Unconstant Love

by Timothy J Meyer

  Once it's past, Odisseus doesn't have a chance to glance up and confirm his theory about the mudwrecker's engine. It doesn't make a dozen yards before it catches a glancing blow from a stray capital-class bolt. The vehicle, Grav9 and all, is destroyed in a column of showering dirt and blinding green ditrogen.

  Dirt clods and hunks of thermosteel thud to the ground all around them. Flask makes a profound observation. “I would like to leave here.”

  “You're in luck,” Moira Quicksilver announces over the comm. Then, distinct from all the din of destruction and death and derby, there comes another sound. The sound is so pleasingly familiar that Odisseus, in a fit of madness, pricks up his whiskers in an Ortoki smile. Rising over the stadium's flanged and flaming walls comes the sound of The Unconstant Lover's jetboosters.

  “I'm not even about to ask,” Moira clarifies, “why the bleeding shit you're right in the middle of the demoliti–”

  Something takes Moira completely aback, stopping her smug superiority routine in its tracks. Odisseus is instantly terrified that she'll, for whatever reason, fly away and leave them.

  “–where's his clothes what the fuck.”

  High above, capital-class laserfire streaking past her, that sweet IZ36 Briza Light Freighter bobs into view. She hovers a moment between the stadium's struts before she engages jetboosters to, Odisseus imagines, swoop gracefully down into the arena, boarding ramp yawning welcomingly open. This is what he imagines, of course, but it's not exactly what happens.

  It becomes immediately clear that The Unconstant Lover has someone else behind the helm. With a little hiccup, she bumps into the stadium's upper lip and proceeds to scrape her entire starboard side against the thermosteel with a cascade of sparks.

  “Autopilot,” Moira is screaming. “Autopilot, I swear! Autopilot!”

  “Fuck you, autopilot!” barks Nemo, shaking a fist cartoonishly at the darkening sky as the Briza's shadow shelters them overhead.

  CHAPTER 26

  Moira is tossed unceremoniously starboard by a sudden shudder of the ship. With as much grace as she can, she clutches the wall of the abovedecks corridor, attempting to decide whether that was a laser blast, a collision or simply another swerve of the ship. She lingers there another second, trying to ratify that they weren't instantly destroyed by whatever it was – ditrogen, scrap metal or incompetence. Still alive and the whole ship around her, she hustles forward, headed straight for the gundeck.

  If that drug-addled moron was really about to kill them all, Moira Quicksilver sure as shit would die strapped to her Antagonist, gun literally blazing.

  When the three of them came scrambling aboard, manic and wild-eyed, Moira made the conscious decision to ask very few questions about what had happened. She didn't ask what the situation on the ground was. She didn't ask why they'd wandered into the middle of a demolition derby. She didn't ask where in the bloom all Nemo's clothes went.

  Thankfully, by the time they'd passed in the hall, someone had the foresight to throw his duster over his shoulders. That same someone hadn't the foresight, Moira was horrified to discover, to actually button the duster.

  With all speed, Moira made for the gundeck and a view much less grotesque.

  Three more times between corridor and topturret, Moira is tossed this way and that, most frighteningly once on the access ladder, where she's her most vulnerable. In short order, she's clambering into her cherished bucket seat, fumbling with safety restraints and surveying her surroundings.

  This gives her pause.

  The airspace all around The Unconstant Lover is thronged with floating and exploding junk. Shorn machine parts, busted mining equipment, the hollowed-out husks of moons-know-what, spin and collide and scrape against each other. The sky above Thaksu is a moving minefield, an ever-shifting maze of potential explosions, lurking behind every false move and every miscalculation. Through gaps in the tangle, Moira can catch glimpses of Thaksu's pockmarked surface below and even occasional flickers of the distant stars far above.

  All this Moira anticipated. She's known the atmospheric exit from Thaksu would be a complete crapshoot, as perilous as their arrival. Now, however, their captain is hopped up on bathtub narcotics and there's a capital-class cruiser unloading a planetary broadside at them.

  Every few seconds, there's a blinding green flash from above, so bright Moira must squint and look away. One moment, the freighter's rocketing around the side of gigantic decommissioned drilldrifter. The next, there's a brilliant green flash and all that remains is a few scraps of blackened thermosteel, spinning idly through the atmosphere.

