Hull Damage

by Timothy J Meyer

  Whether the obese Obax that owned and operated the Heaven Spot was somehow in cahoots with Mel or whether he'd simply shown up to work one morning to discover an ornate ornamental sheen to his establishment, Two-Bit couldn't swear for certain, but the panoramic masterpiece, complete with massive underfoot depiction of Takioro Defederate Station itself, had certainly boosted the daily foot traffic the modest cantina could claim from virtually none to practically none.

  “Don't ye leave us in suspense, boyo,” Abraham beckons with a two-fingered gesture.

  Recalling an image from the Attaché with three taps on its touch screen, Two-Bit swings the device around and edges it across the table toward the Grimalti between two fingers of his own. “You know this gantine?”

  Abraham massages his wattle scrutinizingly before answering. “She's a schooner, ain't she? Vbeck & Rhissol, what, a GL-3?”

  “Spot on.”

  “Nabdres?”

  “Double spot on,” Two-Bit sprightly confirms as Abraham scrolls through various of the Attaché's displays. “Calls her The Dead Messenger and she's all ten flavors of combat zone booter. Half the size of the Lover, this one, but ball it up for me, she's tragged out beyond belief.”

  Another whistle from Nemo, no acknowledgment from the enthralled waitress. “Would you look at this?” the Captain, amazed in his vexation, breathes to no one in particular.

  “Ye ain't japin',” Abraham concurs gravelly. “Four bow chasers, two stern chasers, top-mounted swivel gun...” the sailing master numerates murmuringly with his archaic mariner's parlance, “not to mention her anti-pursuant bar engine.”

  Leaning halfway across the table, Two-Bit drums an illuminating rhythm against the touch screen to conjure more of the Dead Messenger's schematics for Abraham's perusal. “Don't blank on the deflective hull plates or the extended zeen of forward-firing zoomers,” he chimes cheerfully.

  “What's he smuggle?”

  “Wheels. Outta Haess.”

  Abraham, lopsided gaze still planted on the Attaché's rotating read-outs, declines backward, wooden chair voicing its dissent with an oaken groan. “What's this V&B gunrunner to do with us?”

  Two-Bit ventures a prankish smirk. “We're gonna pinch her.”

  An oceanic world in the Ring Confed's Sesmon Sector fabled for its blustery gales, behemothic jiihu fish and bribable politicians, Haess, ten months and a thousand years ago, served as the de facto base of operations for Two-Bit Switch and Nabdres No-Cock to peddle cut-rate firearms to underfunded mercenary firms and desperate revolutionaries. Bountifully possessed of a ditrogen copycat chemical, Haess shepherds itself a brisk munitions business, both over the counter and under the table; playing host for the industrial interests of major arms corporations like Halisdro or AccCo to legitimately manufacture substandard products while, in the same breath, supplying the booming criminal element with enough merchandise to fetch ample profits on the local black market. Into this sweetest spot of commercial climates did Switch and No-Cock ideally situate their exploitation of both gunrunning and graft.

  In hindsight, Two-Bit wouldn't have described it as an entirely unhappy union; the profits were tidy, the overhead was low and the only comeuppances delivered from on high resulted in a shared twelve-hour incarceration and, of course, Nabdres' eponymous gelding at the hands of a particularly displeased and particularly rancorous customer. Thusly, the unanticipated divorce of their business enterprise came as something of a shock when, after discovering Two-Bit's traditional seven-percent skim off the winnings' top, Nabdres lacked the felonious decency to properly execute him and rather opted to sloppily empty half a clip in the general direction of Two-Bit's crotch, in an attempt to “even up the score.” Luckily for Two-Bit's dangly bits, No-Cock was never renowned for marksmanship.

  Two-Bit managed to escape with manhood intact, though the four gunshot wounds he took to the legs during said escape ensured that, ten months later, when Nemo came to Two-Bit requesting a caper that would necessitate hustling a Haessian gunrunner, Nabdres comprised the beginning, middle and end of the potential target list.

  With a clamor sufficient to rattle both glasses and frighten the Attaché into “collision mode,” Nemo spanks the tabletop with a palm, in a last-ditch attempt to snag the waitress' bubbleheaded attention. Oddly enough, this most brutish of tactics is evidently successful; jarring the Obax from her slack-jawed preoccupation and into startled discernment of her single patron. “All the moons,” Nemo bemoans, jangling a pantomimed shot glass over his head to signify his earnest desire for alcohol, to which the apparently bleary barmaid sets about accommodating.

