Third Interlude
Abraham Bonaventure slapped the Fifth of Fisticuffs to the toilethead, the impact of its landing nearly scattering the mated members of its posse, the Cardsharp of Stilettos and the Pugilist of Nooses, off their improvised card table. As the big Grimalti properly aligned the three participants of his latest play beneath three bloated gray fingers, his opponent, having just laid down the Doxy of Truncheons, scowled obliquely at all six cards arrayed against one another, in groups of three. He jabbed a baffled finger toward Abraham's displayed hand.
“So, that...” he dangled measuringly.
“Fucks yer shite up. Aye.”
As his opponent reached apart to retrieve the ream of toilet tissue, he regarded Abraham with skeptical disfavor. “And you could just be making all this up?”
“Precisely.”
“Explain it to me, then,” he demanded, fingering out four squares of winnings.
Abraham blustered a balked sigh and inched his cumbersome form forward to interpret the complexities of the triumphant combo, A Suspicious Shore Leave, to his moronic cellmate, as he had with The Mysteriously Ransacked Caravan, The Duke's Diamond-Studded Purse and A Colorful Assortment of Bruises.
In all fairness, Abraham had only, in fact, made three of those four up.
It had been two weeks and eight days, wasting away what remained of his blubber beneath the sweltering yoke of a Vhaseen summer, locked in a twenty-foot by twenty-foot sandsod prison cell with this idiot. Frontier planets like Vhase could rarely be bothered to hold anything resembling a proper trial, much less expend resources to build an actual jail, so when the Coggi County Police Department, consisting of seven Triommans with tiny tin shields and big wooden clubs rumbled his friendly neighborhood moonshining operation, Abraham found himself unceremoniously pitched into the county's only prison cell – a sinkhole half a mottible outside of town, complete with titanium bars barricading the ceiling and a desperately thirsty cellmate.
Abraham wasn't certain precisely how long this bedraggled scarecrow of a humanoid had been imprisoned down here, nor when he was likely to be released. This close to the Gitter Consortium, moonshining held a stern punishment, but the old Grimalti felt confident he'd only summer in this sinkhole and, given a few months, he'd walk free a thinner, but unlikely a wiser being. He couldn't necessarily say the same for his press-ganged partner, however.
At first, they'd said little to nothing, each entertaining their own private corners, each heeding the other with the wary mistrust of two caged but dissimilar predators, as the typical Bad Space prison custom demanded. Before long, however, suspicion invariably gave way to boredom, which, in turn, gave way to conversation and one botched escape attempt. As soon as Abraham succeeded in his attempts to cajole a deck of cards from their attendant minder when he delivered the daily rations, things quickly dissolved into gambling and thusly, via the ancient Trijan art of Iniquity, did Abraham come to learn some important distinctions about his temporary holemate.
By his talk, he was some form of pilot, professional, contract or otherwise, though Abraham had little trouble imagining this emaciated captive as one of the thousands of all-balls, no-backbone fighter jocks that troubled the Outer Ring's space lanes like droves of so many unemployed flies. Whether he was actually a pirate or an honest hired gun, Abraham couldn't immediately ascertain, but the boy was certainly fond of taking risks, both in his cards and in his captivity. His bets were large and summarily foolhardy, especially for a game he wasn't terribly familiar with. His shouted insolence toward the posted sentry had earned him the odd ill-aimed potshot or three during Abraham's stay within the sinkhole and, to judge from the carbon scoring on the cell floor, at least seven more before the Grimalti's arrival.
The most salient description of this strange little man, however, was that he definitively loathed imprisonment. He spent much of his mornings, afternoons and evenings concocting elaborate and impossible escape maneuvers and, when not scheming said schemes, he sulked in his prescribed corner until the water was delivered and he greedily guzzled down his share, oftentimes even more than that. The single escape he attempted came to a crashing halt when, while laboriously attempting to tunnel to freedom with the help of a pocketed plastolieum cup, he uncovered something he apparently feared worse than incarceration; a nest of burrowing agwaifapedes. A furious stomping session later, the threat was neutralized with Abraham's help and, for fear of unearthing more poisonous insects beneath the Vhaseen desert, all further tunneling ventures were promptly abandoned.
