Hull Damage

by Timothy J Meyer

  Anchorage, with vision superior only by way of not being Ortoki, had alerted Odisseus to another factor in the bar-brawl-waiting-to-happen that was the Bloody Afterburn's crammed common room: a second rough customer, one the Ortok didn't recognize, but the Aurik evidently did. While he didn't have her name or even a working alias, Anchorage could mutteringly confirm a hard reputation hogtying sizable bounty-heads for live capture. To judge from the manner in which she sat, perched on seat's edge across the tavern and positioned perfectly to share Froz's apparent intent, it wasn't difficult for Odisseus to fathom her purpose here.

  Uncommonly short for a humanoid, she sports salmon skin, a strained topknot of coarse black dreadlocks and a flagrantly tribal ensemble. Animalistic tattoos in stark white ink, outlandish garb of dyed hide and boiled leather and an assortment of unconventional weaponry – all part of a transparent effort to capitalize on the hoodlum's bedtime-story-fear of a certain ritualistic Yheum reality feedshow star.

  Odisseus privately fumes. Should Nemo emerge from his impromptu bathroom break via the side entrance, in full view of Froz, he'd undoubtedly be gunned down on the spot. Should Odisseus or Anchorage attempt any manner of retrieval, Froz or his petite counterpart would certainly catch wise before they'd made ten feet from the table. As a multitude of valid options fail to present themselves for irascible Odisseus' approval, Anchorage commiserates with a cagey glance.

  All Odisseus' saltbrother arts hadn't been capable to the apparently insurmountable task of restraining the squirrelly Captain this evening, though assuredly not for lack of effort on either part. In terms he'd deemed more-or-less relevant to Nemo's interests, Odisseus had repeatedly expressed, upon making berth at the First Ring's Docking Port #2767 a hour ago, how extraordinarily fortunate they'd been in skirting fiery, screaming deaths at the hands of the Exacting Counterattack during their fateful polar exit and there'd be precisely no opportunity to return the favor should they expose themselves to Velocity and all be shot in the head on principle. While the Captain absorbed this revelation reasonably well, Odisseus had taken the added precaution of jury-rigging a pressure catch with a spare transponder to ping his comm unit whenever anyone activated the boarding ramp's extenders; a tidy plan completely circumvented when Nemo snuck off-ship as Two-Bit and Moira slipped away to run their individual errands.

  Nearly forty-five minutes had passed before Odisseus, busy remedying the shellshocked jetboosters from last week's events, had crawled out of the belowdecks engine room to fetch his replacement neticgrappler and discovered his saltbrother's disappearance. Roping Anchorage, the Lover's last remaining meathook, along for an escort, a thwarted and cursing Odisseus had tromped off into the obscene revelry of Takioro's Yarba New Year, with specific knowledge, garnered through long months of acquaintance, of his truant Captain's whereabouts.

  “A quick drink,” had, in fact, been his alibi, though that recognizable sheen of doom to his eyes told otherwise. Now, here they sat, an Ortoki mechanic and a Aurik bare-knuckle bruiser, restlessly awaiting their absent employer to stuff his penis, whatever its recent engagements, back into his pants, waltz into The Bloody Afterburn and be promptly perforated by the efforts of Froz Four-Eyes and his signature showman's pistols.

  Neither Two-Bit nor Moira had answered his summons but he'd had words with them sooner or later; it was this immediate business of keeping Nemo alive that vexed him at present.

  Moments before Odisseus, bereft of better ideas, throws caution to the wind himself and attempts a headlong bull rush of the nearest bounty hunter, Anchorage scoots fully out of the corner booth, grasps his empty pilsner in the forked fingers at trunk's tip and murmurs to Odisseus, with his broad back turned against their awaiting adversaries. “Inch over into plain sight. I got an idea.”

  Odisseus upturns his muzzle in consternation. 'Where are you going?”

  “I'm empty,” he observes, hoisting the sudsy glass and a rascally grin before he strides off to elbow himself a place at the bar.

  Odisseus complies after a suspicious beat, motivated partially by his ardent lack of options and partially by pure curiosity, for the guileless Aurik brute was hardly reputed for his subterfuge or his scheming. No sooner has the Ortok squirmed his paunchy form out of the booth's nook and opened himself to view by the majority of the taproom's rambunctious patrons, as per Anchorage's instructions, than the less attentive left head of Froz Four-Eyes, who grants the Afterburn proper the odd subconscious glance, catches sight of Odisseus and narrows his gaze. Half a second later, the right head, though never diverting its unflinching scrutiny of the side entrance, adopts an expression of distrust and disdain to match his opposite number's. Odisseus responds with an upraised glass and a condescending regard of his own.

