Hull Damage

by Timothy J Meyer

  “Yeah, I don't know,” Odisseus surmises before the Messenger's bridge door purrs wide to reveal Garrok Brondi, lightly stubbled, buttoned into a pressed waistcoat and smelling vaguely of perfume, as he retracts a gloved hand from the release button and somehow manages to swagger his single step into the room.

  “I trust I'm not interrupting something?”

  The Captain, still sprawled out at maximum accumbency, prods himself a quarter of the way around to catch Brondi at an incredulous slant. “Nice to see you all dolled-up, sweetheart.”

  “What, come a-courting?” Odisseus opines gruffly before refocusing his attention toward the navpanel.

  “I'd hardly constitute socks and a shirt as 'dolled-up,' Captain.” Brondi's return withers beneath characteristic disdain. “And how're those trunks working out for you?”

  “Don't tell me you're putting on airs for whatsername, that second squad lancer everybody's getting their dicks wet about,” Nemo struggles to recall with a succession of finger snaps before Odisseus contributes.

  “Jakosha Joojberry?”

  “Her. You got designs on Kivad's underlieutenant, Garrok?” Nemo spares a peek towards the clock before qualifying, “'cause if you do, I'd suggest you hurry or else Two-Bit's gonna beat you to the punch.”

  Brondi attempts to hide his bristle, straightening his waistcoat with a meager tug and answering oddly, “I've got designs.”

  “And which of these designs impels you to interrupt us today?”

  “Uh,” Brondi stammers in response to Odisseus' snarled rebuke.

  “Whaddya want, Brondi?” Nemo translates bluntly.

  The smuggler ganders two steps into The Dead Messenger's solemnly beeping bridge with the companionable commentary of a passing pedestrian, as if noticing renovations to his neighbor's home for the first time. “How're the repairs going?”

  “Slowly,” Nemo relates as Odisseus continues to fiddle with the navpanel's keypad. “Today, it's...” he dangles beseechingly toward the co-pilot's seat.

  “Turbine signal reception. As it specifically relates to navigation.”

  “That,” Nemo confirms with a halfhearted point towards his saltbrother. “I don't know, I think it's a little excessive, but Fishballs over there is convinced it'll fetch a higher price at market this way and I, being the fan of money that I am, see no reason to argue.”

  Brondi, left blinking behind the language barrier, nods dumbly and ambles a step starboard, to trace a finger along the lineament of the mainframe shielding fixture, a model probably a decade and more newer than the Lover's and assuredly less grimy. “She's sure a jig little vessel, though.”

  “Sure is,” comes the first hint of Nemo's suspicion, an ingrained incertitude Odisseus immediately attaches to any dealings with Garrok Brondi.

  “How much?” Odisseus questions flatly. Brondi imparts Nemo with a quizzical look, but the Captain's adjusted his focus to his saltbrother.

  “You really think so?”

  “I really do.”

  “Care to share, Nemo, or...?” Brondi interjects with a vaguely unnerved glance to the Ortok.

  “Odisseus smells an ulterior motive behind your unprecedented loitering.” Nemo lolls his head off his propped wrist to realign a buoyant gaze toward their visitor. “How much you willing to shell out for her?”

  Brondi barricades both biceps across his chest. “Three hundred. Even.”

  Odisseus makes little effort to swallow his scoff. Nemo patronizes Brondi beneath a deflated, bemused smirk. “Where'd you get that kinda scratch, smuggler?”

  Struggling manfully to ignore Odisseus' flagrant depreciation, Brondi splays his right fingers off the muscle of his bicep. “Will have. Figure I chop up the Rose, pool the cost of her organs with Rooster and I's winnings off this Haess thing – all that piled up oughta come out as three,” he elucidates, feigning a faint unconcern. “Give or take.”

  Unlacing his fingers to ramble a right hand through the clumpy jungle of his still-drying hair, the Captain slings it straight. “There's half-a-dozen scrubbers right here in this sector'd pay more than six, I give 'em ship this fine. Why should I throw you a bone?”

