Hull Damage

by Timothy J Meyer

  “Raise some hell,” is his only stipulation.

  “Aye aye,” Anchorage agrees with a significant chuckle.

  So enthralled is Two-Bit by this exchange that he entirely ignores the screaming charge of the tattooed travesty, hefting high the sort of impractical weapon that one could only purchase from the dime-a-dozen curio arms dealers on the Third Ring's bad side and barreling straight at Anchorage's behind, who, thankfully, isn't as inattentive as Two-Bit.

  Unleashing the shameless war cry of a dead-Aurik-walking, Anchorage whips himself halfway around in a wrathful full-body pivot and introduces the unsuspecting side of the incoming bounty hunter's cranium to the business end of his trunk, the business end of his paralyzed left arm and, adding insult to injury, an entire scalp's worth of beaded, knotted dreadlocks. The tricornered centrifugal bitch slap backhands her headlong into the teltriton tile three yards off. Anchorage, completing his pivot and planting his flagging feet defiantly broad, yanks free the blue-blood-tipped dart from his backside, crumbles it between the three fingers of his trunk and receives five of Froz's next shots directly in his brand new torso, which he, being the big-balled bastard Two-Bit knew him as, proceeds to laugh off.

  This time, it's Odisseus who hurries them off, shaking fascinated Nemo and distraught Two-Bit from their respective reveries, collecting the scramble codifier where Two-Bit had forgotten it and veritably shoving the pair of them away from the bench and its sole, somehow-snoozing occupant, past the congested gladiatorial crowd and into the confetti, cacophony and salacious splendor of Takioro Defederate Station.

  They hustle along the overpopulous curve of the Second Ring's upper thoroughfare at maximum speed and in absolute reticence, equally eager to outrun both the bevy of bounty hunters moments behind and the assuredly gory curtain call of Two-Bit's last recruit. None of the three turn to watch the punch-addled Saurian pry himself out of the shallow grave Anchorage had dented for him, to see the unarmed and poisoned Aurik, reduced to one knee, hold his own against three-and-a-half adversaries with whatever panache and dirty tricks remained to him.

  Before them, a pair of painfully intoxicated Diraaqi galoots take turns surfing one-legged up and down an alleyway to Two-Bit's right atop a fraught custodial drone, which mewls its compliant in muffled distortions. A presumably unrelated altercation, involving five Mantrians, seven Xend, a designed-to-be tank-mounted flamethrower and a costumed mascot for the Cuddly Craz's Pan-Fried Cuppi Bear outlet up the boulevard, rages outside The Wet Whistle on the understreet below, complete with customary collateral damage, uproarious profanity and people running about on fire. Starfish Saz, a Zibbian prostitute Two-Bit shared an Iniquity table with once in a Jotor's moon, quite flagrantly services an unfamiliar blueskin, devoid of any pants but boasting an extremely satisfied expression, on his back smack dab in the middle of the street ahead, the traffic's bustle circumventing by a wide berth, to avoid becoming implicated in the cepholopoid-on-humanoid transaction.

  The shared silence, stark, sullen and sober respectively, persists between the Lover's mechanic, her captain and her quartermaster for a sizable fraction of their sojourn to the nearest Second-to-First Ring shoot, until Two-Bit tilts his gaze past Nemo to Odisseus. “What happened to your Acathi?”

  “Says the Noxix-wannabe put one of her death darts right through the mechanism,” Nemo translates a beat after the Ortok's grumbling explanation. “Had to leave it behind.”

  “That's who she looked like! All the moons, that was mithering me. Well, if you're in the market now,” he changes topics, “I know a bloke, fact I know two blokes, who could...”

  “Uh, Two-Bit? Are you gonna finish that sentence or...?”

  “Second thought, no,” he amends with some solemnity. “I don't. They're snuffed.”

  “Which one?”

  “Either. Salo and Nabdres both. Jabbin' of which–”

  “Oh no,” Nemo bemoans quietly.

  “Guess who Nabdres was really crimin' for when we blagged his bloomhole back on Haess?” Two-Bit address to Odisseus.

  The Ortok crinkles his muzzle in confusion and replies with calm ignorance.

  “Xo.”

  Without two words in Ortoki to rub together, Two-Bit Switch is more or less oblivious to the specific details of Odisseus' phrasing, but the animalistic snarl, partnered with a open-paw cuff across the back of Nemo's skull to clobber a wiser man to the floor in submission, is indicative enough of his general reaction.

