“That's what you said. That's exactly what you said.”
The Galactic Menace, standing impatiently to Rymple's immediate left, crosses both pairs of burly forearms. “If you two girls are about finished?”
They, Odisseus, Rymple, Ott, Nemo and Kivad, cluster together beneath the most gaping puncture in the Vollocki symphonic ceiling that brackets the roof come landing strip of Ott's palatial headquarters. Slush continues its grungy accumulation around the stained landing feet of the dozen and more starships squatting in the speckled shade. The torridity unit, quaking and snorting fire like some childhood nightmare kitchen appliance, is thankfully welded in place far across the platform, though all its rattling exertions suggest it has other plans.
The focal point of their collective attention, however, dwelt not on Ott's landing circle, but seventy or eighty mottibles upward, dangling enormously some distance above Baz's exosphere, like a teltriton storm cloud or a bad portent. Though only a handful of its lower spars and a portion of its underbelly are visible through the threading cloud cover that perennially blanketed the planet's polar region, Odisseus had nonetheless identified its various overt components as what they'd dreaded most, Rymple's amateur opinion notwithstanding.
“Yeah,” Odisseus summarizes literally over Rymple's head to Nemo, past Ott's left shoulder, “it's a TFS 545 Pylon-class capital cruiser and, unless I'm very much mistaken, the Exacting Counterattack.”
Nemo begrudgingly translates, scuffing a boot tip against the besmirched thermosteel, before adding, “That name continues its eerie relevance.”
Ott lolls his head aside, headtails drooping with it. “See what you've done?”
“Think Rooster broke?”
“Unprovoked redeployment of the blockade's flagship? Yeah, sounds like a safe bet.”
“No chance of like, 'Musical Warships' or something?”
Ott's countenance is the very essence of unamused. “Now, I think, would be a perfectly acceptable time to lose my temper.”
“Have we any notion,” Rymple interrupts, “of why it's failed to appear on any outboard sensors?”
It had been Kivad, preparing to pressgang his rowdy crew into their weekly servicing of the nearby Chain, who'd first noticed the Pylon's looming specter, hapless chance rather the sophisticated system of planetary sensor packages the fortress employed responsible for its initial discovery. Ott's technicians, Rymple chief among them, cultivated assiduous tabs on the movements and whereabouts of every Imperium craft in the blockade and had, in fact, noted with interest the Counterattack's abrupt withdrawal from their sensor bubble the previous hour. Rymple himself had been bodily astounded at the Pylon's unexpected reveal over the polar window and thusly obstructed the planet's only unblockaded exit point. Ever since, the Treffel'd stood dissembling any theory that called for his incompetence.
“What's fuckin' me is why they ain't opened fire on us by now.” Kivad, standing precisely where he had been when he'd buzzed the spectacle in, puzzles aloud.
Odisseus knits his brow and extends an open paw and no comment to Rymple. After a hesitant moment, the Treffel drops the Spyglass into his awaiting grasp. Replacing the viewfinder to his right eye, Odisseus sharpens the resolution as much as the discount Spyglass will allow, pinpointing the absolute nearest of the extended sensor arrays and attempting to trace its movements.
“Nemo, you remember what we did off Moqu?
Without looking, he confirms Nemo's rumpled expression. “You think they're blindfolding?”
Kivad scoffs. “A capital? Is that even blooming possible?”
“I wouldn't imagine so,” Ott comments unassumingly.
“I'm afraid not,” Rymple demurs coldly. “Such a method of sensor displacement becomes exponentially more difficult with each size category of craft attempted. A capital ship, much less a Pylon, couldn't–”
“Fits with the patterns the arrays are using,” Odisseus verifies. “Concentric circles, as opposed to cross-hatched grids.” He lowers the Spyglass and confidently deactivates it. “They're not searching – they're screening.”
“Well, that certainly would explain why we can't see 'em,” Kivad considers. “Or why they ain't nuked us.”
“Or started landing troops,” Ott dispassionately mentions.
“Their programmer would have to be a mathematical prodigy,” Rymple carps quietly.
He shrugs his upper shoulders. “Crew of what, forty thousand some? Maybe he is.” Ott passes his disapproving deliberation back toward Nemo where, at least to Odisseus' thinking, it belonged. “Do you understand all the ramifications of this?”
“I'm betting not.”