  It was an exaggeration perhaps, but at the very least a calculated one which, when measured against the steep standard of Nemo's recurrent “big fish” braggartism, found itself very solidly in the minority. In truth, only two feasible fencing options presented themselves within the Orbika Sector. A former associate of Two-Bit's, evidently an associate with less leftover chagrin than the late Nabdres No-Cock had borne for the slippery little jabberhead, oversaw a scrapbarn on Qel Qatar while Abraham, at some undisclosed point in a past decade, worked some thirty odd shifts driving an orbital sideloader for one of Foundry's two score shipyards and somehow managed to retain some handy business contacts. None of this, however, Brondi needs to know.

  Odisseus didn't altogether hate Garrok Brondi. Indeed, having proved himself capable in scrap, more capable with a neticgrappler and possessing an allegedly well-earned reputation as a top-flight smuggler, Odisseus could perchance respect a man like Garrok Brondi, were it not for the profound mistrust of his every action. This was a man, barring his general and unprecedented avarice and that particular duplicity that clung about him like so many expensive perfumes, who, by all appearances, didn't bat a nostalgic eyelid at the thought of indiscriminately scrapping a starship he'd flown nearly twice as long as Nemo'd captained the Lover. No matter how much the damage The Compass Rose had sustained, to Odisseus' mind, it was difficult to fathom anything quite as callow.

  Brondi's habitual hauteur instinctively spikes an eyebrow. “Six? Hope you don't con anyone I know into it.”

  “Yes, you do,” Nemo counters calmly. The Captain momentarily distracts himself as he tweedles some unseen atomy from between his right fingers before meeting Brondi's pretentions with insolence of his own. “You'll have to do better than three, old sport.”

  “I can go to four,” Brondi grants with artificial reluctance, “and I give you twelve percent off whatever first run Rooster and I take.”

  “Cute,” Odisseus jeers huskily, systematically powering down the navpanel in preparation for the engine maintenance he'd need to square away tomorrow.

  While he doesn't necessarily deduce his exact phrasing, Brondi certainly comprehends Odisseus' ambivalence. “Fifteen. Maximum.”

  Thirty seconds behind, Nemo echoes Brondi's former posture by threading his forearms together, coupled with a contentedly contemptuous shrug. “Contract's out. Cash is in.”

  “Six is insanity, Nemo. I don't care who you think you can manhandle – literally no one is gonna front six in hard cash.”

  “Gotta feed my crew. Gotta fuel my ship.” The Captain reprises his previously issued shrugging dismissal. “Match six and I'll gladly put her in your hands. If not, do me a favor and fuck off.”

  “Four upfront, could easily clear five with the incoming percentage, is plenty,” Brondi cajoles. He, stonewalled, flaps his arms off his belt in a gesture of aggravated fruitlessness. “Why does every blooming thing need to be a forty-yard pissing contest with you?”

  Nemo's smile, a wan, listless thing, scarcely masks the departure of his patience. “Because I'm really good at pissing.”

  “All the moons of Jotor,” Brondi hisses, frustration vicing his jaw together.

  Odisseus climbs off the taxed co-pilot's seat to his full height, ostensibly to collect his tools and patch down that troublesome compression pad before heading to supper, though should Brondi suddenly appreciate the imminent bulk of impatient Ortok impending overhead and thereby lose whatever remained of his nerve, so much the better, but Brondi remains resolved in his denouncement.

  “You understand nobody's fucking amused, right? That this is bad business and nothing else?”

  “Six or leave,” Odisseus ultimates with a hiss of his own, only employing his lips to enunciate before bared fangs.

  At seemingly long last, Brondi, instinctual self-preservation tr
umping righteous self-entitlement, receives the hint from Odisseus' less-than-subtle warning, sidles back a step with stymied enmity painfully evident on his face, mutters something about “big wet blowbags” and stomps moodily from The Dead Messenger's helm, tail firmly established between his legs.

  Odisseus watches him go, the aromatic wake of perfume dissipating into the bridge's redolence of spiced Jowna, residual chlorine and burnished shipmetal. Nemo saunters the pilot's chair fully around to face the panels of waiting equipment, expression crumpled in confusion.

  “Who's up his ass?”

  –––

  Moira couldn't decide precisely which was worse; that she might be forced to agree with Abraham or, conversely, that she might forced to agree with Two-Bit. Certainly one of the presented options could safely be defined as the lesser evil but, try as she might, Moira simply couldn't determine which choice was the least desirable.

