Hull Damage

by Timothy J Meyer

  “You've done it!” Jeldine exclaims.

  Dreffek nods in modest approval. “Excellent work, Warrant Officer Bel8.”

  Belton, however, only scowls at the projection of his revealed spaceship. “What are they doing?”

  Depicted as a Briza-shaped silhouette of brilliant cobalt on Belton's sensory window, The Unconstant Lover loops wide, unmitigated circles around the Exacting Counterattack's stern quarter, at improbable speed and with extremely erratic handling. Broadside batteries, just recently gifted with accurate targeting, fire their quadroturrets more or less as blindly as they had a moment ago. Meanwhile, equally disoriented Spur squadrons, represented on Belton's screen by clusters of red pinpricks, attempt strafing runs past and around the freewheeling freighter to no avail, so unpredictable are the Lover's fluctuations of bearing and angle as it zips its inscrutable circuits around the Pylon.

  To judge from the infectious silence behind him, both the Second Captain and the Campaign Admiral are stricken as baffled as Belton is. A few keystrokes and some control wheel scrolling later, Belton regards the lopsided heat expenditure readings and flops back in his seat, checked entirely by amazement. “They've deactivated a main engine. I believe the tramp term is 'clubhauling'? You see here,” he indicates with a middle finger, “only the portside jetbooster is functioning, allowing them to rotate with all that torque and speed. Masterful.”

  “Why?” Jeldine stammers.

  “Evasive maneuvers,” Belton hypothesizes. “They ascertained, somehow, that we'd managed to pin a bead on them and so they started,” he waves a vague gesture toward the screen, “doing this.”

  “What does it mean?” Dreffek presses.

  “That whomever is commanding that vessel a strategist of the purest genius.”

  –––

  Odisseus just wishes he'd stop screaming. Bedside manner notwithstanding, The Unconstant Lover's Ortoki mechanic, voice of reason and, at this particular moment, last real hope of survival, finds it strangely difficult to regain what's left of his own composure when the vessel's Captain, the man ostensibly responsible for the individual lives of each and every crewman aboard, won't stop screaming like a little girl.

  From what admittedly little information he could glean during the sixteen seconds tameless inertia has him pinned against the helm's navpanel, Odisseus surmises that something in Starboard, the rightmost jetbooster, has gone quite indisputably haywire and made the executive decision to, rather than simply rolling with this latest punch, deactivate entirely. With the spastic inertial dampener returned to its old tricks and the unsung entrance of the Lover's brake light on the ignored dashboard as his evidence, Odisseus deduces, in less than thirty seconds, the identity of the culprit, having mentally gathered the combustion cavity, the pressure helix and the fuel contractor as suspects in the proverbial library.

  Two-Bit Switch whips wild circles, strapped into the co-pilot's gyroscopic rig tighter than a mental patient in a straight jacket. “So, anybody got any fucking flashes?”

  “The pressure helix blew!” Odisseus reveals at the top of his lungs.

  “I thought you fixed it!” Nemo accuses at the same volume as his panicked screaming.

  “It's the other one!”

  In a scene unhappily reminiscent of their penultimate arrival at Takioro Defederate Station, The Unconstant Lover, one booster blaring, the other dead as Danboowui, flies perilous and unintentional circles with some rear section of the Exacting Counterattack as their epicenter. Nemo, while voicing his apparent concern most vociferously, somehow manages to maintain the Briza at some dubious level of control despite both the ship's obvious infirmity and his obvious inebriation. Two-Bit would need to be a good deal less hogtied to be of any use to anyone. As for Odisseus, who'd intended to visit the helm for a brief moment to reroute power from a handful of auxiliary systems to the expired ray shields, found himself decorating the opposite wall with all three hundred of his furry, press-ganged pounds, courtesy of a little displaced gravity.

  That very same gravity currently barring him from his duties in favor of an awkward canoodle with the navpanel rather suddenly releases Odisseus from its artificial grip and is subsequently responsible for tossing him tumblingly toward his erstwhile objective across the helm. Landing practically head first into the shielding mainframe's regulation controls, the Ortok weathers the storm with five claws sunk deep into the cushioning of the nearest crewman's chair as he fiddles with the delicacies of combination codes and power percentages. Three-quarters of a revolution later, at the expense of onboard plumbing and a few minor electrical systems, the Lover's ray shields are laboriously returned at a not-unimpressive sum of 42%. This achieved, it's of course Nemo who advances Odisseus' next seemingly impossible task.

