“Quit wiggling the chain,” Odisseus suddenly complains, turning a mouthful of fangs on his saltbrother.
Nemo responds in typical Nemo fashion, wrenching his foot and the chain it's attached to all the way to the side in a petulant little kick. “You quit wiggling the chain.”
“I am not,” Odisseus swears, “the one wiggling the chain.”
“You know,” Flask mentions offhandedly, “I sure wish somebody'd fooking mentioned to me that Creezok Skullchewer had beef with them. Maybe then I wouldn'ta suggested coming here in the bloody first place!”
“Well,” weasels Nemo, now wiggling the chain out of some inbred sense of spite, “how was I supposed to know he'd remember that? That was two cannons I stole, what, six years ago?”
“Almost seven, now,” Quicksilver corrects.
“Seven years ago?” He tosses his head in the direction of the enthroned Saurian and pulls a condescending face. “Moons, Creezok. Grow up.”
“Shall our guests make good sport for Gutwrencher?” Creezok put to his audience, hovering his many-ringed claws over the control panel that could open any of death cube's dozen doors. “Or shall Skinshriveler teach them the meaning of agony?”
Flask isn't sure, from the sound of their screams, which gruesome fate the bloodthirsty throng would prefer.
Following the calamitous events on Nmino, Flask was determined they not be recognized when they approached the palace-away-from-palace of Creezok Skullchewer, barbaric captain of The Beast's Belly and notable terror to interstellar society. He honestly thought they were verging on paranoia, landing on Ptemesis' smaller moon, commandeering a moonhopper and making the approach in that completely unrecognizable vessel.
That part of the plan, actually, went off without a hitch. It was the moment they were led before Skullchewer himself, in all his oily opulence, that the whole thing went, skidding and screeching, off the rails. It was then Flask made the charming discover that the two Captains shared some ugly history, that the Galactic Menace had boosted the Lover's twin Antagonist gun emplacements out from under the Saurian's forked tongue many moons ago.
It had been Flask's second erroneous assumption of the evening that they'd rot in a dingy prison cell a few nights and eventually be sold to the highest bidder, whether Imperium or Consortium or some other surprise pirate beef Nemo neglected to mention. Instead, they were to be fed to an undisclosed member of Skullchewer's menagerie of pet monsters, to the delight of his teeth-gnashing, tail-lashing underlings.
Here they were, then – trapped inside the shimmering pink walls of the death cube, chained to one another by their ankles and awaiting the arrival of their drooling, many-fanged executioner.
“I choose,” declares Creezok in his best barbarian king voice, “Bonebreaker!”
The hovering claw clacks a button, one of the dozen portcullises shunts into the ceiling and the room veritably shakes with the crowd's screaming approval. Flask does actually reognize the beast that comes swaggering into view, one meathook after the other, but it brings him little comfort.
“Oh, it's an arlaxi,” Moira comments idly. “Hm.” She throws one glance down the length of chain and up to the faces of her companions shackled there. “Too bad.”
Out comes the arlaxi, four hundred pounds of rangy muscle and bristling scruff. It's a knuckle-walker, thudding the ground with each step it takes into the death cube. The muscles of those powerful forearms flex and glisten with secreted slime. The sloping tusks mark this specimen, pitted and scarred from a hundred battles, as a bull. From the way the quills along its flanks thrum with excitement, Flask knows its primed to either kill something or fuck something or both.
At the sight of the four prisoners, it lolls its lowering head, saliva dropping in gobbets from its maw. With one nine-fingered hand, it paws at the dirt and the littered bones of the cube's previous victims.
“I can fix this,” Flask reminds everyone, in the moment before the monster charges.
Flask makes his ultimatum. “We ain't going lower than fifty. Period.”
“Pity,” croons Honest Orgo. “I'm not prepared to go higher than forty-five.”
Despite his eponymous honesty, Orgo is quite the practiced liar. It may have taken Flask the better part of this negotiation to zero in on the gangster's tell. Now that he has, Flask intends to milk the Midzu for all he's worth. Whenever Flask sees those suckered fingers temple and loudly unsuction, he knows he's played his cards just right. All he needs to do now is stand firm and keep his less canny confederates from chiming in.
