Hull Damage

by Timothy J Meyer

  –––

  Two-Bit Switch stands bemused before the chiller. He'd only entered the galley fleetingly, to wash the Beggarman's greasy soot from his palms and potentially snag a yogurt for a job well done, before setting about whatever fresh task Abraham, currently taking his ease with Marco and a bushel of nachos not ten feet away, allocated for him in the eight remaining hours before warping off to Baz. The spectacle newly magnetized to the chiller door froze him in his over-booked tracks.

  A pictorial orgy would perhaps be the best description Two-Bit could fathom for it.

  Certainly some piece of pornography, Two-Bit could at least deduce, judging by the glossy disposable material it was printed on, the same that constitutes those nudie magazines he was occasionally guilty of leafing through. Making sense of the smutty one-sheet proves impossible, depicting as it did, a knot of naked participants, in ludicrous positions and of various bipedal and non-bipedal species. What most confounds Two-Bit, no xenobiologist by his own admission, about the hedonistic fucksplosion hanging before him, is that each specimen illustrated within appears to be male.

  He walks back about his duties bewildered, leaving “Walk My Plank,” as it was captioned, to its own sordid devices and wondering whom, in all the moons of Jotor, would have possibly hung something like that on the chiller in the first place.

  Chapter 22

  Moira remains undecided. With the culmination of this whole Pylon affair only hours and days away, they'd been long overdue for another meeting, despite this being only the fourth overall and their second within two months. As arguments from both viewpoints are weighed or deflated by either party of conflict, Moira, sitting on the lip of the undersupplied bathroom's single basin, still could not fully subscribe to either course of action.

  “Odisseus' point bein',” Abraham translates for Two-Bit's benefit, “there's no bouncin' back from this. Real heat be on us now and we'd be bloomwits not to take Takioro's events as a sign a' that.” The hoary old Grimalti lingers nearest the door, the least enthused about the location of their meeting and seemingly possessed of some superstitious fear of the place. Considering the dump's general state of disrepair, she couldn't rightly begrudge him the point.

  “And act accordingly,” Odisseus pointlessly adds, almost to himself. The harried Ortok, barely able to squeeze a few free minutes away from the laundry list of repairs, modifications and other such errands Nemo'd outlined for him, leans against the dinted dryer mechanism to Moira's right and multitasks, fiddling with a compression valve.

  “A blinker of what?” Two-Bit fights dirty. “That we're all hard fucking brunos now and any anglers out there better think twice before chaveling with us and our ten-foot teltriton plonkers?” The jabberhead, lounging atop the toilet in the corner stall, appears more comfortable in this locale than even Moira, a thought whose ramifications she's determined not to further speculate upon.

  The women's restroom of Iogo's Warp Gate Junction had been deemed by the Lover's four lieutenants, after some reluctant debate on the subject, the only accessible place that Nemo would honestly have no reason to visit and therefore have almost no chance of interrupting their latest covert meeting. The Trijan behind the counter had given each of them the evilest of eyes when all four officers, a woman, an Ortok, a Grimalti and an enthusiastic consumer of jellydogs, had jointly requested the room's keycode and shuffled in together. Considering the gunky, mysteriously stained nature of the place, however, entirely worse scenarios had been enacted in here than whatever that cashier could possibly suspect.

  Moira herself elected to squat atop the scuffed and scummy basin, with her sweater yanked up over her nose, unwilling to risk lodging spent condoms or loose teeth between the grooves of her jackboots' corrugated bottoms, a fate she prescribed for each of her comrades, given their apparent readiness to stand on the sullied tile, Odisseus barefoot even.

  “Speak for yourself,” the Ortok grumbles. “You don't think Takioro was at least some indication that we're in over our heads?”

  “Aye,” Abraham confirms. “How long until some serious trouble, somebody what puts Froz and his lot to shame, comes a-crawlin' out of the woodwork?”

  “How the bloom should I delly that?” Two-Bit disassociates with a mockingly helpless shrug. “I ain't Huong Xo or IMIS or an angler myself, am I?”

  “We're sayin',” the Grimalti reiterates, “ye ain't lookin' at the whole kit and caboodle.”

