Hull Damage

by Timothy J Meyer

  “And Anchorage?” Ebeneezer crinkles his unibrow.

  Ignoring him, Moira presses Danbonte. “Where's the crew?”

  Danbonte shrugs with honest ignorance. “When that bastard showed,” he indicates the driftcraft with an indefinite gesture of his pistol, “we split. I imagine the Captain and the rest are in a similar predicament, somewheres over there.” He points his weapon's nozzle straight north, toward the opposite side of the path and Moira, waiting until the seeking searchlight rolls by, dares a glance in the direction of Danbonte's pointing. After several seconds of scanning the recesses of the trees, Moira indeed perceives the signature shape of Odisseus, skulking unnoticed by the floodlight's scrutiny. “Orders, Quicksilver?” Danbonte defers.

  Before Moira's even half a breath to contemplate their next move, a trumpeting howl signals the nhybark's destructive entrance. Seconds later, the creature itself, all hatred and horns, rumbles into view a score of yards to Moira's right, still ferrying a trembling Anchorage as lofty burden and colored an entirely new color of rabid. The M2, at the unprecedented advent of this berserk beast, recoils slightly to allow the nhybark sufficient space, with the cannon emplacement swiveling about at the hectic behest of its gunner. The nhybark squeezes off a single habitual roar of challenge before the gunner can activate her minigun's firing mechanism and let a volley loose.

  What was once durable armor against the best efforts of handguns and assault rifles is proven bloodily useless by the vented thunder of the I34 Dragoon. A merciless storm of red laserfire buckles and bursts open the nhybark's spike-shod neck. With a final discombobulated bray, the nhybark lurches drunkenly and quakes the earth with a titanic collapse as its suddenly unstable legs cave beneath it, the impaled Baziron rent to ribbons amid the hail of broken antler. Miraculously, however, Anchorage, with a severed hunk of horn still protruding outward from his torso, clambers coughing from the wreckage, struggles to his blocky feet and hobbles, with an understandable degree of affliction, limpingly toward the opposite treeline and unabashedly toward Nemo, Odisseus and the rest of his comrades in hiding.

  “Shit,” Moira spits. The M2's gunner, outfitted with more common sense than Moira'd expect in the average genocide commando, traces Anchorage's passing with intent rather than actual gunfire, delaying long enough for the perforated Aurik to clear the bleached brush and for the floodlight operator to swing the high beam fully around to catch Nemo in plain sight, standing there with his thumb practically up his ass, before engaging another salvo.

  Canisters cascade to the dirt, spent and slivered, from the Dragoon's flashing shell chamber. The fiery bombardment, matched in volume by the machine gun's thudding rapport, tears entire trees to smithereens and effectively disintegrates any foliage unfortunate enough to be caught in the crossfire. All five of the assailed crewmen, Odisseus, Two-Bit Switch, Garrok Brondi, Anchorage with his innards in his arms, and the Captain himself, rally a ragged retreat, disbanding and scampering deeper into the jungle before the fearsome display of the Dragoon's pure horsepower. A rushed conference between the three commandos ensues before the driftcraft actually gives chase, tilting inelegantly on its axis to better navigate the treacherous trees. As it trundles off into pursuit, the next round of hounding fire from the Dragoon lights up the musty depths of the jungle with vivid flashes of crimson.

  “Fall back,” Moira orders grimly, stalking past both Danbonte and Ebeneezer in a hunkered crouch. “Try to raise Abraham on the comm, see if we can get ourselves evac. Nemo or Odi or whomever will figure something.”

  With that, the majority of their crew harried and harassed into the rainforest by an M2 Vagrant-Class Short-Range Scout, Moira Quicksilver, Ebeneezer and Danbonte abscond silently southward, the latter attempting to excavate a workable comm frequency on his handheld unit and the former gradually succumbing to the charms of a nice peaceful nap, courtesy of extreme blood loss.

  Under Moira's implacable lead, they drive deeper and deeper into the trackless bush, the strident ruckus of combat ebbing away somewhere behind. All around her, the manifold shapes of ferns, fronds and all the flapping, momentary foliage of a dead run through the jungle blur and coalesce together under Moira's faltering vision. Her mind and senses benumb themselves but her body, press-ganged into ability by rigorous physical conditioning, soldiers forward regardless. One moment, she's hastening deftly in the direction of nowhere in particular and the next, she's on hands and knees in the tameless undergrowth, saturated bandage forlorn in the mud and exactly no recollection of any events between.

