“Froz. Froz,” Nemo acknowledges with two polite nods. “How you been?”
“Thood! That's the one! There!” Froz thrusts a spindly finger at the recently entered Captain, while his right head habitually hems and haws. “Get ahold of him! It's time we, uh, time we, oh, moons, time we blow this, whaddya call it, blow this, uh-, c'mon, blow this–”
Thood, somehow able to decipher enough meaning from Froz's misremembered idioms, instantly relinquishes his hold on Anchorage to pound toward the side entrance and the bounty-head waiting within.
“Stewed arlaxi balls in shit sauce,” Nemo curses, upon seeing Thood's sudden advance. “Gertie was not kidding. You're one big motherbloomer.” Still some distance from the side door, Thood starts wading through the brawling masses en route to the Captain.
“Nemo...” Odisseus warns and his saltbrother instinctually obeys, absconding step-by-step in the opposite direction and yanking his trusty Carbon Industrial piece free of its holster.
“Froz, call your boy off,” he recommends haltingly, leveling the firearm at the gargantuan Saurian yet easing himself proportionately away all the same. “Froz? How's about we talk about this before things got a chance to get ugly?”
“Your boy threw a table at me! I'd say they're already pretty ugly!”
“That was you?” Nemo offers to Odisseus, forgetting Thood entirely for a second. “Nice.”
“Nemo...” Odisseus repeats.
“Yes. Right.”
Nemo squeezes a canister through his pistol and pokes a bloody black hole under Thood's right pectoral. The Saurian brute's forward momentum is unabated, however, and if the live round pumped into his lower ribcage has any measurable impact on him beyond the apparently superficial wound, Odisseus can't distinguish one. “Well, that's discouraging,” Nemo breathes.
He opens up the remainder of the chamber to mostly misses and only a scare few actual hits, though entirely grazes and scuffs and not a one with the dubious potency of the first. Anchorage and Odisseus, the latter hastily chucking a handful of nearby bar peanuts at the Noxix-wannabe as a last-ditch distraction, scamper forward to intercept Thood. The Saurian himself stomps ever forward, walloping aside whatever furniture or tosspot Nemo's able to finagle himself behind and sneering through broken fangs, like the jborra that swallowed the rat-canary.
Dropping his lifeless pistol into his holster to lob a limping chair end-over-end, the last conceivable obstacle within arm's reach, Nemo is literally cornered in the Afterburn's farthest booth, loosing a string of wild, muttered invective and eyes darting about for a potential escape route. Thood spikes Nemo's airborne chair to the floor like a skooshball, deflects Anchorage's violent propositions for his scaled knee with a sideways kick to send the Aurik sprawling, utterly ignores the full compliment of gashes Odisseus' claws lend to his lower back and finally succeeds, after some jostling, in grabbing the Captain firmly by the ankle and hauling him, twisting and wrestling, off the floor.
“Oh, no, no, no, no,” Nemo sputters in jerky apprehension as Thood rotates fully around to face the Bloody Afterburn's wide storefront and its subsequent bay window, overlooking Takioro's Second Ring and the partying populace without, his true intentions becoming painfully apparent. Odisseus and Anchorage share an unheralded wince of expectant sympathy as Thood elevates the captured Captain over his head in a sidelong grip, expels a wordless reptilian cry and winds Nemo back to throw.
Chapter 20
Two-Bit Switch is going to kick him good and hard in the balls if he knew. This is a sentiment he would have happily shared with anyone who cared enough to listen, had he not snagged the only empty lift tube departing Takioro's Third Ring for its Second. An opportune hiccup of foot traffic had granted Two-Bit forty whole seconds with which to contemplate the newfound depths of Nemo's derangement in relative solitude. Short of regaling the scramble codifier tucked neatly beneath his arm of his less-than-courteous intentions for the Captain's crotch, however, he'd simply need to wait until their meeting at the Bloody Afterburn to deliver on this inward promise.
During the sixteen-minute jaunt between Eidesmoe's ransacked office and the corresponding shoot platform, a station waif in Two-Bit's trust had confided a select piece of previously omitted information regarding the most recent of his planned capers and its direct ramifications. This morsel of news, Two-Bit was infuriated to learn, could very possibly spell neat individual deaths for most of The Unconstant Lover's crew, particularly three of her lieutenants and especially her Captain though Two-Bit, in his current truculent mood, wouldn't necessarily mind that last possibility so terribly. According to Two-Bit's source, at the time of their famously successful Haess caper, Nabdres No-Cock was, in fact, no longer a freelance arms merchant but instead, for the past five months, had been sub-contracted, quite under the radar, by none other than Huong Xo.