“Up until this point, their entire blockade, however inconvenient, was more or less fruitless because they didn't know where on this moons-forsaken planet I even was, but, of course, you had to go and ruin that for everybody. I can't fly ships out of here. I can't fly ships in here.” He begins counting on a thick blue finger. “You have, in seemingly one fell swoop, barricaded any means of ingress for traffic, weapons, re-enforcements, amenities or even the most rudimentary of supplies, alerted the enemy to basically my exact coordinates, forced my hand directly into open conflict and so thoroughly vanquished any further attempts at resistance that you'd probably earned some sort of honorary medal in the Imperium Navy. We are now, in fact, besieged, Captain. This is why we can't have nice things.”
Odisseus endeavors his level best to avoid stealing a glance at his saltbrother, a humanoid who, not two days past, gunned down an enlisted crewman for implying less than a tenth of what the Galactic Menace baldly accuses him of now.
Starkly out of character, Nemo is quiescent. “What'll it be, Boss?”
“Go lift the siege.”
“That'd just be a waste of a ship.” The reasoning, surprisingly, comes from Kivad. The bright blue buccaneer, apparently unaware of whose neck he's spared from Ott's chopping block, sustains his heavenward gaze, appraising features braced by a male Braaca's four facial horns. “His little Briza'd be easy pickings against a Pylon.”
“For once,” Nemo, instantly divorced of austere duty, affirms, “I completely agree.”
“You volunteering?”
“I mean,” Kivad begins to qualify, throwing an absent gesture back toward his dormant 889 Chaperone, “the Chain's only capital we got. Couple her with the End and the Winds, though, you've almost got a fair fight,” he forecasts with a lighthearted shrug, referencing The Yanked Chain's two sister ships, partners in piracy that fly Kivad's colors and prowl in flanking formation, a practice common among those lucky captains with too many marauders for a single craft.
Ott grinds his teeth in evident conflict. “Think that'll really give you a chance?”
“A fighting one, maybe,” Kivad relents, “but better chance than he's got.”
“Again, agreed.”
Boss Ott, all four sets of eyes upon him, weighs invisible pros against invisible cons before, with the slightest shake of the head, he capitulates. “Bloom me out. Call me a sentimental fool, Kivad, but you've been in my employ longer than anyone, longer than even Dijiqi had been. If anyone's to have a fighting chance against an Imperium capital ship, I'd be a fool to think it anyone but you.”
“Heh. Sure,” Kivad allows, grinning. “Rymple, get me any relevant information you can drag outta the feeds about this Counterattack. Armaments, captain, military history, all that. Anything you think I could use, as soon as possible.” Rymple nods and immediately scurries from view, eager to be set upon a fresh, less embarrassing task. Kivad, favoring the remote Pylon with a fortuitous glance, claps his fuzzy mitts together and tromps off after him. “Best go tell the irregulars.”
After Ott, nearly leveling Nemo with more unspoken scorn, takes his own leave toward the lift platform, Odisseus' saltbrother sidles into clearer view of the warship's shadowed shape and to the Ortok's direct right, remarking in a hushed tone. “Pretty much dodged the fucking canister on that one, did we not?”
&nbs
p; “I guess.”
“You're not convinced?”
“How about we don't count our lonktonks just yet, alright?”
Nemo unbuttons both a carefree smile and a favorite maxim. “You worry too much, brother.”
–––
Two-Bit bites his knuckle hard as The Yanked Chain explodes. His rapid focusing of the Spyglass' lens had cost him the sight of the ray shield's final faltering. Clarity, however, overwhelms the rendering screen pressed to his eye just as the Exacting Counterattack's second battery bores brightly into the commandeered corvette's broadside and grants Two-Bit a front row seat, however surrogate, to its splashy destruction. In a sight six months familiar to Two-Bit, Kivad's 889 Chaperone-Class Chain splinters beneath the warship's barrage and into three sundered chunks, twirling harmlessly away from the distant engagement.
A chorus of silence resounds from the assembled onlookers, each aiming their own Spyglass high into the atmosphere, each observing the grisly events through the largest pinhole in the whistling, malachite dome, professedly the very pinhole Kivad had initially spotted the Counterattack through in the first place.