  “But, I'm jabbing, that's all flash and feelings, that's all that is,” Two-Bit, dangling his feet childishly off the engine coil repository's rim, disparages absently as he cuts and shuffles one half of an Iniquity deck. “You take one second and vizz at it, you know, objective-like and it don't take some kinda brainer to suss out how many bees we got.”

  Abraham, however, appears unconcerned by aspersions cast against his spacer's intuition. Leaning both his considerable girth and ineradicable authority against a fuel contractor, as if he had always leaned there, the Grimalti offers a negligible shrug and counters calmly, “Those 'flashes and feelings' o' mine kept me afloat long afore they e'er even strung up that station you was whelped on, boyo.”

  This seems to pluck a chord somewhere in Two-Bit, who starkly surceases his shuffling to nibble loose a strip of flesh from his lower lip. Odisseus, facial fur sooty from engine exhaust, briefly pops his head into view from somewhere beneath the lumbering mechanism to rejoin, “Can't argue with that,” before vanishing into the contrivance again.

  Ever since the Bozee Bushwhack, they, Nemo's four lieutenants, had held three such impromptu conferences over the course of their fourteen months aboard The Unconstant Lover, each one staged at some discreet location unlikely to attract attention, each one deliberately exempting the presence of their apparently clueless Captain. The subject matter of these meetings was, in truth, fairly benign, nothing terribly mutinous or even dishonest, as evidenced by Odisseus' presence. Rather, whenever Nemo contemplated a major policy shift or a uniquely suicidal caper, his first mate, his bodyguard, his mentor and his accomplice all congregated to discuss the particular wisdom, or in most cases, the stupidity underlying said decision and whether the lengthy process of dissuasion was worth the collective headache.

  They'd first convened in the frozen food section of a neighborhood Galaxmart on Ortolé directly following the thoroughly unexpected results of the Bozee Bushwhack. They'd secondly held extemporized council in the Xwollese jungled outskirts of Chaconta City and now, with Nemo solidly clasped within Ott's thrall, they all assemble within The Dead Messenger's engine room, to discuss this latest development in the mercurial moods of their capricious Captain.

  “Well, I mean, alright, minus your misgivin's, if you vizz at the mathematicals of it, you ain't really got much to queeg about, does you?” Two-Bit commences an insanely fast and extraordinarily precise overhand shuffle, slapping fractions of the deck against the meat of his palm and withdrawing equally sized chunks with an alarming rapidity. “We jank forty on the nail for the little Haess maneuver, with another sixty on the way for this gantine – we're vizzing at a jig million, which oughta sum out to one hundred and thirty thou a maggie for the four of us and the Cap'n.” He desists the blurring shuffle a moment and gestures dismissively with a transitory stack, the Third of Truncheons vanguarding the clasped cards. “That's, what, three times over and again what Xo scored us for that previous business. Now that is something you can't row about.”

  Abraham massages the dappled flesh of his wattle as though a beard. “Xo's a machine – it don't warrant no more debate than does this rudder here,” he mentions with a distracted wave toward the housing mainframe of the Messenger's bar engine. “We got us a debt ain't been paid. Whatever the boy thinks of her, he owes Velocity a job.”

  “That's her affair, isn't it?” Moira formulates bemusedly. “I mean, if she wants him on a shorter leash, then that should fall within her responsibilities to rein him in.” She drops into something of a conversational squat, hunkering down to rest haunches weary from Tebi-Gali before clarifying with a meager shrug. “As far as I see it.”

  “I agree,” Two-Bit mainstays emphatically.

  “Which deeply horrifies me.”

  “And let's not blank on, let us not blank on these beasty bloomin' mummies Ott's bunked us up with.” He polarizes both halves of the bifurcated deck in opposite hands and alternately shuffles each portion with every selling point. “Maxed access to a top-gauge galley, half a wank's worth of truly tomato lizzies,” he sneers a filth-laded sneer, referencing the in-house harem of professionals floozies Ott kept at hand to amuse his victorious raiders, “feez past two thou holovision channels and best of all, if there's a better spot in the galaxy to be down low in the lavender, I can't imagine where that'd be.” He slaps both halves together again, mingling the cards into a whole deck with an arresting display of legerdemain. “Ain't no anglers gonna bump us up here.”

