Unconstant Love

by Timothy J Meyer

  Nemo grins as he unsuccessfully wipes the vomit from his mouth and beard. “You got something smart to say, Quicksilver?”

  “I'm not gonna congratulate you,” Quicksilver replies, “for not killing us.”

  “I ain't complainin', like,” Flask, palms up, would like the record to reflect.

  “Thank you, Two-Bit,” Nemo grants with a nod.

  “...the fook did you just say?”

  “Can I make a request?” wonders Odisseus from where's he's plastered flush against the wall. Nemo throws a glance over his shoulder at this while Flask can't stop staring astonished daggers his direction. “Would you,” Odisseus requests between gritted fangs, “mind turning the inertial compensator fucking on?”

  Nemo blinks. “Oh. Yeah.” He flicks a trio of switches. “Sure.”

  No sooner has he done this than the polarity of the helm and, indeed, the entire ship instantly equalizes, no matter how rakish the Lover's angle as she races through the sky. The sudden reversal of gravity comes as a physical relief even to Flask, pressed into the ratty leather of the co-pilot's seat.

  Free from the crushing pressure, Odisseus staggers forward, trash scattering about his hindpaws. “Much appreciated,” he snarls, anything but appreciative, as he stoops to collect the field exemptor.

  “You called me fooking Two-Bit, didn't you?”

  “Hm?” Nemo glances at him, eyebrows raised, face blank.

  “Eyes open, helm,” warns a voice from the topturret. “Bogies incoming, 9 degrees.”

  It's with great reluctance that Flask – temporarily – leaves off that line of questioning to squint through the viewport at these supposed bogies incoming.

  The glare from Gi's yellow sun is all-encompassing, shimmering the viewport as monochromatically white as the sandstorm did. Magnified by the climatic field, the sunlight's impenetrable and how Quicksilver thinks she can see anything but the blinding noon is beyond Flask.

  The scopes wouldn't lie to him, though. Glancing at the sensor monitor, Flask would honestly describe Quicksilver's terse warning as an understatement. Dozens of hateful red triangles drop from the planet's low orbit to intercept the Lover on her skyrocketing course upward.

  Flask squints through the viewport again and, indeed, after a moment, he does see blackish blots start to appear, like sunspots, in the glossed over viewport. These tiny pinpricks of silhouette only grow and grow by the second as they plummet, in loose formation, down towards the Lover. He can't start to count them all but the sensor monitor at his arm bleeps a warning, feeding him the necessary data.

  “Captain, there's–”

  “I see 'em, I see 'em,” Nemo acknowledges, snapping a couple of dials on the console and snatching up his headset. “These're your buddies?”

  “I oughta object to that description,” Flask stipulates before shrugging, “but, yeah, I suspect you're probably fooking right.”

  Thirty-four Dropships, launched from various points all across the climatic field, descend in a predatory pounce upon the outnumbered Lover far below. As the freighter shoots upward through the sky, the Dropships plummet downward, the space between them shrinking and shrinking.

  Individually, the triangular dropcraft were no real match for a freighter of the Lover's size and armament. In a great undisciplined mass like this, in a maneuver the surface-to-orbital vessels were never designed nor trained for, who knew what they were capable of?

  They were far off protocol now, Flask knew; an interloper vessel, with a sapling confirmedly aboard, blasts towards escape and thwarts all the Consortium's paranoid defenses.

  As fast as he can, Flask moves to unclip his buckles. “Should I–”

  “Angle ray shields?” suggests Nemo archly, dancing ten fingers across the instrument panel, keeping the yoke throttled all the way back with a knee. “Why, what a marvellous idea.”

  “But I'm not–” Flask starts to stammer, considering all the foreign doodads and blinking lights all about him. He could probably muddle his way through piloting a vessel, especially with a generous autopilot. He couldn't realistically be expected to man the shielding station in the midst of a dogfight. “I don't think I'm the best–”

  This actually causes Nemo to stop what he's doing, to throw a glance his way. “You see an abundance of other co-pilots lying around?”

