Hull Damage

by Timothy J Meyer

  “Fine. But, if we see any of those cunts on the way, all bets are off.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “So, what?” Brondi fumes, exasperation coloring the fringes of his voice. “What about Rooster? He's just expendable?”

  “He's gone,” Moira consummates sternly. Careful to maintain a firm hold on the side of her neck, she pulls herself into a squat and gestures with her drawn pistol. “You're welcome to go after him, Garrok, but we're leaving.”

  As the mercenaries collect themselves, ready additional ammunition and begin charting an exiting course, Moira watches Brondi grind his teeth, glance back into the broiling havoc for any sign and ultimately, with the rest of his companions preparing their expeditious getaway and neither Rooster nor his captors anywhere in sight, swear flagrantly, moodily retrieve an assault rifle from Anchorage and follow the rest of the party out.

  Their numbers dwindled from eleven to eight, the remains of Lover's fielded crew sprint, as one, across the expanse of exposure between the haven of their driftcarts and the density of the western jungle treeline, hopefully blitzing whatever perimeter patrol Insurgent Company had installed beneath the mingled hail of their concerted gunfire. As they, a band of cold-blooded killers, fervently flee the scene of their own utter routing, abandoning two driftcarts, forty crates of illegal weaponry and vo Qwer, who apparently vanished during the opening seconds of the fray, Moira can't help but spare a passing thought for Boss Ott and what precisely he'd think of this fantastically disastrous caper.

  They crash into the initial thickets like a surf of screaming marauders, a smattering of targets emerging from hiding to brandish their line of impeding Sv7s. After a breathless beat, the firefight begins in earnest.

  Ebeneezer's Backlash belches buckshot, spattering the arranged opposition with a fierce shower of fragmented ditrogen particles and allowing his allies to execute their haymakers. A super-charged canister from Anchorage's five-round shotgun clangs against and consequently catapults a commando clean off the ground, slamming her to the earth with a caved-in breastplate. Nemo's tactic is more manic – he simply pours the full contents of his newly-acquired DU5 assault rifle's first clip into his trooper's powered armor, the constant pummeling not only bewildering its wearer against return fire, but also staggering and eventually shorting out the plate's power supply, leaving the unfortified commando behind perfectly vulnerable to the last four of the Captain's shells.

  Lefty, on the other hand, is somewhat more selective of its targets. Moira bobs and weaves in response to incoming fire, adopting the abounding underbrush as concealment against the SV7's red-hot reproach, clipping and pruning the feathered fronds but missing elusive Moira. Before long, however, she's within optimal distance and, taking exacting aim, she pops a single shot into the unprotected groin of the commando in question. He wavers, agonized outcry smothered beneath his mask, and, having received sufficient excuse to do so, takes his leave to collapse into a writhing heap on the dirt. As she passes his squirming form, Lefty, almost as an afterthought, delivers a second bolt to his brain.

  With that, the Lover's crew punctures the perimeter, each of the seven pirates dispatching one or more counterparts out of hand and soon, they're relatively free and relatively clear, galloping away westward through the steaming jungle, towards the last known location of their famously-departed spaceship.

  “Abraham!” Nemo blathers into the comm when they're an agreeable distance away. “Abraham! Where's my ship?”

  “Cap'n? Cap'n, you readin'?” Static feedback beleaguers the Grimalti's reply, but it's discernible, enough for Nemo to snap back.

  “Abraham, I swear on my mother's revolver, if you've stolen my ship, I will broil your fat ass in your own blubber.”

  “Me blubber be the very least of yer concerns o' the moment, Cap'n. We got razorbacks, whole troop of 'em, inbound–”

  “We actually noticed. Where's my blooming spaceship?”

  “She hadta be relocated, Cap'n. Couldn't have Insurgent Company makin' her–”

  “No, Abraham, you're not listening to me. You need to tell me where the ship is right fucking now, because right fucking now is when we are in desperate need of evac!”

  “Oh, moons' tits, Cap'n! Why'd ye not say nothin'? Gimme a minute – I'll triangulate.” Moira's left knee wobbles beneath her next step. “I did try buzzing ye, let the record show.”

  “The comm is for emergencies only.”

  “This don't qualify as a bloody emergency?”