  “So, is anybody gonna do something about this whole death-circles thing, or...?”

  Growling a string of garbled profanity that Odisseus himself would have considerable difficulty translating into Commercial, the Ortok extracts his claws from the bracing support of the chair, literally bumps into the door release button and stumbles bodily out of the helm.

  Ortoki physiology doesn't care two whits about hours logged aboard a moving starship or the accumulation of space legs thereof. Try as he might to retain some level of personal balance, Odisseus is left entirely to the mercy of the malfunctioning inertial dampener as he staggers his way through the corridors and hallways of a spaceship pitching as violently as might an ancient wood and canvas number upon actual seas. The remedy, he supposes, would be a relatively simple matter of programming a little more sense into the drive motor via the emergency deactivation panel. In order to even be presented with such a chance to save the day, however, Odisseus would need to actually reach the engine room before Nemo crashed into something, which was, all things considered, no small feat indeed.

  The journey between helm and hold reminds Odisseus more of some cruelly abusive funhouse than the spaceship upon which he'd lived and worked these past sixteen months. The observation ceiling roofing the main abovedecks corridor flashes terrifyingly nonsensical images of the Pylon's surface as the Lover rockets around it, as well as split-second out-of-context glimpses of Spurs flying, firing and otherwise ducking for cover from the rampaging freighter. An outlandish yet unmistakably accented voice chants something forbidding and nautical from the direction of the sensor room. To both his and Odisseus' surprise, Marco the Mange, certifiably weightless amongst all the rollicking gravity, plows ungainly out of the ajar gundeck door and into the opposite wall. With no further explanation necessary, Odisseus snatches the airborne Mruka by the belt and elbows open the door release to the hold.

  If her abovedecks is a demented funhouse, the Lover's cargo hold is a homicidal tilt-a-whirl. Like Marco, any of the assorted detritus lighter than the average humanoid, from empty consignment crates, loose Iniquity cards to even the much-maligned sacks of unspaced garbage, are susceptible to the charms of both partial weightlessness and being hurled carelessly about on the whims of the seemingly maniacal inertial dampener. After one embarrassing spill down the companionway stairs that could possibly have broken Marco's nose, the Ortok, with bleeding Mruka in tow, navigates the crossfire of flung items with little incident, before scrambling top speed down the access ladder into the cramped, but markedly safer engine room.

  Having formulated his plan of attack on the scramble down, Odisseus sentences Marco to fuel adjudication duty while he clings to the emergency deactivation panel for support. Prepping the shutdown routine and waiting for Marco and his smashed muzzle to squeeze into position at the manual intake lever, Odisseus hails Nemo to warn him of the sudden pending amelioration of his vessel.

  “Try not to vomit on everything,” he advises and, on signal from Marco, toggles two switches, snaps three valves closed and whacks the instrument panel once for good measure. With all his weight, Marco shoves the three-foot-tall lever as erect as he can manage.

  Wailing like a misbehaving toddler, Port settles
into her more normal spewing and hissing and, after a beat, Starboard resurrects herself to similar sputtering and eventual hissing. The entire Unconstant Lover shudders and retches from recoil, as though recovering herself from a boozy bender identical to the one her Captain still labors under.

  The situation was far from ideal. The pressure helix remained completely out of commission, probably broken into multiple pieces. Thusly, a certain underling who shall remain Marco the Mange would be required to doggedly man the fuel intake lever anytime Nemo needed to brake or turn. With some elbow grease and much more of Nemo's habitual good luck, however, it would at least keep them afloat, something Odisseus needed, for his own sanity's sake, to mark up as a victory.

  All Nemo needed to do now was switch from automatic to manual.

  “Okay, you're gonna open the panel next to your...starboard kneecap, alright?” Odisseus instructs into the comm as Starboard continues its slow grind into full operation. “Inside, there'll be two green switches and you're gonna flip both of them. Tell me when you've done that.”

  “I see four switches,” he reports.

  “You should see two.”

  “Yeah, I'm not seeing too good.”