  “I'm saying,” Two-Bit reprises with a forceful point, “you ain't vizzing at the bigger caboodle.” He scoots himself to the edge of the toilet seat in explanation. “We stick with Ott, we got a planetary defense edgie, a whole mess of gantines and the bloody fucking Galactic Menace between us and whatever anglers Xo's welcome to throw our way.” He spreads both hands wide in a gesture of inevitable vulnerability. “We blow Ott off, add another dapadan and all his klamber to the list of beefed personages soon to be up our bloomholes.”

  That notion, presented crudely though it was, carries some weight with both mechanic and navigator, causing them both a moment of recoiled recalculation. Once, they'd all shuddered at the prospect of fleeing before the summons of the incensed Galactic Menace, yet here they stand, four months later, presenting retreat and desertion as their only options with their backs pressed to a proverbial wall. Much to her own chagrin, Moira briefly finds herself commiserating with Two-Bit's concerns.

  “Ott's house is falling apart,” Odisseus devalues with a swaying shake of his furry head. “He's low on soldiers, resources, ships and the Imperium's sniffing around his foxhole.”

  Two-Bit, after the translation from Abraham, sputters. “Because of us! Don't you feel the slightest bit hooked for any of that?”

  “Oh, come off it, ye crooked fucker. Ye ain't never felt responsible fer nothin', not even yer own shite, a day in yer life,” Abraham immediately belittles, the effect of which catches Two-Bit's next embitterment in his throat and tosses his gaze to the soiled tiles.

  “What we're saying is, Two-Bit,” Odisseus attempts to summarize, perhaps gentler than Abraham's blunt rebuff, “that destroying the Counterattack might slow the Imperium down, but it certainly won't stop them. With, what, an entire fleet and change, their lunar base, plus their extensive planetside commitments, its pretty clear they're not going away and even a few destroyed capital ships will only dent those plans.” He stops tinkering a moment to pass a significant glance toward the seated jabberhead, who maintains his scrutiny of the floor. “Trust me.”

  Moira considers voicing something to the ironic defense of Two-Bit's argument, but Odisseus' reasoning rings too true to conjure anything worthwhile.

  “Then what're you propoing?” Two-Bit offers slowly.

  “I think lamming it,” Abraham, fresh from translation, relates. “Assuming the boy's right about his plan and we survive this Pylon business, we take the bounty, cut our ties with Ott and find a nice quiet corner of the Offchart to fritter our winnings away and watch our postings decrease.”

  “And you think that'll be enough to keep the anglers off?”

  “A bloom sight better'n stickin' our ten-foot teltriton cocks of song and story out in the open and invitin' 'em to come take a chomp.”

  “Wasn't exactly free bounty hunter bludges I had in mind, but...”

  “Then what did you have in mind?” Odisseus poses with an encouraging gesture of the compression valve.

  Two-Bit interprets the Ortok's tone and gesture correctly and outlines his theory. “Well, minus this bit about his outfit 'falling apart,' I thought Ott's place'd be as ozzy a spot as any in the galaxy to be in the lavender, wouldn't it? They'd need a bleeding army to kuckle us out of there and we'd have the blooming best mummies we could possibly bump until everything was all drongo again.”

  “They do have an army, Two-Bit. They've got several, in fact, and, more importantly, they've got a position.” Odisseus disillusions grimly. “Before long, even if that Pylon goes down, they're gonna get tired of tending the nets
and'll come looking themselves.” He flops the clasped valve back and forth in with his argument. “Ott's fortress is well-hidden, but given enough time, they'll find it. Ott's fortress is well-defended, but given enough guns, they'll take it.”

  “Well, alright, then,” Two-Bit relents bitterly. “Let's zilch our losses and hoof it deep and dark in the Offchart where we can hide under rocks from Vel, Xo, Ott and the bloody Imperium until, what, more anglers come and find us? What then? That's usin' the old thinkbox!”

  “Whatever the case may be,” Moira resolves beneath her impromptu black cotton veil, her first utterance the entire meeting and sufficient to draw each gaze in the room, “we won't know the score until after our attempt on the Counterattack. As long as we're all still sold on that insanity, seems reasonably stupid to argue about fates not yet assured.”