The Game of Iniquity, then, served as his most recent distraction and Abraham, for his part, saw precious little reason to dissuade him of the vice.
Fortunately for Abraham, his opponent was only passingly familiar with the game, though he offhandedly claimed to have encountered it in his youth, back where he, as he put it, “first got into trouble.” Abraham imagined this to be Gallow, judging by the merest whiff of a Worldshine dialect in his speech, indicating that they may have, though decades apart, shared a common stomping ground. Even more fortunately for Abraham, however, Iniquity was a game uniquely suited to cheat the living daylights out of amateur players and, in this case, it was difficult to qualify “amateur” any lower than his befuddled opponent.
Originally conceived by Trijan cardsharps untold centuries ago, Iniquity was somehow resurrected to popularity among the Outer Ring's more unsavory denizens at some point in the past five decades and, before long, asserted itself as the premier amusement in all the best and worst casinos, dicing dens and chance houses throughout Bad Space's dankest nooks and dingiest crannies. Though manifold versions and variants abounded wherever the game was played, a traditional game of Iniquity harbored six or fewer players, hands rarely ranging larger than ten cards a pop and an expansive eighty-four-piece deck. Lewd and vulgar characters, like Doxies, Hooligans and Picaroons rounded out four separate suits, each representing tools of the archaic hoodlum; Fisticuffs, Nooses, Stilettos and Truncheons.
Victory was achieved through the employment of various conjucted cards to create “incidents,” as they were colloquially referred to, of varying superiority. Abraham, who'd been introduced to the game within months of its resurgence, had yet to see a comprehensive list of the individual incidents and their relative rankings. This lack of clarity tended to foster rather more debate and its ensuing cousin, violence, per table than most of the galaxy's other chance games. While a base two hundred or so combinations were well-established and agreed-upon among the vast majority of Iniquity players, along with a general sense of each card's singular position in the hierarchy, nearly every round included some unknown incident, at whose appearance, the game either dissolved into clamorous altercation or, conversely, veiled acceptance, depending entirely on with whom the mysterious hand had originated. By that token, one could infer that, at any given table, the most successful Iniquity player was likely to be synonymous with the hardest cocksucker in the room.
Such was a lesson this young punk desperately needed to learn about two hours ago, had he wished to wipe his ass with something other than his hand for the remainder of his stay in their less-than-tastefully appointed hole.
He plucked the meager remains of toilet tissue from his emptying spool, with that satisfying tearing sound which came to signal triumph for Abraham, before pitching his final four squares across the makeshift card table in rebuff. Pawing up the waxen spoils and adding them to his accumulated pile of winnings, Abraham creased his beak into a faux-magnanimous grin. “I trust I sucked ye dry there, eh, boyo?”
“Um.” The boyo in question glanced about momentarily, as though he had some great store of provisions lying about him over there on the left side of the toilet, rather than a empty paper tube and a good deal of loose sand. Certainly out of habit, he even padded himself down, dusty shirt to abused leather boot, before surprising himself with an unforeseen discovery.
He, as puzzled as Abraham, hastily unfolded a square of grimy paper, folded and cock
led several times over into its current shape, for closer inspection. The afternoon suns, a trio of screaming Vhaseen scorchers, permeated the segmented document as it expanded and exposed a formatting familiar to Abraham; a standardized starship work-order, such as any number of chopshops might issue, including the uncounted dozens Abraham had found employment within over the years.
“Got this?” his cellmate mused.
“Give it here,” Abraham beckoned and, without apparent hesitation, the boy passed it across the extended toilethead and his latest defeat.
A work-order it was; a faded, barely legible print-off from a digital manifest which, to judge from its dilapidated state, had been riding around inside a sweaty boot for several months. Abraham had never heard of “Dirty Djembe,” but evidently, this dehydrated jockey was currently paying top dollar to renovate a freighter remix equal parts IZ36 Briza and Shell-Class Nautiloid Blockade Cruiser, a craft most flatteringly described as “suicidally unconventional.”
“Yer bettin' yer ship?”
The boy scoffed. “Moons no. Get bent. I'm betting the work-order.”
“What, like the piece of paper?”
“Sure. What, have you got too much toilet paper now? When did this happen?”