  Enormous Ebeneezer stoops comically over her, expression of uncertain concern troubling his purple features. “Ya alright, Quicksilver?”

  A reddish discoloration in a bomber's jacket, tromps about at the edge of Moira's perception. “I think,” it mutters in Danbonte's voice, “I think we got something–”

  “...position...” a crusty Grimalti stammers somewhere, the greater part of his sentence squashed beneath unchecked static, “...dial yer...touchdown....”

  The three confounded pirates need little time to suss a meaning out of this, however, as the telltale grumble of The Unconstant Lover's bellyaching boosters, followed by the initial whining of its shrill landing sequence, reverberates deafening through the forest from every direction, as if an unknown number of IZ36 Briza Light Freighters were anchoring unseen all about them.

  A toothy smile, indicative of the absolute sincerest relief, dominates Ebeneezer's face. “Thank the moons.”

  “We lucked out,” Danbonte comments with a nearly nervous smirk and a cautious crane onto his tiptoes. “Sounds like he brought her in actually close.” He shoots a glance around. “Not precisely sure where, of course.”

  Moira grits her teeth, scoops up her bandage from the muck and shakily struggles to her feet. Much as she likely could have benefited from his help, she opts to cling to whatever shreds of her dignity remain and waves off Ebeneezer's assistance, instead steeling her nerves and enacting a Tebi-Gali breathing exercise against a nearby stump.

  In an effort to pinpoint their unrevealed evac, Ebeneezer scales the slanted trunk of the only dead tree courteous enough to lend Moira a seat and, thus elevated, employs the full effect of his stature to better overlook their surroundings. “I think I–” he begins to report before something unpredicted, something alive, stirs within the presumably hollow confines of the capsized tree trunk. Moira's instincts tumble her instantaneously from the stump at the first hint of ambush, but her punctured throat continues to forbid her from warning her fellow crewmember of forthcoming danger.

  The rotten wood yields like a coward beneath Ebeneezer's weight, unmasking the fleshy form of a strange broad serpent slithering beneath – eyeless, viscous and royal blue. The cyclops, jammed halfway into the shaft of splintered, decomposing wood, yowls in shock as the muculent creature, whatever it was, doesn't dawdle a second before cincturing his burly torso in a single swift stroke and constricting his entire body beneath its muscular coil.

  It isn't until entrapped Ebeneezer is yanked, by some unknown power, a full fifteen feet farther into the jungle, with another sustained yowl and a total hewing of the rotted timber into deadfall confetti, that Moira recognizes the peerless abomination that truly awaits Ebeneezer at grappler's end. Predicated both on vo Qwer's all-too-brief briefings and what little research she'd muddled together from the Lover's laughably outdated encyclopedia the previous night, the “serpent” in question, the end of which now disappeared unresolvedly into the jungle, was mostly likely, in fact, a tongue, a tongue that, given the context, would almost assuredly belong to the dreaded crerpo toad. In her limited knowledge, Moira could safely ascertain that, should such a toad succeed in withdrawing this newest catch, a most macabre exsanguination, thanks to a saw-toothed throatsac, was Ebeneezer's only possible outcome.

  The crerpo toad's designs, however, have thus far been thwarted by designs of Ebeneezer's own. He's snagged himself on the sturdy reliance of another tree, healthy and hale this
time, and strains with all his strength against the potent pull of the portentous predator, still shrouded by vegetation an untold distance away. “Somebody–” Ebeneezer wheezes, all the wind exhaustively knocked from him. Moira wallows in the mud, thirsty mind reeling, enervated limbs unresponsive and perfectly functional eyes nothing but powerless witnesses to the grisly unfolding. Danbonte, however, bolts to the rescue of his desperate companion, though, upon arriving, appears entirely unclear on how, exactly, to be of service.

  After watching him uselessly loose a couple of hesitant shots from his semiautomatic both farther down the tongue's lead and in the vague direction of where the crerpo toad might actually be, Ebeneezer groans out some advice to Danbonte. “The belt,” he mutters, with a stiff inclination of his horn. “Electrochette.”

  Moira, still floundered several feet away, bends all her willpower to browbeating her rebellious right arm into operation as Danbonte, careful to avoid catching himself on the tongue's adherent surface, tugs the folded weapon from its sheath, snaps it flush and powers it up. A hyper-charged current of electricity tracing the blunted blade, Danbonte hammers out methodical work on the toad's bulbous tongue. The creature's flesh, however, is pliant enough to absorb each blow's weight and only chop after repeated chop starts to peel and flake the clammy skin in response to Danbonte's frenetic battery.

