Hull Damage

by Timothy J Meyer

  “No time,” Abraham behooves. “Ten seconds – prepare to disengage.”

  “If I'm having second thoughts,” Danbonte proposes, “is it too late to drop me off somewhere?”

  “I really need that bucket,” Nemo appreciates squeamishly.

  “Nemo!” Abraham bellows. “Disengage!”

  “I'm doing it, I'm doing it, don't rush me,” Nemo relents and, within another two seconds, he's disengaged the helm's warping protocols in a matter both mechanical and careless. As if yanked by her proverbial shirt collar, The Unconstant Lover literally screeches to a comparative standstill from the incalculable speeds of interstellar warp, slapping Two-Bit, Nemo and certainly all the crew fiercely against their seat belts. The viewport's dazzling view of the rippled and shimmering wake of the cosmos unfolding before them is replaced by an all-encompassing expanse of solid teltriton wall, which Two-Bit recognizes within the heartbeat before impact as the port side of the Exacting Counterattack's engine bank.

  “Whoa,” Nemo murmurs a microsecond before wrenching the yoke back with all his strength and peeling the Lover off at such an acute angle as to instantly nauseate everyone aboard, inertial dampeners included. The freighter flashes her belly and twists away. Garrigan, in the underturret, screams in surprise and only the Lover's shield package, thrown into operation when Two-Bit was tossed violently forward, saves him from being pulverized in a scrapping collision, as the two ships respective bombard shields fizzle against each other and ultimately repulse the smaller craft away. Nemo wrestles a moment to right the bucking Briza, selects an initial approach vector and initiates a hasty strafing run along the Counterattack's starboard broadside, allowing the pirates their first undiluted view of the proximate Pylon.

  Up close and personal, the Pylon is more a landscape than a spaceship; a city skyline, a rocky canyon and a mountain range. An irregular teltriton terrain of attitude fins, docking ridges, sensor arrays, command towers and, most notably, quadroturret broadside batteries, stretches dottible upon dottible onward, like a bumpy beige horizon. From bulging engine bank to distant point of prow, the Pylon is over three times the width, five times the height and thirty times the length of The Unconstant Lover.

  Without question, the Exacting Counterattack is the single largest, best defended, heaviest-armed and certainly most expensive spacecraft Two-Bit has ever, in his twenty-two years of life, laid his astounded eyes upon. Capital ships, he knew, took assembly crews of thousands painstaking years to properly construct, but he couldn't imagine raw teltriton and electrical wiring transforming into something as bafflingly complex and world-eclipsing as this Pylon-class war cruiser in anything less than a decade. He suddenly remembers, only too starkly, that their expressed purpose here was to somehow destroy this colossus of modern naval might.

  The transceiver hisses and hums with the patched indignation of the Counterattack's baffled communications officers, their official cessation orders and their commands to cut engines and prepare to receive boarders. The Lover's own crew, on the other hand, is silent and circumspect, almost awestruck by the titanic task laid before them as their craft whistles along the Pylon's starboard quarter. Even having previously braced and bolstered themselves beforehand, the pirates undoubtedly all glue themselves to viewports and sensor renderings to view the passing Pylon. Two-Bit imagines, behind layers of displaced defensive energy and hulls upon hulls of hard-wrought teltriton, forty thousand crewmen, caught completely off guard, scrambling about a manifold of duties – angling shields, calibrating sensors, establishing communications, manning starfighter squadrons and arming hundreds of quadroturret batteries, all toward the destructive end of The Unconstant Lover.

  “I think I'll take that vomit now,” Nemo whimpers.

  “I think I might join you,” Two-Bit agrees.

  Without warning, a full third of the panels, terminals and monitors currently limning the helm and its two queasy occupants in the muted green of full operation flutter once and die. In the space of a blink, a second third, including roughly half of Two-Bit's shielding station equipment, apparently succumb to peer pressure and follow suit, both mass suicides survived only by those few screens and sensors related to internal systems – weapon and shield power, life support and the like. Two-Bit envisions his momentary confusion shared in wonderful synchronicity with the thousand some members of the Exacting Counterattack's gunnery teams as their audacious target simply vanishes from all their scopes.

  Nemo, mouth agape, glances suspiciously about at his dead instruments. “That was supposed to happen, right?”