  A panicking Flask turns to Odisseus, founding crewman with an intimate knowledge of everything Unconstant Lover. When he turns, he discovers the Ortok on his back beneath the communications package, loose machinery scattered all about.

  “Yeah, he's terrible,” Nemo explains.

  “Or I have an exemptor to install?” offers Odisseus in his own defense.

  His objections all dying, Flask is shaking his head vigorously, palms extended. “This isn't what you–”

  “Closing to firing range,” announces Quicksilver over the comm. To support this, there's a whining sound and a rattling green barrage of the freighter's topturret. In answer, the black dots visible far above start to spark with green of their own, arcing ditrogen down to meet the Lover.

  “Moons,” growls Nemo, straining far across the dashboard and snapping a handful of switches in Flask's reach, in a quick and memorized sequence. This immediately grinds something into operation within the bowels of the ship and indeed on all Flask's screens – the ray shields're online. The Captain's precisely on time too, the first incoming ditrogen bolts twanged away by the suddenly appearing ray shield.

  Flopping back into his seat, Nemo's wearing a rare expression of exasperation. “Make yourself useful, huh?” With that, he cranks the yoke far to the port and the ship comes lurching after.

  Stripped of all possible objections, Flask fastens those few buckles he'd unclasped and does his level best to understand all the beeping and booping instruments around him.

  CHAPTER 18

  Moira Quicksilver could die happy.

  Righty and Lefty are heavy in their holsters and omnipresent in Moira's every movement. Nestled between her legs, more intimate than any lover, is Moira's beloved Antagonist Heavy Autofire, the laser cannon that's delivered her and the spaceship beneath from countless tangles and turmoils.

  Moira could very happily seal the access hatch beneath her and stay up here, safe in her topturret, for the rest of forever. It makes no difference what dangers – sandstorms, asteroid fields, broadside barrages – the universe might throw at her, so long as she was off that planet and strapped to her three-pronged murder machine.

  Here, amongst her three favorite firearms, Moira wasn't worrying about field exemptors or inexperienced co-pilots or the squadron of enemy ships that descends on them even now. What's more, the intermittent system failure that's plagued The Unconstant Lover seems to have claimed another victim – the munitions computer, that precocious twat.

  There are no witnesses there to confirm this, but it is possible that, as she opens fire, there's a big stupid grin on Moira's face.

  The Antagonist is a little sluggish out of the gate, somewhat gunshy after being cooped up so long beneath the spaceberg that coated the ship. Her internal machinery whines and clanks in a way that pangs Moira's heart to hear. True to her superior craftsmanship, however, this proves no real problem for the Antagonist. Once she's warmed up, the chamber is clicking fiercely through its ammunition chain.

  In no hurry, Moira simply chooses the nearest of the three dozen dropcraft as her first target. From this vantage, they look like little more than holes poked through the climatic field's scintillant ceiling of sunlight. At this extreme distance, it's hard to know for certain whether she hits or not, the Antagonist thrumming contentedly all the while.

  Then the tiny black dot veers drunkenly off course, terminating in a sudden starburst of orange and red fire.

  She can only repeat this tactic once more before the gap between the ships is cinched tight like a drawstring bag. Their numbers thinned by a paltry two ships, the distance between the Lover and her attackers almost instantly dwindles to
zero. In that heartbeat, Moira's afforded the briefest of glances at the shower of sun-streaked teltriton that drops all about the Lover.

  Nemo's canny enough to avoid any collisions, of course. He effortlessly threads the Briza through the second gap Moira and her Antagonist opened for him in the divebombing hordes. Nevertheless, the ray shield takes a heavy toll, the target of so many barrages from the passing dropcraft.

  “What blooming now?” spits Flask through the comm, the background of his transmission all blaring klaxons.

  “Angle ray shields aftwise, port and starboard,” Nemo answers by rote, swaying the freighter back and forth to present a less predictable target for everyone that's about to come chasing after them. There's a considerable pause here before a frustrated Nemo is forced to translate. “The back part! And both sides!”

  “I know what fooking–”

  Like water poured into a basin, the dropships that race past the Lover splash back and come surging up at the Briza from either side. One second earlier, the two sides of the dogfight were charging straight at each other and now, it's quite suddenly become a chase upwards into the stratosphere. The dropcraft swarm after the Lover's exhaust trail, sunlight glinting off their sides and their turrets afire.

