Unconstant Love

by Timothy J Meyer

  “Meaning,” Quicksilver deduces, “if she kills us, she gets our bounty and our tree. You know, the same logic that everyone in the galaxy is going to operate under.”

  Flask blinks. “You don't know that.”

  Quicksilver purses her lips. “I really do.”

  In his defense, coming to Karvela was not Flask's first choice. Had their cover not been so publically blown, they could have gone to Qetapi or Pursma and dealt with Tish Vicious or Honest Orgo before anybody could really catch wise. Instead, here they were, surrounded, outnumbered and trading ditrogen with Turquoise's endless supply of no-talent thuggery in the lobby of the dingy Lucky Stars Casino.

  On one hand, the Gronqo's rumrunning ring was one of the best in the business, a persistent thorn in the Consortium's bloated side. Its head honcho, therefore, made an inspired choice for a buyer. On the other hand, her reputation pegged her for a coldblooded opportunist, not living to her ripe old age by playing nice or honoring every past agreement.

  That said, the number of trustworthy and discreet customers looking to launch their own Gitter vineyard and good for 50 plus million credits was not so high as to exclude any potential options.

  Flask can feel the eyes of the crew, all expecting miracles of him, all looking to him to remedy the situation. “She'll come around, like,” he assures them and himself. “Trust me.”

  “I don't know,” Nemo makes the point with a shrug and a waggle of his pistol. “This ain't so bad. Kinda reminds me of old times, honestly.”

  The return fire suddenly stops. Shouldering his Domino, Flask and his comrade keep peppering Turq's entrenched position with laserfire, hoping to catch any unwary goons. As usual, though, Flask's assault rifle finds no purchase against the enemy, only shattering and sparking against their cover.

  Nemo fires with utter abandon, his concussive blue shots whizzing harmlessly past anything that might resemble the intended target. A shot from the Ortok’s shiny new YN9 Haymaker practially tears a holoshot machine in two and Quicksilver works her magic on those crouching behind it. A Jrosk in a bomber jacket falls screaming while an Eussi manages to squeeze off one swan song shot before Lefty pegs him between the eyes.

  That shot races across the casino and slams into some vital component in the holoslot machine Nemo and Quicksilver both cower behind. There's a shower of sparks, a short congratulatory ditty plays and the machine's internal droidvox makes the auspicious announcement. “CONGRATULATIONS,” it declares lusterlessly, “YOU'VE WON.”

  With that, a cascade of chips, each tiny hologram broadcasting its worth, comes pouring from the machine's dispenser and onto Nemo and Quicksilver's heads. As one curses and the other hurries to scoop the chips into his open duster pocket, Flask grimaces and makes a useless gesture towards them, feeling somehow responsible for even this small embarrasment.

  “I can fix this, I can fix this,” he chants, almost to himself.

  Flask knows that wasn't an ordinary laser blast. An ordinary laser blast might rattle the ship some when it impacts the shields. It takes something more, something stronger and more solid, to whip the pilot and co-pilot so violently about in their seats.

  Collecting his scattered wits, Flask has a sudden flash of Gi's upper atmosphere and the dropcraft that latched parasitically onto the Lover's starboard airlock, the one full of spice rangers.

  “Not blooming again,” bemoans the Captain, evidently struck with the same memory. He gives the yoke a few quick toggles, port to starboard, and seems dissatisfied with the result. “Controls've gone all wonky.”

  The helm and the whole ship, presumably, is lurched unnaturally to the side and serves as perfect proof of the Captain's theory. Every time Nemo fruitlessly twists the yoke, the entire Unconstant Lover can be heard to whine and groan from the marrow of her metallic bones but she doesn't move an inch, for all Nemo's efforts.

  “That weren't no ordinary shot,” Flask puts out there, attempting to raise any relevant data on the dozen or so screens arrayed before him, “what hit us. That last one, like.”

  “A torpedo?” wonders Nemo. “What's your thing say?”

  “Uh,” stammers Flask, soon as his equipment feels like behaving. The data comes streaming out and Flask, hungry for the answer, opens his mouth to reply. The more he reads, though, the less it makes sense. “It's givin' me these readings I don't bloody understand, like.”

