Hull Damage

by Timothy J Meyer

  The prisoner flops prostrate against the sloping surface of the crater with a sodden squish. “I swear, that's all I know. I was just a Field Captain. I follow orders. I swear.”

  “Hm,” Ott grunts, unsatisfied. “Too bad. Nemo?”

  Like a child on his birthday, Odisseus' saltbrother ruptures into an exultant and profoundly nefarious grin before he triggers the sparker afire once again. Haldaz has barely a second to glimpse his incoming fiery destruction as Nemo consummates his fathomless hatred for the Endless Imperium with a simple “Drink deep, cocksucker,” and tosses the conflagrant sparker into the bowl.

  Chapter 13

  Moira Quicksilver executes a passable Headlong Buhox, ramming her forehead directly into her opponent's chalky countenance. She follows this with a shoddy Clapping Ksaosiok, viciously snapping both wrists to the crux of its imagined neck. She finishes with a flawless Oabbra's Visegrip, simultaneously kicking high left with her right knee and chopping low right with her right fist in order to instantaneously hook and topple her bulky, leathern adversary.

  The punching bag recoils, jouncing wildly about with the links of its ceiling-pinioned lead rattling. Garrigan, seconds before the haymaker, releases his steadying hold and inches half a step away, to avoid being incapacitated himself. Moira, exhaling a fierce athlete's breath, matches the bag's drunken dizziness with her own boxer's bounce and dashes some of the sweat from her eyes. “I'm gonna try the clap again – I didn't get enough torque that second time.”

  Garrigan spews a wad of masticated fungus from his mouth. “Sure,” he vacantly concedes between upraised hands.

  This particular move set continued to vex Moira, mostly because the specific combination was itself a little nebulous, only hinging on the effectiveness of the conclusive Visegrip, and thusly, its exact preluding ploy was pretty much dependent on the individual Gali's fancy. Moira typically settled upon the aggregate cranial discombobulation afforded her by the jolt of a Buhox's fierce headbutt mated to the momentary paralysis a Ksasosiok's polarized clap induced. However, this combo tactic was measurably slower than the one-hit-wonders most brawnier practitioners could usually rely on and Quicksilver, of significantly slighter build than the average specimen of the martial art's founding species, scrambled to compensate.

  Moira undertakes the routine a third time, with an exact eye toward achieving the necessary leverage to maximize the clap's efficiency. She decreases the headbutt's initial drawback, amending the Buhox from a brutal nose-breaker into a mere bell-ringer. This allows her the necessary nanoseconds to properly focus the kinetic energy of the clap and deliver a vectored strike potent enough to fully disconnect the punching bag from its crook. The attendant Visegrip arrives just in time to callously clobber the bag with a leathery slap to the thermosteel floor.

  Panting perspiry over the fallen form of her fat inanimate foe, Moira Quicksilver sweeps the sparse occupants of Ott's subterranean gymnasium, as if in challenge or defiance, like a spent predator standing vigil over the carcass of sought-after prey. The smattering of off-duty muscle and tight bevy of vo Qwer's Baziron faithfuls seem bored or unimpressed. Garrigan golf-claps.

  “That'll do, I guess,” Moira breathlessly intones.

  “Question,” Garrigan poses as he kneels to collect the crumpled remains of the lambasted bag. “I can't imagine too many of your theoretical opponents would have, what's the word, the courtesy to just swing there, waiting to have the ever-blooming shit slapped out of them, would they?”

  Moira bops back a little, throwing a few playfully pantomimed punches. “Probably not,” she concedes.

  Steadying himself against the weight of the pendant chain, Garrigan rises, bag cockled over his shoulder, and begins fussing with the hooking mechanism. “Then, what's the point?”

  “Of a martial art?” she clarifies, mopping her brow with a forearm.

  “Yeah.”

  “Ostensibly, discipline,” is her short answer to a question Nemo'd pestered her about ever since he stumbled onto her rehearsal in the abandoned hold during an extremely lengthy layover on Cothmozar. “Focuses your mind, maximizes your output.” She sidesteps left to snatch her draped towel off the adjacent chair before adding. “I don't know – seemed like a good idea for a bounty hunter.”

  “And you keep up with it?”

  “Apparently.”