Abraham considered his impressive stack of earnings, amounting roughly two full spools of toilet tissue, freshly swindled off his neighbor's supply, and shrugged consentingly. “Fair enough.”
As his young opponent gathered up the spent cards from the previous hand, Abraham palmed what remained of his borrowed deck after exhaustive hours of play and flicked out a pair of starting hands, a single card apiece, for the both of them. The boy snatched his up covetously and brooded over it for several moments, Abraham only sparing a brief glimpse at his Third of Nooses.
“Yer ship got herself a name?” he inquired pleasantly.
“She does.” He flavored his reply as a riposte, leering dubiously from behind the sheltering screen of his single card. “Card,” he commanded after an additional handful of stewing seconds.
Abraham tossed the topmost card his direction as requested. “Card,” the Grimalti repeated before selecting his own, the Brute of Nooses, allocating a number of potential options, one of which was The Gallows Tree and a recognized, mid-level incident, while the others were decidedly not. “Care to ante up, lad?”
He distractedly cast his final remaining valuable, a creased and tattered work-order, into the center of the substitute table and pinpointed his attention back to scrying some value from his clasped cards. “The Poetic Justice,” he muttered abstractedly.
“Heh.” Abraham, for humors sake, supplemented the central pot with his own wager, a solitary square of his tissue paper hoard. “So, what, she's got the basic chassis of the Briza, with the bar swapped out and the boosters just plugged in aft?”
He gave an inattentive nod before waving vaguely in the direction of the deck. “Tarry,” he beseeched bloodlessly before requisitioning a third card. Abraham indulged himself off the top of the deck to stay competitive and, complimenting his duo with a Highwayman, resolved himself behind a Gallows Tree as he attempted to visualize this abomination of a spaceship. He did his level best to call to mind the boxy B-shaped frame of the IZ36, its precipitous bridge, the sloped slant of its teltriton rafters, all while envisioning a forked pair of protuberant super-charged capital class jetboosters where a modest orbital-cruising bar engine once dwelt.
“How's her handlin'?” he probed at his preoccupied partner.
“Great and terrible,” he summarized brusquely, shifting a card in his line-up. Abraham digested this an allowable moment, before testing the waters with a final question.
“How's she painted?”
For the first time since being dealt his original card of this latest hand, Abraham's opponent made cagey eye contact with the old Grimalti. “She hasn't been yet. Why?”
To this, Abraham merely shrugged. “No reason. Dealer reveals,” he instigated as he arranged his hand to the toilethead with Highwayman of Truncheons front and center, flanked on either side by The Brute and his Nooses, “The Gallows Tree. Let's see 'em, boy.”
With an augmented braggartism unearned by the afternoon's complete routing, Abraham's opponent flattened three cards in opposition to the Grimalti's own and burgeoned into a most mischievous sneer, a smile to give even Abraham, a scallywag among scallywags, who'd cut canvas with ruffians and rapscallions of the very worst dispositions, pause.
The Picaroon of Stilettos, The Cutthroat of Fisticuffs and The Cutthroat of Stilettos formed no incident that Abraham had ever encountered. “The Pirate King and All His Crooked Court,” he announced grandiosely.
Abraham blinked. “Ye made that up?”
“Oh, very much so.”
The Grimalti broke into a husky chuckle. “As ye wish, boyo. Take yer prize.”
Immensely pleased with himself, the boy clutched together the work-order and his newly won sheet of toilet tissue as Abraham raked aside the disbursed cards and clustered them together into the discard pile. “The Poetic Justice, eh?”
“That's the notion. What,” he instantly impugned, “you got a problem?”
“Only with the name.”
Affront immediately melted into piqued curiosity. “Yeah? You think it's too obvious?”
“Well, I don't know from obvious, but I've got a couple of names a-squared away that I've been savin' for the right ships and this here Briza,” he motioned toward the work-order clenched in the boy's hand, “sounds like one 'a them right ships. 'magine this, painted 'crost her fuselage, if ye fancy.”
He popped open his scarred hands to bracket the imaginary title in mid-air above the pillaged remains of their card game, attempting to convey the sense of mysticism the old Grimalti thought the disembodied moniker evoked. “The Unconstant Lover.”