“It's w–” an outraged Nemo starts to sputter but Flask's gesture – a subtle slicing of the hand – is enough to keep the Menace quiet. He obviously means well, in his brutish way, but it's these childish outbursts, more than anything, that'll allow Orgo to walk all over them.
Flask brushes some imaginary dust from the front of his windbreaker and starts to rise from his seat, a motion that makes Orgo's circle of thuggery instantly twitchy. “Puts us at an impasse, then, I suppose.”
“Not from where I'm sitting,” Honest Orgo replies, calm as cold water. “You'll play ball.” The Midzu splays his suckered fingers out, indicating the damp backroom as though it were the entire breadth of the galaxy. “You got nowhere else to go. You think I don't know you've chased every other buyer in the galaxy into the woodwork?” He folds his hands back together and sits patiently, toying with his food. “So, I'll pay what I want.”
“You'll pay–” snarls Quicksilver, her temper rubbed as raw as all their ankles, following that incident with the arlaxi. Once again, Flask quiets her with a small gesture and she, while unhappy at the yanking of the leash, still understands the wisdom in letting Flask do the talking.
“We're a fooking x-factor, though, ain't we?” Flask counters. “He's the blooming Galactic Menace, mate. We're the lunatics who stole this impossible thing in the first place.” He shrugs fatalistically. “You don't wanna meet our price, maybe we'll walk. Get shot to shit by the Consortium or the Imperium or all them fookin' bounty hunters.” He finishes his patch with a small spike of his eyebrow. “Then where's your profit?”
He puts on a brave face but this clearly digs into Orgo. One doesn't become a “legitimate” business tycoon of Orgo's size and affluence by letting too much gangland posturing stand in the way of opportunities like this one.
For all that their host is the unofficial ruler of Pursma and all the surrounding worlds of any worth, the environs chosen for this powwow – the stock room at a third-rate laundromat – couldn't possibly be less auspicious. On the way to some charity ball or investor luncheon, Orgo's dressed to the absolute nines, way out of place in this dredgy locale. His muscle, however – redskins and Panuvans from the planet's mean streets – much more match their surroundings, each one of them overawed at the sight of the Galactic Menace, sitting a folding chair an arm's length away.
The sight of those suckered fingers steepling back together is how Flask knows he's finally bagged his buyer. “Let's see this thing, then, that I'm to spend fift–”
The fact that the explosion catches them all – Orgo and his goons included – is how Flask knows this isn't a frame-up job. The wall behind the gangster bursts outward in a sudden spray of dust, rubble and fire. The sheer force topples Flask, Nemo, Quicksilver and Odisseus to the hard ground, rolling away from the blast area and batting out small fires on their persons.
The sensation of blood that trickles down his forehead is how Flask knows he's still alive. Their hosts, however, aren't nearly so fortunate.
Orgo is nowhere to be seen, buried completely beneath the partially-collapsed wall. Here and there, a Panuvan arm or redskin leg pokes out of the rubble, sometimes wriggling, sometimes not. It's the three figures that Flask sees standing amid the smoke and settling dust that command his attention.
One's a fat-throated Lhovuss, outfitted with advanced targeting goggles and a smoking grenade launcher, the wall's obvious demolisher. Another's a scaly-scalped Neek, with
baggy fatigues and a sparking pair of electochettes. The third's a sunken-eyed Yvora, his mismatched armor blackened and his massive underslung repeater nearly twice his size.
They're, all three of them, undeniably bounty hunters.
Flask discovers that he's screaming. “No, no, no, no!” He also discovers, in the same instant, his pistol – a Halisdro OT9 piece borrowed from the Lover's overstocked armory – in his hand and his trigger finger clicking madly. The poorly-aimed shots fizzle uselessly against the Yvora's reinforced armor, until one blasts him in the shoulder.
The Yvora, cursing through his needle-teeth, sprays the room with ditrogen from his repeater, his aim marred by his wounded arm.
Flask is climbing to his feet, spilling the contents of his pistol at the unexpected trio of new attackers when someone stops him. That someone is much stronger than him, gripping his shoulder with a black-clad sleeve. It's Quicksilver who's dragging him away, the rest of his crew hustling towards the exit. Flask, meanwhile, filled with more fight than even the Captain, keeps shooting and struggling all the same.