  Moira stumbles. She's reflexive enough to catch herself on the nearest bough of appropriate height, though with her left hand, alleviating pressure from her neck wound and ushering a fresh onset of trickling blood. The pirates, the jungle, the very planet all unscrew themselves from their sedentary positions and seem to careen about in Moira's quavering vision. Her building bewilderment is dramatically highlighted as the perfunctory cloud of ktotari birds, thousands of tiny appetites suddenly whetted by Moira's leaking blunder, cease swamping the general air to redouble their thirsty teeming about her head. Danbonte, the closest, first catches sight of her dizzy dilemma.

  “Whoa, hold up,” he relays to the rest of the heedless hoodlums before swatting open a pathway to Moira through the pendant parasites with his wounded hand. “You hangin' in there, Quicksilver?”

  Having little conception precisely how feeble she currently appeared or exactly how rapidly she was losing face to the burgeoning circle of crewmen, Moira instead commits the bulk of her energy to smothering nausea and blood loss enough into submission to at least utter a response to Danbonte, but the severity of her injury conspires against her even in this.

  Some distance away, Abraham's craggy voice, further beset by more whirring feedback, declares at last. “There – got ye charted, Cap'n. Won't be but a few minutes. Ye stay put and I'll bring the Lover there. Keep yer comm live.”

  “Finally,” Nemo concludes brusquely, scarcely recognizable to Moira's slowly amending senses as an arrogant blur at the edge of sight. “Hey,” the blur grunts in her vague direction, “what's wrong with you?” Despite her queasy condition, Moira musters the moxie to roll her eyes and gesture emphatically with the point of her pistol at the gaping hole in her throat. “Oh, sure,” comes Nemo's recognition a moment later.

  Moira's engineered a gradual straightening of her posture, a replacement of her five-fingered substitute bandage and is making appreciable progress toward the reassembly of her motor functions when Two-Bit screams.

  It's an incoherent curse, inspired by horror or alarm or both and immediately following a moist suction and an unfurling of wet tendrils. Anchorage and Odisseus, those two most adjacent, instinctively recoil and scramble aside, conceding Two-Bit the privacy of a wide berth to contend jerkingly with whatever underfoot fiend he'd unwittingly disturbed with a careless footfall into one of vo Qwer's reputed sinkholes.

  Coils, rubbery yellow and dripping with some unknowable ichor, snake a dozen routes up Two-Bit's aghast thigh, investigating all the creases and pleats of his trousers, as though fingering out any means of ingress. Two-Bit, understandably anxious about this particular line of inquiry, wrenches and wriggles to extract his snatched appendage, but all his panicked exertions only seem to engulf him further and further.

  “Okay, ew,” Nemo grimaces.

  Ebeneezer crouches from his tremendous height to better inspect what's undulating up Two-Bit's calf. “What in the butt-fuck tarnation is that?”

  “Muck leech,” Odisseus breathes.

  “Do us a kindie,” Two-Bit requests curtly, “and get it fuckin' off me!”

  With the enlisted help of Anchorage, Ebeneezer, Danbonte and Odisseus, minus the sulking Brondi and the effective hindrance of Nemo's shouted supervision, an array of uprooting methods are attempted, involving pushing, pulling, twisting and firearms, while Moira blearily multitasks; indulging herself in a sequence of progressively deeper breaths, in an attempt to screw her upended equilibrium to the sticking-place, and appoi
nting herself chief sentry to the five-man pratfall comedy unfolding behind her.

  Sentinelship, especially with her flagging eyesight and more especially in Baz's vibrantly eerie jungle, is no mean task. The surrounding forest is afire with motion and noise – swaying flora, the rustle of nearby fauna, the frothing haze of waiting ktotari birds. Enough visual and auditory interference that Moira keens her scrutiny down to either an SV7's signature racket or the squarish blur of an Imperium driftcraft, but something else, something less fitting of their environs, presents itself first.

  Escalating silence, where once clamor flourished, and compounding stillness, where once movement thrived, join unnerving forces to raise each and every one of Moira's bounty hunter hackles. A new sound, the sound of crashing foliage, then manifests at the very edge of Moira's hearing, almost inaudible over the hullabaloo past her shoulder, though its volume seems to swell with each passing second.