Instant recognition of the name's worthiness didn't flood into the youth's eyes and he scowls deep, a concentration riddling his features that Abraham hadn't since seen and would scarcely again, before breaking his reverie abruptly to scrunch up his face. “Nah. I like mine better.”
“Suit yerself,” Abraham allows privately, honestly somewhat disappointed.
“Yeah. Yeah,” he repeats, as if to assure himself. “Yours was weird and confusing.”
“Wait 'till ye see her built. Ye might change yer mind.”
“Eh. I don't know. What was the other one?”
“Ain't found the right ship for that one yet,” is all Abraham chose to reply.
“Huh, well,” his cellmate concluded, browsing the specifics of his recently reclaimed work-order with seemingly new eyes, “when I become a famous pirate lord, maybe I'll make you my official ship-namer.”
“I'd be delighted,” the old Grimalti chortled. “Oh, one stipulation, however.”
The boy eyed him again. “Yeah?”
“What's yer policy on singin'?”
“My policy on what?”
Chapter 14
Two-Bit intercepts the ball. It falls into his outstretched hands with a satisfyingly eponymous skoosh and subsequently douses him fully in the face with a fresh stream of its defense liquid: a sterile, slimy substance the organ come sporting good naturally exudes, with a similar, if wetter, reprise of its namesake. Its increased viscosity is quickly allied to its attempts to escape his grasp, but Two-Bit, already plastered from the waist upwards in partially dried solution, has no intention of granting its most ardent pleas for freedom for another four or five steps at least. Clamping the skooshball hard, Two-Bit bounds across the slippery floor three, four, five steps before closing to acceptable throwing distance from Marco the Mange, himself spattered in the grayish-greenish ooze and waving for the pass Two-Bit was already so inclined to make. Finally, just before it wrestles itself free, Two-Bit emancipates the skooshball in the form of a one-handed, shot-put style heave, practically clobbering the petite Mruka to the floor beneath the concerted force of his throw and the ball's own willing flight.
&nb
sp; Another gout of pasty goop greets Marco the Mange as he catches of the pliant green orb between a clap of his tiny paws and, for a moment, Two-Bit doubts the wisdom of his toss, until the Mruka's claws sink into the skoosh's sides and lock it firmly in place; technically legal, but typically considered unsportsmanlike. The Chains hoot and heckle with derision as they scramble to intercept but, before even the nearest of them can close the gap, Marco zeroes a target, cranks both forearms back over his head and lets the skoosh loose. It tumbles true, effortlessly across the expanse until it connects sharply with Ebeneezer's shaven pate. The ball rebounds deeply and, for the briefest of heartbeats, the lanky purple giant is wearing an elastic emerald hat, before the skoosh snaps abruptly away and, guided by the slight tossing of his head, Ebeneezer casts the ball cleanly through the largest of the five hoops.
The scoreboard, sensing the ball's passage through the main hoop, reflects this with a droning tone and the Lovers inch one point closer to the Chains' daunting lead. This point is met with exultant applause from the Lovers and playful jeering from the Chains. The skoosh, fresh from Ebeneezer's headbutt, dawdles in the court's far corner and a handful of players from both teams scamper to reclaim it from various different approach vectors.
Among the seemingly endless list of amenities, comforts and luxuries Boss Ott had afforded the crew of The Unconstant Lover during their three-week layover on Baz, the regulation skooshball court was, by far, the most singular. Sequestered deep underground, at the base of the West Spire, it had taken nearly two weeks for any among the Lover's crew to even discover the chamber, much less organize a game but, armed with the powers of quartermaster vested in him by the Captain Nemo, Two-Bit had managed to marshal the conscripted thuggery into a formidable team of six skooshers; Danbonte, Marco, Anchorage, Ebeneezer, Heeko and himself.
Two-Bit had attempted to rope, cajole or guilt more of Nemo's lieutenants into the pitched match – Odisseus or Moira would have made inspired teammates, but the Captain continued to tirelessly attend Ott, Odisseus continued to even more tirelessly attend the Captain, Moira flatly refused and Abraham was doubtlessly knee-deep in negotiations on Foundry, with Garrigan and Rooster as prize crew, hopefully cheating a truly enormous pile of money out of some poor sucker in exchange for the Messenger.
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