  “Case ye hadn't forgotten, this Boss Ott be, ye know, the bloody Galactic Menace,” Abraham disillusions immediately. “Literally an entire armada and its accompanyin' army has got this bloke at the top o' their lists and 'twon't be long afore the Imperium drops the right bomb, hires the right gun or commandeers the right ship.” The bristly Grimalti shrugs unconvinced shoulders. “'specially if he keeps making the noises he's been makin' of late, his days be numbered, exactly like the previous Menace and the one afore that and the one afore that one.”

  “It is a brief office,” Moira concurs gravely.

  Two-Bit frowns in the face of Abraham's obstinance. “We're in no immediate shit and I, for one, don't vizz no razz why we can't be squeezing as much rhino as we can outta this outfit until the real flaster hits.”

  Odisseus, autocincher gripped in a paw, emerges from the gap between collider columns to voice a question. “Do we know when that'll be? I saw Tizor, a high-ranking lieutenant, gunned down at Ott's own feet with practically no repercussion.”

  “Well, by Nemo,” Moira qualifies.

  “What's he jabbing?” Two-Bit cluelessly solicits to the room.

  “Tizor.”

  “Ah.”

  “Exactly my point,” Odisseus spitballs off Moira's correction. “What's to prevent that from happening again? Say somebody gets ambitious and decides to off Nemo. Some underling, moons, even Ott himself.” He allows himself a minimal shake of his besmirched head. “Much as I appreciate all the trappings, seems we'd be safer taking our lumps with Velocity than waiting around for the Menace to get tired of us.”

  “Aye,” Abraham endorses with a nod to the reasoning Ortok.

  Several lines of thought behind, a frustrated Two-Bit surrenders fiddling with his Iniquity deck and begins denigrating at full throttle. “You facting? You'd rather we towel up this whole business sos we can tilt our rubbishy bloomholes all the way back to Takioro and tongue up whatever antwacky fuckin' codswallop capers Velocity decides to fooge down on us? You wanna jank twenty times less what you're janking now?”

  The appeal certainly doesn't fall on deaf ears, not among buccaneers with pockets and wallets recently buffered by sizable percentages of hefty prizes, each understandably hesitant to suddenly surrender the possibility of further such opportunities. The prospect of Jowna meals, scavenge missions and even cheaper gin weighs visibly upon the four assembled lieutenants, particularly Moira, to whom a decrease in piracy income would necessitate an increase in bounty hunting income, a risk she certainly couldn't comfortably afford.

  It's Odisseus who, after several baited moments
of individual rumination, breaks the reverie with the obvious counterpoint. “Of course, there's the other matter to consider.”

  Two-Bit squints. “What?”

  “The hat,” Abraham deciphers cryptically.

  A second silence, considerably grimmer than the previous, befalls the collected criminals at the reminder of this most significant of frivolities. As unexpectedly as he'd latched onto the peculiar headgear, Nemo had, directly following the fateful meeting with Ott, altogether divorced himself of the bowler hat he'd looted off Cogden Moore three months previously and indeed, no one among the crew, conscripts included, has seen the stupid thing since.

  Odisseus had unfortunately been out of the room when the exact exchange occurred and was thusly unclear on too many specifics but little doubt was left in the minds of the Lover's officers that something Ott had said, expressed within mere moments, somehow managed to convince the definitively egomaniacal Captain to forfeit his cherished bowler, without any apparent fuss. As superficial as such an event might seem to the hired help, everyone present at the secret meeting understood the magnitude, if not the explicit ramifications, of someone capable of commanding, especially in trivial matters, the obedience of one as ungovernable as Nemo.

  It doesn't escape Moira's astute attention, however, that both Abraham and Odisseus exchange a pair of decidedly more insightful glances than they'd certainly like to portray; an unspoken something, perhaps a shared knowledge, is recognized between two of Nemo's oldest crew members, a distinction Moira notes with intrusive interest.

  As her three compatriots, with varying degrees of information, undoubtedly speculate silently over the very same dilemma, Moira Quicksilver finds herself unable to clearly predict whether Nemo's unnervingly newfound vassalage at the hands of Boss Ott, Galactic Menace, will result in zooming profit or plummeting disaster.