  To chase down new targets, Moira cranks the Antagonist on its axis, pointed vertically towards the planet below. Lugging the heavy weapon with her, she does her best to select a single target among their many pursuers. There is no rhyme, no reason, no squad tactics to shadow and exploit here. No central intelligence guides the individual dropships and this chaos is what's most dangerous to The Unconstant Lover.

  Moira does manage to chase down one of the pinwheeling dropships, tracing its flightpath with short clusters of fire. Her aim proves so exact, she manages to pare an integral seam along one of the ship's three ridges. Fringed by fire and torn teltriton, the Antagonist peels open the Dropship like an Ortok might an oyster. Screaming spice rangers spill from its interior and disappear into the sandstorm below.

  The careening vessel comes spiralling out of control, pointed straight at the Lover's aft section. Shielded against laserfire she might be; shielded against collision from crashing spaceships, The Unconstant Lover is not.

  “Helm!” Moira barks. “Incoming, 46 degrees starboard!”

  At the speed of instinct, Nemo pirouettes the Lover to port, twisting her bulk like a top. The fire-belching spacecraft goes blazing harmlessly past. As it does, Moira gets a nanosecond's glimpse inside the torn-apart vessel – at the fire, the rangers tossed about in panic, the sparking machinery. Fast as it came, it's gone, headbutting into another unlucky dropship, the two of them collaborating on one ship-shaking explosion.

  “Bloom me,” Nemo mutters, a moment later. “No idea that was coming. There's nobody,” he pauses, caught halfway through the thought, “in the sensor room.”

  Fortunately, there's no time to dwell on this. There are plenty of ships still to shoot, ray shields to angle and always that climatic field, looming closer and closer above them all.

  At full burn, the Briza Light Freighter is much faster than these orbit-to-surface dropships and she continues to stretch the distance between them. The Unconstant Lover is pointed unerringly upward, toward the climatic field, toward outer space, toward escape. The hounding pack of dropships stumble over themselves to chase after her, dozens of turrets firing ineffectually.

  Only one turret – wielded very effectively, Moira might add – fires back down at them.

  The sandstorm that roils and scours across the surface of Gi is a much better backdrop to shoot against than the blinding sun. The topturret clacking as it swings this way and that, Moira slots one ship after another into her crosshairs and her darling Antagonist makes fireworks.

  The dropcraft are easy pickings for an eye as dead as Moira's and a cannon as merciless as the Antagonist. Unshielded troop transports, they're wholly unprepared to dogfight with a fleet-tested freighter. One by one, Moira works her methodical way through the disorganized mess of dropships, leaving smoke and shrapnel in her wake.

  Their return fire is a sight to behold. It's a great swath of flashing green, shot from so many ships, but at this extreme range, their aim is laughable. With gunnery emplacements only intended to fire downward, no doubt meant to awe the natives and not much else, it's weak sauce against both evasive action and ray shielding.

  Those regenerating ray shields prove more than enough to shrug away even the best gunners the dropships can boast. Now that Flask's been browbeaten into angling the shield properly, it ricochets or absorbs the odd shot that would otherwise strike the Lover's aft. Meanwhile, the freighter is perpetually wreathed in green laserfire, all the frantic missed shots of the dropcraft below attempting to overwhelm her with raw ditrogen.

  Free to swat enemy ships with impunity, Moira vents some much needed frustration. She rides a machine of death, meticulously designed to destroy by master artisans. Fire and destruction is wrought with the slightest pressure from Moira's knees and thumbs. The impact of each canister vibrates through her whole body.

  She is no one's prisoner now, no stranded outlander deprived of firearms or cigarettes or air conditioning. Now, she is a god of death and she rains her hatred from the sky with fists full of green lightning.

  This is the particular power fantasy Moira is enjoying when a new and massive ditrogen bolt, half the length of the Lover, goes racing a few feet past the topturret.