  Odisseus slaps his thighs helplessly. “Fine!” he barks, storming as much as one can storm on hands and knees, toward the access ladder again. Marco whimpers something unintelligible, Odisseus retorting with further orders against moving from his post on not only pain of personal death but also potentially those of everyone else aboard.

  Minutes later, after a return trip made uneventful by the now-functional and seemingly repentant inertial dampener, Odisseus practically punches the relevant door release into a concave and stomps into the helm, sweaty, out of breath, claws extended and passingly contemplating mutiny via good old-fashioned disembowelment.

  Nemo shoots a glance over his shoulder at the incensed Ortok. “What kept you?”

  “I was busy not killing you.” Odisseus tramples his way across a helm the recent engine trouble had made yet messier than the one he'd left behind, were such a thing indeed possible. Two-Bit seems to have ceased his senseless spinning and now busies himself manning what remains of the ray shields. Nemo, apparently cool as a space cucumber, calmly coasts The Unconstant Lover far starboard of the Exacting Counterattack at a comparatively reduced speed, considering both boosters still struggle on automatic.

  Batting Nemo aside with a cuff across the scalp and a fangs-bared glower, Odisseus stoops before the aforementioned open panel and, in the space of about two seconds, locates and flips both indicated green switches. No sooner has he done this, of course, that the entire ship hiccups emphatically to the starboard, as though from impact. Odisseus, fortuitously positioned, slams his temple into the nearby dashboard, yelping in pain and surprise.

  “Wasn't that supposed to fix it?” Nemo complains, professedly as surprised as his saltbrother.

  Odisseus draws a bloody paw away from his brow. “It was supposed to.”

  “Nag, somethin' biffed us!” Two-Bit updates. “Edgies just dropped to 28%.”

  “Fighters?”

  “Gee, lemme just stick me maggie out the window and have a vizz!” Two-Bit snaps.

  “I've got visual and you're not gonna like it,” the patched voice of Moira volunteers from Odisseus' belted comm and Nemo and Two-Bit's headsets. “The Pylon just opened up on us.”

  All three pirates simultaneously pale.

  “Lucky shot?” Nemo proposes, the poster child for wishful thinking.

  “Don't think so. No idea how, but I think they found themselves targeting. I recommend you move your ass.”

  “So noted.” He turns to Odisseus for approval. “May I...?”

  “Be my guest,” Odisseus growls and rises from his stoop.

  With a heartbeat of delay and an ensuing roar, Nemo motors the clutchlever to the floor. Odisseus belatedly regrets standing up as he's backhanded brusquely into the navigator's seat. To Moira's credit and everyone's dismay, an ocean of hateful red laserfire, launched from so many quadroturret batteries, washes over The Unconstant Lover. Only by Nemo's rapid boost and Two-Bit's sudden re-angling of the ray shield do they prevent instantaneous destruction. The Briza still takes a sizable beating, buffeting from side to side as though shaken by the shoulders and half a hundred dashboard and console lights blink furious warnings from the shield mainframe.

  “Edgies at 6%!” Two-Bit hollers above the commotion of the rattling freighter and Nemo's continued attempts to muscle more speed from the boosters.

  A second volley, originating from an entirely fresh stretch of the Counterattack's broadside batteries is averted with a harsh dive down toward Baz's distant atmosphere and another flipping of Odisseus' apparently acrobatic stomach. A third volley quickly thwarts this evasion, from yet another fresh section of quadroturrets that evidently anticipated Nemo's dodge and aimed accordingly. Streaking red death comes racing toward the recovering Lover and is only ducked when Nemo paradoxically rolls into the blast. The dregs of the ray shield are utterly obliterated by the lower limits of the barrage. The freighter skirts still deeper toward the planet in response.

  “Edgies're gone – Odi, you'd best fangle something or we're bannies in a boo-boo.”

  Odisseus, forcing himself out of the chair, makes time to eye Two-Bit strangely as he plods his way to the mainframe. “Well, we can't have that.”

  For all his previous ramming of the panic button, Nemo appears oddly unperturbed by these dire events unfolding around him and his adored spaceship. At least, such is how he certainly appeared to a superficial and cursory glance. The firmness of his jaw suggests clenched teeth and the near imperceptible twitching of his upper lip implies something like the ghost of a snarl, both idiosyncrasies discernible only to Odisseus, the galaxy's foremost expert on the mutable moods of Nehel Morel.

