Hull Damage

by Timothy J Meyer

  Abraham, his warty back turned completely away from the approaching Odisseus, remains somehow unsurprised by his unheralded question. “Slapdash uses what for thickener?”

  “Flavored Xiab powder,” he answers matter-of-factly, without missing a beat.

  Odisseus pauses. “Uh huh. And what do you use?”

  “Oh, lard and gravy,” he answers exactly as matter-of-factly, twisting his blubbery torso about to snag the Ortok in one of his trademark squinty considerations.

  One of the Beggarman's aftside hull plates is wrenched loose. Engine grease and spilt coolant color Abraham's bulky arms to the elbows and dab the very tip of his fleshy beak a patchy brown. He grasps a whirring torquer between soiled fingers and Odisseus reminds himself that, in fact, Abraham was, unlike the majority of the Lover's crew, conscripted or otherwise, a competent mechanic in his own right. “Ye'll be wantin' to spice that with a shot or two o' the Wage's Borsk, be there any left to speak of.”

  “You'll be wanting to neticgrapple these six bow rivets tight,” Odisseus counters with a lazily extended claw, “or she'll peel up in atmo.”

  Abraham further crumples his leery countenance and stretches a glance toward the Beggarman's indicated bow and their loose rivets. “Oh,” he relents, after a moment. “Suppose ye're right.”

  Barring his superlative experience as a dirty navigator, the odd barrel of booster-brewed moonshine and more crusty nautical wisdom than one could shake a spaceship at, The Little Beggarman had been Abraham's primary offering to Nemo when the antiquated Grimalti, for whatever enigmatic reasons he possessed, sought to join the fledgling crew. Tightly qualified as a two-man jockey box, the Beggarman was nearly as old as the Lover - an HH331 Starlight Incorporated Beacon-class Heavy Escort Starfighter, modified nearly beyond recognition, practically devoid of whatever green and yellow paint job it had so brightly adorned unknowable decades ago and perennially parked over the Lover's starboard freight elevator.

  Despite the potential usefulness the bizarrely-named HH331 presented the crew, she was rarely employed, as the instance almost never arouse in which Nemo deferred to the Beggarman in place of the better armed, far better armored and ultimately more agile Lover. Otherwise, Odisseus couldn't imagine squeezing his paunchy self into that cramped bucket seat, Abraham didn't trust Two-Bit with his prized relic any farther than he could throw it and all souls be in peril the dark day Moira should feel the need to fly anything, from tiny compliment fighter to cardboard box.

  “You tuning her up for fun, or...?” Odisseus dangles, his curiosity at Abraham's sudden interest duly piqued.

  “Cap'n's orders. Says she's to be all trim come next week's end or it's me head,” he relays, inching his squatted bulk a few degrees to better face the standing Ortok. “Meant it too.”

  “What's happening come week's end?”

  “Not sure,” he confesses with a shrug of his bare shoulders. “Says that's when he ought to have his brilliant idea by.”

  Odisseus shifts his weight, each rifle wound announcing their continued presence with a stinging regard. “You talked to him?” he muscles though the ache.

  He breaks eye contact a moment. “But briefly.”

  Following the Exacting Counterattack's emergence, Kivad's subsequent destruction and Ott's grim charge, the Captain Nemo had promptly quarantined himself within his quarters, professedly toward puzzling out some manner of solution for the Galactic Menace's “capital-warship-at-my-doorstep” dilemma, though if amount of alcohol consumed and number of Quuilar Noxix reruns re-watched were any indication, some truly villainous works were undoubtedly fermenting in his saltbrother's truant mind. Whether instantaneous bouts of madness, like the Bozee Bushwhack, or convoluted concoctions slowly simmered, like the stash-and-blast on Nos Mantri, all of Nemo's bad ideas were born of urgency.

  Three days now he'd been isolated by the strictest possible instructions and with the “Brondi incident,” as it had been dubbed, not even a week cold, none of the crew had yet conjured a reason to dare and defy the Captain's most dangerous of temperaments. Two-Bit had started to take exception only this morning, but personally, Odisseus wasn't overly concerned – a mood such as this had once claimed Nemo for six years, hijacking his saltbrother away on the unwise caprice of mercenary jockeydom and three days of same wasn't enough for the Ortok mechanic to fret over.