  “She's fully blindfolded, Cap'n,” Abraham, clearly distracted by the copious mathematical and technical responsibilities placed upon him, explains moments too late.

  Nemo's suspicions realign to Two-Bit. “I was just testing you.”

  The next several seconds Two-Bit would later recall as some of the most harrowing he'd ever experienced aboard The Unconstant Lover. Two-Bit holds his breath, himself a voluntary, by the loosest sense, passenger to a plastered Nemo's attempts to relocate his boastful money to the general vicinity of his proverbial mouth and fly a blind spaceship a treacherously close distance from the Exacting Counterattack's uneven surface on a full speed strafing run.

  Swelling obstacles are ducked and dodged via no evasive arithmetic save for whatever passes as such in Nemo's booze-addled brain. For the most part, he blazes the trail with an deftness belied by his current state of gross intoxication, piloting the Lover through the host of obstructions with self-evident ease. In addition to which, Abraham's blindfolding appears to be the perfect tool for this particularly impossible job, each quadroturret emplacement they whizz past entirely oblivious to the enemy in their midst until far too late. As far as Two-Bit can ascertain, their presence goes mostly uncontested, at least until they pass the starfighter deployment gantries.

  Each of its four hollow arms sprout some distance from corresponding corners of the Counterattack's prodigious midsection, forming an enormous letter “X” of crosshatched girders and docking clamps. Already, particularly at the outer corners, the first wave of emergency-deploy Spur-class starfighters churn outward to meet their electronically invisible foe. The under-arches looming ahead prove a more potent obstacle and one Nemo narrowly avoids by tilting the Lover diagonally on her axis and sliding scarcely between bracing beams in the roots of the gantry. Upon somehow emerging unharmed on the opposite side, Nemo straightens the Lover backwards and completes the lazy half-finished barrel roll, skimming underbelly to underbelly along the Pylon's bottom, as upside down as one can truly be in the topsy-turvy of space combat.

  As the first red laser reprisals streak past the corners of the viewport, Two-Bit allocates the majority of the Lover's ray shielding to encompass her stern quarter, now undoubtedly dogged by pursuing starfighters, and attempts to suggest helpfully to Nemo. “Maybe now'd be a fine time to cast Brondi about his business?”

  Nemo, after briefly recoiling as though noticing Two-Bit for the first time, offers a drunken salute, originating some inches above his scalp. “Aye aye, Cap'n!” he jokes, the comparison a little too close to home for Two-Bit's taste.

  –––

  Moira Quicksilver never necessarily grew accustomed to flying upside down. Practically, there wasn't much difference between whatever angle Nemo could choose to align the ship at – the inertial dampener, as beleaguered as it may have been, could at least be called upon to regulate consistent “up” and “down” sensations within the Lover herself, but for a humanoid who so rigorously drills the notion of balance and physical equilibrium into her subconscious, the notion of flipping oneself a complete one hundred and eighty degrees on the axis to no measurable difference still discomforted and disquieted her somewhat. Moira votes to vent this uneasiness on the first squadron of Spurs unwise enough to enter her firing arc.

  Her ammunition window boasts its maximum allowable magazine. The joints and rotator cuffs of her gyroscopic rig are newly oiled to allow totally un
hindered movement. The viewport, interior and exterior, was scrubbed until squeaky. The Antagonist itself had been virtually dissembled and reassembled to clean and polish its gears, hammers and all its moving parts.

  Moira immediately tarnishes all of that by screeching the topturret fully around and blasting out her virginal canisters in a brilliant green hellstorm toward the disorganized pack of pursuant starfighters. Without time to properly form into full squadrons or even four-member quadrons, her enemies aren't as neatly organized for their own destruction as Moira would typically prefer, but she makes do. She focuses on spraying as wide a swath as she can across the Lover's dorsal quarter, clipping wingtips, fuselages and occasionally cracking cockpits, all the while attempting to minimize misfires, which more often than not spark and steam up pointlessly against the Counterattack's mother of all ray shields.

