“Not really,” Two-Bit admitted. “I can flash on like, one episode.”
Nemo buzzed his lips. “I was a kid, you couldn’t tear me away from this crap with a graviton. Really rare, actually, on Gallow. Never gotta watch the thing in syndication because, that far into the Inner Sectors, all we could get were pirate broadcasts, you know, whatever you could beam in. Imperium didn’t like it, right, thought it was bad messaging for kids.” He chewed his candyfloss thoughtfully, watching the screen with the critical appreciation of a holo historian. “Pirates as good guys.”
Glancing between Captain and screen, it wasn’t hard for Two-Bit Switch to see how formative this very stupid cartoon must have been upon an adolescent Nehel Morel.
“Sorry again,” Two-Bit mentioned, a few minutes into the broadcast, when Captain Starstrike suspects one of his crew might actually be a Blackskull spy. “About the whole Haess thing.”
By now, Nemo’s attention is fixated by the cartoon, flashing competing colors onto his great moon of a face. “Sorry for what?”
“Haess,” Two-Bit reminded him, a little sheepishly. “How the whole thing got outta wank.”
Nemo turned to his crewmate, green caramelized sugar stuck to his teeth. “The bloom’re you talking about?”
“The gunfight, Nemo,” Two-Bit repeated, now becoming concerned for the state of his Captain’s memory. “How that Prul put a piece to my head and we nearly got kuc–”
“No, no,” Nemo cut to the chase, “that I remember. I don’t understand what you’re apologizing about.” He shrugged, looking honestly bewildered. “That went great.”
“That did not go drongo,” Two-Bit was insistent, shifting his weight to better address his captain. “That is not how a drongo caper is supposed to go. A drongo caper wouldn’t have a blooming firefight right in the middle–”
“A boring caper, you mean,” Nemo muttered.
“But, for some razz,” Two-Bit continued, unable to completely stop his own rant, “every heist I schemed for you, since way back with Nemen Uil, always goes lollies up at some point. Like, we always make tracks and we even usually make tracks with the goodies but, I don’t know, there’s always something I can’t specc that makes the whole thing go a little antwacky.”
Nemo stretched both legs, plopping them atop the next row of seats in a manner anyone sitting there would find supremely annoying. “Example.”
“An example would be the Kapla Caper, or–”
“Weren’t your idea to knock over that Pickle Planet,” Nemo scoffed. “That was all me.”
“–or the Bozee Bushwhack, I guess–”
“Yeah, but Mongoose was asking for one in the brain,” Nemo argued, “and after that, we had a really good reason to give it to him.”
“The Zaboola Blockade, then,” Two-Bit resolved, confident in his logic.
This only caused Nemo to smirk in remember. “I’d always wanted to try that.”
“What I’m jabbing is,” Two-Bit reached his bottom line, “I don’t know whether this is actually working out all that well. Me on the crew, I mean.”
The silence that followed with filled with all Endless Night’s cartoonish clamor and Two-Bit’s anxiety at finally voicing that niggling doubt he’d nursed the past few months. Nemo simply stared.
“Dude.” He blinked once, like his point was self-evident. “I haven’t shot you. We’re buds.” He punctuated this heartfelt sentiment with a great mouthful of candyfloss. “You think all those jobs you planned were failures? I think all those jobs you planned were a blast.” He shook his head slowly, sucking sugar from each of his fingers. “That’s precisely the reason I like your plans. More fun.”
With that, Nemo had turned his attention back towards the exploits of Captain Starstrike and his lovable crew of misfits. “Nah, buddy,” he decided, the matter closed for discussion. “You’re stuck with us now.”
To that, Two-Bit made no immediate reply. His eyes had landed at the Attaché in his lap, now deactivated and all its secrets hidden. His thoughts ignored the frenetic cartoon that blazed all around him, peppered by the occasional snort, whoop or fist of thrown popcorn from his left. Instead, his thoughts dwelled on the caper that Attaché contained and all the pieces still missing from it.