  They weren't two minutes out of warp above Qetapi before everything went wrong. Flask could see the planet before them through the viewport, a great sphere swirled with purple against yellow. Down on its surface waits Tish Vicious, all ready to make them an offer on their purloined Gitter sapling. Soon as a straight line to the payday came into view, of course, every motherbloomer in the universe must take up arms to oppose them.

  Today's motherbloomer was a 516 Cataphract, thorny with gun emplacements and lurking in the Warp Gate's shadow, like the muggers that prey on Arrival Tier tourists back on his beloved Gallow. Whether they were tracked here or simply anticipated, the moment the ship appeared on scopes, its weapons were hot and the Lover was under attack.

  Her skeleton crew were still scrambling to battle stations when that strange impact hit, the one that baffled both Flask and his sensors.

  “There's drag for days,” Flask attempts to explain, “and I'm also reading...” He whallops the dashboard once, the same as he's seen Nemo do innumerable times, in an attempt to make his instruments make sense. “A fooking hull breach? In the hold? But there's no pressure los–”

  Nemo is flabbergasted. “Um.”

  “Perhaps I can explain,” offers an Ortoki voice over the comm. “So, I'm standing here in the hold, minding my own–”

  Another laser barrage rattles the angled shields of the stalled out Lover. “Explain faster,” demands the impatient Captain.

  “When a great blooming hullpoon punches its way through the wall. Missed my whiskers by this much.”

  “Oh, no,” comes the voice of Quicksilver as she hustles through the freighter.

  “The fook's a hullpoon?” asks Flask, a little indignantly.

  “Sound it out,” snaps Odisseus in a flat voice. “Hull. Harpoon. Got the nuances?”

  “They shot us with a motherfucking harpoon?” remarks Nemo, sounding a little too impressed. “Who are these bastards?”

  “Flask,” address Quicksilver with a knowing air, “you called the ship a 561 Cataphract?”

  “Says it's a 516 Cataphract. Friend of yours?”

  “Bounty hunter. The Cannibal. Owned by this Grimalti hag, calls herself Queequeg. Been around for-fucking-ever. Trust me,” she adds after a moment, “you do not want her reeling us in.”

  Even as Moira's making her warning, Flask can feel the tug, the ship's sickening list to starboard worsening with each passing second. Worse still, the sensors seem to confirm this, the distance between the hunter and her prey shrinking and shrinking.

  “Open to suggestions, then,” declares Nemo. “Getting nothing from the yoke.”

  “Can you,” Flask puts tentatively to Odisseus, “dislodge the thing?”

  Odisseus makes the Ortoki version of a scoff. “I mean, the thing's strong enough to puncture three layers of reinforced teltriton. Plus, you know, not super interested in opening a vacuum to space, so.”

  “The cable,” provides a panting Quicksilver a second later. “Gimme another minute, I'll get into the topturret, see if I can draw a bead on the actual fucking rope.”

  “Oh, sure,” Flask agrees, his argument supported by another hail of gunfire from the Cannibal, chipping away at their ray shields. “We’ll just sit here and get fooking shot at, shall we?”

  “I didn't say sit there,” Quicksilver counters meaningfully.

  Pilot and co-pilot share a scowl at this before both pairs of eyes drop to the clutchlever, ignored at Nemo's side. A devilish grin, the ancestor to a devilish idea, corrupts all of the Captain's face as his hand lands heavily on that clutchlever.

  Drinking ca
rbon petro in great gulps, The Unconstant Lover struggles at her leash. To be so pierced by the Cannibal's hullpoon, the Briza is none too happy. The overtaxed hull voices its teltriton displeasure at every turn, but she starts to crawl forward nonetheless.

  As expected, the drag is massive and seems insurmountable at first. No engine aboard a measely Cataphract, however, could possibly hope to match a pair of JR-1 Yeltain jetboosters in sheer horsepower.

  Laboriously at first but with greater and greater speed, The Unconstant Lover drags its supposed pursuer through Qetapi's high orbit, an impaled levitathan pulling its harpooner across the waves. Growing from sproadic chuckles, through fits of giggling and eventually into a full-blown maniacal cackle, Nemo keeps laughing all the way.