  “Well, well,” the left head's annular cadence greets, “long time no, long time no, um, well, that is to say, didn't expect that you'd still be, I mean, considering all the, you know, the time that's passed, I thought, how do you say, long time no, uh, long time no–”

  “See,” the right head summarizes bluntly.

  “See. Right.”

  “Recommend you make yourself scarce, Four-Eyes,” Odisseus threatens over the hubbub, “unless the plan is to get both your necks broken.”

  “The plan,” the left head counters, reaching a corresponding hand suspiciously close to his holstered pistol to retrieve a folded leaflet, “is to retire. What I figure, bounty on your boy's head oughta make that, you know, fait, uh, fait, what is it, fait...”

  “Accompli,” the right head finishes.

  “Accompli.” With leaflet unfurled, he paraphrases with a disesteeming tone. “Coupla hundred counts of murder, handful of smuggling, gunrunning, piracy and brigandage charges–” Odisseus opens his mouth to speak, but Froz's left head pays him no heed. “Now, here's the real money – three acts of war, plus treason, sedition and terrorism. Oh, and one lonely count of enthusiastic corruption of the galactic, uh, what's the word, galactic, galactic, not 'peace,' not, uh, 'betterment,' but–” he stumbles, scanning the flyer fruitlessly.

  “Good.”

  “Good. Galactic good.”

  “Gunrunning?” Odisseus murmurs involuntarily, moments before Froz's left pistol materializes in his hand and finds itself pointed directly at the Ortok.

  “So, how's about you set your gun down on the table there and get ready to talk your boy out of his soon as he gets back from gettin' his pecker sucked on?”

  Odisseus, as he typically does when confronted with a loaded pistol at point blank range, acquiesces, deliberately unsheathing and placing, gently at arm's length, his timeworn Acathi combat shotgun on the ale-stained wooden table. “Better off shooting me now. Save you some limbs.”

  “Ain't part of the plan, I'm afraid. I need the whole kit-and-kaboodle to secure my retirement. You, Quicksilver, that jabberhead and the Cap'n are all coming with me this evening.”

  Odisseus recoils his countenance in thinly veiled confusion. Sufficiently distracted by the ongoing guerilla warfare on Baz, the Lover's crew had neglected to keep tabs on the newest bounty postings, by their own admission. Recent events might certainly have escalated the prices on their heads, Odisseus had no doubt, but in order to extrapolate his, Moira's and Two-Bit's identities from a single scrap in the jungle, Insurgent Company's intelligence would had to have been gravely underestimated.

  “Surprised?” The left head of Froz Four-Eyes interprets, “Moons, I even get me a juicy little bonus if I bring that clunker of yours back in one piece. That, uh, oh, what's it now, the Unconstant something, Unconstant, uh, it's a Briza, ain't it? The Unconstant...”

  “Lover.”

  Allowing himself the lowest of growls at this maligning of his beloved Briza, Odisseus contemplates the aesthetic pleasure achieved when both of Froz's heads are comically smacked together as he challenges, “You think you got enough muscle for that?”

  “I got plenty. Why, I practically count for two myself. That bony number back there,” he indicates
the hateful little Noxix-wannabe with a tilt of his temple, “'s been tracking you since that Haess job and was more than eager to throw in with me for a chunk of the bounty. On top of that, as if the three of us ain't enough, which we are, I got me some insurance.”

  When summoned, a mammoth shape, occupying space normally allocated for two or three normal-sized patrons, rears its grotesque head off the bar top and climbs to its tree-trunk legs, a full head and shoulders taller than every other swain and soul around him and twice as wide. By the time he's turned completely around to face the seated Ortok, Odisseus is confronted with the single largest Saurian he's ever seen – built like a GF4 HAZtanker, dwarfing an overfull pint in his prodigious claw and boasting both a crocodilian hide brimming with overlapping scales and a crocodilian smile brimming with overlapping teeth. The shirtless, tailless mountain of a brute plants an unequivocal stance and emits a rumbling growl on a pitch to shame even Odisseus' own.