The knot of bystanders had evidently ballooned some, his presence included. Ott and Odisseus, it seemed, had similar impulses this afternoon – Mutha Be Mean and two heavies whose acquaintances Two-Bit hadn't the displeasure of making; the brawn, an able-bodied Akishi drooping two identical cigars from his lower jaw and the brains, a scrawny Ufaki bristling a disquieting number of electroknives, had jointly accompanied the Galactic Menace to the rooftop vantage, should today's events go sharply south. Meanwhile, Odisseus had bolstered Nemo's ranks with Two-Bit himself and an Anchorage fresh from the replicator's forty-eight hour embrace and boasting a brand new abdomen.
These eight, plus the gutless little technician Rymple, all huddle together and peer upward with Spyglasses planted on their eyes, watching with varying degrees of stunned, shocked and stony expressions.
An hour before dawn, Kivad and three ample crews, notably minus any trace of boarding party, manned their scrappy flotilla and disembarked Ott's landing circle, ostensibly to the end of the Exacting Counterattack. The Karracki clipper Chain and her two wing mates; The Four Winds – a souped-up Concord Industries Interceptor frigate, a capital ship by technicality and built for relative speed and The Business End – a tooled-up TFS IntraSystem Tugger, not remotely a capital ship but packing prodigious firepower all the same, skulked away southward under cover of darkness.
Unlike yesterday's broody conditions, high polar winds granted the afternoon in question spotless skies. Bereft of cloud cover, their adversary was plainly visible, in all its outstretched glory. Military beige against Nebho's dull aquamarine, the Pylon's underbelly points her procession of spires and steeples toward the pole below, like an inverted city skyline on the moon's underside. Though the off-brand Spyglass couldn't actually discern them, Two-Bit knew all too well that each of those outcroppings brandished dozens of broadside batteries, a mere fraction of the Counterattack's complete armaments.
The battle was bitterly brief. Kivad, approaching from an obscure southerly vector so as not to reveal the exact location of Ott's fortress, blitzed, all three craft opening mad fire and loosing torpedoes with abandon as soon as they came within range, hoping to inflict as much damage as physically possible on the blind Pylon.
Their introductory salvo found marketable purchase. Their concerted laserfire tarnished the Counterattack's naval-quality ray shields and the swarm of loosed missiles slid effortlessly past them to pocket and deface the Pylon's outer hulls, the dire explosions seeming almost miniature and precious through Two-Bit's Spyglass. Beyond this initial gambit, however, the element of surprise availed the pirates little and less. Once within range of the batteries' individual targeting sensors, the preemptive strike's hope was subsequently dashed beneath a hail of capital-class fire.
Even at their obtuse angle of approach, even with only a minute portion of the Pylon's full broadside arrayed against them, a single volley proved potent enough to entirely flatten the double-angled ray shields of each pirate ship but the Chain, who stubbornly clung to those last wisps of her projected protection for several more minutes. The hard lesson learnt, Kivad's toy fleet had scattered before the Counterattack's fearful cannonade, affording them greater evasiveness in the face of concentrated battery fire, but rendering them virtually helpless against the oncoming starfighters.
Scrambled comparatively slow on account of the Pylon's obliviousness, a handful of emergency-deploy squadrons, minute men pilots seconds away from their ships at all times, oozed from yawning docking ports along the Pylon's fighter gantries, like Spith stingers defending a burning hive, and made even shorter work of Kivad's joke of an armada.
The Business End had, of course, been the first, the cumbersome tug utterly overwhelmed beneath the furious teeming of the Fjoran fighter craft and chewed into burning, teltriton rags. The Four Winds' greater speed and agility had spared it thus far, but with The Yanked Chain's ray shield finally forfeit thanks to oppressive waves of fighter fire and its ultimate destruction assured by another unfortunate broadside from the Counterattack, those starfighters who'd plagued both her sister ships were hastily abandoning the wrecks of their former targets and giving chase to the fleeing frigate.
Two-Bit attempts to catch the Winds' progress through his Spyglass as her captain, the famed Jakosha Joojberry, plummets her frigate into the atmosphere, seemingly innumerable Spurs hounding her every dottible, but the pursuit's jerky movements prove too difficult to predict. Dialing his lens out into a general wide angle of the quickly-unraveling action, Two-Bit fears, for half a heartbeat, that Joojberry is driving hard for Ott's fortress, with scores of Spurs and the eyes of the Pylon on her, until laserfire shorts the frigate's main propulsion drive to a sputtering mess. Almost peacefully, The Four Winds idles and tumbles into a lazy nosedive.