The evidently exponential spike in the crew's respective bounty rewards, not to mention how exhaustively thorough their postings have lately become, could all be elegantly explained had Huong Xo, rather than simply Nabdres himself, been the party most spurned by the Haess maneuver. Normally, Two-Bit would have shuddered at the sheer quantity of top-flight bounty hunters the Yheum crime lord cabal could personally dispatch to his and his crew mates' ends, had he been seeing any other color but red.
Two-Bit Switch, for the first time, a fingered accomplice in connection to high treason before the Endless Imperium and unhappy recipient of a personalized death mark higher than the market value of a small capital ship, is now charged with the unpleasant task of uncovering whether or not his employer, captain and comrade was actually ignorant of Xo's involvement when he'd initially tapped Two-Bit to plan such a heist. Both likelihoods, the first that he willfully withheld the proper context and objective of the caper from his crew in an attempt to better champion the Galactic Menace's wartime enterprises, the second that he was honestly too bird-brained to recognize the full scope of Ott's mysterious beef with Xo, seem equally plausible in Two-Bit's estimation, as they both rely principally upon Nemo's ever-abiding obliviousness to all things rational.
Whatever the case may be, after a fortuitously well-aimed shoot shot and a six second skyrocketing ride twenty-two years too late to turn his spacer's stomach, Two-Bit Switch seeks nothing less than to track the Captain down, ascertain the truth and potentially boot him in the nuts.
Two steps off the shoot and he's found him. He lies crumpled, moaning and bleeding lightly from a dozen miniscule cuts, at Two-Bit's feet on the sullied Second Ring floor, amid a strewn spray of glass shards obviously emanating from the gaping fracture hole where, when Two-Bit had last checked, the Bloody Afterburn's main window had once stood. Though the telltale sounds of an old-fashioned bar brawl resounded within the tavern itself, whatever passing pedestrians had been debauching in the street between the Afterburn and the shoot embarkation platform possessed enough bleary decency or morbid curiosity to allow the groaning Nemo a substantial berth, though Two-Bit judges he couldn't have missed the Captain's forceful flight by more than a minute, as he hadn't yet been mugged.
With a moment's regard to the smattering of half-interested onlookers, Two-Bit Switch sighs, kneads his forehead with an unoccupied hand and affixes his impatient attention downward. “Why, hello, Cap'n.”
“Hello, Two-Bit,” Nemo croaks.
“This what you meant by 'maining out of fucking stook'?”
He spews up a mouthful of blood to the tile, as well as the stub of an unbrushed tooth. “They started it,” he maintains petulantly.
“It don't matter who started it. What matters is this ain't no low profile.” Two-Bit gives the growing bystanders a cursory inspection. “What's it, Traasha in there?”
“I lost another tooth,” Nemo notices with amazed annoyance. “We might hafta stop by Joji's place, on the Third Ring, and get it fixed real quick.”
Two-Bit scoffs. “What're you, bladdered?”
“Sorta.”
“We gotta hoof it and how. Be
fore more heat arrives.”
Nemo pinches the lost tooth between thumb and pointer. “I think it's the same one!”
Two-Bit points emphatically. “Nemo, what's the skinny? Is it Traasha or not?”
“Nah, it's only bounty hunters. Froz, a couple others I don't know.” Nemo idly attempts to re-insert the broken remnant of his tooth into its former seat, before gazing up at Two-Bit and stopping. “Two-Bit, you spilt mustard on your pants.”
“No, I didn't.”
“Oh, hey, you got the codifier. That's cool.”
“Yes, I did.” Two-Bit sniffs. “Did you know Nabdres No-Cock was criming for Xo back when we deered the Messenger?”
Nemo frowns with fingers in his mouth. “Where'd you hear that?”
“Threesies. Did you know?”
The Captain contemplatively withdraws the severed tooth from his mouth and intakes a slow breath, exactly the manner of prevaricating tool Two-Bit, a seasoned liar himself, would employ before stretching the truth with a severe understatement or a drastic exaggeration. Thusly, he resolves to render the vouched-for kick.