  Once again, all The Unconstant Lover wants to do is leave the atmosphere and all the Gitter Consortium wants to do is obliterate them from orbit.

  Then the freighter slams into a hunk of floating wreckage and all Moira's bones are practically liquefied from the sheer whiplash.

  “Bombard shield!” she snarls, her safety straps fastened a moment before the impact.

  “Well, that's the question,” argues Odisseus over the comm. “Bombard against the wreckage or ray against the laserfire?”

  “Gotta be ray,” counters Flask. “One of them shots,” he times this observation perfectly as another blast tears through the surrounding scrap metal, “is gonna be the end of us. Few of them flotsams or jetsams,” he continues a little too casually, considering the thousands of jagged shards of thermosteel all around them, “the hull'll handle.”

  This inspires a growl of consternation from Odisseus on behalf of the hull and how much it can handle.

  “How's about,” Moira starts to suggest, when the disembodied arm of a driftcrane sails by, inches from crashing into the topturret and hurling her into open space, “we try to actually, I don't know, dodge a few of them, then?”

  “Sorry,” is a woozy-sounding Nemo's honest reply. “I'm feeling sorta dizzy.”

  “Oh, okay,” Moira allows bitterly. “Don't worry about it, then.”

  “Wow. Thanks for understanding,” a disturbingly sincere Nemo replies, before he crashes abruptly into another piece of trash, a loose scrap of unpeeled hull plate.

  Soon as the shaking's stopped, Odisseus is howling over the comm. “You can't use sarcasm with him right now! The fucking soak's fried his brain and he's gonna take you literally!”

  “Well, excuse blooming me!” Moira snaps back. She decides to take matters, along the reins of her Antagonist, in her own hands. “Guess it's all up to Auntie fucking Moira again.”

  The firing chamber buzzes with anticipation before Moira lets fly. She draws a bead on the nearest piece of space junk – some shattered satellite or another – and, a few canisters later, it ruptures in green sunburst. The force of the blast even spins away nearby wreckage and clears a path for the unobstructed Lover to race through.

  There's no time to celebrate when she's swinging the turret around and choosing a new target. An orbital backloader is dismantled by precision strikes here and there and here, leaving only smoke and dust for Nemo's unsubtle piloting to plow through. Something ignites the spare fuel cells aboard the next shapeless hulk that Moira targets. The ensuing explosion is both fantastic and mostly deflected by the Lover's ray shield. An onslaught of ditrogen punches a hole clean through a massive sheet of thermosteel, large enough to steer a Briza Light Freighter through with only minimal scraping at the edges.

  This allows what’s left of Nemo's rotted brain to focus on the task at hand – avoiding those ship-destroying laser blasts. Thanks to the bright telltale flashing and Flask's terrified screams, the Captain's squirrelly attention is kept focused long enough to stay a little ahead of their destruction.

  To dodge the next barrage, his innate piloting instincts spin the freighter hard to port and straight towards a spray of scrap metal. With a fierce pivot of her hips, Moira's able to swing her Antagonist rattingly around and rip them into small shreds that dink harmlessly against the Lover's hull.

  “Can I ask you guys a question?” posits a suddenly contempla
tive Nemo. “I think I need some advice.”

  Not thinking, Moira makes her typical snarky reply. “By all means.”

  The Ortok's rebuke is sharp and bestial. “No sarca–”

  “Thanks for understanding.” Nemo dips the Lover a hair to allow another great green laser bolt to burn past the ship and especially past the topturret. “So, Gertie offered us 70 million even, you know, to buy the sapling–”

  “She did what?” Flask spits.

  “–but she also said that I had to quote unquote come to bed with her and Triggan?” This is met with a pause of legendary proportions. “Her husband, right?” Nemo clarifies, for no one's benefit. “With the wings and the funny accent and the things on his fa–”

  “And what,” a reluctant Odisseus strives to ask, “did you say?”

  “See, that's thing,” Nemo starts to explain, “'cause I didn't really say anything, 'cause that's pretty much when the spice–”

  “We gotta proximity spike,” blurts Flask, the appropriate alarm bleeping in the background. “Another ship, maybe ninety degrees off the starboard.”

