. “Only ones who know’s the Consortium and they sure ain’t bloody telling.”

  “We’re wasting our blazzing time,” Impara, above them both, concluded with a frustrated sigh. “You two, that way. You two, the other way.” There came another clattering of boots against the grating. “Ain’t never gonna find ‘em standing around here, our dicks in our mouths.”

  Without visual, Twitch could nonetheless confirm the exodus of Showder’s thuggery to the four corners, tromping away across the Third Ring in search of two station waifs and one bottle they won’t find. In moments, they’d be lost to Takioro’s general murmur and the coast would be plenty clear for the two accomplices to make their getaway, long before the incinerator would come back online.

  Zoot was unfazed by any of this, continuing to dangle the bottle tantalizingly before Twitch. “That’s what makes this,” she explained, with a little slosh for emphasis, “so bleeding valuable. That’s why Showder’d rather drown us in a spin cycle than give us a taste.”

  With a quick motion, Twitch lunged forward and snatched the bottle from Zoot’s grip. He sat back hard enough to slam his back against the incinerator’s wall and, holding the bottle at arm’s length, considered what remained of their prize.

  It was vibrantly blue, almost iridescent and toxic-looking in the way that it seems to catch the light. It was not hard to imagine, looking at the magic potion in his hand, that such a substance as this could captivate the whole galaxy. There was a promise in those indigo depths, of escape and experience, sensation and senselessness.

  He may not have known where it was made, who made it or what it was made from but Twitch knew what Gitterswitch Gin was. It was the ultimate luxury of Bad Space’s criminal class, the very best and the very fastest way to get drunk in all the galaxy. It was something that took Twitch, to Takioro Defederate Station born, all nine years of his life to lay hands on.

  Those nine years were years of want and desperation and danger. The life led by a station waif aboard Takioro Defederate Station was far from comfortable, slinking through gutters and alleys and incinerators. There were times of plenty, when there was food and shelter and even the odd credit thrown his way, typically in the Depot-Commissioner’s service. It was the lean times, though, that would not leave Twitch, even into his adult life.

  As he clutched that bottle, gazing into its sapphire contents, Twitch thought on all the nights he slept huddled in trash for warmth and security, hunger the only contents of his stomach.

  This was his first score, plucking this bottle from Shoddy Showder’s safebox. This would not be his last.

  Zoot started to climb to her feet, straining to hear through the commotion above. “Think we’re safe to move.”

  “Somebody should steal one,” Twitch decided, gaze still locked on the Gitterswitch bottle.

  “Steal one what?” Zoot wondered, looking down at her partner where he was still seated.

  “A tree,” Twitch supplied. “I think somebody should steal one of them trees.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Zoot stopped her all-business act to plant hands on her jaunty hips. “And that somebody’s you?”

  “Yeah,” confirmed Twitch, right before he drains the rest of the bottle. “I’mana be the first.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Moira Quicksilver cannot abide these pussy-ass boots.

  How anyone aboard the GCF Franchise managed to accomplish anything with these noncommittal scraps of leather on their feet, Moira would never know. They were hasty sweatshop garbage, stitched together by Raqeese grub labor on inferior equipment; all style, little substance and zero traction.

  Under any other circumstances, Moira would be wearing her beloved baby-stompers right now but they were all wrong for Jesbra Thoi. Once glance at her footwear would blow Moira’s cover long before her buhoxshit ident could.

  Still, Moira would give an arm and a leg for a few hobnails right now; anything to gain a little purchase on all this slippery blooming ice. These
shoddy boots were clearly designed to tread plush spaceship interiors and nothing else – certainly not to go scrambling around gigantic space glaciers.

  Moira squats as comfortably as she can inside the cramped and icy tunnel. With crawling fingers and scooting knees, she makes the sloping descent to freedom, painstaking inch by painstaking inch. The Ortok's cutting beam left the encircling walls both jagged and slick, the many handholds difficult to maintain a grip on. She tries not to dwell on the consequences of losing her balance – the fifteen-foot slide and the fall from an unknown height onto hard teltriton below.

  These standard-issue Consortium trash boots would be the death of her.

  Were she to glance behind, Moira knows what she'd see. At the end of a short tunnel through the ice, she'd find Nemo, Odisseus, the Lover's airlock and the six weeks of hellish imprisonment she's leaving behind. Straight ahead, however, there's a literal light at the end of the tunnel, as close to daylight or salvation or freedom as their current circumstances allow. All Moira needs to do is wriggle her way down the chute, kick loose what little ice still bars her way and she'll be free, gloriously free.

  She'll also be cold, gloriously cold. Moira doesn't imagine the Franchise's cargo bay, designed to keep its payload of spacebergs nice and frozen, will be especially comfortable. She's thankful, in that moment, for the gloves and the extra layers, even though she'll need to ditch those soon as she's heading into the cruiser proper.

  They'd originally hoped to time this infiltration to coordinate with the Franchise's sleepiest shift. Much of the crew would be off duty and the ship, hanging in orbit, would be run mostly by automated systems. This plan was thwarted by simple bad luck. Odisseus had been forced to abandon his first attempt at cutting a clean tunnel, when he discovered the port airlock pointed upwards, towards the cargo bay's ceiling.

  In these shoes, Moira could hardly be expected to scramble safely around the side of a slowly melting spaceberg until she could reach the floor below. Instead, the complaining Ortok and his cutting beam started work on the starboard airlock, assuming its tunnel would open into the empty hold air.