  The toad's retaliation, however, is far more potent. Following a pained bellow somewhere out of sight, the tongue tightens its strangulating grasp, taxing a terrible toll on the tautened cyclops. Already Moira can behold its effects as black blood trespasses down Ebeneezer's chin and dribbles to the dirt. He opens his mouth to voice some final protest, but only more blood, black as pitch, gushingly words his cry. Moira summons barely enough strength to drag her pistol off the ground and tender three laughably-aimed shots toward the rescue attempt before some vital bone, likely a vertebrate, severs somewhere in Ebeneezer's body, his fingers fail and, bearing a stupefied contortion on his face, the kickback nosily whips him from view in the space of a blink.

  Half a second of turbulent jungle dragging, half a second of a mortifying sluicing sound, half a second of the toad's gratified rumble and Ebeneezer's gone.

  A pang of unsettled silence passes, even the enveloping wilderness adopting a bizarre solemnity, as if humbled by the crerpo toad's monstrous might. Danbonte looks for a moment as if he might possibly follow the absurdly obvious trail of Ebeneezer's ultimate passing, but at another of the crerpo toad's nearly infrasonic growls, he immediately thinks better of it and instead drops down to his haunches. Moira does what little she can to ameliorate her posture.

  “You tried.”

  Danbonte sniffs coldly. “I did.” His glare doesn't budge from the ground until, after a quick second, he palms an empty vial from his breast pocket and syringes up a tiny fraction of Ebeneezer's coughed blood, pooling in the scoop of a broad-faced leaf. “Worth a shot,” he rationalizes with a curt, wolfen sneer after filling a quarter of a container, just barely enough to claim a bounty, even by Lenduza's shifty standards.

  His daily quota of spinelessness accomplished, Danbonte helps the flummoxed Moira to her feet who, in light of her current condition, concludes against commenting on his latest indecency. She focuses rather on renewing her neglected breathing pattern and hardening the wispy remnants of her runaway consciousness into something resembling optimal operation.

  “How's the neck?” Danbonte appeals, despite not meaning it. She regroups a workable posture, confirms her memorized ammunition window inside Lefty's chamber and conducts a comprehensive audit of the ambience, until she detects the pained spluttering of the Lover's twin turbines, grinding themselves to a standstill some uncounted number of feet to the east. “Fine,” she answers to Danbonte before stomping as best she can into the waist-high brush.

  It's, as Danbonte predicted, a short trip. The Unconstant Lover, three stories of piss-yellow hull plating among the alabaster-white forest, awaits them a quarter of a mottible away, unevenly parked atop a reasonably clear tract of ground. Her engines rasp, her floodlights flicker and her boarding ramp yawns open with an unspeakably welcome creak. The silhouette of Abraham is, by activated instruments, blotted neon green through the viewport. Further more, the half-limping form of Garrigan, by his powered plate and his SV7 nearly a clone of the Insurgent Company commandos were it not for his scruff and his khaki shorts, jaunts down the Lover's ramp with weapon ready, but Moira spots no trace of Nemo, Odisseus or the rest of the trounced crew. She frowns as much as her wound allows.

  “Where's everybody else,” Garrigan interrogates as the unimpressive pair of them slog gratefully toward the ramp, “and what in all the shitting moons happened to your face?”

  Danbonte smears more black blood across his red forehead as he massages it with three fingers. “Ebeneezer's dead. Heeko's dead. Rooster's captured,” he indelicately relates. “The rest are, well, busy at the moment, I'd imagine.”

  “Or dead,” Moira hisses. Garrigan opens his mouth to react, but Moira stretches her neck and shifts the bandage. “An M2 Vagrant. Chased them north.”

  Garrigan's naturally aghast. “Well, with Nemo MIA, that'd make you the Captain.” He practically winces as he speaks. “Orders?”

  Under both Danbonte and Garrigan's irresolute expressions, Moira clamps her jaw tight and half-reluctantly commands, “Glive, fetch me a proper bandage. Danbonte, tell Abraham to trace my comm signal.”

  Both of her enlisted men nod in synchronization and jog three steps up the ramp before they, almost simultaneously, apprehend the full breadth Moira's extremely bad idea.

  “You're blasted,” Danbonte utters.

  “Moira, you've got a hole in your neck. You're not seriously going back out there.”

  “There's no chance in Jotor those dipshits are just gonna find us here. Especially with an M2 to worry about.” She adjusts the blood-soaked dressing's placement anxiously. “But I can find them.”

