Hull Damage

by Timothy J Meyer

  Eidesmoe leafs out a hefty sum of funds on an uncluttered space of table and slaps the lockbox closed harshly, the retina scanner re-arming. “Total should come to 64, for four gallons.”

  Two-Bit crinkles his brow and scoops up the money. Unbothered, Eidesmoe returns to his basin and drains the fourth carton into the last canteen. Two-Bit thumbs through the stack of crumpled bills, mostly originating from deep Ring worlds like Ostara and Bozee, before tapping the butt of the stack against an open palm to level it out. “I was vizzing to jack a lot less,” he comments, contentedly surprised.

  “Told ya,” Eidesmoe adds. “Hot commodity right now.”

  –––

  Moira Quicksilver shouldn’t smoke. Taxing on the budget of a common hood, hazardous to her health without heinously expensive genetic treatments and capable of recalling potent memories of her father’s jackets, Moira typically disdained smoking as a waste of time, money and energy, only occasionally engaging in the behavior to alleviate serious duress.

  She drains the next cigarette to cinders in under a minute, billowing the subsequent gouts of smoke out her nostrils like a Tyorth dragon and banishing the scorched stub to the gap between floor tiles, the same shallow grave where she’d sentenced the first three butts.

  She loiters on a Second Ring Takioro side-street, a constant amid a sloshing sea of both vaporous and humanoid effluvia. As the expected crowd of miscreants and vagabonds filter past, the air is ablaze with the mingling aromas of the dozen nearby restaurants, taverns, saloons and luncheonettes. Brined rodent mutton from the local Pickle Planet kiosk, freshly brewed Nokko chococino off the Nomad Café as it bustles by, the acrid and pervasive stench of overcooked jellyfish, all amalgam together to mellow the reasonably pungent smell of her Yellowtooth cigarettes into the stinking soup of the sweating space station street.

  Holster clips unbuttoned, fingers of her right hand limbered and prepared to draw a preemptive pistol at the first sign of trouble and resisting the urge to siphon off another cigarette from her dwindling emergency packet, Moira focuses her conscious attention on the passerby, scanning for any familiar face, all the while locking her peripheral on The Pistol-Whip’s side door, desperate for the first sign of Danbonte’s exit.

  This had been a stupid idea, a principle Moira was constitutionally averse to complying with. The Pistol-Whip presented itself as the double-edged sword of rendezvous points; its unpopularity was both her best defense and her worst alibi. It was extremely unlikely that Nemo or any of his crew would happen up this particular alley and spot her, lurking around the side entrance to Takioro’s only bounty hunter bar, but should they, she could employ no reasonable excuse they’d believe, considering her history. Her best option, if presented with one of the Lover's conscript crew, was to simply kill them, as she had Zella. People were ignominiously murdered on Takioro every hour. Doubtless she could at least capitalize on their bounty, if nothing else.

  Though, in truth, should Nemo himself come strutting down the street towards her, the best strategy she had was probably the same one.

  Despite this, she’d chosen a decent moment to make this most delicate of errands. Nemo currently hosted the third of his celebratory debauches at the Afterburn and the majority of the crew elected to attend. Those few who declined, Odisseus among them, were unaccounted for and could very possibly round the corner at any moment. Moira thumbs another cigarette from its packet.

  They’d been three days in Takioro, with plans to remain another four, before shipping off to whatever catchpenny chore Velocity had chambered for them on Rith. The crew, distended with the spoils of their piracy, had streamed off-ship to fritter away their winnings, ingest outrageous quantities of alcohol and catch new diseases from discount meals and even more discounted whores. The only dive and dicing den left untouched by the crew, on Nemo’s official mandate, was the Astrobounce, as the Captain, swollen with bravado, suddenly felt no need to float Gozzer his promised eight percent, a total beyond nine thousand credits, for nightclub repairs easily accomplished with six.

  She’s guzzled down half of the fifth cigarette and nearly gunned down a sulking Quarg brute she briefly mistook for a prowling Odisseus before Danbonte strolls out the side door, skimming a bundle of ill-gotten cash as if he’d just delivered a Nanosecond Pizza pie rather than a handful of blood samples. Moira curses the insolence of amateur bounty hunters and stalks forward to meet her redskinned co-conspirator.