When he’d left Gella’s care, nearly a year ago now, she’d tasked him to find – chief among many other things – a team that he trusted to run this caper for him. It was impossible for Two-Bit Switch not to consider this clunker, her crazed captain and her capable crew as candidates for the job. They weren’t perfect, that much was clear, and they weren’t particularly professional but they did have that inexplicable ability to always pull a messy victory from the jaws of certain defeat.
It wouldn’t be clean, it wouldn’t be the way that Gella would like it, but Two-Bit believed that they could walk away from that planet with a tree in tow.
That was all assuming he was there to chaperone them, every single step of the way.
That was when he remembered that last fateful conversation with Gella, the one they’d shared in the small hours of their final morning together. They might very well be capable of pulling off the caper but could Two-Bit really go through with his exit strategy, in that case? Wouldn’t complete strangers be preferable, considering what he was planning for the grand finale?
There would be another team, Two-Bit Switch knew. This one, like all his previous partnerships, would dissolve following a betrayal or a capture or a job truly gone awry. He was allowed his fun now, paying the bills while he researched and collected the disparate pieces of the caper, but when the actual showtime came, Two-Bit Switch would seek another crew, one with fewer sentimental attachments.
Until then, he supposed, he was stuck with these psychos.
CHAPTER 24
Flask has never been to Thaksu. Flask doesn't know anyone who's ever been to Thaksu. In point of fact, Flask had never even heard of Thaksu until they'd received Gertie's transmission. He knows Thaksu is deep Outer Ring and that means, in his imagination, it's an uncivilized boondock whose criminals are drooling hicks and where a heist is only considered successful when the entire planet's police force has been murdered in the process.
He's no idea, then why Thaksu's atmosphere would be littered with an impenetrable curtain of space junk.
“The bloom?” remarks Nemo, soon as they're through the Warp Gate and into the outer fringes of the debris field.
“Sensors're all wigged out, like,” Flask adds, all his instruments fuzzing over with static. “Can't raise nothing down there.”
“Get Gertie on comms. We better not've come all this way to get fucking bushwhacked.”
Peering nervously at the spinning wreckage that Nemo steers them ever closer towards, Flask inputs the coordinates and sends an introductory hail down to the planet below. By the time he's finished, Nemo's in the thick of things, navigating their bulky freighter through the maze of debris that seems to circle the entire planet.
The wreckage they pass is silhouetted against the planet's faint worldshine, highlighting every piece of charred, crunched or chewed up metal. The Lover's bombard shield brushes the smaller flotsam aside but it takes Nemo's trademark reflexes to steer the Briza past the few hunks of garbage large enough to, even at their decelerating speed, spell an end to the freighter.
At a glance, Flask would describe most of the wreckage as ancient mining equipment, based on the drills and pumps and magma drains he spots, typical of the Inner Sector mining megacorps. Scattered amongst these, now and again, The Unconstant Lover will zoom past a partially-hollowed asteroid or even through the fractured hulk of a capital spaceship. Whatever resources Thaksu might once have been responsible for, that industry's long since been abandoned.
Moments later, the comm chirrups to life as, against all appearances, someone's alive enough down there to answer his hail.
Her regional Talosian accent is unmistakable. “You made it!”
“Nearly didn't,” gripes Nemo as
he strains the Lover through a thorny patch of detritus, the ripped remains of an orbital backloader. “You know, you coulda mentioned we might warp into a fucking minefield up here.”
The connection crackles with what Flask assumes is the woman's chuckle. “Didn't really believe you'd make the trip, tell you the truth. Be careful, is basically the whole spiel.”
“Cool,” grunts Nemo unhappily. “Good timing.”
“Little worried about landing, like,” Flask leans forward to confess. “Screwing with our sensors up here.”
“That's sorta by design,” the woman replies. Before Flask can give Nemo a look, she goes onto explain. “Don't want the Imperium or whomever the bloom getting a bead on our operations here. It'll clear up,” she assures them, unconcerned about their destruction, “you get through the worst of it.”