  Cold-blooded Danbonte needs no more assurance and trots upward, soon disappearing into the flickering light of the hold and about his duty. Only Garrigan, concern creasing his brow, lingers halfway up the ramp. “You're in no condition.”

  “I outrank you, I'm afraid. Get me that bandage, at least,” she tasks with a feeble gesture, “and Salo's rocket launcher too, actually.”

  A guileful smirk softens his “aye aye” and Garrigan's also gone, shambling up and into the ship, off to the medbay by way of the weapons locker. Moira relies on this transitory break to slump against the ramp's nearest retractable pylon, to regulate her irregular breathing and to scrape the bottom of her nerve's proverbial barrel for the final push. In this respite, the jungle around her seems almost tranquil, serene, but Moira is fixedly aware that somewhere, far to the northeast, the combat labors on.

  Garrigan's reappeared before she truly registers his return and he applies the sturdier, more prescriptive dressing from his field kit to her neck wound wordlessly, neither party necessarily willing to concede any dialogue to what may be their final conversation. Finally, when he'd administered as much first aid as Moira's time constraint made feasible, he looses the slung Culminator from his back, extends the bulky weapon, armed with three auxiliary grenades, and chucks her chummily on the shoulder. “You should come back,” he requests oddly.

  “If you insist,” is all she can think of to offer.

  Salo's unofficially bequeathed rocket launcher slaps against her back as she strides stupidly back into the oppressive confusion of Baz's intertangled jungle, forsaking asylum behind triple-thick teltriton walls and further medical attention at Garrigan's hands to woundedly scour across more untrodden territory in fruitless search of her wayward and likely dead companions and very possibly contend head-to-head with mounted artillery.

  She ought to abandon them. She ought to convince herself that five disorderly outlaws could hardly hope to survive a blind rout through Baz's unforgiving wilderness, particularly not with a fully-armed M2 in pursuit and, in t
ruth, she ought to realize she was more likely chasing a crowd of corpses, but a suitable trail, consisting mainly of ditrogen scorch marks and the odd Ortoki footprint, was quickly located. Before her better angels could object, the distinguished drumfire of a Dragoon echoes somewhere nearby, suggesting to Moira that, at the very least, enough of her crew mates were left alive to shoot at.

  A corridor of blanched trunks interrupts the complexity of the underbrush like a wide thoroughfare bisecting a metropolis of white woodland. Possibly a game trail, etched from the implacable wild by the passing of ejvora crab or nhybark or crerpo toad, Moira couldn't fathom but, as the obscure droning of the M2's driftmotor only increases in pitch and volume, she prepares herself. Slouching her exhausted form within a convenient cranny of the nearest tree bowl, she hefts the unwieldy 53B Culminator and fumbles loading its first shell into the cartridge. Half a mottible to the north, verging along the western edge of the strangely sculpted aisle, comes the first sign of her mislaid compatriots.

  The semi-distant figure of Brondi bounds and springs at full tilt along the cusp of the passageway, heading exactly in Moira's direction and obviously in flight from something. A beat later, two more, easily identified as scrawny Two-Bit Switch and speared Anchorage, surface some feet behind Brondi, each shouldering for position, but both with the same obvious intent as the fleeing smuggler. Finally, just as Moira manages to socket the grenade shell properly into place, the M2 rounds a surrogate corner of clustered trees and into plain view, drawing a lancing red line of laserfire and igniting any sheltering vegetation. For a second, Moira assumes both Odisseus and Nemo to have met fates similar to Ebeneezer's or worse, Rooster's, but, backlit by the annihilating brush, they materialize as Ortoki and humanoid silhouettes, Odisseus in the lead and Nemo, straggler of stragglers, lagging somewhat behind.

  Her target within optimal firing range at last, Moira, the surplus of her strength sapped by trailblazing, grapples to effectively hoist the Culminator even in the same direction as the floating M2 hovercraft when Nemo, somehow unsurprisingly, stops himself short, whips about-face and stomps defiantly into plain view. Even over the rattling sound of the Dragoon's expectant gunner cramming another chain of ammunition into her weapon's chamber, Moira can just barely make out the sound of Odisseus' horrified protestation to his Captain's latest bad idea. Nemo stands comically meager before the suspended shape of the weapons platform, aviator's jacket snapping and crackling clumsily about him by the displaced force of the driftmotor, pistol extended upward with sloppy, one-eye-closed aim.