  As soon as he’s within reach, Moira snatches outward, succinctly palming the money to stash it from prying eyes. If Danbonte is alarmed by this action, it doesn’t break his stride as the two fall in together, stalking back up the alley, Danbonte half-jogging to keep up with Moira’s brisk jaunt.

  “Looking at about a thousand,” Danbonte summarizes as he finally submits to a cursory glance about the street. “Lenduza sends his regards.”

  “Does he?” Moira inquires flatly, mapping methods through the madness of milling foot traffic. They were a sizable distance from the nearest shoot back to the First Ring, but they couldn’t chance riding it together. More likely she’d have to send Danbonte up there and she’d find another route back to the Lover, or better yet, to the Third Ring and lose a hypothetical tail entirely.

  “I guess the Iella was the big money,” Danbonte idly comments. “Seven hundred. Most of the Szarzarr were only packing short sheets in the Ring ConFed. Assault, battery, that type of thing.”

  “Can you do me a favor and shut the fuck up?” Moira hisses curtly, before spacing them apart between a crowd of quacking Kieshans, each one sprouting metallic oddments from their brows and beaks, as they strike out onto the main avenue of the Second Ring. Danbonte only replies with a huffy sniff and a steeling of his crimson facial features.

  They transverse the main thoroughfare for many long moments in silence, amid the desperate bleating of merchants, the hazy din of holovision advertisements clattering above them and the pooled hustle and bustle of a hundred passing sentients before finally clearing the last block. All the raucous tumult and atonal turmoil of a Takioro minute is oblivious to the circumventing stealth of two bounty hunters, one more discreet than the other, absconding among the ebb and flow of the pedestrians.

  A pair of tagalongs, both passengerless and therefore evidently in some manner of high-density drag race, zig past, perilously close to Moira's right flank, and zag onward, cutting uncomfortably tight corkscrews into the crowd. Promising station waifs, plucked from indigent lives in Takioro's drainpipes and sewage arteries by Velocity's opportunistic embrace, piloting decommissioned dash scooters, tagalongs, as they were colloquially known, were the only form of public transit the Defederate Station could offer. For a handful of change, anyone both wishing a whisky ride to the opposite side of the appropriate Ring and willing to chance bodily harm at comparatively high speeds could requisition the services of a tagalong and commute, by dangling off the trolley pole jutting from the scooter's tailpiece, to the destination of their choice.

  The shoot ingress swells ahead and Moira hastily calculates the most efficient trajectory to both escort Danbonte to the lift and achieve adequate concealment among the churning pandemonium of the embarkation platform. A driftconvoy, captained by a three-eyed Powosi taskmaster, promenades through the bystanders at the shoot landing, in seeming preparation to depart to the Third Ring, and Moira seizes her opportune moment.

  With a palm to the flat of his back, Moira pitches her compatriot towards the shoot before flicking the halved cigarette away. With a last surreptitious glance about the swirling hubbub of faces, she slinks off, hopefully unnoticed, into the crowd.

  –––

  Two-Bit cringes. The larger mantis, a bellicose brute of an Aloroid purple and apparently the house favorite, succeeds in achieving a headlock on its wirier opponent, the bleached and virulent Pixocotto white. Even at this distance, through the tobacco’s smoggy haze, Two-Bit can watch the serrated barbs of the prevailing grappler’s forearms rend and rake the chitino
us neck of its smaller adversary. The match’s final seconds include the frenetic floundering of the white’s ineffectual stinger and the nauseatingly progressive decapitation of the doomed mantis. Before long, the dangling head tumbles to the tile, the previously enraptured audience disavows their gristly reverence and explodes into a chorus of expletives, Velocity calmly applauds against the base of her wrist and Two-Bit subsequently loses a small fortune.

  The Depot-Commissioner thumbs another briku beech nut into her mouth and begins her pitch as the victorious Aloroid mantis, seemingly ignorant of the droves of attentive onlookers, begins to mate vigorously with the unsuspecting corpse of the headless white, eliciting disgusted protest and congratulatory whoops from the massed gamblers. As a result, Two-Bit has little difficulty paying Velocity with his unadulterated attention.