“Sure hope there ain't the wrong kinda welcome,” Nemo suggests, the faintest trace of threat behind his voice, “waiting for us down there.”
This earns another laugh, distorted weirdly through the comm's interference. “Coordinates I sent you should keep you outta the public eye. Trust me, chaps. You're in good hands with me.”
“Much obliged.”
“See you dirtside,” the voice purrs and the connection shorts out.
As Flask is beaming the coordinates to the navpanel, the Captain ducks and dodges through the last outskirts of the scrap field, freeing the freighter from all that spins and drifts about it. Finally, The Unconstant Lover can make her approach to Thaksu unimpeded, with no more impedimenta to obstruct their view of the planet.
There's not much to the planet they discover behind the debris field. Thaksu is a ball of brownish-beige crud, devoid any splotches of blue and green to denote oceans or vegetation. The Lover's cursory scan indicates a high concentration of active technology but a comparatively low amount of organic life – some high density pockets but not nearly enough to occupy a whole planet.
At this distance, though, Thaksu appears to be anything other than a whole planet.
Jagged gouges mar the planet's surface, so deep they're actually visible from high orbit. So scratched and scraped, the planet resembles a piece of hard candy, masticated by a mouth of cosmic proportions. In one quarter, far on Thaksu's southern hemisphere, the entire crust has been punched clean through, sunlight streaming through the planet's grevious wound.
Whatever was once mined from Thaksu, it was clear to see, at even a passing glance, that it was all long gone.
The strange sight, beautiful and bizarre, draws the breath from both Nemo and Flask. “The bloom's she doing here?” wonders the Captain.
Moira stares across the mountains of stacked cash at the woman that she, Moira decides in a flash of prescience, will one day kill.
That woman in question, Gertrude Guspatch, looks positively pleased as punch to receive the four of them in their bedraggled state. After all, she – once Good Luck, then Gertie Gundeck and now, finally, Governor Gertie – is the allegedly benevolent ruler of this backwater dump. As long as they're here, in her court and at her suffrage, there's a certain amount of kowtowing and homage to be paid – something Moira Quicksilver flatly refuses to do.
Flask, however, has no compunction against kowtowing. It's he, goaded occasionally by a bashful Nemo, that makes the pitch. To his credit, he's a natural-born pitchman, spinning a tale of their daring and heroism that Moira, witness to all the fuck-ups and buhoxshit, nearly even believes.
“Colored me interested,” remarks Gertie, soon as she's heard the whole thing. She reclines there in her seat, the wad of cash in each hand so fat, she's practically spilling bills onto the floor around her.
“Can we,” supposes Nemo, a little ahead of Flask's obvious wishes, “color you an interested buyer?”
“For now,” she points one wad of cash his direction, taunting him, “just interested. Awful big decision to make, you gotta understand. Especially with that price tag.” She wears the expression of a hammy panhandler, undercut somewhat by the literal heaps of money all over her desk. “Times're tough.”
Flask's face is perfectly neutral. “Of course. We understand. How could we not?”
The five of them are crammed like canned sporefin into what passes as Gertie's office. This tiny thermosteel box would have been cramped for its ancient operating crew and, even with its instrument panels long since stripped clean for parts, the decrepit bridge is hardly enough space to accommodate a quartet of visitors.
It took even Odisseus a few moments of mental cataloguing to identify what Gertie's behemothic headquarters might have been during its own lifetime. This gargantuan hulk, the largest of the million similar that were littered across Thaksu's grimy surface, had obviously never been spaceworthy, not even fresh off the factory floor. Climbing through the ship's superstructure on their way to meet Gertie, Moira couldn't fathom what the craft could possibly have been originally constructed for. Essentially the same shape as a spaceship, she lacked thrusters, stabilizers, viewports and practically every other spacefaring feature.
When examining a patch of exposed hull plating, Odisseus concluded it was a magma diver, a submersible meant to navigate the molten sections of the planet's core.