  “And how, precisely, do ye suppose we does that? Ye said yerself, this bitch's got more teeth than a Nartachi's bleeder,” Abraham challenges before licking dripping residue from off the worn sides of his homemade tankard.

  “Listen, I know Nabdres like I know my own lollies, don't I?” Two-Bit elucidates in a slightly hushed tone as he slants forward, counting each mannerism of his former accomplice on his fingers. “He never claws his bloomhole without snuffin' it afterward, he never inks his handle on his mess in the chiller–”

  “And that be a bad habit, no mistake,” Abraham pipes in, with a glance to the still thoroughly inattentive Captain.

  “–and, of greater jazz to us, whenever he and his outfit fangle themselves a beasty little heist, they have their pre-game beanos out at the very same pub. Every bloomin' time,” Two-Bit emphasizes by splaying out both hands and reposing back into his chair.

  A gleam, the waxing of piratical guile, enkindles Abraham's murky, asymmetrical orbs as the true disingenuity of Two-Bit's scheme dawns on him. “So, alls we have to do is–”

  Abruptly interrupting his revelation, the Obaxi waitress promptly appears bearing both the beseeched tumbler, brimming with the briny lather of Gitterswitch Gin, and an expression of vacant lassitude. “Was that so fucking hard?” Nemo casts both arms aimlessly upward in a brief, futile shrug. “Bloom me out,” he adds as he bewilderedly brings the drink to his lips.

  “–diddle around this boozer a bit, wait for No-Cock and his brunos to show, push their motherbloomin' buttons, lift the Messenger's jingles off one of the stiffs and, as habby as that, we'll be having the bees.” Two-Bit laces his fingers together behind his gratified head and reprises his earlier smirk with another, even more prankish version. “Easy as foogin'.”

  Sporting a sudsy new mustache, Nemo blinks into the conversation for the first time. “What're we talking about?”

  “Well, you've put your dick in it now.” Moira Quicksilver, all dourness and disgust, somehow materializes, standing two feet off Two-Bit's right shoulder.

  “Moons, woman,” Two-Bit flinches, sense of alarm summarily spiked by the double dose of Third-Ring-quality Spicion. “I didn't even ord the lift platform go.” Ignoring him as per usual, Moira thrusts a clammy sheet of letterhead across the flowery tabletop, pinned under tented fingers. Depositing the document before Nemo without further comment, she sheathes both hands to the stocks of her holstered firepower and awaits the Captain's assessment.

  For his part, Nemo scans the leaflet a moment, before billowing out a buffaloed breath and befuddedly pitching the paper toward Two-Bit. “Congratu-blooming-lations, numbnuts,” Moira lauds bitterly as Two-Bit gathers up the jettisoned flier to inspect its contents for himself.

  Two-Bit Switch had, in his decade and a half of breaking the law for money, encountered quite the lion's share of bounty postings, many promising pronounced profit, most detailing fellow ne'er-do-wells and a vanishingly small number of them emblazoned with his own lovable mug. While this most recent addition couldn't boast anything in the way of that last qualification, its achievements in the first two categories were impressive enough to be considered vaguely legendary.

  “250 thou? Quicksilver's affied there, you're crimin' for keeps now.”

  Abraham yanks the notice from Two-Bit's grasp to begin his inherently suspicious questioning of the new arrival. “Ho
w fresh is this?”

  “Very. Barely a week old,” Moira relates as she chews her bottom lip. “Took them some time to correlate their differing reports with the ConFed, but, as of last week, the Endless Imperium officially regards you as a hostile power. Which would make sense after you–”

  “Destroyed their warship. Sure,” Nemo concurs, craning to confirm details on the posting. “Still no picture, though,” he comments, crestfallen. “This artist's rendering maybe leaves a little something to be desired.”

  “Oh, this is gonna unlag a shiny new gauge of angler,” Two-Bit recognizes.

  “How'd ye know?” Abraham squints his oblique squint at Moira, who parries with an unflappable stare of her own.

  “Amateur hour at The Barrel's Bottom. Half-wit teenager with a dimestore piece tried to bushwhack me on my way out. Left her in a pile of her own broken teeth, though I did find this on her.” She waves an approximate gesture toward the certificate. “Indeed, you'll notice a supplementary reward there for an unidentified Anglian female.”