  What Odisseus had begun to fret over was this latest unwise caprice, Boss Ott's newest and most suicidal of errands.

  “You think she's up to the task?” Odisseus poses implicitly, with a nearly imperceptible nod of the nose toward the disassembled Beggarman.

  “Well.” Abraham returns Odisseus' significant gaze and significant question with a ponderous aspect of his own, his eyes flicking toward the abovedecks corridor and his Captain's quarters for half a second. “Been too long since she's been serviced, maybe, but I imagine she's got it in her.” He follows the statement up with a mutter. “Somewhere.”

  “She's never seen action like this before.”

  “She's ready. Wouldn'ta carried me this far iffen she didn't have salt enough for a Pylon.”

  Odisseus inwardly debates voicing his next statement. “I would know better than you.”

  Abraham absorbs it graciously, however. “That ye would, but I've a sense 'bout these things. Ships, their names and their captains. Trust me on that, boyo.”

  A moment passes in silence between Nemo's saltbrother and Nemo's mentor, the same unspoken knowledge inspiring both Odisseus' pragmatism and Abraham's idealism, a tacit history that freezes the both of them into an insinuated stalemate.

  “I guess I have to. You hear where we're heading next week?”

  Abraham crinkles his leathern brow. “No?”

  “Takioro.”

  Releasing his scowl from relieved wrinkle lines, the Grimalti snorts and shuffles his stooped form back around to the exposed mechanics of his Beggarman as Odisseus meanders a handful of steps backward. “Heh. Vel'll have kittens.”

  “So will Moira,” Odisseus adds, spinning completely around and nearly tangling himself in the drooping apron.

  “Add that Borsk,” Abraham calls out, over the sound of the clanking torquer.

  “Fasten those rivets,” Odisseus offers as a reply, over the sound of the betweendecks doors sputtering open.

  –––

  Moira Quicksilver is keenly aware that consuming an entire carton of Deluxe Mint Chococino chiller cream would be both fantastically unhealthy and veritably disastrous to a physique already eight days bedridden and deprived of any meaningful manner of exercise. At the same time, someone shot her in the neck with an assault rifle last week and came remarkably close to actually killing her, so she's going to eat all the damn chiller cream she feels like and her waistline will just have to suffer the consequences.

  She'd, at long last, reunited herself with her beloved topturret, devoting the entire evening to nostalgic familiarizations with a secreted bottle of premium Gitterswitch, the triple-barreled, super-charged machine gun whose upkeep she'd tragically neglected and the unbridled calorie dump her melty carton of chiller cream represented. Much of the crew hadn't yet been informed of the extent of her recuperation and she was intent on seizing a little much-deserved R&R, before facing either a direct crewmen or whatever new calamity Nemo had roped her into next.

  From her secluded roost high atop The Unconstant Lover, Moira watches the midnight, awash with the muted blue of Nebho, leak through the punctured canopy of the Vollocki symphonic ceiling, trickle off the ghostly shapes of Ott's idle armada and pool in dim spotlights, great and small, upon the greasy rooftop. Not a soul stirs anywhere in Moira's all-encompassing line of sight – stillness across the sleet-stained landing pad, stillness across the polar horizon, the only movement the occasional blink of operation lights off the atmospheric Pylon. With the gunner's hatch tightly sealed beneath her feet, Moira is finally alone, with only chiller cream, gin and peace to accompany her.

  In truth, activity
aboard the Lover had been blessedly circumspect these past three days. Whereas normally after a successful raid, the conscript crew would be engaged in recurrent carousal and pervasive debauchery about the various public areas of the ship, the previous week's failures cast something of a melancholy over the remaining marauders. On express instructions from Odisseus not to leave the ship for any reason, they'd all kept mostly to themselves, a brigand's abrupt mortality so starkly illustrated by the recent events in the jungle. Moira, who'd passed eight days on her deathbed with former Petty Officer Glive Garrigan hovering over her, could sympathize.