  The ship's instruments, however, are not laughing but rather screaming. Internal damage is spiking across several systems and the fuel reserves are tailspinning to zero. Flask's hands run ineffectually across the controls, tapping buttons, flicking switches, attempting to make anything beneficial happen.

  “Um, um, um,” stammers Flask, nearly watching the ship come apart before his very eyes. “I can fix this!”

  Flask spins his weapon on the newcomer. Everyone else follows suit and now there're a dozen firearms all pointing at her where she hovers a few inches off the blast-blackened and glass-strewn ground.

  This newcomer, with the same wide-set eyestalks and slate gray skin of their Nminese hosts, elbows her jetpack's kill-switch and lands heavily on the warehouse floor. As she recovers her poise, the plates of her Kelkian battle-chassis squeak against each other and she levels a nasty-looking piece – heavy ordinance, something that might shoot acid or poison gas or confetti, for all Flask knows – straight at the Captain.

  There's a moment of absolute silence following this, none of the warehouse's dozen occupants quite certain how to react.

  The newcomer with the confetti-shooter takes the initiative to garble out a long string of Nminese, gesticulating violently towards Nemo.

  “The bloom was that?” the Captain demands to know, his flintlock pointed at the level of his hip. “What'd she say?”

  The designated spokesman among the Nminese hit squad, the one with the hunk of blinking metal over his right eyestalk, spends a moment conferring with his comrades before turning back to Nemo. “That she are being a bounty hunter,” he answers in his best pinyin Commercial. “That you are worthing much coin.”

  “Lovely,” Flask responds. “Can you do us a favor and tell her, 'cause it don't much seem as she can count, that she's outgunned, ten to fooking one?”

  The spokesman digests this a moment, nods and turns to make the translation, his many-layered lips pulling back to expose wicked canines as he snarls at her.

  “How'd she fooking find us, is what I'd like to know,” mutters Flask to no one in particular.

  For someone with ten guns pointed at her, the Nminese bounty hunter maintains her cool. She absorbs the spokesman's threat stoically and proceeds to ramble out another string of spittle-flecked obscentities in the two's shared language.

  “How'd any of them find us?” Odisseus counters, standing a few feet around the circle from Flask and shifting the weight of his YN9 Haymaker shotgun.

  This was precisely the outcome Flask knew they'd avoid this time around. After the disasters on both Karvela and Qetapi, he'd hatched a foolproof scheme that should've prevented any bounty hunting interference. Headed to the politically unstable hotbed of Nmino, Flask knew they'd be spotted the moment they dropped warp in the populous system. Thus, it'd been his idea to warp instead to Kashda Major, an adjacent and uninhabited system, and simply make the voyage between the two systems the old fashioned way.

  This maneuver added another week onto their travel time and meant they were coasting into Nmino on fumes but, up until it now, it'd proved wholly successful. Then this Nminese whackjob and her pet jetpack burst through the warehouse's upper story window and threw everything into disarray.

  Once the bounty hunter's finished speaking, another member of the Nminese death squad pipes up. Tuning to his leader, he makes a short statement, full of “hoota”s and “shoota”s that the pirates are woefully ill-equipped to translate.

  “And?” Nemo attempts to interrupt, throwing his arms wide a moment. “What'd she say?”

  The cartel's spokesman, his pistol level at the bounty hunter, extends a single finger toward Nemo, begging the Galactic Menace's patience a moment. This done, he continues chatting with the newly-arrived bounty hunter twice as fast, making the occasional gesture towards Nemo and The Unconstant Lover parked a short distance away, looming over the whole transaction.

  The Nminese drug cartels that ran this sector, the local government quite comfortably in their collective pockets, were notorious for the massive amounts of capital they splurged on bizarre and expensive fripperies. Playing a hunch, Flask gambled that the uniqueness of the sapling – the only one of its kind in the greater galaxy – might tickle the fancy of some cartel headman.

  Once the proper introductions were made, the Lover touched down amid one of the planet's worst ghettos, parking in the firebombed ruins of a warehouse. There, the crew successfully made contact with the local criminal element – six repeater-toting Nminese with about a hundred words of Commercial between them. After a few handshakes and a few harrowing mistranslations, they were well on their way to a sitdown with the resident kingpin when somebody felt the need to crash a window and make a big entrance.