  “I got visual,” Moira confirms, glancing that direction as she hauls the turret around.

  Only spitting distance to starboard, there's another vessel. She's smaller, in much better repair and of some specific make and model that Odisseus could certainly identify and Moira certainly didn't care. Her bombard shield engaged, she navigates the tangle of space junk as best she can and braves the occasional capital-class blast that's thrown her way.

  Fast as Flask can report them, Moira can spot them, smuggled among all the other moving metallic parts in Thaksu's atmosphere. A fleet of scrappy, third-hand ships – the spacecraft of the sector’s gambling scum – race The Unconstant Lover to the Warp Gate. While not the Galactic Menace, the local riffraff are no more eager to be caught or killed in this random Consortium raid than the galaxy's most wanted are.

  Those few ships not blessed with Nemo's dumb luck, however, quickly meet their comeuppances. For the crime of flying with only bombard shields activated, the odd fleeing freighter is caught in a blast from above and reduced to a spinning, fiery carcass. Crashing into adjacent trash or occasionally adjacent craft is a brief, horrific and illustrative death, a sharp education for Moira about the consequences of bad luck or bad steering.

  For every ship that gets pulverized, another rises to take its place. The whole way up to Thaksu's high orbit, The Unconstant Lover is accompanied by a loose, unofficial escort of other scumbags.

  “Do you guys think I should do it?” Nemo proposes to the ship as a whole. “'cause like, if you think about it, I'm pretty sure when they said quote unquote come to bed, they were really talking about–”

  “Do I think you should fook that nice lady?”

  “And her husband,” Moira reminds them both. “With the things on his face.”

  This doesn't seem to bother Flask one bit. “Bloom me out, for 70 million credits, I'd fook you and your husband. You get me?”

  Odisseus is taken aback. “Is that supposed to be a reference to me?”

  “Hey, that's really nice of you,” Nemo appreciates. “I don't really have 70 million credits to give you, if we did fuck, but the offer is–”

  “Is there still time,” wonders Odisseus, “to turn around? Do you think it's still on the table?”

  “We’re outta time for turning around,” Moira regrets to inform them. “Dead ahead.”

  Open space is mere dottibles away. Moira can see its comforting blackness in the seams between the space trash ahead. The obstacles start to thin, the planet's gravitational grip lessens and soon, they'll be free of Thaksu and that much closer to the Warp Gate and escape.

  First, of course, Moira must shoot their way to freedom.

  Right as she’s choosing her first target, a broadside from the Consortium cruiser destroys every loose piece of trash – the skeletons of beam drills and moongrinders and driftsleds – that floats between the Lover and open space. For one moment, everything in Moira's line sight becomes an orange-and-green hellscape. When the proverbial dust settles, there's a fine mist of razor-sharp thermosteel racing towards them.

  There's no time to aim. Her bombard shields disengaged, The Unconstant Lover is about to be nickel-and-dimed to destruction – unless Moira and her Antagonist can save her.

  One hand snaps open the cylinder and prepares another ammunition chain. The other hand and a guiding knee open fire, laying about in great sweeps of the Antagonist, hoping to spread a fine green net across the Briza's bow. She's rewarded by little pops, her ditrogen finding marks on each little fleck of shrapnel coming their way.

  Of course it's impossible to catch them all. Drawing lines of sparks and peeled paint, the flecks she did miss claw against the Lover's triple-thick hull to little effect. The real danger comes when one impacts against the topturret's viewport. A single rivet imbeds with a little chipping sound in the plexishield and there it freezes, framed by a corona of cracks that reach out in every direction.

  Moira too freezes and stares. The Antagonist's fire dies and her body goes rigid, her life hanging in the balance of that little screw. As Moira watches unblinking, the cracks spread no further and, for the moment, she's safe from an asphyxiating death.

  When she returns from her personal peril to the general peril, Thaksu's junk field is behind them. Open stars span outwards before The Unconstant Lover, interrupted by two notable landmarks.

  The first is the Warp Gate, that distant hoop that the rest of the galaxy beckons them through. Without a dedicated navigator aboard, the Warp Gate was their only hope of true escape from Thaksu and the clutches of the second notable landmark.