  “As I’m sure you’re aware,” she stipulates around the shape of her acorn, “my brother Baigo heads a small time cargo redistrib on Rith.” She casts the masticated shell into the dried sludge of the impromptu arena, along with the rest of the accumulated trash – Bubble cans, loose change and cigarette butts – that litters the saturated fighting ring. “And he’s recently come into the possession of some cargo he’s gotta move offworld to adequately vend. Discreetly, if it all possible,” she appends, shifting weight off her left elbow to daintily select another specimen from her greasy paper pouch of broiled nuts.

  “Hate to break it to ya, dollface, but we don’t really do discreet anymore,” Nemo disillusions jovially. Declining forward with both elbows propped on the grubby railing, he serves both as a counterpoint to the reverse reclining Velocity and the only sentient peering into the arena with absolutely no interest in any of the proceedings below, Two-Bit included.

  They stand amid the rowdy assembly enveloping the cordoned lip of one of the tavern’s lesser fighting pits which, in reality, are little more than cropped sewage pipes, jutting out of the unkempt floor and retrofitted to host miniaturized gladiatorial combat for the amusement of Dirty Fighting’s patrons.

  A sixteen table joint at the crux of three major gutters on the Sewer Level, Dirty Fighting panders to two of the largest constituencies on Takioro Defederate Station – the violent and the dirty. In addition to the sludge cocktails, the saloon offers its patrons the unique service of inhumane and consequently popular wagered combat between freshly imported forty-pound mantis, attack jborra and shovel-snout frackers. Every hour on the hour via the use of their dozen makeshift fighting pits, the tavern exhibits all manner of specialty events and grudge matches.

  The only major downside to doing business at Dirty Fighting is the pervasive sewage stink, supplemented suddenly by the noxious addition of mantis ejaculate. Deepening his cringe from his vantage three paces to Nemo’s left, Two-Bit resolves to stop hanging around places that smell like shit.

  Posted in reserve at a nearby cocktail table with the serenely sickened Moira, Odisseus seems assured by the publicity of their latest parley with Velocity, though Two-Bit reckons it prudent to withhold the notion that, should Takioro’s Depot-Commissioner wish to murder someone in station, she could accomplish it anywhere she damn well pleased without too much, if any, hue or cry. Traasha, ignoring her own drink at the end of the bar, guarantees that.

  “You’ll do discreet if I ask you to,” Velocity resolves and, as if to emphasize her point, vises the briku beneath broad herbivore’s teeth until it bursts.

  Nemo’s habitually unimpressed. “Your brother.”

  “My brother,” she mutters confirmedly as she mashes the nut to pulp. She glances over her shoulder at some commotion below.

  A triumphant mantis handler shepherds his engorged champion into a steel enclosure with a sparking neticgrappler while a dejected one ladles up the remains of the less fortune contender. Turning the nugatory marker over in his hands, Two-Bit empathizes, having only originally wagered on the Pixocotto white centered upon the memory of a dire sting one of the venomous fiends bestowed upon Two-Bit in his youth. What was once capable to the task of fully debilitating a six-year-old station waif for nearly a week now appeared paltry poison against all thirty-seven pounds of the incensed Aloroid purple, however.

  “So, Baigo’s got his hands on a valuable cargo at a bargain rate, an eager buyer waiting on Gant, everything seems sublime. But there’s one little snag.” Velocity's appeasing shrug does little to pull the punch. “Following some unrelated terrorist activity on the larger port towns, the Ring ConFed has spiked Rith’s system space security up a notch or two over the past few weeks and the contraband trade’s colder than a Bozeen tit down there,” she concludes with a deepening of her shrug.

  Two-Bit buzzes his lips with impatience. “So, what your frat and, by noil, you, hank yourselfs,” he expresses, intertwining his arms, “is a booter.”

  Nemo scoffs and twists a disapproving glimpse back towards Odisseus and Moira, obscuring his eyes from Two-Bit beneath the shadow of his billycock's rim. “I keep tellin’ ya, Vel, hoping one time maybe it’ll stick,” he reiterates, “I’m no smuggler.”

  “You gotta ship with decent ident jammers, compartments in all the right places and you can make her move like she’s your own two feet. What’s the difference?” Velocity theorizes brusquely, fingering through the package of nuts. “You got no idea how many cocks I hadta suck to move your flagged Kapla cargo. You owe me.”

  “Okay, okay,” Nemo amends amiably, gyrating a finger above his head in signal to Odisseus. If the Ortok comprehends its meaning, a vague approximation of the galactic ‘get me a drink’ gesture, he doesn’t appear to act on it more than squinting obliquely in response.