  “Ten to zilch it was them what cast these sweets out for us, thinkin' we dritched 'em. Which hums it why our sheets went and got all fuckin' indexed and whatnot.”

  The Ortok growls more invective toward the Captain, who does his level best to placate with assuaging gestures. “You wouldn't.”

  “Oh, don't get hinked,” Two-Bit informs Odisseus. “I booted him in the bollocks once already.” Odisseus hoots a response. Nemo, evidently offended, answers the Ortok's cuff with a snapped wrist against his hairy bicep.

  “Don't congratulate him.”

  “So, how's about the full skinny, Cap'n? When'd you get it in that loopsy maggie of yours to fuck with the jeebiest outfit in the Ring?”

  “Okay, I'm not entirely clear on what that meant.”

  “Bloom me mum out,” Two-Bit plows onward. “Name me one dapadan in Bad Space what don't sport us a ragin' hate-on.”

  “I mean, there's probably one but, look,” he deflects, nimbly skirting a steaming pile of confetti-speckled animal dung, “I can think of a thousand better times to have this discussion.”

  Odisseus tenders some vitriol, which Nemo scoffs aside, but Two-Bit only smirks. “I guess have it your way, Cap'n. You can just wait until we tell Moira.”

  Nemo pales. “You really wouldn't.”

  “What, you think she ain't gonna notice? The sky-high sweets her maggie's massed up, all of a bloody sudden, courtesy of Our Vindictive Asshats?”

  Stepping apart long enough to avoid being sideswiped by a careening tagalong and its Iella passenger, Odisseus poses a brief inquisitive. Nemo shrugs helplessly. “No idea. Said she had 'things to take care of.' Wasn't about to ask.”

  “No good buzzin' her?” Two-Bit assumes. Odisseus shakes his head.

  Nemo grimaces before submitting at proverbial arm's length, “You don't think she's taking care of like,” he searches for wording, “woman's things, do you?”

  Two-Bit matches his expression. “I suppose she must at some point.”

  “Blech.”

  Despite what little Two-Bit knows of Ortoki biology and what less he knows of Ortoki gestation, he's able to approximate that, judging from his extended vocalization, Odisseus is a little sketchy on humanoid gestation himself.

  “There is definitely a better time to have that discussion,” Nemo concludes.

  “I'm gonna try buzzin' her,” Two-Bit resolves.

  “I mean, it wouldn't be the first gunfight she'd missed because of, um, bathroom, uh–” Nemo halts himself hard, stopping Two-Bit with a right hand on his shoulder and Odisseus with a left to his chest. Two-Bit jerks to a standstill and, after he's dialed Moira's frequency, glances up.

  “Crunches?” he finishes, before catching sight of what froze Nemo in his tracks.

  Humblest among the lucky few businesses to have snagged storefront space around one of the four stairwell plazas, small circular atriums that grant companionway access to the Ring's understreet, the Freezee-Squeez boasts a dingy holoneon sign declaring same as well as some of the cheapest, runniest soft serve chiller cream available in station. Currently occupying the parlor's two exterior café tables and nursing sugared waffle cones in half a dozen dripping flavors, sits Traasha, along with her handful of heavily armed and heavily scarred hoodlums – a local sampling of whatever desperate, unaffiliated muscle the old Vollocki and her taciturn bodyguard could buy, bully or bamboozle into the Depot-Commissioner's underhanded service.

  Upon sighting them across the courtyard, Traasha halts herself, the chiller cream c
one less than an inch from her extended tongue. One by one, each member of her entourage ceases their conversation and the consumption of their confections to ogle across the expanse at the petrified pirates. Glares are exchanged. Weapons are drawn. Traasha's chiller cream scoop sloughs off the cone and splats on the floor.

  The plaza is sloppily bisected by a sudden stream of multicolored laser bolts from eight dissimilar firearms, Two-Bit committing half a moonclip toward claiming the first kill with two shots to the torso of a Suraaqi too stupid to load his gun before joining a death posse. The press from said posse, however, is quickly too much and Two-Bit finds himself scooting, against the surge of scattering innocents, left toward the only viable option for shelter with the unloading Captain and the unarmed Odisseus before him. Years of unanticipated firefights in troublesome locations had at least taught Two-Bit and Odisseus to hunker some when directly fired upon. Nemo, of course, remained exempt from this piece of gunfighter's etiquette and stood carelessly tall as he returned fire, presenting himself as a prime target and yet somehow made inviolable by his boundless good fortune, at least until Odisseus wrenches him to asylum behind the adjacent Pickle Planet kiosk.