  The wound on her neck, still bearing the ugly square of gauzy bandage, is considerably uglier beneath, still a reddish, blotchy, semi-yielding mess despite the dermal sealer's best efforts. She had Garrigan's profuse assurances that, given a few more days to settle, the organicon compound would graft more permanently onto the side of her neck but, for the time being, perhaps a nice solid bandage would be preferable to leaking replacement tissue everywhere she went with her newfound freedom. Moira had been compelled to agree.

  The same, however, could not be said for the two liters of freshly transfused Triomman blood currently swimming its grimy little way through her veins.

  She's scavenging together the dredgy remnants at carton's bottom with the flat of her spoon when her precious solitude is quite suddenly shattered by the spontaneous explosion of some ungodly scrabbling and screeching racket, dully audible even through the prodigious thickness of the gunner's hatch. Convinced that someone must be simultaneously torturing innocent animals and juggling grenades very poorly to produce commotion of that unprecedented caliber, she slivers the hatch open scarcely an inch, only to be assaulted by a clamorous cacophony of atonal riffs and thudding breakbeats. Nearly deafened in the process, she ascertains the epicenter to be somewhere directly below her, in the bowels of the ship. With a wearisome smirk, she slams the hatch closed, lest her ambushed eardrums start bleeding.

  Especially with the hatch latched beneath her, she could conceivably ignore it. Safely insulated within her hallowed topturret, the tumultuous roar from below was relegated into little more than a muffled throb, resonating through the Lover's teltriton. Obnoxious as it may be, it was nothing that Moira Quicksilver, firm devotee in “mind-over-matter” couldn't simply phase out of her bubble of consciousness. She would simply sample her Gitterswitch, shut her ears to the screaming upheaval beneath her and assume that someone more discerning, maybe Odisseus or Two-Bit, would handle this situation in due time.

  The siege wears tirelessly on, however, surprisingly audible fingers of distant dissonance grasping around her private fortress and gnawing at the outermost fringes of her attention. Three sips into her bottle, her own better angels are peeved past the point of any esoteric justifications and she's forced to intervene.

  She plucks the dangling headset free in two fingers, hastily secures it against her temples and, adjusting the receiver to allow her unfettered access to her booze, dials down a hailing frequency to the underturret. Her first attempt finds no purchase, the ringtone and evidently the flashing indicator light drowned out beneath the caterwauling chaos. Her second effort, coupled with ramming the heel of her jackboot against the gunner's hatch, actually achieves a response.

  A connection is established and, before the ensuing uproar can violate her ears, Moira's cranked the channel's interior volume drastically down, the pounding and keening at as reasonable a decibel as Moira can imagine. After a jostling of the opposite end of the receiver, he shouts something completely unintelligible.

  “I assume you can't be convinced to turn that garbage off, or at least down?” Moira requests as politely as she ever bothers to be.

  Finally, blissfully, the astrogrunge bedlam below is drained to a manageable volume. “This is their second album,” Nemo, his voice alarmingly distinct, categorizes on the other end of the line. “Their third album is the garbage.”

  “Cosmic Vomit again?”

  “Yup.”

  “And there's no chance it's all garbage?”

  “Nope.” At a stroke, he deactivates the maelstrom, leaving only the soft buzz of electrical feedback to blur the channel. “You're awake."

  “I am awake.”

  “And in the turret?”

  “And in the turret.”

  “You know,” he poses, as casually as one might broach the topic of last night's skooshball match, “we all thought you were gonna die back there.”

  “Yeah,” she's forced to admit, “that was sorta my assumption for a while there too.”

  She'd, in fact, only regained consciousness the previous night, with a handful of wispy memories of doxychoraphum and rocket launchers, sullen voices and grave faces, mainly Garrigan's scruffy features and scruffier speech, and most of all, the unmistakable sound of the spewing dermal sealer and the unforgettable sight of the riveted teltriton ceiling to her quarters. The notion of her own death, even now, seems more an estranged concept than a possible reality.

  “Suppose it just wasn't in the cards.”

  “Not yet, anyway,” Nemo cheerily qualifies.

  “So,” Moira begins, eager to switch subjects, “do I wanna ask what you're doing down there?”