  “What’s the goodies?” Two-Bit presses, adjusting his comportment to directly face Velocity, who returns his consideration with little but withering contempt. Rather than hocking more witless abuse, however, the Vollocki delays her answer by glancing away herself, towards the direction of her own garrisoned bodyguard, before wandering her apparently reluctant gaze back to her order of saturated bar nuts and relinquishing bluntly, “Puppies.”

  Nemo suddenly freezes, ceasing his listless gesture to evaluate Velocity with a matching mask of incredulity. “Puppies?”

  “Domesticated tje cubs,” she’s quick to clarify. “Little blowbags go for a hefty price in the right market. Apparently bloodthirsty household carnivores are all the rage in the Inner,” she shrugs uncomprehendingly. “I don’t know.”

  “Wait, you’re serious?” Nemo slowly apprehends. “Actual fucking, like, puppies? Baby dogs are the cargo?” he continues to disbelieve, glancing hesitantly to Two-Bit for confirmation.

  “I ord of this,” Two-Bit attests grimly. “Bloke of mine, crimin’ the Inner, had a gashouse run booting the bity bastards. You ever bump Flask?”

  “He’s my damn cousin.”

  “He is?”

  “Yeah. You didn’t know that?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “On my mother’s side. Good kid. His dad’s a little–”

  Velocity clears her throat loudly. “Point being,” she redirects, “alls you gotta do is pick up the cargo, make it past Port Authority and rendezvous with Baigo’s people on Okberrin. It’s that simple. One little choke point.”

  “I thought we was all marked men in the ConFed,” Two-Bit invalidates with a spiking of his eyebrows and the slightest cock of his head. “What about the 78 worth of posting? Plus, we take on organi goodies, it falls on us to mess ‘em and slosh ‘em. It ain’t near as habby a hustle as you think it is.”

  Spewing a wad of crumpled shells into the vacating ring, Velocity finally unchains some ire. “Rith’s a province of the ConFed, numbnuts. You earn a flag in any other major system, any certified system in there, it’s gonna take the RPA at least three months to file all the digitwork. Nobody on Rith’s gonna give two jizz squirts about your little bounty.”

  “And the food?” Nemo persists.

  “All that falls under Baigo. He wants to keep his cargo alive, he’s gonna supply you w
ith everything you need to do that. Long as you don’t cook ‘em or step on ‘em or something, it ain’t an issue.” Velocity scoots along the grimy handrail several inches towards Nemo, as if to cloister him against Two-Bit’s ill council. “Listen, you don’t gotta tell me twice that this is a scrub job, alright? I know that – my brother’s just in a bad way right now and could use a little income. I’m his sister, what’m I gonna do?” she intones privately.

  Cornered, Nemo jabs a discouraged forefinger against the railing twice, lingers his hand in midair for a moment and ultimately pokes towards the reposed Velocity. “Alright. You win. You buzz the coordinates to the Lover, tell your brother we’re coming and we’ll take care of it. Savvy?”

  Velocity creases into a relieved smile. “Savvy.”

  “This squares us, though, Vel. No more ‘you owe me’ jobs. I mean it,” he admonishes tartly, eyes flashing impassioned for a beat as he repels himself off the railing.

  Her expression reforms hard. “I put you where you are, Nemo.”

  Flagging Two-Bit with two fingers, Nemo stalks away towards his re-enforcements, commenting conclusively, “And now you can’t put me back.”

  –––

  Odisseus hooks all eight primary claws, wicked fish-gutters, between the cracked lips of both plates and wrenches outward with every last inch of his backbone, only succeeding in uncoupling the panel after several arduous seconds of embittered struggle. Seemingly without warning, the panel ruptures forth and clatters itself to the Docking Port floor, plumb at Marco's feet. A charred and twisted chunk of plummeting metal, however, isn’t enough to even hiccup Marco's unremitting babble.

  “I mean, at that point, you might as well just rip the whole fucking system out, right, and fly around naked. It’d be exactly as useful to you as an old B24 relay strip. Seriously,” he emphatically squeaks, jangling his belay cords with the force of his pontificating. Odisseus chokes on a snarl and manages to spit out a question as he paws pointlessly towards the ship’s hull with his truncated rear paws.