  Snapping the clasp connected and shuffling the sack off his shoulder, Garrigan allows sufficient berth for the punching bag to dangle, relocating himself to the seat left vacant by Moira's towel. “So, this is just in case you miss them with both of your pistols?”

  Her face freshly swabbed, Moira peevishly pitches the damp towel from whence it came and subsequently into Garrigan's unsuspecting face. He fumbles with the castoff cloth a moment, before draping it over the aloft railing and stooping to the ground to retrieve his own discarded items. As Moira deposits herself into a Counterbalanced Gracko stance, Garrigan gathers up the unhinged exertion sleeve and withdraws another sinewy, shaved stem from his tepid glass of jehorak mushrooms. He slides the former clumsily around his left calf and pops the latter into his waiting mouth.

  It had been no simple task requisitioning jehorak mushroom this far from Nos Mantri, even for Ott's exquisitely stocked larder. Yet, after several abortive efforts to combat his voracious Vapid withdrawals, regularly chewing on cured stems of its component fungi had yielded the most measurable remedy of the narcotic's exorbitant aftereffects on the Lover's undergunner. After only five days of nibbling mushroom stems, the changes to his demeanor, activeness and appetite had been gradual but profound, ameliorating even his appearance into something resembling a humanoid being from the malodorous skeleton he'd seemed less than a week previously.

  Regardless, Ott's Nyvo kitchen master persisted in looking down his forked snout at her whenever Moira arrived in his expansive galley to replenish Garrigan's depleted stock of jehorak stems, a repeated reminder of the tenuousness of their position within Ott's criminal household.

  Such implicit admonitions were never more present than in the company of vo Qwer and his outfit of allegiant Baziron. Moira instigates her first bout of left knee strikes and Garrigan switches the exertion sleeve on with a clack and accompanying hum as the seven such Baziron patriots bore of free weights. Clustered together like a departing flock of scavengers, the Baziron take their collective leave of the gymnasium via the distant lift tube, all prattling amongst themselves with their thrumming throat sacs, all spoiling at Moira with those distrustful scowls their mouthless faces seem to perpetually leer outward.

  “Abbers,” Garrigan breathes when the sibilating troop is safely out of earshot. Watching them retire over her shoulder, Moira pounds the bag with a knee.

  They were an odd and disquieting breed, these queer sanguivores of Baz's bloodless bush. In the fourteen days the crew had frittered away, savoring the manifold comforts and profuse succors of the Galactic Menace's polar fortress, Moira had casually observed the movements and behavior of the taciturn vo Qwer; Ott's mute shadow and the ringleader of this group of native militants.

  From what little information she'd managed to glean, vo Qwer began his service to the Galactic Menace as a gift, an emissary of sorts from the “Dancing-Horizon kojaj” as Ott referred to it, presumably one of the several Baziron tribes dwelling on the planet's northern continent. While he appeared a stout and unflappable guerrilla, vanguard and pathfinder, the dietary and cultural barriers kept him at arm's length from Nemo's commissioned cutthroats and even Ott's own brigand band. If the sedate Baziron ranger or any of his roughly two-dozen hangers-on took offense at the considerable berth afforded them, however, they gave no outward sign.

  While the enlisted natives, vo Qwer included, seemed to, however reluctantly, tolerate the cooperation of Ott's established pillagers, their exact opinion of Nemo, Moira and the rest of their irregulars was relatively indiscernible across the mammoth ethnic gap.

  Moira eyes Garrigan. “Not a fan?”

  “I d
on't know – I feel sorry for the silly blowbags.”

  She halts a beat, hesitating on one foot, before delivering another punt. “Why?”

  Garrigan withdraws the jehorak stem between pointer and middle finger as he considers. “Well, that's the whole notion, isn't it? The plucky, fractious natives fending off the militaristic invaders for home and hearth, right?” He places the stem's butt between the right side of his bite, almost imperceptibly shaking his head. “At least the Mantrians had the foresight to assimilate.”

  “You see combat out there?”

  Garrigan snorts. “Through the window of our embarking cruiser, maybe.” The exertion sleeve packaging his lower leg ceases humming and he reaches down to unfasten it. “Moons, this woulda been, what, twelve, thirteen years ago and, as I remember it, by the time the 16th Fleet arrived, most of the truly deplorable shit was pretty much over. Besides which,” he adds, peeling the limp device off his clammy calf, “tail gunners typically don't see a lot of ground action.”