Nemo wheezes and doubles further over, assuredly more from surprise than actual pain, as Two-Bit's punt lost much of its propulsion when it bounced off the Captain's knee. “For moons' sake, Two-Bit,” he whines. “What in the furious blue fist-fucks was that for?”
By way of answering, Two-Bit reels his foot back, aligns his aim more carefully and prepares to launch a second, hopefully more gratifying ball-buster of a kick, when something else, something larger and more pressing, catches his eye.
Stepping cleanly over the Afterburn's three-foot window ledge and into the shard bestrewn space station street comes a colossal hulk of a biped, armored fully in dull blue scales, only registering as a Saurian, Two-Bit supposes, by the most lenient of definitions and completely capable of dwarfing the late Ebeneezer himself by at least a foot and probably more. His fang-filled grin is shivered and split, pitch-black blood oozes unevenly with each step from an open gunshot wound in his exposed torso and an impressive assortment of Ortok-caliber claw marks mar his lower back in a bizarre ebony crosshatch.
His beady glare fixated on the squirming form of prone Nemo, the Saurian covers the glass-spattered distance between the Afterburn and his equally battered quarry in four powerful strides. Spotting his approach only seconds too late, the Captain entreats Two-Bit with wide eyes and a feeble scramble in the opposite direction.
Edging a step further into the crowd entirely on instinct, Two-Bit raises an eyebrow. “What's this, one of them anglers?”
“Yes! What the fuck're you waiting for? Shoot him!”
Pinching the codifier to his side with the point of his elbow, Two-Bit paces several steps backward and plants both hands deep into his pockets in submission.
“Answer the ringer first.”
“Answer what first?” Nemo pleads.
“Did you know Nabdres was crimin' for Xo?”
“I didn't not know. How's that?”
Two-Bit scrunches his face as he considers. “That's not really an answer, is it?”
“This isn't really the time for stupid fucking questions, is it?”
As the Saurian, whose massive shadow encompasses even apart Two-Bit, paws up the back of Nemo's duster in a clenched fist and wrenches him off the bloodstained floorplates, the Captain still succeeds in shaking an infuriated fist at his misbehaving quartermaster. “I'll have you peeling my space potatoes until your eighty for this!”
“As though. When was the last time you had a potato?”
The dangling, thrashing Nemo is heaved up to receive a compulsory face-to-face snarl from the Saurian, which he returns with the added bonus of a truly ambitious loogie hawked right between his bloodshot eyes. This achieved, the Captain is roughly tucked beneath the Saurian's spacious armpit, suspended much the same way that Eidesmoe's codifier is suspended under Two-Bit's own arm. The enormous goon, with utterly acerbated Nemo in tow, turns to take his leave.
Just as Two-Bit reasons he's probably had enough fun watching his Captain twist and is reaching for his holstered Dissident, the Saurian hesitates, halting hard in his tracks at the unexpected appearance of bruised Anchorage and breathless Odisseus, clambering over the Afterburn's window ledge and presenting themselves as a pair of fairly compelling impediments to any hope of an expedient exit for the Saurian. Two-Bit frees his revolver as the Lover's last two bruisers make their move in concert, spearing forward from different vectors like tje wolves attempting to topple a bull buhox. It's Anchorage who feints, suddenly conceding Odisseus a split second head start on his charge, hopefully to distract the foe's attention to the left, before shouldering in full speed from the right. The Saurian manages to fend Odisseus off by snatching the oncoming muzzle in a mammoth mitt and wrestling the Ortok's three hundred pounds at bay. Fortunately for the Captain, Anchorage's vicious headbutt to the kidney buckles the big blue crocodile with sufficient horsepower to flummox Nemo free enough to salvage himself a scuttling, undignified getaway.
“You're back!” Two-Bit exclaims.
“You're a fucking douchebag,” Nemo reports after scurrying on hands and knees over to Two-Bit's position who, despite himself, acquiesces with a self-satisfied smile.
“I could vizz that.”
As Nemo hurriedly shoves round after round into his pistol's depleted chamber, Two-Bit Switch surveys the mounting numbers of bystanders in an attempt to catch a whiff of Traasha or her alleged posse. By this time, a considerable crowd of passerby has accrued, an accidental audience of Yarba New Year celebrants of every shape, size and criminal creed, forming an oblong gladiatorial ring and offering encouragement or derision to one or all of the combatants. Despite spotting the Nomad Café's idling driftcart and more than a dozen hoodlums, hellions and harlots of his acquaintance among the accumulating assemblage, of Traasha there yet remained no sign.