“I can fix this!” he's screaming, even as he's pulled through the door and into the laundromat's lobby. “I can still fix this!”
Flask is forced to consider the possibility that he might not actually be able to fix this.
When presented with this crisis of competence, a repeatedly bested Flask decides to double down on those few skills that he knows he excels at – drinking like a fish and smoking like a chimney.
To this end, he has colonized the Ujad mahogany at the far end of The Unconstant lover's mess hall. Considering the length of time they spent imprisoned here, Flask feels confident none of the freighter's crew will come and disturb him here. Most of the cigarettes he'd purchased above Arzenka were smoked, their stubs arrayed all around him in a gruesome display of carcinogenic conquest. His own meager supply of booze long depleted, he'd since resorted to those few bottles he could scrounge from here and there about the ship. Fortunately for his scavenging habits, the Lover was a vessel so exhaustively stocked with alcohol, one could open practically any hull panel and discover a hidden cache of goodies.
Where they were headed next, Flask had no idea. From this stage forward, that was officially no longer his responsibility.
Pursma was the latest and greatest catastrophe, chased through the city streets with three heavily-armed lunatics chomping on their tail feathers the whole way. Ptemesis was an utter fiasco, the four of them nearly ground to chum and fed to Skullchewer's frothing Saurian hordes. Nmino had such promise before the unwelcome and cliché arrival of a bounty-hunting third party threw the whole deal into disarray. Qetapi had no opportunity to go well, the Cannibal's orbital attack forcing them away with Port Authority on their heels.
Had things with Turquoise, Flask reflects, on Karvela gone even a little smoother, they might not be warping from Who Knows Where to Noplace In Particular with half the galaxy on their scent and the galaxy's most valuable cargo burning a hole in their hold.
By now, Flask has exhausted all his contacts in the Ring, outed himself as a Galactic Menace collaborator and earned a bronze place, three spots from the top of the galaxy's perpetual shit list.
All because, once again, he'd been convinced to throw in with that monomaniacal cousin of his.
“Where,” comes the unexpected voice of that monomaniacal cousin, “in the name of every shitting moon of Jotor,” he points an accusing finger as he storms through the mess hall's doors, defying Flask's expectations yet again, “did you get that?”
Flask wiggles his left fist, bottle of Gitterswitch Gin sloshing its contents. “This?” he asks, startled by how slurred the word sounds when it escapes his lips.
“That.”
Flask extends the bottle to arm's length, pointing back towards the galley. “Think this one was in that little drawer, you know, underneath the oven, like?”
“Oh,” Nemo realizes, all anger and accusation instantly vanished. “That must be Odi's stash, I think. Never mind, then.”
With a great dramatic sweep of his forearm, Nemo wipes away most of the mess hall's scarred and stained tabletop, the cigarettes and empty gin bottles cascading to the floor in a sooty, clattering heap. In its place, he slaps down a stack of laminate charts, improperly folded and crusty with age and use.
“Fook's that?” Flask manages, as soberly as he can.
“Nav charts,” Nemo responds, flipping one over and examining what's written there with a deep scowl. “Tell you what, I ain't a million-year-old, fat-assed Grimalti sonuvabitch but I cannot, for the life of me, figure out how Abraham ever gotta handle on this warp navigator stuff.” He snaps that particular chart closed and tosses it back on the heap. “Boils the brain.”
“Lookin',” Flask stammers, reach a hand towards the charts, “for summat?”
Nemo slaps that hand away before Flask would have, in all likelihood, knocked the stack completely over. “A heading,” answers Nemo as he leafs through the various charts. Soon as he's found the one he's searching for, he snaps it open and presses its creased edges flat against the table, grabbing an empty bottle or two for paperweights.
“We're here.” The Captain jabs a finger at a particular system. Flask cranes forward a little and manages to wrangle his boozy brain into deciphering the upside-down letters as Nenoa Major, a wholly unfamilair planet to Flask. “Or will be, come tomorrow.”