  Moira switches feet. “Fair.”

  “I did, however,” he comments, gingerly cinching the sleeve around the meat of his left thigh, “spent some quality leave time there, you know, absorbing a little local color,” he bares his teeth to highlight the fungal barb drooping like a stogie out of his mouth, “and we all know how well that went.” He dials a few settings into the sleeve's menu before muttering “And not just for me.”

  Moira wallops too hard, sending the kick-addled sack lurching away, and she spares Garrigan a brief glance before it returns to range. “For the Mantrians too?”

  “The dumb ones, anyway.” The exertion sleeve quivers into operation, blanketing and buffeting the enclosed thigh with repulsion and retraction waves to flex and exercise the muscles beneath, Garrigan wincing as his still-sore gunshot wound is gently kneaded. “See, that's the thing with abbers, the thing that pisses me all the way off. They regard themselves as these defiants, you know, fighting to the last man, fighting only for survival–”

  “–and then the Imperium, of course, are just greedy cocksuckers, come to rape and despoil their planet for fun. Sure.”

  “They have no context, these indigenous.” Garrigan adjusts his posture as he begins to relate. “You gotta think of the Imperium as a big hungry animal and, if seven centuries of galactic conquest have taught us anything, we oughta know that an animal doesn't like to get cornered. When that happens, it'll eat anything its gotta to survive. Governments, people, planets – all more grist for the mill.”

  Moira desists her kicking as Garrigan chomps the jehorak stem messily in twain and wrenches the protuberant end free, gesticulating with one severed stump while he summarizes around chewing the other. “The Imperium gets stuck on something, be it drugs or repellent or whatever, they'll fight to the last man to take it – they've just got more ships and more guns and more men. Sooner, rather than later, they're gonna put a definitive end here – to Ott, the Baziron, all of it.”

  Moira lingers on one foot, watching Garrigan chew. “And the dumb Mantrians?”

  He shrugs resolvedly. “They got smart or they got dead.”

  –––

  Odisseus is thoroughly drenched. Chlorinated water continues to slough off his bristly fur, even after forty minutes surfaced, pooling in great puddles on the deckplates between his hind paws and potentially lessening The Dead Messenger's overall market value. Nemo, though, snapping dials and twisting switches with complete disregard, has little ground to object, likewise sodden and dripping from their mid-afternoon swim.

  He occupies the pilot's seat of this pilfered V&B GR-1 Interloper with all the authoritative impudence of her Captain, but with none of the infatuated homage he pays the Lover whenever he graces her helmsman's chair. Juxtapositionally attired in only his scrappy pilot's duster and his sopping swim trunks, Nemo rebounds the swoop-back seat off the precarious limit of its reclination and shovels fork loads of Jowna directly from his battle-scarred pot and into his eager mouth. Swimming had always given the both of them monstrous appetites but even granted access to the vast multitudes of Ott's unreasonably well-provisioned larders, his saltbrother still unflaggingly favors dimestore instant noodles.

  Odisseus, his big wet girth overwhelming a co-pilot's seat clearly built to accommodate a co-pilot of more Prulish proportions, flatters the red light of the navpanel with a disinterested glance. “Tell me when you see it.”

  Propping one foot against the counter, Nemo gradually hoofs the pilot's seat around to face the exposed wiring where the regulation grid had once been bolted. After a few prolonged seconds of slurping limp noodles into his mouth, Nemo frowns into the jumbled mess of crusty regulatory cables. “I see nothing.”

  “Nothing?” Odisseus squints in Nemo's general direction but, as always, his narrow eyesight fails him. “You should see prescribed activity on port and starboard alignment thrusters.”

  Nemo nudges his head a scant inch in each of said directions while harvesting another bundle of Jowna with successive gyrations of his fork. “What does it mean if I don't?”

  “That I did something wrong,” Odisseus quietly muses, regarding the navpanel with a consternated scowl.