  “All the moons of Jotor,” he whispers.

  “This here,” Froz's left head introduces, “is...oh, bloom me out, what was the name now, this is, um, this is, I swear, you told me, it's–”

  This time it's the Saurian himself, with a voice so deep it's practically subterranean, who puts the left head out of its misery. “Thood.”

  “Thood. Of course.”

  Odisseus attempts to ballpark the Saurian's unmatchable weight. “Hello, Thood.”

  “Well, Ortok,” the right head, finally peeling its stare from the bar's back door, addresses with customary arrogance as Froz's second pistol flees its holster, “you think four-on-two's enough muscle?”

  Odisseus frowns in consideration. “You might wanna do that math again.”

  Anchorage, from his relocated seat at the bar, wheels about, plants a hand on Thood's mountainous shoulder to draw the Saurian's attention and smashes his half-full pilsner directly into Thood's startled face. The Aurik's full bore trunk punch, coupled with the shock of shattering glass and splashing Gitterswitch straight into his eyes, is nearly enough to topple titanic Thood, sending the Saurian stumbling into the clusters of patrons thronging the western bar and unleashing an unholy volley of laserfire from flabbergasted Froz's extended pistols.

  Odisseus anticipates this with a violent skyward shove of the booth's table, which plops noisily and upright onto its side, shields him effectively from Froz's barrage and clatters his Acathi, along with his and Nemo's drinks, uselessly to the floor. As Froz Four-Eyes drums a twin-pistol tempo against three thick inches of aged hardwood, Odisseus muses, perhaps too late, that Nemo's minute has expired.

  In the space of nine seconds, the Bloody Afterburn, already a veritable powder keg of disorderly, drunken miscreants armed beyond the teeth, predictably explodes into the most unsportsmanlike bar fight Odisseus had, at that time, the dubious honor of participating in, though, at the moment, he wasn't necessarily “participating” in the traditional sense and was rather hunkering on paws and knees behind the upturned corner table. Over the swollen din of random barflies slugging, punting and breaking chairs over other random barflies, Odisseus can discern two clear realities; firstly, Anchorage giving pitched battle to Thood along the southwestern bar, as evidenced by unfamiliar throaty hisses and familiar husky laughter to his left, and secondly, Froz Four-Eyes closing the gap to jointly nullify the Ortok's improvised cover and riddle him with holes, as evidenced by the sudden cessation of his pistols' barking.

  To prevent such an ignominious end at the hands of someone as undeserving as Froz, Odisseus sinks eight of ten claws into the boot-licked wood of the table's stem, heaves the whole piece of cumbersome furniture clear off the ground and, hugging it horizontally like a battering ram, takes a blind gamble to hurl the entire number, tabletop first, toward the last known position of Froz Four-Eyes, with a grunting exertion and a relieved wheeze. He's rewarded for his efforts by a dumfounded scream of bodily surprise, followed by a fierce wooden slapping sound and completed by the irreplaceable sight of flailing Froz, pinned wholly to the floor beneath the upside-down mushroom of Odisseus' table, both heads cursing wildly, both frantically attempting to envision a method to extricate themselves after being so thoroughly proned.

  Odisseus stalks from the booth, collecting his forsaken Acathi as he treads toward the thrashing bounty hunter, with the bashing, crashing Afterburn upheaving all around him. A nearby Nyvo boozehound treats Herne Halfsmile to a vicious knee-shot in the groin, before bouncing the same foot off the tile and feeding the doubled-over Phnuki corsair captain said knee again, likely snapping free another assortment of the Halfsmile's upper teeth. Anchorage, gripping its steel legs with both hands and trunk, swats Thood full in the abdomen with the business end of a reappropriated barstool to visibly no effect. Unhappy Roger continues to mournfully polish the veneer off an overworked section of the bar top with a marketably clean washcloth, the destructive uproar ravaging his establishment instilling nothing but a gloomier shade of melancholy to his every action.

  Skittering a dropped pistol aside with a flick of his broad hind paw, Odisseus racks the Acathi, levels both its sawed-off snub and a disappointed grimace at Froz's right head before receiving a twelve-inch wooden dart, capped in green down, clean through his shotgun's chamber for his trouble. Partially relieved to be spared the grisly duty of shooting Froz between his four eyes and partially baffled by the modus operandi this relief chose to manifest itself with, Odisseus twists to his right to spy the stocky Noxix-wannabe, halfway across the joint and jamming a second such dart, frilled with fuzzy green fletching, into a clasped tube of a weapon that could only be some manner of blowgun.