Now it was flopped here on Thaksu's surface, like a beached leviathan, and Gertie Guspatch was running her current criminal enterprise out of its bridge.
Thaksu's primary terrain appears to be mudslicks, bottomless quarries and derelict mining equipment. On their overland stroll to the magma diver, they'd wound, boots slogging through grime and gravel, between dizzying drops into the planet's crust and the bones of timeworn machinery, rusted by rain and scrapped by scavengers. Looking at this wretched place, Moira couldn't start to fathom how Gertie transformed Thaksu into the criminal cash cow it evidently was.
The planet was clearly lousy with thuggery. A healthy spread of species, plus a gentle majority of local color – Naskren, Tixani, Ponduur – could be seen loitering around the dump, nursing nicotine halos, shooting the shit and universally tinkering with mining equipment. They climb and clamber about the skeletons of grim machinery, bickering and soldering and generally mucking about.
How all this translated into the topography of cash on Gertie's desk, Moira's no idea.
The Governor of Thaksu tosses her two handfuls of bills so carelessly onto the desk it threatens to topple all the careful stacks. She rises from her chair with a creak and stretches like she's heading home after a long day at the office. “Gimme a day or two, mull things over, talk you down from your price a bit,” she commands more than requests. “Then,” she resolves, at the absolute limit of her stretch, “I bet we can make each other very happy.”
Something in her expression or her voice makes Nemo and Moira cringe simultaneously. Flask is not to be fazed, however. “I'm sure that we can.”
“Enough fuckin' business, though, huh?” Gertie croons in a companionable way, adjusting the stupid frilly sleeves of her Trijan naval officer's duds. “How you like my new digs?”
“Not much,” opines Odisseus from the doorway and earns a glare from Flask.
At Gertie's raised eyebrow, Moira helps with the translation. “Not much.”
Much to Moira's annoyance, this seems only to amuse the gloating Guspatch all the more and she simpers. “I admit,” she confesses, milking the whole routine way too much, “don't make mucha first impression but, you know, you gotta look past the exterior, see the potential underneath.”
“Yeah?” Nemo grunts, a little willing to bite. “Potential for what?”
Her reply is sickly-sweet. “For carnage.”
A finger against a nearby control pad activates some hidden mechanism behind the wall and a panel shunts away, exposing the bridge to Thaksu's open air.
Scowls on their faces, the four pirates crane a little forward, eager to see what the bloom Gertie's hiding on this remote planet. Like a museum curator, their gracious host stands to the side, arms folded delicately while they take in the scenery.
When two war machines grind into one another, sparks and spare parts go flying. One vehicle is all rusty spikes and hard edges while the other is nothing more than an incline plane on boosters. There's some exchange of bladed weapons, revealed from hidden compartments, and the sparks only double, shooting high into the night sky. Both vehicles, bastardized nothings built only for destruction, disengage long enough to snarl at each other, like squared-off beasts, before the flamethrower makes its entrance.
The distant arena glows unearthly green, the crowd's cheer intensifies to a distant drone and Moira doesn't even need to look at Nemo to understand the expression that's plastered across his face.
“Demolition derby,” he breathes.
Odisseus would basically consider this torture-porn.
A 687 Autogrinder, heavy on its mag-treads, is still nearly toppled when its frontispiece is gored by the vicious teeth of an OreWorld CH8 forkdrift. The two vehicles, each one so retrofitted and jury rigged that his classification system is basically useless, jostle back and forth, neither one making a lick of progress, particularly with the mag-treads in the mud.
They don't struggle too long before a third party, a monstrosity of mangled metal called the Bucking Buhox, comes careening backward into the tangle, its stabiliziers ablaze. There's a heart-rending screech of twisting thermosteel as hull plates are peeled like fruit rinds. In moments, all three vehicles are inseparably gnashed together. Odisseus covers his eyes with a paw as all three pump their thrusters to escape, attempting to tear away. They only succeed, however, in ripping free the Buhox's fuselage in the process – spraying the battlefield with carbon petro.
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