  “Well, okay, there I was, watching Quuilar Noxix and–”

  “Which season?”

  “Eleven. That one with those lame HAZtank dumpers on Glory?”

  “That one is dumb.”

  “Right?” Moira can clearly envision him down there, irresponsibly spinning the turret seat around and inadvertently tangling himself in the comm cord. “So I figure, indecent quantities of Gitterswitch Gin is really the only way to get through this episode–”

  “Naturally.”

  “But, as luck would have apparently have it, I've just run dry. And,” he forswears, “as soon as I get my hands on the thieving little blowbag-muncher who cleaned out all my emergency stashes, I'manna keelhaul me a motherfucker.”

  Hoisting her own emergency stash to her lips, Moira inquires before sipping again. “Any leads?”

  “The investigation is ongoing.”

  Moira wipes the residual gin away from her lips with the meat of her thumb. “What exactly is a blowbag-muncher?”

  “I don't know. Something bad. Somebody who steals my alcohol and like,” he sniffs, “munches blowbags.”

  “That seems logical.”

  “So, yeah,” he upshifts, with a little cursory drumming on the armrests, “I've got, what, sixteen some minutes until this episode is over.”

  “Could you just skip the episode?”

  “Lost the remote.”

  “Fair.”

  “But, wait a minute,” he sharply ceases drumming. “What're you doing up there?”

  “Um.”

  Moira bites the bottle between unresolved teeth. She certainly wasn't about to admit, especially to Nemo, that she'd been secretly hiding from Garrigan of all people, that her apparent eight days worth of enfeebled helplessness deeply disquieted her, that, from all reports, Glive's bedside manner remained utterly unflagging, that she was finding his unprecedented compassion strangely difficult to swallow and instead sought refuge in her confidential little clubhouse, the only place aboard where she could comfortably let her guard down.

  “Um?” Nemo repeats blandly.

  “...Garrigan said I should exercise. Odisseus said I couldn't leave the ship.”

  “Oh. Sure,” Nemo appreciates and immediately begins drumming again. Relieved at his obliviousness, Moira rewards herself with a mouthful of Gitter. “Hey,” Nemo blathers on, “you wanna come watch Noxix with me in...fifteen minutes?”

  This she honestly considers first. “I'll probably pass. The next one is the casino break-in.”

  “Yeah? Fuck.”

  “The eleventh season,” Moira concurs resignedly.

  “It's rough.”

  Motion on the shadowed landing pad catches Moira's eye as the hexagonal lift platform clicks silently into place and th
e handful of figures occupying its center shuffle off toward separate ships. “Anything happen that I should know about?”

  “Nah. Not really.”

  “I heard you shot Brondi.”

  “Oh, yeah. That happened.”

  “And stuck a gun in his mouth?”

  “That too. Where'd you hear it?”

  “Garrigan mentioned it. What did he say?”

  “Well, nothing.” Nemo halts drumming a second. “He had a gun in his mouth.”

  Moira frowns. “No, I mean, why did you stick the gun in his mouth? What did he say before that?”

  “I don't know. Some stupid shit.”

  Detecting that conversational malaise that would occasionally seize the Captain in his queerer moods, Moira briefly wonders if she'd accidentally strayed too close to that unuttured territory that no one presumed to encroach upon. She half-expects Nemo to deactivate the comm channel and wander off to blare more Cosmic Vomit or watch more Quuilar Noxix or masturbate for what would likely be the ninth time today.

  “So, were you like, dead dead?” he questions instead. “Did he like, revivify you?”

  “Garrigan says no,” she reports. “He says that when you found me, I was just passed out. You know, from blood loss.” She shifts anxiously in her seat.

  “Sure.”

  “But I didn't see any like, lights or anything,” she's quick to disillusion. “No visions or whatever. I was just basically asleep for most of it.”

  “Sure.”

  “Why?”

  “Oh, I don't know,” he confesses, with a concerted slapping of his thighs. “Nobody's ever shot me in the neck.”

  “Yeah? I don't recommend it.”

  “I've actually never been seriously wounded,” he relates with an unnervingly degree of disappointment.