  Now, here they all stand, an eleven-member Talosian stand-off, while everyone Nminese in the room, friend and foe alike, conducts a private conference.

  “Guys,” warns Quicksilver in a tentative tone, “we're losing this.”

  The gestures exchanged between the two parties – bounty hunter and death squad – become more emphatic and Flask certainly catches a few unnerving glances towards the four pirates and their extended firearms.

  “We're fine,” Flask attempts to brush aside, unwilling to lose another potential buyer. “Everything's fine. See? He's shaking his head.”

  The spokesman is indeed shaking his wide-eyed head back and forth and swapping the point of his weapon between the bounty hunter and the Briza Light Freighter behind them all.

  “And she's nodding,” Odisseus makes the point.

  In response, the bounty hunter vigorously nods her head a few times. This causes a general consensus to ripple through the Nminese gangsters, glancing to one another for approval. The spokesman squints for a moment, attempting to squeeze something meaningful from the newcomer with his one working eye but eventually relents.

  “And now,” Quicksilver sighs, “he's nodding too.”

  “So, what?” Nemo puts to his own gunmen. “I shoot her?”

  “You do that,” Quicksilver informs him, “she's gonna fill your belly with shrapnel. That's 53B Fletchette Launcher she's got there.”

  Flask's eyebrows spike. “Is that what that–”

  On a barked command from their leader, the Nminese death squad, as one, turn all six of their ratatats on the Lover's crew. Flask strangles a curse as everyone reshuffles their guns, the pirates suddenly overflowing with enemies to aim at. Flask chooses one member of the death squad, the too-eager one that was the first to turn coats and point his repeater at Flask's heart. Nemo chooses the spokesman, Odisseus another of the hit squad and only Quicksilver, with two pistols to hand, keeps the bounty hunter covered.

  Her other pistol, Flask observes, seems to choose its target more on instinct.

  “Pointing at me,” he points out politely.

  “Oh.” Quicksilver blinks and her Lawman's pointing at another target, one of the Nminese thugs. “Sorry.”

  “Guys?” Nemo questions the whole group, the ones pointing their seven guns his direction. “What gives?”

  “That we is making of an arrangement. That she are having you for the bounty, that we is having the tree.” He waggles his repeater a little towards the grimy warehouse floo. “You is n
ow putting your guns down, I am to think?”

  “Gee, what a fucking coincidence,” chimes in a cheerful Quicksilver.

  “Nobody say shit,” Flask commands them, as forcefully as he can. “I can fix this!”

  Flask knows one of these moons-damned doors is gonna open and unleash some slavering monster on the four of them. The only question is which door and which monster.

  Chained to his three comrades at the center of the killing floor, he can only see four of the beasts and, of those, he can only identify two. Thankfully, they had Moira Quicksilver, amateur zoologist, here to edify them all.

  “Could be the musk vool,” she remarks, seemingly to herself but perfectly audible to everyone at these close quarters. “It's the musk vool, we're really gonna be fucked.”

  “I think it's fair to say,” Flask attests, twisting his ankle to offset as much of the chafe as he can, “no matter what comes outta there, we're really gonna be fooked.”

  “Not if it's a treezma,” Quicksilver counters quietly. “I know how to kill a treezma.”

  “With your fooking bare hands?”

  “Which one shall I choose?” booms the amplified voice of Creezok Skullchewer, loud enough that all in attendance – those inside the death cube and those outside – can hear him deliberating. “Shall I pulverize the so-called Galactic Menace? Shall I have him exsanguinated and wear his shriveled skin as my cloak?”

  This is met with a thunderous roar, the Saurian pirate king's entire court hissing and snarling their approval. Garbage – bottles, bones, rotten hunks of meat – go splattering against the scintillant pink walls of the death cube's deflection shield. This doesn't seem to stop or discourage the Saurian hordes, however. They keep showering the arena with improvised missiles all the same.

  “Worst case scenario,” Quicksilver informs them all, with a slicing gesture, “it's the xydomander. Neurotoxin'll make you brain dead before you hit the ground. Doesn't touch the pain centers, though. That's worst case,” she stipulates a moment later.