  A Consortium Corporate Cruiser, that very same outline that haunted them from the skies above Gi, drifts across their view and moves to intercept their straight shot to the Warp Gate. Vital information scrolls across Moira's panels, naming the ship the CGF Logistic and one of the Quadrant's native mercantile envoys. Here to play bad cop, the Logistic must have borne the nearest spice rangers the Consortium could possibly scramble, which explains how a naked and zonked out Nemo could’ve escaped their clutches.

  The moment they emerge from the trash cloud, the Logistic's generous supply of broadside batteries doesn't ignominiously gun them down. This, Moira supposes, is thanks to the protecting halo of fleeing freighters, rattletraps and jalopies that emerges at the same time they do. In moments, Moira knows, the gunnery crews will decide that plastering all these vagabond spacecraft will do the Quadrant a favor and open their fire.

  Before they make that decision, the Lover needs to cut a very hasty retreat.

  “Coordinates,” Moira is barking into the comm, “soon as we can raise them–”

  “Who're you blooming talking to? Me?” demands Flask after too long a pause. “Are you suggesting I abandon the fooking shield station here, so’s I might run off and–”

  Nemo won't countenance this. “Oh, no, Two-Bit. We need you at the shield station.”

  Flask's response to this is nonverbal but still somehow strong enough to register on comms.

  “Should I be heading to the warp room, then?” Odisseus starts to volunteer.

  “Somebody fucking should,” Moira makes the somehow ambiguous point.

  “Then, do we have any idea for a heading? Nothing's nearby enoug–”

  Her eyes fixated on that faraway Warp Gate, Moira notices its activation lights before even, seconds later, Flask reports that it's coming online. He prattles off some warning in his Gallwegian brogue but Moira's attention is occupied solely by what actually comes through the Warp Gate.

  The impossibly long silhouette of a TFD 545 Pylon-class Capital Warship pops into existence, vomited through the Gate at reality-bending speed. The powerhouse of the Imperium Interstellar Navy is joined, moments later, by the rest of its friends. Four Chaperone–Class Capital Clippers shimmer into view around the vastly larger Pylon. The gang's not yet all here, of course, as a pair of Ov
erwhelm-class Mobile Fighter Gantries, soon to be swarming with Spurs, warp in last.

  Where, seconds later, there was empty space, there now awaits a full fleet of the Imperium Interstellar Navy, seemingly panting from hustling over here so fast.

  To the starboard stretches a Consortium Corporate Cruiser, here to punish The Unconstant Lover and collect or destroy her stolen sapling. To the port is arrayed all the might the Endless Imperium could bring to bear upon the Galactic Menace at such short notice. In between, at the end of this hellish gauntlet, is that Warp Gate, the only door still open to escape.

  The next few seconds are flooded with external comm chatter. Admirals and executives, captains and financiers are bickering with each other, attempting to determine who outranks whom. In one ear, the Consortium is asserting its property rights and in the other, the Imperium is ordering an immediate ceasefire in their august presence. Soon, Admiral Dzerric of the Pincer Maneuver, the 27th Fleet's flagship, is threatening to invalidate the Consortium's ability to trade in the Inner Sectors. Captain Jessaline of the Logistic responds by accusing the Admiral and all she represents of committing war crimes.

  Meanwhile, The Unconstant Lover's internal comms are also flooded with chatter, no less officious or galaxy-shaking.

  “Holy fooking shite,” Flask is still repeating. “Holy fooking shite. Holy fooking shite.”

  “It's still processing!” Odisseus snaps, all prickly. “I'm looking at that blooming little hourglass thing!”

  “There's no way they were scrambled this fast,” is Moira's assertion, attempting to make sense of the intergalactic incident that's playing out before them. “We're talking about separate rats, right? Somebody tips off the Consortium, somebody else tips off the–”

  “I think I'mana do it,” Nemo resolves. “I think I'mana fuck Gertie and her husband with the things on his face.”

  “Holy fooking shite.”

  “There!” announces Odisseus. “We have contact with the Warp Gate!” Everyone aboard the Lover is silenced by this, only the external comm continuing to prattle with more accusations between the galaxy's superpowers. “Says we're outta range to establish a firm coagulation,” the Ortok reports, crestfallen.