  Fresh off the factory floor, a GR-1 Interloper of the Messenger's clean caliber could conservatively be audited at well over four times the Lover's own totaled monetary value and, coupled with the various individual modifications, many costly and many more illegal, The Dead Messenger was potentially the most profitable prize they'd ever managed to seize, especially considering that she was relatively undamaged, unlike the vast majority of the Lover's previous catches.

  However, with the promise of profuse proceeds came the need for assiduous maintenance and, as Moira and her four-man prize crew could attest to, Odisseus' shrewdness had indeed been well-founded. While The Dead Messenger certainly compensated with premium equipment and embellished gadgetry, negligence had apparently been the order of the day under Nabdres', and quite possibly Two-Bit's, regime. Compounded laxity, mostly as regards to the auxiliary systems, had quietly accrued beneath undisturbed plates and panels, improprieties only brought to light under the Ortok's seasoned diligence.

  Nemo considered rectifying wave after wave of minute mechanical indiscretions a tedious way to pass an afternoon, particularly in deference to swimming, but Odisseus found a certain degree of inexhaustible refreshment in starship repair aimed to his direct profit and unrelated to his direct destruction. Each fault he remedies denied the discerning buyer a chance to micro-disparage the Messenger to a lower price and in the event he catastrophically botches a particular repair, he was unlikely to face any explosive consequences.

  A constant in their provisional daily schedule, three hours of ten afternoons, directly following an invigorating hour in Ott's underground pool and unerringly preceding a dinner of authentic preserved dubix trout, were spent inspecting and examining the Messenger for the open market. Swimming with his saltbrother, consistent meals of extinct fish and a state-of-the-art spaceship to tinker with – sixteen days of leave on Baz had been kind to Odisseus.

  Now if he could only stabilize those navigational thrusters.

  A modernized ringtone severs Odisseus' concentration as the dashboard comm unit emblazons an incoming transmission across its touch screen. Nemo and Odisseus reciprocate each other's wary glances and crane forward in concert to check their mysterious caller's scrolling identification number. “Unknown Herald,” it claims, the sobriquet most communication computers assign to unregistered channels and subsequently, the telephonic alias of ninety percent of Bad Space, though the determining digits themselves are apparently appreciable to Nemo.

  “Brondi.”

  “Sublime,” Odisseus murmurs as Nemo taps the touch screen in question with a pinky, balancing an unstable noodle knot atop his upright fork.

  “Nemo here.”

  “Permission to come aboard, Captain?” Brondi's oily arrogance, present even in such a seemingly complacent request, oozes from encircli
ng dashboard speakers. Nemo appeals Odisseus with an irritated glance, to which the Ortok rolls his eyes and returns to the navpanel.

  “Permission granted.” With another tap and a combination of rapidly rapped keys, Nemo concurrently silences the transmission and initiates the lowering-ramp sequence before flopping back in his chair and thrusting the saturated wad of Jowna into his mouth. “What do you suppose he's after?” he manages from somewhere behind the noodles.

  “Money,” Odisseus flatly returns, toggling a string of switches to evidently little effect. “I'm thinking,” he gladly changes the subject, “we've got a thruster fluctuation problem.”

  “Yeah?” Nemo grunts.

  “Yeah.” Odisseus reels his seat starboard to correlate his hypothesis against the computerized fuel register. “I'm getting no triangulation between navcontrol and the turbine motor. If this computer is to be believed, the flanges are properly adjusted, but if you're not reading activity, then they certainly aren't.”

  Nemo swallows the mouthful. “What do you think, then?”

  “Missed synapse somewhere. Situation like this not commonly caused by software failure.” He finishes fiddling and adjusts his posture to properly address Nemo, brushing matted wet fur from his eyes. “Probably hardware.”

  Nemo slings the presumably empty pot aside, clanking against the instrument panel and assuredly complimenting its already sizable array of scratches, scuffs and dings with a shiny new dent. “Expensive?”

  “No reason to think so. Not yet, anyway. In theory, we could just be talking about a loose cable here. I won't know until I check.”

  “When you wanna do that?”

  “Tomorrow, most likely. Should fuse down that compression pad first.”

  Nemo knits his fingers together and retires the chair to its previously reclined position, with an appreciable lack of the maudlin creak the Lover's helm lends its furniture. “Wonder why it didn't give Moira any trouble.”