  Shooing away the beaproned Zourim vendor and heaving the entire affair, green-and-white striped umbrella, vats of brine and all, onto its side with an Ortoki roar and a metallic clatter, Odisseus, Nemo and Two-Bit, in that order, make their improvised stand sequestered behind an overturned Pickle Planet pushcart at the mouth of the alley between The Pistol-Whip and SQ, Takioro's most violent gay strip joint. Piles of spilt pickles wallow in pooling vinegar, bolts almost too close to call clank and whistle off the edges of the lopsided kiosk and short of bottlenecking themselves down the offhand alleyway, no conceivable escape route is in evidence.

  “Well, of course we were gonna run into her sooner or later,” Nemo reasons.

  “Whaddya think, Odi? Any squeak of hoofing for it?”

  Peering past the corner of the pushcart long enough to earn a scorching graze across his whiskers, the perturbed Ortok delivers a definitive “no”, before rumbling some manner of complaint to Nemo as he bats away the embers from his muzzle.

  “Uh,” Nemo breaks off reloading his Carbon Industrial piece to pat himself pointlessly down before, “Well, here,” he leans forward and snatches an eleven-inch pickle from the viridian puddle where it floats. “You know what they had before shotguns?” he suggests, offering up the saturated vegetable.

  As Odisseus, growling out what Two-Bit surmises to be the Ortoki equivalent of “hardy har har,” swipes the offered pickle out of Nemo's grasp all the same, Two-Bit locks his second moonclip into place, waits for a likely enough lapse in the crossfire and, when it comes, hoists himself onto his knees to answer with gunfire of his own.

  Traasha's entrenched her position across the plaza as best she can, considering the Freezee-Squeez's flimsy café tables. While that's still zottibles better than his own feeble fortification, Two-Bit, after discouraging the others with a hasty blanket of covering fire, is able to zero a Helker mercenary stringing a fresh strand of linked canisters into the side of his low-slung ratatat. Two-Bit manages to pound three separate shots into his chest before the Helker can even latch the ammunition window closed, but it costs him the majority of the moonclip and of course he clicks the trigger too fast and before he's aware of what he's doing, he's constricted his last round between the cylinder and the firing mechanism. Exactly like his debacle on Haess, his B7 Dissident is once again doomed to the depths of inoperable fire jamming.

  “Fuck me in the beezer!” Two-Bit curses miserably, sliding back down to cover as retributive fire clips and notches the scummy varnish off the pushcart's rim. “Me wheel's gone and got lagged up again!”

  “Have you tried–”

  “Yes I've tried biffing it!” he exclaims, just then whacking the revolver's body with the meat of his palm. “This is all your bloody fault.”

  Nemo, unconcerned enough about their impending deaths to have helped himself to a pickled pacho paw, shrugs and snaps his pistol closed. “There's always the pickle,” he suggests again, around a mouthful of seasoned gopher meat.

  “Gimme one,” Two-Bit resolves and snags the nearest of the castoff cucumbers.

  Honestly about to hurl a wet pickle, for lack of actual firepower, toward the entrenched adversary, Two-Bit Switch, with scurrilous curse on his lips and vegetable held high, arrests his marinated assault when something yet still more distressing captures his attention out of the corner of his eye.

  Despite a convulsive left-side limp diagnostic of some truly profound level of knee-related trauma and a full dosing with enough black-and-blue blood to lend him the paradoxical appearance of a personified bruise, he comes onward all the same, struggling his prodigious bulk through the churning rabble of the station street proper and to the cusp of the stairwell plaza. The Saurian, more alive than dead, stands on the edge of the gunfight, heaving agonized breaths, clawed fists clenched promises of vengeance. Shortly, he's joined on his right flank by the battered, bloodied Noxix clone and on his left, the absolutely out-of-breath Froz Four-Eyes.

  Two-Bit Switch debates the merits of soiling himself and taps Nemo with the now-lowered pickle. “Er, hey, Cap'n...”

  Pacho meat dangles out of Nemo's agape mouth. “I think he means to kill me,” he starkly realizes.

  “I think he means to kill us,” Two-Bit corrects.