“Means,” Nemo starts to speculate, idly reaching a hand towards Flask's forgotten bottle, “there's only five possible jumps outta there that I'm confident I got the skills to make.” Taking a gulp from the bottle, he spiderwalks his other hand across the chart, tapping different systems with each finger. “There's Wask,” he comments, soon as he's swallowed. “Chellek, Dynomic, Gy Mbano and...”
His thumb lands heavily on the fifth possibility and this stops the Captain cold. He pulls his hand off the chart and instead rubs his jaw in contemplation, a beardless version of the same gesture he might've made weeks ago.
Flask strains to see what system his cousin's contemplating so hard. He practically has to stand to see the label that’s etched there.
Takioro, the nav chart reads.
CHAPTER 23
Velocity had just assumed he was dead.
The last time Takioro's Depot-Commissioner had seen on the Galactic Menace, it was a chance encounter, passing in a Second Ring sidestreet. The Freebooter Fleet had come, in all its regalia, to Takioro Defederate Station to celebrate a Valladian Shipping Line well sacked. Its big kahuna, then, was out among his people, heading someplace or another, doubtlessly on one of his many important duties.
Velocity too was about on business, attending to some new disaster the visiting pirates had wrought upon her defenseless station. The two parties, Nemo's entourage and her own, passed through one of the narrow sidestreets the wise use to circumnavigate the station.
Their entourages merged and blended for a moment, hers all bodyguards, his all sycophants. Velocity had realized only too late who it was she was actually passing behind the Astrobounce and Second Ring Wok. When they actually did pass, Nehel Morel didn't spare Velocity a glance, too deeply invested in listening to himself talk. It was that grimy counterfeiter Two-Bit Switch that she actually made eye contact with. A terse nod was all he gave her and, not reacting quite quickly enough, she could only respond in kind.
He was there and, quick as that, he was gone. Turning a hard corner around the Astrobounce's left side, he and his gaggle of followers disappeared up the alley.
Four years previously, he'd been the least talented smuggler on her laundry list of pet smugglers. Then, behind Velocity's back, he'd gone and become a blooming galactic sensation, leaving her in his wake.
The only appropriate way Velocity could pay Nemo back for his ingratitude was with ingratitude of her own. If he ignored her, she would ignore him right back.
In the years and months that followed, then, Takioro's Depot-Commissioner was far too preoccupied with
the day-to-day business of her station – squabbling landlords, tenant's rights, breaking the occasional thumb – to pay much attention to the occasional rumors she'd hear about the Galactic Menace's fate. The Freebooter Fleet never returned to Takioro following their attack on Trija and, in Velocity's mind, it was good riddance to them all.
No matter her disinterest, the occasional mumble or whisper would still reach her ears. The odd depraved deep spacer would claim they saw the Menace robbing some liquor store or another on remote moon someplace. This was unavoidable; far as Velocity was concerned, though, as long as he wasn't causing trouble aboard her station, he might as well be dead.
In her mind, he eventually was.
It was certainly more credible than half the blooming stories that the rest of the galaxy cooked up to explain his disappearance. According to some, he'd lead the remainder of the Freebooter Fleet away from Trija's defeat and conquered some Offchart planet somewhere, where he was worshipped as some kind of buccaneering god-king. According to others, he'd warped away from Trija too quickly and the Lover crashed on Spithax or Jotor or Crawk's Locker or somewhere even more mythical. According to still others, he'd been apprehended by the Trijans and was rotting away still in some lightless prison cell beneath Zaraskevi.
Velocity dismissed each of these in turn as the poppycock they were. She had more immediate concerns, bigger jiihu to fry than the whereabouts of the troublesome Galactic Menace. Things aboard the Defederate Station were far from hunky or dory.
It seemed that every other week, some stationside business or another was drying up and rolling down its shutters for good. First, it was Skarn Tarvish and her Traditional Sozonese Pub, not clearing enough on punters to keep the lights on and to pay Velocity's very reasonable taxes. Then came Tooth and Nails, the two joints so intrinsically linked that, if one went, the other was bound to follow. Much as Velocity might wish to frown and blame the vissisitudes of a plunderous economy, the trend was becoming far too frequent to dismiss.
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