  Moira's warning, ruder than Two-Bit, grimmer than Abraham and ultimately gloomier than Odisseus, pitches the four of them into the brooding silence that traditionally followed these meetings, when all their planning, plotting and underhanded machinations ran hard against that immovable object that was their whimsical Captain. Moira was pretty certain she'd killed the discussion outright then and there when the door to Abraham's right clatters open and, through some paradoxical ill fortune, Nemo strides casually into the women's bathroom.

  Each of his officers, gathered here in secret to debate how best to invisibly steer the Lover's proverbial rudder without offending his legendary ego, freezes, fears immediate discovery and, with various degrees of severity, envisions the unavoidable violence to ensue. Moira, with hands resting on her folded knees and therefore inches from Righty and Lefty, likes her odds. Nemo, on the other hand, shambles inside, fumbles with his trouser fly and boots open the nearest stall door before even taking note of the room's four other occupants, all staring anxiously at him.

  “Hey,” he remarks as nonchalantly as though passing them on the companionway, before sidling fully into the stall, latching the door closed behind him and presumably, as Moira doesn't intend to stick around and find out, makes with his business, none the wiser for all their wide-eyed stares.

  –––

  Two-Bit's jaw drops.

  “Oh, no,” he mutters upon stepping into the helm, steepling both hands around his nose and mouth to create a private sanctuary for the lower half of his face to panic within. “Uh, no, you can't–, oh, moons,” he splays his cupped fingers apart, “can still we turn around?”

  Nemo, practically poured into the helmsmen's chair he's so sprawled, breaks off the rapid evacuation of foamy blue Gitterswitch Gin from his hefted bottle to swallow hard and frown, “Probably not, no,” before resuming his gulping chug.

  The otherwise abandoned helm is currently engaged in its best impression of a brewery, assuming its irresponsible lout of a brewer had, approximately four hours previously, become very, very thirsty. The disguise is present not only in appearance, Two-Bit notes, but also, more prevalently, in stench. The atmosphere within is veritably humid from the allied stinks of sweat, vermouth and disaster. In addition to the dump's customary collection of clutter, no console, instrument panel or dashboard within extreme arm's reach of Nemo's cherished chair is spared the graveyard spread of empty or nearly-empty booze bottles. These, Two-Bit judges by the Captain's profound state of intoxication, are the only witnesses left standing to what must have been a drunken bender close to six and a half full bottles in duration.

  All of which would have been likely both amusing and pathetic had The Unconstant Lover, its anxious crew and its now apparently hammered Captain, been anything but minutes away from executing a dangerous and experimental dirty warp maneuver that would drop them, without the aid of a warp gate, within legitimate spitting distance from the Exacting Counterattack, all of her fighters and all of her guns.

  “You're having a laugh, right?” Two-Bit desperately attempts to convince himself. “You're just taking a go at me, like you did last year with my birthday and those laxatives, right?”

  Nemo's faces broadens into the drunkest beam Two-Bit'd ever seen, no mean feat to be sure. “That was great.”

  “Oh, we're totally fucked. We're chaveled right in the bloomhole now.”

  “Listen. Listen,” Nemo entreats, propping himself improbably forward on an elbow and jangling the bottle's dregs to emphasize his arguments. “It's gonna be totally bitchin', I'm gonna be totally bitchin' out there. I promise.” He pinches his thumb and forefinger together on the opposite hand and waggles it toward the door. “I've just gotta go vomit a little, and–”

  “Are you blasted? Abraham buzzed for all wanks – we're dropping warp in less than two minutes!” By way of urgency, Two-Bit jogs suddenly forward and plops himself, with an accompanied bob from the unlocking gyroscopic rig, into the co-pilot's seat.

  “It'll like, barely take a second and–”

  “It's gonna take no seconds because you're not wending fucking anywhere. You can ralph all you like after they've iced us,” Two-Bit ultimates.

  Nemo crinkles his expression. “Which side of the bed did you wake up on?” He inches slightly closer, as though to receive a hushed confession. “Was it the douchey side?”