  “Ooof, you see this?” Nemo indicates with an eager pointer finger over Abraham's wrist. “That Chaperone, what you call it, the Indurna? It's entire crew; lost.” This confirmed with a nod from the Grimalti, Nemo sprawls back into his chair with a deeply contended comportment. “No survivors.”

  “Shit, 250 puts you on an even keel with Vel's own sweets, don't it?” Two-Bit posits with a propositional shrug and accompanying scowl.

  Nemo, reclining complacently, mushrooms into a deeply satisfied grin. “Does it now?”

  “Well, this certainly wasn't the reaction I'd anticipated,” Moira appraises resolvedly.

  “You get anything at the Bottom? No? Come on, pull up a chair, have a drink,” the Captain gesticulates from the elbow and inches an unoccupied chair away from the table with a gunky wingtip. “Hey, can we get another–” Nemo begins until, shooting a glance to his left, he notices the truant waitress, returned to her previous half-full mesmerism. “Oh, sublime,” he utters and clouts the tabletop again, rougher this time, unsettling an olive from Two-Bit's tumbler, sloshing Abraham's booze onto the bounty poster and jolting the baffled Attaché back out of collision mode once more.

  Moira, with a cursory glimpse at the reactivated device, spies the various displays and readouts with her archetypal foul humor. “What's this, Ott's audition? That gunrunning thing?”

  “Right first try. We got schemes on deerin' a combat booter off Haess.”

  “You ever hear of Nabdres No-Cock?” Nemo inquires.

  Tracing a finger along the touch screen, Moira frowns. “This is the one without the penis?”

  “Quite the little detective, aren't ye, missy?” Abraham calmly dismisses.

  Moira compounds her frown. “Yeah, well, I came to inform you that Xo's payment has finally come in, but I certainly didn't mean to interrupt the circlejerk.” Adjusting the weight of her gunfighter's rig with a thumb, Moira pads two steps away from the trio of conspiring hoodlums. “As you were.”

  As soon as the dispiriting first mate is thusly departed from safe earshot, Two-Bit Switch returns his gaze from the direction of her departure and musses up his face. “Jabb about your bleeders with teeth, eh?”

  –––

  Moira burns her tongue. It made exactly no difference how assiduously Moira followed the unimpugnable recipe, nor would her level of mental preparation, predicated on years and years of adverse trial-and-error, ever truly change this particular outcome because every single time Moira Quicksilver took her first sip of a new blend of spacer's tea, she burnt her tongue.

  She cordons off the scalded area by sticking out said tongue, banishes the gouts of steam issuing from her calescent beverage with a puff of breath and, balancing adroitly on one foot to increase her reach with the other, simultaneously clicks off the oven's port most burner between middle and pointer finger and heels open the chiller door. Ice was the simplest, if least elegant, solution to this time-honored problem, though, in all fairness, elegance was not a primary virtue of spacer's tea.

  Concocted either by bored fighter-jockeys on extended warp jumps or strapped freight trampers lacking the necessary funds for luxuries like alcohol, spacer's tea was ostensibly a revolting and poisonous category of hodgepodge grog, comprised mainly of boiled water and miniscule doses of the various lethal liquids one might find aboard a spaceship. Engine coolant, wiper solvent, other sundry chemicals like glareguard or turret oil, even trace amounts of carbon fuel were all popular ingredients for differing flavors and brands of the homemade tea. Moira herself prefers a straight helping of deceleration fluid, a fact she'd thus far managed to conceal from the cantankerous Odisseus, perpetually baffled at how frequently the booster's reserves needed replacement.

  Of course, the only way to consume spacer's tea and not suffer a horrific, retching death was to boil it beyond reason, to the point where any of the component toxins were summarily neutralized and their previous presence was demonstrable only by a sharply astringent aftertaste. In truth, most humanoid stomachs could barely handle the tea's pungency, which was certainly the drink's main attraction, beyond its reasonably affordable cost. Moira had, during her itinerant years as a wayfaring bounty hunter, cultivated an appetite for the appalling swill, though she required an empty galley to comfortably brew herself a batch.