  “Something's coming,” Moira first ventures, forgetting for all the galaxy that someone had poked open a hole in her neck and, in consequence, only mustering a wet whisper. “Hey, fuckwits,” she exhorts hoarsely as she turns around to address the fuckwits in question, with still-ensnarled Two-Bit boosted high onto Odisseus' shoulder and Ebeneezer chopping gainlessly at taut tentacles, “something's coming!” Frustration looses two shots from Lefty into a rare spot of dry dirt some inches ahead of the crew's stumbling spectacle, which both commands their instant attention and, after a long moment, appears to dissatisfy the muck leech of Two-Bit. Its pulpous yellow feelers unbind themselves from their advance up his breeches and, with a disquieting slurp, retreat back into the safety of their muddy hole.

  “Good work, Quicksilver,” Anchorage bemusedly congratulates. “You scared it off.”

  Only by the jungle's unorthodox quiet can they discern Moira's stifled reply. “No, I didn't.”

  Three strides worth of guttural panting and a throaty squeal, its first vociferation, resound behind her. Moira spins to catch the materialization of this approaching phantom and finds, much to her chagrin, the unanticipated shape of a creature that had already twice attempted to waylay her this morning.

  Paradoxically, what Moira first sees when this gargantuan animal comes smashing through the underbrush is seemingly a Baziron specter – ghostly pale, even for a Scream-Weed, suspended several feet off the ground and thoroughly dead, deeply impaled on the jagged barb anchoring its chest. What resolves itself through the vegetation seconds later, however, is a confused knot of bifurcated antlers, serrated spines and sloping horns, all mounted unevenly atop the loping form of a monstrous quadruped, bearing aloft the desiccated corpse of previous prey like a waving standard or a gruesome trophy. vo Qwer had christened this particular beast a “nhybark” and, barring flaunting one's polearm and swilling one's throatsac mucus, offered precious little example on how to halt its blood-crazed bull rush.

  No conversation, no debate and no exchange occurs between the eight of the nhybark's various quarries. With no vo Qwer to admonish them otherwise, the thrice-ambushed pirates each unsheathe their individual weaponry and, lacking either polearms or throatsac mucus, unanimously respond with the one action vo Qwer had rebuked them from doing: shooting.

  For its own part, the nhybark seems to accept this prismatic protestation in relative stride, barreling forward with unchecked velocity and practically shrugging off the onslaught of laserfire its potential prey volleys toward it. It peals another bloodthirsty bleat from its fanged maw, ensconced by notched prongs, and Moira, as she pelts its relentless headway with Lefty's fiercest disincentives, perceives nothing short of feral frenzy baking deep in the creature's beady eyes.

  The nhybark, Moira cynically denotes as the Lover's crew hastily disperses with an outbreak of cursing from the raging beast's warpath, is substantially larger in person, standing at least Ebeneezer's already considerable height at the bone-spurred shoulder and possibly twice that in total length from snout to rump. It sunders through the last patch of opposing brush, smashes into full view and entirely clogs the pirate's impromptu pathway with its disorderly turmoil of forward-facing spikes.

  A blizzard of ditrogen reprisals from the strewn pirates buffet the galumphing monstrosity, Moira contributing, however sporadically, by blasting away at the creature's rear haunches, in a markedly pointless attempt to cripple the creature's mobility. Ebeneezer, fool enough to close to melee range with the nhybark, clashes and clangs his sparking electrochette against its cartilaginous hide to even less purchase. The incensed nhybark, evidently alarmed by the electrochette's sudden voltage, veers its ponderous bulk about in search of this newest assailant on his hindquarters and subsequently gores an unsuspecting Anchorage from behind with a hateful hook.

  Bodily skewered by one of the nhybark's uppermost antlers, wriggling Anchorage, leaking sapphire blood from three separate punctures, rides jerky co-pilot to the ghastly Baziron as the nhybark wheels about to pursue Ebeneezer. Upraised Anchorage's leaking blood streams down twisting corrugations in the nhybark's horns until it seeps wholly into its agape mouth. After a second's deliberation, Lefty plugs a single brilliant bolt into the crown of thorns encircling the nhybark's brow, scant inches from one of the beast's only two defenseless points – its minute eyes.

  The nhybark, jolted and furious, tosses its head with a snort and aligns its seething gaze toward Moira, disentangling antlers from its pursuit of Ebeneezer to confront this most recent of threats. Moira matches the nhybark's wrathful scowl measure for measure with a frigid glower of her own, edging several tantalizing steps backward, toward the brushline, and sighting a second shot down the length of Lefty's barrel. The nhybark swallows the bait, heaving heavy breaths and draining more blood from still-dangling Anchorage. As Lefty lets fly, it surges forward in a mad dash, baying uproariously and chasing Moira headlong into the jungle.