  “There's a brainy flash, Nemo – cheese off the bloke who's running your gantine's edgies.” Two-Bit, in grim remembrance of previous bruises, clasps closed both safety belts across his chest anyway. “Do me a kindie, willya, and just act like everything's, you know, peaches-and-unicorns for the next, I don't know, twenty-five-ish minutes? Can you do that for me?” He grasps at the main defensive console and sets about preparing a shielding package for the moment they drop warp. “Moira will jank your plonker up to make her bread, should she catch wise and I don't even wanna spec about Odi's reaction. So, don't you jabb nothing to nobody until we're clear of this.”

  Nemo reaches for his headset and shrugs it danglingly. “I don't even remember how to work this thing.”

  “Projected point of withdrawal be closing fast, Cap'n,” comes the crackling voice of a busily engaged Abraham, Two-Bit's communication matrix indicating his proper place in the sensor room. “All hands – stand-by to withdraw in two minutes.” Odisseus grumbles some reply from the engine room that Two-Bit recognizes, even over the language barrier and the rampant feedback of the Lover's undedicated interior comm channels, as a confirmation. A trio of “I'm in”s, originating from the “topturret,” “underturret” and “torpedo chamber” comm ports and therefore from Moira, Garrigan and Danbonte respectively, shortly follow. Seconds later, an exterior link, which takes Two-Bit a moment to recognize as The Little Beggarman, joins the conversation in a fresh burble of interference.

  “Um,” Brondi's voice wavers under the sibilating static, “having some trouble dialing a clean frequency, what with the warp flux. Should be fully patched in a minute or so.”

  “Ninety seconds to disengage,” Abraham reports on Brondi's heels. “Anything ye'd like to say, Cap'n?”

  Nemo, somehow still grappling with the headset, employs the general intercom instead to request, “Yeah, could somebody bring me a bucket?”

  A shocked and astringent silence, save for the channel's snowy feedback, ensues. Two-Bit reprises his previous gesture, this time dropping his head to his hand and shielding his eyes from the prompt shattering of the fiction that Nemo's both sober and competent.

  “All the moons of Jotor,” Moira mutters. “He's drunk.”

  “He's drunk?” Garrigan struggles to comprehend.

  “Putting it fluffy, yeah,” Two-Bit confesses with a grimace. “Bladdered. Stinko. Three sheets. Take your pick.”

  A patched roar, some furious vocalization of Odisseus, tramples over Moira's first attempt at a reply and her second is barely audible over the series of vicious Ortoki castigation that follows. “I don't even care why at this point – I'm just going to kill you,” Moira resolves.

  “Come on, I never fly totally sober,” Nemo explains defensively, both hands monkeying with his headset. “I'm jus
t a little, you know, more less sober than I usually–” he stops suddenly and attempts to free his hands from the connecting cable. “How'd you–, moons, I can't–, why is this so hard to put on?”

  “Is he tangled in his headset?” Moira questions after a beat.

  “Erm...” is all Two-Bit can muster.

  “Abraham, how long would it take you to recalibrate coordinates out of here?”

  “Recalibrating unregistered route codes ain't near as simple as changing yer breeches, missy,” Abraham disillusions. “An hour'd be risking it, four to make it comfortable.”

  Odisseus growls something sarcastic and sullen, his meaning illuminated by Moira's resigned addendum. “And we were only gonna have one shot at this anyway.”

  As, to his left, the cornerstone to their entire scheme struggles to unfetter his fingers from the tricky, twisting comm cord, Two-Bit cocks his head aside and rigidifies the crew's grit. “Everybody's still decking with this course of action?”

  “No real choice about the matter,” Abraham capitulates. “Thirty seconds to disengage.”

  Moira's odd calm claims her again. “Wasn't exactly the smartest plan to begin with.”

  Odisseus, seemingly instinctual senses of caution and custodianship conflicting bodily with the sudden spike in the plan's recklessness, snarls some plea to sanity or reason.

  “Sure I do.” Nemo shrugs sloppily as he replies with a summary. “We fly around a bit, Brondi does some stuff, we blow the cunt up. That's it, right?”

  Clearly not satisfied with Nemo's perception of the events, Odisseus makes some suggestion, only to receive Moira's discredit before he's finished. “And get doxychoraphum enemas in our sleep, courtesy of the Galactic Menace? Thanks but no thanks.”