  Moira, of course, does not go unaided in this endeavor. Glive Garrigan dispatches more than his fair share of starfighters with expertly minimal ammunition, as well as occasionally amusing himself by planting the odd bolt in that tiny keyhole of ray shield vulnerability in the passing quadroturret batteries. Even Nemo lends a hand or, perhaps more accurately, a double-edged sword. He weaves the Lover through a maddening series of slaloms, each within a hair's-breadth of the nearest inverted impediment dangling or protruding from the Counterattack's asymmetrical underside, apparently the envy of every member of the local Imperium Starfighter Corps, to judge by how often their attempts to imitate him result in explosions. Yet, for all that his unparalleled evasiveness helps to thin the ranks steadily growing behind them, Nemo's abject drunkenness is painfully evident in the manner of his flying – what was once imperiled only by bravado is further now jeopardized by sloppiness, each dodge and maneuver jarringly imprecise, to the point where Moira's own aim suffers beneath the unpredictability of his swerving.

  Despite the best efforts of mice and Moira, however, the number of Spurs swilling about their spaceship actually continues to increase rather than decrease as they near the bottom of the Counterattack's sweeping prow. By now, enough have broken off from the main pursuit behind to circle halfway around and dart in to strafe the Lover from either side, forcing Moira to open her firing arc still further on her port and starboard peripherals. It's when, following the example of one ambitious smattering of a squadron, the starfighters begin circling fully around and bearing down on the oncoming Lover head-on, from the opposite direction, that Moira first tastes their impending failure – ray shields dwindling, surrounded and outnumbered by what she estimates to total somewhere near forty-five starfighters and all their current hopes auspiciously pinned to one Garrok Brondi.

  Brondi, who'd been launched uncounted minutes previously in a particularly harrowing sideways deployment gambit Nemo felt like “trying,” had fallen strangely silent in the interim. His initial reception among the other starfighters was expectedly frosty and even a nearby quadroturret, seemingly relieved at the prospect of finally having a target, spared a potshot or two in his direction. With the scramble codifier activated, however, he'd satisfyingly disappeared from the preoccupied attentions of both The Unconstant Lover and her forty some followers. Now, with the enemies rapidly cinching the net closed around them, he was more than a little overdue for an update.

  “Garrok?” Nemo, trepidation perhaps sobering him somewhat, addresses on a hailed frequency. “You got any good news for me yet?”

  The reply is a little long in the returning and Nemo narrowly sidesteps the Lover around a communications antennae before Brondi answers. “Hate to be a spoilsport, Captain,” he reports amid a haze of static earned by the blindfolding and grin entirely unearned from anything, “but I'm afraid I gotta make tracks.”

  Moira's chest tightens. A second silence, awe replaced with dismay and accompanied by a heavy bout of static, floods out from each of the Lover's seven live comm ports and Moira receives her second helping of their imminent defeat. Nemo's reply is no less shaken, though the alcohol is certainly to blame for that. “That'd be mutiny.”

  “Oh, I don't think so. Not technically,” Brondi counters, ensconced in feedback. “I'm the captain of this ship, ain't I?”

  “Ten percent wasn't enough for you, Garrok?” Moira deduces bitterly.

  “You've got me all wrong. No, Captain, what I want you to take away from this is that I don't much like people hanging my friends out to dry. Or sticking guns in my mouth,” he sneers, in a fashion he certainly imagines to be clever. “And for the record,” he adds after a moment, “no, it wasn't enough.”

  The transmission shorts a moment and dies altogether a moment later.

  “Fucking smugglers,” Nemo sputters, a sentiment Moira mirrors by jerking her Antagonist around and annihilating the nearest starfighter under a shower of ammunition.

  “He stole my ship,” Abraham comments blandly.

  Odisseus is, somewhat understandably, suddenly beside himself. “I tried to warn you, Nemo, I tried to warn you!”

  “You've tried to warn him about a lot of things,” Moira concurs.

  “This seems like a good enough reason to throw up,” Nemo appeals, certainly to Two-Bit.

  “This seems like a good enough razz to wend back home!”

  “Repellent enema,” Moira reminds pointedly.

  “He stole my ship.”

  “Well, what then? How do you figure we kuckle out their bombard edgies without the five-and-five?”

  Obviously improvising, Danbonte suggests categorically. “Somebody else's gotta shoot their projectors off.”

  The conclusion is as inescapable as it is unspoken.

  “Fine,” Moira relents after a beat. “What, prow, stern and under those attitude fins? Could somebody patch me through a copy of those plans? Might wanna give 'em a quick look-see.”