The Captain clicks his firearm complete and they, in unison, raise their weapons at arm's reach to watch the continuing scuffle at barrel's end. Few feasible openings to blast the surrounded Saurian manifest among the shifting and scraping melee. Though Nemo and Two-Bit each unclip a few canisters at opportune moments, Anchorage and Odisseus appear to have the situation as much in hand as one can have a freakishly gigantic Saurian amateur bounty hunter in hand.
“Didn't Odi pack his Acathi?” Two-Bit questions over occasional gunfire.
Nemo cocks his head. “You know, I thought so.”
The more urgent matter of the ensuing slugfest is almost succinctly concluded by the coordination of Odisseus' savage pounce and Anchorage's unrelenting assault on the Saurian's elephantine kneecap, the former reeling the goliath precipitously forward, the latter sweeping the left leg completely out. The entire Saurian is swept along with it, pounding the unfortunate floorplate caught beneath into a craterous concave and doubtlessly a novel expense for Velocity to calculate on their always-increasing list of damages, along with the disdained Rith job and Gozzer's eight-percent pledge.
Anchorage, circling around the Saurian's proned and bell-rung body, is about to attach “gargantuan corpse clean-up” to that list with an unforgiving curb stomp to the back of the skull when a wooden dart, longer than Two-Bit's forearm and fringed in fiery fuzz, buries itself in the spongy meat of his exposed back. He corkscrews and arches, straining to extract the quivering impalement with fingers and trunk, until a second fletched dart bullets inches past Nemo. All eyes snap up to the jagged aperture formerly the Afterburn's window and the street fight's two newest contestants; a tribal-themed trainwreck sprouting a bamboo tube between ballooned cheeks and a wide-stanced gunslinger matching the single-criteria description of Froz Four-Eyes.
“Huh,” Two-Bit remarks. “Ain't never vizzed him in the meat.”
“Oh yeah?”
Two-Bit squints. “He got two different thinkboxes in there or what?”
“Half each. Watch this,” Nemo elbows him in proposition, before launching his empty hand into
the air with his first two fingers erect. “Hey, Froz! How many fingers am I holding up?”
Momentarily dumbfounded, both brows furrow. “Four,” they both declare. “Wait, two.”
Nemo beams proudly. “See?”
“Shit. That's antwacky.”
“Moons,” Froz consternates to himself, “Why did I even–” before raising both pistols.
Froz opens up, his double-pronged bombardment rapidly scrambling Nemo and Two-Bit toward the nearest available cover and instilling similar notions in both Odisseus and Anchorage. The Saurian's groaning bones are abandoned to his advancing compatriot in the animal pelts and, unitedly, the pirates fall back to the comparative safety offered by a station bench. Within sparse seconds, Nemo, Two-Bit, eventually Odisseus and the snoring Obaxi vagrant sprawled across the seat, are each afforded, by the station bench's hard composite back, a decent degree of shelter from Froz's two-pistol salvo.
Anchorage, however, straggles somewhat – suddenly winded and hobbled by a phantom limp that Two-Bit doesn't need more than a moment to attribute to the feathered shaft protruding only a few inches from his lower back.
“Cap'n, I think Anchorage's cabbaged real gashouse,” Two-Bit denotes bitterly.
The Aurik stops himself ten feet short of the bench, catching his collapse with an elbow and a trunk to his knees, his left arm already dangling listlessly from the shoulder. With dreadlocks jungling off his lowered pate, he cranes a self-deprecating smile up to his three crewmates, who peek with bated breath over the bench's rim. “I don't know, fellas.”
Two-Bit cultivates a slow scowl. “You don't know what?”
His breathing increasingly labored, Anchorage shrugs his pugilist's shoulders. “Might wanna make yourselves scarce, is my meaning. Think this's the end of my line.” He eyes Nemo. “With your permission, Cap'n.”
“You're blasted if you think we're gonna–” Two-Bit sputters.
Odisseus mutters something quiescent. Nemo, sporting a bittersweet aloofness, a particular brand of cold fire that heretofore Two-Bit had never witnessed in the Captain, nods after a heartbeat's deliberation.
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