  Moira scowls and lets go of the triggers a moment in surprise. That shot didn't come from below, far too powerful anyway to come from one of the dropcraft. It came from above.

  “Um, anybody else catch that?” Moira wonders through the comm, as she swivels the Antagonist around, from the planet's surface to the planet's orbit. “'cause it very nearly caught me.”

  “They wouldn't dare,” mutters Nemo, his breath in this throat.

  “Who wouldn't dare what?” an Ortoki voice is heard to ask, over the clatter of hand tools.

  Once spun fully around, Moira squints into the sun's oppressive glare. The longer she watches, though, she starts to see something winking, a faint flashing, on the other side of the climatic field. Following this flash, there's a brilliant barrage of laserfire that comes streaking down, through the climatic field and directly towards them.

  “Evasive–” Moira starts to shriek in panic but Nemo's preempted her. He wrenches the Lover away from the laserfire and it howls past, blindingly green and strong enough to shrivel a lesser spaceship with a single strike. Thanks to Nemo's quick maneuver, that barrage connects somewhere among the dropcraft, considering the orange reflection on the inside of Moira's plexishield.

  “The capital ships,” Nemo answers too late, another flashing starting again far above the climatic field, in Gi's low orbit. “They're fucking firing on us.”

  Moira screws up her face. “An orbital bombardment?”

  “Thought you said,” Odisseus objects, in the instant before Nemo's forced to duck and weave again, to avoid a second incoming ditrogen shower, “that was never gonna happen?”

  “It wasn't supposed to!” Nemo snaps defensively. “That was everywhere in Two-Bit's shit. Even in extreme emergencies, orbital bombardment's strictly forbidden!”

  “Could fook with the soil,” responds Flask coldly. “Way against protocol.”

  “I assume,” Odisseus scoffs, “we've got no plan, then?”

  “Well,” Nemo starts, mockery thick in his tone, “we could start by angling ray shields double blooming bowside!” The freighter groans, the boosters sputter and the broadside whistles past, Nemo narrowly avoiding the laserfire even as he screams at Flask.

  There's some grumbling from the press-ganged co-pilot as he fumbles about his duties as best he can. In the time it takes Flask to fold the ray shields twice across the Lover's bow, Nemo's obliged to dodge another pair of barrages from above. With each one, the unseen gunners become more and more precise, measuring the Lover's reaction time and adjusting accordingly.


  The shields come the instant before they're needed. When Nemo can't completely duck the next broadside, they absorb the brunt of the glancing blow. When struck by such a powerful blast, however, even The Unconstant Lover's sophisticated shields are torn practically to ribbons, dropping to a smear of their former strength.

  “Shields're, erm,” Flask struggles to interpret all the data his console assails him with, “30% power?” There's a pause here as he taps a few buttons. “And climbing?”

  “Moons,” remarks Nemo. “That's even full forward, double folded.” He sighs heavily, his frustration mounting. “Motherbloomers can't wait their turn to shoot at us?”

  “Yeah, I don't see us taking another one of those and still staying a spaceship,” Moira theorizes. “That'll short the shields right the fuck out.”

  “Unless there's something you could do...?” dangles Nemo significantly.

  “Of course,” huffs Odisseus, hard at work on the exemptor. “Lemme drop everything and solve your problem.”

  “Kinda everybody’s problem, really,” Nemo makes the point in the same breath that he jukes the Lover unexpectedly to port. This buys him a considerable berth from the laserfire – only because his dodge comes at the last possible second. “Meantime,” he pants, a little winded from the effort, “guess I'mana hafta get sorta original with these.”

  Before he gets a chance, however, there's a sudden screech of rent teltriton and the sort of shipwide shake that everyone knows means hull damage.

  “The bloom was that?” Odisseus is the first to growl, soon as he's recovered from the jolt and the surprise.

  “You know,” Nemo speculates through gritted teeth, spiralling the Lover through a spray of capital-class laserfire, “maybe I'm not the ideal person to fucking ask in this situation.”

  “Erm, erm,” stutters Flask, overwhelmed by the sheer number of unfriendly noises and blinking lights the shielding station must be throwing his way, “the thing says 38%, though. I don't understand how–”