  Moira tears through the undergrowth at maximum speed, whacking aside shrubbery with the butt of her pistol and feeling her knees weaken with every footfall. Mere moments behind, the infuriated nhybark tramples the vegetation out of hand; uprooting trees, pulverizing any unlucky plant-life and rampaging after Moira, brandishing the limp Baziron and twisting Anchorage on high, like ever-present reminders of Moira's gory fate. Both of the nhybark's squinty eyes, however, are zeroed directly at her, presenting Moira with two cleanly arrayed targets like an old-fashioned shooting gallery might. Granted said shooting gallery was blanketed in wicked spikes and hell-bent on running her down and drinking her blood.

  Desperately clutching the sodden remnants of her scrappy bandage to her neck and continually wrestling her wits from the grip of unconsciousness, Moira is made keenly aware of the mounting presence of her pursuer, looming nearer and nearer behind her, indicated not only by the raucous tumult of destroyed flora but also by that intangible tingle that haunted the back of her brain right before she was sucker punched. Moira ratchets Lefty's hammer back, spares a glimpse behind to hopefully claim a killing stroke on either of the exposed eyes and discovers, in addition to the rest of its loathsome countenance, the nhybark's lowermost tusks skimming the ground meager feet from her heels. She fires to little avail, her first two attempts flying pathetically wide and the final chipping the forked tip harmlessly off an unrelated antler, and, this aborted, she quickens her pace.

  Her strategy's practical shelf life steadily declining, Moira vaults the mossy mass of a toppled tree trunk and nearly trips herself, scampering artlessly on three limbs with her already-flimsy balance barely maintained. The nhybark, on the other hand, apparently just obliterates the immense hunk of pesky deadfall into sawdust with a single torqued swing of its host of horns, soliciting both a tortured groan from Anchorage and an abrupt recalculation from Moira.

  Vigilantly keeping the faint clamor of the crew within earshot, she veers a skidding, unceremonious left, feasibly flustering the nhybark's mindless charge with a moment of reorientation and earning her invaluable instants to hotfoot back to the rest of her companions. Sure en
ough, the nhybark hoots in surprise, screeches its hooves to a stop and squanders several seconds to adjust its standing. Moira, meanwhile, is plainly gone, sprinting with all speed for the relative safety the remainder of the Lover's crew could provide, whether as security or scapegoats.

  Moira breaks cover onto the pathway of their previous passage, the nhybark righting itself an entire minute behind, to a disappeared crew and an M2 Vagrant-Class Short-Range Scout, hovering ten feet above the leafy ground, in their place. She forgoes a thwarted sigh, which would certainly complicate her injured throat, and instead prays to all the moons for Salo's erstwhile rocket launcher.

  Barring a sudden downpour of heaven-sent ordinance, however, Moira instinctively sidesteps to the closest available cover, a fanned batch of ferns, to formulate some manner of new retreat. Despite its blotchy camouflage paint job, the M2 is a sterile teltriton eyesore among the sylvan savagery of Baz's jungle, its driftmotor mutely repulsing all adjacent vegetation and thereby sculpting a windblown halo of waving white flora wherever it lingers. Three Insurgent Company cadets man the thickset dropship – all three humanoid, all three appareled identically to their infantry brethren; one to pilot the craft atop a pivoting helm, a second to operate the starboard-side floodlight and a third to dangle on the port-side bucket seat, with a mounted MI Model I34 Dragoon Anti-Infantry Cannon to keep her company.

  “Hey, Moira,” an unexpectedly immediate voice whispers, “over here!” Moira whizzes as Danbonte, fur-lined collar of his bomber jacket hiked up, seemingly to hide as much of his scarlet complexion from prying eyes as he can, emerges from the foliage farther to her left. He signals hurriedly and Moira complies without complaint, as the M2's spotlight begins bathing the forest's shadows in probing illumination. A dozen feet deeper in the brush, Danbonte, with close-by Ebeneezer striving his damndest to conceal his massive build behind a squat sapling, addresses Moira in a harsh murmur. “You handle that monster?”

  “For a minute,” Moira manages gratingly.