  A pair of strident yellow bolts with an apparently dissenting opinion whizz narrowly past Two-Bit and Nemo's shoulders to find smoldering homes in the Saurian – the first in the dead center of his chest, inches from his previous gunshot wound, the second into the side of his scaled head at an askance angle. With heart and brain perforated, he finally furrows the teltriton beneath him with his crumbling death and every head in the plaza whips around to confirm the unheralded entrance of Moira Quicksilver.

  Residual ditrogen snaking out of six-shooter snouts, Righty and Lefty loose from the draw in gloved hands and stony expression betraying nothing save the trifling trace of disdain, Moira Quicksilver stands undaunted in the yawning doorway of The Pistol-Whip like the new sheriff in Takioro. Two-Bit, habitually underwhelmed by Moira's posturing, is momentarily frightened of her.

  –––

  Moira is going to pry his eyeballs out of his skull with a hot knife and wear them as earrings at the next feasible opportunity. First things first, however, she needed to orchestrate as expeditious a retreat from the Defederate Station as she physically could, without running any further afoul of any of the innumerable parties very much interested in the astronomical price on her, her Captain and his crew's collective heads, all the while dragging three brainless, more-than-likely intoxicated scumbags behind her by their ears. To this end, she had every intention of remorselessly gunning down anyone and everyone brave, stupid or somewhere in between enough to stand between her and that shoot platform.

  A brief pit-stop at The Pistol-Whip to collect Ebeneezer's bounty, as well some shopping too delicate to keep the crew abreast of and too urgent to ignore much longer, had sufficiently motivated this briefest of outings into enemy territory. While she'd given token discouragement to Nemo's insistence on catching a quick drink at the Afterburn, her evasiveness about her own errand denied her the ability to exhort him any further, lest he decide to accompany her himself. When all five of the idle bounty hunters in the Whip had jumped her in unison, when Lenduza, at gunpoint, had fessed up to the exact amount balanced atop her uninformed head, when she'd stepped outside to discover Nemo, Two-Bit and Odisseus squatting behind a capsized Pickle Planet kiosk to avoid a laser bolt gangbang at the hands of Traasha, Froz Four-Eyes or either of their individual thuggery, she instantly regretted not slapping Nemo in manacles, collecting the exorbitant prize herself and having done.

  “Boys,” is her only greeting, flinty and forbidding, to her cowering crew mates before she consigns Righty to badger Froz and his compatriot, a miniature humanoid done up like a Whuudi wa
r-doll, back into the beyond crowd and conscripts Lefty to flatten Traasha and her goonage to the proverbial deck with a veritable rain of yellow counter fire. She avails herself of the purchased distraction time by sweeping the plaza for the swiftest possible method of their escape and, in seven seconds, has formulated the most workable plan at her disposal. Adjusting the hang of her shopping satchel over her shoulder, she drops into a combat crouch to issue commands to her outnumbered underlings and to avoid the hail of laser reprisals.

  “Nice of you to drop–” Two-Bit begins to snark, but Moira shuts him down cold.

  “On my mark, you're going to make for cover behind those trash receptacles out front of SQ. Nemo, if you want to offer a little disincentive, you're more than welcome. I'll follow shortly after.”

  “Hey Moira,” Nemo accosts with a leer. “What's in the bag?”

  She slants him her most unamused deadpan. “Shut the fuck up.”

  “When should we–” Odisseus, a little confused, questions.

  “Now,” Moira orders and rises from her crouch.

  Within another twenty seconds, Odisseus, Nemo and Two-Bit, followed closely by Moira, have dashed unharmed over the first hurdle, both Righty and Lefty promising Traasha and the underpaid brigade splashy head shots should they pop even slightly into view, Froz and his scrawny shadow having disappeared amongst the distant crowd. The three pirates and their bounty hunter babysitter huddle awkwardly behind the four rubbish bins. Moira points their attention to the opposite side of the SQ's garish storefront. “You see those?”

  At the junction of the SQ's far corner and where the stairwell plaza estuaries out into the Second Ring's main station street, a pair of ten-year-old tagalongs, a scrappy humanoid girl and a pint-sized Prulish boy with an open sore dotting his cheek, watch the unfolding festivities with pre-teen detachment and unfiltered cigarettes, leaning heavily on the spray-painted chassis of their decommissioned dash bikes. “Nemo, Two-Bit,” Moira names, “can you both fly one of those?”