  Despite the foot long shaft of barbed wood forcibly decorating his weapon's firing mechanism, Odisseus listlessly hefts the skewered shotgun anyway and, chancing his second blind gamble of the evening, lets fly. The Acathi veritably ruptures with its swan song, launching both an uncoupled bolt and a piddling ditrogen spray in the general direction of the distant bounty hunter with varying degrees of accuracy. He accomplishes the desired effect, at least, as the narrowly-missed Noxix-wannabe brushes herself off, stows the offending blowgun in favor of a wicked spike of bone and wood and turns to hasten through the scuffling hordes toward Odisseus.

  With a sincere pang of fleeting nostalgia for the untimely defunction of his two-year-old firearm, Odisseus lays his inoperative Acathi to rest on the alehouse floor and proceeds to busy himself kicking Froz in the head until his latest opponent arrives.

  She circumnavigates a dozen private quarrels and half as many public ones, including Anchorage and Thood trading bruises and broken facial features, before she actually reaches him. Her first uncoiled pounce places her atop the southernmost bar top amongst clanging dishware, her next spanning its western curvature and landing her scant inches from the undeterred Roger, her third, with anomalous weapon clutched two-handed over her head, throws her back to the floor again, less than five feet opposite Odisseus.

  He towers over her, to the extent that his first two swings, claws poised to rend hide armor and tattooed flesh alike, sail comically wide above her head. She exploits this window to entice him backward with the blunt prod of her weapon, scoring a pair of miniscule points, which Odisseus consequently ignores, on each of his sides. Her armament of choice is an oblique, feral thing of animal bone and painted wood, drawn from an equally oblique leather cross-draw shoulder harness – a three-foot tribal bastardization of a grapple's hook, a polearm and a fire poker. She brandishes it with a very peculiar stance, equal parts sword and equal parts spear and her thrusts and ripostes are accordingly impossible to predict.

  His next blow Odisseus aims true and would have clobbered her midsection into a row of as-of-yet unmolested barstools had she not brought her queer weapon to bear with a rushed parry. She catches the Ortok's meaty paw within her serrated hook and the implanted animal fangs edging the blade pierce his pad. The bounty hunter squawks victorious, Odisseus bays startled and succinctly backhands her with an opposite paw, teaching her temp
orary flight and tracing four curt red tallies across the artificial white of her cheek before she prangs awkwardly into the floor ten feet off.

  Odisseus, with a weather eye to the still floundering Froz, licks his slashed palm and concedes a meager whimper as he attempts a closed fist. The Noxix-wannabe, meanwhile, collects herself, hook-spear-poker included, from her crumpled heap on the ground, smears blood away from her mouth and punishes unfortunate Herne Halfsmile, who unsuspectingly tumbles into her reach, with a vengeful haft clout into his unsuspecting belly, before she clambers to her own squat feet. As the much-abused Phnuki moans and writhes on the floor between them, Odisseus and the Noxix-wannabe circle each other with a respectful duelist's distance, the former with bloody claws at the ready, the latter with bizarre pike loose in her hands, each favoring the other with a distrustful glower of the highest caliber.

  “Whaddya think he's doin' back there?” Anchorage momentarily escapes Thood's world-eclipsing headlock long enough to shout. “Taking a fucking dump?”

  “Down the emergency exhaust vent? Can't say I'd be surprised.”

  “Are my ears burning in here?”

  Everyone, at least among the interested parties, freezes. Anchorage breaks off his attempts to extricate himself from Thood's vise-grip and Froz ceases his flopping while Odisseus and the Noxix-wannabe both stand panting. With the rest of the fray thundering heedlessly on without them, they all turn regard the Afterburn's newest arrival, flooding the side entrance with boozy bravado. Nemo, his fly freshly zippered, his unwashed hands rooted deeply in his pockets, watches nonchalantly from the doorway, with Good Luck Gertie nowhere to be seen.

  “Hey, you made it,” Odisseus comments brusquely.

  “Who spilt my drink?” he carps, offended, with an irresolute gesture toward the corner booth.

  Froz resumes his struggling, only with new fervor. “There! Him! That's, Thood, that's–”