  While Odisseus converts a considerable chunk of system power from both turrets toward the revival of the ray shields, Nemo negotiates The Unconstant Lover through various ditrogen-related embroilments via every last trick in the deep space jockey's handbook. All the while, the Briza banks sharply away from the Pylon at an obtuse angle, much to the chagrin of the Ortok's best efforts to keep any stable footing. With ray shields restored to 63% strength and both turrets little more than shiny expensive popguns, Odisseus slams himself back into the shield station chair. Nemo initiates phase two with a shrill bellow into the comm. “Danbonte!”

  “You rang?” The redskin's voice is calm to the point of counterfeit.

  “You ready to get off your ass and do something?”

  “Just gimme the signal, Cap'n,” Danbonte affirms, “and things'll sure get interesting in a hurry.”

  “Little too interesting for my taste as it stands,” Abraham opines.

  Two-Bit nods vigorously. “I'll second that.”

  “Odi!” Nemo shouts into his headset, before catching sight of the Ortok over his right shoulder. “Or, um, whoever's in the engine room, I guess?”

  “That'd,” Marco chimes in with a wheeze of exertion, “be me.”

  “On my signal, you're gonna give me half of whatever fuel we got left and on my second signal, you're gonna give me the other half.”

  “Uh,” Marco hesitates, clearly sharing Odisseus' about-to-be-voiced objection, “aye aye?”

  “And what about afterwards, Nemo? What about landing?”

  Nemo flashes him a half-grimace as though his bottom lip was snagged by a fisherman's hook. “Don't remind me.”

  With an apparently acceptable distance from the Pylon achieved, he twists the yoke in the opposite direction harsh enough to perfectly center the Exacting Counterattack in the viewport and coincidentally in their forward-facing torpedo launcher's sights. “Two-Bit,” he commands in a queer foreboding mutter, “angle everything double-forward. Marco, feed me the first half of the fuel. Danbonte,” he squeezes in before an incoming wall of capital-class laserfire rocks the ray shields and the ship beneath it, “pick your target a
nd start shooting.”

  With that, the clutchlever kisses the plate. After a second for the fuel to properly feed into both boosters, The Unconstant Lover springs forward with such thrusting velocity that Odisseus fleetingly imagines a cartoonish dust cloud kicked up behind them. The mounting momentum doesn't abate, however. All the emptied fuel into the boosters gooses them to still higher and higher speeds, the Exacting Counterattack's two further points inching past the edges of the viewport.

  The first of Danbonte's launched Wolfsbane torpedoes achieves even greater speed. Like a mother lonktonk leading her tonklings across a dangerous street, it spearheads a chain of identical missiles straight into the waiting arms of another quadroturret barrage.

  One might call it providence or fate or something equally esoteric but, considering Nemo's presence, Odisseus was inclined to blame sheer dumbass luck as the string of repellent-loaded projectiles hurtle unharmed past the expansive cloud of laserfire. The barrage is not entirely toothless, however; forced to content itself by obliterating both Odisseus' recent hard work and the last scraps of the Lover's double-layered ray shield instead. Still, the Counterattack swells and swells through the viewport and, by the Ortok's hurried calculations, the procession of war-crime-level explosives ought to reach their intended target, a pleasingly narrow section of the Pylon's anchoring spine, before the broadside batteries can muster another round.

  Out of the corner of Odisseus' eye, Nemo begins to mouth murmured obscenities with growing intensity. “You fuckos with your standard operating procedure and your manifest blowbagging destiny and your chipper little uniforms with those pretentious fuckin' cufflinks and shit...” The Lover chases the torpedo parade toward their targeted area, Odisseus has the foresight to clip his own safety belts into place and Nemo's stream-of-drunken-consciousness tirade increases in fervor and lunacy, all directed toward the Imperium warship closer and closer ahead. “You blooming fucking bastards think you own everything you shit on. You're those cunt-guzzling sons of bleeders that wanna stamp everybody with a bar code and buy them health insurance and throw bread to the lonktonks on sunny afternoons.”