  “Uh,” Odisseus stammers, “maybe I could get Marco to do it. Marco – go, uh, do it.”

  “Well, you might wanna look lively,” Two-Bit instructs. “That's the prow up ahead there.”

  Moira grudgingly grants the swarming Spurs behind them a moment's respite to crane her neck around and spy, racing toward the Lover at an alarming rate, the bottom point of the Pylon's prow. “Garrigan, think you can handle these clowns?”

  “Biggest circus I ever saw, but I'll do what I can.”

  “That asteroid-humpin', buhox-suckin' brainless son of an odorous motherbloomin' sack of blah, blah, blah stole my ship!” Abraham trumpets, undoubtedly spraying his headset microphone in a fine mist of furious spittle. For a split second, Moira notices several of her turret's previously darkened instruments, most notably her targeting sensor, waver to fuzzy life.

  “Abraham, asteroid humping later,” Odisseus admonishes. “Blindfolding now.”

  “Everybody hold onto your wozzers,” Two-Bit warns with a grimace. “Nemo, are you–?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Nemo deflects, alcohol's muddying presence returning full force, “zoom zoom.”

  Contrary to all her attempts to gird her stomach with lead, even Moira bites back a mouthful of vomit as Nemo dips the Lover Bazward for a fraction of a second, like the recoil on a springboard, in preparation to vault her back upward at full velocity. He opens both boosters for the first time in the engagement and traces the curve of the Counterattack's sloping prow with the gawky outline of his Briza. The freighter flops rightwise again and it costs Moira most of her finely-honed reflexes and all of her upper body strength to wrench her gyroscopic rig perpendicular to the vertical Lover, Antagonist aimed directly at the prow's passing crest. Without anything resembling the time it would take to properly calculate the generator's actual position or even to visually locate the damn thing before she starts firing, Moira mimics Nemo with his clutchlever and opens her magazine fully up, mourning the truckload of ammunition wasted against the impregnable ray shield covering the prow's lower half. She audibly thanks all the moons when her gamble pays off, an iota of unshielded machinery near the center of her Antagonist's warpath finds itself the unhap
py recipient of half a dozen or so blistering hot ditrogen bolts. A shivering ripple sweeps all across the Exacting Counterattack's enveloping bombard shield.

  Moira, halting the canister massacre and withdrawing still-quivering hands from the controls, smirks. “Pew pew.”

  With both jetboosters so thoroughly activated, skyrocketing past fifteen decks worth of capital-class warship is a speedier, if not necessarily simpler, matter for The Unconstant Lover. Seconds later, she surfaces splashingly above the Exacting Counterattack's proverbial waterline. In the moment before Nemo scrapes her skiddingly to starboard, the flagship once again eclipses Moira's viewport in a breathtaking vista of beige against the bleached white of Baz's polar cap below. She's little time to be struck by its nautical majesty, however, as Nemo pitches his vessel so cruelly into the next turn that Moira's politely whiplashed into next month, courtesy of Gitterswitch Gin and its abusive relationship with her Captain.

  “How'd she do?” Nemo barks, flicking the Lover away from a fishtail messy enough to nearly sideswipe the Counterattack and make the Yeltain jetboosters weep.

  “No points for style, I'm afraid, but she got the job done,” Garrigan's the first to report.

  “Ye're sure?”

  “Saw the shield buckle myself. If she can make three more shots like that, we might just make it through this after all.”

  “You know she can hear you,” Moira retorts.

  “Sure hope she's shellin' attention, then,” Two-Bit advises, “'cause I'll be buggered if that ain't the portside attitude fin up ahead there.”

  With an eye behind toward the starfighter stragglers struggling to copycat Nemo's latest maneuver to explosive results, Moira positions herself, her gyroscopic rig and her residually hot Antagonist fully forward to face her next feat of daring, improvised markswomanship. She also notes, more pressingly perhaps, the fresh squadrons upon squadrons of Spurs boiling out of the deployment gantries ahead. She locates a likely enough bulge on the Counterattack's teltriton hide to correspond with her admittedly dim recollections of Nemo's pilfered plans and, her target thankfully a ways off yet, settles herself hard in to meet the three score starfighters closing fast.