Above it all, the Pylon, bearing a few blackened scars along her underside but virtually unharmed, watches with expressionless indifference.
“Well, that didn't work,” Mutha Be Mean blurts to little reaction.
“Remind me, Captain,” Ott, sheathing his Spyglass Deluxe, addresses to Nemo, after a prolonged enough pause for the Spurs to flutter back to the Pylon and the scorched and flaming thirds of The Yanked Chain to crash distantly to the ice with a muffled hiss. “How many of my lieutenants have you killed? I'm afraid I've lost count.”
Nemo wallows in further silence.
Ott ceases craning his neck toward the victorious Counterattack to numerate on great blue fingers. “First there was Dijiqi, then Tizor, then vo Qwer and now, Kivad. Did I miss one?”
“Far as I ord it, Kivad anted up himself,” Two-Bit interjects mutteringly.
“Boss ain't talking to you,” Mutha lashes out with all the sham authority of her recently minted office. A reaver on Ott's bottom-rung hastily promoted to the Galactic Menace's official shadow, Mutha Be Mean had a fortunate few months, having inherited Bald Tizor's ship and entire crew, the remainder of vo Qwer's pathfinders and likely now Kivad's boarding parties, and her jumped-up station certainly amplified her already abrasive nature.
“I'm reading minimal debasement to her lower deck's outer hull, which practically guarantees no major system damage and effectively zero percent reduction of combat capabilities,” Rymple assesses through his Spyglass. “She could be repaired in a fortnight, assuming they even make such a priority.”
Odisseus grumbles something, assuredly some technical correction, but Ott pays him no heed. “Any chance they discovered us?”
“Not with our scrambler feed and their undedicated sensors. Given Kivad's southern angle of approach, it's unlikely they detect us.”
Ott nods succinctly before aligning his condemning blank scowl upon Nemo. “I trust you understand what this means for you.”
Nemo, a statue carven of flapping leather and unwashed black locks, squints upward at the imminent outline of the Exacting Counterattack
, down and across to the black smoke pall emanating off the far-flung ruin of the Chain, smoldering in the snow somewhere out of sight and finally, with the merest narrowing of his eyes, whips fully around to march hard for the Lover's lopsided shadow, parked far across the pad.
Odisseus tags immediately behind, glowering his ingrained glower. Two-Bit and Anchorage are only moments later, Two-Bit disregardfully tossing Mutha the borrowed Spyglass before stomping off after his Captain.
Chapter 18
Odisseus can't remember the precise recipe for Artelian slapdash gumbo. A smattering of various species of arctic shellfish, unwittingly provided by Ott's voluminous pantries, a bushel of unsliced yellow rhama onions and a half-vine of detoxified talorja tomatoes, all patiently await the stymied Odisseus to make his move. He's neatly arrayed these along the galley counter beside the full battalion of various flavorings, spices and seasonings the Ortok and the currently absent Grimalti had accumulated across their fifteen-month interstellar sojourn aboard The Unconstant Lover. A tenth a shaker of sea salt and three unopened cases of expired Trijan cilantro make up the unimpressive display, the latter of which is the only ingredient present that he's reasonably certain doesn't feature in the ill-remembered gumbo recipe.
To this end, Odisseus is seeking Abraham Bonaventure, his mislaid cooking partner, hoping the soggy fat bastard's often-spotty memory serves and Two-Bit Switch hadn't been sent for another daring midnight raid of Ott's kitchens in vain. The navigator's typical roosts, his personal quarters, the sensor room and the engineering shed, all vacant, Odisseus, resembling his litterbearer more than a little with wooden ladle in paw and swaddled in that stained novelty “Shoot the Cook” apron Nemo'd surprised him with last year, trudges through the Lover, in search of the crotchety old Grimalti.
After a fruitless survey of the abovedecks and betweendecks corridors, Odisseus finally happens upon him on his second pass through the hold, the familiar clink and clatter of hand tools echoing forlornly off the encapsulating teltriton walls of the queerly deserted hold and cueing Odisseus to Abraham's presence, hunkered before The Little Beggarman where it collects dust in the Lover's far starboard corner.
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