  Plunking several iceballs into her steaming beverage while the open chiller pants huskily, Moira ponders the singularity of her solitude. Save Garrigan, sweating out another bout of retributive Vapid withdrawal, and Odisseus, sequestered deep within the belowdecks engine room, the majority of the conscript crew were squandering the remaining ten hours of their leave among the manifold venalities and vices Takioro Defederate Station could offer. With Nemo, Two-Bit and all the rest of the miscreants evacuated, Moira found herself with an unheard-of privacy in The Unconstant Lover's now vacant chambers and corridors, to engage in unobserved activities like blending a mug of spacer's tea or drilling a Tebi-Gali regiment in the open hold or wearing sweatpants.

  Momentarily affluent from her commission of Xo's payment, plus the augmented bonus that Salo, Taré and the smattering of other bounty-heads she'd been lucky enough to collect aboard the Shame, Moira could even treat herself to a posh Gitter vintage, securely stowed in the topturret compartment for future use, and a double carton of deluxe chiller cream on which she currently, along with her recently-finished helping of spacer's tea, held designs.

  Her comparably congenial mood is hastily curtailed, however, upon smacking the chiller closed with a clatter and glimpsing, for the first time, the appliance's only decoration. As opposed to Nemo's latter-day and grossly inflated bounty posting, which Moira begrudgingly anticipated, a freshly-purchased Bubble brand magnet pinions the dog-eared corner of an abhorrent illustration to the chiller's front door, a depiction so saturated with lechery, it's virtually transparent.

  The “Dread Pirate Blackbush,” with her eerily familiar footwear, sneers crustily out at Moira Quicksilver. A brief visual stalemate unfolds, one corner manifesting the austere comportment of the career gunfighter and the other all the buxom bravado that befits a pin-up prostitute, until the entire matter is brusquely concluded when the fuming Moira proceeds to tear the exploitative thing straight off the chiller and pitch it directly into the garbage.

  Chapter 12

  Two-Bit Switch appreciates nearly every aspect of his B7 Dissident – her relative range, her impressive stopping power, her agreeable weight distribution, even the contoured snugness of her grip. Coupled with the handy moonclips and her subsequent rapid reloading feature, the Dissident could have been, to Two-Bit's thinking, the ideal handgun, had not the recently departed Salo Shouldermount neglected to warn him of one little imperfection; her tendency to jam.

  The bane of all vintage revolvers, the B7's rotating cylinder was ill suited to the trigger-happy gusto Two-Bit and today's mercenary marksmen favor. When pressured by rapid firing, the weapon's expelling mechanism tends to constrict wh
ichever canister it's about to shoot and consequently obstructs the barrel. With his secondary firearm forfeited to a high-stakes Iniquity hand a week previously and monochrome laserfire erupting about his hunkered head, Two-Bit Switch, short of flinging his inoperable Dissident at Nabdres' assorted thuggery, is running low on options.

  To his immediate left, Ebeneezer, doing his level best to squat his mountainous purple frame wholly behind the overturned barroom table, palms massive shells into the magazine well of his Acathi Backlash 7-LV Bolt-Action Rifle and attends Two-Bit with a crumpled brow. “You tried smackin' it?”

  “'Course I have,” Two-Bit remonstrates sorely, “and it ain't done me no kindies thus far.” Despite the rebuke, he endeavors another attempt, walloping the stymied sidearm with the flat of his own palm, to absolutely no effect. “No squeak you got a spare on you?” Ebeneezer halts his reloading, withdraws the folded form of his electrochette from its scabbard and offers it offhandedly to Two-Bit.

  “Er, thanks, but no thanks, mate.”

  The cyclops shrugs his doublewide shoulders once, sheathes the collapsible weapon, sidles the shortened barrel of his rifle over the table's upturned lip and proceeds to thunder off a spray of buckshot in the general direction of the opposition. “Gotta get me wanks on another wheel,” Two-Bit resolves mutteringly.

  If memory served, Loose Lips was a placid, if unscrupulous, taproom of shabby titanium tabletops, gin of unremarkable distinction and quiet, corrupt company; the quintessential drinkery for underhanded, unmolested dealings. At present, however, its spacious common room plays unwitting host to a time-honored knock-down-drag-out brouhaha, almost worthy of the Admiralty's illustrious altercations. As if by some act of augury, a tempest, the brawl's superior in size yet possibly its equal in sheer vehemence, ravages the oceanic surface of Haess just outside, pelting torrential rain and sizable tidal waves against the ample windows of the anchored edificial bubble that houses the tavern.